My Language Teaching Experience

The ESL Program is part of the Community Language Program at Teachers College. Students and faculty in the Applied Linguistics and TESOL program create a learning environment geared towards English as a Second Language learners who have come to New York from around the world.

The ESL students, who for the most part are adult learners, come to class four days a week during the summer sessions. Classes are 2.5 hours long. The teachers are students or alumni of the TESOL/AL program at TC. We not only try our best to teach the students how to speak, listen to, read, and write English, but we also facilitate our colleagues' research in language acquisition so that we can further the body of knowledge about ESL teaching and learning.

For more about the CEP, click here: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/communitylanguage/clp-courses/

Building a Community of Learners

As a multilingual, Urdu is one of my first languages.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to develop and teach a course on Urdu as a Foreign Language at the CIFLTE at Teachers College.

Group Work (part 1)

The lesson was on 'making wishes'

The students were paired up to figure out how to make 'wishes in the past'.

In Part 1 of the clip, I provide instructions and pair up the students for the activity.

As the students engage in the activity, I go around the class to facilitate the pairs and provide crucial scaffolding.

In Part 2 of the clip, the pair work comes to an end and the whole class discussion starts.