Remember me complaining about tesall.com? Well, this time I actually got what I wanted. They are going to revise the old format of their list of blogs but the plan to rank sites based on traffic has been scrapped. This makes me feel good and I'm adding tesall.com to the list of sites I like.
Speaking of traffic, thank you for reading evryone. I've been averaging about 100 different readers/day (468 hits/day) and almost none of them come from search engines or other web sites... One fo these days I'll start a link building campaign...
And still speaking (more) of traffic, please visit a sponsor, Custom Hats . Custom embroidery superstore sells custom hats and custom caps.
A very inclusive translation services company with the following services:
So my EAP/CBI classes are writing essays for their final assessment. What do you think of these prompts for argumentative essays?
American History essay questions. Some from http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/CAS/US_History/question.html
Early American colonists came to America seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. How did their treatment of Native Americans fail to reflect these values?
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed "All men are created equal." Did this include Native Americans?
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed "All men are created equal." Did this include black men?
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed "All men are created equal." Did this include women?
In 1776 Britain's American colonists enjoyed a profitable trading relationship, the protection of the Royal Navy, a higher standard of living, lower taxes and greater religious liberty than the people of Britain. Why, then, did the colonists declare independence?
Was reconstruction a success or a failure?
Choose any historical event discussed during the course. How does this event reflect or fail to reflect two or three of the following values: freedom, human rights, democracy, opportunity, initiative, entrepreneurship, inventiveness.
So I posted a few messages a few months ago looking for classes that were discussing the death penalty. The idea was to have students in another country discussing the death penalty with my students on my death penalty message board. The benefits: if students organize their thoughts in order to post to a message board before a class discussion, this planning time will help students produce more accurate and complex language the second time around (see Martin Bygate's research on task repetition). After the class discussion, students might be motivated to continue communicating with the other class, especially if the members of one class post their messages in response to members of the other class (If everyone just starts a new thread there's no real interaction going on). More English practice.
This could work for any of my English practice message boards. For example students could disuss the attractions in their own countries and respond with questions about attractions in other countries on the travel message baord. Or after the first day of class, more practice with introductions on the say "hi" message board. If you have a class that's doing a topic not listed on my message boards, just leave a comment and tell me which topic you'd like me to add. Then you can look for another class to share ideas with your class.
So I tried a new roleplay today with my EAP/CBI "American History and Sociocultural Values" class. Students acted as diplomats engaging in peace treaty negotiations; 2 As and 2 Bs would do the roleplay and at the end I asked them if they had negotiated a peace or if they were going to war. In my class, 4 of 5 groups succeded in negotiating a peace treaty.
Both A and B got this (all of which they were supposed to have read already because these are just excerpts from the homework):
http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/history/ch4.htmBy 1807 the British had built their navy to more than 700 warships manned by nearly 150,000 sailors and marines. The massive force controlled the sea lanes: blockading French ports, protecting British commerce and maintaining the crucial links to Britain's colonies. Yet the men of the British fleet lived under such harsh conditions that it was impossible to obtain crews by free enlistment. Many sailors deserted and found refuge on U.S. vessels. In these circumstances, British officers regarded it as their right to search American ships and take off British subjects, to the great humiliation of the Americans. Moreover, British officers frequently impressed American seamen into their service.
President Jefferson decided to rely on economic pressure to force the British to back down. In December 1807 Congress passed the Embargo Act, forbidding all foreign commerce.... In a single year American exports fell to one-fifth of their former volume. Shipping interests were almost ruined by the measure, and discontent rose in New England and New York. Agricultural interests found that they too were suffering heavily, for prices dropped drastically when the Southern and Western farmers could not export their surplus grain, cotton, meat and tobacco.
The hope that the embargo would starve Great Britain into a change of policy failed.The US is preparing for war with Britain. The United States suffers from internal divisions. While the South and West favor war (northwestern settlers had suffered from attacks by Indians whom they believed had been incited by British agents in Canada), New York and New England oppose it because it will interfere with their commerce.
The US has fewer than 7,000 regular soldiers, distributed in widely scattered posts along the coast, near the Canadian border and in the remote interior. These soldiers need to be supported by the undisciplined militia of the states.
President James Madison has called on you to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. It is up to you to avoid war. You need guarantees that Britain will not harm US shipping interests; Britain must not stop American ships for any reason and must apologize for removing sailors from American ships and offer compensation. Finally, Britain must protect American settlers from indigenous Canadians and property carried off by British soldiers during the Revolution should be restored or paid for.
British Parliament has chosen you to negotiate with the Americans. In order to avoid war, you must receive a guarantee that America will trade with Britain but not with France. The American must also promise not to move north into Canada or west of the Mississippi. Also America should stop seeking compensation for cargo seized, sailors taken from American ships, and items looted during the Revolutionary War.
B1: If you trade with ony us, not France, we will security.
A1: You mean you will guarantee our ships safety?
B1: Sure.
B2: No, wait a minute....
This is exactly the kind of negotiation for meaning that leads to language learning. This activity has the potential to be a huge success but students (at least mine today) need to be directed so as to make use of the time alloted for planning.
I won't link to it because soon it will be a broken link, but http://www.tesall.com/bloglog.html is a list of ESL / EFL blogs. However their switching to an annoying format, where users have to create an account and link back to tesall.com (I counted over 15 ads on their index page). From their e-mail: The reason is simple: the top sites format is more engaging and effective.
I don't think so. The top sites format ranks sites based on how much traffic they bring to tesall.com. This format encourages us bloggers to place ugly tesall.com banners prominently on our sites in order to get the #1 ranking. Whoever sends them the most visitors (whoever makes them the most money) wins and gets a #1 ranking. No way am I joining that list. I'll make my own list of ESL & EFL teacher blogs.
If we all link to each other, we don't need tesall.com.
Marcus's Journal A personal blog from an EFL teaching friend.
The LongBow Papers - Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news and political events--with emphasis on China.
anglosaxy - A Brit's insight into life in the Holy Land...teaching, writing, drinking and anything else in the present continuous...
Me in Taiwan - Daily Blog about life in Taiwan as a foreigner teaching English. I spare no topic. SARS, toilet paper, tampons... all the info I had trouble finding when I was researching Taiwan as a home for a year!
Anna Overseas - A Canadian learning about Chinese culture and language while teaching in Jiangsu Province.
An Enlgishman in Verona - The adventures, musings and photos of an English teacher in Verona, Italy.
Scot's Dot - Technology and English language training, with a Macintosh bent.
Blog-efl - Blog for teachers interested in blogging with their classes.
China Hand - A description of daily life plus thoughts on greater issues in China from Huizhou, China by a long term China Hand.
Welcome to Dalian - Adventures of a Chinese-Canadian teaching, experiencing, learning and trekking around Dalian.
Travelitch - Travel & life in Korea and beyond. Over 98.6% Subjective.
TESOL Blog - This is the Blog of a wonderful group of TESOL postgraduate students at the University of Melbourne. Everydoby is welcome to send posts and comments!
seeing eye blog - The least intellectual Korea-based blogger since 2003.
Ruminations in Korea - Views on Life, Korea, the Universe, and Everything From a Tired, Old Man of 34.
The Rhialto - Report from Air-Conditioned Hovel No61.
Peking Duck - A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him...
The Laowai Monologues - An American teacher's accounts of teaching and living and struggling in a small city and a small college in China. Entries are long and detailed. Realistic, not promotional.
Korea Life - Enjoy reading about my experiences living and teaching in South Korea. Please leave comments.
Nevada in Taiwan - Hello..How are you?....I'm fine thank you, and you? Beleive it or not teaching English has diminished my ability to speak English.
frangipani - An Australian woman woke up on Christmas Day 2002 and found herself living at the foot of Mt Fuji, teaching English. Lots of lovely photos and.... a few words.
EFL in Japan - The politics, economics, education and environment of EFL in Japan.
Doom in China - A blithe account of my time in Haikou, Hainan P.R.C.
Brainylady - Dealing with a knitting obsession, one day at a time.
bjorn's web log - An Anglophile Swede's view of the Middle East, books and TEFL.
The Big Electric Kurva - A blog about me and the Koreans.
alive in kyoto - Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
An English as a second language weblog - ESL news, reviews, opinions, and links regarding learning and teaching English as a second language and English as a foreign language.
Bee-coming a Webhead - Comments/ Links/Ideas on Blogging and Learning Online.
Where is the love? - Italian EFL students bloggin' about peace.
On English - Gentle help for those who are struggling to master the English language, and a good read for those who think they do.
touchy issues - A running commentary on touchy issues relating to ESL teachers in Taiwan.
Blinger: A linguistics and ESL blog - I am a practicing ESL or EFL instructor at a university in Seoul, South Korea. I will be writing about my thoughts regarding how linguistic theory can or should be transformed into practice and any difficulties that are likely to occur.
First Conditional - An English teacher blogs from Spain. Stories from the classroom and the staffroom.
byoi in hong kong - Young American writer calls Hong Kong home for his travels and experiences.
If you know of any more ESL or EFL teacher blogs, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail.
The web site marksesl.com sent me an e-mail the other day requesting a reciprocal link with ESL go. Now I'm not suggesting you visit markesl, but if you do you'll a ton of advertisements (annoying pop up ads included) and a ton of links. Here's what they promised for my site if I linked to them:
* Properly categorized in its own section.
* Reviewed for possible improvement of its description.
* A big "Wow" image will be added.
....
If you link to me from your main page, I will add an "A" in
front of your site's name so as to alphabetize your site at the top of
its list.
This site actually competes with ESL go for search engine traffic! Maybe some day search engines will be able to tell the difference between teachers who build web sites to help people (me) and teachers who build web sites to display as many ads as possible (Mark's ESL).
I've been working to reorganize ESL go because I'm outgowing my original plans. I started a year ago (less actually) with 8 classes. Now I have 40 free online English classes. I just divided them into high beginner lessons, intermediate lessons, and advanved lessons.
The classes are designed to be short demonstrations of how language is used followed by a chance to practice English communication on message boards. Any comments on how to make the classes better are very welcome.
If you have 5 minutes to kill, this teaching methodology quiz entertained me. If you have more time, this survey about how CALL techniques are learned might be interesting.
A downloadable cloze generator. You could do the same text different ways (every 4 words, every 5 words, every 6 words, etc.) and students could choose which one they wanted to try. Then students could check the answers by themselves because between them they have all the words.
Remember how I talked about the class that said everything was too hard? I did a grammar cloze with them and they really liked it? Well last class I did some more picture based vocabulary. As they decorated their houses with lamps, vanity mirrors, etc. one student struggled. Most handled it easily, but one said that it was stupid (because it was too easy). That's a new student but still what a disagreeable class!
Then I did a listening where they looked at a picture (a decorated room so no change in context) which I described with some mistakes. They listened for mistakes. Too easy. We did a conversation from New Interchange 2 (workbook unit 4) where they filled in the present perfect and past simple verbs. I asked the to create a dialogue that was true for them based on that conversation. Foe example one student said "I sprained my pinky last week. Have you ever sprained..." instead of repeating the worksheet. Too hard for half the class.
Anyway, the big problem is finding something that the all enjoy and are challenged by. Today I'm going to try a C-test cloze. You can read about the theory and then make your own.
I've recently started a new web site: Blogs for learning English & teaching English. The feedback I've gotten so far has been very positive, but I'd certainly love to hear more. The basic premise is that students can communicate with native speakers about topics they find personally interesting through weblogs with comments.
To that end I've been emailing bloggers and asking if they would welcome comments from English learners. When I get a postive response, I add the blog to my directory of ESL & EFL friendly blogs.
A few other intersting resources for blogging: http://blog-efl.blogspot.com/ is a blog about blogging in EFL. http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-Weblogs.html is an article that discusses learner blogs, class blogs, and tutor blogs. I created my site around a fourth kind, normal blogs (blogs written for purposes other than education).
From ESL go.com's questions forum:
Ok, today's question is.. do you (as a native English speaker) make distinction between syllables when you speak a word? You know.. like.. first syllable, then second one and so on.
How do you know where one syllable starts and ends?What I mean by that is...
do you make conscious, unconscious, physical or psychological effort to give a distinction between syllables in a word when you speak them?
If so, that means you know how many syllables there are in a word and you know what they are, right?
Then how did you manage to make such syllabic divisions in a word when the English alphabetical spelling doesn't tell you how to do that.For example, when you say the two syllable word 'playing' /pleI.Ing/ ,
Do you first say, /pleI/ then /Ing/ so it's aurally different from one syllable word /pleIng/ (I know the word doesn't exist in English..)?*please note that I used a dot (.) to indicate syllabic division
Or..
For the word 'better'
should /bet. er/ sound different from /be. ter/ (if the accent difference is disregarded)?If they sound different, is it because you gave a small pause or glottal stop between the two syllables? If not how did you differenciate the two examples above?
Ok, here is a background of why I'm asking such questions..
I always believed that syllables are the order of consisting sounds when a word is spoken because I do consciously speak by syllables when I speak my native language (Korean) which incidentally spelled in syllables.
There is only one letter for one syllable where one letter can be consisted of multiple phonemic symbols.
So there is no chance of confusing where the inter-vocalic consonent should go (to the left syllable or to the right) as I do in English.. and I can't even begin to fathom how on earth can one syllable have upto 9 or 10 letters in it as they do in English. (ie. scrunched)
The word scrunched would sound like it has 5 syllables for a Korean because, in Korean, you can't have a consonent only sound (like 's' in scrunched).In other words, we actually have a vowel for every syllable we pronounce, and yes even the "s" only sound. So a Korean would pronounce the word "scrunched" as below
/s. k. run. ch. t/
5 syllables, not one..and it sound completely different from original one syllabic word.
Hence...I'm stumped because I can't figure out where the syllables start and ends in English and whether I should give any kind of indication (ie: a small pause maybe?) in between 2 syllables due to the problem I described above.Sure I can check it with my dictionary, but am I not supposed to "know" it naturally? Sometime, I get confused how many syllables there are in one word.
In Korean, if one syllable consists of one onset, one nucleus and one coda (not obligatory), it's represented as one letter consisting 3 phonemes with onset on top, the nucleus in the middle and the coda at the bottom (not always though).
For example, the word cook would be represented as
C
oo
k
(in English)or
ㅋ
ㅜ
ㄱ
(in Korean)and that's one syllabic letter with 3 phonemic symbols in it. (2 dimensional)
And also there is physical and psychological stop (almost like glottal stop) between the syllables when you say them, so I must say Korean is very syllable oriented language..and sort of syllable timed when you are reading also.
I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it right, I tried my best to be as specific as possible.
Can someone please help me.... it took a whole day to complete this post.. T_t
I need help answering this one. Any ideas?