“Lexis is the core or heart of language”, wrote Michael Lewis (Lewis, 1993, p. 89). Yes, but which lexis? Given the hundreds of thousands of words that there are, which ones should we be teaching soonest? Is there a ‘core’ vocabulary? If so, where can we find it? […]
Our recent presentation at the state TexTESOL was a blast! Here’s a link to the handout: Aligning OC & Pragmatics. We talked about pragmatics, grammar, vocabulary, and lexicogrammatical chunks. We laughed a lot too. The audience role-played two colleagues meeting for dinner at a TESOL conference, under slightly uncomfortable […]
While traveling for a sabbatical, Alice has had a chance to talk to students and teachers at various language programs across the U.S. This post was inspired by an encounter she had with a student at a community college program in the northeast. Riata suddenly had hives. The […]
Yesterday, I went on a beautiful fall walk with a friend who happens to be a personal trainer. I told her I like to jog slowly. She scolded me and said I needed to push myself. It is not enough to just jog around the track, she said. […]
Download: Sentence and Clause Connectors Every semester, I see my students holding enormous charts of transition words that they’ve downloaded from the Internet. I’ve never been a big fan of them. They usually give too much […]
We are super excited about the launch of Trio Listening & Speaking as it gave us a chance to try out some new ideas for building skills with the invisible language that we hear and say. The following article written for the Oxford University Press Newsletter lays out […]
Along with our newest feature, downloadable, graded texts, we’ve been doing some research on extensive reading, and it turns out that in many programs, fluency reading is an ESOL underdog. It’s quite valuable, but we do not do enough of it. To start, much research supports the notion […]
