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
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
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 school was pretty bad. But I think I’ve come a long way in the past
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
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
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
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
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
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 to my principal, and she loved the idea! I also did a tiny lesson on
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
$5.00 incl tax
$5.00 incl tax
$5.00 incl tax
$5.00 incl tax
