Yet another post just to promote a lesson plan on this site and to reward myself for converting it from html to WordPress post (not as grueling as I pretend it is).
Culture Shock is another topic that all students have something to say about. This lesson plan is accessible to students who have never left their own country because it focuses on different behaviors and asks if they are normal or rude in the students’ cultures. Gets students talking about whether they shake hands or bow to greet someone, …Continue

As I go through stuff I would have posted on if this blog had been active, I remembered this interview I did for my alumni magazine on How to Find Your Voice. My piece is called “How to Communicate Without Language” and I hope it gives some tips for communicating in a different culture. Stuff like body language and cultural communication really should be part of any ESL class, as well as intonation and emphasis.
By the way, I love the last interview on how to speak with an accent …Continue

Ever since ESL Flow, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic to my lesson plans. One of the most popular lesson plans is called culture shock and gets students talking about different habits and manners in different cultures.
Since it’s getting so many hits, I’ve typed up a related lesson: Cultural Role Play, which is basically adapted for ESL lessons from a Peace Corps exercise.
It’s a fun exercise where you give students one of two different cultural roles to play with very different standards of behavior and ideas of what …Continue

Interesting article up on lexophiles.com, Does learning a language give you a split personality? Some people seem to feel that it is very different to think in different languages and others feel that there is no difference. The author drawing on his own experience seems to feel his whole personality changes when he speaks English and when he speaks Indonesian or Balinese. Regardless of whether speaking a new language changes your mentality or not, he makes a great point that I would agree with: students that pay attention to not …Continue

The Food lesson plan is one that goes over very well with students. It’s accessible to everyone. Beginners can handle describing their native dishes simply and you can push more advanced learners to describe detailed recipes. The lesson also has a multicultural aspect as the teacher can introduce common foods from his/her home country. Finally, the plan moves on to discussing holiday meals, which means this lesson can be used for any holiday, especially holidays that have associations with special foods: Christmas, New Years, May Day, Nauryz, Easter, Ramadan, Passover.
Or …Continue

Obama still hasn’t decided on a puppy, but hopefully he will be as good a press secretary as Clinton’s cat, Socks

One day after his inauguration, Barack Obama has already brought change to the country, or at least to the White House website. It’s a great resource for Americans and foreigners alike who want to learn more about the President, the Presidency and the Executive Office.
One of the new features that looks particularly promising is White House 101, an introduction to the White House and the Presidency. There are some …Continue

Found a great blog for learning about American life and culture: Ted Landpahir’s America. Ted Landphair is a journalist for Voice of America and his posts, while few and far between, provide nice coverage of what’s going in America. For foreigners, I suspect it is a very interesting insight into American life from the point of view of an average American.
His most recent post, Michigone?, talks about the auto industry bailout and goes on to discuss the history of the economy of Michigan and automobile companies in the US.
Some …Continue

This week (Sept. 27th to Oct 4th) is National Banned Book week in the US. This week is dedicated to celebrating freedom of speech by reminding people of what happens when books are banned. Societies and communities that refuse to let people read suffer from stagnation. Unless we are exposed to ideas from all sources we can never learn to think critically, to develop innovations, or to be exposed to a wide range of perspectives.
Living in a former Soviet country where banning literature that didn’t meet state standards of ideology, …Continue

In an awesome summary of the situation, John Edgell, a public relations consultant, noted that “The country is probably 10 percent more productive today.”. Why?Scrabulous, a game on Facebook that closely resembles the board game Scrabble, has been taken down pursuant to a copyright law suit by Hasbro, makers of Scrabble. I guess Scrabulous is a little too close to Scrabble. Until further notice, users in the US and Canada are unable to play. But those of us in Kazakhstan are good to go.
That’s right. Scrabulous works just fine for …Continue