Great way for students to improve their vocabulary

Get them to find an article, song or any piece of text that they're interested and go to WordSift.

Paste the text in the box provided and they will get incredible results - all they need to extend and make their use of vocabulary more accurate. Great fun too!

(Thanks to Jon Brown for the link)

My Cardiff IATEFL

There were nearly 2,000 delegates at the conference, a lot of people milling around with nowhere to sit. So here from the comfort of your swivel chair you can enjoy some of the interesting bits.



Barry Tomalin talking on the importance of cultural awareness in language teaching.

There's also a very good video interview with him on the teachingEnglish site plus his article on the same theme.



David Crystal on whether texting will affect the English language and why he maintains a blog (amongst other things).



Penny Urr on how to make bog standard vocabulary and grammar exercises more interesting.



Richard Gallen on his experience studying Spanish and how he wished his teacher would have corrected him more.



The Pecha Kucha evening (Pecha Kucha has been described as the antidote to death from PowerPoint) - a relaxed occasion when teachers showed that they can sometimes be both amusing and imaginative.

IATEFL conference Cardiff

The 3-day IATEFL conference in Cardiff was a real treat although the quality of the sessions varied greatly. My tip to conference-goers: Think very carefully before you go to a session which includes the words 'research findings' in the blurp.

The photo is from Ann Foreman's session - you can just make her out at the front. It's in the assembly room in Cardiff city hall, about 90 people came and the session went down really well, it made me want to try out Vokies in one of my class - just wonder whether it would work well with adult students.

There will be an Insett in May when participant at the recent Cardiff, Serville and Milan conferences will share new ideas and activities. Until then, here are a few interesting websites which came up in different presentations

1. Wordle Copy and paste texts or simply give a web address and it produces a word cloud based on the frequency of each word? Good fun but would be interested to hear ideas about how to make use of it with students?

2. One of the most inspiring talks was by Marc Prensky, who talks a lot about the problem of YL students being 'digital natives' whilst their teachers are mostly 'digital migrants'. He had ideas for making use of their mobile phones instead of always insisting that they 'power down'. One idea was to do SMS text polls e.g. for student - teacher feedback: ask the question, they text their response and you watch the results appear on the screen.

3. Found Magazine - a great authentic source of things, notes and letters which have been found by someone somewhere - plenty of opportunity for speculation as well as exposing students to really colloquial and informal English.

4. Lindsay Clanfield gave a talk at the Bilbao conference on last September. In Cardiff he gave a session on using lists. Click here for 6 ideas.

Thinking About The Diploma?

There are essentially 3 diplomas to choose from:
i) DELTA (Cambridge)
ii) Distance DELTA (British Council & IH)
iii) Diploma in TESOL (Trinity)

1. The Cambridge DELTA can’t be done part-time in Bilbao. But it would be a possibility for full-time study in the summer – I think it’s a 6-week course. (Martin, amongst others, did this course and you can ask him more about it).
2. The Distance DELTA is actually a British Council product (co-owned with IH). I don’t think there is anyone on the staff who did it but I believe Anne has worked as tutor / mentor for a teacher who did it in Bilbao a few years ago. Here’s a link to the Intranet: http://bcnet.britishcouncil.org:8000/ee/training/grants/delta_financial.htm
3. The most popular option in Bilbao in recent years has been the Trinity Diploma in TESOL. This link below is to a school called SGI in London, which is the school where the majority of our 'dip' teachers are studying. It gives a lot of flexibility in terms of start dates and when you do the practical element.
   http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/diploma.html

If you have any experience with any of the above diplomas, then please leave a comment.

Learning styles

If you are interested in focussing on your learning style and getting your students to think about their own, here are a few useful links:

• Two lessons plans

learning styles (including a listening, personal dictionaries and grammar revision activities)

multiple intelligences (including how to introduce the topic and matching and problem solving activities)

• Two online quizzes

from the BBC

Birmingham City Council quiz

The more we vary activities, the more lessons will appeal to individual students. Helping them reflect on how they learn better also makes them responsible for their own learning and enables them to be more efficient students, which is also motivating and productive. Multiple Intelligences are not an answer to everything, but they are a useful tool for teachers to react to different personalities and make sure their lessons are as student centred as possible.

Mini Saga winner, Iker Muñoz & BC Director Simon Creasey

 

Ideas and resources for Young Adult and Teenage classes

If you missed the February INSETT on this one, here are the links and ideas I mentioned:

• don't forget the Teaching Materials Bank on the Staffroom on the BC's intranet. You need to become a member (quick + easy) then you can access material by age, CEF level, skill and topic. Good for flipcharts.
• ready made class plans from James Keddie (mostly elementary and intermediate)
• ideas for class work from The English Blog
• new ideas daily from ex BC TeachEnglish site Nik Peachy
• more tips, resources and teaching materials from the same guy
• lesson plans based around current news
• great for work on instructions/ jigsaw readings/listenings videojug.com. For example, get half your class to watch http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-be-the-perfect-girlfriend and the other half to watch http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-be-the-perfect-boyfriend then get them to report back on what they learnt and discuss the 2 videos.
• fun way to practise pronunciation with karaokes (register yourself first before the class for a greater choice of songs)
• and don’t forget the BC's LearnEnglish site :
  Recommended: Agents Underground, Scary spelling game, Vocabulary/spelling game
• For practising listening skills LearnEnglish podcasts
• More listening and comprehension practice Big City Small Word sitcom
  
  

Uploading Documents To Blog, Wikis etc

Hi Everyone

I promised in a recent workshop to put up instructions for uploading Word documents onto blogs and wikis so here goes:

When I set up a class blog last year I found it very frustrating that I couldn't upload Word documents. After a bit of research I discovered that there are sites out there which just act as banks for your files and documents. The one I recommend is www.box.net

'Box' is free and I've used it to upload MP3 files and Word documents. For example, here's an ex-colleague of ours telling a travel anecdote.

You then link from your blog or wiki to the 'box' site as I've done with the travel anecdote above.

It's really easy to use but give me a shout if you want any help.

Funky Flipcharts for the new year

Found this blog article with some really simple and good ideas for using flipcharts with your classes.