Teaching Insightss

Speaking Part 3 pushes candidates beyond personal topics into broader discussion. Here's how teachers can help students structure and extend their answers with confidence.

Coursebooks provide structure, but real fluency often needs more. Here's how and when teachers can use authentic resources purposefully alongside the coursebook.

Native speakerism has been present in the ELT market for decades, yet it often goes unnoticed.

As language teachers, we often look for fresh ways to help learners think faster, listen better, and express themselves more naturally. In my experience, some of the most powerful classroom tools come from the world of interpreting.

As we come to celebrate UNESCO World Teachers' Day on 5 October, at MTS we make a clear commitment: to celebrate EFL teachers and provide them with the tools, recognition, and support they deserve. And we are particularly committed to building a global network of confident, highly trained IELTS instructors through our structured IELTS teacher training courses.

I’ve never been a particularly techy person. I didn’t grow up gaming, and I was never interested in computer studies. That carried into my professional life. In the early years of teaching, I remember dreading interview questions like: “What technology do you use in the classroom?” 

Teacher Juliana Valadares shares how she moved from AI sceptic to advocate, and how she now uses AI to plan lessons, differentiate materials, and support learner independence.

Teenagers can struggle to generate the ideas needed for a discursive essay under time pressure, perhaps because they feel that the ideas all have to come from within themselves as original opinions.

Teacher Mohammed Rayhan shares how keeping a digital diary of everyday photos can inspire creative, engaging IELTS lessons and spark learner discussion.

In today’s interconnected world, the ability to communicate in English opens doors: academic doors, career doors, and even international borders. And when it comes to proving English proficiency on the global stage, few qualifications carry the weight and reputation of the IELTS (the International English Language Testing System) test.

Microlearning is something that piqued my curiosity as a teacher, as I thought it might be a practical tool to help me with some issues I was facing in the classroom. The students I was working with were often coming from traumatic experiences, suffering from post-COVID brain fog, or simply under a huge amount of pressure to pass IELTS.

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, teachers may feel pressured to constantly seek innovative ways to improve their ways of teaching and increase classroom efficiency. However, finding and ‘fixing’ problems can put a great amount of pressure on the teacher, particularly if they look to solve them alone.

MTS announces the winners of its 2023 awards in Vietnam: HEW London for Best International Partnership, and Gem Nguyen for Best Country Manager.

A recap of the MTS Business Party in Hanoi, bringing together language centre professionals from across Vietnam to celebrate and connect.

Following an initial successful business trip to Vietnam in May 2023, MTS’s Head of Operations Ivo Vicente and Business Growth Manager Korina Freese both spent the latter part of October 2023 meeting our key partners and friends in Vietnam, including the British Council team in Hanoi.

Today (5 October) is World Teachers' Day, an international day held annually to celebrate the work of teachers worldwide and the value they add to society as a whole. Established in 1994, the day’s activities aim to focus on "appreciating, assessing and improving the educators of the world" and to provide an opportunity to appreciate our wonderful teachers.

Today is Tet Doan Ngo, the mid-year festival in Vietnam, celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, and a perfect opportunity for this blog post about MTS’s recent IELTS English language teaching events and business development activity in Vietnam.

MTS is delighted to announce that it has recruited Gem Nguyen* as MTS’s IELTS Training Country Manager for Vietnam.

The focus in the IELTS reading component, for the academic and general versions of the exam, is on testing competence, that is use of the language rather than language knowledge per se. Yet, the temptation for many students and teachers is to focus on the latter. A common outcome of this is that candidates fail to make progress during IELTS preparation by themselves or in courses and perform well below their level of competence in the reading component in the exam itself, much to their own frustration, and that of their teacher.