Ukrainian accents and the correct way to pronounce 'bus'

When I visit Ukrainian schools, there is usually a question after the lesson that goes something like this..

"Why do you say  b/ʊ/s?  and why not  b/ʌ/s?"

The question is referring to the fact I, like most people from Yorkshire in England, pronounce that word as if I have just been lightly jabbed in the guts.

" Because I'm from North England" I always reply

This answer always seems to disappoint the teacher. It seems they were hoping for a walking example of perfect English and instead got an extra from 'Billy Elliot'.

Of course, the reality is that there isn't such a thing as a 'perfect accent'.

Something brilliantly described by Hugh Dellar on his FB vlogs and website here:

http://www.lexicallab.com/2015/05/politics-pronunciation-and-the-pursuit-of-perfection/

What is a British accent?

So the truth is there is no 'British accent'  despite what American sit-coms might think. School text books use recieved pronunciation (RP) as the standard because,  hey, they have to put something! But, in the real world of English communication, 97% of British speakers have an alternate accent. Are they wrong? Are their accents 'worse'  than RP?

They aren't, and the quicker we make students aware of differences in accent the better.

That's why good modern text books use videos and audios that include people from different parts of the world, both native and non-native speakers. 

So what should we teach?

I don't believe we should teach students that they have to copy 'British accents' or RP. The focus of English lessons should be helping the students to communicate with people from around the world, not on training them to be like British people (who don't speak like that anyway). If students are able to pronouce words intelligibly and can communicate in English then I believe we shouldn't make them feel that it's wrong to have an accent when they speak.

As a teacher I just pronounce a word how I would pronounce it naturally, the students do the same and if we all understand each other that's fine. 

So should we correct?

If one of my students pronounces /V/ as /W/  as they can't distinguish between the sounds, then yes I correct it. This confusion could be because the student is unable to hear the difference, so I would help them to identify the two sounds. However, if the student has a Ukrainian accent due to sentence or word stress I believe this totally fine. As I tell students, 'It's ok to have a Ukrainian accent, you are Ukrainian'.

 Most of what the students learn isn't English as a Foreign Language(EFL)  anymore, it's English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). So British norms are becoming less relevant. Do we need to teach our students RP when they are unlikely to ever encounter anybody speaking like this?

Having an accent is part of who we are. After all, Billy Elliot wouldn't have been the same in RP!

Activity of the Week - Vocab Grab!

Hi Everyone,

This week my students have been preparing for exams, so I came up with a fun game to review vocabulary we have studied so far.

Preparation

Chop up some slips of  paper and write down one word or phrase that you want to practice with the students on the each one. Scatter these slips on a table in the centre of the room.

Procedure

The students stand around the table in a circle a few steps back from the slips of paper.
When the teacher shouts 'Go!', the students must rush to the table, find a word they know and return to the outside of the circle.
The students must then provide a correct definition and example of their word.
Any student who fails to grab a slip or provide a correct definition is out of the game and must sit down.
The last remaining student is the winner!

I had a lot of fun with this activity this week. Hope you guys do too!

Activity of the week - Sentence Building Race

  Hi Everyone,

Here is a quick activity to practice sentence formation and collocation. Especially good for helping students with ZNO Use of English. It's easy to prepare and lots of fun!

Materials:
Slips of paper

Procedure:

• Divide the class into teams of 4/5
• Give a slip of paper to one person on each team
• Give them a root word like 'despite'  or 'suggested'
• The first student writes the root word on the paper and passes the paper to the left.  The next student must add a word either before or after the root word  such as  'despite being'. They pass the slip to the next student who adds another word, e.g. 'Despite being rich'. The students keep passing the slip around the table adding one word each until a logical sentence with at least 6 words is formed.
• The fastest team then holds up the slip to win.

Brilliant for practising collocations with prepositions and gerund/infinitive in particular.

Have fun!

Activity of the Week - Audio Prediction

Hi Everyone,

 This week's activity is designed to get students engaged in listening activities.

When using an audio track or reading text in a class, it is important to engage the students first by setting a context. There are three main reasons for this.

1. More Authentic  -  We rarely listen to information in the real world without knowing the context.

2.Less challenging - Knowing the context of the audio will help the learners to understand what they are listening to.

3. More Engaging  -  Giving learners a reason to listen to the audio will help to generate interest. With no context the learners are just listening for the sake of listening. The task will feel like an examination and it's no wonder they might not find it interesting.

So what can we do?

Good text books will always include a pre-listening task to engage the learners before the listening task.

Here is one.

Audio prediction

Before playing the audio track, choose 5-10 key content words from the audio and write them on the board. Ask your learners to then work in small groups to predict what they will hear by creating their own version of the listening script using the key words on the board.

Give the students 5-10 minutes to do this.

The learners then tell their predictions to the other group or to the whole class.  When the students have done this and they are familiar with their own version of events, they listen to the audio track and note down similarities and differences between the real track and their own version.

For extra motivation, points can be given for correct predictions.

This gives the learners a reason to listen as they are eager to learn what the real story was and how accurate their predictions were. 

Have fun!

Activities of the Week- 5 Activities for small groups

Hi Guys,

Here is the view from our new Dinternal office in Chernyachovskogo Street, Odessa.

As you can see, we have a lot of snow in Odessa at the moment and this can only mean one thing for English teachers.... smaller groups!

We all have experienced that lesson, where we have planned activities for 15+ students only to arrive in the classroom to find that the majority of the class have decided not to risk the deadly perils of snow or wind. leaving us with a group of three or four people when we had expected many more.

Never fear.. help is at hand!

Here are 5 low-prep activities for dealing with small groups:

Grand-prix

Materials: Board, Magnets or paper with sticky-tape or blu-tac

Procedure:

Draw a racetrack like the one above on the board.

Using board magnets or blue-tac, the students will race each other round the track. The winner is the first one to reach the end.

The students/teams answer questions in order to move forward. The questions can be prepared by the students to make the activity even more student-centred and, of course, cut down on your valuable preparation time.

Idea:

• Put different letters on different squares to represent different types of questions. eg  V+ vocabulary   G+ grammar

The Tower Game

Materials:  Building blocks such as  Lego or dominoes or Jenga

  

This is a fun game that works in a similar way to 'Grand-Prix'. 


Students in small teams answer questions on a set topic. As in the previous game, getting students to create their own questions can be fun and motivating and great for recycling.

If the group answers the question correctly they are awarded 10 seconds to build their tower.

The team with the highest tower at the end of the game is the winner.

The towers can fall at any time making the game more fun, less predictable and also more even if there are weaker and stronger teams.

How We Roll

A great activity to generate discussion and use target language in small groups.

Materials: a pair of dice

Procedure: 

Choose  6 discussion topics (e.g. sport) and number them 1-6 on the board

The teacher chooses six structures (eg  present perfect/linking words) and also labels them 1-6.

The first student rolls the dice and the number indicates which topic must speak about.

The second roll indicates which structure the student must include in their discussion.

 The teacher can impose time restrictions or just let the discussion flow.

Word Grab

This activity is great fun and really helps students with listening for detail.

Materials: listening material and some slips with the words or phrases from the dialogue.

Procedure:  

Choose a listening track or even a reading text which can be read out by the teacher.

Choose relevant words or phrases from the text and write them on large slips.

Spread these slips out on the table.

The students then listen to the audio (or the reading from the teacher) and when they hear one of the words on the table they have to try and grab it before the other students.

At the end of the dialogue the student with the most slips is the winner.

Word grab can be used to practice listening for detail and also anticipating information, as well as a novel way of introducing new vocabulary.

Grammatical chairs

Another great activity I practised with JJ Wilson in Kiev!

The simple activity involves students sitting in a circle on chairs. 

The teacher asks a 'Have you ever'  question (questions with other forms work too)  and any student who answers 'yes' has to stand up and change their seat. The person asking the question (in this case the teacher) will try to sit down and claim a seat and the person left standing must ask the next question.

Students who moved then give more information and generate interesting stories and discussions.

A really enjoyable game to practice speaking skills and keep those potentially challenging small-group lessons fun and dynamic.

Have fun!

TeachingwithTom meets....

On Saturday February 10th I had the pleasure of seeing JJ Wilson live in Kyiv. Here in Ukraine JJ is best known as one of the authors of Speakout and Total English.  He wrote his first Pearson title, Language to Go, when he was just 28 years old and was also authored one of my favourite methodology books,  How to Teach Listening.   During the presentation he gave lots of practical tips on how to improve listening skills in general and provided some advice for Ukrainian teachers and students on how to pass the new listening part of ZNO.

If you follow our Facebook pages, you'll know that JJ is also a poet, fiction writer and ex-rugby international, playing for England Under-19s in rugby union and Scotland in rugby league.  After his event, I spoke to JJ about writing, English teaching and, of course, rugby too.

Thanks very much to JJ Wilson for his time and energy.  If you were at any of his three events, I'm sure you enjoyed them just as much as I did.

Lessons from JJ Wilson

Who saw JJ Wilson's fantastic events in Kyiv this week?  I was there on Saturday to get lots of ideas about teaching listening and even got to see the National Presidential Orchestra of Ukraine live on stage.  It was great to see so many teachers there, including several I know from Odessa, Mykolaiv and Kherson.  If you couldn't make it in person, you can watch his presentation from Monday on the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics YouTube channel.


I was very pleased to see JJ live because I really enjoy teaching from his books. There are loads of great lessons in Speakout but one of my favourites is on the topic of six word stories.  What did you think of JJ's presentation?  Could you describe it in just six words?

Mine would be:  Learnt lots of lovely listening lessons!

If you like or follow Dinternal Education's Facebook page, you'll have the chance to win a small prize personally signed by JJ Wilson tomorrow.  The only thing you have to do is write six words.

Good luck!

Working with Wordlists: Vocabulary Cards

You might remember Michael Hudson's webinar from December on ways of using the fantastic wordlist resources in Focus and Wider World.  As promised, here he is with a follow up post on another activity you can use to get the most out of wordlists.  

If you missed the webinar, you can see it on our Dinternal Education YouTube channel. 

Hello everyone, and a big thanks to Tom for letting me write on the blog again!  Just before the Christmas and New Year holidays, I went through 13 activities for using wordlists to help your students learn and retain vocabulary.  Today I'd like to show you a routine I've developed with students in different countries around the world based on using vocabulary cards in class.

If you watched the webinar, you might remember I mentioned some of my golden rules for teaching, including the advice to never do something yourself that your students can do for you while learning English at the same time.  One way of putting this into practice is to ask your students to start making their own vocabulary cards.

As teachers, we all know how important it is to make sure students are recording new vocabulary in a way that is meaningful and memorable for them.  We also know the importance of recycling new language.  That's why wordlists are such a fantastic resource.   After you've done some work on wordlists, you could start your next lesson with a quick review game such as Brainstorm 3 or Stop the Bus.  You could include categories like words ending in -ly, types of fruit, furtniture, etc or words that can go before 'city'

Do some whole class feedback on the vocabulary after the game is finished and use this to elicit some parts of speech. Depending on the level of your students, use some or all of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, exclamations and articles.   It's also useful to elicit or pre-teach the distinction between a word and a chunk (two or more words which go together, like New Year holidays or put something into practice) here.

You'll need to model the task using a word or phrase that you have recently studied, using the following information on the board.

Word or chunk        ______   ____________

Meaning                   A seminar done on the internet

Example sentence   I watched Michael doing ___  _______ last month. 

Translation              ________________       

Ask students to fill in the gaps (each line is one word).   If you've been reading carefully, you should know that the chunk I'm looking for is a webinar.   The translation of this word is easy, of course, but that's not always the case.  That's why I usually take out translation and add the category 'A good way to remember this'.   Sometimes this might be a simple translation but it could also be a real-life example, for instance.

Now divide your class into teams with two or three students in each.  Give each team three vocabulary cards (you can see an example on the left) and ask them to follow your example.  Remind them to choose words or chunks they've already studied in the lessons and not to write the word or chunk itself!


When the students have finished doing this, give the word cards to another team and ask them to try to complete the cards.  In doing this activity, your students have actually prepared and done their own vocabulary test.  Because it comes from their classmates and not the teachers, they won't all realise this, of course!

At the end of the activity, I collect all the cards and keep them in a drawer or a box.  If you make this a regular routine, your students will soon have prepared a lot of easy review materials for you to use in class.  That means next time you want to try any of the wordlist games I mention in the webinar, you won't need to think of the vocabulary to be tested as your students can select it from the cards and run the whole activity themselves.

Activity of the week! Webquests

This week's activity is designed to keep our technology mad students motivated!

Webquests are basically tasks given to students that they must complete by hunting for the information online. The idea is to encourage students to use their love of technology to learn for themselves, with the teacher's supporting and directing in the background.

Webquests are motivating and fun for students, encourage learner autonomy and are an easy way to bring technology into your teaching!

Why webquests?

There are lots of reasons for using webquests in the classroom. They are an easy way to make use of the learning opportunites provided by the internet, which many students have access to on phones or home computers.  Webquests can be used to practise English, but can also easily be used for work on other subjects too.   You could ask your students to find information about history, science or art, for example. 

Webquests encourage critical thinking skills like comparing, categorising, making deductions and analysing mistakes.  They are really useful tools in Competency-based Language Teaching! 

What are the stages of a webquest?

The introduction stage is normally used to introduce the topic of the webquest.  It's here that you'd give background information and introduce any language that the learners will need to understand while completing the task.  

The task section explains very clearly what the learners have to do to complete the webquest.

The process stage is where the learners start working on the webquest.  They are guided and directed by the teacher through a series of activities or research tasks. The activities are web-based and are usually presented in a task document with links the students can type in or click on to access the relevant sites.   

The evaluation stage includes self-evaluation, comparing and contrasting what they've learned with other groups and giving feedback on what they found out or achieved.  It will also involve feedback from the teacher to the students.  

Try example webquests connected to London and zoos here and here. 

There's more information on webquests here.  

And there's a framework for creating your own webquest here. 

And look out for a very simple webquest in tomorrow's Friday competition on our Dinternal Education Facebook page. 

Listening as a Lifelong Skill: Free Seminar in Kiev with award winning writer JJ Wilson

Hi Everyone,

With so much focus on Listening for ZNO this year I'm really pleased to be attending JJ Wilson's seminar on listening strategies for real life and exams.

The event takes place in Kiev on Saturday Feb 10th and it's absolutely free!

JJ Wilson is an award winning EFL writer and is the author of books such as 'How to Teach Listening'  and 'Speakout', which is one of our most popular adult and teenage courses.

JJ has taught and trained teachers in over 30 countries and it's a great opportunity for teachers all over Ukraine to get advice on teaching listening and to meet the multi-talented man himself!

Register for free here:

http://events.dinternal.com.ua/wilson10/

See you there! 

Happy New Year

The holidays are almost over and a new term awaits. We hope you've had a wonderful time since we last saw you!  If you were too busy to catch them last month, our December webinars are all now available on Dinternal Education's YouTube channel.  While Michael Hudson's webinar on word lists won't be repeated live, he will be writing a January blogpost for us with some more ideas for vocabulary activities, so keep watching this space. You can also sign up here for our new webinars on ZNO Listening (January 16th and 25th). 

To kick off 2018 we'll be running Friday competitions on our Dinternal Education Facebook page between January 12th and 26th.   As an early clue, the first one will have a small connection to a special visitor who'll be doing three big events for us in February.....

On the subject of competitions, we started an exclusive one for Pearson Partner Schools at the end of 2017. If you missed the details, you can read all about them here.  The closing date is March 31st 2018 so there's still plenty of time to take part.   During January we'll also be making some how-to guides to help students put their videos together and win a trip to discover Britain for themselves this summer.  

Wherever you are in Ukraine, a very happy new year from all of us at Dinternal Education!  Together, let's make 2018 a very special one...

All the best,
The Dinternal Education Team

Another Competition Coming Soon: Meet the Judges

More than two decades ago Dinternal Education was formed from a connection between Great Britain and Ukraine.  Along with our sister language schools, we've since grown to become the biggest provider of English-language education in the country but we've never lost sight of the power of partnership.  That's why, together with our generous main prize sponsors Alekom Tour, we're all very excited by our final competition to celebrate Pearson's 20th anniversary in Ukraine. Next summer one lucky student from a Pearson Partner School will be spending two weeks in Great Britain, where they'll have the chance to study English with teenagers from many other countries and visit world famous destinations like London, Oxford, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.  Working together, we really can do more.

The competition itself will be announced in early December and will close at the end of March.  Before then, here are the experts who'll be judging the entries:

Sam Cooke and Wendy Grace are the founders of Bright Schooling, a British educational charity which aims to make English language lessons accessible to as many people as possible. After teaching or lecturing in countries as diverse as Vietnam, Denmark, Taiwan, Kosovo and South Korea, both Sam and Wendy have spent a number of years working in English-language teaching here in Ukraine.  Earlier this year they partnered with Dinternal on a project to provide free classroom resources to schools in Mariupol.

Colin Gibson is a doctoral researcher in literature at the University of York. He has a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in English Literary Studies from the University of York. He worked as an English language teacher for six years between 2011 and 2017. He was born in Oxford but lived in a forest for the first six years of his life due to his father's job. His main interests are reading, writing, and playing football.



Aaron Fearnley comes from Rochdale, a town in the north-west of England.  He studied Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire and then did his CELTA at the Manchester Academy of English.  Since 2012, he has taught English in Britain, Hong Kong and Spain and travelled to four different continents.  "I know from my own experience that English is a vital global language nowadays and I'm passionate about passing on my knowledge to give students the best chance to succeed."



Monika Sherry was born in Wroclaw, Poland but now lives and works in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland.  She worked for IBM in Bratislava and has taught English and Polish for a total of eight years, completing the CELTA while teaching in Paris.  Her students have included film stars and workers from Chanel, Hermes and BNP Paribas bank.  She loves reading, travelling and learning about new cultures.

Grace Thomas studied English Literature and Language with Creative Writing at St Mary's University in London.  Since doing her CELTA in 2012, she's taught English in Spain, France, the Czech Republic, Britain and Italy, where she worked as assistant director of studies at a school in Naples.  She now lives in Chester and works full-time for a company that organises study trips for teenagers in Britain.

Keep watching and good luck everyone!

Michael Hudson

Activity of the week - Paraphrase Pairs

ZNO Teachers!

Here is a simple way to make reading activities more fun, and a nice way to get students paraphrasing. Of course, that's a skill which is essential for tackling the writing, reading and listening parts of ZNO.

Many modern books aimed at helping students with ZNO, such as 'Focus' or 'Wider World' include reading tasks such as Matching, Multiple Choice and Gap Fills. These reflect the exam tasks the students will tackle in their exams.

Paraphrase Pairs

Instead of asking the students to do the multiple choice individually. We can put the students in pairs and give one student the questions and the other student the text.
The student with the questions must find out the answers without looking at the text themself. The students must work together to decide what the answers are, without showing each other the questions or text.

However...

Neither of the students are allowed to read directly from their paper!

They must summarise and paraphrase the questions and relavent parts of the text to each other. This will encourage them to think of synonyms and alternative ways of expressing ideas, skills which will come in handy when taking those all-important ZNO papers.

Have fun!

Activity of the week-- Banana!

Hi Guys,

A very quick and simple game to practice vocabulary!

Ask the students to choose a word that they learnt in that lesson, and to write a sentence using that word in context. For example, if the topic was 'reporting verbs', they might choose the word 'avoid' and the sentence might be as below.

"I always avoid watching films that are very romantic"

The student then erases the original word from the sentence.

"I always  ------  watching films that are very romantic"

The student then writes the word 'banana' instead of the original word.

"I always banana watching films that are very romantic".

Ask the students to read their sentences to one another, asking their partner to guess the original word. Students can then mingle around the room practising their sentences.

Excellent for ZNO exam skills!

Works particularly well with:

Gerund and infinitive

Phrasal verbs

Collocations

Have fun!

Another Competition Coming Soon....

After our recent Focus and Wider World competitions, a lot of you have been asking when our next contest will take place.  Here's Michael Hudson with a special preview....

The Christmas lights are going up, the leaves are coming down and we're almost at the end of Pearson's 20th anniversary year in Ukraine.  It's been a landmark 12 months for us all.  In April, over 1,000 people saw Vaughan Jones, Ania Kolbuszewska and Marek Jedryka speak in three different cities, while more than 500 teachers attended last month's two-day English Forum conference held at the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics.  Personally, I've spent much of this year travelling the length and breadth of the country, doing seminars, workshops, demonstration lessons and PTE examining in - deep breath! - Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Lutsk, Shatsk, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskiy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Ivano Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Drohobych, Zaporizhia and Khmelnitskiy. 

We were almost as busy with our competitions.  Several lucky teachers got the chance to have coffee with Focus author Vaughan Jones when he visited Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv. From May to October, hundreds of students from all over Ukraine joined the wider world by writing to tell us about their hometowns.  I know Tom and I are both really looking forward to meeting the winning year 6 students from Vinnytsia's Gymnasium Number 1 in person sometime soon!

Our final competition of 2017 had to be something really special.  Thanks to our partners at Alekom Tour, it really, really is.  How special?  Well, if you're a student in a year 8, 9, 10 or 11 class at one of our Pearson Partner Schools, you'll soon have the chance to win a two-week study trip here:

Visas?  Free
Flights?  Free
English classes?  Free
Afternoon and evening activities?  Free
Food?  Free
Accommodation? Free
Excursions to places like London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace?  Free

Want to know more?  Keep watching this space....

Activity of the week - Grammar investigation!

A nice game to help students focus on common errors and improve accuracy. It's easy to set up and is also a lot of fun!

Materials
Just some paper!

Procedure
Tell the students about a crime that occurred the night before the lesson - a robbery at the school, for example. 

Explain that all the students are suspects, and they must investiagate to find the 3 culprits.
Give all the students a slip of paper.   You need to have written 'thief' or 'murderer' on three of them to signify the people who committed the specific crime. . Make sure the students don't  give the game away by revealing what is on their paper.  If it has nothing written on it, they are innocent.

The students then imagine what they were doing  last night and use the target language to explain it. The culprits must lie of course!

Target language which suits this activity includes:

Narrative tenses
Gerund and infinitive
Passives
3rd conditional

The culprits must intentionally include a small grammar mistake in their story. Something they think will be hard to recognise.

When the students have completed this task. They interview each other in pairs, listening for mistakes. The innocent students must identify the culprits by listening for the grammar errors. The culprits must avoid detection by trying to slip their errors in unnoticed.

At the end, the students work in pairs and try to identify all 3 culprits according to the particular mistake they used.


This game is great to encourage students to pay attention to common errors and accuracy.

Have fun!

Activity of the week - Brainstorm 3

This week's activity is a fun alternative or addition to 'Concept Checking Questions.'
Its very simple and requires no preparation!

• Divide the class into small groups of 3 or 4.
• The teacher calls out  CCQs using the target language; the groups have to brainstorm 3 examples. For instance, if the lesson is about adjectives of feeling, you could use '3 things that make people jealous'  or  '3 things that make people annoyed in the cinema'  or '3 things that might make you feel relieved'
• The groups then brainstorm and write down 3 things.The first group to do it holds up their paper and shouts out!
• The teacher then reads the examples and if all the class agree then that team scores a point.

A simple way to concept check and make sure the students have REALLY understood the meaning of words.

Have fun!

Visual scaffolding - helping our students climb to the top

It's difficult to climb without something to hold on to. When students are trying to increase their level of English by producing new language they need something too. This is why Jerome Bruner decided to call his teaching theory 'Scaffolding'.

Scaffolding is a word Bruner used to describe all the assistance teachers give to students in order to help them reach their goal. If you have ever tried to cook a curry with lots of ingredients, you will know that constant reference to the recipe is required. Simply reading once and trying to remember everything isn't enough. This is the same for students trying to put together large chunks of language.

Visual scaffolding

We can help students by providing visual aids to remind them of structures and words as a reference whilst trying to produce longer utterances. Clear, organised whiteboard work can help us do this. Boardwork should be planned carefully to produce a frame the students can use whilst trying to produce the target language.

My terrible doctor's handwriting aside ("like a spider wrote it" was one of my teacher'S comments), here is an example of scaffolding from a recent lesson on family vocabulary and 'have got'. In the production stage of the lesson the students have to ask each other  questions about their families using 'have got'. All the language the students need is there for them to put together and refer to when forming it for the first time.

Learning to fly

After giving the students plenty of time to practice with 'Scaffolding' a nice technique is to remove it once the students feel more comfortable and let them repeat the activity. This time using only memory and experience. Being able to do this will give the students a real sense of achievement.

Focus on Scaffolding

"Focus" has taken the idea of Scaffolding a step further by adding the 'Word store'.  The word store is a booklet attatched at the back (one page for each unit) with exercises for students to complete and store the relevent vocabulary for that unit. The Word Store can be opened at the same time as the lesson page to create a three page spread. So for every lesson in that unit, the Word Store will be right there providing the perfect scaffolding to help students recycle that all-important vocabulary.

No more excuses for forgetting words or not using them!

Providing students with Scaffolding increases confidence and therefore motivation. Let's help our learners climb as high as they possibly can!

Tom