The Grammar Thing

  Just how much grammar should a person know in order to teach English? Perhaps for beginning classes, not much; however, knowing the grammatical structure of the language you teach might help you even with beginners. What do you think? How much should you know? How important is grammar in ELT?

 Check out Carmeyrose’s youtube videos http://www.youtube.com/user/carmeyrose) :

                                             

 How much do you know? Respond to these right here in this post.

 If you need to review, attached is a PPT you can look at to review the eight parts of speech. Before you view, can you name them?U1 Grammar parts of speech. Also, please visit under TKT support, Your Teacher Trainer for great practice.

Now, here is a Website that can get your students practicing their grammar: http://www.timetoast.com/. By having students set up a timeline to tell certain events about the past, or certain events they plan to do in the future, they can have fun while creating an online timeline to be shared with everyone an apply their knowledge in a real life fun activity. Make it relevant, make it fun.

Welcome to the TKT Course

You made it! You are about to embark on a journey that will help you be not just a well-prepared teacher to take the TKT exams, but also a great teacher with lots of tricks, tools and toys up his or her sleeve.

Welcome to the TKT Preparation Course I am very excited about starting a fresh semester with you.

TKT is a course and test about teaching English to speakers of other languages. In this course, you will not only be learning strategies to help you pass the test but you will also discover strategies, techniques and methods to improve your teaching.
You might end up shaking your foundations and at the very least, breaking your own traditions to let some new ones in.

Subscribe to the blog for any new posts or pages. In order to grow with this course you must participate in the post forums in an active and substantial manner. Please read the page Blogging to do’s for details.

Substantial= 75 words initial post with minimum amount of grammar and spelling mistakes. 25 words minimum to reply to someone. Posting,”Good job!” will not make it here.

Special Requirements:
80% attendance to class session (presencial)
100% self-discovery work, essays, posts, and assignments
80% GPA on the three exams

As part of the class you must create a blog which you will use in this class as your interconnected e-portfolio. Two blog spaces are recommended: WordPress.com or Edublogs.org. Both sites will walk you through the set up process. Set up your blog before class starts. On the class blog you can find Teacher Challenge on the right hand side. This can walk you through the blog-set up process.

Start participating and getting used to our blogsite by stating what you plan to do with the TKT certificate once you pass this diploma course. Click on the comments button and add your participation to this post.

Also, since we don’t start class until a week from now, why don’t we get started with our introductions? Please leave your introduction on the Voicethread found http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=2731337.

Copyright Laws and Plagiarism on your Blogs

I’d like to invite all my readers to read a post written by Sue Waters of The Edublogger, the brain behind Edublogs. I believe this is s timely post for many of you who have copied pictures from Google without giving credit to the original authors.

Read this post and find out what to do to avoid breaking the law:
The Educator's Guide Copyright Laws

Fun new Internet toys…I mean tools.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time trying to get students more engaged in what they are reading: every semester of English language teaching I ask my students to read and report on a book, perhaps a graded reader, perhaps authentic extensive reading. I make sure that students do not feel the pressure of getting a grade, but they know that completion of the task will help them.

Up to this point I had been using Toondo and Glogster to get student to synthesize what they read. I just played with some great synthesizing tools:
Magazine Cover Creator,
ReadWriteThink Printing Press, and
CD/DVD Cover Creator (DVD Cover option).
Here is what I did:

My favorite was the Magazine Cover Creator I rank it a 10+ for easy-to-use, easy to edit and fun to create toy…oops, I mean tool. Students can use this tool to summarize short readings.

When trying out the Magazine cover Creator, I read this article. The article presents an online quiz to see your level of technological savvy. Then using the Magazine Cover Creator, I synthesized what I had read into a general synthesis, using color, pictures and words.

It was easy-to-use and had very little to read in the way of instructions. I think that it is much easier than my former ways of asking students to synthesize. I plan to use these and during next semester, I’ll let you know how it went.

TKT Special Treatment: Access to Gotta Getta Blog Series: Get your students talking with Fotobabble

As some of you won’t be able to attend the Regional Convention of Mextesol, and attendance to the workshop I will give is limited to 26 seats per session, here is the Gotta Getta Blog series workshop I will be sharing during the convention.

The topic is how to get your students talking using Fotobabble. The use of this application by beginning and advanced level students at university level is demonstrated in the workshop. However, Fotobabble is an online speaking application that can be applied to any age.

Check it out through the Google doc PPT here. Enjoy!

Please leave your responses to these discussion questions as a comment at the end of this post. Your comment will be approved as I read them but will not be visible immediately.
Discuss it, through this discussion forum here.
What are the pros?
What are the cons?

What my students really think of school

As we came back to the last three weeks of classes after a three week Christmas break, I decided to ask my university students what words they associated with their lives as students. I gave them markers, cut papers and asked them to post words they associated with Student Life.
I was flabbergasted by the results. I asked them to classify the words they had posted into positive or negative categories. This is what they came up with:

Positive words:
party, intelligence, learning, party, having friends, conferences, really caring about learning (I love this student), vacation, fun.

Negative words:
responsibilities, books, junk food, projects, hunger, headaches, hard work, exams, more exams, studying, homework, tests, reading, writing, paying attention, studying, more homework, stress, questions, reading and not understanding, homework, no social life, sacrifice, tests, no sleeping.

As I read their cards, my students noticed that my smile started to fall. They quickly reassured me that they were referring to their life in general and that their class with me was the first time they had ever been able to express themselves with the truth.

My students have mostly been schooled in traditional settings. Many traditional teachers (the majority) believe that our students in Mexico are accustomed to the traditional passive receptive learning model and that we should not change. What my students expressed voices just the opposite. I have been making baby steps towards change in classrooms in my area through this teacher training course, but we definitely need to spread the student’s point of view. We are no longer teaching them effectively. It is time to change.

student centered learning

Be active. Stand up. Create a real life context which begs answers.

Digital Learning Day

What is that?

It is your opportunity to bring more skills into your classroom. Celebrate this new event in your life as a student or a teacher by doing something digital that you have never done before, create a Voki, record a Voicethread, or any other Web 2.0 tool you might be waiting to try and haven’t done so yet. Try something new with your students. Help prepare them for their futures.

Find out how by linking to Blogwalker's post

Ellen’s a learner and a doer

I love to experiment with new Web tools, Here’s a good one for making videos out of pictures. Not scary for students, nor overwhelming with text. Check it out.

Ellen's a learner and a doer.

How would I use Animoto in my classes? I have noticed that students speak easier and feel less fear of mistaking when they have a visual to accompany them. I would ask students to experiment with Animoto until they felt comfortable and ask them to put together a tour of their house, favorite restaurant, or any space they choose.

My beginning students (young adults) have just finished learning about the rooms of the house and the furniture which might be found in each room. I would ask the students to take us on a tour of their house or a restaurant, or any other space they feel comfortable sharing and talk about what they find there.
Target vocabulary: rooms of a house, furniture of the rooms, family members
Target grammar: there is, there are; I can see; prepositions of place
Target skill: speaking

Great Tool: Movie Segments for Grammar Goals

Ever get caught in the “explanation” game, where the teacher-centered explanation, the worksheets you supply, and the extra practice you give on drill exercises don’t seem to help all your students get the grammar point?

Sometimes you just have to use material outside the coursebook.
In a previous post I had linked to Eva in Turkey’s suggestion of songs to teach grammar.

If you like movies and would like to use those in your home collection, Claudio in Brazil has collected a mountain of information and linked movie scenes to grammar points with great lesson ideas to help your teaching become student-centered.

Try it…it is more interesting than teacher explanations of grammar! Movie Segments to Assess Grammar.

Baby Steps to bridge a technology gap?

This post is written in response to a conversation on Twitter #ft_eie

Baby steps to shorten the gap…well it’s a wee step in the right direction.

I live in Mexico.
Imagine a whole set of different circumstances, such as
-limited availability of computers and Internet (except among a very few elite) in the home,
-most teachers resistant to technology,
-a low level use of Internet tools and applications,
-a fear of the unknown with avoidance behaviors,
-and a long history of passive learning methodology.

Ouch! you say. As an outsider living in Mexico (an American ex-pat married to a Mexican), I saw technology and the information gap widen and widen. So over the past year I started to do something to close the gap by baby steps.

I -set up blogging in teacher training classes and writing workshops (http:// teachingknowledge.wordpress.com & http://writingcu.wordpress.com) in a university setting (among 60 English teachers only 5 use blogs or even technology).
-create interlinked e-portfolios among teacher-trainees (a beginning local PLN) and
-created reflective, interactive classrooms to stimulate a more active learning situation among student-teachers and teachers accustomed to passive learning environments.

The result: resistance to change, avoidance behaviors, reprimands by the administration…I was only trying to create an active learning environment! Eventually, each semester, the trainees settle down and face their computer screens..and take a baby step.

This wee bitty baby step of blogging where I live in Mexico needs to continue and become established before stepping it up.

I had hoped that after promoting blogging platforms in teacher training classrooms that teachers would continue blogging and accessing their ready-made local PLN. However, the reality is that after course completion, most new bloggers stop blogging completely.

Although teachers see the worth of blogging while in class, they revert to the passive learning framework so well entrenched in the Mexican educational system. However, they have learned the value of technology, another little bitty baby step,and they have learned to turn on the computer. Most adults do not understand their students’ penchant for fbing. Few graduates of my course have used the free web tools we explored together during their courses, but so far they have been battling with thinking about breaking out of the passive mold. They havent’ done it yet, but their students need them to…

I believe that most bloggers worldwide come from cultures which have a firm continuous history of written tradition. In Mexico, the written tradition was wiped out more than 500 years ago with the Spanish conquest. Look at any busy site’s cluster map and you will see little participation from countries in which an oral tradition instead of a written tradition prevailed, providing corroborating evidence of imbalance.

The few of us in traditionally taught communities who do step it up are looked upon as gurus, although I know I ain’t no guru!

Some of us must advance by baby steps in order to foment wider participation among our colleagues before we are ready to step it up. There’s a lot to learn, and the gap keeps growing.

Ellen in Mexico

Why use technology?

Ah yes here is one of the thought provoking posts that I like to send out to you every so often. Through my twitter network of supporters, teachers and learners, I found this great commentary and review on an article which was published in the NY Times not too long ago. Check it out.

Collision Detection

It explains in clear language how technology enhances learning, and demonstrates different ways of applying wordles in academic situations, even in a second language classroom!