Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

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.

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...