Excerpt from the article
(This posting includes handouts which you are welcome to use with your students.)
• 8th Free Reading Unit. Scarcity: Not Having Enough of Something (can effect mental capacity)
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• LINCS Discussion about Student-Centered Conversation Lessons.
If you’d like to read the discussion about teaching conversation skills on LINCS, in which I was “interviewed” through posted Q & A for Dec. 6-9, here is the link: LINCS discussion about student-centered conversation lesson.
David Kehe
• An Effective Technique for Analyzing Students’ Grammar Skills in a Writing Context
Here is typical exchange that I’ve often heard between teachers who were evaluating a student’s writing together.
It’s relatively easy to evaluate the content in students’ writing. We can usually agree about how well it is organized, how clear the ideas are presented and how deep the support is. The challenge comes when trying to gage the students’ level of grammar in a writing context. It involves more than just counting grammar mistakes. We need to consider a couple of aspects, and one of them is the seriousness of the errors. For example, look at these two sentences:
(Student A) One day, a young bride 1 name Jane packed her stuff and tried to leave her hotel.
(Student B) One day, a young bride packed her stuff, 1 she tried to leave her hotel.
They both have one error, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are at the same level. Student A’s mistake could easily be just an editing error. On the other hand, Student B’s is a run-on and could indicate that the student is still struggling with sentence boundaries.
When analyzing grammar mistakes, we also need to consider the complexity of the students’ sentence style.
• Writing Your Own ESL Exercises: Two Basic Recommendations
When I first started to write my own exercises, I learned two simple but important steps the hard way. In this short, 5-minute video, I describe what happened when I did NOT include the two steps in a couple of exercise and how I was able to improve them.
Also, see • Recommended Treasure Chest for Writing Your Own ESL Materials
Common Sense Teaching ESL 