If you are a busy English language teacher or trainer looking for support and development materials for your classroom, we can help you with this weekly collection of links to free materials from our British Council websites for teachers.
We are having a break for IATEFL 2010
Join us at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/
Next update: 16 April 2010
LATEST UPDATES
Counselling learners
There are various ways of measuring learners' progress. Whichever method you choose, you should take time out to counsel your learners. Counselling involves talking through their strengths and weaknesses. It is an interactive process in which they are able to say how they feel about their learning, the course, and their teacher.
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How green are you?
This lesson looks at ways the learners can take to reduce their impact on climate change. Learners will carry out two surveys and summarise their findings as a report. It gives students the chance to interview others to complete a survey and summarise findings in a report and develop questionnaires on current behaviour using present perfect forms.
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Premier Skills
Your students can win a trip to the UK to watch a Barclays Premier League game in a new global competition from the British Council on premier-skills. Premierskills is a joint project between British Council and the UK’s Premier League which enables learners and teachers to communicate in two of the world’s global languages – football and English.
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Constructivism in Saint Petersburg
This week I have participated in the Philological Conference in Saint Petersburg. It is an indispensable part of a university lecturer life to keep up with innovations or contribute to the progress in your field speaking to colleagues or writing articles. About a thousand speakers took part in it and the Lingvodidactic section welcomed about 30 researchers mostly from Russia and Ukraine.
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Lesson Suggestions Please
I am giving one-one-one private English conversation lessons to two teenagers (separately) and I'm not sure what to do. They are elementary students and can express themselves but their pronunciation and vocabulary are not very good, although I can understand what they are trying to say. Should I be correcting this?
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Gobbledygook
Put students in pairs and give them a scene to act out. They are going to have a conversation using an invented language. Explain to your students that gobbledygook is a made up language that is total nonsense. The pair should act out the scene using the correct intonation as if they were really talking to one another.
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Zero Materials
Do you find yourself spending hours preparing your lessons? Are you getting very little support from colleagues? Is it difficult to know what to teach your children without a syllabus? Would you like some tips on how to create a good lesson when you find yourself with ten minutes to prepare a lesson, a broken photocopier, and your bag of teaching goodies safely locked up at home?
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PREVIOUS UPDATES
Using the Board
Do you have a blackboard, a whiteboard or an IWB? Whatever type of board you have in your classroom it is important to be organised and to put yourself in your students' shoes for a moment. What do they see when they look at your board? In this article we will consider ways of getting the best use out of your board and perhaps give suggestions for exploiting your board in a different way.
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Save water
This lesson looks at the causes of water shortages locally and internationally, and learners will produce a poster giving advice on saving water in the home or in the school. The lesson gives students the opportunity to talk about the use of water in every day life and to give advice to others on their role in water conservation.
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ELTons 2010 Winners
The winners of the ELTons 2010 have now been announced! The ceremony, sponsored by Cambridge ESOL, took place on 3 March in London, marking the seventh year of the prestigious awards. Find out who won.
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Teacher problems
This week’s poll is about the challenging job of teaching and the many problems we face as teachers. Which of these do you think is the biggest problem? What are your views on this topic? If you have any comments you would like to make on this topic, visit the post them below.
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Teaching English in large, multi-level and multi-lingual classroom
I teach in mid-eastern hill of Nepal. One of my classes has 90 students. I found 9 native languages of their own in this class. Similarly, many students have come from different lower secondary schools with different abilities. It is very difficult to teach English in this large class with mixed abilities. Their own native languages has also created problem in correct pronunciation as well. I would like some practical ideas or techniques to teach in this type of classroom.
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Computer Games Can Teach Schools Some Lessons
Some parents might see video games as an impediment to children keeping up with their schoolwork. James Gee, however, thinks video games are some of the best learning environments around. He says that if schools adopted some of the strategies that games use, they could educate children more effectively.
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Getting adults and children to talk
Both adults and children need practice at talking to be able to develop their speaking skills, but that things that stimulate them to talk are often quite different. This tip contrasts the different approaches to getting adults and children talking.
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Mobile phones
This lesson is about mobile phones and the issues that surround them. Students have the chance to learn some vocabulary related to phones and to do a quiz to test their knowledge of mobiles. Task 3 looks at text messaging and the language used for sending text messages. Students are given the chance to teach you about some of the text short-hand in their own language too.
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Minggu, 09 Mei 2010
If you are an English language teacher???
If you are an English language teacher and you want to develop your understanding of teaching methodology and practice, we can help you with a new article every week.
We are having a break for IATEFL 2010
Join us at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/
Next update: 16 April 2010
Working with minimal resources - teacher training in Mongolia
Karen Waterstone
Teaching with minimal resources can seem a daunting prospect for those of us lucky enough to work with coursebooks, photocopiers, audio and IT facilities in our schools. Karen Waterston recently returned from Mongolia, where she ran an in-service teacher training course. Here she writes about how she adapted to her new working environment.
A new start
I resigned from my job with the British Council in February 2008 to start an in-service teacher training course in a small town in the North East of Mongolia. For 3 months, I saw more sand storms than I have ever seen in my life. I moved house twice, saw horses parked outside the bank, and was joyous to see green leaves in summer.
I worked with the most incredible teachers who had relatively little in terms of resources, and so during that time I had to become good at teaching and training with next to nothing. The teachers I worked with have no teachers' books, no cassettes or CDs, and would have nothing to play them on even if they did. The students share a course book between 4 or 5, sometimes more. Photocopiers are scarce and often locked in a room – the key nowhere to be found. Computers are slow and the sand storms meant that the connections disappeared on a daily basis. So, here I was, with an empty training room, eager teachers, a chalk board, no resources, and me.
What I did
I managed to find some small notebooks and gave one each to the teachers to use as journals. Every week the teachers wrote to me about their classes and what they found hard, needed help with and also what had worked and what the students liked. I used this to feed into my training sessions.
I became an actress. To demonstrate different types of teaching techniques I became two or three different teachers. We couldn’t read case studies and analyse them because there was no printer and paper was like gold dust. I acted the scenarios, as a teacher-centred teacher and as a learner-centred teacher. It wasn’t easy but with a smile and some energy, the teachers saw what I was trying to illustrate.
We did a lot of TPR activities using words and actions of everyday life - relevant to the local situation - such as chopping wood, collecting water, cooking, herding animals.
I cut down on my use of paper. I became an expert at only using the paper I needed so I put 2 or 3 activities on one page and photocopied it for teachers to share. I then cut away the margins and kept these to use for games such as pictionary. One thing I noticed was that memory becomes better when you don’t have everything on hundreds of pieces of paper.
For bingo activities, the teachers drew grids in their books and we used to come back to this to practise areas such as giving instructions and the use of imperatives.
I exploited language and stories from the teachers’ own lives rather than made up dialogues and situations in books. I asked them to bring stories from their classroom situations and we used these as material for discussion.
At the end of each session, I asked teachers to summarise what we had done, and we put bullet points on the board which they copied into their notebooks.
I went to schools and observed the teachers and in exchange I taught their classes. This became useful material to use as illustrations of the differences and similarities between our teaching styles. I encouraged student participation and for students to provide words, sentences and situations for dialogues and games. It’s amazing how much we all have in our heads that can be tapped into. And it’s real.
Teachers had access to computers, but as internet was limited, sharing resources was difficult and I couldn’t find a solution to having shared online space. So I saved everything on my work computer and transferred materials, sessions, websites and resources (along with photos I’d taken) onto the teachers USB keys, which most of them had.
Conclusion
All in all, it was a very rewarding time. I had to be creative and realise that we don’t always need a huge amount of resources to be a good teacher. Energy, creativity and a sense of humour go a long way. Oh, and being flexible really helps too.
We are having a break for IATEFL 2010
Join us at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/
Next update: 16 April 2010
Working with minimal resources - teacher training in Mongolia
Karen Waterstone
Teaching with minimal resources can seem a daunting prospect for those of us lucky enough to work with coursebooks, photocopiers, audio and IT facilities in our schools. Karen Waterston recently returned from Mongolia, where she ran an in-service teacher training course. Here she writes about how she adapted to her new working environment.
A new start
I resigned from my job with the British Council in February 2008 to start an in-service teacher training course in a small town in the North East of Mongolia. For 3 months, I saw more sand storms than I have ever seen in my life. I moved house twice, saw horses parked outside the bank, and was joyous to see green leaves in summer.
I worked with the most incredible teachers who had relatively little in terms of resources, and so during that time I had to become good at teaching and training with next to nothing. The teachers I worked with have no teachers' books, no cassettes or CDs, and would have nothing to play them on even if they did. The students share a course book between 4 or 5, sometimes more. Photocopiers are scarce and often locked in a room – the key nowhere to be found. Computers are slow and the sand storms meant that the connections disappeared on a daily basis. So, here I was, with an empty training room, eager teachers, a chalk board, no resources, and me.
What I did
I managed to find some small notebooks and gave one each to the teachers to use as journals. Every week the teachers wrote to me about their classes and what they found hard, needed help with and also what had worked and what the students liked. I used this to feed into my training sessions.
I became an actress. To demonstrate different types of teaching techniques I became two or three different teachers. We couldn’t read case studies and analyse them because there was no printer and paper was like gold dust. I acted the scenarios, as a teacher-centred teacher and as a learner-centred teacher. It wasn’t easy but with a smile and some energy, the teachers saw what I was trying to illustrate.
We did a lot of TPR activities using words and actions of everyday life - relevant to the local situation - such as chopping wood, collecting water, cooking, herding animals.
I cut down on my use of paper. I became an expert at only using the paper I needed so I put 2 or 3 activities on one page and photocopied it for teachers to share. I then cut away the margins and kept these to use for games such as pictionary. One thing I noticed was that memory becomes better when you don’t have everything on hundreds of pieces of paper.
For bingo activities, the teachers drew grids in their books and we used to come back to this to practise areas such as giving instructions and the use of imperatives.
I exploited language and stories from the teachers’ own lives rather than made up dialogues and situations in books. I asked them to bring stories from their classroom situations and we used these as material for discussion.
At the end of each session, I asked teachers to summarise what we had done, and we put bullet points on the board which they copied into their notebooks.
I went to schools and observed the teachers and in exchange I taught their classes. This became useful material to use as illustrations of the differences and similarities between our teaching styles. I encouraged student participation and for students to provide words, sentences and situations for dialogues and games. It’s amazing how much we all have in our heads that can be tapped into. And it’s real.
Teachers had access to computers, but as internet was limited, sharing resources was difficult and I couldn’t find a solution to having shared online space. So I saved everything on my work computer and transferred materials, sessions, websites and resources (along with photos I’d taken) onto the teachers USB keys, which most of them had.
Conclusion
All in all, it was a very rewarding time. I had to be creative and realise that we don’t always need a huge amount of resources to be a good teacher. Energy, creativity and a sense of humour go a long way. Oh, and being flexible really helps too.
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