Students learn important concepts and ways of thinking by building on their own actions and experiences. In much of higher education, the primacy of textbooks and the lectures that accompany them are inconsistent with the nature of student learning. Some students manage to learn despite the problems from this emphasis, but educators can do much…

This unit is intended to help teach and test the prepositions outlined in the "English as a Second Language Guide" of the Milwaukee Public Schools. The text is sequenced to develop listening and understanding skills first, then speaking and writing skills, and finally reading comprehension without visual clues. Review and testing sections are…

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…

This newsletter contains five articles. The first, "Discourse Structure in Reading," by Ron Shook, suggests that reading materials for the beginning ESL (English as a second language) reader often have three defects: (1) profusion of detail as question fodder; (2) an oversimplified syntax; and (3) an artificial construction that violates…

This book has been written to help improve the composition skills of students of English as a second language or second dialect. It has been planned for students at the advanced secondary, college, and university levels who have had some previous training in English vocabulary and grammar; it is particularly suited for a one-semester course for…