Learning through songs

Here are some students studying the song 'I can see a Rainbow' from the Finding Out Series. (Finding Out 2)

I leave the students alone and they practise the words first. Then I let them listen to the CD and then they practise some more this time practising the melody as well.

The students more often than not help each other with the words. In the second video (the actual performance) you can see two of the students.




I stress that it is best to leave the students to teach each other. Questions do come, like 'what's this word?', but most of the students now know that I encourage them to ask each other questions before asking me. I'm the last resort. I'm giving them a valuable lesson in how to become interdependent learners. The scaffolding that happens in the classroom is fantastic and the students are much happier learning this on their own. Who would have thought that a ten year old 'bully' would put so much passion into singing the rainbow song? He loved it!

Mark

Dictogloss

Here is a group of students doing a dictogloss exercise. We did a song from the SuperKids 3 book, the 'Did you play baseball yesterday?' song.

The students responded much better than I thought they would and I tried to do as much scaffolding as I could; for example getting them to spell a word as much as they could before I helped them the rest of the way, rather than me just spelling the word for them when they asked. Of I redirected the question back to the group to see if anyone else could help spell the word. This was the first dictogloss that I did with them and I did end up playing the song about 6 times. (I also played the last part of the song once as you'll see in this video).

Overall the dictogloss was a surprise success, the students had a slow start, but to be expected having never done this before, but the students ended up doing a lot of communicating amongst themselves to get the words all down. In the end, I let them check their version against the version in the book. They were almost all perfect.

As you will see in the video too, the Did you....? version was OK, but when it came to the simple past sentence, they couldn't catch the -ed on the end of play, or paint.
This was only their second week on this chapter - simple past with regular verbs adding -ed only, so I will try something different next time to see how much they were able to notice.

Running Dictation

A favorite lesson for students is always the running dictation game.

In this class, there are 4 students, all aged 10, and they are studying from the SuperKids 3 textbook. Since I don't like to follow the PPP method, I use the text mostly as a guide for the students to get a jist of what we are doing in the class. We still do a bit of the pairwork but mostly it is learning on their own and if they have questions, please ask me sort of lesson.

This lesson was all about learning some of the skills, the students did them all, reading, writing, listening and speaking. But they also learn other skills such as understanding, expressing, indicating, recognizing, learning the elements of sentence structure and using punctuation. (see White, R.V. (1988) The ELT Curriculum. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, MA. pp. 70-71)

Not only did they have to find out spelling, but they also had to find out where the beginning of the sentence was, capital letters, the comma, period, question mark and even the apostrophe.

They learned that the beginning of a sentence always starts with a capital, it ends with a period and 'it is' is abbreviated to 'it apostrophe s'.

The way the lesson goes;

Students are in pairs. One student writes, the other runs. In this case, the paragraph the runner had to dictate to their partner was in another room. They run to the other room, memorize as much as they could, then come back and tell the writer - who then writes it down in their notebook. 'How do you spell...?' 'Once more please.' are popular phrases they use to be able to correctly write down everything they are told to write.

When the paragraph is finished, then the students switch and a new paragraph is started. I don't use the same paragraph for all the students, it's too easy for them to copy from each other. The point is that they listen and write. And if they don't understand, then they have to ask to get the correct spelling and punctuation.

It keeps them busy and occupied and it's great exercise for the students too! I only do this lesson once every few months with a class.

It's great for all ages. I even do it with the little ones, but with words only, like cat or dog. They get so frustrated after only remembering the 'c' or the 'a' and having to run back to remember the word again, but they remember their letters and they have so much fun! And they get to practise their writing too!

Mark

Fumiaki-san is one of my adult students. He comes whenever he can, as he's very busy, but his keen interest in English and his perseverence make him a joy to teach.

He has his own blog, which he faithfully keeps everyday; http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/fumiaki_sasaki38

In his class we cover so many different aspects of English.
We read numerous books, he has had his favorites (The Firm) and his not so favorites (1984) but currently we have switched to movies. We did study John Grisham's 'The Runaway Jury' last year and now we have switched to an all movie mode studying the nuances of the English language through Mission Impossible 1. It's amazing how simple the story becomes when you actually sit down to teach it, the scenes are short enough for a 90 minute lesson, we can cover a 8-10 minute scene every week. We look at different nuances between words that are used versus the ones he already knows, but his interest lies mostly in the interesting phrases that are used in the movies. They differ so much from books in the language they use that despite books being more descriptive, the movies have the language which I think is much more effective for studying conversation. Not to say that extensive reading is not important; it is, just that movies have a different language about them and the language that is used can be used to teach things like collocations, concepts like overgeneralization and just plain natural ways of saying things.

The next movie we will do in conjunction with the book 'Snow falling on cedars'. We are about halfway through MI1, but we'll finish it within the next few months.

Thank you Fumiaki-san. I really enjoy our lessons!

Mark

This is R-chan.
She is currently in SuperKids 4, yet, most of the lessons we do are from a variety of sources, as well as from whatever R-chan wants to do. She pretty much decides what she wants to learn. She has gone from a student who followed the PPP method to one of now who much prefers learning things on her own using a much more holistic method. So the SuperKids 4 book isn't followed from the traditional PPP format it was designed for, but instead we move around a lot, covering things from the book but in a TBL format.

The picture here was taken after we played 2 games.

The first game was based on the lesson in SK4 making comparisons between 2 animals.
We played the memory game. But when two cards were turned over they had to be compared in some way.

So I went first.
I turned over the ostrich and hippopotamus cards. I said 'An ostrich is faster than a hippopotamus'. Her response was one of '???' So I said the word 'fast' again and then repeated my sentence. This time going slower and emphasizing the faster.
She agreed and then it was her turn.

She turned over the lion and the elephant. 'Elephant big is lion.' Far from a perfect sentence, but the word order was correct.

The game progressed to the point where she heard enough of my language so that she could begin to create the comparisons herself with much more sentence structure.

Then came the moment that defines the new v-task. She asked me to help her with a new word so that she could make the sentence.

She turned over the elephant card and the bear card. She could have said bigger, but she asked me 'How do you say 'omoi' in English? I replied 'heavy', I didn't want to give the comparitive form, she didn't ask for it. Her sentence 'A elephant is heavier is than bear.' Her interlanguage was working its way through and she was discovering that the adjective -er form was used for comparisons. The word order remained correct and the emergence of the -er form told me she was on her way.
The rule she then applied to the peacock and snake card which she used the word beautifuller.

The next game we played was designed to reduce this simple form to something more applicable. In the picture, on the table you can see all of the cards face up. The object of this game was to choose an animal and the other person had to guess which animal it was.

I went first. I chose 'elephant'. She guessed lion. I said 'it's bigger'. She then said 'rhinocerous'. I replied 'It's heavier'. So every animal she guessed I used her new guess to compare it to my animal. She was pretty much in tune with this game. It was simpler, the language was simpler and it allowed me also to focus on the 'more' structures, although these structures were not part of her ZPD on this day. She wasn't able to distance this zone.

It came to the point in this game though that she could guess my animal within 3 guesses based on the clues I gave her. Also using the idea of the v-task, I added new adjectives and in order for her to guess the animal, she needed to know what this new adjective meant. She was allowed to ask me. I used slower, more beautiful, taller (she got the word longer, but the concept of taller wasn't there until I had picked giraffe as my animal to introduce this new adjective). She immediately guessed 'giraffe' and then turned around and used 'taller' herself in her next turn.

Having a student by themselves at this age can sometimes be very tedious, but R-chan has the personality and the motivation to be able to learn on her own.

Other things we do in class;

She does 10 minutes of reading out loud, from Penguin Readers 'Anne of Green Gables' level 2 book. At the 10 minute mark, I stop her and we look at the progress she has made based on previous week's readings. She can read a little over a page in 10 minutes, as opposed to 3/4 of a page from when she first started.
She also signs out a book a week from our library, she picks it. She has read over 50 books since the library began.We have a variety of readers from various publishers, so there is a variety for her to choose from. She has no favorites, but she has read a lot of the Story Street series from Longman. She is reading level 5 of that series. Sometimes she chooses a much lower level book than she is more capable of, but it is her choice.

We also do a lot of writing in class, she does study a little grammar when the need arises, or when the homework dictates that grammar needs to be covered, but I design the lesson around a more 'noticing' approach. For example when we covered past tense. I laid all of the cards on the table, so she could see the words. I asked her to point out similarities between the cards, and she immediately pointed out the -ed ending.

A pleasure to teach. Her dream is to work at Disneyland as a guide.

Good luck R-chan!

Mark

Here is Y-kun, recently he joined our school in Shiwa.
He is going to be in grade school starting next year and well, he's the blog of the day article.

His perseverence to learn English is amazing. Today he walked in to the school and said, Mr. Mark? Excuse me, Mr. Mark? So I replied, yes? There was no reply after that, but his mom explained that he learned a new phrase and wanted to use it.

He refuses to speak any Japanese in class, and to all other students his favorite phrase is 'no Japanese please'. Of course when he says it, he isn't sitting down, he is standing on his chair, shaking his finger and demanding.
Today, in class, we didn't do any TBL lesson, we did some phonics, they use the reading rods to match the letters and then we did a small science lesson, learning about planting seeds, giving them water and seeing the plant grow, flowers blooming and then turning into tomatoes. 'I don't like tomatoes! Yes!' was his reply.

His greetings and his funny character make the class so fun to teach, and due to his love of copying everything I say, he is so fun to teach! Recently I bought colored pencils from Canada, and they all have unusual names, there are even metallic colors. He has them all memorized. If the children want to color in class, they have to ask for the color they want before taking it. He loves the metallic colors, maybe not so much because of the color, but because he loves saying the colors. 'metalllllllic purrrple please!'


I don't have to teach anymore. Not this class. He makes sure everyone knows what the new vocab is, or the new activity is, before we move on.

He will be in my next research group when I start to link Vygotsky to TBL. It will be fun to design a lesson around Vygotsky's ZPD and keeping him in mind, see how I can have him teach others through scaffolding and through his world of social interaction.
He will be learning to read soon so his demands will increase I'm sure.

Thank you Y-kun!

Find the Differences

In today's lesson, with four Jr. High School Students we did a 'Find the Differences' lesson.

Students were put in pairs, and one person from the pair was given Sheet A and the other was given Sheet B. They were not allowed to show each other their sheets and they were only allowed to talk to 'find the differences between sheet A and sheet B items.

Not all items are different. One pair was done relatively quickly, within 30 minutes and when I asked them how many of the items were the same, they replied 'ten'. At that point I wrote on the board, that only the gloves, key and the wallet were the same, all others had some sort of difference.

Now, this class has had experience in the past with being able to ask for meanings, or ask to acquire new language, this kind of task is ideal for that. Yes, they need to use language that they already know, but they need to ask for more. I sometimes answered, but most times, I redirect the question to the rest of the class.

Finding the differences is not the point, the point is being able to communicate what you see to the other person. Confusions were mostly on the jeans or the suitcase.

The jeans drew confusion from the students in one case saying the 'happy face is on the left' vs the other student 'the happy face is on the left leg'.

The suitcase drew confusion, since they were all able to tell that the arrow was pointing up, but no one was able to determine that one arrow was short and the other was long.

The writing colors threw them off as well. All of the pictures were discussed diligently, the point of the lesson being just that. I didn't want them to feel that they failed in the lesson if the differences were not discovered, but I wanted them to be able to be able to discuss the pictures in detail, or most importantly ask for new language when needed.

At the end of the lesson, when the students were able to see the differences, groans and laughter filled the classroom.

The last 10 minutes of class was to discuss the various lexical items or chunks that they learned during the task.

At the bottom, at the top, left leg, facing, long, short...

but in asking about the lesson itself, all students agreed that this kind of lesson is useful just about in any situation, and although one of the students is not as grammatically advanced as the others, he was very good at being able to communicate exactly what he wanted to say.

How was the lesson?

fun, useful, difficult to explain the pictures but I could use my English, I learn how to say more English when describing things.

Great lesson and great student response.

Mark

A Sample Communicative TBL

Today I had a class with 4 Jr. High School students.

I wanted to teach them simple present and have them use it.

On the board, I wrote the following 9 questions;

1. Where were you born?
2. When were you born?
3. Where did you go to grade school?
4. Who was your favorite teacher?
5. What was your favorite subject?
6. Where do you go to Jr. High School?
7. Who is your favorite teacher?
8. What is your favorite subject?
9. What is your future ambition?

The idea being that I wanted them to notice the difference between Questions 4 and 7 and Questions 5 and 8. I wanted them to be able to make the distinction that starting question 6, the tense changes and becomes present.

The first 5 questions went rather smoothly, questions did arise, such as 'How do you spell September?' or 'How do you say 地理学' in English? (Geography).

One student raised his hand and inquired about the question 4 being repeated again in question 7, but he immediately withdrew his question when he noticed for himself that the question 7 pertained to Jr. High School. The others were listening to his question and at that point they all realized that the part starting at Jr.High was in the present tense.

We had covered the past tense in a previous lesson, but we hadn't really covered the 'be' verb past tense to any great degree. But no questions arose about this and they had completed the task by the end of the lesson. They had to ask all other students, all of the questions.

They communicated pretty much in English for the most part, but this kind of lesson raises the same question as outlined Hobbs, J. 2005 'Interactive Lexical Phrases in Pair Interview Tasks' in Edwards, C., Willis, J. (2005) Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching. MACMILLAN, Hampshire, U.K. pp. 143-156. There needs to be some focus on helping students become less stilted in their language and more smooth in their interactions. By introducing students to lexical phrases as suggested by Hobbs, it could help the students use more peripheral language and less of their own Mother tongue.

A definite case for action research on how we could do this within the school as a whole and not just for this class.

Mark