Rike Neville | Teaching Adult ESL

Everyday Role Plays Perfectly Tailored for Adult ESL: 3 Easy Steps

Everyday role plays are essential for our adult ESL students. Teaching adult ESL, especially in an Intensive English Program, means teaching more than the four language domains and more than the culture of the country your students are studying English in. It means teaching them how to do life tasks such as getting an apartment,… Read More
Breaking Barriers: 7 Strategies for Supporting Adult ESL Students Facing Challenges on the Road to Fluency

The challenges adult ESL students face can be daunting, from limited study time to difficulty understanding native speakers. However, you can help them break down these barriers by providing strategies and support. Keep reading to explore seven effective strategies for supporting adult ESL students, from accessing resources to staying motivated and expanding horizons. Strategy #1.… Read More
Two Engaging Multi-Level Vocabulary Games for Adult ESL

Adults love vocabulary games as much as children do, but unlike kids, they tend to want fun and educational games. Adult students have limited time, and they’re usually paying for their English classes. They prefer games that give them English practice, but they’re not likely to object to prizes! ^_^ Still, you might run into… Read More
Winter Activities: The Best Idea I Ever Had for Adult ESL Classes

Winter activities need not be synonymous with Christmas. There’s a lot to love about winter that is holiday-free, like snow days. Yes, the pandemic probably killed snow days for the children of today and tomorrow. However, many adults who didn’t work for a school district probably went Hulk-green with envy over the snow days they… Read More
Do These 5 Essential Things When Teaching Young Adult ESL Students

Teaching young adult ESL students is not the same as public school ESL classes or buxiban classes in China. Whether you’ve already done a stint overseas or this is your first time teaching adult ESL, taking these five steps will ensure greater success for you as a teacher and for your students as learners. Intensive… Read More
9 Delightful Springtime Activities for Adult ESL Classes

The days are (finally) getting longer and you want to shake off the winter doldrums your adult ESL students are mired in. Embrace the springtime with activities that will engage and delight your students! Spring-flavored activities for adult ESL springtime activities: Make It Local Introduce them to some activities that are commonly enjoyed in the… Read More
How to Teach Academic Vocabulary: A Helpful Guide for New Adult ESL Teachers

Teaching academic vocabulary can intimidate new adult ESL teachers. Maybe you don’t know how to teach academic vocabulary. You need ideas, strategies, and resources, and if you are lucky, all that is provided to you in abundance. However, if you are reading this, that’s probably not the case for you. Luckily for you (though not… Read More
4 Surefire Strategies for Refining R/L Pronunciation

When you teach Korean, Chinese, or Japanese students, you know you’re going to run into R/L pronunciation blunders. Before I knew about this common pronunciation error, I wondered why I kept hearing people talk about eating lice. I assumed it was a cultural dish because I hadn’t yet trained my brain to immediately switch r/l… Read More
Begging for Grades: Set Expectations

Listening to students begging for grades used to drive me nuts. If you teach ESL to university-bound adults, you already know that you don’t just teach ESL. You teach culture. Maybe it’s the importance of being on time. Perhaps it’s explaining that we prefer to blow our noses rather than sharply inhaling, repeatedly, throughout the… Read More
3 Fun Speaking Activities for Comparative Adjectives

Your adult ESL students barely managed to politely smother their sighs and suppress the glaze from creeping across their eyes when they realized that today’s grammar lesson would be a review on comparative adjectives. You know they need the practice, and if pressed, they’re likely to admit it even if only in their heads. Still,… Read More
Quickly Prepping for Grammar Classes

Prepping for grammar classes during a time crunch has never been easy. Now many teachers are teaching online as well as in-person. Who has the time to prepare EVERYTHING needed for a grammar class? I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Sometimes, I used to let YouTube teach my class, and now… Read More
Be Ready: The Best Emergency Sub Activity

We all get sick, have appointments that must be kept, an event that cannot be missed, or have SOMETHING that necessitates our absence. That’s why you need to know about this emergency sub activity! Besides, when you are sick, how much time do you really want to spend trying to develop a lesson that someone… Read More
Teaching the Months of the Year: Fun and Practical Ideas for Adult ESL

The months of the year are a fundamental aspect of the English language and have practical applications in everyday life. In this article, let’s discuss why we need to teach this topic to adult ESL students (and not just sing a song to memorize the order). I’ll provide examples of real-life situations where this knowledge… Read More
Future Progressive: Elevating Adult ESL Students’ Communication Skills

The future progressive is the future! Are you ready to take your adult ESL students’ communication skills to the next level? Teaching the future progressive tense, a crucial aspect of the English language, can help them do just that. The future progressive tense is used to describe actions that will be in progress at a… Read More
Short I and Long E Sounds: 4 Engaging Activities for Adult ESL Pronunciation

Short I and Long E sounds require clear pronunciation for effective communication and building confidence in adult ESL speakers. Conquering these sounds may present challenges, but none of us want our students to confuse “beach” with “bitch,” right? The thing is, drilling is effective but boring. So how about some activities for Short I and… Read More

4 Reasons We Avoid Teaching English Articles in ESL Classes

English articles convey a greater wealth of information than you’d think. These useful little words enable us to be more precise. When we don’t teach our students to use them properly, we deprive them of the ability to be unambiguous in their own communication. But, time and again, I observed teachers completely ignore their students’ …
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4 Fun Plural Noun Activities for Adult ESL

While I absolutely see the value in a good worksheet, using plural noun activities when you have the time is just so much more fun! What kind of activity would be appropriate for an adult ESL class? Here are four I encourage you to try. Stage a plural noun linguistic investigation. Linguistic investigations are one …
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Linguistic Investigations: an Incredible Way to Build Student Self-Reliance

Do your students immediately ask you for help when they don’t understand something? That they feel comfortable asking you is one thing. Relying on you to explain EVERYTHING to them is another. You need linguistic investigations. One of the toughest aspects of teaching adult ESL is, the better you are at it, the less your …
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5 Fun and Educational Health-Themed Activities for Adult ESL Classes

If you like using themes when teaching adult ESL vocabulary or speaking classes, hold onto your kale smoothies and consider “health” for your next theme. It’s relevant and practical as health impacts everyone. Students can learn healthcare, nutrition, and exercise terms. You can explore cultural perspectives on health with your students. Most importantly, because we …
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3 Legitimate Reasons Commonly Confused Words Often Confuse Us

Do your students ask for your advise in learning vocabulary? Its a common question, right? You might want to take a brake in your lessen to insure your students have a through knowledge of commonly confused words. But first, what causes this confusion? Exactly why are commonly confused words so confusing? While some of the …
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8 Great Ideas for Teaching Weather Vocabulary in Adult ESL

Weather vocabulary serves important communication purposes for adult ESL. Students can use it to quickly break the ice when speaking with someone new because it is such an innocuous part of small talk. Knowing the terms associated with the extreme weather found in their location could be a matter of safety or even life or …
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Discover Two Ideas for Cultivating Insightful Discussion Questions for ESL

Did the dropped pin echo in your speaking class? Was that a heavy sigh, a set of rolled eyes, or the clink of students mentally disengaging? Cultivate lists of discussion questions for ESL that are tailored to the needs of your adult learners, and you’ll rarely have a quiet moment again. So where do you …
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5 Innovative Ideas for Using Music in Adult ESL Classes

Music is a universal language that can bring people together and facilitate meaningful conversation. In an adult ESL class, incorporating music in adult ESL can be a fun and engaging way to improve language skills and create a sense of community among learners. Here are five ideas for adding music in adult ESL classes: Share …
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Exploring Cultural Differences in Adult ESL Classrooms: Why it Matters

Cultural differences in adult ESL can create a rewarding and enriching experience for both the teacher and the students. Indeed, the opportunity to learn about and explore cultural differences in the classroom is one of the most interesting aspects of teaching adult ESL. Understanding and acknowledging these differences can lead to a more inclusive and …
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4 Surefire Strategies for Refining R/L Pronunciation

When you teach Korean, Chinese, or Japanese students, you know you’re going to run into R/L pronunciation blunders. Before I knew about this common pronunciation error, I wondered why I kept hearing people talk about eating lice. I assumed it was a cultural dish because I hadn’t yet trained my brain to immediately switch r/l …
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Sh/Ch: 3 Must-Have Methods for Successful Pronunciation Tweaks

The pronunciation of sh/ch is a bigger problem than you might think! Whenever I heard teasher, I knew to look towards one of my Saudi students, not the ones from Korea or Spain or but sometimes one of the students from the Ivory Coast. These were the students who would ask where they could find …
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Pronunciation Truly Matters!

Some of my most vocal students harbored a deep belief that they spoke English rather flawlessly, at least when it came to pronunciation. They would often complain about their classmates’ accents. They’d even protest at having to work with a partner who they couldn’t understand easily because of the classmate’s accent. I know this because …
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