Past Issues of English Teaching Forum

This article uses the Stephen Crane story “The Open Boat” (freely available on the American English website) as an anchor text to demonstrate how teachers can apply Raphael’s Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) technique to a text that students might be assigned to read. The article includes numerous examples and tips that teachers can use to adapt the technique to other texts as a way to enhance student engagement and interest in reading.

In this article, author Aljohn Francis Ruiz Flores presents a clever and easy-to-apply technique that helps students engage with texts they are reading in an enjoyable way: they show their comprehension by generating tweets (or posts or texts), using their own words to retell events and characters’ thoughts. The versatile technique allows students at all levels to be creative but can also be used as a check on student comprehension and even for assessment.

Author Kevin McCaughey takes game-boarding to another dimension by showing how teachers and students can turn part of a classroom into a board game that the entire class can play. Step-by-step instructions ensure that teachers will know exactly how to apply the idea of vertical games in their own classrooms—and will be able to let students not only play the games, but help create them, too.