As students advance to and through middle school, teachers expect them to meet higher academic expectations. Students' ability to meet these expectations depends, in part, on their use of effective study skills. Using notecards represents one study skill that students can use flexibly in many subjects to prepare for upcoming assessments. With some…

English learners (ELs) benefit from inquiry-based science instruction that includes explicit attention to language learning goals. The purpose of this article is to share a third-grade unit on forces and motion which integrates science inquiry and writing in science notebooks with the goal of developing ELs' engagement in science, conceptual…

Freely available online videos are the basis of an Intensive English Program (IEP) listening and speaking course described in this article. Strands and activities of this course could easily be adapted for use in other institutions. For each strand of the course, rationales are stated, activities are described, and suggested online resources are…

A 20-year veteran teacher of college Spanish, the author decided to take an intensive First-Year German course during one summer. The author found the German class was not only a great opportunity to acquire another language, but a rich source of insight about the language teaching and the learning process itself. Not only did she take German…

Some educators see the Common Core State Standards as reason for stress, most recognize the positive possibilities associated with them and are willing to make the professional commitment to implementing them so that academic rigor for all students will increase. But business leaders, parents, and the authors of the Common Core are not the only…

Independent lexical development initiatives empower and equip language learners with skills to boost their lexical repertoires. Language instructors can train learners to be autonomous word learners. A sample activity, namely word of the day, is presented in this article. The activity is an independent lexical learning task, which aims to develop…

Offers six teaching activities suggested by teachers: addressing vocabulary development; punctuation awareness; building background knowledge for English literature; a system for notetaking; a month-long unit on African folktales; and an Alzheimer patient's response to children's literature. (SR)

A college-level integrated study skills and orientation course is described. The unique aspect of the course is that learning/teaching occurs in the context of the university environment. Learning experiences generally utilized with this approach to reading and study skills instruction are illustrated by the following projects: an organized…

Art English is a combination of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)/English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) and art content. As a new instructional area, it faces several challenges: as with all English for Special Purposes (ESP), exchange of information among programs; development of a suitable combination of art content and ESL, due to lack of…