When a student turned in a paragraph that was clearly written by an A.I., I shoveled the paragraph into my own A.I. and asked it to give her feedback. Then I printed both and gave the paper back to her. “Now wasn’t that easy?” I said. She […]
Monday, I asked my evening students, “What do you remember from last week?” They thought for a minute, then Grielda said, “Paco lost his leg!” Ana chimed in. “There was a fire, a . . .an explosion.” It was not the present simple, conjunctions, or paragraph organization. […]
In his ground-breaking work, The Literary Mind (1996, Oxford University Press), the cognitive scientist Mark Turner, quotes the following lines from a Robert Browning Poem, Porphyria’s Lover. The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did […]
I recently started using an app to learn German. I liked it more than I wanted to. As a language teacher, I would like to side with my colleague who says, “There’s no substitute for a teacher in the classroom.” But I don’t feel like taking on […]
As instructors, we’ve been told that beginning students cannot handle multiple paragraphs and more advanced grammatical concepts, such as infinitives or subordinating conjunctions. The aim of this post is to challenge that belief.
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 […]
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 […]
“Think in English,” we say to our lower level multi-lingual writers. However, to really support them in avoiding translation errors, we need to give them lots of practice. The following prewriting refresher is structured as a game in which teams compete to create target sentence types. The first team to […]
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 […]
Students rely on models to help them communicate accurately and effectively. How often do you see a student’s thesis statement modeled after one in the textbook? Words are swapped out, but the pattern of the sentence essentially remains the same. Swapping is a useful learning strategy, and one […]
English Endeavors 