Quick Tip: Online Chat Rooms for ELT: 5 Reading Activities

by Trisha Dowling

Whether there is a no-cell phone policy in place or not, many teachers are finding it difficult to deter student attention from the screen and into the classroom. While there are many resources available online, it can be difficult to know how to best utilize them. This Quick Tip will introduce teachers to online class chat rooms and provide ideas on how to utilize this resource in a variety of skill areas. 

Audience: Teachers of academic English or adult ESL

If your students are anything like mine, they are equipped with a variety of electronic devices that are constantly connected to Wi-Fi. Why not use these devices to our benefit and allow students to use them to participate in class? You can simply provide students with a web address during class, have students input their names, and the interaction begins! No sign up required.

TodaysMeet is a free website that allows users to create their own chat room. You decide on the name of the chat room (which then becomes your web address) and choose the duration of the chat room’s existence. If using the chat for one class period, it is probably best to choose just 1 or 2 hours. If you are looking for something a little more long term, you can keep a chat room open for up to a year. After entering the chat room name and the duration, click on “Create Your Room” and—there you have it—your own class chat room! The last step is to enter your name, and the communication can begin. These activities are for you to use with students during class.

Chat Room Teaching Activities

1. Prediction
Before reading a text, students can predict what they believe will happen by simply reading the title or the first few sentences. Students’ predictions can be entered in the chat room and read by classmates, encouraging class discussions.

2. Vocabulary Practice
To practice or review vocabulary, the teacher can type in definitions while students enter the vocabulary words matching the definitions into the chat room. This can be turned into a competition (e.g., the first student to type in and correctly spell the right word gets a point) and is great spelling practice!

3. Reading Comprehension Check
After reading, the teacher can type follow-up questions into the chat room, and students can respond to them. This helps the teacher ensure that all parties have read and understood a resource.

4. Noting Vocabulary
While reading, students can have the chat room open and type in any unfamiliar words that they would like to look up later. This can help create a class vocabulary list with all of the difficult words from your students.

5. Paraphrasing a Passage
Upon completion of in-class reading, students can use the class chat room to paraphrase what the reading is about. This is a helpful way to demonstrate the multiple ways that the same reading can be paraphrased.

All of these ideas may be done individually or with a group. If some students are not as comfortable (or as fast) as others typing on their phone, tablet, or laptop (or if not everyone has his or her own device), dividing students into groups may work better so that everyone is able to participate and not feel discouraged. If you choose a chat room duration that’s long enough to cover the term, you can even make use of the chat room for homework assignments and out-of-class discussions.

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Trisha Dowling is currently an MA TESOL student at Eastern Michigan University. She works with adult English language learners in academic and business English settings.

Free TESOL Quarterly Article:
"Towards a Plurilingual Approach in English Language Teaching: Softening the Boundaries Between Languages"

September 2013: Volume 47, Issue 3

In this article, "Towards a Plurilingual Approach in English Language Teaching: Softening the Boundaries Between Languages," Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter present a critique of the policy of language isolation in TESOL and propose an innovative plurilingual approach to the teaching of English that softens the boundaries between languages. 

This article first appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Volume 47, Number 3, pgs. 591–599. Subscribers can access issues here. Only TESOL members may subscribe. To become a member of TESOL, please click here, and to purchase articles, please visit Wiley-Blackwell. © TESOL International Association.

This forum article presents a critique of the policy of language isolation in TESOL and proposes an innovative plurilingual approach to the teaching of English that softens the boundaries between languages. First, the article looks at how teaching English as a second or foreign language has traditionally been associated with teaching practices that encourage the isolation of English from the other languages in the student’s repertoire and in the school curriculum. Then, some proposals that consider the need to make the boundaries between languages softer are considered, including the concept of plurilingualism of the Council of Europe. The article ends by providing some teaching implications for TESOL professionals.

English is the dominant language of international communication, and as such it is intensively used and taught in the European Union (EU) as well as elsewhere in the world. The results of the European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC) indicate that, outside the United Kingdom, English is the most widely taught foreign language in the EU with the exception of the Flemish and German communities of Belgium (European Commission, 2012). This survey reports on language skills, including reading, writing, and listening in foreign languages. The survey focused on 53,000 secondary students from 14 European countries who completed tests of second language proficiency. The countries with the highest percentages of students who reach the upper-intermediate level, that is, the B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR), in secondary school were Malta (60%), Sweden (57%), and Estonia (41%). The countries with the lowest scores were France (5%), Poland (10%), and the French community in Belgium (10%). The CEFR will be discussed in more detail below.

Learning English in Europe cannot be separated from the use of other languages in education. English is most often a language directly addressed in the curriculum and accompanies other state languages or minority languages that are also given priority within the curriculum (De Houwer & Wilton, 2011; Gorter, 2013). This article discusses hard and soft boundaries between the teaching of English and other languages in the European context. In the next section, we look at how teaching English as a second or foreign language has traditionally been associated with teaching practices that encourage the isolation of English from other languages in the student’s repertoire and in the school curriculum. Then, we look at how this policy has been questioned and how the boundaries between languages need to be made softer and more fluid.

Download the full article and references for free (PDF)

 

This article first appeared in TESOL Quarterly, 47, 591–599. For permission to use text from this article, please go to Wiley-Blackwell and click on "Request Permissions" under "Article Tools."
doi: 10.1002/tesq.121

Grammatically Speaking

by T. Leo Schmitt
In T. Leo Schmitt's final column, he discusses the different types of passive voice, and he shares how to change passive to active voice. Language notes and teaching tips included.

Dear Mr. Schmitt,

Of the four examples of passive voice in Strunk and White, three have been denounced as incorrect by critics. Which are not passive voice and why? How would you render the “incorrect” examples in true passive voice?

a) “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground."
b) "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard."
c) "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had."
d) "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired.”

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous Questioner,

Thank you for sharing your question.

Traditional Grammatical Explanation

The passive construction is generally considered to be made up of the subject, the verb “to be” (in any tense), and the past participle, as in “It was thrown by David Schummy...” It can have a “by phrase” indicating the agent (by David Schummy, in this case), but that is not necessary. The passive is a separate grammatical structure from the active. In the case above, the active would be “David Schummy threw it.” We can see then that the standard active sentence structure of subject-verb-object is changed by moving the object to the subject position and changing the verb. The verb “to be” takes the tense of the main verb (simple past threw becomes was) and adding the past participle of the main verb (thrown). The agent David Schummy is now optional as “It was thrown” is a complete thought on its own.

It is important to note that only transitive verbs can be turned into passive constructions. Verbs that do not take an object clearly cannot move that missing object into the subject position, such as “When the sun rose.” In addition to the verb “to be,” it is possible to use the verb “to get” (“It got thrown”) for a more colloquial usage.

The verb “to be” is prolific in English, with many uses, and this can lead to some confusion as to its specific grammatical function in a sentence.

One use is to use it in the “there is/there are” construction, indicating existence, as in “There are places I remember.” This certainly seems to be the most logical reading of sentence (a) that you cite above, indicating the existence of dead leaves on the ground.

Another use is to join a noun and an adjective, as in “I am happy.” This seems to be the case in both uses of the verb “to be” in sentence (b), where we see the adjectives long and sorry, but no past participles. The so-called “stative passive” uses past participles that behave like adjectives as in “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” but in this case long and sorry are clearly not participles.

You may see and hear the use of the verb “to become” to form the passive voice as “to be” and “to get” are used, such as in “Then, the tailgating driver behind you subsequently ran into you, and they became hit by the person driving behind them.” However, there are many who find this construction inelegant at the very least, and it is not mainstream English usage. It may well be a case of interference from German or other languages that use “become” as the verb for constructing the passive. Thus, sentence (d) may be confused for a passive, but unless there is a clear agent that/who impaired that poor student’s health, then it is more likely to be interpreted as a nonagentive decline.

The question of rewriting these sentences is very challenging. Putting them in the passive would require changing verbs and changing the meaning considerably. If push came to shove, I would suggest the approximating sentences below:

A great number of dead leaves were strewn on the ground.

Here I use the verb strew, which is transitive, unlike lie, but comes somewhat close to the meaning.

It was not long before she was saddened by what she had said.

Here I use a form of the transitive verb sadden, instead of the adjective sorry.

The reason that he left college was that his health was impaired by constant stress.

Here I use the verb “to be” along with a clear agent, constant stress, rather than the verb “become.”

Teaching Tips

The passive construction is fairly straightforward as outlined above, though there are some complications with more advanced and specific uses. I have found that lessons that emphasize the flexibility of tense are useful as the past participle can influence learners to think that the passive cannot happen in the past, present, and future.

It is also useful to tell advanced students some of the most common uses of the passive: that the agent is unknown, already clear, or irrelevant; to highlight the receiver over the agent; and to create a sense of objectivity. They can then practice finding such uses in authentic texts. 

The active is more common than the passive in all forms of English, and some writers, including Strunk and White whom you cite, advocate minimizing it or even eliminating it. Business English in particular seems to prefer the active voice. However, academic, particularly scientific, language often uses the passive. A good knowledge of genres and their preferences on the use or nonuse of the passive can be helpful for advanced students.

Languages deal with the passive (if they have it) in many ways. Some learners may try direct translations (as “become” above). Some languages, such as Turkish, may use the passive more frequently than or in different situations from English.

Look at the two sentences below. What traditional rule of grammar do they both appear to violate? How would you explain this to an English learner?

1. “I never was nor never will be false.”
2. “It don’t mean nothing if it don’t mean something so you don’t mean nothing to me.”

Nobody wrote to me for this one, which surprised me as I thought it was a pretty straightforward one. These are examples of negative concord, or the double negative. The double negative is generally frowned upon in mainstream English, especially as it is associated with low-prestige variations of English. However, the first example is from Shakespeare. It used to be standard in English, but was dying out by the time of Shakespeare, and the example above is his only use of the double negative. It has continued over the years in many varieties of English including African American Vernacular English and Cockney. This means that students may well hear it and even pick it up, especially if their first language uses double negatives, as, for example, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi do. It can be helpful to explain to students that the usage is not mainstream and may have negative connotations in some areas, particularly for those learning academic or business English.

Farewell

It is with mixed emotions that I announce that I am stepping down from writing Grammatically Speaking. I have enjoyed this opportunity immensely, but I have started working on my dissertation project and would like to devote more time to that endeavor. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the many people who have helped me along the way. I would like to heartily thank those kind enough to have read through earlier drafts and given me their enormously helpful comments, including Hilary Kuris, Ross Fenske, Jim Runner, and especially Brett Reynolds. I would also like to thank my wonderful editor, Tomiko Breland, who has been incredibly supportive along the way. I would also like to thank TESOL Connections and TESOL International Association for this opportunity and for all the work they do for ESL and language professionals such as us. Last but far from least, I would like to thank you and all the readers for your wonderful questions, comments, and support over these past 5 years. I look forward to seeing you at TESOL conventions in years to come; feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.

Examples cited in this column are authentic examples of language use and are not the author’s creations.

Are you a grammar expert with a knack for clearly explaining how to teach grammar? TESOL is seeking a quarterly grammar columnist for TESOL Connections. The columnist will address difficult or tricky English grammar and usage issues. Open to all. Deadline: 31 October 2014.  Read the call.

 

Scaffolding for Success: Best Practices for Secondary ELLs

by Carla Huck and Beth Amaral
Use these proven instructional scaffolds across content areas to help your ELs with reading and speaking. 

Scaffolding is an instructional technique, associated with the zone of proximal development, in which a teacher provides individualized support by incrementally improving a learner’s ability to build on prior knowledge. Effective scaffolding can increase the students’ independence in performing a task or learning a new concept through the gradual release of responsibility (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2010; Fisher & Frey, 2008). One of the main benefits of scaffolded instruction is that it provides for a supportive learning environment. Students are free to ask questions, provide feedback, and support their peers in learning new material no matter what their level of language proficiency may be. When you incorporate scaffolding in the classroom, you become more of a mentor and facilitator of knowledge rather than the dominant content expert.

Planning for instructional scaffolding can be a challenge for those teachers new to working with ELLs. A few “tried and true” instructional scaffolds that have been implemented successfully across content areas in our high school include THIEVES, GIST, Conga Line, and Constructive Conversation Skills starters.

For Reading

THIEVES: Activating Prior Knowledge

This prereading strategy involves students surveying the specific elements of a textbook chapter to help them activate prior knowledge as well as identify their purpose and expectations for reading the chapter. Perusing the title, headings, introduction, every first sentence in a paragraph, visuals and vocabulary, end-of-chapter questions, and summary before reading the text itself helps readers identify important concepts, establish a context, and note significant points.

Teachers can use a THIEVES note-taking organizer, or distribute laminated bookmarks with the elements outlined for discussion in pairs. See the THIEVES handout (.docx) for use in your classroom.

GIST: Improving Comprehension
 
GIST stands for “generating interaction between schemata and text.” It is a comprehension strategy that is used both during and after reading. It helps students pull out essential vocabulary and concepts to summarize the passage. It is best to train students in the strategy by first displaying a passage on the board and then reading it with the class. With the students, pick out eight to ten of the most important words from the passage and underline or circle them. Then write a summary of the passage in a sentence or two using those words. Do this as a class for several passages of text, then ask students to try the technique on their own or in pairs.

Alternatively, teachers can use this strategy with content-based video clips. Students with less proficient listening comprehension skills will be able to “get the GIST” with structured listening tasks. We have even created a modified template (.docx) for our ELLs to write 10 words they hear and then use those words to write a one- to two-sentence summary. Students with higher proficiency can listen for Who, What, Where, When, Why and How information.

For Speaking

Conga: An Interactive Activity

As language teachers, we all know that one of the key principles of language acquisition requires students’ frequent opportunities to interact with one another and with curricular information on a daily basis. Working from our completed GIST worksheets, we added a Conga Line interactive activity for students to share their ideas while enhancing listening and speaking skills. It is a useful strategy for formative assessment as well, as the teacher can circulate and monitor student responses throughout the process. How does it work? Well, cue up your Gloria Estefan “Conga” music and then have students:

• Count off by twos
• Form two lines of “ones” and “twos” facing each other
• For 30 seconds, ones will orally share their GIST summary with the person across from them
• After 30 seconds, the “twos” will share. Students may add to their responses if desired
• Then, the head of the line of “twos” will conga through the center to the end of the “twos” line and everyone will shift up one, giving everyone a new partner.
• Repeat!

Depending on class size and allotted time for the activity, the teacher can stop after several exchanges or complete the entire sequence with new pairs.

Constructive Conversation Skills Posters: Group Work

Another scaffold that supports academic language use while speaking in small groups is a Constructive Conversation Skills poster (pdf; Zwiers, O’Hara, & Pritchard, 2014). With prompts and response starters for student reference as they work to build ideas during small group discussions, this chart can be modified for classroom use by selecting areas students need most help with, such as fortifying ideas with evidence from text or asking a peer for clarification of their comments.

You can also reduce the number of examples in each category and create your own customized handouts for students. To do this, you can model for the class using the fishbowl technique. This is an instructional technique to foster group discussions, with one group modeling and the other group observing and taking notes. Model for the class how to refer to the poster to keep the conversation moving forward, and then monitor for student use of these particular starters using a checklist as you circulate and listen in on group discussions. This chart can be used in any content area, addressing many CCSS standards, such as constructing and engaging in viable arguments, or making sense of problems and persevering in solving them, while at the same time helping all students meet content and language objectives.

Incorporating scaffolds into your practice will provide the incentive for students to take a more active role in the classroom. Aside from creating a supportive learning environment, scaffolds also empower students to take ownership for their learning. It is important that we make our scaffolding efforts transparent to students and employ them consistently, moving learners along the continuum from dependence to guided practice to independence.

References

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2010). Making content comprehensible for secondary English learners: The SIOP® Model. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
   
Zwiers, J., O’Hara, S., & Pritchard, R. (2014). Common Core Standards in diverse classrooms: Essential practices for developing academic language and disciplinary literacy. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

________________________________

Carla Huck (MA TESOL, EdM Urban Education Administration) has 18 years of experience as an ESL and French teacher and administrator, curriculum and grant writer, and online course developer in New York City. As a SIOP instructional coach at Danbury High School, she provides job-embedded professional development and 1:1 coaching to teachers as they plan for and implement sheltered instructional practices in content areas.

Beth Amaral (MA Bilingual and Special Education) began her teaching profession 20 years ago as a special education teacher in Miami, FL. Since moving to CT, she has taught 4th–8th grade language arts and ESL classes in urban school districts. Most recently, Beth has been assigned to Danbury High School as a SIOP instructional coach, providing job-embedded professional development in best practices of sheltered instruction.

Idioms Are Always Easier in Somebody Else's Class

by Gabriela Marcenaro and Adriana Rodriguez Lamas
The study—and teaching—of idioms has always been challenging. These activities help ELLs develop idiomatic competence. 

Teachers have always found teaching idioms both challenging and demanding. The world of idioms demands the study of the language from a level that goes beyond the literal meaning of words or chunks. This study maximizes the use of thinking strategies that help students guess the hidden meaning of idioms.

From the least creative activity of rote memorization to the most creative one, these activities help students develop higher-order thinking activities to help them learn in an active and motivating way the many idioms that shape the English language.

Idioms are fixed phrases with meanings that are not generally easy to guess or infer from their individual components. Because of this, it is not advisable to change an idiomatic expression syntactically; a literal translation is hard to comprehend. In an idiom, if a word is substituted for its synonym, it does not make another idiom—to arrive at another idiom, we need to explore the language in depth. However, we can “play with the language to gain a bigger linguistic repertoire. Teachers need to find and create activities which in one way or another help them “kill two birds with one stone.”

Here are some activities which have proven successful in many groups and levels. Some of them focus on the meaning of idioms and proverbs, fixed collocations, and expressions. It is important to bear in mind that the real usage of idioms becomes clear in the best corpora, which give authentic and relevant data to provide both informed feedback to students and help the teacher make decisions to develop idiomatic competence.

All the activities suggested can be used for presentation, recycling and revision.

A definite taxonomy of idioms is impossible. We find criteria based on the form, the meaning and usage, all of which are pertinent and mingle to help teachers create a battery of activities to help students learn idioms successfully. The activities shown here are a small sample, and act as a basis or starting point for you to create your own, more extensive activities. The concept of “chunking” that students get and need from studying Pairs of Nouns, Collective Noun Phrases, and possibly Pairs of Adjectives and Compound Adjectives is a “warming-up” toward understanding idioms.

Download the answer key here (.docx).

Idioms: Pairs of Adjectives

Solve these anagrams.

CATINNIE and NMDROE 

____________________________________________

ROF TEBTER or ROF ESWRO

____________________________________________

 

Idioms: Pairs of Nouns

Circle the correct option.

Bed and Breakfast / Breakfast and Bed

Friend or Foe / Foe or Friend

Soul and Heart / Heart and Soul

Earth and Heaven /Heaven and Earth

 

Idioms: Collective Noun Phrases

Fill in the sentences with the words in the box.

School   Colony   Herd   Swarm   Drove Litter   Pack   Flock   Flight

1.  A_________ of ants
2.  A_________ of cattle
3.  A_________ of birds
4.  A_________ of sheep
5.  A_________ of pigs
6.  A_________ of puppies
7.  A_________ of wolves
8.  A_________ of bees
9.  A_________ of dolphins

 

Idioms: Compound Adjectives

These adjectives are always made up of hyphenated words. Here are two typical examples in current use.

_____________________________ driver.

_____________________________ job.

 

Idioms: Adjectives and Noun phrases

Match the two halves.

1. An iron 2. Second 3. An ivory 4. A tall 5. A wet

A. Blanket B. Tale C. Tower D. Thoughts E. Will

 

Noun Phrases

Finish these noun phrases.

1. A bolt from ___________________
2. A bull in a ____________________
3. A cuckoo ____________________
4. A feather ____________________

 

Idioms From Special Categories

Colours

Find expressions that contain colours.

Red

White

Blue

Black

[You can also focus on categories such as parts of the body, animals, and food items]

 

Origins of Idioms

A very important element is to provide students with roots so they can understand the origin of idioms. This semantic approach has opened students’ minds to this topic. The data below have been adapted from the bibliography suggested. This activity is preceded by other activities; as with matching idiom meanings, here you can provide origins for famous idioms and check comprehension and retention afterward.

In the next pair-work activity, students are asked to use their prior knowledge to fill in the table below. In a second step, after sharing their attempt with the rest of the pairs, they can be asked to check their work against information that can be obtained online or in selected reference books. (See references below for books and link.) All text provided below, in the Origin and Meaning columns, is from Terban (1998).

IDIOM	ORIGIN	MEANING
Every cloud has a silver lining.		There is something good in every bad situation.
Gild the lily.	William Shakespeare used a similar expression in his play “King John.” “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Over the years, the saying got shortened to just “gild the lily.” Gild means to cover with a thick layer of gold. Why did Shakespeare use a lily? Because it is already a beautiful flower and covering it with gold to make it more beautiful would be unnecessary.
Go fly a kite.		Go away, leave, stop bothering me!
It’s Greek to me.	William Shakespeare used this phrase in his play, “Julius Caesar.” In the play, which takes place in 44 BC, a Roman who spoke only Latin said that he had heard another man speaking Greek, but he could not understand what he was saying.
Head and shoulders above someone.		Far superior, much better than.
Head over heels in love.	This expression goes back to the ancient Romans and means that being in love with someone makes one’s emotions topsy-turvy, upside-down.
Hit the jackpot.		To be very lucky, to achieve amazing success.
It takes two to tango.	In the 1920s, tango, a dance style, became popular in the United States, and so did this expression. Just as it takes two dancers to do the tango, there are certain activities that need the cooperation of two people in order to work.
Keep up with the Joneses.	In 1913, a popular comic strip called “Keeping Up With the Joneses” appeared in many American newspapers, starting with The New York Globe. The cartoon was about the experiences of a newly-married young man, and the cartoonist based it on his own life. He chose the name Jones because it was a popular name in America. The name of the comic strip became a popular expression that meant to try hard to follow the latest fashion and live in the style of those around you.
Kick the bucket.		To die.
Kill two birds with one stone.		To do two things by one action, to get two results by just one effort.
Let the cat out of the bag.	Centuries ago in England, you might have bought a costly pig at a farmer’s market. But, if the merchant was dishonest and put a worthless cat into the bag instead of a piglet, you might not find out until you got home and let the cat out of the bag. (Related expressions : buy a pig in a poke, spill the beans.)
Mad as a hatter.		Completely crazy, strange, eccentric.
Pull your leg.	In the late 1800s, people sometimes tripped other people by catching their legs with a cane or running a string across the sidewalk. Sometimes it was just for fun, at other times robbers did it to steal from the victim after he or she had fallen.
Raining cats and dogs.		To rain heavily

 

Using Online Videos to Teach Idioms

There are hundreds of excellent video clips on YouTube and Vimeo either by teachers or as students’ projects which provide an impeccable source of informative input to study useful idioms.

Here are some links to a few of them:

Confessions of an Idiom
Idioms to express happiness in English — Free Advance English lesson
Animal Idioms Song
That's What Makes an Idiom!
Learn English - Most Common Idioms in English [English Conversation]

We invite you to try these activities as they foster a process of exploration through certainties and seminal doubts. And since we started this article by paraphrasing the proverb “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” meaning things seem to be better everywhere else but where you are, we have decided to wrap it up hoping that, when you try some of these activities, idioms will become “greener” on your side of the fence, too!

 

References

Terban, M. (1998). Dictionary of idioms. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Resources

Seidl, J., & Mc Mordie, W. (1978). English idioms and how to use them. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

The Free Dictionary. (n.d.). Idioms and phrases. Retrieved from http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com

The Phrase Finder. (n.d.). Meanings and origins. Retrieved from http://www.phrases.org.uk

 

Download this article (PDF), just the activities (.docx), or the answer key (.docx)

______________________________

Gabriela Marcenaro is an IPA (Instituto de Profesores Artigas) graduate and has been a teacher of English for 30 years. She currently teaches didactics at this institution. She has lectured extensively in her country and abroad, including at TESOL 2014 in Portland.

Adriana Rodriguez Lamas has been a teacher of English since 1985. She currently prepares secondary school students for international exams including the IB Diploma Programme at Escuela Integral Hebreo Uruguaya.