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PHRAS.IN – Say this or say that?

22 Apr

This is a quite a neat tool for learners who are trying to find the right way to express something - PHRAS.IN – Say this or say that?.

You type in two choices and it comes back and tells you which of the two is more common:

I wouldn’t recommend it as a grammar checker as it would just take far too long – but it might be useful for learners struggling with phrasal verbs or idiomatic expressions.

Also – it could be a fun research tool to use in class as a way of raising learners awareness of common errors – give the learners a list of pairs of expressions, some of which could be unfortunate utterances taken from past classes or written work, and the learners discuss and choose which they think is more common / correct, before checking on the website.

Getting learners writing: FoldBooks!

19 Apr

It can be difficult to get learners writing, especially young learners who often see writing as an imposition on classroom fun and games – so fun ways to encourage learner writing are always welcome.

At the FoldPlay website, they’ve come up with FoldBooks.  As the name suggests, these are mini-booklets made out of A4 paper, which have been pre-printed with images and text.

If you go to the FoldBooks page you’ll find input boxes there to work with, once you’ve filled everything in, click the “make your book” button, then print and follow the folding and cutting instructions precisely.

There are eight boxes that need text adding to them, and consequently eight pictures that need to be included.  In order to maximise the amount of text that can be put on the page, it’s best to reduce the font size to about 12 and the text margin to about 18, which is roughly the same as the image margins.  Pictures though, can only be uploaded from the computer, so if learners want to use pictures from the internet, they’ll need to download those to the computer, before uploading them again, which is a bit of a hassle, but there you go.

I think with learners, particularly younger learners, I’d ask them to write a first draft in the classroom before adding the excitement of the computers.  All that’s needed is eight smallish – say two or three sentence – paragraphs.  It might fit nicely with some of the circle writing tasks along the lines of “describe a man  / describe a woman  /  the place they met  /  what did they say to each other / what were their dreams  /  what was the problem  /  what did they do  /  how did it end”  (for example).

Once learners have got a set of  accurate texts they’re happy with, they can think about pictures they want to illustrate their books.

That, I think, is the point to take them into the computer room and let them have a go at making their  FoldBooks.

Guest Post: Say what you see…

9 Apr
In his second guest post on this blog, Dave Cosby thinks about forcing changes on languages and considers the sound-spelling relationships apparent in English.  Above all, he admonishes, just

Say what you see…

Here in Portugal the language is undergoing a change. The new orthography is slowly being introduced and new spellings enforced by public bodies, taught in schools and universities and the older, more Latinate spellings are being phased out. The agreement between the Portuguese speaking nations was made with the best of intentions, mainly to keep the link between the spoken and written languages, and my Portuguese students tell me that it does, mostly have that effect. They have removed silent letters, such as the p from excepto, but I can’t help thinking that it’s sad to remove the link with the existing corpus of literature, and the link between Portuguese and other Latinate languages.

As an outsider though, this is not really a huge concern. What is perhaps worrying is that a  petition of more than a hundred thousand people in Portugal, complaining of the new rules, was ignored by the government of the day who pushed the law through. You might think that a hundred thousand isn’t that many, but remember that this country only has a population of ten millions or so, so we’re talking about proportionally a fair number of people.

Another couple of points strike me. As a native English speaker it feels odd that language could be imposed top down like this from a government. The English speaking world muddles along without any bodies such as the Académie française, the guardians of the French language, and seems to do alright with the informal musings of the Oxford English Dictionary and Websters.

It also seems a little bizarre that the changes were necessary at all. Portuguese, or perhaps Old Portuguese as it should now be called, is an incredibly phonetic language. Much more so than English and even French, though to be fair the main raison d’etre of the Académie these days seems to be to prevent Anglicisms creeping in such as those dangerous phrases, le weekend and le computer.

On the flip side, perhaps we in the English speaking world should take a leaf out of the Portuguese book (though using what organ I know not) and repair some of the tatty edges of our tongue. The Americans have done away with a superfluous ‘u’ here and there, as well as the simply awful ‘ough’ when a ‘w’ works much better. Even so, by ridding itself of odd spellings the Portuguese have instead landed themselves with a few more homographs.  I was reminded of this old chestnut:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
 
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

.

Just try reading that aloud quickly… or if you’re feeling malicious get a cocky FCE/CAE/CPE student to have a crack. It might bring them down a peg or two (until they respond with a totally incomprehensible local tongue twister).

Perhaps we should reform English after all. Here’s another tract that seems to have existed as long as the internet, but perhaps there’s one or two readers out there who haven’t come across it.

Euro English
 The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five year phase-in plan that would be known as “Euro-English”.
In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of the “k”. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like “fotograf” 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent “e”s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru! And zen world!

We often take the link between written and spoken language for granted. We should not. I came across this excellent article by David Moser on ‘Why Chinese is so Damn Hard!’, so here’s a link to remind you why its so important.

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Like the great Mr Roy Walker used to say, ‘ Just say what you see’.

Dave Cosby is a teacher of more years experience than he cares to remember and has worked in a variety of countries around the world, in a variety of roles from teacher to Director of Studies to language school chain troubleshooter.  Currently he’s based in Coimbra, Portugal.
This is his second guest post on the blog – his first is here:  ”If you look at the bottom of the screen“.

#ELTChat Summary: Teaching at a Discourse Level

15 Feb

How can we focus language teaching more at discourse level rather than sentence level?

The first #eltchat of 2012 attempted to answer this question!  I wasn’t actually there and didn’t take part in the chat and I’m still not quite sure how I’ve ended up writing the summary except that Marisa_C possesses remarkable powers of persuasion and as someone who teaches higher levels this is an area of interest!  Hopefully, this captures the key points, but I’m not a “discourse specialist”, so feel free to point out any errors or omissions.  I haven’t cited individual contributors, but the transcript is available if you’d like to know who said what.

“Teacher, what mean “discourse”?”

The initial question makes the assumption that discourse works at a higher level than merely the sentence thought the Wikipedia entry relating discourse analysis to “approaches to analyzing written, spoken . signed language use or any significant semiotic event” – which I interpret broadly as meaning “if something attempts to convey meaning, it can be analysed to see how it does so”.  A more accessible overview of discourse suggests that discourse analysts are concerned with “the construction of meaning throughout a text”.  (it should be pointed out here that the word “text” is used more to mean a linguistic event than a written document).

Thus discourse can apply to patterns of interaction, “text” structures, communication events, language within a text – usually occurring within a context of authentic language use.  There are no set “rules” of discourse per se, because discourse examines everything and the rules change depending on the context.

Stuck at the Sentence?  Problems with discourse:

Receptively, learners simply may not know enough vocabulary to access texts effectively – to fully understand a text learners need to be able to recognize 95% of the vocabulary used in the text (Laufer, 1989).  Additionally, the mechanics of textual cohesion devices like referencing, linking expressions and paragraphing need to be understood.

Receptive knowledge of these devices also form part of language tests, like FCE, CAE, CPE, IELTS (etc), and within fields like EAP.  Often these tests also require learners to demonstrate productive knowledge of these devices in structured, genre specific writing tasks.  While genre is an aspect of discourse, genre familiarity is a separate issue for learners to grapple with.

Where learners are preparing for a language test, classes tend to become very test focused, very accuracy focused and very form focused – developing a test dependency that can be difficult to move away from.  This may account for the amount of language teaching conducted at the sentence level within test preparation classes, though this is not ideal.

It isn’t helped by the general trend within published ELT materials for decontextualized, fragmented, sentence based language presentations.  Grammar teaching in particular tends to be conducted at the level of the sentence and examine items in isolation and without reference to a wider context.  The natural fluidity of language would seem to predicate against this.

Problem?  Solution! – what a bunch of Hoey!

(Bonus points to those who got the discourse analysis joke there….)

The simplest responses to the issue of isolated sentence based grammar teaching would appear to be just to teach grammar in a wider context and by making learners aware of functional aspects of language and their use – aspects of Speech Act study (which is only possible in context).  This could be facilitated by more use of authentic materials or by use of digital coursebooks (this latter point wasn’t fully expanded upon – I’m intrigued and would welcome comments!).

The other key suggestion is to move learners from receptive awareness of discourse patterns, for example making them aware of such patterns as they occur in listening and reading tasks, through to productive acts that feature and practice the target discourse structures.  This would seem to favour a product approach to writing – the exposure of learners to a model text before asking them to produce something based on that model.  There is often a reluctance amongst learners to “do writing” in class, but while instruction could take place in class, the actual practice of the writing skill need not.

(An authorial aside – just from reading through the tweets as they related to discourse and testing, in particular the learners desire just to “get through the test”, I think it’s worth pointing out to learners that often with testing, there is no “quick fix”.  Discourse features occur in many language tests precisely because they are skills to be developed and rather than something that can be sidestepped.  There are task strategies than can help fine tune learner performance, but if the underlying skills aren’t there, neither will exam performance be! )

In conclusion – Do Learners need Discourse Analysis?

A good question – do learners really need discourse analysis skills or is it just the teachers who do?  There was a general consensus that the main goal is to have learners working and using “real language”, which would seem to take us back to using authentic materials as part of the input process, both to serve for language development and provision of exponents, but also to raise awareness of discourse structures and patterns as they arise in the target texts.

Teachers therefore need training in discourse analysis so that they can effectively instruct the learners, and be able to evaluate published materials more critically.  Thus they can help the learners to not only look at language performance but also to reflect on the language they encounter, to think about aspects of discourse such as audience and purpose – to be aware of the patterns rather than actually conduct a discourse analysis.

Further Reading, References and links from the chat:

(Links given where possible)

 

An apology on behalf of #eltchat – Raquel_EFL appeared to make a large contribution to the chat with people responding with phrases like “brilliant” and “Good point!!!”  but unfortunately for some reason these contributions didn’t show up in the transcript and I fear have been lost to history….

#eltchat takes place on twitter every Wednesday at 12 noon and 9.00pm London time.  Simply sign in or sign up to twitter and search for the hashtag #eltchat.  For more information, check out the website.

Using Haiku for Summary Tasks

12 Jan
Summary task woes
Unfound ideas from the texts
Lacking clarity
 
What is a Haiku?
Distillation of ideas
Concisely worded 
 
This could go quite wrong
Haiku for summary tasks?
Might be worth a try 
 
 
 

Learners at CPE (Proficiency) level frequently have issues with the comprehension and summary task on the Use of English paper (click here for Cambridge ESOL’s candidate guide).

Answering the comprehension questions can be difficult enough, but the summary task is enough to turn teachers and students into gibbering wrecks, sobbing in the corner of the classroom and wailing at their own percieved inadequacy.  The truth is that they aren’t inadequate in any way – they just need some training!  Using Haiku is an approach I’ve used to try and help learners access the core ideas of the texts in a simple and succinct way.

(more…)

The First day of Geekmas: A short talk on using Poetry…

20 Dec

On the first day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  a short talk on using poetry…..

It’s the last / first day of the teflgeek Christmas countdown and it’s been a fun, somewhat introspective, quite stressful on occasion but ultimately I hope, useful, Christmas countdown.  I’m not sure I’ll be repeating the experience again next year – at least not in this form!  So a reminder of what we’ve had so far:

I thought that, in a twist and given how I’ve massacred the poetic form in creating spurious rhymes in attempting the twelve days of geekmas, I’d end with a short talk on poetry.  I’ve put this together as a you tube video – it’s the first video cast I’ve attempted, so any feedback on technique etc gratefully appreciated!

Any and all links referred to in the presentation, plus a load more besides, are given below.  Enjoy!

References and further ideas:

 poetryclass – “taking the fear out of poetry” – http://www.poetryclass.net/

A wealth of teaching resources, articles and ideas on how and why to use poetry with classes.  Designed more for students within the UK education system, but resources are graded by year group, so you’ll be able to find some suitable resources for most ages and levels.

The Poetry Express – poetry writing for 7-11year olds – http://www.thepoetryexpress.com/

Again, aimed more at the UK education system.  Poetry Express has a lot of stuff that’s aimed directly at the kids developing their abilities to write poetry as well as teaching resources that approach poetry from a cross-curricular viewpoint.

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/exercises.html

This is a just a simple list of poetry workshop ideas – more ideas to stimulate poetry creation than developing ability per se.

http://connected.waldenu.edu/language-and-literacy/english-language-learners/item/1482-how-to-teach-english-through-poetry

This is a useful and interesting, but more theoretical, article on how and why to use poetry in the classroom.

The Poetry Zone: http://poetryzone.woodshed.co.uk/index2.htm

Another kids based site – with competitions, poetry theme ideas, a place for kids to upload their poems to and usefully, a teacher zone with further links and ideas to help you use poetry in the classroom.  Look at classroom resources and “Poetry Kit” by Jan Dean for some great ideas! ( I really liked the “mismatch” idea!)

Forms of Poetry:  http://www.tooter4kids.com/forms_of_poetry.htm

This is an excellent resource for different types of poetry and poetry ideas – from limericks to haiku, language based  (e.g. used to), shape poems, parts of speech poems – the list goes on and one.  Just scroll down to see what there is to see.  Strongly recommended!

Teaching Grammar Creatively.  Gerngross, Puchta & Thornbury, 2006 Helbling Languages.

A great grammar teaching ideas source, many of the outcomes are based around the idea of poems or poetry creation.  Repetition of a grammatical form, so it seems, can lead to some great poetry!

Poem into Poem, Maley & Moulding, 1985, Cambridge University Press.

Possibly a little dated in terms of content, but the ideas included are still very definitely worth taking a look at.  “We ignore the poetic function of language at our peril.  It is the cutting edge of linguistic creativity and innovation, and the key to a feel for the soul of a language.”  Page 134.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/text-language-classrooms-talo-tavi-tasp

Lindsay Clandfield has an excellent in-depth article on using texts in the classroom, looking at TAVI / TALO / TASP in more detail.

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: Nine pretty pictures (#eltpics)

6 Dec

On the ninth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  nine pretty pictures

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

10 tricks for reading

And nine pretty pictures – or rather some ideas to use with images and some images to use with them!

All of the pictures used below in this post have come from the excellent #eltpics Flickr photostream and are reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence.

potential by @hartle

(1)  Make me a story – using either a single image or with a series of images (which can give a greater degree of support), learners come up with a story based on the image(s).  By using superlame to add speech bubbles and captions, and by being creative with the windows snipping tool, it is possible to create comic book sequences.  But pen and paper can also work!

Decorated bicycles at Children's Perahara, Tangalle, Sri Lanka, July 2010 by @CliveSir

(2)  Caption Competition - take in a series of images, ideally one per learner in the class, but fewer if you have a large class, and stick them up around the room.  Chop some scrap A4 into sentence sized strips so that each learner has one strip per picture.  So, if you have 12 learners and 12 pictures up, you’ll need 144 strips of paper…  Or you could just give each learner 4 strips of paper, which would be quicker and more manageable.  Learners move around the room independently and when they feel inspired by a picture, they write a caption for it on one of their strips of paper.  Captions don’t need to be humorous (though they can be!).  After a set amount of time, collect all the strips back in and redistribute them, making sure learners don’t have any of their original strips.  Learners then try to stick the captions up next to the picture they think it refers to.  This can then be followed up with learners checking to see whether their captions got put in the right place or not and explaining why they wrote what they wrote.  Plus any language feedback.

Knitting and crocheting-Huayhuash, Peru by @VictoriaB52

(3)  Role play Prompts  I saw this done in a session a couple of years ago – I sadly can’t remember who gave the session or what it was on…  - but I remember the activity.  Using a picture of Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage”, we put ourselves in the positions of the people in the painting and then came up with questions to ask each other, which then lead into a sort of role play as we acted out being the people in the pictures.  It was great fun and a really nice way of helping learners to access imagery, particularly for learners about to do exam speaking tasks involving pictures.

Street market, Copacabana, Bolivia by @sandymillin

(4)  Labeltastic  Something that occurred to me as an incredibly simple and effective way of using pictures, which I confess I’ve not used yet – the create-your-own picture dictionary.  Most vocabulary lessons are based around a topic, so why not simply find a picture of that topic and give copies to the learners to stick into their notebooks so that they can add lots of little arrows and labels, thus creating their own lexically organised picture dictionaries?

(5) Mind Mapping  In a similar vein, the idea of using mind mapping techniques with images can extend the labelling idea.  With the mind map, you could not only access the key vocabulary items, but also access learners’ emotional reactions to the images and learners’ speculation on the content and individuals in those pictures.  Thanks to @acliltoclimb for the inspiration from his post  ”Every Picture tells a Story“.

Easter in Seville. The park to themselves. by @europeaantje

(6) Dictadraw A very simple premise, but a nice way to revise vocabulary and practice / develop picture description skills.  Essentially, you give different pictures to different learners in a pair.  They take turns to describe their pictures to each other and as one partner describes, the other one draws.  At the end of the activity, they compare their ideas.  Obviously the object isn’t to create a perfect replica – particularly if you do use a photograph! I use this activity more with appearance vocabulary (he has red hair and a big nose) than with anything else, but it can also work with photos – as long as they aren’t too complex!

ET, come home! by @AClilToClimb

(7) Speculation  Using bizarre, odd or unclear imagery can be fun ways of introducing and practicing modals of speculation and deduction.  If you can’t find any pictures that you think are sufficiently bizarre (or likely to lead to enough speculation) then a simple remedy is to take a picture of a mundane everyday item and zoom in really really close on one particular aspect of it, and ask the learners to guess what it is.  For example, the milled edge of a coin or the underneath of a pepper grinder could prove fruitful!

Browsing by @sueannan

(8)  Expert Witness  another old favourite – a memory game where learners look at an image for one minute, the image is then removed (removing the image also removes the temptation to peek!), and learners then have to recall the scene.  With low levels / ages, this can be a Q&A session based on “Is there a ___?  /  Are there any ___? ” to revise a particular vocab set.  For higher levels, it could be situated in a police interview scenario, the learner witnessed an incident (for example in the photo on the right “Browsing”, they could have witnessed a theft) and has to describe the scene.  Or it could be run as a straight listing activity – learners look at the image for a minute and then have a further minute to list all the items they remember seeing in the picture.

(9)  Selection In  This is another fairly obvious one – it might require raiding the school flashcard / image files as it works best with a large amount of pictures.  For a more structured task though, it might be best to generate a handout with a limited selection of images.  In simple terms learners select the “best” image or images for a particular purpose, e.g. to include in a tourist brochure of the area  /  to put on the front page of an nature magazine  (etc).  This is a fairly simple task and one that mimics exam speaking tasks at FCE, CAE & CPE (sort of) – so would be good practice for prospective candidates.  A twist on this is to ask the learners to select three or four similar pictures and to generate their own selection task for another group of learners to perform – they could then give feedback on performance.

Hot Air Balloon by @mrsdkrebs

street painting by Jane Arnold

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: eleven tips for writing

2 Dec

On the eleventh day of Geekmas, teflgeek gave to me:  11 tips for writing

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

Although to be more accurate this should be called “11 tips to give your students to help them develop their writing (for exam classes)”, but again, that just wouldn’t scan properly…

Teachers – feel free to cut and paste and print out (some editing may be required!)

  1. Read the question!  It shouldn’t need saying and I’d be willing to bet this is a constant cri-de-coeur for many a teacher, but failure to read the question – or more importantly failure to respond to the required aspects of the question – is what costs learners the most marks.  Cambridge exams are lovely and kind.  They tell you what to write about – massive amounts of thought not required – just good identification technique….. (see below)
  2. What’s important here?  Every question has “content points”.  If you miss one you fail.  But on the plus side they’re easy to spot – they usually appear in sentences that read:  ”You should write about….”  /  ”Include information on”.  Or sometimes they have little arrows pointing to them (only in part one).  Teachers – give your learners a copy of the sample writing paper from the handbook and a highlighter pen – take the time to go through it step by step.  It won’t be wasted time.
  3. Don’t get word fear!  Word fear is when learners worry too much about how many words they need to write.  Key symptoms include:  (a)  obsessively counting the number of words they’ve written to make sure they have enough.  (b)  Using a lengthy and inappropriate style to try and increase the number of words in a sentence.  (c) adding additional random sentences and paragraphs to the end of your text upon realising they don’t have enough content.  There is a simple cure:  relax.  No-one’s going to count the number of words.  Examiners have lives too!  Besides – the only true way to eradicate word fear is in proper planning.
  4. PPPPP – PROPER PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE.  Very very few learners actually plan their writing.  This also explains why very very few learners get top grades for exam writing.  Having insisted all my learners submit a plan along with their compositions, I was once accosted by a worried student before class:  ”I’m really sorry I haven’t finished it all.  I can give you the essay now, but can I give you the plan next lesson?”  I don’t insist anymore.  If you can’t be bothered, then fine.  It doesn’t work for everybody, and I hope you’re happy with your “c” grade.
  5. Know your genre.  Again, it seems silly to state it so obviously, but learners need to know what the different texts types (a) look like, (b) feature stylistically.  If learners have a clear visual representation of the text type, it makes the planning process easier.  I tend to do block diagrams of the different text types as a labelling task, so that learners get a clear idea of what all the different sections involve.  This then leads into a language matching task, with key phrases matched to the relevant sections.
  6. Who’s the reader?  A mistake that many writers make is in mis-imagining the reader.  A letter for publication in a newspaper or magazine is written as personal correspondence between the writer and the editor – but not written for the wider audience who’ll read the published letter.  Another common fault is writing for the Examiner, not for the target reader.  Knowledge of who the reader is also affects register choice (as well as genre does).
  7. Leave a blank line.  This is possibly a personal bugbear of mine, but I speak as someone who’s sat down and gone slightly insane whilst attempting to mark over a 150 FCE writing scripts in a single afternoon (with some help).  The blank line is a psychological trick.  Learners need to leave one blank line between each section of their writing text as it is more pleasing to the eye, clearly indicates attempted paragraphing (and hence organisation, even if the organisation doesn’t actually exist) and basically puts the examiner in a much better frame of mind.  Generally, you want a better disposed examiner marking your paper – they tend to give higher marks!  (Apparently research bears this out, but I don’t know whose.)
  8. Don’t draft – plan.  It’s not unknown for learners to write out an entire first draft of a text and then copy it out again neatly.  Fine, if you can get away with it and not run out of time, but why go to all the trouble of doing twice the work?  Couldn’t you just do the work once, but twice as well?  If you plan, you don’t need to draft (at least not in an exam situation).  Also, planning gets rid of all those unsightly crossing outs and substitutions and insertions.  If you know what you want to say before you start writing…..
  9. A brief note on paragraphs.  Earlier, I may have given the impression that a paragraph is a collection of words separated from a similar collection of words by one blank line.  Psychological trickery will only get you so far – there does also need to be some substance behind the style.  In an attempt to help with paragraph structure, I’ve been talking to my learners about TARS – Topic Sentence / Argument / Reason / Specific Example.  As a basic paragraph structure it works quite neatly, though obviously there are variations…
  10. It’s the way you tell ‘em.  With some answers, you feel really engaged, as though the writer really cares about the topic and wants to share that with you.  With others, you feel as though the writer is going through the motions.  And let’s face it – why shouldn’t they?  It’s an artificial situation that wouldn’t occur to them in the real world.   But to get the top marks, the writing needs to make the reader feel loved.
  11. Role play it then write it.  Which is why, I like converting writing tasks into role plays.  If, for example, a task asks the learners to write a report for the principal on the use of technology in the college, it can be nice to put half the class in the position of the principal and half in the position of the writer and ask them to converse on the topic.  It can give both parties a new appreciation of the roles and requirements of the task!

Say that again? avoiding repetition & developing paraphrase

25 Nov

Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill that taxes most of us on a daily basis:  ”I like your hair.”  ”Your hair looks nice.”  ”Wow!  Have you had your hair done?”  ”That new style really suits you!”

For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult.  For learners preparing for exam classes, where displaying a wide ranging linguistic resource helps garner improved scores – it’s an essential skill.  It’s useful for all those writing tasks (avoid using words or phrases from the questions) and particularly useful for CPE comprehension and summary tasks where the questions state “in your own words”.  But it’s also a handy skill to have for those speaking tasks, where demonstrating ”range” is almost as important as actually having range.  After all, there’s no point learning all those different words and structures if you don’t actually use them?  Right?

So here’s an activity which needs no (only a very small amount) of preparation, but which helps extend and develop the paraphrase skill.  I call it “Say that again?”

Materials:  As much scrap A4 paper as you can find chopped down into either A6 or A7 sized slips – ideally it’d be about six bits of paper per student.

Students write a single (short) sentence on each bit of paper – ideally something they might say in everyday life.  You can model this with “I like your hair.”  or “Local football team played well/badly at the weekend.”  Students can work together in pairs during the sentence creation phase.

Collect all the slips of paper up and ask the learners to form small groups (three or four people per group).  re-distribute the slips of paper with the sentences on evenly between the groups, placed face down (i.e. sentences not visible) in a pile in the middle.

One learner takes a slip and turns it face up and reads the sentence.  They then have to produce a paraphrase of the sentence, as does the next person and the next etc, until someone can’t come up with something that hasn’t already been said.  So if we go back to our example:  Learner A turns over the slip of paper and reads out ”I like your hair.”  Learner A paraphrases thusly:  ”Your hair looks nice.”   Learner B comes up with “Wow!  Have you had your hair done?”  and Learner C with “That new style really suits you!”.  Learner D however can’t think of anything new, so gets to keep the slip of paper.

The winner is the person in each group with the fewest slips of paper at the end of the activity.

Feedback can be given on any errors that were overheard during the game, but also content feedback on any sentences they found particularly difficult to paraphrase.

As an extension, for those classes preparing for an exam, the teacher could take the input from one of the writing paper questions and divide it up into sentences on separate bits of paper and ask learners to come up with alternative phrasings.

“The candidate demonstrated an impressive range.”

(Bonus points for anyone who can identify the “impressive range” featured!  Post your answers below!)

Halloween Teaching Resources

28 Oct

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners…

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