Category Archives: Making teachers’ lives better

• Terrible Advice to Novice Teachers From a Teacher-Trainer

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One day a teaching intern asked me for some advice about a listening-skills class that she was struggling with. Her internship was for three-month, and she had been assigned to our ESL program. The lesson in the textbook for the class didn’t seem to address a skill that the students needed, but she had an idea for an exercise. However, she didn’t know if she should spend an hour or two or more developing a more relevant activity. Then she added this: “The professor in my TESL Methods class told us that we shouldn’t spend time writing exercises during our internship unless we know that we’ll be able to use them in the future.”

It made me want to cry.

The most obvious reason why this advice is so wrong is that none of us in the field of Teaching ESL can know when an exercise will come in handy in the future. But, besides that, there are more paramount reasons for teachers to write exercises.

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• If You Want To Really Motivate Your ESL Students, This Will Do It.

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One problem for ESL teachers is that we can become complacent and start to take shortcuts. One day, part way through my career, I realized that this was happening to me.

I was teaching a TESL methods course to American university students who wanted to teach ESL. During one class, a student asked me what to do if some students aren’t doing the assignments or not doing them seriously. I told them that the most important motivator is to always introduce an assignment with an explanation of its purpose and how this assignment will help them in the short-  or long-term future.  WAIT! I suddenly realized that I had become lax in doing that in my own ESL classes.

For a dozen years, I had had the good fortune of teaching at colleges in Asia. For the most part, the students there were diligent about doing whatever I assigned without question. I soon fell in the habit of just tell them what the assignment was when I introduced it.

For example, in a Writing class, I might say, “We are going to do some practice with dramatic introductions. Look at pages 17-19. There are eight introductions. Two of them are dramatic. After you read each, you will identify which are dramatic.”

Or for a grammar exercise, I might say, “We are going to practice the most common places to use commas in sentence. Look at page 194. Let’s do the first exercise together.”

Or for a conversation activity, I would say, “Today, you will work with a partner and give directions to each other to find places on a map.”

Explaining the big picture purpose of an exercise: how it will help them in future.

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• An Early Course Correction: Making Sure You Are Evaluating Your Students’ Writing Accurately Before It’s Too Late

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This posting is directed specifically to teachers in these categories:

  • You have experience teaching ESL Writing, but you have been assigned to teach a new level.
  • You have just been hired to teach in an ESL program and are assigned a Writing class.
  • You have been teaching an ESL Writing class for a few terms, but this term you have some students who have “unusual” writing characteristics.

Imagine that it’s the third week of the term. You just picked up your students’ first writing sample (e.g. a paragraph or essay) and are starting to mark/evaluate them. (See Most Effective Technique for Marking Grammar on Essays to Develop Self-Editing Skills)

You start with Adey’s essay and soon some questions come to your mind:

Next, you read Naomi’s essay and wonder about this:

  • She uses complex sentences, but sometimes her grammar breaks down, especially word forms. Would these kinds of mistakes disqualify her from passing to the next level? How “perfect” must a students’ grammar be to pass?

Another student, Dante had this characteristic:

  • His ideas seemed quite simplistic; he doesn’t develop them with enough details. What is the expectation for students passing to the next level concerning idea development?

Help is on the way!

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• Pain-Free ESL Speaking Placement-Testing Process: Reliable, Time-Efficient and User-Friendly

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(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your colleagues.)*

At first, all the teachers wanted to administer the oral test for placing students into one of the four levels of conversation classes. But that enthusiasm waned once they discovered what this commercially-made placement test would entail.

Two major problems with many speaking placement tests (commercial and in-house)

1)  The testing process in labor intensive. The scoring rubrics are onerous, ineffective and require time-consuming training.

2)  Rather than just focusing on the skills being developed in speaking/conversation classes, the interviewers have to evaluate several peripheral aspects of speaking at the same time.

A Speaking Placement-Testing Process That Addresses Those Problems.

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