TESL Ontario’s Magazine for Language Teachers
The benefits of having a little quiet time
Introduction
Class time and the interaction with other students is crucial to learning and developing in any second language. But more importantly, it is important to have the time to reflect and mentally digest information you are learning, your own personal thoughts, and feelings on any given topic, as well as being able to…
ELL teachers create cultural video projects
Sukhdeep Birdi, Kawaldeep Ghuman, and Harjit Chauhan are ELL teachers in the Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows school district in British Columbia. After years of teaching ELL students, they noticed one common theme when it came to celebrating calendar holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. The theme is that their students excitedly shared and made…
Spotlight — Raj Bhandari
You presented at the 2022 TESL Ontario Conference (Integrating web-based formative assessment in test preparation courses). What is web-based formative assessment and why and how did it grab your attention originally?
I believe that assessing learners’ language abilities is an essential part of language learning and teaching. In order to ensure success in language…
Multimodality-enhanced teaching: Fostering global citizenship and intercultural competence in ELT
*For images, please see the PDF version of the article.
Introduction
This article showcases multimodality-enhanced learning tasks that embrace learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity as an asset to advance their oral communication skills, promote global citizenship (UNESCO, 2018), and cultivate intercultural competence (Byram, 1996) in a university English communication course. Drawing upon Cummins’…
Adapting teaching materials for L2 pragmatics instruction
Introduction
In the past three decades, English as an additional language (EAL) researchers and practitioners have become increasingly concerned with the instruction of second language (L2) pragmatics. Broadly defined as the ability to communicate and interpret meaning in social situations (Taguchi, 2015), pragmatics is an essential component of many models of communicative competence (Timpe-Laughlin et…
Perspectives on classroom writing assessment literacy in ESL/EFL contexts
Abstract
Despite the importance of writing assessment in ESL/EFL classrooms, it is not getting enough attention either from teacher education program designers or from teachers themselves. It is commonly believed that assessment courses do not have much to offer to classroom teachers compared to high stake tests. Some classroom teachers avoid learning about writing assessment…
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…
Professionalism in TESL
Abstract
This paper presents a discussion of what professionalism means in the workplace and how it can shape the relationship between the employees and the employee-employer relationship. The paper also hopes to promote the professional attitude and the high standards of professional behaviour expected of employees in the multicultural and highly-competitive ESL environment. A multicultural…
Learner variability in English for Academic Purposes classes
As educators, we may often hear the term learner variability, especially when working with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because classes consist of learners from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Before I delve into defining learner variability, I invite you to take a moment to reflect on yourself as a learner at a specific time…
Spotlight — Danielle Freitas
Tell us a little about yourself. Who is Danielle?
I would say that I am a proud non-native speaker, Latina, immigrant woman who truly believes in the power of equity, diversity, and inclusion and works to support and enable whoever I can through the power of education to reach their full potential, regardless of who…
The complex situation with prepositions in the English language: A tiny word with much importance
Introduction
It is known that the English language is one of the most spoken languages in the world. With a large population speaking it as their L1, it has also become one of the learned languages as L2. Whether it is for pleasure or need, the English language has acquired a high place on…
Teaching the pronunciation of vowels on Zoom
The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted many previously in-person ESL classes to online learning. Many of these online classes are taught synchronously using video conferencing software such as Zoom. The exclusive focus in this article is on teaching ESL classes using Zoom, since that is the software that the author uses to teach with and…
