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1. My Classroom: Peru

   In: English Teaching Forum 2015, Volume 53, Number 2 Format(s): Text

   This article was written by Deanna Paglia, an English and Spanish second language teacher and teacher trainer who is currently the English Language Fellow hosted by Centro Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Arequipa, Peru.

2. English Teaching Forum 2010, Volume 48, Number 3

   Format(s): Text

   Baseball is the focus of this issue. "Baseball: A National Tradition" offers an in-depth look at this popular American sport, while the Lesson Plan provides activities to interest students in baseball. Other articles in this issue discuss teaching critical thinking to prepare EFL students for university success, setting up oral homework, using mobile phones in the language classroom, and an innovative way to use literature to teach advanced EFL students.

3. Bringing One Language to Another: Multilingualism as a Resource in the Language Classroom

   In: English Teaching Forum 2011, Volume 49, Number 1 Format(s): Text

   Many EFL students are already multilingual, but they may not realize the strengths they bring to language learning. This article calls on instructors to help students develop language awareness and guide them to find ways to apply what they know about language. The author shows how this process occurred in a sociolinguistics course and includes sample lessons for all ages and a variety of levels of proficiency. Lessons incorporate the students’ language knowledge in such skill areas as grammar and vocabulary.

4. English Magazines = Motivation + Improved ESL Writing Skills

   In: English Teaching Forum 2004, Volume 42, Issue 1 Format(s): Text

   Creating and editing a magazine in English is a challenging and motivating type of portfolio assessment. It encourages student fluency and freedom by allowing students to choose their own topics for writing. It is real communication for a real audience and requires students to take responsibility for their own writing. It can also make the teacher’s job more enjoyable. The article describes a magazine-editing project for an intermediate university writing class. The students performed well on the national writing examination.

5. Language Teaching through Critical Thinking and Self-Awareness

   In: English Teaching Forum 2004, Volume 42, Issue 3 Format(s): Text

   This article contains a wealth of activities that will help students develop critical thinking skills. These fun and dynamic activities raise students’ self-awareness regarding their perceptions, assumptions, prejudices, and values. The author addresses the teacher's role in helping students think differently and consider ideas from multiple points of view. To encourage critical thinking, assessment should not rely on summary and definition questions, but those that require analysis, hypothesis, and evaluation. A rationale for the importance of critical thinking is provided from a cognitive perspective.

6. Houseboats

   In: English Teaching Forum 2007, Volume 45, Number 2 Format(s): Text

   This lesson uses a text about the houseboats of Kashmir to give students practice with descriptions, compound words, and participles. The lesson plan could be adapted to tourist destinations familiar to the students. Students are asked to write a description of their homes and create a tourism brochure for their own cities or towns.

7. 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.

8. Teaching Techniques: Group Grammar

   In: English Teaching Forum 2015, Volume 53, Number 3 Format(s): Text

   Before becoming a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, I taught French, and too often I saw that impersonal grammar exercises about “Jacques” and “Nathalie” were meaningless to the students. Worse, those exercises led to apathy and stagnation. So I decided to do grammar activities in which students used each other’s names, instead of random ones, and used the grammar to express ideas about their own lives.

9. Language & Literature in Tertiary Education: The Case for Stylistics

   In: English Teaching Forum 2002, Volume 40, Number 2 Format(s): Text

   This article discusses the lack of quality in students’ literary criticism in degree English courses, suggesting that students have difficulty understanding literary texts in English. It recommends stylistic analysis, the analysis of structures and vocabulary, as a way that learners of English as a second or foreign language can develop a more active and independent approach to understanding and critiquing literary works.

10. 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.

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