This is one of my favorite handouts to promote peace in the world. I often use it with material about the Civil Rights Movement or at the beginning of the semester, especially the spring semester, which begins right after MLK Day. It went very well with the Rosa Parks book I used this semester. First, I elicit what students know about MLK and ask them what was different about his kind of protest marches. Who […]
Rosa Parks and the Bus to Freedom by Beth Johnson
Here are the additional handouts to the rest or the chapters of this wonderful book from Townsend Press (only $2.00 per book for teachers, very affordable!). My Level 2 students have enjoyed the challenge of reading this for 2 semesters now, and learned a lot of vocabulary. They were very inspired by the story of Rosa Parks’ life. It would be an easier read at Level 3 or 4, but just as motivating. The first […]
Word Family Framework – Vocabulary
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/word-family-framework What is the Word Family Framework (WFF)? The WFF is a searchable resource for teachers and learners of English that consists of over 22,000 vocabulary items arranged according to six levels aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).. Start using the Word Family Framework What can the WFF be used for? The WFF can be used by institutions, teachers and learners to construct target vocabularies for individual learning, syllabus and lesson […]
Showing versus Telling – Building Support
This lesson illustrates to students how to write “telling” versus “showing” paragraphs. That is, student are shown the difference between a paragraph that merely states reasons rather than develops them through explanation, examples, or specific details. The lesson proceeds as follows after discussing components of a paragraph from previous lessons: Project on the screen the first model of a “telling” paragraph. Read the paragraph aloud and then ask students to complete the comprehension questions following. […]
Smart Phones and You – Research Results
This unit/module focuses on the negative effects that smart phones are playing in our life in terms of memory and our attention via an article entitled “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds,” by Nicholas Carr, October 6, 2017. The article is rather lengthy so best to do this towards the end of the semester than at the beginning. With that in mind, the unit/module focuses on teaching students how to relay research results in a […]
Sentence Structures – Five basic
This lesson entails familiarizing our students with some of the basic sentence structures in English – especially where word order is concerned. See handout attached to begin and later expand this lesson to other English structures. The lesson entails beginning with the basic subject-verb structure and ending with subject-verb-noun structure shown on the handout. The instructor writes the first structure and ask students from the various language-groups represented in the class to come to the […]
Summary Writing
Summary writing is challenging at best for native speakers let along English language learners who often resort to copying huge amounts of text from the original source feeling they can’t paraphrase due to their lack of vocabulary. Last semester and again now this semester actively, I started a new practice of asking students to focus on using the ten survival words in their summary and limiting the number of sentences they could use. This has […]
Modals Talking Chart
<<would rather talking chart>> I used this in ESL 235/535: Integrated skills level 3. The week before we had gone over World English 2 “Unit 12” with its introduction to using ‘would rather’ and using comparisons. I used this talking practice as part of a review day about halfway through the semester. We reviewed how and when we use ‘would rather (not)’ and then students moved around to talk with 10 classmates and write complete sentence […]
World English 2 Unit 12 reading handout
<<WE2 un12 Starting a new tradition>> I used this about halfway through a semester in ESL 235/535: level 3 integrated skills. We had already done some practice with reading and finding main ideas in readings (what is a main idea vs supporting detail). I made a handout of the reading from World English 2 “Unit 12” to encourage students to take notes on readings (specifically I modeled highlighting where answers are in the text) and then […]
Practice for a Writing Test
<<Practice Midterm>> I used this handout to prepare students for the writing midterm in integrated skills level 3. We began by looking at the prompt together. We focused on noticing verb tenses used in the prompt and what verb tenses they should use responding to the prompt, with me annotating the prompt on the document camera (with students writing it out on the handout to help plan). We then talked about what a topic sentence […]