There’s really only one core, key principle when it comes to becoming a successful edu-blogger, and it is this:
“Do unto your fellow bloggers
what you would have them
do unto you.”
Follow this dogma on their blogs, within the blogosphere and right across the twitterverse and eventually – you must be patient – the Great Google God will bless your life with love and you shall be gloriously showered with many, many visitations.
Once you have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are most selfless and diligent then you shall also be rewarded with the keywords to Google’s first page and forever more, be known as blogian.
This article is part of a new series: Thoughts on Edu-blogging. Karenne is an ELT edu-blogger, a ESP:IT teacher, EdTech teacher-trainer and materials writer, originally from Grenada in the Caribbean. She currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany and writes Kalinago English and BusinessEnglish~5mins.
This video appeared on the news in Turkey and around the world on Tuesday evening. It’s a short clip of a troupe of Israeli soldiers performing a dance while on duty in the West Bank.
Israel has been a major focal point of much discussion recently in Turkey due to the attack on the primarily Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, during the Gaza Flotilla incident a couple weeks ago. This is on top of the major outcry that went up in Turkey a while back when Israel made some extremely violent and heavy-handed incursions into Gaza.
The comical nature of soldiers dancing on duty contrasts sharply with the context of the Occupation and recent events in which it was done.
Needless to say, it provides a great basis for a lesson.
I brought the video into both my upper-intermediate classes on Wednesday although it could easily be done with Intermediates as well.
Step 1 – Start the lesson by showing the clip. Before showing the clip, make sure to ask any students that have seen it already to remain silent about it.
Step 2 – After the clip is shown ask the students to write a reaction response to it about how they felt while watching it.
Step 3 - Now invite students to share their reactions to the video. Let the conversation run. The initial conversation took about an hour in both classes that I did it with and could have gone on longer.
At least one person will have seen the clip already and it will come out that it was performed by Israeli soldiers. If the conversation doesn’t move in this direction, you might want to open up a debate on how their opinions changed once they knew where the video came from and why that might be.
Step 4 - During the last five minutes of the lesson, have the students write at least three questions they would like answered about the video. Most of my students came up with pretty much the same questions, which were:
Were the soldiers real soldiers or actors?
Who made the video (i.e. was it actors, the soldiers, the military, an outside group)?
Who uploaded the video?
What was the message that’s trying to be sent?
Why was the call to prayer played in the beginning?
Step 5 - The second hour I ask the students to try to answer their own questions. To do this they are given access a short newspaper article from the Herald Sun and YNet.
The students do a good job of then debating the article amongst themselves and calling on you for help with any unknown words or questions they have about the texts.
Step 6 - Finally I play the clip made by American soldiers in April (Soldiers remaking music videos is a meme going back to at least 2006).
I also make them aware of a number of other videos that I let them watch on break if interested. (Note that almost all these videos can be found in better quality on YouTube, but, since Turkey doesn’t have access to it, I didn’t link them unless I couldn’t find it elsewhere.)
American Soldiers in Iraq – Electric Avenue (This one is the most well made, but it has a short seen of blind-folded Iraqis taken prisoner, which might not be something you want to show as it’s a bit sensitive).
There are a ton more on YouTube as well if you have a look.
Step 7 - After having read the material and seen some previous videos, I next have the class write up a report on the video that attempts to answer all the questions they came up with in the first hour. This could also be done as homework if you only have 2-hour classes.
Step 8+ - Finally I do some peer-editing, correction work, and final reflection.
All in all, this lesson turned out incredibly well and I was extremely pleased with the result. The debates were varied, lively, and thoughtful. Coming up with questions to be answered, finding the answers to those questions, and then reporting on the information was also a great way to collaborate, research and analyze information, and then synthesize said information from a variety of sources.
Finally, a note of caution, a lot of sensitive issues are raised with this topic relating to Israel and Palestine and, as I’m American, conversation also often spilled over into America’s relationship with Israel and the war in Iraq. Be prepared to discuss these issues.
It’s holiday season here in Turkey. As a result, a large number of students and teachers take off for a month or more to various places. The vacation area of choice for most students is the Southwest coasts of Turkey on the Aegean or the Mediterranean. As a teacher here you quickly become familiar with places like Bodrum, Antalya, and Fethiye.
I just returned from my own holiday on the beach last night. It was my first holiday done in true Turkish fashion, which means a lot of R & R.
As teachers, we often get excited when our students come back from holiday because we think they’ll have some interesting stories to tell. In Turkey, you quickly find out that, by and large, this isn’t the case. When students are asked what they did on holiday, more often than not the reply is either “nothing” or “I slept.” When I first started teaching here, I thought that this was just a case of students not wanting to speak about their holidays in English. I later learned that they actually meant it.
Compared to many places in the US or Europe, Turkish people have to work really hard. They work longer hours and for between 2 to 10 times less what the person in the same job would make in another country. There are also a lot more stressors in general living here. So, for many, the ideal holiday is going somewhere where you can relax, forget about the hardships of life, and do as little as possible.
So what’s a poor teacher to do during the summer slump when everyone would rather be outside and there doesn’t seem to be much to talk about? Here is a nice task-based project on vacations (what’s a task you say? Check out this fabulous guest post by Marcos Benevides over at Six Things).
Level: Pre-Intermediate and Up
Objective: Presentation Skills
Research Skills
Unreal structures with ”would”
Holiday Vocabulary
Materials: Some big, poster-sized paper, scissors, colored markers, access to a computer lab with Internet connection or travel magazines.
Procedure: This lesson can easily be modified to last over several class periods or cut down to just one. For instance, you can do large skills focus lessons on researching or presenting. It can also be adapted as a short presentation follow up to the Create a Country lesson.
Step 1) Write “Dream Vacation” up on the board. Give a student the board marker and have the class brainstorm words associated with that topic.
Step 2) Looking at the board, ask if everyone seems to have the same idea about what a dream vacation is like. Now tell the students that they are going to plan a dream vacation, but that they need to go on this vacation with a partner. Have them prepare some questions to ask people to determine if they have the same ideas about what a perfect vacation entails. (For example, Do you like adventurous vacations or quite ones? Would you prefer the beach or the mountains? Would you like to go abroad or stay in Turkey? Etc.)
Step 3) Do a mingle where the class needs to discuss their ideas of a perfect vacation and decide who would be the best person in the class for them to go with.
Step 4) Once they’ve found someone they think they’d like to travel with, have them sit down as a pair. Once everyone is finished, students need to explain who they chose for a partner and why. This is a good place to review agreement language as Turkish students tend to have trouble remembering this language point, especially in the negative. Encourage sentences like “Seda likes relaxing on the beach and so do I“, “Burak doesn’t like swimming and neither do I.” Correlative conjunctions also work (both…and, neither….nor, either…or).
Step 5) Now write “Money is no object” on the board. Explain the meaning of the phrase if necessary. Tell students that they are going to imagine that money was no object and that they are going to plan an ideal vacation with their partner ( If the class has access to a computer lab with Internet, then they can choose anywhere. If not, they’ll be limited to destinations in the travel magazines). The catch is that the holiday has to be abroad and it can‘t be somewhere they‘ve already been. Making it outside the students’ own country facilitates the need for more research and makes it more likely that web sites will be in English.
With the class, brainstorm what they’ll have to plan.
-Where to go
-What to bring
-How long to stay
-Where to stay
-What sights to see
-What to do there
-How to travel
-What money to use
-Visa requirements
-Language issues
-Safety and health
-Etc.
Step 6) Show students the poster paper. Explain that they will need to plan their ideal vacation and find out all the details by researching it. After researching it, they will have to draw out a map of their travel plan and include any relevant images. Students can cut out images from magazines, print them out, or draw them. I usually give one to one and a half class periods to research and then prepare the poster.
Step 7) The pairs then present the imaginary holiday to the class. Make sure to emphasize that this is not a real holiday and of course money is always a factor, so they will need to use a lot of 2nd conditional type structures. This is good practice for students as they often have trouble with this. They’ll often use unreal would for the first sentence and then revert back to present simple or something. This is also a good presentation project because students will have to switch back and forth between present simple for facts about things like visas and historical sights and unreal sentences for their plans.
I usually give the students 15-30 minutes to divide up who will talk about what, prepare the presentation, and practice it before they do it for real. Also make it clear that each person in the pair will have to speak for half the time. Before starting the presentations, it’s a good idea to collect the posters and split groups members up as they often will chat about the upcoming presentation rather than listen to the presenters.
During the presentation, listeners need to pay attention to fill out an focus form. Also encourage them to ask questions at the end of the presentation. The listening focus questions are here (FYI: I’m having some problems with MS Office at the moment, so these are rtf files for now). Note that the listening focus forms should be anonymous and then handed to the group who presented them.
Step 8 ) The final stage of the project involves reflection. The reflection form is here. Students should fill it out and then discuss it with a partner. I usually tell the students to keep the reflection forms anonymous as well.
Step 9) Take the forms home and go over them for the next day. Discuss the feedback as a class, possibly presenting a selection of it on the board and go over any major language issues that came up.
Please check out the video before reading the post. It’s about a program started at Bernard College.
I happened to come across this video through On War and Words blog. For me, this project is the embodiment of good teaching. This is the type of teaching I strive for.
There is certainly a lot to like about this style of teaching, but by far the most important for me is the creation of a critical classroom. Students were deliberately challenged to seek out new worldviews, question preconceived notions, and identify with the Other. I truly feel that good teaching always does those things.
Seeking out new worldviews, especially ones that challenge our current beliefs is so important to be able to critically engage with the world around us, each other, and even ourselves. These students had to delve into a very complex and difficult topic and really look at it.
More importantly, they are doing more than just acquiring and then passing on that information. They are living it. They are not just reporting what someone else says. They are being asked to truly understand that person and become them within the classroom. This ability to get inside the head of an other is an invaluable skill and can teach so much, especially when you are asked to do it with the side you don’t agree with.
We as teachers have very powerful opportunities to bring these critical elements into our students lives and I feel that it is something many teachers either rarely consider or shy away from.
We should ask ourselves if our teaching is truly transformative or if it simply aids the accumulation of knowledge and skills. Personally, I feel we should do both rather than one or the other.
This project also rests on some very sound pedagogical principles. The students are given a lot of free-reign, most of the work is done by them, and the knowledge and skills are lived rather than passively received.
I don’t know 100% of how this classroom was run, but I bet I can make some pretty good guesses. Students were given roles, but how they developed those roles, how they acquired the information, and how they presented it was probably largely left up to them. I’m sure the teacher merely acted as a guide, someone who could point them in the right direction or make sure they were staying on track. It’s a class where the students were mostly teaching each other.
Students were given specific goals and an excellent framework to work within, but after this, it seems that the achievement of those goals was their responsibility. They were provided access to materials rather than spoon-fed answsers.
The most important point here is that the lesson was lived. It was actively experienced. I guarantee that the students will remember most of what they learned throughout this project. How could they not? This is the true benefit of drama in the classroom.
Your ability to implement this kind of teaching depends on a lot of things and not everyone will be able to do it to the same degree, but I think we should all try to do our best. Simple things like access to materials for this kind of project may be hard to come by, but I imagine there is more than enough material available on the Internet, especially for an English class.
Another problem often faced in Turkey is inconsistent students. Extended projects are quite hard to do with students that pop in and out of classes fairly frequently and can’t be counted on to come on time. I’ve found it’s beneficial to initiate projects that can be done regardless of who shows up. If you have to depend on key people, a big problem arises when they don’t come that day or come 2 hours late.
There is also the matter of school policies regarding controversial issues and the students’ own reactions to them. We can simply work within our limits and I’d say we should push them as much as we can as well. I did a number of posts a while back on different ways of introducing controversy into the classroom: Juxtaposition, Displacement,Pushing.
What about you? Do you consider your teaching to be critical or transformative in the lives of your students? How do you accomplish this? What hurdles do you have to overcome when doing so? How feasible is it within the English classroom?
The other day Scott Thornbury brought up the notoriously difficult grammar point of gerunds. It became clear from Scott’s post that there isn’t even a consensus on what they are or if they actually exist. This brought me back to my posts about how I feel grammar is extremely overrated in the ELT classroom.
In the course of the discussion that ensued, Scott asked if grammar was perhaps at the very least an expedient means to an end for learners with little actual time in the class. A very good question and one I decided to answer here rather than in the comments, as I’d like to give a lengthy response.
While I think simple grammar has its place in the classroom, I would answer “no” to Scott’s question if we’re talking about complicated distinctions like gerunds vs. infinitives.
Here’s my argument:
I think far and away the biggest mistake we adult learners and teachers of adults make is that analytical understanding of grammar aids acquisition. This is probably the biggest complication when looking at adult vs. young learners. Adults constantly want to understand why something is the way it is instead of just accepting it and using it. This need to understand actually acts as an obstacle to acquisition. As language learners, we need to accept language as it is and use it.
I can’t remember exactly who, but someone once made a comment that helping students to analytically understand grammar makes them comfortable in the classroom and therefore raises the affective filter, aiding learning. I would agree. That, I think, is the main positive effect it has.
If analytical understanding truly aided language acquisition, then lecturing and grammar translation would be wild successes. It’s quite clear they are not. So why do we persist in trying to teach language this way?
Now, I do think that knowledge of grammar rules can help, but only if the rule is simple to apply and mirrors the students’ L1. For instance, adding –ed to make the past tense in English or not using the verb “be” with he/she/it in Turkish. These are very simple rules that can be clearly understood by students with nearly no explanation.
Actually, there should be a distinction made between application of simple rules and analytical understanding. The former is useful while the latter is not.
An example of a simple rule is adding “s” to present simple verbs when he/she/it is the subject. We don’t have to understand why that is and it wouldn’t be helpful to do so, we merely apply the rule. To go back to Scott’s discussion, telling students that the infinitive is more common after verbs than gerunds is useful. Telling them that one is more nouny and one more verby is not.
Trying to explain something complicated like gerunds vs. infinitives, articles, or the myriad rules surrounding relative clauses is not useful in my opinion. In fact, most students pick up these “rules” and use the language correctly without explicit instruction the majority of the time. I never teach explicit rules for articles yet even my beginner and elementary students start to use them correctly as the course progresses if encouraged to do so. In the same way, I have as yet to have a student that could tell me the difference between an subject & object relative clause, but most of them, if given a choice between sentences on the board, can tell me in which ones we can omit the relative pronoun.
How is this possible? Well, they are simply taking the language they know and repeating it to themselves. They go with whatever sounds right.
Think about it. How many times have you taught a finer grammar point to a class until every one in the room was very confident with it. They could even give example sentences and do basic substitution drills. Yet, the students fail to use the new grammar afterwards no matter what context you provide. In fact, they don’t use it again until you actually direct them to do so. If analytical understanding aided production, wouldn’t the opposite be the case?
When is explicit rule teaching helpful? There are a couple cases:
1) There is a similar structure in the L1 and they transfer over the grammatical chunk.
2) Simple rules that don’t require in-depth understanding of grammatical concepts.
3) To aid error correction, especially in writing when dealing with really complicated language. Students can be more confident of their work if there is a rule supporting their language choices although, again, I’d consider ear and sight correction a more important goal.
4) To aid in guessing about how to create unfamiliar sentences based on the rules they know (although really the same can be done by making logical guesses based off of the language they are familiar with rather than some sort of rule and I would say it’s preferable).
Grammar concepts are ultimately quite murky and, let’s face it, in real-time conversation there is absolutely no time think about conceptually complex rules before formulating a sentence. The same applies for most test situations where writing and speaking are required. I can think he with verb+s pretty quickly, but I can’t determine whether what I’m about to say is something connected to both past and present vs. something definitely finished in the past vs. my L1 that would use a present construction.
I remember my first month of teaching; I was ecstatic when I realized the difference between the use of “be” & “do” in present simple was one of verbs vs. other parts of speech. With a grin, I walked into my elementary classes and happily explained this distinction. Yet, my students still consistently failed to grasp this difference.
Then I thought about it. As a native speaker of the language it took me over a month of looking at it and trying to teach it and the difference only clicked with me because my grammatical knowledge had been growing and growing. I analytically understood a grammatical point, but this didn’t really aid my students in terms of meaning and use or really help them at all as they still couldn’t figure out an adjective from a verb unless they really stopped to think about it. We were back to square one.
The same went for me in Turkish. There is a clear grammatical distinction between subject and object relative clauses in Turkish and looking at them really helped me figure out the English equivalents. Yet, despite this knowledge, I still could not use them. I simply couldn’t figure out how to make sentences with them or when to use which form.
Then I started going to the café with co-workers and students after class and the majority of the conversations were in Turkish. One day I joined the conversations and was using relative clauses. Sure, it was a bit haltingly, but it quickly improved. Something had just clicked. I looked at myself and realized my understanding was no different, but intuitively I had started to figure out when to use what. The same went for all the Turkish structures and concepts that differed from ones in English. There was so much stuff that simply never made any sense to me and then I would just find myself using it one day.
If we really look at our learners and our own language learning experiences, this is almost always what happens. There is a point where it just clicks. When we first start to learn language, things go quite slow and we’re always formulating sentences in our heads. With use and exposure, these phrases and transformations become internalized and automatic. Quite quickly we move from checking our utterances against grammar rules to checking our utterances against what sounds or looks right.
This is really the goal. I think much explicit grammar teaching of complex concepts literally slows down the process of actual acquisition as students break language into pieces, obsess about rules before producing, and spend more time translating.
Think about moving to a new country. You always pick up some useful phrases and apply them immediately. You make no grammar mistakes because you have the necessary language as a chunk. Why then do so many beginning students say things like “Where you live?” or “I 18.”? Instead of taking what they’ve heard or seen, they are either translating in their heads or trying to construct sentences based on barely remembered rules. Other students, especially ones that picked up English at younger ages I’ve noticed, never make these kinds of mistakes. They’ve learned things in whole pieces, not bite-sized chunks.
What does all this mean?
1) Students need lots of exposure to the language.
2) Students need to use that language so often that it becomes automatic and comfortable.
3) Getting students to understand the finer points of grammar may make them feel comfortable, but ultimately doesn’t aid their inter-language and production abilities.
4) Spending lots of time on conceptually complex grammar rules is time not well spent.
In the end, my strategy is to give an explanation and then just move on. Turkish students can never figure out why we say “Have you read any of the Harry Potter books?” rather than “Did you read any of them?” Often the murky answer to this question is that it’s the past connected to the future or life experience or something else that the students simply never conceptualize. I provide the appropriate rule, which makes them feel like they know it and therefore comfortable, we move on, and then I encourage use of the structure in that vein through error correction in the class and getting them to notice examples of it in material we use. Sometimes rather quickly, the students just start using it right although I guarantee they aren’t thinking about the rules we worked out previously when they make these sentences.
Over to you. Is the distinction between simple application rules and conceptual distinctions valid? What’s the importance of this adult need to analytically understand things rather than just accepting it as “In English, we use this language in this situation”, especially as it regards motivation? What are your experiences as language learners?
First off, I’ve updated a lot of my lessons and added quite a few new ones. I’ve forgotten to mention that for the last umpteen blogposts. Check ‘em out and feel free to give me feedback on them if you use them .
This is a bittersweet post. I got some bad news a couple weeks ago – the owner of my school is going through some major financial difficulties and can’t afford to keep my branch open through the summer. For this reason, my students, my teachers, and myself have been transferred over to the main branch. At best, it’ll be a year before the branch is able to reopen.
My responsibilities have been much reduced and my travel time to work has doubled, leaving me with a lot of time to reflect. Lots of successes and of course a few failures, with many lessons learned along the way.
I really miss my school already. I was DoS of it for under a year, but we sure accomplished a lot in that time. My team and I were able to take it from less than 40 students with a 10% renewal rate to almost 90 students and an over 90% renewal rate. No small feat in such a short time, especially with practically no support from the main branch.
I can quite honestly say that our little branch was fantastic. It was far and away the best private language school on the Asian side of Istanbul. Students learned English, they learned it well, and they learned it surprisingly quickly. A majority of students went from Beginner to Intermediate in an average of between 180-240 hours.
Lessons learned along the way:
- Teachers get really nervous about observations regardless of how they are done. While I think they are still useful, I’m still searching for some better ways to accomplish the same goals.
- Never fire a teacher over Christmas break when half your staff is away on holiday and you are running two schools with over 500 students and 30 staff .
- Unfortunately, students are still not convinced of the value of non-native teachers. For the most part, our students came around on this eventually, but there was many a struggle with it.
- As a DoS, keep a set schedule and try not to deviate from it too much regardless of what the owner wants. A constantly changing schedule makes it almost impossible to organize things or set up a routine for any number of programs.
- Always have a few teachers on the backbench as possible hires in case something comes up.
- If one of your teachers literally goes crazy, it’s best to get them outside help as soon as possible.
- Create more long-term projects where something concrete and meaningful is produced in classes, especially for upper levels.
- Always talk about any issues with staff or students in private.
+ Don’t hold a meeting if the same information can be relayed by email.
+ A school is a community and should always be treated as such.
I really got a lot out of working at my branch and have a lot of good memories:
Students coming up to me or other teachers and personally thanking me/them for helping them to learn English (and actually seeing that that was, in fact, the case)
Having a teacher get hired by another good school precisely because of the methodology at ours and the things they’d learned.
My first process drama retelling “Little Red Riding Hood” with students coming up with the most hilarious stories.
Getting pumped up before lessons even though some of my teachers thought I was more than a little strange
Students transferring to the other branch and raising hell when other teachers used the book. The main complaint was that “we can do it at home!” (I’m quite proud of that one although I can’t say the teachers in question were very happy about it).
There was a lot more that happened at the school, but these are the things that came to mind while writing this post.
What does the future hold now? I’m not quite sure. Almost at the same time that my branch closed, I’ve had a number of rather interesting new opportunities fall into my lap. I was first thinking about moving on early and going somewhere else, but at least two of the opportunities would keep me in Turkey and seem too good to pass up. The wife and I will definitely have to make some big decisions.
To all my staff and students, a big thank you for the wonderful experiences.
Continuing on from my first post in this series I now want to examine some possible economic inequalities that underlie conference attendance.
Many conferences outside of Turkey come with a very hefty price tag. Not including travel, accommodation, and food, prices of some conferences that I attended this year ranged from 68 to 150 Euro. Now that’s a huge chunk of change, especially for someone on a teacher’s salary in a country where the conversion rate from the local currency to the Euro is 2 to 1, not to mention that time taken off of work. Already, what I’m sure is the vast majority of educators are excluded from the bigger ELT conferences simply by price.
Interestingly enough, at my last international ELT conference, I found out that I seemed to be the only person paying my own way. I was also the only person camping out behind the hotel in a tent . Perhaps one reason why conference fees remain so high is that the average teacher doesn’t actually attend. Expenses are generally covered by the institutions teachers work for. This would mean that, by and large, only teachers working at schools already interested in development and with the expense account to finance it are given the chance to go.
In this respect, should ELT conferences be considered a tool of the elite? Generally, only those from wealthy families, countries or institutions are able to attend the big international conferences. What about the rest of the educators out there?
In contrast to this situation, there have definitely been some positive steps forward with conferences in the form of scholarships and live Internet feeds, and that’s a trend that I hope continues into the future. Would it be possible to do more of this? I think it would even be reasonable to charge a small fee for access to a video archive of talks and workshops. Perhaps more conferences could take this direction in the future.
I’ve been told by some conference attendees and organizers that very little money is made off of conferences. I’d be curious to know for what percentage of conferences that holds true. I’ve also been told by others that prices can be much higher than they need to be. Any readers who have organized conferences in the past, I’d be grateful to get some numbers on either one.
I think the best example of affordable conferences done right is actually Turkey. Conferences in Turkey are usually free or rarely cost more than 15 Euro to attend. Often included in that fee is transportation to and from the event and lunch at the very least. In addition, as they are often organized by large universities or school conglomerates, accommodation is provided on site for a very low fee. If conferences can be organized for this cheap, why can’t the same be done in other countries? Standard expenses here are often comparable to other nearby countries, so there shouldn’t be that much difference.
I think, as members of the ELT profession, we need to critically examine the role of conferences and actually look at who they are benefiting. You seem to see a lot of the same names and faces and conferences and, to me, that‘s more an indication of who has the ability to go rather than who has the desire to go.
What do you think? Could conferences be cheaper? If so, how? What could be done to allow more teachers to be able to attend? Would lower prices even mean more teachers would attend or do the ones that really want to go make it happen? How many people pass on conferences because of expenses? Also – from the other side – isn’t it better to at least have conferences than have nothing? What would be the alternatives?
Have you ever walked out of the cinema and thought to yourself, “Man, I could have written a better ending than that. Hell, my kid could have written a better one”? I think we’ve all been there.
Well, thanks to a comment made by someone on my brother’s Facebook page, I found a site that does just that. It’s called “How It Should Have Ended.”
This would be a great activity for any class to practice past modals. One movie I would love to see on this site is Die Hard 4. God was that awful. An example of the preposterous situations in the movie is given in the pic above. If you’re not familiar with how this film assumed everyone in the audience was an idiot with it’s over-done action sequences and mindless techno-jargon see this Penny Arcade Comic and a hilarious IMDB discussion on “What I learned from Die Hard 4.”
You could teach things like:
The director really shouldn’t have let that annoying kid be in so many scenes.
You’d think that with a multi-million dollar budget they could at least have had some better CGI.
They should have done more research on computers. Last time I checked, it wasn’t possible for the entire Internet to crash.
Proposed Lesson Plan:
Pick a clip from the website of a movie you think most of your students have seen (you could also just show them the webpage and they could call out the films they are familiar with so you can get a good idea for this). Tell your students the movie you have in mind and then ask them to recap it.
Now ask them if they would change anything about the film if they had a chance, especially the ending.
Show the clip and have them compare their proposed changes to the website’s.
Draw their attention to the name of the website and discuss the language for a bit if necessary.
Put students into pairs and have them decide on a movie they have both seen that they think could’ve been better.
Students discuss what could or should have been different. They can write these ideas down if they wish.
Students can then rewrite the ending for the movie as to how they think it should’ve have gone. At this point it would be pretty unnatural to continue using past modals, so the writing would probably be better using normal tenses.
Students present their changed movies to the class and explain their reasoning, fielding any questions the audience might have.
Write the word “Trust” on the board. Ask your students to take a minute and reflect on what trust means to them, where it’s important, and if it’s important in the classroom. You can have them write down some ideas on paper if you wish.
Tell them to share their ideas with a partner.
Now ask the class if they trust you. Hopefully, they say yes . Tell them that you trust all of them and that you are going to prove it to them. Ask them to volunteer a couple ways in which you might do this.
Ask a volunteer to come to the front. Tell them that you are going to fall and that they have to catch you.
Do a practice run so they get a feel for your weight and so they can get the positioning down right. The volunteer should place their hands firmly on your shoulder blades with the fingertips points up (this is very important because the wrists are weak and if they do it the opposite way they could drop you), bend their knees in a tripod fashion, and get themselves squarely under you. See the above picture (although this example has two people supporting which is a good idea for heavier individuals).
Lean backward into them and have them take you farther and farther down each time.
Now tell them you will do it for real. You need to keep your eyes closed, your legs straight, and cross your arms in front of you like the guy in the picture. Then just tip backwards. It’s a bit scary, but the volunteer will catch you.
Now switch positions and do the same with them.
Each student now grabs a partner and they start of with some practice runs and then do the real thing. Warning: Make sure partners are of about equal weight. If there is a really big person in the class, you can do it with two people supporting, one at each shoulder blade. Have them change partners a few times.
You can now do a reflective writing or a round table discussion on how they felt during the exercise. What did they learn about themselves and each other? Is it easy to trust others? Why or why not? In what ways do we need to trust each other in the classroom?
This activity is great for building up relationships in the class and fostering trust. I highly recommend it for any class.
From time to time I’ve decided to throw up a dogme lesson plan. Like most of what I consider to be dogme lessons, this plan was written after the lesson was completed. It is, in fact, a post-plan. As a teacher, I always come to class with something prepared to do, but quite often I chuck it out the window as something else comes up.
These posts will be an attempt to show how I come up with the lesson as it happens.
Banking
Level: Intermediate
Materials Used: None
Time: About 3 hours
In Turkey, students tend to slowly filter in to class during the first hour as being on time is not much of a concern here. Many of my classes, therefore, start out with general conversations or light activities that people can slip into as they arrive.
About a half hour into class a reasonable number of students had arrived and one of the students was telling a story about a problem they had at the bank the other day. Everyone was pretty interested in the story.
Decision: Do a lesson on banking. I decided on this because 1) a number of the students worked or studied banking & finance, 2) it was clear from the conversation that banking vocabulary was weak or unknown, and 3) the students had brought up the subject and were expressing interest.
I thought a good way to do the lesson would be a role-play as I like drama and real life situations.
First (after the student finished telling their story and questions died out), we brainstormed a number of terms that the students should be using like deposit, withdraw, interest rate, signature, etc.
One student started adding words like stock and share-holder and…
Decision: Stop it there as that would be getting off track of the direction the lesson was taking and complicate things too much, especially since many students wouldn’t know those terms and situations even in Turkish. Also, I wasn’t at all confident with that language or those situations in English either and so I doubted my ability to help create an effective lesson in that direction.
After the brainstorm session, I left all the words and phrases on the board. Students then became bank tellers and customers. The bank tellers pulled their chairs to the front of the class and stood behind them as customers formed lines in front of the tellers.
The activity ran for about 8 minutes. I noticed that the students were using a lot of the language we had come up with, but that their general language was very informal. I wound down the activity and everyone went back to their seats.
Decision: Focus on formal language, particularly things like indirect questions, modals, and if clauses. The students obviously had less experience with this and needed the practice.
We now did a bit of feedback on the first part of the lesson. Students asked questions and we added some more language that they needed to the board. We then discussed the formality of the situation and talked about the language used. The students decided that they needed to use more formal language. We brainstormed again and put up example phrases like “Could you tell me your customer number, please?” “Do you mind waiting a minute while I…“ “I was wondering if you could tell me…“ and “If you could just sign right here…”
Switching tellers and customers, the activity ran again. This time students were using much more appropriate language. Again, I helped out students when they got stuck, pointed out minor errors, or commented when students became a bit too informal.
The activity ran for almost 15 minutes this time. Students that weren’t involved in a transaction chatted in line with their fellow customers.
After this activity, I initiated a feedback session and students discussed what they liked about the activity or didn’t, who did a good job, what was easy or difficult, questions they had, etc. While this was happening, I boarded a lot of language, both good and bad, that had come from the students. We talked about the nature of the language, why certain language was good or bad and we discussed corrections in grammar, vocabulary, and register.
After a break, I thought we could work on complaints at the bank as that is basically what started off the lesson. I started by giving an example of a lot of problems I’d been having with Internet banking lately. My plan was to have some students come up with complaints, others be tellers who would decide on a particular emotion to react with, and others to be managers to be called in to help out.
After I told my story though, a number of other students started complaining about Internet banking as well. Still others didn’t trust it and were very curious about those who used it and whether it was safe or not.
Decision: Scrap the original plan and allow an open class discussion. The students were obviously highly interested in the topic and to stop it and move on to something else would perhaps be de-motivating. The students were still recycling much of the language we had been practicing and they were all actively involved in the discussion.
My job was simply to support students in the language they were using if they got stuck, especially regarding vocabulary, and to get them to self-correct some areas of language that we had been working on lately or that particular students were having problems with.
The discussion ran for a good 30 minutes. This time I dictated a number of sentences back to them where they used vocabulary that was too general or structures that were a bit too simple. They copied the sentences down and then had to work in pairs to find ways of improving the sentences using more specific vocabulary we’d covered that day or by making the language more structurally complex. Changes were then discussed as a class.
Including the rather open ended chat in the beginning and breaks, the entire lesson took a little over 3 hours.
So what do you think of the lesson outcome, decisions made, etc? Is this similar to how you run a dogme lesson or different? What would you change or have done differently? If you’re not familiar with dogme, does this lesson help you understand the approach better?
There’s really only one core, key principle when it comes to becoming a successful edu-blogger, and it is this:
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