Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

One of my first posts was on collaborative story telling as used in language classrooms under the name TPRS.  I shared  Blaine Ray's site about TPRS and TPRStories.com and mention how people promote it as relating to 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 produce (i + 1). Since then, I've come across this series of blog posts about TPRS , and here's a link to my colleague and friend Nancy Meredith's blog with a great video of a second rehearsal of a story that her students composed together using aspects of TPRS. Try it out in your class!  It's good stuff, especially when combined with other styles and techniques of teaching!

Corpora can be amazingly powerful tools to determine whether two words work together nicely or whether the word or phrase you want to use is appropriate for the meaning you intend and the context in which you want to use it. Here is an overview of some of the most useful and powerful corpora that I know.  Many props to Mark Davies and the scholars at Brigham Young University for making it and sharing it: https://corpus.byu.edu/variation.asp#x2 And here are some useful corpora: https://books.google.com/ngrams https://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ For years, I used the corpora with just really basic searches, and there are great things you can learn, but recently I finally watched some tutorials and there is SO MUCH MORE you can do!  Watch this Youtube tutorial to better understand how to use COCA: How to Use the COCA And this one to see how to analyze longer passages (reading or your own essay writing) using Word and Phrase: Word a

I stumbled on this awesome animated music video about a shy man named Mr. Morton , which is trying to focus on subjects and predicates, but does a really nice job with past tense verbs too. My students found it funny and useful to listen to and re-tell. Here's another nice one that's more of a pattern chant. For the different pronunciations of -ed in regular past tense verbs, here's a nice list . For irregular past tense verbs, I like giving a fairly complete alphabetical list and then shorter lists grouped by patterns . That's all for now!  Have a great day!

Check out the University of Iowa's Sounds of Speech App.   It gives great animations, descriptions, and videos of how the mouth forms the sounds of English. Also Pronuncian has some great resources and strategies for pronouncing difficult sounds, words, and phrases.  Please comment with any other resources you would recommend!

I'm a big fan of songs for learning in general.  You can learn vocabulary, phrases, rhythm, slang, grammar, and so much more!  Here are a few songs that one of my classes listened to and sang a long with last week.  Yes, they're for children, but they're still useful! Vowel Spelling and pronunciation song (short and long vowels!) Head Shoulders Knees and Toes Health Vocabulary I'll add more as I find them! Will

Learning a new language is hard.  If you have money to devote to learning English, I highly recommend you study where I work!  UT ESL is awesome! However, sometimes paying for courses is not possible.  Austin provides many free or almost-free opportunities to learn English.  Here is an incomplete list.  The Austin Public Library has a great list of ESL Classes around town.  I will replicate it in part below, with my own commentary, but their list is more complete. UT hosts a free ESL course that is taught by master teachers and practicing teacher interns.  They provide a free class that the students can practice teaching, and ESL students can get an excellent, challenging free classes, Monday through Friday from 5:00 - 7:00.  Space is very limited, so watch the website or get on the e-mail list for information on how to register. Manos de Cristo provides almost-free ($20/semester) classes with morning and evening schedules.  They have computer and citizenship classes too!