Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

In previous posts I've mentioned an interest in group improvisational story telling; I love role play activities that use improvisation, and even the URL of this blog has the word "improv" in it. I wanted to give some ideas for places where teachers and language learners can experience and learn about improv techniques and games for fun and for language learning. In Austin, there are a variety of theaters that put on Improv shows and teach classes in improvisational acting. I am most familiar with the Hideout , the Salvage Vanguard Theater , and Coldtowne Theater . Check them out! I can especially recommend the P-graph show on Thursday nights at 8:00 at Coldetown or classes from Andy Crouch at the Hideout. For games, check out these sites and blogs: Five Minute Fillers , Larry Ferlazzo's games for students , Dave Kees Teach English in China Also, great board games for creative, spontaneous speech are Apples to Apples (especially the youth version), Balderdash ,

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