As educators, we often rely on pictures to teach new vocabulary to students. It works perfectly for concrete words. A quick search on Google Images will often give us the exact image we need to illustrate such words as bridge, run, or mother. But what are we to […]
“It’s the past of the past,” I often say when explaining the past perfect to intermediate learners. However, this can sound odd, as if we were wandering someplace long ago and far away. While it is true that the past perfect is very past-oriented, much of the time, we […]
The students in our ESOL program have busy lives. The majority of them have jobs, many have children, and several are full-time students and part-time workers. They have very little time to socialize at school, and few have the opportunity practice their English outside of class. As a […]
When I mentioned I was thinking about doing a post on board work, I got a flurry of comments from a couple of department chairs who frequently observe teachers. Make a plan for the board before class. Write the date, your goals and the homework assignments at the […]
In our last post, we described the role of grammar journals. In addition to helping students individualize their grammar practice in a meaningful context, the grammar journals fostered greater awareness of how vocabulary and grammar work together on a continuum. In this post, we look at the same […]
Last year, our department did some soul-searching about our grammar classes. We had become increasingly concerned that students were learning grammar in a way that trapped it in tidy little boxes. They could do discrete item exercises and tests, but in writing in particular grammar control was […]
In physics, the space-time continuum refers to the idea that space and time are very different at the extremes, yet are still parts of a continuous whole. They are intrinsically interwoven, dependent on one another, and must be mixed together to accurately describe what we observe in the […]
One, two or three paragraphs? Colin and I were working on a low level writing series when we came up against this question: What do beginning second language writers do after they have mastered the basic paragraph? We took a look at our choices. We could teach one […]
One of the best feelings a student can have is the feeling that one’s hard work knowledge and/or ability is reflected in a great test score. Teachers feel pretty happy about those tests, too. On the flip side, one of the worst moments for a student or teacher is that […]
Summaries are difficult to teach. For a summary to be effective, several reading and writing skills must align. On the reading side, students need to identify purpose and audience, understand text organization, and distinguish between main ideas, major supporting points, and minor details. On the writing side, they […]
