Professional development for teachers

Here you’ll find a wide range of free, self-access training and resources designed to help you build the skills and knowledge you need as an English teacher.

All TeachingEnglish professional development resources are aligned with the British Council Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for teachers, to help you plan your learning and develop the areas most relevant to your professional growth.

You can explore resources in a way that suits your goals:
- by professional practices – to focus on specific areas of teaching where you want to deepen your skills and expertise
- by professional development levels – to find resources matched to your training and experience and see how they can help you progress within each area.

Each resource includes a timer icon to show how much time you’ll need, helping you plan your learning effectively.

Non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication (body language, paralinguistics) has been a focus of attention for some time in areas such as the refinement of presentation skills, developing social skills, and even as a realistic alternative to the lie-detector test.

Structured Inquiry

For the purpose of this article 'inquiry’ will be taken to mean 'a language act in which one attempts to elicit another’s help in going beyond his or her present understanding.' (Lindfors 1999)

Two girls and a boy working in a group with a teacher watching

Context developing activities

It is widely recognized that second language (L2) mental lexicon must be independent of its first language (L1) counterpart, if learners are to use the target language effectively and fluently.

Seven steps to vocabulary learning

Have you ever considered why a learner (even an advanced one) can hear a difficult English word or phrase literally thousands of times and still not use that word in the way that a native speaker does?

Learning English through children's literature - literature article

Extensive reading

In general, students learning to read in English do not like reading and they rarely read. This is partly due to the way reading is approached in the language class.

Ethnically diverse adults studying together

Multi-word verbs: Methods and approaches

In the first of these two articles, Multi-word verbs: Learner problems, I looked at some of the problems that multi-word verbs cause students.

Multi-word verbs: Learner problems

Multi-word verbs are complex and present problems for learners both in terms of their grammatical form and their lexical meaning.

diverse group in a classroom with one learner presenting to her classmates

Listening to body language

Explore how teaching body language can help learners develop their ability to understand others.

Teaching online

When, in a speech in Cape Town in 1966, Robert F Kennedy invented the 'ancient Chinese curse’, "May he live in interesting times" he might well have been talking about education at the beginning of the 21st century; for while the ubiquity of Internet access has indeed made our times interesting, it has also cursed educators into poorly defined online roles.

Conveying meaning

When teaching any language whether it is a word, a phrase or a verb form, at some point it will be essential to convey and check that your students have understood the meaning.

Teaching resources