Creating teacher-authored materials can be a challenging task for a variety of reasons. While relying on coursebooks to provide a ready-made structure to our classes, we often design our own materials to meet some of the specific needs and interests of our learners. Teachers usually approach the task of materials development through intuition and…

Reading is a complicated cognitive procedure of deciphering symbols to create meaning. It's a complicated relationship that the reader has with the text and is lead by a reader's previous knowledge, experiences, attitude, and culture. Second language (L2) reading comprehension is perhaps a more complicated procedure and there's a need to ensure…

For many ESL/EFL learners, reading is their main learning goal and may be the most important of the four language skills in the second language. For many ESL/EFL teachers, the issue of promoting proficient reading is important, and they look for additional or alternative methods to achieve this goal. However, when discussing reading as a primary…

One of the questions facing language instructors is how direct vocabulary instruction should be. Much recent research into vocabulary acquisition and studies of learning strategies strongly indicates that the explicit vocabulary learning vs. implicit vocabulary learning issue is not a dichotomy, but rather a continuum (Hunt and Belgar, 2005; Lee…

Case studies are often traditionally thought of as being used in medical, legal, and business training. Physicians have long been trained by the case method, as medical school students are presented with the particulars of a patient's medical problem and are tasked with providing a diagnosis and course of treatment. In the legal field, Stanford…

Accredited universities normally include a standard that addresses faculty evaluation. It may contain references to performance criteria and procedures and usually emphasizes the need for faculty evaluations to be systematic, regular, fair, objective and relevant to achieving the goals of the institution. Accredited language programs usually have…

The author collaborated with teachers and a English Language Learners (ELL) specialist at an elementary school that had a high percentage of ELLs, primarily from Spanish-speaking heritage, where teachers were in the early stages of exploring uses of English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards for English Language Development (ELD) (Oregon…