Just a few lesson plan competitions I became aware of recently. Thought I’d share.
 
TED wants you! to nominate educators, come onboard as an animator or propose a lesson plan based on their talks.
Tailor Made English believes teachers are nothing more than the blind leading the blind. The ultimate dogmé challenge-a lesson plan for students in the dark. The winner gets $50 at Amazon.com or equivalent. Nice!

Saw this activity a while back on So this is English…. You can click the link to read the full activity, but basically the idea is that you show students a picture for a few seconds and then get them to describe it. I have done similar things in the past and it works really well, especially if the picture is interesting and has lots of weird details. Students start arguing about what they really saw.
I posted once about my first course as a teacher and how my poor students …Continue

Via Views from the Whiteboard, I discovered English Attack which is a cool little resource to teach English from media. It features video clips from popular TV shows and sitcoms taken from Hulu (so I don’t know if it’ll work outside the US) with vocab reviews before watching. Then after watching there are some comprehension questions and cloze exercises. Obviously you could put something like this together yourself in the classroom, but English Attack seems like a good way to get students to practice at home.
You do need to …Continue

Has to be the best name for dictoglosses. I stole the title from Jason Renshaw and I highly recommend his comprehensive article on how to do dictoglosses.
Dictoglossia? Anyway, there’s a nice looking template hand out there as well.
And this is the best example of a dictogloss I’ve ever seen, apparently taken from The Practice of English Language Teaching by Jeremy Harmer:

Word Wise, from English Raven, looks like an awesome resource for getting students to remember vocabulary. It’s basically a book students fill out with vocabulary, but it gets students to use the word in context, translate it into L1, think about concepts associated with that word, and interestingly enough, to write the word in English three times.
In the video, which I recommend watching, Jason explains that he developed it as a way to appease teachers and parents who associate memorization of words with learning a language. So while it’s …Continue

I don’t know if my experience as an EFL teacher is typical, but I find myself getting suckered into teaching all sorts of stuff I’m not necessarily comfortable in. “We have a student who’s going to be taking courses in English in quantum physics and string theory, Can you help him practice his advanced theoretical physics English terms?He has no one else to turn to?”
More usually, it’s something like the IELTS. I read practice tests and the official website and all the resource books I can get my hands …Continue

Catch the Crooks with That and Which is a cool, short little game that tests your understanding of the use of that and which. It’s a fun little game. If you want to review the difference, there’s also a nice explanation on the same site.

Lexiophiles.com’s Interview of the Week with Matthew Bennet, a Spanish-English translator has some great advice for people who want to learn a foreign language–including students who want to learn English.
Check out the interview for the full article but I wanted to put up excerpts from his three tips for language learners:
1. Be proactive: learn to criticise and correct yourself…Don’t be afraid to make lots of really stupid mistakes, more than once, until you get it right…
2. Persevere & practice: always, at all times, practice, practice and practice some more…
3. Keep …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