CONTACT | Teaching
Finding voice through story: Supporting EFL writers with digital storytelling
Storytelling has long been a powerful tool for teaching and learning. Across cultures and disciplines, it allows educators and students to connect personal experience with academic content. In language classrooms, storytelling can take many forms, like written narratives, digital stories, reflective journals, or oral accounts. Yet many teachers hesitate to incorporate storytelling into writing instruction. Time constraints, curriculum demands, assessment…
Practical tips for early-career language teachers to build resilience
While resilience has become a buzzword across many helping professions, research on language teacher resilience is still in its early stages, with much yet to be explored about how teachers, particularly those new to the profession, navigate challenges and sustain themselves in their teaching careers. To help bridge this gap, I draw on insights from my…
The magic of rapport in language teaching: A review of rapport-building strategies from in-person to virtual classrooms
One of the indispensable elements of education in general, and language teaching in particular, is building good rapport in the classroom. A classroom with strong rapport promotes a learning environment through friendly relationships, trust, respect, and mental engagement between the teacher and students, as well as among students. Senior (2006) stated that the rapport teachers develop…
Teacher, I write a photograph
Introduction
Writers make the blind see. We are talking about readers here. Readers see only what writers show them. I tell my students this, adding that luckily readers can see photographs and it is their job to make good photographs.
Then we get down to business, and I run through a drill that goes…
EAP teacher identity negotiation and its impact on our teaching practice: Research insight from the public college system in Ontario
Rationale for research into EAP teacher identity
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional/pathway classes are a popular course offering at private and public institutions in Ontario (Kushkiev, 2022) as Canada ranks amongst the most popular study destinations for English language learning (Languages Canada- Bonard Research Report, 2021). Around 40 % of Canadian ESL and EAP…
The Native Speaker Myth and re-storying oneself within a disempowering discourse
It was in high school that I started toying with the idea of pursuing teaching as a career. Having not known much about what I needed to pursue for this career path initially, I assumed my plan to earn a university degree in literature would be enough. When I found out that teacher’s college was a…
