Hello from my Hometown: Join the Wider World

All of us at Dinternal Book and Pearson are really excited about our brand new course for lower-secondary students, Wider World.  To celebrate its launch here in Ukraine, we're also beginning a new competition which will run until October 13th 2017

As part of the competition, we've made a video that you can use with your students in class.  Robert Hartigan, Michael Hudson and I talk about our hometowns in Britain and Ireland and mention the best and worst things about living there.  For example, I talk about the famous Hull City football club.  We've  made a worksheet that you can give to your students, which you can download here along with the competition rules.  To help your students with language for sharing opinions about their hometown, we've also produced a great classroom poster full of useful expressions from Wider World which we'll be giving out to schools.

 

I hope you and your students enjoy using the materials and learning about the places we're from.  Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions using the comment box below.  I'm sure the competition would also make a great project for those of you who have summer camps with your students and will help introduce your part of this beautiful country to the wider world.  What are the best and worst things about your hometown?  Tell us before the competition closes in October and we could soon be visiting you in person to find out more!

Click here for the competition rules and entry form 

Remember that you need to send us the answers to three things: the video, the listening activity from Wider World and the writing your students do about their hometown.

The poster we've made includes lots of the useful, high-frequency phrases from Wider World, which are great for helping your students sound more natural and fluent when they speak. The book also has video and reading texts based on authentic BBC programmes that answer questions like 'What do the British really eat?', 'Do smartphones make you smarter?' and 'Can school be fun?' If you don't have video facilities in your classroom, you can use them to practise listening work in class and then your students can watch them at home using the extra online homework that comes with both the workbook and MyEnglishLab.

You can see more about the book here.  

Good luck, guys.

Activity of the week -Phrasal verb Bingo!

Before new vocabulary is introduced, it's a good idea for the students to brainstorm which vocabulary connected to that topic they can remember.This is called activating prior knowledge, or schema.

A simple way to do this is by playing bingo.

Materials: A small empty bingo card (a grid of 3 columns and 2 rows)

Procedure:

1. Put the students in small groups
2. Give each group a bingo card (they can easily make their own)
3. Tell the students you are going to talk about how you got to school that day, and they must try to predict which phrasal verbs you are going to use.
4. The students brainstorm and choose 6 phrasal verbs, one for each box on the bingo card
5. Talk about your journey to work using a variety of phrasal verbs.
6. The students listen and tick off the phrasal verbs as they hear them.
7. The first one to tick all 6 or a line shouts BINGO!

A great way to activate schema and also introduce new target language.

Apart from phrasal verbs, other ideas include:

verbs - talk about your daily routine

adjectives - describe your home town

verb tenses  - tell a story

Have fun!

Hello From My Hometown Competition: Closing Soon!

Michael Hudson

With only ONE WEEK left before the closing date in our Wider World competition, here's another guest post from Dinternal's Michael Hudson.  Michael's from the north-east of England but he's now based in our Kyiv office, where he's been reading all your work and judging the monthly prizes since the competition started in May.   The deadline for entries is midnight on October 13th - our marketing team will wait until then before closing the entry form because so many of you have been sending us your work late at night recently.  If you can stay awake, so can we.  The wider world is waiting...  

Hello from my Hometown began on May 1st and ends on another memorable date,  Friday October 13th! Does the mention of Friday and 13th make you feel nervous about suffering from bad luck? Then you might have a problem with

Paraskevidekatriaphobia!!!

Paraskevidekatriaphobia isn't just an incredibly hard word to spell.  It also describes the fear of Friday the 13th.  It was first used in the early 1990s by an American psychotherapist who combined the Greek words paraskevi (Friday) and dekatria (thirteen) with the suffix -phobia.  Apparently, he also claimed that anyone who could pronounce the word would immediately be cured.

But why do so many people consider Friday 13th to be unlucky?  The truth is that  nobody knows for sure. Some people say the superstition dates back to a biblical story or a Viking legend.  Others believe it started on October 13th 1307 when King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest and torture of hundreds of Knights Templars. Whatever the reason, a recent study in the USA estimated that over 17 million people in that country alone are affected by a fear of Friday 13th.  Travel south of the border to Mexico, however, and they'll tell you that it's Tuesday 13th you should really be afraid of....

Our international team at Dinternal Books all know that cultural awareness is a vital skill.   That's why we've decided to offer a very special prize for 13 lucky winners this Friday 13th!  All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to send in your entry before noon next Friday.  In the afternoon,  I'll pick 13 winners at random from all the entries we've received since May.  So Friday 13th could finally be your lucky day!

The prize will be a copy of Pearson's Culture Close Up DVD for you to use with your students in class. Each DVD includes 10 videos on aspects of culture in Britain and the USA.  The videos come together with ready-made worksheets at A1 and A2+ level and teacher's notes to save you time while you're preparing for class. 

There are five videos using British English and five that use American English.  Each video comes with easier and more challenging voice-overs so you can decide on the level of difficulty for your students.  If you want, you can also play them with subtitles.  The topics include school life in the UK,  music, sport, cities in the USA and festivals, which means you can introduce your students to British and American culture using language they understand and through topics they'll find engaging, relevant and fun.

Even if you don't win, every entry we receive before midnight on Friday 13th will go into the grand prize draw to get some of our native speaker methodologists at your school for one whole day.  If any of your students still haven't conquered their fear of Friday 13th, we can start by helping them to pronounce that word....

Good luck! 
Michael

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!