Search results matching tags 'video' and 'grammar'

Neat Stuff: 10-7-12

Anonymous — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 22:31:31 GMT

EdCanvas - http://www.edcanvas.com - Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply [...]

Truth or Lie: Activity for any classroom

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:23:00 GMT

I recently responded to a blog challenge by a video recording of myself - you can see it by clicking here. Most EFL teachers are probably aware of the activity where students are asked to say some things about themselves, and the others are to guess if they're true or false. I suggested taking this a step further and have the students bring video recordings of themselves saying those things. But

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!

Jackson Browne on Ted Talks: If I Could Be Anywhere

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:12:00 GMT

Ted Talks has a speaker with a difference - he isn't going to speak! Don't worry - it isn't a silent video, lol. Jackson Browne is one of my favourite singer-songwriters, and he has written many powerful songs in his long career, this one here being no exception. What I would like you to do first is to watch and listen to the song, and try to understand as much as possible. Then, watch it a

A Day In The Life: One Song, Countless Activities: Simple Past Cloze, Phrasal verbs, Vocabulary, etc.

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:43:00 GMT

In We Are The Champions, I wrote about several ideas you could do with songs in the classroom, so if you'd missed it, you ought to take a look now. Warm-up Play the video, freeze it when Paul McCartney can be seen. Ask if anyone knows him, what they know: the group he belonged to, the instrument he plays, the period the song was written, etc. Gap-fill Play the video once, asking them to listen

A lesson on Learning Goals – Ken Robinson TED Talk

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:07:45 GMT

I first watched Ken Robinson’s TED talk – “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” some months ago – a thought provoking examination of the aims of the educational establishment. It has influenced my thinking about the aims of teaching quite heavily, though perhaps more on this in a later post.

It occurred to me that this would be a nice talk to use with a class…

A basic lesson outline is included below the talk – it is primarily a discussion based lesson, so any language input would be reactive and immediate (i.e. when learners want to know how to express their views in a particular way) rather than pre-planned – though I would suggest following an output-feedback model and making careful notes on language use throughout the discussion period, so that a corrective feedback / reformulation stage can follow at the end.

This also functions as a class needs analysis, so you might also want to take some detailed notes on the content of their ideas! By the end of the lesson, your learners may have arrived at a set of learning outcomes or, at the very least a set of more general goals they would like to try and achieve by the end of the course. This may well guide your thinking when planning out the course or individual lessons, and by relating the lessons to the goals the learners decided for themselves, it might help increase learner motivation and participation in the classroom.

Lesson Outline:

(1) Lead In Discussion: three questions on the board: (a) What’t the point of education? (b) Does education achieve it’s aims? (c) How would you change the system to make it better?

(2) Video Task – play Sir Ken’s talk (as above) and ask them to make notes on his answers to the questions and whether they agree or not. Do some reactive content feedback.

(3) Ask the learners to relate these ideas to your lessons – be prepared to receive some harsh criticisms! But, at the same time try to direct these into constructive criticisms… Some guidance questions: (a) what do you think the aims of our classes are? (b) What do you think the aims of these classes should be? (c) What do you think are the best ways to achieve these aims?

(4) Pyramid discussion. Ask each learner to try and arrive at ten specific goals they want to achieve within the remaining classes of their course. Then pair the learners, who must then agree both on a set of ten and rank them in order of importance. Then put the learners into larger groups of four or five, to do the same task – agree on ten goals in order of importance. Finally, bring the whole class together and hand over the classroom to them – get them to nominate a “scribe” to collate the feedback and to get the list of ten goals up on the board.

(NB) their initial goals can be as frivolous as they wish – mostly the more humorous goals will be winnowed out during the discussion stages. But it is important to guide to into phrasing attainable goals, otherwise frustration looms large!

(5) Let them know you’ll use these ideas to guide your planning of the rest of the course.

(6) Provide a language correction / reformulation as appropriate.

A lesson on “Should and Shouldn’t”

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:00:54 GMT

This is a lesson aimed more at pre-intermediate / intermediate level learners that “introduces” SHOULD and SHOULDN’T. Though it can be used to revise the language point if learners have met it previously!

It is based around using Should / Shouldn’t for expressing advice within the “good idea” “bad idea” range – obviously this is not the only use of Should!

The lesson plan, which is relatively straightforward is available to download here: teflgeek – Should and Shouldn’t.

It’s ready to go as is – doesn’t need any additional planning or preparation.

The good idea / bad idea graphic above comes from a kids TV show – Animaniacs – which I remember from my earlier years ( I don’t know if it’s still going). Here is a Google video search selection for the segements, which could be used to extend or introduce the general topic with younger learners (or adults?).

Some additional online “should / shouldn’t” practice activities:

A flash gapfill task from englishgrammarsecrets.com

A sentence matching task from OUP’s Natural English Pre-Intermediate coursebook site

A type-the-answer gapfill task from esl-lounge.com

And finally – a downloadable Garfield based worksheet by Zailda Coirano posted on docstoc.com

We Are The Champions: One Song, Countless Activities: Present Perfect Cloze, Idioms, Vocabulary, etc.

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:26:00 GMT

A lot of teachers who use songs for ELT restrict themselves to a gap-fill activity plus a singalong, but there are, however, many other activities you could do besides those, some of which I've set out below, and I also created a quiz incorporating some of them. Due to copyright problems, I'm not allowed to embed the video here, but click on the video image, and then, again, where it says 'Watch

Conditional Type 2 with Norah Jones

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:14:00 GMT

Here's a simple beautiful song by the equally beautiful Norah Jones. Look at the word cloud - all the lyrics are there - and see if you can put the words in the order in which Norah sings. You can click on the image to see a larger version. As you probably already know, we use the conditional sentence type 2 to talk about conditions that, although possible, are not likely to be fulfilled: If I

Noun Video

HaveFunTeachingDotCom — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:41:00 GMT

The Have Fun Teaching Web Site Presents: The Noun Video. This Noun Video will teach the basic definition of a common noun. A noun is a part of speech that names a person, place, or thing. The song will go over how a noun is a word that can be a person, place, thing or an idea. The noun movie will give examples of common nouns for people, places, and things and will also go over ideas being nouns.

The Noun Video - Click Here to Watch

You can also print out the lyrics and sing them out loud with your class!