Language tends to spiral like nature. As planets spiral around the sun, so the sun spirals around the galaxy. On earth, hurricanes spiral, picking up objects and pulling them into whirling winds. Vocabulary and grammar spiral as well, around the language learner. It is a dynamic system where chunks […]
On Thursday, October 1, we will be presenting an OUP webinar titled Spiraling Into Control: Meeting the needs of beginning writers. This practice-oriented webinar draws on some of our biggest influences, including Eli Hinkle, Ken Hyland, and Diane Larsen-Freeman, who provide possible answers for one of the biggest questions in second language […]
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 […]
Our students love certain words because they are familiar to them. However, when working within the register of academic English, they begin learning that some of these words are less appropriate because they are too informal or vague. Words like good, bad, nice, stuff, and thing often pop […]
As educators, we often rely on pictures to teach new vocabulary to students. It works perfectly for concrete words. A quick search on Google Images will often give us the exact image we need to illustrate such words as bridge, run, or mother. But what are we to […]
The students in our ESOL program have busy lives. The majority of them have jobs, many have children, and several are full-time students and part-time workers. They have very little time to socialize at school, and few have the opportunity practice their English outside of class. As a […]
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 […]
