Teaching ESL students vocabulary is an important component of their education.
I was sitting in my graduate program class, getting my M.Ed. in TESL while teaching full-time, when one of my international student classmates got visibly frustrated. “Why does he use so many idioms?” she whispered. “I can’t follow what he’s saying.” I’d never noticed. Our professor seemed pretty straightforward to me. But once she pointed […]
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 sounds about as exciting sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with no data, wifi, or magazines.. But hear me out. Health is one of those topics that’s both practical AND
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 his culture and to help with their cooking. But he couldn’t really, and not because he didn’t know how to cook. He did. The problem was language. He didn’t have
Mariam could explain complex ideas. She understood the concepts in her psychology class. She could write coherent essays that made sense. But her professor kept giving her B’s and C’s with comments like “needs more sophisticated vocabulary” and “language too simplistic for college-level work.” I ran into her in the hallway looking frustrated. “I understand
Way back when, in my high school German class, we were learning colors. Pretty basic stuff, right? The teacher was going around asking students what color various things were in German. “Welche Farbe hat Ihr Auto?” One student answered, “Well, I’m told it’s grün.” The teacher looked confused. “You’re told it’s green?” That’s when we
It’s 10:30 am. Your students have been in class since 8 am. They’ll be here until at least noon, maybe longer. Or maybe you teach night classes, and the nights know exactly how many days it is from the winter solstice. Your students are exhausted. You’re exhausted. Everyone’s energy is gone. You need something that
I once had a student who labeled everything in his home with sticky notes to learn vocabulary. Not unusual, right? Lots of language learners do that. But this student took it further. He photographed every single labeled item. Then, whenever he had downtime, like waiting for the bus, sitting in the library between classes, or
I’ll never forget “Pablo” telling me, completely deadpan, that he felt “very boring” during our class discussion about emotions. He meant bored. But honestly? His version was more accurate, even if it hurt. Most ESL classes skip emotion vocabulary entirely, or worse, they turn it into one of those soul-crushing vocabulary lists where students robotically
Let me guess. You’re staring at your lesson plan thinking, Really? Months of the year? These are adults. And yet…here we are. Because someone put ‘months of the year’ on the curriculum, now you’re supposed to make a whole lesson out of twelve words your students probably already half-know. Because here’s the thing…the months of
So there I was, day three in a hospital in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language. Nurses kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer, and eventually they started dragging in patients from other rooms to translate what turned out to be fairly simple stuff. If I’d known some basic body vocabulary? I
