Working with Images by Ben Goldstein (a review)

I was given Working with Images [affiliate link] when I was doing a CELTA at IH Palma, as they had a couple of extra copies left over after a conference. As one of the curators of the amazing resource that is ELTpics, I am very interested in how images can be used in the classroom, although I have to say that in the past I have tended to stick to tasks involving describing the story behind an image or using modals of deduction (because they’re easy, not because I don’t know about many other ways to use images!)

This is a useful resource book full of ideas for different types of images, not restricted only to photos as is often the case. It includes ideas for analysing adverts, icons, and works of art. There are activities for every level and age group, and it is accompanied by a CD-ROM with all of the relevant images. Every activity is explained step-by-step, and often includes many variations to adapt it to other age groups or images, or to extend the core activity.

A lot of the activities could also be used in conjunction with ELTpics sets:

• 1.4 Points of view / 1.5 Who am I? / 2.3 Connecting people: people set
• 1.8 Minimal differences: windows and doors set
• 1.9 Flickr colours: colours set
• 2.8 What’s changed?: spot the difference set
• 2.9 Sequencing: sequences set
• 2.14 Abstracts: close ups set
• 2.15 What’s in your bag?: a variation could be done with the bookshelves set
• 2.16 Concepts: examining happiness could be done through Things I like doing
• 4.7 Hotel rooms: roads set for the ‘paths’ variation
• 5.7 Culture shock: signs set
• 5.8 Image history: lots of hearts in the love and romance set
• 5.9 Hands: busy hands set
• 5.12 Alphabets: things shaped like letters set (although we’re missing some of the alphabet!)

Having read all of the activities, I certainly have a much better idea of how versatile images are and the range of different ways that you could exploit them in the classroom, moving beyond storytelling and grammar activities.

There are activities that will prompt critical thinking and visual literacy, particularly those in the section about advertising, such as 6.6 Adverts everywhere, which encourages students to consider how the positioning of an advert can effect their response to it. 2.19 Coursebook Images challenges students to say what kind of images should appear in a coursebook, and think about how representative the images in their coursebook are.

For those of you who want to incorporate PARSNIPs (a variety of potentially taboo subjects, covering politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, -isms, pork) into their lessons, activities like 6.8 Subvertising look at how advertising messages we are familiar with can be subverted to make us think about a company or an issue in a different way. 5.7 Culture Shock uses signs to prompt students to consider differences in attitude and exposure to different situations in different cultures, such as the sign ‘no ice cream or guns’.

Working with Images [Amazon affiliate link] would be useful to have in a school library as a reference for teachers who would like to push themselves, although I suspect that as with many resource books like this, teachers would also need to be prompted to use it or it will just sit on the shelf gathering dust. That’s not to say that it isn’t full of great activities, just that it can sometimes be difficult to know where to incorporate them if you are working from a syllabus.

My challenge now is to start trying out some of the activities I keep reading about in resource books more actively in the classroom, slightly hindered by the fact that I now only teach for three hours a week! I’ll take it into school for our teachers to use, and hopefully it will be just one of the books which I use next year as I try and make our professional development for second years at the school more research driven. Watch this space to find out if I manage it…

Conversation jumble with ELTpics

I’ve recently been sorting out some of the files on my computer and came across a worksheet I created for low-level students to help them practise punctuation within a basic conversation. I thought I’d share it with you as I’m sure there’s somebody who’ll find it useful.

The sheet uses ELTpics by Kevin Stein and Laura Phelps. Kevin, I just realised that I said you lived in South Korea – obviously I wasn’t quite so aware then, and was just keen to use one of my all-time favourite ELTpics! Sorry 🙂

There are no contractions in there, but you might want to encourage the students to add them, maybe as a second stage after they done the un-jumbling task. There are also no exclamation marks, as I originally designed it for beginner Arabic and Chinese speakers and I thought that would be a bit too much for them to deal with. I’ve included them in brackets in the answers below.

[I believe you need a free SlideShare account to be able to download the worksheet]

Here are the answers:

A: Good morning. (!)

B: Hello. What is your name? (!) (What’s)

A: My name is Kevin. And you? (name’s)

B: I am Laura. Where are you from? (I’m)

A: I am from America. I live in South Korea. What about you? (I’m)

B: I am from the UK. What do you do? (I’m)

A: I am a teacher. What do you do? (I’m)

B: I am a teacher too. I love my job. (I’m) (!)

A: Me too. (!)

If you’ve created materials using ELTpics, why not share them with us (I’m one of the curators)? If you need inspiration, take a look at the ELTpics blog and start exploring the collection, which now has over 25,000 images!

Picture this (IH Live Online Workshop January 2015)

Today I had the pleasure of presenting a Live Online Workshop for International House teachers around the world.

The topic was the use of images in the classroom, including an introduction to ELTpics. This was the abstract:

Picture this: ELTpics and images in the classroom
Images are the language of the 21st century. How can we exploit them to maximise our students’ language production? This webinar will introduce you to ELTpics, a collection of nearly 25,000 images shared by teachers and other members of the ELT profession and available for you to use in the classroom. Learn how to make the most of the collection with activities to use the ELTpics images, those in your coursebooks and those your learners bring with them every day.

You can watch a recording of the session, which will take you 56 minutes:

Almost all of the activities were taken from the blogs of various wonderful people, as well as the ELTpics blog. Here are the links:

• Picture Scavenger Hunt: Adam Simpson
• Mobile Stories: Paul Braddock
• The Getaway: Paco Gascón
• A Museum of Me: Antonia Clare
• Bridges: Fiona Mauchline
• Zoom out: Ceri Jones
• Subverting the coursebook: Dave Dodgson

Information about how to credit ELTpics images can be found on the attribution page of the ELTpics website.

I also shared two mosaic makers. On BigHugeLabs, you can use the Flickr links or images which you have on your computer. For Fotor you need to have the images on your computer first. I think the Fotor mosaics look nicer, and you have more options for layouts on them, but you can include more images in a BigHugeLabs mosaic.

Finally, you can download the slides, which will give you a summary of all of the activities (not all of them have links above):

[I believe you need a free SlideShare account to be able to download the slides]

Introducing past modals of deduction

London, the Olympics, train ticket

I wrote these on the board.

Based on these words, what did I do at the weekend? Are you 100% sure? How can you show this in your sentences?

I asked these questions. The students worked in groups to come up with one suggestion for each word, which they then put on the board:

We went through the sentences. Is it grammatically correct? Does it talk about the right time? For example: while “She might visit the Olympic Stadium” is grammatically correct, it refers to the future, not the past. In the process, I introduced the perfect infinitive, formed by ‘have + past participle’. One student asked if she could say “She might went to London.” and we talked about why that wasn’t possible. By introducing the perfect infinitive within the first few sentences, the students were well practised at using it by the end of the lesson.

This took 45 minutes, including me confirming that I did indeed go to London, and telling them that I lost the return part of my ticket, had to buy a new one – £121 – and then noone checked it (grrr!)

After a brief break, I asked the students to suggest another idea for ‘Olympics’ as none of theirs were correct. I asked them how sure they were, and elicited other words which could be used in place of ‘might’ if you were more or less sure. We also reiterated the form of the perfect infinitive:

I showed them a picture of me at the Olympics, and they eventually got to the fact that I went to London for a (very enjoyable) reunion with some of my fellow Games Makers.

The students each had a slip of paper. They wrote three words about their weekend on the paper, plus their name, and left it on their desk along with a blank piece of A4 paper.

They circulated, writing a suggestions as to what the other students might/could/must have done at the weekend on the A4 paper, then folding the paper (consequences-style) so noone else could see their sentence.

When they had written on every other piece of paper, they returned to their desks and read what their classmates thought they had done. I asked how close they were. I also pointed out that all of our original modal sentences were with ‘might’, and asked if their paper had a range of modals.

To finish this stage, the students turned the paper over and used the past simple to write what they actually did. They then circulated and read what everyone had written.

As preparation for homework I showed them this picture from eltpics by @elt_pics (Victoria Boobyer):

As a class, they suggested what could have happened. Once we’d covered the obvious “She might have broken/sprained her ankle.” I asked how? When? Where?

As homework, the students have to find a picture, preferably one that isn’t their own, and suggest what might have happened before it was taken.

What worked

The students were engaged by the personal nature of the activity. They were interested in trying to find out what their classmates did at the weekend. There was quite a lot of movement, catering for more kinaesthetic learners, something which I sometimes forget to do, and changing the dynamic. There was a lot of repetition of the target structure and the context was clear. Perhaps best of all for a busy Monday morning, it required minimal prep time.

What I’d change next time

The stage where we looked at whether the sentences were grammatically/temporally correct dragged a little because it was teacher-centred. I should have done a couple of examples then handed it over to the students.
I decided to use this method because I wanted to see whether the students could produce past modals of infinitive in a context which would definitely prompt them from native speakers. However there wasn’t a very clear reason for students to guess what the others had done. Perhaps I could have set up some kind of contest – find someone with the most similar weekend to you for example. Since a lot of them took advantage of the school trip to Edinburgh, this might not be the best example!

Picture role plays

I’ve been investigating role plays as part of my Delta reflection. I rarely use them because I never enjoyed them as a language student, but I think some students would respond to them very well.

Today I adapted an activity from Role Play by Gillian Porter Ladousse, called ‘Picture role plays’, with pre-intermediate (A2+) students.

• I put a few pictures from eltpics around the room. Each picture showed a minimum of two people, and it was relatively easy to imagine that they were having a conversation. First, students walked around in pairs discussing what they could see. To prompt them, I had the question words Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? written on the board.

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @acliltoclimb, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

• Each pair chose their favourite picture and took it back to their desk.
• They chose one person in their picture to write a mini biography of.
• These were quite short, so I then asked students to read all the biographies and add one question under each.
• The students then had to ‘inhabit’ the person they wrote a biography of and have a conversation with the other person in their photo.
• Finally, they wrote out the conversation.

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @inglishteacher, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Shaun Wilden brought picture role plays to my attention during his seminar at the recent IH Online Conference. You can watch his session here and read the original description of the activity here.

Did it work?

Yes and no. The quieter students were very creative in the biography, and added lots of extra details. My favourite was ‘My grandmother loves playing chess and is the world champion.’ However, when it came to the roleplay, the conversation was quite stilted. They did ‘inhabit’ the role a little, but for the quieter students this was very difficult. The more confident students really seemed to enjoy it, and were arguing quite a lot about the correct language to use.

We had been practising indirect questions during the week, and one or two of the quieter students got them into their conversations. However, I didn’t have a particularly clear aim for the activity. It was very much a ‘Friday afternoon’ activity.

Doing it again

With role plays, you definitely need some kind of clear aim. Why do the students need to imagine the conversations between the people in the photos?

Most of the language work I did with the students was in their pairs. It would be useful to work more with the language and build on it further.

We didn’t have time to repeat the role play, and this is definitely something the students would benefit from.

Do you have any other advice?

(This is one of a series of shared mini reflections on some of the activities I’m trying out during my Delta. The first was here.)

How to join in with #eltpics

Made using shapecollage.com

All of the pictures in the image above are taken from the #eltpics photos on Flickr. #eltpics was started in October 2010 when three teachers (@VictoriaB52, @vickyloras and @cgoodey) decided to tweet pictures to each other on a given theme each week. As Victoria said in this interview with tefl.net:

The idea blossomed, so we asked ELT folk on Twitter to join in and share our diversity. In 3 weeks [we had] over 200 images from 20 countries on our Flickr site.

As of this week, we’re up to 3000 images in 30 categories including all of the following:

Made using wordle.net

You can see the 10 most recent pictures in the bottom-right hand corner of this page.

So how can you join in?

1. If you are not a member of Twitter, sign up for free.

2. Find out the topic for the week by searching for the #eltpics hashtag or asking @sandymillin, @fionamau or @cgoodey (the current curators of the site). A new topic is announced every Sunday. (By the way, if you have any topic suggestions, feel free to let us know!)

3. Choose the photos you want to share and upload them to a site like flickr, yfrog or twitpic. You can also use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck. Please ensure that the photos are your own and that you have the copyright.

4. Tweet the links to the pictures you want us to upload. Don’t forget to include the hashtag #eltpics so we can find them! If you want to help us out, you could also mention the set you want us to add the photo to.

5. Sit back and wait for us to tell you they have been uploaded. If we don’t reply within a couple of days, please let us know, as we sometimes miss one or two pictures.

Using the pictures

All of the photos are shared under a Creative Commons licence:

Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

If you’re not happy with your pictures being shared and used in this way, please don’t send them! 🙂

Once they are on the flickr page, all of the images are available for teachers to use in their classrooms, for materials or for teaching-related blogposts. We would love to hear how you use them.

Links

• Ideas for using the 2000th #eltpic on Ceri Jones’ blog
• Ideas for using the 3000th #eltpic on Infinite ELT ideas
• Ceri’s presentation from the 2011 IATEFL Conference on ‘Unleashing the Power of Images‘, including many #eltpics, as well as an interview in which she talked about them
• And another one from Ceri: this time, a guest post on Ken Wilson’s blog suggeting ways to use two of the images
• A ‘weather’ worksheet made using #eltpics
• Phil Bird describing #eltpics and crowdsourcing
• Adam Simpson advertising his #eltpics
• Cecilia Coelho’s lesson plan challenge, inspired by an #eltpics suggestion
• Chiew’s lesson plan and mind-mapping ideas with suggestions for how to use pictures in class
• From my own blog: Story prompts with #eltpics and Emotions wordclouds (including an #eltpics slideshow)
• A post from Denise including ideas for websites which you could use with #eltpics

Emotions word clouds

I created these word clouds based on The Little Book of Feelings and Emotions which I received at a recent conference as promotional material from Oxford University Press.

I have been using them with my 1-2-1 post-Proficiency student, and we have two questions for you.

Which five-ten of these words/phrases would you be most likely to use?

Are there any which you would never use? Why not?

Thank you!

And as a bonus, I created a downloadable slideshow using the #eltpics ‘Emotions‘ set on Flickr…

Enjoy!

Story Prompts with #eltpics

In April 2010 I attended a talk by Laura Patsko at the IH Prague Conference about storytelling in an adult classroom. This week I finally got round to adapting it to make use of some #eltpics (pictures for teachers by teachers which can be used under a Creative Commons licence) and thought I would share the presentation and the lesson plan with you. Feel free to use it however you like. (My context was an Advanced group, but it could be used with other levels)

I showed them the first slide of the presentation and told them we were going to look at six pictures and talk about the ideas in the word cloud. I copied the cloud onto each picture so that they would have some ideas.

Once they had talked about each picture and I had given them any extra vocabulary they needed, they voted on the most interesting picture. I copied and pasted it onto the final slide, right-clicked on it and chose ‘send to back’. We were revising narrative tenses, used to and would, hence the orange box, but you could change it or delete it entirely.

I told the class to imagine that this picture was an image taken from the midpoint of a film. They were going to create the story of the film. Half of the class worked on the story leading up to the picture, the rest worked on the story after the picture. They were allowed to take a few notes, but could not write out the whole story.

After about fifteen minutes I then reorganised the groups. Each new group had one ‘beginning’ student and one ‘ending’ student. They then had to put their halves together to create one logical complete story.

The final step in the process was for each pair to tell their story to the group. I recorded it using Audacity and emailed it to the students after class. Next week we will focus on their use of narrative tenses, used to and would based on the recordings.

One-to-one variation

I also (unintentionally) taught the same lesson 1-2-1 when only one student turned up from a class of five! We followed the same process, but got through it much faster, finishing all of these steps in about 30 minutes. Once we’d recorded the story, the student then typed out what she had said. We then went through a series of drafts, each time focussing on one or two changes, for example tenses, punctuation and choice of vocabulary. This is the document we produced based on the picture of the two girls at the castle door:

What worked

• The students found the pictures interesting and were motivated to discuss them.

• They enjoyed being able to create their own stories.
• They used their English in a natural way, so it recording their stories really showed the areas which they need to focus on.
• In the 1-2-1 lesson, the student was given an intensive personalised focus on her errors. She also learned about punctuation in a relevant way, particularly the punctuation of speech (which I personally find can be difficult to teach/learn)

What I should change

• At the beginning of the lesson I should have introduced the idea of storytelling in more detail. We could have talked about why we like stories and what a good story requires.
• With more time we could have created more detailed stories, adding in information about the characters, using more adverbs etc.

If you choose to use this lesson (and even if you don’t!) please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions to improve it.
Enjoy!