THiNK Thursday #1: First day of class activities - getting to know your students. Published 13 April 2017 Each Thursday we will bringing you practical ideas and resources for the teenage classroom from the THiNK team. We start the series with Product Manager, Laura Sigsworth’s favourite activities for the first day of class. The first day of class can often be as nerve-wracking for teachers as it is for students, particularly if you have completely new classes of students! Will they be silent and uncommunicative, or rowdy? How will you remember all their names? How will you make the right impression? Here are some simple ‘getting to know you’ activities to break the ice and get your students speaking. What’s the question? At the beginning of the class, write a list of 4 or 5 questions about yourself on the board.
For example: What is your name? Guess Who?! Images in your coursebook can be exploited to find out how much relevant language your students already know. Get students to work in pairs. Where do/does he/she/they live? Extensive reading in ELT: Why and how? Free whitepaper | WoBL. Published 12 January 2018 Extensive reading is a useful practice that can manifest itself in different ways depending on the teacher and class, however it remains a relatively underused language teaching technique.
Dr. Peter Watkins has created an Extensive reading in ELT whitepaper as part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series to discuss why extensive reading is important and how we can implement it in the classroom… Characteristics of the reading activity The paper is based around the 10 key principles you should keep in mind when considering such a task in the classroom.
The benefits Why it’s important for learners to undertake this type of reading and how they develop through an activity like this. Barriers to extensive reading Discover why this technique is relatively underused in language teaching, determine the potential barriers that you may need to overcome, and decide whether it is something you would like to encourage your learners to undertake. Implementing extensive reading. Seven tips for English language beginners. Winner of the TeachingEnglish blog award Larissa Albano shares seven ways to make learning English easier for beginners. Once upon a time, an Italian woman in her 40s wanted to learn English. Maria was a widow and came into a bit of money when her husband prematurely died. She was keen to travel around the UK, but she only had a poor grasp of grammar learnt at school. So she bought an English language audio box set and started to parrot everything the recordings said.
After a couple of months, she booked a low-cost flight to London. She landed at Stansted airport and managed to buy a one-way ticket to Victoria station by coach, with the help of a couple of Spanish retirees who were also heading to the centre of London. But once in London, she ran into a major source of frustration: she couldn’t understand or speak to the people she met. Welcome to the age of global English. 1. Learning a foreign language is like going to the gym. 2. Tip: start to learn collocations immediately. 3. 4. 5.
25 BEST WEBSITES FOR LEARNING ENGLISH - Fluency Spot. We all know how important English is nowadays, it’s the international language, and everyone needs to know it. Maybe you want to study abroad, attend a conference or just travel. English isn’t my mother tongue but knowing it opened new doors for me. It’s crucial to know a foreign language, especially English. Test your English here, find out how good you are at English idioms. I won’t write too much because I want you to get to these incredible and useful links. So let me share my resources: I use well know websites like: Duolingo Babbel Bussu Memrise Lingq Fluentu I love this website because you learn via videos, that is the most interesting way in my opinion. Lang-8 On this website you can write your sentences and a native speaker will correct them. Grammarly Check your grammar mistakes.
Audible English4today.com BBC Languages Vocabulix Digital Dialects Lingualia Buky Erasmus Plus My Language Exchange Fluent in 3 months Using English Bab.la Word Steps Idiom Site ESL Gold Real English Repeat After Us EngVid A.J. How to boost your lessons with 20 online tools « Cecilia Nobre ELT Blog. After two years of teaching online, I am convinced that this was the best decision I have made in my 17-year career in ELT. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching face-to-face, but I also love the freedom and flexibility that online teaching offers. Having said that, I have selected 18 tools that will boost your online lessons.
Mind you, these tools are useful for face-to-face lessons as well. 1. I gave up on Skype 2 years ago because Zoom won my heart. Using Zoom and Padlet Resource I love: Zoom 2. Making video tutorials on how to use certain tools or even send a two-minute video giving homework directions can be really convenient. Resource I love: Zoom again and Screen-o-Matic 3. Some teachers have asked me how I find inspiration and save interesting several links. Resources I love: Diigo and Google Keep 4. I still enjoy using paper diaries but I had to surrender to booking my lessons online and activate the notifications. Resources I love: Google Calendar 5. 6. Resources I love: Google Drive. 10 Recommended Books for the CELTA Course - ELT Experiences. It has been a number years since I took the CELTA Course, at least seven years since I actually completed the course at the British Council Seoul.
It was a wonderful opportunity to meet other Native English Speaker Teachers (NESTS) and Non-Native English Speaker Teachers (NNESTS) resident in Korea wishing to develop professionally as teachers. We all shared our commitment to the profession and wanted to improve our skills as teachers. I enjoyed the course so much that I created a CELTA Group on Facebook to keep in touch with the other trainees. Anyhow, I have been thinking about books that were recommended before starting the course, as well as books that I have come across after the CELTA course, and I thought a blog post suggesting potential books to aid the CELTA trainee would suffice. 1. The first book, Learning Teaching, that was recommended for trainees as part of pre-reading and preparation before as well as during the CELTA course. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Like this: What exactly do we mean by speaking skills?
A couple of weeks ago I received a comment on the blog from a teacher who asked me to write a post about speaking skills. This is what she said: ‘The other day I was asked to observe some students doing a short peer teaching session. They were supposed to “teach a speaking skill”. Each group decided to do a group discussion activity. When I asked them what speaking skill they had tried to focus on, they were really puzzled; in fact, they had no idea what I was getting at. They said their aim was ‘fluency’. I realised that she was absolutely right. Practice is important of course, but, as the teacher asked, what are the microskills involved in speaking? First of all, we need to identify what exactly we mean by speaking. Each of these three types of speaking could be more or less formal, depending on the context of the talk, who is taking part in the talk and the power relations between them. I would argue that teaching these chunks is very much part of teaching the speaking skill.
Salt! 467953 teaching language in chunks. What Makes A Good Speaking Class? Posted at 13:00h in Skills by Adriano Zanetti Whatever needs analyses one carries out with their groups, there is every likelihood that 9 out 10 will record that they will want to improve their speaking skills best. At this point I do not believe that anyone involved in ELT would be surprised at this, yet we can witness the fact that developing speaking skills might still be a challenge that either provokes or haunts teachers, especially if they are confronted with high demands. Speaking of provocation, here we have some questions to which you might want to give some thoughts: a) What are some differences between speaking L1 outside class and L2 inside class? B) How can a teacher create opportunities for Speaking English inside class? English in class? IMHO, a good speaking class will depend and rely on five basic foundations: a) the teacher; b) the students; c) the tasks; d) learning environment; e) the feedback.
Adriano Zanetti. The role of Rigor in the English classroom. Carolyn Nason, a recent guest on the Oxford Adult ESL Conversations podcast, discusses the role of rigor in the Adult ESL classroom. Recently I signed up for a professional development project focused on infusing rigor into ESL instruction. Knowing the 21st century challenges that my beginning adult English language learners (ELLs) face and their language proficiency level, I was quite skeptical about the idea.
However, I was delighted to discover that adding rigor doesn’t have to be difficult for the student or for the teacher. It also doesn’t require a lot of extra work, and the payoffs are spectacular. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy as modeled by Jessica Loose What is rigor? Rigor is all about ensuring that learners are prepared to succeed in academic and workplace settings. How do I add rigor to my class? Once I got used to the overall idea of rigor, I thought, “Okay, it’s certainly for higher levels, but not MY level. Categorisation – Carolyn Nason First, we began with brainstorming. Advice and tips if you’re thinking of teaching English abroad. On the over-use of concept-checking questions: part 1 | Lexical Lab. There aren’t many things that I think should be comprehensively banned from EFL classrooms, but the use of closed CCQs (Concept-Checking Questions) for items of vocabulary is one!
For those of you unfamiliar with CCQs, they seem to have come into the ELT mainstream via International House and the very early teacher training courses offered there, and have gone on to become part of what is now widely considered to be CELTA orthodoxy. The basic idea is that simply explaining what something means is insufficient and therefore teachers need to ask their students questions to check whether or not they’ve actually grasped the ‘concepts’ that have been laid out for them.
CCQs tend to be closed yes / no questions and just to be clear, I’m not opposed to their use in all circumstances. I used to have really long hair. I used to smoke a lot more. I used to drink a lot more. I used to go out five nights a week. I used to play in a band. Activities for correcting writing in the language classroom. How can teachers encourage learners to correct their own writing?
Second-time winner of TeachingEnglish blog award, Cristina Cabal, offers a few tried and tested error-correction activities. Does every single writing error need to be corrected? In the learning of a second language, this is a question that stirs up great controversy. While it is true that most spelling errors will disappear as learner proficiency increases, there are some persistent errors – mainly grammatical – which remain despite repeated efforts to correct them. In the following collection of error-correction activities for writing, the main aim is to get students to identify and correct writing errors taken from their own essays. The activities are fun and highly motivating, and because they are fast-paced, I would suggest going through the errors with the whole class a second time at the end to reinforce learning.
Use 'grass skirts' This activity is a lot of fun. Use sticky notes Use slips of paper Correct or incorrect? Responding to students’ writing | elt-resourceful. I have called this post responding to writing, rather than error correction on writing, as I believe that there is a lot more to responding to written work than simply correcting errors. To begin with, it is very important to respond to the content of the writing as well as the form.
Otherwise we risk being like this teacher: By Jon Marks, as featured in ETp When we assess a piece of writing there are various questions we could ask: Is the content interesting and/or appropriate to the task? Is there a clear sense of audience (who the writer is writing to or for) and is this reflected in the language chosen? It is, I think, important that we look at the questions further up the list, as well as picking out discrete errors with word choice, agreement, spelling and so on. Yet most feedback from teachers still tends to focus on error correction. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with using a correction code to mark work from time to time. To these I would add: Like this: Our Favourite Online Course Providers - Active English. We all know that a good quality teacher development course is a worthwhile investment to give your teaching practice and career a boost.
However, what happens when the city you live in or your busy timetable makes attending face-to-face classes impossible? Many teachers these days are turning to online education as a viable option that allows them to access quality training from anywhere at almost any time. The options are seemingly endless with everything from MOOCs, webinars, short courses, online conferences, and even university qualifications. If you are ready to give online learning a go, check out some of our favorite course providers. International iTDi’s courses give teachers from anywhere the chance to learn online with classes led by renowned experts in ELT. NILE is a world-leading centre of excellence, offering training and development from initial qualifications to an MA, both face-to-face and online. In Brazil Active English (that’s us!) AND! Index. P is for Practised Control. Practising control A Swiss student who I was teaching on-line produced the following short text, in response to an invitation to introduce himself: “I like to play piano very much.
I enjoy to watch TV. I love really to eat pizza. I don’t like to drink tea at all. I like to read newpapers and magazins a lot”. This is how I responded: Thanks H***. – nice to hear from you, and to get an idea of your interests. The next day I received the following (Task 2: Describe your computer and what you use it for): My computer is 2 years old. It appears that the student only then received my feedback on his first task, because he immediately re-sent the above work, self-corrected, thus: Thanks for your e-mail! Notice how the student has picked up on the -ing errors, and self-corrected them. Central to the notion of this transfer of control is the idea that aspects of the skill are appropriated.
This is a very different process to what is often called controlled practice. References: Lantolf, J. Catenation | elt-resourceful. There is a huge difference between what our students see printed on a page and what we actually say in everyday speech. In a recording of a TESOL Spain Presentation on Youtube (well worth watching), Mark Hancock makes the following joke: Patient: Doctor, Doctor, I’ve got two theik, a near rake, sore rise, bruise darms a stummer cake and I far tall the time. Doctor: I see, perhaps you’d like to way tin the corridor? (Try reading it aloud) The joke [apologies for the vulgarity ] showcases a good number of examples of features of connected speech. Features of connected speech As a brief overview, there is a strong tendency in English to simplify and link words together in the stream of speech, in order to help the language flow rhythmically.
Assimilation This is when the sound at the end of one word changes to make it easier to say the next word. ‘ten boys’ sounds like ‘ tem boys’ (the /n/ sound changes to the bilabial /m/ to make it easier to transition to the also bilabial /b/) Catenation Elision. The 'Bi-literate' Brain: The Key to Reading in a Sea of Screens. How to create content for private ESL lessons - Off2Class. Lingoda. Lingoda. 70 useful sentences for academic writing. 70 useful sentences for academic writing. 12 tiny tips for writing lesson plans | ELT planning. Grammar Police: 30 of the Most Common Grammatical Errors We All Need to Stop Making. 30 Skills Every Online Teacher Should Have - Teach ESL Online.
The freelance language teacher. 12 Tools That Made The Biggest Difference In My Teaching - Challenges in ELT: Teaching online. Conheça 6 ferramentas digitais para facilitar o dia a dia dos professores. 24 resources for bringing AR and VR to the classroom. How to create lesson content for online ESL lessons « Cecilia Nobre ELT Blog. 40 Things to Do with a Text. 9 mistakes you need to stop making with your teaching | TESOL. Teaching English in Spain: “The traditional method of teaching English isn’t working” | In English | EL PAÍS.
The 6 Stages Of A Teaching Career - Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management. Applied linguistics for the language classroom. 'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists Viviane Talks Weekends – Teach Pronunciation. I Want To Get Better At... Classroom Management. The Atlantic - Americans greet each other with huge... Wait … is that a rule? Ten everyday grammar mistakes you might be making | Books. How to get freelance work from ELT publishers | Uncharted Tesol. Whiteboards: The Force Awakens. Boardwork Tips for Teachers. - InnovateELT 2017. Pronúncia: o que os professores brasileiros precisam (mesmo) saber. CELTA Anticipated Problems: How to find problem words quickly and easily.
A different side of EFL: 7+1 tips to make CLIL work with your class. Metro - Listen up, it's pronounced scone. Help! My students think their course book is too easy - Oxford University Press. Natalia Guerreiro on Braz-TESOL. Webinário Higor Cavalcante. When We Listen to Students. 25 maps that explain the English language.