Walk the Walk, a blog by a middle school teacher and football coach, cites a nice writing exercise that we may all remember from school.
Basically, you force students to take a piece of writing and get rid of all the adjectives and adverbs, then rewrite with more descriptive nouns and verbs. This helps them to use nouns and verbs more effectively. One problem a lot of EFL and ESL students have when writing essays in English is that formal English writing tends to be briefer and more concise than …Continue

Although I designed this lesson plan to be about food and holiday foods in general, it originally came from a lesson I taught in an English speaking club about Thanksgiving. The Food Lesson Plan gives students a chance to talk about their national food, then gives you a chance to discuss Thanksgiving and the traditional foods we eat on that holiday. Finally students get talk about their special holiday meals. It’s a great way to approach Thanksgiving with international students because they may not know a lot about this primarily …Continue

Now that I have some time to reflect on my recent IELTS lessons, I’m putting together some resources to help prepare students. While there are a lot of good resources out there, some texts I felt didn’t cover everything I wanted or cover it in the way that I thought was best for my students. One big area where I found some good isolated exercises and ideas, but not one integrated series of lessons was in teaching Writing.
So I’m starting by putting together lessons on writing the IELTS task 1 …Continue

No, this is not a post on vocabulary retention or drilling. I’m still reflecting on my IELTS teaching and will be putting up lesson plans and suggestions, but we’re entering Writing territory and this is an area I have a lot more confidence in since I have taught academic writing for years.
This was our first week of IELTS Writing Prep. We started with Task 1 in which students must describe a graph or chart or some data in a short essay. I noticed two points that I had to …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

I got this comment recently on a post here and I get the question from students all the time, Where can I practice English? How can I improve my English outside of class? Basically any exposure to English is going to help you. So try as much as possible to read, listen to and speak English.
Some resources for reading in English include news websites like:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Boston Globe
The Economist Magazine
CNN television channel
BBC
Some great resources for books online include:
The Gutenberg Project and The Burgomeister’s Books
Also reading blogs, …Continue

I’ve put up a few sample TOEFL essays here, here and some tips for writing essays here.
Now I’m going to try something slightly different. I’m putting up a sample TOEFL writing test question and I encourage readers to try to answer. Email your answer to walton [at] englishadvantage [.] com (replacing @ for at, obviously) and I’ll email you back comments and notes. I will also post the best essay up here, with a link of the writer’s choice. I’ll link to you blog, website, facebook profile, whatever you want.
Question:Do …Continue