Riddle Me This!

Click the link to listen to this post. Yes, I want to hear the May 19, 2011 blog post and a bonus riddle!

What’s short in delivery, long in effect, and can add fun to a lesson? You got it: a riddle!

Have you ever used riddles with your students? Because the typical riddle is short, riddles can be used individually or as a collection depending on your time frame and purpose. Do you simply want to engage students at the start of a lesson on a rainy Monday morning, or do you want to contextualize an upcoming language point in a fresh way? No matter how you use riddles, they always prompt thought and often evoke laughter. Here are some suggestions:

• Declare next week “Riddle Week” and start off each class with a riddle. Post one on the board and/ or on your class website. Give the answer to the riddle on the following day. On the last day, have students submit their own riddles. Edit and post for all to enjoy.

 

• Select riddles that target the grammar you’re studying as part of your regular curriculum. For example, many riddles are in the present tense to illustrate general truths: What goes up, but never comes down? Children celebrate it. Adults sometimes fear it. Women try to hide it. [Answer: one’s age] You can choose only one riddle to lead into a grammar presentation, or you may share 3-4 riddles at once. Scramble the answers and ask students to match them to the correct riddles. After the matches are made, highlight the grammar. Common grammar structures used in riddles include comparatives and superlatives, adverb clauses (if, although, when, etc.), and wh- questions.

 

• Have students compose riddles to practice vocabulary. Assign each student a key word and request a riddle using that word. Example: [perceive] It spins and moves in a circle to create a heavenly dance. But its movements happen so slowly that it’s difficult for us to perceive them. What is it? [Answer: Earth] Each riddle can be read aloud and students can call out their guesses before the author reveals the answer.

Online collections of riddles:

Tricky Riddles    

TeachersNeedHelp

Riddles                

AZKidsNet

TESOL – Day 1 Observations (continued)

One can be certain that a visit to the Electronic Village at TESOL will always result in a learning experience. With multiple mini workshops to attend within a single hour, the only challenge is deciding where to start. Yesterday I first sat down at Randall Davis’s computer station. Randall, who teaches at the University of Utah and maintains the well-known site Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab, presented several applications to support listening and speaking practice. In his session “Online Listening: Tricks, Tools, and New Directions” he demonstrated possibilities with free resources, such as Download Helper, Google Voice, and CinchCast. (To download his presentation slides, click here.)

DownloadHelper is a tool for downloading videos from the Internet. Randall demonstrated how a teacher can combine that tool with VLC Media Player as a portable app. This combination allows teachers to make use of VLC Media Player’s wonderful feature of variable speed during playback of a video AND the selected video doesn’t have to be downloaded onto the computer. Instead, one can keep the portable version of VLC Media Player on a flash drive. This solves any problems a computer administrator might have with users downloading content onto school computers.

Randall also explained how his staff at the University of Utah has made use of Google Voice to collect student audio files in mp3 format. While keeping your actual phone number hidden, you can invite students to call your Google Voice number and submit audio recordings. Imagine the possibilities. You can use this application to collect speech samples for assessment, oral answers to questions, and more. The main convenience is that all the files are sent to and kept on your Google Voice account. The process of collecting and organizing such files becomes far less cumbersome, and it’s entirely free save for the minutes students use to place their calls. Randall passed along the tip to collect students’ cell phone numbers to aid in the identification of submitted files.

With the time we had left, Randall shared his knowledge of CinchCast, an application that allows users to make audio posts on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The beauty is that this free app allows one to create audio podcasts on the go. Also, the audio posts have no time limit. Whereas Google is recommended for student submissions to the teacher, CinchCast was presented as a tool for the teacher to send audio messages to the students. Randall suggested using this medium for sending homework assignments and discussion questions. There are other possibilities, of course.

Indeed, mobile apps were a hot topic yesterday. If time allows, I’ll share more ideas from other presenters. From making flashcards to holding group brainstorming sessions with movable sticky notes, the apps being discussed this year at TESOL are showing how much technology is reshaping and facilitating language study and instruction.

TESOL Observations – Day 1 (academic session)

My first day of TESOL actually began on Wednesday because I attended a committee meeting and luncheon. As much as I enjoyed the company and the discussion yesterday, the true excitement always begins when the academic sessions are in full swing.  That is why I mark Thursday as Day 1. An interest in technology guided my choices of sessions today, and I soon understood that one hot topic this year at TESOL is the use of cell phones, and in particular smartphones.

I joined several dozen teachers bright and early at 7:30 a.m. to listen to Weston Bennett speak about cell phones as learning tools in the classrom. This instructor from The American Language Institute at San Diego State University titled his session “If You Can’t Beat’Em, Join’Em”, and he opened with a list of convincing reasons to encourage cell phone use by students. For example, Bennett pointed out that cell phones, especially smartphones, can partly substitute computers, which some classrooms lack. Also, even the basic cell phone can be used as a tool to promote speaking skills. It was argued that practice on the phone as part of students’ language study can increase their confidence when handling real life phone conversations.

Weston shared some creative activities that motivate, energize, and teach. For instance, students can compare and contrast their phones, and with a list of questions to guide them you can simply stimulate discussion or target specific grammar or vocabulary (such as comparatives and superlatives).  You can also put a spin on the classic telephone game and have students call one another to pass along a teacher-created message. Will the final student repeat the message as it was originally delivered?

From Weston’s presentation, I learned about GeoCaching, a type of scavenger hunt that makes use of the GPS device in a smartphone, and Wifitti, which allows students to send real time messages to the teacher’s computer so that they are automatically projected onto the classroom screen. This can be an alternative form for student contributions during brainstorming sessions. Weston also touched on the use of cell video recorders during student presentations for the purpose of self-critique. In the short 20 minutes, the presenter filled our heads with plenty of exciting possibilities.

After this Teaching Tip session, I headed off to the Electronic Village, which I can talk about in my next post!

And the Oscar Goes to… Using Popular Films for Language Lessons

Share a bit of pop culture and allow recently nominated and/ or awarded films to engage your students. Here are just a few ideas.

• Black Swan. Look at the official trailer posted by Foxsearchlight. Have students read the video description and locate all present and past participles used as modifiers. After watching the trailer, pair students up and challenge them to write 2-3 sentences describing the characters and/ or the film using participial adjectives.

 

• Inception. Go to the official website. Students can either watch the trailer or read About the Film for background information. Select a photo from the Gallery. Ask students to describe on paper what they see. Allow five minutes of writing, and require students to write in the present tense.  At the end of five minutes, have students switch papers with a partner. They will proofread and offer suggestions to each other. Final versions can be read aloud to the class. Review common uses of the simple present, present progressive, and present perfect tenses using examples from the students’ writings.

 

• Choose any of the nominations for Best Picture and ask students to work in small groups or pairs to write an introduction. “The next nomination is a film about… .” They may use (but not copy word-for-word) information online that supplies the plot, the cast, etc. Have volunteers read the texts aloud as if they were presenters for that category.

Finding the Right Match: A small collection of teaching ideas for Valentine’s Day

Two days remain before February 14. That’s not much, but it’s certainly enough to plan one more Valentine’s Day activity. In my previous post I suggested using a love song to improve listening skills. In this posting, I’ll offer a short list of ideas from which you can hopefully find one that suits your students’ level and interests.

1. Expressions about love and marriage.  In an older YouTube video of mine, I present “pop the question” and other love-related expressions. After watching the video, students can create a short love story using all three expressions. Put spin on each story by giving each writing team a genre: sci-fi, horror, comedy, mystery, and drama.

2. Word forms. In another YouTube video dedicated to Valentine’s Day I give a review of word forms, such as love, lover, lovely.  After watching the video, students can work solo to create their own fill-in-the-blank quiz for another student. For each sentence, a choice of three word forms must be provided. Use word families from the video.

3.  Similes and metaphors. Recycle this idea from 2009. Have students create greeting cards. The fun activity ends with students either shopping for cards or receiving cards from a secret admirer.

4. Poetry for rhyme and rhythm. Students can write acrostic poems using love-related words. See this 2010 posting on the use of poetry in the classroom.

5. Collocations. Play off the idea of words being attracted to each other to form standard phrases. Teach collocations with simple verbs like make and get.  First, quiz them. In small groups, see how many marriage- or love-related phrases they can create. Examples: get married, get engaged, make plans, make a list. Next, list all their collocations on the board. Use the story idea from activity #1 above: students cann write in pairs or small groups and use the phrases listed on the board. Each writing team can be assigned a genre, from comedy to sci-fi. Additional practice with collocations is nicely provided by Kenneth Beare on ESL.About.com.

Groundhog Day Activities

Groundhog Day is just around the corner. If time allows, I will meet one YouTube viewer’s request and publish an English Mini Lesson about this fun, folksy holiday before or on February 2. In any case, there are already a number of ways you can share this holiday with your own students. Choose what suits their level and your time frame.

1. Try a true-false oral quiz to check their current knowledge about the holiday. You’ll also be testing their listening skills. Suggested questions:

• Groundhog Day is on February 1. (False: Feb. 2)
• Groundhog Day is only celebrated in the United States.  (False: It’s observed in Canada, too.  I’m not sure if any other country has this tradition of relying on groundhogs to predict the coming of spring.) 
• If a groundhog sees its shadow, there will be an early spring. (False. See next question.)
• If a groundhog sees its shadow, there will be 6 more weeks of winter. (True.)
• One of the most famous groundhogs lives in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. (True. Punxsutawney Phil makes his yearly prediction in Punxsutawney, PA.)

2. Try a word game. Write “GROUNDHOG” on the board and challenge students to list as many words possible using the those letters. Common nouns only. Teacher’s cheat sheet: on, no, ground, hog, hug, hound, hood, do, door, dog, dug, God, gourd, go, goo, goon, nod, nor, round, run, rug, urn (Did I miss any?)

3.  Try a movie session. You don’t have to watch the whole Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. Even the trailer offers good language practice. The plot raises a wonderful question for discussion or composition. What would you do if every day you woke up to the same day in the same place with the same people, and nothing you did or said could change this fact?

4. Try an online quiz. A high-intermediate quiz for listening comprehension of a weather forecast has been posted on ESLVideo.com. The report is dated February 2, 2009. Curious about the author of the quiz? It’s yours truly. (Note: This was my first contribution to ESLVideo.com. I can say based on experience that the site has easy-to-use quiz tools. If you choose to make your own quiz and use a YouTube video, I recommend doing what I did. I got written permission from the source, WeatherBug, to embed the video for educational purposes.)

5. Use ESLVideo to create your own quiz. The Groundhog Day trailer on Turner Classic Movies is posted with an easily accessible embed code, which makes it a convenient and safe choice. I created the quiz on the Groundhog Day Forecast. Now it’s your turn. Who will step up to the challenge?

Little Steps, Useful Lessons: Braving the learning curve of a new online resource

It’s Week 1 of the Electronic Village Online 2011, an annual online even sponsored by the CALL-Interest Section of TESOL, Inc. Latecomers are often allowed to join, so I wouldn’t hesitate to request membership in a group if a particular session catches your interest. I signed up for VILLAGE: Language Learning and Community Building in Second Life. I don’t know how active a role I’ll be able to take in the coming weeks, but even if I increase my familiarity and comfort with Second Life just a little, I’ll be happy. I’m already pleased that I managed to teleport to EduNation, the moderators’ headquarters, without getting too lost (I did somehow make a sidetrip into a land called Korea).

While it’s too early for me to jump on the bandwagon and tell all teachers to get an avatar on SL and regularly hold virtual classes with students, I do see some possibilities for everyone, including those who are hesitant to delve into virtual worlds. The reportedly steep learning curve on SL might falsely create the impression that no language lessons are possible until one masters everything. Not true.

If you and your students have Internet access at school, you can learn some of the basics in SL and turn these early experiments into language lessons:

• Infinitives of purpose. Go through the tutorial on Orientation Island and learn how to sit, stand, walk, fly, and perhaps teleport. After the orientation is completed, have students answer “how to” questions with infinitives of purpose to recall what they’ve learned. Example: (Q) How do you sit? (A) To sit, you right click on an object. / To sit, right click on an object. / You right click on an object in order to sit.
• Present simple and present progressive. Learn to change the appearance of your avatar. Even if only the teacher has an avatar and the class is observing, students can describe the appearance of the given “resident”, using present simple for permanent features (she has long dark hair) and present progressive for clothing and accessories (she‘s wearing a jacket and skirt).

In my experience, learning how to use a new tool is easier and more fun when you’re not left alone. Frustrations are reduced and successes are celebrated together. Mistakes become amusing, and having shared goals can increase confidence. Good luck if you decide to try out SL. Perhaps our avatars will one day cross paths.

Playful Props

Do you keep a bag of props in your classroom? I’ve known teachers who used various props in their grammar and vocabulary presentations, from hand puppets to bouncing balls.  Props can also come in handy for making stories. We all know about chain stories, but consider the variations listed below. All you need is a large container (opaque,  not transparent) that can hold 15-20 small items. Choose from utensils, grooming kits, children’s play sets, stationery, and more. Have a mix of common items and unusual ones.

Grab Bag Story.  Use this whole group activity as a warm-up or end-of-the-lesson filler. The container of props will be passed around the room. Each student will take a turn pulling out an item and stating a sentence based on the object they’re holding. Each sentence should build on to the previous ones, forming a logical (and likely amusing) story.

Grammar Connections. (No, this isn’t a reference to the textbook series.) The format is similar to Grab Bag Story, but student-generated sentences do not necessarily have to form a narrative. On one side of the board make a list of target words or phrases students must use. On the other side, you can record students’ sentences.

• For a group of high beginners, you might list irregular verbs as base verbs. Have each student take an item from the container and select a target verb to create a sentence in the simple past tense. You can erase words from the list as they are used and write students’ sentences on the other side of the board. Suggestions for irregular verbs: (napkin – eat), (toy car – drive), (pen – write), (knife – cut), (magazine – read), (marker – draw), (eyeglasses – see), etc. 
• This activity can also be modified to practice phrasal verbs (napkin – eat out, wipe off), (toy car – pick up), (pen – write down), (knife - cut out, cut up), (magazine - look through), (marker- play around, wash out), (eyeglasses – look over), etc. 
• Other suitable grammar topics: adjective clauses (list relative pronouns on the board), adverb clauses (list subordinating conjunctions on the board), order of modifiers (list adjectives on the board).

Lucky Lot Story. In this variation place students in small groups. Have one member of each group grab a handful of items without looking in the container. The collection items will be placed in the middle of a group, and members must create a story based on those items. As in Grammar Connections, you should require the use of target grammar by listing prompts on the board.

ESL/ EFL Site Forecast for 2011

I’m curious to see if anyone reading this will suggest a website we should all keep our eyes on in the future. Do you anticipate the growth of any particular resource or contributions of an individual content creator? Let me share a few sources that I predict will develop some good materials for ESL/ EFL teachers and students in 2011. If you can, please add to the list.

In no particular order, here they are.

1.  Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab.  This is already a well-known site in the ESL/ EFL community. However, I anticipate much growth in 2011. First off, Randall promises to make his materials accessible for use on portable devices, such as iPhones. Second, I appreciate his collection of Video Snapshots because they offer lessons on both language and culture. Yet another project I find interesting is Randall’s Multimedia Language Activities. It shows his willingness to experiment with other online tools, namely Voice Thread, to enage more of the learner.

2.  Voice of America. This is another big name, but perhaps not so many are aware of The Classroom, which offers a growing collection of multimedia lessons based on readings that range from American Life & Culture to Science & Technology. The activities that follow each article are consistent in format and pedagogically sound. Explore VOA’s virtual classroom and you’ll also find additional activities for all levels, from grammar practice to mini lessons on common idioms.

3. EnglishCafe. There are good reasons why I often collaborate with this site. I truly like the spirit of community and the willingness of all the teachers to support one another. Also, I have observed and participated in the site’s growth over the past couple of years. More and more talented teachers are joining, and that means more free resources are being developed for ESL/ EFL learners. Check out the blog posts and lessons published by Paul Meier, for example. When students ask if I have materials on a certain pronunciation topic and I don’t, I often look to see if Paul does. Then I recommend it. I do the same with the materials created by Kenneth Beare regarding grammar. When I receive requests for online lessons and I’m not available, I often steer students in the direction of fellow TESOL member, Smiling7 (aka Holly). In short, EnglishCafe is a growing community, and in 2011 I expect to see dozens of contributions to the already sizable collection of blog posts and interactive lessons created by qualified teachers around the world.

4. English with Jennifer. You didn’t think I’d miss the chance to put my own website on this list, did you? Of course, I’m excited about how it will develop in 2011! The site was launched in Februrary of this year, and over the past several months I’ve been able to consolidate my online work and make it easier for users to find resources they need. The site features projects I’ve created in response to popular demands for help with writing (Improve Your Writing), vocabulary (Word of the Day and Everday Vocabulary), listening and speaking skills (The Jim & Jen Show), and self-study (Study Tips). I hope to continue working on all these projects as time allows, and I suspect that new ideas will come about in response to other requests for online resources.

Celebrating New Year’s Eve: A whole language activity

Are you planning ahead for your last lesson of the month? Perhaps you’d like to use an activity with a New Year’s Eve theme. Here’s one for adult learners at the lower levels.  Enjoy!

Step 1 – Present the following vocabulary:

at midnight                         champagne                        make a toast                      celebrate                             dress up                               New Year’s Eve                                                                                                  tradition

 

 Step 2 – Ask them to complete the short text (Task A) on the New Year’s Eve Activity_handout.

Step 3 – Have students work in pairs to unscramble the survey questions (Task B). Then correct their work as a class. Discuss variations.

Step 4 – Have students work in small groups of 3 or 4 to discuss the questions from Task B.

Step 5 – OPTIONAL: Ask the small groups of students to create 1-2 additional questions about celebrating New Year’s Eve. Write the questions on the board and then ask each student to answer one of the questions (in a complete sentence).