ESL Blogs

At the beginning of April I took part in a teachers’ training “Teaching English Through ICT Is Fun”, organized by ITC in Prague and funded within COMENIUS LIFELONG LEARNING PROGRAMME by Polish National Agency.

I would like to share with you some useful tips on encouraging creativity and using ICT to make teaching and learning English more fun.

The first training session dealt with creative thinking. To encourage creative thinking, you can give your students a number of tasks where (it’s the most essential point) there are no incorrect answers.  It can be problem solving (analyzing real or hypothetical problems or situations, reasoning, decision making), sharing personal experiences (like narrating, describing, exploring and explaining attitudes, opinions and reactions) and many others. During the training we were shown a number of activities of this kind. I am going to present you the most interesting ones:

1.      Before your students read a text or article, give them some vocabulary from the text and ask them to work in groups and write their own short article. You will be surprised with how many interesting ideas they  have.

2.      Channel Hopping. For this activity you will need a remote control as a prop. Divide the class into groups and give each different group “channels” or “television shows”. Possibilities include a soap opera, a sportscast, a reality show etc. Give students some time to prepare. Point the remote at one group and pretend to “turn on” the channel. The group must provide the speech of the channel or show they represent. After a while, “change” the channel.

3.      Alphabet dialogue. This is an activity which consists of 26 lines of dialogue. The first starts with the given letter (say “R”). The reply to that line must start with an “S” and so on, until the whole alphabet has been covered. You can leave out the letters K, Q, X and Z. Students that hesitate, or use the wrong letter “Die”. You can relate the dialogue to a definite topic.

4.      The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Advice. Nominate or ask for three students. They form a line or sit down in a row. The class asks questions or gives problems for which they need advice. Each of the three chosen students provides a different kind of advice: good, bad, and really bad (ugly).

5.      The Fortune Teller with Two Heads. Nominate two students to be the fortune teller. People from the class ask them questions about their future. The fortune teller must answer the question one word at a time per “head”, without consulting each other about what they are going to say. Hilarity often results!

6.      One-word-a-student sentences. Each student says just one word one by one and they create a sentence together.

7.      Students write two sentences on separate pieces of paper, then you collect them and each student picks two sentences and has to use them “naturally” in a conversation, like “on a train” or “at the party” , not telling the others when exactly they are using the written sentence.

8.      Moral Dilemmas are also excellent for encouraging creative thinking, as they introduce a problem that must be solved. Here is one popular philosophical problem:

“You are a vegetarian now but previously enjoyed the taste of meat. You do not eat meat for ethical and compassionate reasons. One day, a talking pig says to you, ‘I don’t mind if you eat me. I want to die so that you can be fed.’ What will you do?”

These dilemmas can be very interesting to discuss but be warned: participants can become very passionate! This game requires careful management from a facilitator as the merits here are in how it encourages the brain to work. Move on before people actually fight as adrenaline will impede creative discussion afterwards.

9.      Metaphors and Similes, for one or more players. Metaphors and similes call for huge leaps of imagination. The most imaginative artists we have are experts at making connections between things in a meaningful way. Shakespeare, for example, was a master of metaphor. One way to create lots of lovely metaphors and similes is to leap through a collection of nature photography and really study each picture. Encourage similes… “the grass looks like the waves on the sea”.

10.  “If you could talk to  trees (or other objects), what do you think they might say?  Create a conversation between you and a tree”.

There were a few sessions on Computer Assisted Language Learning. We were given an interesting (and very true) description of today’s kids as “digital natives”, while the adults (including teachers) are rather “digital immigrants”. I hope the list of interesting links for CALL given below will help us, teachers, become “more digital”.

·         Websites for learners of English

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/subjects/english.shtml

http://www.funenglishgames.com/

http://www.english-daily.com/

http://www.englishpage.com/

http://linguapress.com/

www.esolsources.com

http://www.esl-galaxy.com/writing.html

·         Online dictionaries are  very useful too

Merriam Webster Student Dictionary http://www.learnersdictionary.com/, http://www.wordcentral.com/

Wordsmyth dictionaries (including children’s. intermediate http://www.wordsmyth.net/

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english

Little explorers http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Dictionary.html

Longman http://www.ldoceonline.com/

Exercises http://www.autoenglish.org/vocab.htm

·         For more advanced students, an online  visual thesaurus is a great tool to expand their vocabulary:

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/

http://www.visuwords.com/

·         YouTube is often used by teachers, TeacherTube is not as widely known:

http://www.teachertube.com/videos.php?cat=31&sort=most_recent&time=all_time&seo_cat_name=&page=2

You can also use adverts or debates from YouTube to make your lessons more interesting

Adverts https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=advertisement+commercials&oq=advert&gs_l=youtube.1.0.35i39j0l9.2602.6668.0.9784.8.8.0.0.0.0.1017.3204.3j2j5-1j0j2.8.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.agJC4sFf7Sk

Debates https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=debate+competition&oq=debate&gs_l=youtube.1.4.0l10.21884.22533.0.26859.6.6.0.0.0.0.184.473.5j1.6.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.Q-ER38YSpiE

·         Online recourses can be very helpful in improving students’ listening skills

Stories, e.g. Storynory, http://www.storynory.com/2007/05/08/big-sisters-clothes/

English songs, e.g. http://www.songlyrics.com

http://www.lyrics.com/

http://www.azlyrics.com/

http://songsinenglish.blog.linkua.com/

Listening exercises

http://www.esl-lab.com/

http://www.carolinebrownlisteninglessons.com/

http://www.manythings.org/e/listening.html

http://www.esolcourses.com/content/topicsmenu/listening.html

http://www.englishlistening.com/

·         We were also given some ideas on using ICT for developing writing:

Exchanging postcards http://www.postcrossing.com/

http://www.funenglishgames.com/writinggames.html

http://www.parapal-online.co.uk/letters.html

Other useful links  for ELT presented during the course were:

www.edutopia.org/

www.educatorstechnology.com/

·         Using films in teaching is not a new idea. There are many websites with short films suitable for educational needs:

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2012/06/top-11-educational-video-websites-for.html

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/

http://www.edutopia.org/blogs/beat/five-minute-film-festival

To make it easier for the teachers, there are a lot of ready to use worksheets based on short films.

http://film-english.com/blog/

Cyberbullying and safety issues were the topic of one session too. Here are some links to be used to show the students how serious the consequences of cyberbullying can be and how young people can deal with them:

http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Teens/Games%20and%20videos.aspx

The story of Amanda Todd suicide will definitely make students think seriously about the problem of cyberbullying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gycqAJcDFM

Using and creating your own WebQuests is a wonderful teaching tool to make students do  research on some topic.

http://webquest.org/index.php

And here are some examples of ready-made WebQuests:

http://questgarden.com/search/webquest_results.php?language=en&searchcriteria=anyword&descwords=English+traditions&searchfield=descrip&search=Search

The participants of the training also learned how to create their own free webpage (to use for ELT purposes) on http://www.weebly.com/index.php?lang=pl (you have to register first), how to create an avatar on  http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/createpic (a great idea to get to know the students, or to teach about looks and character) and how to create comics on http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/

The training also included a visit to a primary school, attending English lessons based on using ICT and creating our own lesson plans with the use of techniques we had learned.

All in all, the training proved that teaching English with ICT IS fun. I hope you will try out at least some of the tools presented here and come to like them.

  Iryna Polikowska