Sad Mouse - Mark's story (an activity)

This is a lesson plan I developed for my TP teaching. It focuses on transforming words from one part of speech to another (so for instance happy, happily and happiness) and correct usage of the forms in sentence. The whole lesson is designed around a story. Recommended level of students is intermediate.

1) I begin with telling students what we are going to do today (create a story) and tell them two pieces of information about the main character (his name is Mark and he is not happy). Then I let them brainstorm both questions and answers using question words (What is Mark's job? Why is he sad? Where does he live? etc.) We end up with a basic idea of the character.

2) I show students a slide with several pictures depicting reasons why Mark is not happy. I let students discuss in pairs what I each picture represents. Afterwards, they share their ideas with the whole class.

3) After the these two warm-ups designed to intrigue the students, I get to the main aim of the lesson. I begin by making a table on the whiteboard with three columns - nouns, adjectives and adverbs. I give them an example on the first line, such as surprise, surprised and surprisingly. Then I hand out pieces of paper with a short text on them:

The students will find ten words in bold in the text. They are asked to determine the correct part of speech of each of the words. This way, they see the different parts of speech in use in the text. Next task of theirs is to rewrite the sentences by transforming each word in bold into a different part of speech. This task requires a bit of invention from their part but it is good for practicing working with the language. It is important to stress to the students that they may change the sentences any way they need in order to work the given word in the sentence. So the first one might be: "Mark didn't wake up happy because his dog sadly ran away the previous day." Or a more fancy version: "Mark woke up with sadness in his heart..."

nouns	adjectives	adverbs
happiness	happy	happily
sadness	sad	sadly
possibility	possible	possibly
honesty	honest	honestly
patience	patient	patiently
surprise	surprised	surprisingly
hope	hopeful	hopefully
luck	lucky	luckily
amazement	amazing	amazingly

4) Students will watch a three minute video (I subtitled mine but can't make it public for copyright reasons). Then, they are asked to summarize the video in five sentences. A screen with the events in the video in several steps was provided to guide them.

After they're finished, they will need to insert one noun, one adjective and one adverb form into each sentence. They may choose from any word from the text from the previous activity or choose from suggestions on screen:

The sentences may go something like: Mark patiently waved at people, or With luck, he met another person in costume, or He angrily kicked a street trash bin.

At this point, the lesson was taken over by my colleague who went on teaching phrasal verbs that has to do with the topic of relationships and Mark and the girl in the costume became a couple. As homework, the students were asked to finish the story any way they like. There was also an interactive element, because we asked them to include a part where Mark leaves a message for her girlfriend on an answering machine and the students actually recorded this message with their own voice using Vocaroo and pasted the link to the recording directly into the story. I think this was a nice way to make otherwise common task more engaging.

The idea behind this lesson plan was to give students idea of how are nouns, adjectives and adverbs commonly used in an English text (they often mixed these parts of speech in the past) by presenting them with the text in the activity n.3 and then make them work with the language autonomously in the activity n.4 without any guidance.
During the feedback however, it was pointed out to me that more guidance would be appropriate. So I would suggest to include another activity for smoother transition between n.3 and n.4 and to basically take it babysteps with students.

False friends

False friends are pairs of words in two languages that are similar or identical in their form but have different meaning in one language than they do in the other. This may lead to a confusion among learners and recurring use of the incorrect translation may lead to fossilised errors. Some of the common false friends between Czech and English language (and the most bothersome if you ask me) include:

• sympathetic does NOT translate as "sympatický" (it's "soucitný")
• a brilliant scientist does NOT translate as "brilantní věděc" (it's "geniální vědec")
• a billion does NOT translate as "bilión" (it's "miliarda," so actually thousand times less)
• a notebook does NOT translate as "notebook" as in a computer (it's "poznámkový blok," what we call a notebook computer would in English be "a laptop")
• a gymnasium does NOT translate as "gymnázium" (it's "tělocvična," the short of which is "a gym")
• a novel does NOT translate as "novela" (it's "román," what we call "novela" in Czech would be "a novella" in English)

The exampes above are in most cases derrived from the fact that languages borrow words from other languages but in the process they alter or change the meaning altogether. Over the years, the two words may gain entirely different meaning.

There is another instance of false friends based on pure coincidence when two word evolve independently and end up with visual similarity or resablemnce in form. The example of this type of false friends may be the English word for a building (house) and Czech term for a young duck (house) but since the meaning in these cases is understandably entirely different, this type of false friends is not very tricky for ESL learner to see through.

Fotobabble

Fotobabble is an internet service providing an easy way to record your voice to a picture of your choosing. In terms of teaching, it can serve as a great tool allowing students to record themselves describing pictures. Since describing picture is a common part of English speaking exams, this is a great way for practicing in the comfort of home.



(As stated in assignment description, this is me talking about a picture on the topic of knitting.)

English vocab #1

(disclaimer: This category of posts is designed to accumulate the terms I encouter on every-day basis and I'm not familiar with them OR I find them useful to put down for everyone to see. Some are phrasal verbs, some phrases, some idioms, some just various terms for things, etc. I'll try to always include the context of use.)

to mull over = to think about smth. deeply and carefully, to contemplate something
You don't need to decide right now. Mull it over and let me know in the morning.

to jump the gun = to do smth. hastily or before you were supposed to do (from racing - to start running without the starting signal)
I guess I jumped the gun on calling you a liar. It turns out you were right all along.

coming or going = to be very confused
I'm so busy I don't know if I'm coming or going.

to pick up (usually a girl or a woman) = To make casual acquaintance with, usually in anticipation of sexual relations
Me and my friend Tony are going picking up girls this Friday night.
also: pick-up lines (American) or chat-up lines (British) = common phrases used while picking up girls

spoon-feeding = to treat someone with too much care or help
A teacher shouldn't spoon-feed his students - they must be able to deal with the assignment on their own.

a greengrocer = a grocer who sells fresh fruits and vegetables

digress = to stray from a subject
You shouldn't digress when you are giving a lecture.

a heckler = someone who purposefully interrupts a public speaker with aggresive comments or pointless questions

Fossilized errors

Fossilized errors are those errors students make without even realizing it because they have made the error so many times in the past it has become a natural part of their speech. The error then becomes a habit and cannot be easily corrected. The only way to do so from teacher's part is close monitoring of individual students and emphasizing the error he or she is making. Only by keeping focus on the error, the student will become aware of it and try to correct himself/herself.

Speaking for myself, there are several instances of fossilized errors that I am aware of that are present in my speech and they can be traced to two issues - either I speak too quickly before I think about what I'm saying and therefore don't take the time to realize I'm making the mistake (that comes two seconds later), or it is subconscious.

The example of my subconscious fossilized error would be the use of the word concrete. I vividly remember the moment from my school years when my teacher stressed that this word has only one meaning in English and that would be the noun meaning (the building material), and therefore we can't use it in place of Czech "konkrétní" (=particular). He was actually making a case for a false friend. And even though I know now it to be not true, I have a block in my mind that prevents me from using the word concrete in its adjective form. Harsh, huh? Well, we all have our crosses to bear...

The examples of the "speaking before thinking" error are more numerous (especially in my case). I will provide two most recent (they're both from the last night actually):
For some reason, when I want to say that I am looking after someone or something, I always use the phrasal verb watch over instead. Though the meaning is somewhat related (look after = to take care of, watch over = to be in charge of), there is a slight difference. There's no deep insight here, it's just what I do...
The other example has to do with drinking - for some reason in place of the phrase bottoms up!, I use an expression to top up the glass instead (which is an utter nonsense, you don't top up a glass of a drink, you top up a battery when it's out of juice). You can see some resemblance between the phrases - both use the direction up and one speaks of a bottom while the other of a top, so if I had to look for a reason for this error, that would be my best educated guess. (This would make for a good study - the most common mix-ups in English phrases - but unfortunately I think this matter is so individual that it would be extremely difficult to arrive at any sort of generalization.)

This post and the examples of my faulty language were designed to give you an idea about what a fossilized error is and what form it can take. From my own experience I can say that old habits indeed die hard so teachers, be nice to your students, they may be very well doing their best and that one damn error slips away anyway.

Who Wants to Be a Millionare? English quiz

This is an example of a revision quiz themed as the once popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionare? Here is the link to the quiz. The Flash site uses authentic sounds and graphics and can be used to create your own customized quizzes. We used it in our teaching group as a revision before handing the students the actual exam. According to their feedback, they enjoyed the experience very much :-)

1. Jimmy (age 10): I (go) to school every day. (am going, went, go, am go)
2. (There is) a dog in the picture. (there are, there is, is, is there)
3. I play tennis twice a week. I (often) play tennis. (always, often, never, seldom)
4. Barbara (reads) a lot of books. (is reading, read, reads, reading)
5. John doesn’t like (dancing). (dance, to dancing, danced, dancing)
6. I (be, never) to France. (never was, was never, never have been, have never been)
7. (Have) you ever tried bungee jumping? (Did, have, do, has)
8. The women in the picture (are shopping). (is shopping, shop, shopping, are shopping)
9. Michael (bought) a nice pair of shoes yesterday. (buyed, bought, has bought, has buyed)
10. (Did) you go to the cinema last week? (have, has, did, do)
11. I can’t help you in the kitchen. I (am watching) TV at the moment. (watch, am watching, am watch, watching)
12. I have never done yoga before. I (would like to) try it one day. (want, am wanting to, would like, would like to)
13. The Earth (goes) around the Sun. (is going, went, would like to go, goes)
14. I only bake cookies at Christmas and Easter. I (occasionally) bake cookies. (often,frequently, occasionally, never)
15. Are you now ready to take the test? (Yes I am, Yes I do, Yes I will, Yes I have been)

Afterwards, we awarded students with a coupon allowing them to take the mid-term exam :-)

My Vocaroo recording

Vocaroo is a simple web service that can be used to record your voice or voice of your students, just like I did here in this post. The recording can be then shared via e-mail, link, tweet, web embedding, whatever...

Record music with Vocaroo >>

Connected speech

Words in connected speech often get pronounced very differently than they would on their own. This can be very troublesome for English learners. Consider the difference in pronunciation of the following simple sentence between its written form with emphasis on every word and the same sentence in the form how it would be commonly spoken:

What do you have got there? –>  [vot dů jů hef gat thér]

What you have got there? –>

What you got there? –>

Whatcha got there? [uotča gat thér]

The sound changes can be roughly categorized as following:

Catenation (Linking) - a word starting with a vowel joins to the previous word

She’s out again [ší zautegen]

In an afternoon [i nen afternůn]

Here is [hi ris]

an apple [e neple]

each other [í čadr]

Intrusion (r) (j) (w) - an extra sound (that is not present as a letter in the text) links a word starting with a vowel to the previous word

Intrusion (r)

Law and order [ló ren ódr]

here and there [hi ren thér]

Intrusion (j)

I am [ajem]

They are [thejár]

I agree [ajegrí]

the idea [thíajdíja]

Intrusion (w)

You are [juár]

go off [gouof]

grow up [grouap]

blow away [blouevej]

Assimilation (a sound changes) - sounds next to one another in connected speech may influence and change each other, typically the sound at the end of a word changes because of the first sound in the following word

In bed [imbed]

Did you…? [didžju]

this shop [thišop]

good boy [gubój]

bad girl [bégrl]

last year [lásčír]

have to go [heftgou]

do you want [djuvont]

Elision (a sound disappears) - some sounds dissapear in order to ease pronunciation, it is easier to pronounce them in the reduced form than it would be in their full form (contraction is the special case of elision because it is represented by the spelling - “I’ve done it”)

Next week [neksvík]

I don’t know [idonnou]

got to [gata]

chestnut [česnat]

strictly [strikly]

past perfect [pásperfekt]

Notes from Class Management lecture, 14th November 2013

Class Management Ideas

a lecture by Anette Igel (igelanette@yahoo.co.uk)

• the rules should be established in the very first lesson of the school year
• keep the rules positive, as few “don’ts” as possible
• it is a good idea to let students come up with the rules themselves by brainstorming and only guide them to what you actually aim for - all IN ENGLISH! A lot of grammar used just in this activity (turning negative sentences into positive ones, etc.) - there is a notion of responsibility among the students for the rules if they are actually the ones who came up with them
• Activity - Anti-rules: Let students come up with the OPPOSITE of what is expected of them in classroom (“Speak out loud whenever you feel like it.” vs. “Keep quiet.” etc.)
• see to it that rules are followed (it usually takes only one example and the others will get the message)!
• Activity - Pyramid discussion: Split the class into small groups of two, let them brainstorm six adjectives for a given topic, then join groups to a larger one and boil the adjectives down to six again, repeat until the group is not the whole class again and then put the remaining (and supposedly the most essential) adjectives on board.
• keep your personal attitudes and feelings outside the classroom, your personal viewpoints affect your professional judgment and performance
• Activity: give students some answers first and them let them brainstorm questions for these answers - practices forming questions and choosing the correct tense.

• Activity: Dictation: Ask students to put down fifteen numbers with the following things (example follows):

1 - green (favorite color)
2- crappy (type of weather)
3 - Karen Gillan (favorite actor/actress)
4 - Peter (favorite boy/girl name)
5 - July (favorite month)
6 - train (favorite mean of transport)
7 - dog (favorite animal)
8 - pizza (favorite food)
9 - the Netherlands (favorite country or city)
10 - jeans (favorite piece of clothing)
11 - coffee shop (favorite type of shop)
12 - running (favorite activity)
13 - hacky sack (favorite object)
14 - beer (favorite drink)
15 - happy (favorite mood)

Then dictate them a short text with numbers in it. They need to replace the numbers with the stuff they have written earlier:

It was a crappy day in July. I was in the Netherlands and I was drinking some beer. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Karen Gillan and friends. They were happy because I was late. So I put on my green jeans and picked up hacky sack. I made sure that Peter, the dog, had some pizza, and left. I quickly travelled by train and went to coffee shop. When I arrived, I was surprised to see my friends were running there.

• Activity - Getting to know each other: an activity to remember everyone’s name - acronyms out of students’ names are made into somewhat truthful sentences that describe them, make these into posters and hang them around the classroom. Check grammar of the sentences as well!

Anette is

Not

English

Though she

Thinks in

English

Mirek

Is

of Rather

Energetic

Kind

• Activity - The best homework excuses: how to deal with students constantly apologizing for forgetting homework - the first student has to put the excuse on paper (“My dog ate my homework.”), this paper will be hanged in the classroom and every time someone else forgets the homework, he or she must come up with a new apology (it doesn’t substitute the homework but at least it makes them use the language in some way)
• how to deal with a noisy classroom: after entering the classroom, put several page/exercise numbers of students’ text book on board and announce this to be the homework, then, during the lesson, reward good work by erasing one number in time, this will give the class the notion that the better they behave, the less work they will have to endure at home (it is a good idea to keep the most essential exercises that you actually DO want as the homework on the top and keep them there)

Teaching our EEE group

Janča's engaging teaching performance

Students hard at work during the mid-term exam

Notes from Oxford seminar, 4th November 2013

Here follow my notes from Oxford Professional Development seminar for secondary teachers from the 4th of November 2013, MZK in Brno. More about the seminar and the speakers can be found here.

Learning to Fail - Failing to Learn

Gareth Davies


How can we teach students how to fail?

• marking is not the end of the process but in fact the beginning
• reward and praise good attempts
• change our language (don’t use the same phrases constantly - fail, mistake, wrong,…)
• allow “cheating”
• students decide what is good enough

Marking

• focus on the wrong answers as much as the correct ones
• why did the student make the mistake? what was his conjecture? this helps the teacher to understand his students’ thinking

Praising

• there should be equality among students in one classroom, even though the weak students usually need more encouragement and the good ones might feel discouraged for receiving less praising by doing a better job
• over praising can be dangerous if misplaced, if it’s justified and the students have good results and the improvement is apparent, it’s fine

Cheating

• students shouldn’t cheat the process of thinking and simply wait for the correct answers
• finding out the answers any other way (internet, answer sheet, copying from a friend) is a part of the process of learning and therefore ok

Activities

• reverse activity - teacher fills in gaps with some correct and some incorrect words and students are asked to find the mistakes
• information gap - students work in pairs, As get a text with gaps, Bs have the full text, their goal is for the student A to fill in the gaps with the help of B student
• come up with a mistake - students will receive a correct sentence, they will need to make a mistake in it and then give it to other groups to let them find the mistake

Classroom management ideas

• espionage - during a brainstorm or an activity, students will go spy on other groups in order to come back with the correct answer
• mistake day - have a given day when you won’t be correcting mistakes but only praising for good things
• Points for effort - let students know they will be rewarded for wrong answers as much as for the right ones
• quantity, not quality - more is more, the more the better
• I won’t accept your first answer - tell students they have more than one go for the exercises

Activities that Work

Jeremy Bowell


Students don’t speak English if

• they aren’t used to speaking in English
• they make a lot of mistakes
• they don’t have enough preparation for a task
• they don’t know what to say
• they are worried about their pronunciation

Activities

• Characters - students first come up with words or numbers, then these are given meaning (name a fruit –> this is your first name, name a female movie star –> this is your wife, etc.), based on this meaning you practice phrases, you talk to other people and find out stuff about them, communicative activity, students ask real questions but don’t feel embaressed to speak because they are not themselves, they are in the character, it builds confidence, a lot of practice (name a fruit, name a vegetable, name a number from 1 to 100, name your favorite movie star, yes/no question

• Coat of Arms - present the students with a number of objects or pictures and ask them to figure out the story or link behind them (ticket from a city, a postcard from different country, birthday postcard, cinema ticket, a medicine, a photograph, 

• Prove it! - present students with several statements (Everyone had breakfast this morning. Two students went to bed later than 11pm last night. No one went to the cinema last week. More than 50% of students have done their homework.), then let them prove they are correct by mingling around and asking others.

• show students answers and their goal is to come up with the correct question related to you (Pálava - What is your favorite place in the Czech Republic?, 11pm - What time did you go to bed last night? etc.)

• particular topic, e.g. Food in the UK - three columns, what they know (Fish and Chips, Afternoon tea, Cottage Pie), what they want to know (What do they eat for breakfast? What do they eat on special occasion? What is the most popular food in the UK?), what they learned (a place to put down all new information)

• Make your own crossword (practicing vocabulary) - name something you read (BOOK)

• Break it up (looking at texts) - break up the text into paragraphs and let the students guess some words in the text

• Reading circles - students read a short text and each has a different role and task afterwards (summariser summarizes the whole text in 50 words, word master underlines key words and new words in the text, connector relates the text to local issues, questioner asks additional questions about the text), in addition, there can be a role play (selecting ideally the strongest of the students) with a character related to the text, the rest of the class asks the character questions

• Cartoon stories (speaking activity) - provide a short cartoon without text and let students come up with a story to the pictures, interpret each individual picture in turn, describe and interpret the events in each frame

• fly-swating - this can be used for teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, basically anything; words are either right on the whiteboard or on stickies, students form two lines and compete, you provide definitions of words, antonyms, phonetic form of the words on the board etc. or read a text and they need to grab the words as soon as they see it

Concept Checking Questions (CCQs)

You've just explained your students new grammar or taught them new vocabulary and you need to check if they understand the concept correctly. What is the most common way to do this? Yeah, you've got it - asking questions such as "Do you understand?" or "Is this clear?" Unfortunately, apart from this being the most common way, it is also the least effective one because very scarcely you will come across a student who will be brave enough to admit he doesn't understand what you've been talking about for the past several minutes. Would you anyway? Would you like to be apparently the only person among your peers dumb enough to not grasp the new material? This problem however doesn't need to be limited to the matter of courage among your students - they may honestly believe they understand the concept correctly simply because you weren't specific enough. Say you've explained the word "thumb" by raising your own thumb. Clear as a day, right? But are you talking about your thumb or any finger? Or your whole hand? Or you might be even miming the activity of hitch-hiking! All of this creates ambiguity that adds to the possible confusion among your students.

Concept checking questions are designed to deal exactly with this - you need to come up with a question that will check the understanding among your students without revealing the word itself in case of vocabulary or the grammar pattern in case of grammar explanation (especially the latter one can be very tricky because you usually need to use the past simple tense to talk about the past).

So what would be a correct way of checking the understanding of the word thumb?

• "On what part of your body can you find a thumb?"
• "How many thumbs do you have?"
• "Is this thumb?" (and lifting your index finger)

CCQs in general should exclude all ambiguity and leave no space for a different interpretation. This can be tricky because you usually cannot compose CCQs in advance for every single new item of vocabulary which means you must come up with them on-the-go.

Slightly harder than vocabulary are grammar CCQs. Say you've just been with your students over the difference in the use of Present Simple and Present Simple Continuous and one of your students produces the sentence:

"I am playing football every Wednesday."

What would be the correct way of correcting the student by using CCQs?

• Are you playing football right now?
• Is it Wednesday today?
• Do you play football every Wednesday?

(this naturally assumes that the students are aware that Present Simple is used for events that occur repeatedly and regularly, and Present Simple Continuous for events that are happening at the moment the sentence is being spoken)

Overview of English tenses

There are six tenses in English. However, with their continuous forms it makes twelve tenses in total. They are separated into three categories according to the time they refer to - the present, the past and the future. 

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as the table below makes it seem. For example, present perfect tense (1.3) does not actually refer to the present but rather to the past (in Czech, it would be usually translated just like past simple).

Anyway, this is just a brief overview and more thorough look at each of the individual tenses will be the subject of other posts in the future.

1. Present Tenses

1.1 Present simple – I walk

1.2 Present progressive – I am walking

1.3 Present perfect– I have walked

1.4 Present perfect progressive – I have been walking

2. Past Tenses

2.1 Past simple – I walked

2.2 Past progressive – I was walking

2.3 Past perfect – I had walked

2.4 Past perfect progressive – I had been walking

3. Future Tenses

3.1 Future simple – I will walk

3.2 Future progressive – I will be walking

3.3 Future perfect – I will have walked

3.4 Future perfect progressive – I will have been walking

A trip to Paris (reading activity)

1) Discuss with your partner the following questions:

a) Is Ellie still in France at the time she’s writing the letter? How long has she been there?

b) How many times did Ellie visit Paris in the past?

c) Would you say that Ellie is more interested in sightseeing or shopping?

Is André still travelling with Ellie and Lucy?

Summerize each of the three paragraphs of the letter in a single sentence.

#1 .................................................................................................................................

#2 .................................................................................................................................

#3 .................................................................................................................................

Look at the examples of the Present Perfect from the letter. Match them with the uses of the Present Perfect:

We’ve been here in France for about two weeks now.

My friend Lucy is really happy because she has met a handsome French guy.

I have always wanted to visit Paris.

to talk about a past action without saying exactly when it happened

to emphasise a present result of something that happened in the past

to describe something that started in the past and continues in the present

Ask your partner using the correct tense:

about his/her travel experience with France/Paris.

about his/her dream city that they visited or they are going to visit.

about his/her love affair with a handsome stranger from another country.

 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 

Do we use Present Perfect or Past Simple when:

Something happened in the specific time in the past.

The time of the action in the past is not given or known.

A past action has results in the present.

The past action is not linked with the present.

Complete the rules with the correct words in brackets:

We use the Present Perfect to talk about actions that (are happening now / happened in the past) and have clear consequences in the (past / present).

We use the Past Simple to talk about actions that happened in the past and (we know exactly when they happened / we only know they happened at some time before 

download the whole activity in .pdf

First post

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

This site is dedicated to teaching English and it will gather all the material I use during my teaching activities. It is designed for both learners and teachers of English. Any materials you find here are either done entirely by me or I have found them somewhere on the web (of which I lost trace by now) and I adjusted them to suit my needs. So with respect to the possible original authors, I hereby authorize the use of any material found on this site for non-profit use. The only profit you can make from this website is not monetary but purely intelectual :-)

Happy teaching / learning English!