Week Three over so fast...all the sessions have had an impact on my teaching.

Week Three over so fast...all the sessions have had an impact on my teaching. I am more deliberate, and more aware of use of time, notice things - like I can get a bit lazy about planning -especially listening and speaking activities. ...I have included more speaking activities (conversation as the students like to call it). They are happy.
But I also noticed that there are things that I do that are found in the tips...and that is very validating.

I raised the question of PEDs (Personal Electronic Dictionaries) use in the chat and Penny asked me to repeat it here.

I think I mentioned that I do not allow my students to use their cell phones in class.

The first reason is selfish. It drives me crazy. I'm sure they are texting, looking at Instagram....not listening to me. I also do not let them use their phones IN CLASS DURING BREAK ( and I do not use mine!) And that's just because I think it is not good manners. I tell them my daughter met me for lunch. I took out my phone. "Mom, put your phone away", she said...

The second reason ( mire important) has to do with dictionary use and vocabulary retention. Somewhere I picked up the idea that vocabulary retention is not as great with the PEDs as with those huge unwieldy paper dictionaries I have (Oxford, CoBuild, Longmans)
I have seen research studies that said this ( but others that said it is the same). I'm going with the less retention until proven wrong. Penny - do you have any information or thoughts about this?

Third reason - There are students who believe they have to translate every word...and I am trying to get them to use other strategies...

Fourth reason - not all the learners have smartphones....

Looking forward to tomorrow.

I am posting the "letter display" This was the follow up after the Ontario Legislature field trip: "Write a letter to a friend..."( Most of them copied information from the brochures they took! No matter. It was review.) I was looking for personal letter format,and paragraph format. I corrected some errors and provided the yellow paper...The letters were still not "perfect" but I saw improvement in everyone so up they went so all can share. I am big on displaying students' work...I also put a copy of the corrected draft in the work sample folder/portfolio kept in the classroom to track progress....



Comments

  1. Penny UrNovember 25, 2017 at 8:49 PM

    Thanks very much for this, Claudie. I'm afraid I don't know about the dictionary research: it does sound plausible that looking at paper dictionaries is more impactful, but on the other hand it takes longer and involves heavy books rather than a small light hand-held device... so the bottom line ('which is better?') remains unclear. In any case, whether a new word is retained or not depends much more on what you do with it AFTER you've found out the meaning, rather than HOW you find out the meaning. So in principle, we want to get our students to access the correct meaning as quickly as possible (if it's in class, I'm in favor of the teacher giving the meaning rather than sending them to a dictionary, for this reason) and then get them to devote time to 'processing' the new item - writing it down with its translation, for example, using it in a real context, linking it with other words they already know, exchanging real-life experiences that involve it ... Have a look at the 'disappointed' slide in last week's presentation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Claudie GNovember 26, 2017 at 4:58 AM

    Penny Ur Yes, absolutely..vocabulary retention is more than looking at a word once...I teach a high level adult ESL class and mostly I will give the meaning when they ask "What means this word?" - another of those "fossilised" errors :) OR I will ask another student "what's this in Albanian Jugurta?" (No problem in exploiting L1!) Dictionary use - I see it also as extra "reading" practice - and modelling explaining, defining words...use judiciously..
    Of course you realise I was speaking tongue in cheek when I complained about "not listening to me". But device use in classroom IS a hot topic. I feel uncomfortable tweeting about the session during conference workshops (@thespreadingoak) because it seems so disrespectful. Online? - well, you can't see all the other things I am doing whilst following the session!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Julia BlinovaNovember 26, 2017 at 8:45 AM

    Claudie G Thank you for raising this point. I have never thought that using a digital dictionary is anything but beneficial. Both as a learner and a teacher I love the ease of accessing everything with just a few clicks. That's definitely something for me to think more about.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hannah McCullochDecember 2, 2017 at 9:42 AM

    The mobile/cell phone debate is growing. I won't get into it so much here, but I think there is a time and a place for its use in lessons, but we need to teach (young) people about phone etiquette more often these days because it is slipping away at an incredible rate! I respect your rules Claudie G but I think that banning the use of phones isn't necessarily the answer if we are to encourage autonomous learning and exploit ease of learning. I explicitly tell students when to use or not use their phones at various points of the lesson as required. They must put phones away in their bags. If not, they'll have them out on the table, which is terribly distracting for them and rude! As for lexis retention, I totally agree Penny Ur that it depends how you use it afterwards, and I read somewhere that writing things down connects it to the brain better. I know the notes I've made on these sessions have been more memorable than the printed out slides, so I'll have that!

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