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Building Classroom Community Presentation

When I started writing this, I was coming off my high from an awesome TESOL 2018, and apparently it was a pretty good conference, as the first clause of this sentence is all I wrote before saving this to my drafts folder. So here, belatedly, is my presentation on from

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How to Engage Reluctant Writers

There was a recent piece in The Atlantic about a teacher who helped her students who get over their fear that they couldn’t write well or that writing wasn’t for them. How did she engage reluctant writers? By forcing them to write a lot. Once they had built a portfolio

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The Editors

Middle School ESL Drama Activities

In honor of Alice Savage‘s post on Middleweb on exploiting scripts and using role plays in the classroom, I dug up this draft article we worked on together for something or other. There’s some overlap in the two articles so it’s worth checking out both. What I really love about

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Creative Writing Class With Stories Without End by Taylor Sapp, published by Alphabet Publishing
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The Editors

Creative Writing Class With Stories Without End

We are very excited to learn that Taylor is going to be teaching a creative writing class based on his first book, Stories Without End, at his Intensive English Program (IEP). Many IEPs offer flexible elective classes periodically. Stories Without End is uniquely well-suited to this kind of extra-curricular class. It can fill

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Students Disagreeing
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The Editors

Let’s agree to disagree: a lesson in pragmatics

Another great post from Alice on using theater to teach pragmatics, in this case the pragmatics of disagreement. In this day and age especially, it can be useful to teach our students how to express disagreement, and to go beyond useful words and phrases, to the construction of logical arguments.

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The Editors

Drawing in Language Teaching on National Drawing Day

May 19th is National Drawing Day (at least in Ireland) and while it might seem to odd to use drawing in language teaching, there are a number of benefits to incorporating art in your language lessons. Art can be a source of discussion as students describe an interpret works of

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Fun
The Editors

Teaching is Simple: Follow These Easy Steps

Isn’t it great how stock photos accurately portray what the teaching profession is all about? Look how happy that teacher looks. And it’s all because teaching is simple if you just follow these easy steps (a little teacher humor, if you’ll forgive me). Dress your students in bright colors from

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Reader's Theater
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The Editors

How to Do Reader’s Theater

What is Reader’s Theater? In its simplest form, Reader’s Theater is an activity where students read a play aloud with the scripts in hand. They often do so without having memorized the script. They may not have props, act out the action of the play, or even move. There doesn’t

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The Editors

Guide to Stories Without End

Our latest book, Stories Without End  by Taylor Sapp, came out last week. In case you missed it, or the subtitle “24 open-ended stories to engage students in reading, discussion, and creative writing,” wasn’t clear, the Stories Without End is a collection of 24 short stories that end on a

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