The Performance (Note: This is part 2 of 2. It briefly reviews the previous post and details the outcome of a process drama reading project.) Two students, in role, stand in front of a seated Dr. Lister, also in role. One is berating the nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon for […]
Note: This is part 1 of 2. It introduces a drama project that attempts to engage students more deeply with reading. Here is my big idea question for 2026: Can I use art to level up my students’ engagement with language? My instinct says yes, but my coursebook […]
As instructors, we’ve been told that beginning students cannot handle multiple paragraphs and more advanced grammatical concepts, such as infinitives or subordinating conjunctions. The aim of this post is to challenge that belief.
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 […]
English Endeavors 