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The Editors

TESOL 2015: Corpus Tools in Action

This year at TESOL, I didn’t get to go to a lot of sessions because I was busy exhibiting. However, I did run across this summary of some corpus tools I discovered at TESOL 2015 in Toronto. Since corpus tools never go out of style, I thought I’d share what

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The Editors

My Teacher Manifesto

Why am I sharing my teacher manifesto? I discovered some old blogposts from my now-defunct personal blog recently on professional development that I think stand up and are worth reposting. The best ones were inspired by the 30 Goals Challenge by Shelly Terrell. This was a brilliant professional development idea

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Why Accent Doesn’t Matter

I hear it from students all the time. “I need to get rid of my accent.” Or “I need sound like a real British person” There’s a whole cottage industry of people “teaching” real native accents. The problem is that accent doesn’t matter! Comprehensibility does! And don’t tell anyone, but

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The Editors

Writing Outside the Box: Building Students’ Creativity

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students tell me that they don’t know how to be creative. They think creativity is a talent that you are born with or not. While it’s true that some people seem to be better at creativity than others, I really think

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The Editors

Those Students: Deictic Expressions and Real-World Communication Skills

I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on pragmatics recently and thinking about how to teach students real-world communication skills in English. The problem is that in the classroom we often communicate at a very literal and direct level. Outside the classroom, we don’t! We leave things unsaid, assume knowledge

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The Editors

Best of the Year!

I feel like this is the year that we are less looking forward to a new year, as looking forward to saying goodbye to the old year! But there were definitely some highlights of the year. I’m amazed at how so many teachers found ways to survive and even thrive

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The Editors

Why a Teacher Shared Her Burnout Story

Patrice Palmer had been teaching English for 20 years when she left teaching in 2015. She felt no desire to continue teaching even though she loved ESL. But she didn’t realize that she had burned out, unaware that teacher burnout was a thing. Ironically, not teaching every day may have

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Back to School but Keeping the Essence in Sight

This is the perfect time to pick up a copy of Keeping the Essence in Sight by Sharon Hartle. Why now? It’s August already. The first day of class is on the horizon. Or for some of you, it’s already here, or there was no summer break at all. If you are

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The Editors

Back to School Advice from Our Authors

We’ve had a post up for a long time on classroom community builders and icebreakers full of back to school advice. We’ve even put up a post of general first day tips! And now that the back to school season is upon us, I wanted to highlight a few articles

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