Fun at the Fair!

Living in Andalucía, one of the most important weeks of the year (after Holy Week) is approaching: the feria, or fair. In Jerez, where I live, the fair is considered to be far better than the more famous Feria de Abril in Seville and the local ladies spend hundreds on their new frilly flamenco dresses and impossibly high heels, enormous earrings and the like, and the kids are all completely over-excited because they get to go on rollercoasters and dodgems and the ferris wheel.

So the days during the run up to the fair it is impossible to get any work out of the younger students and your typical course book lesson goes out the window. Here are a few activities I do with my youngest learners, to take advantage of their excitement and enthusiasm.

First, I ask them to supply words about the fair. This is usually in L1 since they don't have the vocabulary to do so in English. I write up their suggestions on the board. I then show them some pictures of different fairground attractions (big wheel, carousel, dodgems, roller coaster, ghost train, haunted house) as well as candy floss, horses (in Jerez it is The Horse Fair), girls dressed up in flamenco dresses dancing "sevillanas". I then drill the vocabulary with them, doing different picture activities such as: point and say, what's the missing picture?, run and touch, the "corner" game.

We then walk in a line around the classroom chanting  or singing this little song I made up (to the tune of The Farmer's in the Den):

We're going to the fair

We're going to the fair

 We're going to have lots of fun

 We're going to the fair

I then ask the children what they are going to go on?  "I'm going to go on the big wheel", "I'm going to dance sevillanas" etc.

We then go on to mime the different activities, which they love. We all go on the ghost train together, me at the front and the children all hanging on behind, me going "woooo woooo"; we drive round in dodgems, all bumping into each other; we go on the big wheel, crouching down and standing up tall and looking at all the imaginary tiny people down below; we go into the haunted house, all in darkness, and get frightened by the monsters (me - roaring); we dance sevillanas; we ride horses; and best of all, we go on the rollercoaster, slowly creeping up to the top only to rush down the other side screaming!

After all this excitement, comes a calm down period, where we sit and discuss our favourite parts of the fair. I sometimes get them to draw pictures and label the rides, or tell me the names, if they can not yet read.

With children that have started reading in English, you can make a wordsearch or crossword with some of the vocabulary.

Activities on the topic of Emergencies and Road Safety for Very YLs

New post on my resources page: http://sothisisenglishresources.blogspot.com/2010/04/activities-on-topic-of-emergencies-and.html

Praise

I recently watched an interview with the wonderful Carol Read on the subject of praise. Carol is in my opinion THE authority on young (primary age) learners and so when I saw her name on the interviewees list, I clicked straight on the video link (http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/sessions/2010-04-09/interview-carol-read-spain).

Carol focuses on the use of praise with young learners, explaining about how to use praise in order to give encouragement and to build up children's self esteem as well as to help with classroom management and deal with behavioural problems, without going overboard and using too much praise, making it empty and meaningless. I don't want to go into too much detail, as you can see the video for yourselves.

However, this interview got me thinking about the use of praise with teenagers and adults. When we think about praise, we automatically think of children, since they seem to need a certain amount of praise and they are constantly demanding it, by asking the teacher if their work is OK, if they can have a tick and so on. But what about older students? You will rarely find a sixteen-year-old directly asking for praise, but there may be indirect signs which we as teachers must learn to interpret. For example, a teenager who answers questions when no-one else does may secretly be hoping for a "good" from the teacher. I find my FCE students looking for a "well done" when I give them back their writing tasks, and see their disappointment when they see a "good effort" which they interpret to be a mediocre result.  Most teenagers have many insecurities and lack self-esteem and confidence in  their abilities and therefore maybe need some sort of praise more than any other age group. Nevertheless, we must be very careful not to make the praise too obvious or selective since this can have the opposite effect. Peer pressure may make it uncool to be a model student, so I think private praise could be the solution. On written work, think carefully about the comments you write as using the right words can be an excellent method of encouragment. However, as Carol mentions in her interview, it can be much more effective to praise the different elements of a piece of work such as the planning and ideas, as well as the linguistic aspects. Give praise for good paragraphing, or the use of different vocabulary and structures. Notice the work that has gone into the piece; with practise you will be able to quickly tell when an essay has been rushed and when some thought has gone into it at the planning stage. As for other types of work, if you do not want to openly praise your students, write them little notes at the end of the lesson mentioning anything they did especially well. They will probably want to compare them with their classmates but if everyone gets one, there should be no problem with this.

Now, what about adults? I feel that we neglect adults because we think that they don't need praise, but surely this isn't true. I am convinced, when I think about it, that adults need just as much praise as younger learners, they just don't show it. Think of an elementary group of adults. These learners don't have enough English to express themselves well; they get stuck, they get frustrated when they can't understand or make themselves understood, and all we do is tell them not to worry, we try to encourage and motivate them to keep trying and we may even put words in their mouths for them, but how often do we say "excellent" or "you are doing really well!"? And as we go up through the levels, we give less and less praise. With an advanced class, we already have high expectations (maybe too high) and assume that these learners know how well they are doing and don't need to be told so.

Adults are actually the biggest drop outs of evening classes. We must understand that they have many other commitments like work and families and they could be making sacrifices to come to their English lessons. When these people feel that they are not progressing enough, or that they are simply not good language learners, they drop out. It is then, more important than ever to show learners how they are doing and give them support and praise when necessary.

Topic of the month: Natural Disasters

Most course books at Intermediate or FCE level have a chapter or unit devoted to the topic of natural diasters or extreme weather, and I think it can be much more sensible to study these topics when an event of this kind has recently occurred. Most adults watch the news or read a newspaper, and even many children also see images of what is happening in the world, and to me it seems far more  natural to discuss these things as they take place, rather than when you get to that chapter in the book, as it makes the topic much more interesting and personal. After the recent eruption in Iceland, (and of course Haiti) most learners (of any age) will have seen some images on TV and will want to discuss them. It is far better to look at a topic about which everyone has something to contribute, than the one that appears in your couse book on the next page just because you are following the book from front to back cover.

So this week (in Europe, at least) could be a good time to talk about volcanoes, possibly leading on to other natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.This kind of topic is interesting for all age groups from small children to the elderly, and there are plenty of resources on the internet that you can use. Here are some I have found:

Great for CLIL but suitable for any class are these presentations on how volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis are caused. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/science/2009/09/090930_volcanoes_guide.shtml

Lots of links here for Primary learners: http://www.teachervision.fen.com/natural-disasters/teacher-resources/48771.html

Some wonderful ideas on the British Council site: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/essential-uk/natural-disasters

Nice listening activities by Adrian Tennant on Onestopenglish: http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?catid=100283

If you have access to the internet in your school (for students) you could create a webquest where learners have to find out the answers to a set of questions. If, like for me, such resources are unavailable, you could print out texts about different disasters which you could then hide around the school or classroom making a kind of treasure hunt out of the activity. Each pair or group should get only one question at a time (it is best to stagger the groups by giving them a different question each) to which they have to find the answer, like a reading race. You could even bring in audio so that it is not just practising reading, having some of the answers in a recorded text. You could use the one provided by Adrian Tennant, or download a podcast from a new website. In fact, you could also include puzzles like anagrams of vocabulary or crosswords that they have to complete as part of the quest. All this may take quite a bit of planning, but it should certainly make for a fun and productive lesson.

The topic can be a good one for practising modal verbs with elementary students, having them design posters or leaflets giving advice and recommendations for what to do in an emergency situation like an earthquake or severe flooding.

Please feel free to send in any good ideas that have worked well with your students on this topic, especially with YLs.

Psychiatrists: a good game for practising questions

This is a well known game in Spain, but I had never thought of using it in class until my teenage students asked if they could play it. It is a typical group guessing game where some of the players know the rules but others are unaware and have to guess what is going on.

You will need to have the class sitting in a circle (or semi circle if you lack space). Some of the students must go out of the room while you explain how to play the game. These students are the "psychiatrists". These students must never have played the game before (it is better if they are stronger students). The others are patients. Tell the patients that they have an illness. This is usually that they think they are the person sitting to their right (but if you want to play the game on other occasions, change this every time e.g, the person sitting opposite, to the left, two to the right etc).

Then, invite the psychiatrists back into the room and tell them that they must diagnose their patients by asking questions. The patients must answer as if they were the person to their right, e.g to the question: Are you wearing jeans? If the person to your right is wearing jeans, say yes. Students must be careful not to look at this person as this will give the game away. If the patient does not know the answer to a question, they must shout "psychiatrist!" and everbody changes places. If a question is too revealing, any player can shout "psychiatrist" at which point everbody, again, changes seats.

The game continues until the psychiatrists correctly diagnose the illness.

This game can be played at any level; at higher levels make sure the students ask more complex questions using different tenses, the passive etc.

Play it again, Teacher!

After so many years in Spain, I may have forgotten what it is like to be in the presence of a group of people and not understand a single word of what they are saying. Having my mum over for a few days, I have realised how unpleasant it can be for someone to be in the company of people who speak a different language. That feeling of overwhelming frustration and annoyance and even paranoia you get when everyone seems to be laughing and you have no idea of what's going on. Trying to put myself in my mum's shoes, I got a faint recollection of how I used to feel for the first few months I spent here, with a group of Spanish friends. Despite actually speaking the language quite well even in those days, whenever I found myself sitting at a table with more than two or three other people I suddenly became unable to understand what anyone was talking about. On a one to one basis I was fine, but put me in a group and they could have been speaking Mongolian for all I knew. All this got me thinking about some of my students and their inability to understand listening extracts or videos, even those that are below their productive level.

As teachers, we have usually forgotten about our own experiences of language learning, and blocked out those unpleasant memories of being in a classroom with another 30 students all trying to make out what is being said on a tiny taperecorder placed unstrategically on the teacher's desk at the front of the classroom. Maybe you were lucky and had a language laboratory with individual headphones, but it was rare to do any listening comprehension at all, at least in my French class, and when we did it was a recording of Mrs Rowlands speaking in her lovely Potteries accent.

Teaching methodologies have changed a lot over the past couple of decades and we now force plenty of natural sounding English conversations and interviews down the ears of our students, whether it is still on a cassette player, a CD or if you are "modern" like me (that's what my students say when I get the equipment out) an MP3 player with portable speakers. But however good the equipment and acoustics of the room, unless our students are well prepared for what they are going to listen to, the exercise will be useless. Put yourself in the situation my mum was in last week, sitting on a bar terrace having a drink with me and seven Spaniards, not knowing the language. Even if she did speak Spanish, what would the chances be of her understanding what we were all talking about? She doesn't know any of the people or places mentioned, and has little knowledge of what we do every weekend or what kinds of things we discuss. Now put yourself in the place of your students. They know they are going to listen to a recording, but unless they are given some clues as to what it is going to be about, they are unlikely to understand a thing and the whole activity will be pointless.

So, what can we do to make listening comprehension tasks more productive? Firstly, it is vital to provide some information about the context. How many people will speak? Who are they and what relationship do they have with each other? Where are they? What are they going to talk about? You can do this by explaining the situation, you can provide a photo of the interlocutors (which often appears in the coursebook) or you could get your students to ask you questions which they think will help them with the listening task. Secondly, make sure it is clear what students have to do. What information do they have to listen for? Are there any questions they have to answer? Where are the questions? Which exercise do they have to complete? This may all seem far too obvious, but I can guarantee that all of you have had at some point at least one student trying to complete exercise three (fill in the gaps) when they are supposed to be doing exercise two (comprehension check). They should be allowed plenty of time to read the questions before they listen so that they don't get lost because there is a word they don't understand in the questions. Take the time to explain any confusing words or questions, and if you feel it is necessary, preteach some of the vocabulary that occurs in the recording. All of this preparation should at least make your learners feel more relaxed when they listen.

One of the most important qualities a teacher needs and especially with listening exercises is patience. Listening may be something which comes naturally in your own language, but in a second language a great deal of concentration is required. Don't try to make a challenge out of listening and don't allow your learners to feel that they have failed if they have not been able to understand. You may find that certain learners or even whole classes have a listening ability below their general English level. If this is the case, you will need to adapt the materials (it is easier to adapt the questions rather than the recording) and make sure your students get plenty of practice. Build up the level little by little, start with easy tasks and gradually make them more difficult or complex. Be sympathetic and understanding, and if the pressure is off, your learners will become better listeners.

The Benefits of Exams for Young Learners

Here's the link to an article about exams for young learners I have written as a guest piece on Alex Case's blog:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/tefl/young-learner-exams/

Adapting traditional games for whole-class use

Most students enjoy playing games from time to time, even adults, who after a long day's work need a bit of relaxation. As I mostly teach young learners, I will be focussing on using games with them, but you could use the same principles with more mature students. One of the important things to decide before you play a game is whether the objective is just to play and give students a break, or if you want to practise a specific set of vocabulary or grammar point. With children I usually involve some vocabulary practice, but it can be a good idea to allow older students to play as a break in the lesson or as a reward for working well. There are many traditional board and card games that you may have at home which you can use in class.


Card games
You will need a set of cards with pictures on. There are some nice sets available for children that have pictures of animals that are split into two or three cards. This makes it into a kind of jigsaw puzzle. With a group of young children for example aged 5, deal the cards until everyone has the same number, if there are any left over, keep them for yourself to demonstrate and start off the game. Place one of the cards on the floor an ask the children if they have a card which matches it. If so they place it in the right position. When you have placed all the extra cards, say the name of an animal e.g lion and the children that have the lion come and place their card on the floor. The winner is the child who gets rid of all their cards first. Afterwards, you could play a pelmanism game where all the cards are spread out face down on the floor and the children take it in turns to turn over a card. When they find a match, they form the animal and keep it.

This can be done with almost any set of cards or even dominoes. Games traditionally played in small groups can become whole class activities.

Board games
Games such as Monopoly, Ludo, Scrabble, Snakes and Ladders or Cluedo can all be played with the whole class by dividing the students into teams. I have a large floor board game which is called The game of the goose. It is a traditional board game in Spain. The one I have is based on a national children's TV programme. It has giant counters and a giant dice, making it ideal for the whole class to play. What I usually do is show the children a flashcard every time they throw the dice, and they can only move forward if they say the word correctly. If they are a bit older (7-8) I ask them questions, sometimes based on pictures or objects e.g What is the boy doing? How many pencils are there? etc. You could use this strategy with Snakes and Ladders or Ludo. Monopoly and Cluedo are more complex games and require lots of language, which you will need to prepare students with before playing. You can grade the language provided depending on the level. Scrabble can be played according to the rules, or you could just use the letters. A very popular game in my school is Combiletter, which can also be played with Scrabble letters, where the letters are placed face down in the middle of the table (or floor) and are turned over one by one. When a student sees a word can be formed with those letters, he/she says "Stop!" and forms the word, which the team keeps.

Other children's games such as "Guess Who" can be very useful when teaching parts of the body or "has got". Playing such games makes the lesson much more fun and motivating for the children, although beware of using them too much! Young Learners will get used to playing games and will demand to play every day, something which should not always be allowed. Make sure that your learners do all the work before they play, or just let them play occasionally as a treat. When the games are to practice a certain structure or vocabulary, tell the students this so that they know why they are playing. If you do have the odd student who doesn't like playing games and feels that they are not learning if they are playing, explain the reasons why they are playing and what they are learning/practising with this.

Generally, using games regularly as either a way of learning and practising or as a break from the routine of the course book, can be a postive way in which you can reward your students for their hard work, and get a few brownie points in the process!

Preparing children for Young Learners Exams

Those of you who who work with Young Learners will probably have heard of the Cambridge Young Learner Exams. These exams are for children aged 7 to 13 and are available at three different levels. The benefits of children doing these exams are not so clear to me, as I generally believe that assessment should not be exam-based, but I'm sure the marketing people at Cambridge will have plenty of reasons why your young learners should sit these exams. In any case, they are becoming more and more popular, and you will probably have to help prepare your learners so that they are ready to do the exam.

The original idea of these exams I believe, was to introduce the concept and format of Cambridge exams to younger learners, so that they would be better prepared for KET, PET or FCE at a later stage. The exams were introduced to teachers as being suitable for children from as little as one year's English experience and that no extra preparation was required. If you have looked at these exams, you will see that they include quite an unusual vocabulary list, with some Americanisms (French Fries, eraser), unusual fruits that the children may not have even tasted (kiwi, mango), and some of the grammatical structures are quite challenging for a child who has only been learning the language for a year or two.

In recent years, Cambridge have realised that a general English course for children may not be enough to get them through the exams and have been publishing materials to specifically help with the preparation of them, and they have even brought out a new course specifically for the Young Learners Exams. I am actually using such a course with my seven to nine year olds, and I must admit, it is quite a nice course to use.

I would like to suggest some activities that can help with the preparation for these exams, including vocabulary tasks, grammar practice activities and ideas of how to improve students' reading, listening and speaking skills for the exams.

Firstly, lets look at the different levels. The first is called Starters, and is suitable for children of around seven to nine years with one or two years of English. Quite a lot of vocabulary is required, at least in a passive sense, and the ablility to read English is essential. As for all the exams, there is a reading and writing component, a listening paper and an oral interview. The second level is called Movers and requires a level quite a bit higher than Starters. It corresponds to level A1 in the Common European Framework. Understanding of the past simple tense is necessary, as is that of some modal verbs and comparatives and superlatives. The final level is called Flyers and is equivalent to KET (A2). This is a challenging exam and in my school we don't usually prepare our learners for it, as they are usually about 13 years old when they get to this level and find it too babyish for them. Instead, we start them on a two year PET course.

For this reason, I shall be focussing on activities for Starters and Movers. However, you could probably adapt them to Flyers, if you wish. Any worksheets will be posted on my Resources page (see link above).

Reading and Writing
There are five parts to this exam at Starters (S) level and six at Movers (M). The activities are very easy at the start and progress to become quite challenging in the later parts. In the first part the children have a set of pictures and a list of definitions which they decide are correct or incorrect (S) or names and definitions to match (M).
One activity you can do with your learners to practise this is Pelmanism.

Pelmanism
You can make your own cards with a set of pictures and definitions or see my Resources section for examples or to download. Learners can work in pairs or small groups with a set of cards between them. They spread out the cards face down in two separate areas, one for the pictures and one for the definitions.  Each turn they pick up one picture and one definition. If they match, they keep the cards. If not, they return the cards to their original position. The game continues until all the cards have been used or whenever you think the children are getting bored. The winner is the person with the most cards at the end of the game.

Another part of the Starters exam is based on spelling. Learners should have plenty of practice of ordering jumbled letters (anagrams) of common words e.g classroom objects, food, transport and other words that appear in the thematic vocabulary list (see http://www.cambridgeesol.org/assets/pdf/resources/teacher/yle_hb.pdf) You can do this by writing anagrams on the board for them to copy and rearrange, or give them words cut up into letters which they should place in order. They can also make their own anagrams for other students.

They will also need practice of singular and plural forms of nouns for part 4 (S). In this part candidates are given a short gapped text but they are given the missing words. They have to decide which word fits in each gap, but should be aware of the artcile a/an before singluar nouns and no article before plural or uncountable nouns. They should have practice in completing simple sentences with missing words. You can make cards or worksheets to practise this. There are examples on my Resources page.

Generally, you can practise most parts of the exam as a whole class activity if you have access to large pictures, big books or flip charts where you can ask all types of questions, either orally or written, about the pictures.

Listening
Tasks in the Starters and Movers Listening exams are mostly based on matching, notetaking and carrying out instructions. Learners will need to be able to recognise the names of the letters of the alphabet, numbers, colours and days of the week (M).

Here are a couple of activities which practise giving and carrying out instructions, prepositions of place. These are good practise for parts 1 and 4 of Starters, and parts 1 and 5 of Movers.

Draw It!
Give students a blank piece of paper and show them how to place it in a landscape postion by drawing a rectangle on the board. Draw a few basic objects e.g a tree, a house, a car (S) or stick people doing various activities such as carrying a book, climbing a tree, eating a sandwich etc (M). Students copy these pictures. Then give instructions such as the following:

Draw a ball next to the tree. Colour it orange. Can you see the house? Draw a cloud behind the house. Now draw a cat in front of the house and colour it black.

or

Can you see the girl eating a sandwich? Her name is Sally. And look at Peter, he's climbing a tree. John is the boy who is carrying a book and wearing a blue t-shirt. Colour his t-shirt.

Now, on another piece of paper the children do their own drawings. They then give instructions to their partner who draws and colours as instructed.

NB You will need to make sure the children know the names used in the exams and whether they are boys' or girls' names. These names are included in the vocabulary lists in the Handbook.

Lego Building
 This activity includes giving and carrying out instructions, prepositions, colours and sizes. Give each student a selection of Lego bricks. Each child makes a sculpture with their bricks. They then have to give instructions to their partner so that they can make the same sculpture without actually seeing it. You should revise statements such as Can you repeat it please? and  I don't understand so that the children can ask for clarification.

Silly Words
To practise spelling, make a list of silly words. These are invented words - you can give them a meaning if you like but make sure the learners know they are not real words!. It can be fun to invent animals e.g. SQUANT, PREATER, JUMSLE etc. Spell the words to the class and get them to write the word and then draw what they imagine they look like. Then, the children invent their own silly words and spell them to each other in pairs, groups or to the whole class.

Speaking
For Starters, the speaking test also includes carrying out instructions such as pointing to objects and placing objects in certain places. It also includes some basic personal questions about likes and dislikes, hobbies, family and school.

The House
This activity is to practise giving and understanding instructions. Give students a picture of a house with different rooms and some pictures of furniture. They colour and cut out the furniture (if you prefer you can give them magazines or catalogues from which to cut out the pieces of furniture). Then write the following dialogue on the board:

A) Can you see the lamp?
B) Yes I can.
A) Put the lamp in the bathroom next to the bath.
B) Sorry?
A) Put the lamp in the bathroom mext to the bath.
B) OK.

The learners use the dialogue to tell each other where to place each object in their house.

Vocabulary and Structures
There are some specific vocabulary and structures that you may wish to practise with your learners in preparation for the exam. Really, this will depend on your students and their weaker areas. However here is an activity that you can do with any vocabulary.

Tricky Words
Write a song or chant that includes some of the words your learners find it hard to learn (abstract nouns, determiners, quantifiers, adverbs etc) for example:

I like sweets! Sweets! Sweets!
Some are here
Some are there
A lot of sweets
and chocolate too!
Yummy Yummy
Let's chant again.

Here I have taken some of the words my students have problems with and after learning the chant, the children were able to guess the meaning of these words. We did actions to help understanding. You can call the chant a rap if the children are a bit older. I have a class of nine and ten year olds who I soemtimes get to create their own raps. You could give them a set of tricky words that they have to incorporate into their own raps or songs.

Find the Answer
I find it quite hard to get students to remember the different WH- question words and so they need lots of practice in this. This activity can help:
Print and cut out the questions and answers from the Resource section, or create your own. This activity is a mingle activity. Depending on the number of students, each child has a Q/A or Q&A. The objective is to find the answer to their question. They must mingle, asking their question to different students in order to find the answer. They must not show their question to anybody. When they find their answer, they take it and sit down.

Resources: http://sothisisenglishresources.blogspot.com/

   

Articles

I am currently writing articles about various aspects of methodology with a practical focus that am hoping will get published on some of the more well-known and professional ELT websites and magazines. If this actually happens, I will post links to these publications so you can read them.

I will continue to write about practical issues on this blog, and I have also set up a new Resources section, where I will be posting useful activities and ideas for you to try out in class.

Technical Problems

I am having a few technical problems with the layout and design of this blog, so if it keeps changing, don't worry, it's still the same blog!

Teaching "chunks" to Very Young Learners

For those of us who teach very young children, who are still at the nursery or reception class stage (in Spain until 6 years), it can be very frustrating to see that after all our efforts, the children only remember a few individual words. I have been teaching at a nusery school twice a week for many years, I only see them for half an hour at a time, and only a few of those children actually go home at the end of the year with more than a few words learnt. This is due to the extremely little exposure they get to English, an hour a week is not enough, they would ideally need to be practising and reviewing the new vocabulary throughout the rest of the week in order for me to teach them something new each lesson. As this is not the case, since English is just an "extra" and not actually part of the syllabus, it is disappointing, especially for the parents who think that their child is going to come out speaking English, that they cannot remember the color orange when they go home after 6 months of English lessons.

However, if you have more contact with the children, you can get much better results by teaching "chunks". By chunks, I mean expressions or short sentences, instead of individual words. I have a class of five-year-olds in my language school, whom I see for two hours a week, and recently we have been learning to use can for ability. Children of this age evidently have no understanding of grammatical concepts, but you can ask them in L1 if they can do certain things, like swim or skate, and then go on to teach the English way of saying it. You can also teach through mime. Children love it when the teacher acts a bit silly, I have had many laughs when pretending to ride a bike and then falling off to elicit "I can't ride a bike"  and this helps them to remember. The important thing is to teach them "I can ride a bike", instead of just ride, or bike. I actually taught the vocabulary first, and later added "I can" and "I can't". In our course book, the current unit includes the vocabulary: skip, slide, ride a bike, fly, play football, swim and dive. There are flashcards with the characters doing these activities, so in the second lesson, I used "Anna can skip", "Lee can play football" etc. Some of the brighter children started to use these chunks even in that very lesson! In a subsequent lesson, I introduced: "I can swim. Can you swim?" and encouraged them to reply "Yes, I can" or No, I can't". We had already practised hearing the difference between can and can't in one of the previous lessons.

What I would like to point out with these examples is that it is much more rewarding for the child and the teacher if the child has learnt a "chunk" of language, rather than just an individual word. I encourage the children by telling them that they can now say complete sentences in English! The child feels that they have learnt something important, and the teacher sees that the child is using real English, they are actually communicating, not just looking at a flashcard and saying what they see. I think this is especially important for 5 and 6 year olds because they are competent in their own language and if they can communicate in another language, they feel (and rightly so) proud of themselves, and want to learn more. It is much more motivating to learn how to really communicate something in another language, than just to learn individual words. I still remember quite a few words in German from school, but I cannot say a single sentence, and I therefore feel that I know no German. Our learners must feel the same, whatever their age.

Every year, at the beginning of term, I teach the chunks: Can I have a pencil/rubber/ruler/sharpener, please? along with Can I go to the toilet, please? as I feel it is much more positive for the children to ask for things properly, instead of saying "rubber please", and they do actually learn to do so. It is important to start these habits early on, and not let them off because they are so young. The more you can get a child to communicate, the better!

Planning versus Improvisation

Anyone who has done any kind of formal training in ESOL (Celta etc) will know that lesson planning is absolutely essential in every lesson, and anyone who does not write out a proper plan is a terrible teacher with no thought whatsoever for his/her poor students, who of course will learn nothing.

In this article, I would like to discuss the importance of lesson planning and whether or not it is entirely necessary. I am sure there are many novice (and not so novice) teachers out there who have terrible feelings of guilt whenever they have just blagged their way through a lesson, hoping that no colleagues will have realised that they have committed such an abomination!

The main advantage of lesson planning in my view, is that during the process of planning you think through what you want to acheive and how you can do this. The stages of the lesson are carefully structured and aim to acheive the very objectives that you have chosen whilst planning. I disagree that the lesson plan should be based on a template such as the ones used in most TEFL courses and classroom observations, usually PPP methodology (although this may have changed in recent years), primarily because I believe that the process of planning is useful for the teacher whilst it is being done, therefore the paper itself on which the plan is written is not essential to the teaching of the lesson. By this I mean that each teacher should make a plan in whichever way it suits him/her. The plan does not have to follow a specific structure, neither does it have to be produced with pen and paper. The important thing is that the teacher have clear in his/her head what is going to happen in the classroom and why. If you have made a clear plan, there is probably no need to even take this plan into the classroom with you since you will already have internalised all the stages of your lesson. If you feel more comfortable having the stages written down in front of you, make a brief plan on one sheet of paper, or index cards if you prefer. You will find it much easier to follow your plan or find your place if you get lost than if you have a fully-blown 2 or 3 page observation type plan in front of you!

The main problem with thinking through and planning all your lessons is the time factor. If you have 4 or 5 classes a day, and a thorough plan can take an hour, this means that you will be spending 3 or 4 hours every day planning! This is obviously not ideal, especially since most of us do not get paid for planning time and it would mean a 10 hour day! In this business we most definitely do not earn enough to spend so much time planning, many of you will even supplement your work with private classes in your free time and simply not have the time to do so.

In practice, most good teachers spend some time planning each lesson, looking at what comes next in the coursebook, thinking of how to present the information, of maybe adapting activities from the book to make them more engaging or thinking up supplementary activities. However we do not write out a proper detailed plan of everything we are going to do in the lesson, we usually make a few notes that will enable us to follow through our ideas. In fact, most courses that use a course book will provide you with a teacher's book which can give you plenty of ideas of how to use the exercises in the book and even provide you with extra activities, sometimes photocopiable. This seriously reduces our lesson planning time, thankfully!

Having discussed lesson planning, I now come to improvisation. Every teacher has improvised at some time or other and in fact, improvisation can be a good thing - there is little point sticking to your lesson plan just because you have written it, if the lesson is a complete failure! As teachers we need to be flexible to our students' wants and needs. This obviously does not mean giving in to all their demands, but if we see that something isn't working, we shouldn't be afraid to abandon the activity.

But what about those days when we haven't prepared a thing, or have decided to forget about everything we had planned to do? Is this such a bad thing? Well, I believe that once in a while it can be something positive, a breath of fresh air for you and for your students. Sometimes, just starting a discussion by asking a few questions can turn into a complex debate which lasts for half the lesson, sometimes your class will be in one of those moods in which forcing them to do work is useless and something a bit more relaxing is required. Sometimes, one of your students will tell you something which completely changes the direction of the lesson, and, as we all know, there is no point running against the wind. As teachers we need to be aware of how our learners are feeling and adapt our lessons to this. I honestly believe that a flexible teacher who does very little planning can be a better teacher than one who meticulously plans lessons and refuses to change anything.

In conclusion, planning is an important stage in the teaching process, but it should not be overestimated, the way it often is in teaching courses. The teacher is the one who needs to decide how much he/she wants to plan for each particular class and lesson. I would like to end with a nice quote which gives a fairly accurate description of how I feel about improvising at times:

The work can wait while you show the child the rainbow but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work. (Patricia Clafford)

Nice Classroom Routines for (very) Young Learners

I have set up two activities to use as routines with a couple of my young learner groups. Any kind of routine at the beginning of the lesson is a good idea with small children, up to about 6 years old, as they know what to expect and therefore feel more comfortable. This is especially important if it is the first time they have been in a language learning situation.

The first is a colour table. The coursebook the children will be using has a colour scheme - each unit is a different colour and the book's mascot turns that same colour. I decided to set up a colour table following the scheme of the book. The first unit is red and I have made the table out of an old cardboard box and a piece of red fabric. After discussing red items with the children, they started to bring in red objects to put on the table. This can produce some unusual vocabulary depending on the items they bring in, but they are usually engaged at this stage and are keen to know the names of their objects in English. When we progress to unit 2 the table will change colour.

The other routine, which I am using with two classes on alternate days, is a calendar. I bought the calendar set from www.latiendadelprofesor.com. It consists of a large sun with the days of the week and a space for each date. The dates come on small cards to stick in the right place. Each lesson the children tell me what the date is and one of them sticks the number on the calendar. The name of the month comes on a nice cloud which is placed next to the sun. There are also cards for "Today is..." and "The weather is...". These make a nice activity for the beginning of each lesson, revising days of the week, numbers up to 31, months of the year and weather. There are also special cards for festivals and birthdays - making it easier to remember all the children's birthdays!

OneStopBlogs

I am happy to announce that this blog has been added to the OneStopBlogs service, a collection of blogs related to the teaching of English.

Improving Reading Speed

One problem that many learners face when they get to a certain level is how to increase their reading speed. As the texts become longer and more complex, learners find it takes them longer and longer to read. Readers usually get stuck at a certain speed, often between 120 and 200 words per minute, and even lower if they are trying to understand everything in the text. Evidently, we need to discourage the latter, especially when trying to get them to read more quickly.

My main reason for trying to increase their reading speed is part of their exam preparation. I have a group of post-FCE students hoping to sit the CAE exam in June. These students are used to reading and answering questions in a timed situation from all their FCE practice but at CAE level the texts are quite a bit longer than at FCE and they therefore need to learn to read more quickly. After doing a quick timing of their reading yesterday, we discovered that they have reading speeds of between 150 - 250 words per minute. However, before I gave them comprehension questions to answer I let them re-read the text. The second time, they paid more attention to what they were reading, but did not take any longer than the first time. I did not let them look at the text to find the answers to the questions, so they had to understand the main ideas of the text without seeing the questions first. They managed to get 100% comprehension of the text in this way, although perhaps the questions were slightly easy for their level.

We will be regularly doing this kind of reading task, using authentic materials, and recording their reading speeds and level of comprehension, to see how their reading and comprehension improves. I have given them tables in which to record their speed and comprehension. We will also be doing plenty of exam tasks, although in this case the procedure will be different. For exam tasks, they will need to quickly read the text to get a general idea, and the look at the questions before re-reading it. They will need more practice in skimming and scanning in order to perfect these skills, and complete the CAE reading paper in the time allocated.

Before beginning this reading programme, I had my students decide what were some of the DOs and DON'Ts of reading. The DOs included: Skimming and scanning; using context to understand new words; look for topic phrases in each paragraph; read chunks. The DONT's: regress (look back at what you have already read); read word by word; point at the words; say or mouth the words; use a dictionary while reading.

Some simple exercises to help increase reading speed, even with lower levels are:

• Giving students a catalogue or telephone directory or similar and having them search for specific information (scanning)
• Giving them a short text and having them read it several times in one or two minutes.
• Providing students with a template to enforce forward reading and preventing regression.
• Allowing students one minute to read as much of a text as they can, repeating several times. They have to read more each time they read.

Hopefully, with all this practice, reading will come much easier to the learners and will not seem such a cumbersome task.

Classroom Management with YLs

On the first day with my new group of 4-5 year-olds I had a bit of a nightmare with two children. This is their second year in the English academy, whereas all the other children are here for the first time, and I think that partly because they had 7 new classmates, and because they did not know me, they started to play up and "test" me to see what they could get away with. One of the two boys would not sit on his chair for more than about two minutes before he would get up and move to another part of the classroom, or start swinging on his chair. Him and his friend were also quite silly and began shouting and making noises, which, when I asked them if that was correct behaviour for a classroom, they replied "yes". I did have a word with one of them and mentioned speaking to their mothers, as that was no way to behave, especially on their first day, but this didn't really trouble them for more than a few minutes.

So, it was obvious that I had to try something different. Yesterday, I had the same class for their second lesson and we spent a good part of it discuccing appropriate behaviour and I also introduced them to a reward scheme.

We played a game which helped us discuss good and bad behaviour, where I would give an instruction to a child e.g stand on your chair, and the others would have to decide whether this was appropriate classroom behaviour. They either put their thumbs up and said "OK" or they wagged their finger and said "Don't do that!". We had great fun and managed to agree on what behaviour was and wasn't acceptable.

Small children love the idea of getting stickers or stars and it usually motivates them to behave better. So, we now have a reward scheme: a chart with everyone's name on it and plenty of space to stick gold stars. After explaining the system and writing their names, the children helped me to decorate the edges with drawings. I have told them that they can get stars for good behaviour, or if they do their work really well, or try very hard, or help their classmates. The "naughty" boy from the first day informed me that he would be behaving very well and that he was going to get lots of stars. We shall see...

Another idea which will hopefully complement the star system is that of having a class helper. Each day, one of the children will be responsible for helping me to hand out and collect books and worksheets, crayons etc. I have cut out a small smiley face which I stick next to the name of that day's helper on the star chart. Yesterday I made one of the two problematic boys helper, and he seemed to enjoy that responsibility and was very good. His friend kept asking me if he would be the helper the following day.

So, even if I can't keep their "bottoms on seats" I do think that this system will make life a bit easier for me and enjoyable for them

Note: I have used similar schemes before, with slighlty older children. Last year I tried to get the children to cooperate more with each other by dividing them into teams, giving it a competitive aspect. The team with the most stars at the end of term got a prize. With this I hoped that peer pressure would encourage the naughtier children to behave better. It didn't go quite as well as I had hoped, since some of the children often complained that they didn't want to be in "so-and-so's team" because he never got any stars. For this year I have decided to make it individual.

Revision

I usually spend the first couple of weeks of a new school year revising vocabulary and structures from the previous year, or if the students are new to the academy, on diagnosis of what they already know. This is partly because normally the new coursebooks haven't yet arrived (or in some cases been ordered!) but the real reason is that the vast majority of learners have hardly touched English for the whole summer. They have abandoned all contact with the language for two to three months! This is a more serious problem for very young learners, for whom three months is a lifetime. They therefore need plenty of revision and practice of what they have previously learnt, before they go on to a new course. Of course, many coursebooks start of gently, including some revision, but I usually find that this is not quite enough.

One of the problems with revision, is that younger learners recognise that they have studied the concepts before and therefore feel that they do not need to look at them again, complaining that it is too easy and they have "already done it". What I usually try to do to prevent this is to make the revision into game-like activities. For example, I am currently revising "can/can't" for ability with a group of 9 year-olds, before we move on to the same structure for asking for permission and requests. After practising a little at the end of last lesson, today I will be presenting them with a list of "challenges" to try out, where they will complete a worksheet in pairs or small groups and present their feedback to the class. The challenges are things like: Can you write 10 animals in English? or Can you say the English alphabet? or Can you name all the rooms in a house? This also revises vocabulary so it is a good idea to change the questions according to what the class have previously studied. They have great fun trying to complete the challenges, and then afterwards I ask them some questions about what they have discovered.

Email in English Scheme

I have decided to set up a scheme for my teenage (FCE and CAE) students that I have called "Email in English". Basically, I want to have the students open a new email account, separate from their normal email, in which they will use only English. The idea is for me to send them homework assignments by email and for them to be able to share things they like with each other.

Homework is something that all teenagers hate, they get far too much of it from school, and they don't really have much time to spend on doing English homework from their language academy. Also, most of the homework I tend to set for these exam prep groups are writing pieces to practice for the writing part of the exam, and grammar or vocabulary exercises that we haven't had time to finish in class. Most of the time it impossible to get every piece of homework from every student, or even if they do it, they may have spent 5 minutes before the class scribbling it on a piece of paper.

My idea, then, is to make homework more fun and relevant to their interests. I will be able to send them things that I have received - jokes, powerpoint presentations, videos on Youtube, interesting articles etc. With the use of Youtube, this means that I can set listening tasks as well as just reading or writing.

Another plus is that email accounts such as Gmail include a live chat. No program is needed to be installed, you can just chat directly from your email. I hope that my students will try to chat to each other, and possibly me, in English. This should improve their ability to think in English, and make it easier when speaking, as well as being a fun way to use English in their free time.

Day Two

In the end two students did turn up for their first Advanced lesson and I wasn't expecting them! I have no idea if or when the other 3 will turn up which makes it a bit hard to start the course. Nevermind, they'll all need a bit of time to adjust after spending an English-free summer. I need to try and bridge the gap between FCE and CAE because they are going to find the level of CAE materials quite daunting.

Anyway, today is the second "first day" as I get my other new groups. As I said in an earlier post, with the new 8 year olds I am going to get my fancy dress stuff out (sunglasses, hats) and hope that will make "introductions" a bit more fun. Drilling the same sentences over and over again will surely bore them, so I've decided that each of us (yes, me included) will invent our own new characters with a different name, age, number of brothers and sisters and maybe likes/dislikes, depending on how much the children already know.

The only class that I am slightly nervous about is the group of 4 and 5 year olds as I have now discovered that there will be 11 of them in the class! I am definitely going to have some classroom management issues with such a large number of very small children. I just hope that they don't all start crying! If that was not bad enough, I have also been told that one of the little girls is not yet 4, so that means a 3 year old in with the 5 year olds. Wish me luck, please!
I am going to spend the first lesson on trying to learn their names, as I find this really important with little ones. We will be doing plenty of "Hello-ing" and not much else. The main thing is for them to feel comfortable in new surroundings, with a new teacher, new classmates, and for them to not get frightened or overwhelmed by hearing English. I will be using a puppet, which hopefully they will enjoy.