I’ve always loved our bookcase at the school. It’s functional, it looks nice, and it actually draws in our students. None of my previous English teaching jobs in Taiwan have had anything even remotely like it. Some schools have had a mostly ignored bookcase full of things that are way too hard [...]

I’ve been having great results with the Dr. Seuss books I’ve been using in my 1st and 2nd grader’s class. In fact, it almost feels like they were made to go along with the oral spelling drills I’ve already been doing. The kids love them, too.

Following up on what I’ve earlier written about the differences between intensive reading and extensive reading, it’s now time to talk about reading materials. For higher level students, this isn’t so big of a problem. For students with, say an IBT TOEFL of 70 (525 on the paper based version) or an IELTS band 5.5, [...]

Last night, while I was doing some Chinese reading online, I came across some pretty good comics. The down side of comics is that it’s all in picture format, so you can’t use Dr. Eye to translate it. So, I guess they aren’t that useful for beginning students. But, for an low-intermediate student like me, [...]

In my last article, I talked about intensive reading. Hopefully, I’ve convinced some of you that languages are too complex to learn properly by memorizing new vocabulary and grammar structures. Now, I’ll describe extensive reading. What is extensive reading? In short, extensive reading is everything that intensive reading is not. It [...]

I’ve been promising an article about extensive reading for a while, now. Originally, I was going to write about ways in which it can be employed in the EFL classroom. However, based on the feedback I’ve been receiving, I’ve decided to write about intensive reading instead. The main idea of extensive reading is not to [...]

One of the largest failings I see of EFL education in general, including some of the best schools, is the total disregard for modern 2nd language acquisition pedagogy. Linguists have demonstrated time and again that a purely skills-based approach to teaching a second language does not work very well. And yet, a skills based [...]