Digital literacy skills are crucial twenty-first-century skills that are required for the successful use of technology and active engagement in today's world. However, there is a lack of effective resources and guidelines for developing English as a second language (ESL) learners' digital literacy skills. Due to their increasingly important and…

As the demand for opportunities to learn English grows throughout the world, parents and educators are looking for innovative ways to engage students in English-learning opportunities. Perhaps your school or municipality will seek to initiate an English Camp to be on trend with this growing need. Or perhaps, like many go-getter teachers, you wish…

Paraphrasing is a productive exercise for students at the intermediate level because it develops capability in both directions: the cognitive capability to comprehend and the linguistic capability to express ideas autonomously--that is, without needing to copy from the original or from a model. However, for students at this level, paraphrasing is…

In Madagascar, secondary and adult English as a foreign language (EFL) classes commonly have limited resources and inadequate teacher preparation. Schools often have few or no textbooks and dictionaries. Computers with Internet access are a rare luxury. Teachers themselves may be underprepared, with no English teaching credential, minimal…

When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the…

"Lesson that come easy are not lessons at all. They are gracious acts of luck. Yet lessons learned the hard way are lessons never forgotten"--Don William. The present paper illustrates how to plan effectively for teaching prose in English. The design and strategy of the lesson can be planned prior to the teaching class. Teaching prose is…

To help ESP college instructors improve the English curriculum taught at polytechnic institutes, colleges and universities, the current study proposes a model for designing English for Polytechnic Purposes (EPP) courses for undergraduate students majoring in mechanical engineering, chemistry, technology, economics, textile industry and other…

Each of the four language skills--reading, writing, speaking, and listening--plays an important role in language learning, and successful teaching can benefit from including a combination of these skills in the classroom. This article shares strategies for integrating speaking into a writing-focused course, with the goal of improving students'…

This document presents a step-by-step description of an activity that demonstrates how learners at all levels and all ages can use percussion and percussion instruments to support their learning of English pronunciation.

This article proposes a theoretical foundation and practical strategies for incorporating pedagogical songs and corresponding gestures into the language classroom. Music and movement are connected to verbal memory, which is a key component of language learning. Music and language are processed in the same areas of the brain, and recent empirical…

In this article Karen Adams demonstrates how to incorporate group grammar techniques into a classroom activity. In the activity, students practice using the target grammar to do something they naturally enjoy: learning about each other.

This article defines rapport in a teaching context as knowing your students, their different learning styles, and using that relationship with them to teach on a personal level. The author describes an activity using playdough. While giving learners opportunities to interact with others it naturally appeals to a variety of learning styles,…

This is a step-by-step guide to offering role plays that give learners practice in describing a problem, asking for advice, giving advice--and giving and receiving feedback from peers. The article includes numerous sample prompts.

Technology-mediated task-based language teaching is the merger between technology and task-based language teaching (TBLT; González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014) and is arguably now an imperative for language education. As language classrooms are being redefined, training for how to set learners up to successfully do tasks online must be part of…

The author is responsible for teaching reading classes and overseeing the reading curriculum at an intensive English program in the United States. The institution strives to make reading fluency a priority in the classroom, but after conducting a basic overview of the literature on the topic, the author realized that the approach could be improved…