Ask Your English Students to Review TED.Com videos – and Create Compelling Conversations
How can you encourage your advanced ESL students to develop their speaking skills and tap their interest in our rapidly changing world? Create compelling classroom assignments that respect their intelligence, engage their curiosity, and model great speaking skills. Let your students be hunters, gathers, and presenters of new information to their classmates! Adding a homework assignment that...
Read MoreFluency Requires Practice
“To know and not do is to not know.” The Talmud Fluency requires practice. Our students also know that speaking English can be both satisfying and stressful. Therefore, we require speaking activities in class – and strongly suggest ways to speak more out of class. Our students want to be fluent, but they often hesitate to practice their speaking skills. Many students do not...
Read MoreWhat is your word of the year for 2009?
What would be your word of the year? Why? The New Oxford Dictionary chose “unfriend” as its word of the year, but that clever choice is not the first, only, or last word. This excellent article from Ruth Walker’s outstanding “Verbal Energy” column in the Christian Science Monitor looks at the choices of Oxford American Dictionary, Dictionary.com, Webster’s New...
Read MoreConversation tip #15: Seek to Understand
Seek to Understand Have you ever seen two emotional people talk past each other? Both talk and neither listen. Both want to tell the other, and don’t want to hear – or understand – what the other person is saying. This happens too often in stressful workplaces. Stephen Covey, author of the international bestseller called “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, advises people “to seek first to...
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