Archive for the ‘Teaching skills’ Category

I thought so.  Try these with your classes, then:

Student A: How are you?
Student B: Old

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How am I? How should I be?

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How should I be, with my feet?

Student A: How’s your brother?
Student B: Dead

Student A: What’s doing?
Student B: Nothing
A: Nothing?
B: Nothing.

Student A: How was your weekend?
Student B: It should happen to my enemies

Student A: What time is it?
Student B: What am I, a clock?

In case you haven’t guessed they are all from Yiddish, specifically mainly from the surprisingly readable popular linguistics book Born to Kvetch. More good stuff from there coming on TEFLtastic soon.

More bits and pieces that I didn’t know, had never thought about or had doubts about from The Cambridge Grammar of English:

- The reason why you don’t double the p in “developing” is because the previous vowel isn’t stressed. Ditto for “delivered” and “opener”, but lots of words ending in -l in BrE and others such as handicapped and programmed don’t follow the rule
 
- Doubling consonants when adding -ed and -ing is part of a more general rule when “a suffix beginning with a vowel is added”, e.g. -ish, -ence and –er

- The “i before e except after c” rule only counts for the /i:/ pronunciation like “brief”, so most of the “exceptions” are because other pronunciations are spelt “ei”, e.g. neighbour, weigh, reign, leisure. Real exceptions include financier, species and examples of -cy changing to -cies, e.g. democracies.
 
- The final e making the preceding stressed vowel long, e.g. hat/hate, also works for -le, hence able, fable, bible etc.
 
- The plural of bus can be buses or busses. Ditto with biased/biassed, focusing/focussing, gases/gasses.

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

My first surprise was introducing students to the piece of ELT jargon “speech acts”, something I only vaguely remembered from my reading for my DELTA myself, but more about that when I get round to reviewing The Cambridge Grammar of English…

Some of the above were some I had never thought about, some are ones I still doubt, and the rest are just vaguely interesting (something that is worth celebrating when you are reading your way through a grammar book!) Any comments after testing these against your “native speaker intuitions” (also known as “TEFL teacher prejudices”) gratefully received:

“You must” and “you’ll have to” are often used to give non-specific invitations
 
“And you must come down to Barr at some stage or another”
 
“You’ll have to come round for a coffee”
 
What if…? is used for How about…? in “standard British and Irish English”
 
“What if I set the table?”
 
“What if we had it here?”
 
How’s about…? for How about…? in informal contexts in standard British and Irish English

Informal lexis softens a speech act:
“pop in” instead of “visit”/ “wee” in “a wee favour”
 
“Please” is usually used at the end of a question, but children often put it first:
 
“Please can I have some more bread?”
 
“so” and “then” are common in declarative clauses functioning as questions
 
“So you had a good day at work then?”
 
“Didn’t it just!” is part of a general pattern of interrogative structures used as explanations, like “Was I exhausted!” and “Hasn’t she grown!”

“Would you mind if one of our representatives comes and gives you a free demonstration?” Would you mind + present

“You want to sound-proof your room with egg boxes”- “want to” for advice in “standard British and Irish English”

For those of you who haven’t been on the Worksheet pages yet (although surely no one would waste their time reading the blog when they could save planning time by using the worksheets??) and the many more of you who are going to end up here after the error messages because I’ve shortened lots of html names (because good names are good apparently), here is where the worksheets are now:

Medical and Pharmaceutical worksheets

Business English and ESP Games and Worksheets

Telephoning Games and Worksheets

Technical English and Numbers Games and Worksheets

EFL Exam games and worksheets- IELTS, TOEIC etc.

Travel English, Tourism and Study Abroad worksheets

Writing Games and Worksheets

Vocabulary Games and Worksheets

Functional and Social English Games and Worksheets

Video worksheets

Song worksheets

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

Grammar games and worksheets

I found the top one of this page of Langwich scool quite funny. That fact that I didn’t laugh at all of them was almost a relief- means I haven’t turned into a complete TEFL otaku yet… I would, however, 100% recommend the Puzzle Time books by the same guy (Jon Marks), and a look at the other links on the page.

This post might just seem like a list of links, but actually this is the good stuff- TEFLtastic was started as a way of linking to my much more serious and useful stuff elsewhere on the web, and to be honest the actual blog entries just remain a bit of padding between the links. So, click away and see if you agree that I am capable of more than vaguely funny attempts at satire and self-indulgent musings on the meaning of TEFL:

On Usingenglish.com

Worksheets

Business English- Words that can and can’t be shortened

Articles for students (but hopefully of interest to teachers too)

Why does my teacher make me use an English-English dictionary?

Why does my teacher make me learn English grammar words?

On TEFL.net

Games and other practical teaching ideas in the Idea Thinktank

15 uses for guessing games in any pre-school English class

15 problems and solutions for large pre-school classes

15 variations on TPR for little kids

The 15 stages of teaching numbers- for everyone from 2 year olds to financial analysts

15 ways to simplify reading texts

15 ways to reproduce exam conditions

15 ways to make EFL exam tasks fun

15 ways to make EFL exam tasks easier

15 fun ways to score points

Slightly more general and theoretical stuff in the TEFL articles section

15 problems and solutions for large pre-school classes

15 ways to judge an EFL textbook for adults

15 criteria for a good pre-school English class

15 reasons why PPP is so unfashionable

And if all that ain’t enough for yer, here’s the link to all my publications on the Net since 1874.

The case for the prosecution starts with exhibit A, Intelligent Business, the newish series of textbooks from Longman.

First, a mea culpa. At first glance Intelligent Business seemed like such a good concept that I recommended it to my school-a business series where the bits about marketing that are useless for accountants are left to another book where the teaching of business concepts are implicit for once,leaving the separate series of skills books to deal with the nitty gritty of telephoning etc.

Good concepts don’t cost publishers money, however, and the rest of the process was obviously done on the cheap- cheap production values, obvious skimping on proof reading and classroom testing, filling of page space with waffle and instructions etc etc.

And cost (and corner) cutting is not the only example of economics at play here- we also have The Economist magazine tie in, The Economist magazine being owned by Pearson, who also own the ELT publisher…(I’m sure you can guess). And then there is the classic having it both ways of designing it clearly for a market niche and then hiding that fact in the hope that people it is less suitable for will buy it and so make it a bestseller.Either I’m turning into the grumpy old man of TEFL well before my time or there really was a halcyon time when the evil magic of the ELT publishers’ marketing departments was not so strong.

I’m not suggesting that the advent of real market forces in ELT publishing in the UK has entirely been a bad thing. The publishers have at least started producing materials suitable for the budgets and abilities of real schools, teachers and students. One good example of this is the Oxford Basics series, where we can perhaps forgive the proofreading and other basic errors pointed out in a recent MET review because the budgetary restraints that probably caused those problems seem to have resulted in a book that is much more accessible for the real world than the stuff the big boys produced until a few years ago.

So, no real answer to my question so far I’m afraid, but at least that proves that the post title was a real question and not a lead in to a slagging off I guess… We can all see if things get a bit clearer in Part Two, in which I will list things that have got better and worse over the last few years.

Re-reading my little story on weeping housewives (or not) who hadn’t done their homework, I must admit that it does really cut it as an anecdote- never been a talent of mine, as I find my own life incredibly dull and so hardly worth telling anyone about. To make up for it, here’s the one anecdote from other teachers I have heard over the last 13 years that has made me laugh more than any other. 

Our hero starts with a fairly typical set of difficult TEFLing circumstances, he’s got the Headway textbook and teacher’s book but no tape. Not worried so far, he is slightly put off by the fact that the lesson that is coming up is the part of Headway with the song “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton. Luckily, he finds a solution. (more…)

Hopefully it’s just Mayday bank holiday rather than my lack of effort TEFLtasticwise recently that has seen a sudden drop in my number of views, but if only to make myself feel better I thought I’d give a list of where I’ve been making much more effort elsewhere, with links:

TEFL.net Idea Thinktank

15 fun ways to switch students onto graded readers

15 fun gapfill tasks

15 fun job application practice tasks- CV writing, cover letter, interview practice, HR vocabulary etc.

TEFL.net articles

15 common misconceptions about Business English and ESP

15 cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 more cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 criteria for a good cultural training lesson

15 more criteria for good cultural training lesson

15 important cultural differences in the classroom

15 more important cultural differences in the classroom

Onestopenglish (Macmillan) articles

Motivating teachers whose Business English students miss class

UsingEnglish articles for teachers

Why your students overuse their dictionaries- with solutions

70 characteristics of a good grammar presentation- possibly the longest article on this subject ever!

Why your students don’t want to do pairwork- with solutions and some pondering about whether they might not sometimes be right

Why your students still make mistakes with grammar they know well- with solutions and a call to relax when there are no solutions

The advantages and disadvantages of peer observations- with how to exploit the advantages and avoid the disadvantages

Things to put in a Self-Access Centre or Student Library- with tips on how to do it on the cheap

Why do my students question me?- with solutions

Why your students have problems with listening comprehension- with solutions

UsingEnglish.com articles for students (teachers might also want to have a look at what I am writing about them)

Why does my teacher make me read silently?

Why doesn’t my teacher correct all my mistakes when I’m speaking?

Why does my teacher make me learn the phonemic script?

UsingEnglish photocopiable PDF worksheets

Travel English pairwork B and V

Business and technical English easily confused words

CAE Reading Part Two match the quotes

TEFLtastic worksheets (pain in the arse to print out but worth the effort)

English for job applications/ HR worksheets

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

Requests and offers functional language review

The Roots of Medical English LP and 4 worksheets

And that’s it for TEFL stuff. The other thing I’ve been busy with is my wedding speech for the day after tomorrow, which could well mean that May will be an even less busy month in TEFLtasticland. Anyone fancy writing a guest piece or feeding me a story to keep the 1700 viewers I get on a good day entertained until I get back into the flow? If so, try the “Contact me” link on the right…