ESL Extras ‘show and tell’ with YouTube
I’ve been experimenting with video lately – not that I feel very confident about having my face on screen – but there are things that text just can’t do. I want to show people what the books look like, demonstrate how I’d use the Maybe Next Year faces or the Welcome to Hope Street cut-ups, and answer those questions I … Continue reading
Pre-employment for beginners: the resource list
From July 2017, our national AMEP (Adult Migrant English Program) will change. Providers will be offering both a Social and a Pre-Employment English stream – at all levels. Teachers are looking around the bookshelves to see what’s there that’s not out of date (agencies change names, print ads disappear…). Some may have concerns, addressed a decade ago in the 2006 AMEPRC paper Teaching Strategies – 2 … Continue reading
Pre-employment English for beginners?
I’m going to give a link to my latest post from my other blog, at ‘The Book Next Door’. It’s a list of ways you could still use the ESL Extras reading books in a Pre-Employment class – not by pretending the books are all about employment, but by pulling out threads that invite discussion. It’s a massively long post – the kind … Continue reading
CPSWE resources: what’s around for ‘prelim’ ESOL learners?
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
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








