Foreign and local ESL teacher co-teaching a Taiwan classroom
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Co-Teaching With Local Teachers: 7 ESL Tips

Co-teaching with local teachers works when you split roles by lesson phase instead of by title, protect a fixed slot of planning time even if it’s only 15 minutes, and let your local co-teacher take the lead on classroom culture, discipline norms, and parent communication. The pairs that struggle almost always skip the planning time…

teacher using content-based instruction to teach ESL students a science lesson
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Content-Based Instruction: 7 ESL Techniques

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) teaches English by having students learn real subject matter — science, math, social studies, current events — in English, rather than studying grammar for its own sake. Students pick up vocabulary and structure as a byproduct of understanding content they actually need, which closes the gap between conversational fluency and academic language…

Teacher presenting to a diverse ESL classroom using multiple intelligences techniques
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Multiple Intelligences: 8 ESL Techniques

Multiple intelligences theory, developed by Howard Gardner in 1983, holds that students have distinct strengths across eight areas — linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist — rather than one fixed IQ score. For ESL teachers, that means pairing vocabulary and grammar with movement, music, art, and group work so students who struggle…

Teacher using the SIOP model to teach English language learners in a diverse classroom
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SIOP Model: 7 Proven ESL Techniques

The SIOP model (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) is a research-based framework for teaching academic content to English language learners without simplifying the material itself. It works through 7 classroom techniques — building background, comprehensible input, scaffolded strategies, structured interaction, guided practice, varied delivery, and multi-format review — that let a teacher cover the same science,…

ESL teacher introducing lexical approach vocabulary chunks to young students in classroom
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The Lexical Approach: 7 ESL Techniques

The lexical approach teaches English as a stock of ready-made chunks — collocations, fixed phrases, and sentence frames — instead of grammar rules plus single words. Developed by Michael Lewis in 1993, it argues that fluent speakers aren’t assembling sentences word by word; they’re retrieving pre-built phrases like “take a break” or “as far as…

ESL teacher using the ESA method to present a lesson to students
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ESA Method: 7 Best ESL Techniques

The ESA method — Engage, Study, Activate — is a three-stage lesson-planning framework Jeremy Harmer introduced in his 1998 book How to Teach English. Unlike the fixed order of PPP, ESA lets teachers reorder or repeat its three stages using one of three sequences (straight arrows, boomerang, or patchwork) to match what’s actually happening in…

Dogme Language Teaching: 7 Best Tips
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Dogme Language Teaching: 7 Best Tips

Dogme language teaching is an ESL approach that drops the textbook and builds the lesson from conversation instead — the teacher reacts to what students actually say, writes it up correctly on the board, and lets grammar and vocabulary emerge from that exchange rather than from a pre-set syllabus. Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings developed…