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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
“It’s the past of the past,” I often say when explaining the past perfect to intermediate learners. However, this can sound odd, as if we were wandering someplace long ago and far away. While it is true that the past perfect is very past-oriented, much of the time, we […]
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 […]
