Configuring groups to maximize practice
Waiting for an elevator at the Colorado TESOL conference, I heard two teachers complaining about a session they had attended. “The presenter was only talking,” said a tall woman in an engineer’s cap. “There was no interaction, so I left.” It seems that group work has gotten to […]
Participial Phrases and the Goldilocks Effect
Explaining participial phrases, it is exhausting. The problem with the sentence I just wrote is that I needed a gerund phrase, but I got confused. This is a common occurrence when students are first introduced to participial phrases. When students are asked to complete sentence stems such […]
Making Group Work Work
Truthfully, sometimes it is easier to just lecture. The default mode of the traditional classroom is that the teacher is standing, sometimes pacing, while students are sitting, watching, listening, and taking notes. These roles are still easy to fall into, especially when teachers are entertaining. Still, no matter […]
How to bring abstract words to life
As educators, we often rely on pictures to teach new vocabulary to students. It works perfectly for concrete words. A quick search on Google Images will often give us the exact image we need to illustrate such words as bridge, run, or mother. But what are we to […]
It’s a time thing: Activities for practicing the past perfect
“It’s the past of the past,” I often say when explaining the past perfect to intermediate learners. However, this can sound odd, as if we were wandering someplace long ago and far away. While it is true that the past perfect is very past-oriented, much of the time, we […]
Films as Community Builders
The students in our ESOL program have busy lives. The majority of them have jobs, many have children, and several are full-time students and part-time workers. They have very little time to socialize at school, and few have the opportunity practice their English outside of class. As a […]
Board work: the intersection of teacher, students, and language
When I mentioned I was thinking about doing a post on board work, I got a flurry of comments from a couple of department chairs who frequently observe teachers. Make a plan for the board before class. Write the date, your goals and the homework assignments at the […]
Vocabulary journals: The continuum at work II
In our last post, we described the role of grammar journals. In addition to helping students individualize their grammar practice in a meaningful context, the grammar journals fostered greater awareness of how vocabulary and grammar work together on a continuum. In this post, we look at the same […]
Grammar Journals: The continuum at work
Last year, our department did some soul-searching about our grammar classes. We had become increasingly concerned that students were learning grammar in a way that trapped it in tidy little boxes. They could do discrete item exercises and tests, but in writing in particular grammar control was […]
English Endeavors 