Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s not a BLT with extra tomato, it’s Task-Based Language Teaching. First and foremost, I am in no way an expert on TBLT. What I have learned about tasks I have learned, mostly, from Bill VanPatten, and Claudia Fernández. So here, I am sharing my understanding, and my personal application of TBLT in my classroom.Continue reading “TASKS: What? Why? How?”

Last night on #LangChat we had a GREAT discussion on ways to use music in class, take a look at the archive of the chat! The idea that I shared was an idea I learned from Leslie Davison at iFLT 2018 in Cincinnati when I was an apprentice demo teacher there. The idea is prettyContinue reading “Illustrating Lyrics”

TL;DR Ask the same question to a bunch of students, fish for details, before moving on to another question have students write what someone else said. Something I struggle with often is making PQA engaging for everyone. If you are unfamiliar with PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers), it is a communicative activity where you askContinue reading “Optimizing PQA”

I got this initial idea from Eric Richard’s Grafted Writing book, but today I gamified it a little bit because I needed to fill some time. Essentially: students COPY (not summarize, because we want them to read the right forms, and write the right forms) a number of sentences. Today, I had students do fiveContinue reading “CopyCat: A Quick, No-Prep, Post-Reading Game”

A Brain Break is a pause in instruction to let students refocus, I’ve heard said that we should take our students average age (16 let’s say) and divide it by 2 (8) and after that many minutes you should change activities or take a break. I In a class of 45 minutes that means weContinue reading “Brain breaks that won’t break your brain”

I think we might all be familiar with the card game Spoons. Players pass cards around, trying to get 4 of the same card with a few spoons (one less than the number of players playing)in the middle of the table. When a player gets 4 of a kind they grab a spoon from theContinue reading “Spoons! The classic card game with a reading twist!”