Many teachers see pronunciation as all packaging with no need for any content. We sometimes assume that if we can help students get the pronunciation right, the teacher’s job is done. But one of the central proposals of communicative language teaching methods is that language learning activities should be as…
Formative evaluations are one of the best ways to help students understand where they are now and what they need to do to achieve the objectives. The problem with formative oral evaluations is that students get very anxious and refuse to even try unless it counts because they don’t want…
Imagine two students. One student took the practice test before taking the test that counts. The other student skipped the practice test. Which student do you think will do better on the final test? The answer is pretty obvious.
To help students put their argumentation skills to use in our democracy, repurposed the argument essay discourse model they learned in Actively Engaged in Persuasion to write a letter to the House of Commons in Ottawa. Here’s what happened.
Students learn much more when they teach each other compared with when the teacher does all of the teaching (Hattie, 2009). Students teaching each other is called reciprocal teaching, and it has the second biggest effect on student achievement of all the classroom processes, accelerating learning by 37%
Memorizing new vocabulary using flashcards is a fast, social, fun, and efficient strategy for learning new vocabulary in your second language.
Email writing is one of the most common writing tasks that adults do. As teachers, it is time to put practical writing tasks at the center of our ESL pedagogy. Here’s how.
Dictation exercises accelerate learning. They help you remember words, they help you remember how they are spelled and pronounced, and they help you learn capitalization and punctuation rules that are difficult to learn otherwise.
People can take personality tests. So can ESL courses. Different courses emphasize different learning goals, and suit some students better than others. Does your course reflect your personality or does it have a personality of its own? You have probably heard of the Briggs-Myers Test, right? Briggs-Myers has been around…
Students told me that they want help with their pronunciation, so I developed an automatically scored speaking assignment. Students read the prompt and compose their answer to a question, finish a sentence, or translate a phrase. Then, the student records his or her response with a microphone and submits it…