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 ...

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:...

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...

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 .

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...

Several people have asked me for recommendations for studying Spanish in other countries.  I tell them that my first recommendation comes from my own personal experience; CPI or Centro Panamericano de Idiomas did an amazing job teaching conversational Spanish with well-organized units based around grammatical topics and interesting content.  The locations are spectacular, the teachers competent, interested, and friendly, and the host families became my second and third families! Another school that I would love to visit is Cetlalic or Centro Tlahuica de Lengua e Intercambio Culutural in Cuernavaca, Mexico.  They teach with a focus on social justice and Mexican cultures that is unique among the programs that I have heard of.  My friend and professor, Deborah Palmer, studied there and has taken students and her family there; she recommends it very highly! Another program that friends have recommended is in Antigua, Guatemala. Ixchel Spanish School  receive...

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...

Well, I am a huge advocate of traveling to reinforce your language learning, and to establish and maintain the relationships that help sustain a love for your target culture and language.  This week I am practicing what I preach, visiting Mexico City and Puebla.  I can report that I arrived today at the zócalo down town and am in my hostel.  It seems like a really good place to base a trip out of, but I´ll just be here tonight and tomorrow I'll meet up with my friend Leti and we'll head down to Puebla. The trip from the airport to the hostel on the metro and then walking along busy streets was exciting, and I've already passed several churches and monuments that I want to go back and look at more carefully.  Underground in the metro tunnels they have some ancient remnants of temples and altars from the Aztecs, and many buildings have a plaque that tells you what pre-colombian palace was on that spot. I'll post more soon, and try to be more descriptive...

Many thanks to Vera Dugardsyrenova, a fellow language teacher and education researcher, for introducing me to  Mi Vida Loca, a cool, interactive BBC Spanish series .  I am really impressed with it!  The scenes of Spain are beautiful and interesting; the plot of the series seems engaging, and they manage to expose you to really useful vocabulary in meaningful contexts.  As you watch the episodes, there are opportunities for you to participate as a character and practice some of the phrases they have introduced.  Mi VidaLoca is designed for beginners, but I think someone who is a little more advanced could still get a lot out of listening to the native speakers in the videos.  I came across some vocabulary that was new to me in episode 19, la inmobiliaria (the real estate office), either because a different word is used in Latin America, or just because I have never bought real estate, furniture, or even appliances in Spanish. Check it out and let me know ...

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!

Siempre se dice que entender las noticias en español puede ser difícil por que los reportes pueden ser muy rápidos y siguen sin pausas... pero de todas formas, ¡se puede tratar! En serio, creo que es una buena práctica.  Si se te dificulta mucho, escucha solo una pequeña parte y escucharla varias veces.  Vea si con repetición puedes entender más. In other words, listen to short chunks, play them back several times repeatedly, and listen for the gist.  Don't worry if you're not getting every word.  Also, if you watch a video and have no idea what it was about, try googling a key word or a newspaper article from that country and see if you can learn more. Para ver: Noticias de Argentina : Todo Noticias (even though I don't speak Argentine Spanish, I find the news on this channel slower and easier to follow than others). Televisión de Costa Rica : Teletica Noticias del Ecuador : TeleAmazonas Noticias de Guatemala : Guatevisión Noticias de Honduras : Tele...