Headlines Routine

 “One of the biggest challenges is to get our students from receptive to productive use, in all its forms.”

Professor Norbert Schmitt, Professor of Applied Linguistics, Nottingham University, Www.norbertschmitt.co.uk

 

As teachers in the Israeli school system we need to assist our students to finish high school with knowledge of approximately 5,200 lexical items in English. According to Professor Batia Laufer, without massive input there will be low word gains. Furthermore, the input needs to be at the right level, and properly spaced.

I created this speaking lesson for my 10th grade ‘Keep Talking’ class, based on Laufer’s assertion that we need to ‘activate’ our students’ passive vocabulary. Firstly, I asked my students to recall the meaning of some lexical items previously taught. I presented the words in English, and asked students to recall and translate the words into L1 (receptive skill), and then use some of the words (productive skill), to complete the given tasks, based on picture prompts.

You can see an example of one pair’s work below, and then listen to an excerpt of their ‘Pair and Share’ activity, in order to see how engaged my students were.

צילום מעיתון הארץ   Photo from Ha’Aretz Newspaper, 20 October 2009

 

If you get a chance to do this activity with your students, I’d love to hear about it.

 

It’s Friday I’m in Love – The Cure

A song to get students speaking!

Speaking is the most challenging of the four skills to teach in large heterogeneous classes. As speaking is interactive and demands an almost instant response, the pressure to ‘perform’ is often overwhelming for students.

With this in mind I created a fun lesson plan based on the famous song ‘It’s Friday I’m in Love’ by The Cure. Not one of my 10th grade students knew the song but they all quickly ‘fell in love’ with it.

My aim was to get the students speaking and using the lexical chunks from the song. However, to my amazement they quickly began singing the song, and asked me to play it again and again.

I have included the lesson plan and the PowerPoint for you to use with your classes.

I hope you and your students enjoy the lesson as much as I did.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments box below.

Why Bother?

Our students are constantly asking us: “Will it be on the exam?” “Is there a grade for this?” When the answer is no, the next question is often: What’s the point? “So why bother? With this in mind we ran an informal evening event at the ETAI national summer conference in Ashkelon with our panel of experts: Denise Ross Hayne, Penny Ur, Batia Laufer, Amos Paran, Ben Goldstein . Our goal was to pose questions, sourced from the audience via  Todaysmeet, for our expert panel, who were asked to give us good reasons for why we should still  bother being ‘creative and demanding ELT teachers’ in an age of ‘bottle flipping, finger spinners and Google Translate.’

As the convener of the Q & A session I would like to share with you some of my post-event reflections.

Firstly, there was no need for the panel to prepare anything in advance, which enabled them to communicate directly with the audience, and to answer questions spontaneously, on their area of expertise, without investing further time in preparation in contrast to a Pecha Kucha evening (see Pecha Kucha and the Power of (saying) ‘Yes’).

Secondly, we decided to use Todaysmeet to source questions from the audience, because it is user friendly and has a good visual layout, and meant we did not need a person running around the huge auditorium with a microphone.

Lastly, as the panel members were all experienced conference presenters they understood that the aim of the evening event is to keep things light, fast-paced and informative.

Some tips for those of you who might want to use this format:

  1. Set up the Todaysmeet room in advance, with a demonstration question, for example: ‘Why bother coming to ETAI when you could go to the beach instead?’JaneCohenEFL
  2. Create a slide with instructions and a URL address to source great questions, and enable audience participation, as soon as they enter the auditorium.
  3. As the convener, introduce your panel and then go straight to audience questions, otherwise you might expect some feedback like this:Why bother asking us to write questions if you’re not gonna use them? Anonymous. Or: “Why bother asking us for questions when you’re using yours?” Anon
  4. In order to keep the Q & A session fast paced, use a timer, and tell the plenary speakers that they have 2 or 3 minutes maximum to answer a given question. Note, I didn’t do this but would do next time.
  5. If you want to remember any of the panel’s answers record the event, as it is really difficult to host and remember what was said. Again, I didn’t do this but definitely will next time as I missed out on so much personal learning. 
Photo courtesy of Micki Zaritsky

Here is a sample of some of the questions sourced from the audience, and answered by the panel.

  • Why bother giving our students homework when we know they won’t do it anyway?
  •  Why bother telling my friends how good ETAI conferences are when they never come?
  •  Why bother trying to build up the school English library when kids don’t read books anymore?
  •  Why bother teaching a 45 minute lesson when students can’t stay focused for that long?
  •  Why bother travelling when we can meet online?
  •  Why bother teaching Shakespeare when no one speaks that way anymore?
  •  Why bother looking at research on ESL in the US
  •  Why bother trying to get pupils to read books, they’ll never read enough books to really improve their English.
  •  Why bother teaching English when they plagiarize and use Google translate and don’t understand what’s wrong with it?
  •  Why bother correcting them on present perfect errors when there are more people in the world who use it incorrectly than those who do?
  •  Why bother teaching vocabulary if the students can use electronic dictionaries?
  •  Why bother going to IATEFL conferences abroad?
  •  Why bother spending so much time with grammar when the goal is communication?
  •  Why bother teaching them literary terms? Why not just deal with the message and the useful vocabulary?
  •  Why bother using grammar books with gap-fill activities?
  •  Why bother with spelling tests when our pupils will write e mails and use electronic notebooks in their future?
  •  Why bother giving written feedback on student drafts when they do not bother correcting their work accordingly?
  •  Why bother making kids read books when they don’t even read them in their own language?

 

‘The Seven Year Itch’ and ELT

7-year-itchAfter seven years in ELT management I decided that I need to live the life that I want to live and not just continue doing what I had been doing for the last seven years, just because of the ‘conditions and status’,  or because that is what everybody expected me to do.  My resignation from the Open University surprised everybody, but for me it meant going back to teaching, to learning and to working directly with teenagers.

On 30 August I rolled up to the pre-teaching in-service day at my new school feeling both excited and nervous. Those feelings were personified two days later when I stood at the door of my first class, waiting for the students to stand. How would they perceive me? Would they behave? Would they understand me? Would they participate in the speaking tasks? How was I going to remember all of their names?  I was full of doubts, but as soon as I stepped into the room, greeted the class and started off with a ‘Getting to know you’ icebreaker, those initial doubts evaporated. I left the room feeling energized and excited to be back in my own classroom, after a seven year gap.

Since then I have had a few great lessons, many ordinary lessons and some less than good lessons. Following each lesson I reflect on what went well, what could I have done differently, and did I actually meet the learning aims that I had set? I often think to myself, if I were observing this class I might have asked the teacher why she corrected that particular mistake and interrupted the student’s fluency, or, why didn’t she scaffold the task better, or had she noticed that boy in the back row, who was on his phone under the desk, during most of the speaking task.

I used to think…. But now I think… 

I used to think that if I am the best teacher I can be and plan my lessons really well, the students will respond accordingly. But I now think that this isn’t always enough.

I used to think that if I integrate technology effectively to enhance the learning outcomes, the students will be motivated and engaged. But I now think, that sometimes this is true, but quite often, it is not.

I used to think that through my teacher training I could have an impact on so many more students than I could in the classroom myself. But I now think that there is nothing more satisfying than engaging with the students themselves, in a large classroom, with all its challenges, and seeing everybody engaged and on task.

It is good to be back.