Why use it?

This blog is a great tool becuase it provides students and teachers with reading passages and writing prompts to stimulate these productive skills. It also helps students develop autonomy, which is very important to have during any learning process. Autonomous students learn faster and in a more meaningful way, making the acquired knowledge long lasting. Since students are going to be sharing their work this is going to help them become more confident, which is key during the process of learning a second language. We need to have confident learners that are not afraid of taking risks.

How to use it... (teachers)

Teachers, you can also use this blog as a tool to help your students improve their reading and writing skills. You can use it in different ways that will help them develop autonomy and acquire responsibility for their learning process:

• Assign your students a reading passage for homework and then have them respond to the question in class or you can even come up with a different question. 
• If you have access to a computer lab you can time your students in either a reading or a writing exercise and have them do it in class. Then they can share their answers. 
• Keep a reading and writing chart where you keep track of the number of passages and prompts that students do per week. Reward them at the end with a reading or writing honor roll. Remember that rewarding students for their achievements is important in order to keep them motivated. 
• If you have a video beam in your classroom, try doing reading exercises with the whole class to help them develop reading comprehension. Young learners require guided reading exercises when they are first starting to help them gain confidence. 
• You can also do exercises with them to practice different reading strategies like scanning and skimming. 

How to use it... (learners)

This blog is a great tool for esl students who want to enhance their reading and writing skills, The way it works as follows:
First pick a reading passage according to your level . To make it more challenging you could time yourself, around 20 minutes per passage, that way you can start developing different skills, like skimming and scanning. (I will explain this strategies in the blog as well and provide exercises to help you use them)
Second answer the question posted at the end of the reading passage and share your asnwers with the rest of the RETERS (these are the readers and writers that belong to this blog´s community).
Third, answer a writing prompt and share what you have written. Do not forget to write your personal information(name, last name, age, email address, and nationality) for author´s rights sake.

Note: Make your to write your pesonal information whenever you share your answers. That way we will keep track our RETERS´ progress.