Helping adult ESL students feel comfortable speaking their new language is an important role for an ESL teacher. Get ESL teaching tips for helping adult students overcome their fears about speaking in English and making English relevant to their lives.
Pets are everywhere in your students’ lives. Dogs on Instagram. Cats in memes. Coworkers talking about their rabbits. Neighbors complaining about barking. Rental applications asking about animals. So why not use pets as a theme in your adult ESL classes? Pets give you a relatable, engaging topic that promotes conversation, builds vocabulary, and provides tons […]
Lights, camera, ENGLISH! Movies work in adult ESL classes. Or rather, movie clips do. They give students authentic language input. They’re engaging. Students hear vocabulary in context and pick up cultural knowledge. Their listening comprehension improves. And here’s the thing: you don’t need to make your students sit through a three-hour epic. Short trailers or
Your classroom is full of cultural landmines you don’t even know about yet. Students from cultures with little concept of personal space are getting too close to female Saudi students who can’t be touched by men outside their family. Korean students are asking direct questions about age while the Americans in their communities recoil in
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 is still listening. And when you use music well in adult ESL, it does a lot more than fill time. It gets people talking. It brings culture into the room
Picture this: Your student Mahmoud has been in the country for six months. His English is pretty solid in class. He can talk about his weekend, describe his favorite foods, and a lot more. Then one day, he needs to get bloodwork done at the hospital. He parks, walks in… and the hospital is massive.
You know that moment when you assign a speaking activity and your students look at each other like “Again? With YOU?” Yeah. That moment. They’ve been paired up with the same classmates for weeks (months?), and the spark is gone. They know each other’s stories. They’ve heard each other’s opinions on everything from weekend plans
I’ll never forget my first attempt at a “free talking” session with my A1 class. I had twenty questions printed out. TWENTY. I’d spent the better part of an evening finding good conversation starters, organizing them by difficulty, and feeling pretty smug about my preparation. These were just backups, you know, in case there was
“I can’t speak because I don’t have anything to say.” Hui wailed this in class one day, and honestly? I felt that in my bones. Here was this Chinese student with an IELTS score that made no sense. Reading? Solid. Writing? Good. Listening? Fine. Speaking? She bombed it. Com-plete-ly. Her score was so low I
Somehow, in every Intensive English Program I’ve taught in, practical English gets shoved aside. We rush through it, almost dismissively, trying to hurry students into higher levels, you know, the level they need to pass those English proficiency exams. It’s like we forget they’ll be living in an English-speaking community for YEARS while they work
I’d been teaching Saudi students for almost a YEAR when I finally figured out that they’d been trying to tell me something crucial with a gesture. For a year, I completely missed my students’ pleas for more time to think. It looked like I was refusing to give them time to formulate their answers or
