ESL Blog

Today, I found a blog for ESL students and teachers that I think is great. It is called "Ron's ESL Blogs" and the address is: http://rong-chang.com/blogs/. The teacher, Ron, posts topics about English language learning issues for students to discuss. I really liked reading the posts on the topic of how American culture is different from the students' cultures. It gives everyone insight into other cultures, and it gives students a chance to practice their writing skills when they make posts. Ron also posts tips on teaching ESL. For example, one of his tips is to teach sentences using the "subject+predicate" format instead of "subject+verb" because he finds his students are less confused this way. It is less confusing because "subject+predicate" incorporates other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) and "subject+verb" only talks about subjects and verbs. There can be more to a sentence than just a subject and verb.

Why Comment?

Some people spend a lot of time reading and posting comments on blogs. But... Why is this such a popular activity? I searched the web for blogs and read the comments left by their readers. I found that most people left comments to give their opinions. Sometimes they would express opposition to the blogger's view and sometimes agree with them. Also, they would often praise or criticize the blogs. But above all, it seemed that the main purpose of leaving comments was to interact with people. Blogs make it easy to find people with the same interest, therefore having a common ground to discuss things.

Marit's hobby blog is about a woman named Marit who likes to make crafts. She posts pictures of things she has made. People commented on her blog about how nice her crafts were and the kinds of crafts they made. A New York Times politics blog called "The Caucus" talked about how ballots were still being counted in New Mexico to determine the winner of Tuesday's caucuses. A lot of comments left on that blog were complaints about how long it was taking and that there should be a better process. The last blog I looked at was Jamie's blog. Jamie is my classmate in Etec 414. I left a comment on her blog basically to respond to the comment she left on my blog, and to reconnect with someone who went to my high school. The address of my comment on her blog is https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5098819903369020196&postID=3882181688707807522.

Useful Sites for Teaching

Copyrighted material like writing taken from books, tv shows, movies, music, etc. are all over the internet. We've all probably done it at one time or another... Especially teachers! Yikes! So here is a site that is great for learning about copyright law. Don't you think that little c with the circle around it is kind of cute?

The other site I'd like talk about is http://www.esl-lesson-plan.com/. I teach ELL (better known as ESL, or English as a second language), so this site is great for me. Carol Rueckert, the ESL teacher who writes this blog, frequently updates her site with lesson planning ideas. Lesson planning can be difficult for me, so I really like reading about her activities and selecting ones that I would like to use. In my favorite one so far, she holds up pictures of celebrity couples who have broken up and asks the students why they think they have split up. Then, they are given the task of writing a dialogue for the couple.

Not only is this lesson plan fun and creative, it also gives the students motivation to write dialogue. If I had the chance, I would like to ask the students to use the written dialogue to role-play the breakup in front of the class. This gives the students a chance to practice writing and speaking, and I get to laugh!