The idea of formal writing—whether it's a long essay or just a short piece—is intimidating for a lot of people, but it's especially intimidating for English language learners, who are still developing in their language abilities and often feel like they're bad writers. In the fall, I started teaching an advanced-level ESL class with a …
“How to Make Cranberry Sauce”: A Video for ESL Students
Thanksgiving is almost here! I made a short video for my students showing how to make cranberry sauce. You can watch it with your students, too, especially if they like to cook or are interested in American Thanksgiving foods. https://youtu.be/SSO2rU3Z6yk You could even bring in some cranberry sauce for your students to sample after they …
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“My Fake Boyfriend”: A New Graded Reader for ESL Students
My book is here! It's a graded reader for English language learners—a short novel for students to read to provide them with compelling, comprehensible input in English. You can use it as a whole-class novel, a read-aloud, or as an option to offer students during independent reading time. The book is aimed at lower-level English …
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Video and Task Idea: “Top 10 List” Videos
This is a quick idea for a task you can use with a video that gives some kind of “top 10” or “top 5” (or whatever number) list. It works best with students at the intermediate level or higher, but I think it could be adapted if you want to use it with lower-level students. …
Book Review: Activities for Task-Based Learning
I recently read the book Activities for Task-Based Learning by Neil Anderson and Neil McCutcheon. I first heard about it from this episode of the Teacher Talking Time podcast, where you can listen to an interview with one of the authors about the book. I’ve been wanting to learn more about task-based language teaching, so …
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How to Learn Students’ Names
It’s hard to overstate just how important it is to learn our new students’ names as soon as possible. As Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” We want to create a welcoming community atmosphere in our classrooms, and learning students’ names—as fast as …
How to Use Whole-Class Novels Without Killing the Joy of Reading
When we require our students to read a certain novel or other book together as a class, we are always at risk of committing readicide. The term “readicide” comes from Kelly Gallagher’s book, Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. The author argues that many of the practices used …
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