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...

We’ve been having a heat wave in Vermont, in the northeastern United States where I live. The temperature has reached 95° F (35° C). It’s actually hotter here than it was in Saudi Arabia when I visited in the spring. It got me thinking about the effect of heat and other...

One of my most memorable teachers was a high school English teacher. Thomas Donovan had been teaching for nearly forty years and was in his sixties when I had him as a 14-year-old student. He was what today we would call “old school.” That is, he was very traditional in the way...

A recent thread on the TESOL English as a Foreign Language Interest Section e-list discussion group raised the issue of teaching conversation in the EFL classroom. I came up with the following list of useful books for those interested in teaching speaking. Folse, K. S. (2006) The...

A recent discussion on TESOL’s e-list for the Teacher Education Interest Section provoked some interest in helping novice (and more experienced) teachers find jobs in our profession. Some of the conversation centered around how long a resume should be or in what order....

I’m just back from performing a program review for a couple of intensive English programs in Saudi Arabia. Lots of grist for the intercultural communication mill. Major issues in student motivation and finding the appropriate materials for the curriculum, as well....