I got this idea from my daughter’s second grade classroom. At a certain time everyday, the students get into “stations” where they do different activities for 15 – 20 minutes before they change to the next “station.” The students seemed to really enjoy the diversity and the fast pace of these activities. In this example, there are four stations – pronunciation, vocabulary, summarization, and reading. You can use any category, but I found these to […]
Author: klengyel
ESL Instructor
Support Teams
A warm welcome and authentic engagement builds trust, community and capacity! Support Teams and low stakes team practice are some main elements of acceleration. As teachers, we need to help create trust and unity. It is our by our lead that students feel safe and know how and when to let their guard down and lower their effective filter enough so input becomes fluency. Authentic and early engagement, like writing a letter to students before […]
Run-on Sentences!
Students can struggle with run-on sentences for the entire semester. I created this PP to help students see the different ways you can fix a run-on sentence. At the start of a semester, I always go over the basics of sentence structure. I review it for the midterm and again for the final. I start the first writing assignment by focusing on sentence structure and do selective correction on only run-on sentences. This focus on […]
Let’s Debate!
This activity has become a go to in most of my classes. It goes over how to agree to disagree, but it also focuses on how to support your argument. Supporting a statement contributes to writing and speaking in many ways, but this activity particularly leads students to think in a critical manner. Anytime I ask for the student’s opinion about a topic, they usually need a little prompting to get anything out! I found that […]
Reading Strategies
This semester I taught an intermediate reading class, and we were able to read through two novels while doing multiple writing projects. Before we started the novels, I wanted students to practice different types of reading they do on a daily basis. This seems to be common knowledge, but I found that examining how we read helped us delve deeper into reading strategies. We went through this PP and practiced each “type” of reading as […]
Genre Based Writing
At the CATESOL conference, there was a new technique for teaching writing that has spread to classrooms. Sometimes I feel like language teaching trends can be a lot like fashion or diet trends. Once one style is popular, just wait a decade until the opposite (bell- bottoms versus skinny jeans or low fat versus Keto) comes into play. Since I started teaching, about a decade ago, I’ve been vigorously implementing techniques for my students to […]
Pronunciation – Spanish specific problems
My students loved working on pronunciation this semester. They felt like this was one area that could improve in a concrete way. In the beginning, we went over the sounds in English, and over the concept that letters do not equal sounds. This idea needed repeating throughout the entire semester – English has a lot of blended letters and silent letters. Spanish speakers have lots of issues with their vowels! They tend to use short/long […]
Comparatives and Superlatives
This is a great lesson plan as a prelude to a compare/contrast project. I like teaching superlatives and comparatives because they are a somewhat “simple” grammar concept for students to grasp onto. There are only a few “exceptions” to the rule – like fun! I teach how to use fun as a comparative and tell students that if they listen, they will hear native speakers use funner all the time and this is their opportunity […]
Using theatre skills in class?
Do you consider yourself an actor/actress? Have you ever been taught some basic performance skills? Make your class more exciting and understandable by implementing some of these basic performance strategies. In comparison, speaking another language is not a performance, but it does require adopting voice and gestures that do not come natural to you. This correlates with Guiora’s Language Ego – a kind of identity a person develops in relation to the language that he […]
How to Learn a New Language?
When a new class starts, I usually question how much time is needed to teach second language acquisition methodology. I’ve noticed a lot of students have very poor study habits and really do not understand how a language is acquired. Some students think that if they take one English class they should be fluent by the end of the course! I put together this slide to introduce students to language acquisition and to nullify the […]