Podcast Roundup - podcasts about language

I'll confess upfront, I'm addicted to podcasts.  When I'm travelling, doing chores, working out or just filling some downtime, I like to have something to listen to that exercises my brain.

If students ask me how to improve their English Listening skills, I'll often advise them to find a podcast that matches their interest and level, and fit it into their daily routine.  But I want to write today about 4 podcasts that teachers might enjoy and find useful - I have learnt a lot from all of them.

If... Student poems with a condition

Conditionals are a grammar point that will often get a groan, even from the grammar enthusiasts in a class. To many students they're fiddly, boring and repetitive. Exercises seem to consist of matching sentences or questions such as "What would you do if you won the lottery?". So I decided to give a class the opportunity to do something a bit more creative with conditionals, and I think we were all surprised by the results!

Letting the Idioms out of the bag

Let the cat out of the bag / Not my cup of tea / Spill the beans / Clear as mud.

The Story

Idioms have been on my mind lately.  For example, I'd been wondering how actually to define an idiom, and what idioms students really need to know.  I also had vague recollections of looking through an Academic English textbook a couple of years ago that insisted students be taught that words such as 'affluent' are idioms, because of the Latin etymology from ad+fluere = flowing towards.  While this may be linguistically accurate, it's hard for me to imagine any student being enough of a language nerd to be helped by such an approach.  Anyway, isn't all speech necessarily figurative, when we decide that a sequence of sounds represents meaning?

Reteach, reuse, recycle - activities to help vocabulary to stick.

Confession time: reviewing vocabulary with students is not my strongest point. This isn't necessarily a problem, since many higher level classes don't need so much help: I've tended to advise students on how they can research a word online to learn pronunciation, definitions, collocations, related words and example sentences then largely leave them to it. (1)

But there are students who don't yet have these independent study skills, and generally also for lower levels much more scaffolding will be needed.

So here's a roundup of ideas and activities for reviewing vocabulary from around the web, and a few thoughts of my own.

He's sorry, he's sorry, he's so so sorry (a lesson on apologies)

You may have seen Nick Clegg apologising about increased tuition fees a few months ago.  You may also have seen how his speech was turned into a chart-topping song by a smart alec using Autotune.  (If you haven't seen either one, you may have been on a desert island somewhere.)

Anyway, this has a lot of potential for a lesson on etiquette, politics, quirks of British culture, or all of the above.  Here's how:

First of all, play the video, and ask students to listen to discover what he's apologising for.  It's possible that some students will have seen the clip before, and some of them may even know who Nick Clegg is (although I think in the average class this is unlikely!).  You could also ask them whether they think he is sincere, and why.

This Little Piggy went to Market...

If you're lucky enough to have a good local market, it can be an excellent destination for a class trip, providing numerous opportunities for language practice and discovery.  Here are a few ideas for activities for a market excursion:

Great Videos part 2

This is part 2 of a short series sharing some of my favourite videos to use in class, along with a variety of suggestions for different lesson activities.  For part 1, see here.

3) Are you Typical?

What it is:

A presentation of population data from National Geographic (trust me - much more interesting than it sounds!), including working out the age, nationality and face of the 'typical' human alive at this time.

In class you could:

2 Great Videos to use in Class

The Internet, to misquote Douglas Adams, is big. Really big. Vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big.  (And it's mostly cats).

Even if you discount the cats, there's still so much just out there that the good stuff can be hard to find, especially when it comes to video.  And if we find it, what to do with it?  We can do better than gap-fill exercises using clips of Nineties comedy shows, can't we?

So, in this and my next post I'm sharing some of my favourite videos, with a few ideas on how to use them in a language lesson.

The Christmas Post

Merry Christmas!

I'm off for a couple of weeks, but normal service will be resumed in January.  For now, here's a video of someone gift-wrapping a cat!

Have a great Christmas / holiday / whatever, and see you in the new year.

Interactive Resources: doing it right

Sometimes 'interactive' means 'get students to do a traditional multiple choice quiz on the computer', and sometimes it means 'invite students to explore a professionally produced multimedia resource which has quality content and more than one possible learning application.'  Guess which sort I prefer!

The following three resources stand out to me for their depth of content and production quality.  Although none was produced specifically for an English teaching context, they can all be integrated smoothly into lessons on a variety of typical topic areas - and I have used them all successfully with my classes.

Track an Email with Google Green

The first site is The Story of Send, produced by Google Green.  This is an interactive journey following the path of an email from your computer, through Google's data centres, all the way to the eventual recipient.  On the way, guided by appealing animated characters, you can use text, video and photo galleries to learn about data security and green technology.  The text is in bitesize chunks, and introduces complex technology in an approachable way.  You can also use more or less of the site depending on student level and time constraints, by skipping some of the multimedia content.

Qwerty in the English Language Classroom - why practise writing skills online?

In my earlier post on writing, which looked at the reasons for and against using class time for writing assignments, I focused almost entirely on traditional pen-and-paper writing.  I'd like in this post to look more at reasons for using ICT-based activities for writing skills, and suggest some activities that could work on a VLE such as Nfomedia (which is free!).

So, why are ICT tools and online writing good for students?

1.  ICT-based reasons.

• Students need to be familiar with basic internet tasks in English – logging in and out, completing web forms, reading and replying to short messages, and using web etiquette.  (OK, so most students will already be extremely familiar with this, but by no means all!)
• The configuration of UK keyboards is different – for example the @ key is in a different place from European keyboards.  And of course, many students will also be used to keyboard configurations for completely different alphabets.
• If students aim to use their English in a professional environment, they are likely to be using a computer; hunt-and-peck typing is rarely going to be acceptable.
• Many exams are now computer based, and this will become even more common in future.

Tired Lesson Topics - Part 3

So, we've jazzed up Family, Food, Daily Routines, Sport and Education with lesson ideas that are just a bit different, now it's the turn of Hobbies and Work - both yawn-inducingly familiar textbook topics, I'm sure you'll agree. So how can you teach them again without falling asleep? Read on for ideas.

1. Hobbies

• Students use Etsy or Folksy to search for real examples of unusual craft items or hobbies.  It could be a competition to find the most unusual / beautiful / overpriced / pointless item possible, or they could try to 'sell' the item to another student using persuasive and descriptive language.  
• Story-telling - students choose a hobby and tell a story where the hobby led to a disastrous result (such as loss of a relationship or home, illness, or even death) or to unexpected success (a scientific discovery, a successful career, a new relationship or your home becoming a tourist attraction, for example).  You could use dice as described in my first post to randomise some of the story elements.  Alternatively, Googling "my hobby led to" could provide some useful ideas for students to start with.

Writing in Class - a Waste of Time?

The class sits in silence, apart from the rustling of paper and the scratch of pens.  Meanwhile, the teacher stares off into space, completes her marking, surreptitiously checks her texts or reads the newspaper.  Through the walls drift the sounds of another class apparently having a lot more fun - they are watching a video, playing a raucous game, talking and laughing loudly...  Sound familiar?

Writing in class is a tricky area: some teachers swear by it, while others consider it to be a total waste of time  for all concerned.  Here are some of the most common arguments:

Hitting the doldrums - or not

When you start teaching, everything's a blur, but after a few months or a couple of years, you can suddenly realise that you're in a rut, without even knowing how you got there.  You know what you're doing (or at least you think you do), you have a repertoire of lesson ideas, mountains of photocopies that you might use again one day, and just that nagging feeling that something isn't quite right.  Somewhere along the way, after you lost the sense of panic, you also lost some of your drive and enthusiasm.

So how can you get them back?  How can you stop the doldrums turning into your permanent teaching home?

Here are my top tips:

Jazzing up Tired Lesson Topics - Part 2

In the previous post I looked at 3 textbook 'classics': Daily Routines, Education, and Sport, and some ideas for approaching them in a new way in the classroom.  This time I'll be considering Family and Food, again with activities that are just a bit different, and can be adapted to many different levels and lesson objectives.

So, without further ado...

Two More Typical Tired Textbook Topics, and how to enjoy teaching them again:

1. Family

• Students make a technology family tree.  Which device or invention was the 'parent' of another?  Which devices share a family resemblance?  Which device wants to be just like its big brother or sister, or always goes on about how things were better in the past when it was the latest thing?

Tired Lesson Topics, and what you can do to revitalise them

It's no accident that so many textbooks cover the same old topics.  Family, hobbies, education, work and all the rest of them are exam and textbook staples precisely because they are real-life conversational staples as well.  The problem starts when teacher, students or both are bored by the topic because they've covered it so many times before: when Unit 1 is predictably going to be family and talking about yourself, when food is inevitably the topic for teaching countable and uncountable nouns (yawn), and when you realise that you could actually teach that lesson on the environment (using future forms or conditionals) in your sleep, because you've done the same thing so many times before.

This is for those times.  Here are some techniques for adapting typical ELT activities, and a few less obvious ways of approaching traditional topics.