Is TEFL really a profession?

Ideas on the topic from Professor Baker, Scott Thornbury and The TEFL Times   

Life for weary students?

Want to inject a bit of life into a weary bunch of students? Here's a post on using Discovery's puzzlemaker.

Also a list of the best learning games for English language learners from reknowned blogger, Larry Ferlazzo

Imaginative ways to recycle vocabulary

One of our perrenial tasks is to help our students build up their vocabulary - which means that we have to be inventive in finding ways to recycle and extend the words they know.

Here's some great ideas from Cecilia Lemos which work for all age groups and also a list of further activities from the TeachingEnglish website for you to try out .

MyWordBook - great self-study resource for your students

MyWordBook helps students build up their vocabulary on the go. The program is free and works on on iPhones, iPod touch and iPad. It comes with a set of flashcards but more interestingly, you can create your own and add images, sound and notes. You can even draw your own pictures to help you remember the meaning of a word.

55 ways to use an IWB in the classroom

Following the recent post on 55 ways to support writing in the classroom, here´s a presentation on 55 ways to use an IWB in the classroom

wanna twiddla?

Twiddla is a free online collaborative IWB-type resource: students/you can read, respond in real time to whatever you/they write, draw, etc on the same page. Good for use in the CALL room. No registration or signing in required to use for it free. A Pro a/c with more bells and whistles is available free for teachers, see site for details. Give it a go! twiddla

Other etherpad sites here

Using the speech accent archive for working on students' pronunciation

"The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds".

Unfortunately, the text that's used across the archive is not very inspiring but the fact that all the recordings use it means that it's easy to compare accents and variations in pronunciation.

I've just used 2 recordings with my Post FCE group: a native speaker and a Spanish speaker.

I printed out the text and asked students to mark where they thought there would be sentence stress and where intonation would rise and fall.(We'd been working on this before, so they knew what I was talking about.)

They then listened to the native speaker and compared their notations with what they heard.

They then listened to the Spanish speaker and marked where he put sentence stress and how he used intonation - and drew their conclusions.

Finally, they practised themselves saying the text.

The activity turned out to be quite productive. The the fact that I could use an anonymous speaker as a model of what to avoid was a boon and got over the embarrassment that often occurs when you try to focus on the typical pronunciation problems that students have.

Larry links

A recent post by Larry Ferlazzo a prolific EFL blogger is on The best and easiest ways to use youtube, featuring ESL video, and some interactive sites such as World Adventure Kids, Drop the Weapon, Spelling Bee and Ken Burns National Parks Photo challenge (fotobabble might go with this?). It also back references to Larry's own collections inc. Best places to read, write and choose adventure stories.
Larry tweets here and his blog, at least one of them, is here. Definitely worth a butcher's.

Global Projects for Young Learners

A webinar by internationally renowned ELT blogger, Shelly Terrell.

And here's a link to her wiki: technology4kids

Lesson plan on everyday gadgets (including use of Glogster)

Here's a really comprehensive lesson plan that practises speaking, listening and reading skills plus helps students to build their vocabulary. What more could you want! Should work well with Juniors above /intermediate levels and above.

How do you approach teaching exam classes?

This was the topic of one of last week's #ELTChats and here's the summary of what teachers from all over the world came up with. Well-worth the read and a great help in putting exam classes into perspective.

How do we acquire language?

This was the burning question for Deb Roy, MIT cognitive scientist. But instead of merely writing a paper or a book on it, he has recorded on video the first 5 years of his son's life; focussing it on his progress in learning how to speak. This online article describes Deb's real-time action research and includes a video showing how the boy learnt to say  the word "ball" over a period of months. And here is the video of his recent TED talk.

Six word stories

Looking for an imaginative but simple idea for your class - try this great idea for Six Word Stories from Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto. You can use it with students of all ages.

Finding graded reading material on the internet.

Find it difficult to find authentic online reading material at the right level for your students? Here's Twurdy to your rescue - a search machine that grades the results of your search according to reading difficulty.

BeeOasis is also good source of graded reading material - it's a site that offers stories, news, and comments about the arts and sciences -some of which come with video and sound. At the moment BeeOasis offers 30 days free access to material.

What does it mean to know a word?

A presentation from Karenne Sylvester to help you and your students with vocabulary building.

Teaching English: It isn't rocket science

Bet you knew that already :) In this blog post of the same title, Jason Renshaw comes up with 7 tips that will help to maintain your sanity.

How to improve your students' reading skills

This blog post by Marisa Constantinides is timely reading for all of us who are thinking of taking up Beatrice's excellent Reading Challenge. Marisa digs down to reveal what the reading experience consists of and then provides practical steps we can take to help our students improve their skills. Recommended!

55 ways to support writing in the classroom

This Google presentation is really a must read for all teachers - a goldmine of tips and great resources that will help get your students writing. It compiles the ideas of many teachers and while it covers all ages and levels of students, it is particularly good on reading and writing resources for very young learners.

Another site providing lesson plans based on film clips

Looking for short film clips to liven up your class? Then Film English might be your answer. It provides regular topical lesson plans using a good choice of short film clips. Check it out!

just a note on reducing very large images using Paint

If you use Paint to edit images here, then you´ll have noticed that the zoom of the version we have is restricted to 100% plus which isn´t helpful for managing vast images. To get around that: select the rectangle on the left, right click on the image, chose Stretch and Skew, and reduce the image by percentage (note you'll lose some resolution).