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!
Showing posts with label Oxford University Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxford University Press. Show all posts
Yesterday was Sir Anthony Evans’ eightieth birthday concert.
He played music for the piano by Liszt, and hundreds of people came to listen to this very famous pianist. Before the concert, I went to see him and his wife, Lady Linda Evans, in the theater dressing-room, and Sir Anthony told me his story.
He came first in a music competition when he was fifteen, but the story really began before that. One day in an old building a boy called Tony found a old piano. He was fourteen at the time. He didn’t come from a musical family and he didn’t know a lot about music, and when his fingers touched the keys of the piano, half-forgotten music danced through his mind.
After the win of the music competition, he has given thousands of concert as we know.
He told me to tell our readers that he was very lucky man.
You can imagine my shock to hear a lot of grunting & groaning coming out of Damian's classroom the other afternoon. What the hell is going on? Open the door to find him locked in hand-to-hand combat with @patjack67 and his son, recreating a scrum from the epic England v Ireland tussle last weekend at Twickenham!
The books he has written for Young Learners (which we use) are called "Everybody Up" (not "Scrum V" or #carrythemhome ). His readers series for very Young Learners, Potato Pals, are acclaimed worldwide - and were piloted by Jim at Luna pre-publishing (and reviewed in a local yakitori with OUP!)
We are accustomed to having the great and the good of Planet EFL visiting us at Luna. Over the years we have welcomed a number of authors such as Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto and Ritsuko Nakata (Let's Go, by OUP), Setsuko Toyama (English Time - also OUP) to the school. This is the first time one has turned up on a school day and joined in with our students! A staggering privilege, especially as the next classes both Damian and Jim were going to teach use Patrick Jackson's books!
Luka meets Patrick Jackson in HER class!
Our YLs were delighted to practice their greetings, and to review their "Hello" song with him...no, he did not sit at the back and brood about how we were wrecking his books! Got stuck right in with some singing and dancing, and showed no sympathy when Jim's knee went, bouncing around to "Everybody Up"!
As you can see, we had a very jolly afternoon, and completely out of the blue (we would have baked a cake!) hosted a leading light of the EFL world in our dripping wet building. Made Damian & Jim feel 10 feet tall, and impressed the living daylights out of our mums (who have just paid for their shiny new books with Pat's name on the front)&
Thanks so much for the flying visit - I'm afraid the rain today has killed your snowman though. Hope your socks dried out on the train?
I was thinking about drilling last week, and not just because I've got a hole in one of my teeth...and I put the idea into my 'blog about this soon' folder. This folder is just next to 'go home & eat dinner' in my head, and I think I must have been hungry that evening.
I just came across Martin Sketchley's timely post on his really good blog http://www.eltexperiences.com ARGH!!! on drilling which reminded me I had something to say! Martin's post is here by the way, and I especially agree on using music to do the hard work. A couple of the other ideas are new to me, but as our landlord complains about noisy kids (yes, he's a real gas) the full-volume one will have to wait a while. Find Martin on twitter as @ELTExperiences
Devon Thaggard of Super Simple Songs fame is an exponent of using music all the time - warmers up, coolers down (if that is a proper phrase I don't know!), scene shifting & transitioning, background & subliminal input...all of which I like but I find myself up & down like a yo-yo doing that, and so do this once in a while. But I do like to use his songs a lot - check out some of our Audioboos here.
Songs obviously have rhythm, and I enjoy the challenge this brings to my learners as they are in (L1) habit of giving each consonant the same weight, and not elliding (joining words together). Enunciating nicely yes (I hope - they are copying me after all!) but not getting whole chunks out quickly enough or with too much "oomph" (my favourite technical phrase in EFL since my CELTA course!).
The other day I was introducing my YLs to the this/that concept...by way of a song in English Time 1 (OUP). The children already knew the vocab, so simple matter of sticking the flashcards out of arm's reach (around the room, spread out a bit). Having never hear the song before, I just asked them to listen and touch or point at the approriate card. Windmills! Second time was more co-ordinated, and they wanted to join in (fine - not me forcing them too, and they wanted to know what the other words were...OK, I gave them!). They wanted to try again and do better...it's working!
The lyrics for the songs are in the back of the classbooks, which I really like - and they are also indented to identify different 'parts' in back & forth or question/answer chants. This is a flower That's a bird This is a flower That's a tree......
This makes it really easy to assign parts to students individually or in pairs/little groups, reading their 'bit' and hearing the other bit (a slow read through, focusing on actually reading - remembering? - the words). And then press play for a full speed go with all the words in, emphasising the this/that distinction as a 'battle'. Replay quickly with roles switched, and the little troopers will be singing all the way back to home :)
Here is a very impromptu audio grab of our efforts - remember, this was the 1st time they'd come across the song!
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 :)
I was really glad that my Friday class have got stuck into their Story Tree graded readers. We skipped the red series and leapt straight into the blue, and Kipper's disastrous Toys' Party. Squeels of protest as our new role model Kipper made a cake with milk (OK, apparently!) & beans, ketchup, corn flakes...of course "Mum is angry!"
As this is our first adventure with the readers, we spent a lesson getting used to the (great) workbook that comes with each title. A number of different activities that without guidance could put the brakes on before we even start. Once the ice broken there, had a hard time stopping them from trying to do everything in one go! (Essentially a 'do at home' extra that we review every now & again in class, act out or otherwise use in some way)
A cool song to incorporate here would be Super Simple Songs' "Broccoli Ice-cream", which was recommended to me last year by Ryan Hagglund during examiner training.
At the same time we also moved up a gear with a new class book (English Time 1, also from OUP) and I am delighted that the switch is 'just right'. I used the board as an in-between step - seeing new words (some, anyway) and knowing what they are (from the pictures), to 'owning them' as in adding them to their picture dictionary at the back of the book (too often never to be seen again). Books at one end of the room, to refer to as often as you like - the points go to the most methodical memory and not the fastest runner!
English Time 1, Unit 1 vocab race
I am not too concerned with lettering on the board (whole medium is awkward) just as long as legible. We did have a vote for neatest, though, just to sow a seed! The other penny dropped when they were then asked to find the pictures in their picture dictionary and to put the matching word next to it - whose writing did they copy :) An activity I like because it passively gets them to realise alphabet order. Next week? Hangman, of course!
It is possible, if you work frantically, to have a full scale Voicethread production of a graded reader, such as OUP's Story Tree orange level one seen here, up and published in an hour.
We did not get into this 'cold'. Students have been asked to listen to the CD and to read along at home. This is not homework as such, but our efforts at an extensive reading programme. A book a month is a very gentle commitment I think!
We have also 'milked' this source heavily - it is full of verbs in the past tense - regular and irregular - which we have worked on previously eg using a word cloud to retell the story as best we could & to find the verbs in their past form > write the present tense form. We have also identified how to pronounce the three different /ed/ endings (from the CD).
I gave my boys the camera and asked them to find some of the main 'ingredients' in our story. Those things we couldn't photograph we drew quick pictures eg museum & shop. The students were assigned characters to speak for (reading ahead skills) and then Jim's quick keyboard skills were needed to find the right images/press record etc. We were against time pressure so we did not go back and edit - so what you hear is very much what we did. Pauses are there when someone wandered off thinking they'd finished!
Image via CrunchBaseI hope you'll take a few minutes to follow the link over to Voicethread and leave a comment yourself for us (or leave us a note here). Personally, I think this is a lovely (free) tool that teachers should be able to exploit easily for this kind of personalisation. Involves everyone in a production that would otherwise stay 'hidden' in the book. Performing brings out the characters and imagination, and a lasting finished product is something they can share & go back to with pride. All our classes work is linked for parents to discover on Edmodo too, which if you have not thought about using for classes yet, I'd take a look. We love it!
"My" boys did me proud today, re-telling their homework book from Golden Week (OUP Story Tree, Green series #8, "The Castle Adventure")
They had been asked to read the book, listen to the accompanying CD, and colour codes or esendings on words eg frogs, witches). Why? To notice that one of them gets an extra syllable...So you can teach syllable awareness to elementary school kids in Japan and kill of katakana? You bet! (Just don't tell them!)
I do use a bit of Japanese in this video - I had my hands full with book/video. I try to minimise my teacher talk time (TTT) as much as possible with my body language/facial expression/hand gestures...so not a great example of my teaching as I am asking them for nouns/verbs in L1. I hope you get the idea though . It also helped me suddenly realise (yet again - bell ringing moment) that my left-handed student had a glaring problem with word order. I'd never noticed, but we all did as we went along...and he got plenty of opportunity to correct himself. (I do have a few pet theories about south paws as language learners, non-scientific, but very related to my experiences with dylexia/or not, hearing impaired, and a considerable number of lefties I have taught and one I married).
Personally loved this Cuisenaire Rod exercise, as it was so competitive and really milked the workbook/homework aspect to death. How many times are they repeating the story (and getting more accurate because they want to)? How much are they listening to each other (a lot, and much more critically than in a usual Japanese EFL classroom I'd suggest)? How monotonous is their production? How much meaning are they putting into context/how much context are they interpreting in meaning?
I would love to get some feedback on this as an exercise. I would love to share feedback with the lads on their performances as well.
Got those classes to teach from April and racking your brains for ideas? Having to use that text book and can't figure out how to make it come alive? Doing your head in?
Think you are the only one? Nope!
Practical, extensive, at-your-finger-tips help is here.
Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto (Co-author, Let's Go) Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto has taught English and ESL in the US, and EFL in Japan for more than 20 years. She is co-author of the best-selling Let's Go series. You can find her online on her award winning blog, Teaching Village; her Wiki; on Facebook; or on Twitter.
Presentation: Large or small, teach them all!
Goal for 2011: Teach every student in every class! You can reach this goal by teaching with multi-sensory activities that target all your students' learning channels--visual, auditory, kinesthetic--in every lesson! Whether your classes are large or small, in this session, you'll learn simple ways to get better learning results from the limited time you have with students. When students are learning on all channels, they can learn faster, remember more, and use what they've learned in more meaningful ways.
This is a game I first saw Aileen Scouler play many moons ago, as a way to get her kids to respond a bit more quickly. Very simple, nicely competitive,
and rewards the careful listener/accurate reader as much as the swift of reflex.
Simply, the teacher reads (or plays the CD) of a book. We love our OUP Story Tree series at Luna. Whenever you pause, whoever thinks they can read the next word, dings a bell or something, and has a go. One point if they are 'close enough' for you - shake your head if someone else should try.
Obviously the teacher can be as soft or as picky as they want to be. Personally, I like to be a bit picky after children have listened to the story (at home, for homework). Immediately shows who has been a good student....and teacher can pick on the 'new' words or the oft tricky ones.
With a new book, the opposite works nicely; pause at known words, and children will be happy not to be challenged on the unknown ones - but be keenly motivated to listen up for pronunciation...good grades readers have a healthy habit of recycling words, don't they?!
So, lovely little task to get readers focused, and a nice incidental way for teacher to target vocab. Thanks Aileen!
I studied art at University. I did a lot of photography. There are a lot of artists I like but some of the best exhibitions I’ve seen are of work by Paul Gaugan, Henri Matisse, Howard Hodgkin and Herge’ (Tintin ).
After University I decided to pursue a career in the emergency services. I became a swimming pool lifeguard, an ambulance man and then a fireman. All these careers were interesting and I met a lot of amazing people.
Kevin with OUP presentation helpers
In 1984 I saw a movie called Yellow Earth which made me interested in Asia and when I had the chance to teach in Japan in 1989 I took the opportunity and have been a language teacher ever since.
I have worked in language schools, big and small, public and private high schools and kindergartens, in 2006 I was a special needs teaching assistant in a UK primary school and I also write and present for the UK publisher Oxford University Press. One of my favourite series of books is the Oxford Reading Tree.
In 2005 I made a DVD published by OUP about teaching English to children in Japan.
From 1990-2004, I was an examiner for the United Nations Test of English Proficiency at their testing centers in Yokohama and Tokyo. In 2009 I moved to Singapore and taught English to kindergarten, primary and high school students at the British Council and Hwa Chong International school.
I have traveled quite a lot in Asia and a little bit in Europe. I used to do a lot of sports especially swimming, squash and running but my main hobbies now are listening to music and reading.
I also dj. My dj name is numonix and I play a kind of music called drum and bass. You can listen to this kind of music at www.humanelements.jp
Kevin Churchley.
Jim adds: Kevin will be presenting for Oxford University Press around the country in February and March next year, and will be adding a special date to the calendar in April - right here at Luna. Parents and teachers alike will want to see Kevin's very special classroom style and exciting ideas for involving young learners in their reading books. One of the major reasons we adopted OUP's The Story Tree series was because of the magic presentation I saw Kevin make years ago. I have known Kevin for several years, and I am delighted we have been able to tempt him back to his beloved Japan from Singapore. Please join me in welcoming him to our chilly town and to our warm school!
I've been in this game long enough to know that this afternoon is not the last time I will ever see Ayako, who had her last class with Luna today after about eight years. The next time I do see her though, she is likely to have found herself a place at uni, had her hair done and look nothing like the super-shy elementary school girl I first taught from ABC, and still remember her as. I guess she'd pass PET (CEFR B1) fairly easily now, but she wouldn't volunteer for yet another test!
Today she muttered dark things about her reader (Tutankhamen) being 'too hard' - but that her favourite character was King Tut himself. We were drawing lines under bits & bobs we hadn't finished off before.Ayako has read countless books from the Story Tree series (OUP) into Dominoes & Bookworms - she prefers Dominoes with the quizzes at the end of each chapter. She has consistently & steadily done everything she has been asked to try, and has come such a long way she can only continue to 'use her English' from now on. She leaves us ready to blossom.
Ayako has stolen the hearts of all her teachers over the years she has been coming to us for English classes. Going to have to find another way to make Saturday afternoons fun now...
Best of luck getting into the FE course you want, Ayako. Very sad to see you go, but more excited to see what you achieve next.
This is a song/chant I've not used in class for ages, and I'd forgotten how much children enjoyed the challenge of listening hard for detail...when they really want to do something like colour a picture! An extra way I like to exploit the material is colour coding the lines in the song - our pre-schoolers are pre-reading stage for now - and it helps them sing-a-long/remember the song later.(The Yellow Chair Chant, from Let's Sing, Let's Chant 1, OUP)
Establishing trust and helping your friends is a very important part of growing up, and we've noticed with our kids a certain tendency called 'me firstism' closely followed by tantrum alert if frustrated. It was therefore very pleasing to see the girls lending each other a hand to walk along the wobbly causeway they'd designed, and telling each other to 'be careful'.
We have been working on combining short vowel sounds with consonants recently, and this game was a step ahead of where we really are in terms of learning, but it served a purpose which was to generate 'oh wow!' and also to notice there was a recurrent theme - ie a/e/i/o/u tend to get used a lot "again?" they kept saying! Even a couple of weeks ago this game (My first scrabble) was 'too hard', but letting it 'settle' and having another go worked like a charm. I like the set up as it is colour-coded and self-correcting, the pictures are clear and colourful, and pieces unbreakable.
My perennially 'noisy' boys are always up for something different; today we had a go at creating a VoiceThread project, talking about illnesses (unit 10 of our textbook English Time 2 - I hope Setsuko & OUP can cope with the image used?)
They had fun trying to take each others' pictures, then trying to put each other off when it was their turn/asking the harder questions (involving pronouncing 'stomachache'). First effort with this technology which looks very easy to use & obviously a lot of applications for our various classrooms, collaborating on projects & sharing comments. Check it out; comments welcome!
Attendance isn't usually a problem I have to worry about much with my business classes, so I have gradually relocated my stock of 'emergency' activities to more likely places (back of the car, mostly!). By about 8.40 this morning I was wishing I hadn't been so complacent.
The one student who did turn up, of the seven I was expecting, has just come back from a lengthy placement ie has missed the last two months because he was on Yamada denki skivvy duty ("researching sales outlet & consumer behaviour"). So, plan A went flying out the window (closed, it was bracing this morning)...
I did not want to wade into 8 weeks catch up, in case stragglers turned up. Luckily these days I have internet access in the classroom, albeit limited. Fortunately the book we are using has a variety of rather good resources online (becoming a very important component of any materials package). Thank you OUP & Clive Oxenden!
Got to say I am a flag waving fan of the English File series :)
Blended learning then, initially teacher directed until he figured out the parameters and started challenging himself. He self-diagnosed a weakness with prepositions, so we found an activity to practice them. After that, a text completion exercise (by which time a colleague had wandered in to join us), a fiddle with some past tense verb patterns, collocation practice and identifying stress patterns in longer words.
I enjoyed seeing my students realise they could do an awful lot more out of class if they have the inclination. I hope they catch the bug!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sw97b0Uzvzroi0F27HTixM5TpYLmvSB9QnxrcszgLgrK4xZbj7RE1rFtmHrmRpsFaldHYBRv1r_mt5OoqLSkKfNsgOrU8oDrIos0CVxEDkNsIVM4iHKqkt6ITuB1mobFb4soqnUzrETpVFbvW2A1Zz=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tD9jqROBsmpJ5pDAS3tiUT_Tdr_4ZaSAqlMSd3SQMbNUvRvuwTDeHg0e5Y5XTvULpY0-_O8vcnZ9Xq9aa7mgkkvBfXQP5ifq2rkqvFCr43oPbXRhkBUkgjD-CH0qaObeSDmq3OXJwiieFZAxFokfY=s0-d)
