Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

Places to see art and beautiful sunsets: I think seeing beautiful places and art is valuable for its own merits, but I would also highly recommend these activities to someone who is visiting or living in Austin and working on their English. These can be inspirational and they can lend themselves to meeting people, making friendships, and engaging in stimulating conversations! - Mozart’s Cafe (nice coffee, snacks, and sunset!) - The Blanton’s Ellsworth Kelly installation (new art space/building.  Closed on Mondays) - The Oasis (beautiful sunset at this restaurant… I’ve never been there; it’s a little far northwest on Lake Travis, but people recommend it highly) - The MexicArte Museum displays Mexican art and culture in Downtown Austin - “Skyspace” art installation by James Turrell on UT Campus in the Student Services Building (location) .   Go at sunrise or sunset for a really amazing light and color experience. - More Art recommendations ...

Online Listening Opportunities and Podcasts ESL Lab This has a ton of Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced English conversations with questions and activities. English Central -- listening, spelling, vocabulary, speaking -- although a short trial, it requires you to pay for most of the services. Eng Vid --  Great material on grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and you listen to it to get the lesson! Modern Family on ABC and on Hulu   (this is the TV show we started watching together) BBC Learning English -- If you want some exposure to a British accent PBS Learning Media   has a variety of subjects for any interest. These Podcasts are favorites of mine.  They are more advanced than the listening above: Radio Lab is an excellent NPR show from New York that specializes in fascinating, unusual scientific stories.  In class, we have listened to this episode about technology , and I like this long one one about the environment and ...

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

These comics are some of my favorites.  I think they would be wonderful, bite-sized reading practice.  Some are decidedly advanced in their vocabulary and cultural context; others could be accessible to a beginner.  Enjoy!  Calvin and Hobbes (a new strip every day, although actually they were all written ten or more years ago) Here is a list of several people's favorite 25 Calvin and Hobbes strips .  They are some pretty great, philosophical ones!  Non Sequitur is another of my favorite comic strips.  It is more consistently advanced, but it's worth the effort!

I have been tutoring a few high intermediate Korean students, and I have compiled some resources that I think are great for practicing pronunciation, reading, and listening.  I thought, why not share these on my blog?!  Here they are. Pronunciation: Guide to IPA pronunciation George Mason University’s accent archive database -- a cool way to listen to different accents around the US and the world. Reading: Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/ good news source and amazing photograph of the day section (not actually a religious publication) Wait But Why -- fun, insightful, illustrated articles.  I'm hooked on this guy's material.  His illustrations are fun as well.  Enjoy! xkcd -- a fun, nerdy comic strip.  Some of the vocabulary may be difficult, but the illustrations and humor are great, and I'll bet you can get something out of most of them regardless of your level. USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/ The Week: ht...

I was searching for ideas for interviews that students could do with random people in the community, but I stumbled on some pretty cool resources that might help with job interviews as well. Talk English. com has a bunch of sample questions and advice on how to answer them.  It's pretty advanced, but it could be really helpful even for a native speaker. I may have posted this before, but the University of Iowa's English Phonetics page is a really powerful tool for the mechanics of producing sounds in English!  They have other languages' phonetics too, such as German and Spanish!

I have been fairly impressed with two apps for language learning.  These are by no means a magic solution that replace attending class and practicing with real people (nothing is, despite the claims of Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone).  But they do as good a job as much more expensive software for providing basic vocabulary, spelling, listening, and functional grammar practice. Duolingo has options to study French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German for English speakers.  I just now noticed (maybe it's a new addition) that they are offering English for Spanish speakers, French speakers, Italian speakers, and Portuguese speakers.  Good for them!  Complaints: sometimes I have noticed that the stress on the syllables in the Spanish version are incorrect, leading to some strange pronunciations that a Spanish speaker would not understand.  Also, I find the typing on the phone a little bit cumbersome, so I actually prefer the computer version.  But th...

I'm excited to recommend Science Niblets , an on-line magazine that a friend of mine writes and edits.  The articles there will interest intermediate English learners and fluent native speakers alike with topics such as the physics of a curveball and solar powered electricity.  Incidentally, Elmar, the author of the website is an extremely proficient second language speaker of English.  His level of bilingualism and his writing skills are an inspiration to me as a language learner and teacher!  Not to mention I find his articles really useful for my students!

Lou Rawls performed this popular classic using modals in the past .  His title "If I Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda" uses an informal contraction for "If I could have (done something), I should have (done it), I would have (done it)."  He is using the modals in the past to talk about the regret when someone realizes that they have made a mistake but it is too late. This popular song by Cheap Trick uses infinitives patterns and verbs in the past tense in an interesting way.  It also includes some  puns or jokes with the double meaning of words like "want." The lyrics to this Smokey Robinson and the Miracles song are very simple, but they include a nice use of an idiomatic phrase "get a hold on someone"... They use it in kind of a unique way, that seems to mean that the singer is very attached to his or her lover.   (Of course, this is different than to "get a hold of someone" which means to contact them, especially by phone.)  There are...

One of my current students is focusing on verb tenses, and he asked for some resources and advice.  Here's what I sent him: For practicing verb tenses , here are some websites:  http://www. englishpage.com/verbpage/ verbtenseintro.html http://www.eflnet.com/grammar/ verbtense.php These should be good opportunities for specific practice on these skills; however, continued conversation and speaking practice is my number one recommendation.   Have you downloaded the  Audacity  program?  That is a great way to record yourself speaking and listen to yourself or send to an English teacher (like me) for feedback.  Obviously I am limited in how much I can listen to and comment on, but I will do what I can.  : ) Also, listening to  esl-lab.com  and noticing the use of tenses will help raise your awareness of correct usage.  As you pay attention to the tenses, you will find it more natural to use them in the standard way.  and notic...

Austin is famous for having a lot of stuff going on.  How can you find out about it?  How can you access it?  This post will brainstorm different activities that I enjoy, and give links where you can find more information.  Search any of them in google maps  and click on "BUS" to figure out the best bus route to get there. Improvised theater can be really fun.  There are many theaters, like the Hideout , the Cold Town Theater , and Salvage Vanguard .  You can watch hilarious performances, and you can sign up to take an improv theater class -- most of these are attended by American English-speakers who are practicing to speak spontaneously. There are lots of outdoor places to swim in Austin.   Barton Springs and Deep Eddie are two of the most popular places to swim in Austin.  They are both natural water, but Barton Springs has more plants.  Big Stacie is a free pool in South Austin, and there are lots of pools at apartment comple...

I'm excited to be teaching at TIEP with a group of fascinating, intelligent students this summer!  We are using the Grammar in Context book by Sandra Elbaum, which I have used before and really like.  The stories are interesting, and the grammatical explanations and exercises are very detailed. The website for the text book:  Grammar in Context  has quizzes and writing activities.  When we finish a lesson, we will do the quiz.  For example,  this is the quiz  for Lesson 2 in Book 3.   Before Tuesday, would you go back and take at least three quizzes from  Grammar in Context 1  and/or  Grammar in Context 2  and e-mail me your results?  My e-mail address is sladewill AT gmail DOT com (substitute @ for AT and . for DOT).

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...