Marmara Elt Resources

Some Suggestions to Assist ESL TeachersUsing and Managing Role-plays
Learning a language is a complex and long process as anyone who has tried will agree. One of the most difficult and frustrating things is making the transition from the classroom to the ‘real’ world. In the classroom, everyone knows you are a student and mistakes are allowed, and the environment is contained and safe. Speaking another language outside the classroom is completely different and often students are lost at sea as soon as they step outside the door. Lists of memorized vocabulary are suddenly useless when ordering in a restaurant.

Role-plays, or simulations are one of the ways ESL instructors can ease students’ transition into using English in real world situations. A simulation is where students act out a real-life situation, for example checking into at a hotel, but do not act out a different personality. Role-plays are where students take on different personalities. In a role-play, for example, one student may be asked to take on the role of “an angry neighbor” which is out of character for the student.
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Ten Tips to Teaching Middle School (By Bob Roach)
I can not tell you how many teachers have began their career teaching Middle School and quickly started looking for a new occupation. Believe me when I tell you that if you are not prepared for the job they will eat you alive on the first week of school.

If teaching is your occupation, and you are teaching Middle School, I hope you are ready to teach teenagers and not beat yourself up about teaching Math, Science, English, Literature, or Social Studies. I get very up set when I ask a fellow teacher what they are going to teach and they tell me they are going to teach Math. This brings me to the first of the ten tips I plan to share with you as you begin a new year teaching Middle School Students.

Ten tips:

1. Never forget that you are teaching teens. If someone asks you what you teach, you tell them that you teach an awesome group of over achievers known as teens. Read the rest of this entry »

ESL Literature Library-The Indian Who Lost His Wife
(Retold by Andrew Lang)
ONCE upon a time there was a man and his wife who lived in the forest
far from the rest of the tribe. Very often they spent the day in
hunting together, but after awhile the wife found that she had so many
things to do that she was obliged to stay at home; so he went alone,
though he found that when his wife was not with him he never had any
luck. One day, when he was away hunting, the woman fell ill, and in a
few days she died. Her husband grieved bitterly and buried her in the
house where she had passed her life; but as the time went on he felt so
lonely without her that he made a wooden doll about her height amid
size for company and dressed it in her clothes. He seated it in front
of the fire and tried to think he had his wife back again. The next
day he went out to hunt, and when he came home the first thing he did
was to go up to the doll and brush off some of the ashes from the fire
which had fallen on its face. But he was very busy now, for he had to
cook and mend, besides getting food, for there was no one to help him.
And so a whole year passed away.
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ESL Literature Library-Manabozho and the Woodpeckers
(Adapted from H. R. Schoolcraft)

MANABOZHO lost the greater part of his magical power through letting
his young wolf grandson fall through the thin ice and drown. No one
knew where his grandmother had gone to. He married the arrow maker’s
daughter, and became the father of several children, but he was very
poor and scarcely able to procure a living. His lodge was pitched in a
distant part of the country, where he could get no game, and it was
winter time. One day he said to his wife, “I will go out walking and
see if I can find some lodges.”

After walking some time he finally discovered a lodge at a distance.
There were children playing at the door, and when they saw him
approaching they ran in and told their parents Manabozho was coming.
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