Hot Potatoes

Today I will focus on a more traditional ICT tool to develop language skills: Hot Potatoes.

Here you can see three activities created by means of this software, which allow the students to practice their listening, reading and writing skills.

ACTIVITY #1

"Five little monkeys"

(for developing listening, reading and writing skills)

STEP 1: play this short video for the students to watch and listen:

STEP 2: let the students take a look at this JCloze gap-filling exercise:

Five little monkeys

STEP 3: play the video again and let the students fill the gaps with the missing words (you may need to play it several times, depending on your students age and level).

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ACTIVITY #2

"My favourite characters"

(for developing reading and writing skills)

STEP 1: show your students these pictures of their favourite characters:

STEP 2: let the students solve this crossword made by means of JCross:

My favourite characters

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ACTIVITY #3

"The lion and the mouse"

(for developing reading skills)

STEP 1: give the students this short story for them to read it carefully:

Aesop's Fables: The Lion and the Mouse

Once, when a lion was asleep, a little mouse began running up and down upon him. This soon wakened the lion, who placed his huge paw upon him and opened his big jaws to swallow him. "Pardon, oh King!", cried the little mouse. "Forgive me this time. I shall never forget it. Who knows but what I may be able to do you a turn some of these days?" The lion was so tickled at the idea of the mouse being able to help him, that he lifted up his paw and let him go. Sometime after, the lion was caught in a trap and the hunters, who desired to carry him alive to the king, tied him to a tree while they went in search of a wagon to carry him on. Just then, the little mouse happened to pass by and, seeing the sad plight in which the lion was, went up to him and soon gnawed away the ropes that bound the king of the beasts. "Was I not right?", said the little mouse. Little friends may prove great friends.

STEP 2: let the students solve this JQuiz exercise for practicing reading comprehension skills:

The Lion and the Mouse

Virtual tours through Webquests

Whenever your students seem interested in knowing anything about a specific place, they will be giving you the chance of either organising a virtual trip for them or helping them to organise it by themselves. It will basically depend on their age and their command of ICTs.

If you are the one to organise it, I recommend you to do it through a Webquest.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tool, go to Wikispaces.com and start exploring. You will find a fantastic way of engaging your students.

Creating a Webquest can take quite a lot of your free time, but be sure it will worth it: you will be promoting collaborative work and autonomous learning while your students get involved and have fun exploring.

Webquests are mainly suitable for older kids, since they usually require certain skills younger students still lack, but you can create friendly webquests about different topics for younger users, so that they can also start exploring by themselves.

Through a Webquest virtual tour you can provide your students with several links, previously selected and checked by you, for them to directly access certain sites related to the place they want to know about. This way they will be able to watch some interesting videos and images and they will gain access to some useful articles which will guide them through their research while improving their listening and reading skills. Then, they may be asked to comment on them (while improving their writing skills), select some relevant information, etc.

If you want to see how an already made Webquest looks like, you can have a look at this one, although it was created by me with a different teaching purpose: Digiriendo.

We have to bear in mind that we, teachers, are not required to be information providers anymore, but self-learning facilitators. Take advantage of Webquests and you will be helping your students to learn by themselves.

Artful storytelling

Let me intruduce you to my favourite e-learning writing tool: Storybird. This is a very special tool, as it combines artistic appreciation with writing skills. Of course, it is also a fantastic tool for developing reading skills, since there are lots of colourful stories created and published by children.

To start using it you must first create an account and then you can start exploring through all the artists and get inspired by their illustrations, available for you to create your own story. The stunning illustrations stimulate children and adult imagination and creativity.

As a teacher, you can create your own teacher's account, which is like a regular account but customized to manage class and students. Through this account you will be able to sign-up your students without e-mail addresses, create thematic assignments to inspire them, review their work-in-progress, give them some feedback, reward them with digital stickers, send their work to parents, download it, embed the stories into a class blog or wiki, and so on.

Take a look at this assignment I have created in order to encourage my students to write about what makes them happy: What makes me happy.

Access

I hope you enjoy using it as much as I do.

Oral skills

As we all know, oral skills have not been given the importance they deserve in ESL teaching. Traditional grammar-focused ESL teaching methods left speaking skills absolutely aside, while listening activities were just occasional.

Fortunately, things are changing, since our global world currently demands communicative competence above all.

Teachers are thus required to prepare their students to be able to use the English language in an oral way, and not just in its written form.

Luckily, nowadays we have plenty of tools to develop our students' oral skills.

If you are a more traditional teacher, but still worried about oral skills and cultural awareness, you can always fall back on a good listening source, as the ones you can find at the British Council website. They are suitable for learners with different levels of English and you can even download the transcripts for your older students to take a look at them at the end of each session.

If you like challenges, innovation and creativity and have a certain command of ICTs, then you may want to create your own exercises for your students to practice either their listening or their speaking skills by themselves at their own level.

In this sense, Voxopop is a great tool to develop listening and specifically speaking skills, since it is a voice-based e-learning tool which allows students to record their voice messages while promoting interaction. It also gives you the option of listening to your own recorded messages, as well as adding written messages, so it is a quite complete and useful tool. Here you have an example of a talkgroup, created by me with this software, where students can share their thoughts about their favourite movies.

And, if you still want to know more about useful sites to develop oral skills, take a look at Clarityenglish.com

Mixed up words

Scrambling words from a sentence in order to put them back together in the right order have always been a fun way to learn syntax.

I have recently discovered Wordle, a site that allows you to go further by creating a cloud of mixed up words not just from a sentence but from a whole text.

This offers the teacher the option of also working on vocabulary and deduction, especially when using long texts. So we mainly have two options:

• We can either enter just a sentence, like "The bus stops in front of my house", click on Go and get a scrambled sentence for the students to put the words back in order while working on syntax

• Or we can enter a whole text, click on Go and get a scrambled text for the students to select either the most meaningful words or the unknown words in order to work on vocabulary, while also working on meaning deduction. Here you can see an example I have just created from a chocolate covered strawberries recipe:

The students will have the chance of focusing on the most common words (highlighted by a bigger size) to deduce the overall meaning of the original text.

Of course, we can also encourage our older students (and even our younger ones, as the site is really easy to use) to create their own word clouds from topics they are interested in, like friendship, music, a movie they like, etc.

Drama

There are many useful tools for teaching ESL in the classroom, but drama seems to me the ideal one to work on language skills development together with cultural awareness.

The social side of learning a language should be never left aside. A language is a communication tool, so interaction is a must.

Through drama, children interact with other people and with their world around, learning in an active and meaningful way. Besides, we are providing them with useful information for them to improve their communicative competence (and not just their linguistic skills). They lead conversations and get involved.

 

 

If you are still reluctant to carry out drama activities in your classroom in order to turn your students' language learning process into a more effective and enjoyable experience, please take a look at Miranda Flynn Legge's blog so that you can start with drama games and puppet shows before role-playing.

Looking forward to hearing from your experience.

Being an ESL teacher

This is not an easy task, but is such a rewarding one that I would not hesitate to choose it again for a living.

Helping kids on their adventure of discovering a new world, where not just a new language is needed but also a different approach to situations, is priceless.

Because teaching ESL is not just about teaching a new language, with its own grammatical structures, vocabulary and phonetics, but mainly about teaching a new culture.

As an ESL teacher, you have to get your students involved enough to be able to change their identity to some degree. Learning a foreign language always entails learning a foreign culture, since any language has been built in order to express a particular culture. Thus, learning how to speak and write a given language involves an understanding of the culture out of which that language emerged.

That is why we should start revising our students' ideas, attitudes and even prejudices about the culture that is bound up with the language we expect them to learn. This way, we will manage their motivation.