Teaching adult ESL with no materials or time? Here’s what works when nothing else does.
Getting Adult ESL Students to Talk About the Environment
The environment is everywhere in the news. Microplastics in our water. Fast fashion waste filling landfills. Wildfires and extreme weather events. Rising sea levels. Your…
I Found My Old Gratitude Post…And Then I Found What Came After
I’ve been going through all my blog posts, fixing where images exploded into huge sizes and formatting got weird after I changed my site theme…
Pronunciation Truly Matters: The Spelling Quiz That Made My Students Question Everything
“Bet.” I said it clearly. The students hunched over their papers, writing what they heard. “Pat.” More writing. A few confused glances around the room….
Linguistic Investigations: Teaching Students to Teach Themselves
I’ll never forget watching “Layla” lean over a pile of sentence cards, using her finger to separate them and making that little clicking noise in…
6 Exciting Subject-Verb Agreement Games & Activities for Adult ESL
Subject-verb agreement has a reputation for being dry, tedious, and the grammatical equivalent of watching paint dry. And if we’re being real, that reputation is…
3 Fun Speaking Activities for Comparative Adjectives
Your adult ESL students barely manage to politely smother their sighs and suppress the glaze from creeping across their eyes when they realize that today’s…
5 Health-Themed Activities That Won’t Make You Want to Fake Being Sick
If you’re looking for a theme that won’t make your adult ESL students groan and check their phones, try “health.” I know, I know. It…
5 Smart Ways to Use Music in Adult ESL
Music is one of those magical classroom tools that almost everyone reacts to. Even the grumpiest student with their arms crossed and their hood up…
3 Ideas for Inspiring Shared Gratitude in the Classroom
Have you ever worked at a place where people had genuine (not coffee-induced) smiles in the mornings? Where people asked about your weekend and listened instead of…
Put Cooking Verbs on the Menu in Your Adult ESL Classes
I once had a low-beginner student from Saudi Arabia who lived with a homestay family. He wanted to cook with them—both to share dishes from…
TED Talks Aren’t Just for Advanced ESL Students, So Here’s How to Use Them with Everyone Else
I used to think TED Talks were only for my advanced adult ESL students. You know, the ones who could already hold their own in…
10 Practical Ways to Teach the Alphabet to Adult ESL Students
So, you’re teaching adult ESL true beginners, and you need to teach the alphabet. You know there are millions of resources and ideas for teaching…
How to Sneak Test-Taking Strategies into Beginning Adult ESL Lessons
When we started working on color vocabulary, Ama’s face went dark. I didn’t know her well because she had just started in my class that…
When Your Students Want to Reduce Their Accent (And Why That’s Okay)
“Teacher, I need to fix my accent. Nobody understands me.” Zara pulled me aside after class, frustrated and exhausted. She’d been in the US for…
Why Your Adult ESL Students Need Reflective Writing
I don’t remember why I asked the question, but I’d written it on the board: “What’s the most terrible sound you’ve ever heard?” Amara raised…
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