http://www.wordsurfing.co.uk/123547/index.html has some inofrmation on vocabulary assessment and development. Teachers can download materials to use with their students or students can go to a testing center in Budapest.
Speaking of vocabulary assessment and development, my English vocabulary message board has had a few more successes since the last time I wrote about message board instructions. Here's a thread started by one of my students for extra credit about the word obstacle's meaning & use. And then here's a thread started by another student for homework: match - meanings & uses.
A colleague of mine and I are going to prepare some instructions on how to get the most out of your students' posts but in the meantime, feel free to send your students to the site and tell me about any problems/successes.
Thesis 0-4
Organization 0-4
Topic sentences 0-3
Concluding sentences 0-3
Arguments/examples 0-6
Introduction 0-2
Conclusion 0-3
I found that this worked well because I wanted the sum to be 25. Otherwise I would have made arguments more heavily weighted.
The final week of class I helped students develop comparison contrast essays. They were highly motivated because this essay was their final exam grade or 25% of their grade for the course. They showed me their writing, and I told them the parts I thought they could improve. They went and improved it and showed me again. I said OK or made more suggestions. By the end of the final day of class, I had given out all perfect scores, even though one essay wasn't quite where I thought it needed to be (it had been written by a student who had proabbly been placed a level too high and who really struggled to keep up). I was happy to see all those essays written just the way I like them and students were happy too (maybe more about their grades and the end of the course but I think they were happy about their essays too).
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I want as many people as possible to read ESL blog, so I'm starting a link trading campaign. If you have an Education related site, request a reciprocal link via e-mail: eslblog {at} eslgo {dot} com (link to http://www.esl-blog.com/, send me an e-mail telling me where the link is, I'll look at your site and, if it's appropriate, link to it from this page).
Categorized ESL and education links for teachers with comments
English language teaching links with comments
ESL go - TESOL TESL TEFL resources - Speaking activities (role-plays, information gaps, find someone who..., oral assessment rubric); Business English handouts (writing business letters and e-mails, needs analysis); and lesson plans
(Communicative speaking/listening ones). This is my site.
KOTESOL CALL SIG - Computer assisted language learning in Korea. I facilitate this SIG.
Developing Teachers - Articles, lesson plans, and forums (which I sometimes use).
Music to teach ESOL - Songs that can be used to help English learners.
Teaching in Japan? Want Students? - Teachers in Japan may use this free service to get private students. Your online profile is browsed by students in your area. Set your own rates / schedule / workplace.
ESL Jobs, TEFL Jobs, TESOL Jobs - Jobs worldwide in ESL/TEFL/TESOL. Contains career-related information, lesson plans, activities and related resources. Completely
free but some pop ups and pop unders.
General Education teaching links with comments
Literacy Connections - Resources for teaching reading. Useful for ESL but not restricted to ESL.
Language and linguistics links with comments
Blinger: a linguistics + ESL blog - An EFL teacher's thoughts on language and teaching.
Translation - Language translation by human translators. High quality translation at excellent prices.
Blog links with comments
The Intern's Journal - Journals by Interns at Vancouver English Centre, in Vancouver, Canada.
directories
Education - Universities, research, math, history and other related topics.
I just added two web pages to ESL go.com. They are both for practice with transition words. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.
Business transitions.
5-HTP transitions.
I'm starting a CALL - CMC - cross cultural communication blog in which maybe 10 or so authors would blog occasionally about their experiences using CALL. The application process won't be time consuming, but if interested you will have to send me an email about your CALL experience past and present. It shouldn't be long, but should convince me you have had and will have some experiences worth sharing.
Today I used an unbelievable story roleplay in which one student reports a story about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman while the other students expresses disbelief. I wanted students to build a conversation using past simple, past progressive, and present perfect.
Taxi driver:
Today, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were running away from paparazzi when they got in your cab. You took them to LAX (Los Angeles airport). Tell your friend about what happened.Driver's friend:
Your friend is always making up stories about meeting celebrities. Politely tell your friend that you're tired of hearing make-believe stories.
I put drivers together to plan their story: "I was driving..." and friends together: "You've told me so many stories..." Then into pairs for the roleplay. Now there was interactions and students enjoyed it, but the interaction was lower quality than I would have liked. Each student would read his/her prepared story and then the interaction would be something like: "You're lying" "No I'm not" "You told me the same story yesterday" "I don't remember".
I did notice a few useful mistakes: "You was drinking a beer this morning?" "You are always tell me stories" but generally the interaction wasn't built on the structures I hoped it would be. I'm thinking about this as a revision:
Taxi driver:
Today, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were running away from paparazzi when they got in your cab. You took them to LAX (Los Angeles airport). Tell your friend about what happened. Your friend might not believe you because you sometimes make up stories to entertain your friend (who has a boring job). In fact, the last time you told a story (one month ago Drew Barrymore got into your cab) your friend didn't believe you even though you were telling the truth.Driver's friend:
Your friend was always making up stories about meeting celebrities until about a month ago. Last month s/he told you a story about meeting Drew Barrymore but you made your friend promise not to tell any more stories (this made your friend angry). Today your friend is claiming s/he met Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but they've broken up. Politely tell your friend that you're tired of hearing make-believe stories.What do you think?
Posted by James Trotta at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
In Interactions 2, chapter 4 the writing task is to write a personal anecdote. Students begin by exchanging stories about experiences that taught them some sort of lesson, then read an example, then look at how to decide which details are worth including, and finally get to work on their own anecdotes. Of course, writing an anecdote for me isn't very inspiring when students could just tell me in person...
I sent students to ESL go.com's "say hi" forum to read some messages and find pen pals in other countries. Each student took a few minutes to read the introductions and find someone interesting. Now they have a more inspiring audience - an interesting person in another country - for their anecdotes.
An interesting message from a Yahoo group I joined recently was written by someone in Malysia about an emerging variety of English there that includes characteristics of British and American varieties as well as a few words from Malay, Cantonese and Tamil.
Reminds me of a post from a while back about defining World Standard English and one about differences in English ability between Malaysian and Thai people. While I'm reminiscing, how about one from my travel blog about Kuala Lumpur.
I recently set up a vocabulary message board, where English learners can work together to create a big online vocabulary journal. A colleague of mine and I have been sending students to the site for homework in hopes that getting a bunch of examples of how a word can be used will help learners increase active vocabulary.
However, we didn't anticipate some things that learners have done. I suppose it's no surprise that our students don't intuitively know how to organize an online vocabulary journal, but some of the things they've done are really surprising.
For example, I've got students starting a thread with a post about four different words. I envisioned one word per thread so if you want to study the word status, you don't have to read about a bunch of other words as well.
I've also got students starting new threads all the time. I must have 5 different threads with the word "status". If all those examples were in one place it would be a valuable source of information.
I think in the future this message board will really help people, and everyone is welcome to use it with their classes. We just have to be careful to make sure learners use it in the way that will benefit them the most.
Sorry I haven't been posting much recently. Last Saturday I did a workshop at the International KATE conference in Seoul (based on some of my lesson plans), came home to relax, and got bitten in the nose by a psycho dog (my psycho dog). I had to go to the emergency room and get six stitches. Plus I'm teaching from 9:30-4:00 Monday through Friday for our Intensive English program, so I've been incredibly busy. Anyway, things should be back to normal now.