Search results matching tags 'vocabulary', 'proficiency', 'pre-intermediate', and 'all levels'

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.

The Vortex Game

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:30:40 GMT

The Vortex Game. This is a game I’ve created that can be used with any age or level – for pretty much any purpose. It came out of a conversation with a colleague (thanks Sarah!) who was looking for an idea to help learners with minimal pronunciation pairs, but it can be used with pretty much anything!

I can’t claim complete originality here though – this game was inspired by a very old BBC tv show called “The Adventure Game“. Now this is going back almost thirty years to a time when special effects were…. well a bit shoddy really. But truly amazing by the standards of the time! If anyone wants to look at the amount of progress the human race has made in the last quarter century, you only have to look at clips of the adventure game – of which more later…

Anyway – for game board, rules and different ways to play it (there’s a TPR style method) etc – read on!

At the end of every episode of the Adventure Game, as far as I remember it, the contestants had to cross “the vortex”. This was basically a diamond shaped grid. The catch was that “the evaporator” was also moving on the grid and… you know what – just watch the clip:

So the premise of “The Vortex Game” is relatively simple. The game board is available to download here: teflgeek – The Vortex Game

Versions and Rules:

In it’s simplest form – each team has to get to the other side of the grid. They can only move along the lines, from node to node or star to star, and can only move when they answer a question correctly. In this scenario, you would need a minimum of 15 questions, before one or both teams achieve their goal.

However – the catch is – that if one team steps into a space occupied by the other, then the team occupying the node initially get sent back to their starting base. Thus turning the thing into a lengthy game of cat and mouse, back-tracking, chasing and quite possibly nobody winning at all…. You are almost certainly going to need double the number of questions, if not more.

An even longer version can be played as a “capture the flag” style game. Teams have to make it over to their opponents’ base, capture the flag, and then make it all the way back again….

It probably works best with the game board displayed on an Interactive whiteboard, with virtual counters moved over the top of the board. But it also works well enough printed out and enlarged onto A3 paper. If you have access to an outside space, like a playing field, sports hall, garden or local park, it should be easy enough to recreate the game board in the real world, and have learners nominated to be the game pieces – if a learner gets sent back to base, another player can take their place for the next attempt. I’ve not tried the physical version of this – so any feedback greatly appreciated!

As an alternative to the teacher coming up with all the questions, why not ask your class to do this for you? You could collectively think about different categories, which could extend beyond the language learning context (geography, history, celebrity gossip, partical physics – the list goes on…) and allocate each category to a group of two or three learners to generate ten questions (and provide the answers!!!) – which could then all be jumbled up together and the questions asked at random.

Or there’s always exam practice classes…..

Anyway, let me know how it goes. I’ve only used this once so far and it went down really well – though apparently my questions were “too difficult”…. but they enjoyed the game! So I’d be really interested to hear how it’s worked elsewhere – or in any more variations or developments that you come up with!

Postie Postie / Agony Aunt

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:10:04 GMT

This is a great activity that you can use as a warmer or as a fun practice task in a number of situations.

I should acknowledge that I originally saw my Dip tutor Peter Moran do this during a lesson in Wroclaw in 2006 – in various forms it’s been one of my staple activities ever since!

I can’t remember why Peter did this – though as I recall he was stepping in to cover an absent colleague – and I can’t even remember what the lesson was about… In fact now that I think about it, it might have been an input seminar and not a lesson. But there we go – the important things matter….

In it’s basic form, “Postie Postie” needs only a lot of scrap A4 paper chopped into quarters (or not – depending on how you want to adapt it). As I recall Peter running the activity you give every learner or pair or small group a large amount of chopped up bits of paper. The bits of paper then play the role of the message medium – in other words, the learners write short notes to each other. When they finish writing the note, they shout “Postie Postie” and the teacher delivery system swings into operation. Or you collect and deliver the messages. From that point of view, it’s probably a good idea to ask the class to address and acknowledge their messages in a “to” and “from” format.

Adaptations:

As a warmer – if you brainstorm topic areas / conversations issues to the board (i.e. what everyone did at the weekend – or for summer schools -what the trip was like yesterday / how hot are the teachers / what’s different between my country and yours). Then learners simply write brief notes to each other in question or reply.

As a “freer” practice task – I have a suspicion that originally I saw this done in the context of “emailing” each other. It could of course also work in the context of a text messageathon – if text english is a lesson focus.

I used it that other day as an “agony aunt” style task. The learners were paired and had a bunch of scrap A4 paper. They were encouraged to think Jerry Springer style (e.g. My husband is in love with a tree / My daughter wants to marry our goldfish) but it was basically all their own work. They addressed their “problem” to another pair/group in the room and wrote their letter. As a grammatically correct postman – I refused to deliver letters with mistakes in them – but that was my choice, you could be more lenient!

At the end of the task we decided which problems and which solutions were worthy of awards…..

The general idea is a nice variation on a mingle style task. The learners can stay where they are and can work collaboratively in a way they can’t so easily in a mingle. Plus, as teacher, you get to vet the messages (essential with any class under the age of 16…) for content appropriacy and grammatical accuracy. As a really pedantic postman….. this task can run and run….!

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!

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!

Online Teaching Resource: Primary Pad

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 10:32:25 GMT

Thanks to Tommy Holt for spotting this and mentioning it on facebook!

Primary pad is an online synchronous editing tool – learners can access and edit the same document at the same time. This is the first tool I’ve come across that allows synchronous editing and as such is quite an exciting development! It’s free and requires no registration, though “public pads” only last for 30 days, so longer term projects would require a sign up to the “professional” paid for version.

Take a look at it here: http://www.primarypad.com/

There is a google docs presentation on the site by Simon Haughton, which lists five ways that you can use the tool – synonyms generation / sentence correction & development / online interviewing / task achievement identification / collaborative writing tasks.

I really like the idea of the collaborative writing task as it puts the learners in the positions of writer and reader at the same time, thus hopefully allowing for a peer teaching mode where good ideas are justified and bad ones discarded. It could also work well with text organisation and structure as ideas would need to be grouped effectively and paragraphed. I can see this being used with exam preparation classes a lot!

It would also be perfect for use with Grammar Dictation / Dictagloss tasks – if you’re not familiar with these, the basic premise is that the teacher has a short text (which can be littered with examples of the target language structure) that they read to the learners initially for a content reaction, then read again. On the second reading the learners take notes on what was said. They then try to recreate the text exactly as it was read out. A common problem I find with this, is that the learners’ notetaking ability varies, and so different reconstruction pairs achieve the task with differing accuracy. Bringing all the learners together to recreate the text using primary pad would solve this issue and might lead to a more effective collaboration and reconstruction of the target text!

Also, I like the idea of error correction tasks. As it is a synchronous tool, learners could work together to correct a set of teacher generated sentences, before challenging each other by adding additional error strewn sentences to challenge each other with. I really like asking learners to deliberately make errors – after all they have to know what the correct form is before they can make a deliberate error, and it can raise their awareness of incidental errors that creep in!

One further idea is in identifying the main ideas in a reading text. Useful, again, for exam preparation classes, but with a target text uploaded onto the primary pad, learners can reach a mutual understanding of the text by discussing their ideas below it.

As far as I can work out, the system works with the teacher creating an initial “primary pad” and then simply sharing the URL. So you just send all the other computers to the same web address and they should be able to simply get on with it! And if they don’t finish in class, they can still access the primary pad from the comfort of their own home! (for 30 days!).

Only one word of caution – it’s called “primary pad” – but personally, I think the “primary” is a bit misleading. I can see chaos ensuing if this was used with a class of 24 six-year-olds… and I’m not sure whether it’s bright and shiny enough for the younger end of the teaching spectrum! But teenagers and adults could happily get into it and get a lot out of it.

It’s currently the Easter break with me, so no opportunity to use this with a class at the moment – any feedback from those of you who have tried it, and suggestions on what you did with it are gratefully received!

Other sites that do much the same thing:

A quick look through Larry Ferlazzo’s archive reveals “The best online tools for real-time collaboration”: where he lists primary pad alongside http://sync.in/ and http://piratepad.net/front-page/ and http://typewith.me/. Though pirate pad appears to be exactly the same as primary pad and typewithme.

Not used any of them – so again, any feedback appreciated!

Help with Homework

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:54:30 GMT

“Teacher No!” “Teacher, I have three tests this week!” Chances are, you’ve probably experienced the chorus of protest and dismay as you blithely announce the homework task of the day. Or alternatively as you ask your learners to present the task you set last lesson, you find that half the class hand it in while quarter of the class hand in something approximating what you asked for and the remainder present a litany of excuses: “I’ve done it, but I didn’t bring it.” “I didn’t understand what to do.” “I had no time.” Or possibly even, “I did my homework but I was kidnapped by aliens who took my homework to help with their intergalactic language comprehension project.”

Homework is a tricky area and I think if we’re all honest and think back to the days when we were in the learners’ shoes, we can perhaps identify with the way our learners feel when they get given yet something else that takes them away from their busy lives.

As a language teacher, I’m acutely aware that the homework I set is in fierce competition with a whole range of demands of my learners’ time. There are of course the non-educational demands: learners’ interests, from basketball to surfing, music to art, chilling out, socialising, facebooking, texting and gossiping all play vital roles in their lives, as indeed they do in ours. Equally, learners who work have to find the time in the schedule when they aren’t juggling sales orders or invoices or preparing for the meeting on Thursday. And those poor souls still in school have it even worse: a vast range of subject teachers who all set their charges weekly homework tasks that must be completed sometimes on pain of failing the grade.

There are any number of reasons why learners might not do their homework – Alex Case lists 14 reasons in an article for UsingEnglish.com. The trick of course is in finding ways to try and make sure they do it.

Purpose

The biggest question is why bother setting homework in the first place? Generally, I would expect most homework tasks to fall into three categories: Consolidation / Development / Assessment.

Consolidation – you set the task because it helps learners get a better idea of something you did in class (or helps you figure out which learners don’t have a better idea).
Development – the task helps the learners to improve their knowledge or skills in some way.
Assessment – particularly used with writing tasks (I suspect), you set tasks that will in some way contribute to learner grades or reports.

The question then becomes – do the learners know why they’re doing the task? Just as you might choose to communicate your lesson aims to the class via a lesson menu, why not do the same with homework tasks? Generally, if learners understand why they’re doing something they are more motivated to do it. Or if they choose not to do it, at least they will have made a more informed decision! Either way, informing learners that the task they’re doing will help them understand better something they did in class, or that what they’re doing will be used in the next class, might help underline the need for them to do it. Of course, it might also underline to them the pointlessness of any task that hasn’t been thought through!

Involvement

Get learner input on the homework process. Learners are often very aware of their strengths and weaknesses and talking to them or doing needs analysis with them might help you to tailor the homework tasks to them. You could also get a better idea of what external time commitments they have and find out how much homework they can realistically cope with in any given week. Working with learners schedules and negotiating homework quantities with them can help them realise that you are taking their needs into account and thereby make them more willing to take yours into account. Learners are often informed when their tests are scheduled, in some cases their homework tasks too, and by giving you this information, you can help avoid overload during particularly busy periods, thus increasing the likelihood that your tasks will get done.

Integration – Routines & Consequences:

Integrate the homework process into your classes more effectively. If learners know that you are always going to check the homework, they are more likely to do it. If they see that your commitment to homework checking and marking wavers, theirs will too. A routine check at the beginning of lessons, where whether the homework has been done is seen by the learners to be noted down may help here.

This leads onto the consequences of doing it and of not doing it. Many teachers employ a carrot and stick approach where learners who do the homework consistently are rewarded and those who do not are punished in some way. There are any number of ways in which you might implement such a system and in many respects these are probably best left to individual teachers in their different contexts to decide. Your school might well have views on this, or already have such systems in place. Reward systems I’ve seen used have ranged from star charts, computer room tokens, stamps and stickers, or the ever popular “homework pass”. I’ve even heard of one teacher who took the best homework contributors out for pizza! Punishments vary equally, though in schools I’ve worked in, homework is either treated as one aspect of misbehaviour in a wider discipline system, or is basically ignored until report card time when the student gets a “0” and the parent then comes storming in to find out what’s going on… but more on this last aspect in a moment.

Activities, warmers or lead in tasks that borrow from homework tasks (but do not duplicate them) when used at the start of lessons can reinforce to learners the benefits of doing the homework as those who’ve completed the homework will perform better than those who did not. For example the target items from a vocabulary homework exercise can be used as part of a revision game.

Organisation

It might be worth finding out from your learners what approach they take to doing their homework. What, for example, are their study habits? Do they do it on the bus on the way to school? Do they just copy from the one student who actually did it, just before the class starts? Do they have an organised rota system in place with answers being emailed or texted to everyone else? Or do they have a quiet place at home where they can sit and focus on the task in hand?

Getting this kind of information from your learners and having a discussion about what constitutes good study practice and how they can help themselves might be useful. Suggesting, however abhorrent the idea may be, that they turn off their mobile phones while they study so as to avoid distraction could be useful. Allocating a specific study time to their days for however long they need and organising a study area for them to work at might also help. Many learners might already have something like this in place, others might not. Opening up a discussion in the class would allow for the sharing of experiences and the working towards some form of “best practice”.

Parents

From a teacher’s perspective, getting the parents involved can be a tricky proposition. Some parents are heavily involved in their child’s education and others feel that this is the teacher’s responsibility alone. The general view amongst teachers, from what I’ve read, seems to be that parental involvement is a welcome thing – in moderation. As far as homework is concerned at least, it should be possible to set up a framework for the parents to best support the way their children do their homework. If you and your class have a working system in place, it can be worthwhile communicating that system to the parents so that they can contribute meaningfully to the process. For example, giving learners a “homework planner” which they can stick into their folders or into the front page of their coursebook, gives them a place to write down the tasks (which you can then check for accuracy) and which the parents can then check for completion.

Bringing parents into the dialogue that you’ve opened up with the learners about quantity, quality and organisation of homework can help them understand what and why you use homework for and how they can best help – even if that help only extends to leaving their kids alone for an hour or so a week! And it might help prevent the irate father showing up in the school reception to demand an explanation for the “zero” on that report card.

I hope this helps!

There is quite a lot to take on board here and quite a wide range of different things to try, some of which will work while others will not and some might not even be necessary. The key, though is the dialogue between you and your learners as to what you all think will work best for your situation. Try having that conversation, because if you do, the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll all understand each other a little better, even if you still don’t get much more homework handed in. Best case scenario? You’ll have a lot more marking to do!

Online Teaching Tool: Kubbu

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:40:06 GMT

This website has the potential to be an invaluable online teaching tool and is worth checking out!

I only came across this the other day, but they’ve been around for a while and further research reveals that Larry Ferlazzo mentions this site in a post from 2009!

Kubbu offers a “free account” to teachers who register, which allows you to create student profiles for up to 30 learners and limits you to creating 15 resources. I’m not sure if you can then delete old resources / student profiles and create new ones.

Here’s the list of things that Kubbu say you can do with their site:

Match – extended form of a classic matching excercise. It is an ideal tool for language practice. Matching helps assimilate new words, idioms, meanings, collocations, synonyms, etc.
Divide – used when some notions, terms, concepts or definitions must be classified into categories or groups.
Slider – a type of a dynamic quiz. It contains three types of activities, classic single and multiple choice questions with four answers, as well as a unique “climb up” quiz which leaves no place for mistakes.
Composer – a tool for teachers who want to introduce their own concept of a quiz. With Composer you can create quizzes with single and multiple choice questions, true/false questions, fill-in or short answer questions. Pictures as well as sound files can be used to make your quizzes fully multimedia and interactive.
Crossword – with a crossword generator you can create crosswords using your own list of words.

It also allows you to create / print paper versions of your tasks, so that theoretically you could give them the task on paper in class and ask them to complete it online for homework.

There is also a tracking feature that allows you to monitor learner achievement, how they did, and to track that over time, thus allowing you to track progress.

All in all, well worth a visit!