Search results matching tags 'teaching', 'cpe', 'ielts', 'cae', 'fce', and 'business'

Online Teaching Resource: Idioms Videos

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:30:16 GMT

I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions. The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a dictionary definition. One of the tasks they give is “Can you guess the idiom before the definition comes up?” If you had learners in teams with different coloured board pens, and they raced to write the expression on the board before it came up, it could work….

The videos are also available via the Pearson You Tube channel (I’ve tried to embed one of them below, but don’t think it’s worked – so click the link instead).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHo5DXDFGyo

Here’s the original page again: ELTCommunity.com: Space: Idioms Discussions.

The 8.5 billion dollar verb?

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:53:56 GMT

An interesting post by Deborah Capras on the Business Spotlight blog relating to Microsoft’s recent billion dollar purchase of Skype. She raises the question:

Doesn’t $8.5 billion seem a lot of money for a verb I use almost every day for free?

Which is a really good question and got me thinking…. How much are words worth? It would be an interesting concept to play around with, particularly in the business classroom, but elsewhere as well I think.

You would need to define your parameters fairly clearly and this is an idea that probably needs a bit more work, but, if you limited the supply of a number of words, things could get interesting…..

So my thought is that you create a chopped up vocabulary set for a discussion topic. So say you wanted to discuss the Microsoft / Skype deal, you’d highlight the most commonly used words in discussion about the deal (this could be done by using wordle over news story URLs) and create a set of vocab cards. the higher frequency the word, the more copies you make of it – so while everybody might get a “Microsoft” card, or a “Skype” card, only one or two people would get a “deal” card or a “takeover” card. Then in conversation, if they wanted to use the word “deal”, they’d have to negotiate the purchase of the word from someone who owned it.

The negotiation process could take place either pre-conversation or during conversation. You could either allocate each participant with a set mythical amount of money (i.e. here is your thousand Euros), or people could swap words. Though this wouldn’t really set the value of the words.

It would be a really interesting way of increasing learners awareness of the value of high frequency vocabulary.

Just a thought anyway… I welcome any contributions from economists willing to help correct any fundamental flaws in the idea!

For more teaching ideas based on the Microsoft Skype deal have a look here:

The English Blog: “Words in the News – Gamble”
The English Blog: “Newsy Video: Microsoft buys Skype”
Compass ELT blog: “Microsoft buys Skype”
Business Spotlight Blog: “Skype me!”

Online Teaching Resource: Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:38:56 GMT

The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource.

But…. I’ve tended not to use it because of their policy of only giving users a limited set of “tries” on the online version before shutting you down. There is of course a way round that, which involves deleting all the cookies on your computer and clearing down your browser’s history and such like (check out this nifty and free download, if you want to know more about how to do that), but the hassle is a little too much to bother with….

However, the other day I went back and discovered the visual thesaurus has evolved into something more…

There is a growing collection of lesson plans related to use of the visual thesaurus, 53 and counting thus far, and while many seem more intended for native speaker language lessons, there are those that are aimed and EFL / ESL, and those that are adaptable to it (like the one on prefixes – word formation anyone?).

Other things on the site that I think are worth a mention include:

Michele Dunaway’s “Teachers at Work” blog, whose most recent post encourages us to think differently about the way we teach creative writing to our students.
the “wordshop” collection of vocabulary activities (same caveat about target market applies…)
and finally, the vocabgrabber, which you paste text into and which generates word lists of “the most useful vocabulary words” from the text. I’m not so sure about this one, but it might be useful in deciding which items you want to pre-teach to allow learners to access a text more effectively. Though that would require you to type the target text into the website…. like I said, not quite sure about how best t0 use this tool.

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!

Oil Stories

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:52:16 GMT

The Guardian newspaper recently ran a series of short stories related to oil, as part of a project to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster – (see BBC story for background).

Called “Oil Stories“, the Guardian project contains eight short stories from different authors that seek to examine our relationship with oil. The stories aren’t particularly long and one of them comes in the form of a graphic novel.

This would be a useful opportunity for learners to access an authentic text (with all the implications relating to vocabulary etc that this carries) – perhaps more than that, it is a good opportunity for a group of learners to access a range of texts on the same topic (albeit, in one or two cases, somewhat obliquely). If the texts were given out as a homework reading task, then perhaps learners could peer teach any useful vocabulary at the start of the next lesson, as well as sharing the perspectives on oil as apparent from their texts and of course their reactions to it.

The teasing out of the themes, ideas and perspectives contained within the short stories and the sharing of these within the classroom could also create optimal conditions for a summary type task, where learners work together to create a single text summarising (and possibly directly referencing) the eight short stories.

Having had the discussion in their groups of eight, learners with the same texts could work together to create a brief 50 – 75 word summary highlighting the main points in their texts. They could then work back in their groups of eight to co-ordinate and organise the ideas into a cohesive whole. This might be a good opportunity, for those with computer room access, to try one or more of the synchronous editing tools I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

The Oil Stories project contains work by the following authors: China Miéville, Alain Mabanckou, Tim Gautreaux, Joanna Kavenna, Mohammed Hasan Alwan, Simone Lia, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Rose Tremain. Even if you decide not to use these with your classes – they’re all well worth a read. Enjoy!

Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:41:20 GMT

Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned | Books | guardian.co.uk.

This is a slightly misleading and somewhat patronising view of American life, when you consider, as the article states, that this list is based on a total of 348 “attempts” to remove books from American libraries. But it still makes interesting reading – at least the article does – not sure about the books as I’m a little disappointed by the fact that I’ve only read one of the books on this list!

This could lead into a very interesting discussion with learners. And quite possibly a very emotive one, so a certain amount of judgement needed as to whether this would be s suitable issue for your class! But if learners wanted to express views on what was or wasn’t suitable to discuss in school, or topics that are inappropriate for the local library, then why not? Or of course if they want to defend freedom of speech?

It is interesting to think about what is acceptable to talk about in the classroom and what isn’t – Scott Thornbury has an interesting perspective in “T is for Taboo“, it might be fun to use some of his themes as a lead in with the class – challenge them to find a picture of a mother comforting small children, young hispanic people working on a car or an old lady with twenty cats. And then ask them to think about why they might not have been able to find the images?

The alternative to choosing which books to ban, is to choose which books to select in….

David McCandless from informationisbeautiful created the visualisation below, of 100 books everyone should read (taking a composite ranking from a variety of sources).

Why not divide up the books amongst the learners in your class and send them off to wikipedia or amazon or even the local library, to take a quick look at their set of books and decide which ones to keep and which ones not to. When the class reconvenes, they can, as a whole, decide on a top 50 books that everyone should read.