#ESL teaching

[0rb0t]

Oh yeah, I should probably mention. I was an ESL teacher in South Korea for many different parts of my life. 2010 for a few months, 2013 for a full year, and then late 2016 to early 2022! All different places, but all very memorable and beloved to me. I adored being a teacher and I tried my hardest to make English fun for students, rather than a chore. I wanted them to talk about their interests, so I encouraged them to do so by learning English so we could communicate. I had students explain to me the entire premise of Among Us, which may not sound like much, but is a pretty huge deal for an 8 year old learning English vocabulary and doing their best to explain it to me. I miss all my students a lot, and they've even sent me letters since then.

[richardtheteacher]

Introducing The P.O.W.E.R. Method of Retrieval Practice

🚀 Unleash the P.O.W.E.R. of Learning! 🌟✨ Introducing a game-changing strategy for educators: Prime, Organize, Wrestle, Evaluate, Reinforce, Internalize. From mind maps to escape rooms, this technique transforms the classroom into an engaging adventure!

An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati. Unless you’ve been hiding in cave for the past five years, it’s highly likely that you have heard the phrase ‘retrieval practice’ being bandied…

[elanorx]

ESL Body parts

Here’s a word list from Cambridge Dictionary +Plus I’ve made to help people learning English as a Second Language to get some practice. I love their quizzes, they’ve got an audio quiz I use a lot! This is a great way to get some practice while you’re waiting in line or have a few minutes. You do need to have an account there, but it’s a free tool! Note: I can’t believe I left this one as a…

[heljar-heimur]

Teaching thoughts...

I have a bunch of adult students right now, doing distance studies and they just want to get their certifications. Sometimes it is a struggle to give them feedback. I try to not put too much in order to not make them feel hopeless. However, I struggle with not pointing out errors that they should not be making at this level of English.

Also sometimes it is very hard to suggest alternatives or how to fix it, because I am just not sure what they are trying to say.....

[mrlancer]

Teaching English in Korea is wild. Besides the generally shitty working conditions most of the time (I'm lucky now that I have a good hagwon), but the parents are so crazily involved and pick at every tiny thing you do and think they know how to teach better. Like, I dont want to be that person, but you're telling me, someone who has a Masters degree in English, that the way I've taught a child to answer a question is wrong. The worst part is they don't even speak English themselves.

I hate being that person, and I will listen to criticism and explain what the teaching method is and what our goals are, but when you encourage your child to call me out and tell me I'm wrong in the middle of class when I'm most certainly not, is when you push your luck.

[heljar-heimur]

telling kids the books are terrible and you need to memorize them for the test does a huge disservice to both students and teachers.

I have tried to explain this to my students, sadly there is a group of them that wants to just get multiple choice questions from the book and nothing else.

I have been doing various assignments related to the books topic but not about the book. Keep in mind that I am teaching English EFL/ESL and not a pure literature class so I take a somewhat different approach than someone teaching literature through reading. I still disagree using memorization tests in teaching literature on specific books, you are teaching how to analyze style and structure and sometimes students ability to use those on their own. Remembering exactly who said what is not something that helps you learn anything.

My students still request to do multiple choice quiz assignments on moodle instead of writing assignments or having a discussion class. Mostly because of teacher issues last year so that is something they got used to. The students actually got kind of upset that I said that they were not reading the book to memorize it but rather to use it as a tool for getting a new perspective on things unfamiliar to them. While learning a language.

Additionally the school I am teaching at uses formative assessment and there should not be any final exams or any big final projects for courses. I approach the formative assessment with a project based learning approach. Multiple choice questions about events from a random novel are not productive at assessing if you actually learned something.

The interesting thing about the YA convo months ago was how people are trying to use YA to change school curriculum for better or worse. “X book is dated,” “students don’t relate to x books,” “teenagers don’t enjoy reading x genre or style.” I hear them say these things all the time, but, honestly, that’s fine. Books aren’t chosen for students to enjoy. They’re chosen for them to learn how to analyze a text and critically think. They don’t need to like the book, as long as they can engage with it properly. No one pushes for kids to learn math or history for enjoyment. I can understand wanting high schoolers to read for fun, but that’s a job for their parents not teachers. I’m also not exactly sure how it feeds into the rise in purity culture. I can see a correlation, just not sure if that’s also causation.

--

I do think schools should try not to actively teach that reading sucks, but yes.

[littlemizzlinguistics]

As an English-as-a-second language teacher, I would never ever ever tell my students that TikTok English isn’t a valid and legitimate use of the language. I tell them that it’s a register of English that has appropriate contexts and inappropriate context, and “here’s how you say ‘no wait, let him cook’” in formal, standard English, or “this phrase that you’re asking me about means this but it should only be used with friends in informal context, there’s a time and a place for TikTok English”, but I’d never tell them not to use it or that it’s not valid.

Today’s internet idioms might be next decade’s “perfectly fine in a business email” idioms and I’m not going to stop my students from learning and embracing all aspects of the language. My job is to teach them the appropriate contexts for different things, and to ready them to use English in different contexts and to be able to use it to their benefits. It’s not to be the arbiter of what parts of the language are “real” or “not real” or to say that they MUST only use certain dialects. That would be doing them a disservice and not fully preparing them for the increasingly English-speaking, rapidly-changing world they’re about to face.

Shakespeare was once written for the unwashed masses who spared a little coin to go see a play in a register of their language that made sense to them. Now it’s the height of sophistication. I’m not here to make those decisions. I’m just here to teach my students to move through the world and to know how to use the language in different situations. I’m not so arrogant as to say “that’s not REAL English” because obviously that’s not true. People are using it, so it’s real English.

I’m here to say stuff like “it’s rizz with your friends, that’s fine. But let’s stick to “style” in your essays for now”

[isfjmel-phleg]

:/

[stvlti]

Honestly as an ESL speaker and teacher I wish all variations of Standard English were more like their regional dialectal counterparts

[richardtheteacher]

The 7 Golden Rules of Communication for Online Meetings

Even as far back as 2020, during the height of the pandemic, research was being conducted on the effectiveness of video conferencing in education, and some such research concluded that online meetings would remain popular long-after the pandemic was over.

An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati. Even as far back as 2020, during the height of the pandemic, research was being conducted on the effectiveness of video conferencing in education,…

[casual-eumetazoa]

I'm gonna try applying for jobs today! Wish me luck 😬

[happy10thousandyears]

Doing igcse art genuinely felt like being skinned alive tbh I pity the British and other kids who have to go thru that gay shit

[anguilliforme]

vagueposting about a reply on another post that had replies restricted but i am really sick of (sorry but usually) USamericans acting like the australian accent is incomprehensible when it’s literally just another dialect of english.

[dumb-silly-bug]

In these trying times of final exams, I wish to spread the wisdom of one of the ESL 4th graders I've been observing for class:

💛~"awos bliv in your self bi!!!."~💛

("always believe in yourself, bye!!!.")

[lenectarine]

How do you manage to say the shittiest AND the most idiotic fucking thing at once? Do you think this man realizes how patronizing he sounds?

[edbangingrobot]

being an english teacher can be really fun at times