I've been reading quite a lot about teaching listening. There are some things that I've believed for years: language in listening texts should be authentic or should approximate authentic language if it's graded for learner's level and tasks should have something to do with what learners might do in real life.
Then there are new ideas which I'm not sure about. Penny Ur says that visual materials are "essential" (Teaching Listening Comprehension p.29), but why? A picture on the board can help contextualize something and activate background knowledge, but so can a discussion... And while visual clues exist in real life, they don't exist in terms of badly drawn pictures on the board, so how does me drawing something make things more similar to how the aural input would be encountered in real life?
What I've been doing this past month is having students bring in their favorite song on CD. I'll prepare a cloze activity in advance and on the day of the class the student will say a few words about why they chose this song (that's got to be more natural than me drawing some ugly picture on the board) and then I'll give students a general question like "How does the singer feel?" After we listen students discuss how the singer might feel and when things start to wander I do a little class survey. Then I hand out the cloze and we listen again. Students check their answers, I collect the various answers and put them on the board, then we listen again to check which ones are correct.
Then students analyze the lyrics and talk about their reactions to the song in groups. At this point they usually ask about a few vocabulary words. After the discussion we sing the song together (or at least try).
I suppose its biggest strength is the discussion aspect. We've always got personally meaningful topics to discuss. I've been wondering about the value of the listening practice though. We start off with general idea stuff, top-down processing and follow it up with the cloze, bottom-up processing. That part's good.
The language is authentic and motivating, but students aren't exposed to many types of discourse. They get songs and then discussion (When students speak to each other their getting conversation-based listening practice). They never get speeches, directions, or a few other things.
I asked students recently which was better, Interactions 1, and the listenings we've done from there or the songs. The consensus was that the songs are more fun, but that the book is better for listening practice and learning how to listen.
The big differences I see are the types of input (conversations vs. songs) and the types of tasks. The book starts off with main idea tasks too, but then they have some listening for detail questions which I don't do. I suppose I could do that with the songs, before or instead of the cloze.
A Christmas board game: http://www.onestopenglish.com/News/Magazine/Vocab/worksheets/xmas_speaking_b.pdf and lesson plan: http://www.onestopenglish.com/News/Magazine/Vocab/worksheets/xmas_speaking.pdf
Some Christmas discussion questions: http://www.eslgo.com/resources/sa/discussion/christmas.html
Printable Christmas vocabulary worksheet: http://www.englishpage.com/holidays/christmasprintable.html
Check out this homework assignment and tell me if you think it was written by an intermediate English learner. Of course it wasn't!
The search term "promotes murder for murder" turns up one Google result: http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/2164.html.
An exact match. If you find yourself facing an obviously plagiarised paper, and cases of plagiarism are usually easy to spot in ESL classes, put a distinct sounding phrase in quotes and do a google search. Note that the quotes are very important. The term promotes murder for murder without quotes returns lots of pages. With quotes returns only one.
Linguist List - Ask A Linguist Index Page is a great web site! I was correcting some quizzes and the first three I looked at had "... are showed" as an answer. As I marked the third one wrong I said "Wait a minute! The past participle could be showed": Have you showed him the pictures? I get my dictionary: showed or shown. I get the teachers book: shown. I do a web search and find this Ask a linguist site. It turns out someone asked my question back in 1998. In the active shown and showed are both possible. In the passive, it has to be "shown". I just wish I'd told my students before the quiz...
I had an interview with IH Moscow on Nov. 12, 2003. They threw me a curve by starting off with "How do you like Korea?" and related questions. I'm used to that sort of thing from interviewing in Korea, but I didn't expect BKC International House Moscow in Russia to care. If you're curious about what they asked me, keep reading.
When were you born?
What kind of passport do you have?
When does your passport expire?
How many hours of instruction was your CELTA?
What grade did you receive on your CELTA?
Do you have business English experience?
Have you taught ESP?
What books have you taught with?
How would you explain the difference between "be going to" and "will"?
Why do students have trouble with the future tenses?
Why do students have trouble with phrasal verbs?
How do you teach phrasal verbs?
How would you handle a teen who is disrupting class?
How would you handle a good student who is so enthusiastic that he dominates a class?
ADOS questions
Do you have any administrative/ supervisory experience?
How would you deal with complaints from teachers?
Have you observed other teachers?
How would you conduct a class observation?
By the way, if you're also dealing with them you might want to know that they told me this interview would only be about teaching and that if it was successful, there would be a follow-up interview about being an ADOS. As you can tell from the questions they asked me, the IH Moscow interview actually covered both topics. Perhaps they wanted to get answers that I wasn't prepared to give because they prefer a "gut resonse" to a planned one. Maybe they're just a bit disorganized.
There was an interesting question recently on the TESL-L email list. One person mentioned that the presentation of grammar point: "be able to do, was able to do, etc." in a certain textbook was confusing because it followed a chapter in which "could do" was presented. "Wasn't able to do" sounded unnatural to me (compared to "couldn't do" which sounded OK) so I did a google search to see if people use this term on the web and it turns out they do.
"Wasn't able to install" seemed to be a big one. That got me thinking of collocations as I recently taught my students how to use the wonderful Oxford Collocations, using obtain as an example. "be able to" collocates with obtain. I think it would sound unnatural to use "couldn't obtain" now that I think about it.
Perhaps teachers can turn this confusing presentation of grammar forms into a positive by pointing out that natural sounding English depends on collocations and having students keep journals (for example of which actions go with "could" and which go with "be able to"). Of course, keep in mind that the book may be wrong and when your book uses unnatural collocations students must be made aware of this.
I suppose the first blog entry has to be about my site, ESL go - English as a second language learning and teaching. I started the site because so many ESL learning sites are grammar drills leftover from my high school Latin class. I mean we'd never use these activities in a communicative classroom, so why do we put them on the web and call it educational? My site is different and the Free online ESL classes are all contextualized and they all lead to interaction on the English practice forums.