Teacher Discussion Forums

I teach English to Peruvian students at the San Marcos University in Peru. This would work great for me, but unfortunately the post is rather old. Also, a problem one would run into in Peru is that the language centers of the universities are not part of the semester system, but rather run in 1 mont...

I just started a university EFL class with a blind student. But there is only one blind student in the class, the rest are regular hearing students. It´s interesting to me, but learning braille and specializing the course for her are not so useful. I assume she gets a lot of outside help and works ...

Umm, I realize that this is ENGLISH as a second language cafe, but I'm at a little of a loss and don't know where to ask. There are a ton of physical texts and online material for English, but I teach a little Spanish sometimes too, and I can't find much at all for this other than occasional online ...

I completely agree with longshikong. I tried using that assessment I posted several times, and while it can tell you some things by seeing where they make mistakes, it`s not all that emcompassing. For the reading it was okay, the grammar got really specific and didn´t leave much room for creativity....

That`s a good point. However, the thing is that he is fairly advanced, and he can already use a large variety of verbs for, for example, decision making. The problem, due to the frequency that do or make are used in everyday English, is that he frequently and consistently uses make , do , or have in...

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had any advice. I have an advanced adult student (a Spanish speaker) who is largely self taught but knows English very well. I teach conversation classes with him, so we do not usually use worksheets or go over grammar points or that kind of thing. My problem is that, l...

Okay, thank you, this helps. The pause idea is good.

I have a student (in a one-on-one) class that is fairly advaced. He wants to work on fluency, and in our classes I try to come up with conversational activities that focus on the areas of dificulty that he has. He has the present tense, the past tense, the future tense, and even the present perfect ...

Here is a practical link I found for a good "general" test, for those that are just starting this assessment stuff. Thought I'd share it:

http://www.uefap.com/test/index.htm

Things are working out better in my classes, time and interest has helped the kids to want to communicate, the advice helped a lot, but maybe I can rephrase my question because I'm still hitting a wall sometimes when we work from the book. When we have a new reading passage, my co-teacher basically ...

You don't have to have live internet to access youtube. If you have a laptop (with internet at home) you can load the whole video (pr many videos in separate windows) the night before and just leave your computer on standby until you need to use it in class. If you have to use a separate computer th...

This is more or less what the above post was talking about (ie downloading it ahead of time), but here is a real easy way of doing it: I have not taught in China, so I don't know the technological issues involved, but if you have for example a laptop that connects to an overhead then you can use you...

At least in the US, you can find colleges that teach ASL in most states at least. At Portland State they recently changed it so that ASL can fulfill you foreign language requirements. They only taught it for 2 years, but at that point, at least if you are socially inclined, you can get yourself invo...

This topic is a little old (some of the links no longer work, and others have way to much information), so I am going to revive it. Does anyone know where I can find some good sample assessment tests and/or information on how to create them? I know that all tests are different, depending on the need...

Just to revive an old (and good) topic. I think this is most effective with each penpal's target language being the native language of the one he or she is communicating with. Ideally, for example, a Spanish speaker learning English from Spain would be communicating with an American learning Spanish...