Monday, October 29, 2012

The Dreaded "D" Word




Dictionaries have always been part of the language classroom – even if only as background props used by teachers and students when an unknown word crops up. However, despite their usefulness, they are seldom allowed to take center stage.

WebWords 001For many teachers and students, the idea of using monolingual learners’ dictionaries to supplement the staple diet of every class sounds unappealing. This is partly due to teachers’ ignorance of the strategies they can employ to help their learners build dictionary skills and partly due to students’ lack of ability to use dictionaries appropriately.

In this post, we will consider some of the reasons teachers should integrate dictionary work into their classes, and take a look at some possible class activities.

Why should we use dictionaries?

Dictionaries provide not only definitions of words, but also phonemic transcriptions. These are especially useful given the confusing nature of English spelling, which often
misleads us as to how words should be pronounced (consider, for instance, though, trough and thought).

Another reason is that by reading through the example sentences illustrating how words are commonly used, students are exposed to natural-sounding ways of using new input, to words and phrases that usually co-occur with the headword, and to the grammatical patterns a word can take. An interesting side-effect of this is that users can acquire the ability to self-correct once they realize how much potential there is to be exploited in dictionary examples.

In addition, building dictionary skills leads students towards autonomy, thereby giving them the chance to work independently, especially in situations where this is crucial (e.g. when writing a business email to a foreign colleague).

Teachers often forget that one’s first encounter with a monolingual dictionary can be very daunting and that learners may need time to become comfortable with definitions written in the target language. However, integrating continual dictionary work into your classes should help your students overcome their initial reservations.

Ideas for using dictionaries

1 Elicit the meanings and pronunciation of new words from the students. When no one can provide these, have one or two students look up the words in the dictionary. Encourage them to help each other with phonemic transcriptions. Point out the example sentences and how the students can use them as a way of increasing their access to how words are used – by learning collocates, grammatical patterns, etc.

2 Before a test, or after the students have worked intensively on a unit or two, split the class into small groups. Have each group pick out a few words from each unit and look up how they’re transcribed phonemically. They then give these transcriptions to the other groups, who must write the words in ordinary spelling.
Note: Tell the students which pages of the coursebook each group will cover so that they don’t pick out the same words. Extend this activity by having the students work on meaning and collocations, too.

3 Give the students definitions of new words on small cards and ask them to work out what words are being defined. Then hand out cards with example sentences of the words and get the students to match the sentences to the definitions.

4 Write a couple of new words in phonemic script on the board. Split the class into two groups and get them to take turns trying to guess how the words are pronounced. Award a point for each correct answer.

5 Prepare a quiz with mistakes your students have made, e.g. incorrect use of dependent prepositions, awkward collocations, etc. Using dictionaries, the students work together to correct the errors.

6 Prepare a quiz with useful collocations which you think your students might not know. Gap example sentences from the dictionary, leaving only the headword. Students then have to look up the headwords to find out what the collocations are, e.g.:
Managers are __________ aware of the need to provide new staff with appropriate support. (Answer: acutely aware)

7 When students are confused about a pair of words, ask them to look both words up in the dictionary and find the difference between them. This works with words which have similar meanings (e.g. say and tell), those that students have difficulty pronouncing accurately (e.g. ship and sheep) and those that are pronounced the same (e.g. won and one).

8 Split the class into two teams. Explain that you will dictate some words, but that you will also mispronounce some of them. If the students are not sure whether a word was pronounced correctly or not, they look it up in the dictionary. Points are awarded for each (first) correct answer.

9 Tell the students that you are going to dictate a number of sentences, but you will hum some words in each sentence. (Make sure all the words you hum are the same part of speech, i.e. all prepositions, verbs, nouns, etc.) The students write down the complete sentences, including the missing words. They then check their answers in pairs, by looking up the appropriate dictionary entries.
Note: Students are often not aware of how to learn how to use prepositions accurately. This can be a useful strategy to help them understand that they can use a dictionary whenever they are not sure which preposition to use.

10 To teach students how to make their writing more “colorful”, pick out some sentences from their essays that make little use of interesting adjectives or adverbs. Get them to work together, using dictionaries, to make their writing more vivid by adding adjective + noun, adverb + adjective or adverb + verb couplings. For example, they can rewrite The girl was beautiful as The girl was remarkably beautiful.

Many teachers and students do not feel comfortable using dictionaries, and for this reason many of the activities proposed here aim at building dictionary skills without necessarily making use of dictionaries proper. However, it is my firm belief that students should be told about the important role dictionaries can play in their learning process. By gradually introducing our students to dictionary skill-building tasks such as these, we can make them feel more at ease with the dreaded “d” word – as well as making the task much lighter and more appealing to everyone involved.

Online resources:

Learners’ dictionaries

ELTChat summary on how to integrate dictionary work into classes
http://eltchat.org/wordpress/summary/how-to-integrate-dictionary-work-into-lessons-an-eltchat-summary-18072012/

* This post was originally published in issue 80 of English Teaching Professional.



Tuesday, October 23, 2012

mLearning and Digital Images

Picture this scene: You ask your students to open their books to work on a grammar exercise. You decide to walk around to check how they are doing the exercise, but you, unfortunately, realize some students are actually using their mobile devices to check updates on Facebook and Twitter or sending an SMS to a friend. 

Would you call that fiction? Definitely not! I am quite sure this has already happened to you if you teach tennagers! So, how do you deal with it? Should you ban mobile devices from your classroom? Every time new technologies land in the classroom, students do naturally react with excitement to them. After a while they get used and tend to calm down. As an educator, I believe that we should never ignore the "world" students live in, but rather find ways to bring it to the learning environment. The number of students who own mobile devices has skyrocketed in recent years and the prediction is that every single person will have a digital camera, a cellphone or a tablet in the near future. In some cases, some might already have them all! So, how about thinking of ways to use these devices creatively in order to effectively teach and practice different grammar points and even improve levels of interaction and communication? Here is one idea I have recently developed for the typical ESL/EFL setting. This activity can be used to practice vocabulary related to clothing and the present continuous as well!

Activity: What's the Occasion?


Level: beginning/intermediate 
Vocabulary: clothing
Grammar topic: Present Continuous
Language skill: speaking 
Device needed: any device with a built-in digital camera
Number of devices needed: one per student 
Internet connection: offline

This is a class project that requires in-class and outside-class work. 

Part 1: On the first day, give each student a slip with a particular situation written in it (EX: GOING TO SCHOOL/CHURCH/WORK/THE BEACH/THE CHURCH/THE MALL/THE GYM/A WEDDING/A JOB INTERVIEW/ A ROMANTIC DINNER/ A FAMILY PICNIC/A NIGHTCLUB/ETC...). 

Remind them that they should not reveal which situation they were given. Then, explain that they should go home, pick up in their closet the outfit they would wear for that occasion and take pictures of all items (clothes/shoes/accessories) and a picture of themselves wearing the outfit for that occasion. 

Part 2: On the second day, ask students to sit in small groups. Explain that they should show the pictures they have taken (and orally say the name of all clothing items) and other group members should guess where their classmates are going dressed like that. As a follow-up, ask students to show the picture in which they are wearing their outfit and have other classmates describe using the Present Continuous (ex: you are wearing a pink dress, high heels, a watch and a necklace). You can also have them vote on the student who was best dressed for the assigned occasion. 

Alternative suggestion: In part 1, ask students to send you via e-mail their picture wearing the outfit. Then, in part 2, you can show the pictures of all students in a slide presentation and elicit from them the sentences in the Present Continuous (follow-up part).

I hope you liked it and let me know if you ever have the chance to test it with your students. I am a mobile learning junkie and I display all my ideas in my blog http://mthatlearning.blogspot.com. If you want to learn more about mobile learning, be my guest!


Thursday, October 18, 2012

Reading Recommendations for English Teachers



Dear teachers,

I strongly recommend two articles I've recently read in the Times. One is about how British English is more and more present in conversations in the USA. Very funny and, after all, pertinent to our discussions regarding whose English we speak after all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/fashion/americans-are-barmy-over-britishisms.html?pagewanted=all
 
The other article refers to teachers' evaluations in the USA and how this issue has gained importance lately.

Hope you enjoy them!

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Wikis for Empowering Teachers and Students


This article is the summary of a workshop presented in the 13th Braz-Tesol National Convention last July in Rio de Janeiro.

In the last decade the way we access and share information has changed dramatically. One of the examples of this change can be seen in Wikipedia and its growing reputation as a source of information for students, teachers, and the larger community in general. The advent of Wikipedia and so many other similar tools has not only transformed the way we catalogue and share knowledge but also empowered users when it allows them to create and distribute content. Amazing as it might sound, we teachers, have at our disposal software that enables us to do for our classes and for professional development the same thing that Wikipedia has done for the whole world: share knowledge and collaborate. In this article, we are going to write a little about this very software (wikis) and some ways in which they can be used to empower teachers and students. As we describe these wikis, we will also provide samples of real ones that fall into the categories we assigned. The only exception will be intranet wikis, that being private can only be accessed by its members.

First, let us begin with a definition of what a wiki is. A wiki is a free, online writing space that allows collaboration among multiple editors. It also has simple formatting rules and dispenses knowledge of HTML or any other computer programming language to add content. Its collaborative nature coupled with its user friendly interface, makes it an ideal collaborative tool for teachers and teachers, teachers and students, or students and students. As you can see, a huge spectrum of collaboration is possible if you opt for using it. In the lines below, we are going to give you some examples of usage of wikis for collaborative work having teachers and students in most of the combinations mentioned above.

One reason for using a platform that allows multile editing is that teachers, as a rule, have lots of ideas to share, but many times do not have a channel to do so. This necessity for sharing ideas calls for using wikis is as an intranet: a collaborative space restricted to teachers of a given institution. Having such a user friendly interface, a wiki allows teachers to upload power point presentations, videos, word documents, and other kinds of files that are part of their lesson plans, and therefore, making a whole range of resources available for their teaching community. Besides that, one can also add links to external resources that contributes to make it a rich catalogue of possibilities for adding content that is relevant for educators. One example of such experience is the one at our institution (Casa Thomas Jefferson). We have an intranet wiki harboring around ten thousand files and around three hundred teachers sharing and collaborating. Another language institute using a wiki as an intranet is IBEU in Rio de Janeiro which as of July of 2012 (according to informationtion shared in a presentation on the subject) had around twenty eight thousand files and also connected hundreds of teachers. An intranet wiki, besides being a place for sharing files and lesson plans, is also a venue for keeping staff informed about institutional events, sharing changes in policy and procedures, and fundamentally, a channel for communication.

A second reason for the use of wiki by educators is that in an age where e-learning seems to have become so popular, teachers involved in an online course can be at the four corners of the globe and, as a result, in different time zones. So, a wiki can be the platform of choice for collaboration and serves as the course platform and a channel for communication between course tutors and participants. The feature allowing one to create pages and folders makes it possible to have pages for participants’ and coordinators' profiles, syllabus, schedule for course activities and many other trinkets that are part of such courses. A practical example of such kind of cyber space is the Webheads’ wiki for the Becoming a Weabhead (BaW) online course. This is a yearly free five-week online course for language teachers interested in learning how to integrate technology into their classes. The course usually has around two hundred and fifty participants and they are all connected to the course wiki. This online space teaches and guides participants and empowers them once it allows them to collaborate and learn with course instructors and their peers.

A third motive for using wikis can be drawn from the Project/Problem Based Learning approach.This is an approach that has collaboration as one of its principles. Therefore, if a group has to come up with a final product that is a result of collaborative team work, a wiki can be the platform of choice. Once the group agrees on a project idea, members can start working on their own with the advantage that all group members can visualize, edit, and add their contribution to their partners ongoing work. This allows members to see the format the product is taking as it develops, and as a result, permitting members to have a more holistic view of what is being done. Such platform also enables participants to volonteer whichever specialized they have to the service of the group. A good example of such endeavor is the wiki with reading activities for EFL teachers created by three teachers (one in Argentina, another in Brazil, and another in Chile) while taking an online course in the University of Oregon.

A fourth reason for adopting wikis arises from the fact that teachers many times need to create a cyber space for students to add content and collaborate. The challenge, quite often, resides in finding a platform that would allow the creation of different pages and folders and permit students to work individually and access and see the work of others in the same web address as well. A wiki is such a tool: it allows the teacher to create pages for students and put them in charge of editing and adding content. For young learners, that in general do not have e-mail accounts, the platform makes it possible for the teacher to create an account with different user names and password for every single learner in his class. A great example of such achievement is the prize winning work of the Egyptian educator Azhar Yousef and her students . This was a project started by this teacher and her students after the political turmoil in Egypt. The goal of this collaborative project was to invite tourists to go back to visit Egypt and its amazing tourist attractions.

Finally, we would like to point out that this is in no way a final, comprehensive list of all the possibilities wikis can offer educators. If you enjoyed reading and happen to be interested in learning how to set up your own wiki, you can browse an example of wiki as a handout. This one was created specifically to teach workshop participants attending our presentation in the 13th Braz-Tesol National Convention how to create their own wikis.

by Jose Antonio da Silva and Maria Ines Saboya



Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Going Mobile

                                 


Nowadays, it's much easier to find interesting ideas online that can cause a great impact on our teaching practice. One of these days, I came across a blog called Mapping Media to the Curriculum which starts with a very simple question: what do you want to create today? The author talks about different apps that students can use to produce digital content. I explored some of the ideas and decided to experiment with Mobile Learning (mLearning). Learning a language has to be a dynamic and automonous process.  However, I had some questions on the back of my mind:

Does Mlearning add value to my lessons?
What are the benefits?
Can I use it with all group levels effectively?
Do I have to work harder?

I got together with  Jose Antonio and we presented a workshop called - One Ipad-Only Class - to tell our peers about our experiences, tips and ideas regarding mlearning. Here you can read about what we said.




We talked about the main characteristics of each age group, and we showed activities that are easy to carry out to maximize learning that respect the aforementioned general traits.

We started talking about adult learners. What are the main characteristics? What should a task designer have in mind when planning a task?

The adult learner


                            http://www.freakingnews.com/Van-Gogh-Modernized-Pictures----3289.asp

  • Long attention span.
  • Ability to deal with tasks that are not intrinsically motivating.
  • To maximize learning plan tasks that appeal to multiple senses and lower affective filters.
Su 

We then suggested some  activities that we used with our groups. It's important to mention that all the APPS used worked offline and are free. Click on the links below for details.
Proverbs  
Order of adjectives
Subordinating conjunctions


The teenage learner




  • Child- like playfulness
  • Adult-like ability to hypothesize and think critically
  • Facts surrounding ego, self -esteem and  self- image are at pinnacle.
  • Teachers should affirm talents and strengths and encourage collaboration
Suggested activities

The young learner

Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

  • Concrete operation
  • Centeredness in functional purposes of the language
  • Can understand patterns and examples



Suggested activities







José Antonio and I counted with the contribution of Denise De Felice, who added a prespective on how the brain works and how/why the proposed activities might be effective to boost learning.


When I reflect upon my experience, I come to the conclusion that Mlearning can be very powerful if we hold truth to our teaching principles, respect our students and find the correct practices that mirror our beliefs. I have gone mobile. Have you?

Monday, October 01, 2012

Roaming Mode & Productivity Tools for Busy Educators

Educators are are always on the move. In many different ways.

In class, we move around to connect to our learners and assess their activity during the tasks.  We ask our students to do the same, moving, standing up, connecting to peers for the sake of keeping them attentive and interactive.

Many English teachers have more than one job, so they need to constantly commute to go from one class to the other, sometimes even going from one part of the city to the other extreme. Even when educators are full-time teachers in an institution, they have to move from one class to the other, one break time to the next. Circulating is part of an educator´s daily job. An itinerant life at its best.

Peseux calibre 320 movement Not to mention our roaming mode, trying to juggle the intensity of school work and our personal lives. There´s no need to say that the golden asset for an educator is time. The currency that we always lack and long for more. As there´s no magic trick to extend the number of hours we have in a day, the only viable solution is to find ways to enhance our productivity and efficiency. Educators need to realize they should be managers of their own time, and good ones!

If somebody asked me the toolkit that could optimize an educator´s urgency to better manage his life, I´d start by exploring four! Four seems to be a manageable number for exploration.
An educator´s toolkit should be composed of tools that are cross-platform, working in different devices and operational systems. So here´s a basic toolkit to get started:


EVERNOTE - Your virtual notebook. You create your notes, to-do lists, lesson plans and aggregate them in one single place. Once you download the app to your cellphone, desktop computer, laptop, and you create an account in Evernote, all your notes are automatically synchronized, which means that important moments, documents, ideas, and visuals are kept portable. Wherever you go, you can access them. Evernote is a powerful tool to organize your main resources, be it professional or personal, and easily retrieve them.
Check the Epic Experiment the Nerdy Teacher is doing with his students using Evernote: http://www.thenerdyteacher.com/2012/07/epic-evernote-experiment-edchat.html



DROPBOX - Your virtual flashdrive. Dropbox, just like Evernote, works in the cloud, synchronizing all the files you add to it with all your devices (cellphones, laptops, desktops). When I want to open any file in my iPad, for example, I just add it to my dropbox and open it in my iPad, using the Dropbox app. It stores all my main files and you can share folders and files with whomever you want, including your students and family members! You can share files and folders.
Here´s an example of some questions I used in class with my students: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oy4ssy65mkf7iq/Indirect%20questions.doc



FLIPBOARD - Your virtual newsstand. My favorite app ever! It works on cellphones and tablets. What makes it a very special tool is that in one single place, you can aggregate all your social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader...), and you can subscribe to specific news feeds, specialized sites, interesting magazines to follow the latest updates. On top of it, the user experience is simply amazing. Though it can add to your productivity and keep you updated on the latest news, you can lose yourself in so many interesting, serendipitous resources that can be a drain to your lack of time. The good thing is that you can always save an article to read it later or email it to yourself and share it with friends and students.



PINTEREST - Your virtual visually-enhanced bookmark. Organize your boards by topic, start following people, grow your personal networks and let the platform and the people behind it filter relevant information for you. You can "repin" relevant resources to your own boards, you can pin interesting links and digital treasures as you browse the Net. Instead of relying on you computer´s favorites, you can now take bookmarking to a more social and fun level.
Here are my Pinterest boards for you to have an idea of how it works: http://pinterest.com/carlaarena/

An educator´s life is always in shifting mode, but with the mobile possibilities we have in our hands, we can better manage our routine on the go and add a more enterprising and enthusiastic feel to the many daily tasks we carry out.

I know, I know... The question is always, "From where do I start?"
First, stop lamenting the time you don´t have! Start by signing up for an account in those platforms, click and touch fearlessly, watch youtube tutorials, ask around or ask me. I´d be more than glad to give you the push you need to be a happier and more productive educator! I´m sure once you dig into this digital exploration, you´ll have a smile on your face to have worked on your own personal and professional survival toolkit.



Cross-posted at http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com 


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

QR Codes Treasure Hunt for Beginners

Learn more about QR Codes

I have a group of teens 1 at CTJ South Lake Branch with few students. For this very reason, I'm always looking for extra activities which can keep them motivated. I heard about QR codes last year. I was teaching at Maristao (a high school in Brasilia) with Dani Lyra, and she mentioned how she had used it in one of her classes and how engaged students were trying to find out what the codes were about. Since that time, I wanted to develop an activity in which students depended on the codes to solve a problem. That's how I came up with the idea of the treasure hunt.




LEVEL: Teens 1
When: After all unit 1
Objective: Ask personal questions (third person)
People involved: teacher, students and staff

Preparation:

  1. If you are going to use students´ device, one class before the activity, ask them to download a QR reader app (there are free QR readers available for iOS and Android).
  2. Think of the person you want to be your "secret" one. Look for information about this person. In our case, it was Romero Britto. 
  3. I did the activity in the second part of my class, so in the first part, I had the the opportunity to revise all the questions they were supposed to ask. This was of undue importance because I asked all people involved not to answer students questions if they were incorrect.
  4. Create the codes which contain the instructions. I created mine on a site Carla Arena suggested -  qrstuff.comGive the Qr Codes to the other people involved with the questions students should ask and  the answer they should give. In  my case, I wanted students to practice the questions orally, so the codes just led them to where they should go.
  5. Students were to find out who the secret famous person was. So, they had to go to the places I indicated in the secret messages (QR codes) and follow all the instructions given. For example: The first code was in the classroom. They had to scan it, using their mobile devices,  and it said, "Go to 'Secretaria'. Look for Juliana. Ask her if it is a man or a woman.After asking the question correctly, students would not only receive the answer but also another code which guided them to the next person. For example, after asking Juliana, they received the second code, that was:Go to the library. Look for Dalva. Ask her how old he is.
    The process was the same until the last code, which was in class again. In this code, I led them to a google page where they saw Romero Britto's paintings.

Follow-up:  I asked them to create a page in Skitch (a mobile app), including Romero Britto's picture. They were supposed to make sentences with all the information collected.

Conclusion: I loved the result! Thinking of all the steps and procedures was hard, but my job during the activity was just monitoring them and check if they were speaking English all the time. I love when I can integrate other skills in my classes. It wasn't just another language practice activity. They had to download apps, learn how to use them, include photos and text... They were autonomous. I was there just to help. That's it! They were responsible for finding the clues, the answers, writing the text. They were responsible for their own learning process, and it was magic!



Our contributor for this post


The Ed Tech Team RESOURCES:
Here´s a QR Code Treasure Hunt Generator you might want to try: http://www.classtools.net/QR/
40 ways of using QR Codes in the classroom 


Monday, September 17, 2012

Jeremy Harmer Says it All

9th CTJ TEFL Seminar - July 24



Our CTJ teachers asked; Jeremy Harmer, our inspired and inspiring ELT guest of the month, gave educators some food for thought on various topics related to our field, igniting our professional minds to go above and beyond.









Hello Dani. I am so pleased you picked up on the ‘door out’ way of thinking about ending lessons. Apart from the ones I mentioned, we might want to select a student and ask him or her to summarise what has happened; we might give a period of quiet where students sit and think about the lessons and then individual students can say anything they want about what ahs happened in the lesson; we might want to end with a fantastic video or song; we might end by telling a story which encourages them to look forward to the next lesson; we might want to….. the list is endless. The most important thing, it seems to me, is to think carefully about how we end lessons and then vary the ways we do it. Surprise!


Hi Carlos! There are so many of them. A teacher at school who believed in me and let me do amazing things that I wouldn’t have believed possible. A lecturer at university who understood how to inform but also entertain – and who looked as if he loved what he was doing. Now? People I read and listen to – my generation includes people like Scott Thornbury who always enlightens and challenges me  - but also a whole tribe of new teachers and writers from Brazil (I met many of them at BRAZTESOL and CJT) and other countries who are ‘pushing the boundaries’, challenging us all, have great energy, new ideas and fresh eyes. I am so lucky to live, partly, in their world! To learn from people all we have to do, I think is open our ears and our eyes and start by saying ‘how can I make this work for me?’ rather than ‘That’s never going to work in my situation!!!


I remember one teacher standing outside the classroom and throwing in an orange, a book and something else. I can’t remember what the point of this was, but it got the students’ attention! How to start a lesson, Selma? Well there are all sorts of warmers and ice breakers, fund things to do. A story, a game a poem, an information gap activity to lead into the next stage of the lesson. But I think we need to vary the way we start lessons so that students have something to look forward to or be curious about. Sometimes, for example, we will start a lesson in a more formal way, explaining what we are going to do, or giving information. Sometimes we may go straight into a teaching sequence. But sometimes we will do something completely unexpected. Starting lessons – like ending a lesson (see above) – needs to live somewhere between comforting predictability and unsettling craziness. I guess it depends on you and the students.


You know what, Patricia, my greatest challenge was once when I went to Paris (which is very close to London of course) to speak to French College teachers (secondary teachers). They didn’t react like anyone else ever and to be honest I don’t think my talk was a great success! What I learned? First, try to know more about who you will be with and think how to work with them in an appropriate way; and secondly, culture does matter, and all teaching and learning takes place in a setting which is more socially constructed than linguistically focused.



I think it helps, Thiago, if you love doing it! I love working with teachers. Secondly (and I’m sure about this, having watched so many teachers with students and presenters etc), it’s all about passion in a way. If a speaker or teacher has a passion for what they do (or at least looks as if they have a passion) it is difficult to resist them! As far as a connection is concerned – well people are just so interesting. Listen, watch, enjoy – and the connection is there straight away!



Originally, Vinicius, I didn’t have a great desire to be a teacher really. I wanted to be a musician, but I wasn’t good enough :-( But then someone said I could do a short course about teaching and then I could get a job, maybe in some other country, so I thought I’d try that. I was incredibly fortunate to find, before that first training course had ended, that I really enjoyed it, and that the rewards for me, as a teacher, were likely to be far greater than the negative points. I was inspired by my trainers – and by the teachers at school who had believed in me and encouraged me.


Hello Rick…yes I have been coming to Brazil for years. How quickly time passes…But coming to Brazil has been an ongoing and repeated joy for me.
What’s changed? Well in Brazil there’s a confidence and an expertise in the language teaching profession which is stronger and more exciting than it has ever been – at least if the people I meet on my visits are anything to go by. There’s an enthusiasm and creativity among the younger teachers that is incredibly exciting. Part of this is a desire to examine things in a new way and not accept things just because they are ‘there’. Of course part of that is driven by the new technologies that have become part of our educational life. But it’s more than that. It’s a desire to constantly question and interrogate what we do. That’s what keeps even older teachers young, I think, and what makes it all worth doing.


That’s a really interesting question, Clarissa, especially since our students now live in a world where information about almost anything is instantly available on the Internet, for example. The challenge is to make coursebooks relevant in that reality, and really useful. So what we have to do is find ways to train students to learn, to suggest where they can go next in their learning, and create material that will help teachers make sense of the chaotic world of learning and teaching.


My first reaction to your question, Lilian, is to say that a good teacher can (or should be able to) teach well with nothing but a stick in the desert. However, we live in a world in which information technology informs everything we do, one way or another. And so it would be crazy to ignore that in the socially constructed world of the classroom. And anyway, technology enhances the learning experience of learning, can make things more ‘current’ and more ‘real’ – and a lot of English use, which students need to be comfortable with, around the world is digitally delivered. We are so lucky to live and teach in the age we do. But (and, to use an old cliché, it’s a big but) I have a default question I always ask about technology (or any other teaching innovation) and it is: ‘why is X the best way to do this?’ If we can’t answer that question satisfactorily then we should use a way that IS better, even if it doesn’t use technology. Best analogy? The blackboard. Innovative technology, I bet, when it first appeared. Now indispensable! But finally: ‘Ask not what we can do for technology, but what technology can do for us!’


I’m glad you were at that session in IATEFL, Alba. I enjoyed doing it. I think my point then was (and still is) that we don’t quite know the best ways to correct people – especially when you consider that language learners are individuals and each one may respond differently, and benefit from different correction techniques.
But I think we DO know that heavy correction during a fluency activity sort of ruins the point of the activity – although helping students with a more ‘gentle’ variety is almost certainly helpful for some.
I like the approach that my brother took when he was teaching at the Wimbledon School of English. He did a questionnaire and asked all the students how they wanted to be corrected – because he was worried that he only ever used reformulation, and he wasn’t sure if it worked (neither am I! Do students REALLY hear the difference between what they say and what we say?) When he got the results he could then correct in the way the students said they wanted to be corrected – although interestingly they realized that wasn’t quite what they wanted once they’d experienced it. So then he changed again. What I like is that he consulted the students as experts in their own learning, and the dialogue he had with them was useful and productive. 


Hi Inez! I think the job of a coursebook writer is to provide clear engaging material that will help teachers and students to learn. The progression needs to be clear, the instruction rubrics have to be transparent, and both teacher and students need to see the point of what they are being asked to do.

Of course we try and come up with enjoyable and interesting topics too, but that depends so much on who the teachers and students are. It’s up to teachers to make what the coursebook writer has provided alive and enjoyable. So how to ‘give the teacher a voice’? Maybe by not putting too much in the book; maybe by leaving metaphorical spaces between exercises. Maybe by providing lots of suggestions for what can be done; maybe by offering alternatives at various points; maybe by suggesting how students and teachers can follow up topics and language material.

Thanks for your kind words about that plenary in July. I loved being at the CTJ. Lovely place!





Saturday, June 02, 2012

Simple Activities Using an iPad in the Elementary Classroom

Level : Junior 2 
Goal: Have students use Can and Can't in affirmative sentences and Yes/No questions.
Vocabulary: sports - basketball, soccer, catch a ball, kick, play, dance, swim,... 
Verb:  Can - affirmative and Yes/No questions.
Materials: a small ball and a basket.




 

 





1 - T or a st asks each student: "Can you play basketball?"  Model on the board.

Then,  have the student shoot a free throw to make sure he/she is right.  Teacher takes a picture.

2  -  Students write sentences about their classmates' abilities using can.

Go on until all the students have participated.


3 - Finally, show the photos and students make up sentences using can and the vocabulary they learned.


4 - For the following class, I have created a quiz using their photos.

http://photopeach.com/album/16fb4t1

Maria da Luz Delfino

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Online Storytelling


Storytelling is an art and it is as old as speech. Stories can educate and build rapport. Telling a story can provide the opportunity to gain deeper understanding of a specific topic or experience and a way of doing so is by taking your kids to the school’s library and exploring this awesome environment. Kids are able to explore the book and learn not only to enjoy reading, but also learn that books are a way to find out lots of useful and important things.  

However, technology has opened a new dimension to this fantastic educational tool. There are myriad online resources that can be used for this purpose. Children will be fascinated by the fantastic illustrations, and captivated by the animation, music, and sound effects that enhance the narration. Furthermore, there are some websites where students can create their own stories, providing students with an opportunity for personalization.

I have often used storytelling as a means of presenting a new unit or a new topic and what I have found is that stories can be used not only to communicate, educate and inform, but also to establish connections, inspire and encourage students. My experience has told me that students tend to get more motivated and also this type of warming-up might help activate schemata and lead to better long-term retention of the target language focus.

Some useful websites for online storytelling:

Some useful websites to create ebooks:

Lilian Marchesoni