Learning to Teach Better

A 2017 news quiz for back to school! http://leoxicon.blogspot.com/2017/12/news-quiz-2017.html

For anyone fascinated by languages! I'm currently reading his book, The Etymologicon and it's brilliant. http://blog.inkyfool.com/

You can check the common usage of words using Google Ngram and trace its history since the 1800s until 2008. I hope they continue it to count the last 10 years, as I am sure there have been some significant declines and increases. My students often say "persons", so I have used this as an example. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=persons&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpersons%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=persons&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share&direct_url=t1;,persons;,c0

Another website I have encouraged my students to use for writing practice is Write and Improve by Cambridge English. They choose a topic to write about - beginners, intermediate, advanced or Just for Fun, write their text then get instant feedback for how to improve it before submitting a final copy. There is also a section for IELTS. https://writeandimprove.com https://writeandimprove.com

For those of you teaching young learners and teens and you'd like to give your students some authentic writing and reading practice, we have used this digital pen pal website before. You can choose a course for your class to join then it matches them with other students from around the world who are similar in age and interests and can be as young as 8 and as old as 18. They then interact by responding to each other's comments and questions on the course. There is a great range of topics such as Fake News, Protecting the Planet, Robotics, Festivals and Cultures lasting from 1 to 6 weeks. One of our classes signed up to a course about Pakistan to tie in with Malala Yusafzai's book which they were going reading afterwards. https://www.penpalschools.com https://www.penpalschools.com

Business Result series offer interactive online resources where you can work with texts. One of the activities is called a TEXT BUILDER, wher you can read the text, take some of the words out and write the missing words in again.

One useful way to teach is to use dominoes for different grammar/vocabulary items. The one attached is for echo questions, but it could be done for prepositions (I thought ...... about this and I prepared..... for the project), question tags, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms etc. It could be made easily at home and I personally like to laminate and cut the ones I know I would be using more than few times.

Does anyone know of any good activities to practice the past simple? I'm teaching a Syrian refugee who has been here for a few years but I'm stumped for how to approach this because usually it's related to personal stories and experiences and we don't know each other well enough yet to broach his past. One activity book at school featured a speaking game with bomb and military tanker cards with past tense verbs and questions on it. I wish I was making this up! I'm shocked at how Eurocentric and downright inappropriate some books can be! He likes reading so maybe I can base it around the last book he read?

A couple of resources I mentioned in yesterday's session: Trello https://trello.com/ This can be used for writing projects, especially those where learners work on continuing or completing each others' stories. The teacher can see it being updated in real time. My students introduced me to it and I've used in in workshops and for collaborative tasks. draftback.com - http://draftback.com/ This enables you to 'playback' google documents - yours or anyone else's - to see the edits and revisions as they were made. It looks like a good tool if you want to see how your students develop their writing. https://trello.com/

Readers' Theatre Here's a great resource I stumbled across for Readers' Theatre: http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm In addition to a brief summary, it has free downloadables aimed at K-3 but may also be useful for some EFL contexts. For my 2nd year uni students in Japan, I let them choose their own stories to perform in groups of 3-5. They either chose excerpt from graded readers or movie scripts which were featured regularly (with plenty of L1 support) in the weekly, English student newspaper, The Japan Times ST (that our uni had a subscription to): http://st.japantimes.co.jp/ Although some students were initially reluctant, they could all find roles and most students had a lot of fun doing it. Like many new activities and tasks, however, it usually takes a couple of times before students (as well as the teacher) get into it so it's good to remember a former colleagues words, "I'll try anything twice!"

With my one-to-one classes I design a so-called ‚self-error correction plan‘, where we work on getting rid of fossilised mistakes and bad habits step by step. Together with my student we define the mistakes that are the weakest points and difficult to get rid of and we create a chart on the wall/flipchart in their office/ word document in their laptops. The chart includes typical wrong sentences and expressions on the left with examples and collocations of correct usage on the right. We try to focus on a particular mistake for a certain period, one month or two and we keep coming back to the mistake if they appear. The principle is to focus on one type of a mistake and keep drilling. Then we move on to another one, etc. It’s a long-term project but seems to be working. The fact that students see wrong and right options on the wall ideally fosters the learning process. The students appreciate the feeling that they have a good chance to manage their mistakes, the sense of achievement is...

After our visit to the Ontario Legislature the follow up activity was to write a letter to a friend describing the trip and giving their impressions of the Parliament. I'm looking for letter format, paragraph format, flow, etc. This group mostly copied information from the pre teaching activities - and from the brochures they picked up! No matter. Reviewed vocabulary and information. We did discuss if copying from the brochures was plagiarism - and also if our friends really wanted all that information...I'm really big on displaying learner work...make sure everyone gets something up...if not this time,then next time...if they don't give work to me I don't hound them..it is a non credit course..

I've taught a lot of students that want every written error corrected, but they don't seem to actually look at the corrections. What I've started implementing is error logs. I correct their errors and use an error code to indicate the type of error. The error codes are fairly detailed i.e. perfect tense error, present tense error, preposition. When students get their essays back, they keep a record of the different types of errors they make. In subsequent essays, they add any new error types and keep a running count of how many errors they made of a particular type. They can also add any example sentences that help them see their error. Before students revise their essay, I ask them to go back, look at that error logs, and focus on their most frequent errors. I find it definitely helps them focus on their weaknesses and improve.

A student who volunteers to do this activity has their eyes covered. I remove things item by item from my handbag and let the student feel and guess what the items are. The student practically does a "think aloud" (which can be recorded for reflection on accuracy) and asks questions and/or guesses the nature of the object. The rest of the students, who can see the item, answer the questions and cheer him/her on. Time is set (2 min should be OK). Similar items may require more detailed questions (ID cards and bus passes are the same size and material). Since I have everything under the sun in my handbag (except for a dead German soldier, as we say in Hungarian), this activity can be quite engaging (wouldn't you love to know what your teacher has in her bag?). For the purposes of teacher training (to demonstrate think aloud techniques), I've done this activity with more complicated items, like my granny's ancient, manual walnut grinder (taken to pieces, to make it m...

Making students ask more questions I heard this story the other day and I thought it could be turned into a fun (higher order thinking skills) activity: an international company that was selling washing liquid in the Middle East had the following images on the box: dirty shirt + washing liquid poured on the shirt + clean shirt. The washing liquid was a disaster in all countries of the region except Turkey. What could have been the reason? Give it a couple of days if you know the answer, just so that we don't spoil it for the others :-) In similar activities, students have to ask Yes / No questions from the teacher. It's like 20 questions, but the aim is to figure out the explanation for a puzzling situation.

DICE One activity I found extremely effective is using dice for drilling particular target language or useful phrases, it’s in In Company Intermediate course book for training the language of meetings (checking understanding). I modify this game for any language I intend to drill and it’s great fun both for group and individuals. You actually make the students say the key phrases over and over again. The principle is to identify 6 key phrases and allocate one number to each phrase. Then students throw the dice and have to say the phrase (which is gap-filled on board). Of course, you could use 2 dice and 12 phrases if there’s more language to drill.

I like to coordinate lessons with other teachers at my school, which has led to using books as sources of debate material. I take whatever book my students are reading that and either a) ask them to generate topics that could be controversial, or b) make a list of questions that would prompt the same sort of discussion. It has worked really well the last few years. Last year, they read Frankenstein which generated topics ranging from "Who is responsible for the deaths in the book?" to "Do scientists have the right to create life?" It is really though-provoking and the students get really into it (especially for Japanese students). The writing teacher then asked to use the ideas we generated in debate to write an essay.

One technique I developed to encourage Ss' talking, specially the weak , was to ask some analytical questions about the characters they acted. Here is an example of "Oliver Twist " After dramatization ,I had this conversation with 2 students : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ALgDzFdiWOLWyngXMI6wWXWv5ty_6Zpl/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ALgDzFdiWOLWyngXMI6wWXWv5ty_6Zpl/view?usp=drivesdk

ANONYMOUSLY IDENTIFYING KIDS IN NEED Although the following blog is from a few years back, it's one that I wish to return to, remember, and incorporate into my future classes once I have more students again. In the meantime, here's a good place to share: "... Every Friday afternoon Chase’s teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, Chase’s teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who doesn’t even know who to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had ...

This is a warmer activity I often use with new student groups and one-to-one classes at just about any level. I’ve adapted it over time and I think it works well for me. How does it work? Before the students come into the room I will draw a grid, usually with nine squares, on the whiteboard. Each square in the grid will contain information that can be interpreted generally, or relating to me specifically. The student’s task is to think of questions to match the ‘answers’ they can see on the board. It is possible to ask a ‘general’ question to match any of the answers, or a ‘personal’ one (all of the answers, in different ways, relate to me and my own life). Questions must make sense, and should match the ‘answers’ on the board in a logical way. What I mean is: let’s say I write “Teacher” in one of the squares. – If a student, trying to ‘win’ the square that contains this word, asks me “Are you a teacher?”, that question would be incorrect (as the answer to that question is “Yes” or “No...