Category: vocabulary

Valentine’s Day Fact Check & Idioms Fun

Posted on | by Pearson

Bill Bliss Photo 2014Bill Bliss

True or False?
Can your students answer these true-or-false statements? Have them correct the false sentences and rewrite them as true facts.

1. We celebrate Valentine’s Day on February 15.
2. Two common colors of Valentine’s Day cards are green and blue.
3. Post offices and banks are closed on Valentine’s Day because it’s a national holiday.
4. A heart is a common symbol of Valentine’s Day.
5. A popular gift to give someone on Valentine’s Day is a long-stemmed carrot.
6. Another popular gift to give someone on Valentine’s Day is a box of candles.
7. Presidents’ Day is a U.S. holiday in February that occurs before Valentine’s Day.
8. Cupid is a fictional character we associate with love and Valentine’s Day.
9. Many people like to go to a restaurant for breakfast in the evening on Valentine’s Day.
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The Central Role of Literature in the ESL/EFL Classroom

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page43_SybilMarcus Sybil Marcus

Earlier this year, my colleague Jamie Reinstein and I were corresponding about the value and joy of using literature in ESL education. We found that our experiences were closely aligned, and he invited me to run a workshop on literature and ESL at the Community College of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, U.S. Since he was using my anthology A World of Fiction 2 as the text for his advanced class, he also suggested that I take over for the morning and teach a story from the book.

I decided that I would ask Jamie’s students to read Peter Meinke’s short story “The Cranes,” which is about an elderly couple on an outing to the Gulf of Mexico. Although the story seems innocuous at first, the events lead to an enigmatic ending that prompts reconsideration of what’s been happening all along.

Like many ESL classes, Jamie’s class was made up of a mix of nationalities with students from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They quickly made me feel very welcome and we settled down to business. I had requested that students read the story for homework and then come to class with a written explanation of what the ending meant to them and why. Continue reading →

How Do Our Dictionaries Help
Your Students Learn Real-Life English?

Posted on | by Pearson

Tania Saiz-Sousa Tania Saiz, Marketing Manager

Longman American English dictionaries are created
using the Longman Corpus Network (a huge database of 330 million
words from a wide range of real-life sources such as books, newspapers
and magazines.) All the information in our dictionaries, including
example sentences, is based on the words in this network, so you see
only real American English, as it’s really used. So what’s in the
Corpus Network?

The Longman Spoken American Corpus

The Longman American Spoken Corpus is a new project comprising 5 million words of text. The gathering of recordings was undertaken for Pearson by the University of California at Santa Barbara. It represents the everyday conversations of more than 1,000
Americans of various age groups, levels of education, and ethnicity, and includes speakers from over 30 states. …

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Online Reading-Instruction Practice at Multiple Levels

Posted on | by Pearson

s_johnsonStefanie Johnson
Instructor, Grossmont College and San Diego Miramar College

Launched this fall is a new online reading lab series from Pearson called MyEnglishLab: Reading. While there are currently Pearson labs for reading, MyEnglishLab: Reading (MELR) is the first one from this publisher geared toward English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students. In contrast to online reading labs for students available through other authors and publishers, these labs come with purchase of the text. It is here that Pearson’s MELR has the clear advantage in that the online component can be used as a supplement with any textbook or as a stand-alone product. As such, MELR provides more practice with various readings and skills practice. MELR is a great tool that is available for four levels and would work in any ESOL course with reading in it. Continue reading →

10 Tips for Teaching Short Stories: Part 2

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page43_SybilMarcusSybil Marcus, Author of A World of Fiction series

Last month, I gave you 10 tips for using short stories in an ESL/EFL class.  This month, we’ll examine brief excerpts from both levels of A World of Fiction, looking closely at how short stories may be used to teach critical thinking and language.

Although each of these excerpts could be used as a discrete classroom activity, you’ll have many more teaching possibilities when using the complete stories – and your students will have the extra satisfaction of knowing what happens next.  What we’d like to show here is that even a few paragraphs of a fine story can afford numerous possibilities for learning and discussion. Continue reading →