Hi all, It is the first year in my career as English teacher. I have a group from Congo, they speak french and have just started to get to know about English....
Welcome to the inauguration of the Ventures community list. By participating in and contributing to discussions, you have the opportunity to seek or share...
Hi Ayman, You might find the article in the link below very useful. http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/collections/beginning.html It gives advice for the...
A study in California looked at teachers with high retention rates. Here are some of the things the researchers found: Many or all of the teachers with high...
In a previous posting, I listed some of the elements that were found in ESL classrooms with high retention rates. In addition to these elements, the following...
Another question asked of the teachers with good retention was: "What do your students love?" Here are the responses: "Making progress. Seeing success in...
An article in the Ventures eNewsletter discusses setting up and using interview grids. (http://www.cambridge.org/us/esl/ventures/articles/enews1206a.htm) What...
Here is another way to use grids. Again, a grid is a table with rows and columns. The number of rows is determined by the number of questions to be answered....
Making It Real: Teaching Pre-literate Adult Refugee Students (a free resource at http://www.tchtrainingproject.com/pdf/prelit.pdf) has excellent information...
Instead of providing the questions for the grids, each individual writes 3-5 questions to elicit information about classmates' homes/apartments (or any topic)....
As our adult learners have jobs and other responsibilities, they do not always arrive on time for class. Rather than introduce new content while students are...
Here is another `warm up' idea for the first few minutes of class. Introduce a word of the day. Students can make guesses as to what the word means. They can...
The Internet has made creating activities much easier for teachers. This site: http://bogglesworldesl.com/ provides many free printable activities for ESL...
Cambridge University Press is introducing a new four level series designed especially for adult English language learners. Level 1 will be introduced at TESOL...
Since vocabulary is so critical to understanding, it is important that unfamiliar words be pre-taught before they are encountered in a reading passage or other...
Learning a new word requires repeated exposures to the word in different settings. Seeing the word, hearing the word, and writing the word are all important...
Repetition is important in any learning situation. One learns to play tennis, ride a bike or drive a car through repetition. In the same way, learning a...
One interesting way to provide students with the need to reread a specific text is to ask them to `reduce' the text. Have the students `reduce' the text they...
Here is another fun and interesting way to get students to look at a text more than one time. Select a number of key words from a text. The number of words...
Here is yet another way to provide for multiple interactions with new vocabulary and reading passages. Before the reading, select a number of key words from...
There is a lot of data to support the fact that learning and retention increase when students work on activities together rather than individually. The...
Another way to combine reading with group work is to use a cooperative activity known as Jigsaw. Take the reading and divide it into three or four pieces....
One of the products coming out with the support materials for the new Ventures adult ESL series are reproducible worksheets of collaborative activities....
Collaborative activities has been shown to contribute to increased learning and better retention. Think/Pair/Share is a collaborative activity that works well...
This one is a little hard to put in an email, but it is too good not to share. So…you'll need to visualize a little. Make two lists of words, numbers,...
Jogger's memory is another great twist on a paired dictation. Make several copies of a short text. It can be a dialogue, a reading passage, a schedule or any...
Here are some other ways to use dictations. For beginning level students, dictations may just involve their filling in initial letter sounds in words. Or...
The communicative approach to language learning stresses the use of meaningful communication, emphasizing the importance of giving students a genuine reason or...
One of the major benefits of gap activities is that they significantly increase student talking time. As the activity is done in pairs, half of the students in...
Here are more ideas for gap activities. Make a grid on paper, with the heads of the columns lettered and the heads of the rows numbered. Thus, any particular...
Having problems with message search?
Fill out this form to ensure your group is one of the first to be migrated to the new message search system.
