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 […]
When can we say we know the meaning of a word? After looking it up in the dictionary? After experiencing it in discourse seven times? In fact, some might argue that we never stop learning a word because it is constantly changing, evolving, and taking on new meanings. Our job as teachers, […]
How can we help our students engage in pre-writing actively and collaboratively?
The Russian education researcher, Lev Vygotsky, remains famous among language teachers because his work continues to resonate. His enduring Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) occupies the territory in a lesson in which the scaffolding provided by teachers and peers enhances student learning beyond what individuals could do on their own. This elegant […]
Our students love certain words because they are familiar to them. However, when working within the register of academic English, they begin learning that some of these words are less appropriate because they are too informal or vague. Words like good, bad, nice, stuff, and thing often pop […]
The first day of class can be a bit scary. New students shuffle in, nervously clutching registration papers. After a quick glance at the room number, they take a seat, often far from each other. Occasionally, a returning student will recognize a pal from the past, and after a joyful greeting, the friends sit close together. The new ones, […]
The students were sharing stories in a circle. They had practiced for several days, and were fluent enough; however, in the telling almost none of these low intermediate English learners actually used past tenses to describe past experiences. Fluency and grammar do not travel the same neural networks. […]
The young Vietnamese man sat in the back and quietly looked at his book. When called on, he was silent for so long that other students became fidgety. When he did speak, it was a whisper. What do you do with a student like Thao? What if you […]
English Endeavors 