Irfan TEFL

Teaching Greeting to Children | Greeting Race

This activity is a very quick gap-filler for practicing greetings.

Learning objectives:

Recognize and respond to sound patterns and words. Listen with care. Identify phonemes which are the same as or different from English and other known languages. Speak clearly and confidently

Listen for specific words and phrases. Listen with care. Use physical response to show recognition and understanding of specific words and phrases

Aim: To practice greetings

Vocabulary: Greetings

What to do:

You and the children sit or stand in a circle.

Explain that you have ‘collected’ some TL greetings and they are in your pocket – recap two alternative words for either ‘Hello’ or ‘Goodbye’ (depending if it is the beginning or the end of the lesson).

Turn to the child to your left, shake their hand and say the first word for ‘hello’ (or ‘goodbye’) e.g. bonjour.

Ask the child to pass it to the child on their left with a handshake, and so on all the way round the circle clockwise.

Meanwhile shake hands with the child on your right and say the other TL greeting (e.g. salut) and ask them to pass it on anti-clockwise.

See which greeting ‘arrives’ back in your hand first – when they have both ‘arrived’ put them back in your pocket safely for next time.

Note that the child halfway round the circle at the cross-over point will have the tricky task of passing on both greetings at the same time and must concentrate hard not to get them muddled up!

The activity was taken from:
Drinkwater, Nicola. 2008. Games & activities for primary modern foreign languages. London: Pearson, Longman.

Strategies for Collaborative Teaching

By Judi Moreillon
What is collaboration? Friend and Cook explain interpersonal collaboration as “a style for direct interaction between at least two coequal parties voluntarily engaged in shared decision making as they work toward a common goal” (1996, 6). Collaboration describes how people work together rather than what they do. It is a dynamic, interactive process among equal partners who strive together to reach excellence. In the 21st century, educators’ overarching common goal is increasing achievement for all learners.

Collaboration can happen in the planning, implementation, and assessment stages of teaching. It begins with planning the partnership itself. In formal collaborations, collaborators must schedule time to meet. Ideally, they preview the lesson ideas to each other in advance of the meeting so that planning can be more focused. Each person can then bring possible goals and objectives to the meeting, along with ideas for curriculum integration, instructional strategies, student grouping arrangements, and potential resources. In the planning process, educators establish shared goals and specific learning outcomes for students as well as assessment tools to evaluate student achievement.

They discuss students’ background knowledge, prior learning experiences, and skill development and determine what resources will best meet learners’ needs. Educators decide on one or more coteaching approaches, assign responsibilities for particular aspects of the lesson, and schedule teaching time based on the needs of students and the requirements of the learning tasks. They may set up another meeting before teaching the lesson and schedule a follow-up time to coassess student work and to evaluate the lesson itself.

Using a collaborative planning form can help guide the initial planning meeting. (Web Supplements 1A, 1B, and 1C are sample planning forms; these planning documents do not replace formal lesson plans.) The goals and objectives are the most important sections on classroom-library collaborative planning forms. While negotiating the best way for the teacher-librarian to coteach curriculum standards and to integrate information literacy skills, the “backward planning” framework (Wiggins and McTighe 1998) charges educators with knowing where they are going before they begin determining instructional strategies and resources. This planning model is centered on student outcomes.

Many teacher-librarian resources provide sample collaborative planning forms. The software program Impact! Documenting the LMC Program for Accountability (Miller 1998) combines both advanced planning and lesson plan support. It also helps teacher-librarians create reports that graphically and statistically document their contributions to the school’s academic goals.

During lesson implementation, collaborators can assume different coteaching roles. In Interactions: Collaboration Skills for School Professionals, Friend and Cook describe various coteaching approaches (1996, 47–50). Depending on the lesson, the students’ prior knowledge and skill development, the expertise of the educators, and their level of trust, collaborators can assume one or more of these roles during a lesson or unit of instruction.

Of these five approaches, team teaching requires the most collaboration and is the approach needed to teach the sample lessons offered in this book most effectively. Team teaching requires careful planning, respect for each educator’s style, and ultimately a shared belief in the value that this level of risk taking can offer students and educators themselves. Teacher-librarians, working within a supportive learning community, must develop interpersonal skills as well as teaching expertise that can allow team teaching to flourish.

Collaboration can also occur during assessment. After coplanning and coimplementing lessons and units of instruction, it is logical that evaluating student learning is part of a shared responsibility for instruction. Checklists, rating scales, and rubrics, developed with colleagues and in some cases with students in advance of instruction or early in the lesson, establish the criteria for postlesson assessment. Students should use these tools to guide, revise, and self-assess their work. Educators can use the same criteria to inform their teaching and modeling, guide student practice, and assess students’ learning process and final products.

Educators may decide to divide assessment on the basis of components of the lesson for which each one took primary responsibility. For example, teacherlibrarians may take the lead in teaching notemaking skills and may then take responsibility for assessing students’ notes with a rubric. Joint assessment can happen before designing a lesson when educators administer pretests to determine the students’ level of skill development or prior knowledge of a particular concept. Even if they did not coteach a lesson, educators might ask one another to provide another set of eyes to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction based on students’ learning products. In Assessing

Learning: Librarians and Teachers as Partners, Harada and Yoshina (2005) provide a comprehensive guide to best practices in assessment. Coassessing the lesson or unit of instruction is too often overlooked. After coplanning, coteaching, and coassessing students’ work, collaborating educators must make time to debrief in order to determine which aspects of the lesson went well and which could use revision. If educators are team teaching, then some of this evaluation occurs as they share responsibility for monitoring and adjusting the teaching and learning while the lesson is in progress. Taking the time to reflect on the lesson after it has been taught is important for professional growth. Reflection helps educators more clearly articulate the relationships between their goals and objectives for student learning and student outcomes.

Reflective practitioners focus on students’ learning as well as on improving their own practice. In “TAG Team: Collaborate to Teach, Assess and Grow,” Schomberg (2003) offers a glimpse into her learning team’s collaborative teaching journey, a journey through the initial planning stages, coteaching and modeling learning tasks, coassessing student work, and sharing responsibility for revising the team’s solar system unit for future use.

Source:
Moreillon, Judi. 2007. Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension – Maximizing Your Impact. Chicago: American Library Association.

Components of Communication by Randy Fujishin

By Randy Fujishin

Even though the following seven components of communication operate almost instantaneously, we will examine them separately to more clearly understand their specific function. The seven components are source, message, receiver, encoding, channel, decoding, and context.

Source

The source is the originator of the message. It is the person or persons who want to communicate a message to another person or a group of people. The source of a message can be an individual speaker addressing a group, a child asking for candy, a couple sending out invitations to a family reunion, or a person writing a letter.

Message

The message is the idea, thought, or feeling that the source wants to communicate. This message is encoded or converted into verbal and nonverbal symbols that will most likely be understood by the receiver.

Receiver

The receiver is the recipient of the message. The receiver can be an individual or a group of people. Once the receiver hears the words and receives the nonverbal cues from the sender, she must interpret or decode them if communication is to occur.

Encoding

Once the source has decided on a message to communicate, he must encode or convert that idea, thought, or feeling into verbal and nonverbal symbols that will be most effectively understood by the receiver. This encoding process can be extremely creative because there are unlimited ways for the source to convert the idea or feeling into words and behaviors.

Consider a simple message such as “I want to see you again.” The source can simply say, “I want to see you again,” and smile as he says the words. He can also say, “Let’s get together again,” and cast a humorous glance, or he can murmur, “I need to see you again,” with direct eye contact and outstretched arms. He could simply scribble a note on a napkin saying, “We need an encore,” and place it gently in front of the other person. There are countless ways to encode this simple message and each one would be received and interpreted by the recipient in a slightly different way.

The important thing to remember is that you can open yourself up to the endless possibilities of selecting, arranging, and delivering messages you want to communicate. Your willingness to put greater creativity into the encoding process will enhance and deepen your communication with others.

Channel

A channel is the medium by which the message is communicated. The source can utilize the channels of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. For instance, if you want to communicate affection for another person, you can utilize a variety of channels or combination of channels. You can say, “I like you” (sound). You can give a hug (touch). You can wink an eye (sight). You can send cookies that you baked (taste). Or you can deliver a dozen roses (smell). You can creatively select the channels of communication to productively communicate your message.

Decoding

Decoding is the process of making sense out of the message received. The receiver must decipher the language and behaviors sent by the source so they will have meaning. After the receiver decodes the message, the receiver (now the source) can encode a return message and send it back to the other person.

Context

All communication occurs within a certain context. The context is made up of the physical surroundings, the occasion in which the communication occurs, the time, the number of people present, noise level, and many other variables that can influence and affect the encoding and decoding of messages. The context plays an important role in the communication process.

As you consider the effects that the context can have on communication, you might want to put your creativity to good use. Think of ways you can create a serene, healthy, and productive communication environment. Simple things like choosing a time when you both have an opportunity to meet. Making the actual physical surroundings clean, uncluttered, and peaceful. Maybe straightening up the house, buying some flowers to cheer the place up, and even putting on some soothing background music. Perhaps a drive in the country or a walk in a park will create a more relaxed context in which you can communicate more effectively. Whatever you do, remember that you can have some influence over the context in which communication occurs within your life.

Source:

Fujishin, Randy. 2008. Creating Communication: Exploring and Expanding Your Fundamental Communication Skills (2^nd). Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, Inc.

Features of a Good Intensive Reading Exercise

By I.S.P. Nation
Let us look at what a good reading exercise should do.
1. A good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies for dealing with any text, with the aim “to develop in the language learner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to comprehension of a text” (Davies and Widdowson, 1974: 172). To put it another way, when learners study a reading text, we want them to gain knowledge that will help them to understand tomorrow’s reading text. We want them to learn things that apply to all texts. We want them to gain knowledge of the language and ways of dealing with the language rather than an understanding of a particular message. If a reading exercise does not focus on generalisable features of a text, it does not provide much opportunity for any useful, cumulative learning to take place. This requirement is particularly important for teaching reading.

2. A good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to the reading text. That is, the learners need to read the text or at least part of it in order to do the exercise. It is also important that some reading exercises require the learners to consider parts of the text in relation to their wider context, that is, other parts of the text, and information from outside the text.

3. A good reading exercise provides the teacher and the learners with useful information about the learners’ performance on the exercise. If the learners were not successful on some parts of the exercise, then they should be aware of what they have to learn in order to do the exercise successfully with another text. Also, the teacher can get guidance from the learners’ performance to improve teaching. Good exercises provide useful feedback for the teacher and the learners. Also, if the teacher understands what an exercise is trying to teach, they can judge the value of the exercise according to what they think is important for teaching reading.

4. A good reading exercise is easy to make. Teachers have to choose texts suited to the particular needs of their learners, and if these texts do not have satisfactory exercises, the teachers must make their own. Often teachers may want the learners to work with a textbook that is used in another discipline they are studying, and so they will have to make their own exercises. This should require a minimum of skill and time. If the preparation of language teaching materials becomes the job only of experts, then language teachers will have lost the flexibility needed for successful teaching.

So, a good reading exercise focuses on items or strategies that apply to any text, requires the learners to read the text, provides useful feedback for the learners and the teacher, and is easy to make.

Source: Nation, I.S.P. 2009. Teaching ES/EFL reading and writing. New York: Routledge.

Teaching ESL Simple Present Tense

IN COMMON

Materials: Worksheet 1

Dynamic: Whole class

Time: 20 minutes

Procedure:

1. Create a worksheet, perhaps by using the blank Worksheet 1, by listing your students’ names in the left column. Another way to do this is to use the attendance list, block out everything but the name column, then draw lines across.

2. Give each student a copy of the handout. Instruct students to cross out their name and the names of any absent students.

3. Instruct students to circulate and find one thing they have in common with each other student on the list. They must find a different thing for each student. For example, Soheyla might write:

Juan: We both like sports.

Maria: We both have dark hair.

Akiko: We both have two older brothers.

Kimtien: We both drive a car.

4. When two students have discovered something in common, each writes it down on the line next to the name of the student he/she is talking to. In the above example, Soheyla writes We both like sports next to Juan’s name, and Juan writes it next to Soheyla’s name.

5. When they have finished, the students sit down. Ask which verb tense they used most often (simple present) and why (facts). If the students cannot provide these answers, give them clues by soliciting some of the sentences they wrote down. Ask if these are true statements, etc.

6. For fun and to learn more about the students, ask individual students at random what they have in common with someone on their list. (It would take too long to go over all the answers.) You may want to collect the papers to use as a source of information for preparing other activities or exercises.

NOTE: This is a good culmination game at a lower level, after completing the present tense chapter. It also works well as a review for higher students to see if they remember why they use the present tense.

Taken from: Woodward, Suzanne W. 1997. Fun With Grammar: Communicative Activities for the Azar Grammar Series. London: Prentice-Hall International (Page 2).