Leverage gives us more power. It was the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Archimedes who calculated just how much it helps. Why not encourage your business English students to leverage their English skills to reach their goals? Celebrities, professional athletes, and rock stars have learned English to reach the top....
by Ellen Baker Dubois · Published October 1, 2022 · Last modified October 11, 2022
Give your ESL students the vocabulary to discuss their life goals and what success looks like to them. Brainstorm the difference in meaning between goals and success. The aim of this lesson is to start students thinking about setting goals in English or in TOEIC exam preparation. Start off by...
What’s the difference between language teaching and language coaching? A trainer transfers knowledge and skills to learners. It’s as if the learner were a passive passenger in her language acquisition journey. A coach puts the learner directly in the driver’s seat by pushing her to accept responsibility for learning. A...
by Ellen Baker Dubois · Published January 24, 2021 · Last modified August 17, 2022
If you’re an English teacher you’re going to want to organize your ESL lessons so you can reuse them. I’m going to show you my system, where I put all my lessons into an Excel table with a link back to the file location. I classify each lesson by subject,...
by Ellen Baker Dubois · Published December 26, 2020 · Last modified August 16, 2022
Have you been hearing about breakout rooms? Maybe you don’t even know what they are? Or why they’re important for online EFL teachers? We’ve asked an expert EFL teacher, Uma Tadema, to answer our questions about Zoom breakout rooms. Watch the interview with Uma or read the accompanying article with...
Want to help your ESL students to finally master the prepositions ‘in on at‘? Try this ‘visual’ slideshow tour of New York City and its flashcard game. Learn how to teach your students to ‘visualize’ each preposition of place and time in 3D or 2D with this slideshow of images...
by Ellen Baker Dubois · Published November 1, 2017 · Last modified December 30, 2023
Here’s the logical, efficient hack to teach your English students how to differentiate between past and present tenses and help them to improve their speaking skills. It’s a timed flash-card game using 41 keywords normally associated with the four basic verb tenses in the present and past. Keywords like: always,...
There’s nothing like learning a new language to tax our memories. If you’re teaching English in a foreign country, you certainly had to learn a second language yourself. Remember how difficult it was to remember all that new vocabulary? Here’s a game to review English vocabulary in class just after...
by Ellen Baker Dubois · Published June 22, 2016 · Last modified October 13, 2022
Games are a great way to use competition and team learning to motivate your students to learn and retain new business vocabulary and expressions. Print these four business phrasal verb games today to use in class over and over. This is a follow-up to my last blog “How to engage...
Want to make your ESL students sit up and listen in class? Just announce ‘We’ve got a video today’. A video, and especially a funny video, instantly perks up the hardest to inspire students. Learn to find and download the perfect ESL video without a YouTube Premium account. It doesn’t...
