The Gentle ESL Way

If you have ever questioned whether you could help someone learn to speak English, the answer is: Yes you can. As a new teacher or volunteer teacher, you can help newcomers to your community express themselves in English as their second language. The Gentle ESL Way's purpose is to offer those who are contemplating teaching ESL a new confidence and firm foundation for working with their students. This approach for helping non-English speakers provides an understanding of the nature of English as a form of sound vibration. This foundation leads an ESL teacher into the use of music, chants, songs, poetry, and metaphor to help students "feel" English as a form of vibratory energy. Often students can puzzle together the working of grammar rules. They may read and write in English, but be unable to make the shift into speaking or meet their most pressing need to communicate. Helping students speak English is greatly enhanced and enlivened by viewing speaking as a natural process of new self-expression using new energy. Students develop the ability to speak as a process over time, and this relieves the teacher's stress of being solely responsible for students becoming bilingual. The Gentle ESL Way approach is supported by new information from new science about how Nature and the nature of language work. It provides a much needed scientific rationale and a comprehensive view of what second language teaching is all about, what language is, and how it forms organically as a function of the body. The new teacher can begin teaching with confidence as Nature's assistant and observer as English naturally happens to students. Also, with this perspective the new teacher can experience all the pieces of ESL - listening, speaking, reading, and writing - as a connected whole. The connectedness of teacher and student within Nature's process enables teachers to be themselves, to relax and enjoy the visible changes as their students become new speakers of English.