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.
Download: Sentence and Clause Connectors Every semester, I see my students holding enormous charts of transition words that they’ve downloaded from the Internet. I’ve never been a big fan of them. They usually give too much […]
Today we have a special guest blogger, Kate Adams, author of Trio Reading, Oxford University Press. Kate has some great ideas for connecting students with content. Krashen points out that the only way we become good readers is by reading (2004). If we gain reading skill by […]
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 […]
Making tests that push our students enough but not too far can feel like one of the biggest challenges for teachers. Tests that are too easy may lead to a false assessment of proficiency. Those that are too hard can be discouraging to students, and challenging for teachers to grade. What we want […]
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 […]
Below is a slideshow of one of the presentations we gave at Baltimore TESOL, “Thinking Outside the Paragraph,” where we outline three key principles that inform our teaching of academic writing at lower levels and helped formulate the pedagogy behind our new writing series, Trio Writing, by Oxford University Press. Beginning […]
We had a wonderful time at Baltimore TESOL this year! Below is a copy of the presentation we gave about the Spiraling Lesson Plan, the pedagogy that forms the basis of our new writing series by Oxford University Press, Trio Writing.
English Endeavors 