Welcome to my ELT blog









I am an ESOL teacher and teacher trainer in the UK: all the tools I'm looking at here are easy to handle and have lots of learning potential inside and outside the classroom. I hope you find this too.



Sunday 12 February 2012

Phrasr

 This tool can be found on the Pimpampum website, home of bubblr and bookr and, like them, draws on the repository of flikr photos.  It is ridiculously easy to use: it offers to find photos to illustrate any phrase you care to type in.  It tries to find a match for each item in the phrase and if you don't think much of any of the matches, you are offered others or the option of a blank.  Once you are happy with the collection of pictures, you write a title for your row of pictures and e-mail it to someone.
 
At first glance this is a dodgy idea, but as long as you remember this is not attempting to be an elementary photo dictionary then your learners can use it to explore their understanding of the meanings of new words and phrases.  If they type in a vocabulary list of concrete nouns, they will be presented with a straightforward collection of pictures to choose from.  With more idiomatic phrases the pictures start to become  more idiosyncratic.  Used in this way it becomes more challenging to find the best (sometimes quite personal) fit between word and picture.  Students could work in pairs with their vocabulary lists compiling then comparing their illustrations.  Successful acquisition of vocabulary requires a lot of recycling like this, and the process of making a personal selection of pictures can only help to make it more memorable.        

I typed in a number of phrases to see what it would come up with.




  

However...

Some phrases and words will never trigger an acceptable match - the pictures draw from one repository.
YOu can't save the illustrated phrases: you can find them again in the website's public gallery or by e-mailing them.  


  http://www.pimpampum.net/en/content/phrasr

WebQuests

Webquests are task-based projects in which most of the input is sourced  from the internet. There are many free webquest banks on the internet or you can design one yourself using an on-line template.  Making your own webquest is technically straightforward because the templates found on websites like QuestGarden are user friendly and highly schematic.  There may be nothing stopping highly motivated students creating one themselves.  


There is much potential satisfaction and value for language learners in working through one of these internet projects.  If learners work collaboratively - and this may depend on the task design - there could be a lot of purposeful spoken interaction and motivational higher order level problem solving.  If the tasks are well staged and the links well chosen, learners will be able to engage with authentic texts without being overwhelmed by them.  

However...

Finding the perfect ready-made webquest may not be easy.  Many repositories are of very mixed quality; be careful with quests designed for a content rather than language learning context; some of the websites aren't being maintained and the links remain broken. Making your own may seem the perfect solution, because you know your students and their context.  However, this is not a quick solution and it's rather like designing a good test, if you want a really motivating one, it's more difficult than you think.   

 http://questgarden.com/  

Friday 10 February 2012

Listen a minute




This is another Sean Banfield site and, like his Breaking News English, you wonder how such a huge and well-designed bank of resources can be free.  As the title says, the listening texts are all short, though he must have forgotten about the one minute bit when he went on to develop all the gapped texts, word order, spelling and discussion tasks.  You print off the writing tasks (pdf) and download the listening file.  The listening titles cover a vast range of subjects and are arranged alphabetically, which makes them very user friendly.  He reads and writes the texts himself, so they all have a personal and slightly quirky spin - not your standard course book fare.  The printable format and the pair work speaking tasks mean they work for well for classrooms. However, there is also a nice, on-line interactive 'dictogloss' type activity with each recording which is very satisfying to do and would encourage students to do some intensive listening and language processing at home.   


However...
Being read by the same 'sympathetic' reader, these recordings don't pretend to be 'authentic' conversations: they don't challenge students with a variety of accents, situations and speakers or with natural speed. 
 They are all roughly the same kind of level too, so perhaps not challenging enough for advanced learners.  Still, we teachers can get too hung up on levels: the more exposure learners get to spoken English the better.  So, if they find his topics and 'voice' attractive enough to seek him out at home, they are away! 


http://www.listenaminute.com/

dvolver



dvolver is one of the easiest tools you could introduce to your students in the classroom.  It's a simple movie-making website which you don't have to register with or log on to.  You choose from a range of settings, select two characters and a (very) simple plot, some music, a title and then start dialogue building in the speech balloons. Once done, you need to e-mail it to someone if you want to see it again, or embed it in a blog or website.  The choices are not infinite and the dialogues quite short so I thought it would be ideal at the end of a lesson where your students are practising functional or situational language (asking for/giving directions, inviting/accepting, etc).  Students could have quite a lot of fun after oral work, choosing (suitable or unsuitable)characters and settings and then having a whole class film show.  Errors can be corrected and language polished up while students are working on the dialogues before publishing them.  If your students feel fairly confident using this tool they could compose a dialogue at home and e-mail it to you for homework.

So, it's great if you have younger learners with five minutes' concentration spans.  If they are working in pairs, they will be motivated to negotiate as they compose their movies. In addition, the issue of choosing the right language becomes much more important if there is a 'polished' product and a performance at the end of it. 

However...
The backgrounds, scenes, plot lines are limited and it would be nice if they kept expanding them.  Don't be tempted to overuse this tool.  To continue to be motivating it must used where it works best.   Finally, if you have everyone doing this in the classroom, the noise will drive you crackers once they have selected the background music.  Suggest the mute button, until the final performance.   

http://www.dvolver.com/

Thursday 2 February 2012

Videos

Of course, videos have been around for a long while in language teaching and likewise ideas for using them.  What is new is the quantity and range we can now access on the internet.  That is the plus.  The minus is that you need a lifetime to sift through it all and find the gems that will create brilliant and motivating speaking and listening activities.  I have done a bit of my own sifting, but I tend to look for people who are good at doing this for me.  However, this is one of choices - a Mr Bean favourite from Youtube.   

I do the usual things with it: students work in pairs, one with their back to the screen while their partner describes what they can see.  The only frustrating thing for the listener is that their partner generally breaks down giggling.  It's usually a good idea to pause and swap roles.  Beforehand, they brainstorm what you would take on a trip to ...Groups then have to agree on what they would need to get rid of if they could only take hand luggage.  'Silent' movies like Mr Bean are ideal for generating speaking and listening activities.  Alternatively, you turn the volume down. 



There are a few free gems to be found in the National Archive of Public Information films and the British Film Institute Digital Archive.  This screen shot is from a public service film, ie a government ad to educate people in the 1950s about pedestrian crossings and it's a hoot. You would brainstorm lots of street furniture vocabulary before watching it.  It would be a good one to get students to improvise or describe and also to pause and invite them to predict what happens next.  It has a voice-over that you could turn off at least to begin with. 


If you are looking for different ways of introducing functional language to beginner students, the British Council have some more traditional ELT videos: the 'How to...' series are quite entertaining and a bit hammed up.  To help your students to catch some of the detail give them cards with little chunks of the dialogue to listen out for.     



http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/

Once you start visiting elt blogs and websites many more (better) ideas emerge.  Visit elteachertrainer (see my blogroll) for some excellent ideas for using the National Geographic videos.
So, videos can bring a motivating multimodal dimension into the language classroom.  Listening is at its most naturalistic, including visual and situational clues, introducing varieties of English you may not meet in course books.  They can also be fun, though this depends on your video.  They don't have to be just for listening either, as you can see.

Finally, there are the videos your students make themselves. Below is an example of a project in which a group of women students decided they wanted their own voice in the campaign to get proper funding for ESOL in the UK. See what multimedia can empower your own students to do: you can imagine how much work, in English, (students and teachers) went into this clip.




However...
If you haven't planned something quite purposeful for your video lesson, it can be unfocused and de-motivating.  It takes some while to find the perfect clip for your purpose and it generally is needs to be very short.  Sometimes, your favourite videos somehow, don't have the same appeal to your students.