EFL 1

Migration

2010-10-06T09:58:00.001+02:00

This blog has moved to

http://idleeflthoughts.wordpress.com/

Journals and Organisations

2010-09-22T12:30:00.000+02:00

As a professional EFL teacher it is probably a good idea to subscribe to some of the many journals and magazines available to the industry. It also probably pays to belong to one of the professional bodies such as IATEFL. Or does it? I belong to IATEFL and also take the Voices journal, ELTJ and English Teaching Professional. I find these mostly interesting and often helpful but I wonder if in the age of forums, blogs and twitter if these are still worthwhile and worth the money.

I think, personally, that on balance they probably still are but I would be interested to know what journals (if any) you read and if you belong to any of the professional bodies. It would also be interesting to know if you find them valuable or not, and what would you recommend to fellow teachers?

Twitter as water cooler.

2010-08-23T09:11:00.000+02:00

For every twitter user their must be at least 20 twitter sceptics - you know the people who sneer and make weirdly unfunny comments about you being a 'twit' (or cruder) and imply that you have to manufacture an online community in order to make up for your lack of immediate community. In addition to these people are another group who are perhaps curious and want to know what the point in it all is. Why Twitter? is no an original question nor will this blog give an original answer but it might just add one or two more Twitterers which is probably no bad thing.

Twitter for me is the water cooler for the global office. It is where your co-workers from the US, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Italy, India, South Africa, Australia and China gather to exchange ideas, gossip, jokes, banalities, concerns and occasionally insults. Ever wanted to work for a multi-national without actually having to work for a multi-national? Well now you do. In most Twitter communities there is a thread or two holding the followers together - for me it is Education, Education Technology and EFL (or ESL) and most of those who I follow are also in this field. The pleasure that you get from Twitter revolves around the relatively simple idea that if you are enthusiastic about what you do it helps to be able to share that enthusiasm with like minded people. Often, sadly, this is not the case in our physical working environments where you either have no colleagues (self-employed) or are working with people for whom the grudge and drudge took over a long time ago. But with Twitter you can now communicate with equally motivated individuals globally - people who have a ton of good ideas alongside a ton of terrible ideas and some that are simply okay - the point is that they have ideas and are willing to share them.

Don't get me wrong, I do not leap out of bed every morning (I don't leap out of bed any morning!) yelling yippee, work today! No-one does, or at least they shouldn't, not least you will annoy the neighbours. I do, however get a rejuvenated sense of motivation from flipping up the laptop and reading comments from people all over the world who are also just starting, in the middle of or just ending their teaching day and are letting you know what they've read, seen, done, heard or thought of that might be of interest to you too. You might also get a little chat going as you hunch over keyboard and coffee and find that someone else shares your cynicism or enthusiasm for IWBs. You may discover coincidentally that your colleague in Peru also likes Erasure's early music (I said may!) or that another colleague in Sri Lanka clearly needs to improve their repertoire of jokes, you might find yourself directed to and taking part in a fascinating discussion on multi-tasking, fluent teaching or taboo themes in classrooms.

Twitter will not change your life, it could make you enjoy your job more. You do not need to be witty or pithy or original or wise or funny or even there all the time. You need to be enthusiastic about what you do and willing to chat with other like-minded people - you need to be willing to work in an organisation with other colleagues who also like to gather around the Twitter water cooler and chat together. After that you had also better get back to work.

Agree, disagree, add, subtract - love to hear from people

Der Weg ist das Ziel

2010-08-17T11:29:00.001+02:00

Somebody used this line in a seminar I was on recently to talk about the constant state of transformation that companies and organisations throw themselves into in order to reach a seemingly unatainable position of perfection. In German the phrase was meant to imply that that in place of a goal we had substituted a process, roughly translated into English then the idea is that the journey is the destination. This is a grand idea in principle, especially for literal travel but is problematic when applied as an operating principal to organistations, allowing of no stability and, by extension, no achievement. Learning a language is a continuous process its true and the idea of final achievement is self evidently absurd - no-one has final command of a language. This idea though is questionable in practice, I would guess that most language learners have a defined goal from learning a language for holiday purposes through to learning a language to live and work in a foreign country. In order to achieve these aims then a language learner essentially needs to be able to absorb words, understand how they connect and deploy the two together when needed. Nothing more. As a profession I sometimes wonder if we haven't lost sight of this goal a little. In place of a language learning goal we have put a series of diverting activities on the road, so much so that it is less and less simple to discern the aim behind the activities. Instead of being teachers we have become holiday camp activity coordinators obsessed (to a greater or lesser extent) with devising the most entertaining activities for the students. A course is now littered with gap-fills, comprehension questions, guess-who games, gap-fills, jumbled sentences, crosswords and, of course, gap-fills. It is not that such activities are not entertaining, if done well and thoughtfully they can be very entertaining, but we are not entertainers, we are teachers. A huge amount has been written on the seemingly complex relationship and differeing roles of teachers and learners, for me though the essential equation is relatively simple. A teacher teaches and a learner learns. In order for these roles to work effectively then they must not run in parralel but in unison. A teacher's role is to be an expert in the field of (here) languages. He or she must understand the language they are teaching (intuitively and mechanically) and understand the process of language aquisition (easier blogged than done). A good teacher, I think, will provide what Dick Allwright has termed learning opportunties and will be ready to exploit these in ways that help the learner to aquire the language. Authenticity has become a key component of language teaching material in recent years but has not filtered through to the activity construction phase. Unless we are teaching students who will need to read texts where someone has spilt marmite over every third word then gap-fills are perhaps one of the most pointless activities invented. Similarly comprehension questions that simply, at best, test understanding of the article in question are, I think, of limited value in that they fail the authenticity standard. The core activity in classrooms has to be meeting new language, exploring and extending that language, recycling aquired language and then practicing the language in authentic settings (as fas ar is practicable). What does all this mean for planning? For me, a teacher should be providing authentic material selected for its L+1 comprehensibility and guiding students to select goal appropriate items to learn and providing strategies for learning and deploying the items. Instead of a reading exercise that revolves around gap-fill and comprehension questions or matching definition exercises the student should be invited to read the article and highlight unknown words/phrases/structures and then do as they would in their own language - guess from context, check with peers, check with dictionaries amd finally ask the teacher or better verify with the teacher - the essential teaching input now comes in, wherby the teacher must indicate to the student the usefulness of the item, the collocational and grammatical field of the item, alternate meanings and possible ambiguities, contrasting elements and then be ready to design activities that allow the student to use the item(s) in an authentic setting such as retelling the news story from memory, discussing the issues that arise, writing a forum response, twittering responses etc. The teacher should then store the item for use at a later date (hopefully repeated) when the items range can be explored and learnt. The teacher should also then advise on learning strategies and be prepared to coach and monitor these strategies as they fit an individual students needs/strengths. They should emphatically not be spending their preparation time cutting up bits of pink paper and copy and pasting gaps onto articles. The aim is learning and this is more important than having an entertaining journey!

Rant over! I could go on but will probably only come across as embittered from this point on! A couple of caveats to what I have written above;

1. I teach adults, not children, and for teachers of children I fully accept that different rules apply.

2. Motivation is often difficult and hence the need for entertainment. Yes and no. Motivation is often a problem but I'm not entirely sure that it's always my problem...If a student is demonstrably learning and feels that they are making progress then my own feeling is that they will be motivated to continue, if not learning or making progress then I am not sure any amount of fun activities will change that in the medium to long term.

3. I work in the public sector and the pressures to keep people happy are much tougher in the commercial sector. Accepted, but I think my point above covers this aswell. Making progress towards the goal will ensure repeat custom more than simply turning up to have a laugh every week.

Agree, disagree, let me know - always open to debate.

TMSNs?

2010-07-08T11:30:00.001+02:00

I think for me thst one of the most useful uses of technology for the language teacher is the ability to quickly pass on tips and links to some of the huge array of material available on the internet. Twitter is a great way of doing this and I'm personally a great fan of Nick Peachey's blog and follow Scott Thornbury as well. I also belong to an excellent Yahoo Group for teachers at the BSPRA where I work and where Ingrid Braband sends out a regular stream of great ideas and websites. Grouped under the heading of PLN or personal learning network these tools (blogs, groups, twitter etc.) help teachers and learners to multiply the effect of what they do. However, one area where I think there is possibly the scope for more collaboration between teachers is in the development of teacher material support networks (maybe TMSN is an acronym too far!?) where teachers can request specific help with materials and can then be supported by the network. An example of what I mean is in the area of listening comprehension. The internet has a huge range of audio files available for download and online form authentic material from the BBC, CNN, itunes etc. to more tailor made ESL material such as ESL podcast and others. The slight drawback I find with these is that you are forced in to using what somebody else has thought of and trying to adapt it for what you need or you must spend hours trawling the web for something aproximating what you had in mind. Instead it must be possible using programmes like audacity to put a group of teachers together (virually) and request soemthing specific be recorded and then sent to you or uploaded to platform. For example if you wanted to do some work on how to introduce yourself and talk about your background etc. you could send a shout out to the network asking for people to record themselves and then send it back - obvioulsy the bigger the group the greater the number of recordings. This has the advantage of giving you more or less exactly what you want, a range of examples and a range of different accents, dialects etc. I am not a great fan of scripted recordings and so it could be that the request asks people in broad strokes to talk about who they are, where they are from, what they do, what they like etc. and perhaps give an indication of the language level they want to use it for. Now it may be that this idea is already out there and up and running somewhere in which case I apologise for wasting anyone's time but here you can simply shake your head pityingly and move on to reading the paper or whatever else you wanted to do - if you do know of a network where this is the case then I'd be grateful if you could let me know. If not then perhaps you could let me know if you think it's a good idea or not? Anyway, enough rambling for now I think I'm off for coffee - next post will be on the subject of planning lessons and courses and then I hope to start uploading some material!

New Beginnings

2010-06-29T10:50:00.008+02:00

Having last posted an entry over a year ago it would seem to be more than time to restart this project. Initially I thought it would be a good place to put up lesson plans and ideas and I think that's still true but I will also now expand it to include random thoughts and ideas as well as links to other projects. With that in mind then I am posting a link to a netvibes web page that I am in the process of building to help my long course students with self study and project work. It's only in the early stages and at the moment doesn't look very polished but the idea essentially is to have a one stop shop (no infringement on onestopenglish intended!) for the students to access a wide variety of articles and exercises as well as hopefully a forum and twitter feed at some point. The internet is awash with sites designed with English students in mind, however whilst some are really excellent others are not and I think part of the job of the teacher is to act as a filter to point students in the right direction which is hopefully what the website will do. If you happen to have stumbled across this blog site whilst looking for something more interesting and have managed to read to the end then please feel free to comment or give any feedback on the website as I'm still trying to figure out what I want from it exactly and any ideas would be extremely welcome!

The Website

A level 1 listening exercise

2009-05-13T10:36:00.001+02:00

Around the neighborhood

Before you listen.

1. A neighborhood is a part of a town or city where people live, work and shop. With a partner write a list of things you find in a neighborhood.

While you listen.

1. Watch the film and tick off the things that are on your list. For example, if you have 'bank' on your list and the film shows a bank then put a √ next to the word on your list.

Neighborhood lessons

2. Watch the film again and write down any things from the film that are not on your list.

After you listen.

1. Look at you list. Can you say what each place is? Write a sentence for each place in the film, look at the example below;

Bank √ A bank is a place where you keep your money.

Now you do the same for the other places using the phrase 'is a place where...'

2. Ask your partner if there were any places he or she had on their list that were not in the film. Tell your partner about any places you had that were not in the film. Can you also write a sentence to say what each place is like you did in exercise 1?

3. In my neighborhood we have banks, shops, restaurants, hotels, a park and a town hall. Ask your partner the question, 'What things do you have in your neighborhood?'

Examples of pre-listening activities

2009-05-13T10:17:00.001+02:00

Trapped into living with the ex!

1. Look at the world bubble below. What is the film about, do you think?

2. Look at the words/phrases below which are taken from the video clip. What do they mean and using the words write a sentence or two with your partner saying what you think the film could be about.

couple / split / housing market / deposit
awkward / down by 20-30% / rent out
loss / living arrangements

3. The title of this film is “Trapped into living with the ex”. What could the film be about?

4. The film is about a couple who bought a house together and then split up. They still live in the same house.

A. Why would they be still living together?

B. What problems could this situation bring?

C. What would you do in the same situation?

D. What vocabulary here is specifically to do with a) housing and b) relationships?

5. Click here to explore the text that accompanies the film.

6. These sentences come from the video;

The housing market is forcing them to live together under the same roof.

“This is my room and I’m very lucky I got the biggest room”.

It’s a two-bedroom Victorian villa in South East London that they planned to live in for years to come.

A ₤70,000 loss on the house is too much for Gemma and Ben to take.

Watch the video and then say what order the sentences come in.

7. These characters, settings and situations all appear in the film. How do the link together do you think?

"Living apart under the same roof"
a modern tragedy
by
Lehmann Brothers (and others)

Cast.

Gemma (Ben's ex)
Ben (Gemma's ex)
Ben's mother (Moneybags)
Housing Market (the villain)

Settings.

A two bedroom victorian villa
South East London
Big bedroom
Little bedroom

Situations.

A couple
A deposit
A purchase
A split
A loss
A solution
A hope for the future

Watch the film. Were you right?

What's it all about?

2009-05-12T14:13:00.001+02:00

In the beginning

Listen to the audio file below and say what you think it is about?

http://www.box.net/shared/tr62n1vaft

Check your answer with your partner. What made you decide on your answer?

The middle kingdom

Look at the words below from the text and match them with the descriptions underneath.

horrible / the amount of / match / terrible / scary / flow / common
get used to it / overcome / complain about

a quantity of something

causing fear

familiar with something so that it seems normal or usual

of a type that is regularly seen and not considered special or unique

someone or something that is equal to or as good as another person or thing

to move, come, or go continuously in one direction

to say (something that expresses annoyance or unhappiness)

to successfully deal with or gain control of (something difficult)

very bad or unpleasant

What does the word 'gonna' mean? When can you use it? Can you think of other examples like this? Discuss with a partner.

Listen now to the full text and answer the questions below;

a. Do Tu and Amir describe their cities positively or negatively?

b. What words could you use to describe Tehran and Ho Chi Minh City? What words do Tu and Amir use?

c. What forms of transport are mentioned?

d. What common group of transport is not mentioned?

Check your answers with a partner.

Going Deeper Underground

Listen again to the full text and count how many times you here the words 'just' and 'tell'.

just = ? times

tell = ? times

With your partner try and write down the sentences that are used with both words.

Just has many meanings and is a very useful word in English. It can be used as an adverb or as an adjective. Tu and Amir use it as an adverb. Look here in the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary for the list of meanings. Which meanings do Tu and Amir use?

Look at the examples of tell from the text. What can you say about how this word is used? Think about pronouns, form and collocations.

Follow Up

How would you describe the transport and traffic situation in your city or town? Write an email to Amir or Tu explaining the situation, try to use as many of the red words from this activity as possible.

What's the best job in the world?

2009-05-12T09:19:00.001+02:00

Pre-Listening

With your partner make a list of the best five jobs in the world, in your opinion.

With your partner discuss how you would interview people for these jobs.

Look at the pictures below; what job is being advertised here?

Did you spot the odd one out?

While watching

Now watch the film below once and note down what you understand from the film;

Check your notes with a partner, make two columns on a piece of paper and in the left hand column write the points you agree on and in the right hand column write the things that only one of you noted or where you disagree.

Now watch the film again to check your notes.

As a class fill in the who, where, when, what, how and why table on the board - if you can't fill in a box then leave it blank!

Finally, we will watch the film together and check the table.

Follow up

Watch some of the related films on youtube or google best job in the world and find out who won and why.

Discuss in threes if you would have applied for this job. Why/Why not?