Students love games. A little competition can often bring out the best in them. A Grammar Throwdown is a very simple yet effective game you can bring to any class to reinforce the grammar your students are studying or need to review. The concept comes from the television […]
We are Colin Ward and Alice Savage, a couple of English language teachers who met at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas and discovered a common passion for testing theory in the classroom. This hunger to help our students learn better and faster led to a collaboration on the […]
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, […]
In honor of summer break, it’s a good time for a little pleasure reading. We’ve been collecting Quotables from our students for years now. Some of them come to us in a first, second, or final draft. Others show up in our students’ journals or on their writing finals. […]
How can we help our students engage in pre-writing actively and collaboratively?
When students are writing to prompts, they have language needs that grammar textbooks may not cover. These are often due to translation or a writer trying to compensate for lack of vocabulary, as in the following example from an intermediate student’s paper: Playing too much computer games can […]
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. […]
English Endeavors 