Talk to the Clouds archive (to be removed soon)
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Audio Journal? Well, After a Fashion…
ITESLJ, the longstanding free online TESOL journal, is trying out a nifty new feature: free audio versions of its articles. Go to the main ITESLJ page to get the free password and check it out. The catch is that the articles use the Mac’s text-to-speech program, something like what the Kindle 2 e-book reader does.…
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A Voice for ESL and Community Colleges in the White House?
I confess that during the election, I didn’t read anything about the Democratic vice-presidential candidate’s spouse. However, I would have been happy if I had, because Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, is an ESL teacher! She seems to be serious about her job, too: she has two master’s degrees (English and education)…
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2009 Linguistic Institute
If you are or could be in the San Francisco Bay Area this summer, check out the 2009 Linguistic Institute. It’s going to be hosted at UC Berkeley and sounds really amazing. Geoffrey K. Pullum will be giving a 3-week course on English grammar, and there are all kinds of fascinating courses on language contact,…
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Another Free Journal
I’m going to go back and add this journal to the previous post about free online journals, but I thought this one merited its own update: The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching is another free online peer-reviewed journal. I think this journal is especially interesting, because it’s open to articles about the teaching of…
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Delightful Lexicography
I think a lot of people have already seen this video from last year, but if you haven’t, it’s well worth it! Erin McKean is a lexicographer who gives an entertaining and surprisingly funny overview of the descriptivist (as opposed to prescriptivist) approach to dictionaries and lexicography. It’s made for non-linguists, so it’s a good…
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Free Online Journals
Ah, free journals. I love them so very much. Even if you join a professional organization, you sometimes still have to pay extra to get their peer-reviewed publications. Never fear: there are various online publications that are free, and yes, some of them are even refereed/peer-reviewed. Best of all, you don’t have to pay premium…
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Word Games
A year or two ago, a CSUEB classmate and I presented a workshop on using word games with student writers. There is research that word games are connected to a higher degree of language awareness, which is correlated with better language control. We made a PDF with a couple of references, some game recommendations, URLs…
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Quickly: Paper Generator
Here’s a mini-post of something that might be useful for a variety of teachers: graph paper PDFs and generators. The page has much more than standard graph paper, including musical staff paper, storyboards (great for helping student writers!), polar graphs, and all kinds of things. There’s even a generator where you can enter your own…
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Composition’s Dirty Little Secret
In my experience with developmental composition classes, most of the teachers and most of the students involved are pretty frustrated. Many of the problems stem from the fact that students were not well prepared for academic writing much earlier in their learning careers, either in underfunded and badly mismanaged American schools or in non-English learning…
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US Citizenship
Like most US Americans, I’ve always had opinions about the citizenship process without really knowing the details. It’s complicated stuff! Now that I have clients who are curious about the process, I’m trying to become better informed–and really, I should have done this ages ago. First off, let’s start with Reason magazine’s flowchart showing the…
Got any book recommendations?