Category Archives: * MAKING ESL TEACHERS’ LIVES BETTER

• ESL Teachers’ Gift to Students: Silence

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I’m experiencing life as a L2 learner for four hours. One of our colleagues, Susan, has volunteered to teach eight of us ESL teachers beginning Farsi for professional development. After we have learned some basics, she does an oral “drill”. She calls on me, and I feel some pressure to respond quickly not wanting to make everyone wait. To my relief, though, Susan patiently remains silent while I formulate my answer.

As she calls on others, I become aware of how I am feeling. To my surprise, unlike how I imagined my ESL students feeling in these situations, I , as an L2 learner, am not restlessly yearning for a faster pace. Instead, I appreciate the chance to formulate responses in my own mind, and when I’m called on again, I feel my stress level diminish.

 According to research, many of us ESL teachers find silence to be uncomfortable. And this can result in loss opportunities.

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• Getting Backed Up with ESL Paperwork: Effective Solution

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There seems to be certain times during a term when we can feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork coming in. During those times, it makes sense to establish some priorities concerning how we approach “marking” the various assignments.

It’s sometimes tempting to rationalize not giving any feedback on or returning some homework assignments by thinking that there are intrinsic benefits for students to just do the exercises. We say to ourselves that it’s not absolutely vital that they get them back quickly (or even, in some cases, ever). Thus, we might consider doing a “triage” with assignments. Essays might get top priority for our time and attention with “lesser” assignments just filed away or held off until sometime in the future when we are all caught up.

Surprisingly, this feeling of being overwhelmed can actually open up a motivation to respond to homework assignments in a way that is more effective than how we would “normally” do it when we have plenty of time.

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• The Writing Workshop: Countless Benefits for ESL Students and Teachers

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This posting includes sample lessons of a Writing Workshop that give students a lot of autonomy.*

This posting is an update of my February 1, 2019 post:  Most Important Motivator of Students: How You Can Do It

Since posting this back in 2019, I’ve heard from teachers who decided to try out a Writing Workshop with their ESL Writing classes even though they were skeptical at first. Their hesitation seemed to be doubtful that their students would actually be productive without more direct teacher control. However, they reported that their initial skepticism was quickly dispelled after seeing the same great benefits that I had described in the post below. Almost all of them stated that they couldn’t imagine teaching a Writing class in any other way in the future.

Here is that posting.

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• Recommended Treasure Chest for Writing Your Own ESL Materials

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I wanted to encourage my Writing students to include information from their own country to support their ideas in their essays. If done well, this kind of information can be very enthralling for anyone who reads their papers. (See • The Huge Advantage International Student Writers Have Over Their American Classmates )

The problem was that, when they tried to do this, the information was often too general, which made it sound kind of trite. So, I decided to write an exercise in which they would see how effective detailed information could be.

For the exercise, I wanted to juxtapose weak short paragraphs with few details to strong ones with more , and then have students identify each type. The challenge for me was to come up with stimulating content for these short paragraphs.

Fortunately, I had a treasure chest filled with interesting content that I could draw from. And as I’ll demonstrate below, this treasure chest has been my go-to place when writing materials for all the other skills too.

Here is what is in my treasure chest.

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