Southern Ontario Cooperative of ESL Ministries
By Jennifer Tong “We like lively classes, we want to see the students participate, speak up, take the floor, contribute actively to class discussion. Communicative language teaching puts a premium on talk and thus often rewards students who ‘do’ conversation and self-expression rather than those who reflect and understand in silence.” (Kramsch, 2009; quoted in […]
Joyce always goes to class on time. She is the only one who is there on the snowy evenings in winter. She is shy and never speaks much during the class. Sometimes she writes down new words and looks them up in the dictionary at home. She likes grammar exercises, but she does not like […]
In October we asked some experienced ESL teachers who are part of SOCEM to share the resources they have been using or would recommend that will help students improve their pronunciation. Several teachers responded. We want to share our compilation because it will probably be of use to many others. Here is what the teachers […]
By Jennifer Tong Many of our church-based ESL classes tend to be informal. This means classes are smaller; there may not be a fixed curriculum, the leaders are often conversation facilitators rather than ‘teachers’, and there may not be formal procedures of assessments or advancing from one level to another. Often, organizers aspire towards being […]
By Tom McCormick Editor’s Note: Winter, Covid, Christmas with limited gatherings, loneliness and missing home and family, the unfamiliarity of a new country and how things work – our students are facing multiple challenges that demand a lot of them. It is probably true that Christmas is not celebrated in their home countries in the […]
Editor’s Note: Perhaps most of us have chatted with our students about their lives under COVID 19. Seldom, though, have we seen them expressed in writing. We continue to publish selected writings from the students of an ESL teacher in our midst, submitted in their knowledge and with their permission. Let’s hear the voice of […]
Love New Canadians is offering a free training workshop on “Using Zoom to Teach ESL Classes Online: A strategy to help churches develop pathways to Jesus for immigrants in their neighbourhoods” on September 12 and 19, 2020 (same webinar offered twice). For details and to register, contact Rick at rick@lovenewcanadians.ca. Tutela.ca is an online community […]
What words do your Chinese-speaking students have most difficulty with? Perhaps you thought of ‘walk’ and ‘work’; ‘bit’ and ‘beet’; and pronouncing words starting with a consonant cluster like ‘drape’ and ‘French’. Here are some articles on common errors of Chinese English speakers: 10 English Pronunciation Errors by Mandarin Speakers Chinese Pronunciation Problems in English […]
By Carol Blake Does grammar make you nervous? Do you wonder if you know enough to be able to help your students with their grammar? Let’s take pronouns, for example. Can you explain when to use who or whom? You and I or You and me? You can Google these issues fairly easily and find […]
Author’s Note: Here’s an article I wrote for the TESL Ontario blog back in the summertime, while researching for the workshop I presented at the October SOCEM Gathering. Then at the Gathering, at our lunch table, I learned of yet another way to use smart phones for pronunciation—see the PS at the end! Aren’t SOCEM […]