It’s Never Too Late to Integrate (skills)!

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Integrating language skills in your lesson can kill two birds with one stone: you can cover more material and attempt to simulate a more natural language environment (in my humble opinion).

There are many ways to do this, but one quick way is by using listening to introduce key language (like vocabulary or grammar). Pick a conversation or a song (If you can’t find one, just record one yourself! You can do this easily with this website.) that includes the language point you are covering. Prepare some questions for the students answer while listening to help them highlight key points of the language being taught. By answering the questions about the language, they are encountering the grammar or vocabulary you want to teach while at the same time getting some listening practice in.

This method can also help speed up the clarification of the lesson’s language because your students will already have answered most of their own questions through the language analysis provided while listening. In the end, this can give them more time to focus on practicing in class :) . So, try it out if you haven’t already!

image: www.colourbox.com

Reduce your TTT!

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By TTT I mean teacher talk time of course! For this week’s teaching tip, I would like to share with you a few tips on how to reduce the amount of time in the lesson you, as the teacher, spend speaking. Why is it important to reduce your TTT? Well, as I always say, it is my students (not me) who need to improve their English. Therefore, they need as much speaking practice time in class as possible :).

Here are a few ideas:

  1. Student talking time (STT) should be around 75 % of the class. Plan your classes taking this into consideration. a class which is not previously planned is likely to have an excessive amount of teacher talking time.
  2. Have your students do plenty of pair and group work.  Monitor students’ performance by discreetly circulating among them while they are working, and assisting them when necessary.
  3. Use body language whenever possible. It is amazing how much you can reduce your TTT by using a simple gesture in place of a verbal explanation. 
  4. Have students read the instructions for textbook activities and model the examples if any instead of you.
  5. Listen to your students patiently and attentively.  Resist the temptation of interrupting them while they are talking. Also, after you ask a question  count to 10 before you say anything. Don’t be afraid of long pauses because this will give students enough time to think and formulate a response.
  6. Provide your students with enough support language when they engage in discussions and role plays. Prepare posters of common A/B dialog sentence structures. The students can refer to them while doing group and pair work.  This will lessen the amount of support/nudging during group/pair work and increases the amount students talk!
  7. Let your students be teachers once in a while.  We can also learn from them!

Have any other ideas? Feel free to share them in the comments!

  image source: teachertoolkit.me 

5 Quick Activity Ideas Using a Cell Phone Camera

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Cell phones—most of our students have them and most of the time they make our jobs harder! Students are texting, checking emails or checking Facebook when they should be paying attention in class. However, there are some great ways to incorporate students’ cell phones into your lessons to build student engagement and motivation. Here are 6 quick ideas for using a cell phone camera in your class. Enjoy!

  1. This first idea is pretty easy to use and helps the students focus more when you are doing board work. Some students love to take lots and lots of notes. However, others tune out during these parts of the lesson unless they can focus on the board and ask questions. To help out the latter, have your students take photos of notes on the board. This way the students who like taking notes are getting double notes (they LOVE this) and other students are able to focus in a way that suits their learning style.
  2. The Picture Preposition activity: have your students take a picture of an object in the school > the students text a partner the picture >the partner has to text back a description of the position of the object using proper prepositions of place > then the students text the sentences to the teacher for correction. If your students don’t feel comfortable texting each other, you can just have them show each other the pictures in class and write/say the sentences.
  3. For homework, have your students take a picture of something interesting. Leave it open-ended to see what they come up with. Have them show the picture to a classmate the next day in class. That classmate needs to use the picture as inspiration for an essay topic.
  4. Put students in small groups and have them make a simple slide show story by  taking 4-6 snapshots that illustrate important moments in the story.  They then have another group scroll through the images on the phone in order and verbally tell the story as they imagine it from the pictures. 
  5. Make a vocabulary exercise in which each student is given a word. They then have to illustrate that word with three photographs taken with their cell phones by the end of the day to share in class. 

image source: www.123rf.com 

This is Noga La’or, the Academic Director here at Rennert International, sharing some tips on how to use TED talks in the classroom. 

Transcript:

Noga: Hi everyone, my name is Noga and I am the Academic Director here at Rennert International based in New York and what I’d like to talk about today is how to use TED talks in your classrooms. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and there are whole variety of TED talks on TED.com. For these TED talks you have people from different communities, different cultures, different countries coming together and giving talks that  are anywhere from 2 minutes to 20 minutes in length about a variety of different topics. There are talks about design, education, entertainment, technology, health—there are even some inspirational talks. These are great—this is great authentic material to use with higher level students. You can build an entire lesson around a TED talk where you introduce the topic, you pre-teach the appropriate vocabulary, you do comprehension check activities and you can even have post listening or post watching activities that’ll allow the students to continue speaking about the topic and to use the language in a meaningful way. Rennert will actually be holding a workshop for higher level students on a TED talk on May 30th at 6pm and if you would like to attend as an observer to see how you can present a TED talk in your classroom we would be more than happy to have you. So, hopefully we’ll see you there! Thank you and good luck!

Common English Mistakes and Mix-ups: altogether vs all together

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All together is a phrase that means everyone (a group) does something all at the same time or a group of things are together in the same place. For example:

  • Let’s sing the chorus all together!
  • Put the vegetables all together in the sink and I will wash them in a minute.
  • The last time we were all together was way back in high school!

Altogether is an adverb that means completely/totally or in total. For example:

  • I have 7 pets altogether: 2 cats, 1 dog, 3 fish and a bird!
  • The price of the vacation package is $3,000 per person altogether.
  • I can’t believe it! We were supposed to have a huge thunderstorm today, but it stopped raining altogether! 

Helpful Tip: If you can replace the word with ‘completely’ or ‘in total’ you should use altogether. If you can replace the word with ‘in a group’ then you know you want all together. Just read the sentence out loud and substitute one of these phrases. After that you can feel altogether confident about choosing altogether or all together!

image source: aurorameyer.com

Weekly Teaching Tip: Multi-level Classes

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It is unrealistic, in my opinion, that a teacher will encounter a class in which the students are all the exact same level. It is natural to have a mix of similar yet different levels in the same class. Sometimes, though, the disparity between students’ levels can negatively affect the way your classroom operates. One of the following tips might help to fix that situation:

(1) Set activities that are open-ended so that students can respond at their own level.This means that you give everyone the same activity, but the student will choose how they will complete it based on their language level. For example, you can assign a basic journaling activity, but leave it open ended in terms of the exact topic/length. In the same amount of time, students at a higher level will write a longer more complete entry while the lower level students will complete something shorter and less complex. 

(2) Arrange activities so collaboration is involved. You can pair higher level students with lower level students to encourage peer teaching. You can also pair similar level students, but perhaps alter the task/your expectations of the task. More on this last point to come.

(3) Use different criteria for ‘success’. As I mentioned above, you can give the students the same activities, but you should assess them differently based on what their level is capable of. This means that a higher level student and a lower level student can reach the same level of success, but the work that they will have completed will look very different :) .

(4) Have compulsory material and optional material. This is a great way to manage those high level early finishers. Have all student complete the same task, but prepare additional materials that can allow early finishers to interact more deeply with the language being taught. 

(5) Work with the whole class at first, but adapt the materials or tasks for different levels. This corresponds with my point in number 2 about grouping students with other students of a similar level. This method is the most work for the teacher. You might present the language of the day to the whole group, but you have prepared level appropriate materials for the high group and the low group. All students are learning about the same topic, but completing different activities that are suitable to their level. 

I hope at least one of these tips will be helpful for you! Dealing with a mixed-level class is never a piece of cake, but taking into consideration the above points it can still be a rewarding experience for you and your students!

image source: hub1.worlded.org 

Quick Activity Idea: Peer Sentence Correction

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Can also be used in your language classroom!

Giving students feedback on their language is not only your job as a teacher, but also a key part of the language learning process. It can be fun and rewarding to get the students involved in this process to build learner autonomy, language self-reflection skills, and build student motivation in class. 

Here’s a sentence correction activity to try (leave 15-20 minutes at the end of class/activity to do complete the following):

1. During a fluency activity, or throughout the lesson, take notes on common errors you notice. Choose to focus on just one type of error. Correcting a lot of errors at once can be overwhelming and hinder students’ learning. Some categories are: habitual errors, errors that relate to the language you are teaching that week, common errors of the level you are teaching, or errors that block communication.

2. When you are taking notes, make sure you are writing in full sentences and writing in a way that will allow you to cut up the sentences into strips.

3. After you cut up the strips, put them all in the center of the table. Have your students choose 1-2 sentences each, or a few sentences in groups or pairs. Your students should not know who made the errors.  

4. The students then work alone or in groups or pairs to correct the sentences. You can then collect the strips, put the corrected sentences on the whiteboard and have whole class correction.  This preserves anonymity.

I hope you found this helpful and can try this out with your class :) .

image source: flickr.com

This is Maria, a teacher trainer at Rennert International, giving 2 quick tips about teaching beginner level students.

Transcript:

Maria: Hi, my name is Maria and I am a teacher trainer here at Rennert, but before I was a teacher trainer I taught beginners for many years. And one thing that I found super helpful was acting things out as I did them. Now it is important to think about because beginners have limited vocabulary, their listening skills are also limited, so how I supplemented that was if I gave them any instructions I would actually do them as I delivered the instructions. So, if you want them to stand up, I actually stood up so they could see what I wanted from them and that was really important. If I wanted them to, you know, write a paragraph I would gesture, you know, the writing. So, things like that are really really important. Gestures and body language are really important for beginners because that is how they can make the connections—that’s how they can start to make the connections between what the words are and what you actually expect them to do. Another thing that I found was really helpful was to have a bank of pictures available. So, if your students have questions about, you know, an object, a particular object or don’t know what that is having a picture of it really makes it just much smoother and they make that instant connection. So, for instance if the picture—if the word, is umbrella or something and you pull out a picture of umbrella, “Oh, that’s umbrella”, so they are able to make that instant connection with that. And it’s just really helpful for your students to start to build that vocabulary and start to make those connections, and it gives them a lot of confidence because they are able to understand what you want from them and they are able to actually do the activity smoothly. So, try that out and I’m sure you’ll be great! Bye!

Common English Mistakes and Mix-ups: already vs. all ready


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These are easy to mix up when writing because they are pronounced the same way even though all ready is 2 words and already is 1 word. 

All ready is a phrase that means absolutely, totally, completely ready :). For example: I studied a lot last night. I am all ready to take that test now! 

Already is an adverb that usually has 2 meanings. First, it can mean that something happened sooner than you expected. For example: I can’t believe you already bought all of your Christmas presents! It is only July! 

It can also mean that something happened before the moment you are speaking. For example: I can’t believe you already saw that movie! I thought we were going to watch it together.

So, how can you prevent mixing them up? I like to think that if I am ‘all ready’ I don’t have to rush anymore because my work is done, so I have time to write 2 words. Another tip is that already is usually used with the present perfect tense (She has already eaten—it happened at a non-specific time before right now), but all ready is often used with either the simple present or simple past (She was all ready for her trip, so she left. I am all ready for the hug you promised me).

I hope you found this tip helpful! Good luck :).

image: www.abaenglish.com

Weekly Teaching Tip: Collocate!

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image: blog.suss-argentina.com.ar

Students often say that they understand/know grammar or vocabulary, but are stumped on how to actually use what they know in a conversation. When teaching vocabulary or grammar, it is really helpful to present and practice the language in chunks of speech. These helpful chunks should include the common collocations that are associated with the language. Chunking what you are teaching (including helpful collocations)  can really help build a bridge between what students know and what student can say.  For example, take a look at this graphic organizer focusing on the noun money:

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image: www.funkyenglish.com

If I only teach the word ‘money’, students will only know how to use the word ‘money’. However, by  incorporating the commonly collocated verbs, the students can begin to practice and gain confidence about how to use it when they are speaking. They can also infer from the collocations some common contexts the word money is used in.

Did you know that the 10 most frequent nouns used (collocated) with “How Many …?” are: people, times, years, hours, children, kids, women, days, votes, men?  I used to teach this grammar to talk about countable food like apples, oranges and bananas, but after I found out about the above fact I completely changed my lesson around.

Teaching grammar with the most commonly used words can prepare students for language use in the real world. Try to keep this in mind the next time you plan a vocabulary or grammar lesson :).