One teacher's reflections on English as a foreign language
Posted in Abstracts/Presentations, My Teaching Journal, Uncategorized on Jun 11th, 2010
At a recent workshop I conducted at the American Corner here in St. Petersburg, I talked with a group of teachers about tides of change and innovation in education, specifically in Russia. I shared an experience of my own: ten years ago, when I was in graduate school at the American University in Washington, DC, [...]
Posted in Abstracts/Presentations, Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2009
Download 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 [...]
Posted in Lessons/Materials, Speaking, Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2009
Attached 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 [...]
Posted in My Teaching Journal, Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2009
I 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 [...]
Posted in My Teaching Journal, Teaching Culture, Uncategorized on Nov 6th, 2009
This week in my two intercultural communication classes at my university, I taught students about prosody, or intonation and timing, in spoken discourse. I have found that many of the skills of intonation and timing are similar between Russians and Americans, with only a few exceptions. This would make adjustment for non-native speakers not as [...]
Posted in Lessons/Materials, Uncategorized on Dec 31st, 2007
Download materials here. For one hour during a technical training session for a group of 26 Peace Corps trainees, the ELF discussed practical approaches to designing an English language course at a secondary school in Turkmenistan. Because of his own experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the region (Uzbekistan) and his understanding of the [...]
Posted in Lessons/Materials, Uncategorized on Dec 31st, 2007
Download materials here. Every Monday for six weeks, English Language Fellow John Mark King hosted a 90-minute workshop for English teachers on teaching effective reading strategies to non-native speakers of English. The workshop first introduced participants to the nature of reading and the importance of helping their students to develop their own effective reading strategies [...]
Posted in Lessons/Materials, Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2006
Download workshop materials here. Every Monday and Friday for six weeks, English Language Fellow John Mark King hosted a two hour workshop for English teachers on teaching process writing and the American-style academic essay. To meet the schedule demands of busy teachers, the same workshop was held both days each week. The workshop focused on [...]