Today, Cheolseong and I were laughing like madmen when a student of Mike’s came in and started to talk to him. Why? The first thing she said was something like, “Uh, it’s Chuseok.” Mike said, “Are you in my class?” When the girl claimed she was, he asked, “Then why have I never seen you before?” This got us laughing so hard we couldn’t stop for a minute. Why? As of today, there have been nine classes. Any student who has not bothered to show up at class by now has, as of the end of today, automatically flunked their …

Another ESL teaching aid: A description exercise for use with lower-level students. This one’s for kids. And here’s a template for a board game. You just need to write “Start” at one end and “Finish” at the other, and then fill the squares with whatever information you want students to get from, or tell to, their partners. You can use this in many ways: write a word and have students use the word in a sentence; write a requested piece of information that you want students to ask their partners for (“Father’s name”, for example), or write instructions for advanced …

Yes, it’s that time again. This week’s pair of handouts (one page for Wednesday, one for Thursday) for my writing class is focused on using Question-and-Answer format as a way of organizing their writing and giving them one more style tool for their writing toolkit. The level’s a little high in the handout, but I am making the kind of handout I’d give to a writing class back home. It’s easier to simplify things verbally than to make them more complex, and the level in the class is a little uneven, so I’m trying to include something for the highest-level …

Here’s a bit of ESL stuff I’ll be using with my class: handout on using tables to build lists of contrasts in writing.