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Only the Best Intentions Shortlisted for English Language Awards
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The Editors

Shortlisted for an English Language Award

We are thrilled to announce that Only the Best Intentions by Alice Savage has been shortlisted for an English Language Award from the English-Speaking Union in the Resources for Secondary to Adult Learners category! The English Language Awards “celebrate and reward innovation and good practice in the field of English Language teaching.” It is

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When To Do Icebreakers?

I just want to pass along this great point about icebreakers from the book Voices of Experience: How Teachers Manage Student-Centered ESL Classes by Janet Giannotti: It should also be noted that some teachers do not use an icebreaker in the first class. Some icebreakers may seem like games, and

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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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Resource
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
Resource
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
Article
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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Resource
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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