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.
Let me tell you about my (first) year of disasters in South Korea. There was the time I insisted on buying a fish at the grocery store despite three increasingly frantic workers trying to stop me. I thought they were being weird about foreigners buying fish. Turned out the fish was deadly poisonous if you […]
All right, picture this…you’ve carefully arranged your discussion groups ahead of time. You’ve balanced your chatty adult ESL students with the quiet ones, mixed high and low levels thoughtfully, and you’re feeling so good that you gave yourself a literal pat on the back. Overconfident much? (I was.) Class starts. You look around and realize
Nothing kills a discussion faster than asking “What do you think about technology?” and watching a room full of adults suddenly find their phones fascinating. You know the feeling. You throw out what you think is a decent question, and you get… crickets, if you’re lucky. Stone cold silence otherwise punctuated by an exasperated sigh
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
Omar would not shut up. I mean that literally. The guy came from a family of twelve siblings, and apparently the only way to get a word in edgewise at his dinner table (or anywhere else in the house) was to talk over everyone else at maximum volume. So that’s what he did in my
