Richard Firsten is a retired ESOL teacher, teacher-trainer and columnist Oh, so you think there’s a typo in the title, do you? Well, no, it’s written that way deliberately. And why shouldn’t it be hop-hip instead of hip-hop? The way you’ve reacted to the title, you’d think there’s a rule or something about this. Well, guess what. There actually is! Way back some 6,000 years or more, there was a language which linguists now refer to as PIE, Proto-Indo-European. It was the mother tongue which gave rise to what we now call the family of modern Indo-European languages, from Hindi and Farsi in the ..read more

Kristine Fielding teaches ESOL at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas. The word “get” is hard to get. It does not have a set definition. It frequently embraces new meanings as technology requires, expanding and enveloping to absorb new semantical shapes, much like a boneless sea creature manipulating its form to acquire a new source of food. Its ubiquitous use proves how flexible the word is. Not only does the word “get” have multiple meanings by itself, it is also used in a variety of phrasal verbs. An ESL/EFL student trying to communicate with native speakers in authentic settings can become ..read more

Kristine Fielding teaches ESOL at Lone Star College in Houston, TX. Maybe I’m not as old-school as I thought. Back in the day, I was a staunch supporter of the Class Presentation, believing it was a sign of a Good Teacher to require one from all students. A Good Teacher helps her students iron out a presentation, demonstrates how a rubric works, and then dutifully sits through hours of student speeches, making a tally mark here or there on her grading sheet. For good or bad, times have changed. Lately, I have been reflecting on the value of class presentations and wondering if they are worth t ..read more