TEFL warmer: MAD Discussion

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Bren Brennan

 
You probably have a TEFL warmer or two that you can draw on to start off an English lesson in the best possible way, but all English teachers are on the look out for more of these conversation starters, right?

I just read a blog by Hugh Dellar that quoted a warmer exercise lifted from Keep Talking by F. Klippel.


 
I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like a fun one for use in good intermediate level classes and higher. The warmer is called MAD DISCUSSIONS. As I said, it’s not my invention and all credit goes to the Klipp-meister General. I thought I’d just make a handout of the idea, so that you can have it ready to cut out and use. Plus, I have added some variations/extensions to the activity below the handout download for you to try out.

On page 1 and 2, I have left some blank spaces for you to add your own ideas/things. Maybe you could include some vocabulary items that you have used recently in class that you want to recycle OR use an item that is relevant to your learner’s culture / country / lifestyle / interests.

Page 3 is images only. I think that there is more scope for the imaginative student here e.g. the flowers pic may be construed as ‘colour’ or ‘art’, which could lead to some nice tangents for you. You may also get things like ‘traffic warden’, rather than ‘police officer’. Who knows what might come up with these images? Let’s not forget that we’ve just had #theimageconference with various speakers talking about the power of images in the classroom.

 

TEFL WARMER Instructions: Mad Discussion

1. Print out sheet below and cut up words or pictures

2. Split your class into 2 teams.

3. A member from each team picks a random word out of a bag. (e.g. Milk / New York / a bike)

4. The ‘picker’ has 1 min to consult with their team on any/all advantages of that item.

5. The picker from both teams debate with each other (90 seconds) about why their item (picked from the bag) is better than their opponents.

6. Teacher / Students decide who won the debate. 1 point to the winner. Move on to next team member.

TEFL Lesson Warmer Activity: Mad Discussion

Warmer Activity Variations

1. GRAMMAR BONUS:
Tell the students that they can gain “Teacher Bonus Points” if they use the grammar that you have been using in class recently e.g. conditional sentences, comparatives, superlatives, past simple, present perfect, future perfect, rhetorical questions, linkers… whatever.

2. STARRED ITEMS BONUS:
On page 2 of my handout above, some words are starred…. because I imagine that these will be more difficult to win a debate with. 2 points to a team if they can win a debate with a starred item.

3. DON’T NAME IT!
If a student can talk about their item/thing without ever using the name on their card, they get 2 bonus points – whether they win the debate or not.

4. HOP TO IT:
Students have to hop continuously while debating – sorry, I ran out of ideas! :)

 
Any other variations that you can think of, please feel free to outline them below.
 

Posted in Lesson Ideas, Lesson Plans | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Advanced TEFL Lesson Plan: Marketing – Business English

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Bren Brennan

It’s quite difficult sometimes to find material for you top-level students, don’t you find? Well, here’s an Advanced TEFL lesson plan to try and help you in that area. The theme is marketing and therefore the target language could be considered business English, but this lesson works just as well with anyone who has ever seen an advert or bought a product! :)

The student handout and the teacher instructions are based on THIS STUDENT BLOG HERE.
You will need this link so that you can use the cool video and have the vocabulary glossary to hand if you are not completely au fait with marketing terms.

 

Student handout

Advanced TEFL Lesson Plan: Effective Marketing – Business English

 
 

Teacher Instructions/answers

Advanced TEFL Lesson Plan: Marketing (Teacher Instructions/Answers)

 

Posted in Lesson Ideas, Lesson Plans | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

TEFL Lesson Plan: Angelina Jolie Mastectomy

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Bren Brennan

 
Another TEFL lesson plan for you to download for free here
Angelina Jolie

…. or below from Scribd


 
This is based on the student blog over on our other website, (see pic to the right), where you can also find the audio for this high-level class.

There are no teacher instructions as this is a straight forward lesson with all directions that you need included within the student worksheet. If you are unsure about the answers to Exercise 6 where learners have to insert the target language and transform to fit in with the correct grammar, then the full transcript/answers are on the relating student blogpost page, and also later on in the student worksheet on the last page.
 

TEFL Lesson Plan: Angelina Jolie Mastectomy

If you have any additions, improvements or ‘off on a tangents’ to this lesson plan that were successful for you, then please let us know about it in the comments section below. Thanks

 

Posted in Lesson Ideas, Lesson Plans | Tagged | 1 Comment

EFL Real Beginners – Better Board Management

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Bren Brennan

 
Following on from my previous blog regarding teaching EFL real beginners:

During your TESOL Certificate course at SGI, amongst a million other things concerning best practice teaching, you will be dealing with issues of ‘Board Management’. So, here is a view into my ‘Real Beginners’ classroom from this morning to see how I boarded all the target language.

 

RECIPE ENGLISH LESSON: HOW DO YOU MAKE….?


Actually, it wasn’t like I did a standard PPP lesson with target language like you are required to do in your observed lessons. It was more of a dogme approach (just read ‘freeform/improvised’, if you don’t know what dogme teaching is) opening and I improvised from there.

 

STARTING POINT

Let me give you some background as to why I went with this lesson, rather than the one I had prepared.

  • Most of the South American and Spanish students in this class work as kitchen staff.
  • On Friday, the students mostly turn up 5 or 10 minutes late, as Thursday is a BIG night in this town when the whole town is out eating and drinking and a bar can 1800 tapas, whereas a normal day they usually sell about 20 – 30. So, the students work very hard (and late) on Thursdays and find it difficult to make it for exactly 9am.
  • The first student who showed up (at 9:01) is the main chef at one of the most popular tapas bars here. I asked her how her previous night’s work was.
  • We spoke about the tapas she has to cook on Thursday nights in VERY basic English
  • I asked her for her recipe for making tortilla: “How do you make omelette?”
  • I had been speaking to another teacher the other day about a successful intermediate lesson she had done about ‘Working through a recipe’, so that was obviously lurking somewhere in my TEFL subconscious!
  • My totally original TEFL thinking (natch) came up with “Let’s make a recipe” idea for a lesson – coz yeah, that’s NEVER been done before. :)

 
 

EMERGENT LANGUAGE

As you would imagine, we had the need of ‘recipe chunks’ of English like:

  • How do you make…?
  • First, you need…
  • salt and pepper
  • Then you have to…
  • Cut the…
  • Mix everything together
  • Fry it for 5 minutes: More or less.
  • …and lots more

 
 

TEACHING REFLECTION

During this section, my TTT was very high AND I was translating as the monolingual students know absolutely no English whatsoever. Accurate pronunciation is a real difficulty for these South Americans, so we did lots of variations of drilling. I was also correcting them when peer correction wasn’t able to outline important errors like, ’6 eggs’ was produced as ‘SICK egg’.

I didn’t have any prepared pictures with me to help with comprehension, as this was totally improvised (and unusually, I didn’t have my tablet with me for quick jumps into google images), so no presentation from the PPP. We did however use the class bi-lingual dictionary, as I didn’t know what ‘trocear’ or ‘batir’ were in Spanish when the Ss asked me. BUT, I did make them ask in the classroom meta-language that I had previously taught them: “How do you say ______ in English?”

So, let’s say that the teaching style was a mish-mash of things you should and should not do for your observed lessons on your Cert course. In fact, it was much more leaning towards a perfect illustration of Anthony Gaughan‘s ‘The Se7en Deadly Sins of ELT‘! :)

 
 

BOARDWORK HALFWAY THROUGH THE CLASS

This is what my board looked like after students had constructed their recipe dialogue. What do you think about it?

A bit messy, disorganised and colourless. But probably OK for CELTA level…. but could be better. As the students practised their dialogue (before presenting in fornt of class in pairs), whilst monitoring and assisting, I was thinking how I could improve the board.

The first thing was to get a refill for the red pen, so that I wasn’t limited to one colour!!!

 
 

BETTER BOARD MANAGEMENT IN LANGUAGE REVIEW

I always do a ‘language review’ at the end of every class, trying to give it about 10 mins or more to reflect on ‘what we have learnt today’. At this point, I re-elict the ‘good shit’ from the class members, by either rubbing items off the board or simply standing in the way as an obstruction to ‘reading it off the board instead of remembering’.
But because I wanted to restructure the board a tad and then also do a final ‘chain recipe’ (where after the students had done their own presentations, they had to follow on with one line each as we went round the class, in order to make a communal tortilla), I did this section earlier than usual.

What do you think now?

I think the ‘red for verbs’ adds something and Sectioning off the vocab from the verbs both probably help visual learners.
But what else could have been improved upon?

 
 

SUMMARY

What things I will take from this lesson: On your Cert course you have to reflect on how the class went in your post-observed class review.

I need to plan my boardwork in advance (although how do you do that with this improvised approach? – Well, Bren you probably do it by using some colours and having clear understandable sections for TL, Grammar, errors)

I did some big tefl training no-no’s like very high teacher-centred focus, translation, Practice not production at the end of class .

But does that matter? The learners had got it, by Jove! They could deliver a recipe. Some of the grammar here is highly complex – we’ve got imperatives, instructional language, advice, staging. According to a standard textbook, there’s no way that real beginners should be able to achieve this after 4 weeks. Good on the students for jumping into it, enjoying it and making tons of progress.

Let’s see if it really is effective teaching: next week I am going to recycle the language and make a video of the students with their very own TV cooking programme.

The proof is in the pudding (pun intended).

 

Posted in Newbies, Reflecting on Teaching | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Comprehensible Input – Real Beginner’s Conversation

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Bren Brennan

 
If you are studying the Trinity TESOL certificate at SGI, when you cover different TEFL methodologies you will definitely learn about comprehensible input and its figurehead Stephen Krashen.

His theory explains how second language acquisition is at its most effective when students ‘understand messages’. In other words,
L2 learners acquire a new language by hearing it in contexts where the meaning is made plain to them. Ideally, the speech they hear has enough ‘old’ language to be understood and absorbed. (p132: Cook, V., Second Language Learning and Teaching, Hodder Education, 2008)

You can see how this all pans out in the short video below from the 80s…

 

Comprehensible Input explained by Stephen Krashen

Now you may think that vocabulary of body parts is not particularly useful, high-frequency language, but you can easily select target language for your lessons that is both extremely useful, relevant and also 100% understandable.

In Spain, I have recently started teaching a new class of Real Beginners, i.e. people who have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of English. To be honest, I couldn’t be arsed to follow boring textbooks with weeks spent on content like ‘a baby, an orange, a laptop, an umbrella’ – boring, boring, boring right? The pre-course needs analysis of the students showed that they wanted to learn English for social situations and for potential holiday or work travel to the UK (most of the students are South Americans that work as kitchen staff).

The language is actually extremely complex for this ‘zero’ level in terms of grammar and should be beyond their reach (you would say definitely if you were a textbook author for a big publishing compnay). But because the students, as normal human beings, understand the situation perfectly, they are able to successfully reproduce the conversations (with the aid of other TEFL teaching techniques like ‘drilling’, ‘miming’, visual context setting with images’, ‘listening to a model conversation on audio’ that you will be learning on the SGI course)

 

Real Beginner’s Conversation


A: Hi, How are you?

B: Fine thanks. And you?

A: Yes, great. It’s been a long time!

B: Yes, yes. A looooong time.

A: Where do you live now?

B: I live in __________

A: And what are you up to now?

B: I’m working in ____________. And you?

A: I’m working in _____________. Let’s go and have a drink.

B: Great. Let’s go.

 
I have done similar conversations with this class for ‘check-in at the airport’, ‘Getting some food and drink on the plane’ and ‘Ordering in a restaurant’. The progress that the students have made is astounding. Their enjoyment and pride in their achievements is plain to see and consequently the class is also very enjoyable for me, the teacher, especially when the learners try and throw in their own variations to the conversations to try and trick their partners. Great fun.

So, even if you are dealing with the beginner’s group in your SGI teacher training, don’t be afraid to try for a complex conversation… as long as the situation is understandable for all concerned.

 
Good luck on the teacher training course!
 

Posted in Lesson Ideas, Professional Development, Reflecting on Teaching | 1 Comment

Teaching Dyslexic students in EFL

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Bren Brennan

 
So, yesterday I got told (not asked) that I would be teaching a dyslexic student teenager in a 1-2-1, twice a week lesson starting on Monday.
I have never (knowingly) taught a dyslexic or dyspraxic learner before, so this is going to be a new challenge. I like challenges.

 

Helpful Font

I remembered a font that I had came across a while back and had forwarded to a dyslexic friend: Open Dyslexic

http://opendyslexic.org/

As the name suggests, it’s a freeware font and also easy to install into your computer’s fonts folder. There’s also a browser option for ipads.

My friend said that it actually works, so I made a simple document to present to my (apparently, strong intermediate) student to check whether it makes a difference.

I varied the text slightly, as I didn’t want the student to learn/memorise the text in version 1 and then declare that option 2 was easier, due to repetition.

 

Basic Classroom Methods to help dyslexic students

With some basic internet research, I found some nice ideas like….

MAKE A SAND TRAY
Fill a tray with sand and get students to spell out words by engaging their sense of touch to spell out words or draw pictures

USE VISUAL CUES
Having more bullet points or numbered lists than normally appropriate will aid the dyslexic learner

PREPARE COLOURFUL AND TANGIBLE MATERIAL
Using black font on yellow background is supposed to help.
Use lots of different colours on the whiteboard (I do this anyway… I don’t think you need to be dyslexic for colour variation to aid learning)
Making note cards that the student can hold whilst reading out loud should engage various motor and auditory skills

ORGANISE MATERIAL
Help Ss organise their folder, so that class work and homework are in different colour-coded sections, for instance.
Write instructions with a coloured text-background and stick to that system, so that it helps identify the task at hand.

 

Good Practice

Along with other ‘normal’ good-practice basics such as…

Repeating often: instructions, new target vocab, grammar concepts need to be checked repeatedly to confirm understanding.

Taking your time: Dyslexic students need longer to complete a task. They need longer to copy sth from the board. Don’t rush Ss which can lead to frustration.

Having short breaks: Ss with learning difficulties tend to be restless and have difficulty concentrating for ‘normal’ length periods.

 
 
I found this site, ELT Well, ( http://www.eltwell.co.uk/inclusive-language-teaching.html ) but in my opinion, it wasn’t incredibly user-friendly and seems (with only a quick scan through) that it is more for someone looking to get into research areas, more than just a private class up until the end of June, like me.

 
 
So… has anyone taught dyslexic students (or other learning difficulties) that could pass on any useful classroom tips or provide links to improve on the basic info above?
 
Thanks in advance!

Posted in Professional Development | Tagged | Leave a comment

TEFL Technology: My daily tech teaching classroom

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Phil Wade

 

The world of tech has invaded our classrooms whether we like it or not. There are phones, tablets and maybe laptops in students pockets and bags. I even saw one bring in a desktop last week.

If you are against a TEFL technology environment and using it in teaching then you are fighting a losing battle. The days of paper are numbered and it’s only a matter of time until all our journals, books and courses are online. Well, in theory.

I’ve always been into using tech or IT/ICT as we used to call it. When I got my first proper TEFL job we had a computer lab and a CALL (computer assisted language learning) co-ordinator. His job was to source and make activities which we could do in the labs. at that time, we had a few expensive programmes on the network but the majority of classes were spent doing website activities or just reading online.

Things changed when Blended Learning came in and we said goodbye to classic student books. Since then, I’ve seen schools use handouts, PPT, their self-produced materials, e-readers and classic lab lessons. Now, technology has caught up and we finally have the hardware and the online and downloadable content to finally teach with tech. Nevertheless, be warned, there is a danger.

Never let the tech rule your class!

When I started getting into apps and sites I tended to focus the lessons just on using them and forgot about the lesson. In my opinion ‘less is more’ so using one site to help with an activity is better than spending 30 minutes register and logging into 3. A simple shared Gdoc for group writing or an interesting video, if fully exploited, is worth its weight in gold.

I teach in France which I used to think was a bit behind England tech-wise. That doesn’t seem to be true though. I haven’t actually worked anywhere since 2011 that has used books or copies and even in 2010/11 that uni brought in Moodle and was going digital. The average French higher education institute, from my experience, seems to have embraced tech. For example, I see time and again just empty classrooms. They have a projector, desks and chairs and that’s it. Teachers arrive, connect, deliver and leave. PPT is the name of the game and the students bring and use their laptops.

A couple of other places use iPads with one for every teacher and student. This is very modern and, like the above example, can be a shock to use TEFLers who carry round grammar books. It took me a while to adapt to but it’s not really that different. You still teach but instead of having copies you have screens. Here is one iPad lesson I taught yesterday:

 

Course:

Conversation

Level:

C1+ 121  

Time:

45 mins

Objectives:

To discuss a topical issue, to work on pronunciation errors, to adopt and use content-specific vocabulary

Material:

http://www.newsy.com/ iPad app

Preparation:

Create a playlist of 4 news videos, watch them and note down challenging vocabulary

  1. I gave the student an iPad and asked her to flick through the playlist and choose one to watch.
  2. We watched the video, discussed it and I asked questions using the vocabulary I had listed. For the items she didn’t recognise I replayed the video to use the context to work out their meaning or let her use a dictionary app. We continued the discussion with free conversation.
  3. I noted her pronunciation errors and then recorded myself and her saying the words, replayed it and compared them. I also tested her by using Siri (voice recognition) to see if it could recognise her pronunciation

For homework I asked her to watch the other 3 videos and bring a list of new or interesting language to the next lesson. I also recommended recording herself talking using the sounds we had worked on and sending it to me as an MP3 file. I will then analyse it using https://soundcloud.com/ and go over it in the next lesson.

As you can see, my prep involved watching 4 short news clips and noting down vocab. In the lesson, we had real conversation and I helped her learn the lexis and focus on her pron errors. Then, I gave her plenty of homework and material to bring to our next class.

 

Posted in Reflecting on Teaching, Teaching with Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment