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 :)

A Screencast!

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

Your questions and comments are always welcome :) 

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?

Getting ‘techy’

Following on from Dan’s ‘techy’ theme last week, I want to talk about my (often limited) approach to technology. As Philip, Head of the Executive Department at Hyland Language Centre, Madrid, will tell you, I am fairly (if not very) incompetent when things go wrong. After 7 years of comments such as ‘Philip, my mouse doesn’t work/is stuck’ or ‘My page has gone big/small/won’t print’, at least that is one part of his job that he no longer has to do! Dan now has to do this job, only now it’s usually ‘Dan, I can’t get the listening to work from the IWB’ or (more than once) ‘Dan, how do I get the video link onto the IWB?’

However, I AM interested in technology and where technology can take teachers. I have been lurking for a while (just looking at other people’s blogs, not commenting and not being brave enough to write my own). Now, I find myself contributing to this blog at Anglolang, which is interesting, challenging and, at times, even a bit scary!

It was Sandy Millin who (inadvertently) got me thinking about this particular post. I saw her interview

at Harrogate 2014 and was interested in her advice about blogging. Firstly, she said that you should write about what interests you and write a blog that you would be interested in reading. So true! The blogs I’ve enjoyed have a chatty style that I like and encourage me to reflect on my teaching without being too academic or difficult to follow. They are blogs I am happy to read on the bus / train home, not too taxing.

Keeping things simple!

Secondly, Sandy talked about staying simple and practical. Again, so true! Of the blogs I have written on this page, the most viewed (by a mile!) was one entitled Getting students to speak, which is the only one with a list of practical classroom activities.

Thirdly (and this is the one I am working on), hone your writing style. At times I think I have been too academic and, more often than not, I am not sure how a blog reads. I always ask Dan to read through what I have written and sometimes find that I haven’t expressed things in the way that I intended.

Starting and contributing to this blog has been interesting both in terms of having a forum on which to share ideas (and sometimes even to talk myself into or out of an idea which may not have been fully formed) and also in terms of the actual mechanics of setting up a blog (all very easy). I am an experienced teacher but this introduction to all things techy has been great for my own professional development.

Something else that Sandy talked about (and this

might have actually been on her blog. I didn’t write down the reference) was the importance of sharing and how her own blog had a huge number of hits after the British Council Teaching EnglishFacebook page shared it.

Anglolang’s  previous blog, which talked about IATEFL 2014 in Harrogate, received 100 times more hits than previous blogs because Sandy shared it on her blog (thank you!).  I think that this was the first time I had really understood the power of sharing and creating networks online. Something I would like to think more about.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of giving practical information in a blog so, in the interests of being practical, here are the sites that I have lurked on most frequently on over the years:

1.    Jamie Keddie -  http://lessonstream.org/ . This site, with its comprehensive lesson plans, has been a lifesaver during many a standby class! Looking forward to the new Videotelling site. http://jamiekeddie.com/project/videotelling/  

2.    Ceri Jones - http://cerij.wordpress.com/.  Ceri was my first DoS in Spain so this seemed like a good place to start. Thanks, Ceri, for lots of reflection in language most of us can understand!

3.     Ditto Sandy Millin. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/ whose reflections have helped me to understand the possibilities surrounding technology.

4.    Sadly now no longer updated is http://sixthings.net/ .  I liked this because there were only ever 6 things – some were useful things for my classroom but others were just 6 things that made me laugh or random facts that I found interesting.

5.    Russell Stannard’s site http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ which gives step-by-step training videos in various things technological.

I’m sure my thoughts will develop as I get further down the road of becoming more technological. I’d be really interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience / similar concerns.

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?!

Food for thought – IATEFL 2014

I was at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate almost 3 weeks’ ago now and I just wanted to share some of the ideas that came out of the conference, things that particularly struck me.

I was surprised that Michael Lewis’ book The Lexical Approach is now 20 years old. The idea of students learning vocabulary in context and becoming aware of fixed expressions in speech is still very much part of my teaching philosophy. Michael Hoey, in his plenary, talked about the importance of lexis, about how, if you store words as part of a combination (like black and white or get married to), being able to recall one part of this combination will help you recall the other. Language, as he said, is not about having grammatical frames into which we slot words but about having a bank of expressions into which we slot grammar.

However, I wonder if this idea has been translated into syllabi around the world. Many of the teachers who come on our teacher training courses complain of very fixed grammar-led syllabi, stating that they often ‘don’t have enough time for’ vocabulary or at least to look at vocabulary within the context of a text.

Michael Hoey also talked about the fact that there is no single language, just languages with a number of variables. Kathleen Graves, in her plenary the previous day, had shown a clip of a class in which the children were transferring phrases from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) into the standard English required for schooling. Therefore ‘he funny’ (accurate in  AAVE) was transferred to ‘he was funny’. Kathleen Graves talked about how AAVE is considered substandard – but is it? Or is it just a variety of English? And who decides what the standard is anyway?

This AAVE class was a perfect example of a teacher using their students as a resource and also of that teacher effectively preparing the students for a standardised test. Very inspiring.

Later in the day, I attended the Cambridge Signature Event about LOA (Learning Oriented Assessment) in which the message was about putting learning and learners back at the heart of assessment through individualised goals and purposeful language activities. LOA is a combination of formal exams and class-based tasks which are assessed and then provide the teacher with evidence of strengths and weaknesses which can then be fed into the next stage of the planning / learning process. Learners also give feedback on their own learning.

The idea here is that the end-of-course test is not the ‘be all and end all’, which seems logical to me. Assessment also provides future learning targets. However, as the speakers pointed out, LOA relies on the expertise of teachers (who are not necessarily assessment specialists) and also formalises a process which most teachers currently do intuitively (we all know who the stronger / less able students in our classes are). This will lead to a heavier workload in terms of paperwork.

Jane Spiro also raised an interesting point. She commented that what teachers believe is a good lesson might not correspond to what students believe. I think most teachers know this but it was good to think about it again. Jane also asked who should decide how students learn: the students or the teachers?  Here at Anglolang we have a negotiated syllabus, which means that the students have an important input into what goes on in the classroom. This is important: if students are engaged in their class, they will be more motivated to learn and participate.

This brings me back once again to Michael Hoey’s plenary. He talked about what students expect in a class and what the role of the teacher should be. The term ‘manager of learning opportunities’ is slightly long-winded but today’s teacher is not expected to know everything. They are supposed to facilitate learning.  For me, this also means making students aware of where they can go for more information or practice (self-study) and also helping them to develop better learning skills (learner training).

Michael Hoey also stated that ‘classrooms reflect the societies they come from’. Some cultures are less communicative than others and therefore some classrooms will also be less communicative. Food for thought. Especially when I am trying to get my xxx (substitute as appropriate) to be quiet and my xxxxx (again substitute!) to say anything at all!

Many of the sessions I attended were fairly theoretical so it was good to attend a couple of practical training sessions. Sandy Millin’s session focussing on how we can help students develop real-life listening skills and how we can help them ‘transition’ to real-life listening texts was excellent. I was reminded of Mark Hancock’s excellent website (and the word blender – have a look!) and the micro-dictations activity (in which the teacher reads one sentence at a time and asks the students to write it down). I was also encouraged to try different websites (www.elllo.org, where there is a HUGE range of listening material divided by topic, level and country; and www.ted.com, which I had heard of but have never used. There are a variety of talks on different topics. Some of them are fairly long so they would need to be adapted. Alternatively, students could listen to the talks at home.

Jamie Keddie’s workshop based around a sneezing baby panda video was also excellent. He was looking at using videos to tell stories, getting participants to guess what the story was about (and initially giving no indication that the video would be about pandas!) and then to predict what happened next before retelling. It was good to come away with some practical low preparation classroom material.

I really enjoyed the conference and it gave me a lot of things to think about. Do you have any thoughts about what I thought?(!)