I teach 12 Grade Language Arts in Suwanee, Georgia, USA.


I teach 12 Grade Language Arts in Suwanee, Georgia, USA. I recently returned to the States after teaching English in Korea for 8 years. I’m so excited to do another Penny Ur course. I’m particularly looking to learn more about teaching long reading text in an engaging way.

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I really enjoyed Tip 7 in how simple yet effective is to make everyday exercises more interesting, engaging, and...

I really enjoyed Tip 7 in how simple yet effective is to make everyday exercises more interesting, engaging, and memorable. Tip 8 is another great one. By chance, I saw Carolyn Graham once at ETJ Tokyo EXPO (English Teachers in Japan) where I was volunteering on tech support and she needed help setting up and cueing some things. I'd been wondering how to reach learners who'd felt they'd grown out of singing songs in class, her jazz chants seemed just the ticket I was looking for! However, it was a while before I had an opportunity to use them in class, but when I tried some motivation chants with 1st year uni students, it went over really well and much better than expected. So, it became 'a keeper'! I'm getting better You're getting better We're getting better now Step by step Day by day I introduced it orally first as a whole class choral listen and repeat, line by line, then building up. Teams of 4-5 then had to work together to recall and write it dow...
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Thanks Penny for sharing an interesting topic: error correction.

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Thanks Penny for sharing an interesting topic: error correction. Allow me to share with you what my students and I have done with the error correction practices in our essay writing class. 1. I have encouraged my students to do peer-review as a part of writing cycle before submitting their final drafts. We did that using Google doc. I see this peer-review activities worth doing at least based on the following considerations: a. Learn how to read carefully, with attention to the details of a piece of writing (whether their own or another writer’s); b. Learn how to strengthen their writing by taking into account the responses of actual and anticipated readers; c.Learn how to formulate and communicate constructive feedback on a peer’s work; d. Learn how to gather and respond to feedback on their own work. 2. Before the peer-review session, I taught some techniques of correcting their peer's to them: make the errors explicit so that the writers knew about what and how to improve the e...
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