I'd just like to wish all the readers of my blog a very merry Christmas, or happy holiday season, a happy new year or just a nice couple of weeks - if you don't celebrate anything at this time of year! I'm travelling to Spain today and keeping my fingers crossed that there won't be any problems flying out or back in a week or so. I'll not really have reliable internet over there so I thought I'd get out a Christmas message now.
For all the Christmas-celebrating people, I'd like to share a video of the greatest (imho) Christmas tune EVER!! Complete with amazing facial hair.
That's it. I've had it. I've tried a couple of times to write a post about this, trying to be satirical and amusing, didn't work, I'm not Diarmuid. Now, however, I don't care any more, I'm just going to say it. So, as a result, this is going to be a bit of a rant.
Some of the people preaching evangelically about the technological future of education seem not to be using the critical thinking skills that they think certain aspects of technology and the use of online research will support. Prensky is a good example. To read into his background and check out his references is to find a complete lack of academic rigour and absolutely no support for the outrageous suggestion that his so-called 'digital natives' have evolved alternative neurological processes. It's a completely useless dichotomy anyway.
Repeated references to Prensky's writings demonstrate that some people blogging about educational technology have not perhaps actually read the writing of real academics investigating the pedagogical benefits of its use. Blindly calling for institutional change without making an effort to consider whether these things are actually supported at all by science. I'm sick of seeing Prensky's quote (as shown in the picture) which is based on research completely unrelated to education and technology and has been conveniently cherry-picked to support his sales pitch.
I'm not saying that there is absolutely no truth or purpose in his ideas, there probably is a need to engage students in more IT based learning, as in general it seems to be motivating, yet all students are not the same and categorising all students below a certain age in the same way is unhelpful and wrong. Furthermore, learning can't be fun all the time, 'edutainment' has its limits.
Prensky has his own bandwagon rolling and the promotion of technology in education is not helped by jumping on it. There seems to be a repeated online call saying that without technology in class you're a bad teacher, which is a massive a guilt trip, a suggestion that some of Prensky's writings are full of, openly attempting to pension off any teachers who aren't suddenly leaping into the digital world. It must certainly make people feel better about themselves if they are one of these amazing technologically enhanced 'super-educators', eh? Since when did a teacher become an 'educator' anyway? But I digress.
Another thing is that it is worth remembering that, as Morrissey once sang: "America is not the world". Just because US kids are glued to a digital screen doesn't mean the rest of the world is, or that it even wants to be. I know from first hand experience that in Spain, generally, teenagers are far more active socially OUT of their house and away from their computers than they are on them. If that's what they want, who's going to make them change?
There is a place for technology in education, but education is not technology, just as education is not a course book. If people want to change the world of education, they might want to support their ideas with a little research first; critical thinking is necessary for teachers as well as learners.
I'm having a sudden burst of blog proliferousness (not a real word, I know, but it works nicely and there are 156 Google hits for its use) and here I am with another great web tool. Well, it is Christmas…nearly.
I found this tool in use by Paul Koch (who has very kindly followed my humble blog) on his class blog here. I couldn't help thinking that this is such a fantastic tool to use on a class blog! There is huge potential for vocabulary work: brainstorming before a class or after, as follow up, and it's SO simple that even the technophobic or kids with only basic skills can use it easily.
It could be made into an alphabet game: challenge the learners to come up with one word for every letter of the alphabet based on a certain topic - animals, for example. If they can do it before the next lesson they get to play their favourite game or something.
We could also get feedback on the lessons, with the students naming activities that they really like doing.
I'm sure their are more possibilities, so I thought I'd post a version here so that we could try it out, and if anyone has any thoughts about further uses, please comment below and we can create an effective AnswerGarden resource page. Here's my AnswerGarden...
Inspired by this story from this blog post I was thinking about how it would be good to get students to create a menu for an imaginary restaurant as a mini-project. Obviously, this is not new and I've seen it featured in many a young learners course book. However, often there is little linguistic benefit in them creating lists of food such as this example below.
I've seen many versions of this with lots of lovely coloured pencil scribblings or pictures of food stuck round the outside, when the students are at a level where they could do more.
What I'm thinking is that the ability to describe the food and bring a certain beauty to the descriptions of the meals would be a great way of working not only with food vocabulary, but also lexis used to describe the food itself. Clearly, this could be graded to suit all levels, but even at fairly low levels the learners could be pushed to create more descriptive menu entries using simple adjectives. Here's an example I just knocked up.
Lesson Idea
As an introduction, you could have a discussion about eating out, favourite types of restaurant etc, then talk about menus and what information appears on them. After that, some example menus would be good, with the students comparing simple menus to more descriptive ones, being introduced to some new vocabulary on the way - perhaps with some dictionary work.
Ok, the fish is a bit random, but my mind was in tapasland!
This new lexis could be mind-mapped to the whiteboard and followed up with some pronunciation work. Then, working in pairs or small groups, the students could make some connections with words on the board. For example, for the word 'crunchy', they would brainstorm a few foods that could be described with this word and mind-map it, like the example. These could be made into a poster and stuck up on the wall or scanned for inclusion on a class blog.
As a model for the description of one of the meals, like the cheeseburger one to the left, I would suggest having the whole class work together to create one on the whiteboard, so that everyone is clear about what to do in the next stage. Then, in groups, the students can work together to design their own menu, choosing their meals and writing draft descriptions, which could be checked and redrafted before letting them loose on computers to create beautifully designed menus with fancy fonts, colours and pictures! It would be easy enough to create such a thing in Word, but I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. Alternatively, of course, the scissors, glue, crayons and card could come out and the technological malarkey conveniently ignored.
Follow up
Depending on the age/ level of the students, this mini-project could be followed up with the creation of an advert to promote an imaginary restaurant that they invent, on video or podcast. In fact, I often like getting teens to create radio-adverts rather than video, because they have to be a bit more creative in order to get their message across. Often I'm surprised by their ingenuity, particularly with sound effects and comedy jingles.
Wouldn't it be great to have different classes in different countries doing the same thing and posting the work on their class blogs, then commenting and voting on which advert was the best? I love this possibilities of blogging with young learners and can't wait to get back in the classroom to try out the ideas I have.
In fact, the food/ restaurant theme could keep going a bit…
…how about some bad food jokes?
"Waiter, there's a fly in my soup!",
"Quiet, sir, or everyone will want one!"
"Waiter, there's a fly in the butter!"
"Yes sir, it's a butterfly!"
A cabbage, a tap and a tomato were having a race. The cabbage was a head, the tap was running and the tomato was trying to ketchup!
You can beat an egg, but you can't beat a bad joke! That was mine. I thank you.
If you can stand it, there are more waiter jokes here.
We're not finished yet! How about some customer complaint role-plays? Perhaps about the fly in the soup! These could even be recorded with a video camera. Then this could neatly develop into a letter (or email) of complaint to the restaurant, fitting in nicely with those pesky exam preparation requirements.
And who knows, maybe there would be time to squeeze in one of these videos, although the last one may not fit in with everybody's requirements!
I have designed this survey in order to compile some information which I could use in an assignment for my MA. I'm investigating the non-participation of some students in class blogging projects and would greatly appreciate any help you lovely people could give me!
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.
Here's quick post based on debates regarding what sort of English to teach, what is useful, what isn't and how it relates to the majority of learners who don't wish to communicate with native speakers, but other non-native speakers of English.
I followed a link posted by @japglish on twitter this evening for this blog, with an interesting video on Globish, by its originator, Jean Paul Nerriere. He claims that this version of English is the way forward and that with only 1500 words and simple grammatical structures, without idioms or jokes and many other culturally related linguistic features, everyone could communicate perfectly well.
There is a website to scan text to see what percentage of the words are written in Globish. I scanned a short news story from Orange News (incidentally, a great source of quirky news stories), that I used for an exercise I created recently and the result is below. The words in red are those not included in the Globish 1500. Firstly, I noticed that some words, such as abdomen, runaway, handbrake, driveway and fence, are not high frequency and could be ignored by teachers and learners up to a certain level. However, I was surprised to see that 'could' doesn't feature. Surely speaking English without 'could', could be problematic? You couldn't explain hypothetical possibilities, could you? Nerriere talks about business English users and a discussion of business possibilities would be more difficult if they couldn't express what they could do, couldn't it?
Ok, enough of 'could' overuse! Let's try…
"Surely speaking English without 'could', might possibly be problematic? You wouldn't be able to explain hypothetical possibilities, would you?"
Hmm, ok, perhaps!
Here's the text:
Paramedics in Australia described a woman as "incredibly lucky" after she was run over by her own car - twice. The 37-year-old had pulled into the driveway of her Melbourne home and, in her haste, failed to put on the handbrake. The runaway car knocked the woman to the ground and ran over her abdomen and legs, reports the Melbourne Age.
As she lay injured on the driveway, the car continued rolling down the incline, hit a fence and rolled back towards her, running her over again. Paramedic Craig Brooks said the woman was "incredibly lucky" despite the unfortunate chain of events.
"The woman said she couldn't move after being crushed the first time," he said. "She definitely was fortunate that her injuries, whilst possibly being serious, they could have been much worse."
Intensive care paramedics took the woman to hospital where her condition was described as serious but stable.
So, what do you think of this Globish idea? Is there any need to follow the idea that with a certain number of words it's possible to be a communicative speaker of English? What about the need for idiomatic English?
It certainly seems like Monsieur Nerriere speaks pretty well in the video! Watch it yourself and let me know what you think. Personally, I see an experienced businessman with an attractive idea marketing books and websites for his own financial gain, but I'm a complete cynic and always will be!
I was thinking, though, that this Globish scanning tool might be an interesting thing to use with learners, perhaps at an upper intermediate level, where they should be learning some of the words that Globish fails to recognise. Perhaps the non-Globish words could be gapped out and the learners encouraged to think of words that might fit in the gaps. It also might be interesting to get them to scan their own written work to see how many non-Globish words they use. For lower levels, it might help to scan an authentic text to see how you could modify it so that lower level learners could understand it.
Just some thoughts of the top of my head. Any further ideas or critical reviews of my thoughts are most welcome!
