At #IHTOC9 on Friday 19th May 2017, I gave a thirty minute presentation called ‘The Key to EFL – Exploit the c**ts!’. The video of the talk and the talk slides are both available on the conference blog:
as well as right here:
Enjoy!
And it’d be great to hear what you think of the talk and how you exploit the c**ts in your context!
Saturday May 1th 2014 saw me presenting a spanking new talk at MAC2014 – the annual Macmillan conference in Montevideo, hosted by the Anglo institute. It’s the third time I’ve talked at the Macmillan Montevideo conference and it was great to catch up with old friends and make some new ones.
#2014mac
The talk has been a long time in the making since it was inspired by Jeremy Harmer’s talk at the 2010 International House DoS Conference – ‘Speak the speech, I pray thee’, which discussed improving students’ fluency by helping them to think and prepare inside their heads first. It was an inspiring talk, but a little short on practical ways to get the students actually doing this in the classroom. So I set about trying to motivate and inspire my students to think much more in the class, alongside their development of the other four skills. It’s taken me a few years to put what I’ve done into a talk, since it’s very much a case of small steps and slowly, slowly catchy thinking student. As the Macmillan conference was focused on developing Life Skills, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to make myself write the talk and bring together my ideas on the topic.
#2014MAC Life Skills tree
The results are here, in the form of the slides for the talk in PDF:
and a video of them too:
as well as the video I used at the end as a way of having the students reflect on the ideas we discussed during the talk and think about how they could create more thinking space, structure and sensitivity into a lesson using this video. Unfortunately during the talk the sound was dodgy, so the great lyrics couldn’t be heard beyond the front row (and apologies to the audience that I had to resort to singing some of them myself!
I also hope to put a lesson together myself using this text as a launching ad, so look out for that here too!
Next up is the example text-based guided discovery lesson I used. You can read more about Guided Discovery and this lesson here if you’re interested.
And then here are some lesson ideas to use at the beginning of your efforts to inspire your students to think in English:
A reading based on a text about why to try and think in English when learning the language, with a worksheet that has built in space and structure for thinking.
Encourage your students to do some thinking for homework and then discuss what they’ve done in class – the flipped classroom turns your students flipping (if they talk to themselves 🙂 ).
Anecdote feedback sheet An example of how the students can reflect on each others’ work and tech each other a little more about anecdoting.
In full flow at #2014MAC
Wasn’t the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games brilliant? Danny Boyle and those thousands of volunteers did a fabulous job keeping us entertained for over three hours on Friday night, revelling in the best of British music, history and culture.
Why not share the brilliance with your students through this reading lesson, based on the BBC review of the event.
Download:
Olympics Opening Ceremony Reading Students
Olympics Opening Ceremony Reading Teachers
and
Olympics Opening Ceremony Reading Lesson Plan
and your off!
Hope your students and you enjoy it. Let us know what you think.
P.S. I originally posted this on ih-buenosairesblog.com
This week sees the beginning of the Olympic Games in London. Why not get your students into the mood by doing some Olympics related activities in the classroom? The idea of this blog is to provide a space for us to share ideas and resources we create around IHWO so that we can motivate and inspire our students to learn English as well as enjoy the way London hosts the Olympic Games.
Please do add your ideas and resources to the platform both as files and here as comments. I’ve been brainstorming a few ideas to get you underway. Hope you like them:
Olympic Activities
Present an Olympic sport:
Rules
Students explain to classmates how one of the Olympic sports / disciplines works. Great for developing vocabulary and research and speaking skills. When giving their presentations, the classmates can be making notes, filling in a chart (to later compare sports) or thinking of follow up questions to ask.
Olympic history
Students present the Olympic history of a sport or discipline. How long has it featured in the games for? When was it first included? Who were its most famous winners? What Olympic stories are most connected to this sport. Listeners can fill in a chart or ask questions or decide on the most Olympic sport / best presentation.
Olympic timetable
Students present the where and when and how to watch this Olympic sport, aiming to make it as attractive an event to the other students as possible. Listeners can choose one event to watch, fill in an info chart or decide which presentation was most successful.
Present the athlete
Biography
Students choose a favorite athlete to present to the class, giving a summary of their careers to date and previewing their possible participation in the games to come. Listeners can rank athletes in order of interest of decide on the best presentations. or ask follow up questions on each athlete.
Career in pictures
SS can post a blog about an athlete, describing their career highlights and accompanying it with pictures from the web. Students then comment on each others’ posts, asking follow up questions about their careers or making simple comments on the pictures posted.
Daily Olympic journal
Students choose an athlete to follow throughout the games and each day / class/ week write a journal entry as if they were that athlete.
Present the country
Top three athletes
Students research a country’s Olympic team and choose three athletes to focus on. These can be presented as an article, a blog post, a picture presentation or a short speech.
Top three teams
As above, but focusing on teams rather than individuals (e.g. the women’s football team, the cycling team, the yachting team).
Gold medal possibilities
Students write a summary of a country’s best medal prospects. The class can keep a log of each student’s recommendations as the games progress – did they win the medals predicted?
Country background / Country history
Students choose a country to write or speak about and can summarize their background or history, either sporting or entire, perhaps focusing more on lesser known or smaller countries.
The host country
There are myriad articles available on the internet about all of the topics below and many more.
Students can each choose an article to read from the internet on the given theme and then in class they discuss the information in their articles, comparing and contrasting their research or giving each other tasks to do based on their texts (e.g. use of Englsi closes or reading comprehension tasks).
Games preparation
The bidding process
The Olympic village
Security arrangements
The Olympic torch
The Opening Ceremony
The Olympics
History
Each group can present a summary of a previous Olympic games
Ideals
Students discuss what the Olympics mean to them and debate their value to society in the modern world.
Future
How will the Olympic movement continue beyond 2012?
Students could prepare a pitch for their countries/cities to host the Olympic games.
I’m sure there are millions of other activities that can be done using the Olympics theme and making the most of all the written and spoken materials that there is out there on the web. but I hope some of these ideas help you to incorporate the excitement of the games into your lessons and help your students learn some English in a fun way.
Happy Olympics everyone!
Neil
Last Wednesday evening I was standing in for my Director, who has a Post-Proficiency literature class once a week here at IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training.
He asked me to do so last Thursday and low and behold on Friday morning I was moderating Ratna Ragunathan from IH Malaysia’s Live Online Workshop ‘Weaving the magic of literature circles’ and I quickly found my standby lesson staring me in the face.
The idea of literature circles is that each learner takes a different angle towards the book / story they are reading and leads a discussion of that angle when the circle meets in class.
The different roles:
The story we read:
The Story of An Hour – Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Since I didn’t know the learners it was difficult for me to assign them roles I thought they would get into, so I asked who would like to be the Illustrators and then gave out the other roles at random. In the end there were eight students, so I ended up giving out the first four roles to pairs, who then helped each other prepare the role in relation to the story and then the class split up into two circles to discuss the story.
To be honest I was expecting more discussion to come out of the roles, I felt students at this level (post-proficiency) should have been able to mine the text for more ideas and have more interesting responses to it. Perhaps a combination of things played against my expectations for the activity being fulfilled:
Actually, by the time they had got through the four roles about an hour of the lesson had passed, so the circles had taken a good 30minutes, which is actually an excellent amount of continuous speaking in a normal kind of class – it just didn’t seem that fluent and engaging as they were doing it.
Then I gave out the last two roles and each circle discussed one role in preparation fro swapping over and, in pairs, leading the discussion of their new role with a new pair of partners. This lead to more good conversation, and as before I had trouble finding anything to give them constructive feedback on language-wise, so I didn’t.
And then finally I gave each of them a part of Kate Chopin’s biography and they had to discuss the story in light of her life, thus sharing with each other more details about the author and the time she lived in. It would have been good to have more time for this stage of the lesson, since it ended up being the most interesting discussion for them.
So, all in all, a successful first attempt at using literature classes and I will definitely go back and use them again, although perhaps with more concrete texts, particularly at lower levels.
The other week I was reading Adam Beale’s fab blog ‘Five against one‘ rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing and yet again I found myself chastising myself for not going to #eltchat anymore (it’s actually the fault of doing CELTA at the times that the chat is held rather than of my own choosing), since Adam had blogged a summary of the latest chat, that just happened to be on one of my pet topics and favourite ways of teaching – guided discovery.
And so I was rather surprised with Adam’s concluding paragraph and this post is my own humble attempt at helping Adam address the balance. Here’s what he had to say:
ELTchat may not have answered my question or provided me with the plethora of examples I was hoping for, but it certainly highlighted the need for some further hands on research and investigation. Now, I may be looking in the wrong places or typing the wrong words into my search engine. So please tell me if you know of any great resources. I know that there must be research papers out there, but for teachers what we really need is examples and people writing or talking about their experiences with it. So if you do use Guided Discovery and have some ideas get them out there, blog them or put it out on twitter.
And so my response is to share my latest foray into Guided Discovery world on Wednesday morning. I was teaching the CELTA TP students and being watched by my CELTA candidates – having to put my money where my mouth was since we’d had a session on conditionals the afternoon before where I had espoused Guided Discovery worksheets – time to show them the power of student-centred text-based step-by-step language clarification (i.e. Guided Discovery).
K had taken the students above-standardly through the text (Global Intermediate Page 95), so I simply started with the worksheet, which you can download here:
Unreal Past Conditions Guided Discovery Worksheet
The students anwered the questions about meaning alone, checked them with a partner and then we fed back on them. The main sticking point was the question ‘Is this staement real or unreal’, since they mostly saw it as real. I think I need to rephrase this question to something like ‘Is the speaker describing a situation in the real world or imagining an unreal situation in their head?’, although that seems too wordy to me.
A little bit of elicitation and refining the context by asking this question helped me convince them the statement was unreal. And this elicitation of the fact that we’re talking about the past and we¡re talking about an unreal situation made eliciting the name of the structure to the top of the handout easy peasy – Unreal Past Conditions.
Then we drilled the statement aplenty. First lots of choral drilling of each clause, backchaining the phrases ‘If he hadn’t noticed’ and ‘this wouldn’t have been’, and they had quite a bit of trouble at first reproducing /w@d@n@bIn/ (the @ are supposed to be schwas but I can’t get them to come out) but they got there after lots of laughs and backchains:
/bIn/
/n@bIn/
/d@n@bIn/
/w@d@n@bIn/
Then they completed the pronunciation section by themselves, in pairs and we fed back to the whiteboard.
Unreal past conditions pronunciation
Unreal Past Result Pronunciation
I did a bit more drilling to consolidate it with the written phonemes, which seemed to help them a bit and then they headed on to completing the form section by themselves which they found pretty straightforward.
Unreal Past Condition Form
Unreal Past Result Form
What really pleased me is they were able to come up with different possible modals for the result clause, they weren’t limited by the ‘third conditional’ misnomer to would, they quickly proferred could and might and may and must and should as well, although lots of credit must also go to K here who had brought out this point when guided discovering Unreal Present conditions on Monday.
So they had been guided and they had discovered. Time to practice. Turn over the worksheet and consider the other inventions mentioned in the global text and discovered by accident. What would have happened if their accidents hadn’t happened. Off the students went to try and complete their own conditional sentences. It was a very challenging exercise since they had to go back to the text to remind themselves of the accidents that had led to the discoveries. But they were able to have a good go at it, although there were plenty of forms errors in their work. Have was being missed out regularly, one or two weren’t using past participles and one was using the past simple and so talking about the present. But with a few points back at my boardwork and the odd return to my CCQs – are we in the past? – they were able to self correct or at least peer correct when they got together to confirm answers. By the time they got to the group feedback they had the correct structures between them and I elicited them to the board (after some more focused drilling) to consolidate the structure for these very visual learners.
Unreal Past Conditions Controlled Practice
Unreal Past Results Controlled Practice
Unfortunately the 40minute lesson was drawing to a close, so there was just time for a quick discussion of the inventions in Practice 2 and how things would have changed if they hadn’t been invented. Not surprisingly, some of them had unreal present results rather than past ones, but this was a good thing as they were able to form them correctly on the back of K’s Monday lesson and they were all happy to accept these as correct answers. No time for discussing the difference or for personalisation, but the practice activities will live to fight another day.
If I’d had more time, I’d’ve done more personalisation.
We’d’ve discussed real and unreal results of unreal past conditions, if the lesson had been longer.
They’d’ve practised more freely and probably have made even more mistakes if we’d gone any further.
But they wouldn’t have felt such a sense of achievement if they hadn’t discovered the rules for themselves.
There was no accident about their discoveries.
Hope that helps Adam and any other Guided Discovery newbies out there. Let us know how you get on if you try using the worksheet yourself or adapting it to another piece of language. Go discover!
B2 Lesson – Oasis Album Review
This is a lesson I taught on an FCE prep course last week, which supplements (replaces) the review writing in Unit One of Premium.
First the students do an FCE speaking task comparing and contrasting the album covers of Abbey Road and What’s The Story?
Then they read the text and summarise each paragraph, followed by a focus on the vocab used to describe the band, the album and the music / individual songs.
It leads nicely into the learners bringing in their own reviews to share with each other and then using all of this input, writing their own reviews of one of their fave CDs.
Enjoy!
Realising Reading - Macmillan Montevideo 2012
Realising Reading – Handout from Macmillan Montevideo 2012
Here are the slides from my talk ‘Realising Reading’ which I gave for the first time at the Macmillan Conference in Montevideo on February 29th 2012. The talk is about how we can keep reading real for our students at the same time as getting them to realise what they’re reading, thinking about it critically and noticing the language in the texts.
Look forward to hearing what you think about it. Enjoy!
No Man’s Land – Slides from Montevideo 29/2/12
On Wednesday 29/2/12 I had another go at No Man’s Land at the Macmillan Montevideo Conference 2011 held at the Anglo. It was interesting to see how the talk changed as a result of having a different dialogue with a different audience – Montevideo was much less impressed with Dogme than Buenos Aires was and quite a few members of the audience were brave enough to call themselves Textbook Traditionalists at the beginning of the talk, although we all ended up as Dog-maurauders at the end. The talk was also shorter, so I focused more on the ten key principles and had also summarised 10 key Dogme-rauder principles which the audience were happy to accept and take away to consider. Let us know how you get on!
Many thanks to Nicolas from Macmillan for organising the day, my impressive fellow speakers Aldo Rodriguez, Phil Hanham and Gustavo Gonzalez and, of course, the anglo for hosting the event – although it was the great audience that made the day such a success.
Here are the slides from the talk at Pro-T 2012 on Thursday 16th February 2012.
Many thanks to everyone who came to the talk on Thursday and to @lcamio and the Pro-T team for inviting me and organising everything so smoothly. I really enjoyed the talk and discovering much more about the principles of Dogme ELT through the process of researching, planning and writing the talk and sharing it with you on Thursday. It was exciting (and empowering) to put the decision about whether or not to ‘convert’ myself into a Dogme-gician in your hands, and participating in that Dialogic Co-construction of knowledge to see what emerged was an enlightening process. I hope the talk has helped some of you to look at your classrooms from a slightly different angle and gives you some ideas about how to ensure our students are at the centre of everything we do.
If you feel you are a Dogme-gician, it would be great to hear how you have managed to incorporate your Dogme teaching style into the confines of the educational context where you work.
Dogme-gician's believe in all the magic of Dogme.
If you’re a Dogme-rauder, it would be great to hear which principles of Dogme you have particularly pillaged and which ’emergent’ tasks and activities you have used successfully or are going to try out.
Dogme-rauders have a soft spot for the 10 key Dogme principles, but prefer to loot and pillage the best of all methods
And if you’re a Textbook Traditionalist, then it would be great to hear the reasons why.
Textbook traditionalists start their planning from the next page of the course book and feed their students grammar mcnuggets
The ones that came up during the talk were pressure from above (Principals getting in the way of principles?) and the necessity to prepare students for exams.
The first problem is going to take time and persistence in order to convince principals, parents and even ministries of education, that the syllabus can be covered and students can learn English and prepare themselves for exams without having to faithfully follow a course book step by step.
And exam classes can easily prepare through a less materials dominated approach. Students choose the texts they want to work with (be they authentic, course book, test book or whatever). Students can construct test activities for each other from these texts, empowering them to discover much more about the tests and the strategies needed to complete them successfully. Students can decide which tasks to work on when, depending on mood, trending current affairs topics, previous classes, perceived weaknesses. Students can design the course syllabus, selecting the test materials to use, the balance of test types to focus on, writing proposals at the beginning of the course, progress summaries during the course, reviews of the course as it progresses and reports on their progress towards the end of the course. Obviously, the students will choose to use Practice Test materials during the course (I imagine), but this is all part of being a good Dogme-rauder – letting students choose, allowing the syllabus (as well as the langauge) emerge through a dialogue involving the whole class.
Al, Vicky and Susan enjoying the talk – laughing in the face of Dogme?
I seem to have burst into song – lyrics a-merging!
Looking forward to hearing where you stand and I was relieved to find out I can continue to be a Dogme-rauder at the end of the talk!
A Muse Amuses 
Comment on @ThornburyScott’s blog post ‘I is for Imitation’
26 03 2012A very timely post for me and my IH CAM (Advanced Methodology) course participants who have been discussing the difference between active and passive noticing this week, Scott.
We decided active noticers find useful language in the texts they read and listen to and try it out in other contexts in order to communicate for themselves, thus (eventually) making the language their own. Passive noticers on the other hand just copy and paste without thinking or adapting or creating something new out of the old.
Surely the imitation being discussed here is the same, and the more actively we imitate (i.e. think about the meaning and contextual use of the utterance we’re imitating as well as copying its form) the more successful language learners we become?
The teachers roles are many in this process. Giving helpful and immediate feedback, as Kathy suggests above, is crucial. But training / encouraging our learners to take as active a role as possible in their imitation / noticing, as both Bruno and Luiz have done, is also crucial learner training. Activities such as When would you say this? Who could you say this to? can help immensely in this regard.
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