When a student turned in a paragraph that was clearly written by an A.I., I shoveled the paragraph into my own A.I. and asked it to give her feedback. Then I printed both and gave the paper back to her. “Now wasn’t that easy?” I said. She […]
Being able to speak effortlessly is a great luxury. As a native speaker, I can more or less assume my messages and intentions are clear. I know my objective in a conversation, and I use my voice to support that objective. In addition to strategic […]
In his ground-breaking work, The Literary Mind (1996, Oxford University Press), the cognitive scientist Mark Turner, quotes the following lines from a Robert Browning Poem, Porphyria’s Lover. The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did […]
At first glance, Rashid seems like a difficult guest. He’s coming out of war-torn Syria. His father died in the conflict, and Rashid has enemies in Jordan. But when Rashid’s uncle and his wife agree to host the young man in their small, Houston home, no one thinks […]
Being able to speak effortlessly is a great luxury. As a native speaker, I can more or less assume my messages and intentions are clear. I know my objective in a conversation, and I use my voice to support that objective. In addition to strategic […]
As instructors, we’ve been told that beginning students cannot handle multiple paragraphs and more advanced grammatical concepts, such as infinitives or subordinating conjunctions. The aim of this post is to challenge that belief.
Here is a drawing-and-guessing activity from our new book, 60 Kinesthetic Grammar Activities (Alphabet Publishing) that gives students an opportunity to practice the imperative in a fun and meaningful way. The activity can easily be adapted to a socially-distanced classroom with partners sitting face-to-face and six-feet apart.
For the first post of the year, let’s talk about pragmatics, prosody and pronunciation. Our voice tells the other person whether we are serious, joking, offended or something else. Stress emphasis communicates what information is new or important. And our way of expressing thought groups enhances comprehensibility. When […]
Many students have photos like this one on their phones, and they provide an example of the material we can draw on to create community in an online classroom. The following five icebreakers are fairly simple and do not require specialized technology or skills. They work best when […]
Humor’s a funny thing. It’s an unconscious, unfakable, universal form of communication all humans share, no matter what culture they’re from or language they speak. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, humor emerges less from the crack of one-liners than it does from the uncertainty that emerges from shared experiences and […]
English Endeavors 