It is once again time to prepare those proposals for next year’s  TESOL Convention in Dallas in March of 2013. The deadline is June 1, 2012.  It’s a challenge to make it onto the program. Last year, the acceptance rate was about one in four.  But you can enhance your chances by...

Have you been asked to deliver a webinar? Wondering how to do it? Check out the tips in this webinar about how to give good webinars! This was part of the Virtual Roundtable Conference in April.  You can view the slides alone on Slideshare, but you’ll get more out of it if you...

Looking for conference presentation slides and handouts?  Try this page first. The most recent presentations are at the top. In most cases you can download the PowerPoint slides and handout. You can usually also view the PowerPoint on SlideShare. You can download from there, as...

Thanks very much to those of you in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who have expressed interest in my Tips for Teaching Culture book.  If you are outside the U.S., the best way to get a copy of this book is from the Pearson international website.  Be sure to check the shipping...

Greetings, all! Conference season is just about upon us. This winter and spring I’ll be giving talks at TESOL Arabia in Dubai, TESOL in Philadelphia, a symposium on English language teaching in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then at CATESOL in Oakland. The brief audio file below...

The December 2011 TESOL Quarterly contains a wonderful study by Dilin Liu analyzing the frequency of phrasal verbs across several corpora. This is a really useful article for teachers and materials writers, with lots of great information in it and a valuable companion to his 2003...

How much time do you spend preparing your lessons in advance? Are you a planner? Or do you like to let the lesson take its own course? As a young student teacher I learned how to carefully plan my lessons. I would write out exactly what I planned to do during each part of the...

Have you ever taught a class that just never seemed to come together? Or one in which the students all worked together really well? Do you think that classes have their own personalities? I first learned about the concept of class chemistry as a student teacher. My master...

I’m delighted to announce that my latest ESL textbook, coauthored with Jenny Bixby is now available. It is the introductory level of Q: Skills for Success, the Reading/Writing strand.  Like our other book in the Q series, this level has entertaining readings, solid...

I am not good at remembering names and faces. In the small town where I live,  I am constantly running into people and trying to recall if I know them from my son’s school or from musical theater or from church or just where we might have met. So you can imagine the difficulty I...