Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

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