Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

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'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 .

My new position teaching fifth grade bilingual education has introduced me to tons of resources that would be really great for other language learning contexts as well.  I had done Reader's Theater before, but I didn't realize how many awesome, free on-line resources there were for Reader's Theater.  Aaron Shep comes highly recommended, and has a huge variety of texts. This school district from Spokane also has a bunch of cool Reader's Theater. There are some fun Cinderella adaptations, like Cinderella Bigfoot and Cinderella's Step-family's press conference which is probably aimed at a teenage or young adult crowd. Anyway, lots of fun stuff!  And all of this is after a few recommendations and some quick google searches.  You can probably find a bunch of other materials without much effort!

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!

My student Yousef and I are practicing for the TOEFL -- an academic English proficiency test -- and we have found some good free resources.  These are some of the best ones that came up from Google searches. Timed speaking is one of the most stressful and difficult parts of TOEFL and most tests.  This website has good practice opportunities.  We use Audacity to record and listen to our answers. Another website gives listening and reading exercises.  Check it out!  Yousef also showed me that you can search Youtube for listening practice  and speaking practice .  Click on "Show More" to see questions.  Scroll down to the bottom for the answers.  Obviously, some of these may not be perfect, but they should be good opportunities to practice.  If you have recommendations for websites for TOEFL practice, let me know.

Two things are reinforcing my interest in Bilingual Education: I am substituting for the H.O.L.A. program, a non-profit that is trying to help implement two-way dual language programs at campuses around Austin, 2. an awesome class in Bilingual Teacher Leadership with Deb Palmer and the Proyecto Maestria group. From that group I learned about the Daily Five , a program for helping kindergartners learn to read. My classmates say that their students have learned to read more quickly and successfully with the Daily Five than with any other program they've used. More links soon.

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...

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...