Student-Generated Comprehension Questions

Paul Emmerson, the TEFL writer / trainer has an excellent section on his website with tips on using authentic texts in class which involve zero preparation.

I’d been looking for ways to make work incorporating authentic reading and listening texts purposeful and fun without depending too heavily on worksheets (last thing my production workers want either before or after their 9-hour shift is a worksheet; and part of the ongoing “unplugging” of my teaching!) and was delighted to find Paul’s ideas. I’d like to add to Paul’s ideas with a couple of my own.

Image-based Text Summaries.
Show students a collection of photos related to the article / report that you’re going to use (a lot of online newspapers have news galleries that you can use – see the Guardian ones, for example). Instruct students to write down a few words /phrases that come to mind with each picture. Get students to pool their ideas and write a 2-or-3-sentence summary of what they expect to see / hear in the story. When students are done, give them the text to check their ideas. They can then amend or add to their summaries.

Key Info Prediction Task
Activate students’ prior knowledge and topic knowledge by looking at the headline and photo of a news article and pre-teach any necessary vocabulary. Then, write some of the key details from the text on the board and have students try to guess what the details refer to – students can discuss their predictions pyramid style and come up with a final list. Then, give out the text and get students to check their answers.

Jumbled Articles
Find two different news articles and cut them up into sections which each contain 2 or 3 sentences. Give each pair of students the two jumbled stories and have them separate and order the texts. Once they have finished (and you have checked that the texts are in the right order) give one of the complete texts to one of the pair, and the other complete text to the other partner (i.e. text 1 to student A, and text 2 to student B) and have them write 3 or 4 comprehension questions based on their text. Finally, have students exchange texts and questions and get the students to answer each other’s questions about the text.

Typical Texts
With texts that tend to have a fairly predictable structure, such as film reviews or job ads, have students write questions that they expect the text to answer, then give out the text and have students answer their own questions (i.e. What happens in the film? Who stars in the film? What’s the salary? What are the main job responsibilities?) Here’s a sample text that you could use for this:

Would love to hear more ideas from you…

Organising Class Material with Evernote – ELT Library January Blog Challenge

I’d been thinking about writing a post on Evernote and a couple of other web tools that I’ve been using lately when I came across the ESL Library January blog challenge, which is about how teachers use bookmarking tools. So, here’s short post on how I’ve been using Evernote to organise content for some classes that I’m currently teaching. You can also see a screencast that I made using Evernote here.

Evernote allows you to create Notebooks for storing information that you find online. When you come across something interesting, you can clip it to Evernote. The easiest way to do this is by clicking the Evernote icon in your tool bar. Here’s what Evernote looks like (Click on the image to see a larger version):

What I really like about it though, is that in addition to web pages, I can also store other kinds of notes. Notes can be added as text, photos, or voice recordings and they can sit along side the web pages that have been clipped. In practical, classroom teaching terms, I can have a clipping of a news report that I want my students to watch, a clipping of a picture gallery related to the report, and next to them both, the corresponding worksheet that I will use in class (which I had previously typed up in Evernote!). I might also have a document with vocabulary that has come up in class there too which I can easily access and add to. All those things together in the same folder for easy retrieval!

Here’s one of the worksheets that I mentioned:

I can also share these via email, Twitter etc. This is handy for sharing worksheets, for example, with students.

The desktop version of Evernote means that I can see my clippings when I’m off-line, while the Android Evernote app allows me to take photos, record voice notes or type in notes on my phone and save them directly into the corresponding Evernote folder. Here’s an Evernote Snapshot of (not the neatest!) board work (to be used in planning the next class), taken via the Evernote app on my phone:

Of course, Evernote is completely searchable and searches will even recognise text in photos!

There are also some other Evernote related products that, from a teacher’s point of view, are really nice. One in particular is the Clearly extension. This changes any webpage into a text-only version, getting rid of menus, ads and other stuff that you might not want your students to look at. It also makes them easy to print out or copy and paste. Here’s a comparison of a news article from the BBC before and after the application of Clearly:

So there you go, that’s Evernote, which, so far, has been pretty useful.

Adaptable, Fun, Student-Centered? Too True, No Lie

Recently, I mentioned reading some great posts on Dogme and materials-light teaching (for Dogme teaching in a nutshell, see Oli Beddal’s post, here). While reading, one comment caught my attention – a comment in which a teacher talked about how he frequently uses variations of the game, 2 Truths and 1 Lie, in class, not only because it is materials-light but also (and more importantly) because it always goes down well with his students, and because it can be adapted for just about any language area.

“Two Truths and One Lie”, I thought. “I haven’t used that for a while!” And my mind wandered back to the early days of my teaching career. It’s a learning activity that I associate with the the period immediately after passing my CertTESOL. Part of the newly qualified teacher’s classroom survival kit.

But why? If it’s communicative, fun, adaptable, why did I stop taking advantage it?

With no good answer to my question, I decided to put Two Truths and One Lie’s adaptability to the test and put it to use in class last week.

My Challenge
I currently teach a number of blended courses at a large international company. Learners spend 2 hours working through a unit of Tell Me More – commercially available language learning software, and my colleagues and I are required to design and deliver the face-to-face element – two-and-a-half hours of consolidation work and productive skills development based on the online material.

Last week, the language areas that my group of B2/C1 level learners worked on on-line were lexis related to airports and, teacher’s favorite, reported speech. I challenged myself to work 2 Truths and One Lie into the lesson.

You can download my lesson notes and handouts by clicking the following link, Reported Speech 2 Truths 1 Lie

The Lesson Sequence
Rather than worry too much about tense change and “back shift”, I targeted reporting verbs, in order to expand the range of my learners’ vocabulary. I prepared a dialogue script – two friends discussing a recent travel nightmare. I initially used the script as a gapfill exercise to check some of the airport lexis that had been presented online (testing language seen online is a course requirement). After some brief teacher-centered, form-focused work on reporting and reporting verbs, I had learners use a number of reporting verbs to complete sentences about the conversation that they’d read in the previous stage. Learners then did some work analyzing the structures that follow the various reporting verbs before classifying the verbs as either “attitude” or “non-attitude” verbs (in line with the classification in Parrot).

Further consolidation work was provided by having learners listen to and take notes on a course book recording in which a couple discuss their honey-moon trip to Europe. Having compared notes, learners made reporting sentences based on the recording, using the verbs from the previous stages.

Two Truths and One Lie
I planned to use Two Truths and One Lie not only to provide fun speaking and listening practice but also as a vehicle for getting learners to use reported speech. I set up the activity, demonstrating with my own examples and having learners interrogate me. I then had them write their own sentences in order play the game before pairing them up and instruct them to start. I monitored discretely, taking notes and letting the activity run. Once the majority of pairs had finished, learners changed partners. I asked one learner to report back on the previous stage but pushed her to do so by using reporting verbs (i.e. “My partner claimed that…”,). I then instructed learners to report back on the previous stage to their new partners, using reporting verbs.

Reflection
The lesson was effective in the sense that learners it provided further practice of work that learners had seen online, integrated all 4 skills, and provided study and fun (and hopefully) memorable practice of a notoriously difficult grammar area. In the final stage, learners had to be prompted, in some cases, to use the reporting verbs, but then expecting spontaneous production of new language so quickly is probably a little over optimistic.

So, Two Truths and One Lie passed my first test – it was easily adapted to fit my class last week. And I will endeavor to put to use in a different class this week too. And leads me to my final question: Is good teaching (or a least a large part of it) simply about having a repertoire of highly adaptable, easy-to-set-set up, learner-centered activities?

Focus on patterns, not just exceptions

My advanced level students seemed surprised yesterday when I corrected their mispronunciation of the words figure and feature by referring to the pronunciation of bigger and teacher. Of course, negative transfer from the L1 means that Spanish speakers tend to pronounce words as they are written and thus pronounce the u in the final syllable of the two words mentioned above. Yet, the final syllable of words in English spelled er, re, or, our, ure, ar, tend to be pronounced in the same way – /ə(r)/.

It surprises me that this particular pronunciation pattern hadn’t been pointed out to my students’ before, as they worked their ways up to an advanced level.

Surely part of our jobs as language teachers is to work with, and exploit patterns and regularities (as well as the exceptions!) in English.

Another example of this kind of thing, with beginner level students, might be showing how regular English question patterns are – e.g. Can you..? / Do you..? Did you..? Are you..? and working with this pattern, rather than over-analyzing conjugations and subject and auxiliary inversion.

It would nice to hear other patterns that you think English teachers should exploit!

In The Spirit of Dogme: 4, 3, 2 Presentations and Other Gems

Recently I’ve enjoyed reading various blogs / blog posts on putting Dogme or materials light teaching into practice in the ELT classroom. See the excellent An Experiment with Dogme, ELT Reflections, and Language Moments, for example.

As Thornbury writes in his A to Z blog, Dogme is all about “teaching that focuses on emergent language.” What this means is, rather than walking into the classroom with a pile handouts and predetermined set of activities “to do”, or language areas “to cover”, we work with the language the naturally results from classroom talk.

Spurred on by the excellent blogs and posts that I mention above, here are 3 staples of my classroom teaching over the years that seem to fit in with the spirit of a Dogme approach to ELT.

N.B. I do not claim to have invented these activities, they all come from, or are adapted from, published teaching resources.

4, 3, 2 Presentations
Basically, students prepare a 3 minute talk on a topic of their choice. In the first round they give their talks in four minutes to each other. Students then change partners and give their talks in three minutes to their new partner. In the final round, students switch partners again and repeat their presentation, but this time in just two minutes. The idea of all this being, of course, that it boosts fluency and automaticity as students get the chance to repeat their talks.

Variations / adaptations are infinite – students can be given specific lexis / chunks to use in their talks, and can be asked to tick of lexis / chunks as they hear them. A really fun one that was suggested to me the other day by my colleague Mike Rowley for higher levels, is to have specific pieces of languages to be used but also to have the listener interrupt and try to stop the speaker getting his or her message out.

15 Minutes of Today
This is nice for intermediate + learners and above. Each student thinks of a specific 15 minute period of their day and then writes down 20 things that they did during those 15 minutes. The teacher helps out here pushing students to break activities such as making a cup of coffee or checking email down into its individual actions (“I filled the kettle”, “I took a spoon form the drawer”, for example). Once students have their list of 20 activities, they read six of them randomly to their partner. Based on those six, the partner has to guess another six actions / processes from their partner’s list (e.g. “Did you boil some water?”). In a business English context, this work really well as generates a need for quite specific lexis for processes and work tasks.

Collaborative Emails Error Correction Task
This small group writing task works really well with classes of 8 to 16 business English students and in classrooms where there is a large board. You start by asking groups to think of a work problem that they can all identify with (for example, server problems, or low staffing levels) and then ask to state specifically what the problem is and who they would address this problem to. The teacher then divides the board into sections according to how many groups there are. Groups are then given time to plan and write their emails on their section of the board. Once they are done, the other groups are invited to come make any changes that they feel appropriate to the other group’s emails. This correction stage typically provokes a lot of discussion and generates a lot of language work.

Teaching Resources
Here are some resources that have helped me teach “materials light” over the years: Mario Rinvolucri’s Grammar Games and More Grammar Games is a must for so many imaginative classroom activities; Friederike Klippel’s Keep Talking has a load of good ideas; as does, of course, Thornbury’s How to Teach Speaking. And last but not least, the Humanising Language Teaching online magazine, which, while not the most user friendly website, is well worth exploring.

Blended Learning – The Best or Worst of Both Worlds?

At a talk /workshop on blended learning in Mexico City recently, Pete Sharma referred to some research which claims that learning outcomes on blended courses are superior to those on either 100% face-to-face or 100% online courses. The piece of research (which is actually an analysis of existing research), from the US Department of Education, is here.

The report states the following:

The corpus of 50 effect sizes extracted from 45 studies meeting these criteria was sufficient to
demonstrate that in recent applications, online learning has been modestly more effective, on
average, than the traditional face-to-face instruction with which it has been compared. It should
be noted, however, that this overall effect can be attributed to the advantage of blended learning
approaches over instruction conducted entirely face-to-face. Of the 11 individual studies with
significant effects favoring the online condition, 9 used a blended learning approach.

The authors speculate that the reason for these findings might be:

additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for
collaboration, that has proven effective

There’s also loads of other research available online that apparently backs this up. To be honest though, my experiences with teaching on blended courses in EFL have been mixed. What about you? I’d love to hear any comments on teachers / learners experiences of blended learning.

Here’s what I’d like to know:

In your experience
…are learners on blended courses more highly motivated?
…what new challenges do teaching blended courses present for learners and teachers?
…are learners really taking advantage of the additional flexibility of blended courses?
…when it comes to designing and planning classes, are there any particularly good models to use?
…what can teachers do to make the blended experience more engaging / productive / effective?

Teaching with Technology

I made 3 very short screencasts about 3 online tools that you could work with in the classroom. The first one is the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This is searchable database of thousands of texts which gives useful info about word frequency and collocation patterns. Watch the video here:

The second screencast is about the website GoAnimate. Here you can make cool looking text-to-video animations. Watch the screencast here.

The third online tool has been around for a while but it’s still really great and fun. Animoto allows you (and your students) to make eye-catching slideshows with audio. Watch the video here.

I hope these are useful.

Mark

Raw TEFL

A few days ago, I was reading here about how Kanye West has started using Twitter so that he can connect with his fans directly (or, in his words “raw”), without having to go through his manager, publicists, record company etc. Many celebrities have been doing this for some time in order to stay in touch with fans but this change in the way we communicate is by no means restricted to pop stars, professional athletes and Hollywood actors.

Indeed, one of the greatest things that has happened in recent years in TEFL (and in many other fields, I’m sure) is that some of the academics, experts, authors that we used to only be able to read or read about in methodology books (and occasionally see at conferences and workshops if we were lucky) are actively tweeting and blogging and interacting directly with their readers. The Teacher Trainer Center (where I work) reading list includes books by Scott Thornbury, Jeremy Harmer and Jim Scrivener – they are all on Twitter, they all publish blog posts, and they participate in on-line discussions. Thornbury’s blog, which is an extension of his 2006 book An A to Z of ELT, in particular, is always interesting and always generates a lot of discussion from other ELT professionals. Take a look at this post on phrasal verbs, for example.

In addition to these 3 authors, there are countless other teaching professionals worth reading on the web – here are just a few that you might find of interest:

Coursebook writer / teacher Jason Renshaw’s blog

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

TEFLTASTIC

Nik’s Learning Technology Blog

Kubbu – a fantastic free e-learning tool

I ran a workshop at MEXTESOL 2009 titled (not by me, in my absence, and without my knowing) Continuous Assessment and Technology.

My objective was to share some free, user friendly internet tools that I have been using with my students and to show how teachers might be able to use them as an additional way of keeping track of learner progress.

The tool that seemed to impress most was Kubbu – a free e-learning tool that I heard for through Larry Ferlazzo’s blog.

5 different activity types to choose from!

If you haven’t used Kubbu yet, it’s great for designing simple quizzes, matching games and crosswords which can be either post on a class website or blog or sent directly to learning email accounts.

There are 5 different activity types to choose from. Here’s a matching game:

A rather cool matching game

Add your students' contact info and mail exercises and games straight to them

What I really like to too is that everything can be easily printed and used in class – the crossword generator is particularly useful in that crossword grids are automatically generated in a matter of seconds (anyone who has ever tried to write a crossword using word processing software will appreciate this function!).

Kubbu also makes it easy to track learner progress but providing statistical breakdowns of student performance – you can see, for example, how many times a student has done an activity, how long it took them and what they scored.

Well done Guillermo!

MEXTESOL: A Prestigious Academic Event

This picture pretty much sums up my MEXTESOL.

Me and the Longman monkey at MEXTESOL