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.
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: […]
What if there is not just one way to categorize and describe grammar? What if there are several? What if one grammar exists inside another and that exists inside a third? This view of the way language is organized for communication comes from Complex Systems Theory […]
Power points are great for lectures, but for classrooms with projectors, nothing beats a word doc for interacting with students’ in-the-moment learning. The beauty of being able to work with a word doc on a screen is that you can be more responsive to what comes from the […]
At a drama presentation given by Kathleen McGovern at the Chicago TESOL last week, participants created and performed skits that were meant to advocate for a change we’d like to see at the TESOL convention. Many of the groups did skits about the long walking distances. Others advocated […]
TESOL Chicago is coming, and that’s usually a time when people are thinking about course books. With this in mind, we are reposting a reflection on the TRIO series. After using it with real students, we’ve discovered some interesting results, especially when it […]