Listening Practice: Mind Control
Two audio articles in one unit explore psychology in different ways.
Effective Academic Writing and the Learning Process
Last year, Stanford professor and AI researcher Andrew Ng told Harvard Business Review that if a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, it can probably be automated by using artificial intelligence. With this in mind, perhaps we should be thankful […]
What exactly is Core Vocabulary? – repost from Scott Thornbury
“Lexis is the core or heart of language”, wrote Michael Lewis (Lewis, 1993, p. 89). Yes, but which lexis? Given the hundreds of thousands of words that there are, which ones should we be teaching soonest? Is there a ‘core’ vocabulary? If so, where can we find it? […]
Aligning Oral Communication w/ real-world pragmatics (handout)
Our recent presentation at the state TexTESOL was a blast! Here’s a link to the handout: Aligning OC & Pragmatics. We talked about pragmatics, grammar, vocabulary, and lexicogrammatical chunks. We laughed a lot too. The audience role-played two colleagues meeting for dinner at a TESOL conference, under slightly uncomfortable […]
Finding or adapting just-right materials
While traveling for a sabbatical, Alice has had a chance to talk to students and teachers at various language programs across the U.S. This post was inspired by an encounter she had with a student at a community college program in the northeast. Riata suddenly had hives. The […]
Speed Work in the Reading Classroom
Yesterday, I went on a beautiful fall walk with a friend who happens to be a personal trainer. I told her I like to jog slowly. She scolded me and said I needed to push myself. It is not enough to just jog around the track, she said. […]
Transition Words 2.0 (free download)
Download: Sentence and Clause Connectors Every semester, I see my students holding enormous charts of transition words that they’ve downloaded from the Internet. I’ve never been a big fan of them. They usually give too much […]
Celebrating the launch of TRIO Listening & Speaking: Listening as a process
We are super excited about the launch of Trio Listening & Speaking as it gave us a chance to try out some new ideas for building skills with the invisible language that we hear and say. The following article written for the Oxford University Press Newsletter lays out […]
Using Graded Texts across the Curriculum
Along with our newest feature, downloadable, graded texts, we’ve been doing some research on extensive reading, and it turns out that in many programs, fluency reading is an ESOL underdog. It’s quite valuable, but we do not do enough of it. To start, much research supports the notion […]
Introducing Graded Texts And Five Ways to Use them
If reading exists on a continuum, then intensive reading occupies the end where students work heavily on reading skills. Intensive lessons generally include much frontloading in the form of vocabulary work and schema building. Next, while students read, they work on additional skills such as scanning for the […]
