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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
In our last post, we described the role of grammar journals. In addition to helping students individualize their grammar practice in a meaningful context, the grammar journals fostered greater awareness of how vocabulary and grammar work together on a continuum. In this post, we look at the same […]
Last year, our department did some soul-searching about our grammar classes. We had become increasingly concerned that students were learning grammar in a way that trapped it in tidy little boxes. They could do discrete item exercises and tests, but in writing in particular grammar control was […]
In physics, the space-time continuum refers to the idea that space and time are very different at the extremes, yet are still parts of a continuous whole. They are intrinsically interwoven, dependent on one another, and must be mixed together to accurately describe what we observe in the […]
We have recently published an article for the TESOL AEIS newsletter on the “vocabulary-grammar continuum,” presenting how vocabulary, word forms, and grammar may be taught together rather than separately. We also look at how teachers might handle high-frequency word lists by categorizing words into content, grammar, and “shadow” words. The article […]
English Endeavors 