Community Village

Eli is involved in content development, training and demonstrations for schools in the Australasia region. He is a registered secondary teacher with over 15 years' experience teaching English in Japan, Australia, Brunei and New Zealand. He has also worked with educators as a literacy coach and an education project manager. He has a keen interest in extensive reading and producing graded reading material. Eli has a Master of Applied Linguistics and a Cambridge Delta, and lives in Nelson, New Zealand.

Articles from this author

Boy cupping hand to ear listening
Author: Eli Briasco, EAL Specialist
Created: Wed 12th Apr 2023

Despite legitimate claims that EAL students devote over half of their time to listening when functioning in English (Nunan, 1998), this is often not reflected in the time that we dedicate to the four main skills in the classroom. In fact, Nation (2009) states that listening is arguably the least understood and most overlooked of the four skills in language teaching.

Teacher giving corrective feedback
Author: Eli Briasco, EAL specialist
Created: Sat 29th Oct 2022

Chances are, if you’ve been teaching English for a while, you’ve provided plenty of feedback to your learners on the accuracy of their writing. Prior to undertaking action research on this practice, it was evident from my observations of colleagues that there were multiple approaches and attitudes towards written corrective feedback.

Dialogic teaching
Author: Eli Briasco, EAL specialist
Created: Sun 8th Nov 2020

Think about the last lesson you taught to English language learners. I’m sure you did some form of planning beforehand. I imagine you probably asked several questions throughout the lesson as well. After all, the foundation of effective teaching is interaction with learners. However, did you think about the questions you were going to ask when you were planning? Did you write down any key questions?