Esl Quotes

There comes a moment when you know you just aren't going to do anything esle productive for the rest of the day.-T-Shirt

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly. NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a children's book called Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Calahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I'm doing fine."... You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers adn sons, is considered taboo- so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say,'This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!

It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted.

Henry had never been good with words. Case in point: The first month he’d been at Aglionby, he had tried to explain this to Jonah Milo, the English teacher, and had been told that he was being hard on himself. You’ve got a great vocabulary, Milo had said. Henry was aware he had a great vocabulary. It was not the same thing as having the words you needed to express yourself. You’re very well-spoken for a kid your age, Milo had added. Hell, ha, even for a guy my age. But sounding like you were saying what you felt was not the same as actually pulling it off. A lot of ESL folks feel that way, Milo had finished. My mom said she was never herself in English. But it wasn’t that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much...

It turned out that they already had enough ESL teachers and what they needed was people to teach high school equivalency math. I wasn’t particularly interested in high school math acquisition, but nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment.

The Thai people are pathologically shy. Combine that with a reluctance to lose face by giving a wrong answer, and it makes for a painfully long [ESL] class. Usually I ask the students to work on exercises in small groups, and then I move around and check their progress. But for days like today, when I'm grading on participation, speaking up in public is a necessary evil. "Jao," I say to a man in my class. "You own a pet store, and you want to convince Jaidee to buy a pet." I turn to a second man. "Jaidee, you do not want to buy that pet. Let's hear your conversation." They stand up, clutching their papers. "This dog is reccommended," Jao begins. "I have one already," Jaidee replies. "Good job!" I encourage. "Jao, give him a reason why he should buy your dog." "This dog is alive," Jao adds. Jaidee shrugs. "Not everyone wants a pet that is alive." Well, not all days are successes...

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Nothing You Encounter in Life is Too Difficult - It's There to Teach you a Lesson Fred Cheshire, "There's Nothing I Can't Do - Fred's Story

I’m convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, “Today’s assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call ‘Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.

The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn’t even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn’t exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed,

They met at the high school up on 131st. At night there were adult classes. He was working on his GED and she taught ESL to Dominicans and Poles in the classroom next door. He waited to finish the course before he asked her out. Earned his certificate and feeling proud and it was one of those moments that make you realize you have no one in your life who cares about the occasional triumph. He'd had the thought of getting his GED in the back of his mind for a while. Tended to it like a candle flame cupped in his hand out of the wind. He kept seeing the ads on the subway--Complete Your Studies at Night on Your Own Terms--and was so happy to get that piece of paper that he said,

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation. This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid. We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.

Everything is funny when its happening to some esle

the best of luck in improving their English writing skills. However, in saying that, it's not up to luck so much as dedication, hard work, and a personal interest in improving your English academic writing skills. APPLY your newly learned knowledge with practical essay writing skills, and you can write you way to a BA.

I lack precisely the thing to explain what I lack. The words. For every word I get out, there's a whole iceberg of thoughts and hopes and feelings that stay unspoken. But how do I speak them?

While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome

Horst (2005) used simplified readers in a study of vocabulary development among adult immigrants who were enrolled in an ESL programme in a community centre in Montreal, Canada. The 21 participants represented several language backgrounds and proficiency levels. In addition to the activities of their regular ESL class, students chose simplified readers that were made available in a class library. Over a six-week period, students took books home and read them on their own. Horst developed individualized vocabulary measures so that learning could be assessed in terms of the books each student actually read. She found that there was vocabulary growth attributable to reading, even over this short period, and that the more students read, the more words they learned. She concluded that substantial vocabulary growth through reading is possible, but that students must read a great deal (more than just one or two books per semester) to realize those benefits. As we saw in Chapter 2, when we interact in ordinary conversations, we tend to use mainly the 1,000 or 2,000 most frequent words. Thus, reading is a particularly valuable source of new vocabulary. Students who have reached an intermediate level of proficiency may have few opportunities to learn new words in everyday conversation. It is in reading a variety of texts that students are most likely to encounter new vocabulary. The benefit of simplified readers is that students encounter a reasonable number of new words. This increases the likelihood that they can figure out the meaning of new words (or perhaps be motivated to look them up). If the new words occur often enough, students may remember them when they encounter them in a new context.

Mark Patkowski (1980) studied the relationship between age and the acquisition of features of a second language other than pronunciation. He hypothesized that, even if accent were ignored, only those who had begun learning their second language before the age of 15 could achieve full, native-like mastery of that language. Patkowski studied 67 highly educated immigrants to the United States. They had started to learn English at various ages, but all had lived in the United States for more than five years. He compared them to 15 native-born Americans with a similarly high level of education, whose variety of English could be considered the second language speakers’ target language. The main question in Patkowski’s research was: ‘Will there be a difference between learners who began to learn English before puberty and those who began learning English later?’ However, he also compared learners on the basis of other characteristics and experiences that some people have suggested might be as good as age in predicting or explaining a person’s success in mastering a second language. For example, he looked at the total amount of time a speaker had been in the United States as well as the amount of formal ESL instruction each speaker had had. A lengthy interview with each person was tape-recorded. Because Patkowski wanted to remove the possibility that the results would be affected by accent, he transcribed five-minute samples from the interviews and asked trained native-speaker judges to place each transcript on a scale from 0 (no knowledge of English) to 5 (a level of English expected from an educated native speaker). The findings were quite dramatic. The transcripts of all native speakers and 32 out of 33 second language speakers who had begun learning English before the age of 15 were rated 4+ or 5. The homogeneity of the pre-puberty learners suggests that, for this group, success in learning a second language was almost inevitable. In contrast, 27 of the 32 post-puberty learners were rated between 3 and 4, but a few learners were rated higher (4+ or 5) and one was rated at 2+. The performance of this group looked like the sort of range one would expect if one were measuring success in learning almost any kind of skill or knowledge: some people did extremely well; some did poorly; most were in the middle.

In a longitudinal study, Kelleen Toohey (2000) observed a group of children aged 5–7 in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 in Vancouver, Canada. The group included children who were native speakers of English, as well as children whose home language was Cantonese, Hindi, Polish, Punjabi, or Tagalog. All the children were in the same class, and English was the medium of instruction. Toohey identified three classroom practices that led to the separation of the ESL children. First, the ESL children’s desks were placed close to the teacher’s desk, on the assumption that they needed more direct help from the teacher. Some of them were also removed from the classroom twice a week to obtain assistance from an ESL teacher. Second, instances in which the ESL learners interacted more with each other usually involved borrowing or lending materials but this had to be done surreptitiously because the teacher did not always tolerate it. Finally, there was a ‘rule’ in the classroom that children should not copy one another’s oral or written productions. This was particularly problematic for the ESL children because repeating the words of others was often the only way in which they could participate in conversational interaction. According to Toohey, these classroom practices led to the exclusion of ESL students from activities and associations in school and also in the broader community in which they were new members. Furthermore, such practices did not contribute positively to the children’s ESL development.

learners receiving intensive ESL instruction for five hours every day for five months of one school year (in Grade 5 or 6) were compared to learners at the end of secondary school who had received the same total amount of instruction spread over 7–8 years of schooling. On a number of measures, the students who received the intensive instruction performed as well as or better than those whose instruction was delivered in what has been called a ‘drip feed’ approach (Lightbown and Spada 1994). In subsequent research, comparisons were made between groups of Grade 5 and 6 students who participated in intensive English language instruction during a single school year, but with the time distributed differently: some students received five hours of English a day for five months; others received the same total number of hours, doing two and a half hours of English each day for 10 months. The researchers found that both groups benefited from the overall increase in hours of instruction with some additional advantages for learners receiving the more intensive instruction (Collins et al. 1999; Collins and White 2011). The advantages were evident not only in superior language abilities but also in attitudes toward the language and satisfaction with language learning experiences. Similar findings have been reported for different models of intensive and core French programmes (Netten and Germain 2004; Lapkin, Hart, and Harley 1998).

How This Book Works

In Tinkham (1993), two experiments compared the learning rates of the same ESL learners who were learning semantically related and then semantically unrelated target vocabulary items. Results of this study showed that the learners were able to learn the semantically unrelated target items much more quickly than they could do with the semantically related items.

commit suicide, commit grand larceny, commit adultery. Thus, commit does not mean just “do or make” but “do or make something negative.” An ESL student who learns that commit in commit a murder means “to do or perform an action” might attempt to make the following seemingly logical combinations: commit a joke on someone, commit the housework, commit a lie. The problem—a huge problem for nonnative learners—is that commit does not collocate with joke, housework, or lie.

Learning a second language entails learning numerous aspects of that language, including vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, composition, reading, culture, and even body language. Unfortunately, traditionally vocabulary has received less attention in second language (L2) pedagogy than any of these other aspects, particularly grammar. Arguably, vocabulary is perhaps the most important component in L2 ability. For more than 2,000 years, the study of a foreign language primarily entailed grammatical analysis, which was practiced through translation of written work (Hinkel & Fotos, 2002). As a result, vocabulary has been academically excluded from or at best limited within L2 curricula and classroom teaching. A perusal of ESL textbooks quickly reveals a lack of focus on vocabulary. Unlike books in French, Spanish, or other foreign languages, there are no vocabulary lists in the lessons/units or vocabulary index at the back of the book. Exercises practicing vocabulary may be found in reading books, but such exercises are rarely found in grammar books, speaking books, listening books, or writing books in spite of the importance of vocabulary in these areas.

You’re such a nerd.” She laughed cruelly at me. “What?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I laughed too, just in case it was a joke, but right away I felt hurt. “LPT,” she said. “TIMATOV. ROFLAARP. PRGV. Totally PRGV.” The youth and their abbreviations. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about. “Right,” I said. “IMF. PLO. ESL.” She looked at me like I was insane. “JBF,” she said.

sheltered classes are for intermediate [language learners], not beginners.” The reason should be obvious: “It is extremely difficult to teach subject matter to those who have acquired none or little of the language. Beginners should be in regular ESL, where they are assured of comprehensible input.”63 Unrealistic language demands create, in effect, a sink-or-swim situation, in which academic learning is minimal.

You may be good. You may even be better than everyone esle. But without a coach you will never be as good as you could be.

15But make sure in your hearts that Christ is Lord. Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the hope you have. Be ready to give the reason for it. But do it gently and with respect.

23Everyone has sinned. No one measures up to God’s glory. 24The free gift of God’s grace makes all of us right with him. Christ Jesus paid the price to set us free. 25God gave him as a sacrifice to pay for sins. So he forgives the sins of those who have faith in his blood.

Los buenos son malvados, los malvados son buenos. Los tiempos cambian. Esl es en lo que se ha convertido Oz.

Unless you're living in the best neighborhoods, Philadelphia is indeed everything David Lynch claims it is: a very sick, twisted, violent, fear-ridden, decadent and decaying place. Huyen was so shocked, she wanted to go back to Vietnam immediately. Only pride prevented her from doing so. Grays Ferry was sullen and desolate and everyone seemed paranoid. Saigon is often squalid but it is never desolate. Vietnam is a disaster, agreed, but it is a socialized disaster, whereas America is -- for many people, natives or not -- a solitary nightmare. If Americans weren't so stoic and alienated, if they weren't' so cool, they wouldn't be so quiet about their desperation. Huyen could handle poverty, but she had no aptitude for paranoia, the one skill you needed to survive in Philadelphia. In Saigon you dreaded being cheated or robbed; in Philadelphia you feared getting raped and killed. In the end, Philadelphia was even worse than Eraserhead, because it didn't last for 108 minutes but went on forever. As in Vietnam, Huyen sought comfort in American movies to escape from the real America she could see just outside her window. Every American home was its own inviolable domain, a fortress with the door never left open. The rest of the world could go to hell as long as there was enough beer in the fridge and a good game on TV. And utopia was already on the internet, why go outside if you didn't have to? In the morning, Huyen kept the door locked, bolted and chained, and watched Jerry Springer -- in his glasses and tweed suit the image of a college professor -- to learn more about Americans and improve her colloquial English. In the afternoon, she took a bus to the YMCA to attend an ESL class. At night, the couple barely screwed in the land of bountiful screwing. His wife was so tense, Jaded went back to masturbating.

But something seemed funny, even strange and surreal. When she called her friends mouses, was that right? What's the deal?

In this book we look at the learning conditions of repetition, deliberate attention, retrieval, and creative use which are very important for language learning, and teachers could examine how well the activities they use make use of these conditions.

To an ESL student, every class is an English class.

In the words of Nizar, the surliest and least-English-speaking of Benson’s ESL kids, “Fuck dick shit ass.

My letter,” Bella said in Yiddish that was a bit garbled, but perfectly understandable. “I want my letter back and she won’t give it to me. Why doesn’t she understand my English?” “That’s Yiddish you’re speaking,” Yetta said. “No, it’s not,” Bella said irritably. “It’s the English I learned in the factory.” “It’s Yiddish! You must have learned Yiddish because there were so many of us Jews in the factory. Listen”—Yetta switched languages—“English sounds like this.” Bella stared up at Yetta, her eyes seeming to grow in her pale face. “I don’t even know what Yiddish is,” she said, in Yiddish….. “Bella learned Yiddish by mistake,” Yetta said. “She thought she was speaking English.” “Wish I could learn a new language just by mistake,” Jane said. “I’ve been studying Italian for weeks, and it’s totally useless.

Ironically, being an ESL student made it easy for me to speak up. I continued to need so many words and English-language concepts explained that isolated questions became an ongoing dialogue. The more we spoke, the more I realized that he wasn’t anything like the teacher I’d overheard dismissing the intellectual capabilities of girls back in China, or the discouraging restaurant boss who’d all but mocked my love for reading. He could be terse and abrasive, but he never wrote me off the way others had. He was challenging me, and it was working.

City University of New York officials recall a nighttime security guard at Brooklyn College telling them he saw immigrants line up before 4:00 A.M. for a 9:00 A.M. open registration for ESL classes. The nativist claim that immigrants do not want to learn English makes me hysterical.

To provide a foundation in the use of ASL with its unique vocabulary and syntax rules; English as a second language (ESL) instruction

¿Para qué ha y que molestar a la gente que se muera, si de muerte es el final normal y legítimo de todo? ¿Qué esl o que cambia si un triste comerciante o un funcionario vive unos cinco o diez años de más? Incluso si consideramos que el objeto de la medicina está en que los medicamentos alivian los sufrimientos, sin querer salta la pregunta: ¿para qué aliviarlos? En primer lugar, se dice que los sufrimientos abren al hombre el camino de la perfección, y en segundo lugar, si de verdad la humanidad aprendiese a aliviar sus sufrimientos con pastillas y gotas, entonces abandonaría definitivamente la religión y la filosofía, en las cuales ha encontrado hasta ahora no solo protección ante todo género de desgracias, sino incluso la felicidad." - El Pabellón N. 6

Jed Fernandez is also excellent for classroom teaching. Teachers can engage students in a classroom vocabulary or grammar review. Jed Fernandez is suitable for intermediate and advanced esl learners. It can be used to energize a dull class, to review work that was done or simply as a reward for good classroom work. Have fun teaching and learning English. jedfernandezimages.blogspot.com

This game is likewise fantastic for study hall educating. Instructors can draw in understudies in a study hall jargon or sentence structure audit. Jed Fernandez is appropriate for middle of the road and progressed esl students. It very well may be utilized to invigorate a dull class, to audit work that was done or essentially as a compensation for good study hall work. Have some good times educating and learning English.

Dumpling is the kind of dog that makes people on the street do double- and triple-takes and ask in astonished voices, "What kind of dog IS that?!" His head is way too small for his thick, solid body, and his legs are too spindly. His eyes point away from each other like a chameleon. One side of his mouth curls up a little, half-Elvis, half palsy-victim, and his tongue has a tendency to stick out just a smidgen on that side. He was found as a puppy running down the median of a local highway, and I adopted him from PAWS five years ago, after he had been there for nearly a year. He is, without a doubt, the best thing that ever happened to me. My girlfriend Bennie says it looks like he was assembled by a disgruntled committee. Barry calls him a random collection of dog bits. My mom, in a classic ESL moment, asked upon meeting him, "He has the Jack Daniels in him, leetle bit, no?' I was going to correct her and say Jack Russell, but when you look at him, he does look a little bit like he has the Jack Daniels in him. My oldest nephew, Alex, who watches too much Family Guy and idolizes Stewie, took one look, and then turned to me in all seriousness and said in that weird almost-British accent, "Aunt Alana, precisely what brand of dog is that?" I replied, equally seriously, that he was a purebred Westphalian Stoat Hound. When the kid learns how to Google, I'm going to lose major cool aunt points. Dumpling tilts his head back and licks the underside of my chin, wallowing in love. "Dog, you are going to be the death of me. You have got to let me sleep sometime." These words are barely out of my mouth, when he leaps up and starts barking, in a powerful growly baritone that belies his small stature.

I’ve come to believe there are four types of ESL teachers in Asia. The first are young people looking to travel for a year or two and save a bit of money before returning home and starting the careers they would sink into for the rest of their lives. The second are those who end up marrying an Asian and living the rest of their lives as expatriates, maybe flying home every so often for a wedding or a funeral or Christmas with their ageing parents. The third are the more adventurous who are willing to give up the better salaries and standards of living in Japan and South Korea for a more laissez faire lifestyle in a tropical environment in Southeast Asia.

If she lives here, she is expected to speak the language, Eric says. Immediately, he apologizes. Immediately, I put the stapler down. But I can't forgive him. That thing you said, I have heard from other people as well. So I don't need to hear it from you. Who am I really trying to forgive? That thing he says I have also thought as well. I have probably even said it. Her poor English is not for a lack of trying. She goes to ESL. She goes to reading groups. She is frustrated-- a former pharmacist with a great memory but that memory is no longer there. Yet how this must have felt: in high school, I walk ten feet in front of her whenever we are out in public. She asks for help and I pretend not to hear her. Then when she tells the neighbor there are three panthers in the house, I am mortified. I correct her. Only later do I see humor in it.

I repeat, Há, and wish I knew enough English to tell her to listen for the diacritical mark, this one directing the tone downward.

24In a race all the runners run. But only one gets the prize. You know that, don’t you? So run in a way that will get you the prize. 25All who take part in the games train hard. They do it to get a crown that will not last. But we do it to get a crown that will last forever.