This year at TESOL, I didn’t get to go to a lot of sessions because I was busy exhibiting. However, I did run across this summary of some corpus tools I discovered at TESOL 2015 […]
My Teacher Manifesto
Why am I sharing my teacher manifesto? I discovered some old blogposts from my now-defunct personal blog recently on professional development that I think stand up and are worth reposting. The best ones were inspired […]
Why Accent Doesn’t Matter
I hear it from students all the time. “I need to get rid of my accent.” Or “I need sound like a real British person” There’s a whole cottage industry of people “teaching” real native […]
Writing Outside the Box: Building Students’ Creativity
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students tell me that they don’t know how to be creative. They think creativity is a talent that you are born with or not. While it’s […]
Elements of Effective Instruction and the Art of Mario Brothers
I’ve been doing a lot of drawing with my son lately. I love to draw and I always have, but I don’t think I’m incredibly good at it. A lot of my art in high […]
Those Students: Deictic Expressions and Real-World Communication Skills
I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on pragmatics recently and thinking about how to teach students real-world communication skills in English. The problem is that in the classroom we often communicate at a very […]
Best of the Year!
I feel like this is the year that we are less looking forward to a new year, as looking forward to saying goodbye to the old year! But there were definitely some highlights of the […]
Why a Teacher Shared Her Burnout Story
Patrice Palmer had been teaching English for 20 years when she left teaching in 2015. She felt no desire to continue teaching even though she loved ESL. But she didn’t realize that she had burned […]
Back to School but Keeping the Essence in Sight
This is the perfect time to pick up a copy of Keeping the Essence in Sight by Sharon Hartle. Why now? It’s August already. The first day of class is on the horizon. Or for some of […]
Back to School Advice from Our Authors
We’ve had a post up for a long time on classroom community builders and icebreakers full of back to school advice. We’ve even put up a post of general first day tips! And now that […]