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The zombie apocalypse and its role in the ELT classroom

6 Jan

From the always interesting yearinthelifeofanenglishteacher comes what is clearly the best blog post title of 2011:  ”The zombie apocalypse and its role in the ELT classroom“.

I missed the original post in June, only picking up on it via Tyson Seburn’s 11 posts I wish I’d written  in December, but it is a truly inspired way of teaching speculative language – mainly focusing on conditional forms – through the medium of you tube “choose your own adventure” style videos.

The original post features the Zombie Apocalypse (courtesy of a New Zealand pizza company ad campaign);  the time travelling adventures of office-bound Chad, Matt and Rob; and a UK anti-knife crime campaign.  This last features incredibly authentic North London dialect – while making the choices will be accessible to all levels – the language from the participants will not!  Also worth watching it all the way through (as with all the videos) to check for suitability!

That last point is also worth making of all these type adventures, it’s not always necessary for learners to understand everything the characters in the videos say – unless you specifically want to work on listening skills – the choices, as you see from the picture above, are quite clear and these should prompt the discussion, which will in turn probably clarify any areas of confusion relating to the events on screen.

Finally – it’s also worth reading through the comments section below the post – some great ideas and further links from the commenters.

 

 

Online Teaching Resource: Idioms Videos

29 Sep

I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions.  The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a dictionary definition.  One of the tasks they give is “Can you guess the idiom before the definition comes up?”  If you had learners in teams with different coloured board pens, and they raced to write the expression on the board before it came up, it could work….

The videos are also available via the Pearson You Tube channel (I’ve tried to embed one of them below, but don’t think it’s worked – so click the link instead).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHo5DXDFGyo

Here’s the original page again:  ELTCommunity.com: Space: Idioms Discussions.

Tea, Coffee and Comparisons

14 Jul

Just a quick lesson overview rather than a full plan etc today:  this is an idea for helping learners with comparisons / comparatives.

Basically it starts out with the activity “Tea or Coffee”, follows up with the language input stage, invites comparisons between learners’ home country and the UK / USA etc and finishes off with an oppostion debate based around the initial “Tea or Coffee” activity.  It’s materials light – in fact there aren’t any!

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First Lesson Ideas / Warmers

10 Jul

For many teachers, though the school year might have just ended – the joy of summer school classes is about to start.  Or may have already, but I think lessons at my habitual summer haunt are due to begin on Monday morning – I’m not there this year, so not sure.

In any event this post contains a collection of getting to know you type activities / ice-breakers or first lesson warmers for you to choose from.  If you started teaching summer school last week – sorry about the delay – but you can probably use these or adapt these as warmer or lead in type activities – so it might still be useful!

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The disabled access friendly world blog challenge: Creature Discomforts

29 Jun

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter.

The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way they see disability.

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Zip Zap Boing (I think?)

24 May

I blame that Simon Thomas over at efl-resource.  It’s all his fault.  And I’m still not sure whether it’s “zip zap zop” or “zig zag zog” or something else entirely!

I’ve inherited a class, which Simon once taught back in the misty dawn of time, of 12-year-old pre-intermediate students.  When I walked in the classroom the other day, they were all so keen and motivated to begin the lesson that they roundly rejected my fun warmer and started going on about this bizarre pointing game.  With some careful misunderstandings on my part, it took them ten minutes to explain the rules to me, all of which they did in extremely fluent English (which only goes to show if the motivation is there, the language will follow).

As far as I can work out, everyone stands in a circle.  Someone starts things off and the game runs as follows:  if you point (in a sort of two handed gun gesture) to the person on your immediate left or right you say ZIP,  to anyone else in the circle you say ZAP.  To deflect someone’s pointing at you back at them, you hold both hands up (as if in surrender) and say “BOING”.

It’s meant to be a fast paced, rapid fire game and if you get it wrong you’re out (though I’m not sure how you then declare a winner?).

To give this a larger linguistic focus or to work with higher levels, you could do this with parts of speech:  Nouns to the left, verbs to the right and adjectives down the middle!  A colleague, Alexis, also does this with vocabulary categories:  learners have to precede their ZIP/ZAP/BOING with a vocabulary item linked to the target category.

A nice way to start the lesson – or a fun way to finish it!

Habitat for Humanity: Lesson Plans

13 May

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Habitat for Humanity.  I’m mentioning them here because they posted a comment under one of the blog posts and I just went and took a quick look at their site.

They have quite a wealth of lessons (detailed plans, learning outcomes, materials etc), categorised by age ranges.  The bad news is that these lesson plans are not aimed at foreign language learners.  So the stuff in the 5-8 category might be a bit beyond the non-native speakers, though there are a couple of colouring tasks which might work?

I think adaptation is going to be the name of the game here.  I think there’s quite a lot of stuff here that is likely to be of interest to learners and some things that might make some nice end of year/term projects.  It should appeal to the cross-curricular / CLIL crowd….

Habitat for Humanity operates in a large number of countries around the world, so the chances are you’ll be able to find a local office, which might make things a bit more relevant to the learners?

Habitat for Humanity lessons — Habitat for Humanity Int’l.

Online Teaching Resource: Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

12 May

The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource.

But….  I’ve tended not to use it because of their policy of only giving users a limited set of “tries” on the online version before shutting you down.  There is of course a way round that, which involves deleting all the cookies on your computer and clearing down your browser’s history and such like (check out this nifty and free download, if you want to know more about how to do that), but the hassle is a little too much to bother with….

However, the other day I went back and discovered the visual thesaurus has evolved into something more…

There is a growing collection of lesson plans related to use of the visual thesaurus, 53 and counting thus far, and while many seem more intended for native speaker language lessons, there are those that are aimed and EFL / ESL, and those that are adaptable to it (like the one on prefixes – word formation anyone?).

Other things on the site that I think are worth a mention include:

  • Michele Dunaway’s “Teachers at Work” blog, whose most recent post encourages us to think differently about the way we teach creative writing to our students.
  • the “wordshop” collection of vocabulary activities (same caveat about target market applies…)
  • and finally, the vocabgrabber, which you paste text into and which generates word lists of “the most useful vocabulary words” from the text.  I’m not so sure about this one, but it might be useful in deciding which items you want to pre-teach to allow learners to access a text more effectively.  Though that would require you to type the target text into the website….  like I said, not quite sure about how best t0 use this tool.

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State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

11 May

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..

There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….

Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?

But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource.  Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind.  Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!

There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).

These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!

Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned

18 Apr

Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned | Books | guardian.co.uk.

This is a slightly misleading and somewhat patronising view of American life, when you consider, as the article states, that this list is based on a total of 348 “attempts” to remove books from American libraries.  But it still makes interesting reading – at least the article does – not sure about the books as I’m a little disappointed by the fact that I’ve only read one of the books on this list!

This could lead into a very interesting discussion with learners.  And quite possibly a very emotive one, so a certain amount of judgement needed as to whether this would be s suitable issue for your class!  But if learners wanted to express views on what was or wasn’t suitable to discuss in school, or topics that are inappropriate for the local library, then why not?  Or of course if they want to defend freedom of speech?

It is interesting to think about what is acceptable to talk about in the classroom and what isn’t – Scott Thornbury has an interesting perspective in “T is for Taboo“,  it might be fun to use some of his themes as a lead in with the class – challenge them to find a picture of a mother comforting small children, young hispanic people working on a car or an old lady with twenty cats.  And then ask them to think about why they might not have been able to find the images?

The alternative to choosing which books to ban, is to choose which books to select in….

David McCandless from informationisbeautiful created the visualisation below, of 100 books everyone should read (taking a composite ranking from a variety of sources).

Why not divide up the books amongst the learners in your class and send them off to wikipedia or amazon or even the local library, to take a quick look at their set of books and decide which ones to keep and which ones not to.  When the class reconvenes, they can, as a whole, decide on a top 50 books that everyone should read.

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