Category Archives: * MAKING ESL TEACHERS’ LIVES BETTER

• Fun Activity To Reduce Irritating Classroom Behavior

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

 (This is a revision to an earlier posting: Enjoyable and Effective Awareness Activity for Changing ESL Students Classroom Behavior)

Most ESL students don’t do goofy things just to irritate the teacher. Usually, they are unaware of how they are coming across or unaware that they are acting differently from the other students or even what is expected of them.  These are some of the habits students tend to bring to our classes:

  • Chronically arriving to class late
  • Chatting with classmate
  • Text messaging during class
  • Not paying attention
  • Not participating in a group
  • Calling out answer before others get a chance
  • Sitting in the back of the room day-dreaming
  • No eye contact to teacher or classmates in a group
  • Speaking own language in a group
  • And more

An effective approach to circumventing these habits is one in which students become aware of the effects these habits have on the teacher and other students. In this post, I’ll explain how programs that I’ve taught in were able to help students see how their behavior is viewed by others. Not only was the process enjoyable for the students, but also, we noticed far fewer students engaging in these behaviors.

Here is how we did it. 

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• Don’t Wastes Students’ Energy Teaching Certain Types of Vocabulary Words in Reading Class (Revisited)

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Three Tiers

“Radiance,” “strike a deal,” “gorgeous” “ecosystem.” In my 40 years of teaching academic ESL, I’ve probably seen these word in a reading passage at most only once or twice.  And I’ve never seen a student use them in a writing task.  And yet, these words were  included in several vocabulary exercises in a textbook, and students were asked to write sentences with them.  Because the words were in a reading passage, the author of the textbook, for some reason, decided that these were important words for students to study and try to internalize.

I think most of us would agree that spending time on words so rarely used as “radiance” or “strike a deal” is probably not the best use of students’ precious time and mental energy if our true goal is to help them develop their reading skills.  At the same time, many of us who have studied a foreign language would agree that reading comprehension is enhanced by knowledge of a lot of vocabulary words.

At this point, two questions come to mind: (1) How do learners increase their vocabulary, and (2) which vocabulary words would perhaps be beneficial to study through exercises?

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• Introverts Find Their Call Teaching ESL

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I was ready to start class. Unlike previous days when I left my door open, I slowly closed it because I didn’t want any administrators walking down the halls to see what I was doing with my students. I was afraid that I might get fired.

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

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Cover ppt shot

(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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