Search results matching tags 'vocabulary' and 'online'

Halloween Teaching Resources

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:30:36 GMT

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners…

ESL-Galaxy has it’s usual great selection of flashcards, crosswords, wordsearches here: http://www.esl-galaxy.com/holiday.html.

Weird and wacky fun (usually involving carved pumpkins) pictures can be found here: http://www.funnyhalloweenpictures.com/ - though it should be stressed not all the pictures are classroom safe – teachers will need to select carefully beforehand!

Bogglesworld has absolutely masses of halloween related stuff here http://bogglesworldesl.com/halloween_worksheets.htm - almost too much to go through! But I think the one I’ll be using from here is the “Are you a werewolf, witch or vampire?“

LearnEnglishKids from the British Council has some great resources, including fun computer games, quizzes, short stories and a story maker http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/category/topics/halloween.

Katie, posting on teflogue.com has a scary urban legends reading race that might be suitable for higher / older levels.

People who are already registered with TES will know they have a huge range of halloween related resources - people who aren’t might want to register! Remember though, that not everything is designed with EFL in mind.

Spotted yesterday on efl-resource – a link to some fantastic online young learner halloween resources: monster creation, spooky stories and halloween e-cards: say “Boo” to Ozge Karaoglu’s blog!

Finally, Sean Banville has a Breaking News English lesson plan on the news that the world population is set to hit seven billion on halloween: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1110/111025-world_population.html - which also links back to my post of the other day: Global Population – 7 billion people and you.

Have fun!

Global Population – 7 billion people and you

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:15:59 GMT

There’s a really nice app on the BBC website that lets you figure out where you come in the global population statistics – for example, when I was born I was the four billionth, 50 millionth, seven hundred and sixty four thousandth, one hundred and sixty first person alive on the planet. It goes on to let you look at country population statistics and average life expectancy. Check it out here: BBC News – 7 billion people and you: Whats your number?.

The app is based (primarily) on data from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) , who have their own app at http://www.7billionandme.org/. This asks you for more detailed information, not only your date of birth, but birth location, current location and such like, but it does then break down the data into a much wider spread of infographics that compare the situation back then, with the way things are now. Anyone who’s helping learners work with describing trends and/or numbers (big numbers!) would find this a useful place to go to get some personalised data for the learners to work with.

Also on the web via UNFPA, is http://www.7billionactions.org which is hoping to inspire people to take positive actions in their communities and around the world. One of the more powerful ways they hope to achieve this is by people sharing their stories: 7 billion stories. There is a registration form to complete (the usual) and you need a picture to upload. Participants also need to be 13 years old or over. Then you write a 600 character “story” about yourself and how you hope to influence change, give it a title and go!

It seems like there’s a fairly obvious lesson plan there! The kicker though, is that it is only 600 CHARACTERS – not words! So learners will need to be concise! It may also help learners to look at the existing stories to get a better idea of the type of content that’s expected of them.

Worth a look anyway! At the time of writing, the world’s population stands at 6, 999, 175, 608. So be quick if you want to get there in time for 7 billion!

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:

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 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!

Twittercordances? – Tweetolife stats

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:17:18 GMT

There’s a new twitter based application on the web that you don’t have to sign up to twitter to use: Tweetolife. It’s the outcome – well, it’s one outcome of the development of Twitter corpus data by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, whose paper on the subject is available to read as pdf.

Tweetolife can show you which genders use words more frequently (percentage statistics) and interestingly, can also show you at which times of day certain words peak or trough in frequency. For example the word “class” peaks at just before 8.00am.

Of most use though is the gender differences “detailed query” which shows you which other words are most commonly used along with your search word – split by gender: so for example, more men (@70%) use the word “replacement” than women (@30%) and with men it collocates most with “battery” while with women it’s “valve”.

Gender differences aside, it’s quite a useful mini-concordancer that could be used for collocation work with classes as it’s a bit more accessible than the Collins Co-build, which I’m not sure is still available anyway… My only minor quibble is that there seem to be words that don’t register in the database – is this because people just don’t tweet them? If so, it raises the interesting question of how and why we alter our language use when tweeting…..

Acknowledgement: this was first spotted on Larry Ferlazzo’s site - thanks to Larry for that.

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.

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!