So this is English...

Conducting a Survey with 7-year-olds

2011-12-05T18:48:00.000+01:00

As part of our current topic Healthy Eating, the children carried out a survey to find out what foods other students in the school eat and how often. At first I asked the children if they knew what a survey was in Spanish (encuesta) but they weren't sure what one was, so I explained that it consisted of asking people questions to find out information. We were going to ask questions about food to see if the students in our school were healthy eaters or not.

As the children had not come across a survey or questionnaire before, I gave them some sample questions and the class decided that they would be good questions to ask. I divided the children into groups of three and asked them to come up with five questions about different foods e.g.

Do you eat fish? Do you drink milk? Do you eat vegetables?

We then drilled these questions with a chant:

Do you eat fish?
Yes, I eat fish!
Do you drink milk?
Yes, I drink milk!
Do you eat peas?
No, no I don't!

The children really enjoyed the chant, and we did several versions with different food items and with different dynamics such as teacher vs whole class, girls vs boys etc.

By this point they were all able to ask "do you" questions with no problems. I gave them a worksheet in groups with a table. In the first column they had to choose the different foods they wanted to ask questions about. The second column was to record YES or NO and the third column was to write down how many times a week.

In the following lesson, we practised asking questions to find out how many times a week people ate different foods, and the possible answers (one, two, three times, every day). I didn't want to complicate things to much so I avoided teaching ONCE, TWICE. We were then ready to go and ask the questions.
We went to another class and each group went to ask different people. Because the other class were teenagers, I allowed the groups to stay together to ask their questions. The children said they enjoyed asking questions to the other class and asked to do it again! So I said they could go to another class in the following lesson. This time the groups split up and asked questions individually.

The next stage was to compile the results. The members of each group got together and added up all the YES answers to form a total number of people that eat each food. When they had done this, I showed them an empty bar chart and started to complete it with examples that the children gave me. When they were clear about how to make a bar chart using their figures, each group started work.

In the final lesson, the groups finished their charts and then presented their results to the class, saying:

Eleven people eat sweets. Nine people eat carrots. Twelve people eat chicken.

Each group compared their results with those of the group that was presenting, telling the class of any differences.

The children really enjoyed this project and I think it was because they were really using English to communicate with other people. Conducting a questionnaire and compiling the results is a challenging task for this age group but they seemed to relish in the fact that they were doing something new, that they had never even done in Spanish. They all managed to ask people questions with only a little prompting, and they were all able to work in groups to produce the end results. All in all, a successful project!

A Story Project with Six-year-olds

2011-11-24T10:50:00.000+01:00

I am a big fan of trying out tasks traditionally left to older students with my youngest learners. Writing stories is one of these activities. I suppose "writing" isn't the right word here as these children are just learning to read and write in Spanish, and have only been learning English for two months with very little exposure to the written word. Perhaps "creating" stories would be a better way of putting it. In any case, my class of six-year-olds have worked together to create a story from scratch, make the pages and then tell the story using Voicethread for the world to see. This is how we did it:

Day One

1) First I told the children that we were going to create our own story as a class. "¿¿En inglés??" (In English???) they all cried! Yes, in English. The first thing was to choose a character as the protagonist. I introduced the concept of voting and we ended up with the spider as our main character.

2) Having ascertained that a story usually contains a problem that must be solved we then started to think of problems the spider might have. The winner (actually my suggestion, but it could have been a student's) was that the spider was sad because her friends were playing without her.

3) I then stuck a series of pieces of A4 paper on the board to create a storyboard. I did this so that afterwards each learner would get a page from which to base their picture. We decided on the events and their order and I drew a quick sketch to remind us of what happened in each scene.

4) I then showed the children the materials we were going to be using - tissue paper, glue and felt-tip pens. I showed them that by layering different coloured pieces of tissue paper, we got different colours and textures. The glue would have a similar effect and the felt-tip pens had a roller stamp which would give us more visible texture. The idea was to create a story similar to Eric Carle's illustrations, as we had looked at The Very Hungry Caterpillar in previous lessons.

Days Two and Three

1) I put the storyboard back on display and I told the story again, pointing to each page. Some new vocabulary came up in the story such as park, play tag, friends, lonely as well as negative sentences (didn't, isn't). If that isn't emergent language, I don't know what is! When all the children were clear about the events of the story and could provide most of the important words, I asked each child to choose a scene. They would be responsible for creating that page of the book.

2) I asked the children what colours they would like to use for the spider. They decided that blue and yellow would be nice with green for the legs. We did the same for the other characters. I cut out some basic shapes from the tissue paper and the children started to stick them onto their pages. The sticking took a while as I had to go round helping them squeeze the glue as you needed very strong fingers! As I went round, I would ask the children what insect the were making. Some children had more sticking to do, others had a spider's web to draw. In the end, we drew the faces and used the pens to draw legs, antennae and patterns.

3) It was then time to find out if the children remembered the story. I ask them to stand in a line with their pages in order. There were no problems here so we then added page numbers. I told the story again, with their help, using their pictures.

4)I took photos of the pictures and later uploaded them to Voicethread.

Day Four

1) I showed the children the basic Voicethread (just picures, no comments) on the computer. They were all thrilled to see their pictures on the internet! I asked them what was missing. I asked them if somebody saw our story, would they know what happened? They decided that it would be difficult to know what happened because there were no words. So I told them that they were going to add the words, but not written words. They were going to tell the story with their voices. "¿¿¿En inglés???" they all cried!

2) I went through the story, page by page, asking the children what happened. I elicited the important words in English and the provided the full sentence. Each child would repeat their sentence several times. We did quite a bit of rehearsing, including using "big voices" that the microphone would pick up.

3) By this stage, the children could say their sentences and they knew what they were saying, so it was time to record. Each child came up to the computer and said their sentence. Some needed a few tries to get it right (including the volume). We listened to each child and then we listened to the whole story. I had to fill in for a couple of absent learners. Our story was now complete!

4) The final task was to collate the pages and create the actual storybook which I would hang in the classroom for everone to look at.

Here is the final product:

Storybooks from the 70s and 80s

2011-11-21T14:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, browsing on Amazon, I came across the exact same edition of a book I had in around 1980. The book in question was There was an old lady who swallowed a fly by Pam Adams, first published in 1973. Of course, I promptly bought it for the modest price of 3.78 euros! But childhood nostalgia apart, I bought the book to use in the classroom. I loved the story as a young child, partly because the fact that an old lady swallows a horse is hilarious to a four-year-old, but also because the story has fantastic rhythm and rhyme.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bird. How absurd she swallowed a bird! She swallowed the bird to catch the spider that wriggled a wriggled and tickled inside her.

The story also contains a lot of repetition, (think along the lines of The Twelve Days of Christmas) always ending each verse with "perhaps she'll die". My mother, who used to read me the story, is tone deaf, but even she got the rhythm right!

Finding this book, however, got me thinking about other storybooks I loved as a child and whether they are still in print. Here is a list of books I read frequently in the early to mid 80s:

1. Paddington at the Seaside by Michael Bond
2. The Topsy and Tim series by Jean Adamson and Belinda Worsley (an eighties Charlie and Lola?)
3. My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards (I had one!)
4. Mog's Christmas by Judith Kerr
5. The Secret Seven by Enid Blighton
6. The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
7. Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown
8. The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
9. The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton

These are the ones I can remember, but I'm sure there were many more. I loved anything by Enid Blyton including the Mallory Towers series (boarding schools sounded so exciting!). Most of these books were first published in the 60s and 70s ( the Blighton books in the 40s!) but most are still available in new prints or second-hand on Amazon. It just goes to show that a good book will never disappear.

The next few posts will be dedicated to children's storybooks, old and new, and how we can use them in the classroom.

ACEIA: CHALLENGING CHILDREN - Content in the Primary EFL Classroom

2011-11-13T13:03:00.000+01:00

I would like to thank all those that came to my session yesterday and I hope that you took something useful away with you ready to use in your classrooms. I apologise for rushing through some of the practical activities at the end - I would have sincerely preferred to spend more time discussing stories, crafts and games, but as often happens, time got the better of me! If you do have any questions or if there is anything you would like to discuss, you can do so here in the comments section.

In any case, here is the slideshow if you would like to take another look:

ACEIA Challenging Children: Content in the Primary EFL Classroom

If you would like to know the titles of the books I showed you, let me know and I will post them here.

I hope everyone enjoyed the day, I know I did!

Personalised Dictogloss to Practise Tenses

2011-10-13T12:48:00.000+02:00

One way of diagnosing students' knowledge of tenses, or of getting them to focus on the difference between two tenses, is by doing a dictogloss. On Tuesday with my CAE class, we were revising the use of different tenses, and I began by reading out the following short text:

Last Sunday I took part in the Race for Life.

This was the first time I had ever participated in a race, except for the odd fun run when I was at school.

I took up running in March and I have been training since then - two or three times a week.

There were over 5,000 women doing the run, of all ages. It wasn't easy to run at first because some of the women were walking.

In the end I finished in 412th position! I'm now thinking of trying to increase the distance on my training runs. Maybe next year I'll do a 10K!

I read it twice. The students then had to write down what they remembered from the text. They then worked in pairs to try to reconstruct the text, paying close attention to the verb tenses used. They could ask me questions about any details they couldn't remember, but I would reply with one word answers. I then wrote all the verbs that appeared in the story on the board and the students could check that they had included everything. There didn't seem to be any problems with the use of tenses in this case, but you can always focus on some of the verbs and ask the students why they used each particular tense.

Today I have a teenage group who were looking at the main differences between the present simple and continuous last lesson. I am going to do a dictogloss with the following text:

I'm feeling nervous and excited. It's very noisy because there are so many people. I am with more than five thousand other people and we are all standing in a small space, like a outdoor corridor. I hear a man through the speakers. He is telling us how long we have before we start. The atmosphere is amazing. Everybody is getting ready to go. The man is reading some names and now five thousand people are singing "Happy Birthday" to those people! The man is now counting ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go! Now there are lots of pink balloons in the air and we are all running.

I will pre-teach some of the vocabulary so that the weaker students don't panic when I start to read. The first time they listen will be to find out where the speaker is. This is not explicit - they will have to imagine they are in this situation and guess where they are. Can you guess? The first example should help you!

The second time they can take notes. They will then work in pairs or threes to reconstruct the text. Again, I will write the verbs in their infinitive form on the board. If they find it difficult, I will put the verbs in the correct order. They will have to think carefully about whether each verb should be in present simple or continuous and why.

I am then going to ask them to write their own short text. They should imagine they are somewhere interesting (at a Cup Final, lost in a forest, in the A&E ward etc) and write how they are feeling and what they can see, hear etc. Hopefully, this will get them using both tenses appropriately.

Both texts are true and about an event I took part in last weekend. I think that giving a personalised touch to the materials you use can provoke more interest and discussion - the students may wish to know more, and it is more motivating for students to find out something about their teacher as a person instead of an impersonal text from a book. It may even motivate them to write their own!

Children's Book Week

2011-10-12T12:31:00.001+02:00

Last week was Children's Book Week in the UK and I thought it would be nice to have a lesson where we talked about our favourite books. My first stop looking for suggestions on how to focus the lesson was the British Council's Teaching English website because I have previously found great ideas on using literature and poetry there. I wasn't disappointed, finding this great set of lesson ideas by Jo Bertrand.

I didn't know the book "Charlie Cook's Favourite Book" (which you can see here, Jackanory style) but it seemed a great way to introduce different types of books and the topic of "My Favourite Book".
I thought the story video would be too difficult for my class, so instead I followed Jo's advice and concentrated on some of the images from the story. I introduced some key vocabulary and we talked about whether we liked different genres of books or not.

As I don't have a copy of the book, I made this presentation so we could guess what each book on Charlie's shelf was about.

Charlie Cook's Favourite Book

It was then time to think about our own favourite books. One of the girls had brought in a book she was reading (I had asked them to but the others had forgotten!) and I asked her what is was about. I then wrote a simple text on the board with hints to remind the learners what information they would have to include.

My favourite book is ........................ by ........................................
It's about a .................. (who?) who ........................................ (what?) in ........................... (where?)
It's very exciting/interesting/funny/mysterious etc

We completed it with an example and then the learners wote down the text and thought about their favourite book. They are to post their work on our class blog.

Blogging with Kids

2011-10-12T11:31:00.000+02:00

By KristinaB

This year I decided to set up a blog for my class of eight to ten year olds. Now I think a bit of background information is required here. Firstly, we do not have interactive whiteboards or projectors in the classroom. However, I have a laptop and wifi access. This has proved to be sufficient to show the learners how to access the blog and to answer any questions with a quick demonstration. In this class there are ten learners but I think even with larger groups you could show them how to use the blog a few at a time and allow them to practise in small groups while the others are working on something else. My main point here is that you don't need lots of equipment to set up a class blog. The main requirement is that the learners have computer and internet access at home.

I wasn't sure how willing the kids would be at first. This is the group I wrote about last month who were having some problems with their attitude towards each other and in particular to one boy. They are in the third and fourth year ar primary school and come to English lessons twice a week after school. For this reason they are not used to having to do homework for me - they have enough of that from school. When I introduced the blog, I didn't use the word "homework" but focused on how they would be able to write what they wanted, from time to time having specific tasks to do. This is in fact not true, at least not yet - I have given them a task to do every week, but until they get used to blogging I think this is a good idea. One of the girls already posted an entry about what she was doing that weekend and I think some of the others will follow suit when they have got used to the platform and how it works.

You can imagine how surprised I was when the very day I gave the homework some kids had already posted their answers! I set up the blog on 21st September and showed it to the class, and I wrote an introductory post which they dictated to me. The following week I set a task - write about your favourite outfit. On that weekend every single student wrote an entry and what is more, they started to comment on each others' posts! Some started by saying hello on our introductory post and then commenting on other people's work. One of the reasons for this is our "Kindness and Respect Box" into which a marble is placed every time somebody does or says something nice to a classmate and the children decided that the blog was a good place for this.

Some of the comments they have made are:
"So good description"
"Wow, your outfit is very beauty!"
"A very good description!"
"Excellent work, goodbye"

There are now 28 entries (so far I have set three tasks, the last one just yesterday) and over 50 comments, some of which are mine. I use the comments to recast some of the learners' errors. However, these kids are not used to writing in English and their work is full of strange spellings and a lack of grammar. I plan to go over some of the more common errors in class, but I'm not too worried about this because they are still young and one of the objectives of setting up the blog was to motivate them to use English outside the classroom.

All in all I am really pleased with the results - the kids are very enthusiastic and love writing and reading each others' comments about their work. The platform we are using is called Kidblog and is designed specifically for primary aged children. You set up a page for your class and then each member of the blog has their own individual page. It is very intuitive and easy enough for children to use without help, once they have been shown how to use it.

Give it a try!

But I don't like him!

2011-09-20T20:23:00.001+02:00

What do you do when your students complain in front of the class about being put in a group with another student? When nobody in the class likes one student because of his problematic behaviour in the past? When several parents threatened to remove their children from the school because of this one "difficult" child?

John (fictional name) is an extremely bright eight-year-old, very short for his age, but intellectually more advanced than many of the nine and ten year olds in his class. Prone to aggressive and challenging behaviour in previous years, John is, after the first two lessons, working fine. There has been no particularly conflictive behaviour on his part, except when provoked by another student.

However, nobody wants to work with John. Of course, John realises this and therefore reacts to their lack of friendliness and kindness with more of the same.

It is going to be hard to undo several years of negative experience that the other children have had with John, but hopefully not impossible. I would like to start straightaway by introducing games or activities that will help integrate John more and foster a positive and kind classroom atmosphere. However, I'm not sure how to go about it. If the children were younger, I feel it would be easier. These children are around ten years old. If you have any ideas or experience of this type of problem, I'd love to hear about how you attempted to solve it.

Thanks in advance :)

Classroom Routines for Young Learners: Circle Time

2011-09-13T13:52:00.000+02:00

Circle Time is a period of the lesson where all the learners sit in a circle with the teacher. Often this is at the beginning of the lesson, when it helps get the children focussed and attentive. When children come into school on a Monday morning or, in my case, in the afternoons, their heads are full of interesting thoughts about what they have done or seen at the weekend, what they did at school this morning, what happened on the way to school, what they are going to watch on TV after the class and so on. There are two ways of getting children to forget all this interesting stuff that is occupying their thoughts: the first is distraction - maybe showing them something unusual, saying something funny or doing something silly, although we don't really want to excite them too much - that would have the opposite effect to what we really want. The other is sitting down and allowing the children to talk about all those things that preoccupy them. Depending on the situation, both methods can be useful, but I find that having Circle Time at the beginning is a nice routine to have with young learners.

So how does Circle Time work?

Well, the first thing is to have the classroom arranged in an appropriate way before the children come in. If you have space, a rug for the children to sit on is great (those cold marble floors we have here are terribly uncomfortable) but if not you can just arrange the chairs in a circle. The children should leave any coats, bags or materials on their desks/pegs or whatever, outside the circle. If the children have brought in something to show to the class, it is best to take it off them until it is their turn to speak, otherwise they will be easily distracted by this plaything.

Once everyone is sitting down quietly, you may like to ask a question about the weekend/school/holidays to get things started, but more often than not several of the children will be bursting to tell you something, and this will lead to everyone else having something to say, whether or not this is related. Now, some rules are necessary here, to prevent everyone from interrupting each other, speaking all at once, or dominating the time you have.
The main rule is that only one person can speak at a time and everyone else must wait their turn. This is easier said than done. The younger they are, the harder it is for children to understand the concept of turn-taking, so we need to aid them in some way. One way is by having some kind of toy/ball/puppet that the speaker holds. Only the child holding this object can speak, the others have to ask for the object before they can speak. If you have a class mascot or puppet, this is ideal. Another option is to have all the children's names or photos in a bag or box, and the child whose name is taken out is the one who gets to speak. The main thing is to make sure the children know what the rules of Circle Time are and how it works. It is essential to limit this time to five or ten minutes, so that it doesn't take over the whole lesson. This is especially important when Circle Time is conducted mostly in L1. You can make sure the children are aware by holding up a toy clock which shows how much time is left.

One of the advantages of Circle Time is that it can help foment the skill of listening to others, which is something that young children find very difficult. It will often be the case that each child is thinking about what they are going to say and is sitting there with their hand up just waiting to be chosen and is paying absolutely no attention to what is being said. One way of encouraging children to listen is by rewarding any comments they make about what was said before. This could be a simple "Excellent listening!" or you could give the "best listener" a sticker at the end of Circle Time.

Show and tell can also be a fun way to start the lesson and can also be done in Circle Time. Each day a different child can bring something in. I have done this in the past and children have brought in anything from a small toy, a sticker album to a stone they found in the school playground. I usually encourage the child in question to pass around their object so that the others can see it clearly and touch it.

We can also have Circle Time at the end of the lesson. I am going to introduce this in my young learner lessons this year, and possibly with older students too (although with the adults I think "Round Up" or "Lesson Review" would be a better name!). This is what is known as a plenary or lesson review and its objective is to round up what has been covered in the lesson and clarify any problems. The teacher can make a note of any gaps in knowledge that will need to be covered again. Use the Circle Time in the last five minutes of each lesson to remind the children of what they have learnt or practised that lesson. You could play a ball game (still sitting in the circle) to review vocabulary or structures. This review stage has the extra benefit of when parents ask their children what they have learnt in class today, they should remember something!

I have focused on very young learners in this post, but something similar can be useful with all age groups. Older teens and adults can find it beneficial to ease into English at the beginning of the lesson with a simple conversation about the weekend, and it also gives the teacher the opportunity to outline the learning objectives of the lesson. In the review session, students can evaluate themselves against these learning objectives and notice the areas on which they may need more work or practice.

Introducing... Five Six Seven Now Live!

2011-08-17T13:40:00.000+02:00

Those of you who read this blog regularly may have heard a little about my latest project, Five Six Seven. I have been working on this over the past year and have trialled the programme with my own class, for whom the project was originally created. Here are a few more details.

Five Six Seven

What is Five Six Seven?

Five Six Seven is a content-based language course for young learners of five to seven years of age.

Who is it aimed at?

Five Six Seven is aimed at teachers of English to young learners. It is meant as an alternative to traditional language lessons.

Is Five Six Seven suitable for subject teachers?

No. The course includes content from other areas of the curriculum but does not replace those subjects. It is an English course that uses content from other subjects to motivate and maintain interest whilst encouraging the learners to communicate in a natural way. It may, however, be useful for CLIL teachers who are looking for extra ideas.

What is included in the Five Six Seven course?

Five Six Seven is a teacher's guide. There is no class book. The guide is made up of a series of 6 step by step lesson plans for each of the 9 units, plus 4 insertable units. At the back of the guide you will find photocopiable worksheets and handouts to accompany the lesson plans, and a bank of pictures that you can download from the Microsoft Office website.

How can I download Five Six Seven to try it out with my class?

Five Six Seven has its own website. On the site you will find a full copy of the syllabus ready to download. You will also be able to view the first two units of the course. If you wish to download the units or have a preview of later units, please use the contact form on the website.

Do I have to pay to use Five Six Seven?

No! It is completely free of charge. You can also share the contents with your colleagues and other teachers in your school. However, I ask that you provide some feedback as to the use, quality and practicality of the materials. If there is anything that you think could be improved, please drop me a line!

Visit http://www.wix.com/michelleworgan/fivesixseven now!

Blogging, Twitter and Distractions

2011-08-03T16:50:00.000+02:00

Having realised that I haven't posted on this blog for well over a month, I thought it was about time I made a comeback! I hope I haven't lost many of my faithful readers during the dry spell that was July.

A bit of a dry spell... by jczart on Flickr

My excuses? A week meeting my new niece in sunny Stoke, another week spring (that should be summer) cleaning and sorting out the tip that our flat had become, a week being very lazy (after all that work) and a final week getting back down to the grindstone to my project Five Six Seven (which you will hear about very soon!)

I have opened Tweetdeck for the first time in weeks and found no messages or mentions, so I don't think I have been missed too much! That is, of course, the very nature of Twitter. The same people at the same time every day have random conversations, which I must say are great fun, but when the same people disappear off the face of the Twearth nobody really notices. For many teachers like myself, the summer break is a chance to disconnect from teaching and get our real lives back for a bit, spending more time with friends and family and less time stuck in front of a Twitterstream. Having said that, I am getting a smartphone, so I will surely become a Twaddict again sometime soon.

In any case, I haven't completely disowned ELT for the summer. I have been working on Five Six Seven and its website. Sometimes, one needs to choose one thing to focus on and ignore all other distractions.

If I have been away for too long and neglected my own blog, it doesn't mean that I have been ignoring yours - I may not have commented but I have been reading...I promise! I'm just no longer spending hours every day reading and commenting and tweeting.

I will be away in the last week of August, but as soon as I am back I will be launching the Five Six Seven website, ready for Back to School in September. Then it's all go!

Wrong Trousers Day

2011-06-20T13:06:00.000+02:00

School ends tomorrow. By this I mean that "real" school ends but we, in the language school, still have another ten days to go. Tomorrow will be the last day for many of our younger students, but others will come on Wednesday or Thursday, and a few (poor kids!) will be made to come next week. For these last few lessons something special is required - games, a video, an ice-cream, is common for the very last day of the year, but what happens when there are two or three lessons to go? Well, in my inbox this morning there was a nice surprise from The Guardian Teacher Network - Wrong Trouser Day!

Apparently, Friday 24th June is Wrong Trouser Day. People will dress in a pair of unusual trousers and go about their normal routine. Each participant pays one pound and the benefits go to children's hospitals and hospices around the UK. Organised by the Wallace and Gromit's Children's Foundation, you can find a promotional video on their website which is great for classroom use.

The Guardian Teacher Network has lots of resources for different areas of the curriculum but most are suitable for primary or early secondary learners of English. You will find the most useful links here, in my Delicious bookmarks. Activities include a reading comprehension about the fund raising event, drawing and design tasks, and thinking about how to describe trousers using adjectives. On the Guardian Teacher Network you can find more activities related to numeracy and literacy. You need to be registered to download the worksheets, but I recommend doing so as there are hundreds of useful resources on the site and you will be sent a regular newsletter summarising new or timely content.

I will be using some of these ideas with nine to eleven year old learners, but you could use or adapt them for younger children.

Introduction:
See who is wearing trousers in the class (here shorts are more likely due to the sweltering weather we are having) and describe them. For example, say: "This person is wearing long grey trousers. They are part of a school uniform." or "This person is wearing white short trousers". The others have to guess who you are describing.

Watching:
Play the video shown on the Wallace and Gromit Foundation website. Ask the children what people they have seen. This is a good opportunity to teach or revise some professions. What was strange about these people? Were they wearing their own trousers? Whose trousers was each person wearing?

Reading/Listening:
You could use the text as a listening task instead of reading if the children don't feel like reading. In any case, the text and questions will probably need to be modified to suit the level of your students.

Describing:
Choose one of the students wearing trousers and ask the others to describe them. What colour are they? Are they long or short? What are they made of? Have they got a pattern or picture? Have they got pockets? Are the smart or casual? Write all the adjectives on the board and tell the learners (or elicit, if they have some knowledge of grammar in their own language) that they are adjectives and we use them to describe things. Write some examples of phrases e.g long, black trousers/ short, yellow trousers/ white cotton trousers/ short blue jeans. Now elicit where we put the adjective in English. It may be a good idea to underline the adjectives or use a different colour. Hand out this worksheet and show the students how to complete it.

Drawing/Designing:
There are two worksheets you can use for this activity. The first is All Sorts of Trousers where learners think about the different kinds of trousers you can wear for different activities. In the second, they Design a Pair of Trousers for Wallace.The first activity is more suitable for younger, lower level learners.

Watching (film):
Now show the film The Wrong Trousers. There is a special ELT version published by OUP and divided into six parts.

I plan to do these activities over the next two classes.

If you are brave enough, you may wish to go into school that day actually wearing the "wrong trousers" yourself! Or if it would be too embarrassing on the commuter train, take a pair of trousers in and get changed before the lesson!

100th post!

2011-05-28T12:44:00.002+02:00

I thought I should do something special to celebrate my 100th post on this blog - 100 posts may not sound like many in an 18 month period, but it's still a landmark! I made a Wordle of both my 2009 and 2011 (so far*) entries and have added them to the glog below. I have made several glogs for young children before, but I am quite useless at it and it takes me hours even to create a simple glog like the one below! Click on "full size" to see it properly.

*I actually wrote this quite a few weeks back, due to Blogger counting non-published drafts as entries - I thought I had made 100 when really I was only up to about 94! So I had to wait a while... The Wordle, therefore, doesn't include my more recent posts.

I hope you like it :)

Dogme McNuggets?

2011-05-27T18:49:00.000+02:00


McNuggets by Calgary Reviews on Flickr

I have a new student. She's twenty-eight and is in the armed forces. I decided to try and take a dogme approach with her lessons, as she's having individual classes. During our first two lessons this has worked well because we've been doing quite a bit of talking about familiar topics such as family and our typical day, and lots of language has come up, but nothing unusual - in fact, the language that emerged was actually the typical grammar and vocabulary you would find in a coursebook lesson on those topics. This makes me feel that I haven't been doing dogme at all! Is it that after so many years of traditional course book lessons, I have it all so strongly etched into my brain that I automatically encourage certain language items to come up? If so, that can hardly be called dogme! But am I really directing the language so much? Or is it that when you talk about your daily life you automatically use certain Mcnuggets? Hmm, I'm getting a bit confused.

In any case, this student has a grammar and vocabulary exam next month, so our short term goal is actually to brush up on all those Mcnuggets. This is student-centred learning - the student's priority is to try to pass her exam, rather than be able to communicate in English. That will come later. Sometimes, I think we forget about our students' priorities because we were trained in the Communicative era and have some kind of need to help our students communicate. However, as I mentioned in a recent post on jigsaw puzzles, this is not necessarily whar our students want or need.

So, assuming that I have to help my student remember (and in some cases learn) the grammar and vocabulary she needs to pass her exam, can I possibly take a dogme approach? If I do, we will certainly miss out some important Mcnuggets. Again, I'm slightly perplexed.

These are just some thoughts that have been running through my mind, anyway. Sorry for rambling. Take no notice!

Rainbow Colours

2011-05-23T11:42:00.002+02:00

In several of my previous posts I have talked about my class of six-year-olds, for whom I designed a syllabus based around content from other subject areas such as literacy, science, art and crafts, drama and P.S.H.E.

Today I'm going to talk about an activity I did last week, which the children thoroughly enjoyed. At the moment we are looking at the world around us, and in the previous lessons we had been talking about the weather. In the lesson in question we were looking at primary colours and the other colours that can be formed by these. Some of the children were aware that mixing colours formed new ones, but others were finding it hard to guess which colours would be created. So we did an experiment to see how by using only three colours: RED, BLUE and YELLOW, we could make others such as orange, green, purple and pink.

What you need:

A bowl
red, blue and green food coloring
milk
washing-up liquid

First, I showed the children what we were going to do. I mimed pouring milk into the bowl, and then adding a drop of each food colouring at the edges of the bowl, about a third of the way apart. I then pretended to put a drop of washing-up liquid in the middle. As I was doing this I explained what I was doing in simple English.
I then gave the children a worksheet where they had to predict what they would see.

Worksheet 5

We carried out the experiment twice, in order to see if there were any changes between the two bowls.

The children were fascinated by how the colours moved around the bowls, mixing and changing shade and form. We left the bowls for a few minutes and then came back to note any changes.

The children commented on the new colours that emerged and even compared the second bowl to a planet!
These pictures show how the two bowls developed:

The children then completed the second part of the worksheet, by choosing one of the two bowls and drawing what they had seen.

The final activity was noticing which colours merged together to form new ones.

The children had lots of fun and were really engaged - one of the few times I have managed to get them all standing still around the table quietly!

Baggy Trousers

2011-05-20T12:41:00.000+02:00

How many of you teach teenage boys? Or lads in their early twenties?
For those of you that do, this may well be a common sight in or around your classroom:


By Lebatihem on Flickr

Always on the lookout for interesting and unusual non-coursebook topics to use with some of my teenage students, I was glad to find this article in The Guardian.

I will use the unmodified text with my advanced students, but may come up with a graded version for my younger teen group. Here are some quesions to get the discussion going before introducing the text, for Upper-Intermediate or Advanced learners:

Introduction to the topic
1) What kinds of clothes do you usually wear?
2) Do you wear the same style of clothes all the time? e.g. at school, hanging out with friends, at a disco etc
3) Do you prefer your clother to be tight and fitted or loose and baggy?
4) Does your style belong to a particular trend or group? e.g. emo, goth, mod, rocker, hippy, preppy, hip hop, gangster etc
5) Do your classmates wear the same types of clothes as you? If not, how would you describe their outfits?

After seeing the picture above:
6) Have you ever worn your trousers like this?
7) Would you consider dressing like this? Why (not)?
8) Why do you think some boys wear their trousers in this way?
9) Does this style say anything about their personality or views?
10) Should they be allowed to dress like this at school?

Tell the students that the council of Florida is considering banning men from wearing trousers that show their underpants.

11) What do you think about this proposal?
12) Why do you think they are considering making this law?
13) Do you think we should have the right to dress how we like? How important is this to you?
14) Do you think that some ways of dressing are unacceptable in public? If so, which?
15) In France, the wearing of a face-covering veil in public has been banned for Muslim women. What do you think about this law?
16) Can we compare Florida's law and France's law?

Students now read the article.

17) Are "saggy trousers" only worn by one group of people?
18) Where did the look originate?
19) Does "showing your pants" have the same consequences for girls and boys?
20) What do the "saggers" say are their reasons for dressing in this way?

With very small high level groups (at the moment I only have 2 or 3 in the class!) I tend to take a more relaxed approach and allow the discussion to move on in whatever way is appropriate in that lesson. These questions are just a guide to fall back on. With a larger group I would hand out the list of questions to students in groups of three or four. I would then look at any language that comes up in the text and any that emerges during the discussion. The text is used as a basis for discussion rather than a reading comprehension, as my students have more trouble speaking (and coming up with things to say) than reading and understanding a text.

You could do lots of other things with the article, or as a follow up. For example, you could create some rather interesting roleplay scenarios with a "sagger" and his grandmother! The students could write a composition about different styles and fashions, or they could write a diary entry for a boy who has been told he must not wear saggy trousers. If you have any more ideas, share them in the comments section.

I am now wondering if there are any "saggy-trousered" TEACHERS out there!

Not A Real Post!

2011-05-18T15:01:00.000+02:00

In case you were thinking that I had miraculously written a second post today, just a few minutes after the first, this isn't a real post! I just thought I would mention that this humble blog is in the Top 200 list of Language Learning blogs created by Lexophiles. There are another 199 fantastic blogs on the list, so I don't expect I'll get many votes, but if you would like to vote (for this one or any other blog) you can do so here.

I won't be voting for my own blog this year either! (Thought doing that was a bit cheeky!)
Good luck to all those other bloggers on the list!

How do you do a jigsaw puzzle?

2011-05-18T14:09:00.005+02:00

Sorry the text is so small - I've tried to change it but nothing happens! The spacing has gone mad too!

Thanks to liza31337 on Flickr

I wrote the title to this post sometime ago and then promptly forgot about it. I have just found it amongst the drafts that I never got round to finishing and posting. At first, I didn't even remember why I had decided to write a post entitled "How do you do a jigsaw puzzle?" and what it had to do with learning or teaching English, but then I remembered - I often get these flashes of parallels between day-to-day occurences and language learning methods, as in these older posts: Queuing in the Supermarket and Brick by Brick the Tower is Built. Having received a new jigsaw puzzle as a Christmas present (and taking ages to do it!), I got thinking about the different ways in which people approach things like jigsaws and how this is a reflection of a person's character, and consequently, their learning style.

I hate Science and Maths and Logic and anything else where you have to follow a procedure, step by step, methodically - boring! Now, I'm not a particularly creative person either, but I have always found it hard to think in a logical, ordered way. This is probably why I never really enjoyed Maths and Science at school. (By the way, you must read Brad Patterson's post Etymology and Dogme flies,

where he talks about Science, Humanity and Coursebooks!) I prefer to do things in a slightly more random and ecletic manner. If I do have to solve a mathematical problem, for instance, I would try to work it out (in my head or on paper), but I wouldn't methodically work out the equation that could probably solve it much more quickly. I don't "do" equations! My partner, however, works out absolutely any problem with an equation - he believes this is the most practical, and the easiest way.

So, back to the jigsaw. Just as my partner methodically separates all the pieces - first the border, then all the other pieces according to colour (yes, in lots of little plastic tubs), I would rather do it more randomly. Ok, I do the border first, but I would rather not spend hours putting pieces into separate piles. On a larger section of colour, such as the sea in a map of the world, my partner puts all those pieces in nice lines, separated according to gender (in Spain jigsaw pieces are male or female, depending whether they have holes or sticking-out bits) and methodically tries each one in the space he is trying to fill. A jigsaw is supposed to be fun and for me there is no fun in this. In the past, we have done jigsaws together, and it's much better as we both have our own style. We complement each other in this way. However, I had to do this last jigsaw alone, and I found myself having to do some of it in exactly the way he would have done - trying out each piece one by one. This was mainly because I was fairly sick of it - it takes a long time to do a 2000 piecer on your own, and I really wanted to finish it.

Ok, you are wondering what on earth this has to do with anything. (Again!) Well, I think this can say a lot about how a student learns. As a language learner myself, I hated memorising lists and verb conjugations, and grammar rules. In fact, I never got to grips with the subjunctive at university - there are far to many rules to remember. And in any case, knowing the rules doesn't mean that you can actually use them. I learnt how to use the subjunctive by using it, by listening to people and reading. I picked it up. And I think this is reflected in the way I do jigsaw puzzles and solve problems. Other people prefer a more methodical approach.

So here we have two types of learners, although, of course, there are many more, especially if we look at Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. I think, as teachers, we need to be aware of this - that some of our students feel the need to know rules and have direct translations, and others don't. We often tend to stick to a methodology which encourages discovery and sometimes even glosses over the grammar, keeping everything in context (well, one context), but we always get at least one student who keeps asking "Ok, but what is the rule?" and "How do you say that in Spanish?". In many cases, I have seen teachers (and I have done it myself), try to keep explaining something with examples, refusing to either state the rules or translate, just because it was not the "in" thing to do. But if we really are trying to make our lessons learner-centred, surely we need to do things in the way that best suits our students?

I think my main point here is really that "no one way is the right way". Depending on the students in a particular class, you may need to cover areas of language in more than one way. We could have reading and listening texts, even extensive reading, for students like me, who "find" language automatically with exposure. But we could also have more drilling and controlled exercises for those who need to separate their learning into categories. This is obviously very difficult to do in class, but for homework we could give the students several options. On occasion, we could divide the class up into two groups (according to learner type) and give them different actvities to complete. Or even, in pair work, put two different learners together and have one concentrate more on form and the other on the ideas.

So, how do you do a jigsaw puzzle?

Imaginary Trips - Let's go to the fair!

2011-05-09T12:05:00.000+02:00

It's Feria time again and I thought I would link to last year's post in which I outlined a way of encouraging (very) young learners to talk about the fair.

At the Fair by Dominic on Flickr

When creating my own lesson ideas for young children I always try to provide a variety of activities that include movement and drawing or colouring, in order to change the dynamics - after a noisy game that includes running around, an arts and craft activity can be ideal in order to lower excitement levels and successfully sustain a quiet period during the lesson. I also try to make the lesson multi-sensory, which means using senses other than sight and hearing (which are the predominant senses used in an English lesson), such as touch and smell. This may mean bringing in real or toy objects for the children to handle.

In the lesson above, I used pictures to present the vocabulary, but another option would be to play recordings of the sounds as well. There could be a horse trotting or galloping, fireworks going off, "sevillanas" music, the sound of a rollercoaster, the siren of the dodgems etc. Using the sense of smell can be more difficult to organise, but you could try to bring in some typical foods of the fair, such as candy floss, caramelised nuts. Taste would be a better option maybe - you could have a blindfolded tasting session of toffee apples, candy floss, lollypops, crisps or whatever else is typical. Try not to give them too much sugar though!

With young children I always try to tap into their imaginations, as they have not yet begun to doubt their own creativity. Children left alone will naturally start to play and imitate situations they have seen in real life or on TV. All little girls have played "house" and all boys "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" and we have all pretended to be superheroes like Batman or Superman. Children know that these games are not real, but this doesn't stop them from having fun - in fact, it is much more fun to be a superhero than a 6 year-old boy!
I really believe we should be taking advantage of this in the classroom. Too much lesson time is spent on drilling with flashcards or large pictures - I'm not saying this is bad, but the same language can be "presented" and practised in a much more fun way. Instead of having the children sitting at their desks pointing to flashcards around the room, take them on a pretend bus to wherever you want to take them (with animals you can go to the zoo or the jungle), in this case to the fair. Put them in a line holding hands in twos, just like on a real school trip, and point things out to them. I usually have the pictures of the vocabulary placed around the classroom and I point to them, saying "Ooh look! There's the big wheel! Can you see it? It's very big! Shall we go on it?" In this way the children are being exposed to a lot more language than if you just say "big wheel" and they point to or touch the flashcard. You can involve the children even more by asking them where they want to go next. All this makes it more special - the children can really imagine being at the fair!

I have done similar "physical" visualisations with the topics Autumn, Winter and Spring, as well as Animals. We pretend to do lots of the activities we associate with those seasons, such as making snowmen or jumping in puddles. The children have lots of fun and just as importantly, all the children have the opportunity learn, whether they remember more things they have done, heard, drawn or written. In short, this kind of lesson is VAK because it includes activities that activate the different senses and therefore encourages learning from all types of learner.

Consequences

2011-04-19T14:17:00.000+02:00

Another activity that older children love is the traditional consequences game. It's very old game and there's nothing new about it, but I think it's worth reminding ourselves of some of the older activities that get put away and forgotten about. The only materials required are a piece of A4 paper and a pen for each student. The activity is carried out in lockstep and practises listening and writing. It is very simple and can be adapted in many ways to suit your purpose and the level of the students. As in Flash the picture, this activity allows each student to work at their own level - starting off very simply but allowing more detail from faster students. One of the best things about it is that the learners see it as a kind of game, but really they are doing a writing task!

The version that I did last week with my teenage group and with a group of ten-year-olds is one found in the same book as Flash the Picture:

It is called Fake Biographies and in it the students each write a piece of information about an anonymous member of the class. The procedure is as follows:

1) Give each student a piece of paper and tell them to write at the top "My name is ..." with their name. They should then fold the top of the paper back twice, so that the name is hidden. I also do the same - students love it when the teacher takes part in something a bit silly, too.

2) Take in all the papers and randomly give them out. They are not allowed to open the paper!

3) Say "I am ... years old" and the students complete it with ANY number. It is important that from now on, the students use their imaginations. Encourage them to be inventive and even slightly outrageous - this will make for funnier results.

4) Carry on doing the same, making up a new piece of information each time. This will, of course, depend on the age and level of the learners. Some of the "questions" I used were:

I was born in... (place)
I have ---- brothers and ... sisters.
My favourite TV programme is ....
My favourite singer is ...
In my free time I like to ....
Last year, I went on holiday to ....
I met ... and we ....

You can also ask actual questions if you think the students are capable of writing complete sentences by themselves: What's your name? How many brothers and sisters have you got? What's your favourite TV programme? etc

5) The students then opened their paper and read the description. I got them to copy out the information onto a piece of paper as a paragraph. They had to correct any spelling or grammar mistakes as they did so.

6) They then gave the biography to the person whose name was at the top and each student read theirs out to the class. They also had to say if anything was true.

We have also played the same type of game with a story (as in the orginal consequences game) - this is always good preparation for story telling and writing. You start with a main character, introduce another character, and go on to write about where they went, what they did and said and so on. I usually do this with introductory sentences such as:

His name was...     He was... years old.      He was from ...    He was .... (physically).
Her name was...    She was ... years old.    She was from ...   She was ... (physically).
They met in/at ....    He said "..."    She said "...."    They went to ....    In the end they ....

This kind of activity can be used with any age group and level from elementary upwards. For younger children or beginners, you could pre-print out the beginnings of the sentences for the students to complete.

Another version, good for higher levels, is to mix sentences with drawings. Each person writes a sentence and passes the paper on. The next person reads the sentences and draws a picture illustrating it. They then fold the paper and pass it on. The following person can only see the drawing, and must write a sentence summarising the picture, and so on.

By evalottchen on flickr

One of the good things about it is that everybody wants to listen to each other (something very rare with teenage groups!) at the end, and everybody ends up laughing - it's a real feel good activity that's perfect to use at the end of term when something more relaxing is required but you don't want to just play games all lesson. Highly recommended!

Flashing and Mapping: getting teens to speak

2011-04-11T10:19:00.000+02:00

I've noticed that on this blog I spend half the time moaning about how nothing I ever do with my teenage group is very successful - well in this post that's all about to change as I actually enjoyed our last lesson and I think the students did too! I based the lesson around a very simple activity that appears in Language Activities for Teenagers by CUP, called Flash The Picture.

The first time I heard of this activity was during my first TEFL experience (not counting my time as a language assistant), during a TEFL taster course in my final year at university. I attended a weekend course, which actually included a kind of teaching practice, run by Jim Wingate. It was a fantastic course, based on humanistic teaching, and had lots of practical ideas, some of which I still dig out from time to time.

The idea is that you show a picture for only a few seconds before asking students to talk about it. This is great for mixed-ability classes, as learners can use more complex or simple language to describe what they say, according to their level.

Starting off with something very simple is, I think, ideal for this age group, who are self-conscious and not willing to take risks in front of their peers. They can start with basic sentences, and gradually try to use more language to express what they want to say.

I decided to do "Flash the Picture" with the whole class, before asking them to do something related in pairs. In this way, the lesser confident learners would be able to listen to some of the stronger students before speaking. For the picture I used one from an old giant flip chart of illustrated scenes. The particular scene I chose was in some kind of office with lots of customers waiting. Some of these customers were daydreaming or thinking about things in cloud bubbles above their heads. There was plenty to talk about, and speculation was also possible. Here is the procedure:

1) Flash the picture for 1 second. (Yes, only one second! It gives them time to see something, but not much.)

2) Ask the class what they saw in the picture. Allow everyone to say whatever comes into their heads and don't make any corrections, unless students ask for it (we want to encourage them to speak - we can leave accuracy for later).

3) Repeat stages 1 and 2.

4) Show the picture for 3 or 4 seconds (ooh, we're really going for a good look now!) and ask students what they saw.

5) Display the picture for everybody to see, for as long as they want. The students will now be able to look more closely and add details they had missed previously. I asked the students what they thought was going to happen next, and if they could see any problems in the situation.

6) Ask each student to choose a person from the scene and talk about them. (This worked for me because there were about ten people in the picture and eight students) I also had each student talk in front of the class, but you could do this stage in pairs or small groups if you prefer. I asked the strongest students to speak first, allowing the others to listen before they would speak.

I asked the following questions to prompt more information:

What is this person doing?
What does he/she look like?
What is he/she wearing?
How do you think he/she feels?
What is he/she going to do next?

These questions are useful for students who are preparing for the PET speaking paper (Part 3). This particular class is not yet studying a PET course, but will probably begin to do so next year.

There are plenty of follow up activities you could do, depending on what your lesson objectives are. In this case, I wanted the students to be able to describe a picture in detail. So, based on another idea from the book above, called "Mindmap the Text", I decided to do "Mindmap the Picture".

This is what I did:

1) I asked the class to choose another picture from the flipchart. They chose one where lots of sports were going on. I wrote the word "Sports" in the middle of the board, and then branched out from the centre with sub-topics such as PEOPLE, EQUIPMENT, PLACES, ACTIVITIES, FEELINGS. I asked the students to shout out a few things they could see in the picture and to write it in the correct place on the board.

2) Having shown them how to make a mindmap, I gave each pair a sheet of paper and asked them to copy the map. They then had to continue adding as much information as they could to it.

3) I then told them that they were going to speak about the picture for 1 minute, using the words on their map to help them. I chose a different picture and demonstrated the task. However, they wouldn't have to talk individually, but within their pair, taking over from the other student when he/she had nothing more to say.

4) In pairs, I gave them a minute to talk about the picture, all working at the same time. This way, nobody would get embarrassed and, as accuracy was not my objective, it didn't matter that I couldn't hear everything that everybody was saying. The students were actually quite good at taking turns to speak - from what I heard, one student would say a sentence or two and pause, and then the other would jump in with something else. Because they only had a minute for the two of them to say as much as they could, and the picture was very complete, they didn't run out of things to say.

They seemed to enjoy this activity, so I chose another picture and repeated stage 4, but this time they couldn't make a mindmap beforehand. This time they had to think more quickly, as they hadn't had time to prepare or organise their thoughts.

I was very pleased with the outcome of this lesson and these very simple activities that require no preparation. All the students had recycled, to some extent, some of the verb tenses we had looked at earlier in the year (present continuous, going to), physical description, clothes and sports vocabulary. They had all participated and had all had some speaking practice. They had practised turn-taking and speaking under the pressure of a time limit. And most importantly for me, they were all on task and fairly motivated.

Overall, a great success!

Wiki Waste of Time?

2011-04-05T15:53:00.001+02:00

This year I set up a wiki for one of my classes. The class in question is a group of six year old children, mostly in their second year of English, and with whom I have been imparting my own content-based syllabus instead of using a course book.

The purpose of wikis, generally, is to encourage the sharing of information, allowing members to edit and add to the entries. This was not my objective in this case, but I preferred the look and navegability of the wiki to a traditional blog, like this one. In a blog, entries are in chronological order, making it difficult to find older posts if those posts are not tagged adequately, or if the user is not aware of how blogs work. In the wiki, there would be a menu of all the pages I created, in the order that I wished to publish them, and a home page with links to every single page.


Home page of our class wiki

The other main reason why I chose an Edu Wikispace, free at the time, was that I could make it private. Personally, I would love to share with the world everything that we have been doing, but I wanted to have the possibility of posting photos and videos of the children for their parents to see, and therefore privacy was a big issue.

Wikispaces makes it really simple to embed almost any kind of multimedia content including Youtube videos, Glogs, documents which can be downloaded, RSS feeds, slideshows etc.

At the beginning of the year, I sent a letter out to all the parents explaining that we wouldn't be using a course book and for this reason, I had set up a website where they would be able to see all the topics we were covering in class. They would be able to look at the page with their child to practice the language we had been learning. On the wiki I include all the songs and videos we have seen in class, so that the children can see them again if they want to. I explained that the webpage would be completely private and that each child would receive a username and password that would be necessary to access the site. The parents seemed to think it was a good idea, and they all filled in the consent slip I added to the bottom of the letter. I proceeded to create bulk user accounts and gave each child a copy of their username and password.

I regularly update the wiki with new content, as you will see from the screenshot above. I assumed that most of the parents were visiting from time to time. On a couple of occasions, parents had asked me for another copy of their access details, which they had misplaced.

So it was to my surprise, this morning, when I looked at the wikis stas and saw that it had hardly been visited at all. Five different users (although this could include anonymous users from search engines that had tried to access the site) entered the wiki in the first month, but after that only an average of two or three users had visited per month. There are ten children in the class, so my impression is that only a small number of them have seen the wiki more than once or twice.

My priority now is to find out why there has been such little interest in the wiki. I actually thought parents would be interested in what their young children were doing in their lessons, and would take this opportunity to find out. I hoped that they would sit down with their children and go over what they had been learning in their two weekly lessons. How wrong I seem to have been!

I am thinking of sending out a questionnaire towards the end of the year, on how useful they found the wiki and what problems they had. They all seemed to find the idea attractive, but few of them seem to have done much more. I imagine that time is a huge issue here, but it would only take a few minutes every week to see what's new. I'd like to know if you have any experiences of using wikis/blogs with very young learners as a wasy of encouraging them to interact with English outside of the classroom. Has anybody come up against any lack of interest, as I seem to have? Any ideas for questions to include in my questionnaire to parents.

This just goes to show that, although everybody uses technology in their day to day life, this does not automatically mean that they want to use it related to their own or their children's learning, especially if this requires more effort on their part.

And, thinking of the time and effort I have spent on this project - is it really worth it?

THE BEST ACTIVITY IN THE WORLD... EVER!!!

2011-04-05T00:07:00.000+02:00

Ok, before you all start accusing me of outrageous lies, this ISN'T the best activity in the world. Those of you who were in Britain in the nineties (and noughties) will recognise the title as a take on the countless pop music albums that appeared, named The Best ... Album in the World...Ever!


Some fantastic songs from some of the best "indie" artists of the 90s

The activity I'm going to share with you is certainly not the best in the world, and it's probably not very original either, but it is one of the easiest activities to set up as well as being suitable for a wide range of levels and age groups.

The main focus can be changed to suit level and needs - in this case (and the most obvious) I have used it to practise superlative adjectives. All you need are lots of small pieces of paper (Post It size is good), enough for each student to have one for each question. You can prepare the questions in advance or make them up as you go along.

Here is the procedure, as I carried it out with a group of ten to twelve year olds who had recently been looking at superlatives. It is carried out in "lockstep", but if you prefer you could write the questions on the board or on a handout and have everybody work at their own pace.

1) Hand out the pieces of paper.

2) Tell the students that you are going to ask some questions, and to write down their answer to each question on a separate piece of paper.

3) Have somewhere the students can place each paper as they complete it. Alternatively, have students number each paper, so that later it is easy to tell which question it answers.

4) Ask each question. The students should write down their OWN PERSONAL answer.

Sample questions:

Who is the best footballer?
What's the most interesting school subject?
Who is the most beautiful woman?
Who is the best singer?
What's the funniest TV programme?
Who is the fastest motorcyclist/F1 driver?
What's the most difficult school subject?
What's the nicest food?
What's the best book?
What are the coolest clothes?
What's the most dangerous animal?

There are plenty of alternative questions but these are some the ones I posed because we had been looking at these particular adjectives. With higher level groups you could use a wider variety of adjectives.

5) Everybody should now have answered all the questions. Collect in the anonymous answers. Younger students often like to fold up their papers, like in a secret ballot.

6) Announce each "nominee" and elicit the category. For example, "Maths, Science, English, History. The category is ..." (most difficult subject) and then announce the "winner". (The winner is the answer repeated the most times. If all the answers are different, or there is a draw you could have another vote.) My class wanted to take it in turns to come out to the front and read out the nominees. I would then say, in a grand voice, Oscars style "And the winner is..."

And that's it! My kids really enjoyed this activity and even asked to play it again the following day with different questions. With older students and adults you could use it as a basis for discussion, a way of practising expressing agreement and disagreement, language of persuasion etc.

Belated April Fool!

2011-04-03T20:16:00.000+02:00

This post should have appeared earlier but I have only just got around to writing it... for some reason I've not had the energy to write anything this week - blame the clocks going forward/a cold (but hopefully not hayfever!)/ my beginning running (a funny mixture of jogging and walking at the moment but I'm getting there)/this long, long term or whatever, but the fact is that I haven't even felt like going on Twitter or reading my usual blog list, let alone writing on my own. I haven't even particpated in ELTchat for the past three weeks! I hope it is not some kind of social networking burn out. However, having just read, albeit quickly, all the posts that were waiting for me on Google Reader, I thought it was about time I jumped back in!

Friday, as you know, was April Fool's Day. In previous years I don't think I have even remembered to pay special attention to the date, but with all the hours I spend on the internet at the moment it would have been hard to miss. As with one class we had just finished a unit of work, I decided to spend Thursday's lesson talking about April Fool's Day. There was actually a page in their book about this unusual day, so we had a look at that to see what it was all about, and role played the two situations that were illustrated (1- swapping salt for sugar, 2 - a whoopee cushion). I was very surprised to hear that very few of the nine to eleven year old children had never played (or received) a practical joke on anybody. Although the 1st April is just a normal day here in Spain, they have their own Día de los santos inocentes on 28th December where people play pranks and jokes on each other. I then played my the trick "The Severed Finger" on them. Of course, these kids were to old to actually fall for the trick, but they found it fun and all wanted to make one for themselves. You can see the video of the trick here.

I also have a class who hate using their course book and so more often than not we do alternative activities. I have written about these students before recently here and here. These teenagers like to see a personal side of their teacher - they never stop nagging me about going swimming after I told them that my new year's resolution was to go swimming two to three times per week! They like to have a laugh in class, so I thought it might be nice to try an April Fool on them too, but this time a more sophisticated one. For the most part, it went down well, but one of the students actually got quite angry when he discovered that it was all a joke! I'm sure he'll have forgotten all about it next week, but it just goes to show how sensitive this particular age group can be.

In the previous lesson the students had been discussing uniforms (it wasn't part of the lesson) and I told them that we could talk more about that on Thursday - very un-dogme" of me, I know, but we were talking about something completely different and I decided to draw on this sudden interest for a topic in another lesson.
In the lesson in question, I asked them about their uniforms, what they liked about them and which of the uniforms they thought were nicest (they go to two or three different schools). They asked me about uniforms in Britain. I then handed out the attached document and we read through it, together. The document explains how our English academy is introducing the concept of a "uniform" for the students and that we would be running a design competition where the best design would be chosen by the school's head. You can read it for yourself here:

Tshirt Competition

The students worked in groups to think up their designs for the t-shirt. Skills practised in the lesson included reading, speaking (although quite a bit in L1) and developing a sense of humour! They seemed quite impressed with my word processing skills "If it's not true, where did you get this handout?" and I think they see me as quite a serious person, which is why they never suspected a thing! I just hope that they can bring themselves to trust me again...

And just a quick link here to Richard Whiteside's treat for us all and Teresa Bestwick's lovely joke, both of which I enjoyed immensely.

And copying Richard himself, here is of classic comedy video:

Dave's Wordle Challenge

2011-03-28T12:07:00.000+02:00

Dave Dodgson has set us all a challenge named "Every blog has a silver lining". The idea, if you haven't already heard about it, is to create a Wordle of your blog by pasting in its URL and looking at the results. Wordle will take all the content from your recent posts and show you which words you have been using more often, by increasing the font size. The bigger words are those you have used more often. Below you can find the word cloud of this blog. I have removed people's names, as they don't really tell us much - they are only there because I wrote two posts about the TESOL Spain conference recently. (Oops, just realised that I missed one!)

As you can see, the most popular word by far is CHILDREN. This is hardly surprising, seeing as the majority of my students are children and that my blog focuses on them. Other important words come from my last post on story writing and the previous posts on the conference I attended.

Things I have noticed:

I seem to use a lot of nouns! The words that stand out most are nouns, and there are few adjectives - I don't know whether this is normal or not, but I think it illustrates the fact that I don't have a particular writing style - I write in a similar way to the way I speak and I think this makes my blog easy to read.

Like many other bloggers taking part in this challenge, I seem to use the word ONE quite a lot! I would imagine that this comes from "one of the ..." type phrases, but I am just guessing here. I haven't noticed any unusual words on the Wordle.

As this word cloud seem to only use the last four or five posts, I think it would be very interesting to look at the "all-time" word stats. I suppose the only way of doing this would be to literally copy and paste each post into Wordle, although there is probably a limit to the number of words you can include. As Dave suggests, it could be something to do every now and again, to see how your blog is evolving.

Our Very Own Superhero!

2011-03-27T14:59:00.000+02:00

As some of you may know, I have been experimenting this year with a CLIL approach in one of my classes. I wrote about my reasons for doing so on Ken Wilson's blog. Our latest unit of work has been on the topic of heroes, and over the last couple of weeks more specifically on superheroes. When we began discussing the topic in the first lesson, the children automatically started naming superheroes. I wanted them to understand that we have real life heroes in our society who do not have special powers and magic swords, so we first looked at heroes in our families and their characteristics; and in the following lessons, heroes in the community. This gave us the opportunity to look at vocabulary for several professions, as well as reinforce some of the postitive characteristics that we may associate with heroes.

This was all very well, but the children are six years old, and what really interests them is superheroes! So, we moved on from more traditional heroes to Superman, Spiderman, Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four and so on. We discussed what makes a superhero and what powers he/she can have. We reviewed vocabulary such as climb, run and fly, and I introduced new phrases such as "seeing through walls", "invisible" and "super strong".
Each child then had to design their own superhero. They drew a picture of their hero and his/her powers and gave him/her a name, and in the following lesson they presented him/her to the class. We then had several rounds of voting to choose our favourite superhero. This character would be the protagonist of our very own superhero comic book!

We ended up with a character with several powers - he can fly, he can climb walls and he is super-strong! We then made suggestions for his name, and another voting session until the unanimous decision was to call him Spiderman. I must make it clear that this is not the Spiderman, but our very own character with the same name. I then told the children that in Spiderman's city, there is a big problem. We disussed various suggestions as to what the problem could be, and we ended up choosing a tsunami (even six year olds watch TV and see the world's important events). I divided the board into ten sections (there are ten students in the class) and we began to decide on how the story would develop. As the children are learning to read in Spanish, but not yet English, I tend to shy away from the written word and use pictures, at least until they are familiar with the vocabulary and its pronunciation. I drew a quick sketch of each event in the story as we came up with the ideas. Each child had one page of the story to draw. They had to try to copy the original drawing (that I had copied and whose colours we had chosen as a class) so that the story has continuity.

In the next lesson, I told the story (I had written one short sentences for each picture using language they would understand) several times, with the children's help. We played a couple of recognition games where I would read out a sentence from the story and they would have to find the appropriate picture. I gave each child the sentence describing their part of the story on a piece of paper. I went round drilling individually, and then they practised their sentences in pairs, with me helping and prompting. Their homework was to practise their sentences ready for the following lesson.

In the final lesson of our Heroes topic, I uploaded the photos of the pictures to Voicthread and recorded each child saying his/her sentence. We now have our very own comic book - on paper in the classroom and in digital format online. I have embedded the slideshow into our class wiki so that the parents can see it. The children had great fun in the whole project - they actually really enjoyed learning their sentences and then recording them and listening to each other's voices on the computer.

Here is the finished product. Be patient as the voices can take some time to load. I hope you like it!

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 3

2011-03-17T13:22:00.000+01:00

This is my final post on the Young Learners talks I attended at TESOL Spain last weekend. The first two talks by Carol Read and Nina Lauder were very informative and given by experienced speakers. Both Carol and Nina are professional educational consultants whose jobs include giving training sessions and presentations about their areas of expertise. The two sessions I am going to talk about today were by classroom teachers, who wanted to share their ideas. I am going to provide an outline of their talks and say how useful (or not) their ideas were for my own teaching context.
The first session was entitled Writing Instructions - Where? How? Where Does It Fit In? by Elizabeth Forster and Richard Stenhouse, from the British Council Primary School in Madrid. Elizabeth talked about reading (following) instructions with lower primary learners and Richard with upper-primary.


By atibens on flickr

One of the main points was how difficult it can be to give effective instructions. We experienced this for ourselves, trying to make a "snapdragon" by following Richard's oral instructions, and most of us failed miserably! We then had to work in pairs where one of us would give instructions to make a paper aeroplane and the other would follow. This didn't work for me as neither my partner nor I could remember how to make one! These two tasks did illustrate very well the complexity of giving clear instructions, whether oral or written, and I think this is something we need to pay more attention to in our classroom language. Demonstration is also equally as important as the instructions themselves. Elizabeth explained why it can be useful to practise writing instructions with children and how this ought to be done. Some relevant real life situations include: Making things for festivals such as Halloween and Christmas, playing a game and recipes. She also showed us an example of the instructions she had given her class for how to make a jack o' lantern. She had written the instructions onto large pieces of card and had used these as reading prompts (even with non-readers who would pick up some of the key words), doing activities such as sequencing, run and touch the instruction card etc.

Richard then talked about how to gradually make the instructions more complex by using different connectives, imperative verbs and by evaluating the instructions of their peers.

Overall Feedback: Although both presenters highlighted some important points and gave us practical ideas, I'm not sure this was enough to warrant a whole session on writing instructions. This talk may have been more useful for primary school teachers in a CLIL or bilingual setting.

The final session I attended on Young Learners was the last talk before Herbert Puchta's Closing Plenary. This was called Classroom Management for Primary by Helena Kennedy. I decided to go to this talk because it is always useful to find out how other teachers successfully manage their classes of young learners and pick up new ideas.

Helena teaches both extra-curricular and curricular primary children at the Hyland Language Centre in Madrid. Her session was relevant for all teachers of primary-aged learners. The talk focussed on how to maintain control in the classroom. Some important aspects she mentioned were:

Coming up with a fixed routine
Obeying responsibilities (learners)
Not only work but also play
Tell the learners how well they are doing
Reprimand when necessary
Give an overall behaviour mark
Leave the last class in the past.


What can happen in the classroom if you're not careful! Photo by Aislinn Ritchie on flickr

Lots of practical ideas were demonstrated and I will now outline some of these:

Name cards - these could be used to make a seating plan before the students arrive; to choose classroom monitors; to keep a check on behaviour.

Helena showed us her system of having a sun, a cloud and a storm on the board and under which she would stick the children's name cards, depending on how well they were behaving.
She also gave each child a card at the end of the lesson, with from 1 to 5 stars coloured in, which showed their overall behaviour in that class/day.

Use positive comments and stamps on the children's work to motivate them
Smile!
Allow those who have performed/behaved best to leave the class first
Give postive comments to their parents

She also showed us a few flashcard games to maintain interest and focus such as:

Odd one out - learners decide which flashcard is different
Remember and re-order - Learners close their eyes and say what has changed
Password - show a flashcard and the children have to say its name before they can sit down
Run and touch - one or more students go out of the room and they have to find the hidden flashcards
Through the keyhole - stick a keyhole template in front of a flashcard and learners have to guess

I have to say that none of these games were new to me, although it is nice to be refreshed sometimes and I do recognise that it can be very difficult to come up with original ideas!

The main problem my friend Leahn and I had with this talk was a difference of opinion on the use of praise and punishment with the presenter. I don't want to go into details as I think Leahn is going to write a blogpost of her own on this subject.

Overall Feedback: A varied talk on different aspects of managing young learners, providing a variety of techniques. I don't agree with everthing that was said, but I value the usefulness of having plenty of tricks up your sleeve!

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 2

2011-03-16T13:01:00.000+01:00

In my last post I talked about Nina Lauder's session "Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom", which you can find here.

It is now the turn of Carol Read, who is an expert in teaching primary-aged children. I recommend taking the time to have a look round her blog where she discusses the theory behind many aspects of teaching younger learners and provides practical ideas on how to do so.

By Enokson on flickr

Carol's talk at TESOL Spain was entitled "Picture books and cross-curricular themes". It was a very interesting session, where Carol talked about different kinds of picture books and how to use them in the CLIL classroom. Unfortunately, I arrived slightly late (blame the slow waiters at VIPS restaurant!) and missed the introduction, where Carol introduced the audience to BICS and CALP (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency).

We looked at Cummins' Quadrant (see below) and where picture books might fit in. Of course, this depends on the book in question, and Carol divided picture books into three categories: Factual, Fictionalised Science and Fiction.

Cummins' Quadrant

We were shown examples of each type of book and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, because the group of learners I am using a CLIL-type syllabus with are very young (6 years old, first year of Primary) I prefer fiction. All young children love stories, and pick up lots of language from listening to a story and participating in a story-telling session. Stories are more fun than non-fiction, although it may sometimes be more useful to use a fictionalised science book, where the story is based on scientific fact, than a fantastical story of pure fiction. Carol did mention, however, that she had never come across a child who had problems distinguishing between fact and fiction in stories. Just because in the story the ladybirds talk, doesn't mean that the children will actually believe that ladybirds can speak! Children are actually very good at differentiating between what is real and what is not.

Carol the showed us some of the books more closely, providing us with examples on how we could use these books in the classroom. The two story books I remember clearly from the presentation, were:

I will not ever NEVER eat a tomato by L. Child
Lost and Found by O. Jeffers

Eric Carle's books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiny Seed were also mentioned. I have used The Very Hungry Caterpillar in my own unit on Creepy Crawlies as a basis for the introduction to the life cycle of the butterfly. This was also one of the ways Carol suggested using picture books as a springboard into CLIL projects. Others she talked about were the life cycle of a frog and the food pyramid.

Overall, Carol's talk was very informative, but more importantly in my opinion, fun! She read us the stories as if we were the children in her class, and we all really really wanted to know what happened next! This was a valuable experience, as sometimes it can be hard for teachers to tell a story effectively, especially when you have a class full of restless children. Carol managed to keep around 200 of us engaged - not such an easy task when your session is just after the lunch break!

If anybody is interested in using CLIL resources in their classrooms, Carol has shared a couple of projects on Onestopclil.

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 1

2011-03-15T12:31:00.003+01:00


Small Explorers - from Morgue File

In the first of this series of posts I plan to write about the TESOL Spain 2011 convention, I will first be looking at the talks I attended about Young Learners. Those of you who regularly read this blog will have discovered that teaching children has become one of my passions over the last two or three years and where better to start than with something I am always striving to do better?

Often, when I go to conferences, I tend to go for any session related to young learners, but this time I decided that a healthy mix would be more valuable. I attended four sessions where the focus was on our younger learners and in this post I will summarise some of the key points that were made in the first session, as well as my own reflections on what was said.

The four sessions were the following:

Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom by Nina Lauder
Picture Books and Cross-curricular Themes by Carol Read
Writing Instructions - Where? How? Where Does It Fit In? by Elizabeth Forster and Richard Stenhouse
Classroom Management for Primary by Helena Kennedy

Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom by Nina Lauder
Nina gave an informative and enjoyable talk about how to incorporate different aspects of a child's world into our classes. Suitable for both a CLIL context and a more traditional language learning setting, her presentation provided lots of practical ideas to take away and use in the classroom. The talk began by looking at reasons why we should be trying to bring the real world into our lessons: It can be motivating and fun; it makes English real and meaningful; it helps the children learn values such as respect and tolerance.

Practical Activities:

Have children bring in a photo, an object, a song to show and tell
Bring realia into the classroom e.g. if you are looking at food, bring in real or plastic food, have tasting sessions etc
Riddles: Choose an animal (or a word from the lexical set that is being studied) and write a set of clues about it. One by one, give the children a clue and ask them to think of what it could be. They could discuss this in pairs or put their hands up to answer.
Guessing Games: Show the children pictures of the words they have been learning. The children ask each other questions to determine which word was chosen.
Stamp or Clap: Like a guessing game, the teacher (or pupil) chooses a word (in this case an animal) and asks questions about it. If the answer is "yes", the children should clap. If the answer is "no". they should stamp their feet. A fun way of getting children to listen carefully and respond.
KWL: This stands for KNOW/ WANT TO KNOW/ LEARNT. Draw a table with three columns and write KWL at the top, one in each column. The children write down things they know about the subject and things they would like to know. When the children have learnt more about the subject (e.g from reading a text or doing a project) they fill in the last column.
Poster Grids: With any poster or large picture, divide it into cells with co-ordinates. The children then ask each other what they can see in a cell of their choice.

Nina also talked about doing experiments and using estimates, code-breaking and using charts; bringing Science and Maths into the classroom.

One of my favourite ideas from this talk was the idea of explorers. OUP have a series called Explorers and Nina showed us her cardboard friends from the series that she takes everywhere with her. She takes photos of herself and the explorer in different places and then brings them into class to use as a springboard for discussion. I love this idea because it really brings the real world into the classroom. Your little "friend" does not necessarily have to be an explorer - it could be any classroom pet or puppet that you choose, but I particularly thought that the idea of an explorer would appeal to children of all ages, both boys and girls, and that it lends itself well to work on the environment, geography, history and so on. After all, what an explorer does is go out and explore new places.

Overall Feedback: A very positive session with lots of practical ideas and the reasons behind the theory.

Next up: Picture Books and Cross-curricular Themes by Carol Read

TESOL Spain Annual Convention - Changes and Challenges: Expanding Horizons in ELT

2011-03-14T11:40:00.000+01:00

This weekend I have been at the annual TESOL Spain conference. I had a great time, met lots of lovely, interesting people, heard some inspirational talks and learnt about some new practical activities to try out in the classroom. When I go to a conference like this one, I try to attend a healthy mix of plenaries, keynotes and practical workshops, and I think I managed to do so this time. Almost all of the sessions I attended were well worth seeing or participating in and I have taken something positive away from all of them.

Over the next few days, I will be posting on some of the talks I enjoyed. I'm going to look at the handouts and the notes I took at each session and split them up into categories before I start posting what I learnt here.

Just to whet your appetite, you can expect to hear about talks by Herbert Puchta, Paul Braddock, Karenne Sylvester, Nicky Hockly, Hugh Dellar, Jamie Keddie, Carol Read and Nina Lauder (in no particular order!)

Troublesome and Intolerant: Part Two

2011-03-08T11:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I outlined some of the problems I've been having with a particular group of young teens. You can read this post here. Lack of motivation (to do anything - not just things they don't enjoy), hormonal mood swings, a tendency to answer back and general apathy are the main factors which complicate the possibility of a successful lesson.

This second post is not to continue to moan about my unsuccessful attempts to get them using English (you'll be glad to know!) but to talk about something that came up in our last two lessons and has been troubling me ever since.

We were discussing the topic of human rights and how everybody should be treated equally whatever their race, sex, sexuality and so on. The class seemed to agree that this was logical and fair. We then discussed a basic human right which states that every citizen has the right to leave his/her country if they wish, and I explained that many people had to leave their country because of war or the political situation and that they were called refugees. Suddenly, some of the students started to complain about some local immigrants who sell packets of tissues at the traffic lights. Comments were made both about African and Chinese immigrants, who form the main group of non-Spanish speaking immigrants. The attitudes expressed by these students were, to put it mildly, not very tolerant. As some of the students were getting quite heated up, I decided against a dogme-style discussion of the matter and to leave it for another day.

The thing is, I'm not sure exactly how much importance to give the topic or quite how to treat it. I'm fairly sure that they were the typical outlandish remarks that teenagers often come out with, without thinking of their consequences. Maybe they were trying to shock me or each other, more likely they were just regurgitating things they had heard from their parents or on TV.

So my question is: should I plan a lesson on tolerance or should I leave it to their "Citizenship" classes at school? (To be honest, I have no idea of what is taught in "Citizenship" but most people deem it a useless subject around here.)

If I do take advantage of this situation, I wonder how I should go about it. I was thinking of possibly doing a lesson on stereotypes and bringing it around to how the Spanish are sometimes considered and how that makes them feel. I'm not sure though, that this wouldn't actually have the opposite effect and make them even less happy with people of other nationalities. Another idea is to try to find a copy of a documentary that was on in the UK a few months ago about asylum seeking children who have been mistreated in the UK and somehow adapting it to their level. If only the African tissue-sellers spoke English - maybe if that were the case I could ask the bloke that stands on the corner of our school's street to come in and answer questions! That would be a bit unorthodox but at least it would be effective! Unfortunately, most of these guys are Senegalese French speakers who don't speak Spanish very well, which would make communication quite difficult. To be honest, I'm not sure how happy some of the parents would be about me bringing in a stranger from the street into the classroom.

Anyway, I wondered if you had ever tried dealing with this kind of topic with such young students, and whether or not it was worthwhile. I'd love to know of any websites that promote the education of tolerance that you may know of.

And before you say it, J (I'm beating you too it!), I know I'm being far too teacher-centred in all this and doing far too much work myself, but I think this group need some kind of input on this in order for them to have a personal reaction. Just asking them to imagine won't work.

So, any ideas or experiences on this that you'd like to share? If you have written a post about something similar, please add a link in the comments section. Cheers!

Troublesome and Intolerant: Part One

2011-03-06T21:43:00.003+01:00


He would fit in well with my class!

Every teacher has one of those classes. You know the one I mean, the class that you come out of with feelings that range from slight dejection to outright depression. The class that makes you feel like a bad teacher because it doesn't go as you'd hoped. The class that makes you react in ways that you wouldn't have dreamt of doing when you were training and may have even got you thrown off the course. Now don't worry, I'm not talking about anything violent here! I mean reactions such as raising your voice, getting into useless discussions with students, sticking to your guns when you know it's best to change tactics or move on.

Every year there seems to be one of these groups to spoil your otherwise perfect timetable. And the funny thing is, that the class in question isn't a group of bad kids, their previous teacher thought they were a lovely group, but there is something invisible that prevents you from gaining their respect and trust. Maybe you started the year on the wrong foot, maybe they preferred last year's teacher, maybe they have just changed over the summer. Maybe, as teachers, we know that the year is not going to be perfect and that there will be one group that will ruin things and we unconsciously stick a label on this group in the first week. Yes, this is going to be my dreaded group this year! I would hope this wasn't the case, but it is a possibility.

For me, this class changes as time goes on. Once upon a time it was very young learners that made my life difficult. Four year olds that I couldn't keep on a chair for more than five minutes. This year it's a group of thirteen year olds. Hormones all over the place, these kids are giggly, touchy-feely (with each other!) and would be much happier if they were allowed to sit chatting in Spanish all lesson. It may not help that I am no longer a "playing games" type teacher. It certainly does not help that they are in that in-between stage of mental and emotional development. They want to "play games" but they don't want to get up from their seats or actually do anything. They definitely don't want to "do the book"!

So, I try (I really do) to find more fun things for them to do. They have been reasonably responsive with a couple of lessons based around activities from the Timesavers Speaking Activities book of resources. They particularly enjoyed the drawing activity but get quite bored with the "opinion" type discussions. They all profess to prefer "grown up" activities like the previous type, but don't really have the maturity to do them effectively. Sometimes they come out with things they have seen on TV and show some interest, so last week I took in a simple copy of the summarised Declaration of Human Rights and the following lesson we looked at what was happening in Libya. They didn't complain as such about the content, although I could tell it went a bit over their heads. A few of the students had never heard of Libya. Only one knew where in the world it was and could easily locate it on a globe. I wasn't particularly surprised as Spanish education focuses on mainly just that: Spain. Spanish history, Spanish geography and so on. I'm sure I had never heard of Libya myself when I was thirteen, but the again it wasn't on TV twenty-four-seven. Very few had heard of Gaddafi, but when we read a short article and discussed briefly what was happening, they were at least showing some interest. Maybe this was because I had promised them a game after we had finished!

Some of the students have showed an interest in history. I'm wondering whether to try a few lessons on historical events. I'm not particularly well-read on history myself, so I would have to do some research first, but if it keeps them happy...

I am open to any ideas on how to keep this group motivated. My main concern is to get them speaking, as I can focus on vocabulary or language features that either emerge or that I can smuggle into the activity itself.
If anybody knows of any resources suitable for teenagers with an elementary productive level (but pre-intermediate receptive skills) please add a comment below.

This post is a two-parter - this is the "Troublesome" part. You can find Part Two "Intolerant" here.

#ELTchat 23rd February 12pm: How do you deal with fossilized errors and help students improve their accuracy?

2011-02-24T12:18:00.000+01:00

#ELTchat 23rd February 12pm

This afternoon's #ELTchat was on a topic that I thought would be a difficult one to discuss. Before the chat began I tweeted that I wasn't sure that I had much to say on the topic and would maybe just lurk in the background. Fortunately, everybody else's comments inspired me and I managed to join in! You can now find the transcript here.

The question was:

How do you deal with fossilized errors and help students improve their accuracy?

We started off by discussing what is meant by "fossilized errors". Some made the distinction between an error, a mistake and a slip and it was mentioned that fossilized errors could actually be either of the first two. Errors were not limited to grammar and pronunciation, although these seem to be the most common types.

What are fossilized errors?

•    A mistake that students know is wrong but keep making.
•    An error from force of habit which students no longer know they are making.
•    Something that students learnt wrong and now need to change.
•    An error that students can correct when focused but still make on their own.
•    A mistake that recurrs despite constant correction.
•    An error based in L1 interference that is made by many speakers.
•    Mistakes that teachers may not “hear” after a number of years teaching in a particular

context (and therefore do not correct).
• A mistake that has been repeated so that it sounds right to the learner.

Some specific errors common to students from different countries were mentioned, such as the use of "I have 20 years" to talk about age. We also came to the conclusion that young learners did not have fossilized errors - yet!

We tried to come up with ideas about why errors become fossilized.

What actually causes fossilization?

• Fossilization is due to L1 interference and is a natural feature of interlanguage

    development.
•    Lack of correction.
•    The connection between interlanguage and errors.
•    Lack of motion (the reason for other types of fossilization).
•    Method of instruction.
•    Errors that come from previous stages of learning (especially with older students).
•    Linear modes of instruction increase the chance of fossilization.
•    When students realise they can make a mistake and be understood, it can become

fossilized.
• Biological, social-affective, cultural, pedagogical, cognitive and environmental perspectives

of a language can lead to fossilized errors.
• Lack of motivation to correct oneself.
• Lack of noticing and discovery and too much presentation, meaning students don’t own the

language.
• Lack of learner autonomy – reliance on correction by teacher.

The conversation then turned to how important it is to do something about fossilized errors. Here are some of the more popular ideas, many of them questions to think more about and we didn’t have time to go into too much detail during the chat.

• Do fossilized errors lead to international English? If so, is there anything wrong with

making these errors?
•    If students communicate meaning, are fossilized errors important?
•    Students love being corrected and prefer teachers that do so.
•    It is impossible to correct everything – deal with what affects meaning most.
•    Self-correction should be fostered.
•    Students should reflect on and play with their mistakes.
•    Correcting every error can be demotivating.
•    Focus on common and impeding errors.

There seemed to be a mixed opinion of how important it is to get rid of fossilized errors. Some chatters thought that communication was the main goal, especially when speaking, therefore as long as the listener could understand what the speaker wanted to communicate, there wasn’t too much of a problem. Others thought that accuracy was very important and that all errors should be corrected, not just those that impede communication. Everybody agreed that the teaching context was important in this question, and that different situations require different levels of accuracy.

So how can we deal with fossilized errors in an effective way? Some great ideas were shared in this part of the discussion, and I'm looking forward to trying some of them out!

Practical Ideas:

• Recording students – you could play the recording, ask for general impression, give them

the tapescript, have them correct their own or peer’s errors – lots of possibilities here!
• Have students self correct and peer correct, which is more effective than teacher

correction.
• Say: "Whaaaaat? That's not English. No one in the UK is going to understand what that

means."
• Playing games with individual mistakes or common errors.
• Focus on one error at a time, stopping students and having them correct it before moving

on.
• Writing slows down and takes a snapshot of how learners really feel the language works.

Better noticing opportunities.
• Give students a funny look when they make a fossilized error – they will realise something

is wrong and correct themselves (not to be tried with new or very shy students!)
•    Prevention is more significant than defossilization (an apple a day…)
•    Discover and clarify why and how errors occur.
•    Personalized “fossil” diaries where students record their particular errors.
•    Focus on fossilized errors at the end of an activity.
•    Keep a “fossil” dictionary.
•    Say “I don’t understand what you’re saying”.
•    Dictations using common errors.
•    Ask students to vary their fluency/accuracy during speaking tasks.
•    Write answers/problems on the board to discuss as a class.
•    Error diaries – students observe themselves out of class and report back on their usage.
•    Have a wiki – each student has their own page for errors.
•    Don’t correct individual students on the spot, but save errors for class correction at the

end.
• Students must be invested in correcting the error.
• Soundcloud, Voicethread, Voxopop etc to record students. They could listen to themselves

and choose good things they have said or errors they have made.
• Motivate students to experiment with language.
• Ask some students to be monitors and write down what they hear during speaking

activities.
• Use fossil journals in pairs – each student tries to get their partner to make the errors in

their journal.
•    Use humour to point out errors e.g. “I talk to the phone”, act out talking to your phone!
•    Recording students can make students more careful – karaoke effect.
•    Take a fun/playful approach to error correction.
•    Ask students to actually make mistakes for short periods to help master the

accuracy/fluency control.
•    Drills
•    Explain the consequences of mistakes, especially embarrassing ones.
•    Students as teachers – note down errors for constructive feedback in groups.
•    Laughing at our own mistakes can work wonders.
•    Grammar auctions.
•    Bring in a guest (who ideally doesn’t speak L1) for students to interview. They may not

understand the “fossils”.
•    Have students mimic different accents (this cuts down on inhibitions that cause mistakes).
•    Snakes and ladders or other games.
•    Mixing correct and incorrect sentences on the board and asking students to spot those

with errors.

Lots of thing to think about and some interesting techniques to try out.
I hope this summary is useful and gives you some new ideas about how to deal with fossilized errors. I’ll end with a couple of tweets that I particularly liked about the topic of fossilization in general:

“We all must agree that life is too short to aim for perfection! Teach your students how to be critical and they themselves will realize their errors.”

“I'm optimistic about it too! I don't see fossilization as a sort of massive failing. It is something to approach head on.”

Links:

Methodology

http://www.onestopenglish.com/support/ask-the-experts/methodology-questions/methodology-fossilized-errors/146396.article

http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2009/03/fossilized-errors-in-foreign-language.html

http://eltnotebook.blogspot.com/2007/04/deciding-what-and-when-to-correct.html

Materials

http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2011/02/writew ays-spelling-and-language-development.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8gqhTlUnCg&feature=youtu.be

http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2010/05/gifts-from-the-ravens-nest-phonics-and-sentence-navigator-kits.html

Friend or Foe? - Getting parents more involved

2011-02-16T12:27:00.000+01:00

This post is a kind of reply to Jason Renshaw's latest post. I began writing a comment in reply to something Leahn (from Early EFL said) but it got longer and longer, so I thought it would be better to make a post out of it.

Parents and children

Jason discussed his ideas on what should be expected of teachers and parents of young students, in terms of greetings, general friendliness and interest; and the importance of teacher-parent relationships. I agree with pretty much everything Jason says, at least in theory. However, there are a few practical implications that can make these suggestions difficult.

Apart from the very young children whose parents actually come upstairs to pick them up, the only time we ever see parents in my school is if they have a complaint. Only once or twice in the past eight years have I had a parent come in to find out how his/her child is progressing. This is unfortunate but reflects the idea of after-school English classes being an alternative babysitting service. It can, be however, the same from the teacher's point of view. How many teachers ring or write to the parents when the child is doing well? If the only communication between teachers and parents is about "bad stuff", surely there is something wrong? This is why Leahn describes parents as being the enemy. You know, when the secretary informs you that a parent is coming in to speak to you, that you are in trouble! And this is not good - the teacher becomes defensive, the parent comes in with the wrong attitude (everything is the teacher's fault, even the fact that little Timmy never does any homework because it is apparently the teacher's job to enforce homework, even though this is physically impossible) and the meeting's result means that neither the teacher nor parent goes away completely satisfied and they both hope that the next meeting will be way into the future. This is, unfortunately, the case more often than not.

So after that little rant, it's time to think of some solutions.

Time is generally an issue here - if there are no breaks between lessons and parents are double-parked outside school, little communication is going to take place. Many of the older children walk to school alone, or the car is waiting outside to pick them up. Many parents pay by direct debit and never enter the school.
I think that one solution to this could be a regular email sent out to parents, even if it is only once a term. It could be a kind of newsletter, but I think a personal mail would be more productive. If you make a note of the positive things each child does, it won't be hard to write a quick update on how he/she is doing. I think it best to focus on the positive (Little Timmy has been trying really hard this term), language progress (Timmy can now talk about his free time) but any problems or concerned should also be mentioned, if not in detail. These things are best discussed face to face, so you could mention that you are concerned about Timmy's lack of attention and that you would like to arrange an informal meeting with the parents to discuss this.

I have a class wiki for the little ones where I post things we have been doing, trying to encourage parents to take part in their child's learning. I am wondering to what extent this could be done with older children or teenagers. It is quite alright for parents to sit with their 6 year old at the computer, but would this be feasible with an eleven year old?

If any of you have tried something like this out, I'd love to hear about it. How do you successsully involve parents with their child's learning? Is it possible to do so with older kids? Let me know in the comments section, or reply to Jason's original post, if you prefer.

Parkour in the Park (with links)

2011-02-09T11:50:00.001+01:00

As is usual, when somebody shares a video on Facebook or Twitter, I automatically wonder whether I could use it in class. This particular video seemed ideal - the theme is relevant and motivating to teenagers and lots of language work could emerge from it. The video shows a group of young men doing parkour or freerunning. Despite the title of this post, the term parkour does not come from the word park but from the French parcours which means route or course. Parkour is a way of moving around a city by the shortest route possible, including jumping over walls, doing forward and backward flips and so on. It is a phenomenon that is taking the world of teenage boys by storm. It has possibly replaced skateboarding as the thing to do in the streets and I have actually seen lads on the street practising jumps from high walls. I plan to show the video to my teenage FCE group to start with, and possibly with a couple of other classes that may find it interesting. Below are some of the activities I have thought of doing.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

First, I plan to show the first 45 seconds, where the men are in the garage getting into their car. I want the students to discuss what kind of people they are, where they think they are going and what they are going to do. There is no indication at this point that they are going to do parkour, in fact, they look more likely to be on their way to rob a petrol station!

Then the expression "Storm Freerun" comes up on the screen. What do they think it refers to? Have they heard this term before?

I may tell the students to write down the actions that they see in the clip while they are watching.

We will brainstorm obstacles that you can find in a city (walls, railings etc) and verbs of movement. This is a good opportunity to check student's knowledge of verbs of movement and preposition combinations, such as jump over, run through, climb over and more unusual verbs such as crouch, squat, leap, drop, crawl, land. We can then move on to nouns such as somersault, backflip, twist, body roll.

An activity that I thought they may enjoy and get to practise some of the vocabulary we looked at in previous activities is to get them design a route suitable for a freerun. They would draw a plan of a part of a city, including buildings, walls, fences, steps, railings etc or any other obstacles. They would then have to describe the sequence of movements of the runner.

Another task, since they are an FCE group, could be to write a story about a freerunner describing his thoughts during a run. It could be written in first or third person and could be told in the present or in the past, as a dream or memory.

Oh, and one final point to make would be "Don't try this at home!" We could discuss the dangers of this type of hobby and possible consequences if safety measures are not taken.

Here is the link to the worksheet I made for my FCE group.

I have also uploaded a magazine article kindly shared by Ceri Jones about local teenagers doing "tricks" in Cádiz, Sothern Spain here, which I hope can be downloaded and printed off in a decent size.

You are welcome to download, edit and use these materials in your own lessons. Enjoy!

The Colour Experience

2011-02-02T12:23:00.000+01:00

Colours by szeretlek_ma on flickr

What colour is the world? Is it rose-tinted, sky blue or a grim grey? This may sound like an unusual question, but allow me to pose an even stranger one:

What colour is the letter M? Or the letter R? Or the letter H?

What on earth is she going on about, you may well be asking yourself. Letters don't have colours! They can be any colour you want them to be! For most people this is probably true, but not for everybody. Not for me.
You see, in my mind, this is how I see these letters:

M R H

Every letter has a colour - not an individual colour - there may be four or five letters which share the same tone. Numbers do too.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

You may be thinking that I am some kind of psycho and that you don't want to read my blog anymore; you may feel slightly uneasy. Or some of you might recognise what I am talking about. Maybe you have read about it somewhere, seen a TV programme, or maybe you have experienced a reaction to my colours because yours aren't the same! There is a name for this wierdness and that is Synesthesia. Now, I don't actually know if I have synesthesia really, but I do know that for me each letter and number has a colour and that if I am trying to remember a word or name, I will often remember the colour of the first letter. You can often hear me say: "Oh what was his name? I think it started with a B... or was it a D... it was definitely with a B or a D" and then I would discover it was Terry.

Now discovering that there is actually a name for this is quite comforting. For a long time I assumed everyone saw letters in colour. I have a very vague memory of arguing about the colour of a letter once with somebody. When I was a child, nobody told me that they didn't see letters and numbers in this way, and perhaps I never mentioned it to anybody, being quite a shy and quiet person. But if I had actually realised that my brain did make these connections, I could have been taught to take advantage of it, especially for memorising information. Imagine if I had known, when learning French at school, that I could use colours in my work to help me remember. Maybe I didn't need to, as I was always very good at French in those days, maybe I did actually use colours to remember vocabulary internally.

Obviously most people don't see things the same way as I do. However, that doesn't mean that using colour is not effective for learning. Colours are very easy to recognise and remember, except for those who are colour-blind. The other day, one of my young learners' course books introduced some vowel sounds by using colours. Each vowel sound was printed in a colour whose name contained that sound. For example

/e/

All the words with this sound were written in red. As long as the children knew the names of the colours, they would remember the sound. We listened to some words on the CD and said what colour they were. We also imagined those things in that colour, for example, a black cat, and orange lorry, a red pen. Then, in groups, the children made small posters for one of the sounds with plenty of examples, all written in the appropriate colour. I do think that using colour can be very helpful for remembering things as connections are made in the brain.

I have seen colour used for remembering different Past Tense patterns, different -ed ending pronunciations, different types of word (verb, noun, adj etc). Other possibilities are different colours for different prefixes or suffixes. But I have never seen it used for general vocabulary. I'm not saying that we should group words by their first letter - this is not effective for most people, but how about recording words related to the environment in green and word about heat in red and other logical coloured topics. Would this make them easier to remember?

Have you used colour with your students to help them learn? Has it worked? Is it too time-consuming? What have you used it for? I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences, with both young learners and adults. Do adults think colour-coding too childish?

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

By Hans Hofmann

So why not use it to enhance our learning experience?

Creative Writing with Young Learners - Poetry

2011-01-23T12:44:00.000+01:00

By Enokson on Flickr

Many teachers are reluctant to spend time on extensive reading or writing in class. There are various reasons for this, some being:

I don't have enough time to get through the syllabus as well as doing extra work.
My students want/need to learn how to speak English, not read literature.
I would rather teach my students how to function in real-life situations.
I don't know much about literature myself.
My students don't like reading.
My students don't like writing.
This is a language class, not a literature class.

These are some of the possible reasons that I can imagine would prevent teachers from introducing poetry into the classroom, though I'm sure there are many more. I myself have been guilty of the first answer - I have been teaching for eleven years and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have used poetry or literature for any other reason than to introduce a new structure, to focus on forms or as an intensive reading task.

Time is extremely valuable and the fact that doing creative writing in class is time-consuming is an important factor. However, if you can spare ten to fifteen minutes each lesson over several days, it does not have to run too much into your heavy schedule. Below is how I introduced poetry with a group of nine and ten year olds, with the final objective of having my learners take part in an international poetry competition.

Lesson One: Reading Poetry

We discussed poetry - whether the learners ever read or wrote poems, at home or at school. They seemed to have the opinion that poetry was something very difficult to both understand and write. In Spain it is very rare for children or teenagers to do much creative writing, and if they do it tends to be very structured and limited by the teacher. When I told them that we were going to look at some poems in English before writing our own poems, they seemed gobsmacked. "We don't know how to write poems in Spanish! We can't write them in English!" So I gave them the following poems written by children to read, taken from The Poetry Zone. First, I gave them a copy and read it aloud myself, twice. This was so the children would get a feeling for how the poem sounded, instead of concentrating on what each word or line meant.

When I look at the sky,

I remember a bird in the air

It came on my finger,

but now it isn't there,

after I looked in the sky

it was exactly where it was

I looked at the clouds

and my bird was flying around in the air

and it was always there.

By Madeeha Saher, age 8

The Poem about an Insect by Joel Oram, aged 12

I am really small

I wish I could be tall

I get covered in leaves

From the huge, huge trees

One side of the wood to the other takes forever

Climbing over mountains which to you are weeds

When the strong wind hits me I fly over the trees like an aeroplane

When I get really cold, I hide under fallen branches

Wherever I go I have to try not to get lost

I don't want to get stepped on

So I shoot off and then I'm gone

I am so small, you will not find me

Hiding in the woodland.

These poems are written by children of around their age. For each poem, we then created actions to go with each poem, focussing on the meaning of the lines. I then asked them to look at the poems and asked them what they noticed about punctuation (there wasn't any in the second poem) and if that was ok in a poem. We discussed that normal rules like punctuation and capital letters aren't necessary in poems (this didn't stop them from using punctuation in their own poems). I then asked them if the poems rhymed and if they thought rhyming poems were better or not. We decided that making poems rhyme is difficult, and for our first poem we would not make it rhyme.

Lesson Two: The topic, preparation and first drafts

I told the learners that the poems they were going to write would be entered into a competition. I had printed off a copy of the poster that can be found, along with lots of useful information and resources, on the British Council's Teaching English Website. We looked at the poster and I explained the rules of the competition.

I then told them that the topic was HOME. I told them to think about what the word HOME meant to them and what they imagined when they heard the word. We brainstormed some vocabulary relating to the topic on the board. Because they were concentrating on their own idea of home, I then asked them to think of the homes of other creatures. We discussed the homes of fish and insects amongst other animals. I made sure that they were aware that it wasn't necessary to write about their own home, if they didn't want to. They could imagine they were somebody or something else and write from their point of view.

Each learner then had a blank sheet of paper on which to write any words that they associated with HOME. They could write whatever came into their heads - as long as it had something to do with the topic. I encouraged them to focus on one aspect of home - Whose home is it? What is it like? What is there? Why does it feel like home? As they were working, I monitored helping with vocabulary and ideas for those who were finding it hard to get started. I also made my own personal brainstorm, trying to stick to words that the learners would understand.

When everybody had written what they could, I wrote my words on the board. Then, as a class, we wrote a poem using my words. I started it off by choosing one of the words and writing the first line, and we built it up bit by bit. Here is a Wordle of the words I chose:

Unfortunately, I didn't make a copy of the poem we created and I don't remember enough to reproduce it here, but you can get an idea of how I imagine home (nothing, in fact, like my real home but a fairly common British idea of the word, I think!) Of course, the students' words were nothing like mine - since it was September and we had recently com back from the summer holidays, many of them wrote about the beach, which is their second home.

The children then drew a picture that represented their idea of home and the words they had written. This was to get them focussing on the different words, and grouping them together to form complete ideas. For example, with my words, I would draw myself sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea, reading a book in front of the fire. Having a disorganised list of words, they would need to bring together their ideas. They could draw circles around groups of words that went together, or that talked about the same thing.

The learners then started working on their first draft of their poems. Luckily, I have found the rough copy of Violeta's work, including her notes. Here is a Wordle of her ideas:

I will be including a link to the children's poetry, but I'm having some formatting problems with the document. I will share the link as soon as I can.

Lesson Three: The finished product

It can be useful to view a first draft with fresh eyes, so we came back to them after the weekend. The students re-read their drafts and made any changes they felt could improve it. I helped correct spelling mistakes, and revised verb forms and agreement (more for the competition than anything else). The learners then copied up their poems and drew pictures to illustrate them. They also had to think of a title that best described their poem.

I entered their poems into the competition that evening. One of the students was eleven and was too old to enter the competition, so I decided to have a parallel competition within the class. My colleague, Stephen, who is actually writes novels when he isn't teaching, was to be the judge. He would choose the three best entries. I then made a booklet on the computer which included all their poems, and gave each student a copy to take home, whilst displaying another on the wall for everyone else to see.

The learners were really proud of their work. The competition element helped motivate them into doing it well, but I think they enjoyed the writing process too. Spelling and grammar were important, but not the be all and end all. The important thing was the content. The poems were judged on content and sound, rather than accuracy. I think it is essential to have students, whatever their age and level, sometimes work on tasks where their ideas are what matters, rather than how they express them. If we constantly focus on form, they will pay much more attention to grammatical accuracy and vocabulary than the planning process and ideas, and to be honest, for a piece of writing to have the desired effect and to be "successful", the ideas and points made can be more important than the way in which they are expressed.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you don't have to spend full lessons on this. You could do a little each day for several weeks. I wouldn't drag it out too long, as the learners may get bored, but it could be something they could work on if they finish their work early.

I hope you have enjoyed these ideas and found them useful. They worked for this particular class, but may not work so well with a different group of learners. I will get the link to their poems up ASAP.

Swap Shop!

2011-01-17T15:21:00.001+01:00

For those of you who weren't around in late 70s to early 80s Britain, Swap Shop was a magazine programme presented by Noel Edmonds (Current presenter of Deal or No Deal - and he hasn't changed much!) where children phoned in to exchange their possessions.

This Saturday I will be attending a Swap Shop organised by TEFLdelSur - a new association for teachers in the Cádiz area of Spain, set up by Teresa Bestwick. We had our first event in October where we enjoyed sessions by Ceri Jones, Guido Europeaantje and Simon Pearlman. This week's session will be different, as instead of a few individuals giving presentations or workshops, all the participants will be sharing our ideas. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to be oragnised - whether we will all have to get up and explain our idea to the others, or whether it will be a kind of group session where each person gives their two-penneth worth as we go along. It sounds like it will be fun, though!

Anyway, I have decided to talk about writing poetry with young learners. I will be posting a summary of what I intend to talk about on here next week with a list of useful links.

The Next Step

2011-01-12T11:15:00.000+01:00

Credit: Evgeni Dinev

Over the past six months I have been working on a "book". The idea came from a various sources: firstly from a personal lack of inspiration in using traditional ELT materials for specific groups, secondly from an interest in the methodology being implemented in local primary schools and thirdly, after reading last year about the ELTons award for new writers sponsored by MacMillan.

Ever since I started blogging I have had an interest in writing - after eleven years of teaching in basically the same situation, I felt that gradually moving in a new direction may be good for me. I was looking for a new focus, something slightly removed from the day to day teaching but also related to it. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy teaching, but sometimes I can't imagine doing exactly the same job, in the same place, for the same wages and even teaching the same families in ten or twenty years' time. Writing would allow me to do some teaching but also do something different. The ELTons offered me an opportunity - a reason for writing, a deadline for submission of three chapters. And in the summer holidays I spent a few hours every morning working on my proposal.

Now, being completely new to this, and not having any inside information as to what the judges were looking for may have put me at a disadvantage. However, I was really writing for myself. The book in question is the basis for the whole syllabus of one of my classes. And it is working really well! The children are having fun, learning lots (not just English) and I feel they are making much more progress than they would have if we had used a traditional course. The shortlist for this award is now out, and my proposal has not made it. Maybe it was that my proposal wasn't clear enough. Or perhaps it isn't marketable enough. Would it make much money? Would it be sold around the world? Is the idea just not appropriate for today's publishers? Am I just too new and unknown? Were there lots of brilliant entries that far surpassed mine? I think that probably the answers to all these questions play a part. It just isn't good enough.

But the motive for this post is not to talk about either the book itself or the awards. It is "What to do next?".
I plan on finishing my book over the next few months, so what should I do with it? Should I publish it for free online? Should I self publish and try to sell a few copies? Should I contact other publishers? Should I just stick it in my drawer at work and keep it for myself (and colleagues)?

What would you do? One of the main drawbacks I see in self-publishing is that I have little experience in page design or programmes other than the basics of Microsoft Word. How do I make it look good enough for people to want to buy it or even download it for that matter? I think that I should probably ask somebody with experience to look at it and give feedback since I haven't got the experience to critically analyse it myself. But who?

This then, is a call for advice. What would you do? Have you tried to publish anything? Have you published and if so how did you go about it? What should my next step be?

Brick By Brick the Tower is Built

2011-01-09T20:26:00.001+01:00

Last night some friends and I were having a nice game of Jenga® which is always good for a laugh. If you've never played it, the game consists of removing blocks from anywhere in the tower using only one hand and then placing them on the top. The tower gets bigger and more unstable as you play and the objective is not to make the tower fall. Some players are more strategic and try to make the tower as unstable as possible for the next person whereas others tend to play safe. Why I am writing about this on my ELT blog? Well, I was thinking about making some New Year's Resolutions related to my teaching and most of them require a step by step approach, doing a little every day, recording and reflecting over time and this made me think of the game we were playing last night.

In fact, Jenga® has quite a lot to do with teaching and learning. One of my objectives for the rest of this year is to work on building up my students' knowledge and use of English, encouraging them to do a little each day, whether this is revisiting vocabulary, doing some grammar reinforcement exercises, sending me an email or watching a video on Youtube. I would also like them to reflect on their own progress, taking time to decide what each individual needs to work on - a bit like thinking carefully about which block to remove in Jenga® and then placing it on top of the tower of knowledge in order to move onto the next block (sorry about that cheesy metaphor there!) My point is that I need to try and make my students understand that in order to be successful at language learning, they must have realistic expectations of what can be achieved before working out what they can do daily to achieve these objectives. And that a little every day often goes much further than a three hour marathon session on a Sunday night or a frantic cramming session before an exam.

As for my other resolutions, they are related to both the classroom and my own professional development outside it.

1) Try to make use of more emergent language and allow the lesson to develop and evolve by itself. I need to loosen the reins a bit. That is not to say that I am going to go full-dogme and abandon the course book or the exam prep, but I would like to extend those dogme moments I have had towards the end of 2010 and let them take over longer parts of the lesson, if relevant.

2) During and after lessons, make a note of any problems, difficulties, and thing that didn't go so well and reflect on possible reasons and solutions or changes that could be made. This refers to materials themselves, the manipulation of those materials, dynamics, individual students, my own behaviour... and probably lots more! I intend to look closely at any problems and try to find logical solutions to them (something that doesn't come very easy to me - I am somewhat lacking in critical thinking skills!) I will try to take up Dave Dodgson's challenge, where he invites us to blog about things that haven't gone too well as well those that do.

3) Try to find the time to create more materials and to organise them properly on my computer... one day maybe I will have a small library of materials in which to dip into and adapt. Again, this is a slow and steady activity that I need to begin and keep up (another characteristic that seems to evade me quite a lot - especially where the gym is concerned!) and regularly update.

4) Continue working every day on my CLIL course (I will blog about that at some point), and when I have finished this particular set of materials, start working on the next age group. Yet again, a little every day is best, allowing my mind to rest in between - unless I have a particularly creative and productive morning. I need to be constant and make myself work on this every weekday, with no buts!

5) Go swimming twice a week. Yes, I know this has nothing to do with teaching, but I do have to try to fit it in with all the other things on my list, AND teaching of course! Also, if I publicly announce it on here, I might just feel an obligation to go! Please feel free to ask me if how many times I have been swimming each week, and don't accept all the excuses I will come up with!

I'm sure there were a few more things in my head before I started writing this post, but I think the ones I have mentioned are enough to be going on with. I really don't want to overwhelm myself with objectives and good intentions, after all, they do need to be realistic and accomplishable (is that a word?) just like those I want my students to set themselves.

Going back to Jenga®, if you think carefully about the blocks to remove and where to place them, if you take your time, you will build a decent tower. If you rush in and try to build up the tower too quickly, this is what will happen.

I'll leave you to think about the analogy with teaching and learning.

Happy 2011 and may you and your students all have a productive, creative, successful and fun year!

Me, panicking during our game - and no, I didn't knock it down once!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

2010-12-23T15:58:00.002+01:00

From Summerhill to ELT: Promoting Democracy in the Classroom

2010-12-16T12:29:00.000+01:00

Anarchy!

Autonomy, democracy, happy children and play are some of the themes of an article I wrote last year, now published in the latest version of HLT Magazine.

The article is titled From Summerhill to ELT: Promoting Democracy in the Classroom and can be found in the Short Articles section. It outlines some of the principles of "free" schools such as Summerhill and how we can implement them into our language classrooms.

If you are interested, take a look and comment here on my blog if you have anything to say.

Thanks :)

Open Book Tests Part 2 - How it went

2010-12-15T10:35:00.001+01:00

Before you start to read I have to warn you that I don't yet have the results of the tests and therefore I don't know how the students have done or what problems they may have had. I left the tests at work yesterday and will be marking them this evening.

What I can say is that the students all appeared to be thinking hard whilst doing the test - I was actually writing some report cards but I had one eye on them all the time (I don't know where I've managed to learn the ability to write without looking at the paper properly!) and they were all concentrated on their work, sometimes looking up to think about something.

Funnily enough, a couple of the students didn't seem to open their books at all. I don't think this is because the test was easy for them but because it was actually harder and would take longer to find the appropriate section in the book than to think it through themselves. This was really one of my objectives for doing the test this way - they would have to think about the answers, using the material available to help them. In a state of such high concentration (as opposed to the usual fun and chatty atmosphere of the class), they would perhaps be more likely to take in and internalise the information and language they were reading about in the book and using in the test exercises.

Most of the learners used their books at some stage, but it seemed to be after thinking about a question that they opened their books, to check the answer they had already formed in their heads. In any case, as I had warned them before we started, they would not have time to look up everything.

One of the problems I had foreseen would be whether or not the tests would actually do their purpose and show me what the students know and what they don't. However, I think that if somebody really didn't know, for example, when to use "will" and "going to", that this will still be apparent in their answers. If they have been looking up individual examples in their book, there are likely to be mistakes in their test. In any case, the point is that even if they weren't sure about something before doing the test, it is quite possible that now, after looking in their books and doing the test, that they understand it.

I will be looking carefully at the test papers this evening. Rather than the number of correct answers, I will be focussing on the areas where the students generally did well, and those that seem to need more work. I will check for consistency within the same grammar point or lexical area for each student.

I think that even if the circumstances of the test turn out to not be ideal, something postive will have been taken from it. The learners felt that there were being some concessions made to them and they felt more confident having their book in front of them, like a kind of security blanket. The latter I believe to be important because it means the affective filter was higher than in a traditional test situation and hopefully this will have provided better working conditions for the students.

I will be asking them next lesson if they thought doing the exam in this way was a good idea, if there could be any improvements, how they felt during the test, if they used their books much etc.

I will report back on their opinions and my conclusions after marking the tests.

Thanks for reading :)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After marking the tests I can say that being able to use their books has not actually helped the students do the test - to be honest, they haven't done as well as I had expected - it is possible that looking in their books may have confused them on some points, but the general impression I have is that they haven't taken advantage of the situation. They don't seem to have looked up the rules for the grammar that was being tested but have relied on their own knowledge, and they ecrtainly haven't used to their books to find examples of collocations that appeared in the test since the questions they got right are of examples they have come across many times.

As I mentioned in the original post, I think I will have to show them how to use their books to find relevant information. Just as they would need training in making notes, they need training in using reference materials.

This has been an experiment, and I am not going to take their test results into account for their end of term reports, because I don't think they are accurate enough. What is clear though, is that if I want to give a test in similar conditions in the future, I am going to have to show the students how to look for information. We will need to do some practice on looking for specific information (scanning) and transferring rules and examples into different types of exercise.

I do think that having their books available for consultation was comforting for the students, but it is clear from the results that they found the test difficult. This obviously isn't very motivating - doing badly in a test is one of the worst things that can happen to a language learner - but I think it will show the learners a need for a change in attitude (they can be particularly lazy). The test was difficult and I will make sure this is clear to the learners, and I plan on going over the exercises and asking the students to find the appropriate pages in the book, encouraging them to find similar examples and rules that they needed to do the exercise well.

The most important thing I need to do today though, is reassure the students that they are making progress, they are improving their English and that their test result isn't so important. What is really important is the work they do every day in class and this is what will be reflected in their reports.

Open Book Tests

2010-12-14T11:43:00.000+01:00


By ccarlstead on Flickr with Creative Commons licence

In October I wrote a post about allowing students to take in notes to exams. The idea was students would hopefully spend some time before the test preparing their set of notes, at the same time revising the content without even realising it. I was planning on using this method with a group of thirteen year olds, who are at an age where they need to understand the importance of doing a test properly because for the next five years at secondary school they will be having tests more often than they actually have a proper lesson, such is the educational system in Spain! However, these kids are actually this - kids. They may be taller than me but inside they are just beginning to step away from childhood. For this reason, I don't think allowing them to prepare notes would be of any help. They know what grammatical structures will be in the test, but do they know how to make notes? Has anybody shown them how to make a good set of revision notes? No. At school nobody teaches them study techniques. They mostly just have to memorise facts and even large chunks of information word for word. Unless I show them myself how to create a set of notes and how to focus on the most important parts, they will have difficulty in doing so successfully.

So, I am going one step further. We are having an open-book test.

The test they have is fairly long and is based on the grammar and vocabulary we have been learning this term, with a writing stage for early finishers. As I said in the other post, I'm not a big fan of tests, but this class is quite lazy (I know, it's their age) and I'm hoping that having a test will help them focus more. They are so used to testing that if we don't have one they seem to think that the class is just to doss around in (for those of you who didn't live in the UK in the nineties, "to doss around" means "to spend time doing very little or being unproductive").

Anyway, they will be able to use their books to help them do the test. However, they won't have time to look up everything in their books. In any case, the test questions are not reproductions of tasks in the book, so they will have to find the approriate section. If they have to choose between the Present Continuous and Will to talk about the future, they can read the grammar section (in English) on that to remind them of their uses before doing that particular exercise. If they can't remember the spelling of a vocabulary item, they can find it in their book to double check.

One of the other reasons why I'm doing this is to reduce stress. I didn't want the learners to be worrying about the test, or hurriedly studying five minutes before the class and getting all nervous. Allowing them to use their books means that everyone is relaxed about doing the test and sould hopefully be more successful - essential with this age group.

I do plan to allow notes as mentioned above in the future, but with older students and when we have some time to discuss how to create these notes.

I shall report back tomorrow on how today went!

Festive Fun!

2010-12-13T13:21:00.000+01:00

The festive season is now upon us and only two more weeks of the term to go. This year's holidays begin quite late compared with previous years - I won't be truly on holiday until 10pm on the 23rd December. All the students will have two classes in that final week before Christmas, and I'm trying to decide what festive things we can do.

In previous years on the last day, there has always been some Christmas craft type activity with the young learners, games or parties with the teens and a drink in the bar with the adults! However, I'm changing things round a bit this year. I haven't yet decided what to do with the little ones but it won't be a craft as we are doing one in our Winter topic the lesson before. Maybe a Christmas song? A nativity play? That would take up too much preparation time, we just don't have the time for a proper play but we could do a bit of acting out - they always love that! We could write a letter to Santa. Maybe we will watch a bit of Dora the Explorer Christmas Special and maybe we will have a party. In any case, with the youngest ones you can make fun out of anything. The main thing is that they go home for the holidays happy, feeling successful and looking forward to coming back in the new year.

What about the older children? Well they all enjoy singing, so I'm sure we will be performing a Christmas song. But which one? Not wanting to do the dreadful "Jingle Bells" yet again, maybe we will go for something a bit more comic such as When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney. One class will be having parties that they themselves have organised. Maybe we could try a traditional Christmas Parlour game like Charades. There are lots of good ideas on the BC Teaching English website.

Now, the tweens are a bit harder to engage, especially at this time of year when they have finished their school work. It can be hard to find materials suitable for their age that actually interest them - they don't want to watch a cartoon as it is too babyish, but adult films and shows are not suitable. I have a copy of the Mr Bean Christmas Special, but it seems so dated now! I think the best think to do is to ask them to suggest several ideas of things to do, put them in a hat, and luck will decide! Either that or have a democratic vote. Maybe it won't be so Christmassy, but they could bring in things they'd like to share such as songs or videos. One idea I have is to do a kind of Christmas Top Ten. I would play ten songs (they could be past UK Chart Number Ones or current songs) and get the students to choose the number one.

That leaves the older teens and adults. My group of adults have suggested having a Christmas party on the last day, with typical local festive treats and English songs and carols. I was thinking of doing something with the Mr Bean episode in the previous lesson - having them write down what Mr Bean would say if he spoke properly, making a note of all the typical British customs the can see in the video.
The teen groups are very small and a party would not work - unless we joined up with another class. Any ideas for a really fun last lesson with the 16 plus?

Sometimes I have just completely ignored Christmas with the adults. They sometimes actually prefer to have a normal lesson. This year they have suggested having a party themselves and they seem quite into the spirit of things, and I'm going to take advantage of this and have a bit of festive fun myself!

Barça - Madrid

2010-11-26T13:41:00.000+01:00

Barça vs Real Madrid.

That's what threatens to mess up next Monday evening's lesson. A class full of "madridistas" means that from 9pm there will be little, if any, concentration in our classroom. One or two have decided not to come to class, others have suggested a kind of Christmas radio party where we listen to the match in the background whilst singing Christmas carols (yes, that was really a suggestion made by one of the students!). If we could get the match in English I wouldn't mind, but I don't think that's going to be possible. Anyway, as we were originally going to be looking at verbs followed by the gerund or the infinitive, I decided to make up a dialogue about football in which lots of these forms were used. You will find the end result below. I tried to make it sound natural whilst including an inappropriate number of gerunds and infinitives! After getting the students to concentrate for ten minutes (before the match starts) and look for the verbs, we will practise the dialogues in pairs. I am hoping that this will be fun...

Watching the match

John:    Alright mate! How’s it going?

Tom:    Not bad, John. I think we’ll win this game.

John:    Yeah, I hope so. Do you want a drink?

Tom:    Just a coke, please. I don’t feel like drinking tonight. Anyway, I’ve got to finish studying for
            Wednesday’s exam later.

John:    Oh right. I love having a beer watching the footy. Don’t you
      miss drinking when everyone else is having one?

Tom:    Sometimes, yeah. Oy! Penalty!........
            Nice one! We’ll score from this.

John:    Yeah, Ronaldo’s been practising taking penalties all week.

Both:    Goooooooooaaaaaaaaallllllllll!

Tom:    Anyway, fancy coming to the match on Saturday? I’m taking
            the kids.

John:    No, I’d like to but I can’t afford to go. My brother suggested
      going and he offered to get the tickets but I refused to accept
them. He’s not working at the moment.

Tom:    Well, if you change your mind, I don’t mind giving you a lift.

John:    Cheers. Hey! That’s not a red card! He was diving! He can’t deny cheating there!

Tom:     Oh I know. They just can’t help cheating, can they?

John:     Well, I still don’t think they’ll avoid being relegated at the end of the season.

Tom:     No, they certainly deserve it.

Five little ducks.. erm pigs...erm... whatever!

2010-11-25T11:14:00.000+01:00

As I was getting ready for work yesterday, I made up a little song. You may be thinking that I get inspired whilst doing some rather mundane activities like doing the shopping or getting ready for work, but to be honest, since these activities are not mentally taxing, I can allow my mind to wander and this is how I come up with ideas. (I suppose I'm not a very methodical kind of person).

My six-year-olds and I are looking at the story of The Three Little Pigs and I thought singing a song about them might reinforce some of the language we have seen. Now, finding it difficult to remember and sing a song in class with an original tune, most of the ditties I make up are sung to the tune of another, more traditional, song. In this case, the "little pigs" fit in very well with the "little ducks" in the song Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day (over the hills and far away...). Everyone know that one? Here are the lyric to my piggy version:

Three little pigs left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig number one built his house of straw

Wolf blew it down and it was no more.

Two little pigs left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig number two built his house of sticks

Wolf blew it down and it fell to bits.

One little pig left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig three built his house from bricks of clay

and the three little pigs could play all day!

What do you think? I haven't tried it on the children yet but I think they'll like it. I doubt I'd make a career out of songwriting but it suits my purpose alright! Feel free to use it if you are doing something similar.

And if you've been singing along while reading this post, I bet you won't be able to get the tune out of your head all day!

Party Time!

2010-11-24T11:11:00.000+01:00

We have just finished a unit on birthdays in our course book, where party food had been the main lexical input and I wanted to do something a bit more creative that would relate to the topic. This particular class sometimes have some problems getting on with each other and there are often silly little arguments and tale telling, so I thought it may be useful to do some group work, in the hope that they would bond more if they had to work together to complete a task.

The idea I came up with was to organise a class party. Now, there are twelve students in the class - too many to work in a group, so I decided to make it more competitive (they just love competition) and to divide the class into two. Since there are six boys and six girls, this seemed the most practical way to split them up. I don't normally allow them to work in single sex groups, unless they are groups of three, as I prefer them to change partners every so often. However in this case, I thought there would be fewer differences of opinion and therefore quarrels if they were allowed to work with their friends. It was very likely that the girls would prepare a completely different kind of party to the boys.

Each group had a supervisor who I appointed. The supervisor's job was to make sure everybody in the group knew what they had to do and to make sure they were doing it. The others would each be responsible for a task, being able to help the others if necessary. These are the tasks that they had to complete:

Make a guestlist
Make invitations
Make a list of food and drinks
Make a list of games to play
Decide what decorations you will need

There will be two different parties that we will hold in December, when we finish our current course book. The children really got into organising their parties and making beautiful invitations. We will be finishing things off this afternoon, and deciding who will bring what, as each child will bring one item of food to the party.

Precious Moments

2010-11-18T11:41:00.017+01:00

It may not look much, but with a lot of dedication and care it will become something wonderful.

On a day when some classes seem like an uphill struggle, when it appears that some students are just trying to make life more difficult for you, when you find it impossible to get the to children stop shouting and sit down, and all because it is raining outside; there sometimes comes a glimpse of light in that dark, heavy ambience; a ray of sunlight or a rainbow to brighten up your day.

This happened to me yesterday. Not that my previous class had gone badly, but the bad weather along with the ever-present challenge of trying to help some students to learn had started to get me down slightly. It is November, one month til the Christmas holidays and just over two months since the new term began, when things have settled down enough for people to start complaining and demanding things from you. Demotivation starts to creep in to the souls of learners and colleagues. There is a reason why in the UK they have a half-term break!

Then, a six-year-old changed everything.

With this particular class I decided to take a kind of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach. I spent the summer designing a course for them, and I am working on the finer details as we go along. Really, what we are doing is learning about and doing lots of different things, of the domains of various school subjects. We learn about living creatures, do projects, make things, do experiments, listen to stories and so on. Yesterday, we were discussing the story of The Three Little Pigs. I hadn't yet read them the story, but as it is a well-known tale in Spain too, we were discussing what the children knew about it. Of course this was being done in Spanish - the children have very little productive English at this stage- and I was providing them with some vocabulary trying to encourage them to use it. This meant that their Spanish sentences explaining the story went something like: "Pig construyó una casa de paja". I could see Lucía was thinking about something, and when she put up her hand she said that she had something to say in English.

Slowly, but confidently, she exclaimed:

"The wolf up the house!"

Well, this was something new! A six-year-old trying to make a full sentence in English. On her own. With no encouragement or elicitation. I was taken aback. Of course the sentence needed a verb for it to make real sense, but her sentence had meaning and could be easily understood. Lucía was communicating in English!
And she knew exactly what she was saying because she made a gesture for "up" so that we would know what she meant. For me, this is a really important step for Lucía. I have been exposing the children to more English than they are used to, in the hope that they will eventually understand me and pick up some of it themselves. I focus on important vocabulary and repeat it a lot while we are doing things, and then wait for them to use it without being prompted. It takes such a long time for this to happen usually, and so I was shocked to hear something that included new vocabulary along with vocabulary we learnt in October, and in a coherent sentence.

My reaction may seem over the top, but I almost had tears in my eyes when this little girl said what she did. I felt so proud! I praised her effusively for her efforts. It gave me the feeling that maybe what I am doing is working, maybe this way of learning is effective.

Thank you, Lucía. You really made my week!

Don't Shoot the Bear!

2010-11-16T20:27:00.000+01:00

Don't Shoot the Bear is an interactive commercial for the brand of error correction products Tipp-Ex. Watch it:

I have used it today with a group of ten year olds and a group of thirteen year olds, and I am now going to use it with my Advanced class.

With the younger ones, I got them to write a list of action verbs on a piece of paper. I had not told them anything about the video. I then wrote on the board "A hunter shoots a bear", and elicited its meaning. I went on to rub out "shoots" and asked them if any of the verbs in their lists could go in its place. I told them that if necessary, they could add "with" so that the sentence would make sense, for example: A hunter plays with a bear. They then had to tick the verbs on their list that would be suitable in the sentence in question.

I then played the video and asked them for verbs with which to complete the sentence. It's really good fun and it gets them practising 3rd person singular "s" (although the sentence does not need to be grammatically correct for the videos to work). It also activates vocabulary as they try to think of as many different actions as possible to try out.

With the advanced students, I'm hopefully going to get something a bit more complex out of them. I will only accept grammatically correct sentences, and demand synonyms of really basic words. Maybe we could hypothesise about what will happen. We can discuss why the same video comes up when different verbs have been entered. We can look up different and alternative meanings in the dictionary. I haven't really decided exactly what we are going to do, I thought I would see what they came up with first.

I do think that this video has endless classroom possibilities though. It could be used as a stimulus for speaking or writing, the students could create a collaborative story about the hunter and the bear. Surely there must be plenty more ways in which we could use this video, so please add your ideas to the comments section to share with us all.

And whatever you do, DON'T SHOOT THE BEAR!

Autumn Days

2010-11-11T12:30:00.000+01:00

Those of you who were at primary school in the eighties will probably remember the following assembly song, especially if you were in the recorder group like I was:

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled

And the silk inside a chestnut shell

Jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled

All the things I love so well

So I mustn't forget

No I mustn't forget

To say a great big thank you

I mustn't forget.

Along with harvest festival celebrations where everyone took in a tin of Spam (when it was something to eat, rather than junkmail) and sang songs about crops and giving and thanking the Lord, autumn was a time for putting on your wellies and jumping in piles of leaves and puddles, smelling bonfires and playing conkers and doing leaf rubbings with wax crayons.

I wanted to allow my class of six-year-olds to feel the magic of those days, and relate to it. I wanted them to imagine they were in a park covered in fallen leaves, to run around and jump and play. To smell roast chestnuts, to feel the chilly autumn wind on their faces. To collect leaves and touch them, feel them, smell them. I wanted them to have a multisensory experience with sights, sound, smells and sensations. And all this in the classroom!

This is all part of the CLILing up of my youngest students. This summer I started working on a project to bring Content and Language Integrated Learning into my classroom. After trying out different course books for this age group and trying a materials free approach, I have come to the conclusion that neither is ideal. So why not do things that the children are really interested in? Topics that will motivate and engage. Tasks that are challenging not just because of the language involved but also for their content. This is what I am trying with one class of six-year-olds and at the moment it seems to be working.

Autumn is a mini.project that we have been doing over three lessons. The final lesson was dedicated to creating a display for our classroom. We had already done the leaf rubbings in the previous lesson and we spent yesterday deciding where to stick each leaf and recognising the written forms of the words we have learnt. Here are a couple of pictures of the display:

Creating a display can take some time and effort on the part of the teacher, but it gives the children a real sense of achievement when they see that their work is the backbone of a beautiful wall display. You can involve the children at all stages, in the planning of what to include and where, in the sticking, in handing out pins and adhesives and so on. The display is ours, we have created it as a class and it shows what we have been doing and what the children have been learning. It shows our progress and it is fun.

Peanuts!

2010-11-10T14:59:00.000+01:00

Teaching grammar to young learners is no easy task. Is there even any need for it? I'm not going to discuss the whys and wherefores right now, but if you want to read more about whether teaching grammar is necessary for young learners, read this post by Dave Dodgson on his blog Reflections of a Teacher and Learner.

In my school we use course books with young learners and in this case I am using Kids Box 2 by CUP, which is actually quite a nice course, with some fantastic songs, although it does present some vocabulary that may seem out of context (who eats water melon at a birthday party?). This is because the course is tailor-made to suit the Cambridge Young Learners' Exams (see this post of mine.) Yesterday's lesson was supposed to present learners with object pronouns - something that they don't even understand in Spanish. Of course, they use the object pronoun "me" without realising it, but I feared, actually explicitly explaining how to use these pronouns was not going to get us very far. The exercise in the book was a very flimsy affair which would be done wrong by all my students if I hadn't shown them the "grammar" beforehand. So how could I get the students using object pronouns correctly without writing lots of boring example sentences on the board and having them write their own?

This is what I did:

After showing them the forms of the object pronouns on a lovely colourful poster with children pointing to each other and speech bubbles saying things like "Give him the ball" I got out a bag of peanuts. Unsurprisingly, everyone started asking me for peanuts in Spanish, to which I replied that they would have to ask me in English if they wanted something. "Can I have a ......, please?" is the phrase they know for asking for things, but that wasn't going to help us with object pronouns, so I provided them with the not-so-polite "Give me a peanut, please!"

They all began shouting for peanuts using "Give me..." and I gave one to each child that asked for one.

I then wrote ME, YOU, HIM, HER, US, THEM on Post-It notes and stuck them along the edge of my desk, where they could be seen by everyone. I then placed several peanuts by each Post-It. I told them that if they wanted more peanuts they would have to come to the desk and ask for one, but they could only take one if they used the word on the note and used the peanut accordingly. For example, if they took a peanut from the HER pile, they would have to say "I give the peanut to her" and proceed by giving the peanut to a female friend. If they chose US, they would take two peanuts and keep one for themself and give one to a friend. And so on.

They loved the game and wanted to carry on playing when we had run out of peanuts! And they were all using object pronouns correctly! When we came to the exercise in their activity book, they had no problems.

It may have taken much longer than a simple explanation, but all the children were involved and engaged, and I think that they will remember what they learnt. I may even have created a cognitive cue with the peanuts - every time they see a monkey nut, will they be reminded of object pronouns?

You could do this with other personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and pronouns, or to practise teh possessive "s". You could use sweets or stickers or anything else instead of peanuts. One hint - if you do use peanuts, make sure nobody has an allergy to them first!

Young Learners Video Challenge!

2010-11-05T13:48:00.001+01:00

As everyone seems to be busy completing various challenges (see Jason's Wandrous Whiteboard and Karenne's Dogme Challenges ) I thought I would come up with my own!

One of my classes is a group of ten year olds who have been in our school for approximately two years.
Over the past couple of lessons we have been looking at different sports and their characteristics as well as how to express likes and dislikes. They wrote about their favourite sports, but I wanted them to practise speaking too, so I asked them if they would like to appear in a video that other children in different countries could see. This particular group are quite outgoing and very enthusiastic, and they love doing drama activities and projects to supplement the course book.

I wrote some prompts on the board to help them remember what kind of things they could say, such as:
I like... I don't like ... Most popular sport etc. They practised their speeches without the camera first, and most of them needed a couple of tries with the webcam recording as they got nervous and started laughing.

Here is the merged video:

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

They really enjoyed seeing themselves speak in English and I have suggested they try it at home too, so they can listen to their pronunciation.

What I would like to suggest is for those of you who teach young learners to do something similar. All you need is a computer or laptop with a webcam. I used the basic software that came with the webcam and then merged the videos online with a free application which does not allow editing or downloading but offers the HTML code for you to embed the video into your blog, and a link you can email to students, as well as being able to upload to youtube if you wish.

My students would love to see other children talking about their favourite sports. If you do decide to record your students, send me a link to the video and I will show it to my class. This could be a great collaborative project!

A Call for Advice

2010-11-02T14:18:00.001+01:00

This is a cry for help to my PLN.

Photo by Simon Howden

It is not a nice feeling, after so many years of teaching, the one you get when you have no idea of how to help a student advance. It is a feeling of complete and utter exasperation. A feeling of uselessness and hopelessness. Thoughts of incompetence run through my mind. Why don't I know what to do? Why have I run out of ideas? It is so hard not to lose patience and blame the student as well as myself for not knowing how to overcome the problem. This is why I am asking you, my network of knowledgeable friends, for help.

The Student: a one-to one student in his early forties working for a company recently taken over by a British firm. Started in February as a False Beginner, had three months off over the summer and has started lessons again in October. Two hours per week.

The Course: using an elementary level course book as a source of general vocabulary and grammar as well as skills practice.

The Problem: The student has an elementary level of vocabulary and grammar structures and can understand written texts on a wide range of topics, however his listening skills are at beginner level. He can only comprehend spoken English at sentence level (on a good day) and freezes whenever a recording is played.

The Situation: The student has face to face contact several times a year with British visitors to the factory with whom he is expected to communicate. He needs to be able to understand and respond to native speakers socially whilst showing them around the factory.

How can we improve his listening skills in a short period of time? What kind of tasks can I give the student? One of the main problems is nerves. However much I try to get him to relax and just listen, this seems impossible. We have been working on pronunciation issues such as elision and sentence stress in order to make listening easier but at the end of the day, when another teacher comes into the classroom and asks him a basic question he just freezes.

So, please if you have or know of any ideas, tasks, links, websites or even books that may help, please let me know. How can I rid my student of the sensation of being thrown into a black hole whenever he hears English?

The Halloween Spell Hunt

2010-10-27T13:45:00.000+02:00

The Halloween Spell Hunt is an activity for children of elementary level upwards and requires relatively little preparation. Similar to a treasure hunt, the children must solve clues in order find each ingredient of a spell. I actually got the idea from the British Council's LearnEnglish Kids website where you will find a game in which the children have to find each ingredient in a haunted house. Having no internet connection in the classroom, I wondered how I could adapt the game for my class of nine and ten year olds.

What you need to do before the lesson is prepare a set of clues. Choose five spell ingredients such as a lizard's tongue or a frog's eye and write descriptions of these creatures such as:

I am a reptile. I have got four legs and a long tongue. I live in hot places. What am I?

You also need to write a list of hiding places around the classroom or school, e.g. You can find me under the table. All the clues and hiding places should be photocopied and cut up into slips of paper (one for each team).

Divide the class into pairs or threes and give each team the first clue. When they have decided on the answer, they should come and tell you, and you give them the hiding place. For example, the answer to the clue above is LIZARD. When a team comes to you and says "lizard", give them the clue for where to find it. In this case, there should be a picture of a lizard or a lizard's tongue under the table. Make sure there are enough pictures as teams.

They then come to you for the following clue. The first team to find all the parts of the spell will then perform the spell for the rest of the class, choosing victims on whom to cast the spell from their classmates.

As well as being fun, the learners are also practising reading skills and language points such as prepositions of place and verbs in the present simple.

You can follow or preced this activity with spells from Boggles World's Spellbook or Potion Book

Unplugged Moments #2

2010-10-26T13:14:00.000+02:00

Having asked my FCE class what skill they wanted to practise in the following lesson, we were going to do some reading yesterday. However, I had had a very busy morning and didn't have a whole lot of time to find a suitable text and create a task for them to do. I then remembered that somewhere, hidden among all the folders, papers, toys and props that fill my classroom shelves, I had a bag full of sets of leaflets acquired from my local library/tourist information centre in Newcastle-under-Lyme several years ago! Great! I would just have to root them out and then try to think of a suitable task for FCE level - What? Think up a challenging task or set of questions for Upper-Int students on the spot? Hmm, not as easy as you may think, however many years experience of teaching FCE you may have.

The solution? Have the students help create the task themselves! What could be more unplugged that using student-created content? Of course the texts themselves were not created by the students, but they were real, authentic texts that are ideal to practise micro-skills such as skimming for gist and scanning for specific information.

I placed sets of leaflets, which all advertised tourist attractions, on tables around the classroom. I then wrote on the board "A day out" and asked the students to write on the board (a kind of wandrous whiteboard but on a specific topic). We then discussed what they had written and what kind of days out they preferred and why. Thanks to Cecilia Coelho for the idea of staying at the board for the discussion.

I then asked them to think of groups of people who may go together on an excursion. I started them off with the first two and they came up with the rest:

A family of four with two children aged between 5 and 10
A playschool trip of children aged 2 to 5
A group of foreign tourists, adults and children
A group of senior citizens
A group of teenage friends
A group of patients with psychological and emotional problems (!)
Schoolchildren on a trip, aged 12 to 14
A group of physically disabled children

They the had to look at all the different leaflets and decide which day out would be the best for each group of people. They would later have to explain their reasons.

The lessons was very successful, and much more interesting than a typical FCE reading task. It got the students skimming and scanning, reading lots of short texts (probably in total longer than an individual exam text) and they had to explain their reasons orally. We almost ran out of time, but I would have encouraged them to persuade each other to change their mind, had we had more time.

Call My Bluff

2010-10-26T12:41:00.000+02:00

A fun way of revising vocabulary that gets students thinking about the meaning of the words AND using lots of English is the game Call My Bluff, which comes from a British TV show from the 80s where teams of celebrity contestants had to provide definitions of an obscure word and guess which was the correct definition.

This game must surely appear in some teacher's resource books, and many of you will have played it at some point. I think it is a good idea, however, to recap on some of the games and activities we have used in the past, as they may be new to some teachers, and often we try out so many new activities that we forget some of the older ones.

I decided to play this game with my elementary/Pre-Int adult class last night. I gave them all a copy of the unit one wordlist which appears in the teacher's book. In pairs, the students had to choose three words and write three definitions for each one, including the real definition. The wordlist includes definitions for each item of vocabulary, but I asked the students to use their own words so as not to give the game away. (The definitions were not of the language production level of the students). They could use dictionaries to check meanings and to look up words they would need for their definitions.

We then played the game. One student from each pair read out their word and the three definitions. Each pair chose A, B or C and was the given the correct answer. You can build up the atmosphere here if you wish by slapping the desk to create a drumroll.

I think the activity was very useful for this level, since they were using structures such as "This is used to ..." without being overtly presented with it. I was pleasantly surprised that some of the students tried to trick their classmates by providing a definition to a similar sounding word. One group defined the word "guess" as "a person who is invited", trying to confuse the class with the word "guest"! Another said that "contain" was "to say 1, 2, 3..." because it sounds similar to "counting". Clever students!

In all, the game gets students thinking about the meaning of words they have come across, in a fun way. It is also suitable for any level, except perhaps beginners.

Unplugged Moments #1

2010-10-26T12:22:00.000+02:00

After all the recent discussions about Dogme in ELT, but not being brave enough to be an outright dogmeist, I have however become more relaxed over what goes on in my lessons and therefore have had a few "dogme moments" recently. My reasons for not being overly supportive of the whole unplugged approach (if that is the same as dogme, something I'm not entirely sure about), are many and I'm not going to go into those reasons here, at least not for the time being. Nonetheless, I would like to outline a some of these moments which have, in my opinion, made the lessons in question "better", or at least more student-centred.

The first of these moments is a case of emergent language. Not exactly language emerging from the students themselves but from the situation. I walked into the classroom last night after my coffee break, and noticed that one of the students had had a haircut. So after the usual "How are you today? Fine/Very well, thanks" (I must get round to providing them with some alternatives to this exchange!), I asked Rafa if he had had his hair cut, miming the action of hair cutting. As I had already imagined, the phrase was a new one for everybody, and I wrote "I have my hair cut" on the board, along with the words hairdresser and barber. I also wrote it in the past simple, with the sentence "Rafa had his hair cut at the weekend". One of the students asked what the difference was between "have my hair cut" and "cut my hair", to whom I gave a pair of scissors and said "Cut your hair!". Luckily he didn't actually do as I said, but explained that he used clippers to cut his own hair. We compared the different meanings of the two sentences before going on to think of some more examples where we would use the structure HAVE SOMETHING DONE such as "have your car repaired" or "have your house painted".

So we ended up looking at a grammatical structure that I hadn't planned on teaching. It just kind of emerged from the conversation. I pointed out to the students that this wasn't part of the lesson I had planned, but that it can be very useful to look at parts of language as they come up. I think that explaining this helps them accept a more relaxed approach, since many students in my teaching context are generally quite inflexible, and expect everything to be a certain way. Hopefully, they will be open to lots more dogme moments, as I believe that presenting students with new language that they actually need to talk about something at that moment, for a genuine reason, is more likely to be remembered and then used than language that appears in an artificial situation in a course book.

The Babbling Blackboard

2010-10-19T13:22:00.000+02:00

This post is in response to Jason Renshaw's Wandrous Whiteboard Challenge where the students create the content for part or all of the lesson. This is a great idea if you prefer a more unplugged approach, but also works well as a stimulus for discussion if you want your students to practise their speaking skills, or for encouraging students to look for and correct their own mistakes or to use peer correction.

I am not using an unplugged approach with any of the three classes with whom I tried out the wandrous whiteboard activity. In fact, all three are "exam classes" and are or will be either using a course book or a folder full of photocopied materials. The reason for using the activity was not the same with all three groups.

The first group of students I tried it out with are a teenage CAE class. There were only three students that day, and our course book has not yet arrived. I wanted to try something that would get them speaking, since they are not exactly the most talkative bunch of students I have ever met. They usually only give fairly short answers to questions, despite having the ability to express themselves perfectly in English. They are teenagers though, and are still shy or embarrassed to spend large amounts of time airing their opinions. So I gave each student a piece of chalk at the beginning of the lesson, told them to write anything they wanted on the board, and left the room for five minutes.

This is what they came up with:


Advanced teenagers' babbling blackboard

We went on to discuss what they had written. José told us what he had learnt about the Illuminati and how he was going to buy a strategic board game of the same name, where the players have to try to control the world (scary!), and made a great effort to explain the technical drawing problem that he had drawn in order to help revise for an exam the following day (of which I understood very little, not due to a lack of communication skills on his part, but on a lack of knowledge of maths on mine!). We discussed the subject of technical drawing and a project-based subject they have at school, and later on we talked about drug use. We ended up having a 45 minute conversation in which all three students and myself contributed interesting points. It was a nice way to have everyone talk in a relaxed situation, with nobody feeling put on the spot.

(By the way, the sentence about moles digging holes was written by a colleague of mine! It did spark off some discussion as to what he had meant though, and one of the students ended up going to ask him what it was about.)

I wanted to use the activity in a similar way with my FCE teens towards the end of the lesson, but we didn't really have enough time to talk about many of the things they had written. In any case, the activity turned out to be more of a vocabulary recycling exercise, as the girls wrote down all the new words they had come across in that lesson, and previous classes. Here is a diagram of their babbling blackboard:

The last class of the evening is a new adult group who want to prepare for the PET exam. However, their level is generally a high elementary, with a couple of exceptions. Many of them haven't studied English since they finished school, and find it difficult to express themselves. We are currently looking at lots of vocabulary, in the hope that this will reach those areas of the brain in which they stored the language from their schooldays! In any case, right at the start of last night's lesson I gave each student a piece of chalk and asked them to write anything they wanted on the board. This is what they wrote:

Plenty of error correction to work on there! I read out each sentence and asked the class if they thought it was grammatically correct. If not, what should we change? They recognised all the errors apart from one, and were able to correct them. I then started asking questions about each sentence to generate a bit of a class discussion, although they are very shy still and it ended up being a question and answer session! The only grammar point they did not know was the use of the present continuous for future plans. Without wanting to explain too much, I went on to ask questions about what the students were doing later that night, at the weekend and so on, encouraging the use of "I'm ......ing".

In each case then, and depending on the level, the babbling blackboard was used in a different way. For higher levels as a base for conversation, but with lower levels to focus on grammar or vocabulary.

How would you use this activity?

Trapped Underground! - a creative writing task

2010-10-14T11:16:00.000+02:00

I have a small group of teenage FCE students who like to do a piece of writing for homework once a week. I usually set them an exam type task since they need practice in writing reports, articles, essays and formal letters. However, sometimes I set them something freer - there is nothing that dampens the imagination more than a FCE task to write yet another story that must begin or end the story with the sentence "it was the worst day of my life".

So after reading some fantastic stories they had written with the only instructions "write a story about whatever you want with no maximum word limit", I decided to give them another creative piece to do.

The piece they are going to write this weekend is this:

Imagine you are one of the Chilean miners trapped underground. Write a diary entry explaining your feelings, hopes and fears.

First we discussed the situation - what the students knew (very little since they don't seem to read newspapers or watch the news very often) and I explained basically what had happened and what was ocurring at the moment (the rescue operation). We then brainstormed vocabulary that we might need to talk about the topic. This involved words to talk about mining, escape and rescue, and started a discussion on how one might feel when trapped 700m below the surface.

I hinted that the students might like to look on the internet to find out what the freed miners have said about their experince to help them.

I am really looking forward to reading their accounts of being in the mine. I will post the best pieces here next week.

Queuing in the Supermarket!

2010-10-13T13:00:00.000+02:00

Which queue do you choose when you only have a few items in your basket? The "Ten items or fewer" or the standard checkout? In the former there are at least eight people each with their basket of nine or ten items, each of whom has to put all their shopping onto the conveyor belt, pay (probably by card) and put it all away. In the latter there are three customers with their trolleys brimming with goods. Which queue is the quickest? What a dilemma!

This is a blog about teaching and it may be useful to explain that yesterday, whilst deciding which queue to join, I realised that I could make an analogy between this situation and a learning situation. You are probably wondering what on earth I am going on about and I may seem a bit mad (especially since I was thinking about ELT in the supermarket!). Well, here goes:

The two queues in question represent two different types of language course. The "ten items or fewer" is the typical intensive course where learners spend time every day in the classroom. The "normal" queue is the traditional 3 hour per week course imparted in most private language institutions in Europe.

The former means that learners have more exposure to the language in a shorter amount of time. They are focused, motivated and can easily see their progression. The latter does not have the advantages of the short intensive course, but it has something else that I think is important: time to reflect and internalise the language.
As I often tell my teenage students, last minute studying is not the best way to go about your exams. Information studied over a short period of time is quickly forgotten. Could the same be true of intensive learning? Will a student who has spent two months having English lessons for fifteen hours a week have learnt more than one who has had three hours a week for nine months? Or will this student have forgotten what they have learnt within a few months? I have not read any research on this (of which I am sure there is plenty) but it is something that I would like to hear your views on.

So which queue would you choose?

To cheat or not to cheat?

2010-10-04T14:28:00.000+02:00

Photo borrowed from nihilantropia.blogspot.com

Last week my tween students were asking me if they would have to do exams. Now our school does not enforce any kind of formal assessment. The students (under 18) get a report card every term with a mark for each area of learning and behaviour. For this reason, with some classes teachers may set a progress test once per term, which helps with grading, especially with grammar.I am not a great fan of testing, personally, and if I do set a test I take the marks into account when writing reports, but don't use them if they are very different from how the student performs in class.

Anyway, when they asked me about exams, I decided to say yes, we would have tests from time to time, to see how everyone was improving their English. I then heard some of the kids talking about cheating, sneaking in notes (which in Spanish are called chuletas - yes, chops as in pork chops!), to which I responded loudly that in these tests they would be able to bring in 'chuletas'. There was a lot of mumbled discussion then of whether I was telling the truth or not, so I explained that in their tests they would be able to take in notes, however the test would be slightly more difficult than usual and they would not be allowed to speak. I read this somewhere in the blogosphere recently, sorry can't remember where and I can't find it now!

Anyway, to whoever it was who came up with the idea of allowing students to look at their notes in exams, thank you!

The reason for allowing students to "cheat" is that if they are allowed to take in notes, but not their books, they will need to prepare these notes beforehand. This means that they will be revising for the test without even realising it. They will be revisiting new vocabulary and structures that they have come across earlier in the term, without having the feeling that they are studying for a test. They will also be more relaxed before and during the test, hopefully with better results!

What do you think of this idea?

Pimp My Ride: an activity to practise comparatives and superlatives

2010-09-30T13:03:00.000+02:00

I actually got the original Pimp My Ride lesson idea from a colleague named Will Hebbron during summer school many moons ago. In this lesson the students were given a basic black and white picture of a car which they then had to "pimp" or "tunear" as it is known in Spain. They had to change the entire look of the car by adding spoilers, wings, tinting windows, adding a cool design to the paintwork and so on. They also had to list the characteristics of their car including any special features it may have had. This was done as a project type lesson, the main aim being communication in L1 and collaboration in groups.

This afternoon my class of thirteen-year-olds are going to be revising comparative and superlative adjective forms. After the usual course book exercises, I wanted to do something a bit more fun with them. What could we do to practise comparatives and superlatives in a way that they would enjoy? Well after actually seeing an episode of the real "Pimp My Ride" tv show on MTV last night, I remembered the activity in question. However, we don't have time to waste colouring in large pictures of cars, so I decided to slightly alter the activity and have them design their own car, in pairs. In each pair, one will be responsible for the design of the car and the other will work on the characteristics. Here are screenshots of the worksheets I have just created:

Fairly self explanatory I think. They have a sample advert to look at first, and I will make sure they understand horse power and engine size (not that I really understand it myself!).

When everyone has finished, which may have to be in the following lesson, we will stick all the worksheets on the wall around the classroom. The students will look at all the pictures and information and decide:
Which car is the fastest?
Which car is the most expensive?
Which car is the biggest?
Which car is the most beautiful?
Which car is the most fashionable?
Which car is ther most sporty?
and so on.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

2010-09-28T16:02:00.000+02:00

I just had a brainwave as I was getting ready for work! I was wondering how I was going to get my group of young teenagers to sit with people other than their friends. Although the boys are starting to have an interest in girls, they still aren't very happy about sitting next to and working with them, but if I want them to work well and not waste time I am going to have to mix them up. I don't want to create a formal seating plan, and in any case, I would rather they changed places every lesson and had the chance to work with everybody.

The idea I have just come up with probably isn't a new one, in fact I've tried similar things with children in the past, but it combines moving students around and vocabulary revision (i.e. killing two birds with one stone!).
This is how it works:

Before the lesson, choose a topic that the students have been studying recently and make a list of words from that lexical set, making sure there is one for each student in the class. You will need two copies of each word. Then, assign each word to a chair. You could write or print out the word in large letters and stick it onto the back of the chair, or you could find a picture illustrating the word and stick that on or above the chair. Then, fold up the second set of words (these should be on small pieces of paper) and put them in a hat or box.
As each student comes into the classroom, they must take a piece of paper from the hat and find their chair. This will be their place for the whole lesson. If they are to work in pairs or groups, they will be with the person or people next to them.

You can do this every day. It will help the learners get used to changing place and working with different people and it is useful revision of vocabulary. If you don't want to revise that many words every lesson, why not use pictures of famous people like Myley Cyrus (Hannah Montana) or Cristiano Ronaldo?

Try it!

Teaching T(w)eens Part 3 - Social Networking

2010-09-28T14:50:00.000+02:00

In the first part of this mini series of posts I explained an idea I had for the first lesson of a group of thirteen year old students: Part 1

This involved asking the learners to think about their interests and likes, what type of activities they would like to do in class and what they need to work on. They came up with lots of typical ideas such as listening to songs, watching videos, sports and so on, but I was surprised to see that a few of them were interested in history and one even mentioned politics! Not that I plan on discuccing politics with a group of 13 year olds - I would have no idea on how to go about that! However, their thoughts have given me something to consider while planning their lessons. We are using a course book, but I would like to supplement that with tasks and activities that really interest the learners. Something else I am going to try with them is peer teaching (see this post on the topic). This afternoon we will be looking at the overview to the next module of study, which lists all the activities they will do for the four main skills. I am going to ask them to tick the ones they like and to choose their favourite. Then I will form small groups of students with the same answer and tell them that they are going to be the teachers for that particular lesson, giving them time in future lessons to prepare adequately.

But this post isn't about learner participation or autonomy, it is about social networking. Now, I have had a Facebook account for around five years, which I use personally rather than professionally. I use Twitter to keep up with ELT news. However, I have never used either of these with my students (yet). To be honest, I would not share my personal Facebook with my students as it would be sharing too much of my personal and past life, although I may consider opening a new account for this purpose in the future. Anyway, the majority of my students don't actually use Facebook, but a Spanish social networking site calle Tuenti.

I have just opened a Tuenti account ofr the purpose of communicating outside the classroom with my students. Last year I tried to set up an Email in English scheme with a teenage FCE class. Most of them opened a Gmail account as specified, in order to be able to use the online chat, however none of them EVER replied to the emails I sent, I only chatted with one student ONCE who is the same student that sent me her homework via email ONCE. The problem? Teenagers don't seem to use email! And why should they? The only people they want to keep in touch with are their friends, all of whom are on Tuenti, which is a much more interesting place than boring email. You can read people's status, see their photos, send them short messages and so on.

So, after giving up last year on the whole email business, I have decided to use Tuenti. If I can manage to get them all to add me as a friend (I wonder if THEIR personal lives aren't too secret to share with their thirty-something English teacher), then hopefully I will be able to engage them in English communication outside of class time. I have set up a Page called Exam English for the FCE and CAE classes where we will all be able to share links to videos, photos, songs and websites. We will be able to write on each other's Wall (or whatever it is called in Tuenti) and basically socialize in English. This is what I'm hoping for anyway!

I am also considering trying this out with my group of tweens. Supposedly, in order to use Tuenti you must be 14 years of age, but I'm sure some of the kids will have got around this minor detail. This afternoon I will bring up the topic and see how many are interested in using social networks. If they do use Tuenti, I will set up another page for them. If not, I wonder if they would be interested in a blog?

Do you have experience using social networks or blogs with young teenagers?

First Lessons: Teaching T(w)eens Part 2 - What they came up with

2010-09-20T12:54:00.001+02:00

In my last post I spoke about an activity to use with a new group of young teenagers, where they are given the opportunity to tell me what they are interested in. Here are some of the results, in no particular order:

Likes and Interests

Sports          Computer games          Shopping          Reading          Watching TV          Talking to friends

Drawing        Listening to music         Girls                Chatting on MSN        Football

Basketball      Justin Bieber               Technology       Art                   History

Preferred Class Activities

Playing Combiletter (a word game)
Listening to songs
Talking to my friends (one can imagine that this would be in Spanish)
Watching a film/video
Talking about interesting things (whatever they are!)
Speaking to girls (Yes, a new obsession has appeared over the summer for one boy!)

Topics to study in class

Art
Famous People
World news
Technology
Science
History
Conversations

Problems

Grammar
Pronunciation
Writing

The Doodle Space didn't give too much away, but I did discover that we have a very talented artist in the class! I also got the impression that quite a few of the kids like drawing Manga style characters. Being allowed to draw while they worked seemed to give them the impression that the activity was more fun. I monitored closely to make sure they were all actually working and not just doodling, helping out with ideas where necessary.

Hopefully I will be able to draw on this information to provide more motivating activities to use to supplement our course book.

First Lessons: Teaching T(w)eens Part One

2010-09-16T12:12:00.004+02:00

I only have one new group this year as I really wanted to continue teaching last year's classes. This new group has been learning English at the school for around four years and I'm guessing they are somewhere around the Pre-Intermediate level. They are about thirteen years old, which can be a difficult age group to deal with, especially if the first day doesn't get off to a good start.

I have titled this post First Lessons: Teaching T(w)eens because although these learners are actually teenagers in their own right, many of them still have the maturity of an eleven year old. I don't really know the kids in question, having never taught them previously, but I get the impression that they are more "tween" than "teen". They don't seem to be at all interested in the opposite sex yet, which is probably a good thing, even though this usually makes it difficult to pair up girls and boys.

So after this bit of background about the students (although after today I may have to rewrite this post) I was thinking of what to do in the first lesson.

I thought of doing the typical "rules" lesson, so that everyone is aware of what is expected and permitted of them, but maybe they are a bit old to enjoy thinking up rules, after all, teenagers are there to bend or break them. I don't want to play games with them, except maybe as a bit of vocabulary revision from last year, as I want to start off the term in the way I want to continue - and that will not be playing too many games! I don't want to get right back into where they left off in their course book either - it is the first day (and their first proper day back at school).

So after a bit of umming and ahhing, this is what I've decided to do:

I'm going to give each learner a sheet of paper and a pen and I'm going to tell them to write down anything that they would like to do throughout the course. I will give them the following titles to start them off on the right track:

Things I like doing.
Activities, people and places I'm interested in.
Things I enjoy doing in class.
Topics I would like to study in class.
Problems I have with English.
Doodle space.

The students will divide the piece of paper into six sections, each with one of the titles above. They will then have around ten minutes to write something in each section. After that, they will talk together in groups and share ideas. This will let them write down ideas that they hadn't originally thought of themselves but that they would like to include. I will take in the papers at the end and make a list on the board, giving the class an idea of some of the topics and activities we may be doing alongside the course book.

What about the doodle space? you may ask. Let me ask you a question. How many times have you set a free-ish task such as this one only to see half the class chewing on their pencils with a blank piece of paper on their desks? My point is made! It can be difficult to get started, and the doodle space is there to give the students some thinking time, allowing them to write or draw anything that comes into their head. This may be an idea that they can then put into one of the other sections, or it may just help them to focus on the task.

The doodle space is actually a double-edged sword, since it also has another function - doodles can show what really interests someone. The learners may have likes and interests that they don't want to write down for others to see, or things that they don't even realise they like! Tweens are very conscious of what is accepted by their peers - if they write down "Hannah Montana" and the rest of the class thinks she is too babyish, they will be mortified. However, if in the doodling section they include the lyrics to one of Hannah's songs, no-one will even notice. They may also write "I hate Hannah Montana" in which case I know never to bring up the topic in class! (By the way, I have nothing personal against HM, I even had her calendar up last year in the classroom!). It also gives me the chance to see who the class artists are, and who prefers writing.

The other sections are, I think, quite self-explanatory. Having students think about both what they like and what they like to do in class gives me a wider view of their personalities. Getting them to think about the parts of English they have difficulties with gives me an idea of what they need to work on. Asking them what they would like to do is actually allowing them to negotiate a small part of the syllabus. I will substitute some of the exercises from their course book with the activities they have chosen.

Finally, I will have a piece of writing from them on the first day (even if it is only notes) which can serve as a diagnostic tool, allowing me to see what their writing skills, their vocabulary and possibly grammar are like.

See the results here.

Motivating teenage exam classes: an autonomous approach

2010-09-14T14:48:00.000+02:00

A few months ago I wrote an article about learner autonomy, which, for those of you who subscribe to MET magazine, appears in the July issue. One of the practical ideas I spoke about for encouraging learner autonomy is a take on "peer teaching".
Peer teaching means that the students are the teachers for a period of time. This could be ten minutes at the beginning or end of a lesson up to a whole lesson. The idea is that the learners choose the lesson focus, possibly from a list that you give them, and find a way to present and practise this content.

With teens, who may be going through a difficult period of self consciousness, this type of approach has to be considered carefully. It really depends on the learners themselves: How shy or outgoing are they? What kind of relationship do they have with one another? Are there any particularly reserved members of the class?

As the typical answers to these questions would generally make it difficult for students to get up in front of the class and present a lesson or activity, the best way of going about peer teaching with this age group is to put students into groups. Ideally the groups should have a healthy mix of different types of learners such as boys and girls, stronger and weaker students, shy and more outgoing people, students with different interests and learning styles. Having variety in a group helps the dynamics and creativity of the results.

I am going to present the following idea to my group of FCE teenagers tomorrow in their first lesson of the new school year.

Each group of students is going to be responsible for one lesson per term.
Each group will choose a different subject as the basis for their lesson. It could be based on a grammar point, a vocabulary topic, or a specific exam skill (e.g. Use of English Part 2).
Each group will spend some time in class to prepare their lesson.
Each member of the group will have a role to fulfil and an area to work on.
Each group will receive a valuation for how they have worked both as a group and individually, as well as a mark from the other learners.

The idea is that including the students in the design process of their course will highly motivate them. They will feel great when there classmates have understood something they didn't before thanks to their presentation or explanation. They will become more involved in decision making and take responsibility for their own and their classmates' learning. They will also improve cognitive skills such as evaluating, decision making, explaining, planning and summarizing.

Would anybody like to try this out as a parallel experience with me and discuss how they get on?

Back to School: 5 things to do before the first day

2010-09-01T23:39:00.000+02:00

It's that time of year again - the start of a new school year. You're feeling refreshed after the summer break and are raring to go, brimming with enthusiasm and you just can't wait to get back into the classroom. Well, maybe I am exaggerating slightly, but most teachers who enjoy their jobs are looking forward to starting a new year. However, this enthusiasm can wane over the first few weeks, especially if your new timetable isn't what you had hoped or if that class that last year's teacher raved on about doesn't live up to your expectations.

There are, nontheless, some things you can do to get off to a good start, to try to get the most out of your students so that both you and the class enjoy their lessons and which will help keep everyone motivated and keen.

1) Prepare the classroom.
Spending an hour or two getting the classroom looking decent before the first day is more important than it may seem. For new students, one of the first thing they will notice is the classroom. Make sure that it at least looks clean and tidy, even if the cleaner hasn't been in yet. Set out the tables and chairs in a way that looks inviting and relaxed. Make sure the windows are open and are letting in enough natural light (for daytime lessons). Hide any paintwork defects or stains on the walls with posters or students' work from the previous year. Decorate the walls in whatever way you prefer - with motivational posters, grammar posters, paintings, student displays. I find student displays to be a real motivator with new students as they often admire the work and show willingness to do something similar.

2) Have all books, CDs and materials ready.
This may sound like an obvious one but very often on the first day you forget something and have to go out to get it, often meaning that the lesson will start slightly late. Not a good first impression! And if you work with young learners it is all the more important - you need to be there, setting an example of punctuality and organisation. If you are using photocopies, make sure you have extra copies. It is very common in private language schools to have students enrolling 5 minutes before the first lesson. Rather than saying that you have to pop out to get a copy because you weren't expecting two extra students, just make two or three extra copies beforehand- don't worry about wasting paper because you can always reuse them as scrap paper!

3) Get the temperature right.
Maybe something for the maintenance man, but making sure the classroom is at a suitable temperature before the students arrive is essential. If you live in a country where the temperature is still 35º C in September, putting the air-conditioning on ten minutes before the lesson is due to start is a good idea. The same goes for heating in colder climates. A suitable room temperature is absolutely essential for high concentration. Students should not feel hot nor cold, as any feeling of discomfort will distract them.

4) Have water available.
This may seem like a luxury, but in a hot country it is important to drink plenty of fluids. If there is no drinks machine in your school, ask your boss if the budget could stretch to a couple of bottles of water per day. If not, bring in water and plastic cups yourself, or ask parents to send their children with individual bottles. Dehydration can drastically lower concentration and sense of well-being. Imagine being really thirsty. Now imagine you are in a classroom. Would you really be able to concentrate on a presentation of the present perfect? Or would you be thinking "I'm really thirsty and if I don't have a drink in one minute I'm going to die!" Point taken?

5) Have everything planned.
Ok, so this is no surprise either. However, many of us don't actually plan much for the first day because we haven't met the students. Of course it is important to adapt a course to the needs of the students, but you should have an idea of what you are going to teach them throughout the year. And even if you haven't yet chosen a course book, have the first lesson properly planned. Explain to the students that you are going to
choose a book specifically for their needs. Don't let them go through the lesson thinking that they haven't got a book, they don't know what the course objectives are and that the teacher doesn't know what he or she is doing. They won't turn up for the second lesson. Even if you prefer the dogme approach, at least explain this to your students. In my experience with Spanish learners at least, students like to have some kind of structure and want to know what they will be doing. They also like to look over things again at home, so if you can give them an outline of the course objectives as early as possible, they will be happy. Like I mentioned before, the first impression counts, and a teacher turning up with no materials on the first day asking the students a few questions and setting up a load of "get to know you" activities does not cause a brilliant one.

I hope these points are useful - I'm actually really just giving myself a reminder of what to do next week but I thought I would share them. If you have any other ideas on what to do before the first day, don't hesitate to post them in the comments section.

Have a great start to the new school year, fellow teachers!

Your Virtual English Friend

2010-07-14T18:36:00.001+02:00

Having just watched a short video of the Microsoft's presentation of their "virtual human", I started thinking how this technology could change language learning.

Milo is a virtual boy. You see him on your TV screen. He will do as you command, but he's not just a character in a computer game. Milo actually responds to your oral commands, answers your questions and interacts with objects that you give him. In the video the girl passes Milo a drawing she has just done on a piece of paper and he take sthe paper from her and responds. Now, doesn't that seem incredible? We can't pass objects through the TV screen! Of course, the paper itself doesn't leave the girl's hand, but an exact replica of the piece of paper is scanned and it's data sent to Milo. The player and Milo interact and this interaction is so much more realistic than in previous video games because facial expressions and body langauge are so successfully portrayed. When the girl asks Milo about his homework, he acquires a sheepish expression. I have no idea how this technology works, and I'm sure that when it is released as a game it will not be anywhere near as effective or realistic as in this demonstration (just like most video game adverts and demos) but even if it does half of what we expect, it can be exploited in many different areas, not just entertainment.

Imagine you have your own English friend with whom you can converse, play games and explore. For a learner of English this is a brilliant opportunity to practise the language. Learners who live in a country where English is not spoken by most people can have great difficulties in practising the language outside of class. With somebody like Milo in their XBox, they can have a fairly realistic experience of interacting with a real English boy. This will surely interest children and teenagers, but I think a similar product could be developed for adults too. Imagine a "game" where you have to negotiate with a board of businessmen who react and respond to everything you say. To be honest, the possiblities are endless.

Let's just hope that one day soon this technology is released into the market, and at a reasonable price. Then we will all be able to have our own mini English friend!

The article from BBC News here

Wiki Wiki (not Waka Waka)

2010-07-14T13:43:00.000+02:00

I have just created my very first class wiki! The wiki is one of the free educational wikis wikispaces are giving away at the moment.

I am currently designing a programme for one of my young learners' groups for next year, for which I have decided against having a course book. The programme is based tasks and activities related to different areas of the primary curriculum. Since the children will have no book to take home and show their parents, I decided to create a wiki which the parents will be able to access and see some of the work their children are doing in class, as well as helping them practise what they have learnt at home. The idea of involving parents in learning is not new one, however it is one that can be difficult to implement, especially when you only teach the children for two hours a week. Parents show much more interest in mainstream education and often they treat their after school English lessons as a bit of a hobby or babysitting service. For this reason I will send out a letter to all parents, explaining what a wiki is and how it will be used, and asking them to participate. Hopefully, in this way we will see a bit more interest in what the children are doing, on the part of their parents.

The wiki in question will have a page per topic; meaning that approximately every month a new page will be set up. On that page I plan to upload some of the children's work including drawings, photos and videos for all the parents to see. The wiki will be private and only those with a password will be able to access it. Parents with passwords will be able to log on and help their child answer questions and complete tasks that I leave on the page. Parents will also be able to comment on what we have been doing.

I really hope that this way parents will be encouraged to participate actively in their child's learning, whether it is just showing an interest, or actually doing extra practice with their child.

Has anybody else set up a wiki for young children? I would love to hear about how it went and any suggestions you may have.

Wordle of the first unit for next year's 6 year olds

2010-07-06T18:49:00.001+02:00

I am currently designing a programme for First Year Primary learners at my school.
Here is a wordle of the first unit syllabus.

PLN quiz - a fun way to encourage self study

2010-07-04T16:24:00.000+02:00

What you can learn from my PLN #4 (June 28) » online exam

Barbara has a great initiative to encourage people to read blog posts they may have missed in her PLN quiz.
http://www.teachingvillage.org/ I have just read five fantastic posts that I hadn't discovered or got round to reading the first time around. I would recommend anyone to take part in these quizzes, not for the chocolatey prize, but to read some great posts you may not have come across. Wanting to do well in the quiz just makes you read the posts even more carefully and think about what they are saying - this must be good! It could actually be a nice way of encouraging students to revise - instead of giving them a formal test, why not make a quiz out of it with a nice certificate for the students who get 100% - if like Barbara you give them unlimited chances to get a perfect score, you are giving them more opportunities to revise what they have been studying.

Thanks Barbara, for starting this initiative!

Fluffy Friends

2010-07-03T11:32:00.000+02:00

Lenny the Lizard, Kitty the Cat and Robbie the Rabbit are my faithful furry friends. Lenny has been around the longest, Kitty was a favourite at the nursery school I teach at, and this past year we have adopted Robbie as our classroom pet.

Now unlike Leahn at Early EFL I am no animal lover. I would rather avoid most animals (except perhaps cats, but even then it depends on the cat!) so the pets I am referring to are of course, puppets. I am going to talk about how I have used these puppets over the years and also suggest some newer ideas I have for exploiting them in class.

This is Lenny. I actually thought he was a crocodile when I found him, but the children said he was a lizard and gave him his name. He was the first puppet I took to the nursery school when I started teaching 3-5 year olds there a couple of hours a week. Lenny is a fun puppet to use, as children find lizards and other reptiles quite interesting. He's very playful and loves pretending to bite small hands!

This is Kitty. She is a well-loved member of the English class. She came to the nursery school for four or five years before she got too big and decided to go to school with the older children. I named her after the "Hello Kitty" craze, because I thought it would be an easy name for the children to remember and it is easy to pronounce. The children love to give Kitty a hug and a kiss, although some cheeky monsters sometimes pull her tail! Kitty has a surprising past, which I tell the children in our Hallowe'en lesson. Kitty used to belong to a witch! I never met the witch so I ask the children if they think she was a good or wicked witch, usually with mixed responses!

Finally, we have Robbie. Robbie has been accompanying me to the nursery this year. He is actually from Robby Rabbit course by Macmillan and I decided to keep his name. Robbie's ears are a great source of enjoyment for the children, as they get bent in my bag and every day he looks a bit different! Robbie is very soft and the children love touching him. I made up a song that we sing to Robbie every day. It goes like this: (tune similar to Twinkle Twinkle)

Hello Robbie, how are you?

Fine, thanks. How about you?

Let's speak English today

Hello Robbie, how are you?

Fine, thanks. How about you?

(Choral), FINE THANKS!

The puppets allow me to use English in a natural way, that doesn't intimidate the children. The puppets don't actually speak themselves, but I talk to the puppets and formulate the questions the children want to ask. Depending on the topic we are covering, I may ask the puppet about his/her favourite food or colour. When we are learning the names of clothes, the children tell me what the puppet should wear and we dress him/her in paper clothes. We have a "Good morning" and "Goodbye" routine where we greet/say goodbye to our puppet. On the odd occasion when I forget to bring him the children always ask about him, so I tell them that he slept in or went away on a short trip.

For young children puppets can be a way of connecting to English and it helps them understand that there are people who do not speak their own language and to communicate with these people they need to do so in English (or whatever language you are teaching). Young children don't really know what a country is and it is hard to explain, they often think that England must be a few kilometres away, which is the furthest they have ever been. Having a puppet that comes from another country (or planet!) and speaks another language can help with this.

However, I have not only used puppets with very young learners. Sometimes I get one out with older children, which they actually quite enjoy, as long as you take care to make sure that the activity is not seen as too babyish. For children with more English, you can do the following activities:

Introduce the puppet as an alien from another planet about whom they must find out as much information as possible by asking questions. (Works great with the puppet from OUP's Galaxy course)
Introduce the puppet as the main character from a story (you can make up your own story or adapt one that exists) that the children will later act out using the puppet.
Show the class the puppet and ask them to write about it, choosing a name, age, sex, nationality, hobbies, likes/dislikes etc.
Students make up dialogues in pairs which they then perform using the puppets.
Ask each student to create a profile for the puppet. They can take a photo of the puppet, dressing it up with props as they require, and add it to the profile. This could be done on computers if they are available.
Again, if the internet is available, use an audio recording program for the children to talk about the character they have invented for the puppet. You could use Fotobabble or Voicethread to do this. All you have to do is upload a photo of the puppet and the students record themselves talking about it.
Games like pass the puppet (like pass the parcel) where you play music and the puppet is passed around until the music stops, when the student holding the puppet has to say a sentence about it e.g. "He's black and white", or "He eats carrots". This can be a fun way of revising vocabulary.
For classroom management issues, make one child resposible each day for the puppet. The child is also responsible for other duties such as handing out books and pencils. You can allow the child to take the puppet home (for younger children), and this can lead on to a discussion of how to look after a pet.

There is another kind of puppet that I also like using to create stories. These are finger puppets. I have a set of around ten, where each puppet is a different character. We have a royal family, a wizard, a dragon, an owl, a jester and a baddie (not sure exactly what he is so I call him the baddie!). These are great for dramatising stories. You can make up a story or get the children to make up and write (if they are older) their own stories which they they recreate with the puppets. Finger puppets are also brilliant for short dialogues, even with beginners.

I'm sure there are hundreds of other possiblities for using puppets in the classroom, and these are just a few. If you have any good ideas, post them in the comments section.

Curriculum Design: Part 3

2010-06-21T13:42:00.001+02:00

Needs Analysis

One of the first things I need to do at the beginning of the planning stage of the course is to conduct a needs analysis. This should be a comprehensive analysis of what the students need, want and lack. It should include information about present knowledge and any gaps in this, general and specific language students will need in the future, skills, types of activity, topics, as well as taking into comsideration the environmental factors outlined in Part 2. The analysis should be partly done by and with the students, but should also take into account research and past experience of similar groups and courses.

The following are some of the aspects I will need to consider:

Needs:

What will learners need to learn in order to be able to reach the goals of the course?
What language will students need in order to communicate at a higher level than present?
Which skill areas do students need to work on?
What types of activity or task would best help students in these areas?
Is fluency work more important than accuracy or vice versa?

Lacks:

What is the students' proficiency in each skill?
What language needs to be revised in order to fill in gaps in their knowledge?
What do students think they need to work on?

Wants:

What would the students like to work on?
What kind of task do students prefer?
How much time would they be prepared to spend on each aspect of the language?
Will they spend time out of class improving their English?
Do students prefer individual, pair, group or whole-class work?

How will I find this information? I will design a questionaire and interview form to use with the students in order to find out as much as possible from their point of view. I will also analyse the work covered this year. I may give students a diagnostic test in order to discover their main weaknesses. When I have all the results, I shall combine them to find the most important areas to include in the course. For example, if an item appears on the "lacks", "needs" and "wants" lists, it is something to spend more time on during the course.

Have I gatecrashed the party?

2010-06-20T13:56:00.000+02:00

Maybe it's just me being silly, but I sometimes get the feeling that I have joined an CPE class when I am only a Pre-Int student in the world of blogging and social networking and that I do not belong here. After all, I am but a simple teacher in a private language school in the South of Spain, doing my job on a day to day basis to earn a living. I have been doing the exact same for the past eight years: preparing lessons based on the course book, spending fairly little time on planning, because I had lots of experiences of spending hours preparing lessons only to be greeted with bored faces asking me to do something else. I felt that it wasn't worth the effort.

However, over the last school year something has changed. Something has changed inside me and it all started when I started to read other blogs and use Twitter. Enthusiasm is infectious, just like a laugh or yawn can be and every day I read comments from professionals that are just oozing in enthusiasm towards their teaching. I have had such zeal relatively few times in my career, but recently I have a new-found passion for my job. Perhaps passion is the wrong word: I do not consider teaching the be all and end all of my life, but I can say that I am much happier about going to work than I used to be. I have plenty of new ideas, thanks to my PLN (a term that I feel uneasy about using, and that I will come to shortly) and I think my students are benefitting from this. I have decided to start giving some in-house teacher development sessions to share what I am learning.

Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that I don't fit in with these professionals that I sometimes communicate with on Twitter. I get the feeling that I am pretending to be a professional and that someone soon will catch me out for being a fraud. As for Personal Learning Networks, I believe this supposed to be a two-way affair. I learn so much from the people whose blogs I read and links I open. But do they learn anything from me? They are teacher trainers, course book writers, directors of studies, whereas I am just a teacher. I can't help thinking that I am taking much more than I am giving back.

I felt even more like a fraud when a well-known magazine agreed to publish an article I wrote. Why would anyone want to read what I have to say? I am not well read on methodology. What I write is really just common sense. I feel slightly embarrassed to see myself on people's educator lists on Twitter - I am not an educator, just a teacher! Now I have always been a quite an insecure person and find it difficult to believe in myself, probably the opposite to a lot of Tweeters and bloggers out there, and so it really does make a difference to me when I get comments on my blog, or people retweet my tweets. I guess I just need a bit of encouragement occasionally!

Does anyone else get these feelings from time to time? Is it normal? How do you deal with it? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Curriculum Design: Part 2

2010-06-18T16:56:00.000+02:00

One of the first things to think about when designing a course is the kinds of situational or environmental constraints that may exist. These constraints are factors that have the potential to impede the success of the course, and must be taken into account during the planning stage. They could be related to the students, the teacher, the resources available and the general situation.

In my case, the biggest constraints are time, resources, students' needs and students' level of proficiency. Let's look at these a little more closely.

Time
One of the most common problems that teachers find it hard to accept is that of time. Most teachers in the private sector only see their students for around three hours per week. In the context of adult learners, the majority of these will also have very little time to spend on language study or practice outside the classroom. Adults have lots of commitments such as work or studies and families as well as all the basic daily activities they have to make time for. This means that trying to get them to do anything in their free time is very difficult, and at best they will find half an hour once or twice a week. The challenge for us is to make sure they progress quickly in order to maintain high motivation, but it is very difficult to do, especially if some of the learners are sporadic attenders. How can we find the time to recycle language enough that the learners really internalise and acquire it without them feeling that they are repeating something they have already learnt. How can we make the students feel that they are making good progress? One possible solution is to do several tasks over several lessons that use the language in question, including warmer and filler games or activities. As for the lack of homework, maybe trying to incorporate the use of technology could be a solution. If we can get students using a social network in English, they can chat to each other, send messages, and share links to English language materials on the web. This will not seem like homework and it is a way of encouraging students to use the language out of the classroom.

Resources
In this particular case the problem is finding interesting and thought-provoking materials that challenge and motivate the learners. This group of adults enjoy talking about things they have been doing and about current affairs, especially local politics! However, we can't talk about politics all the time, and this means that the majority of these discussions are based around something they have read or heard in their own language, or a newspaper article I have brought in. The traditional topics that are found in course books are not suitable for this class, as many of them have been learning English for several years, and are tired of the typical course book material. Their syllabus should be based around topics that are up to date and stimulating. This means that choosing texts and listening tasks before the course starts may be detrimental, as they will be out of date by the time they are used. I will need to design a flexible syllabus whose topics can change according to what goes on in the world. However, I can choose the topics beforehand - in most years there will be a natural disaster, a general election in some part of the world, an important sports event, a change in government policy and so on. It will be the choice of lesson material that will have to wait until each specific lesson is planned.

Students' needs and levels
Although the group is small (usually around 6 students), each student has different needs and wants. Some have excellent speaking skills but have big gaps in their grammar, others find reading and writing fairly easy but have problems listening and speaking, some want conversation and others want grammar practice. I need to accommodate all these needs into the syllabus in order to keep everyone happy and motivated. Looking at common wants, the course should be based around improving speaking and listening skills whilst widening students' vocabulary and revising grammar. However, most of the learners do not enjoy doing the typical controlled grammar exercise, and will therefore need a different way in which to practise language.

These are the most important environmental factors that I need to consider for this class. Other factors to consider are lack of lesson planning time for the teacher and whether it is worth spending so much time designing a course that is only suitable for this specific group. Will the course be suitable for other groups? If not, it may not be practical to develop a whole new course but to adapt an existing syllabus or published course book.

Curriculum Design: Part 1

2010-06-18T13:15:00.002+02:00

I have just started reading a book about curriculum design and I thought that writing down what I understand from the book may be a good way of processing and reflecting on what I am learning. I have decided then, to do so here on my blog, so I apologise if my next few posts are really boring and complicated - I'm writing them for myself rather than for my (very small) audience. Just ignore my posts that begin with Curriculum Design!

I am going to be thinking about a specific group of students whom I have been teaching for the past two years, and will possibly continue with next year. These students have not had a book because they wanted conversational type lessons in order to maintain their level of English and increase their comprehension and fluency. I have had lot of help with lesson planning from onestopenglish.com this year! The group are middle-aged students who do not need English for their job, but really see their lessons as a hobby. This is the class I will be analysing for the purposes of the tasks in the book.

Before planning a course, it is important to think about the following subjects, and to ask yourself a few questions:

What are the levels of the learners and how I am I going to deal with variation in proficiency?
How am I going to encourage autonomy through the course?
How am I going to deal with students' lack of time outside of class to study English?

What do students want to achieve during the course? Long term and short term goals.
Which aspects of ELL do students want to work on most?

Which methodologies would best suit this group?
How can I introduce different methodologies into the lessons?

What are the main aims of the course?
How can I choose the goals from students' needs and wants?

Should the syllabus be lexical/functional/grammatical/skills based?
How will I decide the order of language items to be presented?
How often will I recycle language?

How can I effectively assess progress without the use of tests?

Evaluation (during and after the course) - Is the course successful?
Does it meet its aims?
Are students and teachers happy?

I need to consider these aspects in order to design a suitable curriculum for my learners. As I have not found a suitable course book for this group, I am going to design my own course, based on their needs. I am hoping this book will help me do so in a systematic way.

Teacher, can I write on the board?

2010-06-13T13:39:00.001+02:00

This morning I bought a small whiteboard with washable marker from the local chinese bazaar. As I was standing in the queue I was thinking about what I would use it for. Here are some of my ideas, sometimes requiring more than one board, but you can buy them very cheaply and they will last for a long time.

1) Secret Word - I write a word on the board and tell students what category it is e.g. clothes and they take turns at guessing the word. The student that guesses correctly then writes a word.

2) Pictionary - Instead of whispering the word or sentence to the drawer, I write it on the board.

3) Pictionary - Students draw on the whiteboard and play pictionary in small groups (several boards needed).

4) Sentence completion - I write a sentences with a missing word on the main board. Students in teams write on their board the missing word. (Suitable for PET and FCE exam prep)

5) Writing letters - Very Young Learners practise letter formation on small boards.

6) Picture Dictation - In pairs or small groups students draw a picture and describe for their companions to draw.

7) Giving praise - When a student does something very well, I draw a smiley face or a big tick on the board and show it to the individual.

8) Sentence writing - In a chain, students each write a word to form a sentence. If done in two teams, give points for the number of words.

9) Silent Way - Instead of speaking, write everything on the board, encouraging students to respond orally. This includes saying hello, showing your feelings e.g. big smiley face, a question mark if you don't understand.

10) Writing vocabulary - For young learners who find it hard to locate a specific word on the main board, write the word they want to use on the board.

11) Pass the board - Like pass the parcel but with vocabulary. Give a topic e.g animals and play music. Students pass the board around and when the music stops, the person who has the board writes a word.

12) Prompts - Ask students questions and prompt their answers using the board.

13) Instructions - Write an instruction on the board, show it to one student who does that action, then the others say what the instruction was. (Practice for Starters speaking exam)

14) Menu - For a café or restaurant roleplay, write the menu on the board and display.

15) Shopping List - For a shopping roleplay write the shopping list of items students need to buy.

16) Physical Sentences - With several boards, write a word on each that can form a sentence. Then give one to each student who have to stand in a line in to make a correct sentence.

If I think of any more I will add them to the list. I'm sure Alex Case would come up with a hundred! The possibilities are really quite endless. Most of these activties can be done on paper, but just think that this way you will be saving a tree or two! Please feel free to add any suggestions in the comments section.

Getting the Buggers to Speak English!

2010-06-11T11:52:00.002+02:00

I have often though about trying out different teaching approaches in my lessons, and to some extent I have done so, but some approaches such as Task Based Learning do not work as well as I would like. The main reason for this is the difficulty (impossibility?) of getting my learners to use English during the task. This problem usually occurs with Young Learners. I'm not really thinking about children here, as they do not have enough language to be able to discuss things in English, but teenage learners, for example, a PET or FCE group. At these levels, the students should have enough language to be able to talk about problems and do simple tasks without L2 interference. However, even if they start to do the task in English, they will always end up speaking in Spanish.

So, I'm thinking of doing an experiment to try to make them aware of how much Spanish they actually use in class, as I'm sure they don't realise how little English they use when left to their own devices. What I plan to do is:

a) Give them a task based activity to do in small groups and write down the number of utterances I hear in both English and Spanish on a piece of paper (using a simple five-bar gate method) and later transfering this to the blackboard. I think that if I did this directly on the board, they would ask me what I was doing rather than concentrate on the task. So I will have two columns on the page; one labelled English and the other labelled Spanish. Each time I hear a word or sentences in either of the two languages, I will mark it in the right column. This of course would not work with a large class. Seeing this on the board will give them a visual image of the amount of Spanish they use. We could even transfer the numbers into a bar or pie chart.

b) Record a lesson, either audio or video. For this I will need a good quality microphone that the students can't see in order to pick up the speech whilst drowning out the background noise. It is probably not feasible to record the whole lesson, but just a short part of it should be enough. I have actually done this before with a very small class and a tape recorder. I will then play the recording.

c) I also thought it might be nice to make it more fun. I could bring in two large jars or boxes and a big bag of sweets and a bag of chickpeas or dried beans. Everytime I hear an English sentence, a sweet will go into one jar, and every time I hear Spanish, a chickpea will go into the other. At the end, the jar with the most items will be given to the students.

I don't think the last idea is right for the experiment as I don't want to bribe them into speaking English, but to do a realistic experiment in order to show them the real results. My hopes are that the students will become more responsible and try to speak English as much as they can, without having to be reminded constantly.

What do you think of these ideas? Do you think they could work? Do you have any better ideas?

Competition Winner!!!

2010-06-09T11:42:00.000+02:00

This month I have won the lesson share competition on Onestopenglish and I was so happy when I found out that I felt like a little girl again! It is a strange phenomenon, that whatever the competition, you never really expect to win, or at least that's how I view them. I tend to think of all competitions as a prize draw, where thousands of people enter and only one name is drawn out of a hat, therefore making it virtually impossible for me to win. This is why I have refrained from entering any competition for many years. I suppose however that you can compare the idea of competitions to the phrase: It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Is is better to enter a competition and to lose than to not enter? If you don't enter, you can't win (which is what my partner says every week when he buys several lottery tickets!)

Anyway, that first time I won a competition was when I was about 7 years old, and I remember clearly that it was for drawing a picture of dangers in the home and the prize was a book token. Now I have won the second competition in my life (how sad does that sound?) and my lesson plan about the World Cup which practises First Conditional sentences is here

Thank you, Onestop, for choosing my entry as the winner!