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...

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 ...

I’ve had the opportunity to hire quite a few ESL instructors.  The first few times it wasn’t much of an experience, though. I was the hiring manager but we had a committee of non-ESL instructors and I had to follow the school’s interview questions, which were painfully generic and predictable. They ...

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...

In my previous post I mentioned creating an awareness of how much time is spent by the teacher talking versus how much time each individual student speaks.  Building on that idea, just because students spend a greater proportion of time talking in class, does that mean they’re improving? 

Meaning...

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...