How much ‘TECHNICAL’ (i.e. linguistic or methodology-related) vocab do you use with your IELTS learners?

Just because we know certain CONCEPTS or the names of various (teaching or SKILLS-related e.g. reading techniques), it doesn’t mean our students need to also know these by name. It’s often enough if they can just ‘DO’ them. 

We should make sure we never intimidate our IELTS learners more than what is ‘absolutely necessary’ :D, for example just to help them realize the magnitude of the challenge (of trying to reach X band score on IELTS in Y amount of time, etc.). 

But beyond that I’m a big believer in NOT talking ‘meta’ AT out learners much, and that we need to really think twice before we feed in any ‘technical terms’ when teaching them, either to do with learning new LANGUAGE (e.g. grammar or vocabulary), or SKILL.

Any thoughts on this?

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Hi. I’m Fatime. I’m an IELTS Teacher Trainer, helping CELTA-qualified English language teachers become better at teaching SKILLS, as opposed to just testing them. 

Check out my courses here:

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