Most Americans are not comfortable with silence. We tend to dive in and fill awkward pauses with anything that comes to mind. Our intention is usually sincere. We want to avoid the pain of failing to fill conversational space. However, awkward pauses are bound to come up when […]
“Think in English,” we say to our lower level multi-lingual writers. However, to really support them in avoiding translation errors, we need to give them lots of practice. The following prewriting refresher is structured as a game in which teams compete to create target sentence types. The first team to […]
What is pragmatics? Like the highways, roads, and trails that guide our travel, language-oriented patterns scaffold our conversations. The existence of patterns does not mean there is not variation. Every time we get on a freeway literally or figuratively, it’s a new experience because we bring a different mood […]
On Wednesday, April 22, Colin will be presenting a TESOL Virtual Seminar titled Teaching Modals Across the Levels. This webinar will: show how modals and related structures are used in written and spoken language; describe how to level modals from beginner to advanced levels; explain how to take students from more controlled […]