Weak Forms

It’s another #eltchat on pronunciation, so I thought I’d upload the worksheets I’ve been using recently to focus on weak forms with my students.

Common words which have weak and strong forms, with space to write a conversation underneath

Weak and strong forms table, with word clouds for students to see common weak form combinations.

Weak and strong forms dictogloss (recorded with my flatmate – teacher conversation / Croatia conversation)

Feel free to download them and use them. Please credit the source.

Enjoy!

Edmodo

I love Edmodo! I discovered it via Twitter the day before my first class of the 2010-2011 academic year, and I can honestly say it has revolutionised the way that I interact with my students both inside and outside class.

If you’ve never heard of it, here’s a quick intro. I describe it as ‘facebook for education’. Here’s a screenshot of my homepage at the moment:

 

For anyone who has used facebook, the interface should be instantly familiar, and for anyone who hasn’t it is very easy to pick up. Here’s a video to show you how it works:

Their user guide is very comprehensive, but if you get stuck, feel free to ask for help!

As a teacher, it has meant I can easily:

• share materials
• make sure absent students know what they’ve missed
• offer students help
• collect and mark assignments
• provide a varied diet of homework (not just workbook pages)
• share links and videos to make English more fun
• motivate students to find out more about various aspects of English-speaking culture
• chat with my students outside class
• and much much more…

I’ve received a lot more homework from my students, including returned second drafts of writing (almost unheard of before!), felt a difference in rapport with my students, had great fun discussing various youtube clips, and generally seen a much higher level of engagement and motivation both inside and outside the classroom.

But don’t just take my word for it’s usefulness. 27 of the 45 students I used Edmodo with last year responded to a survey I created to find out what they thought of it, and this is what they had to say:

So as you can see, Edmodo has made a real difference to the English-teaching and -learning experience in my classes over the past year, and it’s definitely something I will use again.

I hope this has persuaded you to try it out (and no, I’m not being paid for this!) 🙂

Enjoy!

Intonation online

I just took part in my first synchronous online workshop, provided by IH Online Training. It was presented by Zoe Taylor from IH Lisbon and dealt with teaching Intonation – something which I’ve been experimenting with a lot recently.

There were 18 participants from around the world, plus Zoe presenting and Shaun Wilden helping out the with technical side. First we had to join the session and download a small piece of software onto our computers which let us into an Ellumiate chatroom. Then we had to set up all of our microphones and test the sound – this took about 10 minutes, and once we were all ready Zoe started.

She showed us around the software first, then discussed some key terminology to do with intonation (like key, tone unit and tonic syllable). She demonstrated intonation patterns with example sentences, then we discussed some intonation rules in smaller ‘rooms’. This was the most surreal part of the experience as it took most of the 10-minute time limit we had to work out whether we could hear each other! (If you ever plan to take part in a workshop like this, PLEASE make sure you are using headphones! The echo effect made it pretty confusing at times) Once Zoe brought us all back into the main room we shared the findings with everyone.

The last part of the workshop was some practical activities, with some of us volunteering to demonstrate them to the group. This was the most useful part of the session, and there are definitely a couple of activities I would like to try out. The workshop was recorded and will be posted on the IH Online YouTube channel at some point – I will post the link when I have it.

For anyone who hasn’t tried out an online workshop before, I would definitely recommend it – it’s a great free place to get new ideas and you’re in the comfort of your own home. Keep an eye on the IH Online Training page for future workshops (and you don’t even have to teach at International House to join in!)

Hope to meet you there soon…

Diary of a beginner: seventh lesson

To see the previous lessons, click here.

In today’s lesson we started off with a quick revision of the long vowel sounds covered at the end of the last lesson because H said he hadn’t listened to them at all. He remembered almost all of them, but struggles with the /3:/ sound in bird.

I then used Cuisenaire rods to elicit the forms that we did last time. This was the result for ‘I’ (without the words!):

I then held up the ‘I’ white rod and said ‘you’ and we repeated the pattern, then did the same for he/she/it. He needed to use his piece of paper to remember the forms the first time round, so we ended up doing it twice: once with the paper, once without.

Before the lesson I had laid out a set of pictures cut from magazines:

I pointed at people/things in the pictures and asked a set of simple questions, along the lines of:

Is he a teacher?

Is it a dog?

designed to elicit Yes/No short answers, referring to the Cuisenaire rods if necessary. We then switched roles so that H was asking the questions. He started to experiment more with the language, adding a few colours, this/that and my/your. I haven’t done colours with him, so I checked quickly and he knows most of the basic ones except for brown, purple and grey.

I decided to build on the possessive pronouns my/your for the rest of the lesson. He wrote another table similar to last week’s one:

I know the sentence ‘It is its cup’ is a little odd, but he was happy with the pattern, so I don’t think it matters too much.

I made a quick list of all of the things we’ve covered, plus some of the extra language he brought up in the picture activity above. It looks like this at the moment:

Vocabulary

Numbers

1-20

Time

Monday-Sunday, January-December

The Alphabet

A-Z

Colours

Knows: red, blue, black, white, green, yellow, orange, pink

Added 19/6: purple, gray, brown

Jobs

Teacher, student, fireman/firewoman, actor/actress, shop assistant, singer, sportsman/sportswoman, secretary

Pronunciation 19/6: hairdresser, waiter, journalist, nurse

Added 19/6: policeman/policewoman

Things

cup, table, chair, armchair

Animals

dog, cat, mouse

Transport

bike, car, train

 

Grammar

To be

I am, You are, He/She/It is (+ – ? yes no)

Possessives

my, your, his, her, its

I’ll try to keep the list up-to-date. H was very motivated to see all of the things we’ve managed to cover so far.

His homework is to listen to recordings of the three colours he had trouble with (he asked for them with Czech too), the jobs he had trouble pronouncing and the sentences from his grid for my/your/etc.

This could be our last face-to-face lesson as I’m leaving Brno a week today. We’re planning to try out teaching via Skype, so watch this space!

Using lino-it to crowdsource ideas

lino-it is an online noticeboard which you can make public or private. You can add sticky notes (a bit like Post-It notes), links to videos, images and more. This week I’ve made two boards to collect ideas from my colleagues on Twitter.

The first is to collect ideas for practising listening to be passed on to my students. Some ideas have already been added, but feel free to add more and share it with your own students. I can’t embed it, but you can click on the picture below to go to the canvas:

The second is to collect cultural ‘nuggets’ to explore with my Advanced students for their final two classes. For their homework they had to choose an area of English-speaking culture which they find interesting and present it in class (that will happen on Tuesday). I would then like to introduce them to some new areas of culture which they’ve never thought/heard of before, and this is where you come in. So far, there’s only one idea from me on there, so again I need your help! Click on the picture to add your ideas 🙂

Thanks very much for your help, and feel free to use these with your own students.

Enjoy!

Pronunciation problems for Czech speakers of English

I wrote this as part of the IH Certificate in Advanced Methodology course which I’ve been following this year. It was partly gleaned from my own experience, and partly from this excellent piece of work conducted at the Pedagogical Faculty at the university in Ceske Budejovice. The only scientific research that went into it was done by the people at the university, and not by me!

Czech is one of the languages which does not appear in Micheal Swan’s excellent Learner English, which details not only pronunciation problems, but also grammar and vocabulary errors, for speakers from a variety of language backgrounds.

I hope you find it useful! (Please let me know if any of the phonetic symbols don’t show up properly and I’ll attach a pdf version too)

 

1.     Segmental

1.1.  Vowel Sounds

1.1.1.     Czech only has 5 vowel phonemes, compared to 20 in English. As Czech has a direct link between spelling and pronunciation, this can cause problems for speakers when they do not know which vowel sound to use in a particular English word.

1.1.2.     In Czech all syllables are pronounced equally. All vowels are strong and no equivalent to the English schwa /ə/ exists.

1.1.3.     Czech speakers find it hard to differentiate between the sounds /æ/, /e/ and /ʌ/, in pairs such as bad/bed, cap/cup

 

1.2.  Consonant sounds

1.2.1.     Neither pronunciation of the morpheme ‘th’ (/ð/, /θ/) exists in Czech. Learners have a tendency to replace them with similar sounds which do not involve putting the tongue between the teeth, namely /d/ or /dz/ for /ð/ and /f/ or /s/ for /θ/.

1.2.2.     /w/ does not exist in Czech. Learners often replace it with /v/. They sometimes also use /w/ in place of /v/.

1.2.3.     /r/ is pronounced in the middle and at the end of words, where it should only be pronounced at the beginning. Czechs also sometimes roll the /r/ sound, which is not necessary in English. Students do not use it to lengthen the preceding vowel sound (see 1.3.2.2).

1.2.4.     /ŋ/, /g/, /k/: these phonemes are most often confused at the end of a word ending in -ing (thing/think, sing/sink). The /g/ can be lost or pronounced as /k/.

1.2.5.     Voiceless /s/ and voiced /z/ are often confused, such as bus/buzz.

1.2.6.     ‘ch’ exists as a single phoneme /x/ in Czech. Learners transfer this to English, especially to replace /k/ in words such as chaos.

1.2.7.     The phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/ at the beginning of a word are often not aspirated by Czech speakers of English. Alternatively, they over-aspirate the same phonemes in mid- and final positions in a word.

 

1.3.  Other

1.3.1.     All Czech words are stressed on the first syllable. This is often transferred to English.

1.3.2.     The differences between English spelling and pronunciation cause the following problems:

1.3.2.1.         incorrect choice of vowel sound (see 1.1.1)

1.3.2.2.         confusion when V+C= vowel sound e.g. ‘er’ in father = /ə/ not /ɜr/, ‘al’ in calm = /a:/ not /æl/

1.3.2.3.         pronunciation of silent letters, such as /b/ in bomb

1.3.2.4.         a difficulty in predicting the pronunciation of previously unseen words

 

2.     Suprasegmental

2.1.  Czech is a syllable-timed language, whereas English is stress-timed. Czech speakers of English therefore find it difficult to use weak forms of common words such as of, a, can. They tend to place equal stress on all the words in a sentence. This is further confused when contrastive stress is introduced to students and they have to decide which stress pattern to choose.

2.2.  There is a much wider range of intonation patterns in English than in Czech. This can lead to Czech English sounding ‘flat’ to a native speaker.

2.3.  Linking words and sounds through assimilation and elision is much more common in English than in Czech.

 

Reference (consulted 11 May 2011)

-, (1997/1998), ‘Most common pronunciation problems of Czech speakers of English’, Pedegogical Faculty JU , Cesky Budejovice, http://eamos.pf.jcu.cz/amos/kat_ang/externi/kat_ang_2834/Nejbeznejsi_vyslovnostni_problemy_ceskych_mluvcich.pdf

If I were a boy (Beyoncé and the Lexical Approach)

As part of my CAM course I was required to teach an experimental lesson using an approach which I haven’t tried before. This is similar but a lot less intense than the DELTA experimental lesson. The lesson had to part of a longer series of lessons trying out a lesson descriptor (like PPP or TTT), again which we hadn’t used before. I decided to use Micheal Lewis’ Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment, which I had trouble with understanding and blogged about here.

I chose to try out the Lexical Approach since it linked directly to the descriptor I had chosen for the other lessons. We’d been looking at conditionals, and herein lay my problem – the Lexical Approach is for vocabulary, but I wanted to teach grammar with it. So, as with all of these things, I put out a call on Twitter, and Fiona Mauchline responded. With her help I put together the materials below. They worked well in class, but whether or not it was a true Lexical Approach lesson or whether the students will remember the phrases afterwards I still don’t know.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the lesson or add more Lexical Approach aspects, please leave a comment below. Feel free to download and use the materials any way you like, crediting the source please. If you have any problems with it, I’m happy to help.

Enjoy!

Literature in EFL (an #eltchat summary)

On Wednesday 8th June at 21.00 BST teachers from around the world met on Twitter for #eltchat to discuss “Creative and effective ways of bringing literature into the EFL/ESL classroom”. I wasn’t able to join in, but I did get to write the summary [and add my own ideas]!

If you want to read the whole conversation, click here.

Why?

• A language is its literature too – a very important part of its culture (@Marisa_C)
• I think lit is one of the most powerful tools to increase a student’s language ability, & I’m amazed it isn’t used more often. (@theteacherjames)
• The fun aspect is absolutely crucial. I want to build a reading habit that will lead to a love of the language. (@theteacherjames)
• The great thing about literature is the way language is used so well. It’s very satisfying to read well turned phrases for students too (@hartle)
• Using literature in class positively encourages active reading – sometimes reading is passive (@pjgallantry)
• I like to believe students can become “better ” people if they read. Opens their world + learn English at the same time. (@mkofab)
• Literature is a real key to higher level language skills… playing with language seems to help (@pysproblem91)

General

• Use it to build critical skills (@theteacherjames)
• “Change endings” of well known pieces by substitution followed by guessing games (@Englodysiac)
• We have also used local folk tales and stories translated into English with our refugee classes – better than Johns and Marys (@Marisa_C)
• Use it as a springboard: reviews, role-plays, change endings, etc. (@rliberni)
• Use cartoon makers to predict the end of a story (@helen100463)
• Sometimes students could read aloud, especially younger learners taking turns (@smaragdav) Most of mine enjoy doing that,they hear their own voices,know when they’re not stressing properly (@vickyloras) They could also read aloud in pairs (@fuertesun) You could pretend it’s for the radio / a podcast (@Marisa_C) It did wonders for @helen100463’s teens.
• Show videos (example) of a person’s book choices and ask students what these choices say about the owner (@hartle) [you could also do this with photos of bookshelves]

Novels

• Encourage students to read outside class.
• Look at some comprehension, some vocab but also theme motif and literary devices too (@Marisa_C)
• Ceri Jones’ activity on translating an Isabel Allende text
• Use exam set texts: “I think the strongest groups of C2 level Ss I have taught are those who took the set text option for the CPE exams” (@Marisa_C) Should ss watch the film based on the book they read or be encouraged to read parts of it again ? (@smaragdav) – many chatters answered they should watch it
• Use clips of the film as part of the pre-reading and prediction for reading (@Marisa_C). You could also use the blurb from the book/DVD jackets for this (@hartle) Show comprehension by discussing what’s not in the film (@Shaunwilden)
• Students can/would never read the same number of pages in just “texts”. It is great confidence boost that they can read novel. (@mkofab) I’ve seen sts beaming because they’ve finished their first ever novel in Eng. I was proud of them too! (@theteacherjames)
• Send the characters to be interview for specific jobs (@Marisa_C) or create fakebook profiles for them (@hartle)
• Have groups summarise, present and order a story (@Marisa_C)
• Making a front page of a newspaper from a book or short story is also a great idea for a class project (@Marisa_C)
• Give students the titles of books and they have to guess the plot (@fuertesun)

Examples

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse (@hartle did an extensive reading project with this)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan: “One year we experimented and did all our FCE exam prep through 39 steps – Wild success!” (@Marisa_C)
• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (If anyone wants to use Peter Pan, I’m recording it for my kids. First 3 audio chapters on my website. http://tinyurl.com/4k5rcpv – @tarabenwell)
• Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding

Short stories

• Cut up the stories, students rearrange it, play with the structure and create new links (@divyabrochier): playing with words and structures is how language is learned and enlivened (@pjgallantry)
• Use them for ‘double’ translation. Take a piece of text, get stds to translate it into L1, then translate it back to English. In trying to recollect the original piece while translating back sts learn chunks (@englodysiac) – could be seen as to much of a specialized skill though (@Marisa_C)
• Use a timeline and a feelings line together to help students enter a short story. (@12mandown)
• Animate the story (@Marisa_C) – some classes might not like comics, so give them a choice (@naomishema)
• Students work together to tell stories they know from their own culture, with the teacher listening (@nutrich)
• Mixed texts: 2 versions of one extract with mixed up parts of text . Students sort out the original (@hartle)
• Use a story with a moral for discussion. Then students write a modern version themselves (@nutrich)
• Reveal a story line by line and make SS think of the rest of the story (@toulasklavou)

Examples

• ‘Thank you Ma’m‘ by Langston Hughes
• Frederic Brown – very short sci-fi stories, tales with a twist, e.g. ‘The Weapon’
• Katherine Mansfield – ‘The Singing Lesson’, ‘Bliss’
• Kate Chopin – ‘The Story of An Hour’
• Brothers Grimm
• Aesop’s Fables (including podcast versions) – over-familiarity could be a problem, but could help too – start with the ending and predict the story (@hartle). Also useful with weaker students. Or try ones that aren’t as popular as the well-known ones. Or get them to guess the moral. (@tarabenwell) Examples of Tara’s online learners reciting Aesop
• Greek/Roman myths
• Bible stories
• Nasruddin stories

Poetry

• Use powerpoint to make slideshows illustrating lines of a poem. (@naomishema)
• Show students limericks, then get them to write their own (@helen100463/@Marisa_C) – although can be frustrating when trying to think of a rhyme for someone’s name (@pjgallantry)
• Use haikus to raise syllable/pronunciation awareness (@Marisa_C). A Haiku is a Japanese poem of 3 lines, with a set number of syllables in each (5-7-5)
• Use the web to find rhymes (@helen100463), for example @flocabulary’s “What rhymes with orange?” or Rhymezone
• Saw a lesson once where T gave ss only the final (rhyming) words of each line of poem – ss had to complete it – worked brilliantly! (@pjgallantry)
• Expression through poetry is very satisfying for learners too, it’s real and can be done at low levels. Grammar poems reinforce too. (@hartle)
• Poetry is expression and can be sparked by all kinds of things: music, images, words… the brain just needs something to set it off (@hartle)
• Use a poem as a dictogloss, then discuss it. I read the poem, they had to listen and write then get into pairs and re-construct and listen again and then again (@fuertesun) I’ve also used mixed up texts , 1 group with nouns, another with verbs etc. They reconstruct text & read (@hartle) More on dictogloss
• I use a lot of poetry: short, we can stop every now and then and comment; even those who “don’t like it” love it in the end & learn! (@vickyloras)
• Use rhymes to teach vocabulary – ‘Word Up‘ from @flocabulary
• Poems are great for seeing word relationships and collocations (@rliberni)
• You can come back to a poem or story later and see what the students remember (@divyabrochier)
• Encourage students to learn a poem by heart (@fuertesun) – espeically good for stress and intonation (@nutrich) @divyabrochier’s Arabic teacher makes them learn something by heart every week ” I am learning a lot of words and remembering them!”
• Practise rhythm /stress by making them do them as a kind of modern rap (@mkofab)

Examples

• Langston Hughes ‘Dreams‘
• Shel Silverstein
• “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost – SS had to discuss a dilemma they had before reading poem. (@naomishema)
• Grammar Jazz Chants by Carolun Graham
• A list of poems and activities from BBC Bitesize (aimed at British 14-16 year olds)
• Tension by @pjgallantry
  
• Sylvia Plath
• Humpty Dumpty – lots of infiniteeltideas
• [Anything by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, especially Please Mrs Butler and Heard It In The Playground – two books of poems about schools. There’s even a schools resource book for the first.]

Plays

• Did an exercise with Romeo & Juliet which looked at using the two families in the play. Students had to spread rumours about the other group. (@rliberni)
• Carry a story forward into our times and change the setting (@Marisa_C)
• Modernize the text (@flocabulary)
• Enact roles, then debate and write from the characters’ viewpoints (@pjgallantry)
• Get them to create own keyword cues for dialogues (@divyabrochier)

Examples

• Shakespeare – including Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet
• Oscar Wilde – quite a few on youtube too

Readers

• Build a reader into each term of your classes (@pjgallantry)
• Turn a short reader into a comic book (@smaragdav)

Other sources #eltchatters have used

• Graphic novels
• Cartoons
• Translated poems/stories from different cultures (not only English poets/writers) – ind English language writers from India, Singapore, Africa, Malaysia etc.. there are many (@rliberni) – for example the OUP reader Land of my Childhood has stories from South-East Asia
• Sometimes they like buying the audiobook too and listen to it on their way to work,works wonders for their language (@vickyloras)
• Such Tweet Sorrow on Twitter

Getting literature to your students

• Share your novels/books with them. Start a private library
• Use a book box.
• Use poetry and short story excerpts if longer sources are not available.
• Use e-books
• Encourage students to exchange books among themselves
• Use Google reader to select reading and listening and then do a project presenting and swapping links on class wiki (@hartle)

Problems

• We have to teach literary concept and thinking skills with the literature. (@naomishema)
• Be age appropriate – “I had an early put-off experience with literature in EFL class: tried teaching some 14-yr-olds some William Blake!” (@pjgallantry)
• It’s important to set the tasks right for literature: just an overview can be enough or select bits (@rliberni)
• What level should extensive literature reading by introduced?
• Do students already read literature in their L1? Even if they don’t, you should still teach them reading skills. (@Marisa_C)
• Be careful of the ‘cultural imperialism’ thingy – some lit can be controversial! (@pjgallantry) But can be avoided by presenting a range of global literature which the sts can choose from. (@theteacherjames)
• Some topics can be controversial: “My teaching Richard Cory sparked a huge eng. teachers debate about if it is o.k to teach a poem that has suicide in it. Scared me” (@naomishema) – “Taught Richard Cory to 10th-12graders. They actually related to seemingly perfect guy on the outside is unhappy inside”
• I worry that it is hard to ‘justify’ using literature in Further Education’s utilitarian view of education as skills training (@pysproblem81): Is being able to appreciate literature, theatre, film etc.. not also a life-skill? (@rliberni)
• Mistakes (used deliberately) in the source text: you can use them to show non-standard use (depending on level of students): noticing this type of thing can reinforce the normal rules (@hartle) I used “Of Mice & Men” which is full of mistakes. Great practice for reading skills & they could check with peers & me. (@theteacherjames)
• Students have trouble with higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) if they’re not taught them in L1 (@naomishema): personally think literature is a real key to higher level language skills… playing with language seems to help (@pysproblem81)
• A lot of teachers have come to ELT from other disciplines and not familiar with literary tradition (@Marisa_C). The teacher must feel enthusiastic and communicate that feeling for any literature work to be really effective (@pjgallantry)
• Very few coursebooks promote literary text – it’s all journalese (@Marisa_C)

Links shared

• Paper about using literature in ESL/ ELL teaching from the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies http://t.co/I1RnUov
• Creative writing and poetry by David C Byrne
• BBC Bitesize English Literature pages – aimed at 14-16 year old Brits
• Website for folk tales
• 60-second recap – fun introductions to literature
• Fakebook – use it to make fakebook pages for characters from stories etc
• Classic English Reading (3 levels)
• Toondoo – a cartoon maker
• Songs specifically for ELL students from @flocabulary, cinlduign ones that summarize stories
• Human Library: a game to play in class from esl library
• [A collection of bookmarks of poetry and short story videos I made and an example of the students performing one of the stories]
• [Children’s Poetry Archive – poets talk about their poems and read them]

Resource Books

• Literature in the Language Classroom by Joanne Collie (on Amazon)
• The Inward Ear: Poetry in the Language Classroom by Alan Maley (on Amazon)

And to end with, here’s one of my favourite poets of all time, performing one of my favourite kid’s books:

“Every weekend I go on the cottage in the nature” (a.k.a. translations to combat L1 (Czech) interference and learn idioms)

The sentence in the title above is beloved of English teachers across the Czech Republic. It’s all due to L1 interference, as with many of these things. One of my classes asked me to help them notice their Czenglish mistakes and try to do something about them. I looked back over old writing and speaking notes and asked around in the staffroom to collate a list of common mistakes, then created the first three sets of materials below.

I asked the students to translate their versions of each group of sentences, trying to write small enough that they could write corrections in the box if necessary (I told them they would get a ‘clean’ version of the sheet later). I then showed them each group of words on the Powerpoint presentation and drilled any difficult sentences / any which they had all made a mistake with. We talked about why Czech people make these mistakes (on a sentence-by-sentence basis) and I encouraged them to highlight anything which they got wrong and need to learn. We also discussed the Czech equivalents (I crowdsourced these from my Czech friends on facebook, so feel free to correct any mistakes you find!). I sent them the presentation after the lesson so that they can look at it whenever they like.

Czech sentences for students to translate

Common Czenglish mistakes and how to correct them

Czenglish Powerpoint presentation

The second set of materials were adapted from the fascinating Omniglot website. I had to edit some of the English on there as not all of them were correctly translated. This was a final ‘fun’ lesson with a CAE group and we spent a long time discussing how to use the idioms and whether there are differences between the use of the equivalents in Czech and English. First, they attempted to translate any of the idioms which they knew already (not many!). I had cut up the ‘answers’ cards before class. They used them to find the rest of the phrases and checked them against my master list.

Czech idioms and their English equivalents (worksheet)

Czech idioms and their English equivalents (answers)

The final step was to play a game I learnt from Anette Igel. Lay the cards out as a board game, with the Czech on one side and the English on the other (back-to-back). Take a counter. Roll the die, move the counter, then translate the idiom you land on to the other language. For instance, if you land on “knedlik v krku”, you have to say “a frog in my throat”. If you are right, turn the card over so you can see the English side. The next person to land on it has to translate it back into Czech. We decided to award one point for each complete circle of the board you did. I lost by quite a long way 😉

The students really enjoyed playing the game, and learnt some more colourful language on the way.

Feel free to download / adapt these in any way you choose, and if you need any help or would like to know how to do a similar thing with your local language, please let me know in the comments below.

Enjoy!

I’ve been interviewed

Following on from my interviews with Naomi and Lizzie for Brad‘s PLN interview challenge, Barbara Sakamoto has now interviewed me. You can read the interview here 🙂

Diary of a Beginner: Sixth Lesson

Last weekend, H and I had our sixth lesson. He led this lesson, starting off with a little card he’d written with 5 sentences on it:

• I am a teacher.
• You are a student.
• He is an actor.
• She is an actress.
• It is a dog.

Because he’d had so much trouble in the previous lesson with the idea of ‘I am’, ‘You are’, ‘I am not’, ‘You are not’ and the question forms, I decided we would write out these sentences in the different forms. These were the results:

As you can see, we did various things to highlight forms. The arrow shows that ‘not’ is how we make a very negative’ – in Czech ‘ne’ is used to say ‘no’ and is added to a verb to make it negative. I used an orange pen to show how the apostrophe in a contraction replaces missing letters. I also drew a line under the phrases to show how the contractions correspond to the longer versions.

This was a real lesson in how to teach beginners for me – there are so many things we take for granted with our students, and we ended up having a lot of discussions in Czech to help H understand various concepts – I dread to think how he would have felt if we couldn’t have done this. I know native speakers who don’t speak the learners L1 can teach beginners, but I can see how much easier it is using a mix of both languages. For example, even the concept of different word order for a statement and a question was very difficult for H to grasp, since in Czech this doesn’t change.

Other problems with L1 became apparent here too: there are no articles in Czech, so he couldn’t understand why he needed one in English even though his original sentences had them already. In the end I showed him the contents page of New English File Beginner and told him not to worry about them – they would be covered in unit 2A and we’re in 1B. The existence of contractions is another thing which Czech lacks – all words are equally stressed, so he found it hard to see why there might be more than one form of these phrases.

The last problem with L1 interference was with ‘dog’ – in Czech ‘pes’ is a masculine noun as it ends in a consonant. Therefore it is always replaced by the subject ‘he’. I extended the idea to ‘It is a bag’/’It is a table’ etc to show other ways to use ‘it’, but H decided to keep his original example sentence.

All of these discussions just from five ‘simple’ sentences!

Once we’d created these tables, we practised the I/you forms using the grammar bank activities in NEF Beginner. Here again we had a couple of problems. Although the two-line dialogues were accompanied by pictures, it wasn’t always clear who was speaking. In the end, we labelled the people in the pictures as A and B to make it a bit easier. H also can’t understand why we say ‘You ARE late’ instead of ‘You ARRIVE late’ like in Czech. I said to him that I can’t understand why they say ‘You ARRIVE late’ and pointed out that that’s why you have to learn other languages 😉 I recorded the conversations so that H could listen to them at home.

After all of that, we only had five minutes left, so I decided to introduce the five long vowel sounds from the English File pronunciation chart. I also gave him these to listen to at home. Ordinarily I wouldn’t rush him with all of these sounds, but we only have three more weeks in which to have lessons, so he asked me to try to do all of them before I leave.

In the end, it was a very educational lesson for both of us!

It’s half past three

It’s half past three.

Thirty minutes ago the tram I was on hit a woman as she was crossing the road. She lay on the road, bleeding profusely. I am a first aider and I had no idea what to do or say. Thankfully I was not the first person to reach her – a pharmacist (lekař) got there first. She knew what to do to help the woman, kept her calm and knew what words to use. The ambulance arrived within five minutes, and the replacement bus to continue our journey arrived soon afterwards. I do not know what state this woman was in when the ambulance arrived as I thought that three people helping her was enough, and an unqualified foreigner who didn’t speak enough of her language wouldn’t help.

I did my first aid course in early July last year, and it was sufficient for summer school aches and pains, and even a minor head injury when one boy fell while running down the stairs. It did not prepare me for this and all I could think was “I should know what to do”. As soon as I get back home I plan to book a refresher course to get up-to-date again, as it’s amazing how quickly you forget (use it or lose it).

The helplessness I felt, even knowing some of the language, is enough to make me go home and find out simple phrases like “Don’t worry.” “The ambulance will be here soon.” Anything to make her feel better.

I hope she survives.

In twenty minutes I have to start a two-hour lesson. I am writing this to help me deal with witnessing this. I don’t know what else to do.

One of the things it made me realise is that we worry about our students and their attitudes coming into class, but what about the teacher? Krashen’s Affective Filter covers the students’ learning, but what about the teachers’ teaching? I don’t ever remember being told how to approach a class when something like this has happened. I’m shaken up, but not enough to warrant cancelling the class. I have taught this group for two years and am coming to the end of my time with them – it’s not fair to them. But I think I will spend a couple of minutes at the beginning of the class telling them what has happened so that they know why I am upset. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I’m a talker, and I want to get it out of my system (I know how callous that sounds). This writing is one way of doing that, but until I speak about it I won’t feel any release.

What would you tell a teacher in a similar situation?

Should you share these things with your students?

If you have never done a first-aid course or don’t know how to say some simple comforting phrases in the language spoken where you live, I would recommend you find out. And I hope you never find yourself in my situation, and even more fervently, that you are never the victim of what happened to that poor women.

When Sandy met Lizzie

Yesterday, @Lizziepinard and I were having one of our many chats on Twitter, and I proposed collaring her as my second interview victim (after Naomi) for Brad Patterson’s excellent PLN interview challenge. We originally planned to do the interview in June, but after chatting for more than an hour, it was clear that neither of us had anything more exciting to do on a Friday afternoon (me)/evening (Lizzie)…so off to Skype we went.

What I already knew

I first became aware of Lizzie as a contributor to #eltchat, the weekly meetings of ELT teachers from around the world which take place every Wednesday. Unfortunately, as she is teaching in Indonesia at the moment, Lizzie can only make the first chat, but she’ll be in England over the summer, so hopefully she’ll be joining us for both soon! Lizzie’s participation in #eltchat has also taken the pressure off me a little 🙂 as she’s now the number one summary writer, having done three summaries in the last month, all of which are easy to read and very entertaining:

• The effect of culture on teaching and learning
• What makes a good Director of Studies?
• How to avoid death by coursebook

Lizzie’s history

In her own words:

born in Chichester (and got family in East Sussex), grew up from age 2-16 in Botswana, A-levels East Sussex, degree Warwick Uni w/a yr in France, a few months in Durham when among other things I worked at Northumbrian Water in Pity Me [that’s a real place if you were wondering!], then landed in Sheffield for a few years, then Indonesia!

Read on to find out more!

The Big Five

1. If your students were to label you with three adjectives, what might they be?

   

   By @VictoriaB52 on #eltpics on Flickr

   This is one of those questions that is pretty difficult to answer, but after much um-ing and er-ing, Lizzie eventually said enthusiastic, creative and…unpredictable (this was the best word we could come up with!). She later qualified it in a great way:

   “Just to clarify on the “unpredictable” point… it’s not in a scary, kids don’t know where they stand with me kind of way, more in a surprising instead of boring kind of way. But maybe energetic would be a better word! In ELT speak (well, in Jim Scrivener’s Learning Teaching book anyway!), I like to go the parabola way instead of the direct way :-p”

2. What would we find in your refrigerator right now?

   

   By @dfogarty on #eltpics on Flickr

   Next week Lizzie is leaving Indonesia for the summer, so her fridge is pretty empty right now: just some biscuits, a quarter of a papaya and some milk (we decided this was very English!).

   Normally it would be much fuller, ideally with:

   “lots of salady things, fruit, hummus, cheese, yoghurt, decent milk (the long-life milk you get in Indonesia isn’t the same)…”

3. If you weren’t a teacher, what might your profession be?

   

   By @ceciELT on #eltpics on Flickr

   Before becoming a teacher, Lizzie did disability support work at Sheffield Hallam University, working with people with a whole range of disabilities. She was employed to go to lectures and take notes for the students. It was a great job, but paid by the hour, so that when the students went home there was no money coming in. Biology lectures were fun, but anything involving a lot of numbers, like Economics, Physics or Applied Mathematics where difficult when she didn’t understand what the lecturers were talking about. If you find yourself in the same situation, her advice is “Let the words go in at your ear and out at your hand – if you try to process them, they will melt your brain!”

   If not doing that, Lizzie would like to be a writer or work in a library – anything with books really.

4. What do you find most difficult about the teaching profession or what has been your most difficult class as a teacher?

   

   By @mk_elt on #eltpics on Flickr

   Any of you who have read Lizzie’s summary and comments about the #eltchat on using coursebooks will already know that she has been having to teach under very strict constraints for the past year, with “a hefty coursebook, too-short courses and zero freedom to stray from the coursebook”. The students and my colleagues have been great though! She’s leaving next week, so hopefully this situation will change soon and she’ll be able to experiment with all of the things she’s learnt from her PLN over the last few months.

5. What was the last book/movie you read/saw, and what have you seen/read too many times?

   

   Not quite the right kind of leopard (by me!)

   The last book Lizzie read was Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was OK, but not earth-shattering, and the section set in Indonesia was interesting. At the moment she’s reading Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry, which is a series of short stories about the inhabitants of an apartment block in Bombay [which I now want to read!]

   The last film she saw was National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor, which was being played on the plane as part of an Elizabeth Taylor tribute. Her comment: “a pleasant watch, good if you like horses”

The DVD extras

After I’d asked Lizzie the five questions for the challenge (with a blip in the middle when we lost the connection, and another as I accidently hung up!), we then carried on chatting for about half an hour. Two questions I really wanted to ask her were:

How did you end up in Indonesia?

I wanted to go there, saw that English First had lots of schools there, and decided it seemed like a safe bet, especially because you get a contract before you arrive in Indonesia, rather than having to do a demo lesson once you arrive with no guarantee of getting a job. I’ve got a new job at a different school for September, this time based in Jakarta. I’m in South Sumatra at the moment, so it’s going to be like going to a whole other world.

What was Botswana like when you were growing up?

Completely different to now! When we first arrived in the mid 1980s the capital city was not much bigger than a village. There was only a ridiculously small number of paved roads in the country! Botswana is the size of France and currently has around 2.4 million people living there, even fewer, much fewer, when we first went there! Now it’s more like a mini-Joburg. (Unfortunately with a crime rate to match! Well, not quite that bad, but heading in the wrong direction!)
We lived in a government house (which we nick named the matchbox) and memories of childhood include running around outside barefoot and climbing over the fence to play with the neighbours.
One Christmas when we were going to the UK, when I was still very young, we got to the airport and THEN my parents noticed my bare feet! Them: “Where are your shoes????!!!!” Me: “Er, in my bedroom…” (Where else would they be?! …did I mention I used to go barefoot a lot? :-p)

Eventually I had to go as there was a parade of masks in Brno that night, but I’m sure if I hadn’t we would still be talking now! We’re going to try and meet at some point in the summer when we’re both in the UK, and Lizzie is also trying to get a scholarship to take her to IATEFL next April, so we should meet there too (good luck!)

Thanks again Brad for challenging us to these interviews!

On top of the world...

...and in an ELT teacher's natural element!

Returning from Borneo

Seven years ago today I landed at Heathrow airport after four and a half months in the Malaysian part of Borneo.

It was the first time I had left Europe (and in fact I had only previously visited France and Germany), so it was a huge experience in my life. When I got back I wrote an article for gapyear.com called ‘Life in the Jungle’, which you can read here. I also created my first website (using angelfire – that takes me back!), which my mum updated with my letters from the jungle. It still exists and tells me that it has been 2556 days since I got back from Borneo! Unfortunately, the photo links don’t work any more, so I’ve shared a selection of them below.

A tree in the jungle. Because green helps 🙂 [my photo]

Since I returned from my Trekforce expedition I have become much better travelled and have lived in France (twice), Paraguay and the Czech Republic for anywhere from two months to three years. I’ve also become a full-time EFL teacher, with Malaysia being my tester. The expedition gave me the confidence to live in unusual circumstances, and comes in very useful in job interviews (I directly attribute my job in Paraguay to my time in Borneo). It was an amazing experience, and one which will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Things I’ve learnt from English coursebooks

One of the ways you can identify an EFL teacher is by the amount of random information they can spew about all kinds of topics under the sun, much of which is gleaned from the coursebooks they use. Here is a small selection of the random things (I think) I have learnt about, which may or not be right!

• The following things were invented by women: Kevlar, disposable nappies, windscreen wipers and the dishwasher (New English File Pre-Intermediate)
• The people who invented Coca Cola and clothes hangars never made any money from their inventions (one of the New Headway books – can’t remember which)
• A French artist created an exhibition based on the break-up email she received from her (ex-)boyfriend called ‘Prenez soin de vous‘ – ‘Take Care of Yourself’ (New English File Advanced)
• Influenza+Affluence=Affluenza – being too affluent can make you ill (New English File Advanced)
• The World’s Funniest Joke has been determined by science – and is only funny the first time you read it! (New English File Advanced, as well as in another book which I can’t remember
• A man cheated in the New York Marathon in the 1920s by getting a lift for about 20 miles of the course (New English File Intermediate)
• Slow living is much more satisfying – I first read about Slow Food and Slow Cities in English coursebooks, including New English File Intermediate and Advanced Expert CAE and have now read “In Praise of Slowness” which I really enjoyed too

So that’s my selection. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learnt from a coursebook?

CAE Speaking Part 3

Here is a presentation I made to help out my CAE students with their final preparation for the speaking exam. I hope your students find it useful too. I used some information from the Splendid Speaking website, which has some excellent tips for many Cambridge exams.