Resources for migrant English learners in Australia

If you’re teaching adult ‘prelim’, CPSWE, Initial Course in EAL, ‘pre-beginner’ or ‘literacy’ students in an ESOL class, you’re probably making a lot of your own materials. Your classroom cupboards are filled with word and letter cards, ‘play money’, food and medicine packets and supermarket flyers. Your reading materials are based on excursions or ‘learner news,’ recorded on learners’ phones for … Continue reading

2016 Sep 13

Learning English through word puzzles

It’s always quite magical to open the box and find a stack of the latest ESL Extras book: they’re real, they’re here – and looking back through my files, it’s only taken around three years… This time it’s a puzzle book – Extra Easy Puzzles – for what I call ‘Beginner C’ learners: strong beginners who can read sentences comfortably and know about … Continue reading

2016 Aug 16

When ESOL reading becomes fun…

Carly and Kumar to the rescue… Yesterday I had to find an activity for a young woman waiting for her husband to finish English language class… what could I offer her to make that couple of hours less tedious? I showed her a few ESOL reading books, and she grabbed Karen Barber’s ‘Carly and Kumar’, with a smile, though she … Continue reading

2016 Jul 28

SpellingWorks – now online

Interested in spelling? It’s a while since Maureen Hague and I wrote a book called Spellingworks for Heinemann Australia – so long that it’s gone out of print. Hooray for the publisher (now Pearson), however – and for the artist, Shane Nagle – and for the publishers who have tiny extracts of their books somewhere on a page – they … Continue reading

2016 Jul 19

Passionate about Picture Crosswords…

Elizabeth Bezant with her crossword book

My next ESL Extras book is almost ready to go – a puzzle book called Extra Easy Puzzles. I’m not the only puzzle creator around, of course, and I’ve recently seen beginner learners getting very excited about some picture puzzles given to them by their class teacher. When I looked more closely, I realised that these puzzles came from the Picture … Continue reading

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