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1. An American Poetry Project for Low Intermediate ESL Adults

   In: English Teaching Forum 2001, Volume 39, Number 4 Format(s): Text

   This article discusses the author’s poetry unit, developed to expose her ESL students to American literature. Students wrote journals about poems they read and were assigned a poem about which to write a composition. The author required her students to memorize and perform one poem. While teaching the unit, the author and a colleague kept a dialog journal of their experience and insights. Both the student reactions and their dialog journals yielded positive results, allowing the author to make several recommendations for using poetry in the ESL classroom.

2. Assessment of Young Learners

   In: English Teaching Forum 2005, Volume 43, Number 1 Format(s): Text

   This article discusses how the trend towards low-anxiety, communicative-based language teaching and integrated language and content teaching has created a need to change assessment strategies for young learners. The author describes alternative assessment techniques such as nonverbal responses, oral interview, narratives, group assessment, and dialogue journals, and suggests how they can be carried out through regular classroom work.

3. Communicative Curriculum Design for the 21st Century

   In: English Teaching Forum 2002 (Volume 40, Number 1) Format(s): Text

   This piece looks at Communicative Language Teaching, or CLT, for teaching EFL. The author discusses the history, the focus, and the future of CLT. The article describes how to shape a communicative curriculum and the five components that it is composed of: language arts, language for a purpose, personal English use, theater arts, and beyond the classroom. The article emphasizes the variation of CLT within each classroom.

4. Creating Meaningful Web Pages: A Project-Based Course

   In: English Teaching Forum 2002, Volume 40, Number 3 Format(s): Text

   This article describes a nine-week course in Web design that can guide students in the production of an electronic project. It discusses the importance of project-based courses in language teaching since they offer learners an opportunity to be creative, control their own learning, and produce something tangible. The article addresses the benefits and difficulties of teaching such a course.

5. English Teaching Forum 2007, Volume 45, Number 2

   Format(s): Text

   This special issue focuses on developing thematic learning units in EFL classrooms. The process for utilizing the five-step system is discussed in detail, and six separate lesson plans are included.

6. Instant Feedback for Learner Training: Using Individual Assessment Cards

   In: English Teaching Forum 2002, Volume 40, Number 4 Format(s): Text

   This article presents the idea of using student assessment cards to train students to adopt efficient learning strategies. It discusses how individual assessment cards allow each student to see how well he or she is progressing at any point in the course. The article describes what a student assessment card is and provides detailed guidelines, including descriptions of the content on each side of the card, and about when and how to use these in the language classroom.

7. The Children's Response: TPR and Beyond

   In: English Teaching Forum 2005, Volume 43, Number 1 Format(s): Text

   This article describes a technique called The Children’s Response, which can be used to teach young EFL learners. The technique is based on Total Physical Response (TPR), which actively involves children from kindergarten to beyond third grade. The article offers three lessons that provide practice with the form and function of the present and past tense as well as prepositions and imperative commands.

8. Teaching Young Learners

   In: English Teaching Forum 2005, Volume 43, Number 1 Format(s): Text

   This author shares her unique approach to teaching young learners. She emphasizes that her approach involves features of communicative styles, the audio lingual approach (AL), and Total Physical Response (TPR), as she believes it is necessary to bring together all three styles of teaching to develop language proficiency. She includes a lesson plan for beginner level students to improve grammar competency.

9. A Process Genre Model for Teaching Writing

   In: English Teaching Forum 2005, Volume 43, Number 3 Format(s): Text

   This article considers three different approaches to the teaching of writing: the product approach, the process approach, and the genre approach. After explaining the different approaches, the author uses recent research to suggest a combination of the genre/process approaches in the composition classroom. A lesson plan is provided.

10. Shall We Dance: Team Teaching as Supervision in the English Language Classroom

    In: English Teaching Forum 2005, Volume 43, Number 4 Format(s): Text

    This article compares team teaching to a dance in which leadership shifts from partner to partner. It argues for the use of team teaching as an effective and motivating means of professional development. The author shares his experience in team teaching and offers a list of steps that can be used to establish and maintain team teaching that is effective for both the professionals and their students, such as when to involve students and when to trade roles.

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