A lot of students worry about their accents. They ask me how to pronounce the word “again” correctly. They refuse to go to university in India because they don’t want an Indian accent. Some students even tell me they won’t take lessons from me because they want a proper British accent not an ugly American one.
The fact of the matter is that because English is a world language, a lot of different people speak English. And because both the UK and the US are countries that exerted a lot of …Continue

One of my favorite lesson plans to teach is At the Restaurant. I compiled it from a series of sources like The British Council and TEFL.net and edited the activities and worksheets to make them more fun and accessible and so that everything relates together into one big lesson.
So if you’re looking for a complete lesson plan about food and restaurants that features vocab building, discussion, reading, cultural notes and a great role play that can be targeted to beginners, intermediate or advanced learners, take a look at At …Continue

Can’t remember if I’ve posted on this or not, but as I’m working on the new site, I’m going through some of the ESL resources I use a lot. Purdue’s Online Writing Center has an awesome section for ESL Teachers and Students. Really good explanations of all parts of speech and sticky points of grammar broken down by how we use them and taking into account problems that students often have. So if you want to analyze a strange sentence like, “The throat sighs!” and figure out where the subject, …Continue

I put up a new article on English Advantage for ESL teachers onwhy and how to plan a lesson. As I say in the article, the most important reasons to have a plan are so that you have clear goals set out for your lesson. Otherwise you are just filling up time and/or entertaining students; both of these can be important too but without a goal, you aren’t really educating. Also students don’t respect teachers who try to improvise everything or aren’t prepared to answer their basic questions about a …Continue