I’ve been doing a lot of drawing with my son lately. I love to draw and I always have, but I don’t think I’m incredibly good at it. A lot of my art in high […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Pragmatics is Everywhere
I got this amazing feedback from an educator about one of our drama books and how teaching pragmatics resonates with her students: I introduced the idea of using [Her Own Worst Enemy] in the classroom […]
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 […]
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 […]
If the students love it, who we to argue?
When I asked our latest author, Taylor Sapp, to collect some review quotes and blurbs about his new book, he did something I’d never thought of! Sure, he asked his colleagues and some big names […]