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 […]
The General Service List has been around since 1953, when researcher Michael West used a 2.5 million corpus to identify the 2000 most important, high-frequency word families English learners needed to know. The GSL has been an indispensable tool for teachers in helping them know which words deserve […]
