(I’m republishing posts on my My All-Time Favorite Posts list. This one appeared in 2014. You can see them all here)
ESL/EFL teachers who have been around awhile know of Jason Renshaw, who at one point had what I thought (and continue to think) was the best resource on the Web for ESL teachers — English Raven. Unfortunately, he took it off-line a few years ago, and now describes himself as a “former Tesol teacher, textbook author and web resources developer, now learning designer and elearning developer in higher ed (Open Universities Australia).”
Jason has continued his blog — with a somewhat different focus — and he has fortunately kept his huge archive there on TESOL available. His Open Source English resources, accompanied with his screencasts on how to use them, are a treasure trove.
One of my favorite inventions of his is called a “Sentence Navigator.” A screenshot of one small example is at the top of this post. It’s sort of a complex multiple choice exercise — I use some of the ones Jason produced, I create originals, and also have students make them for their classmates.
Jason explained them in an older article as:
a sentence navigation grid: five slots each containing three words. It will be up to the student to “navigate” this grid in order to build an appropriate answer to the question. The student will do this by circling the correct word in each slot and then referring to the teacher for feedback. Once all of the correct words have been circled, the student will be permitted to write the full answer in the space beneath.
Jason was kind enough to let me upload up two full units of Sentence Navigators to this blog so that any teachers can download them to use in class:
If you’re not using these already in your classroom, I hope you can start and see how useful they can be…
Thanks, Jason!
(I’m republishing posts on my My All-Time Favorite Posts list. This one appeared in 2014. You can see them all here) ESL/EFL teachers who have been around awhile know of Jason Renshaw, who at one point had what I thought (and continue to think) was the best resource on the Web for ESL teachers a look back Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
