According to Lynell Burmark’s 2011, They Snooze, You Lose, the use of colour in learning materials is beneficial in the following ways:
These research findings are a powerful argument that we are doing our students no service when we rely on photocopies in the classroom!
English Central was pleased to have Elsie and Karen from Eye on Literacy visit us last week. They presented at our Toronto showroom and at the TESL Hamilton conference.
As well as explaining how to use their picture books to build literacy with ESL learners, they shared some useful resources. For ease of reference, we are posting them here:
The title pretty much says it all. Eslvideo.com is a great free resource for teachers. You can take an online video clip from a source like YouTube and create a quiz to go with it. Once you are finished, you can send students to eslvideo.com to complete watch and answer or you can embed the video and quiz onto your own website or blog.
Looking around at some of the videos and quizzes that teachers have made on the site, I was reminded how important it is for teachers to think carefully when they use video. I know that when I was still teaching, I often just wanted to share some of my favourite videos with my students. I knew that was not a good reason to spend class time watching, and yet I often pressed on. Those classes sometimes fell flat; I may have liked the video, but the language may have been way over the students’ heads or there was no clear learning aim. With the principles of effective video use in mind, I created my own quiz on using video on eslvideo.com and embedded it below. Try my quiz!
The Resourceful English Teacher, by the way, can be purchased on our online store. Other books that may be of interest are Using Authentic Video in the Classroom and Film.
Posted by Nicole
“How, exactly, do we teach listening skills??”
Of all the questions asked by teachers, the ones about listening skills seem to indicate the most genuine puzzlement.
Indeed, listening skills are their own unique and challenging issue, but this can be compounded by ineffective tasks that:
aren’t staged or sequenced effectivelyThese issues are likely to have an even greater impact if teacher hasn’t set an engaging and clear context first.
So…here’s a few golden rules to help build more effective listening lessons.
Personalize and engage students before asking them to listen
Set a clear context, preferably using visuals to help activate the appropriate schemata
Ensure there is a clear task set and that tasks are varied – (e.g. a balance of top-down and bottom-up processing)
Ensure the tasks are appropriate to the text
Ensure there is ample time for feedback where the goal is on enabling hearing and practicing effective strategies, not on just getting the answer right
Set tasks that keep students engaged and concentrating throughout the text
Above all, what may simply be required is a shift in perspective. Once we see listening activities as opportunities to improve skills and strategies, instead of tests, the puzzle of just what is supposed to happen in listening lessons becomes much clearer.
3-minute PD
These are two great articles outlining what the heck bottom-up and top-down processing is, and they both offer excellent advice for developing effective listening skills.
Listening Activities for Effective Top-down Processing
Excellent Resources:
Posted by Tania
On most pre-service teacher education courses, the general opinion is that when you first start learning how to teach ESL, avoid humour.
This advice is no doubt born of seeing new teachers tell bad jokes, generate embarrassed silences and then puzzle or offend students.
However, to say ‘avoid humour’ is simply too broad and can result in teachers feeling like they should be stern, stiff and ‘professional’ – which can create an equally ineffective learning atmosphere.
So, why should we bring lots of humour into the class?
Because it:
…and also, studies show that teachers who use humour are seen as more interesting and authentic.
How do we generate it?
Also, it’s good to remember that humour and laughter doesn’t mean you are losing control of the class.
By laughing at ourselves and highlighting the ridiculousness of life you ultimately show your humanness – and that’s what your students will respond to most.
3-minute PD
Ten Techniques for Developing Humour in the Classroom
Posted by Tania
As huge fans of dictation exercises (including dictoglosses), we find it distressing that dictation is often overlooked as a useful classroom activity.
Many teachers see dictation as a throw-back to teacher-centred, uncommunicative activities and believe students will think dictations are boring, stressful and pointless.
If the dictation is handled with old-school techniques, we can see why people would think this.
So, we encourage you to drag this teaching gem out of the dusty closet. Just rethink the who, the what and the how.
In other words, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – just get a funky new bathtub and buy the baby a snazzy new bath toy.
Dictation activities are excellent for a variety of reasons, including:
Tips to make dictations student-centred and engaging
Put more control in the hands of the students
Create student-to-student dictations to work on pronunciation practice and recognition skills.
When students compare their errors, were they due to a lack of accurate pronunciation or inaccurate listening?
Use a CD/tape recorder and put a student (or students) in control of the pace.
Switch up what needs to be written down
Make it more communicative
Choose an interesting or puzzling text that will promote follow on discussion and pique students’ interest
Create a dynamic and energy-raising running dictation.
And importantly, avoid the traps of…
…forgetting to provide feedback on their errors. No matter how fun or interesting a dictation is, if students don’t see the learning value, they will not feel the class has been worth their time or money.
…using a text that has many unknown vocabulary items. This leads to frustrated students and defeats the aims of the dictation in the first place.
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Take a 3-minute PD opportunity and read this great article outlining even more reasons to do dictations.
If you want some truly excellent creative and engaging dictation activities, check out these two books.
Dictation, by Mario Rinvolucri and Paul Davis
Grammar Dictation, by Ruth Wajnryb
Posted by Tania
Promoting Learner Autonomy
We want our students to be proactive, take risks and take responsibility for their own learning because we know that’s how they will go on to be successful in their future studies. ..but they aren’t. Why not?
There are many reasons, but most of them seem to fall within these categories:
1) cultural and educational background
2) unrealistic goals
3) lack of awareness of critical thinking skills and autonomous learning strategies
Want to see how autonomous your learners are?
Here’s a little checklist adapted from EAP Essentials.
Do your students…:
If you answered yes to these, chances are your learners are passive, risk-averse and/or unreflective – in other words, possessing low independence competencies.
But just what does it take to gain a high level of autonomy in both study skills and continued language acquisition?
There are lots of different theories and ideas on this, but the main thinking is that students need to be encouraged to become active, comfortable with risk and reflective.
As such, our role as the teacher needs to incorporate not only this recognition, but also active facilitation and effort to develop these attributes.
To check your own ‘autonomy pulse’, here’s a quick check list of practical classroom activity. See how many you incorporate into your daily teaching. You might be surprised by just how often you do encourage independence.
Ask yourself to what extent do you…
However, like change, autonomy cannot come before awareness and as teachers, we must be aware that we can’t ‘demand’ autonomy, we can only encourage and facilitate it.
3-minute PD:
Read Susan Austin’s excellent article on Encouraging Learner Autonomy
Further Reading:
EAP Essentials, by Alexander et al. published by Garnet Education.
Posted by Tania
Do you ever think, “I’d like to do something different in my classes, but…
Changing our habits and taking risks to expand our teaching horizons can be an unnerving adventure for most of us. Unfortunately, it’s not just lack of exposure to new methods or materials that make it challenging to keep your teaching fresh — it could also be your unconscious thinking patterns – about your materials, your students and your planning decisions - that can make it even more difficult for you to make a change.
Top Thinking Traps
These traps come from a great blog post on litemind.com and are based on psychological research and studies and have everything to do with being human and not much to do with being a teacher. However, as ones who like to throw the inspiration net wide, there could be some interesting lessons to learn here. After all, we are people first and teachers second, and the often unconscious way our thinking impacts decisions and choices is bound to have influence on both our personal and professional lives.
The Status Quo Trap
This could also be called the inertia trap. Why was it so easy as a new teacher to experiment and try new approaches, resources, methods? Because we had no established frame of reference – no status quo – to break from.
What can you do about it? Consider the status quo as just another alternative. Don’t get caught in the ‘current vs. others’ mindset. Analyse the appropriateness of new approaches and unfamiliar techniques, but try doing it as you would have all those years ago.
The Confirmation Trap
You hear about a new way of teaching, or a different kind of activity, but you have suspicions. You seek out someone you know who has tried it (not very successfully) and you ask her why it didn’t work. You have just walked into a confirmation trap – you looked for information that would most likely support your initial suspicions. Apparently this not only affects where we look for information, but also how we interpret it.
What can you do about it?
Don’t avoid or immediately dismiss information that runs contrary to your initial opinion. Seek out devil’s advocates and keep an open mind. Be aware of our natural inclination to prove ourselves right and first try to prove yourself wrong instead.
The Incomplete Information Trap: Check those assumptions
You’d like to try something, but you are sure your students would hate it. However, you hear about how another teacher is quite successful with this new thing. Instead of rejecting it with the belief that it just wouldn’t work with your students, analyse those assumptions more carefully.
The Superiority Trap
This trap states that in general, people have a rather inflated opinion of themselves. This is even truer for those people who have enjoyed a fair amount of success in their chosen field (read: experienced teachers). We like to think all those accolades of, “You’re the best teacher ever!”, and “I LOVE your classes!” are reserved for us and us alone, and for our styles and approach alone. However, this just isn’t true.
We can all benefit from continued growth and change, but believing that you have nothing left to learn (or that none of the plethora of thinking traps apply to you) won’t facilitate this.
Staying humble doesn’t minimize anything you already do. It merely makes it much more possible to continue doing more great things – in ways you haven’t in the past.
We are always asking our students to take risks and get comfortable with making mistakes in service of learning. Perhaps it’s time, if we truly wish to continue our own growth as educators, it might be worth considering to what extent we take our own advice.
For more thinking traps to avoid, check out litemind’s blog: http://litemind.com/thinking-traps/
Posted by Tania
According to Barbara Gross Davis, author of Tools for Teaching,
“Students learn best when they are actively involved in the process.
Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats. Students who work in collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their classes.”
I think this makes a lot of sense, however, ensuring everyone is equally involved, engaged and operating with the same goals and beliefs about group work is a different kettle of fish. there are potentially a lot of underlying ideas as to what participation means, what interaction means and what goal achievement actually involves – and these underlying ideas can differ widely from person to person. Even more challenging is that many beliefs are unconscious, so the believers don’t even know themselves what it is that has made them behave in a particular way during a group task.
So, here’s some ideas to help the process and uncover those ideas of just what good group work involves.
These tips came from our teaching and training experiences as well as from an excellent article in Humanizing Language Teaching Magazine, by Jessica Watson – Talking Together: Working Towards Better Group Work
Free downloadable pdf discussion worksheet ‘Talking points about group talk’ discussion worksheet.
Posted by Tania
In December, Lindsay Clandfield and Nicky Hockly were kind enough to present a webinar for us on the subject of teaching online. We had the greatest turn out yet of all the webainrs we have offered and there have been plenty of requests for the recording to be made available. Because of turkey and champagne, there has been a bit of a delay. Now that we are fully into 2011 and there has been time to recover from the holidays, I have had the chance to post the recordings, so sit back and enjoy. And after that…. go to the shop section of our website to pick up your own copy of Lindsay and Nicky’s book, Teaching Online. ; )
Posted by Nicole
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Webinars, conferences, in-store workshops and more make English
Central an excitingly eventful place. Find out more about all the great
things that are going on in the next few weeks. 
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