The slideshow below summarizes a presentation I made on May 18, 2012, at the UDel ELI Faculty Retreat in Chesapeake, Maryland, describing the implementation of a listening lab, starting from scratch, at our language institute. It is still very much a work in progress. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!
May 032012
I had the good fortune of stumbling across Acapela.tv while searching for something else, and what a gold mine it appears to be. The site offers lots of room for online creativity, whether you are a teacher or a student.
Below is a simple dictation exercise I created with the free version in just a few minutes using the “Good Old Times” feature. The announcer, his dress, and the old TV set could also serve easily as a point of departure for a discussion on life “then and now.”
It would be nice to be able to make longer recordings and rid the screen of distracting animations, but I’m guessing an upgrade to the paid version would allow more flexibility.
Apr 242012
If you look forward to doing the crossword, cryptogram, or sudoku puzzle in the daily newspaper, you’re going to like this site.
Word Games is a free online game website where games are organized into channels like word searches, typing, crosswords, sudoku, Mahjong, and puzzles. There is even one called ‘wordoku’ that uses letters for an extra challenge to traditional sudoku. New games are added every Thursday from popular developers including Crazy Monkey Games and Armor Games.
According to its developers, Word Games uses a custom Google search engine to quickly find your favorite games. You can also rate games and send them to friends.
With ESL students, demo an ‘Easy’ category word search and go from there. You might even add a Word Games block to your class blog or wiki to track the best scores per game, and even award extra-credit achievement points.
ELI Trip to Baltimore, 4/07/2012
Last Saturday, 48 ESL students and three teachers from the ELI descended on Baltimore to explore the Inner Harbor. It was a beautiful day — sunshine, blue sky, and just the right temperature.
For me, the highlight of the trip was a tour of the National Aquarium. On display were hundreds of species of exotic fish and other marine wildlife from around the globe. We were dazzled by two divers handling and feeding all sizes of ray fish as if they were pets. Everyone took tons of pictures, including the group photo above, to remember this special day.
Lunch, of course, was at the famed Phillips seafood restaurant just off the harbor. We filled up on Maryland crab cakes, shrimp salad and scampi, and even pesto penne before heading back outside to enjoy more of the sites and shops.
If you’ve never been to this area, here is a short list of places you might want to visit in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:
- National Aquarium (a must see)
- Historic Ships in Baltimore (four ships and a lighthouse)
- Top of the World (observation deck atop a 27-floor building)
- Shopping: Harborplace (160 shops and dozens of places to eat)
- Visitors Center (maps, brochures, helpful advice)
- Maryland Science Center (exhibits, IMAX films, planetarium)
- American Visionary Art Museum
Many of our students expressed a desire to visit Baltimore’s Inner Harbor again, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s so much to see and do there, and it’s just over an hour’s drive from Newark.
Apr 072012
Fun and Games for Practicing Academic Vocabulary
Presenter: Laurie Martin
At TESOL this year, I went to a session on various ways to practice academic vocabulary after the vocabulary has been introduced. The speaker, Laurie Martin, has complete 10-word vocabulary units of academic words at this website as Word documents.
The four games to practice vocabulary that I thought were the best are described briefly below.
1) Say it if… (best for practicing adjectives)
The teacher prepares a list of things that the adjective does and does not describe. In class, the teacher reads one item at a time and the students say the word if the adjective can describe that thing. For example, if the vocab word is “hesitant”, the teacher may say:
- Jump out of a plane with a parachute. (students say, “hesitant”)
- Eat a bowl of delicious noodles. (students shouldn’t say anything)
- Sign-up for a very difficult class. (hesitant)
- Sing a solo at graduation. (hesitant)
- Email a friend with good news. (no response)
*Instead of having the students just say the vocab word sitting in their seats, they could also be standing in a circle and if they want to answer affirmatively, they step into the circle and say the word. You could ask them questions using the vocab words and if that’s true for them, they step into the circle, say the word, and give everyone else who stepped into the circle a high five. For example, “Have you ever felt hesitant to speak English to a stranger?”
2) Categories (competitive game in pairs- writing)
This game is like “Scatergories”. The students are paired up and have to make a list of as many things that are true for each statement as possible. For example, if the vocab word is “intimidating”, then the teacher can say, “Write down 4 things that are intimidating.” After the students do this in pairs, every group shares their answers and the ideas that are correct that no other group has earn 2 points, and the ideas that are correct but shared with another group earn 1 point.
3) Examples and Non-Examples (reading practice)
The teacher will have to spend more time preparing this one. Before class, the teacher writes a two sentences for each word. One sentence is an example of the word and the other sentence is similar but does not exemplify the word. The students read both related sentences and have to circle the sentence that is an example of the word. I think this is a great activity because it also teaches students to learn new words in text books by looking at the examples the author gives to try and teach the new term in the text so the student doesn’t have to look that term up in a dictionary.
EXAMPLE: convert
- David had to change the wmv (Windows movie file) video file into a mp4 file so it would play on his Mac computer.
- David received a wmv movie file from his friend, but he had to download a special program on his Mac to be able to watch it.
4) The Conversation Game (oral sentence-making game)
The students should be very familiar with the words before they try this game. Before class, the teacher writes each word on a separate piece of paper, then makes a small paper ball out of one word and starts wrapping the other words around the first one to make a larger paper ball (like making a rubber band ball). In class, teacher states the topic that the students must create sentences about using the vocabulary words. The students can stand in a circle and the ball is tossed to one student who peels off the paper on the outside with one word on it. That student has to make a sentence using that word. When he finishes, he tosses the ball to someone else and that student peels off the next word and makes a sentence, then tosses it to the next student.
Reviewed by: Julie Lopez
Apr 072012
Creating Effective Curricula for Teaching Academic Writing
Presenter: Eli Hinkel
Ms. Hinkel conducted a meta-analysis of studies conducted from the 1940s to the 2000s regarding what college faculty are looking for in student writing. Perhaps surprisingly, the studies all said the same thing regardless of the decade. College faculty want to see:
- A clear and effective thesis statement
- Up-front organization (what we call the “scope”)
- Support for the thesis statement (reasons and examples)
- Diverse vocabulary
- Beautiful grammar (few if any errors)
- Proper spelling and punctuation
If we want our students to be able to please college professors with their writing, this is, and has been for some time, the recipe. Please see Ms. Hinkel’s impressive website for more details.
Reviewed by: Ken Cranker
Apr 042012
I most enjoyed our very own Nigel Caplan’s presentations (2 of them!) on teaching grammar to graduate students.
Nigel managed to combine theory and practice in a most engaging way. Basing his idea on the work of Michael Halliday, Nigel stressed ways that students can notice and incorporate cohesive features into their texts.
To delineate the features of academic writing, Nigel used two “corpora” on the web: the Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). He isolated the devices that successful writers use to move texts forward (cohesion) and hold them together (coherence) and devised ways to teach these features to his graduate students.
I plan to use Nigel’s ideas to help my students analyze and acquire the features of successful EAPVI papers taken from the soon-to-be released ELI Anthology of Student Writing.
Those interested in more information about Nigel’s work can consult his website.
Reviewed by: Marcia Halio.
CLEAR (Center for Language Education and Research) at Michigan State University – Rich Internet Applications for Language Learning
I happened upon an offering in the Electronic Village on Thursday that was really intriguing and, I think, offers multiple, relatively easy possibilities in terms of materials creation.
Karen Jogan from Albright College and Daniela Nigro from the National University of Cordoba were presenting on “Mashups: Creating Online Interactive Listening/Viewing Activities with Web 2.0”. I will admit I stopped at their station because they included the word “mashup” in their session description (Glee fanatics will understand). Once I was there, I found that the CLEAR Rich Internet Applications included the opportunity to create these mashups, but also allowed for the creation of other interactive materials.
Any materials that you create using the system are FREE, as it is supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (though Nigel reports that their funding may be in danger). They are hosted on the CLEAR website. The folks at CLEAR have provided a host of video tutorials to help you navigate the creation of your documents as well as a list of possible scenarios in which CLEAR could be beneficial to you and your students.
Mashups are cool because you can combine different online resources into a single document, plus you can add in interactive activities – something that you can’t do with Glogster (which I originally thought this program was similar to). You can create a free user account to begin creating a mashup.
I made a very basic mashup sample which you can visit here. You will also be able to view some of the things I learned on the way (for example, your cloze passage can’t be very long or it runs out of the box. Make two separate ones!)
A few additional notes:
- In order to create an activity, you must have 3 items (for example: a MC question, a cloze passage and a sentence mix). Then you can place the SMILE activity ID code into the Mashup editing page. You cannot paste in the ID code for the item – nothing will happen.
- You can move the items around on your mashup page very easily. Just mouse over the icon that looks like a page with two bullets (the text popup will read “Position your elements on the screen”). Keep in mind that not everyone’s screen is large, so I would recommend grouping things radiating out from the upper left hand corner.
- In order to embed a YouTube video, click Share under the video in YouTube, then click “Embed code”. Copy and paste the code into the Mashup.
Happy Mashing!
Reviewed by: Nicole Servais
Apr 032012
Teachers at the ELI were extremely fortunate this year to have the annual TESOL conference in nearby Philadelphia. Over the 3-day event, we were able to take in a number of excellent workshops and presentations that we would like to showcase and share with others who may have missed the conference.
As a lab teacher, one of the best finds for me was the “We Are New York” (WANY) presentation (download handout) in the Developers’ Showcase section. Simply put, WANY is an online video series for immigrant adults with limited English language proficiency.
From the handout: “WANY is is a video series developed by The City University of New York Adult Literacy/GED/ESOL Programs and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Adult Education. Nine episodes and online materials help adults address problems in their daily lives related to asthma, diabetes, smoking cessation, and more.”
The WANY website holds a treasure trove of teaching resources that will be of particular benefit to ESL instructors teaching lower-level students. The actors are very personable and bring authentic accents from such regions as Russia, Korea, Latin America, and the Middle East to the series. Each one has an identifiable goal that viewers can empathize with. The English used is simplified to facilitate comprehension and encourage learning. And the best part: everything is free!
So go ahead and download individual episodes or the whole series, along with the excellent teaching resources that accompany each episode. There are also ancillary videos on YouTube put together by fans of the WANY series (discussing their favorite characters, for example), as well as the trailer below.
Reviewed by: Bob Palmer
Running out of stimulating freewriting prompts for your reading and writing classes? Try a different approach with these thought-provoking picture cards available from Edupress or Painelearning.
Each set of Writing Styles Photo Prompts consists of 32 photo cards, each with three writing prompts on the back. Prompts are slotted into descriptive, narrative, persuasive, and expository categories. Here is an example of a descriptive prompt from the purple door picture:
“What is behind this door? Why is this place called The Shed? Use your imagination and, with as much detail as possible, describe what you see, hear, and smell when you walk through the door.”
If your classroom lacks an OHP, simply scan the photo and save it to a portable USB drive, or email it to yourself as an attachment. Open it up with your classroom computer, and you’ll have a nice-size picture to project from the overhead monitor.
I’ve used this resource in levels III – VI at the ELI, and found that even the quieter students have incredible imaginations. Has anyone else used this type of activity successfully?
