Author Archive | Shane Mac Donnchaidh

5 Action-packed Discussion Activities for Your Advanced ESL Students

It’s time for your intermediate students to leave the paint-by-numbers shores of English. But as they set sail into the expansive oceans of advanced learning, make sure your learners aren’t swept adrift! One great solution that’ll keep your students …

9 ESL Reading Exercises for More Complete Comprehension

Reading is important. No doubt about it. While it is often referred to as a “passive” skill in language learning along with listening, it is no easy tiger to tame. It requires focus, motivation and knowledge. Fortunately, as with …

8 Smart Ways to Rock EAL Assessment in the Classroom

For a teacher, assessment can be exhausting. You may even think of it as the bane of your working life. It can seem endless and, even worse, at times it can seem pointless: reams of paperwork imposed from on high …

7 Things Every ESL Teacher Should Teach Students About Essay Writing

“Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end.” Many of us recall our teachers drilling this writer’s mantra into us and our fellow students. This is as true for a good essay as it is for a …

5 Brilliant Techniques to Help ESL Students Thread Through Writing

The writer: an almost mythical creature. Alone and aloof, at the mercy of some ethereal muse and her whims. How can we hope to inculcate the skills of the mysterious discipline in our ESL students when it can seem an …

Guesswork, Improv and More: 5 Exciting Drama Activities for Teaching ESL

It has been widely argued that speech makes up only a fraction of human communication. The researcher Albert Mehrabian famously broke it down as follows: 55% of communication is through body language, 38% is tone of voice and a …

Want to Become a Great EAL Teacher? Here Are 5 Valuable Tips to Keep You on the Right Path

You have a passion for language, don’t you? A desire to share the intricacies of your mother tongue with others who are hungry to learn? Or perhaps, after several years overseas on the ESL trail, you’ve decided the lure …

9 ESL Vocabulary Activities to Build Up Your Students’ Word Stores

Most adult native English speakers possess an active vocabulary of anywhere from 20,000 to 35,000 words. That means gaining fluency in English requires the accumulation of loads of vocabulary! In light of this, it stands to reason that …

5 Ingredients for ESL Essay Writing That Would Tempt the Hamburglar

What is the hamburger essay and why is it a great main course when serving up ESL writing lessons? With over 700 million people speaking English as a second language, along with the status of English as the international …

Ghost Stories: 3 Great Storytelling Tricks to Treat Your ESL Students This Halloween

Halloween has crept up on us once again. On the 31st of October we mark this ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain, when the veil between this world of the living and the realm of the dead drops. A time …

Storytelling 101: 6 Engaging Writing Activities for ESL Students

Once upon a time, I was teaching an ESL class full of teenagers in a quiet, northern Thai town. They were ready to write, I was sure. They, however, were not so convinced. No matter how I implored, cajoled, …

Get it Together, Teach! 8 Crucial Elements of Superb ESL Classroom Management

Teaching is only the half of it. As an ESL educator, a large part of your “teaching” time will be spent not developing lesson plans or introducing new material, but doing something else entirely. This time will be spent simply …

How to Create Fun and Meaningful Writing Lessons for Your ESL Students

Is writing a mystery to your students? Writing well in a second language is arguably one of the hardest skills for anyone to develop. It requires not only a broad vocabulary and a good grasp on grammar, but also …

8 Challenges of Teaching English to Adults and How to Overcome Them

As all teachers of English know, one size most certainly does not fit all. Each learner has individual needs, and there are also more general factors to consider, like age. The challenges facing adult language learners can be (and often …

7 Advantages of the Bilingual Method of Teaching English

Is a student’s mother tongue a help or hindrance in learning a new language? Pop your head into English language classes around the world and it would appear it’s more often considered a hindrance. But is that what it really …