TweetOne thing I encounter with greater and greater frequency is the ever-growing technology gap between teachers and students. Our learners tend to be digital natives, that is, they feel quite at home already in the digital and online world of communication. Teachers, on the other hand, are often (at best) digital immigrants. I am working [...]
TweetAt 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, [...]
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 [...]
TweetThis 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 [...]
TweetDownload 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 [...]
TweetDownload 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 [...]
TweetDownload 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 [...]
