TEFL In The Classroom
Read about bloopers, disasters, and everyday classroom drama here.
Saving A Lesson Gone Bad
With experience I get better, but I don’t get perfect. What do you do when a lesson starts to go sour? This could mean that students really don’t catch on to the task or language point, or just don’t like the activity.
If students seem not to get it, it could be that my instructions weren’t clear or I didn’t clarify something well. Even if that is the problem, I’m still faced with the same dilemma: what to do when I realize that in class?
Date: January 24th, 2008 |
1 comment
Wikipedia In Class
A creative teacher at the ESL café - Leigh Thelmadatter - had a neat idea for an interactive writing activity: organize a lesson or series of lessons where your students participate in editing a Wikipedia page on something they are uniquely qualified to speak on. The theme would vary based on your own students, but the teacher in question gave the example of such as Music in Mexico. In a post, Leigh wrote:
all I had to do was have them critique the “Music of Mexico” article and see where many of the edits are coming from. Despite the thousands of edits that article has… and continues to get… my students always diss the form it is in. Finding out that people from as far away as Russia and Japan (not to mention the US) are writing about their stuff can get their dander up pretty good.
If you’re interested in having your students improve Wikipedia pages, here is a link to Leigh’s user page at Wikipedia which you can visit for examples or help.
I think this is an excellent activity for a couple of reasons:
Students are using English in an authentic way, with a real world purpose, and not just for a class assignment.
It is highly motivating to correct misinformation that someone has given about “yourself” or your own country.
While I wouldn’t rule out pre-teaching words, I think this activity would be best for students who could understand much of the vocabulary already. This teacher did not present a step by step activity, but I imagine I’d do it something like this:
Date: January 11th, 2008 |
3 comments
Leading Group Discussions
“Many experienced instructors consider leading small-group discussion more difficult and more challenging than lecturing to a room of two hundred. The lecturer has significant control about what happens in the classroom, while the discussion leader shares control and direction with the students. The best-laid plans must yield to the never wholly predictable factors of the students’ enthusiasm, their preparedness, and the general dynamics of the group.”
A little bit of chicken soup for the EFL teacher’s soul, for me anyway, especially knowing that it came from some kind of teaching assistant’s guide from Princeton.
Its advice on leading discussions:
Ask more divergent than convergent questions. In other words, questions which have more than one answer will lead to better group discussions than questions with one “correct” answer. In general, I agree.
Encourage students to hold discussions with each other, instead of expecting the ultimate response or final word to come from you. Sounds good.
Instead of your frequently summarizing the discussion along the way, ask one or two students what they think were the most important points made at each stage of the discussion.
I like this, and might adapt “most important” to “most interesting” or something, as “importance” can be hard to identify when the point of the discussion is fluency practice.
Listen to what your students are saying. Hmm…do I have to? In fact, this was followed by “take notes and refer to good points later.” I agree that is an encouraging and nice touch.
“The art of questioning”
Date: January 7th, 2008 |
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The 420,000 Days Of Christmas
None of that twelve days business here at the TEFL Logue. To round out the year, here are a few numerical links. What does 420,000 stand for? I’m taking guesses as comments - once I get a few creative ones, I’ll give a clue!
On the first day of TEFL, you might want to try some of these TEFL warmers.
On the second day of TEFL, you should probably do some revision activities.
And then we have
1 article on making money blogging (Without being a real blogger who has done things from scratch, my take is: …
Date: December 29th, 2007 |
7 comments
Tips And Tricks For "Problem Students"
I popped into the friendly forums at eslHQ and found some useful hints, tips and tricks for dealing with “problem students” of all kinds. Here are my top four problematic student situations and how I have dealt with them. Can you add anything?
First I should say that I believe classroom “problems” don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not as if there is only one possible solution for each for each problem that comes from exactly one source (you, the teacher). A class of adult learners is much like any group of people, and while as the teacher I am in a position to set the tone for the class, the six, eight, or twelve others in the room bear some responsibility for the dynamic too. Beyond that, students do in fact exist outside my classroom (at least I think they do), and have several years of education prior to it. I think it’s important to realize that plenty of these problems are not going to be solved by, say, better concept-check questions or a different seating arrangement. Still, you do what you can, and with that in mind:
The student who talks too much
This is the student who jumps in when you call on others, or just takes more than a reasonable share of the speaking time.
Why?
It may happen because you “let it” – by not “controlling” the class enough – but it can be hard to reconcile this with the goal of being student-centered. I think some people just like to talk a lot, or are just enthusiastic about speaking English, and are not inclined to put themselves in the shoes of others who may also need practice speaking.
What to do?
Date: December 27th, 2007 |
4 comments
A New Year In The Blogosphere: TEFL On The Web News
EFL Geek recently shared his first article for the Korean Herald - on Konglish. Read the article for an explanation of Konglish and some examples.
I was ready to say that the countries I’ve worked in really don’t have anything like this … but as I came up with examples of common mistakes, I realized: they do! I have to say they don’t sound as innovative as the Konglish examples, but I think they are similar anyhow.
Some are even the same in different Slavic-language speaking countries, and at times I’ve caught myself using a little …
Date: January 18th, 2008 |
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"The Art Of Questioning": How To Get A Discussion Going
Do you have a specific strategy for getting the discussion going when your questions receive blank stares?
I came across some tips for group discussions from a Princeton handbook for teaching assistants which has some interesting, if not always totally relevant, insight on leading lively discussions.
Keep in mind that the questions given as examples are geared towards university classes on topics like literature. I left them in partly for amusement, because it’s pretty hard to imagine those specific questions coming up in an EFL class, even in a higher level one. Students are rarely put into a position to look for underlying meaning – that’s hard enough for people in their own language! - and most questions will be about the content itself or students’ opinions. Still, I think the examples illustrate the types of questions well.
According to the guide, types of questions that generate discussion well:
The playground question: “Well, that’s a very rich sentence [after reading an excerpt from a book]. . .there’s a lot there. . .OK, what’s there?”
In EFL this would probably be too vague.
The focal question: “Is Ivan Illych a victim of his society, or did he create his problems by his own choices?”
I think this type of question does often lead to a good discussion, as long as students recognize the implicit “why”.
The brainstorm question: “What kinds of things is Hamlet questioning, not just in his soliloquies, but broadly throughout the whole play?”
In a format relevant to something you’ve done in class, and in understandable language – yes (“What kind of people might find this text most useful?” “ Remember the text we read last week, about global warming – what parts of this text would that author agree with? What would he add?”)
Types of questions that don’t generate discussion well:
Date: January 7th, 2008 |
4 comments
Student-Centered Activities
Brigh-eyed and bushy-tailed … or something like that … in the early stages of my TEFL course I came across a bunch of new concepts. It occurs to me now that when people ask “what is a CELTA (or other certificate course) like?”, explaining some of these – and how we would “practice” them in the course might be a better answer than listing activities.
So what does “student-centered” mean?
Imagine the task is for half the students to pretend they are elderly former celebrities, and the other half to pose as journalists interviewing them. Maybe you’ve just dealt with present perfect and one of the aims is to give students a chance to use that tense in their speech.
One approach might be:
The teacher comes up with questions herself and writes them on the whiteboard, the students do the activity, and then one by one she asks students what their answers were or what their partner said. She then asks some follow-up questions about the content of the answers. If students make mistakes, she gives them the correct answer and they repeat it after her.
(Kind of a caricature, of course, for the sake of the example)
Another approach:
The teacher comes up with a few questions herself as examples, and then ask students in pairs to come up with a few more each; while they are working she writes hers on the board, and then students come to the board to write up theirs.
Date: December 31st, 2007 |
2 comments
Tips And Tricks For "Problem Students", The Sequel
Read Tips and Tricks for Problem Students - Part One first.
The student who won’t talk
This is a problem because most native speaker teachers are – at least to some extent – there to get students to use the language and specifically to speak. Many tasks and activities require students to speak and in fact depend on their willingness to do so.
Is this student quiet because that’s their personality? Because they are not up to the level or don’t feel confident? Is something in the class making them feel uncomfortable?
The solution depends on the reason: pairwork should probably be part of the class anyway, and may be especially useful for those who are nervous about speaking in front of the group. If the problem is something in the class, see what you can do to alleviate it. I had one very aware student actually write on a feedback form “Please don’t ever make me work with Adam again”, along with a smiley. Problem solved – if only all students were this politely vocal about similar issues!
Date: December 28th, 2007 |
2 comments
Pre-Literate Learners
Of the 380 English spelling rules, only ONE has no exceptions – no English word ends with the letter “v”.
Source: The American Literacy Council. (All quotes taken from espindle.org)
Most U.S. adults who learn to read well enough to be functionally literate require at least two years of reading instruction to become literate, while students in more than 98% of all other alphabetic languages learn to read in less than three months.
Source: Welcome to the Solution to English Illiteracy.
The United States is ranked 49th among the 156 United Nation member countries with regard to literacy.
Source: United Nations
George Bernard Shaw created the word “Ghoti” which he suggested was pronounced like the English word “fish” if some of the precedents of English spelling were used. He pointed out that the “gh” was pronounced like “f” as in “enough”, the “o” as in “women” and the “ti” as “nation.”
Source: REY, D S., 2006. Language In Use [online]. Cambridge, UK.
As if that isn’t enough to scare your typical learner away, imagine that you’d never learned to read or write in your own language.
That is exactly the situation facing a portion of the students in ESL classes throughout the US, and a class in Kansas City Missouri is described in Programs focus on illiterate immigrants.
Date: December 21st, 2007 |
3 comments
