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1. EPA Teacher and Learner Resource Center

   Format(s): Text, Video, Website

   Looking for ways to teach about the environment to your English language learners? Check out these 12 lesson plans from the Environmental Protection Agency. There are 4 lessons for each level – beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

2. Using the Telephone to Teach Pragmatics

   In: Teaching Pragmatics Format(s): Text, Video, Website

   This lesson in Teaching Pragmatics aims to help students learn to make requests, extend invitations, and offer congratulations (or other speech acts) and to learn how to open and close telephone conversations when leaving a message.

3. Smithsonian Folkways: Tools for Teaching

   Format(s): Website

   Looking for more ways to use music to teach? Check out the Smithsonian Folkways website that has a section called “Tools for Teaching” with free lessons and activities for the classroom.

4. Bright Ideas: A Teacher’s Resource Manual

   Format(s): Text

   Bright Ideas: A Teacher’s Resource Manual offers twenty-six practical teaching strategies and techniques that originally appeared in Ideas Plus, a special series of publications produced by the National Council of Teachers of English.

5. Task-Based Language Teaching for Designing Grammar-Focused Communicative Activities

   In: American English Webinars Format(s): Text, Video

   This session, "Task-Based Language Teaching for Designing Grammar-Focused Communicative Activities," examines how task-based language teaching (TBLT) creates opportunities for students to use and develop language skills in the course of authentic communication.

6. Spot the Problem! (reprinted from Teaching Pragmatics)

   In: English Teaching Forum 2003, Volume 41, Number 3 Format(s): Text

   This lesson plan considers pragmatic violations of openings, closings, and requests. These humorous role plays involve continuing a conversation when one person is trying to end it, being overly direct, and providing an overly informative answer to the greeting “How are you?” Textbooks may lack complete openings and closings, so it is worthwhile to spend time on post-openings and pre-closings. Politeness in English may be problematic for EFL learners because of the lack of grammatical forms that mark it.

7. Building Your Toolkit: Steps and Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing

   Format(s): Text, Video

   This webinar, Building Your Toolkit: Steps and Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing, provides participants with five specific steps and several strategies they can use in teaching academic writing in their own contexts.

8. Global Topics, Local Teaching

   In: American English Webinars Format(s): Text, Video

   This webinar, "Global Topics, Local Teaching," explains how to develop service learning activities in the classroom.

9. From Idea to Essay: Effective Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing

   In: American English Webinars Format(s): Text, Video

   This webinar, "From Idea to Essay: Effective Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing," argues that clear organization is the most important feature of effective academic writing.

10. FORUM City Poster Show (Set 6, 3 posters - Chicago)

    Format(s): Image / Poster / Maps

    These poster sets are a great, flexible classroom resource for information and discussion—each set of three posters corresponds to a city spotlighted in English Teaching Forum, Volume 46 and the feature article about that city, available online.

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