HEIS Chair Kim Song reports on events at TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia and elections scheduled for Fall 2012 and thanks proposal reviewers for TESOL 2013. Read More

Native and nonnative speakers in university classes must produce writing that has both cohesion and coherence if they are to succeed in writing tasks across majors. In this article, the author presents techniques for teaching these elements in an engaging way that readers can adapt for their own writing classes. Read More

This article presents activities and ideas teachers can use to teach spoken grammar in the ESL classroom, specifically targeting fillers, backchannels, heads, tails, and ellipses. These activities can be incorporated into speaking or conversation classes to help students develop more natural conversational English skills. Read More

As it has long been established that there are more nonnative speakers of English than native speakers, many ESL instructors believe that teaching English pronunciation to Thai learners should focus on intelligibility rather than nativeness. Focusing on imitating the native-speaker accents as closely as possible and the importance of sounding like a native speaker is soon adopted by the students themselves, possibly causing them to lack confidence when speaking English. A survey of a group of Thai students examines their attitudes toward pronunciation and suggests implications for teaching. Read More

For educators, technology has been a mixed blessing: on the good side, instant access to numerous databases, Internet searching, online class management systems, sophisticated word processing programs, streaming video; on the bad side, students want quick results, have little patience for the time it takes to think and write well (and then resort to plagiarizing), get easily distracted in class by text messages and cell calls, and prefer video and graphic texts to novel and essay reading. What implications does being highly networked have for student performance? Read More

Four Point: Reading and Writing 2 is a skill-based series designed for teachers of English language learners focusing upon the skill areas identified by the author. These areas includereading, writing, listening and speaking, and developing successful strategies for these learners in the academic setting. The target is teachers of and students within the TOEFL IBT range 54-68, or CBT range 157-190 (compared to the PBT range 480-520) and though reading and writing are the main focus, all four skills are integrated in this book and others in the series. Read More

In Values, Philosophies, and Beliefs in TESOL: Making a Statement, Graham Crookes aids both those new to the field of TESOL who are trying to develop a philosophy of their own teaching in order to include it as a part of their application materials or coursework, and experienced teachers who want to comprehensively reflect on why they teach. Read More

Learning and teaching are often described as two sides of the same coin. By definition, then, it is very difficult to separate them. As teachers, we are first learners―especially as technology advances and we want and need to include it in our teaching. Learning new technology can be daunting, but it need not be. All we must remember is that like our students, we should spiral our existing knowledge upward and depend on our scaffolded background knowledge to help us reach higher. Read More

A brief description of HEIS, its purpose, and its membership. Read More

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