Search results matching tags 'vocabulary' and 'teaching'

Family Feud

Anonymous — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I have recently found this great way to assess understanding of concepts and math vocabulary.

Split the class up into groups of 4-6. Each group gets a set of small cards which each have on them one maths related word. The first thing they have to do is write on each card, under the math related word which is at the top, three words that people will not be allowed to use when describing the top word. For example, if the top word is circumference then three words the team could write underneath could be circle, perimeter and length. The idea is to make the describing of the top word as tricky as possible. The words that they can’t use when describing the top words are called Taboo words.

The sets of cards are then passed onto another group and one person in the group gets 1 minute to describe as many of the top words as possible to their group colleagues without using the taboo words. The teams get a point for each correct word they guess. Each team has a go and the scores added up at the end to identify the winning team. You can do a tie-breaker round if necessary.

There are lots of variations you could do of this game and it does seem to really engage the kids and is an excellent way to revise key vocabulary and assess conceptual knowledge. You can create this variation into a Family Feud where different classrooms come up with the next classrooms list for a review game where you have to find object describes the word best. This can be as a class or as small groups like the ones mentioned above. You can find a link to the original article here: http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com/2010/06/17/taboo-words/#comment-2843

Great Maths Teaching Ideas is a great place to get great teaching ideas for math teachers. Happy Teaching!

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: Fo(u)r Recalling Words…

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:44:54 GMT

On the fourth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me: fo(u)r recalling words

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

and fo(u)r recalling words – or at least four areas to consider for helping students to recall words. The term vocabulary is not used in this post to denote only single word items, but also includes multi-word items, chunks, short phrases…. it’s all good. As you’ll see from the mind map below, I think there are four stages to maximising vocabulary learning: Encounters / Recording / Revisiting and Producing – and within these stages there are things to be thinking about and ways we can help learners through these stages.

Encountering Vocabulary

The importance of the item to the learner promotes intake. If you don’t need to know it, why bother remembering it? My daughter has, for example, perfect mastery of the chunk “Shaun The Sheep”, but can’t tell me what she wants for breakfast. Everyone’s priorities are different – is it any wonder our classes wallow turgidly through the lexical mire, when half of what we teach them is irrelevant to their needs?

“Lumbago”. A great word, once used in a seminar as an example of a low-frequency word. If you’ve not already met it, you might be struggling with an idea of its meaning. How about “My lumbago’s acting up.”? Now it could be a part of the body? An Italian sports car? So how about “My lumbago’s acting up. The Doctor’s told me to go see a chiropractor.” Assuming we have knowledge of the other items, we can now deduce it’s a problem relating to the spinal column. Thus the context clarifies all! Exposure to an item in a variety of contexts helps this.

Our relationships to items is also worth considering. This may sound slightly odd as most people think of our relationship to words as typified in the “master-slave” dynamic, yet because we encounter words in different contexts, words hold different values for us and these values skew our perceptions of the meanings. For instance: define “happy”. OK, so that’s a loaded example, but think for a moment of the word “house” – what did you visualise? The connections are there to be made and developed – forging these connections can help learner retention.

Recording Vocabulary

The written record is surely the cornerstone of any classroom? At the end of the day if it doesn’t get written down, does it get remembered? But this does put a certain onus on us teachers to make sure that the language on the board is relevant, meaningful and useful – not just random collections that arose out of whatever else happened to be going on that day. Not that there isn’t a place for that, but keeping things in touch with the topic can help. Partly, because if you do ask learners to make a written record, then if they write down everything that goes up on the board, they might end up doing little else – which would be a shame! But the written record – the simple question “Can you write that down please?” is another step along the path to retention.

Having written the day’s selection of useful items down in their class books – it would be interesting to find out from learners what they do with the language next. Do they review it regularly or does it just sit there? The problem with only recording vocabulary in a class / lesson based notebook or folder is that the language is essentially grouped chronologically – and this makes it hard to associate items to each other. Walters & Bozkurt (2009) have demonstrated that keeping vocabulary notebooks, as distinct from class notebooks, has a significant effect on learner retention of items and on learner use (production) of the target items. A good study habit for learners to adopt therefore, and something we as teachers should encourage, is for learners to create their own vocabulary notebooks and to transfer items from class book to vocabulary book on a regular basis.

This brings up the question of systemic organisation of notebooks. If you have access to the teacher’s books for the Cutting Edge series, then somewhere at the back in the photocopiable resources section are some learner training worksheets designed to help learners choose a suitable system. They’re definitely in the back of the “classic” Cutting Edge Intermediate teacher’s book – not sure about the others. There are any number of systems available. There are mind mapping techniques (see above graphic), bubble diagrams, picture labelling, diagram labelling, alphabetical lists, translation lists, timelines (not sure about this one myself), parts of speech organisation… and it goes on! The trick is for the learners to find a system that works intuitively for them, and not to have a system imposed upon them. An alternative to the vocabulary notebook per se, is the learner vocabulary diary – Simon Thomas provides a template, discusses how to use them and provides a series of activities in this excellent post here: Vocabulary Diaries for Language Learners. For more ideas on organisational structures – here’s a link to the “Periodic Table of Visualisation Techniques” which may provide some inspiration! Thanks to @Marisa_C via facebook for that one.

Revisiting Vocabulary

There is the old adage that a learner needs to “meet” a vocabulary item seven times before it moves into their active lexicon, I don’t know where this comes from, whether it’s based in fact or just one of those taken for granted tefl truths – in any event simply seeing a word once and writing it down is only the start.

As teachers, the easiest way to recycle vocabulary is simply to use it again – and the simplest way to do that is to incorporate it into future teaching materials. Thus every lesson / every day becomes part of a building process in which the learners encounter some old familiar friends, draw some new acquaintances closer and meet some items for the first time. In fairness, most coursebooks do work like this and grade their input from the early modules to the later modules. But not all – some coursebooks are produced “at level” and are intended as a target for learners to aim at. And in either situation it’s not uncommon to find coursebooks using language, especially in the rubrics, that learners wouldn’t even begin to understand! Know your coursebook! It’s relatively easy to find out this kind of information from the publisher websites, most of will be given on the back of your book (or will turn up fairly rapidly in a quick internet search.

There are also specific class activities that you can use as warmers or fillers which recycle vocabulary items. Backs to the board is a great warmer, but also handy for reinforcing incidental vocabulary at the end of the lesson (if you have time). Also on this site is “Pointless“. Maria Zabala Peña has 5 quick games for vocabulary revision on her blog. Taboo, where learners have to describe an item without using the target item or five associated keywords (e.g. try describing Santa without using the words snow, reindeer, sleigh, north pole or elves) is another alternative. Learner lesson bingo – where learners create a bingo card for the whole lesson based on items they think will arise from the lesson topic and tick them off as the lesson progresses…. I’m sure you have your own favourites – feel free to add them below (via comments)!

There are also self-study activities – a friend used to write down his vocabulary items on blank business cards. He’d put the target language on one side, his own language on the other and used to flick through them on the bus on the way to university in the morning. Every day he’d add new cards to the pile, but he’d go through the pile and select “known” items to go into the archive. Once a month he’d go through the archive and any items he’d forgotten would come back into the working pile. That was almost 20 years ago and I think it’s now possible to purchase apps for your smart phones that do more or less the same thing! If learners do have a vocabulary notebook, simply reviewing the pages every now and again will help. Simon Thomas’ vocab diaries (mentioned earlier) includes a revision timetable that aims to optimise the intake of new items.

Producing Vocabulary

It is a constant source of amazement to me the number of times you get a truly excellent vocabulary presentation section in a coursebook, followed by the standard practice phase – and then nothing further. It is one of those unwritten rules of teaching that learners will consistently fail to use the target items in any activity that has been designed for their production – but still, give them a chance! If nothing else it helps create a meaningful context!

It might be helpful here to differentiate between “Spontaneous” and “Considered” production. Both types can be either written or spoken – I would characterise the difference as the amount of planning or forethought that went into developing the utterance / text. So for example, the difference between answering the question “How was your holiday?” at the office water cooler and sitting down to write your mother a postcard as you sip cool drinks by the pool!

The difference is worth highlighting for two reasons – firstly to help characterise errors and secondly to help think about activity types and providing opportunities for spontaneous and considered production in the classroom. As regards errors – my theory (and I should stress I have no evidence for this!) is that “mistakes” occur more frequently in considered production and “slips” more frequently in spontaneous production. I posted back in October on error types – so take a look here for more background. But the point is that if a learner has taken the time to think about what they want to say and how best to say it, and they still make an error – it’s more likely to be evidence of a systemic lack rather than a performance error, and consequently in more need of correction.

The other point to make is to remember to include opportunities for both types of production in lessons. Again, it seems obvious but it’s easy enough to follow coursebook programs and processes which don’t always include production opportunities. Dogme types will no doubt be nodding along to the request for spontaneous production opportunities – and the informal general chat is a good way, possibly the only authentic way, of providing such an opportunity. It can be a nice way to welcome learners to the class as you wait for everyone to arrive – and by building social chat opportunities into the lesson, you can (sometimes!) reduce the amount of L1 social chat that occurs during other parts of the lesson (especially with teenagers!).

Considered production tasks might be more structured and offer the learners more support. These might be tasks where the learners know they are meant to produce a language type, or not. Either way, these are usually outcome based, have a clear objective or goal, and would be followed by some type of feedback (both language and content). They could range from a pyramid discussion to a formal essay.

Almost done…

The main point here is not that anyone should dogmatically follow each and everyone of these recommendations – I don’t. The idea is more that effective vocabulary learning happens when an integrated approach is taken by the teacher and when the learners are made aware of how they can best help themselves. As such, I hope this post provides a few ideas to take forwards, try out, discard, adapt and with any luck adopt – as a useful way forwards with this process.

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: Five Favourite Things

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:47:48 GMT

On the fifth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me: FIVE FAVOURITE THINGS

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

10 tricks for reading

9 pretty pictures

8 talks worth watching

7 simple statements

6 games worth playing

and five of my favourite things. No brown paper parcels tied up with string here – just five simple activities that I use all the time and can help break up the monotony of the lesson. I don’t claim authorship of any of these – in fact most of these can be found in the one extent copy of “ diht aet álaeran englisc to aelfolc” – a primer that was in wide use after the 1066 invasion of England after which none of the Norman lords and masters could talk to their Anglo Saxon serfs and had to arrange hasty lessons. ”diht aet álaeran englisc to aelfolc” can be found on the shelves at the Bodleian Library, next to a copy of what appears to be the publisher proofs for the very first edition of Headway Elementary (or héafodaerneweg folcsóp).

(1) Backs to the Board.

I’ve mentioned previously, how this activity was demonstrated to me on the CELTA and how I use it with virtually every class (though sometimes I give it a rest to avoid overkill!). The following description is from the teflgeek “Activity Reference“

Essentially a vocabulary review game / activity. Divide the class into two teams (they can choose a team name?).

Take two chairs and turn them round so that anyone sitting in them will have their backs to the board. One person from each team comes up and sits in the chair. The teacher writes a word on the board and the other members of the team try to explain the word, without actually saying the target word. The first person (sitting in the chairs) to say the correct word wins one point for their team. Change the person sitting in the chair after each word, so that all team members get a chance to be the guessers. You can use this with single vocabulary items or with collocations, phrasal verbs, or even full sentences!

Rules: People sitting in the chairs may not look at the board. Explainers may not say the word OR ANY FORM of the word – for example if the target word is “teacher”, teams cannot say “teaching” / “teach” / “taught” and so forth. The only language allowed is English (or your target language). No mime or gesticulation is allowed. No writing things down. no saying the first letter of the word or spelling the words. Points can be taken off for infractions!

Obviously, these rules can be relaxed for lower levels. Fun for all ages and abilities!

(2) Running Dictation

I have a suspicion this one might have come from Nick Kiley, almost ten years ago in China. A running dictation is a great way to get your classes up and moving – especially if they’ve been sat there for a while. It practices all four skills and because there’s a focus on accuracy (i.e. correct transfer of information) can be a nice way to introduce a language point.

What you do – take a target text, not too big, probably about 75-100 words (this will depend on class age and ability – I’ve done this with a list of ten words, or with ten short sentences, or with a short letter). Stick a copy of the text somewhere nearby, ideally outside your classroom – the door to the DoS office is a favourite location – but out of immediate communication range.

The learners work in pairs – person A runs to the text, tries to remember as much of the text as they can, returns to their partner and tells them what they can remember. Person B listens and writes it down. When person B has finished writing, they run to the paper and read the next bit before returning to tell person A who writes it down and so on. At the end of the activity, you can ask pairs of learners to compare their texts for accuracy, or if you’ve extracted the text from the coursebook, they can check it against the original.

Generally, I use these as a means of providing the target language, so I tend to follow the activity with some kind of language mining task – for example if the text had been an anecdote designed to highlight narrative tenses, the task might be to sequence the events in chronological order.

(3) The Domination Game

It sounds worse than it is…. And it’s another one I’ve mentioned before, but seeing as that was two days after this blog first started I don’t think anyone noticed. So I feel no guilt about reproducing it here! This one is, I think a teflgeek original: I originally cooked it up as a comparatively fun way of doing revision / practice of an entire FCE Use of English paper without melting the learners’ brains or causing everyone in the room to lose the will to live….

The term “comparatively fun” is used advisedly – this one can easily run past it’s “use by date” if you let it – if you feel that learners are beginning to shift uncomfortably around, then just cut the whole thing short and declare a winner!

As mentioned, it was originally designed for an FCE Use of English, but it can be used with absolutely any Grammar / Vocabulary revision task – basically all you need is 42 questions. In the past I’ve used it with three separate “revision” pages of a course book – as long as the question references are clear, it’s all good!

Basically, the game is a combination of “blockbusters” and “reversi”. Teams have to try and get the greatest number of connected squares they can. Teams win a square by answering a question correctly. The strategy element is introduced as teams can obviously block each other, cut each other off – and steal squares from each other by surrounding a square on two separate sides.

A full procedure, game grid and question reference sheet are attached and available to download as a pdf file here:

teflgeek – The Domination Game

(4) The Never-Ending Mingle

We’ve all done those “Find Someone Who” tasks, where learners walk around the classroom with a bit of paper, asking the same question to ten different people – and usually getting the same short and effective answer – “No!” The never-ending mingle avoids some of this by imposing two simple rules on the activity (1) learners aren’t allowed to ask a question to the same person twice (2) Learners swap cards after each Q& A encounter. This way, learners will ask as many questions are there are people in the classroom, quite possibly talking to each person as many times as there are people!

Variations: (1) let the learners think up the questions. (2) learners think of more than one question (three seems like a nice number) (3) learners include a follow up question (to avoid short Yes / No type encounters)

Feedback: ”John, what was the most interesting thing somebody told you?”

(5) Reason to believe

This is one of my ultimate cover lessons – particularly useful at short notice. I do it at least once with every class I teach, in one form or another. It’s one of those that works better at higher levels, but I think could work anywhere from Intermediate upwards, as it relies on learner ideas rather than language per se. There are opportunities for language input built in, and these could be developed further if necessary.

Essentially it’s an opposition debate, where learners debate the things they believe in – or not as the case may be!

Downloadable pdf version of the plan is attached here: teflgeek – Reason to believe.

On another note: Reason to Believe was my very first post on this blog!

So these were a few of my favourite things – what’s your favourite five?

(NB Apologies to all students and teachers of “Old English” for the very dodgy book titles at the top of the post…. You can blame my general ignorance of old English grammatical structure and inappropriate use of the Old English Translator for any and all mistakes contained within!)

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: Nine pretty pictures (#eltpics)

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:13:20 GMT

On the ninth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me: nine pretty pictures

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

10 tricks for reading

And nine pretty pictures – or rather some ideas to use with images and some images to use with them!

All of the pictures used below in this post have come from the excellent #eltpics Flickr photostream and are reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence.

potential by @hartle

(1) Make me a story – using either a single image or with a series of images (which can give a greater degree of support), learners come up with a story based on the image(s). By using superlame to add speech bubbles and captions, and by being creative with the windows snipping tool, it is possible to create comic book sequences. But pen and paper can also work!

Decorated bicycles at Children's Perahara, Tangalle, Sri Lanka, July 2010 by @CliveSir

(2) Caption Competition - take in a series of images, ideally one per learner in the class, but fewer if you have a large class, and stick them up around the room. Chop some scrap A4 into sentence sized strips so that each learner has one strip per picture. So, if you have 12 learners and 12 pictures up, you’ll need 144 strips of paper… Or you could just give each learner 4 strips of paper, which would be quicker and more manageable. Learners move around the room independently and when they feel inspired by a picture, they write a caption for it on one of their strips of paper. Captions don’t need to be humorous (though they can be!). After a set amount of time, collect all the strips back in and redistribute them, making sure learners don’t have any of their original strips. Learners then try to stick the captions up next to the picture they think it refers to. This can then be followed up with learners checking to see whether their captions got put in the right place or not and explaining why they wrote what they wrote. Plus any language feedback.

Knitting and crocheting-Huayhuash, Peru by @VictoriaB52

(3) Role play Prompts I saw this done in a session a couple of years ago – I sadly can’t remember who gave the session or what it was on… - but I remember the activity. Using a picture of Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage”, we put ourselves in the positions of the people in the painting and then came up with questions to ask each other, which then lead into a sort of role play as we acted out being the people in the pictures. It was great fun and a really nice way of helping learners to access imagery, particularly for learners about to do exam speaking tasks involving pictures.

Street market, Copacabana, Bolivia by @sandymillin

(4) Labeltastic Something that occurred to me as an incredibly simple and effective way of using pictures, which I confess I’ve not used yet – the create-your-own picture dictionary. Most vocabulary lessons are based around a topic, so why not simply find a picture of that topic and give copies to the learners to stick into their notebooks so that they can add lots of little arrows and labels, thus creating their own lexically organised picture dictionaries?

(5) Mind Mapping In a similar vein, the idea of using mind mapping techniques with images can extend the labelling idea. With the mind map, you could not only access the key vocabulary items, but also access learners’ emotional reactions to the images and learners’ speculation on the content and individuals in those pictures. Thanks to @acliltoclimb for the inspiration from his post “Every Picture tells a Story“.

Easter in Seville. The park to themselves. by @europeaantje

(6) Dictadraw A very simple premise, but a nice way to revise vocabulary and practice / develop picture description skills. Essentially, you give different pictures to different learners in a pair. They take turns to describe their pictures to each other and as one partner describes, the other one draws. At the end of the activity, they compare their ideas. Obviously the object isn’t to create a perfect replica – particularly if you do use a photograph! I use this activity more with appearance vocabulary (he has red hair and a big nose) than with anything else, but it can also work with photos – as long as they aren’t too complex!

ET, come home! by @AClilToClimb

(7) Speculation Using bizarre, odd or unclear imagery can be fun ways of introducing and practicing modals of speculation and deduction. If you can’t find any pictures that you think are sufficiently bizarre (or likely to lead to enough speculation) then a simple remedy is to take a picture of a mundane everyday item and zoom in really really close on one particular aspect of it, and ask the learners to guess what it is. For example, the milled edge of a coin or the underneath of a pepper grinder could prove fruitful!

Browsing by @sueannan

(8) Expert Witness another old favourite – a memory game where learners look at an image for one minute, the image is then removed (removing the image also removes the temptation to peek!), and learners then have to recall the scene. With low levels / ages, this can be a Q&A session based on “Is there a ___? / Are there any ___? ” to revise a particular vocab set. For higher levels, it could be situated in a police interview scenario, the learner witnessed an incident (for example in the photo on the right “Browsing”, they could have witnessed a theft) and has to describe the scene. Or it could be run as a straight listing activity – learners look at the image for a minute and then have a further minute to list all the items they remember seeing in the picture.

(9) Selection In This is another fairly obvious one – it might require raiding the school flashcard / image files as it works best with a large amount of pictures. For a more structured task though, it might be best to generate a handout with a limited selection of images. In simple terms learners select the “best” image or images for a particular purpose, e.g. to include in a tourist brochure of the area / to put on the front page of an nature magazine (etc). This is a fairly simple task and one that mimics exam speaking tasks at FCE, CAE & CPE (sort of) – so would be good practice for prospective candidates. A twist on this is to ask the learners to select three or four similar pictures and to generate their own selection task for another group of learners to perform – they could then give feedback on performance.

Hot Air Balloon by @mrsdkrebs

street painting by Jane Arnold

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:00:02 GMT

Following on from the success of the recent Radio 4 series “A History of the World in 100 objects“, linguist and novelist David Crystal attempts to do the same for the English language. An interesting read for any and all language teachers and language historians out there!

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words – Telegraph.

If you were looking for a particularly challenging lesson for one of your advanced classes….. you could give them a selection of these words as a spelling test! And then divide the list and the class into four or five groups and set them off to discover what their words mean (and provide contextual sentences!).

Or they could just choose their favourites. Mine are numbers 43 and 49 – BODGERY and FOPDOODLE respectively.

(Thanks to Cherry M Philipose for sharing this via facebook)

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!

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.

Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool? (Voxy Blog)

Anonymous — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:30:47 GMT

The Voxy Blog has an interesting infographic for teaching and teacher development, examining the question: “Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool?” . I suspect most YL teachers (especially those at Primary level) are thinking “well duh” at this point.

The infographic was developed at least partially in promotion of one of Voxy’s i-phone apps, which should probably be borne in mind. While I think there are great arguments in favour of flashcard use in teaching (most of which are neatly summarised in the infographic), I’m not so sure about digital flashcards on i-phones. I can see how it might benefit an individual learner working with concrete nouns, but possibly not a busy teacher dealing with a class of 30 or so six-year-olds! I suspect it depends on how you can use the i-phone app and what it lets you do, but this isn’t clear from the information. Can you link it to your interactive whiteboard? Printing?

I also take issue with the uncited assertion that “high frequency words” are mostly “content words” – in fact this pdf of the top 300 high frequency words gives the top 25 words as articles, prepositions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs. As does this list of the top 1200. In both lists the first “content” word appears at number 43 – “said”.

The counter arguments given in the graphic are also worth thinking about – simply showing learners an image once may not lead to learning. Little and often seems to be the general consensus: Remember to Recycle and Revise!

Right at the bottom of their post, they include links to an additional eleven related posts from around the EFL blogosphere.

Overall? Interesting points, but not so sure about the tactics and doubts about the product!

Vocabulary Revision Game: Pointless

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:30:58 GMT

While visiting the UK over the summer, I was introduced to a relatively new BBC Game show – “Pointless“, in which contestants try to score as few points as possible. Or as the BBC phrase it: ”Quiz in which contestants try to score as few points as possible by plumbing the depths of their general knowledge to come up with the answers no-one else can think of.”

Obviously, this game has great teaching possibilities….!

The immediate thought was that this principle would make a great vocabulary revision and extension game.

The learners can work together in pairs (or small groups) and brainstorm five vocabulary items connected to a topic (e.g. animals).

The teacher also writes down (or has pre-selected) five vocab items in the target area.

Scoring can either be complicated or simple…. in the simple version, learners score 0 (zero) points for every word they choose that nobody else thinks of. They score five points for every word that someone else in the room has come up with.

In the complicated version, they score five points for every word they think of that the teacher thinks of, PLUS the same number of points as additional people have their word. So: Group A thinks of the word “tiger”. Groups B & C also have the word, so Group A get 2 points. If Groups B & C AND the teacher have the word tiger, Group A get 7 points.

In either scenario, the aim is to score as few points as possible. Thus (hopefully) encouraging learners to think of more esoteric vocabulary and thus extending their range and offering up the opportunity for peer teaching.

This game could make a great way finishing up a vocabulary based lesson – or could be a nice revision style warmer.

To take a look at how it’s done properly (BBC style with high end production values) – take a look at the you tube video below: