Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

I've been hearing about Edutopia on the radio for years, and right now I'm finding a bunch of cool resources on their site.  This list of alternative strategies for reading instruction is awesome.  The Crazy Professor Reading Game looks particularly fun!  (start watching at 1:49 minutes) I'm teaching adults these days, and I'm curious which of these techniques will appeal more to adults than the others... I've seen Reader's Theater and Jig Saw activities be very successful.  I'm looking forward to trying Radio Reading , FORI (Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction), Reciprocal Reading and others that are recommended in the above Edutopia article by Todd Finley .

You know how a lot of times students need more examples in context for a new word or phrase?  And a lot of times there are weird collocations that you just need to see in different contexts to understand?  Corpora can give you tons of real in-context examples for any given word or phrase.  They can do a lot of other stuff too, but I'm still learning to work with them. One that I've started using are Brigham Young University's Corpus of Contemporary American English , also known as COCA. It's great!  Just click the link above, click "Enter," and search something that might trip a student up, like "wont to" or "despite."  Then click on the blue link that pops up, and you've got hundreds of in-context examples!  You can see what words go with them, how they're punctuated, and students can come up with their own rules to use those words. Maybe more exciting is this translation corpus: Linguee .  You can translate tricky words an