Ask any teacher what he or she needs more of, and it is a good bet that time will top the list. Anything that promises to recoup a little bit of their workday time is sure to be a best seller. One overlooked time-saver is in how they use feedback. Teachers know that feedback is important for teaching and learning. Unfortunately, most secondary…

Discusses the communicative approach to foreign language instruction and provides information on communication exercises. (AG)

In one approach to French second-language instruction, students use free writing assignments to express themselves in their newly learned second language. The primary objective is to encourage students to use the language in a nonthreatening context; it also offers the teacher insights into student problems and needs. (MSE)

Students of English as a second language (ESL) often come to the classroom with little or no experience in writing in any language and with inaccurate assumptions about writing. Rather than correct these assumptions, teachers often seem to unwittingly reinforce them, actually inducing errors into their students' work. Teacher-induced errors occur…

In interlanguage, the transitional state reaching from one's native language to a given target language, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, sociocultural, or psycholinguistic errors may be generated and systematized by the process of fossilization. Depending on the amount of time needed for remediation, fossilized features may be…

A classroom exercise to help college students of economics conceptualize, create, and learn from graphs is described. The technique is illustrated with an exercise concerning the concept of supply and demand in consumer markets. Classroom time required for the activity is small, and students become adept at manipulating models without anxiety.…

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching focuses on the relationship of lexical items to the syntactic situations in which they may occur, and the importance of teaching this relationship to language learners. First, common errors made by ESL students that are attributable to lack of syntactic context knowledge are identified.…

One technique for teaching college-level report writing consists of an essay that students use as a model for their own writing. This model, in turn, contains guidelines for composing a short essay, from title and subheadings to sentence and paragraph structure, word selection, errors to avoid, and revision. (MSE)

A discussion of cognates in second language teaching, particularly in English as a Second Language (ESL), looks at reasons and methods for teaching both true and false cognates ("friends"). A definition of cognates is offered, and a distinction is made between a cognate and a borrowed word, with examples from several languages.…

It is important that teachers help students to realize that writing is not simply a product, or a means to an end, but an exploratory, cyclical process. Research has shown that skilled writers conceptualize the effect of their writing as a whole, as a generative process, whereas unskilled writers are distracted by surface-level features and are…

English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in general, and Chinese speakers in particular, often omit or misuse English prepositions in speaking or writing. A study traced the history and structure of the English preposition, using contrastive analysis and error analysis to find sources of Chinese error. To determine if Chinese speakers exceed…

The technique individuals use to narrow the possible responses in "solicits" (demands, requests, or questions requiring a response) in and outside the classroom often helps to avoid miscommunication and can be a useful tool for classroom teachers. A narrowing exercise was completed by 35 classes of native English and English as a second language…

Techniques for helping college-level non-native English speaking students understand the process of editing include individual and small-group conferencing, peer editing, and follow-up on errors. Teachers should give students the pencil, have them read the draft aloud, look for patterns of both good and erroneous usage, and focus on the positive.…

Offers suggestions for the college teacher with limited opportunity for individual writing conferences with non-native English-speaking students: tolerating some more complex errors; focusing on content; soliciting student ideas for correction; addressing only one or two error types; providing vocabulary choices; and highlighting correct usage.…

International students in American colleges may have learned an accepted international variety of English, rather than British or American forms. Errors may persist because students want to retain their variety of English and cultural identity. Teachers need to address these errors only if they interfere with communication in the academic context;…