Summer 2007
High School ESL Teacher Larry Ferlazzo Honored for Use of Technology
...Assessments showed that students enrolled in the school-site computer lab had a fifty percent greater improvement in their English reading proficiency than those students in a control group not in the Lab. .....
An Oldie but Goodie from Pro Lingua Associates!
...I learned of ProLingua Associates for the first time when I was teaching in Japan, because a number of the best ESL teachers I had the good fortune to meet and work with there came from either the School for International Training (now World Learning, Inc.) or Peace Corps, or both, and that SIT-Peace Corps nexus....
Tim Stewart Controversy Roils TESOL Community
...The dismissal of Tim Stewart apparently resulted from discord between him and Charles Amorosino, Executive Director of TESOL, over plans by Amorosino and TESOL Finance Committee Chair Christine Coombe to reduce the Essential Teacher's publication calendar from quarterly to three times a year....
Online Exchange with Rinvolucri Inspires Memories of Nakajo Stories
...Grellet suggests that reading consists primarily of making hypotheses regarding what a text is about, and then reading a ways into the text in order to check your hypotheses, and refine them. "What one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it," she writes. "This is why...the students should be taught to use what they know to understand unknown elements, whether these are ideas or simple words." Grellet also says that it makes sense to categorize exercises, or activities, by levels of difficulty, because it is not the text, but what is to be done with it, that can be accurately described as easy or difficult....
Suspense Builds in Run-up to 2008 Beijing Olympics: Do You Have Your "Z" Visa?
...The imaginative protest by those who unfurled the "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet" banners at Mt. Everest several months ago and, more recently, at the Great Wall of China, suggest that the battle of words and ideas leading up to the 2008 Olympics will be pitched on a level never before seen. It is truly a rare opportunity for Westerners and others living and working in China to witness history in the making....