TweetFormat: Workshop Time: 90 minutes Title: “Community and Process: Building Engaging Writing Lessons” Target Students: Beginner to advanced, any age group We are all writing teachers, but we sometimes forget. A writing lesson can be dynamic, energetic and creative. In fact, it should be. As teachers, we want our students to work together and share [...]
TweetDownload this text as an MS Word document The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching What is an approach? Your approach as a language teacher is a set of principles about learning and teaching on which you depend to form the way you operate as a teacher. It is not a permanent state, indeed, the good teacher knows [...]
TweetAttached below is a sample lesson plan I designed for teaching the present perfect tense. Of note is that the lesson focuses on a particular communicative task, not the target structure specifically. it is very important to provide students with a real communicative purpose for the structures they learn so that they will know when [...]
TweetI just got back from my first real trip outside of St. Petersburg: The annual National Association of English Teachers Umbrella conference in Kalinigrad, a unique city that is geographically separated from the rest of Russia between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. I flew there on Sunday, just after presenting at the Saint [...]
TweetReading an American newspaper is a unique skill, and your mastery of the genre can help you a great deal in your studies. Most notable when discussing newspaper literacy is your ability to locate useful and/or interesting information. This means you have an understanding of the organizational structure of the American newspaper. Just as native [...]
TweetFormat: Plenary Time: 45 minutes Title: “Written Corrective Feedback: How to Respond to Student Writing” Target Students: Intermediate to advanced When students who are learners of English produce writing in an academic setting, some amount of written feedback is required from their professor. Indeed, research has shown that the type of written feedback teachers give [...]
TweetFormat: Workshop Time: 45 minutes Title: “Negotiating Face and Making Requests: Speech Changes and Imposition” Target Students: Intermediate to advanced One of the most important skills our students learn is how to use language differently in different situations and with different people. Speeches are not like telephone conversations. Essays are not like newspaper articles. And [...]
TweetWhat is Pair and Group Work? Used in conjunction with individual and whole-class work, pair and group work is the act of dividing students so that they work cooperatively with only a small number of their classmates on a specific task assigned by their teacher. Pair and group work first came into usage in the [...]
TweetFormat: Workshop Time: 60-90 minutes Title: “Judging a Book by Its Cover: An Unorthodox Reading Lesson” Target Students: Beginner to advanced, any age group When teaching reading, teachers need to keep in mind that our goal is to help students develop the skills of an effective reader. But, what are these skills? Primarily, effective readers [...]
TweetThere are several in-class or homework activities that can improve a student’s ability to use a newspaper more effectively. Generally, these can be streamlined with summary-writing activities and are facilitated by students having actual copies of newspapers. Here are some examples of possible activities: 1) The instructor can choose two different types of articles (one [...]
