English language school in the heart of the Japanese Alps, and English language learners sharing their experiences online. Teachers post regular items about teaching, learning tools, events in the school, their day to day experiences living & working in a foreign country. Students post on whatever takes their fancy - book reports, festivals in home towns, postcards from business trips etc. A little Brit of England in the guts of Japan!
One of the things I like to do with my YLE classes is to review a graded reader by reading it badly. Sounds a bit daft I know, but for my way of thinking, if the teacher's making mistakes, it's alright if the kids do too!
This works as a listening exercise, as well as a (mostly) model for pronunciation, and gives learners time to think about the words & be reassured with how they will say them. No more than one 'mistake' at a time is challenge enough.
Importantly, reading out loud is not 'a test' or final proof of understanding, internalising the vocab etc. It is hard to do, as we are doing different things to reading silently (eg skipping words we are not sure about, just like the teacher told us to do!). Of course, I would like the higher frequency words to have gone in & be recyclable by now, but new ones (eg met for this first time in this book such as 'whale') or hard ones (eg 'through') ain't no biggie if we need help. Help provided to if, as in this case, we are a weaker class and struggle a bit with confidence. Nudging along and finishing is an important landmark for us all - no need to sweat on the hurdles.
Sunday evening at Matsumoto castle was a knockout event, with the drum festival or taiko matsuri being held within the gardens once again - usually relegated to the gravel beyond the inner moat with not much view. Last time we enjoyed this setting was seven years ago, to my reckoning.
Fabulous view and some very good entertainment as well - name check for our ex-student Haruna playing with the Matsuoka group. Enjoy a sampler below :)
My little class on Friday announced they really did not like milk...and we had to re-write their song a little bit, much to the chagrin of author Patrick Jackson! My class today were very much in favour of cow juice, and were more than happy to sing as loudly as they could.
I was expecting Hibiki's sister to come today as well, so that this review conversation at the start of our new books (English Time 4 from OUP) would make some sense. We adapted it to include yours truly, mum & aunt (ever taught a class with that combo?). We stumbled along fairly well, but I would love to get a bit more "heads up & shoulders back". How did we do? (Can you do better? Send us your introductions - use the "speak" function on the right!)
I know all about picking pears, as I did this quite a bit in New Zealand way back in the day. I don't like picking pears (they are usually hard, and don't bruise as easily as apples)...because wasps love eating them. They get drunk on the sugar, and just hang out on the blind side of the fruit until you put a hand around them. Stung on/between the fingers? That hurts!
That is my story; think Rei's is a lot less dramatic!
This week Rei wanted to tell me about his insect collecting hobby; I am sure his mum hates it!
Cicadas ("semi" in Japanese) are those enormous doodlebug size insects that make a racket this time of year. They really are a bit gross. The worst experience I ever had with one was when I was riding my old Kawasaki, quite quickly, visor open (need air!) & wallop - a cicada flew into my helmet & splattered all over the right side of my face/ear. Remarkably, I didn't crash, but I did feel very well!
Funniest cicada experience was on Sado Island, watching the Kodo drummers - one dived-bombed straight down the crack of my friend Paul's shorts (never to be seen again!)
What is your best/worst cicada story?!
This week Rei wanted to tell me about his insect collecting hobby; I am sure his mum hates it!
Cicadas ("semi" in Japanese) are those enormous doodlebug size insects that make a racket this time of year. They really are a bit gross. The worst experience I ever had with one was when I was riding my old Kawasaki, quite quickly, visor open (need air!) & wallop - a cicada flew into my helmet & splattered all over the right side of my face/ear. Remarkably, I didn't crash, but I did feel very well!
Funniest cicada experience was on Sado Island, watching the Kodo drummers - one dived-bombed straight down the crack of my friend Paul's shorts (never to be seen again!)
After we have all listened to the gentle narration of our Story Tree reader off the CD at home (how many times?) and followed along in the reader itself...
After we have become familiar with new words and practiced using them in different contexts in the workbooks...
After we have had spelling races...
After we have corrected the teacher's silly reading mistakes...
After we have found the page for certain words...
Then we are about ready to read out loud - some more than others, obviously, and reading to an audience (even friends) is a performance with fraught issues such as pronunciation, speed and nerves. Getting it 100% right is not as important as having a go - but it does help the teacher identify any little issues which silent reading clearly doesn't.
My super enthusiatic Friday team love showing off, and why not! They are making excellent progress and my hat is off!
I am not a big fan of 'team reading' - tends to be at the speed of the slowest and 'pronunciation by consent'. As you listen (press play) you can hear that the children get quicker & more 'into' the material. You can't hear me moving my arms around like a windmill to gee them up!
This did help me fogure out which words they needed a bit more focus on (which ones did you identify?) and we did just that next with a board race. After that, I read it through and made some atrocious mistakes ('cow' instead of 'now', hungry/angry, nappy/happy, mad/sad, daddy/dirty etc) which was mildly entertaining and increased the volume significantly.
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'!
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.
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!
I have not seen Misaki for a while, because our schedules have conflicted - I've been away doing exam stuff, or she has. Yes, exam hell time for her. But, she is escaping, which I am thrilled with, and from April will be enjoying a whole new life in Australia. Not messing around, but studying English before college.
She didn't want to open her book today, which was fine. Instead, I dug up a game I haven't used for ages. "Neverending Story" encourages collaborative storytelling by simply requiring turn-takers to add on to the story so far, putting a picture card onto the board. There is no 'right or wrong' direction for the stroy to take - totally at the mercy of the turn taker! What I like about it with my students is the chance for me to ask questions to extract more story details (if necessary). Each turn the player needs to start at the beginning and recycle the story so far. When it is my turn to repeat the whole story with as much of their details as possible, a few embellishments/clarifications/mistakes - but modelling the correct narrative tenses without correcting them are looking for prompts. No pencils, no reading, no safety net!
I find this helps a lot with students getting beyond the first thing they thought of and leaving that as 'their turn'. It makes students listen to each other carefully, and check/clarify details. They have to link their ideas to each others', and use a lot of discourse markers.
By the time we 'finished' - timed out - we had run through the story at least a dozen times, adding bits and polishing the edges. I remembered a Shelly Terrell app recommendation for last year's JALT Conference and popped my iPhone into her hand with AudioBoo ready. The five minute free limit was ideally short - had to get on with it. As you can tell, Misaki is doing a lot of thinking to keep her story fluent. My apologies for getting in the way here & there, but I was watching the timer. Most of the ideas were hers after my "Once upon a time..."
Misaki & I would both like to hear/read your comments :)
One of the things I like to do with my YLE classes is to review a graded reader by reading it badly. Sounds a bit daft I know, but for my way of thinking, if the teacher's making mistakes, it's alright if the kids do too!
