You know how some of your adult ESL students write everything in these tiny, disconnected bursts? I’m talking about short sentences with no flow…just fact after fact after fact until they hit some kind of imagined required word count and call it done. I used to think the exercises in the grammar book would fix […]
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 grammar lesson will 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, judging
I was scrolling through a teacher Facebook group the other day, and someone had posted a photo of their student’s answers in a conditionals grammar exercise. Third sentence in: “If you won a million dollars, what would you buy?” My eyes rolled up, and I groaned so loud my neighbor probably heard me through the
Look, I get it. You need to review prepositions of time. Again. Your students keep saying “on the morning” and “at Monday,” and you’re wondering if drilling in/on/at for the 47th time will finally make it stick this time. Yeah, I didn’t think so either…definitely not if you do it the same way that already
Adult ESL students love “and.” They use it to connect everything. Every. Single. Thing. And while they’re technically communicating, reading what they write (or listening to what they say) feels like being trapped in a run-on sentence that never ends. You know this student, right? The one who strings together every thought with “and” like
You grade another stack of essays from your intermediate students and want to bang your head against the desk. Again. These students can handle a conversation. They understand complex readings. They ace grammar quizzes. But their writing? Well, to be nice about it, it still sounds like a beginner wrote it. They’re still relying on
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 her throat that always meant she wasn’t quite sure if she approved of something. Her groupmate “Chen” kept picking up cards, then putting them down, and muttering in Mandarin. Then
I’m standing outside my classroom door, pretending to check my phone while I eavesdrop on my adult ESL students, and I hear Subin telling Ahmed, “This class is so fun! I learn so much, and we talk the whole time.” And then Ahmed agrees! “Better than my last grammar class. We just did exercises out
I had this all-male class once. Boisterous didn’t even begin to describe them, and their energy was exhausting at times, but also something I looked forward to. Anyway, we’d just finished learning tag questions, and during the break between classes, as I walked down the hall to the teachers’ room, tag questions were flying up
