What if there is not just one way to categorize and describe grammar? What if there are several? What if one grammar exists inside another and that exists inside a third? This view of the way language is organized for communication comes from Complex Systems Theory […]
TESOL Chicago is coming, and that’s usually a time when people are thinking about course books. With this in mind, we are reposting a reflection on the TRIO series. After using it with real students, we’ve discovered some interesting results, especially when it […]
Last year, Stanford professor and AI researcher Andrew Ng told Harvard Business Review that if a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, it can probably be automated by using artificial intelligence. With this in mind, perhaps we should be thankful […]
While traveling for a sabbatical, Alice has had a chance to talk to students and teachers at various language programs across the U.S. This post was inspired by an encounter she had with a student at a community college program in the northeast. Riata suddenly had hives. The […]
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 […]
“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 […]
