Sunday, October 28, 2012

Strip Story Activity

     



   



    What mostly frustrates me as a teacher of ELT is how to engage unmotivated students. As research has shown that "motivation is related to whether or not students have opportunities to be autonomous and to make important acedmic choices". Thus, being autonomous allows children to feel that they have control over their own learning. 
       One of our favorite classroom activities (me and my pupils), that is very motivating to a great degree is as the title suggests: Strip Story activity. First and foremost, what are strip stories? A strip story is a story which has been cut into smaller segments. The whole story is handed to the learners in a scrambled order by cutting it into strips of paper. This activity engages the students to the fullest. They manage in the end, to collaborate to arrange the story in a good order. Learners work in groups of three to four, to read all the strips and stick them on a seperate piece of paper. This activity, not only activates the students' schemata, but also creates a positive atmosphere for learning. 
       I do strongly recommend this type of activity to practice in our clasrooms insomuch that it becomes a weekly habit. However, this activity does not exclude the "basic bottom-up processing, the importance of lexicogrammatical focus, particularly in the early stages of learning". In fact, "second language readers require training in the skill of rapid recognition of large numbers of words and structures in order to accomplish the objective of reading extensively enough to build and improve the schemata they need for fuller enjoyment of the texts they read."(Niget Scott : http://iteslj.org/Articles/Stott-Schema.html
    After ordering the story, learners engage in a post-reading activity, which is usually understanding the story, commenting upon the events, discussing and reacting to the story. 
All in all, this activity offers to both the learners and their teachers  great moments of joy, engagement and learning. 

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Most Useful ESL /EFL links !

    I hope this list of links would be of some help for ELT teachers. It's true that the web is full of resources. Let us wish ,as teachers belonging to the developing world, that these links do not turn out to be paying in a blink. 
Listening:
1-http://www.1-language.com/audiocourse/index.htm
2-http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/listening/
3-http://www.agendaweb.org/listening/intermediate.html
4-http://www.teachya.com/listening/listening_exercises/pre-intermediate.php
5-http://www.podcastsinenglish.com/index.shtml
6-http://www.esl-lab.com/
7-http://www.5minuteenglish.com/listening.htm
8-http://www.eslfast.com/easydialogs/index.html
9-http://www.eslfast.com/
10-http://www.eslfast.com/robot/
11-http://elllo.org/
12-http://www.eslflow.com/
13-http://www.esllistening.org/

Reading :
1-http://www.englishcorner.vacau.com/reading/reading.html
2-http://englishforeveryone.org/Topics/Reading-Comprehension.htm
3-http://www.miguelmllop.com/practice/intermediate/readingcomprehension/readingcompindex.htm
4-http://www.really-learn-english.com/english-short-stories.html
5-http://www.rong-chang.com/nse/
6-http://www.rong-chang.com/ne/
7-http://www.rong-chang.com/qa2/
8-http://www.eslyes.com/nyc/contents.htm
9-http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
10-http://www.rong-chang.com/easyread/
11-http://www.famouspeoplelessons.com/


Miscellaneous: 

http://englishlearner.com/tests/
grammar vocabulary esl plans
online grammar exercises
handouts for classroom use
For all kinds of videos
grammar worksheets and printables
musical lessons categorised according to grammar
Purdue Online Writing Lab
Learn new phrases via daily conversations
Daily English conversations with an audio file
T.E.I.T Join Teachers of English In Tunisia 


          

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

My pupil saved my LESSON





             ''In teaching others we teach ourselves.'' (Proverb)

I would like to share with you this anecdote about an embarrassing situation I had , last year, in class. While preparing the lesson, the whole anecdote flashed through my head and as the title suggests one of my pupils saved my lesson by using her cell phone, which was directly connected to the internet.


As a matter of fact, I am indebted to Mariem for saving my lesson because she has got much savvy. The lesson was a listening lesson revolving around Celine Dion's song "Immortality" and as usual I saved the song on a USB flash drive and on my laptop! I thought I was well-prepared for the lesson! I thought: I am "armed" with two files of the song, so there's no risk! One is an mp3 file and the other is a mp4 file, a video downloaded from YouTube with the lyrics of the song! I have the portable mini speaker with its USB charger. Everything seemed in order!


Nonetheless, I was not ready for a power outage!!! What added insult to injury was that my laptop was out of charge! OMG!!!


You cannot imagine to what extent this situation drew my ire especially when I detected the disappointment in my learners' eyes! I tried to save the situation by postponing the listening to a later session and asked them to use the already taught vocabulary to write a free essay. To my amazement, a diligent , techie girl: Mariem suggested she would download the song via her cell phone, which was connected to Internet.


Therefore, I expressed my great thankfulness because she'd save our lesson.Within few minutes, we listened to the song and carried on the lesson. I was not the only person who expressed her gratitude to Mariem, many of her classmates did!


From that day on, I knew how important is new technology to teaching! My techie pupil saved me. She taught me a good lesson that day and I am still grateful to her. This anecdote made me so eager to embrace more and more new inventions in the field and adapt them to my classroom. Cell phones, usually are banned inside the class! However, cell phones could be of great utility in our classes especially with the limitless number of free applications available on the web!




Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Tagul

      Sharing my experiences with the web "surfers" are meant to enhance collaboration with my colleagues by interchanging  ideas and tips. The digital world offers numerous opportunities for educators to go digital . Amongst these tools, I mention Tagul the gorgeous Tag cloud.(http://tagul.com/)
   It is true that at first, I had a fleeting glipmse, and was fascinated by the shapes, the colours of this tool. But soon a myriad of questions started to insist on the "teacher" in me. How can we benefit from Tagul in our classrooms and make our pupils enjoy this tool as much or even more than I enjoyed it myself? How can Tagul be useful to our pupils?
    What is crystal clear is that this tool can be used to help learners document their vocabulary lists, by classifying them into synonyms, opposites and arrange them accordingly in their portfolios. In my humblest opinion, creating these lists artistically would help learners memorise them easily.Furthermore, it would boost the learners' creativity especially when they start sharing them with their classmates. Such a wonderful tool might urge the learners to think of more possible ways to sum up lessons in this artistic way! What if learners summed up their lessons using Tagul ?
    What if the teachers used these wonderful word clouds to brainstorm a topic or predict what could possibly be the topic of today's class? 
      By and large,Tagul  is a creative and an empowering tool , for it is not that complicated. In the end, when looking at their word clouds, learners would feel a real feather in their cap to be as creative as such! 
Below are some of my attempts as a teacher, but I will soon be posting some of my pupils' own creative word clouds.


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   Below,  is the first wonderful cloud creatively shared by one of my pupils: Cyrine. She amazingly made a cloud about the activities of Holidaying , which is part and parcel of the syllabus. 
Here is the second one presented by Cyrine, which sums up the brainstorming activity of this creative pupil. She wonderfully added nearly most of the important words related to Travel.