Activity of the week - Jigsaw Reading

Here is a really simple way to make reading lessons more active!

Active learning is one of the 3 pillars of Competency based language teaching and an essential tool in creating a class environment full of motivated students who are able to do more than just memorise.

Jigsaw reading is a co-operative task that involves dividing up a long text into smaller parts. Students are then divided into groups of 2-4 and are each given a part of the text to read.

The students then feedback to each other on the information in their own text, which encourages discussion and speaking and also helps the students understand the text properly as they have the responsibility to explain it to somebody else.

Comprehension questions can then be done in teams, making it essential for all the group to have the information and therefore motivating the students to read their text and then paraphrase it properly.  

There's an example in this guide for teachers.

Try a jigsaw reading for yourself and let me know how it goes!

Activity of the week

Here is a zero-prep fun game that really gets students reaching for that target language!

Materials- Some slips of old paper

Target language -  Use with vocabulary sets. Idioms and phrasal verbs work especially well

Procedure - In the final part of the lesson during the production phase, give each student two slips of paper.

Ask the students to write on each slip one of the phrases/words from the board.(making sure to keep it a secret)

Encourage the students to choose a word or phrase they didn't know at the start of the lesson.

The teacher gives a question which the students have to discuss with another student.

The idea is to try and 'win' the slips from their partner by using in context (not just saying) the slips their partner is holding.

Of course the students don't know which phrases and words their partner is holding, and so this activity will force the students try to use the more difficult phrases from the board.

The teacher must monitor and feed in new discussion questions at regular intervals.

the winner is the student who is holding the most slips at the end of the lesson.

This activity can be done sat down in pairs with rotation or as a mingle.

Enjoy!

Competency Based Language Teaching- the art of DOING

I know how to make the perfect fried egg. I know how to curl a ball and score from 25 yards just like David Beckham. I know how to drive. I know how to ski.  I know how to do all of these things flawlessly. Except, of course, I can't do any of them.

The bottom of my fried eggs always seem to burn before the top bit is cooked. Pressure always goes to my head when I shoot in football. My parking is awful. And anybody who has seen me ski - well, the less said, the better.

Yet I KNOW  the techniques for all these things. I have had 25 driving lessons and if anybody tells me to plough my skis again I'll.. well, I'll get to that later.

So what's going wrong?

Many skills require more than just a knowledge of how to complete them.
They also require a good knowledge of what it feels like to complete them without too much thinking, so that these skills be called upon when needed.  If we are not able to call upon the skill we need, then the knowledge of HOW to do it becomes useless.

I can repeat ad infinitum the rules of how to place my body weight and skis correctly, but this is a pointless piece of knowledge considering the fact I still can't ski.

Language learning is very similar. Rarely do I meet a student at B1+ in Odessa who doesn't know how to form the  2nd/3rd conditional. Rarer still is it to find a student at B1 who actually draws on this knowledge when in conversation to express themselves. 
The student can repeat rules but not actually apply them. Wasted knowledge.

It seems there is a gap between knowing and doing. If we want our learners to become successful English speakers then we must bridge this gap.

So what can we do?

Emphasising the need to 'be able to'  rather than just 'to know' is an essential step we must take in order to become competent teachers. I believe the onus is on us not only to give the students ample opportunity to practice- fail- repeat- improve - repeat, etc. but also to make the students aware of the gap they have to bridge. We shouldn't be satisfied with the fact that students can mechanically repeat the form of the present perfect continuous in the classroom.  Can they use it in real life?

It's also our job as teachers to understand that this process will take more than one lesson. We need to support and push our students to the point of 'being able to'  even if they may fight against us with cries of 'We know this'!

The Ukrainian Education Programme

The Ministry of Education in Ukraine has responded to this by reforming its lower-secondary programme and introducing something called CBLT (Competency Based Language Teaching) which (among other things) introduces a more practical 'can do' approach to English learning.

The Ministry has introduced 10 competencies consisting of smaller parts as a guideline  of what students should be able to do, with the emphasis being on DO rather than just know.
This is the first step in a movement away from the traditional parrot-fashion memorising of rules that accounted for a large part of education in the past.

The 10 competencies can be found on the Dinternal website.

Help is at hand!

Don't despair teachers! This shift in focus doesn't mean a total overhaul of everything we have done in the past. In fact, many of the top titles on the market such as Wider World, Next Move and Islands have been designed with all these competencies in mind. Teacher's books now list where each of the competencies are taught and practiced, to make sure your students become doers and not just knowers.

We at Dinternal are working on seminars to help teachers with this new approach and demonstrate how it can be easily applied in the classroom without too much upheaval or change.

Look out for our seminars, webinars and workshops!

CBLT will help our students become people who can use English in their day to day life in order to achieve their maximum potential. Who knows, one day I might get that skiing right!

Tom

Activity of the week!

Here is my first 'Activity of the week' of the new semester!

Designed to help enliven those long classroom hours with activities which students will find engaging and fun whilst practising the target language. I creatively refer to this game as 'sticky on the head mingle' and was inspired by a Christmas day game my family often play after a huge festive dinner.

I use it to practice personality adjectives.

Materials : Sticky labels

Get the students to write a personality adjective you have studied on a sticky label and apply it to the forehead of the person next to them. 
When all the students have done this, they mingle around the room.
When they encounter another student they make a sentence to describe the other person's word by telling them about their behaviour.

For example, ipon meeting a student with 'generous' on their head, they would say something like "Oh, thank you for the money you gave me"  or "You always give good presents." The students wander around commenting on each other's personalities.

At the end, the student guess which personality trait they had.  Simple!

It can also be adapted for many other vocabulary sets.

These secondary pre-intermediate students loved it!

Welcome to the new semester!

After a wonderful summer break, it's great to be back teaching at the London School of English!

This year I've chosen to use Speak Out for General English and CAE Gold for my CAE group. I'll be sharing experiences, activities and teaching tips from these courses during the year, so be sure to keep checking the blog for updates!

Upgrade your Qualifications with LSE Odessa

Graham Jones

Hi everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the start of summer.  With the end of another school year, we'll all be taking a break between now and August. Before we go, here's a post from Graham Jones, the director of the London School of English in Odessa.  Have a great holiday and I'll see you all again soon! 

As teachers are on holiday during the summer months, a lot of them use the time to upgrade their skills and qualifications.  One course we've just finished in the London School of English in Odessa is the TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) exam preparation course.  This was a 6 week course designed to prepare teachers for the TKT Module 2 (lesson preparation and resources) exam which will take place on July 1st.  As well as exam preparation, the course also included a lot of practical tips and advice for teachers, especially regarding lesson planning and use of resources.  The course was really enjoyable to teach and the participants (mainly from Odessa's schools and universities) were really enthusiastic.  Good luck in the exam!

A more intense course will start in LSE on Monday June 26th.  This is a course for teachers to gain the internationally recognised CELTA certificate, which allows teachers to teach English as a Second Language anywhere in the world, including Ukraine.  It's bound to be an exhausting but rewarding 4 weeks for all involved, including the tutors (myself and Kate Leigh).

If you are interested in either TKT (we are going to run a Module 3 preparation course in October) or CELTA, give LSE a call!

Our CELTA class of summer 2016

Working with Graded Readers

Michael Hudson

This is the first guest post on the blog from Michael Hudson, who works in Dinternal Books' Kyiv office and is one of the judges of our fantastic Wider World competition.  Every month between now and September, Michael will choose one of the competition entries to win a special prize of a Culture Close-Up DVD and a set of graded readers for students to use in class.   If you've never used readers before, they're a great resource for students to practise their language skills.  Here's Michael with some practical ideas.

I love using graded readers with students.  Not only do they introduce them to reading in English for pleasure but they also allow you to change the dynamic of your classroom work, help with motivation and provide lots of recycling of vocabulary and grammar.  You get engaging stories that are specially adapted for the language level of your students, which means they're ideal of out-of-class reading work. Like any other resource, readers work best when you give students work to do before, during and after they read the book. I usually do pre-reading activities in the lesson, then give students a chapter or part of the book to read at home (fast finishers in classroom activities can do part of this homework during lesson time).  We then review their while-reading tasks at the start of the next lesson and follow-up with post-reading discussion and extension activities.  You don't have to do it this way, of course.  A great thing about readers is how flexible they are, so you could give students silent reading time in class, too.  I don't usually recommend getting students to read aloud directly from the book.  However, if you want to use the reader for speaking and pronunciation work, you could get them to act out or even improve certain scenes as a post-reading activity.

Pre-reading activities

1.  Show your students the cover of the book and elicit as much vocabulary as possible.  Then ask the students to guess what happens in the story and to write short summaries of the plot.  Keep these until they've finished reading the book and you can look at them again to see which summary was closest to what really happened.

2. Give the students the chapter titles (jumbled up) and ask them to work in small groups to put the titles in what they think is the correct order.  Like the first activity, you can extend this by asking the students to then write a short outline of their story which they can compare to the real one later.  You can also use this as a link to grammar work.  Which chapter do the students think will be the most interesting?  Which will be the funniest?  Which will be the most exciting?

3.  Lots of readers have pictures to go with the text.  Photocopy the pictures, jumble them up and ask the students to put them in order.  Like the chapter titles, they can use the pictures to predict their own version of the story.  Once again, you can easily integrate grammar work into this activity by asking the students to describe what they can see in the picture and what the characters are doing.

4. Often readers will have a list of characters at the front of the book along with some biographical details such as their jobs or where they live.  You could make role play cards for your students.   Give each student a different character (include the name and 2-3 other pieces of information about them). The class can then do a roleplay where the characters meet at a party.   You can make the task harder by giving the students extra questions to ask, which means they have to invent extra information about their characters before they read the book (they can check their ideas later when they're reading).

5.  You can then use the information the students already know about the characters to make a relationship map.  Give your students a template to complete in groups like the one you can see on the left.  They can work in groups to complete it with their ideas before they read the book.  Display the maps in your classroom and the students can check their ideas while they're reading and possibly also add extra biographical information about each character.  At the end, you can go back and find out whose ideas were closest to what really happened.

6.  Find out about the author.  Give the students the author's name and ask them to write down some questions they would like to ask him/her.  The students can then try to find the answers to the questions either online or using the biography of the author at the front of the book.

7. Make a K-W-L chart.  This has three columns:  K (what I already know),  W (what I want to know) and L (what I learnt).  Students can work in groups to complete the first column with any information they know about the book before they start reading.  Then ask them to think of questions they'd like to find the answers to while they read and put these in the W column.  The final column, L, will be blank for now but students will complete this either while they're reading or when they finish the book.

While-reading 

1.  Students write a newspaper-style article on events in the chapter they're reading.  They could also interview the characters involved to get extra information, which works really well if you've already allocated characters to students before they read the book (see ideas for this in pre-reading activities 4 and 5).

2.  Horoscopes.  After the students have been introduced to the characters and have read part of the story, you could ask them to write horoscopes predicting the future.  What will happen to each character next?  What's going to happen before the end of the book?

3. Ask the students to make a comic strip summarising the main events in the chapter as they read. You could either ask the students to draw the pictures (and write text in speech bubbles) themselves or they could use one of these free apps to do it online.

4.  You can do lots of prediction activities before students read each new chapter.  For example, you can write out some sentences about things that might happen in the next part of the story and get students to discuss whether they are true or false (pre-teach or elicit the phrase 'No spoilers!' for enthusiastic students who are reading ahead).   You can also ask students to write down information about specific characters from the chapter they've just read (quotes by or about them, where they are and what they are doing) on bits of paper.  Swap the paper with another student/group and ask them to write some predictions based on the information they've been given.

5. The students can also fill in a table about the characters while they read. You could have each character on the left of the table.  Along the top there will be categories like age, appearance, likes and dislikes, possessions, etc.  You can compare the tables in class. Eventually, you could get the students to create a Facebook page or Wikipedia entry for the characters (on a poster if you don't want to do it online).

6.  Students can retell parts of the story from the point of view of one of the characters.  What happened to you?  How did you feel?  "I......"

7.  What should the character do?  Stop reading at a crucial point of the story.  Ask your students to write down or brainstorm some advice they would give the characters involved.  "I think you should....'

8.  Putting events in order.  At the end of each chapter, give the students a list of events that have happened in the book so far.  Can they remember the order they happened in?

9,  Give the students a list of questions to answer while they're reading.  They then compare their answers in the next class.  Pearson readers have lots of while-reading activities like these already prepared to save you time and effort.  You can see an example here.

10.  Encourage students to keep a list of new words.  Which words would they like to remember? What was their favourite word in the chapter?  You could then get the students to make vocabulary cards of these words to help you review and practise them.  The simplest way of doing this would be to make cards with English on one side and Ukrainian on the other.  However, you could do an online version of this too. Your students could even create their own quiz.

Post-reading 

1.  Ask the students to review the book for future readers.  You can give them criteria such as the theme/topic of the book, how difficult it was to understand, how interesting it is (for boys / girls / people interested in (history), etc,  Ask the students to write their reviews down and you can stick them to the inside back cover of the book or place them in an envelope you attach to the back cover. If your students have smartphones, you can use this great free app and ask them to review the book more interactively.  This way, students can see video reviews of the book just by scanning the cover with their phones!

2. The students can make a quiz about the book. You can either do this in groups with students making questions for other groups to answer or you could switch the normal classroom role and ask the students to make questions for you to answer.  If necessary, you can let the students check for answers they can't remember in the book (but they don't get as many points for a correct answer).

3.  Give the students a list of quotes from the book.  Can they remember which character said each one and why?  Can they put the quotes in the correct order?

4.  Put important words and phrases from the book on the board in the same order they appear in the story.  Can the students retell the story using the prompts you've given them?

5.  Alternative endings.  Ask the students to come up with a different ending to the book.  They could then write an email to the publisher (or to us at Dinternal Books) explaining their suggested changes.

6.  The students could write and perform a play or a short film based on the book. They could even record this on their phones!

7.  The students make a promotional poster for the book to advertise it to other students in your school.

8.   Spin-off stories are very popular nowadays, especially in TV.  The students could take a minor character and invent a whole new story about him/her.

9.  Make your own audio book.  Now the students know the content of the story, you could use an app like audacity to enable them to record themselves reading parts of it aloud.  This reduces the stress of reading live in front of the class as students can delete and re-record if they make any mistakes.  In fact, mistakes could be a good learning opportunity - you could tell the students to make 3 deliberate factual errors while they're speaking.  Can the rest of the class listen to the recording and spot the mistakes?

Pearson also have lots of ideas for using readers as well as certificates you can print out and give your students to celebrate their achievements in learning through extensive reading.

Happy reading and congratulations to our May winners from Novoukrainka in Kirovohrad Oblast, I'm sure your students will enjoy using their new Pearson graded readers!

Cheers,
Michael