Esl Education Articles for Teachers

When living and teaching overseas, I began to seek students to tutor privately. I learned a few things along the way and thought I would pass along this knowledge to those of you who are considering private tutoring. My experiences were abroad, but many of these concepts easily transfer to privat...

When I first started teaching children, I was not only coming from another country, but for the most part, from a classroom full of adults who knew their learning objectives and actually wanted to learn. Therefore, when I stood in front of a room full of small children with my lesson plan in hand...

Teaching ESL is a beautiful and rewarding experience. When an instructor witnesses his learners grow from the point of not being able to speak at all, to people who can actually communicate their thoughts in English, it is thrilling to say the least. Yet, many of the English learners that I met o...

As I sit here with my hands on the keyboard getting ready to write my new article for Lesson Planet, I ponder the words that I always told my students. “Writing is easy” I would say, while looking over a classroom of bewildered and scared faces. The fact that I often said this, but then find myse...

As I was teaching English as a second language in Turkey, it soon became quite apparent that one of the most vexing grammatical difficulties of the English language is deciding when a person should choose to use who, and when he should choose to use whom. Many people somehow think that the word w...

It was early morning, and I waited for my ride to work—a perk offered to me by the school where I was teaching for being their token American, or Yabanci Oretmen (foreign teacher). Balcova was the name of the district of Izmir, Turkey where my wife and I lived, and this was a time when it was rel...

It was November 3rd of 2009, in Izmir, Turkey, and the autumn air had a bite to it. I knew it was getting colder, and although I was a long way from where I used to call home, I was cognizant that the season was changing. With the nip in the air, I also had on my mind the New York Yankees and the...

Two years into my relocation to Turkey, I was sitting in a café smoking a Nargile. I was proud to know that word, which means water pipe. I felt like I was starting to fit in. This served as my nepenthe after a day on the Turkish buses and the busy streets where people would try to speak to me wh...

The memory of standing awkwardly in front of one’s first class is something that most teachers would just as soon forget. When I made my debut as an ESL instructor, I recollect that I had a deep desire to make the students feel comfortable. I wanted an introductory subject that would easily segue...

Kids love to talk, until it’s time to talk in front of the class. While many students are shy or afraid to give the wrong answer, ELD students’ fears are compounded if they are self conscious about their English. Many beginning and early-intermediate ELD students are so afraid to speak in front o...

Through my experiences in the classroom, I found my intermediate to advanced English Language Learners had more challenges than their peers. Not only did they have to learn the content of the class, they had to learn it in a language with which they weren’t yet comfortable. Oftentimes, the questi...