Short, High-Interest Articles for Extensive Reading: # 8: “How We are Influenced by What Other People Think”

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New Cover Influenced

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

Rudy and three of his friends were trying to decide where they should go for their next vacation together, but they couldn’t agree. The other three had suggested either California, New York, or Colorado, but Rudy recommended Florida. For several days, they talked about the cost of traveling to these places, the price of hotels and things to do. Rudy wasn’t having any luck convincing them to choose Florida, but then he remembered an interesting story about a restaurant menu. This story gave him an idea about how to convince the others to agree with him.

In Beijing, China, managers of group of restaurants asked researchers to help them increase the sales of certain dishes on their menus. They didn’t want the increase in sales to cost them more money. For example, they didn’t want to lower the price, or use more expensive ingredients or hire new experienced chefs. They just wanted to change the label next to the dishes on the menu. They tried labels like “Restaurant Specialty” and “Chef’s Recommendation, but sales of those dishes didn’t increase. Then they used “Most Popular.” This was immediately … (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 eighth 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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• The Grammar Aspect with Most Mistakes by Language Learners: Prepositions (REVISITED)

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

I discuss this posting about prepositions in this short video: Grammar Aspect with Most Mistakes: Prepositions

According to Brain Briefs by Bob Duke and cognitive scientist Art Markman, “… adults who learn a new language make more mistakes with prepositions than with just about any other aspect of speech.”

Most ESL teachers have probably been asked questions like this one that I had from one of my students, Camila, from Mexico: “Why do we say ‘I’m confused about’ rather than ‘I’m confused at’?”

It seems futile to try to explain the reasons or give rules for when to use certain prepositions. And even if we could formulate some, it seems unimaginable that students will stop while speaking or writing and ask themselves, “Now what was the rule for the preposition here?” Just the preposition “on” has 10 definitions.

How to learn prepositions

Markman and Duke summarize what many professionals (e.g. Krashen) in the teaching ESL field  have said about how to learn prepositions: “… the best way … is to hear them, use them, and allow your brain to recognize which ones are appropriate in different circumstances by taking into account both the meaning and the statistics of when they are used.  This kind of implicit learning requires a lot of exposure to the language …” (p. 127).

This doesn’t mean that the only role that a teacher plays in this is to just provide meaningful input through reading and listening.

Three ways teachers can facilitate students’ learning of prepositions

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Short, High-Interest Articles for Extensive Reading: # 7: “The Problem with Chasing Happiness”

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

Carmen and Erik had a problem being happy. They thought that the purpose in life was to feel happy, and they thought that they knew what they needed to do in order to be happy. However, when they did it, they still weren’t as happy as they expected to be.

A psychologist explained a big reason why it is not effective for people like Eric and Carmin to chase happiness. If our goal is to feel an emotion (for example, happiness), and if we don’t feel as we had expected to feel, we will think that there is something wrong with us.

However, researchers say that we can prepare ourselves to have positive experiences without the disappointments. (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 seventh 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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• Most Important Tool for Managing Classroom Behavior (Case two and Caveat) REVISITED

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Classroom management

“David, Please report to the Director’s office as soon as your class finishes.  He needs to talk to you.”  A program assistant handed me a note with those sentences on it.  Gulp!

In the early 1980s, my wife and I, without much thought, accepted teaching positions on the Greek island of Lesbos.  It was a Greek island, so what could possible go wrong?

It was a prep school that high school students attended in the late afternoons/evenings after high school to study English.  Shortly after arriving, we met one of the teachers whom we were replacing.  He told us that the school had a lot of discipline problems because many of the students didn’t want to be there.  He said that the teacher-turnover was quite high as a result.  In fact, a couple of teacher had just disappeared a few months earlier.

On the first day of class, as we walked down the hallway, we could see students literally chasing each other around the class rooms and jumping on the desks.  My first class was with 16 tenth-grade students.  Although most of the students paid little attention to me but instead continued to chat as I started the lesson, there were three female students sitting in the front row appearing eager to begin.  Those three became the focus of my attention.  Gradually, most of the others started to engage in the lesson, while a couple slept or doodled or looked out the window.

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