About.com ESL From Kenneth Beare, your About.com Guide to ESL
This week's newsletter provides help for understanding the wide range of literary devices that learners of academic English should know.
There's also a lesson aimed at helping beginning level students use various types of pronouns more precisely.
Finally, there are a number of dialogues to use in Business English classes.
Monday, December 24, 2012
50 Incredibly Useful Links For Learning & Teaching English
Learning a new language on your own or teaching one to non-native speakers may be one of the most challenging educational task out there. Learners and teachers can use all of the help they can get! Thankfully, many excellent resources for ELL and ESL exist online, from full-service websites to reference tools and communities, all designed to make the task of educating ELL students just a little bit easier and more effective.Teach Thought has scoured the Internet to share 50 of the best of these resources,and hopesyou’ll find lots of valuable content and tools through these incredibly useful links for ELL educators.
Websites
Resource tools, printables, other great resources for learners and educators are all available on these sites: 50 Incredibly Useful Links For Learning & Teaching The English Language
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Old techniques, new results
Reposted from Oxford University Press' ELT Global Blog Anna Silva has been a language teacher for over 20 years in Brazil, teaching in state and language schools. In this article, she looks at ways of reinforcing vocabulary and grammar through practical application for young learners....and not just young learners.
Cooking from a US or UK or other Anglophone cookbook would be a good language exercise. If you enjoy cooking and are a "foodie," perhaps you would enjoy subscribing to a cooking blog like Foodista or, if you garden, subscribe to an English language gardening blog. Apply this strategy to any other special interest.
It seems that children can learn another language fast; however, they forget as quickly as they learn. So teachers try to find ways to keep young children interested and at the same time help them learn and use the knowledge acquired.
Is there a magic formula to help us?
Over the years, I have developed several projects and I repeat some of them year after year because I do see good results. One of these projects is our cookery classes. I have noticed that cooking really holds the students` attention and helps them memorize vocabulary related to food and verbs related to instructions. Parents have also expressed how surprised they are when they are abroad and see their children mastering the use of simple structures and daily expressions or words. One of these parents was especially amazed because he saw his son asking a waiter for a straw as naturally as if he was using his first language.
In our cookery classes, we follow some steps which I think are crucial to enrich the learning process: introduce the ingredients/ vocabulary, explain the steps, ask students to repeat and explain by themselves what was taught, make the recipe, taste, take a sample home along with the recipe and do a follow-up activity.
As scientists have emphasized the importance of using as many senses as possible to help our brain retain the information taught, the classes are completely practical and the hands-on technique is of crucial importance. Besides this, the very act of cooking brings joy and a lot of laughter to our classes.
The follow-up activity can be a simple and entertaining exercise like a crossword puzzle or ‘match the columns’, ‘circle the ingredients used’ and ‘put the instructions in the correct order’; but it´s another important step to help them look over what was taught. Howard Gardner proposed that teachers shouldn’t give priority to any one type of intelligence, but that, on the contrary, all types should be catered for in every single class. We can easily follow this advice in any cooking class because students are asked to listen, read, see, make things, walk, taste, and speak.
Another project which complements the cooking class is the gardening project. Every semester, we teach the vocabulary related to gardening: soil, flowerpot, seeds, etc. After this traditional teaching, students not only plant the seeds but often follow their growth. Sometimes we even use them in our cookery classes or just make a flower pot.
Two of our gardening experiences were remarkable: planting tomatoes and strawberries. The tomatoes were used to make a pizza and a smoothie was made with the strawberries. Flowers were also a good idea, since the violets grown were given to their mothers as gifts for Mothers’ Day in May.
The cookery classes help me teach all the vocabulary related to food, which is absolutely fundamental to everyday conversation. The gardening classes are also helpful, not only in what refers to food vocabulary, but also in developing environmental awareness. On Water Day, for instance, we discussed the importance of water for our existence and elicited ways to save water, as well.
Although I love using technology in my classes, I do think that nowadays these activities outside the classroom are a way to surprise students, break the routine and teach new vocabulary effectively! Why don´t you give it a try?
Cooking from a US or UK or other Anglophone cookbook would be a good language exercise. If you enjoy cooking and are a "foodie," perhaps you would enjoy subscribing to a cooking blog like Foodista or, if you garden, subscribe to an English language gardening blog. Apply this strategy to any other special interest. It seems that children can learn another language fast; however, they forget as quickly as they learn. So teachers try to find ways to keep young children interested and at the same time help them learn and use the knowledge acquired.
Is there a magic formula to help us?
Over the years, I have developed several projects and I repeat some of them year after year because I do see good results. One of these projects is our cookery classes. I have noticed that cooking really holds the students` attention and helps them memorize vocabulary related to food and verbs related to instructions. Parents have also expressed how surprised they are when they are abroad and see their children mastering the use of simple structures and daily expressions or words. One of these parents was especially amazed because he saw his son asking a waiter for a straw as naturally as if he was using his first language.
In our cookery classes, we follow some steps which I think are crucial to enrich the learning process: introduce the ingredients/ vocabulary, explain the steps, ask students to repeat and explain by themselves what was taught, make the recipe, taste, take a sample home along with the recipe and do a follow-up activity.
As scientists have emphasized the importance of using as many senses as possible to help our brain retain the information taught, the classes are completely practical and the hands-on technique is of crucial importance. Besides this, the very act of cooking brings joy and a lot of laughter to our classes.
The follow-up activity can be a simple and entertaining exercise like a crossword puzzle or ‘match the columns’, ‘circle the ingredients used’ and ‘put the instructions in the correct order’; but it´s another important step to help them look over what was taught. Howard Gardner proposed that teachers shouldn’t give priority to any one type of intelligence, but that, on the contrary, all types should be catered for in every single class. We can easily follow this advice in any cooking class because students are asked to listen, read, see, make things, walk, taste, and speak.
Another project which complements the cooking class is the gardening project. Every semester, we teach the vocabulary related to gardening: soil, flowerpot, seeds, etc. After this traditional teaching, students not only plant the seeds but often follow their growth. Sometimes we even use them in our cookery classes or just make a flower pot.
Two of our gardening experiences were remarkable: planting tomatoes and strawberries. The tomatoes were used to make a pizza and a smoothie was made with the strawberries. Flowers were also a good idea, since the violets grown were given to their mothers as gifts for Mothers’ Day in May.
The cookery classes help me teach all the vocabulary related to food, which is absolutely fundamental to everyday conversation. The gardening classes are also helpful, not only in what refers to food vocabulary, but also in developing environmental awareness. On Water Day, for instance, we discussed the importance of water for our existence and elicited ways to save water, as well.
Although I love using technology in my classes, I do think that nowadays these activities outside the classroom are a way to surprise students, break the routine and teach new vocabulary effectively! Why don´t you give it a try?
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Learning and Teaching Business English
|
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
English Language & Usage Weekly Newsletter
…Stack Exchange, Tuesday, November 27, 2012
 | ||||||||||||
|
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Practice your English with Academy Island Game!
An unknown alien life form lands on earth and has to learn English to get by in a range of social situations. Players of Academy Island have to progress through different difficulty levels by helping the alien use English in a range of situations such as shopping in a bakery and visiting places such as an art gallery and library. Our game is designed to help learners improve their English language ability, in a fun way.
You can embed it into your classroom wiki or Facebook group. Students can use it to apply what the have learnt. They can practice new vocabulary, grammatical rules, idioms and more. What do you think of it?
Practice your English with Academy Island Game! reposted from Azhar's Reflections.
You can also play this game on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CambridgeESOL. Retrieved from Cambridge ESOL
Practice your English with Academy Island Game! reposted from Azhar's Reflections.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
MailDiary – Keep a Diary Online
Here's a good way to practice writing. Reposted from Ozge Karaoglu's Blog: hat tip to Ogze who writes,
There are different tools to keep a diary online, but this one deserves to be introduced.
There are different tools to keep a diary online, but this one deserves to be introduced. MailDiary is a tool that lets you keep a journal online. You sign up for the tool by just writing your email and then you are in it. The best part about using this tool that you don’t need to go to the page to write a new entry. It mails you to remind that you need to write a new entry every day and you only write a response to that email and it is posted automatically. You can send as many emails as you want and they will be all be stored as new entries. You can add images to your entries as well. If you don’t know what to write, you can answer the question that MailDiary asks you. You can even write your own questions for each day.
This tool also lets you customize the color of your diary and the style. You can also see your entries as a PDF and print it out and here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom…
- Students can keep a diary of their first week at school, then they can re-read this at the end of the school year.Students can keep a diary of a famous person, for a character in a story that you have been reading at class.
- Students can write a diary about a picture that you have sent to them.They come up with an imaginary day that they have lived.
- Start with something simple, ask children to write a few sentences about their days or ask them to summarize the day.
- Create a diary with different entries and ask questions to students to be answered.
This tool is a great way for writing and reading activities for our students, and for us to keep notes of the thing that we do in our lessons and write our reflections.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
