The post of the week: A great example of how to transform teaching into learning

I would like to have a showcase for the best blogging efforts during the week. This week our winner is definitely, hands down, Liz on her blog with her post, “Online tools applied to our content.” Not only did Liz recommend various sites, she created various games using the sites to add to her teaching toolbox. In order to keep a catalogued record of her work she created a page named Glossary term activities/games.

Congratulations Liz for a job superbly done. You are transforming the learning process into the way our students think. Your students are going to love what you do!

Teaching Vocabulary and ICT Vocabulary Applications: Unit 2 reflection and application

Teaching vocabulary can be tricky, but  not if you relate it to contexts which students can associate with. Remember:

• Provide students with continuous opportunities for applying words in receptive and productive situations
• Recycle often, even if doing so isn’t included in the textbook
• Give your students more than the basic vocabulary: gradual expansion is the key
• Organize words to help students organize their knowledge.

Be aware of

• cultural considerations with connotations
• word changes through form.

I invite you to read this E-how Website where you can get ideas for posting activities for students in your blogs.

Watch this helpful video by the Cambridge University Press for helping expose vocabulary to students; and watch this video by TEFL videos about teaching with timelines.

On Saturday we touched the theme of sight words, also known as function words. 220 of them reside in a list called the Dolch list, and most of these words are taught at beginning levels of English as a foreign language; but students have great difficulty learning them. Why are they so difficult to keep straight? Are they easily memorized? Watch this video by Improve-Education which gives us some ideas of Sight Words and Functions words.

Vocabulary is one of the foundations of learning language and it is just as important as grammar when learning a language. We learn and produce vocabulary by using words we learn in context.

Look at this slideshare presentation, Teaching Vocabulary. Did you learn anything new?

The Internet is full of activities that students can practice and play vocabulary on. Look at the slideshare presentation ICT Tools for Teaching Vocabulary.  What game, worksheet, interactive Web tool or just plain fun activity did you like from this presentation or any other space? You can use any of these ideas or tools to share on your blog. Set up your own game using the words that you must learn from the TKT glossary and create and play with your own game.

Write your ideas in a reflection for your blog and link us to the site you recommend. Include: Why do you recommend this tool? How would you use it with your learners?

We are all looking forward to sharing great vocabulary learning tips, strategies, and ideas. Please post your ontribution in a timely manner, not at the last minute, so we can all review them before next weekend. Happy searching and experiementing!

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.
Teachers around the world who blog share ideas about waking up your classes. Eva in Turkey’s suggests maintaining and adding information on a excel page that she started: songs to teach grammar. Check it out; it contains more than Beatles songs and you can get many ideas for using songs int he classroom.

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 from present and past films 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.

Four Skills Great Ideas Post

I’d love to use this post as a forum for the great ideas you all have. From your experiences in the ESL/EFL (or French or Italian) teaching/learning world, recommend another blog, site or page where English teachers can go for extra support in the four skills. I’m sure that everyone has something to contribute.
I would like to recommend a visit to songs-to-teach-grammarthis blog about songs to teach grammar where you can find lots of suggestions and other sites for finding and using songs to teach grammar.
Busy Prepositions from Schoolhouse Rock is one of my favorite videos to teach a difficult concept, prepositional phrases, from Schoolhouse Rock, 2007, found on Youtube. I find it useful to help students distinguish between phrases and clauses.

Here is a great link to a blog, all about making writing lessons meaningful for ESL/EFL students to give you some ideas to use in your classrooms.

To work on stress and intonation in speaking, here is Carolyn Graham’s Jazz Chants.<a href=”Teaching Jazz Chants“>Teaching Jazz Chants

Here are some techniques for teaching speaking in big classes BBC Teaching Speaking

Specific sites such as these provide specific aids for busy teachers who can inject fun and creativity into their classrooms while helping their students learn.

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) :

                                            

 

Here is a PPT you can look at to review the nine parts of speech. U1 Grammar parts of speech. Also, please visit under TKT support, Your Teacher Trainer for great grammar practice.

Answer the above question in a comment on this post. Search the Internet for other fun’ ways to learn grammar and include your suggestion and your findings in the comment you make.

Your comment will not appear right away. First I have to approve each one. Please only post one time. I will see it even if you don’t see your comment right away.