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 […]
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 […]
Teachers understand the value of active listening and active reading. In a writing class, there is also great value in active editing. For example, some teachers tell students to read their paper out loud to themselves in a quiet room. The idea is that sometimes it easier to […]
Waiting for an elevator at the Colorado TESOL conference, I heard two teachers complaining about a session they had attended. “The presenter was only talking,” said a tall woman in an engineer’s cap. “There was no interaction, so I left.” It seems that group work has gotten to […]
Explaining participial phrases, it is exhausting. The problem with the sentence I just wrote is that I needed a gerund phrase, but I got confused. This is a common occurrence when students are first introduced to participial phrases. When students are asked to complete sentence stems such […]
English Endeavors 