About Insights to English
Insights to English is an award-winning nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting English language educators — especially those in TESOL — so that they might become better equipped to present and practice English grammar topics with their students.
How-to-Teach Resources
The cornerstone of Insights’s offerings is our ‘How to Teach’ Grammar Guides. These materials go above and beyond what teachers typically find in standard textbooks. Chief among these resources are videos that model a condensed conversation between teacher and student about the given grammar topic. These videos not only cover the basics of that topic, but also present an innovative approach to presenting it in order to make the topic easier to understand and easier to remember. Our methods are suitable for students of varying learning styles and can be adapted according to varying teaching styles and classroom environments!
In addition to our videos, our How to Teach pages include prerequisites for the topic, information about the relevant proficiency levels, bonus notes, printouts like posters and handouts, recommended practice activities, slideshows for your lessons, and links to related student projects that we’ve crafted.
While much of this content can be shared directly with students, it’s designed more specifically for teachers. Our expectation is that teachers can learn more information about the topic as well as view it from a new perspective, then apply what they’ve learned as they present the topic to their students in their own words, accompanied by other resources such as practice materials. By the way, Insights methods and materials do not replace your curriculum, but rather supplement it. Visit our How It Works page to learn more.
The Insights Illuminated Approach
Insights believes there is a more effective way to teach a grammar point than simply showing students what it should look like and presenting a list of situations when they should use it. We’ve done research into why grammar is the way it is so that we can understand the heart of English language communication. We show teachers how to:
- break a structure down to 3 or 4 parts, or break a transformation down to 3 or 4 steps;
- establish rules-of-thumb to avoid common mistakes;
- identify patterns so that students can form associations between form and meaning; and
- draw connections between related grammar topics so that new concepts feel familiar.
We also believe that students learn better with teachers who can tailor explanations and examples to meet the students’ experiences and who can answer questions with more nuance than students are likely to discover online or in a book. That’s why we work so hard to aim our content toward teachers: the more informed they are and the more confident they feel, the more effectively their students can learn!
Get all the details at our What Sets Us Apart page.
Insightsopedia
This is Insights to English’s Grammar Encyclopedia for Educators. Designed like a Wikipedia-styled resource base, it contains pages on various grammar topics and features of English grammar. Other linguistic properties such as vocabulary and phonology are not heavily featured here, though they may be mentioned where relevant to certain grammar pages.
Unlike most encyclopedias, this one is geared toward English language teaching, especially (but not exclusively) that of the TESOL variety. Insights, and in particular this encyclopedia, bridges the gap between the science of linguistics and the art of teaching. As such, it contains some subjective explanations and terminology (visit the Insights Standards page to learn more). In addition to essential information about the featured grammar topics and features, some Insightsopedia pages also include a Teaching Tips section or links to more content for educators.
Support Our Mission
Insights to English is a 501C-3 nonprofit organization. Our mission is to share an illuminated approach to teaching English that fosters a deeper comprehension of grammar. We believe that quality education should be available to everyone, everywhere.
If you value our work, please consider donating to Insights. Your contributions help us to produce and share more content, and they allow us to keep most of our resources available for free! Click the button below to learn more about how to donate and what we would do with your contributions.