Tag Archives: handouts

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

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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.)

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• Tolerance for Ambiguity in Reading

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

One of my insecure students, Saki, wrote me this comment at the end of my “Reading Support” class: “I decided to take Psychology next term because of the readings in this course. I now have confidence to read the required “Pharmaceutical” book for me to get a higher paid job as a drug counselor all thanks to this course.”.

Thinking back on the Saki that I remember at the beginning of the class, I’m pretty sure I know what changed for her. I noticed that on her copy of the first article, she had tons of translations, even above words that there was no doubt she would know. She believed that the only way that she could feel confident that she was really understanding a passage was if she knew the meaning of absolutely every word. In other words, she lacked a tolerance for ambiguity.

She told me that she had lost her confidence after looking at the Pharmaceutical course book because there seemed to be so many words she didn’t recognize.

How Saki (and her classmates) gained her confidence by developing a tolerance for ambiguity in everything they read.

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• Approaching Grammar with Generation 1.5 Students and Other Ear-Learners (REVISITED)

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

In our college, there was a category of ESL students who stymied the instructors.  They were fluent speakers but continually struggled with basic the grammar on writing tasks.  Any ESL program that has immigrant students will probably have these types of students described as “ear-learners” or Generation 1.5.

Gen 1.5 students are sort of between first generation and second generation immigrant.  They immigrated with their family when they were elementary or high school age.

A growing number of these students indicate a goal of obtaining a college degree.  However, unfortunately, many of them struggle to make the transition from studying basic English skills in ESL courses to taking academic ESL and mainstream academic courses.

Among those who do apply to colleges, a considerable number do not meet the minimum standards for writing and are thus not accepted.

I, along with two colleagues, were able to get a grant a few years ago to study these students and to develop an approach to helping them learn grammar for writing by taking into consideration their special learning styles.

In this posting,

  1. I’ll describe these students and their learning styles.
  2. I’ll also explain the type of materials and include examples that we used with them.
  3. And finally, I’ll summarize the very positive results that we got from the study.

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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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