Search results matching tags 'vocabulary' and 'discussion'

Teaching Resources: Steve Jobs

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:16:36 GMT

It’s not until someone goes that you realise the impact they had on your life – Steve Jobs was one of those public figures who inspired belief and achievement in others.

One of my classes was asking if we could talk about Steve Jobs and his life, and clearly he meant a lot to a lot of people – so here are some resources that you can use with your learners.

The Guardian has a reader tribute interactive here: “Dear Steve, your products changed my life.” They also have a photo slideshow featuring reactions from around the world.

Also from the Guardian, this page “Steve Jobs: the 10 best tributes“.

The Lexical Press Blog from the American TESOL institute has a comemorative lesson plan available here: http://americantesol.com/blogger/?p=366

Cecilia Lemos at Box of Chocolates has an obituary style lesson plan available here: http://cecilialcoelho.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/hot-off-the-press-an-activity-about-steve-jobs/

@MrTESOL tweeted this link to an interactive online Steve Jobs quiz: http://www.tutor2u.net/business/bizquiz/061011/quiz.html.

Eva Büyüksimkeşyan at A Journey in TEFL has a lesson idea here: http://evasimkesyan.edublogs.org/2011/10/06/a-lesson-idea/, she also mentions Sean Banville’s News English lesson: http://www.newsenglishlessons.com/1110/111006-steve_jobs.html.

Finally, you’ve probably seen it elsewhere on the web recently – but here’s Steve Jobs’ famous speech at Stanford university:

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: 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.

Tea, Coffee and Comparisons

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:35:11 GMT

Just a quick lesson overview rather than a full plan etc today: this is an idea for helping learners with comparisons / comparatives.

Basically it starts out with the activity “Tea or Coffee”, follows up with the language input stage, invites comparisons between learners’ home country and the UK / USA etc and finishes off with an oppostion debate based around the initial “Tea or Coffee” activity. It’s materials light – in fact there aren’t any!

A lesson on Comparisons…

(Acknowledgement: I think it was Richard Venner who first introduced me to the “tea or coffee” activity as a warmer – thanks Richard!)

Tea or Coffee:

Learners draw two columns and head one of them with “ME” and the other with the name of someone else in the room – ideally learners should be paired or threed for this activity, preferably with someone on the other side of the room to them.

Dictate the following list of word pairs. Learners write down their preference from each pair in their column and guess which they think their partner would prefer.

TEA / COFFEE
TOWN / COUNTRY
GOLD / SILVER
SPRING / AUTUMN
MORNING / EVENING
SWEET / SAVOURY
STAY IN / GO OUT
DOG / CAT
BEACH / MOUNTAINS
REAL MADRID / BARCELONA
PÃO DE LÓ / PASTEIS DE BELEM (two local (Portuguese) delicacies – suggest substituting these!
ORANGES / APPLES

Learners then find their partners and discuss the choices SAYING WHY.

Language Input:

Write Oranges / Apples on the board and ask learners which they prefer & why.

Elicit a comparative sentence / reformulate their sentence into a comparative structure e.g.

Apples are tastier than oranges.

Ask learners how much tastier? And provide the qualifiers: MUCH / A LOT / A LITTLE / SLIGHTLY

Then write: Oranges are not as tasty as apples. And ask learners if this sentence is true.

Clarify the forms:

TO BE (QUALIFIER) COMPARATIVE THAN

TO BE NOT AS ADJECTIVE AS

Controlled Practice

In pairs – learners make sentences comparing their country to the UK (or USA or wherever) – OR their city to their nearest regional rival.

Monitor and as you spot grammatically accurate sentences (the more contentious the better) – ask the relevant learner to write it on the board.

Feedback on content – do we all agree? (and form if necessary).

Spoken (freer) Practice:

Ask learners to recreate, in two columns, the list from earlier. Fill in the gaps as necessary.

Divide learners into two groups. Group A is Column A / Group B is Column B.

Give each group five-ten minutes to come with reasons why their items are better than the oppositions and why the oppositions are worse than theirs.

Regroup learners from each group so they are facing each other AB AB AB AB etc down the middle of the room. Run the opposition debate.

Monitor and feedback on language issues in a corrective feedback slot at the end.

The disabled access friendly world blog challenge: Creature Discomforts

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:30:31 GMT

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter.

The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way they see disability.

If you go to the Creature Discomforts website, there are eight short video ads (about 20 – 30 seconds each) and nine short radio ads. Both of these have tapescripts available, so would be relatively easy to adapt into short listening tasks – the ads are very visually appealing and would be great with young learners.

There is also a “fun and games” section which contains a quiz about disability in the UK. It could be interesting to do the quiz (which is multiple choice, one question at a time – questions change each time you do it) and get learners to compare the answers with the situation in their country. For example, apparently only 50% of train stations in the UK offer step-free access to the platforms – what’s life like where you live? The section also offers four different games that put the game player in the position of having a disability – in the Callum the Chameleon game, you can play with or without sight as you try to catch the flies buzzing around. Sonny the Shrimp attempts to rescue fish from their hooks – from his wheelchair. Tim-the-crutches-using-Tortoise attempts the long-jump, and finally Millie the mouse attempts to feed peanuts to her elephant friend. I like the way the Chameleon game makes you think about the difference between playing the game sighted and unsighted – the other games are not quite as educational, but fun to play for the younger classes.

Leonard Cheshire Disability is also running a campaign called Action for Access from which you can download access survey forms for shops, organisations and buildings – there are separate forms for transport options. If you work in the UK, then a class project could contribute to developing the access map on the site and making a positive contribution to the local community. If you work outside the UK, then you could adapt the access survey forms (they’re available in pdf or word) to fit your surroundings and develop a class project to survey the area around your school. Some thoughts anyway!

Summer school teachers – have you considered that this could be a handy project to work with one week? You could even incorporate some of the work into one of your trips out and about in the UK?

Online Game: The Curfew

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:49:21 GMT

I spotted a colleague (Thanks Neil!) using this with a class the other day and it looked brilliant and so investigated – it is really impressive work!

Turns out Neil spotted this on Larry Ferlazzo’s site.

The Curfew game is aimed at young adults / older teenagers and is set in a dystopian Britain, some 16 years in our future. It aims to raise issues related to civil liberties, human rights and authoritarianism, though it does this not by preaching, but merely by putting the game player in situations where these rights have been removed.

From a language learners’ point of view, the dialogue is relatively authentic (obviously it’s scripted) and therefore might be difficult for lower levels to access. Dialogue is subtitled though, so I think CEF levels B2 and above would be able to cope with most of it.

I used the game last night with a class who really got into it and refused to leave the room at the end of the lesson… The mix of character interaction, point and click adventure game discovery and the occasional arcade game style task clearly winning them over!

I used this as the second half of a lesson that looked at civil liberties and human rights in fairly broad terms – asking learners to list the rights they had now and then running a mini-pyramid discussion to decide which rights they thought they could live without. This was also a handy way of making sure that the basic concepts and vocabulary of game were pre-taught. We also discussed Martin Niemoller’s “poem” – first they came. Obviously some of these issues may be sensitive topics for your learners, so some discretion is advised! I’d also suggest that you have a go at the game yourself beforehand, just to check over the suitability of the content – and also so that you can help any students struggling with what to do next!

To go and play the game click here: The Curfew Game.

The only caveat is that the game is too long to play in a single lesson (as it should be?) – and it doesn’t “save” (though if you don’t clean down your computer it might remember where you were the next time you try and play it). But I’m fairly sure my learners were happy enough to go home and work through it all again!

Happy Game play!

Habitat for Humanity: Lesson Plans

Anonymous — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:08:49 GMT

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Habitat for Humanity. I’m mentioning them here because they posted a comment under one of the blog posts and I just went and took a quick look at their site.

They have quite a wealth of lessons (detailed plans, learning outcomes, materials etc), categorised by age ranges. The bad news is that these lesson plans are not aimed at foreign language learners. So the stuff in the 5-8 category might be a bit beyond the non-native speakers, though there are a couple of colouring tasks which might work?

I think adaptation is going to be the name of the game here. I think there’s quite a lot of stuff here that is likely to be of interest to learners and some things that might make some nice end of year/term projects. It should appeal to the cross-curricular / CLIL crowd….

Habitat for Humanity operates in a large number of countries around the world, so the chances are you’ll be able to find a local office, which might make things a bit more relevant to the learners?

Habitat for Humanity lessons — Habitat for Humanity Int’l.

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!”

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!