I don’t know if you managed to catch Genki English on the TBS Radio Show “Stream” the other day. I didn’t because I’m in Italy but apparently they were doing a special on phonics are were very (pleasantly) surprised to find out the how easy it is and that the alphabet song doesn’t have to…

Every month I have an article in ALC’s “Kodomo Eigo” magazine and they’ve just given me permission to put the English version online for free. The basic idea is that I take some of the strange or annoying English that is often taught in Japanese schools and try and make it sound a little cooler…

There’s been some great feedback on the forum about the various Genki English songs, here are some comments from Flossy in Austria about CD7 with some nice ideas for the soccer theme and a warning about Baby Monkey! Come on Come on – The football song was a massive hit . They gave it lots…

It’s not often that I find something useful in publishers’ newsletters, but today’s from Longman Pearson had a couple of useful bits & pieces. One is an “academic article” from Aleda Kraus about why music is good in class. I like how she distinguishes between songs and chants, and why songs are better! >> (English)…

On one of the recent discussion boards someone was asking about writing stories for homework and whether students needed a lot of grammar or vocab to be able to do it. Here’s my reply, I thought you might find it useful too! ——————————————————————————— I’ve also had great success with stories and it can be really,…

Yesterday the Daily Yomiuri Newspaper in Japan did a “review” of the Planet Eigo book. If you haven’t ordered the book yet you might want to have a read at what they say. Since I mentioned about the book in the Genki English newsletter this month we sold out of the first batch we received…