Author Archive

Join a global community of over 200,000 TEFL teachers working throughout the world! Enrol me!

Kirsten Colquhoun is the Content Manager for The TEFL Academy. A graduate of Cambridge University and DELTA-qualified, she first started teaching kindergarten in Thailand in 2003. A South African, she has also taught in China, the UK, Spain, Qatar and South Africa, but these days she is a teacher trainer and freelance writer and editor.

Activities For Incoporating Reading In The EFL Classroom: Directed Activities Related To Texts (DARTs)

No matter how often we incorporate reading into EFL classrooms it is difficult to know how much our students understand. Directed Activities Related to Texts (or DARTs) are one way we can ensure learners interact with texts effectively and meaningfully.…

Discover more! >

Learning vocabulary is a tough one. There are loads of different ways of learning vocabulary but at the end of the day all that is left for the student to…

How To Make Learning Vocabulary More Effective

23rd May 2018

Young Learners are cute, adorable, precious – until you put them in a classroom! Then they become little firecrackers just waiting to go off! Teaching English as a Foreign Language…

How To Keep Young Learners Interested

22nd May 2018

It can be really frustrating for teachers when we hear our learners speaking their own language in the EFL classroom. After all, we know they know how important it is…

Encouraging EFL Learners To Speak English In Class

21st May 2018

As English as Foreign Language teachers, we teach more than English. In our EFL classrooms our students learn English but they also learn a number of different skills. One such…

21st Century Skills In The EFL Classroom

18th May 2018

Teaching writing is possibly not on your list of favourite things to do. A lot of students don’t enjoy writing or may even think writing in class is a waste…

Ideas For Teaching Writing

16th May 2018

In EFL, we often find ourselves teaching topics which we have taught a thousand times before – family, crime, global warming, education and technology, to name a few of the…

How To Make Ordinary Teaching Topics Interesting

15th May 2018

What are authentic materials? Menu's. Newspapers. Instruction manuals. Timetables. Blogs. These are all examples of authentic materials. Why are authentic materials important in teaching? Why should you use authentic materials?…

Authentic Materials: How To Find Them And How To Use Them

11th May 2018

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, but since we’re in a language classroom why not utilise pictures to help our students speak a thousand words? Pictures are versatile…

5 Ways Of Using Pictures In The EFL Classroom

10th May 2018

All of these are prepositions – but you knew that, didn’t you? There are so many parts of speech English language learners need to get to grips with, and prepositions…

3 Fun Ways To Teach Prepositions Of Place In The Classroom

9th May 2018

Accreditation & Quality Assurance

The TEFL Academy was the world’s first TEFL course provider to receive official recognition from government regulated awarding bodies in both the USA and UK. This means when you graduate you’ll hold a globally recognised Level 3 (120hr) Certificate or Level 5 (168hr) Diploma, meaning you can find work anywhere and apply for jobs immediately.