Today is a happy day! Colin and I are on our way back to China. We’ll be presenting at the SETRA conference in Beijing next week, and we are absolutely delighted for the opportunity to talk about some of the things we’ve been working on in the past […]
As a teacher, it’s sometimes difficult to investigate students’ progress in a productive (holistic) way. Simulations can help by providing a culturally familiar scaffolding that can guide a fluency experience. They are also a lot of fun! While the talk show simulation described below can be done outside […]
In 2018, an Atlantic Monthly article featured a writer’s experience with Duolingo, the language app that uses gaming principles to attract learners to their lessons. The stickiness of the app seems to work. The article stated that Duolingo has 27.5 million active monthly users, and it is not […]
Click here for presentation handout: Hidden Grammar Handout TESOL 19 There’s more to grammar than discrete rules about verb tenses, articles, and modals. When we channel Diane Larsen’s Freeman’s view of language as a complex, adaptive system, we can start to see grammar as any system of organization, […]
We may assume that our conversations are spontaneous, but the truth is speakers fall into patterns. We especially fall into these conversational grooves in situations that we experience over and over. The patterns exist because they are comfortable and allow us to connect with each other along easy […]
We love our daily work teaching students and writing, but every once in a while we get a chance to stop and feel very grateful for our decision to become English language teachers. This burst of gratitude happened to us last week when we had the opportunity […]
Word forms are notoriously difficult for ESOL students to master. This is especially true for those whose native languages are non-inflected, meaning adjectives, nouns, and adjectives share the same form, as in Vietnamese. It is therefore not uncommon to see our Vietnamese students make errors such as these: […]
Why do English learners still travel to physical classrooms? After all, they can get plenty of information, practice grammar drills and even listen to graded lectures online. Perhaps the answer lies in something that computers cannot provide: a safe space to learn and practice conversation. Conversation is actually […]
