The Russian education researcher, Lev Vygotsky, remains famous among language teachers because his work continues to resonate. His enduring Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) occupies the territory in a lesson in which the scaffolding provided by teachers and peers enhances student learning beyond what individuals could do on their own. This elegant […]
Our students love certain words because they are familiar to them. However, when working within the register of academic English, they begin learning that some of these words are less appropriate because they are too informal or vague. Words like good, bad, nice, stuff, and thing often pop […]
The first day of class can be a bit scary. New students shuffle in, nervously clutching registration papers. After a quick glance at the room number, they take a seat, often far from each other. Occasionally, a returning student will recognize a pal from the past, and after a joyful greeting, the friends sit close together. The new ones, […]
The students were sharing stories in a circle. They had practiced for several days, and were fluent enough; however, in the telling almost none of these low intermediate English learners actually used past tenses to describe past experiences. Fluency and grammar do not travel the same neural networks. […]
The young Vietnamese man sat in the back and quietly looked at his book. When called on, he was silent for so long that other students became fidgety. When he did speak, it was a whisper. What do you do with a student like Thao? What if you […]
Teachers understand the value of active listening and active reading. In a writing class, there is also great value in active editing. For example, some teachers tell students to read their paper out loud to themselves in a quiet room. The idea is that sometimes it easier to […]
Oxford University Press Colin Ward looks at how to support students to think critically in the language classroom. Colin is a Professor of ESOL at Lone Star College – North Harris in Houston, Texas. He is also a co-author of Q: Skills for Success and the forthcoming Trio Writing, […]
Waiting for an elevator at the Colorado TESOL conference, I heard two teachers complaining about a session they had attended. “The presenter was only talking,” said a tall woman in an engineer’s cap. “There was no interaction, so I left.” It seems that group work has gotten to […]
Explaining participial phrases, it is exhausting. The problem with the sentence I just wrote is that I needed a gerund phrase, but I got confused. This is a common occurrence when students are first introduced to participial phrases. When students are asked to complete sentence stems such […]
Truthfully, sometimes it is easier to just lecture. The default mode of the traditional classroom is that the teacher is standing, sometimes pacing, while students are sitting, watching, listening, and taking notes. These roles are still easy to fall into, especially when teachers are entertaining. Still, no matter […]
