In the previous post, I had you list some online resources that you find to be particularly helpful. Take a look at the different ones that other students in the class have posted. Find one that you yourself have not checked out before and take a look at it. On this post comment on what you think of that particular site. What makes it a good resource and what advantages does it have? What disadvantages does it have? If possible, find an activity on that site that you think would be a good choice to use for a communicative activity in an ESL classroom (any age or proficiency level is fine, but you'd be smart to focus on your target group for your final project). Post a link to that activity and tell why it is appealing to you. Print out the activity, make at least 4 copies of it (for a total of 5), and bring it to class with you on Monday, March 7.
Note: If you cannot find a good activity on the site new to you, you may return to one of your own favorite sites and find an activity there. You will still need to bring 5 copies of that activity to class with you on Monday for our use in class.
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I took at a look at a website posted by Pat: http://iteslj.org/Lessons/
ReplyDeleteShe described it as a site containing “EFL/ESL Lessons and Lesson Plans from The Internet TESL Journal – contains articles, lesson plans, and teaching techniques – beginning to advanced – site organization is a plus.”
I love this site! It is one of the more organized sites that I have seen. It puts the lessons in groups under particular headings so that it’s easy to know what you are looking for. And then the title of the lessons is a dead give-away as to what will be taught which makes it even easier to search for something in particular. I also love that when you click on one of the lessons they give you a background on the importance of learning about the topic at hand. These are definite advantages. In addition to having all of these great and well laid out lessons, there are also links to lots of other stuff on that website such as independent activities for ESL students, articles, and other links for teachers to explore to get more resources. The only disadvantage that I can see is that since the lessons are laid out by category, you might have to sift through them to find one appropriate for a particular proficiency level, or be ready to modify the ones you like. Although even that is not a huge disadvantage as many of the lessons explain how it could be modified.
There were 2 lessons on this site that I found particularly interesting to me. The first is found at http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Allen-Intonation.html and it is about intonation. I think for many advanced level students intonation is something the students will be ready to explore and practice, but it is one of those things that does need to be taught and practiced. It can convey more meaning than just the words expressed since intonation is one of those things that can also relay a person’s attitude and thus be read into a little more.
The other site can be found at http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Palmberg-Runner.html and is a vocabulary lesson about words that end in –er. Since many times such words describe the stem word such as runner describing someone who runs, it can be confusing when you get to other words that do not follow the pattern such as sweater, which is not a word describing someone who sweats. My idea for this lesson is that it would be a great way to introduce puns because some –er words can take on more than one meaning such as a joker- one who jokes a lot, and also a playing card. Puns can be tricky and require that the student understands a lot of vocabulary before beginning such a lesson. But an advanced HS ESL class should at some time be introduced to puns since most comedic sitcoms use some sort of play on words, like puns, to create humor.
The site I took was from Pat http://waze.net/oea/
ReplyDeleteEven though this site has only 33 activities, some of them are useful to have classroom interaction with one another. This is a good resource for fun interactive role playing activities.
The activity I like on this site is activity 17: Housemate Role play. In this activity partners assume the identity of a two housemates arguing and they have to resolve their conflicts. This is a good communicative activity because it can help ESL or EFL learners learn to solve their differences using key phrases without being overtly rude and also introduces pragmatic knowledge of said phrases.
I checked out eslcafe.com/ideas/and found Dave's ESL Idea Cookbook a wealth of good ideas from every angle - not only lesson plans, games, exercises. and tips for teaching the 4 language skills, but also resources for choosing texts as well as ideas for enhancing your teaching skills. I went right to the Food section because I am currently doing a lesson on that with my adult beginners. They have brought their recipes to class and we have worked on listing the ingredients, setting out the amounts for the ingredients, and describing how we will prepare the dishes. Next lesson each student will tell the class how to prepare his/her dish. I had been mulling over the idea of creating a class cookook for a final output, and low and behold, I clicked on eslcafe.com/ideas/index.cgi?Food and found a lesson for that on Dave's Cafe: Cooking Up English. (Thank you, Heather.)
ReplyDeleteI also liked your suggestion, Michael - eslflow.com. I found some good ideas there for teaching with pictures.
I really enjoyed breakingnewsenglish.com. Thanks, Heeny. First, the articles are on real life events found in the actual news. My class of 18 Hispanic women seem to have little understanding of current events and I wonder if this could be improved with exercises such as those offered on this site. Second, the articles and exercises are written in a way that is easy to understand. My class could do this. Third, it site offers a complete list of exercises for each article. Fantastic! They do a lot of the work for the teacher.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mike.
ReplyDeleteI checked http://waze.net/oea/. I really liked this web site. Thanks Pat for letting me know the site. Just like Mike mentioned there are various activities that can be applied readily in a classroom. Activity 17 is about Housemates Roleplay. It introduces polite way of opening a conversation and disagreeing in a conversation, such as, “Could I have a word with you please?”, “No offense, but... (I don't like your music)”, “I see your point, but... (I have a bad memory)”, “I understand your feelings, but... (I can't concentrate”.)
In general, second language learners concentrate on the purpose of communication only, therefore they sometimes miss the point of being polite. It is not their intention being rude to the conversation partner, however sometimes they do not pay attention to be polite in a conversation. This is a good way of introducing some polite phrases of disagreeing. I think I can use this activity in my service work class.
This website pumarosa.com contains material that can be used in class as well for students that have good L1 background and what to learn English. The student can listen and pronounce the words with the audio it also introduce the student with Basic English grammar rules. One disadvantage will be that not all the students are in the same level and they might not understand what they are doing and they might just be repeating words.
ReplyDeletetesting - I submitted a comment last night and now I don't see it. So, this is just a test.
ReplyDeleteMartin
3rd try (third time I've written this, different each time):
ReplyDeleteI liked this website that Heeny found:
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/index.htm
This seems to be a subpage of the englishclub main page, but I liked the pronunciation focus. For my students (adult Latinos, community-based learning), this would have a lot of good information and activities that I find our text takes for granted. As Heeny remarked, the content strikes me as high quality, too.
The website may be short on visually fun elements, but I like its simple layout and logical organization: I have confidence that I could find something that I liked easily in the future. Also, not 100% of the content comes with accompanying audio, but a lot does.
An activity (or page that I would use as the basis for an activity) is this page:
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/the.htm
Just the other day, we were reading out loud and one of the students stopped to ask me this very point: when to say "thuh" vs. "thee" for "the" in English. I made up an answer on the spot, admitting to the students that I was doing so, but I would have liked to have this explanation in front of me. The way the student asked, I could tell it was something that had been puzzling him for a while, and the student engagement on the topic showed me that he was not alone.
So, for independent study or as content that it would be easy for me to integrate into the classroom, I do like this area of the englishclub.com website.
I have always known Dave's ESL Cafe's Idea Cookbook. What a treasure! We have a ton of educational activities here. It is also an open vault on teaching positons and advice on each country and their particular circumstance.
ReplyDeleteThis activity is called "Famous People From__________. The teacher is required to write on the whiteboard "Famous People From (Country)
Each student is required to come up to the whiteboard and write a famous person from that
particular country.
I did this activity in Korea in the 1970's
Their history was overshadowed by the Japanese
Occupation. My students felt proud of the great
contribution of the Korean People.
I changed this to Famous Performers, Famous
sport stars, Famous Writers, Famous Political Leaders. I later went around each student and asked them to tell me about a particular
contributor mentioned on the whiteboard.
The only disadvantages of this activity is
mindless nationalism on the part of some students.
William Mastropieri
Loved all the suggestions that everyone posted here. I am trying to stay in my same vein of teaching toward kindergarten as I did with my first lesson, however, and more of the suggestions tended to be toward adults. However, I will definitely use them with the adult class I'm using.
ReplyDeleteI discovered this site
http://www.esl-kids.com
And I like the activity generator where you can create different quizzes and games from the provided vocabulary or enter your own. I decided to play bingo to learn colors.
The site I liked is www.eslflow.com from Michael’s list.(Thanks Mike!) You can find fun speaking activities here including games, pair work, and surveys that can be used for children to adults of all levels.
ReplyDeleteAmong those, I chose the activity dealing with slangs: http://www.eslflow.com/Slang.pdf.
It might look inappropriate to talk about slangs in class. However, from my own experience, it is necessary to know commonly used slangs (as long as they are not bad ones) in order to understand what other people say. I’ve been thinking about what should be different in ESL class compared to English class for native speakers. This activity reminded me that second language learners are always curious about the expressions which do not appear on the textbook, but used widely by native speakers. (Native speakers don’t need to learn slangs, of course.) As slangs in this activity are neither difficult nor sort of bad, it will be okay to teach to my students, who are 10 to 12 years old and in intermediate level.
I looked at several websites that my classmates recommended, even though some of them were very interesting, I decided to use this one for my blog and assignment that I will bring to class,as it relates to my course and student level the most: www.bogglesworldesl.com
ReplyDeleteIt’s very communicative-based and forces the students to speak.
The assignment worksheet (two-way info gap) that I am using needs the class to be split up into two groups: Partners A and Partners B. Two partners at a time discuss what restaurant they want to go to. They talk about the type of the restaurant and then explain where it is in downtown. The other person has to mark it on their map. Then the partner goes to the next person out of the other group and asks the same questions and then records the answers.
I think it’s a great activity that provides real-live communication experience for the students and lets the students talk in the classroom.
Like Iya, I have checked out some of the websites suggested by my colleagues and I found that www.about.com to be very helpful. I am not particularly interested in the way this site is organized (it can actually be very confusing) nonetheless, I was able to find several activities for several types of classes especially grammar classes that suits different levels of competence.
ReplyDeleteFor this assignment, I chose the following activity
http://esl.about.com/od/businessspeakingskills/a/t_message.htm
Which is how to leave a telephone message. It is a particularly interesting and important activity for ESL learners because in most of the Arab world, and probably in many other non English speaking countries, the idea of leaving a voice message is unheard of. I personally struggled to feel comfortable enough to talk to a machine and would simply hang up if not picked up by a real person. Furthermore, I struggled with how to leave a message and would usually leave a very unorganized message in case I decided to leave one in the first place.
Thanks Pat for recommending the site http://waze.net/oea/. These lessons seem very communicative and the site is well-organized. I can see myself using many of these in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe lesson I chose from Pat's site was http://waze.net/oea/activities/34 about setting appointments on a calendar. This would be extremely helpful and practical especially for ESL learners, to help them get used to the fast-paced scheduling of American culture while practicing conversation. It even includes a blank calendar image for students to fill out during the lesson.