EFL In South Korea

Stress test!  As teachers we all know that assessment tests are not always as accurate or reflective of a students' abilities as they could be. Asking students to sit down and take a test is not only stressful, it's also not a true representation of other skills they have , such as articulation, pronunciation, artistic, writing. There are multiple ways of assessing students' skills and showcasing these skills. Some are more labor intensive than others, and some will be more effective with parents than others. The trick is to find the subject matter you want to assess or understand better, and focus on creating an assessment that will accurately measure success, or problem areas.  There are several methods to assess students' progress. Any of these can be used singularly or in combination with each other to build a stronger foundation and impression.  The following are some ways I've incorporated in my classroom to assess my students' progress and

In a previous blog I mentioned phonological awareness which is basically 'sound-letter correspondence' awareness. Now we're going to talk about morphological awareness and how it can benefit your Language Arts lessons, regardless of the student group you are teaching! Let's start with a little history. Morphology is the study of words (basically), so morphological awareness means having awareness of words and how they are related. The easiest way to encourage morphological awareness is to introduce cognates into the classroom. Cognates are words that have similar spelling and meaning in two languages. Cognates can help language students make connections between pre-existing knowledge and the new language.  As you can see, there are many similarities between these words in these Romance languages. You can  clearly see how the words relate and how cognates can really assist language learners. What a great strategy! But.. what if I teach a language that is more

Imagine that you heard about a great new way to implement effective educational strategies into your classroom from a peer, a news cast or some link on social media. You think it sounds great, but wonder if it's really applicable for you or your students. Instead of muddling about, daydreaming about your potentially amazing classroom practices engage in the solution: Action research! Brighton and Moon (2003) wrote an article  about action research and why it is so important. They state action research is, ‘systemic, disciplined inquiry focused on addressing a specific, identifiable research question using qualitative or quantitative methods’ Without question, the very idea of this sounds intimidating to teachers who have little to no practice in the field of research. It also sounds like a huge time commitment. I am here to let you know it's all going to be okay. You can do action research, be a great teacher, and still have time to drink a glass of wine every once in

The basic Korean consonants  Learning English as a foreign language for new Korean learners doesn't have to be a daunting task. Research shows that connecting pre-existing knowledge to new lessons is very effective.  Here I will give you some history of the technique and then some examples of lessons you can use in your classroom. First, assess your students' phonemic awareness in their native language. In my case, students are Korean and many of the consonant sounds are similar.  Students with high phonemic awareness are more likely to become fluent readers, and experience benefits in multiple other areas as well, such as writing and speaking. A South Korean researcher named Yusun Kang has done several studies on the effects of phonological awareness on Korean EFL students. The most common problems come from the consonant sounds not represented in Korean.  Korean consonants and English consonants are relatively similar, and so those corresponding sounds usually