Invert Your Conditionals and Always Let Your Grammar Be Your Guide
So I've been streamlining how I present and give students practice on grammar. I've really been trying to match my grammar lessons as much as possible to real authentic contexts. Almost every teacher...
View ArticleListen for it
Verb tenses have meanings, but they aren't always what we think they are. Here's a fun experiment-put these three sentences up on the board and ask a group of low to intermediate students what the...
View ArticleHow to Teach Grammar by Letting Students Translate
I was just inspired to write about one way I teach the perfect tenses by a post on the Teaching English Facebook page on whether it's ok to translate grammar or not in the classroom. Personally, the...
View ArticleHow to Teach Grammar
So I have been a bit leery of dogme, primarily because it seemed like in the wrong hands, it might turn into anything I do is good for my students or we'll just go in the classroom and chat (c.f. the...
View ArticleFirst Conditional Lesson
This is also another 30 Goals post: Goal 7: Share a Lesson. I kinda sorta already did that with an old lesson plan but here's a new one I wrote and taught for my MA TESOL program. I'm sharing it to get...
View ArticleWho ordered the McNuggets?
Scott Thornbury throws down about the textbook publishing industry with a lot of good points. I think he's a bit mean about writers, but there's a lot to think about here, including how much books (and...
View ArticleArticle Discovery Chart
This is a little ESL grammar lesson plan I've had lying around that lets students discover the rules of article use in English. It's more of an activity than a full lesson plan. To bulk it up, I'd add...
View ArticleDictogloss to Introduce the Present Perfect
I discovered in my boxes of lesson plans this nice little dictogloss that I used to use when teaching English to children or to beginners that introduces the present perfect in contrast to the past...
View ArticleTeaching There is/There are
A nice activity I came across while searching for a way to teach There is/There are/There isn't/ There aren't. I can't use this one as I'm trying to stay in the context of clothing. The activity below...
View ArticleAll Things Corpus!
The last TESOL Convention in Toronto seemed to be corpus-themed for me. I went to a number of sessions about using corpuses as a materials writer, as a teacher, and even having students use corpuses...
View ArticleGuess What’s in the Teacher’s Brain
This is a post that has sat in my drafts box for a while now. I can't remember now if the title comes from Penny Ur or Tessa Woodward. However, the essence of the passage was that too often when...
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Parallel Structure
This lesson plan helps students discover and notice parallel structure in phrases and then use it particularly with correlative conjunctions such as both, either, neither and not only…but also. Because...
View ArticleWho ordered the McNuggets?
Scott Thornbury throws down about the textbook publishing industry with a lot of good points. I think he’s a bit mean about writers, but there’s a lot to think about here, including how much books (and...
View ArticleSentence Auctions
This is one of my favorite ways to review grammar before a test. Students really enjoy the quick pace they need to evaluate sentences and it does wonders to fix common mistakes in their minds. Plus...
View ArticlePractice TOEFL Worksheets
Many years ago, I found myself with not much going on at work. So I began working on my own TOEFL iBT textbook and practice tests, as one does. There was a plan to have them published in Kazakhstan and...
View ArticleOnly Like This Do I Teach Negative Inversion
There aren’t a lot of resources out there for teaching negative inversion. That’s the form in which the verb comes before the subject when the sentence starts with a negative word such as:Nowhere else...
View ArticleArticle Discovery Chart
This is a little ESL grammar lesson plan I’ve had lying around that lets students discover the rules of article use in English. It’s more of an activity than a full lesson plan. To bulk it up, I’d add...
View ArticleDictogloss to Introduce the Present Perfect
I discovered in my boxes of lesson plans this nice little dictogloss that I used to use when teaching English to children or to beginners that introduces the present perfect in contrast to the past...
View ArticleTeaching There is/There are
A nice activity I came across while searching for a way to teach There is/There are/There isn’t/ There aren’t. I can’t use this one as I’m trying to stay in the context of clothing. The activity below...
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