Using smartphones to learn "Telephone English"

 Photograph courtesy of Joseph A. Carr

I have a dread fear of trying to teach telephone English, especially in business classes. Why?

• The more realistic the set up, the more impossible monitoring
• Students know each other & understand each others' short cuts/linguistic tics
• Students are expecting this call
• There is usually some kind of hierarchy in the group
• Not always possible to use phones 
• Work arounds, such as Skype or Google Hangouts firewalled 
• Odd number of students

Obviously, making phone calls & answering them at the office/on the road are everyday working situations, and vitally important that the user masters the absolute basics very well. There are stock phrases to be used, which to sound professional & proficient just can't be mangled. We need to hear the right phrases to trigger the required responses & manage the conversation forwards in a predictable fashion.

Things learners do that kill a telephone exchange:

• get the giggles
• panic attack & go silent
• start nodding or just make sounds that other cultures do not understand
• use their own language as much as possible
• repeat poor pronunciation more slowly
• lack empathy with the listener's level of English

Whether making the call, or answering it, learners simply have to 'learn their part of the dialogue' - an observation I heard years ago as a complaint about native speakers in Hawaii, who didn't function as expected from an Interchange 1 dialogue! On the phone, we do need to learn our lines.

So how to do this in class? 

Well, this may sound stupid, but use your phones! But no, I don't mean start calling each other - recipe for multiple overlapping snippets & malfunctions which you cannot control. The answer is still BYOD, though. Although slow adopters in Japan, most of my business classes now boast mostly smart phones. 

The preparation:

I created a set of very simple phrases I wanted the receiver of a call to use, on Quizlet (here). In this instance, I took out a key word or words. We had already listened to a short dialogue and filled in the blanks, as you do. I asked students to open up the set in the Quizlet app. A few stunned faces (I have only asked them to install the app every week since May)...mini hiatus while 'expert' users led their less coherent colleagues along the app store, password, install, register, join the class dance. OK, itself a learning moment! 

The set up:

Reassuring nods as they scrolled across the flashcard function. Easy. Race each other in mad screen-tapping game mode (scatter) against the clock...pecking order established?

The Challenge:

I asked students to use the 'Learn' feature. 'Too hard!' - needed to toggle the 'term' button so they only had to write in the key word(s) and not the rest of the phrase!

Realisation:

Typing too slowly/deliberately - copying from books open. And why are we typing a telephone dialogue? USE THE MICROPHONE to fill in the answers/blanks!

Reaction:

'Cool! I don't have to type stuff', shortly followed by 'Oh, stupid phone doesn't understand me. I said "and you" but it reads "Andrew"... the dominant students cockily barking at their phones and reacting indignantly at the jumbled message received, looking around to see more deliberate & gentle pronunciation making better progress.

Relaxation:

 At this point all I needed to do was put my hands in the air and let the penny drop. Talk to the phone nicely! And as the teacher, I am totally absolved of any blame or shame game in picking on students' intonation, enunciation, elision etc. Fine tune your own pronunciation! Students wandered off to find quieter corners, they practiced and practiced more than they ever have done before with any dialogue - and importantly, with phone in hand & an unknown 'partner'.

We didn't get to the other half of the phone call (the caller) which was just fine with me. Nail the most important bits first, then we'll get adventurous!

Development: 

• 'Harder' Quizlet sets (though of the same content/conversation), with caller 'terms' to match with receiver 'definitions'. This would really challenge sentence level pronunciation, with stress & intonation features etc
• Use other apps eg Dragon Dictation to polish pronunciation further, again, without the teacher being involved in critique mode, but enabling/suggesting tweaks

Conclusion:

The students 'got it'. If their phones won't understand them, nobody else is going to! They needed to moderate their output to suit their listener, and not be critical of the listener eg 'He's from China' or something. Now they can see another function for their smart phones - a most excellent phone training device.

Jim was teaching from International Express Elementary (OUP) 3rd Ed. when this hallelujah moment struck. Check out "LunaTeacher" on Quizlet for plenty more creative uses of the site.

"I left my books at home" - iPad rescue story!

In spring holiday mode at Luna this & next week, classes being rebuilt  as we lose students randomly to Dads being transferred at a moment's notice, and scrambling to assess sign ups...Yuto got stuck into a very challenging storytelling app.

12 panels of themed images (in our case "space") generating up to 30 seconds of storytelling each; needed some brainstorming before each 'go' and the app allows you to 'redo' as often as you like - great for practicing 'having a go'...superb long turn practice for any #YLE Movers or Flyers candidates (though 4/5 story panels  and much less output required!)

https://youtu.be/XYbJOISua4s?list=UUfKHk9pHVIpNqvHhu-q5ufA

In this story my role as agent provocateur not assessor etc - and I was equally challenged to follow the storyline! For some reason part one is missing; blame the app, we struggled to get going.

In a first outing with Story Wheel, I like what we produced, but there is nothing other than a bog ordinary visual stumuli for the student to get to grips with. Yuto is a confident returnee but he was struggling for fluency - connecting ideas - an did not want to be doing the final 'conclusion' bit.

What's wrong, Kaede?

Created with Sock Puppets for iPhone and iPad, to add a lot of Oomph to student exchange. Sudden need to rehearse, respond quickly, remember lines and help each other out!

ET3 U6 dialogue

Created with Sock Puppets for iPhone and iPad.

Graded readers for YLEs + iOS devices

 I wanted to give my class a break from their usual routine & recent prep for YLE, and exploit one of their OUP Story Tree (Graded Readers) a bit more.

The blue series is just about right for this class - some vocab they have not met before, but by and large they can get their heads around the story & make astute guesses about what they don't 'know'.

We had not listened/read this book before, so I played the CD and asked them to follow (fingers) - they each have a set of the books. They were hooked and enjoyed the surprise ending. They know most of the characters. This particular book introduces the 's' on the end of present tense verbs for third person singular subjects...but they don't need to be told that; going to let the penny drop (maybe next week if it doesn't clatter to the floor today!)

This time around, I 'played' a sentence from the book on my iPhone - it was playing the audio function from a quizlet set I had earlier made for the book (an old teachers' trick of cutting up sentences for students to put back together again!). Instead of my voice (familiar), or CD (tricky to cue) the US accented voice was a new challenge (didn't need a speaker either - new iPhone's inbuilt ones loud enough close up). Their task = find the page the sentence came from (and re-read it out loud). Books well and truly thumbed!

Next, in pairs/3some, showed the children how to plat 'scatter' on iPhones (via dedicated #Quizlet app) to match pairs (in this case, the sentence halves) e.g.

• Chip....goes on the swing
• They....look at the swing

I though they would do this as a scattergun exercise and basically wallop the screen until things matched up. Not at all! They were extremely careful to make the right choices & referred back to the book constantly. Great! Book getting read endlessly! As a co-operative task, I know an iPad would be much better option. Nevertheless, this worked nicely with children negotiating roles of finder/reader/typer, and checking spelling etc. The first run through took quite a while and was nice, quiet, gentle reading pace. Once they realised there was a timer and they were horribly slower than the other group...lights & action!

Unfortunately, the Quizlet app right now does not support images, so we were 'forced' to switch tech & go to the PC interface. All good - still a lot of learning & still mining the same simple story. Turn-taking continued as they dictated to each other, helped find letters on the key board & whack each other when they kept making the same mistakes eg 'i' instead of 'l'. I lost count of how many times they must have read each page - a lot more than "Yeah, know the story, bored!"

Check out the flashcard set for The Rope Swing here and find all our other great flashcard sets from "LunaTeacher"

Oh, nearly forgot! The grammar thing - didn't occur to anyone, so we'll use the board next week - and I really want to use Skitch app for that! Stay iTuned :)

A new coach for Ronaldo & Kuyt?

Kunpei & Takuro present a half-way-line chat between Cristiano Ronaldo & Dirk Kuyt, adapted from our OUP Story Tree graded reader "The return of the cleaning ladies".

England's no.10 helps local lad

Yusuke can't find his little brother; do you think Wayne Rooney can help?

Slideshow on the fly - Animoto via iPhone

My class needed some extra practice with the dreaded drilling; they really do not produce any 'extended' language unless I use a taser. No, we don't have one, but...

When we used a teacher's book resource lately we had an absentee, so I joined and made one myself (OK! I like a quick colouring in as well!). This week the retrieval system the children use = half a dozen knackered, ripped, squashed, battered and lost artifacts. Hmm.

Have already made the flashcards available on Quizlet (click here)for the unit we are doing (but I don't think the mums bother, which is a pity - especially as they ask vaguely "how come there does not appear to be a great deal of progress being made"). So, in between classes I quickly photographed the surviving artwork on my iPhone, and then opened up the (new) Animoto app. Imported the pictures, changed the muzak, added a title & left it to cook. Whole process took less than 5 minutes (the colouring took longer!) & I had a nice 'job done' email by the end of my next lesson.




Now the free version of Animoto only gives you 30 seconds, and a limited choice of music. For more flexibility I like Stupeflix, and am happy with the paid up version as good value for money. For this,very much on the fly, a free 30 second cobble-job better than a poke in the eye I say.

What are your experiences with making slideshows in a hurry?

Little readers - solving a problem

 I had a double page problem with my students the other day; we are learning first letter sounds but not reading. We are recognising a lot of pictures but still not exactly 'there' with the alphabet...and the 'review' section in our books is a minefield of words. I photocopied the pages (we used in class, copyright police, and they all have the books as well!), and chopped them up. Each student had all eight pictures of the story, with the caption. On a larger piece of paper, I made eight frames, and wrote the captions, as well as adding arrows to show the flow (not all cultures have the same cartoon reading 'rules').


In class, I wrote & read out the target words ie the caption/storyline on the board as well, and asked students to find the corresponding picute/caption. The captions were quite similar so required care. Compare "Tom is a monkey" to "Tim is a man". We pasted our agreed answers (quicker ones had to wait until every else was ready) into the appropriate frame. I deliberately do not have enough glue sticks etc to go around (at this age) because I want them to ask for things off each other & use 'sharing' language. A very good way to get 'Please' and 'Thank you' working!

The end result is in this audioboo; yes, they are mostly mimicking me I know, but this is the most they have ever 'read' in English, and they loved being able to 'do it'!

listen to ‘A very emergent readerboo’ on Audioboo

Related articles

• Using the Audioboo phone app (suesdemoblog.wordpress.com)

Exploiting a graded reader with Wordle and Audioboo

Image via CrunchBase

I have been thinking about audioboo for the last week or so since I found a tweet that very interestingly reported using audioboo for error correction. I think the original idea was Steven Herder's. The main gist of that idea was to have students record themselves talking about eg a photo (and for me this immediately said "use it for FCE Speaking Test practice!") and to then write down a transcript, possibly as an out of class activity. In class? Use it as a dictation exercise but have a different student work on a recording. I like this idea because the recording is unobtrusive so would not hinder fluency, and it really does provide a healthy opportunity for refelction/peer input as to actual output.

Image via CrunchBase

 In my class, students have already read the Story Tree graded reader at home, listened to it on CD, and worked through the accompanying workbook. The story and vocab then, is familiar several times over. Nevertheless, important to warm up before wading in to action. In our case, we listened to the story again off the CD, and followed along. Time was going to be an issue, so I did not want to do anything else at this stage, just get the story back in our heads. (With time, an extra resource used would have been Quizlet - key vocab exercise or two).

Preparation: which took 10 minutes typing as quickly as possible, inputting the entire text of the story into Wordle. Important: avoid capitalisation except for names, otherwise you'll get replication in your cloud which is unnecessary/confusing. Here is the wordle on the left.

Word clouds explained: An image is generated of the words found in a text. Size of the words repesents the relative frequency that those words occur in the text. This works very nicely with graded readers which recycle vocabulary/phrases a lot.

I strongly recommend using eg Tagxedo instead of Wordle! There is more variety in the templates etc, and you can save your wordclouds as jpegs etc. Wordles once created cannot be searched i.e. fairly useless if you want to go back later & use again. Embedding here has also given me formatting headaches :(
NB Orientate most/all the words horizontally for young learners, and see if you can find a decent font that does not have unfriendly /a/ or /g/ etc. (I couldn't find one on Wordle)

Cover the words in the readers, and just use the pictures (as cues). Explain that you want students to retell the story, using the wordle (printed out) to remind them of the words they can use.

 Use audioboo app on iOS device and record (the free app allows you 5 minutes of recording time) (another recording app is fine, but the 'boo means other students can access it on their devices/at home after etc). I think with younger learners doing this as a collaborative task is a good format (or in my class, with mum). Seeing the timer run down is a good management tool to get students to 'finish' (and not dwell where they 'get stuck').

It is important that you brief the students against trying to get the story 'perfectly right' - retell it word for word as in the text. I don't think even teachers could do this! Rather, it generates in students the awareness that words 'are missing' (but that they can still narrate a story). Playing back the recording now will identify those words. With the wordle (not the text) listen to the students versions and circle the words on the wordle that they use (with older learners they could mark the word every time they used it). Obviously, teacher will need to hook up the iOS to a speaker for class to hear if this is a group exercise, and to pause regularly for students to 'replay' the soundtrack in their heads as they do a mental wordsearch.

My students really enjoyed listening to themselves and trying to figure out what they had said, and were quite critical of themselves! They were also keen to find their own 'mistakes', such as using the 'wrong' verb/noun collocation. We found that we had used some other words (not in the world) and made a little list of those. We found we had a big bunch of words that we hadn't used at all - for various reasons eg low frequency, 'new', false-friend used instead etc. In our particular case, the students had not used any of the words used in direct speech, nor the narrative verbs eg 'say', 'shout'.

This gave us an excellent excuse to read the story again! Students were asked to speak the parts of the different characters (necessitating a bit of reading ahead to recognise their parts and therefor the key words we had overlooked initially - cool!) while I narrated. This is a nice way to finish, as it gives students a polished final production - record it as an audioboo too. Ask students to 'add oomph' (not yell) - a muttered "Oh! Help!" doesn't work, does it?!

Final reminder - make sure you iOS battery doesn't run out while you are doing this (mine did, as we were reading the book again together). You will get the idea, anyway, I hope! If you want to take pictures while you are doing this, you will need another device/actual camera (recommended)!

 

Try this with your class - and please give me feedback!