We love language

Class Thursday 7 May 2009

2009-05-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

Gael and Sergio taught the last class. Gael explained some idioms and Sergio reviewed the question structure. It was a very nice class!

Stress!

2009-05-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody. We're going back to school tomorrow and, taking into account the situation with the influenza we have just lived, I've been looking for information about managing post-traumatic stress in class. Tomorrow we will work with the students on that topic but, today I want to share with you some interesting links I found for regular teacher stress:
1. Wondering how stressed you are? This teacher's stress test might give you a hint.
2. Wondering how to work it out? "A teacher's stress survival guide" gives some good ideas.
3. Wondering how to do some changes in your class to reduce stress? "10 Ways to reduce stress"... is more focused to children classrooms but it has some ideas that may work for us too.
I hope these ideas are helpful and you'll feel better during the rest of the course ;)
See you tomorrow!

Comics from: http://www.wolfescape.com/Humour/WorkStress.htm

The uncertainty principle

2009-05-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

During the OPP class we've been speaking about observation, who takes part and how, and the fact that being observed changes the way we teach. Serge said in his blog that he was given the chance of observation, I see that as an opportunity. Anyway, I wanted to share with you a fragment of "The Man who Wasn't There" by the Cohen brothers. In this scene a lawyer explains the "Uncertainty principle" pretending to use it in court. Sometimes, observing a class, is also a little like this.

Homework

2009-04-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Hello kids.
I'd like you to check out the following links and pick something that calls your attention. Read it and next time we see each other in class we will share (if possible with an example).

http://iteslj.org/links/TESL/Teaching_Techniques/

http://esl.about.com/od/esleflteachingtechnique/ESL_EFL_Teaching_Techniques_and_Strategies.htm

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/teachtip.htm

and some of the activities they did

2009-04-24T08:54:00.001-07:00

Fossils activity: Thursday 16/april/09

2009-04-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody. On Tuesday 14 I explained the different kind of mistakes we did and the monitor theory of Krashen. We saw that students kind of got the idea but they didn't know what to do in order to correct their errors and fossils. To help them with this on Thursday 16 you taught different ways to improve memory: Sergio explained the good effects of combining color and repetition; Itzel explained how to work with families of words and; Gael how to associate certain topics to pictures. I'm now posting some photos with you teaching and with some of the students' work. Hope you enjoy it!

present perfect simple

2009-04-18T19:37:00.001-07:00

Hello! Well, the "Misterious Teacher" is not comming on Tuesday so I'm teaching. I've been looking for some extra material on present perfect simple and I have found some nice things:
1. This page has nice visuals to explain the tense
http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentperfect.html
2. This is a beautiful handout that helps to distinguish between using the simple past or the present perfect. I think I'll use the first part of this one.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/5617231/present-perfect-vs-past-simple-1?autodown=pdf
3. And this is where I took the lyrics for the U2 song, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for"
http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?display:1027714225-26655.txt
We'll see how things work in class! See you!
Helen.

Krashen The Monitor Theory

2009-04-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

In the following days you will see that in class I will be working with error correction and something I call the "Fossil Chart". Most of this is based on the Monitor Theory by Krashen. So here are some links to read more about this theory:

Krashen in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Krashen
Krashen's personal webpage http://www.sdkrashen.com/
A summary of the Monitor's theory http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/Krashen.htm
Krashen has also worked on bilingual education and has some fierce critics about his work on this topic. If you're interested on that here you can find some information:

http://www.angelfire.com/az/english4thechildren/krashen.html

Learning in the net rules!

2009-04-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

Have you ever felt guilty for all the time you spend in the net, and yet, are sure it's worth it? Well, that's exactly how I felt until I watched and HEARD this guy explaining how we learn through the internet. I must admit this presentation has severely affected my view on learning nowadays ;) for good I guess!

Knowledge maturing and learning

View more presentations from GrahamAttwell.

More great stuff at www.pontydysgu.org

After watching this video I must say I feel happy and full of hope... I always knew lurking wasn't so bad (joke).

Intro to Vygotsky

2009-03-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

Speaking about humanistic education we ended up mentioning Vygotsky. I dove into the net and found the following:

1. Webpage with some of his works
http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/

2. Video with an intro to his life

3. Video more focused in his theory
http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/634376752589779456

4. A very easy following and more amateur but well explained video (with some humor too)

5. Sociocultural wiki
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Sociocultural_Theory

And... if you want to laugh see these cheering up puppets! (But please, don't immitate their pronunciation...

BGFL Multiple intelligences

2009-03-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Multiple intelligences. This is a site that has a very feasible test to know the percentages of different kinds of intelligences. The nice thing is that if you ask all your ss to answer it and give you their code we can actually see the class percentage. We can also see the results of only girls or boys. Give it a try!

Welcome!

2009-03-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to this blog where we will add interesting information about language both to learn it and teach it. We hope you enjoy it!