Last spring, Maissa and Bushra were discussing fall courses, and Bushra casually mentioned that she was not planning to take grammar. “It’s all online.” She said, “I don’t need it.” Bushra has a point. Youtube has made it possible for anyone with a cell phone to post a […]
Being able to speak effortlessly is a great luxury. Expert speakers can assume that their messages and the intentions behind their words are coming across in exactly the way they intend. If they do think about sounds, confident speakers generally focus on the […]
UPDATE: Based on the popularity of this post, we got inspired, and are very excited to announce the upcoming publication of our new book by Alphabet Press, 60 Kinesthetic Grammar Activities! Please click here to find out more and order a copy. There are activities for everything from […]
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 […]
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 […]
After students have studied a set of vocabulary, they are often left with a long list of words which can appear quite lonely. Many textbooks include these lists as a reference for students at the end of unit, but what if they could be used more actively in […]
Making tests that push our students enough but not too far can feel like one of the biggest challenges for teachers. Tests that are too easy may lead to a false assessment of proficiency. Those that are too hard can be discouraging to students, and challenging for teachers to grade. What we want […]
For native speakers, a writing process that starts with a plan and ends with sentence-level editing makes sense. However, nonnative writers have different challenges, especially at the introductory level. Fortunately, process writing is not set in stone. We can adapt it to suit our students’ needs. The first […]
Meeting the demands of writing with language learning is an uphill climb, so one nice thing we can do for second language writers is reduce their cognitive load. A sentence builder box does this by providing relevant vocabulary in a structure that is salient to a task. Students use […]
Power point presentations were never meant for English language teaching, but they lend themselves to lesson plans in myriad ways and are a great way to get one’s feet wet in the waters of technology A very simple power point can be a reusable answer key, a worksheet, a game, or […]
