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 […]
Monday, I asked my evening students, “What do you remember from last week?” They thought for a minute, then Grielda said, “Paco lost his leg!” Ana chimed in. “There was a fire, a . . .an explosion.” It was not the present simple, conjunctions, or paragraph organization. […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
Computer games can provide an interesting insight into reading. The appeal of online games at least partly lies in the software that allows them to precisely level ability. In League of Legends, for example, there are multiple ranks. Players must advance through the ranks to reach platinum or […]
English Endeavors 