You’ve noticed something. Your students are at least intermediate, but their writing isn’t. Sure, they use adjectives, and they add prepositional phrases. You’ve done sentence stretching exercises with them. But they still write short sentences that are short on details and sans anything like adjective clauses. You dream of the day you grade essays with …
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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, …
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Time Clauses: This is How to Make Them Fun
Time clauses are a surefire way for your adult ESL students to lengthen their sentences while enhancing the meaning. Is your students’ writing is full of short, choppy sentences? Introduce time clauses as a sentence writing hack. Time Clauses AKA Adverb Clauses of Time Time clauses are just one of several types of adverb clauses. …
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Cooking Verbs on the Menu: Delicious Recipes for Vocabulary Success
What better way to equip your adult ESL students with practical vocabulary than by teaching cooking verbs? Talk about a delicious approach to language learning that promises both engagement and relevance! Cooking verbs serve as key ingredients to understanding recipes or even following along with cooking shows. So, let’s talk about teaching cooking verbs to …
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Color Vocabulary Made Fun: 3 Levels of Engaging Activities for Adult ESL
Teaching color vocabulary in the adult ESL classroom goes way beyond identifying basic colors like red, blue, green, or yellow. Teaching color vocabulary isn’t just about recognition; it’s a gateway to engaging language instruction, offering opportunities to practice grammar, expand vocabulary, and have meaningful conversations. This article is a guide for ESL teachers working with …
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Stop Pre-Teaching Vocabulary All the Time!
None of my professors EVER told us to stop pre-teaching all the vocabulary, but I’m telling you to do just that. Here’s why. While I was getting my master’s in TESL in the early 2010s, the strategy of pre-teaching vocabulary words was all the rage. Perhaps it still is? This wasn’t something I had done …
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The Amazing Power of Role Plays in Adult ESL
Role plays made this happen: A giant voice roared out of the young woman many never even noticed was in the classroom. She gestured as if she were teaching a class on how to gesture. She moved with the definition of stage presence. Was this the same shy, quiet student who literally couldn’t bring herself to say, “Boo!” …
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Brushing Up on Dental English: How Role Plays Can Help Adult ESL Students Prepare for a Trip to the Dentist
A trip to the dentist can be a nerve-wracking experience when you speak the same language. Now imagine sitting in that chair when you don’t speak the same language as the dentist! (Been there, done that; not fun!) Not only do you have to worry about the potential pain or discomfort that may come with …
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My Bad! Teaching Apologies: Adult ESL Apologizing Role-Play Activities for Real-Life Situations
For real-life English, try making adult ESL apologizing role-play activities part of your next lesson! Why Teaching Apologies Matters in ESL Apologizing is a crucial social skill that can make or break relationships—whether at work, with friends, or even with customers. For adult ESL learners, knowing how and when to say sorry (and sound natural …
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The Intense Power of Minimal Pairs in Teaching Pronunciation to Adult ESL Students
If you want to tempt some of your feistier adult ESL students into throwing their pencils at you, introduce them to minimal pairs during some pronunciation lessons. Okay, so Afaf deliberately missed me when she pitched her pencil in my direction, but using minimal pairs in pronunciation exercises will certainly engage your students! What are …
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Why Adult ESL Students SHOULD Neutralize Their Accent
Try telling an adult ESL learner who has been here for years and still struggles to be understood that reducing accents isn’t necessary. It may be PC to accept everyone no matter how they pronounce English words, but non-native speakers live in the real world. And c’mon…what image do you get in your mind when …
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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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