Reviewing prepositions of time doesn’t have to be yet another worksheet, task cards, or even BOOM cards. Try out some of the following simple but effective ways to review prepositions of time. Go Visual! If you already know your students and their routines and activities, look for photos and pictures representing what you know will …
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3 FUN Vocabulary Games for Adult ESL
“GAME.” When I say “game” in my adult ESL vocabulary classroom, the air crackles. Spines extend, eyes brighten, pulses increase. “GAME” they repeat to each other, and smiles break out. I smile, too, knowing that the next words out of my mouth have already grabbed their complete attention before even being spoken. I doubt I …
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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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Teaching Body Vocabulary: Building a Strong Foundation for Adult ESL Learners
Body vocabulary is a crucial aspect of language learning, particularly for adults studying ESL. This was brought home to me on my third day hospitalized in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak the language. The nurses kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer, and they had to resort to bringing in patients from other …
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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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The 5 Best TH-Pronunciation Activities for Adult ESL
Why do we need TH-pronunciation activities? The voiced TH and the unvoiced TH are two of the most difficult sounds for many of our adult ESL students because these rare phonemes simply don’t exist in many languages. /θ/ is even rarer than /ð/. Imagine going your entire life never making a specific sound and then …
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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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