Teacher Discussion Forums

I have several (male) students with poor pronunciation and poor retention ability and a female with clear pronunciation and superb retention (she also happens to study much harder--possibly as a result of her success). It seems the clarity of pronunciation even in one's native language has a signifi...

Frankly, I'm as mystified as Joooooeeey, that on a site like this, no one's posted anything of substance regarding assessment--most queries have gone unanswered for years. It'd be the equivalent of doctors not knowing or even caring how to properly diagnose patients, just prescribing medicine. I don...

Sally, shabudah, and Patrice: I agree with all of you that children need to see tests from another perspective. One thing that '7 Habits' / Leadership' Schools have tried doing to offset this is to establish individual goals, both academic AND personal as a checklist. These individual goals are also...

Hello, I think something very important is recycling what you did the previous lesson....here,we don't necessarily call it testing but in a way that's what you are doing... I currently teach 90 minute beginner adult classes. Since I teach oral English, it's me that does the writing during formal te...

As I replied to Don's other post on assessment, I don't see much value in using these patterns for assessment but getting students to practice using them in meaningful contexts should be something that we as TEFLers should consider.

By the way, Don, what's your source for these?

I have an easy conversation assessment on my blog http://labonteesl.blogspot.com Let me know if you have questions. Thanks Don Easy, perhaps, but also misleading! This certainly doesn't assess anyone's conversational skills nor even grammatical competence--they just have to follow your lead--do the...

I've told college students to demand bonus marks for locating errors in their exam. In China, college English tests have at least a mistake a page. Often, there's no correct answer or more than one.

Everybody has this problem. Perhaps your poll should have asked "Is anybody happy with the accuracy of their school's placement test?" Seriously, different placement tests produce different results and different problems. At least from the half-dozen I've seen used, none actually delivers what it p...

Canada has a good oral and written 'placement test' for immigration purposes.... but it's not a private school. I'm guessing that even DELTA and CELTA programs only gloss over assessment so it really depends on the DOS or Ed Dept.--a shame really because assessment is such an important tool for teac...

Thanks for your input Syl, I appreciate it! But don't you feel the kids in the video aren't learning anywhere near their optimal level given their age and obvious prior experience with English--I have 5 year-olds ask and answer from picture prompts in full sentence. Is it just me or do others feel t...

I've just been watching Playway to English author, Herbert Puchta (or is it Günter Gerngross?), using Playway in the classroom from Cambridge's website: http://www.cambridge.org/us/esl/catalog/subject/project/custom/item5687844/Playway-to-English-Teacher-training-films/?site_locale=en_US Given the s...

Quite a few worksheets for fun practice of Past Continuous on my blog here: http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/grammar/past-tenses/ It's obvious you've never done TEFL as you'd soon realize by living overseas how much of what you take for granted is totally new. Furthermore, if someone already...

Why not edu-tain them? Give a student a set of actions to mime (or do them yourself with shy ss): 1. Prepare to cook a meal 2. Cook the meal 3. Serve the meal 4. Eat the meal 5. Wash the dishes 6. take out the trash At each stage, have something hilarious happen that you know ss will have the langu...