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How to Teach ESL Online at College with Awesome Results

How do you teach ESL online to language learners who feel they know enough English to get by and are not motivated to take another English course?  What materials do you use to teach ESL online that appeal to disillusioned language learners? Here are four good reasons why Actively Engaged in Communication (AEC) will get students

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Teach ESL Academic Writing the Best Way Guaranteed

Innovative way to teach ESL academic writing   If you teach ESL academic writing with college-level learners, Actively Engaged in Academic Writing offers you a classroom-tested online multimedia course that maximizes student learning and motivation while simplifying your life as a teacher. The ESL academic writing course is brought to by Bokomaru Publications. Looking for

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Encourage Critical Thinking in ESL Teaching

Introduction: Actively Engaged in Critical Thinking   Your students need to develop critical thinking skills. Do you want a way to bring the real world into your ESL classroom using teacher-created instructional videos, provocative reading and listening materials, and stimulating projects to teach critical thinking skills?  Actively Engaged in Critical Thinking (AECT) is a new online multimedia

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ESL Teaching Online Fast

Start ESL Teaching Online The Quick Way With the rush to teach online, teachers are asking many questions about tools, strategies and techniques they can use now to start ESL teaching online quickly. An important question is what learning platform can I use to coordinate everything.  I have a recommendation: the CEGEP English Moodle. Let

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Lesson Planning: Key to Successful English Language Teaching

Lesson Planning is Key If you are either an experienced or novice English-language teacher, you probably prepare your lessons.  I know I do, even though I’ve been teaching for over 30 years. And my way of preparing a lesson is probably different from yours. “All outstanding teachers are ideal in their own ways, and as

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Virtual Writing Tutor and Corrective Feedback

How the Virtual Writing Tutor can help teaching and learning It’s the week before the beginning of the semester and you are finalizing your course plan. How many writing assignments will you assign this semester? Will you assign one midterm essay and one final essay like your colleagues, or will you assign more? You say

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Engaging Learners with a Songwriting Project

Why I love project-based learning In all my years of teaching, I never thought a songwriting project could be so much fun for both learners and me. As I pointed out in my previous post on using a film project. I do a lot of project work with high-intermediate and advanced language learners for many

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Engaging Language Learners Using a Film Project

The value of project-based learning Why am I such a big fan of project-based learning?  As I explained in a previous blog post,  I love project-based learning because it:  fosters learner creativity  allows learners to collaborate and communicate  helps learners think critically using sources of information  involves real-life reading,  speaking, listening and writing tasks  is

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Family Story Writing Project

Engaging Advanced English Learners with the Family Story Project People love stories and that‘s what makes using a family story as the basis of a writing project so powerful. This assignment was created for advanced English learners – primarily high school or college age, but feel free to modify to fit your younger learners as

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Teach Academic Writing with “Teaching Writing”

What is Teaching Writing? “Teaching Writing,” 2nd edition, is a university-approved 3-credit teacher training course offered, by English Learner Portal, to teach academic writing. Frank Bonkowski, teacher trainer and experienced English language teacher, specialist in academic writing, offers best practices for helping your intermediate and advanced English learners succeed in academic writing. You can register here.

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Helen Hefter, College ESL Specialist

This interview with Helen Hefter, ESL specialist, follows on my first interview with Chris Rush of Off2Class about helping struggling English language learners. Helen Hefter teaches college-level ESL and academic writing in Montreal. She has taught English as a second language at two universities in South Korea. She currently teaches at Montmorency College in Laval,

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Family Story Project: Lessons Students Learned

Introduction In a recent blog post entitled “Five tips on getting language learners to write a family story,” I described a family story project I created and used with upper level young adult English language learners at the college level.  In researching and devising the project, I discovered that, “The more children knew about their family’s history,

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How to Help Struggling English Language Learners

Learning problems and how Off2Class can overcome them At the college where I teach in Montréal, each term more and more English language learners enter with different kinds of learning issues. How can classroom teachers deal with these seemingly overwhelming problems without burning themselves out? This blog post will focus on how Off2Class can help

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Five Tips on Getting Language Learners to Write a Family Story

Introduction Ever since I started creating and publishing “communicative” learning materials back in the 80s, I have been a big fan of project learning, both in my classroom teaching and writing. In this post, I will describe a family story project that I recently created for young-adult intermediate to advanced English language learners. What is

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10 Reasons Why You Should Like Online Learning

Introduction I have to admit I’m biased.  I’ve been involved in distance education and online learning for over 25 years, first at TELUQ, a distance-education university, and more recently in online teaching at CÉGEP de Saint-Laurent, a francophone college.   As a teacher, author and learner, it is no surprise I’m a big fan of

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