Sam Shepherd

Just put a long text through Word 2016. I'd forgotten how much of a pain in the bum prescriptivist it was, insisting that I use only "that" with a defining relative clause and advising me to avoid a split infinitive. (And what a ridiculous example sentence it uses...)

Adults There are, in this world, many things which annoy me. Things that irk me. Things that get my goat, wind me up, rattle my cage and downright piss me off. Things like muttonheads in cars speedin…

Reflecting on the post 16 white paper, here's a blog post I wrote in 2017 about the ongoing disregard for adults in the general discourse around education. We've really not moved on much, have we? samuelshep.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/a...

Why. With References. On most, if not all, teacher training courses, there’s a chunk of the lesson plan form dedicated to the “rationale” behind the lesson, or even the stage of the lesson. Sometimes i…

A question I've been pulling over for decades. samuelshep.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/w...

I need to remember this quote

Formative. In my last post, I reflected on the planning processes and the limitations that formal documentation can sometimes place on that process. Since then I’ve been mulling it over a bit more, and …

Thinking about formative assessment and what it looks like in ESOL (and why it's so hard to pin it into little boxes! wp.me/pZQ5N-2Td

Cells As a warm up to going back into work next week, I started to revisit some of the books I’d read for my PhD. Not the research methods ones, obviously, or the heavy duty theory & philosophy…

I always think about planning at this time of year. wp.me/sZQ5N-cells

I felt that something needed explaining after the plenary at #natecla25 today, so I wrote a blog post about it. #bemoresquirrel samuelshep.wordpress.com/2025/06/28/b...

Travelling down to Birmingham, sadly missing out in day one of #NATECLA but will be there tomorrow, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and without a ridiculously early start

Lunch outside today. Love community teaching.

Minimal pair of the day...

She's not wrong. Academic writing can be (and often is) the pits to read. And I don't care how important or insightful your research is, if you write about it in an unreadable way, you might as well lock it in a box at the bottom of the ocean.

Writing as an act of research I’m writing amendments to my thesis at the moment, a process which swings from deeply frustrating to immensely enjoyable on an almost day to day basis. One of things I have noticed, as I refl…

A little self indulgence based on something I may or may not include in my amendments, reflecting on why I write stuff down, and why it's so much easier than the grind of writing a plan. wp.me/pZQ5N-2Qa

Ely cathedral on what passes for a hill.

Stopped off in Ely on my way home from the LSRN conference and found a hill.

Good lord. Travelling to Kings Lynn through Cambridgeshire and I'd forgotten just how flat this part of the world is. It's like God took Oxfordshire and ironed it.

Beastie boys track listing showing No Sleep til Brooklyn as No Sleep til Kings Lynn.

Listening to this. Kind of.

Just hitting the road for the @LSRNetwork National Conference in Kings Lynn. Excited for the event, of course, but also because it's only the third time I've ever ventured east of the M1.

Controversially today, I left students in first language pairs and let them talk in those languages while planning and writing a text together. Talk is work in the ESOL classroom but sometimes the work needs to be something else.

I am notorious at work for being overly sympathetic, i.e. crap, when it comes to chasing attendance and punctuality. But I have a new class which, after three weeks, is challenging even my usually very laissez faire position. Trust me, this is bad.

The incredible shrinking airlines: can anyone actually be comfortable in a 17-inch seat? There are many good reasons to quit flying – primarily, of course, the climate crisis. And the lack of legroom suggests airlines are actually trying to squeeze us out ...

Another reason to never fly again. I just worked it out and those seat dimensions would be crippling for me. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Dear Richard Madeley: ‘I’m scared my bilingual son will lose the ability to speak English’ We’re moving to Poland for a few years and I’m worried it will impact my four-year-old’s language skills

A fairly sensible response to the question but at the same time, I wonder if the author's wife wrote to the Polish equivalent of the Telegraph about her son not being able to speak to her family? www.telegraph.co.uk/family/paren...

It's spring. So obviously time for the last member of our family to emerge from the winter gloom. (For anyone concerned by the size: it's temporary housing, and she'll be out and about around the house soon, as well as getting a nice new big house next week.)

But also there's a lot of blame to be placed at the door of the post 2000 massive surge for technologised resource based teaching, driven by text book publishers and writers, helped by the "plug 'em in and churn 'em out" school of ELT teacher training.

I am slowly gathering various efl teaching "ideas" books published in the 80s and 90s, like the Pilgrims resource books for teachers. They are bloody marvellous. I assume they stopped being published c.1999 because these sorts of ideas collections moved online, which is fine, to a point 1/2

This afternoon's accompaniment to the amendments #phdlife

If he'd sat down with someone from ELT they could have come up with something useful, rather than the straw man guff he wrote here. There are things to be learned from his theories, I think, but I'm deeply disinclined to engage.

I've been digging through the vinyls today too. Slightly less classy, however with this slice of cheese from 1990. (Some good cheese, some musical equivalent of Tesco Value Cheddar.)

Immersion: THAT article by Sweller. I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting the work of Mike Long, in particular the excellent Second Language Acquisition and Task Based Language Teaching. It’s been fascinating going back int…

Been mulling this one over for years. Finally got a shape for it today. wp.me/pZQ5N-2Pw

A whiteboard showing some text demonstrating the use of definite and indefinite articles in English.

I come to ESOL for the students and the satisfaction, I stay for the grammar.

Young mixed breed terrier popping up onto the owner's leg imploringly.

Viva preparation assistance?

Busy writing "schemes of learning" for the rest of the academic year. Internally cursing because it's all for show and the course I'll actually teach will, by April if not earlier, end up radically different to the one I'm trying to squeeze into a spreadsheet.