I am a secondary English language learner, and as a secondary English language learner, I can only distinguish about half… Read more Over-scaffolding for Secondary Newcomers 

Cross-Linguistic Connections? But I don’t speak my students’ language!  I learned English from a Russian-speaking professor in a class of… Read more Morphological Cross-Linguistic Connections

A teacher who does magic tricks. A teacher who raps. A teacher who does impersonations.  And of course everyone’s favorite-… Read more I guess I am not that exciting!

Step 1.  Watch the webinar here. I shared 3 principles of effective sentence-level mini-lessons. The graphic below is from my… Read more What do you do for grammar?

BBW is coming!  In a couple of days, ten people will receive the Advanced Review Copy of my book Building… Read more In Anticipation of Building Better Writers

Building sentences out of sentence tiles is a great way to enhance syntax instruction and to help the students develop… Read more Using Sentence Tiles to Enhance Students’ Writing

Looking back at the years of teaching writing to English learners, I recall some projects that kids and I truly… Read more A Fun Writing Project for the Secondary Language Learners: A Coach Interview

Stephen Krashen’s 5 SLA hypotheses are in every SLA textbook. However, in a teacher prep course, we may only get… Read more What did Dr. Stephen Krashen REALLY say about GRAMMAR?

Are babies linguistic geniuses? Why as adults we lose the mysterious gift of language acquisition that children seem to possess?… Read more The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: Part 2

The most fascinating beach read I am in Florida, and every time I reach for my phone or my laptop,… Read more The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: Part 1