Tuesday 18 November 2014

Teaching Language in Context

In our last blog I talked about my belief in getting students to do most of the work. I believe that by actively engaging them in the material and giving them interesting tasks to complete, they will be more motivated and this will have a positive effect on their learning.



Since then, I have taught on three teacher training courses for European primary and secondary school teachers and have been made aware of how mainstream teaching in many European countries is still largely teacher-led with an emphasis on learning grammatical structures and teaching to the end-of-year test. Many teachers commented that while they had really enjoyed the different activities and they had also changed their perspective with regards their own teaching, implementing a more learner-centred teaching methodology would be difficult within their school due to student/parent expectations and also the constraints of external methods of assessment. They generally felt that parents, students and those in charge at their various schools would put grammar at the top of things to be taught and studied.

I would like to outline 3 activities that went down particularly well among the teachers I worked with. They all essentially have ‘introducing and practising grammar’ at their heart but I have tried to introduce a relevant context into the mix.

1. The Queen, David Cameron or both?
-  Choose 2 people who you think your students would be interested in and would therefore know something about. My group were interested in British culture.
-  Write 5 sentences about each person and jumble them up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a good source of biographical information.
Below are the sentences I used:
            This person has 4 children (B)
            This person became the youngest leader in the UK for 200 years (DC)
            This person's partner is English (DC)
            This person went to a private school (DC)
            This person parachuted from a plane in the opening ceremony for the London             Olympics (QE)
            This person used to ride a bicycle to work (DC)
            This person is the leader of 53 countries (QE)
            This person is a member of the Church of England (B, although you could argue that
            The Queen is the leader)                                           
-  Students work in pairs to decide which sentence goes with which person.
After checking the answers / discussing surprises, the teacher could focus on any grammatical structures used in the sentences. I tend to focus on present and past tenses and therefore ask students to circle all examples of the present simple and underline all examples of the past simple.
-  Students could then, in groups, choose 2 different people and write 10 jumbled sentences for other groups to guess who they ‘belong’ to.

What do I like about this activity? There is a real information gap – students learn something about people they are (hopefully!) interested in. The activity covers all 4 skills (writing, speaking, listening, reading) and also provides a focus on grammar in context. Students then get the opportunity to use the language in a new, relevant context. This activity is also very student-focussed – the students do the vast majority of the work.


2. True or false?
This activity is a very simple expansion on the traditional ‘3 true sentences, 2 false ones’ activity. The stages are as follows:
-  Dictate (at normal speed) 5 sentences about yourself to the students. You may need to repeat the sentences 3 or 4 times but it is important that you do speak at normal speed. Below are the sentences I used for a ‘grammar-focussed’ lesson
·         I have lived in 7 different countries
·         I have never learnt to drive
·         I have hitch-hiked around Europe
·         I have done a bungee jump for charity
·         I have eaten grasshoppers – they were very crunchy
-  Once you have dictated all the sentences, get the students to compare what they have written in pairs.
-  During whole class feedback, write down the parts of the sentences which students have understood correctly. Mark a gap where what they understood is incorrect but don’t provide the correct answer at this stage.  An example sentence may be: I have ________ _____ 7 different countries or I have _______ in ___ different countries
-  Repeat the sentences for students to get the missing words. If they can’t, the teacher can guide them to the correct answer (what’s the preposition after….? What tense is it? What’s the past participle? etc.)
-  Once the students have 5 correct sentences, you could do some work on pronunciation (which words are stressed in the sentence? Where are the weak forms?)
-  In pairs, students now try to decide which statements are true and which are false about you. They could ask you questions in order to try and find out the answer (although you don’t necessarily have to tell the truth!!). If you don’t want to use personal information in class, you could always use that of a famous person or, alternatively, have 5 sentences about 5 different people in the class. For me, sentences 1, 2 & 5 above are true!
-  After feedback, ask the students to focus on the grammatical structure, underlining examples and checking that they are familiar with both form (has/have + past participle) and, more importantly, function (life experiences).
-  Students then write similar true/false sentences about themselves to discuss in pairs.
And the positive things about this activity? Once again, a variety of skills are covered (writing, listening, speaking, reading & pronunciation). The activity can be modified to focus on different aspects of grammar in a (personalised) context. It is also motivating and interesting for the students – they don’t feel as if they have been in a ‘grammar lesson’ and they also love finding things out about their teacher/each other!

3. Using texts – two-way translation
I use this activity to encourage students to look at different language areas that I want to focus on. The activity focuses on a range of skills and ensures that grammar is noticed and recycled in context. Once again, the focus of the activity is on the student and the teacher’s role is simply to support and facilitate.
-  Choose a text (from your coursebook) that students are familiar with and have previously worked on. This ensures that there are no questions or misunderstandings about content.
-  Choose 2 five-line ‘blocks’ from the text. Ask half the class to work with one of the ‘blocks’ and the other half to work with the other.
-  Students should translate their text into their mother tongue.
-  Students then swap their texts and translate back into English.
-  After this, they compare with the original and ‘notice’ the differences.


To summarise, the activities above all put the context before the grammatical structure. Students are introduced to language without perhaps initially realising that the focus on the activity is language and, through the context, should get a better understanding of how the language is learnt. They also work together and help each other to become independent learners.

Putting the context first means that the language simply becomes a ‘vehicle’ for learning (about) something else, which I feel is how it should be. Also, with the students doing the vast majority of the work in these activities, the teacher is free to listen, monitor and support, which is also how it should be.


What do you think about this approach to language? Would it work within your context?

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Getting Students to do the Work

In my classes I believe in getting my students to do the majority of the work. I think that the more they actively participate in a lesson, the more motivating that lesson will be and the more they will retain of its content. I ask them to predict content, to prepare questions for other students to answer, to guess the meaning of vocabulary from the context and to prepare homework questions for their classmates.

Below is an outline of the lesson I have taught over the last couple of days, which will give an idea of what I mean. The topic was stories in the news.

Stage 1


I asked the students to discuss in pairs any stories that were currently making headlines, either at home, in the UK or the wider world. A natural discussion evolved from this task, with students asking questions about Scottish independence, the Pistorius trial, the Royal pregnancy and, loosely connected, the Princess Diana conspiracy theories. In most instances, the students were able to discuss these topics without intervention. In other cases, they asked for my view. In yet other cases, we looked online for information.

This discussion also threw up a range of collocations such as a shifty man or woman, to be neck and neck, too close to call, to have a field day, to lose face, and pompand ceremony. Once again, this vocabulary arose naturally from the discussion and from the students’ questions – it wasn’t vocabulary I had prepared earlier.

Stage 2

I showed the students the 11 pictures below which I had taken from the BBC In pictures site. I asked them, in pairs, to write a sentence to describe each picture. If they knew what story the picture referred to, they could use this information. If they didn’t, I simply asked them to describe what they could see. Some of the sentences they came up with were:
A man holds onto a rope to avoid dirty water
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in_pictures/
A volcano is erupting
A man is repairing cables
A man wins or loses?


The language wasn't complicated but, again, the students had done all the work themselves and had also discussed what they thought the pictures were showing.


Stage 3

I gave the students a photocopy of the captions that went with each picture (also taken from the BBC In Pictures site). One of the captions was a red herring and, as there were only 7 captions, two other pictures didn’t have a matching caption.
I asked the students, again in pairs, to match the captions to the pictures. However, I did give them a fairly strict time limit so they didn’t have chance to read all the words and start asking complicated vocabulary questions at this stage! At the end of the activity, students checked their ideas with each other and I only intervened if there were any problems.

Stage 4

I focussed students on the caption that matched the Joan Rivers star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The caption was:

Flowers surround Joan Rivers’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles following the announcement that she had died. Rivers, 81, had been on life support in Mount Sinai hospital since having a cardiac arrest in New York last week


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-29077084


I asked the students how they would transform this caption into an appropriate headline for the picture. They could only use the words in the caption itself (and I stressed that they couldn’t change the form of the words in any way). They also had to use words in the same order as they appeared in the caption and their headline obviously had to make linguistic and grammatical sense! Valid examples would be:
Joan Rivers’ star
Flowers surround star
Rivers died last week

In pairs, the students then did the same with the remaining pictures, leading to headlines such as:
40 explosions on Monday & volcano activity
Shasta lake near 30% capacity & Shasta hit by drought
Man repairs cables on pylon
Cameron greets Merkel

The students seemed motivated by the fact that there wasn’t a definitive ‘correct answer’. There was also a lot of discussion about whether they could leave out certain words and whether what was left made sense and/or was grammatically correct. And, once again, the students were doing all of the work!

Stage 5
From the students, I elicited the wh questions (who, where, when, why, what, how). I then asked them to choose one of the headlines they had written and pass it onto another group. This group then had to write wh- questions relating to the headline and the picture. They came up with the following suggestions:



Electricity in China
What is the man doing?
Who told him to do it?
When did he start doing this?
Why is he doing this job?
Where is the electricity pylon?
How long has he been doing the job?






Alpine sheep in Switzerland
Who do the sheep belong to?
Where are they going?
When did they leave?
Why are they grazing up a mountain?
What are they doing?
How will they get home?



The students then swapped both headlines and questions. Their homework was to write a short paragraph about the picture making sure that they answered all the questions. So the students had prepared their own homework!
Follow-up: tomorrow’s class
I will ask the students to compare stories. They will have a minute or two to read over what they have written. I will then ask them to tell a partner (who has written a story based on the same headline) their story and find the main differences between their stories.

As I said right at the beginning of this blog, I believe that my students should do most of the work in class. If I look back at this particular class, I had simply taken pictures and captions from the BBC website. During the class, my students participated in discussions, used dictionaries, explained the meaning of new language to each other, wrote sentences, made headlines, and wrote questions. For homework they would write a story. They had also touched on all 4 skills as well as working on grammar and vocabulary. All with very little input from me!

I’d be very interested to hear what other teachers think about this approach to teaching and whether it would work in your classroom. Please comment!

BBC Day in Pictures page 1









Wednesday 23 July 2014

To Blog or not to Blog!

Hello! We are currently running a 2 week Effective Use of Technology in Teaching course here at Anglolang and have been discussing blogs. 
  • What is a blog?
  • Have you ever read a blog?
  • Have you ever contributed to or kept a blog?
    • Is it something you could use with your students?
    • How time consuming is it going to be?
    • Who'll be able to see my / the students' posts?

    I have created this post so that the course participants can see what a living and breathing (!!) blog looks like and provide them (and you!) with the opportunity to contribute. 

    So, feel free ... what are your thoughts / experiences of life in the blogosphere? All contributions, positive or otherwise, are welcomed :)

    Thursday 12 June 2014

    A Screencast!

    This week Dan explains an activity that you can (hopefully!) use with your students.


    Your questions and comments are always welcome :) 

    Monday 2 June 2014

    Facing The Summer

    This blog has two distinct parts – firstly, how the busy UK summer period will affect me as a manager and then, secondly, thinking about different activities I have found useful as a teacher. Starting with the manager bit….

    Life is about to get complicated! Here at Anglolang we are heading towards what will be a very busy summer period, with groups arriving from all over Europe and beyond, with a planned stay of anything from 1 week to 11 months! It will be my first summer as Academic Director in the UK and I am not sure what to expect, although I do know it will be somewhat different to my previous DoS experience in Madrid. This lead me to consider what I do expect and what the differences will be.

    In the UK, English teaching is a lot more seasonal than it is in Europe. The vast majority of students tend to come to the UK during their holidays. In Spain, students go to class during their lunchtime or in the evening after their day’s work. However, they generally continue their studies for a nine or ten month period and then take a holiday during their holiday time! These differences lead to different learning expectations and different motivations.

     July and August are going to be very busy for us (and therefore for me!). There will be hundreds of students and a hugely increased number of teachers. There will be more classes, more social activities and the need for higher precision planning. I am expecting a summer which will be similar to the Septembers I used to spend in Madrid planning for the next academic year.

    I have a long list of things to think about which includes, in no particular order (although the last point probably wins!):

    ü  How to make sure that there are enough teachers who are qualified to teach the different groups/students we have (teenagers, teachers, business people, long term exam students, short term ‘holiday’ students, students wanting private classes, students wanting group classes)

    ü  How to make sure that I am available to deal with the ‘day-to-day’: to talk to students, talk to teachers,  answer questions, provide exam support and generally be ‘visible’, given that we will have so many more students and teachers in the building

    ü  How to not get bogged down with the day-to-day but to still have space in my head to plan, cogitate and keep up with the world of EFL.

    ü  How to carry on blogging while doing all of the above!

    ü  And, on a personal (and very important) level, how to get home with the necessary enthusiasm for 3 very small children who will be desperate to tell me what they have been doing during their holidays.

    It definitely sounds like September in Madrid, with the added complication that the first time is always the most difficult. There are lots of unknowns or things that just don’t occur to you until you have done it once already! Wish me luck!

    Now to part 2….
    Many teachers reading this blog will be teaching on summer courses, be it on month-long intensive or two-week holiday stints, be it in an academy, a university or on a summer camp. Below I have included a selection of activities that I have used during the summer months (and indeed all-year-round as well). I hope they are useful.

    1.   Mnemonics
    Get students to write poems using the letters of a word. The word Summer, for example, might produce a poem like this:


    Sunny days
    Under a beach umbrella.
    My family
    Madrid in the sun
    Eating ice cream
    Reading my favourite book


    You could give the students a number of different words to choose from (beach, holiday, going away etc). You could also change the rules so that the different lines of the poem didn’t have to BEGIN with the letters in the original word but simply CONTAIN these letters. For example:
               

              Sunny Days]
    Sitting under my umbrella etc



    1. Adapt established games
    The Price is Right is a show which, I think, exists in most countries. Contestants have to guess the price of various items they are shown in order to gain prizes. Why not adapt the idea to your classroom? So, if you are teaching international students in the UK, you can ask them to guess the price of various ‘local’ items (10 bananas from the local supermarket, a 3 course meal in the nearest pub). If the students are studying in their own country, how about the cost of a return flight to London/Edinburgh/Sydney etc or a day for a family of 4 to a well-known UK theme park? Teachers can easily find the price information online. Students can then research the cost of other items/packages, write descriptions and ask their classmates to guess the correct price.

    Other popular games can be adapted in the same way:
    Guess Who
     If you don’t have the original game, you just need 10 – 15 photographs of faces. You can easily get these from the internet. Students ask ‘Is it a man/woman?’ ’Has he got blue eyes/long hair?’etc in order to guess who you are thinking of. You could put a limit on the number of questions to make things more competitive.

    Trivial Pursuit – Get students to write their own questions in teams before playing.

    Cluedo
    In this game, students have to work out who the murderer is, where the murder was committed and with what.

    You need 18 cards in total (6 cards per category). Ask the students for suggestions and write one suggestion on each card (so the murderer might be the teacher, the doctor etc; the place might be the garden, the living room, the supermarket etc; the weapon might be a knife, a gun, a bowl, an icicle etc). 

    Students should note down all the suggestions in their notebook so that they can cross out possibilities during the game.

    Randomly choose one word from each category and put them into a sealed envelope. This is your ‘solution’.

    Divide the remaining cards between the students. If you don’t have a board, the first student could simply make an accusation: ‘I suggest it was the teacher in the garden with the icicle’. If the person on the student’s left, has one of these cards, (s)he shows it to the student who crosses it off the list of possibilities. If not, play moves around to the next student on the left until a card has been shown.  Then the next student makes their accusation.

    Play continues until someone has worked out the solution in the sealed envelope.

    3.   A bag of stuff
    This is an old favourite of mine. Basically, you need a bag (non see-through) into which you put a selection of random items. Students have 30 seconds to feel the bag and guess what is in it!

    This is a great activity for reviewing adjectives (It is big/small/round/long), materials (it is made of plastic/metal/wool) and, for higher levels, modal verbs (it could/might/may/must/can’t be a ..). Good fun!

    4.    Fold-over stories
    I’m sure everyone is familiar with these stories – I love them because they include all the skills and can also focus on language practice.

    Firstly, brainstorm with students the typical components of a horror story (although you could use any kind of story): people (vampires, witches) places (haunted house, maze), weapons (axes, knives) & sounds (creaky door, footsteps).

    Next, give them the first line of their story (which the students write at the top of a blank piece of paper): It was a dark and stormy night. The student writes the next line, folds over the first line and passes the paper to the student on their left. Students continue the story, adding the next line and folding over the paper to hide the previous line, until they receive the paper they started with.

    In small groups (3 or 4 students), the students read all the stories they have and choose the best story (together). They now improve it – make it more logical, work on linking the ideas/making the plot better, add more description, correct any grammar mistakes. Once they have done this, they think about how they could adapt it for a radio play: what sound effects they would need, what kind of voice they would use, how to make it sound ‘scary’. Students could then record the story using their mobile phones.

    5.   Project work
    Students could plan a 4-day tour around their town/city (or round the area of the UK that they are studying in). You could give the students different categories (places to visit, things to eat/drink), don’t forget to.. etc) that they could research on the internet/ by interviewing people. They would then choose their method of presentation, which could range from classroom posters to an information booklet to a class magazine to a video (made using their phones) to a presentation.

    You could also ask students to take photos using their mobile phone – 10 activities to do in the town/city on a rainy day, 10 typical things local people eat, 1 beautiful place, 10 things you need to pack etc. This could be competitive if you divide the students into groups. It would also help with vocabulary development.

    Those are some of the activities I have used over the summer (and in fact throughout the year as well!). I hope you find them useful.  It would be great to hear of other activities that people have enjoyed using.

    Wednesday 21 May 2014

    Listening Post

    Listening to English comes in many shapes and sizes for our learners: a teacher explaining an activity, a student listening to a guide on an excursion, watching a DVD or doing a test are just a few examples.

    In this post, I’d like to focus on listening in the classic EFL sense as in an audio excerpt played in the classroom where the students have to listen and complete some kind of task.

    There are various factors to consider when selecting a listening for a particular class, and some rules of thumb that I imagine most teachers usually apply.
    Things to take into account include;
    •    The length of the excerpt
    •    The clarity of the excerpt
    •    The speed of the delivery of the speakers
    •    The subject matter
    •    The type of communication (monologue / dialogue, etc.)
    •    The strength of the accents
    •    The nationality of the learners
    •    The language level of the speakers

    If we are using a coursebook then a lot of these factors have been decided for us i.e. low level books will have shorter, slower passages with the opposite being true of material from higher level equivalents.

    It is only when we step away from our coursebooks and seek to source authentic material that more input is required from us as teachers.

    The inexorable rise of YouTube provides a plethora of authentic listening material which can be both contemporary and fascinating and therefore extremely motivating for our learners. Hooray!

    At the same time this material has, of course, not been edited for use in the language classroom. Clips that we would like to show to our students may be too long, be unintelligible, have long periods where nothing is said or indeed, no dialogue at all.

    Upon finding a clip that contains too much information, I have a remedy that has so far proven successful. An example of this is this beautifully produced biography of Charles Dickens. My classes on the whole enjoy dipping their toes into literary waters and I knew this clip would be a perfect introduction to the life of one of England's finest writers. However, to expect a student to annotate the whole clip would be a big ask, while, at the same time, to miss any of it out would make the story of his life incoherent. 

    So ...

    I divided the class into groups of 4 and gave each of them a worksheet that focused on a single section of the clip. So student A focused on the first 40 seconds only, student B on the next 40 and so on. I informed the groups that they would be listening twice, after which they would reconstruct the story verbally at their tables. In doing this, I applied a certain amount of unspoken pressure on the students to perform, as all of them were dependent on one another for producing the complete story. I put the times the students had to listen to on each worksheet as well as the first and last words of their particular section. 

    By tackling the listening like this students are also encouraged to help one another and, during the oral feedback, flesh out the details that one of their classmates may not have been too clear about. It also, of course, transforms a listening activity into an activity involving the 4 skills; listening, reading, writing and speaking. It’s a simple solution that I’ve used on numerous occasions when faced with a video I want to use that is too long or contains too much information. Do you do this? Are there any other workarounds to this problem that you know of?

    Worksheet for Student A, with times and first and last words of the passage
    If the pace of delivery is too fast, there is now the ability to slow the speed of the clip down on YouTube. Play the clip, click on the settings cog and then select either 0.5 or 0.25 from the Speed drop down bar. Obviously, slowing down the speed of the speech can make the clip sound rather weird, but it is something you may wish to try.


    Slowing it down

    As a footnote, I believe that there are times when we just need to relax and enjoy the classroom experience. After a period of time spent grappling with some of the more prickly aspects of English grammar (articles spring to mind!) it can be beneficial to allow the students to unwind with something less taxing. YouTube can be perfect for this, too. A YouTube clip that provides students with food for thought may not be particularly beneficial to them as language learners. It may not be beneficial to them as language learner at all, but, by providing them with a chance to relax for a few minutes and enjoy being in the classroom, certainly can’t do any harm. Indeed, by fostering a positive classroom atmosphere, learners who are generally reticent about academic life may come to look forward to learning (I did say may!). An example of a clip like this would be Where The Hell is Matt? or a relaxing music video information / karaoke sing-along worksheet. These kind of clips often produce a lot of classroom discussion, could lead on to further activities and leave our students with smiles on their faces.


    Look! Matt is in Japan!



    I'd love to hear about how you adapt YouTube videos (alternative sources of free video material are available - Videojug and Vimeo, to name just two!) to suit the needs of your learners. Any nifty ideas out there?