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 […]
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 […]
Summaries are difficult to teach. For a summary to be effective, several reading and writing skills must align. On the reading side, students need to identify purpose and audience, understand text organization, and distinguish between main ideas, major supporting points, and minor details. On the writing side, they […]
The General Service List has been around since 1953, when researcher Michael West used a 2.5 million corpus to identify the 2000 most important, high-frequency word families English learners needed to know. The GSL has been an indispensable tool for teachers in helping them know which words deserve […]
We have recently published an article for the TESOL AEIS newsletter on the “vocabulary-grammar continuum,” presenting how vocabulary, word forms, and grammar may be taught together rather than separately. We also look at how teachers might handle high-frequency word lists by categorizing words into content, grammar, and “shadow” words. The article […]
