This section aims at being a platform of sharing practical things: ICT-related stories, lessons, lesson plans, ideas, questions about real-life classroom situations.
Let’s start off with a challenge.
After-IATEFL-HU-Conference Challenge
To join and complete the challenge the only thing you have to do is to tell us how you have made use of anything you learned at the conference. Please present us with a real, practical bit that has the flavour of your own classroom. It can be a blog post, a video or even a podcast.
Graham Stanley’s Digital Play invades Balatonfüred
I got home on Sunday after the conference, on Monday one of my lessons was this:
Setting
B. is a10-year-old boy. He does English at school, 2-3 lessons weekly. They use New Chatterbox.
His mum asked me to teach him once a week. We agreed I would try and improve his speaking and listening skills, as writing, grammar and vocabulary are the focus of his school syllabus and often there is no time for “natural” English at school .
My course with him has no set syllabus, I focus on what interests him (he is a gamer and loves anything cool.)
Graham Stanley’s site is a goldmine if you have a student like this. I used this idea.
The lesson was in a cold afternoon, so he came by car, consequently I turned to the driving game. (Far fetched XD?)
So I wanted him to learn and use expressions to use directions, and whatever else that can be learned, bearing in mind my principles (speaking, listening, communication, fun).
Warm up
I asked him a few things:
How’s things? Is everything OK?
Is it cold outside?
How did you come here? Did you walk?
Did you come by car?
In your mum’s car or in your grandma’s car?
What’s the best car? Ferrari? Lamborghini?
Hey, can you drive a car? A truck? Ride a bicycle? Ride an enduro motorbike? Can you ride a quad? (He said yes, big fat liar;).
Pre-teach/recycle vocabulary
I’d created a Quizlet game for him (here), to which I added some new items later as they propped up during the lesson. We looked through the virtual flashcards and listened to them, then I told him to play scatter. I told him it was cool to do within 10 seconds. He was just crazy, his best time was 10.4 🙂
(The game takes you to various scenes, new vocab may arise any time.)
Make him command me in English
Then I showed him the game. Of course he wanted to play right away, but I explained to him that he could play through a robot and this robot was me. He gave me instructions in English. (And added comments in Hungarian, often criticizing my driving style. :D)
More vocabulary
We played for a while and then I generously let them play for a couple of minutes on my netbook. (I’m lucky I have it.) While he was playing on my laptop (that we’d used before) I took two screenshots of scenes from the game, quickly uploaded them on http://purposegames.com/, where I created this quiz and this one. B. didn’t like them of course, these are very uncool. Well, he did them a couple of times, though. 😉
Unexpected exploitable
When the word petrol ‘station/gas station’ came up he got his mobile out of his pocket and found a local petrol station using the GPS function :O. I asked him how he got there. It was easy, the end of the street. Go straight until you see the station.
Then–till B’s grandma arrived to pick him up–we watched a video, that was definitely cool.
My hat is off to you – creative, resourceful, exploiting what comes up at the moment! B. is very lucky to have you as his teacher.
Thank you so much for reassuring me 🙂
The practice page: a place to share about real-life situations. Here goes!
I admit it, I’m on the cross-cultural communication bandwagon. Got Bob Dignen’s book and off I went. Well, almost…my advanced level student works in the group accounting department of a large multinational company. When they have to close the month, quarter, or year she has trouble with her foreign colleagues, for various reasons. I thought Dignen’s lesson on flexible thinking would help. At first, my student was excited about the idea of stepping back and thinking how facts or situations may look different to people raised in other cultures. But she soon began to say, “That’s really hard to do!” and “I don’t think this will work.” Maybe we both had hoped for a kind of quick fix to her problem.
Well, to sum up, I began to worry that I might be overstepping bounds as an English teacher and trying to solve somebody’s personality problems (“psychologist” role?).
I am not going to give up, but it’s not easy knowing where to go from here with my student. The scenarios we were using (Europeans struggling with Indian finance people and Chinese negotiators) are familiar. The book has suggested solutions, so that’s what we’ll look at next lesson.
We need a balanced approach, teaching communication skills and being aware how sensitive students’ real situations can be. I might look for some videos about this and show them next time.