Hugh Dellar

I’m a teacher and teacher trainer at University of Westminster, in central London. I’m also – along with Andrew Walkley – the co-author of two five-level General English series, OUTCOMES and INNOVATIONS, both of which are published by National Geographic Learning. I’ve been teaching since 1993, when I did my CTEFLA at Westminster College. I then spent several years working in Jakarta, Indonesia, before doing my DTEFLA at Hammersmith and West London College and my MA TESOL at the Institute of Education. As a young writer, I was lucky enough to be mentored by Michael Lewis and Jimmie Hill, the men behind The Lexical Approach, a book which has had a profound impact on my career and my life in general!

Image by Flickr user Pierre Tourigny Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Why we should be afraid of the big bad wolf: Sugata Mitra and the neoliberal takeover in sheep’s clothing

February 5, 2020April 9, 2014 by Hugh Dellar

The proliferation of blog posts that have followed in the wake of Sugata Mitra’s keynote speech at IATEFL Harrogate last Saturday morning is almost as remarkable as the fact that such a controversial figure was given the opportunity to deliver his barely concealed sales pitch to such a large and captive audience without having to submit to the usual plenary speaker protocol of then facing a more rigorous Q&A session. Even more astounding, though, was the ecstatic outpouring that greeted the end of Mitra’s talk: the mobbing, the autograph hunting, the eulogies. Which part of his message were people not getting, I fretted to myself? The answer, it seems on reflection, was pretty much all of it.

Hugh’s Reviews: Vocaroo

January 31, 2020February 17, 2014 by Hugh Dellar

Hugh Dellar on tech tools for students and teachers

Hugh’s Reviews: Snappy Words

January 30, 2020June 6, 2013 by Hugh Dellar

As the dash towards digital becomes ever more frenzied, so Scoop It and other ‘curating’ (how I loathe that term!) mechanisms become ever more clogged with uncritical propaganda bombarding decent teachers with endless things that we’re all supposed to be keeping up with if we are to survive as teachers in the 21st century . . . and, perhaps predictably, many of them are utter dross and not worth wasting teachers’ time on, let alone students’ precious spare moments! Or do I mean extra moments? Or redundant ones? Or excess? All will be soon be revealed!

Hugh’s Reviews: Lingro

January 30, 2020June 2, 2013 by Hugh Dellar

Hello there –

Welcome to Hugh’s Reviews. This is the first in a series of posts that aim to explore and consider a range of different tech tools and sites aimed at ELT practitioners and at EFL students. As the number of such things seems to increase exponentially week on week, it becomes ever harder to simply keep abreast of what’s out there, let alone to find sufficient time to digest them and critically appraise them. I shall be exploring things I’ve seen touted and praised – and seeing if they merit the hype.

To begin, I’m going to talk about a site I first encountered courtesy of Russell Stannard called Lingro. It modestly proclaims itself as “the coolest dictionary known to hombre“! And Russell himself was almost as enthusiastic, calling “this fabulous tool” “the best website” he found in 2011.