• Learning Grammar Inductively (No Teacher-Talk)

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                        • Leading Student to Understand It
                                    •  He It is easy to do math.
                                    • Was raining at noon.

Cover It is raining

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

Pointing to this sentence: “It started raining during the game,” Sylvia asked me what the word “it” was. “How can I know when to use it?”

I told her the grammar term for it (‘non-referential it’), but I didn’t tell her any rules. Instead, I led her to understanding it through a set of inductive exercises. This meant that she “formulated the rule” correctly on her own by working with examples.

Some typical problems students have with this are when they write sentences like these:
• Was raining after work.
• He is easy to do math.

Inductive exercises to lead students to understand non-referential “It” as the subject of a sentence.

(This post includes a short form of the exercises. On the handout in the link below, you can see more items for each exercise.) Notice: This does NOT involve any TEACHER TALKING.

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• Stimulating Small-Group Discussion Activity 2: Loneliness Might Not Be What You Think (Including Paraphrasing Exercises.) REVISITED

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Cover read for discussion SHOT

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

Some reasons why students seemed stimulated by this discussion:

1) Since almost all the students were living away from home, they were able to relate to the challenge of connecting to new people.
2) They seemed interested in hearing how their classmates were coping with living away from home: some loved it and some felt lonely.
3) They enjoyed discussing how social media is both helpful and harmful especially concerning making connections to people.
4) They seemed surprised that some of their classmates are not especially connected to their family members.

Here is the basis for this discussion: According to research, loneliness has little connection to how many people are around us.  In his book,  Lost Connections,  Jonathan Hari explains that loneliness is caused by a loss of connection to others. To end loneliness, according Hari, we need two things: other people and a feeling that we are sharing something meaningful or something we care about with another person or other people.

This and future discussion activities include four parts:

1) A one-page article usually including a brief summary of a high-interest research study.
2) Ten true-false comprehension questions.
3) Pre-Discussion Exercise in which students read and think about several questions about their experience and opinions about the topic before discussing them in groups.
4) Small-group discussions of the article in which each student is given a paper with different content/personal experience questions in the form of Student A, B or C.

Bonus for this Discussion Activity 2: Paraphrasing exercise.

About Discussion Activity 2: Loneliness Might Not Be What You Think and the handout.

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• Short, High-Interest Articles for Extensive Reading # 9: “An Important Reason Why Teenagers Stink”

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Cover pic stink

(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

People think close family members smell worse compared to the smell of strangers, according to recent research. And there is an interesting reason for this.

Most studies about recognizing human smells (odors) looked at mothers and their newborn babies. The studies found that they recognized each other’s odors soon after birth. However, a team of researchers wanted to know how well other family members could recognize the smell of each other.

Twenty-five families with at least two children between 6 and 15 years old volunteered for the study. The participants were given special T-shirts and soap that had no odors. They slept in the T-shirts for three nights. Each morning, they put the T-shirts in special bags and then washed themselves with only the special odorless soap (in other words, soap that has no smell).

Next, researchers asked everyone to sniff with their nose two T-shirts. One of the shirts was worn by a family member and the other by someone they didn’t know and was not a relative. The researchers asked mothers and fathers if they could identify which shirt was their children’s, and asked children if they could tell which was their parents’ or siblings’. In addition, they asked which odor they preferred.

Here are the results: (See complete article below.)

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings”  Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: ESL Reading> Short, High Interest Articles for Extensive Readings

Here is the 9th article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

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• Integrated vs Discrete Skills ESL Courses: Advantages of Discrete Skills (REVISITED)

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REVISIT COVER

For an extended discussion of this topic with links to some YouTube videos and downloadable exercises, see Four Part Series: Why, How And When to Teach ESL Integrated- and Discrete-Skills Courses. 

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video: YouTube about advantages of discrete-skills courses

After the first day at a college I had previously taught at, I noticed a long line of students outside our EAP (English for Academic Purposes) director’s office.  It was my first day teaching in this program, so, needless to say, I was curious.  It turns out these students all felt that they had not been placed in the right level.

I soon discovered that this was a common occurrence on the first day of each term in that program.

The courses in that EAP program were organized around integrated skills, so each student was placed into one of five levels for all five hours of instruction. 1 By the end of the first day, students were quick to notice that some of their classmates were weaker than they were in some skills (e.g. speaking) but higher in others (e.g. reading).  They also were aware that some of the activities during the course of the day, depending on the skill, were right at their level, but others were above or below.

It’s not too surprising that this would happen.  New students had been given a placement exam that tested multiple skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening and grammar.  The exam resulted in one score, and their level was determined by that one score.  That seemed to be the crux of the problem. 

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