10 Speaking English Activities using TED.com

Many English Language teachers, when deciding to work with a video clip in their classrooms, make a false assumption that for an activity to be considered as really teaching, then prior to showing it, they'd better sit down for a few hours, prepare an extensive worksheet filled with vocabulary and grammar questions and what-not...in order to turn it into a good pedagogical exercise, you know to ensure it's really not just glorified babysitting.  ;-)

Personally, I don't agree and I really don't think that extensive worksheets provide a particularly authentic experience - such a thing mainly just erodes the power of the message within the video, takes away the inherent pleasure in learning from TED speakers.   

I'm fond of using TED with my adult language learners (+ similar sites - see here for a list of others) for the ingenuity and its realistic relevance and because I know that whenever I visit TED I'll always find short, topical talks which can be used to kick-off real discussions within my classroom: stuff my adult students want to know and talk more about... speeches that will either captivate their interest or through understanding, even with lower students at only 50%, will encourage them to feel a greater motivation about where their English is going.

Here are a few simple activities you can do with the video clip you're about to show/ are showing/ have shown to your students without designing a full worksheet :

1. Prediction:  what's the video going to be about?

Using the search bar function on TED, choose an interesting video (possibly related to the industry your students are currently working in) and then tell your students that they are going to watch a video with xyz talking about abc.  

Ask them what they think the speaker will be discussing and why they think this.   Do they have any pre-formed opinions on the subject matter?  After watching, get them to talk about whether or not the video met their expectations.  Why, why not?

Examples:

• Alan Siegel: Let's simplify legal jargon!
• Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed
• Jeff Bezos on the next web innovation
• Yves Behar's supercharged motorcycle design
• Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture vs Margaret Gould Stewart: How Youtube thinks about copyright

2. Vocabulary Collection

Give students a piece of paper with the numbers 1 - 10 written on it.   While watching, any video you've chosen, ask them to write ten words they found most interesting / or ten words they didn't understand / or ten words which they think would summarize the story.  

After watching, encourage students to share the words they've collected and to tell each other why these words were the ones they recorded.

Best with short TED videos: (see here)

3. Debate

While browsing TED, look for a video which the community has marked as persuasive.  Show the video and ask your students what the main points discussed in the video were.  Ask them to choose sides on these - to take an opposing view from others in the classroom and to debate it.

Examples:

• Philip Zimbardo: The demise of guys?
• Alisa Miller shares the news about the news
• Diane J. Savino: The case for same-sex marriage
• Bill Davenhall: Your health depends on where you live
• Birke Baehr: What's wrong with our food system

4. Post-speech interview

Ask students to pretend that they are journalists at a TED talk.   

Watch one of videos marked as informative and get them to write down questions while-watching and post-viewing.   Get one student to pretend to be the TED speaker, and encourage him/her to sit in the center of the classroom (aim to pick a student who's most likely to know about the ESP subject matter) and then get the other students to read out and ask their questions.

Works with any informative TED video, examples:

• Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education
• Janet Echelmann: Taking imagination seriously
• Negroponte takes OLPC to Colombia
• Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
• Renny Gleeson on antisocial phone tricks

5a. Critique Presentation Style

Give students a piece of paper and divide it to 2 parts:  

+ / -

Tell students to analyze a 3- 6 minute speech: to think about the presenter's style of delivery and ask them to write pluses and minuses, things like: she spoke too quickly; she flaps her hands about; she loves her subject material; she used good slides.

Examples:

• Laura Trice suggests we should say thank you
• Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself
• Lakshmi Pratury on letter-writing 
• Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language
• Stacey Kramer: The best gift I ever received

5b. Compare body-language

Choose two very short videos on similar subjects less than 4 minutes (or use the first few minutes of a longer video) and turn these on without using sound.  

Ask your students to pay attention to the speakers' body language and facial expressions while giving their talks and to compare these.   How many times do they move around the stage?   How do they stand, where do they keep their hands?   Who looks more convinced and thus convincing?  

After this discussion, play the videos again with sound, do they still think the same way?  What role does body language play in the audience's reception of the content of a talk?

Examples:

• Ariana Huffington: How to succeed vs Richard St.John Success is a continuous journey
• Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media vs James Surowiecki: when social media became news
• Sheryl Sanberg: Why we have too few women leaders vs Halla Tomasdottir: A feminine response to Iceland's financial crash

6. Wh-

Write on the board/flipchart the wh-questions: 

who/what/where/when/why/how  

Show the video you've (or one of your students') chosen and tell them they shouldn't write anything down while they're watching. After the video is finished, ask students to sit in groups and discuss what they watched, who was the presenter, why did she make this speech, how effective was it: encourage them to ask each other questions and share opinions.

Works with any TED video.

7. Critical Thinking  - Who's the target audience?

Take one of the videos marked as most-emailed and watch it with your students.    

Show or tell them that out of the thousands of videos on the site, this was one of the most-shared with others via email and social networks.  Ask them to think about what sort of people found this video so interesting they sent it on to family members/ friends/ co-workers/ members of their online communities.   Was the speech designed to go viral?

Will they send it on too?  Why or why not?

Get them to practice writing a "FB status update or a Tweet" summarizing the video in less that 140 characters!

Examples:

• Adam Ostrow: After your final status update
• Jay Walker on the world's English mania
• Eric Whitacre: A choir as big as the internet
• Gregory Petsko on the coming neurological epedemic 
• Howard Rheingold on collaboration

8. Will this idea fly?

Choose a video marked as ingenious, in a subject matter your students have expressed a clear interest in or is connected to their work.  

Watch the video with them and then ask them to discuss in groups whether or not they think the idea has merit; if they've already heard of something similar or if they disagree with its potentiality.

Examples:

• A robot that flies like a bird
• Mike Matas: A next generation digital book
• Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization
• Eythor Bender demos human exoskeletons
• Jakob Trollback rethinks the music video

9. In his/her shoes...

Review the videos marked as courageous and try to choose a video outside the scope of your students' normal interests and responsibilities.   Encourage a group discussion on whether or not, they could have done what was shown in the presentation; how they may have done things differently; who they know in their own lives/ read about who has done something like this?

Examples:

•  Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new
•  Becky Blanton: The year I was homeless
•  Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days
•  Julia Sweeney has "The Talk"
•  David Hoffman on losing everything
•  Matt Weinstein: What Bernie Madoff couldn't steal from me

10. Rank my TED video!

Encourage students to find a TED video based on something they are personally interested in.

It doesn't need to be about work, it can be a poem/song - it can be about glowing underwater fish! 
Whatever they like and while they watch -  possibly as homework (using the interactive transcripts in their own language if they need to) they can take brief notes about the subject matter.

In the next lesson, get students to share with each other what they watched.   Encourage them to    "rank" each person's suggestion in order of interest and at the end of the session, as a group watch the one that sounded the most fascinating.

11. What else?   

Have you got any zero-preparation/ great tips to share with fellow English Language Teachers on using TED in the classroom?  Do let me know your favorite videos, how you use them or any other ideas and experiences.

Best,
Karenne
education

image credit: European Parliment

Useful Links

• TED videos for Business English
• Larry Ferlazzo's links for teaching with TED
• Douglas Evan's TED ESL Lessons Blog 
• I also found Adam Simpson's post filled with 3 useful ideas however you'll need to get your vids from TEDtalks on Youtube. 
• Teaching with TED wiki (via Glennie)

THIS POST IS A RE-POSTING OF AN ACCIDENTALLY DELETED ARTICLE DATED BACK TO JANUARY 2011 (the first lot of comments below are copies of those posted between 26 Jan and ...) 
update 050911: actually, it looks like Blogger/Blogspot has been losing posts (in general, not just my own :( ... re the link to other sites which is also no longer here - will repost these up as well!)

Squeezing the joy out of a thing

Darren Elliot, the blogger behind Lives of Teacher is one of my fave edu-bloggers but he was a complete meanie the other day - he told me, in his comments, that basically it wasn't cool  to keep being cool. 

So while I get the point (and don't think teachers should suck up to their students) I don't entirely agree and actually, fully intend on being über-cool well into my 60's (like our Sensei Jeremy Harmer) but what made Darren's comment worth blogging about, was that interestingly, it occurred just after getting home from class and recognizing that I'd way totally killed the joy out of something for one of my students...  

He's an adult though, so I really do hope not forever.

Sidebar
We blogging teachers do tend to have a habit of only posting up lesson tips and ideas which have worked in our lessons - I mean, that's why we share them, because they worked so they'll probably work for other teachers too.  

But what about the things that don't work?

The things we do that fall flat...

Aren't there lessons worth learning and therefore worth sharing in those things too?  Or do we blogging teachers want everyone in the big old world to think that we're perfect teachers with perfect classes and what we teach is spot-on all the time and the students just love what we do all the time?

Not terribly realistic or truthful, now is it?

Anyhoo, here's my story:

One of my absolute favorite sites is TED.com, the lectures are simply fascinating and very often there are short videos filled with incredibly rich experiences - sometimes I just go in there only to drown in the knowledge of others.  Of course, because the lectures presented  are often by important leaders in the business world, it also is a soucre of authentic content especially if you, like me, teach adult ESP students.

Phillip, the student of the dogme-in-tech-movie fame, has an i-phone so one of my tips for him on developing learner autonomy was that he subscribe to TED.

And he followed through on the advice. SCORE...

He followed through on it so much so that in the last six months he has now watched more videos than I have, shares his favourites not just with me, via email, but also forwards them on to friends and colleagues he knows.

SCORE...

Feeling chuffed to bits that I'd managed to share one of my passions with one of my learners, I said to him, "hey, why don't you write up a blog post of your Ten Top TED videos." (Good so far).  

But then I said:

"Maybe you can include a list of all the new vocabulary you learned."

His face looked a bit incredulous but I continued undaunted.  "Yes," I said, "and maybe you could write about how you see TED as a great learning tool, how you were able to pick up these words from context, how you are then able to transfer that knowledge into the language you need in the workplace."

"Karenne," he replied in a slightly bemused voice, "I just like the videos.  I don't know which words I learn.  I understand some and I don't know what others are.  I don't think about that I watch them on my way to work, they're interesting."

He shrugged.

Oh.

Oh.

OH crap.  I thought to myself - now why'd I have to go and spoil his new hobby?   Now, everytime he looks at his i-phone to watch the latest on TED he's probably going to think about my über enthusiastic  English-teacher-suggestion and instead of  enjoying his videos and soaking up some great  vocabulary subconsciously, he'll now be thinking about what he's "supposed" to be extracting.

A lot of trainers will probably tell you just how important noticing is (including me) but noticing that you're supposed to be noticing - ummm - well, it's probably a distraction and probably hits all the wrong neuro-transmitting-signal-thingies in the brain.

Squoosh!

Best,
Karenne
image credit: diet coke by nesster on flickr.com

p.s. Have you ever gone and accidentally squeezed the joy out of something your students were enjoying doing by making it a way too learning oriented task instead of a simple life-experiential language experience?  Ever brought something into the classroom which completely bombed because it was your passion, not your learners'?  

Useful related links
The video Phillip sent me that launched this conversation. You'll love it :)
My delicious bookmarks: TED videos for Business English
More video sites for Business English classes
If your teach General English: also see Larry Ferlazzo's Best of TED videos.

Interesting articles on failures/successes in the TEFL classroom
Darren Elliot's The importance of failure
Jason Renshaw on Lindsay Clandfield's blog:  Six signs that you are on the right track


(There's a poll going on the Lexiophiles site to determine a list of the best language blogs, see my post about that here and if you haven't yet voted and you don't this it's  tacky of me to ask, do please click and visit the site to let them know you rate my blog :-) thanks muchly).

Conference Report: BESIG 2009

Last week, the annual Teachers of Business English conference was held in Poznan, Poland. I made the trek all the way there to have a look at what’s been going on in my field of teaching English to adult learners.

Poznan is a gorgeous city and having arrived early in the morning, I got the chance to have a wander around the city and even bought myself some lovely Polish amber.

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On Friday evening, there was an official reception and the opportunity to meet up with folks I’ve mostly only spoken to virtually on Twitter, Facebook and in the various yahoo!groups.

Some of my friends from ELTAS were also there so I wasn’t completely alone: Daphne Klimmek and Krystyna Key, Kenny Christian, the English Profi, and Shelly Terrell as well as Laura Hudson, busy manning the impressive Macmillan stand.

Watching Shelly Terrell and Carl Dowse compare i-phone apps probably sums up the running themes throughout this technology driven conference … oh we geeks do love our gadgets… and ha, ha! it turns out that Heike Philp and I have the same wee little blue Acer netbooks… remember that misguided poem I wrote dedicated to this no.1 love-in-my-life LOL… well, I’ll have you know he’s still the very best thing I ever bought.

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It was a lovely treat to meet Barry Tomalin and Petra a.k.a @TEFLPet in person – she’s just as sweet and pretty as she is on Twitter and Barry is wonderful and warmhearted.

The Plenary

Saturday’s event kicked off early with a presentation from Vicki Hollet and it was, undoubtedly, the highlight of my journey to Poznan to meet Vicki in real life.

I’ll let you in on a secret… the first time Vicki wrote on my blog I thought one of my colleagues was playing a trick on me! However, bit by bit over these months, I’ve gotten a chance to know her better - through her blog and on various social networking sites so finally hearing her live and finding out how generous and nice she is as a person - not just as a leading author and trainer - was, well, fab!

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Vicki’s plenary was called Relationships Matter and she put forth an argument about the way we teach ‘relationship’ language in Business English.

In this world of cultural differences where what we say to each other counts, she talked to us about things like how we give directives (orders, suggestions, requests) saying it’s not just about the form we use or who is saying what, but how things are actually said. She introduced us to the concept of whimperatives – the questions we ask when we’re pretending the other person has a choice.

Would you mind opening the window as opposed to Can you open the window; Would it be possible to use your phone instead of May I use your phone / Do you mind if I use your phone? When these instructions are given by a boss or a superior, we know precisely it’s an order no matter how softly or carefully given.

Oh, those are for my son’s classmates in response to My, those biscuits do look awfully delicious, helps save the face of both parties and allows the greedy one to be gracious with a How lucky.

Our students often ask what is a more formal way of saying something or how to be more polite yet it’s really not as simple as that - it depends so much on the context and culture – and this is often ambiguous. What do you think?

Ambiguity, Vicki also explained, in our communication with each other can often make a person more likeable and despite the fact that we teachers tend to think that directness and clarity is a better route in communication, and teach this, it often causes our students to come across as being impolite, stern, bossy! Tentativeness is what makes people more approachable, more likable and what causes others to contribute more, therefore making a team more effective and it’s necessary for this sort of language in contextual frameworks to appear in our teaching texts.

I’ve been thinking about her points all week and it’s already been creeping into my lessons!

This week I had to explain the difference, the subtlety in, rather than the grammatical differences of I’ve already done that, I’ve done that already and I did it already discussing potential implied tones.Tough one huh?

Workshops

After Vicki’s plenary and a couple of cups of coffee and some yummy Polish biscuits I headed off to attend my first workshop. This was with Anisoara Pop from Romania who presented a case study based on her work with university students.

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Anisoara wanted to find a way to narrow the gap between what students need, her schools’ requirements and to engage her students in captivating, memorable lessons. She did a thorough study on the functional language they require, became a webhead: looking for flexible asynchronous tools and thinking about things like motivating less proficient users, creating a safe environment for her learners and on how best to maximize writing and speaking skills.

She created a wiki, which is now public, where she’s able to give students instructions on things like how many articles to write, netiquette issues, copyright and also asked them to create their own blogs, 10% of whom still post!

Using Voxopop, a voice based message board, her students were also able to discuss real issues with people all over the world and linked up with another university in Spain.

By the way, the next free training session to become a webhead starts December 4th.

After this session, I trundled on over to see Heike Philp and Holly Longstroth talking about the use of 2nd Life in Business English and their Avalon project.

This was a pretty interesting session. I’ve visited 2nd Life a couple of times but to be honest, haven’t really explored it as an educational tool - the truth is my current students aren’t much into it - still it was very interesting to find out more what goes on there and I’m hoping to attend Language Lab’s session on the same subject in Harrogate next year.



After lunch it was time for Cleve Miller and the opportunity to learn about English 360. Cleve and I have had a pretty long-standing joke… I thought his avatar looked a bit like Seth Godin back in the early Twitter days… but actually, in RL, he doesn’t!

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However he is as innovative and brave and as dynamic a presenter.

To be honest, bogged down with my blended learning platform plus our supportive wiki recording emergent language - where I’ve got my students becoming co-creators of all the materials we need in true dogmesque2.0 fashion… (huge fun, an engaging learning environment but a lot of work) …after seeing what English 360’s got on offer I must confess this just might have been a much simpler option!

Cleve’s thang lies in the creation of playlists and his concept is, I’m convinced, the future of coursebooks – I love the idea of a book being broke up into parts where I’d have a say (based on my students’ interests) in what is done and when.

English 360 is an online space where TEFL teachers are able to do just that and create, share with others, discuss ideas and learn from each other. It’s an active, user-generated content platform combining your own work plus, this is the wow factor, previously published materials from Cambridge University Press - all of which can be integrated and even branded as per each teachers’ /language institute wishes!

To find out more visit the English 360 website or read the interview with Cleve Miller on Jeremy Day’s Specific English.

World of Work Panel
Then it was time to head off for the World-of-Work forum with Evan Frendo, Matt Firth, Carl Dowse, James Schofield. Due to personal reasons, Eric Baber was beamed in live from the UK.

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Matt spoke to us about the impact technology has on the development of courses and their curriculum… it was a bit odd watching him do this presentation, constantly seated in front of his Mac… I kept wondering if he was filming himself as part of a webinar.

Evan chatted about how the use of technology is principally age-driven and related some of restrictive problems from the corporate perspective (not being able to access youtube or other sites) and glitches (what Thornbury calls faffing about).

And then the most shocking thing I ever did see… occurred in this room.

Well, passions were high – any discussion discussing the use of technology in the classroom is bound to raise the blood pressure…

James threw a book on the floor, stomped on it… I mean he jumped up and down on it, really, then picked it up again, waved the tome in hands and said: See, good as new, I can still teach with it. Books are permanent.

Then he turned round towards the innocently seated Carl and asked if he could have his i-phone. Good lord, I thought I’d faint. So shocked was I, that I’m not even sure if I can tell you what the rest of the session was about.

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No, not really.

Carl gave us the point of view of teachers, showing us a wide range of twitter quotes he’d collected and then James, the book stomper (who is actually a very talented author - my students love his readers… surprisingly(!) they can actually use technology and read books too…;-)), gave us the author’s perspective and brought up issues like how money is going to be made in this age of free (digital books do sell) but also more importantly how to let students know what they’re doing incorrectly.

An issue I have had issues with on my Ning – 35 blog posts in one go can sometimes mean a lot of correcting: I’m trying to teach them awareness and an ability to find their own errors.

Here’s a short video from the World-of-Work forum in July explaining a bit about what they’re doing, there’ll be a virtual conference next year.

Find more videos like this on BESIG2009 SN'eet-up

The next day

I found myself, accidentally, in one of those, oh-dear-what-was-I-thinking sessions so I won’t bother to add notes on that one… whoops… I simply left as fast as I could then met up with a publisher about a project I may well be working on soon.It was a good meeting…a very good meeting….more later.

Finally, I headed off to the last session: the closing panel which was great but again, technology related, a discussion on the future of learning.

Petra Pointer supplied us the teachers’ perspective – she works at a very well-endowed university in Germany and is a tech enthusiast herself but mainly has found out that her students don’t like using technology for technology’s sake.

Fair point, but I do remember not liking writing essays for the sake of writing essays nor memorizing random dates for the sake of memorizing dates… so not much has changed really ;-), learners want to learn stuff that’s useful and practical and all teachers should pay attention to that, innit?

Ian McMaster, Business Spotlight editor, went next updating us on the commercial point of view: that the learners are the deciders - businesses will provide whatever it is they are actually purchasing and so far, to date, at BS only about 10% are downloading their audio tracks. He also pretty much told us that we shouldn’t simply follow the latest bandwagon - while the industry does need its “visionaries” - somewhere between those that see the future and those that are the end-purchasers, the publishers will adapt and stay afloat…I hope he’s right.

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Cleve restated his position on crowd-sourcing and collaborative content: the future’s in personalized materials. I feel in my bones he’s right. Shiv Rajendran, of the Language Lab, described the situation rather sensibly: learners want to learn in the way they want to learn – whatever topic, whenever – adhoc lessons on their own terms.

Eric interrupted from the Skype beam (he was very much in the room with us, I tell ya) with a Henry Ford quote “If I’d have asked the customer what he wanted, he would have said a faster horse” which made us all laugh -Pete Sharma then made an equally witty retort, something to do with apples and oranges but unfortunately I didn’t type it up… so I can’t tell you exactly what he said!

Bryon Russell believes there will always be a call for Publishers, for Editors: his point being that teacher generated materials can sometimes be unprofessional in appearance. And he’s right in part but in part, c'mon, the last time you made a game which wasn’t all cool-bananas, it worked didn’t it? Target language practiced?

Perhaps learning and teaching isn’t really about perfection and shiny covers.

Vicki chipped in with the fact that although we’re all using the internet and it’s great for supplementing our lessons, our students mainly want to speak: they want to talk , to commune-icate and often, pretty much… about themselves.

As this is my no. 1 mantra, the theme if you like of my blog, it was good to hear it from someone I respect so highly - it truly amazes me how many publishers and teachers miss out on taking advantage of the narcissism (not sure that's the right word) driving language acquisition.

Then the discussion raged: teachers asking about the time to learn all these tools, are we losing focus, what’s the pedagogy behind the use of technology – and I thought to myself was it like this when we switched from chalk to whiteboards? Why do we keep blaming the tools, why would the pedagogy all of a sudden go out the window - because we’re sexing-up the lessons? Odd. Na ja, I expect that discussion isn't going to go away soon.

And then but, where’s the money, is there any money, are teachers going to be paid more? Yes, I piped up rather too directly (did I learn nothing from Vicki’s plenary) there is…

So many students don’t want to learn with technology - they’re tired of looking at computers after a hard day’s work – they said. Haven’t noticed this myself and again thought, did we complain about using textbooks and notebooks and pens when students were spending all day dictating letters to their secretaries?

One member of the audience added that she serves up her Business English classes at the kitchen table with lovely cups of tea as they go through projects and proposals and powerpoint slides and noddingly, understandingly, we celebrated the diversity which exists in all of our approaches, the variety of subcultures present within each of our different classrooms’ contexts and the BESIG conference came to its end.

See you next year!
Best, Karenne

To reuse any of the photographs in this posting for your own teaching associations' articles, websites or blog postings, visit the set on Flickr where they are creative commons licensed.

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Who's your googlegänger?

Is anyone wandering about the planet with your name?

What do they do? Where do they live?

Do they have a better job, make more money than you do? Have they written a book, do they lead a football team, are politicians or doctors?

Are they busy creating a digital footprint more weighty than your own?

A great conversation activity for EFL students, especially after a Getting to Know You lesson, is to ask your students to research the 'net for others walking around with the same or a similar name (perhaps an anglicized version) and to report back to the class on what they've discovered.

Good sites to check include Google obviously, however Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and Geneology sites can also produce interesting results.

Once in class, encourage them to share their findings in pairs, along with notes and photographs if they found these, and switch groups as often as time allows.

However, after the second switch, they should leave their paperwork behind and simply discuss their googlegänger freely.

At the end of the session do group feedback, asking participants to tell you about the most interesting thing they found out about another colleague's name-double and discuss some of the authentic words and expressions which came up as a result of their forays into the internet.

Post-task activity
Students write an email to their googlegängers introducing themselves and commenting on what they learned - what they both have in common or don't and they don't need to send these, but can if they want to.

Best,
Karenne
p.s. My googlegänger is an artist in Trinidad - one day I'm going to buy some of her paintings! Do you know who yours is?

Powerpointing Me -EFL Tech Tip #13

The other day when I was reading Nick Jaworski's blog postings on using the Teacher as the Narrative in EFL classes, I left a comment behind regarding one of my used-a-gazillion-times-first-lessons...


The Getting to Know You, Getting to Know Me game

I've no idea where I originally picked up the bones of this before techitizing it for my own purposes, so 'xcuse me if I don't reference the source - however, if you know, let us all know below.


Objective

• Create an atmosphere of sharing right from the get-go.

• Find out your students' communicative abilities and weaknesses: particularly when making small talk /asking and answering questions.

Prep

• Approx 2 - 4 hours, depending which option you choose below. However you'll be able to use it an infinite number of times in an infinite number of (first day) lessons for an infinite number of years.
  

Brainstorm

Who are you?
Jot down quick notes on words that describe you and your life.

• country of birth
• countries lived in
• marital status
• family & siblings
• current job
• previous jobs
• a job you dreamed of having
  
• degree(s)/ other studies
  
• hobbies and interests
• group/ associations you belong to
  
• places you've been on holiday
• your age (number)
  
• how long you've been teaching (number)
• your house number
  
• fave food /drink
• fave music /musicians
  
• fave book(s)
  
• something unusual about you
• anything else you feel like sharing
  

Procedure Option 1 (no tech, photocopier optional)

• Dig out photos that match the above list, clip pics out of a magazine
• Type the numbers using a large font and print
  
• Photocopy the pics to A4 if you'd like them to be uniformed in appearance
  
• Stick on to colored card and laminate

Procedure Option 2 (low tech)

• Open up a PowerPoint document
• Insert personal pictures from your computer
• Search www.flickr.com or google images (cc-licensed*) for the images/maps you don't have yourself - import these into your ppt.
• Type the numbers in a large font.

Procedure Option 3 (medium tech - quickest)

• Go to Wordle.net
• Enter the words you brainstormed
• Print several copies of your wordle & laminate (or capture as a jpeg / insert into a ppt slide)

Procedure Option 4 (will take >4hrs)

• PhotoPeach your life. Use with intermediate learners+ re fast imagery.
• Same as option 2
• Save all slides as jpegs
• Upload into Photopeach
• Select music: something related to your own culture or fave band works best.
  

PhotoPeachingMe on PhotoPeach



NB. It doesn't matter what order you present your images in.



In class

After briefly introducing yourself to your new students and getting their names, ask if they know anything about you and if they'd like to.
Optional: depending on your students' levels you may like to review question structures (wh-q/auxiliary and modals/conditionals/present-perfect) prior to doing this exercise, but not necessary.

Tell your students you're going to show some pictures and you'd like them to guess what the images have to do with your life by asking you questions.

Show the first picture / beam the first slide / show the first 30secs of movie.

Once you've elicited the correct answer, elicit the best question form which would produce that answer.

A rough example:
Picture: A boy and girl which look like me
Teacher: What does this have to do with me?
Students: "Brothers and sister?"
Teacher: How can you make that into a good question?
Students: "Do you have brother and sister?"
Teacher: Brothers and sisters are called siblings, you can also ask "Are they your brother and sister?"
Students: "Do you have (any) siblings?"
Teacher: Yes, I do. I have 2 brothers and a sister. My little brother wasn't born yet - in this picture - he's only 19. Do you have any questions about them?
Students: "Where they live?"
Teacher: Where do they live
etc...

Show the rest of the pictures or slides and continue getting students to ask about your life.

If you chose the movie option, show the whole film and then get students to ask questions about your life based on the images they've seen.

If you chose the Wordle option, get students to work in groups to figure out what the words might have to do with your life before getting them to ask the questions.


Their turn

Get students to jot down 5- 10 questions they'd like to ask each other. Circulate and correct their structures and vocabulary.

Form pairs or small groups and encourage them to ask each other about each others lives.

After around 15 minutes, switch members of groups and now ask them to tell their new partners about the lives of those they were talking to, as well as themselves. Depending on the size of your class, you can repeat this step as often as you like.


Post task

Students can create their own powerpoint presentations, wordles or movies based on what they're able to learn from the internet and/or other sources regarding one or more of the following:

• politicians /local or international
• sports figures
• entertainers: singers, movie stars, tv personalities
• their googlegänger
• anyone else

Ask students to bring what they learned to the next class in order to present it - share and discuss what they learned - again encouraging them to ask each other to ask questions & prompting for extended answers.





Useful links related to this posting:

Getting to know you, video with lyrics (can be used pre-task)
Getting to know you introduction games
Getting to know you - conversation prompt cards (available free to registered members of my website).


Do you have any questions or a creative tip for first lessons that you'd like to share with us?

Best,
Karenne

Note: you can print these lesson tips as a pdf by clicking on the title of the post, scrolling down and then clicking on the green "print as pdf" button.

Hi English Fans! (Motivation in Adult EFL)

alternative title: UP, DOWN, TOP/BOTTOM, CHANGES & NO CHANGES


There have been some rather hot and heavy discussions recently about whether or not it's a good idea to use technology in teaching.

And if you're a regular visitor to my blog then you pretty much already know what I think.

For those who're new: I drum it in hard and heavy. It's the world we live in, it's the world we better be teaching in.



This time, though, I won't be socking you with my opinions. I'll just show you the result.

For those who don't know any back story, I'm very proudly a dogmeist which is a kind of radical movement in teaching, started up by Scott Thornbury back in 2000 (see his website and articles here).

Dogme has the goal of student-centered learning, conversation-driven lessons and a clear focus on emergent language.

Trouble is, I'm also a technologist and most dogmeists aren't.


Now, although Scott Thornbury is my thought leader (there really isn't anyone else like him or his work in our field) we've had a few, somewhat public, arguments about the tech side of things.

I enjoy these discussions - he makes valid points which force me to up my anty each time: just because I think I'm right, doesn't mean that I am.

Being wrong is a point of growth and opportunity to develop - it's specifically because of these arguments, every time they flare up, that I keep copious notes on what's happening in the classroom, how my students are responding, how much they're retaining, where they're improving and constantly question my teaching practice and its effectiveness.

Today's post is about student motivation in my hybrid dogme meets technology teaching.

This blog mostly contains lessons I've done again and again, things that I have experimented with way before you get to see them ;-) however today... I'm going to go out on a wing and admit I don't know what my students will produce next week.

Today, I'll simply ask you to look at the level of motivation my students are displaying due to the fact that we focus on things that they are interested in learning, work on language they need to learn and reuse this in ways applicable to their lives.

We use technology when it fits to do so, not because it's fancy.

Part 1

Language objective:

Mastery over phrases used in statistical reporting /Financial English.

In class procedure:

• Get each student to draw trend expressions as given onto large sheets of paper then present to the rest of the class. If we had had computers in class with us that day, these could have been done in excel.
  

• Discussion and agreement /disagreement. Building contextual examples.

• Cross checking via BlackBerry for expressions when validity of use uncertain.

The expressions in drawings:





Setting up the pretask activity:
(I dislike the word homework)

Brainstorm potential sources for reports.



Pre Task

Find pre-existing graphs, pie-charts, annual reports and download from the internet, preferably in English but not necessarily.

The task is not to create a graph (they know how to do that) but instead to choose any figures and trends personally interesting and think about how to best describe change.

Next week we'll discuss their findings in English.

Student involvement

See emails from Eva, the self appointed moderator, who decided to make sure that all students (including those missing) are on the same page for next week. I did not request for this email to be written, although I wasn't surprised to see it - she often follows up on the lessons.

We live in a world with email. We live in a world where digital photographs can be taken and shared, where .pdfs can be downloaded and distributed.

We live in a world where our phones are micro-sized computers.

We live in a world where the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented but can instead be analyzed - where the focus in language learning can actually be on the language.

Next week I will show you what happens next In Task - what they produce, if they reused the language, how they present these and anything else.


Best,
Karenne
p.s. Can I just say this cracks me up: Hi English Fans! My German/Polish students in this class are aged 40+ and work in the Financial sector.

Business English Teachers Conference - Poland, Nov 20-22nd 2009

For the first time ever, the annual BESIG conference will be held outside central Europe and instead will take place in one of Poland's biggest cities - Poznan.



Every year the IATEFL Business English SIG conference draws between 350 and 550 participants, bringing together teachers, publishers, innovators, school representatives and it is a unique forum for anyone working in the field of business English teaching.

This year the plenary will be given by my favorite business course book author, Vicki Hollett, and she'll be talking to us about relationships and the effect interpersonal language has in the workplace.

Other great presentations include:

Anişoara Pop from Romania presenting asynchronous speaking and writing web 2.0 tools, Nick Robinson designing needs and means analysis in Financial English, Rita Baker spelling and Chia Suan Chong on an alternative to ELF.

Heike Philp, Graham Stanley and Holly Longstroth will be discussing business English in 2ndLife; Christiana Gardikioti will talk about how to make effective powerpoint presentations and Matt Firth will review the Legal English Certificate.

James Schofield will be informing us why Business students should read graded readers - but by the way, I need no convincing on that, my students LOVE his books - some have even written reviews...

David Cotton on authentic business videos, Duncan Baker chatting with you on finding business clients, Paul Emmerson (is this his first live workshop since he became a daddy? ;-)), will be highlighting his book, Business Vocabulary Builder; Anne Hodgson on monitoring and motivating our 1:1 students and also Tonya Trapp reviewing generation Y in business English.

And many, many, many, more fascinating presentations.


For more information about these, full workshop details etc, see the website:

BESIG conference 2009

Early bird registration (by Sept 30) - €120, €95 IATEFL members.

Best,
Karenne

p.s to watch a video from last years' conference, see this posting here.

Water Words (on using images in ESP: Financial English)

One of the absolute best supplementary books to use when teaching banking or financial types is Financial English by Ian MacKenzie.


However, despite the absolute wealth of vocabulary it contains, the exercises can be a bit difficult for students to do, especially if they've never seen the words before and also the book is, quite frankly, a wee dry.

If you've been reading my blog for a while then you've probably already gleaned by now that I like to have a bit of fun in my lessons... and I've noticed you do too... while still sticking to the core learning objectives.

So in this posting I'm going to hone in on two different approaches to working with lists of words, when presenting a visual lexis.

For this example, we'll look at the language in unit 2.10 of Financial English, Liquid Metaphors.

Step one:
Divide up the following words by the number of students you have:

2.10 includes:
channel, dry up, flood, flow, pour, run out of, swim, trickle down, drain, ebb and flow, pool, source, awash, crest, depth, under(water), fluid, sank, plug.

*To mix things up, I also brainstorm a list of related lexis with my students and provide extras before evenly distributing these amongst the students e.g. (water)fall, drop, river, cross that bridge, laundry, ocean, wave & drown.

Step two (the dogme version)

Hand out the vocabulary and ask your students to draw pictures matching each word.






As great masterpieces aren't expected, you'd be surprised how much 50+ year old bankers enjoy doing this type of activity, LOL!





For the words they have difficulty drawing (because they don't know them) either encourage them to help each other out, mime the words or allow them to use a dictionary.

OR

Step two (the techno-teacher version)

Give your students their share of the words and set image searching as their pre-task activity.

They can use Google images (use safe search), any photo based web 2.0 platform and/or my personal favorite, flickr. Remind them to look for images that are creative commons licensed.

Ask them to copy the pictures into Powerpoint, create slides & label if wished.

n.b. if you don't have a computer in the classroom this pre-task can be set as a home based activity.



Step three

Spread the pictures across the table or if you have one, pin them up on a corkboard.

Encourage your students to present their drawings or slides and to share their understanding of the words they've learned with each other.





Step four

Do the exercise provided by the book* - if feasible, get them working in pairs of groups discussing the different solutions applying the words to a financial context, referencing the pictures on the table.

*obviously although I'm using Financial English as the example here, you can do this activity with any vocabulary book.



Step five

Build awareness by highlighting and discussing the common expresssions i.e. trickle down, run out of, riding on the crest of a wave, pulling the plug on something, a huge pool of resources etc - encourage them to come up with alternative sentences using these.

Step six

Now ask your students to write up a short essay reusing the metaphors. For example, in this case, they could describe:

• their company's financial situation
• a project they're currently working on
• their country's economy
• the financial crisis and the global economy
• a current financial news item (e.g. a company heading toward bankruptcy or being listed on the stock exchange)
  

Step seven

Correct their pieces and get them to share what they wrote with each other - encourage further conversation on the opinions stated - reusing the collocative phrases as often as possible.

Best,
Karenne

Side note: I've done both of these methods with my learners and they all reported 1) increased awareness of the vocabulary and 2) a noticing of the lexis in later financial news articles.

For me, these approaches of working with images, while similar probably have different effects on memory.

I've been thinking about it and reckon that they probably trigger different learning processes (one involves some physical learning and discovery of the lexis, the image searching would result in immediate association between the word and image) however, honestly, as I'm not a scientist nor do I have a masters in second language acquisition, I'd really love to know your professional take on this issue.

Do you know of supportive texts that back these ideas up?

Have you/would you also do this type of activity with kids or teens? Why, why not?


Useful links related to this posting:

• Jeremy Day's excellent tips on using Imagery in Financial English
  
• Murder of a Superhero (using drama in the classroom)
• Other teaching tips with a dogme angle added
  
• Other vocabulary teaching tips

• Scott Thornbury on Repetition, great YouTube video!

• The Weboword Ning - for vocabulary enthusiasts, lovers and learners! This is the world's first community dedicated to Visual Vocabulary.

• Jamie Keddie's post: Reasons for buying flowers (grammar + images)
  
• Vicky Saumell on Using Phasr