Parts and Goals of a Listening and Speaking Course
The Four Strands
The basic argument, is that a well-balanced language course should consist of four roughly equal strands:

Learning through meaning-focused input; that is, learning through listening and reading where the learner’s attention is on the ideas and messages conveyed by the language.
Learning through meaning-focused output; that is, [...]

Ideas to “test the water” regarding students’ opinions towards news and current events stories. This writing also contains additional ideas to increase students’ motivation to study English using news stories.
1. THE NEWS HABIT: Encourage your students’ news reading / viewing / listening habits, whether it be in their L1 or in English. Keeping up with [...]

English Skill Level: Advanced Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Secondary to Adult
Background
By and large, vocational English (VESL) grew out of adult education ESL programs that determined the need for programs that are more particularly focused on work place skills. VESL developed to meet the needs of ESL students who planned on entering the workforce or who [...]

English Skill Level: All
Grade Level: All
Also Called: Learner-Centered Curriculum
Background
The learner-centered approach is a general orientation toward language teaching that has evolved since the 1970s in reaction to teacher-fronted, top-down language teaching classrooms and curriculum. In general, a learner-centered approach focuses on the background, needs, and expectations of students to create a more effective, authentic, and [...]

English Skill Level: All
Grade Level: All
Background
Family literacy is based on the belief and related research that students will be more successful in school if their parents prepare and support them. Family literacy was first developed to prepare emergent readers for school success by giving information and activities that parents could use with their children to [...]

English Skill Level: Advanced Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Secondary to Adult
Also Called: Critical Literacy, Participatory ESL, Problem-Posing Education
Background
Critical literacy is a teaching orientation that focuses on encouraging students to analyze critically a text’s purpose and the culture and power structure it represents. It also encourages students to choose issues for their classroom study that have [...]

English Skill Level: Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Upper Elementary to Adult
Background
Competency-based education (CBE), an approach to adult and literacy education, began to be used in adult education ESL in the 1970s. Competency-based ESL is centered around teaching to competencies. A competency is a task-based goal to be met by the learner. Competencies frequently include basic [...]

English Skill Level: Advanced Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Upper Elementary to Adult
Background
The lexical approach was developed by Michael Lewis (The Lexical Approach, 1993) who believes that the primary approach in foreign language teaching should be focused on the lexicon (vocabulary) of the language as opposed to using the more traditional grammatical or structural approach. He [...]

English Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Grade Level: Secondary to Adult
Background
As English became a lingua franca worldwide, particularly in fields such as business and science, there developed a need to focus on the language needs of those people using English as an international language and to develop programs specifically to meet their needs. English for Specific [...]

English Skill Level: Advanced Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Upper Elementary to Adult
Background
English for academic purposes (EAP) has been developed to teach pre-college or college-level students the necessary skills and vocabulary needed to be successful at the college and university level. Such an approach is often used in intensive programs associated with colleges and universities. Traditional [...]