Sprinkle Excitement in the Classroom with These 8 ESL Spelling Games

S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G

C-A-N

B-E

F-U-N!

You read that right. When taught correctly, spelling can be fun for the whole class!

Even if writing isn’t one of your main classroom objectives, it’s still important for students to have a firm grasp on proper spelling.

Whether students find learning proper spelling easy or a nightmare, one thing’s for sure: most students will tell you that spelling exercises are rather dull. That’s why I recommend using some simple and easy games to get your students excited about spelling!

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How to Constructively Leverage Mistakes as Part of Your Teaching Strategy

Students are not perfect, and we spend much of our time correcting their mistakes. Our challenge is in correcting these mistakes in a useful rather than in a discouraging manner. Fortunately, as Dr. Richard Curwin argues cogently in his recent Edutopia blog post. There are ways that we can structure our classrooms and change how we view and talk about mistakes that will actually encourage learning.  Here are a few ways to do just that..

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Seven ways to give better feedback to your students

   

  Research shows that constructive comments can bring a huge boost to learning – but they can also backfire. Here’s how to get them right..

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Why do we teach Grammar?

Why should we teach pupils terms for aspects of language use – a ‘metalanguage’, as it is sometimes called? For example, why does the teacher suggest that the pupil ‘use the past tense’, rather than saying ‘Write "ed" there and there, and "shook", not "shake", there’? The answer seems to be that the terms help the learner to generalise from that activity to all similar ones and thus have a specific way of thinking about such activities in future. This process also, presumably, serves to crystallise the learner’s knowledge about how this aspect of language operates, by making it specific and conscious, especially if similar instances are regularly identified and described in the same way, in similar contexts.

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Is Teaching Grammar Necessary?

Many years ago, while visiting a grade 4/5 classroom in the school where I was principal, I listened to a group of children reading aloud the first drafts of essays they had written about various holidays celebrated in America. The children were helping each other to correct errors and make meaning clearer. In reading her essay one girl said, “In the United states we celebrate Christmas by giving and receiving gifts and sing Christmas carols.” Immediately, another girl in the group interrupted her,..

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Why should we teach grammar?

There are many arguments for putting grammar in the foreground in second language teaching. Here are seven of them:..

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Effective Framework for Primary-Grade Guided Writing Instruction

This article describes the theory and procedures (purpose, format, teacher prompting, and assessment procedures) for small-group writing instruction. Guided writing lessons are intensive, small-group activities that help create instructional support and interaction between teacher and students during writing.

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7 Steps to Teaching Writing Skills to Students with Disabilities

Written expression is a huge part of life inside and outside the classroom. When students with disabilities learn to write, type, and/or select appropriate communicative responses, it opens the door to greater opportunities to reach their learning goals, communicate their preferences, and establish rapport with the people around them.

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Teaching Speaking: Activities to Promote Speaking in a Second Language

Speaking is "the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts" (Chaney, 1998, p. 13). Speaking is a crucial part of second language learning and teaching. Despite its importance, for many years, teaching speaking has been undervalued and English language teachers have continued to teach speaking just as a repetition of drills or memorization of dialogues. However, today's world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students' communicative skills..

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8 Fun Activities for Teaching Verbs

Yup, it’s a pain in the butt for everyone.  Regular and irregular verbs, past tense, past participle and past conditional…it’s confusing even for native speakers.  When it comes time to learn or review verb tenses, you’ll want to find as many ways as you can to make it fun and intuitive. 

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Classroom activities to teach narrative tenses

Narrative tenses are verb tenses that are used to talk about the past. You can often find them in stories, textbooks, spoken accounts and in descriptions of past events.

The following are examples of narrative tenses:

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10 Awesome Activities to Improve Intermediate ESL Students’ Listening

Listening seems like a passive activity.

ESL teachers know better than anyone — that’s not exactly true.

Language learners need to actively develop their listening skills.

Listening is every bit as vital to learning as reading, writing and speaking.

But it often slips through the cracks in the classroom.

Listening exercises are regularly brushed over, confined to the dreaded audio CD that accompanies the textbook.

You yawn as you press play.

And then you start listening to the slow, staged dialogues involving Mario and Margaret’s outing to the store. You know the ones, right?

One thing’s for sure: if you’re bored, your students definitely are.

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How to Teach Listening in the ESL Classroom: 15 Valuable Activities That Create Solid Skills

I was surprised to find that one of the students in my “Listening” class was deaf.

She was proficient in lip-reading in her first language and she was learning to do the same in English.

So I tried to make sure I was always facing the class when I spoke.

She was actually managing well.

Obviously, though, a situation like this raises all kinds of questions for language educators.

For one thing, is it possible to teach listening skills to someone who has physical trouble hearing?

And if so…

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Assessment for Learning

Although Assessment for learning, or AfL, is nothing new to mainstream education in the UK, in the world of ELT it remains a less familiar and practised approach.

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Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Bloom’s Taxonomy in its various forms represents the process of learning.  It was developed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and modified during the 1990’s by a new group of cognitive psychologists, led by Lorin Anderson (a former student of Bloom’s) to make it relevant to the 21st century. 

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Bloom's Taxonomy and English Language Learners

Your English language learners should be developing thinking skills as they acquire English. Dust off your copy of Bloom’s Taxonomy and ask questions from all levels. There are activities that ELLs can do on every level.

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How to make reading fun – and part of life beyond the school room

The love of reading is one of the greatest gifts an adult can give to a child. Pragmatically, reading proficiently helps with school work. But it also widens children’s horizons. It can help readers to understand their own world better, and to explore other worlds.

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Grammar matters and should be taught – differently

I’m going to put it out there - most teachers don’t know enough about how the English language works [aka grammar], and this inevitably impacts upon student literacy outcomes.

There are grammar pundits who love their knowledge about the language for the haughty power it affords them: the ability to write corrective letters to the editor and the certain belief there is one right way to write and speak - their way.

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PPP English Teaching Method

. The "Three Ps" approach to Language Teaching is the most common modern methodology employed by professional schools around the world. This method was created around the early 90’s. PPP was developed as a "soft" approach to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), combining CLT and traditional approaches.

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Different Approaches to Teaching Grammar

As teachers, we’ve likely all been given grammar to teach students and have asked ourselves how we could possibly communicate the rules to our students. True, it is difficult to convey the complicated rules of grammar to students learning a language, and, as I’ve expressed countless times in this blog, simply explaining the rules is not enough. When it comes to TEFL teaching, there are traditionally three different approaches to teaching grammar.

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Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary: Theory and Technique

Why talk about theory and techniques for teaching vocab?

The theory and techniques for teaching vocabulary may not be as fun as the ideas that I’ll share in the next post or as perusing the books in the last post, yet this is the theory applicable to all ages and types of readers. It is the knowledge that will enable you to choose the right activities and strategies for your content and grade level.

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Top Five Vocabulary Strategies for English Language Learners

     That’s the challenge English Language Learners (ELLs) face if they want to catch up to their native English-speaking classmates. That’s almost 4,000 new words a year if a student begins school as a kindergartner!

     But what about the English Language Learners who don’t enroll until middle school or high school? For these students, the vocabulary challenge is even more demanding. To meet it, teachers must learn and use the most effective strategies. Over the years, I've tried many different approaches and techniques and compiled the following list of my top five favorite vocabulary strategies for ELLs.

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Teaching Strategies: 5 Ideas for Instructing Vocabulary

     As children, many of us remember the teaching strategies our instructors used for vocabulary: We’d copy down definitions into our notebooks, and then for homework we would have to rewrite each word for what seemed like a million times.

     We can probably all agree that passive learning is not an effective teaching strategy to instruct vocabulary. Studies are now showing that students need multiple exposures to a word before they can fully understand it. They also need to learn new words in context, by reading. Teachers can emphasize active processing by having students connect new meanings to words they already have knowledge of. The more exposures students have to a word, the better chance that they will remember it.

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Games & Activities for the ESL/EFL Classroom

This is a place were English teachers can share games and activities that they have found useful in the classroom. If you know a game or an activity that works well with ESL/EFL students and it is not yet listed here, please submit it.

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12 Fun Speaking Games for Language Learners

Have you ever asked a question to your language class, only to be answered with complete silence and blank stares? At one point every teacher has had the struggle of encouraging students to speak. Perhaps the student has a deep fear of making a mistake, or maybe the student is just plain shy, even in their native language. Whatever the reason, here is a list of a few fun activities to get your students to speak!

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