How to create lesson content for online ESL lessons « Cecilia Nobre ELT Blog Hello and Happy 2017! It’s Monday, January 2nd and I have already delivered my first online lesson of the year. What about you? In this first post of 2017 I have the pleasure to introduce Kris Jagasia. Thanks a lot, Kris! Hello, teachers! At the time, we were spending hours combing the web on sites like Dave’s ESL Café and Busy Teacher looking for ESL content designed for online classrooms. Today I would like to outline a couple of the things I’ve learned about how to create content for online ESL lessons. How is an online classroom different to a bricks-and-mortar classroom? The online ESL classroom presents some challenges for content creation. Content in an online classroom (such as on Skype, Hangouts or Zoom.us) takes up 90%+ of your student’s visual field. Implications: Online lesson content must be bright and engaging. Mobile is becoming increasingly popular. Implications: Do not try to fit too many words, images or concepts onto any one slide (or page). And one more thing.
Teachers: here's how to get your lessons off to a flying start | Teacher Network How do you start your lessons? In many schools, classes will begin the same way – with the teacher explaining two or three intended learning outcomes. These are often written on the board and students will note them down in their textbooks. Some teachers believe that this is what Ofsted wants. Although there are benefits to opening with learning outcomes – helping teachers choose appropriate activities and letting students know what they’ll be taught – the science of learning suggests there may be more effective ways of starting a lesson. Ask pre-questions Let’s try a quick experiment. You may not know the answer to these yet. The same study found that not only did students remember the correct answers to the pre-questions later on, but they also remembered other key information from the lesson better. Play memory games Retrieval practice, sometimes referred to as “the testing effect”, is any activity that forces the students to recall information in order to generate an answer.
StoryToolz - Writing Prompts and More StoryToolz is a nice assembly of useful tools for writers. Writers who are struggling to come up with ideas for fiction stories will like the story starters featured on StoryToolz. StoryToolz has three tools that you can use to get story ideas; Random Conflicts, Half Title Generator, and Story Idea Generator. In addition to the writing prompts tools StoryToolz offers a few tools to help you edit your work. Applications for EducationStoryToolz offers tools that are useful to almost every student.
Write or Die 2 9 mistakes you need to stop making with your teaching | TESOL Having been a teacher trainer for a few years now, I’ve had opportunities to observe and reflect on the good and bad things teachers do in the classroom (including my own teaching skills!) while looking back on those first terrifying (and exhilarating) teaching years with a more experienced eye, and maintaining an understanding of that first foray into teaching and identifying common mistakes teachers make. I’ve asked my fellow trainers what they’ve observed and here’s a list we’ve come up with. 1. Unclear lesson aims: poor lesson planning comes from having unclear lesson aims. The best-planned lessons often come from a clear understanding of target language, with a strong context for its use. An example of a good lesson aim would be: By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to use the present perfect simple tense, related to travel experiences, and to speak for fluency by extending answers in a conversation. 2. Nothing is more disheartening or dull for a learner. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
What the C-test is by Lucy Katona and Zoltan Dornyei from: Forum English Teaching The C-test is an integrative testing instrument that measures overall language competence, very much like the cloze test. It consists of four to six short, preferably authentic, texts in the target language, to which “the rule of two” has been applied: the second half of every second word has been deleted, beginning with the second word of the second sentence; the first and last sentences are left intact. By way of illustration, here is a short C-test: “One cool autumn evening, Bob L., a young professional, returned home from a trip to the supermarket to find his computer gone. Comparison with the cloze test The C-test was developed as a modification of the cloze test, which is a frequently used, major language-testing instrument, extremely popular because of the ease of constructing it and its high reliability and validity. The C-test appears to have some advantages over the cloze test: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Testing the C-test 2. 1.
Literature sites for ELT-Thanks to Eva :) flashmobELT Believe it or not! A speaking activity I've used with adult learners to practise making questions in the past simple but I guess it could be adapted for any tenses really. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Like I said, this works better with older students as they've had more life experiences so it's difficult to tell if they are telling the truth or not. A page of questions ready to print can be found on my blog but it really doesn't take a lot to write your own if the ones I use are unsuitable for your group. Enjoy. :) Aidan @leedsacademy www.teacherfacilitatorlearnerfriend.wordpress.com
Teaching English in Spain: “The traditional method of teaching English isn’t working” | In English | EL PAÍS For the last two years, language teachers (English, French, German, Latin, Spanish and Catalan) have been working together to avoid duplicating content and to help students better understand the cultural differences that lie behind languages. “The traditional approach to teaching languages doesn’t work. We have to take a risk,” explains Montserrat Montagut, the head of foreign languages at the Catalan Education Department. Motivation has to be based on understanding cultural differences, and that can only be done by getting teachers to work together Olga Esteve, foreign language expert “Languages cannot be taught in isolation and the least important things are grammatical structures. “To acquire a second language, you use the knowledge you already have from your mother tongue. She offers an example: students studying conversational techniques need to understand the origin of expressions in different languages; which means thinking about similarities between languages.
CELTA tip: guided discovery | ELT planning I got an A in my CELTA, but I had some teaching experience before the course. I find one of the hardest things about teaching is actually standing up and doing it. I am a really nervous person, and this trait has plagued me for a long time. Without some experience of being in front of people and presenting information I would have really struggled, but this wasn’t much of a concern for the less neurotic people on the course! Anyhow, teaching experience was not the only contributing factor to my A grade. What made that lesson so effective? We were using Cutting Edge as a class textbook on the CELTA. On the ‘lesson frameworks’ page in my training booklet, I saw this tip for making lessons more student-centred: ‘Use a guided discovery worksheet, containing questions about meaning, form and pronunciation. Well, that sounded like a challenge… What is guided discovery? Here’s a quote from the British Council website: This approach is the CELTA through and through really. A: Oh my god! lesson plan
Five-Minute Film Festival: 8 Interactive Video Tools for Engaging Learners It's no secret that I am a passionate advocate for using video in the classroom. When used well, videos can help students make connections to people and ideas beyond their usual frame of reference. That's why I've been really excited to see a wave of new (and mostly free or low-cost!) Video Playlist: Tools to Enhance Videos for Learning You may notice my playlist below looks a little different this time; I'm embedding using a great tool called Huzzaz, reviewed below. Zaption - Interactive Video for Learning (01:37) With Zaption, transform your students from passive watchers to active learners by adding links, multiple-choice questions, polls, discussions, and more to any video to create a "tour" -- or group a few together for a more complex lesson. More Resources on Using Video in the Classroom Reviews and Guides for Interactive Video Tools Sources and Ideas for Using Videos in the Classroom
The 6 Stages Of A Teaching Career - The 6 Stages Of A Teaching Career by Terry Heick I’ve been thinking about this, and there really is a life cycle to teaching. Not every teacher will experience every stage–or every stage to the same degrees, anyway. Some may notice very little of this at all. Have a look and see what you think. The 6 Stages of Teaching Pride This one starts before you step foot in the classroom–perhaps even as early as your acceptance into a teacher training program, and extends all the way to the first ten seconds of your first class. This is also the most outright ‘fun’ of all the stages. Most conversations with colleagues are still framed around the abstractions of teaching–your views on assessment, how rewarding ‘aha moments’ can be, how teams and departments are setup, and so on. During this stage teaching can be, while tiring, a period of intense growth and oodles of enthusiasm. Survival While it’s not necessarily miserable, during this stage teaching can be stressful and exhausting. Experimentation
CELTA Lesson Frameworks | ELT planning I had a request last week from a reader who wanted to know more about lesson frameworks. I wrote about how useful they are a while back, but only gave one example. So, I’ve dug out my excellent CELTA handbook (from IH Budapest) and summarised most of the frameworks mentioned. I’ve added a bit of information to explain some stages a bit more. Here’s the basic structure for… Receptive skills lessons Note: receptive skills are reading and listening Lead-in – Generate interest in the topic / text. Orientation to text – What do you need to tell the students about the text to prepare them for reading/listening? Gist task – set a short task based on general understanding of the text as a whole. Pre-teach vocabulary – Teach any vocabulary needed for the detailed task Detailed task – set a task based on detailed comprehension (formats might include gap fills, ordering events, true/false, etc). Follow-up activity – do a speaking/writing activity based on the text. The above is the BASIC framework.