Our recent presentation at the state TexTESOL was a blast! Here’s a link to the handout: Aligning OC & Pragmatics. We talked about pragmatics, grammar, vocabulary, and lexicogrammatical chunks. We laughed a lot too. The audience role-played two colleagues meeting for dinner at a TESOL conference, under slightly uncomfortable […]
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 […]
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.
Meeting the demands of writing with language learning is an uphill climb, so one nice thing we can do for second language writers is reduce their cognitive load. A sentence builder box does this by providing relevant vocabulary in a structure that is salient to a task. Students use […]
How is language learning like a roller coaster? Diane Larsen-Freeman (2008) notes that language learning is a complex, dynamic system. According to Freeman, language learning is constantly in motion. Like the loops of a roller coaster, students are taken on a journey in which language is learned and […]
English Endeavors 