Robert Guzman is a professor of undergraduate English courses at Puerto Rico. In his TED Talk, he reconts how early in his career, he would find himself disappointed and frustrated with the level of competence the language students graduated with. He noiced that the students working with grammar books, did not have the necessary cognitive skills of language wielding a native speaker would, so Guzman developed his own method of language instruction : "teaching English without teaching English". His method is divided into three parts : developing critical thinking skills, identifying and analyzing logical fallacies, and identifying levels of cognition. During the first stage, Guzman provides his students with a metaphorical "BS detector", which is his way of explicitly making sure his students are thinking about the content they are encoutering critically. The students then get in the habit of asking specific questions about the content, such as "Is the speaker comprehensive? Is the speaker being specific? Is the speaker and their provided information reputable?" Following the frequent use of the aforementioned "BS detector", the students are then encouraged to detect logical fallacies in their input content. Non sequiturs, ad hominems, arguments from authority, are examples of logical fallacies Guzman focuses on and teaches his students about. Last stage of Guzman's language acquisition, is taken from Benjamin Bloom's 5-6 skills of cognition. Guzman and his students look at other TED Talks, Youtube videos, essays from the internet, to read about and discuss current real world events. This engrosses the students in the content so much, it overshadows their awareness of language instruction occuring. The students are focusing on the conversation rather than language production, which is now a naturally occuring process. The classroom is engaged with each other when they ask questions to one another, "How do I say this?", (with encouragement from Guzman) they are comfortable expressing themselves to their best ability in the target language and at the same time, develop critical thinking skills that are not affected by target language limitations. 

 Seongyeon (Yeonie) Heo is a multilingual student, who at the time of making this video was attending the International School Bangkok. This TED Talk is an amazing place to start discovering what it is like to be a non-native speaker of English, living in an English-speaking environment. Yeonie discusses the struggles of how limitations of the target language influence the learner's identity, feelings, and self expression. Though not every ESL student is the same, Yeonie Heo is a great example when considering the questions "How can I best reach them? How can I best support them? What do they need outside the instruction?" All of these questions are integral to language instruction, as it is a highly interpersonal process that can only foster in place of comfortability and safety. Though I am a past ESL student as well, being at almost fluent proficiency level, I sometimes forget what it felt like to start out. This video will serve me, and I hope others, as a reminder to stay kind and patient, as well as introspective and open-minded to all experiences my future students may bring with them to class, ESL or not.