Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

This article from Stanford's website surprised me on several points. I want to read more about the Supreme Court decision they cite from 1973 that says that education is not a fundamental right. I don't know how I hadn't run across that before. It helps explain the problems with our public education system. In the article, Guadalupe Valdés's featured quote is troubling for those of us who aspire to a multilingual, diverse, just society: “In this country we’ve killed immigrant languages, and then we teach them expensively.”

Check out this cool painting that illustrates three models of pedagogy. I stumbled on it in my search for articles about immersion education, and I thought I would share.

In previous posts I've mentioned an interest in group improvisational story telling; I love role play activities that use improvisation, and even the URL of this blog has the word "improv" in it. I wanted to give some ideas for places where teachers and language learners can experience and learn about improv techniques and games for fun and for language learning. In Austin, there are a variety of theaters that put on Improv shows and teach classes in improvisational acting. I am most familiar with the Hideout , the Salvage Vanguard Theater , and Coldtowne Theater . Check them out! I can especially recommend the P-graph show on Thursday nights at 8:00 at Coldetown or classes from Andy Crouch at the Hideout. For games, check out these sites and blogs: Five Minute Fillers , Larry Ferlazzo's games for students , Dave Kees Teach English in China Also, great board games for creative, spontaneous speech are Apples to Apples (especially the youth version), Balderdash ,...

This past week, our methods class has been conducting lessons for each other in some fascinating contexts; I wanted to record some of the cool activities from my favorite groups (to quote Dr. Elaine Horwitz). Several of my favorite books used songs to integrate listening, reading, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar. Of course, this was a hit. Today we heard "Who wears short shorts" as part of an beginners' ESL lesson about clothing. The video they used was a wonderful old 1950s rock video, but the only one I can find is this short commercial for Nair . My favorite group used " Dos Gardenias " performed by Maria Rita for a beginning Spanish lesson on expressions of love. My other favorite group used Hi5 to appeal to small children. I had never heard of this show, but apparently it is popular with small children. My other favorite group did not use a song. They used a really cool game of Clue. I will link to Mieca's site and ask her to share the title...

In our Oral English class with Alison McGreggor we've been looking at a lot of pronunciation and prosody sites. I want to share some of them: http://www.manythings.org/ has a ton of resources. I like the minimal pair practice for segmental perception. If a Spanish-speaking student needs help with B-V or a Korean student needs help with F-P http://www.manythings.org/pp/ This may not be explicitly a speaking exercise; however, research suggests that perceiving sounds in your target language leads to being able to produce those sounds (Pennington, 2007). http://www.englishlearning.com/ is another cool pronunciation site that a classmate shared with us. http://www.eltgames.com/ESL-jobs-CoUpIn.htm has some great conversation games. I find games to be one of the best ways to practice speaking. http://speak-read-write.com/tonguetwister.html gives you tongue twisters. I love tongue twisters for practicing speaking, because they give focused practice in context, and they are fun ...

Some other resources that I value for reading and writing: Our very own University of Texas Undergraduate Writing Center has one of the coolest on-line writing help sites. It's called Virgil. I'm so proud of my friends and former-co-workers who developed it! The CCC's writing and grammar resource site is also pretty useful. Cando's Helper Page is a much more basic spelling and writing resource page for students, and I love the powerpoints for supplementing usage, punctuation, and style lessons! Sean Banville's Breaking News English is a great source for short, level-specific, non-fiction articles and activities. The articles tend to be pretty interesting, although I wish the original news source were attached. The activities vary a lot in quality and difficulty, but there are so many that you can always find something worth using. I have had a lot of luck finding an article in the Breaking News Archives to go with units that I'm teaching with a fiction...

Hi all, I'm going to do two posts about reading and writing, because this seems like a good place to get on my soap box about Group Improvised Story Telling and Writing! During the past three years, my students and I have really enjoyed and learned from a style of teaching that is somewhat based on a method popularized by Blaine Ray called TPRS . Many people glance at that acronym and think "Total Physical Response," the teaching method developed by James Asher in the 1950s -- and images of children playing Simon Says jump to mind. Now, I am a fan of Simon Says and other teaching strategies that utilize students' kinetic intelligence and physical memory, but for me TPRS has little to do with that. I think TPRStories.com does a good job of explaining TPRS. The authors discuss Dr. Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, which suggests that we learn languages receptively through high-interest, meaning-focused input that is just a little more difficult than we can produc...

Teachers -- do you ever want to refer your students to places they can practice their English outside of class? Well, the city of Austin has a wealth of opportunities! The New Immigrant Project at the Austin Public Library was an eye-opener. They have a wall full of brochures for classes around the Austin area, including English conversation practice in the library. They also have a substantial collection of Pimsleur books, Inglés Sin Bareras, and many other audio-books, DVDs, dictionaries. You can use it in the library on their computers and tape-deck, or you can check them out with a library card. How does your student get a library card? IT'S EASY! I got one today; all you need is a photo ID and a proof of residence in Austin (could be a bill that was delivered to your address, for example -- I printed my UT address information from the computers upstairs; the librarians are extremely helpful!). Also, if you want the library to carry a text book that you use in your clas...

Along with my classmates in Oral English Teaching and Methods of Foreign Language Education, I've been reading, thinking, and learning about how we perceive sounds in our second languages and how we begin to understand what we're hearing. In my time at DHS, I had a bunch of links to websites with listening practice. I'm going to try to recreate that list here: esl-lab.com -- Randall Davis created this site, and I really enjoy listening to the quirky conversations he (and I presume his family members) have recorded. The response activities vary a lot from one topic to another; sometimes they are quite in depth, but often they are not. A draw back to this resource is there is not much variety of accents or voices; the same people record almost everything. real-english.com -- This resource has short videos with a lot of conversations and interviews with people with a variety of accents. The activities are skimpier than in esl-lab, but it's fun to have a video. Englis...

I'm an ESL teacher with five years of experience (one in Loja, Ecuador at Fine Tuned English Language Institute , and four at Denton High School in Denton, Texas), and I love teaching and learning languages. My current teaching context is in a high school ESL beginner's classroom in Texas; however, I aim to share fun activities and teaching ideas that could be useful for any sort of language classroom (and maybe a few classrooms of other subjects). So, this blog is intended for language teachers and other academic practitioners. I've created this blog as part of the class Methods in Foreign Language Education with Dr. Veronica Sardegna at the University of Texas at Austin. I will share links, experiences, and tips related to fun teaching activities, especially improvisational group story telling, communicative games, and cultural awareness projects. I hope to get comments relating experiences, opinions, and ideas that respond to anything on this site or an aspect of la...