Search results matching tags 'elementary', 'all levels', 'teenagers', and 'speaking'

First Lesson Aims: Dave Tucker Guest Post!

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:30:23 GMT

If you’ve had time to look at recent posts on this blog, you’ll have noticed a series of “first lesson” ideas and activities… after all, it’s September, we’ve all got “back-to-school-itis”!

Stepping back from the plethora of great teaching ideas to fill the class time, today our guest blogger, Dave Tucker, looks at some broader learning and teaching goals that we might want to think about before we start planning!

First Lesson Aims

I love first lessons. I tend to approach first lessons with new groups feeling uniformly nervous but excited. I come out of first lessons feeling variously elated, charged up, determined, sometimes shocked, but never despondent. A whole school year ahead to make the most of the medley of characteristics and quirks the students have, in the same nervous mindset as me, laid bare in the first moment of meeting! Lots of activities have in mind exactly this opening and sharing: “getting to know you” is the general term applied to these jolly bare-alls, but different ages, levels and group-types have different aims and needs.

Rather than focus on actual activities which are two a penny and available from anyone who has been through at least one year of this sort of thing, I instead choose to list here the possible aims for my first lessons and encourage people to sculpt accordingly. Not all the below can be achieved in the first lesson, of course, but I would suggest that most of them should make part of your aims in the first several lessons. Otherwise the rest of the school year could well be missing something that would help preserve that glorious sense of nervous excitement and stop it from so easily shading into despondency…

Possible aims for first lessons

Achievement / challenge – students should leave feeling they have learnt something and extended themselves right at the outset
Get to know each other & the teacher – fosters a sharing, supportive atmosphere in the classroom
Get to know the course/book/exam format – gives objective and direction for the course
Establish ground rules (conduct, homework, English, hands up) – removes need for later harrying, lets everyone know where they stand
Set patterns for future lessons (signals, speaking positions, greetings, etc.) – why waste the first lesson? Get into it now and make your life easier!
Establish a positive atmosphere – we want them to enjoy their learning from the outset – we want shy or reluctant students to want to come back for more!
Provide something for learners of all styles – cater for everyone at the beginning, get new students used to new styles
Analyse learning styles – get students to start making the most of their own strong learning channels
Use the discipline system – let students see that it’s not just for show, that rewards and consequences do actually work!
Give rationale for course & methods – students like to know why they’re doing what they’re doing: sometimes the reason for movement or guided discovery isn’t as obvious as we might believe
Needs analysis – help students realise that you are willing to be flexible enough to cater for their needs from the beginning

Have fun! Above all, have fun.

Dave Tucker has been in ELT for 24 years: as a teacher with a particular focus on Young Learners, as a teacher trainer on Young Learner development courses and also as Director of Studies of International House Coimbra (Portugal) for 15 years. He is the author of three Teacher’s Editions for the Primary Macmillan Series Take Shape.

Acknowledgement: Teflgeek has simply copied Dave’s author biography from his profile page on the Macmillan website. This does not represent an endorsement of Teflgeek by Macmillan or vice versa.

First Lesson or First Week Ideas

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:30:14 GMT

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix:

Recently, the 24th Edition of EFL/ESL/ELL Blog Carnival : A Journey in TEFL got posted on Eva Buyuksimkesyan’s “A Journey in TEFL” blog. I strongly recommend taking a look here if you’re in need of inspiration – Eva’s collated over 40 (I lost count) posts from different contributors.

The Lesson Plans Page also has a wide range of back to school resources and materials, though these are aimed more at native speaker young learner classes than a language learner class – and I’ve not tried any of them, so can’t vouch for them personally!

First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last summer!

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:30:07 GMT

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”.

Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class.

I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when. Anyway, the key to the activity, is that if John is writing about Amy’s holidays, John can’t talk directly to Amy. John has to ask the other learners in the class, Frank, Marta and so forth to ask Amy the questions that John wants to know the answers to.

Thus through a constant process of questions and answers John eventually gets enough information to write Amy’s composition for her. Of course, Amy will be writing Marta’s, Marta Frank’s and Frank John’s, so it all evens out eventually.

This is intended as an alternative for classes where learners do know each other – but it also works really well as the final part of a lesson with a class where nobody knows each other, as John will constantly be explaining to his classmates WHO Amy is, thus meaning everyone should have a much better idea of who everybody else in the class is by the end of it!

Having gathered together all the information during the lesson – the actual writing up of the composition can either be done in class or as a homework task. What can then be interesting is for the writer and the subject to check how close to the truth the composition is. The subject can then feedback and edit both the content and language of the composition for later revision – though this would be an optional stage depending on the abilities of the class.

First Lesson: Find Nobody Who…

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:30:58 GMT

This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation. Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you…

It should also combat those conversations with teenage classes that go: T: “Hey, how was your summer?” S: “Alright.” T: ”What did you do?” S: “Nothing.”

The basic objective is that the learners have to find stuff they did over the holidays that NOBODY else did.

So a simple procedure might be:

Ask the learners if they had a nice summer and lead into a REALLY boring description of what you did over the summer. e.g. I watched TV and I played computer games and I did some laundry and stuff. Ask the learners if they did anything similar. Establish that pretty much everybody in the class watched TV and played computer games. Then tell the learners about something slightly more interesting and less usual – for example taking a plane trip – and find out how many people did the same. Finally, describe something really interesting that you did – or alternatively make something up (e.g. rented a Ferrari and drove up the West coast of the USA). Find out whether anyone else did the same.

Thus having established the exclusivity principle, ask learners to find something that they did over the summer that nobody else did. Check that they understand they need to talk to ALL the other learners in the class.

Feedback: Find out from the learners what interesting and relatively exclusive things they did over the summer. You could also do some reformulation of any language areas that came up during their mingle activity.

Working with Project Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:02:14 GMT

This is an entry for everyone currently working at an ELT summer school somewhere in the world! It’s not always easy and there’s a lot of hard work – hopefully this post will help out a bit! I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy my summer school experiences immensely over the years and one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing most has been the project classes. This post takes a look at what’s important to remember before the project class kicks off and gives some ideas for different projects and how to stage them.

There are a number of advantages to doing project work with learners – projects can be (if done right):

Collaborative – they encourage learners to work together to generate something personal and meaningful
Communicative – by their very nature they put learners in a situation where communication is necessary in order to achieve the goal.
Cross-Curricular – they don’t have to be based solely in the language classroom but can draw on learner knowledge from other areas
Cross-cultural – they can be used to develop learners intercultural awareness and intercultural communication skills, both towards the target language culture, but also across the classroom cultural spectrum.
Task-based – there will inevitably be a set of linguistic items that learners need to perform the task successfully. Projects can provide a “real” need for language in order to successfully accomplish the goal.

For me, any project needs to follow five main stages: OUTLINE – PLANNING – GATHERING – CREATION – OUTCOME.

OUTLINE: obviously in a summer school context where the projects might involve more than one class, the decision as to what type of project or what topic area to be investigated might be taken out of the learners’ hands. The OUTLINE therefore needs to be discussed amongst colleagues or decided by the teacher in advance of the class. If you’re only doing a project with one class, then you can involve the learners in this discussion stage, thus making it a bit more relevant to their lives, a bit more consensual and less imposed. At this stage te.achers will also need to think about what the OUTCOME of the project might be, to make sure that they have the relevant materials or technologies available. Sample OUTLINES for six different project ideas are given below.

PLANNING: Once the project outline has been decided, it can (if not already) be handed over to the learners for further development. With younger learners, or in the summer school context, the main role of the teacher is one of restraint! You need to make sure that what your learners are planning is achievable in the time frame or with the resources available! In essence, you need to make sure someone thinks about the practicalities. Keep asking those questions like: ”That’s a brilliant idea! So where are you going to find the elephants for the parachute display?”

GATHERING: Most projects will involve a degree of information gathering – but not all. So depending on the project, this can be an optional stage. But you could also see this stage as a deeper exploration of the ideas generated in the planning stage.

CREATION: Where it all comes together. Break out the scissors, glue and cardboard. Book out the computer room, make friends with the art department. Throw the relevant supplies at the class (making sure there’s not too much glitter) and stand back. If you have identified learners in your class with tendencies towards perfectionism – make sure they’re working together so that you only have one unfinished group at the end of the class and so that everyone else is more likely to contribute!

OUTCOME: It’s worth remembering that not every project needs to involve glitter and glue – in fact the more memorable projects might not involve any. Arts and Craft is great, but at a summer school the kids get arts and crafts lessons separately – they probably don’t need more of the same. In other words – the primary outcome of the project should be linguistic. One of my proudest TEFL memories is watching 150 students do a whole school survey mingle (details below). A colleague recalls watching a student shine during a poetry recital (the student in question is now part of the administrative staff). The most important thing about the OUTCOME is that somebody else should see it. Not just the class that made it – but everyone else in the school! Or the teachers’ room, or parents. But somebody and that these people should have the chance to provide feedback in some way. After all – what’s the point in spending three days making a poster on global warming if it just stays up in the classroom? The students know what it looks like – they made it!

So the outcome should be primarily linguistic and highly visible. If possible, some sort of competition or vote by and amongst the learners on the work performed by their peers?

So finally – here are some of the ideas that I’ve worked with over the years:

PROJECT:	LESSON 1:	LESSON 2:	LESSON 3:	OUTCOME:
Interclass Surveys	SS decide what they will survey and generate a questionnaire	Whole school mingle (somewhere!) and SS ask and answer each other’s questions	SS collate the data from their surveys and prepare their displays	SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc. Other SS view the displays.
PhotoStory	SS plot their stories and decide which scenes need pictures taking	SS take their pictures out and about. (NB – need sufficient digital cameras?) Teachers print pictures	SS organise their images and write text captions / plot synopses.	SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc Other SS view the displays.
Performance Poetry Festival	SS research some poems they like and choose one	SS dramatise the poem into a mini play?	SS gather to watch and perform	Performance based
Board GameBattle	SS plan and design a board game (on any topic / idea) and request materials	SS use the materials to create their board games. T feeds in “game” language etc	The SS and the games gather somewhere and play each others games and vote for the best one?	Demonstrations and playing of different games
Class Newspapers / Magazines	SS research news stories, either from their own country or elsewhere	SS incorporate / edit their stories into a single “newpaper” / magazine.	SS gather somewhere, swap their efforts and read each others – vote for the best?	Written / typed newspaper (copies to take home?)
Shopaholics	SS spend half the time finding out how much they can buy for 50 pounds and half their time planning and designing their own shops	SS actually create their own shops (online pictures of items / shop catalogues?) T teach polite requests & Shopkeeper argot.	SS then go shopping. The idea is to buy the highest number of things for 50quid without buying more than one of the same item	Whole school roleplay / “controlled” language practice

If there’s any clarification needed of any of these ideas – let me know!

Zip Zap Boing (I think?)

Anonymous — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:01:24 GMT

I blame that Simon Thomas over at efl-resource. It’s all his fault. And I’m still not sure whether it’s “zip zap zop” or “zig zag zog” or something else entirely!

I’ve inherited a class, which Simon once taught back in the misty dawn of time, of 12-year-old pre-intermediate students. When I walked in the classroom the other day, they were all so keen and motivated to begin the lesson that they roundly rejected my fun warmer and started going on about this bizarre pointing game. With some careful misunderstandings on my part, it took them ten minutes to explain the rules to me, all of which they did in extremely fluent English (which only goes to show if the motivation is there, the language will follow).

As far as I can work out, everyone stands in a circle. Someone starts things off and the game runs as follows: if you point (in a sort of two handed gun gesture) to the person on your immediate left or right you say ZIP, to anyone else in the circle you say ZAP. To deflect someone’s pointing at you back at them, you hold both hands up (as if in surrender) and say “BOING”.

It’s meant to be a fast paced, rapid fire game and if you get it wrong you’re out (though I’m not sure how you then declare a winner?).

To give this a larger linguistic focus or to work with higher levels, you could do this with parts of speech: Nouns to the left, verbs to the right and adjectives down the middle! A colleague, Alexis, also does this with vocabulary categories: learners have to precede their ZIP/ZAP/BOING with a vocabulary item linked to the target category.

A nice way to start the lesson – or a fun way to finish it!

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:54:20 GMT

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..

There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….

Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?

But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource. Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind. Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!

There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).

These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!

Giving Feedback – 20 ways to do it!

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:56:44 GMT

Giving feedback on classroom tasks is a tricky thing to come up with ideas for. Broadly, I think methods can be broken down into Collaborative / Competitive / Partial / Full. The four methods can interact, so you can have competitive partial feedback, followed by collaborative full feedback – or vice versa.

Collaborative methods might involve learners checking specific answers with you and boarding correct versions – or you can monitor and ask stronger students to board the odd correct answer. Thus all the learners eventually, by a process of deduction and copying, end up with the right answers. Or they might involve giving learners specific answers and asking them to show the answers to each other (as per the silent mingle).

Competitive methods will inevitably involve a certain amount of movement, energy and the occasional broken limb. Board races, team games and points allocation all play a part.

Partial feedback methods will often involve allocating points, but not actually correcting the answers. With multiple choice, you might say “you need 4 As, 2 Bs, 1 C and 3 Ds”. Or my favourite is “you’ve got six wrong”. Partial feedback methods should ideally be used for one of two purposes – either to provide additional support for a difficult task, or possibly to slow down the faster finishers, or those learners who focus more on task completion than on accuracy.

Full feedback – essentially this is making sure everyone has a correct set of answers. It does however go a little beyond that, as you might want to check that learners understand why the answers are correct. Concept questions and checking questions are useful here.

The twenty different ideas listed below all arose from contributions made by everyone who was at a seminar I ran at International House Coimbra on March 22^nd 2011. My thanks to the participants (Jo, Jenny, Dave T, Kate, Jessica, Vera, Alexis, Dave C, Anna, Neil, Stella, Judy, Patricia, Marta, Michael, Daniel) for their contributions.

The notes given are my understanding of the different methods that were described – if I didn’t get any of it quite right or if you have an alternative way of doing it, please let me know!

A pdf version of this post is available to download here: teflgeek – giving feedback

1. Horse Racing:

Learners are in teams, each team has a “horse” (picture cut out) stuck to the board along a “track”, presumably with the same number of squares as there are questions. For every question a team gets right, their horse moves further along the track to the finishing line.

2. Gambling:

Learners are in teams, each team allocated a certain number of points / amount of fictional cash to gamble with. If they get the answer right, they win more cash – if it’s wrong they lose their stake!

3. Connect Four:

As with the popular game (which you could use if you have it available), the object is to get a horizontal or vertical line of four. The size of the grid can vary depending on how many questions you have to answer. A correct answer allows a team to “drop” a token into a column that they choose. A full explanation of the original game can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four. An online version of the game can be found here: http://www.fetchfido.co.uk/games/connect_4/connect_4.htm

4. Board Race:

Learners in two or three teams, which line up in files. A relay race then ensues with one learner from each team running to the board and writing up an answer before giving the pen to the next person in the team and going to the back of the line and so on. Points can be awarded for the fastest team to finish, then for correct answers and deductions made for spelling mistakes and so on. I’ve found it useful to have a chair marking the “start” line, beyond which only the learners with the pens are allowed, so as to prevent crowding and cheating at the board.

5. Group Comparison

A peer-teaching method where learners compare and correct their answers in groups. This also means that it allows the teacher to focus on the really difficult questions as most of the easier ones will have been dealt with at the group level.

6 Changing Pairs

Similar to group comparison, but done in pairs, though different pairs to any pairwork that occurred while learners were completing the task. A thought I just had was that you could also do this by allocating A and B to the learners and every two minutes the A’s stand up and move clockwise or the Bs stand up and move anti-clockwise. Thus all the learners would interact with each other eventually.

7 Answer Votes

Learners vote for the answers they think are correct.

8 Read out loud:

Learners read through the text one sentence at a time, providing the answer they think is correct as they get to a gap.

9 This many wrong

When examining a completed learner exercise, don’t tell the learners which questions they got wrong, only how many questions they got wrong. An extension of this – when a learner has got all the questions right, they can become the teacher and tell their peers how many are still incorrect.

10 Stand Up Sit down

As the teacher reads out possible answers to the question, learners stand up if they think the answer is correct and remain seated if they think it is incorrect. Possibly easiest to run this with multiple choice tasks.

11 Mini-boards

By laminating blank A4 paper (pastel shades or white paper work best for this), you can create mini-board which learners can write on with standard board pens. Pairs or teams can then write their answers on the boards and hold them up at the same time to show their answers. If you don’t have laminated mini-boards available, this is a good way to make in-roads into the scrap paper pile by the photocopier.

12 On the board

You can give learners the answers on the board in a number of ways – either just writing them up in order, writing up the number of different multiple choice answers (e.g. “there are 3 A, 2 B, 1 C, 4 D”), or you could just write up the answers in random places across the board. You could also include some distractors here, wrong answers that learners try to avoid!

13 Noughts & Crosses / Tic Tac Toe

Simple enough – learners in two teams and a correct answer wins learners a chance to take a square!

14 Round the Room

Put the answers up on the walls of the classroom, learners mingle and work out what goes where. A variety of this might be to put the answers on the learners (post it notes / sticky taped to their backs).

15 Jenga

If you have this game available, it can be a fun way of doing feedback. Teams with a correct answer can either elect to remove a block or make the other team remove a block. A full description of jenga can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga. An online version (requires FLASH) can be found here: http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/jenga.html

16 First Letter Last Letter

As a partial feedback technique, give teams the first and last letters of each answer.

17 Bin Basketball

Teams with a correct answer win the chance to throw a paper ball into the rubbish bin. Make sure they don’t through away the handout! An alternative for multiple choice tasks might be to have four bins, marked A, B, C & D and learners throw their paper balls at the correct basket (might need different coloured paper balls?).

18 Coloured Tick method

Learners are in different teams, allocated to a different colour board pen. Question numbers are on the board. As learners think they have a correct answer, they check it with you and are either told right or wrong. If they are right, they get a tick in their team’s colour next to the relevant question. That question is then gone and can’t be answered by other teams.

19 The square game.

For this you need to put a dot grid (i.e. three rows of three dots) on the board. Each team is allocated a different colour board pen. On giving a correct answer, each team gets the chance to connect two of the dots in their colour. The object is to complete a square. Squares can be made of different coloured lines, but the team that draws the line which completes the square gets to colour the square in their team’s colour.

20 TPR answers

Give each learner one of the answers and learners put themselves in the correct order for the text.

If anyone would like any further clarification of the tasks or actitvities listed, please let me know.

A pdf version of this post is available to download here: teflgeek – giving feedback

Search results matching tags 'elementary', 'all levels', 'teenagers', and 'speaking'

First Lesson Aims: Dave Tucker Guest Post!

First Lesson Aims

First Lesson or First Week Ideas

First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last summer!

First Lesson: Find Nobody Who…

Working with Project Classes

PROJECT:

LESSON 1:

LESSON 2:

LESSON 3:

OUTCOME:

Interclass Surveys

SS decide what they will survey and generate a questionnaire

Whole school mingle (somewhere!) and SS ask and answer each other’s questions

SS collate the data from their surveys and prepare their displays

SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc. Other SS view the displays.

PhotoStory

SS plot their stories and decide which scenes need pictures taking

SS take their pictures out and about. (NB – need sufficient digital cameras?) Teachers print pictures

SS organise their images and write text captions / plot synopses.

SS poster displays are put up in the corridors etc Other SS view the displays.

Performance Poetry Festival

SS research some poems they like and choose one

SS dramatise the poem into a mini play?

SS gather to watch and perform

Performance based

Board GameBattle

SS plan and design a board game (on any topic / idea) and request materials

SS use the materials to create their board games. T feeds in “game” language etc

The SS and the games gather somewhere and play each others games and vote for the best one?

Demonstrations and playing of different games

Class Newspapers / Magazines

SS research news stories, either from their own country or elsewhere

SS incorporate / edit their stories into a single “newpaper” / magazine.

SS gather somewhere, swap their efforts and read each others – vote for the best?

Written / typed newspaper

(copies to take home?)

Shopaholics

SS spend half the time finding out how much they can buy for 50 pounds and half their time planning and designing their own shops

SS actually create their own shops (online pictures of items / shop catalogues?)

T teach polite requests & Shopkeeper argot.

SS then go shopping. The idea is to buy the highest number of things for 50quid without buying more than one of the same item

Whole school roleplay / “controlled” language practice

Zip Zap Boing (I think?)

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

Giving Feedback – 20 ways to do it!