Teacher Training: Making Business English Textbooks Interesting

Last week I had a lovely time working with a group of English language teachers who came to the VHS in Ludwigsburg for a workshop entitled

Pepping Up Your Business English Course Book!

Our objectives included looking at different ways to increase student-centered learning in our EFL and ESP classrooms and on making lessons exciting even when the teacher is required to use a published material in their curriculum.

The slides from my presentation are at the bottom of this posting. If you were there, you can use these to refresh your memory of some of the points we went through during our workshop and if you weren't, as you’re an EFL teacher too, you’re welcome to have a look and learn with us.

Do feel free to ask or answer questions!

We Asked the Question: Why Do Textbooks Need Supplementing?

You suggested things like they aren’t timely, they aren’t topical, sometimes they’re years and years out-of-date.



The books are sometimes very dull. Too much reading or too little reading. The role plays aren’t authentic or interesting.

The subjects don’t have anything to do with our students actual lives, professions or responsibilities. They’re generic – one size fits all. Sometimes a bit patronizing.

Vocabulary presented often isn’t the vocabulary our students are looking for. There’s very little review of vocabulary from unit to unit.

Not enough speaking activities.

What do you think?

Do you agree with our conclusions?

Then We Did a Study Of Multiple Intelligence:

And looked at images of

• JK Rowlings
• Stephen Hawking
• Columbus
• David Beckham
• Ray Charles
• Prince Charles
• Barack Obama
• Goethe
• Dalai Lama.

In what ways are they all intelligent people?

We marveled at David Beckham’s enormous ability to not only get a ball to curve but that he is able to understand his body so well to make it move where he needs it to, his intelligence understanding the size and distance of a football field: intelligences none of us in the room could say we possess!

Have a look at the names on the list, who is intrapersonally intelligent?

Which ones are interpersonally, spiritually, musically, spatially, mathematically, verbally, naturalistically intelligent?

Do you think that intelligences overlap? Is there a 10th intelligence? What might that might be?

Hint: All 9 of the above examples probably have it – Prince Charles might be the debatable one…although given his recent talks on climate change – hmm, he fits too!* answer at the bottom.

What about the learning styles?

What role might this play in our classrooms?

We discussed what we would have to do if we were the English teachers of Beethoven, Miles Davies or Louis Armstrong and had to teach them Business English!

Next We Reviewed the Practices Of Teaching Business People Business Skills In English:

What are we teaching our students? Don’t they know more about Business than we do? Shouldn’t we be focusing in on their knowledge, simply giving them the language to perform as well as they normally do?

What is it that they want to learn? How are we teaching this to them?

Are we paying enough attention to who our learners really are?

After That We Analyzed Supplementary Materials:

What is available from the Publishers, from ELT websites – which would we use, why these?

What are the intrinsic strengths in each exercise, what weaknesses lie therein; any opportunities? Are there any changes you’d make to the material, why?

Are they all feasible - with which kind of groups – what learners are they aimed at?

Who wouldn’t they work with?

Do the activities support the course book?

Karenne recommends these books, here

plus these websites:

• http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/index.html
• http://www.business-spotlight.de/
• http://www.handoutsonline.com/navigation/collections/business.htm
• http://www.eslteachersboard.com/cgi-bin/pdf/index.pl
• http://www.teachit.co.uk/

Later On We Discussed Using Authentic Materials and Internet “Realia” in the English Language Classroom

Why? So we watched this video:

We Then Looked Into Creating Materials and Using Authentic Materials from the Internet with English Language Students:

For lesson tips using new media & technology, see here.

Recommended blogs/sites by teachers who provide excellent tips and know-how (click to go to their pages):

• Nadia Nassif (Business English skills)http://www.springboardsltc.com/blog
• Sirin Soyoz (quick tech-tips) http://www.24minutesenglishaday.blogspot.com/
• Jamie Keddie (youtube) http://jamiekeddie.com
• Claudio Azevedo (movies) http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com
• Lindsay Clandfield (methodology, lists & more) http://sixthings.net
• Eric Roth (conversation know-how) http://www.compellingconversations.com/blog
• Johanna Stirling (spelling) http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com
• Nicholas Whitley (grammar tips and full lesson plans) http://strictly4myteacherz.wordpress.com/
• Neal Chambers (grammar and more) http://www.englishspark.com
• Alex Case (news & comments on the TEFL industry) http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/

We Were Also In Awe Of Ronaldo Lima’s Very Impressive Class (who are blogging):

What happens when students choose to write articles and then see themselves published for the world to see?

Pop over there for a visit, http://finally5b.blogspot.com/ ask or get your students to ask his students how they do it & do let them know what you think!

Then I Showed Everyone The Products I Make Myself:

SimplyConversationsTM and SimplyQuestsTM:

What is the target group of SimplyConversations? What type of learners, what kind of intelligence?

Why are they fun to use? What sorts of skills do they activate?

How do students feel about doing 1.5hrs of strictly conversation?

What effect does choosing their own tasks in the SimplyQuests have when they’re doing their post-task activity (a.k.a homework)?

And Finally We Made An Action Plan For Future Lessons

What will you be doing to pep up your Business English courses?

Don’t hesitate to continue the communication with me by clicking on comments (at end of posting).

Thank you for coming Sibylle, Christine, Birgit, Wilfriede, Irmgard, Sandra, Jim, Stormy, Ines, Eva, Elizabeth, Veronique, Helmut and Maulina! Thanks VHS Ludwigsburg for organizing the event and hosting us. Am looking forward to continuing learning, growing and sharing with you.

Karenne

Recommended Reading:

• The Role of Pride in the Language Classroom
• Do you know who your learners are?
• Personally Speaking
• Where's the love y'all

Tech stuff:

• Uncommonly creative
• Using slideshare for teaching Business English
• Start using technology in your classroom
• Hit the Business Blogs for Authentic Materials!

*The 10th intelligence proposed above is visionary: the person who is not only able to 'see' into the future but knows what to do with the way things are changing. Of course, this intelligence is hotly debated as to whether it is an intelligence, as is spiritual and naturalistic intelligence.

There are others too, of course. Read more about multiple intelligences here (lots of links).


The Presentation Slides:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Presentations & Spre esl TEFL

Slide over to slideshare.net, EFL Tech-Tip -4

If you've been reading my blog postings for a while now then you'll already know that I'm a big fan of slideshare and even have my own page there.

If not, then let me quickly introduce you to a super source of material for your business, general English and ESP classes; teacher-training tips; grammatical explanations and much, much, more.

Slideshare is basically a platform where trainers, normal people and experienced consultants load up their powerpoint or open office presentations so that anyone who might be interested in learning from them can.

It's a wonderful source of authentic material, mostly highly professional and very informative.

The best of these are written with very few words, many images and thus work as excellent skills prompters.

You can use them as a basis to get your students chatting, writing, dissecting the issues in context or extracting core vocabulary. Get them making predictions, explaining backgrounds behind the ideas, comparing cultural influences or just simply learning English by learning something they're very interested in knowing more about.

Downloading from this site is a simple procedure: above each presentation which allows this function, there's a button you can use to do this. Look for the little pink heart which marks favorites - next to that there's a button with a down arrow indicating you can take the presentation and store it on your own computer.

And of course, if you don't have access to a computer in your classroom, you can also set the slideshares as a pre- or post-task activity (a.k.a homework) by sending your students the link(s) via email. Best, of course, is getting them to slide on over to make their own choices.

Useful links related to this posting:

Lesson tips using slideshare

Stuff I've used with my students, stuff I learned from, stuff I save here.
(see left side for tag types)

Best,
Karenne

p.s. If you've got any other great tips to share with us on how to use slideshares in the ESL & EFL classroom or if you'd like to tell us how you used one of them with your students, don't hesitate to do so - we can all learn together - click on comments.

Update 25-March-2008 for the smartphone/blackberry and i-phone users:
Slideshare available on your mobile phones (as far as I can tell, still free)

Introducing SlideShare Mobile: use SlideShare on the go!

View more presentations from Amit Ranjan.

Tech Tips for ELT Trainers-3: Using Wordle for Vocabulary

Have you heard of Word Clouds?

Wordle is a great site that allows you to create word clouds out of a text.

You can use this

• to pre-teach vocabulary, 
• do a predictive exercise on an article or a reading you're about to do, 
• make a vocabulary review exercise based on a lexis presented in a textbook and you can even  
• make a poster for your classroom of discussion starters.

Here's a video that explains how to use it:








Pre-teach vocabulary based on an article:
Simply copy a recent article on a subject your students are interested in (online from the net) and then paste this text into wordle. The most frequently used, key-words, will be larger. Get your students to focus on the smaller words and check understanding. 


Predictive exercise based on a reading you're about to present:
Read through an article and then choose around 15 words which you think are an essential part of the story. Type these words into wordle. Multiply the most relevant words exponentially so that some words take on greater importance, i.e. copy a couple of the words and then paste them in ten, fifteen, twenty-five times etc. - depending on how large you'd like some of the words to be.

Give the sheet to the students and get them to tell you what they think the story/ article will be about.

Make a vocabulary review exercise:
Take a list of vocabulary based on a course book you're currently using and import these into wordle, along with synonyms and antonyms, if you wish.

Give the list to the students and review them. You can also do a matching exercise with these.

Consider working different lexical sets within one wordle - say car parts, automotive collocations,  frequent idioms about cars, name of manufacturers and then get your students making different groups out of the words - try turning it into a conversation exercise.



Conversation starters:
Type a list of topics which are regularly seen in the headlines or brainstorm topics you know your students are interested in discussing into a wordle.

Print the wordle(s) out, magnify and paste it up on your classroom wall.

Regularly encourage students to choose which topics they'd like to talk about at the beginning of each class and hold 10-15 minute conversations based on the ones they chose.

Homework activities:
Get your students making their own wordles of words they would like to review in the next class with you.

Useful links related to this posting:
A Wordle I made about Facebook for Business English students
Article that goes with this activity
Notes and further lesson ideas I wrote on the biz-e-tech wiki.
More tips on teaching with technology here.

• Update 18March2009 -just found a few extra tips on Nik Peachey's blog, here.

• Update 20April 2009 - Tom Barrett has created a comprehensive list of different ways to use wordle. The list is mainly aimed at primary/secondary educators but contains many ideas which can be adapted for the EFL classroom.

•  Update 29May 2010 - Marisa Constantinides has written a post comparing different kinds of word cloud tools. JamieKeddie discovered a really useful way of keeping phrases together here.

Best,
Karenne
This post was last updated 29-05-2010

Have you already used Wordle

to create BE lessons? 

Have you got a great tip to share?

Technorati: education

Tech Tips for ELT Trainers-2: Be Brave

While browsing around the net, following one link after and another, I landed up in a Ning group called Classroom 2.0 which I promptly joined as the members there clearly know a lot about the various teaching practices using technology.

One of the pages I visited was a blogger called David Truss who writes a blog called A Pair of Dimes. He has created a beautiful video called the brave new world.

So after my personal-story-rant on why EFL teachers should really start using technology (here) in their classrooms, I thought it’d be fitting to use this as part of the Monday tech-tips series.

He’s agreed to let me post it up here and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

Wasn’t that just great?

Now come on and join those of us producing dynamic lessons, interesting, pedagogically sound materials –there is a shift in education happening today and I do hope you want to be a part of it.

There are a lot of tools and a lot to learn (see article here) so every Monday I’ll add one more tip and we’ll get you there, bit by bit.

Tech Tips for ELT trainers–1: Computer Hardware

Every Monday, I’ll kick off the week by posting up a training video or a slideshare on technology and the English Language Classroom.

To start us off we’ll be looking at this video from the Commoncraft show on hardware.

Knowing how the computer works will help you understand all the other stuff you’re doing on it!

Don’t hesitate to let me know if you like(d) the video or if there is anything else in particular you would like to see. Simply click on the comments to communicate with me.

The History and The Future of the Internet -supplementing your business English textbook with video

As a Business English teacher, you've definitely stumbled across units in textbooks which use the history of the Internet as their introductory theme.

However, they're not always up-2-date or interactive, are they?

Not their fault - history isn't always that interesting especially when it's a subject which is still evolving.

But if you've been looking ahead, racking your brain, thinking about just how to jazz up your next lesson on the internet - yet keep the content and language you've got to teach - then here's an amazing documentary video produced by Melih Bilgil.

Mr Bilgil is a German freelance graphic designer - he made the video (using PICOL icons which he also created) for his diploma in graphic design at FH-Mainz University of Applied Sciences. You can pick up your own copy here (not sure how to download, come here).

One of the complaints revolving around this video is that it only goes up to the 1990's. See article on Time (which you can read yourself to help brief you so you can spice up the discussion with your students) :Brief history of the Internet


My rough lesson plan/ tips for a lesson on the History of the Internet would be:

• Use the video as a pre-task activity before working with the textbook. There's a lot of great jargon which you can extract (or better yet, get your students to note down key business and IT words and phrases themselves).

• Do the exercises in your textbook, possibly skipping what's now out-of-date or redundant.

• Write the words "The Future of the Internet" on the board and challenge your students to fill in the blanks by talking about web2.0, web3.0 and web3D plus the developments they anticipate.
  

• Present this slideshow from Slideshare:

Future Web Trends - at Innovation series with Jimmy Wales

View more presentations from matthewbuckland. (tags: wales jimmy)

• Discuss the ideas presented - what do your students think - do they agree, disagree? Do they have any examples to put forth, opinions, fears?

Business English Textbooks that have internet related units:

• InCompany, Intermediate, unit 13: Technology
• InCompany, Intermediate, 2ndEdition, unit 13: Entering the blogosphere
• InCompany, Upper Intermediate, unit 7: Information age
• InCompany, Upper Intermediate, unit 18: Shaping the future
• Intelligent Business, Upper Intermediate, unit 4: Information
• International Express, Upper Intermediate, Unit 5: The Internet
• IT Matters, Unit 4: The Internet
• Market Leader, Upper Intermediate, unit 7: E-commerce
• Market Leader, Intermediate, unit 13: Innovation
• The Business, Upper Intermediate, Unit 2: IT Solutions
• Technical English, Unit 12: Innovations

• Do you know of any other books/units? Add them in the comments section.
  

If you're not using a textbook and would like to do this as a lesson:
***for IT students mainly, your normal groups might seriously go to sleep if you try doing this with them.
Upper Int/B2

• Wikipedia, The Internet
• Internet society

• Download and then split up the text you've chosen to use.
  

• Divide students into pairs or groups, handing out different sections to different students to read - encourage them to highlight difficult vocabulary and check meanings.
  

• While they're reading, put some or all of the following categories on the board:
  

~ Dates:
1957-1973 / 1974 - 1983 / 1984-1990 /
1991 - 1995 / 1996 +today
~ Uses of the internet
~ Global impact and cultural implications
~ Difficult terminology
~ Your own idea here

• Get your students to walk around the room telling each other what they did/ learned about and what happened in those events.

• Show the video.

• Discuss.
  

• Elicit answers on where the future of the internet's leading.
  

• Show the slideshare.

• Discuss - what was new, interesting?
  

Extending this lesson:

• Watch the video in detail, pausing often, looking for all collocations that go with the word: network. Then get your students to explain what the differences are between the phrases - basically teaching you the terminology!
  

• Create a mural depicting the time-line/ evolution of the internet using items they learned from the video, using the language taught in the textbook and vocabulary and ideas from the slideshare. (Group activity, project work).

• Use my SimplyConversationsTM and SimplyQuestTM material - question prompt cards and post-task activity: shop here
  

Technology - €1.99 (individual trainers) and €4,99 (institutes)
Email and the Internet - €1.49 and €3.99

Do you have another idea for exploiting these materials and turning them into a really effective and interesting lesson?

Share your tips with all of us by clicking on the comments button - if you've already created a great worksheet of your own (or stumbled across one on the 'net) and you'd like to pass on the details, link it here, (even if it's commercial) no problem, am happy for you to share!

Best,
Karenne

p.s More blended learning/TwIT tips here (scroll down). More lesson tips, here
To print only this page, click on the title and then scroll down to the Eco-safe button and hit print as .pdf.

I hate the words "Blended Learning"

I woke up this morning thinking about tags.

Aside from the fact that tags are things which hang off the collar of your shirt, tags  - in the world of the web - are used by people who create content (text on web-pages, blogs, media etc) and they are used to bring these like items together.  The tag system is at its finest form on delicious where they have even gone a step further and created bundles (a way of creating uber categories for your tags) but you can also find them on youtube, slideshare and just about any web 2.0 website.

Examples of tags include the blue labels at the top of this and all my posting - they're there so that if you want to find another blog entry which is similar then all you have to do is click on one of those and travel around.



But I'm getting distracted.

Back to my point, the reason for writing this post:: I really, really, really, hate the term blended learning.

It doesn't say anything to me - a blended what? A mix of... oh man, what does that mean exactly?  Are we talking about mixing skills or are we talking about mixing styles... I mean if I use a tape-recorder instead of my smartphone to listen to an audio recording then I'm now not blending?   Why is that device any different to any other device.... And how exactly do I tag that in my posts - using the keywords blended+learning? Nah, don't like it. I just can't do it anymore, I simply cannot get my fingers to type this phrase nor to make my mouth to move that way.  In fact I can't even get my head around it.

I even looked it up on wikipedia and then got a rather in-depth explanation that even they'd like to be cleaned up. The explanation brought me somewhat closer to its meaning, I guess, but sorry love the concept hate the brand, way too stuffy for my tastes.

So, you know what... from now on guys, I'm going to refer to the whole teaching with technology as  TwIT: http://kalinago.blogspot.com/search/label/TwIT

There's a little irony in there but ya kno', it says what it is.


Best,

Karenne