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

2. 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.

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!

Paperback Writer Worksheet!

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?

A Brief History of EFL Audio Equipment!

I began teaching English as a Foreign Language in the mid 90s and at that time listening activities were all about cassettes. (I'm not sure what preceded cassettes? 78s?) The first problem with cassettes, or tapes, was the machines that played them.

They looked something like this and came with two volume levels; a) so quiet nobody could hear it or b) so tinny and distorted that the whole machine vibrated and the audio sounded like somebody talking through a comb and paper.
They were also extremely temperamental. The player might randomly decide to jam closed, leaving the cassette marooned behind the smoked perspex, useless. This would ultimately lead to the cover being snapped off, giving the player a kind of stripped back, urban look. 


There was also a one in ten chance that the machine would chew and/or eat the tape and result in the dreaded ... tape mangle.

There was a nifty solution to this dilemma of course ... a good old fashioned pencil. 25 million twists later and voila! the tape is fixed. Crinkly, but fixed.

Next came the problem of queueing the tape up. Endless fun spent fast forwarding and rewinding the tape in a desperate bid to track down the starting point of the listening you needed. Trying to get into the mind of whoever it was who did the tape-to-tape in an effort to understand how Unit 5 appeared to come before Unit 4, while Unit 6 (the one you needed) didn't seem to be there at all. Unless it was on the other side. And all of this as the clock was inexorably ticking towards lesson time. Aaah, what sweet panic!

If you were lucky, your tape player may have had a counter on it so (if you could work out how to use it) you could queue it up more effectively. You may also have been able to access the master tape (rather than a copy of a copy of a copy) and so there was a chance that the quality might have been passable. And perhaps your boss even invested in a machine capable of filling the whole room with sound ...

Boom Box!

However, if your school was anything like mine then the chances of all of these factors coinciding was on a par with spotting Haley's Comet. 

Next, and from outer space, came CDs. Bright and shiny they promised a new beginning, devoid of background hiss. But, in the language classroom at least, they usually failed to live up to the hype.

The first problem was that there was often nothing to play CDs on. Tapes had existed for decades and no school could afford a whole new fleet of CD players.  So the older alternative was often favoured simply because it was what we were used to. CDs gathered dust. In addition, some of the books we exercises and units we treasure(d) were in books long out of print and with no prospect of ever being digitised. The answer lay in the CD / cassette / radio hybrid becoming the norm. 

Another drawback of CDs was that, if anything, they were even harder to queue up than tapes. If you wanted a separate track then that's fine, but if you needed to find a certain point in a track or to go back just a few seconds to listen again, fine motor skills were required. Pressing the button down long enough for it to register but briefly enough to prevent it from leaping too far forward or back was a frustrating art. 

I'm using the past tense here because we've moved on from the hi-fi era here at Anglolang. We spent a long time converting old cherished tapes to CDs and then ripping these CDs to mp3 files. These are now all stored on a central server that can be accessed from any of our classrooms. So no more mangled tapes. And no more cracked CDs. Marvellous!

It would be great to hear about your classroom experiences with audio equipment, or to find out how far down the technology road your school has travelled? Anyone?!

Teaching Mixed Level Groups

Three students, beginner level – an easy class? 
In many ways, it is. I have plenty of time to give the students individual attention, they are making good progress (and have a good sense of their progress) and the lesson content is fun (lots of personalisation, spelling games, looking at numbers, talking about families). However, one of the students is a complete beginner (no numbers, letters or any of the classroom language that I need to teach the class in English). The other two are false beginners (and have all of the above).  I also don’t speak Arabic, the mother tongue of two of the students and so have no linguistic tools of my own to help. 

So, how did I manage my class of false beginner & real beginners? 

First of all, I established routines and now start every class with ‘What’s the date?’, ‘What time is it?’ and ‘What did you do at the weekend / yesterday?’ Yes, I am aware that we haven’t ‘reached’ the past tense or the time yet in the normal sequence of things but it is natural for me to ask all my students about their weekends / the day before and it is natural for them to want to share this information with me / other students. We treat this language as vocabulary and, while the false beginners are now able to give quite detailed information (I went to.. / I saw… / I ate… / I liked…), my complete beginner is still able to answer the question with a simple ‘I went to’.

Similarly, to end the class, I ask the students what they are going to do this evening / this weekend as well as tell them what their homework is. Slowly but surely, they are all building up a bank of useful expressions and, hopefully, when we come across ‘going to’ (as well as the past tense and the time) as a structure to be taught), the students will make the connection and feel more comfortable with the language. 

At Anglolang, we have a negotiated syllabus which lends itself well to this way of teaching.


Secondly, we did a basic matching exercise with classroom language followed by a worksheet in order to help the students communicate what they needed from me / each other in the classroom. Once again, by treating the language as vocabulary and encouraging the students to use the complete expression just expands their bank of language and helps with general communication despite the mixed levels.


Thirdly, we build on grammatical structures with differentiated vocabulary. For example, we looked at the structure ‘there is / are’ as an extension of classroom language. The students wanted to know how to say different items in the classroom (stapler / hole punch / folder / pencil case) and so we worked on producing the complete sentence - ‘there is a hole punch’. While the complete beginner student was working on this language (using a dictionary to check meaning, recording the vocabulary, writing complete sentences), the stronger students had moved onto the house (in the living room, there is a sofa / rug / an armchair). I simply provided the sentence frame ‘In the __________, there is a(n) ___________ ‘ 

Fourthly, we personalised a lot of the different activities: looking at maps (where are you from? Where is that? Can you show me?), asking questions about the students’ countries and about the UK. Hopefully, the students (and I) have learnt something about each other’s culture. I, for example, knew nothing about Riad and, while I knew it was hot, I didn't know that the temperature reaches 55 degrees in August!

Finally, I give the students time to work individually and to assimilate the information at their own speed. Four hours is a long time to be in class so I also try to incorporate ‘chat’ time with simple questions: ‘Is England different to Saudi Arabia / Italy?’, ‘How many brothers and sisters have you got?’ The answers may not be grammatically perfect but we do manage to understand each other and the students enjoy being able to talk about ‘real’ things. 

While I have been referring to a beginners’ class, I do feel that this blog could apply to any group of mixed ability students. My students are now working together in the same class and we have been able to take away the additional classroom support we initially offered the absolute beginner. Things are getting better. 

Do you have any other suggestions for dealing with mixed ability classes?

Dan's Favourite Warmer

As a follow up to my ‘throw the ball game’ blog entry, I thought I’d say a few words about my favourite warmer. It’s called (drum roll, please ...) ‘have a chat’.

It’s where I chat. With the students.

You could consider that this isn’t really an activity at all as such but rather just an insignificant start of a lesson. I would beg to differ!

The classroom is often not a place where real English conversation often takes place. We ask our students to do role plays and practise conversations that mirror the outside world but are not actually ‘real’ when they are doing them. 

We create false environments (at the post office, in a job interview, in a meeting etc.) so our students can practise safely within the confines of the classroom in preparation for the outside world. The informal chat that we conduct at the start of a lesson, ‘How are you?’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘Is your leg better?!’ etc. is one of the few times that we engage in real conversation. This;

•          Improves student confidence
•          Shows that the teacher cares about the student as an individual
•          Provides an opportunity for the students to improve / brush up their small talk skills
•          Provides an opportunity for the teacher to identify, for example, pronunciation and grammar weaknesses
•          Allows time for late comers to arrive and get settled
•          Is fun!

The irony of this activity is that we often feel compelled to end  the chat and get on with the lesson. ‘I’m not teaching, we must start soon!’ But by cutting the informal conversation short (which by now may be involving more members of the group and becoming increasingly animated) we move away from real communication. 

We then spend the next ten minutes setting up a completely false speaking environment ‘Ok everyone, I want you to imagine that you’re at the airport and you’ve lost your boarding card’ that can be less personalised and potentially less motivating.

I do, of course fully appreciate the need for role plays in the classroom and consider them an integral part of the English language learning process. And I know the conversation won’t always flow and that we shouldn’t force it, but I also believe that time spent ‘chatting’ is not time wasted and that we shouldn’t rush to finish it.

N.B. Students may also potentially feel that chatting is a waste of time and not ‘real learning’ so it might be worth summarising what has taken place before moving on, e.g. ‘Thanks everyone, that’s a great start to the lesson. We’ve already had the chance to practise our speaking and listening skills together and made a note of a few new words too.’

Chat’s all folks! (sorry!)

Dan

Ice Breakers & the Defence of an Old Classic

We do a lot of teacher training here at Anglolang (mainly teachers from the EU on Erasmus+ programmes) and I often start my first methodology session with a look at ice-breakers. 

These activities, of course, help the students to relax and allow them to find out a little about one another by communicating in English. When we brainstorm what methods the teachers use, the most popular activity by far is the ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ (not the catchiest of titles, I know!!) activity. 

Just in case you teach on Mars (!!) and are not familiar with it, here’s a quick summary.

On day 1 of a new class, the teacher asks the students to stand up and form a circle. Desks and chairs may need to be shifted or the class could always temporarily decamp. The ball is then thrown and (sometimes!) caught between students. The language element involved is, of course, up to the teacher and will depend on the perceived level of the class, but it normally includes some form of basic personal information. For example;

The teacher says their name and throws the ball to Student A. Student A says, ‘Hello teacher, I'm Amy. Nice to meet you!’ and throws the ball to student B. Student B catches (!) the ball and says ‘Hi Amy. It’s nice to meet you. I'm Abdullah’. And so on.
The possibilities for communicating are endless and could involve students’ ages, favourite things … anything!

What a great activity! The students are up and out of their seats and communicating together right from the start. Throwing and catching is endless fun (Even President Obama likes it!) and the students will barely even notice that they are using English – perfect!

I think that as we gain more classroom experience and find out about different ice-breakers, classics such as the example above can end up being left on the shelf. We perhaps see them as boring and ‘old hat’ and prefer a new idea we have learned about. But it’s important to remember that the students probably haven’t done this activity before and we shouldn't drop it just because we’re bored of it! The ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ game is great – cheap, cheerful & perfect for getting the students working together in English right from the start, so why not give the old classic a go next time you have a new class.

‘My name is Dan and I'm a teacher – catch!’

p.s. Choose a soft ‘friendly’ ball as you don’t want students leaving their first class looking as though they've been involved in a rugby match!

Dan

What we hope this blog will be (and what we we hope it won't be!)

By starting this blog we aim to, in the first instance, increase Anglolang's online presence. We are also beginning a second Facebook page exclusively for teachers, a Google+ account, a YouTube channel and a school intranet. Wish us luck!

At the same time we hope that this Another Angle blog becomes a place where both native and non-native teachers of English as a foreign language can come to share ideas & activities, chat about life in the language classroom and (hopefully!) share a laugh or two along the way.

We don't imagine this blog will be overly theoretical, but more a reflection of life at the chalk face, teaching English to students from around the world and all that it entails. Should be fun! 

Dan

Hello & Welcome!

Hello & welcome to the Anglolang blog!

Andrea Sweeney is on the left, our Academic Director and Dan Methven, Head of Online Learning, is on the right. Hi!