Past Issues of English Teaching Forum | American English

Browse online English Teaching Forum issues and articles dating back to 2001. To find a particular article or issue, search the past issues by year or keyword.

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English Teaching Forum Volume 55, Number 3

Read this issue to learn how to build grit, give clear instructions, and make service learning work for you, your students, and your community.

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Identifying and Building Grit in Language Learners

Grit can be described as a strength of character, or the personal quality of courage and resolve. In this article, the author explains how having “grit” is beneficial for language learners and gives detailed suggestions that teachers can follow to build grit in their students.

Good Instruction-Giving in the Second-Language Classroom

Teachers often take instruction-giving for granted, although it is a useful skill for all teachers. The author provides criteria for successful instruction-giving habits and gives suggestions that English language teachers can use to improve their instruction-giving in the classroom.

Service Learning and Community Engagement for English Classes

The author uses her own experience with using service learning to give advice to others interested in creating and making use of service-learning projects in their own schools and communities.

Reader's Guide

This guide is designed to enrich your reading of the articles in this issue. As an individual, you may choose to read each article on your own, taking notes or jotting down answers to the discussion questions here. Or you may use the guide to explore the articles with colleagues.

Speed Pairs, a Spoken Exercise

Learn how to use a highly adaptable technique called “Speed Pairs,” and see how it helps students practice targeted grammar structures..

Rapport-Building Activity

This engaging activity gives students a chance to use playdough in a creative way in order to express themselves, practice using English, and build rapport with their peers and the teacher.

My Classroom: India

This article profiles the teaching context at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science and describes how educator Santosh Kumar Mahapatra develops creative lessons to motivate his students to learn and achieve success both in and out of the classroom.

Try This: Go for the Grit!

This step-by-step activity teaches students the meaning and importance of grit and provides two case studies that are ready to use in the classroom.

The Lighter Side

This puzzle is called Mountain Climbing, with clues for words that give encouragement to people climbing a mountain or taking on other difficult challenges.

English Teaching Forum Volume 55, Number 2

Find suggestions for using cell phones, songs and movement, student-created cartoons, photo diaries—and much more.

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Cell Phones for Low-Resource Environments

This article presents detailed descriptions of activities using cell phones—of various types—in English language classes.

Get Up and Sing! Get Up and Move! Using Songs and Movement with Young Learners of English

The title says it all. This article explains why songs and movement are effective components of English language classes for young learners and presents lyrics, suggested movements, and options for a number of songs.

Reader’s Guide

This guide is designed to enrich your reading of the articles in this issue. You may choose to read them on your own, taking notes or jotting down answers to the discussion questions below.

Creating Cartoons: A Learner-Centered Approach to Comprehending Texts

Kathleen F. Malu and Kelly McNeal

This article carefully describes the technique of having learners create cartoons based on a reading passage to explore their understanding of the passage and to help teachers reflect on what the learners comprehended.

Teaching Students How to Write a Description with Photos

This Teaching Technique explains what the author describes as a pre-task for teaching students to write descriptively about a photo diary that students create themselves.

My Classroom: Philippines

This article profiles the two teaching contexts in which Edgar Manaran has taught English by using creativity, dedication, and perseverance to overcome unique challenges and meet the needs of his students.

Using Percussion to Teach English Pronunciation

This is a step-by-step description of an activity that demonstrates how learners at all levels and of all ages can use percussion and percussion instruments to support their learning of English pronunciation.

The Lighter Side

This puzzle gives you a chance to transform the word note to the word song, one letter (and one word) at a time.

English Teaching Forum Volume 55, Number 1

Painting of small town USA

Find suggestions for teaching the pragmatics of complaining, developing group dynamics, and starting a book club—and much more.

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Pragmatics of Complaining

Amanda Hilliard

This article presents twelve activities for teaching the pragmatics of complaining, including strategies, tasks, and specific scenarios.

Group Dynamics: Belonging in the ESL Classroom

Pham Huynh Phu Quy

The author provides suggestions for English language activities that promote bonding at the beginning of a course, during a course, and at the end of a course.

Book Clubs as a Tool for Community Building and Language Enhancement

Jessica McCaughey

The author uses her own experience starting and facilitating a book club to give advice to others interested in creating a book club in their schools or communities.

Reader's Guide

This guide is designed to enrich your reading of the articles in this issue. You may choose to read them on your own, taking notes or jotting down answers to the discussion questions below. Or you may use the guide to explore the articles with colleagues.

Teaching Technique: Board Games in the English Classroom

Daniel Clausen

Learn how to play a game called “Business Decisions” and see how it can help students develop their language and business acumen.

Teaching Technique: Timed Partner Reading and Text Discussion

Michael Giovacchini

This engaging partner-reading activity provides students with an opportunity to improve their reading comprehension and text-based discussion skills.

My Classroom: Georgia

Melanie Baker

This article profiles the teaching context at Gori State Teaching University and describes how Khatuna Kharkheli develops creative lessons to motivate her students to learn and achieve success both in and out of the classroom.

Try This: The Great Mini-Debate

Heather Benucci

Debates remain popular in English language courses, and this activity gives students a low-stress opportunity to develop their speaking debating skills; seven debate themes, with suggested topics, are provided.

The Lighter Side: Debate Dialogue

This puzzle is a Debate Dialogue with words missing from arguments and counterarguments on the topic, “Mobile technology is more helpful than harmful.”

The Lighter Side: Debate Vocabulary

Enjoy these two puzzles related to the topic of debates. One puzzle gives "For" and "Against" statements with blanks that must be filled in. The second puzzle, available only online, is a crossword that features vocabulary commonly used in debates.