3-step Trip Down Memory Lane: A whole group and small group activity

It’s always fun to build an activity around happy memories. When describing a past experience, students decide how much they’re comfortable sharing, but any amount of sharing helps brings down barriers and creates a stronger sense of community. Furthermore, the content is familiar, and this facilitates self-expression in the target language.

The following activity is outlined with intermediate and advanced students in mind, but it could be modified for lower level students, as long as they have the simple past tense. Once you understand the basic approach, the activity can be recycled many times to cover different topics and to target different kinds of listening tasks: listening for details, listening to make inferences, listening to understand the sequence of events, etc. I call it a 3-step activity because it involves specific speaking, listening, and writing tasks.

Click here to view and print out my 3-step Trip Down Memory Lane_handout. Enjoy!

Recipes for Chicken Soup with Rice: Using a classic children’s book in the classroom

With the colder weather hitting New England this past weekend, I made a timely discovery among my set of teaching papers. Quite some time ago, I taught a pronunciation lesson using Chicken Soup with Rice, Maurice Sendak’s popular story in ryhme. The book about a boy and his love of chicken soup in every month of the year was published in 1962. A little over a decade later, singer Carole King set the lyrics to a jazzy tune, and since then hundreds of American school children have sung along.

It’s quite easy to find the text online, and most copies give the option of downloading an mp3 file. On YouTube you can watch videos based on Sendak’s illustrations and see the lyrics King sings in large text or small text. You can also find an exceprt from the TV version with no text. I also found it amusing that an American grandmother posted her dramatic reading of the book, which was recorded in her kitchen next to a bowl of chicken soup with rice.

What can you do with all these resources?

• Review the months of the year with beginners. Share a set of the lyrics and leave a blank for each month. As students listen to the song, have them write in the months. Check their spelling before showing them a complete copy of the lyrics. Later play a recall game. Read the final two lines of a verse and have students call out the month: “Sipping once. Sipping twice./ Sipping chicken soup with rice./” – January.
• Practice /l/ in medial and final positions as well as in blends. In January alone, students will encounter while, slipping, and sliding. Create a gapped text with key words with /l/ missing. Allow time for the completion of the text as well as for an oral reading and/ or sing-along.
• Practice /r/ in initial, medial, and final positions. In the second verse, for instance, students will read February, anniversary, for, and rice. Again, you can use a gapped text to test their listening first, and then use the completed text for student production.
• Practice rhythm with attention to thought groups and linking words, such as the two S’s in the first line: “In January it’s so nice… .”
• Practice /ŋ/  in the final position. Six out of twelve months present words ending in -ing: sipping, slipping, sliding, blowing, concocting, selling, cooking, and spouting.
• Encourage creating writing and oral presentations. Challenge more advanced students to work in pairs and produce at least one verse for a day of the week. Through division of labor, the whole class should be able to create a new version of this poem based on the seven days of the week. Here’s a sample verse I jotted down: On Monday it’s so nice / To fix some chicken soup with rice./ Sharing those bowls would be so nice./ Sharing once. Sharing twice. / Sharing chicken soup with rice.
• Encourage creative writing to practice use of prepositions. Similar to the previous activity, students can create their own verses using the same rhyming pattern. To groups of twos or threes you should assign days, holidays, and/ or times of the day. Students will have to recall the use of prepositions in phrases like in January, on Sunday, on Halloween, at midnight, in the morning, on the weekend, etc.

Happy Chicken Soup with Rice!

Survival English: Listening to Weather Reports

It’s one thing to understand textbook sentences about the weather. It’s another to actually listen to an authentic forecast and try to make sense of it. A lower level student can deal with statements following a familiar pattern, such as it’s sunny today, it’s hot outside, it’s a rainy day, it’s windy, etc. Trouble with comprehension mounts with a stream of quickly delivered info: Today’s high will be 72, with winds from the southwest. Clouds will develop by evening, and there will be a 60% chance of light showers. The current temperature is 68.

Audio recordings, downloads, and live streaming make it possible to bring authentic listening practice into the language classroom. The National Weather Service offers a variety of options. I took interest in the collection of audio files for download or online listening. The site warns that the weather radio messages may not be current, but for instructional purposes, that’s irrelevant. What’s great is that you can select weather reports for different regions across the U.S. For Flagstaff, Arizona alone you have seven different transmitter locations. Choose a location, and then you can select the kind of message you wish to hear (under Select a Product): Regional Synopsis, Zone Forecast, Hourly Observations, Daily High and Low Temperatures.

• The Regional Synopsis and Zone Forecast for each location provide the most varied information. I’d recommend having students listen to a set of audio files and answer questions to confirm their general comprehension. Without understanding or recalling all the details, they could be asked to identify which activities would be appropriate in a certain area for a specific day of the week according to the forecast. Model questions: If we go to Flagstaff, AZ this weekend, could we have a picnic in the park on Saturday? Should a visitor to Hibernia Park in Pennsylvania plan to go fishing or snowshoeing this week?

 

• The Hourly Observations test students’ comprehension of numbers and percentages. The reports include not only outdoor temperatures, but also air pressure and relative humidity. For this kind of listening, I’d select 2-3 files and prepare the transcript. (Your efforts will pay off if you recycle this activity with other groups.) Make the transcripts gapped texts, leaving out key numbers and percentages. The Daily High and Low Temperatures can serve the same purpose for beginners. You can also help them process the temperatures in Fahrenheit,since so many students are used to the Celsius scale. Select 4-5 files in advance. Ask them to indicate cold, warm, and hot weather.

Learning a Language Through Laughter: Using Online Comedy Materials

 

• The Official Abbott and Costello Website offer scripts and audio recordings of the popular routines created and performed by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The scripts don’t always use standard spelling, and the audio recordings tend to show their age; however, some of the materials can still be put to good use in the ESL/ EFL classroom.

1. Who’s On First – The script to this classic routine could be used for oral readings. An actual video recording would expose students to an extremely fast rate of speech, but one they could digest more easily after gaining familiarity with the script. The humor is based on the idea of confusion and clarification, which illustrates the importance of sentence stress and intonation.
2. I Ordered a Strawberry Sunday & Loafin’ – Short excerpts from these two routines teach the importance of context when dealing with homophones. The audio files are clear, but the rate of speech is fast. Could your students complete a gapped text and then discuss the humor?

MODEL: I Ordered a Strawberry Sunday

[  ] = words to omit

Abbott: I ordered a [strawberry sundae.]

Costello: You did? [What day is it today?]

Abbott: [Friday.]

Costello: You got [two more days] to wait.

(Retrieved from The Official Abbott and Costello Website)

• Bill Cosby is a favorite of mine. In terms of being appropriate for the classroom, Cosby’s routines are never vulgar, and his speaking style is clear and slow. I’ve used his routines for listening, pronunciation, and conversation practice. The topics, such as parents v. children, are easy to understand and comment on. My pattern has been the following:

1. Initial Q&A can prepare students to listen to a routine.
2. A gapped text challenges them to catch details.
3. Further discussion allows students to make a personal connection to the material.
4. Oral readings give practice with suprasegmental features such as sentence stress, thought groups, reduction, linking, and intonation.

Recommended routines:

Jeffrey

Kill the Boy

Top 5 Uses of Top 10 Lists

I discovered a site that publishes top ten lists. That’s all they do. Well, there is some variation.  They have top 20 and top 25 lists as well. The List Universe. The site offers materials that are appropriate for upper level students. Lists contain brief explanations for each item. As an added bonus, the site has begun to make podcasts of existing lists. What does that mean for classroom use? It means you can find some lists presented as an audio file and the original publication serves as the transcript. If you really enjoy the content, you can subscribe to Listverse podcasts on iTunes. The podcasts use fast but very clear speech. (Click here for a sample.)

The archives on this site organize the lists into a dozen categories, giving you a broad selection of topics. You’ll probably want to bypass the categories of Bizarre and Controversial and browse more classroom appropriate ones, such as Art & Literature, Fact & Fiction, and Leisure & Travel. One example of a tame but still interesting topic is Top 20 Facts About Sleep.

What can you do with the lists? I think back to my early experiments with top ten lists to offer these suggestions. You may choose to focus on one or more skills within a single lesson.

1. Detailed listening practice. Use a podcast. First listening: identify the items on the list. Second: use a gapped text to listen for details. Recommended list: 10 Most Annoying Time Wasters.
2. Understanding a theme. Hide the list title and present the items of the list one by one on the board.  As you post each new item, it should be easier for the class to guess the theme. What would they title the list? You can either have students volunteer their guesses as the activity progresses, or you can ask them to wait until the last item is shown and then write down their ideas. After they submit their guesses, show the actual title. Recommended list: Top 10 Ways to Save Money on Food.
3. Understanding a theme. Show the title and hide the items. This is the opposite of the previous activity. Have students work in pairs or small groups to generate their own items for a given list title. Then they can compare their lists to the original one. Recommended list: 10 Greatest Food Combinations.
4. Self-expression through writing. Students can respond to a list in writing. Revised and approved texts can be posted on the site’s forum.
5. Debates and presentations. Lists loaded with personal opinion make for interesting discussion. Discussion can center around the ranking. Assign each pair or small group an item on the list and ask them to prepare an argument for ranking their item number one. Recommended list: Top 10 Everyday Inventions.

Academic Words in A Capella

Music can easily inject an uplifting quality into a lesson. You may not be familiar with Da Vinci’s Notebook, and to tell you the truth I don’t know much about them either! However, I do know this was an amazing a capella group that formed in the ‘90s and stayed together long enough to create and perform some memorable songs. My favorite is called Title of the Song.

 Take a look at the lyrics and you’ll soon grasp the humor. The song is also full of academic words. It has a lot of instructional potential for advanced students studying English for academic purposes. I recall using the lyrics with a group of advanced students, and we used a gapped text to work on listening skills and then we used the completed text to study the vocabulary. Possibilities go beyond this.

• Set the stage with discussion questions:

1. Love is a common theme in art. Do you have a favorite love story? (Book, movie, song, etc.)
2. Romances or romantic comedies are popular genres in films and books. What do many of these works have in common? Do you think the plots are predictable?
3. Many songs are about love. What are some common messages found in songs? For example, “I need you” or “Do you love me?”
4. Listen to the first 1-2 minutes of this song (play Title of the Song by Da Vinci’s Notebook). Can you figure out what the title is?

• Focus on word forms. Write a number of key words from the lyrics on the board. Have students identify the parts of speech and then recall whole word families. Choose more familiar and more frequent words. Examples:

1. Perfection (noun) >> perfect (adjective), perfect (verb), perfectly (adverb)
2. Motivation (noun) >> motivate (verb), motivated (adjective)
3. Realization (noun) >> realize (verb)
4. Expression (noun) >> express (verb), expressive (adjective)
5. Lateness (noun) >> late (adjective/ adverb), lately (adverb)
6. Reassurance (noun) >> reassure (verb), reassuring (adjective)

Identify the noun suffixes used. Tell them that the song has many nouns with these endings.

• Listen and identify the missing words. Hand out a gapped text. This copy should have key nouns omitted since students are now sensitive to common noun endings. Play the song once and pause frequently to allow students to write down what they hear. Allow them to compare their work with a partner, and then do a second hearing. At this point, you may share the lyrics. Online you may be able to find a copy of the music accompanied by a slide show displaying the lyics.
• Focus on understanding the meaning. You can discuss the song line by line or verse by verse. To really test their understanding and make the vocabulary more memorable, have them create real lyrics for each line. In other words, the song is a series of descriptions about the usual format used in the love songs sung by boy groups. The class must supply actual words to fit each description.  It can help to post big magazine photos of a man and a woman. Put a big speech bubble above the man. Tell the students that the man is trying to find words to tell the woman how sorry he is and how much he loves her. They are going to supply the words. You can do the chorus as a class and then assign verses to small groups of students. Example:

Naïve expression of love = “I’m crazy about you.”
Reluctance to accept that you are gone = “Are you really gone?”/ “Have you really left me?”
Request to turn back time = “Can we go back in time?”
And rectify my wrongs = “Can I make it up to you?”

• Do additional vocabulary study and practice.  Additional work can follow depending on which words you wish to target. One option would be to use the nouns that also have verb forms. Assign sets of 2-3 words to pairs of students. Each pair must used their assigned words to create a short text about a couple in a troubled love relationship. Possible sets:

1. Declaration, elaborate, perfection
2. Description, repetition, reformation
3. Admission, expression, compensation
4. Realization, reconciliation, motivation
5. Reminiscence, reassurance, recounting
6. Enumeration, discovery, acknowledgment
7. Departure, renunciation, dissolution

The Art of Creating Activities: Using Museum Websites for Language Teaching

As we all know, the Internet has opened up a wealth of learning opportunities. The trick is to find a resource and then figure out how to use it. While reading my favorite magazine, The Week, I discovered that the world’s museums have been busy making much of its contents available to people who cannot physically visit them. The Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, and the Smithsonian are three such institutions. 

Not every trip to Paris allows time for a day at the Louvre (at least, that’s been my experience). Now anyone can go online and take a virtual tour. If your students do so, remind them to select English on the home page before they begin the tour! Here another possibility.

• Choose Kaleidoscope and select a visual theme, such as “Daily Life”. Click to enlarge or zoom in on the images in the order you wish the class to view them. Have students state a brief description of what they see using targeted grammar. Be sure students know the words painting, sculpture, work of art, and any other vocabulary relevant to the pieces you’ll be showing. Examples: (present progress) “Seated Man Writing” is a sculpture. The man is sitting, and he is writing. / (adjective clauses) “Reading” (by Fragonard) is a drawing in which two women are sitting. One is reading. The other, who is dressed in a beautiful gown, is in the front, and she is listening.

 

The Louvre

Virtual visits to the Hermitage are also possible. Here’s an idea to develop reading skills.

• Attend the Virtual Academy. Challenge upper level students to read for details. For example, if they select the “course” on the history of the Winter Palace, they could be given this list of questions to answer as they move through the slide presentation.

Model: [Slides 1-6]

1. Who lived at the Winter Palace?
2. How did Russia’s relationship with Sweden influence the construction of the Winter Palace?
3. Name at least two positive contributions Peter I made to Russia.
4. How did Elizabeth choose to decorate the palace and why?
5. Who was the first true owner of the palace?

The Hermitage

Of the three, I found the Smithsonian site to be the most attractive. Maybe the appeal had to do with the introductory video hosted by the popular American actor Ben Stiller. The video itself could be used for listening, speaking, and vocabulary practice.

• Comprehension questions based on the video (first 3 minutes)

1. Who founded the Smithsonian?
2. How large is the Smithsonian?
3. (1:40) What does Ben Stiller emphasize “the” when he says, “A lot of people think the castle…is the Smithsonian”?
4. (2:09) Retell the story of the “The Peacock Room” designed by the artist Whistler.

• Vocabulary. Listen to the video (first 3 minutes) and explain the meaning of these phrases:

1. (1:05) hall of fame
2. (1:37) (not) kidding around
3. (2:21) went to town (on it)
4. (2:57) crack a code

 

Got another suggestion for using one of these sites? Please share it.

St. Patrick’s Day: Teaching Ideas

This posting answers the request of a viewer for ideas related to the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day holiday.

Have your students watched my video on St. Patrick’s Day? You can watch the opening talk together and then pose comprehension questions. For example:

1. Who celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in the U.S.?

2. When is it celebrated?

3. What is one symbol of this holiday?

After doing the exercises in the video, have students create examples of their own to illustrate their understanding of the target expressions. You can give prompts:

1. Describe a problem that you were able to solve easily. [as luck would have it]
2. Describe a time you felt that you didn’t have support from others. [rain on my parade]
3. Name an event that you must prepare for very soon. [just around the corner]

You can also create your own supplemental material to this video by using ESLvideo.com or the quiz maker tools on EnglishCafe.com. Both options allow you to embed the video and create an original interactive quiz. Either way, you’ll have one link that will allow you to share the video and your custom-designed quiz with your students.

Alternative ideas:

• Have conversation about

- why certain colors are associated with particular holidays (e.g., green with St. Patrick’s Day)

- why a shamrock is considered lucky/ other symbols of luck

- other holidays that allow people to celebrate their ethnicity/ nationality

- other spring holidays around the world

• Teach and practice more vocabulary (expressions about luck): down on one’s luck, out of luck, be in luck, etc.

Hope that helps, Rone! Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone!

Combining Cool Resources

If you follow my YouTube videos, you’ll know that a cool car was the topic of my last lesson on American Slang. (Secret: I based the dialog on my knowledge of the Acura MDX.) The video lends itself to work with vocabulary (Part 1) and pronunciation (Part 2). I offer a follow-up a vocabulary exercise and a listening activity with fast speech on EnglishCafe.com to supplement the videos. If the lesson is shared in the classroom, I think the next logical step would be group discussion. In the video there are two proposed discussion questions that directly relate to the dialog, and they could easily lead into a more academic talk about the future of cars and the debate over whether the world can sustain the growing number of cars on the roads.

Check out the talk by Larry Burns of General Motors on TED.com. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.) I learned about this site from my EVO session’s database. TED has many videos on thought-provoking topics. Though some are rather lengthy for classroom use, you could always select an excerpt and reserve the entire video for independent study. The site offers a transcript and subtitles in different languages for each talk, giving additional options for viewing.

Getting back to the Larry Burn’s talk on the future of cars, here are some questions to pose to your advanced learners. Have them read the questions and then watch the first 1:30 of the talk.

1. According to Larry, what does a car represent to people? Why do people want to own cars?
2. According to Larry, how many people in the world own cars? Is that number high or low in relation to the world population?
3. According to Larry, how do cars today differ from cars 100 years ago?

If you choose to make more use of the video, students will listen to discussion on the use of hydrogen as car fuel. I’d recommend leaving that subtopic for another time, and focus instead on eliciting students’ opinions on Larry’s opening remarks. End your use of the video after 1:30 (approx.) and direct conversation toward expressing personal views on the use, ownership, and design of cars.

Accents and Activities

A private student of mine recently requested that we talk about accents. He saved me the trouble of searching for material to base our discussion on by sending me links to sources he found interesting. One of them included audio files of various Australian accents. This didn’t surprise me since that’s currently his country of residence. I love listening to varieties of English, so I enjoyed familiarizing myself with the files. I came up with discussion questions for my student, but almost automatically, I began to think of other possibilities the audio recordings lend themselves to for language learners in general.

Take a look at the audio illustrations that folks at Macquarie University have compiled. There are more than a dozen statements read aloud by various speakers. How can you make use of these files in the classroom? What ideas can you come up with? Here are a few that I thought of:

• Dictation. Classic exercise. Could be more effective if first done individually, and then in pairs after a second listening. One pair could volunteer to write their text on the board, and a third and final listening would follow to confirm their accuracy.

 

• Dictation and creative writing. Make the activity more meaningful by asking students to provide more context for one-line from the site. Personally, I’d love to write a mini story based on this one: “They noticed that the door of the hunting lodge stood ajar and they grabbed their guns in fear.”[1] Two men from two different regions read that sentence. The first is fairly dramatic. I’d play both audio files, have the students write down what they hear, correct their work, and then ask them to work with a partner to add one line before and two or three lines after.

 

• Infer rhythmic patterns. Are you ready to teach a lesson on sentence stress? You could play a few audio samples like these, which are all one-liners. Play the clips, show the transcripts on the board, and then have students listen again to identify the stressed words. Guide them to make accurate conclusions about content words (e.g. nouns) and function words (e.g. articles).

 

I must thank my student for asking me to explore the links he sent. It brought to my attention yet another amazing resource that’s just a click away: audio recordings of accents in English. Here are some additional sites you might find useful:

• The Speech Accent Archive. I loved browsing via their map feature. I listened to my hometown dialect as and samples from several other places in the U.S. and Canada. The man from St. Louis, by the way, provides a nice model for thought groups.
• International Dialects of English Archives. Some recordings are rather lengthy, but  you could use only an excerpt. Check out the clip recorded by a man from Martinique. Within the first two minutes or so, he tells a story about a woman who took a goose to the vet.  You could transcribe the story partially, challenging students to complete it. Alternatively, they could simply listen, and in stages do both summarizing and predicting.

 

---

[1] http://clas.mq.edu.au/voices/audio-illustrations