Tag Archives: handouts

• Developing Paraphrasing Skills: Oral Paraphrasing Before Written. (Revisited)

Leave a reply

Cover paraphrasing shot

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

YouTube I discuss this posting in this video: Developing ESL Paraphrasing Skills Naturally: Start with Oral Paraphrasing Exercise

A good paraphrase can demonstrate to the teacher that the student truly understood the source. And if it is clearly written in the student’s normal style and level of vocabulary, the teachers can feel reassured that the writer wasn’t plagiarizing.

Paraphrasing may be a new concept for many of our ESL student. However, we can help them understand how to do it in a way that will let them “experience” what a good paraphrase is through a very natural process.

Continue reading →

• Inductive Grammar: Why are there commas in these sentences? Here are some clues. What’s the rule? (Revisit)

Leave a reply

Cover comma blog shot

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

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video: Why is this comma here?

During a teacher-training course that I was teaching for American college students who wanted to teach ESL, we were discussing where to put commas.  Several of the students said that they decide according to their breath.  As they are re-reading something that they had written, if they stop to take a breath, that’s where they put a comma.  Wow!

Continue reading →

• Teach Reduced Forms for Comprehension Not for Speaking (Revisited)

Leave a reply

Cover reduced forms shot

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

Here is a link to a short video about this posting: Teach Reduced Forms for Comprehension NOT Speaking

A student, Tim, once came to my class all excited and asked me, “Hey David, wha ya gonna do di wee-en? I wanna gedouda taw.” 

I was pretty sure that he was trying to say something in English, but I had no idea what it was. After repeating the sentences several times, he became embarrassed and decided to write them down. “What are you going to do this weekend? I want to get out of town.”

He told me that the teacher in his previous class was doing lessons on reduced forms of speaking and had encouraged them to use them when speaking. So this student whose pronunciation was often hard to understand because he tended to drop final consonants of words (e.g. wee = week / taw = town) was being encouraged to do something that would make him even harder to understand.  Crazy!

How to work with reduced forms. (Handout exercise included)

Continue reading →

• Missing WHO and WHICH/THAT: Common ESL Problem and Solution (Revisited)

Leave a reply

Cover missing who Shot

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

Sometimes I get the feeling that some of my ESL students (including advanced ones) believe that there are a limited number of “who” and “which” out there, and they are afraid of using them all up before they die.

The problem happens when students are trying to write more advanced styles with a dependent and independent clause in a sentence.

Some examples:

Mistake: The people are walking their dogs should keep them on a leash.
Correction: The people WHO are walking their dogs should keep them on a leash.

Mistake: I try to give money to scholarships help low-income students.
Correction: I try to give money to scholarships WHICH help low-income students. *

I’ve also notice that this mistake often happens when students start a sentence with “there”.

Mistake: There was an accident happened near my house.
Correction: There was an accident WHICH happened near my house. * 

* We could substitute the word THAT for WHICH in these sentences.

Solution: Helping students with this. (Handout included.)

Continue reading →