In March 2010, I did my very first conference presentation at a PARK conference in Brno, Czechia, and I’ve been back many times since, so I really didn’t want to miss this special 30th anniversary conference.
This was the abstract for my talk:
What do successful readers do?
As teachers, we’re often guilty of testing our students’ reading abilities through comprehension questions, without actually supporting them to become better readers. But where should we start? How can you move beyond a comprehension focus and help students to become the best readers of English that they can be? What might be stopping them from developing? In this webinar, I’ll aim to answer all of these questions, by looking at what good readers do and demonstrating how to support students to build those skills for themselves.
On 9th February 2024, I presented a plenary at the Educast online conference. It was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was a 45-minute version of the talk I did in January at the IH AMT, sharing the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. Frameworks exist for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise Santos’ IATEFL 2022 talk, I created one for my MA dissertation. I will share what it is, how I created it, and how you can use it.
These are the slides from the presentation (as a link at the moment as the embed function isn’t working!):
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
I’ll add the recorded version of the presentation when the link is available. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
On 13th January 2024, I presented a plenary session at the International House Academic Managers and Trainers (IH AMT) 2024 conference. When I was the Director of Studies at IH Sevastopol and IH Bydgoszcz, I used to attend the AMT regularly, so it was lovely to be back. Follow this link for the notes on the talks I attended.
My own talk was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was the first official public outing for the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. At IATEFL 2022, I saw Denise Santos question the lack of a competency framework for materials writing. Frameworks existed for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise’s talk, I decided to create a competency framework for language learning materials writing for my MA dissertation, recognising that it’s not only materials writers who need this support, but teachers too. I will share the structure of my framework, how I created it, and how you can use it.
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
Subscribe to my blog to see a video version of the presentation over the next couple of months, as I’ll presenting it a few more times in the first half of this year. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
On 13th July 2023, I presented a talk as part of the BRAZ-TESOL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE) for the 2023 BRAZ-TESOL online conference.
As teachers, we can feel a difference when we’re teaching from materials which seem to ‘flow’ perfectly compared to materials which don’t. However, when we create our own materials, it can be difficult to find that same flow. In this talk, I’ll show you techniques to make your materials flow, including through the use of scaffolding for productive tasks, and the exploitation of a single exercise in a range of different ways.
As part of the research I did for my MA dissertation topic, I conducted a survey about the knowledge and skills people need to create effective materials. The second most common response was that creating materials that flow in a logical way is an important skill in materials writing, with 58/124 respondents mentioning it. The only thing that was more common was understanding the target language.
What do we mean by ‘flow’?
I started with definitions of the general meaning of ‘flow’ from two learner dictionaries, and I highlighted some of what I believe are the key concepts relating to flow.
Cambridge starts with (especially of liquids, gases, or electricity) to move in one direction, especially continuously and easily. Oxford says that when flow is related to speech or writing it is the way that words, ideas or themes are linked together in speech, writing or music and when it is related to ideas or conversation to flow is to develop or be produced in an easy and natural way.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a psychologist who wrote and spoke a lot about the psychological concept of flow. I used various internet sources to compile my own summary of the factors which he thought contribute to us feeling like we are in the middle of a state of flow:
Clear goals
Immediate clear feedback
Total focus on task
Balance between skills and challenge
Sense of control
No worry of failure
Altered perception of time
Action and awareness merged
The activity is an end in itself
Based on those ideas from beyond ELT and this article by John Hughes, this is how I understand what ‘flow’ could mean when we relate it to materials and materials writing:
Clear objectives and activity aims
Easy for learners and teachers to navigate
Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
Challenges learners
Gives learners a feeling of control
Sets learners up for success
In the rest of the presentation I looked at each of these areas in turn and offered thoughts and suggestions on how to improve your materials so that they flow better, according to my breakdown of what flow might mean. I’ve included some examples of what I mean, but if you’d like more, please do leave a comment.
1. Clear objectives and activity aims
The objective is what the materials as a whole should help learners to achieve. This should be communicated concisely to users of the materials. For example: ‘By the end of the lesson, you should be better able to get help when trying on clothes in a shop in English.’ After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve got there?
The activity aims are how each activity contributes to the objective and moves learners towards it. These should provide step-by-step support to learners to achieve the overall aim, and (if time) improve further at it. In our clothes shop example, some of the activity aims might include:
To identify what problems the customer has (when listening to a conversation between a shop assistant and a customer in a clothes shop)
To practise polite intonation when making requests
To understand typical responses a shop assistant might make to your requests
You may have come across the acronym SMART to describe what makes a good aim or objective. This is how I equate each of the words in SMART to how learners should feel about each aim or objective in the materials they are using in lessons:
Specific: I know what I have to do
Measurable: I know how to assess my progress
Achievable: I can achieve this (perhaps with help)
Realistic: This will help me in the real world
Timed: I can do this in the time available to me
+ each activity will help me to improve
If you look at materials you’ve produced and don’t feel they meet these criteria, it’s perhaps worth reassessing the objectives and aims to see how you can make them SMARTer.
2. Easy for teachers and learners to navigate
This draws heavily from John Hughes, who has been a huge influence in making my own materials more easy navigable through advice he’s offered in blogposts, workshops and webinars. Thank you John!
To make your materials easier for teachers and learners to navigate, consider the following:
Use clear, unambigious headings
Number activities and questions
Reference relevant grammar notes, vocabulary lists and other exercises
In instructions / rubrics, use consistent wording, consistent fonts (or bold, but not italics – this is harder to read), and include examples.
Use an uncluttered layout, with clear constrats between colours and easy to read fonts and text sizes.
Even if they’re only for you, include teacher’s notes and answer keys. Writing them can often help you to identify problems you might not otherwise notice.
3. Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
To some extent, this links back to objectives and aims in point 1 and navigation in point 2, but I think it’s worth highlighting this as a separate point. As John Hughes says,
You need to make sure [the exercises] fit together in a logical order. In practical terms, this means that if you have six exercises or stages on a worksheet, then any teacher should be able to pick up that worksheet, take it into class, start at exercise 1 and finish at exercise 6. Yes it’s important that the material is also flexible enough for those types of teachers who like to miss some parts out, change the order or even add their own supplementary materials, but its primary function is to offer a complete lesson.
Look at your materials from the perspective or a learner or another teacher using them. Can you easily answer these three questions:
Can I see where I should start and why?
What are the next steps I need to take?
How will I know when I’ve finished?
4. Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Have you ever used materials where…?
The topic keeps changing: one minute it’s about holidays, then food, then learning languages, then… (particularly in controlled practice activities!)
There are sudden jumps of focus: from reading, to grammar practice, to learning some new vocabulary, to writing…
Learners are asked to suddenly asked to start reading, listening, speaking or writing, with no warning or preparation, and then are given little to no support to complete it.
To avoid that yourself, do this:
Stick to a consistent topic throughout the set of materials and throughout each activity.
If you write materials which integrate skills and language, make sure everything you include contributes to the overall aim. No grammar / vocab ‘just because…’!
Provide support (‘scaffolding’) for skills work.
For all skills = lead into the topic first.
For writing / speaking = provide thinking time, useful language, and time to upgrade their work, either by redrafting for writing or task repeition for speaking.
5. Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
To think about how to make your materials engaging, I would highly recommend one of my current favourite methodology books:
Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms by Sarah Mercer and Zoltán Dörnyei [Amazon affiliate link, BEBC, Bookshop.org affiliate link] includes a wealth of ideas for what engagement actually means, any of which you could attempt to build into your materials to help learners approach a sense of flow while they’re using them. This is a slightly different approach to flow and materials, but still an important one! Here are just a few ideas:
Use stories
Activate emotions
Start small and build up
Make progess visible
Build in learner choice
Teacher learners how to learn
Provide appropriate challenge
Include surprise, mystery and puzzles
Build rapport between learners
Built teacher-student rapport
Provide support for pair work and group work
I’d highly recommend reading the whole book if you can!
6. Challenges learners
The challenge about challenge in materials is that it looks different in every context, so to some extent you’ll need to decide yourself what challenge actually means for the learners you’re writing materials for. However, these four activites are simple ways to add a little challenge to any set of materials:
Cover the sentences / words. Can you remember them?
Test your partner: what can they remember? Can you help them remember more with pictures or acting?
Race yourself: how fast can you do it? Can you do it again faster? [for pronucniation practice, reading, speaking, writing, or completing a controlled practice exercise – note that it’s important that learners are racing themselves and not each other]
Can you write down these 3 super-fast sentences? Now can you say them yourself? [accompanied by an audio with some connected speech, or teacher’s notes for a teacher to read the sentences as fast as they can]
7. Gives learners a feeling of control
Again, this is more about helping learners to approach a sense of flow when they’re using your materials. Here are a few ideas for how you can hand over control to learners within your materials:
Offer choice:
Do you want to work alone, in pairs or in groups?
Do you want to write or speak?
Include how to learn:
Dictionary skills
Making use of online translators
How ChatGPT can help you
Include tips on approaching tasks:
Why not try…?
If it’s difficult, you could…
8. Sets learners up for success
If you’re able to incorporate a wide range of the tips above in your materials, you should be well on the way to setting up learners for success. Here’s a summary of some of the ways you can do that:
Maintain the focus
Include how to learn
Scaffold for skills work
Support learners to remember new language
All of this leads to learners going from a feeling of ‘I can do this’ to a feeling of ‘I did it!’, and to teachers enjoying teaching from the materials.
But…
…I’ve shared a lot of different ideas in this talk and post. Don’t try to change all of it at once in your materials if you feel they’re not there already!
Choose one area at a time to work on, try it out and reflect on what does and doesn’t work for your materials and your learners. When you’re ready, choose another area.
I’d be really interested to know where you choose to start and how it goes. Please do leave a comment!
These are the slides from my IATEFL 2023 How to session this morning, giving you guidance on how to present at an international conference, whether that’s face-to-face or online. It’s an updated version of a presentation I’ve done at the last few IATEFL conferences. You can find all of the associated notes in this post from IATEFL Belfast 2022.
These are the slides from my IATEFL 2022 How to session this morning, giving you guidance on how to present at an international conference, whether that’s face-to-face or online. It’s an updated version of my IATEFL 2019 How to session.
Slide 8 has icons. These are the associated notes:
Eye contact – friends around room / Online = odd presenting to yourself sometimes. Ask somebody to stay on video so you can talk to them if possible (the moderator?) / switch off self view if you can?
Microphone – where to hold it. Use it? / Online = headphones stop echo
Pace: Deep breaths – ask somebody to indicate if you’re rushing
What you say – not a script/reading from slides! Index cards? Slides + notes, presenters notes…as natural as possible
Reactions aren’t just based on what you say – also the time of day – 8:15? After lunch? End of the day? / Nobody writing in chat online = don’t worry / invite them
Here are potential solutions to the problems on slide 11:
Slides – USB x 2, Google Drive, email, Slideshare – check compatability. Alternatively, don’t use slides!
Audio – have transcript, play it as a file outside presentation rather than embedded into it
Video – summarise content
Attention – like in class? hands up, countdown
Empty room – ask people to come closer
Too long – decide before what you can cut, underplan!
Too short – more time for questions, what will you take away?
Overall = stay calm 🙂 Ask them a question e.g. what have I told you so far? What do you still want to know?
Here’s an explanation of the images on slide 11:
Reward yourself
Relax
Reflect on how it went
If it’s IATEFL, consider writing up your talk for the Conference Selections – there’s a How To talk about that too 🙂
Here’s a recording of the 2021 version of the talk:
Today I had the pleasure of taking parting in the IH Bydgoszcz Cambridge methodology day. I presented a range of activities to help teachers prepare students for the Cambridge First and Cambridge Advanced writing exams.
The slides from the presentation and all of the resources can be found below. You can download everything from slideshare, for which you will need to create a free account. The links in the presentation are clickable. You’ll find full details of all of the activities in the notes which accompany each slide, which you’ll be able to see when you download the presentation.
For more on linking words of contrast, please see my Contrast Linkers post.
Telescopic Text is a way to get your students to play with language and experiment with writing longer stretches of text. Here’s the example I shared.
The other links I shared were my Useful FCE websites page, flo-joe, Cambridge Write and Improve and my student’s guide to Quizlet, including the link to my B2/FCE Quizlet group. While the last link may not seem so connected to writing, a) it’s amazing, and b) it’s great for practising spelling as well as expanding the range of vocabulary students know.
I’d like to thank David Petrie and Pavla Milerski for activities which they allowed me to incorporate into the presentation, and Anna Ermolenko and Tim Julian for other ideas which didn’t make it in in the end. If you’d like more ideas, you can watch David’s webinar on writing skills for exam practice. Being connected to a network of such helpful teachers is so useful. Thank you!
Many of the activities should be self-explanatory, but if not, you can watch the recording to find out how to run the activity. If you’re a BELTA member, you can watch recordings of webinars from the past six months. Anyone can watch older webinars from the series. My recording is here:
I’d be interested to hear how you use the activities in your own classrooms, and what adaptations you needed to make to fit your context.
At IATEFL Harrogate I watched a presentation which went a long way towards answering a question I posed on this blog a while back: How can we help Arabic learners with their huge problems with spelling in English? It was given by Emina Tuzovic, and she kindly agreed to write a guest post sharing her tips for my blog. What with one thing and another, it’s been a while in coming (she finished it for me 6 months ago!) but I hope it was worth the wait!
Emina
A couple of tips on how to improve spelling in Arabic learners
Any TEFL teacher who has experience teaching Arabic learners is acquainted with the difficulties they face when it comes to spelling. I would like to share some spelling tips which helped my Arabic students improve this skill.
First of all, I would pre-teach what vowels, consonants and syllables are as well as highlight the difference between sounds and letters. This is important for Arabic learners as when they learn English, they need to deal with the following:
a new script;
numerous spelling patterns;
a complex and very often unpredictable system of mapping sounds onto letters (Arabic has a regular 1-1 sound-letter conversion);
a different reading direction (Arabic is written from right to left).
Therefore using the appropriate ‘labels’ will make your explanations much clearer. Also don’t forget that a phonemic chart looks like another script for this group of learners. Therefore I tend to avoid it if I can, especially transcriptions of whole words. Instead of writing a phonemic on the board, I prefer writing another, high-frequency word with the same pronunciation of a sound in question, e.g. moon; rude (/u:/).
Vowels
As you have probably noticed it is the spelling of vowels that creates most difficulties for Arabic students. One of the most effective tasks for this group is simply gapping the vowels: e.g. _xc_pt (except) vs _cc_pt (accept).
‘Problematic vowels’ are down to L1 interference. Firstly, in Arabic short vowels are in most cases not written down but only indicated by diacritics. For that reason, they are frequently glossed over by the students when they read in English (which consequently results in the poor spelling of vowels). Secondly, Arabic only has three long and three short vowels in comparison to English (5 vowel letters and 20 sounds!).
Therefore when I board new vocabulary (especially multi-syllable words), I mark vowels with a colour pen and break the words down into syllables which I subsequently drill in isolation. This is very important as many Arabic students will otherwise either guess the vowel or simply omit it when trying to read a new word.
Breaking down words into CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) patterns is also important as it helps students visually memorise lexical items. I try to encourage my students to practise words by writing them down, not typing them up on the computer. This will help them consolidate the visual form of the words which is absolutely vital if you want to be a good speller! (e.g. they need to see how differently words such as play and blue look like). I also try to get the students not to only copy the word but use the Look, remember, cover, write, check method. I get them to look at a word for about 20 seconds and try to memorise it before covering and then trying to recall it. In this way you know the students have used their processing skills to retain the item instead of just copying it.
Noticing patterns
As teachers, when we teach spelling, we tend to focus too much on spelling and pronunciation irregularities (e.g. plough, cough, etc.) rather than teaching spelling patterns. If you need to check these and the rules associated with them, I suggest using the guide on the Oxford Dictionaries website. In relation to this, I try to get my students to notice the most common letter strings (e.g. sh, ch, spr, ure, etc.) and encourage ‘active reading’ where they look for letter strings and spelling patterns. When they record vocabulary, encourage the use of spelling logs as a separate section of students’ vocabulary books (based on a spelling pattern, e.g. ie vs ei, rather than just randomly recorded vocabulary).
When revising new lexis, I sometimes use magnetic letter strings (rather than only letters) which I simply ordered off Amazon! Here is the link if you’d like to buy your own magnetic letters [affiliate link, so Sandy gets a few pennies if you order here!]
To get a closer insight into spelling games based on spelling patters, I would recommend Shemesh & Waller’s Teaching English Spelling [affiliate link].
I have noticed that my Arabic learners are well aware of their poor spelling. In order to build up their confidence, they need to be shown that they have made progress.
I usually set up a routine: for the first or last 5 minutes of the class we revise vocabulary from the previous day (e.g. spelling bee) or I might give them a spelling test either every day or every other day. In this way they will soon get the sense of achievement.
I also try to praise my students for using a correct pattern (e.g. *reech, *shef, etc.) even though the word might not be spelled correctly.
Morphology
When it comes to spelling, morphology plays a very important role, too. Highlight the root, suffixes and prefixes of a word and encourage students to create word families. Based on their L1, Arabic learners will be familiar/will be able to relate to this concept/aspect of learning the new vocabulary.
Avoid the following…
One of the common spelling activities you find in various coursebook is unjumbling letters (e.g. *fnsniuoco-confusion). However I would not advise these exercises for Arabic learners. Individual letters shuffled around might only confuse them as these exercises do not contribute to consolidating the visual form of a word.
Another exercise which particularly lower-level Arabic learners might not find useful is crosswords for the same reason as listed above (words are often presented vertically and in divided block form).
Spelling games on the computer
Students can check the following useful websites if they want to practise spelling in their own time:
If students enjoy playing spelling bees, spellbee.org is an option. However, you need to register.
In terms of spelling software (which has to be downloaded on your computer), there is a lot to choose from. However, the vast majority is designed for native English speaking children and is therefore not the best tool for ESL learners. After having done some research into those, I’d recommend ‘Speak n Spell’. Although there are some issues with the audio, it’s still worth having a look.
THRASS chart (phonics chart): Although this chart is not free (from £2), it’s a very useful tool to memorise phonics and consequently spelling patterns.
To my knowledge not much has been published to solely cater to Arabic learners’ difficulties in spelling. In the classroom I frequently use Harrison, R. (1990; 1992) Keep Writing 1 and Keep Writing 2, published by Longman [affiliate links]. These books are specifically aimed at helping Arabic learners with their writing. At the end of each chapter you can find spelling exercises.
By incorporating the things mentioned above in my lessons, my Arabic students managed to considerably improve their spelling in a fairly short period of time. I hope you find these tips useful too! You can write to me on emina.tuzovic@londonschool.com.
References
Harrison, R. (1990; 1992). Keep Writing 1 and 2. Longman.
Shemesh & Waller (2000). Teaching English Spelling. CUP.
Two teaching organisations, TESL Toronto and BELTA (Belgium) joined together for a free online conference on the topics of reading and writing on 8th-9th August 2014.
I was very happy to present on an area I’ve been experimenting with for a while, both as a teacher and a Russian learner, that of writing journals.
Here are my slides. Please let me know if any of the links don’t work.
All of the slides and recordings from the whole conference are available via the conference programme.
This week we’re running a series of 90-minute teacher training seminars at IH Sevastopol. The first is about online professional development.
This is a topic I’ve covered many times before, but since I change the slides a little each time, I’ve uploaded the latest version below. To hear the most similar recorded version, go to my October 2013 Online CPD post. July 2014’s version is slightly different from slide 12 onwards.
The only other difference, not included in the slides, is that the Teaching English British Council facebook page now has over 2.5 million likes! What a great community to be part of!
This presentation was part of the Tip-Top local conference in Sevastopol which took place on May 10th, 2014. There’s a video from the conference, with photos from my presentation from about 1:00-1:30.
I shared activities to help students prepare for the KET, PET and FCE reading exams. If you have other activities you like using, why not share them in the comments?
There is a recorded version of the presentation here:
Here is the handout with all of the reading texts referred to during the presentation:
They were taken from the official Cambridge handbooks for Key (KET), Preliminary (PET) and First (FCE), which are all free to download from the Cambridge ESOL site.
The listening book mentioned on the third slide is ‘Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action‘ by Larry Vandergrift and Christine Goh.
The signs used for KET and PET were taken from ELTpics, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license. ELTpics is a collection of over 18,000 images (as I write this) shared by teachers and other education professionals from all over the world. They are arranged into categories, for example ‘Signs‘, ‘Rooms and Furniture‘ and ‘Every Picture Tells a Story‘. The photos used in the presentation were taken by Scott Thornbury, Victoria Boobyer, Mike Harrison, @silpico, Adam Simpson, and me!
The extra links I shared at the end of the presentation were:
Hive of Activities: a blog by Emma Gore-Lloyd, where she shares activities she’s found useful in her class, particularly for FCE, CAE and CPE;
my diigo list of exam-related bookmarks, which I constantly add to. You can narrow it down by clicking ‘+’ next to any of the sub-categories on the left. For example, clicking ‘+’ next to ‘FCE’ will show you only my FCE links.
For those who don’t know IH TOC is the regular International House Teacher’s Online Conference. This time round the conference has returned to the successful 10-minute presentation format of IHTOC60, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of IH.
My presentation offered advice on how to raise your professional profile. You can watch the video below:
Feel free to ask me questions about any of the ideas, or to ask for more advice. I’m always happy to help! You can also watch all of the other talks.
This is the recorded version of a presentation which originally took place on Friday 4th April 2014 at IATEFL Harrogate 2014.
The abstract
“I’ve studied English for years, but I can’t understand anyone!” This was a common complaint from my students on arrival in the UK. This workshop aims to introduce you to practical activities and materials you can use to help students transition from understanding scripted listening materials to feeling comfortable with real-world English.
The summary
Listening is the skill we use most in a second language. We have to understand speakers in many different contexts, of different ages, genders, levels of education, and with a range of accents, both native and non-native. However, this is rarely reflected in the classroom, where listening tends to be focussed on other students in class or on scripted coursebook recordings in ‘standard’ forms of English, mostly spoken by young to middle-aged adults (or overly excited children in the case of young learner materials!). Teachers also tend to focus on testing comprehension, rather than on teaching better listening skills. This results in students lacking confidence in their listening abilities and/or lacking knowledge of how to approach listening in the real world.
The aim of this workshop is to introduce and try out a range of activities and materials which you can use in your classroom to teach listening, rather than testing it. Some of the principles discussed will be based on John Field’s Listening in the Language Classroom (Cambridge 2008), as well as my own experience in the classroom and as a second language learner. The workshop will also look at how you can make the listening you use in the classroom reflect the real world as much as possible. Finally, participants will be given the chance to share activities and materials which have worked for them, as well as discussing how to apply the activities from the workshop to their own contexts.
The presentation
You can watch the full presentation in this video:
(These are affiliate links, so if you buy them or anything else after clicking on these links I will get a little money. Thank you!)
I also recommend showing your students how to make the most of podcasts. I wrote a post on my Independent English blog which you can use as an introduction or to find links to some podcasts I recommend.
The audio tracks are not included in the presentation, so I’ve uploaded them to audioboo so you can listen to them and/or use them in class. No copyright infringement is intended.
Here is the collection of Christmas activities which I presented at the International House Sevastopol seminar on Saturday December 21st 2013.
Some of the activities are available on the web, some I have created, and some are versions of time-honoured none-Christmas EFL activities adapted to the festive season. If there’s no link, click on the picture within the presentation and it should take you to the activity. Hopefully the slides are self-explanatory, but if not, feel free to leave me a comment.
…as the Twitter site has improved a lot, although it can still be difficult to follow chats on it, and I now find that I get a lot out of facebook and webinars in terms of professional development.
You can still find my complete introduction to using Twitter for Professional Development, although the information about Google Reader is now outdated as it no longer exists. I have started using feed.ly instead.
Here is a complete recorded version of the presentation:
If you do decide to start using online professional development, I’d be interested to hear from you. I am also happy to answer any questions about it which I can.
I’ve just finished my presentation at the International House Teachers’ Online Conference to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the IH organisation. All of the presentations are 10 minutes long, and there are 60 presentations in total. All of the videos are (will be) available on the blog. There’s something for everyone!
For my presentation I had the difficult job of choosing 10 blogs to share with the world. I decided to choose blogs which I go back to again and again and/or which lead readers to other great bloggers. Sorry if I had to miss you out! Here is the presentation, handout and the video. Ten blogs in ten minutes (IH TOC 60)
My presentation for IATEFL Liverpool 2013 is an introduction to the Personal Study Programme (PSP) which we run at IH Newcastle. It was part of the Learner Autonomy SIG day.
If you couldn’t be there, or you want to relive it, here is a recorded version:
Feel free to leave me a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.
Note: thank you to Amy Brown for helping me to put the presentation together.
Update:
A few bloggers have very kindly responded to my presentation. I will post the links here if you are interested. Please let me know if I have missed any:
Like Sandy, I was very lucky to be awarded with the IATEFL – International House John Haycraft Classroom Exploration Scholarship, which gave me the opportunity to disseminate a successful story, and meet and share experiences and ideas with other practitioners.
My research was on learner autonomy and exploratory practice which is a kind of practitioner/ teacher research which involves learners in researching their own learning. This research was motivated by an interest in engaging learners in the classroom. I realised that by giving them more control over their learning process they became more involved and interested in learning. Also, suggesting working with their own interests and issues led to a deeper engagement with their learning experience.
I conducted this research in two different contexts: a summer school with teenagers and a pre-sessional course with postgraduate students at university.
If anyone is interested in watching my presentation, it is now available in the Teacher-Research section of the IATEFL Research SIG website at http://resig.weebly.com/teacher-research.html
Ana Inés Salvi
Note: Ana sent me this a few months ago, but unfortunately I managed to save it as a draft, rather than publishing it. Sorry! If you want to read about my IATEFL experience, click here.
This is an introduction to Twitter and three associated tools (Tweetdeck, Google Reader and Diigo) which I did at IH Newcastle on 18th August 2011. I’ve edited it slightly from the original presentation to make it easier to read online. Hopefully it should give you a basic idea of how to use these tools. If you need help, feel free to ask in the comments.
P.S. Here is a screenshot of the tweets people sent me when I asked them to say where they are from and what they’ve learnt from Twitter. Click to make it bigger. It’s a good way to find people to follow to start you off!
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.
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 AnetteIgel. 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.
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.
I created this set of resources for an Intermediate-level group. We used them over a series of five 1-hour lessons, with opportunities during the lessons for students to personalise the phrases. After each lesson I used Edmodo to share the part of the presentation we had done so that students could go over it again at home.
Notes:
Although it looks like it says “an Internet”, when you download the presentation you will find “an Internet connection”
The video links should all take you to youtube.
The ‘structure’ slide is also clickable and takes you to the relevant section of the presentation.
The slides with the phrases look messy here, but when you download it you should see that they work as a series of elicitation prompts. To see the phrases without downloading and clicking through the entire presentation, you can look at the ‘Did you remember?’ slides. These are also the best ones for the students to print as they should contain all of the most useful information. I know that having completely gapped sentences is difficult for students that first time they see the presentation, but in the lesson I skipped past them to the ones with the first letters and told students they would be more useful when they looked at the slides again.
We finished the unit yesterday, and next week they will do their own presentations for assessment. I will record them and give feedback based on language and technique.
Feel free to download the materials and adapt them as you see fit (crediting the source please). They are designed to be a cross between teaching materials and a presentation that could present to your group, demonstrating the techniques.
I would be grateful for any feedback you can give me so that I can improve them for future groups.
Here is a set of worksheets I made last year. I used them over a series of lessons with various groups at Intermediate and Upper Intermediate level. (They may take a while to load on this page)
Some of the activities are taken from other sources, in which case they should always be credited. If you believe I have used something which is uncredited, please let me know.
Feel free to use and adapt the worksheets however you see fit. They can be used in whatever order you see fit. I have tried to arrange them here with the more specific items at the beginning and the general summaries at the end. If you think any of the answers are missing or any of the information is incorrect, please let me know too.
Enjoy!
This is my take on the tools presented by Niall Creaney during the closing plenary at the PARK Conference in Brno on 2nd April 2011. If you have a problem with any of the links, please let me know in the comments. The tools are:
Twitter has opened so many doors since I started using it in October 2010. It’s a micro-blogging site, where you send messages 140-characters long out into the world. For teachers, this means an international community full of support, inspiration and ideas. To find out more about what it’s about and how to get started, take a look at this conference presentation I did about blogs and Twitter for teachers. (Update: I also have a complete introduction to Twitter for Professional Development)
It seems scary at first, but if you keep going back and try to spend an hour or so playing with it at some point, you’ll get the hang of it. For the first couple of months I lurked, which is completed normal (find out more by taking a look at the post on the Online Professional Development survey I did in January 2011, through Twitter of course!) Now I spend a few minutes every day having a quick look at the links, and I always find something to make it worth it: useful, thought-provoking and/or fun.
As well as using it for professional development, many teachers use it with their students. I haven’t tried it myself, but here are some links to people who have:
Twitter links (for teachers and students) (via @pysproblem81)
2. Blogs
I started this blog in October 2010, but nothing much happened on it until I started posting regularly in January 2011. Partly through promoting my blog on Twitter and partly through presenting at conferences and promoting it, my stats look like this:
Apart from giving you a great positive feeling every time you see your stats :), writing a blog is an excellent way to reflect on your teaching. You can use it to share ideas, connect with other teachers, get inspiration and so much more! As with Twitter above, you can find out more about what teachers use it for on my Online Professional Development Survey post, and see how to get started with it in the Whole New World of ELT one.
As well as writing your own blog, there are hundreds of other teachers in the blogosphere sharing their ideas. To get you started, take a look at the sites in my blogroll (on the right of this page).
The best way to keep track of the blogs you read is to use a reader, such as Google Reader. Once you’ve signed up (free), you add the links to the blogs you want to follow and the reader does the rest. This is what my page looks like:
This is the first page I see when I go onto the site. In the centre are all the posts that have been added to blogs since I last went on the site. As I read them they automatically disappear from the main page, but I can access them again by clicking on the name of the blog in the bottom left-hand corner. Of course, you can also go back to the original blog address too!
So now you’ve had a look at Twitter and blogs and you’ve found loads of great new ideas. How do you keep track of them? The answer is Social Bookmarking. Rather than keeping your links on your computer, where you could easily lose them if anything went wrong, you can use a site like Delicious or Diigo. You can access your bookmarks from any computer, without having to worry about being on the same machine. You can also tag them with as many words as you like, making them easier for you to find again.
As you can see, each link is tagged with various key words which I have chosen myself. To find a page again, I have various options:
I can search for any word I remember from the title / post using a box in the top right (not shown);
I can search for a specific tag by typing it in the box at the top (where it says ‘filter by tags’)
I can click on a tag underneath a link
I can click on a tag in the menu on the left
This is the little bar which appears in my browser (Safari) whenever I want to add a site to my bookmarks:
You simply click ‘Bookmark’ when on the page you want to share, change any of the options you choose, and hey, presto! it’s added to your bookmarks. You can also upload the bookmarks from your computer straight onto the social bookmarking site to keep them all together.
As for the ‘social’ part of social bookmarking, you can subscribe to other people’s links and be updated whenever they add to them. My Diigo page is here if you’re interested.
This is the first of the tools which is mainly for students to use. The slogan is ‘Poster Yourself’, and it does what it says on the tin. Here are some examples of work created by 14-year-old boys in the UK: they created glogs about Spanish-speaking celebrities as part of their Spanish studies at secondary school. It is an easy tool for students to use, and the results look impressive quickly. You can include pictures, videos and text, then embed your glog in other sites, such as on a class blog or a school webpage. This one was embedded into a wiki (via @tperran). Students could use it as an alternative to traditional paper-based homework, then email you the link. There is even an option to create a Glogster for Education account, where you can create accounts for your students for free.
Prezi is a web-based alternative to Powerpoint, used to create striking presentations which you can either present online or download to your computer. If you’ve seen my Whole New World of ELT presentation, then you’ve already seen your first prezi. As with Twitter, it looks a little scary at first glance, but once you’ve had a look at some other examples of presentations, followed the tutorial you are given when you first log in to Prezi and played around a little, you’ll soon get the hang of it. One tip: zoom out as far as you can before you start making your presentation if you intend to have a lot of ‘layers’ – the default setting is slightly zoomed in.
You can use it in the classroom too. Here is an example of a presentation made with American primary school students (via @surrealyno). And here are more ideas:
Dropbox is a free online file-sharing site. First download their desktop application, then drag the file you want to share into the folder on your computer. Dropbox will automatically ‘sync’, making your online Dropbox look exactly like the Dropbox folder on your computer and vice-versa (if somebody updates the file online, it will update in your Dropbox too). You can then invite people to see your files and folders. Here is a video tutorial to show you how it works. This is my homepage:
The free account comes with 2GB of space, with an extra 0.25GB added for every person you refer to the site. I have now referred 3 people so I have 2.75GB.
It’s a great way for students to submit work to you as they don’t have to worry about space limits. It’s a lot easier than traditional file-sharing sites in my opinion. I haven’t used it with my students as yet, but it’s been useful for sharing materials with colleagues en masse.
One teacher (lucky enough to have computers for every student!) used Dropbox to synchronise student presentations. To see an excellent summary of everything you ever needed to know about Dropbox, including links to a few lesson plans (mostly primary and secondary), click here.
This is the first of these tools which I’ve not used myself, so I’ll let them explain themselves to you:
It seems it’s an easy way to take notes on anything and in any way you could possibly imagine: use it to type notes, take screenshots, store photos and much-more – it’s like an online, searchable filing cabinet. It can be accessed from computers and mobile devices. Here is their guide to find out how to get started. I reckon the best thing to do is just go and play, then come back here and let others know what you’ve been doing with it… (Thanks in advance!)
This is a customisable flashcard site purposely designed for language learners to use for self-study. It is incredibly easy to use, and you don’t even need to create an account if you already have a facebook one. Once you’ve signed in, there are three big blue buttons to greet you:
You can search for flashcards that have already been created or make your own quickly and easily. Quizlet’s own guide is here. Once you’ve created the set, your students can then look at the flashcards and play two fun games to help them practise the words. This set about vegetables (created by @NikkiFortova) is a good example that you can play with. You can also create groups so that all of your students can see the flashcards you create for them. It’s principally designed for self-study, and the makers recommend allowing students to choose when / if they want to use it.
Wallwisher is one of a variety of online bulletin boards. Others include Primary Wall and Lino-It. All of these tools allow you to post notes, pictures, videos and links on a ‘wall’ which looks similar to a real-world noticeboard. This is the demo screenshot they have on their homepage:
Here is a wall I created for students to post suggestions on how to practise English outside class (unfortunately students didn’t get into it in this class, but I know others who have!) Apart from the example just mentioned, I’ve only added to walls other people have made to send birthday wishes, but there are many other uses for it!
This is the only other tool on the list which I have not used myself. TitanPad is designed for online collaboration when creating documents. This is the example they show on their homepage:
As you can see, each collaborator has their own colour, clearly marking who has edited what in the file. You can save versions of the file and export it in various formats. Up to 8 people are allowed to collaborate on each document. The main attraction is that no sign-up is required – you can create a pad directly from the homepage. Unfortunately, it also has some disadvantages, as the pad is public to anyone who has the url. This post explains how it can be useful.
11b. Google Docs (update: now called Google Drive, but still does the same thing!)
If you’ve ever used Microsoft packages, you can use Google Docs without any more effort than simply logging in. You can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online, as well as professional-looking forms. It looks similar to other offline software, making it very quick to learn if you are already familiar with document etc. software. Here is Google’s tour of their docs function.
As with TitanPad, you can view changes made by other collaborators and the documents are updated in real-time. You can also find out who else is viewing the document at the same time as you. You need to sign in, but don’t have to have a Google account to do this.
Google Docs have myriad uses in the classroom. My students used a document to give me definitions of words and a form to answer reading comprehension questions of an online article during a webquest. Here are some suggestions from other teachers:
Skype is a piece of software which you can download to your computer, then use to make phonecalls to people anywhere in the world. Watch the visual explanation to find out more (they explain it better than I can!):
In March 2011, Skype created an Education section of their website. This enables teachers to set up projects with other schools around the world, as well as finding inspiration for Skype-related projects. Here are 50 suggestions for using Skype, based on real projects which teachers have done. It’s a great way to bring the real world into your classroom.
13. Word clouds
A word cloud of this blogpost so far made using Wordle…
…and the same text entered into Tagxedo
As you can see, word clouds look visually stunning, and encourage students to read and think about what is there. The online software processes the text, making each word appear once in the cloud sized according to how often it appeared in the original text (i.e. the more a word appears in the original text, the bigger it is in the cloud) I won’t go into too much detail here, as I have already blogged and created presentations about word clouds. The posts can be found here, and include links to tutorials for both Wordle and Tagxedo, as well as many ideas on how to use them:
So, that’s it: thirteen (plus one!) tools presented at the PARK Conference, explained in my own words. If you have any more suggestions on how to use the tools, or think I need to make any corrections, feel free to comment on the post. I look forward to hearing what you think!
Enjoy!
25th March 2011: I’ve just discovered that the original plenary session on which I based my list of tools was taken from this page: http://issuu.com/mzimmer557/docs/tools_for_the_21st_century_teacher. You will find more tools and more information there.
by Tessa Woodward (published by Heibling Languages – affiliate link)
[affiliate link, so Sandy gets a few pennies if you order here!]
[affiliate link].
by Johanna Stirling]
and 
, published by Longman [affiliate links]. These books are specifically aimed at helping Arabic learners with their writing. At the end of each chapter you can find spelling exercises.
‘ by Larry Vandergrift and Christine Goh.
by Chris Flint and Jamie Flockhart
by John Field
Sandy Millin 