A few years ago I met weekly with a language client who is a sourcing manager for an international steel company.  An astute student of culture and communication, he often tried out American idioms or expressions that he had remembered from studying English in school or had seen on an internet idio...

 (Note: In the United States, adult education refers to the free English, literacy, and high school equivalency classes for adults, usually administered by community colleges and community-based organizations.)

I’ve had the opportunity to hire quite a few ESL instructors in adult education. The fi...

I doubt that I know ten verbs in German even though I took two years of German in high school. I am certain, however, that one verb I’ll never forget is…wait for it….”crochet”.   “Crochet” sits permamently in my mental hard drive because it became one of my fighting words. By fighting words, I mean ...

 This is the fifth of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

 “Don’t mistake activity for achievement. To produce results, tasks must be well organized and properly executed; otherwise, it’s no different from children running around the playground—everybody is doing something, but nothing is bei...

C is for Coaching

This is the fourth of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

When you ask your friend how they’re doing and their reply is “I’m fine”, semantically it means satisfactory, but pragmatically you know somethin’ ain’t right.  Plus their response was likely delivered with a hollowe...

This is the third of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

Last fall an experienced instructor came to observe a class I was leading and to be a rotating partner to students.  After the class completed the two-hour session, her first comment to me was music to my big ears:  “That was intense.” ...

This is the second of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

The phrase “express yourself” might conjure up memories of the non-Biblical Madonna for those of a certain age.  Or it could just sound artsy-fartsy* to you.  In the context of school, we have limited subjects to which “express yoursel...

 This is the first of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

¿Donde es la biblioteca?  Many of you can relate.  You took a year or two of Spanish or another language in high school or college, but you were at a loss when it came to speaking the language when the class was over, and you definitel...

In the previous post promised a lesson, so here we go! It's a slightly condensed version to keep the email from stretching a mile. This exercise is excellent for beginners through intermediate, but I also use it as the basis for building exercises for more advanced students.

Step 1. Ask your studen...

Oof. I got “clothed” again a few days before writing this.  During a lower level English class I was visiting, the instructor had a page projected with a dozen pictures of clothing items.  The screen showed the usual clothing vocabulary: shirt, shoes, hat, etc., but also overcoat and underpants. Ove...

I had always lamented the fact that I never took a philosophy class.  I wish I had learned some of the classical concepts that I’d heard or read about over the years.  Then about three years ago I had to have my college transcripts sent to a school. Lo and behold, I had, in fact, taken a philosophy ...

Last year I gave a presentation called The Big “No-Know”: Why Students Still Make Basic Errors at the Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - Bilingual Education annual convention.  The presentation comes from my course The Language Sport. About midway through my talk I touched...

A key starting point for successful language training begins with this question: “What’s your teacher to student word ratio?” How many words do you speak in class compared to each student?  

I recently evaluated a class where the instructor probably had a 300:1 teacher to student word ratio.  I’m n...