Literature Circles

Reading is a complex activity and we know that many of our learners are not accustomed to reading in their first language, let alone reading in the target language. When we create a collaborative communicative context for students to work on subskills in the target language, we begin to promote not only reading subskills, but we also promote collaboration, speaking skills, writing skills and listening skills.

It is difficult to separately work with any language skill, out of context with the other language skills. Literacy circles provides students with authentic reasons to communicate, a supportive learning environment and breaks down the tasks that students must do in order to practice and become proficient at reading skills.

Look at the Literature_Circles written by past students of the TKT course.
What is your opinion of Literature Circles? Can they help promote reading in L1 or L2 in your learning/teaching situation? For foreign language learners are they especially helpful? Why? Think about these questions as you investigate more about Literature Circles.
How would you use them in your classes? Investigate the links included in the PPT for more information.

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.