Carmelina and The Language People bookshop
Hooray for language bookshops! Last term I went to the QATESOL-QCAL ‘mini conference’, where I met Carmelina Lanza-Volpe for the first time (we’d spoken on the phone, but I’d never got to her Brisbane shop). She gave a great presentation on grammar, but also ran a scaled-down version of her bookshop, The Language People, in the foyer of the conference … Continue reading
Connecting with Community: The Garage Sale Trail
The Garage Sale Trail is happening on October 21/22 – an Australia-wide community event. So if you’re using the reading book The Garage Sale to practise the language of recounts, now could be a perfect time to link that reading with some community awareness. A confession – I actually hadn’t heard of the Garage Sale Trail before spotting the flyer at … Continue reading
Explaining ESL Extras: a video experiment
Can video offer a quick introduction when you can’t get to an ESL bookstore? I often get questions from teachers and volunteer tutors about the ESL Extras readers: I’m nowhere near a bookshop – what do the books look like? How do you use them? What are the levels, exactly? What’s this ‘Beginner B’? How does your prelim ‘literacy’ reader work? … Continue reading
A new review of ESL Extras
I just got permission to share two book reviews from QATESOL, for Maybe Next Year and Six Stories from Hope Street. Thanks so much to the reviewers, Mary Tibben and Su Murgatroyd, for the time they spent on this – and to QATESOL. Reviews are so important: they alert teachers and librarians to new materials, or remind them of who … Continue reading
ESL Extras and pre-employment English
How do ESL Extras support pre-employment English? This is a question I expect to have to answer, with the new AMEP contract coming soon – and of course it’s already an issue for anyone who teaches on the SEE program. (For anyone outside Australia reading this, these are national government programs providing language and literacy training. The Adult Migrant English … Continue reading
