ESL etc.

Larry Ferlazzo posted today about ESL World News Report, a free site offering an “unbiased and objective” 4-page electronic newspaper every Monday of the school year. The paper attempts to help keep adult ESL students informed about important global events, and prepare them for responsible citizenship. I haven’t looked at it in much detail yet, [...]

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mp3 This week, I talk about the K12 Online Conference, primarily giving some of my thoughts on the pre-conference keynote. Keynote speaker David Warlick talks about how Web 2.0-type technology is changing how we should approach our students, and I reflect on how this applies to language teaching. I also make some comments about the [...]

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The K12 Online Conference is a free online conference inviting participation from educators around the world interested in using Web 2.0 tools and technologies in their teaching. The 2007 conference began with a pre-conference keynote on October 8. Over the following two weeks (October 15-26) forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog [...]

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Ning is a site that allows users to create social networks. Each network is made up of individual pages, along with forums, group blogs and file libraries. I’m new to Ning, but there seems to be a lot of potential here for professional collaboration. I recently joined two networks: EFL Classroom 2.0 and Global Education. [...]

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I recently came across the online journal section of Larry Ferlazzo’s website. He has links to several online ESL journals that I didn’t have on my journal page. When I have time to look at them, I’ll add them to my list of journals, and give each a brief review. Here they are in the [...]

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mp3 First, I answer a listener’s request for ideas on getting larger classes to speak. Specifically, I talk about a pronunciation activity, pair/groupwork and roleplays. Next, I talk about week two of my sophomore English for Tourism conversation classes. I’m trying to improve students acquisition of vocabulary and sentence patterns by covering the same content [...]

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Each episode of Grammar Girl: Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing addresses one problematic grammatical issue. As an English teacher, grammar instruction is a weak area for me, and Grammar Girl explains things very clearly and concisely. There are extensive archives, and each show is short (5 minutes or so) and easily digestible. Past [...]

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The Literacy List is a great and growing list of resources for teachers and adult learners. It has an ESL section, along with lots of “life skill” resources on finding a house, employment, and so on that could be useful for ESL students. One neat thing is Quarantined, a videogame that teaches students how to [...]

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TEFL China – A collection of three listservs dedicated to teaching English in China. One focuses on teaching, one on jobs and one on life in general. TESL-L – The main list has over 30,000 subscribers. There are also sublists dedicated to CALL, IEPs, jobs, young learners and ESP. Archives of each list are also [...]

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mp3 This week, I talk about an activity that I’ve used a few times that teaches students about the concept of boycotting and asks them to do a bit of Internet research on the topic. I currently do a version of it that doesn’t require handouts, but the handouts that I used in the past [...]

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