I came across this video via a post by Jennifer MacDonald on the #tleap discussion forum. Essentially, the video is a warning against overuse of nominalisation. Fair point. Overuse of most things is generally a bad thing. However, in her blog, Jennifer MacDonald makes the point that nominalisation is a feature of academic writing, and as such, should be something we look at with students. Stan Carey also discusses the point here.
I think I may have missed the point when watching the video. Rather than be horrified by nominalisation, I found myself thinking that there could be a good lesson in this. The students that I work with at the moment, tend to start every sentence with an agent (e.g. Many people think.....The Government should.....You need to.....etc.) so a bit of nominalisation might be no bad thing (in fairness to the video, I think it is aimed at proficient writers of English who might get bogged down in a waffly style of writing).
With this lesson, the idea was to introduce nominalisation in a very gentle way, guiding the students to figure it out themselves rather than overload them with rules.
I also thought it might be nice to direct students towards the debate that started me off on this post. It occurs to me that in EAP teachers' blogs, there is a lot that would be of interest to students, as much as to teachers, and it would, therefore, be nice to invite them into the discussion. So, the homework part of this lesson tries to do just that.
Once you've introduced the idea of nominalisation to students, you can do lots of nice things afterwards. Give them a text and ask them to find examples of nominalisations. Peer correct writing and find opportunities to use nominalisation (in fact, it could become part of your feedback - Nom. as shorthand for "you could use a bit of nominalisation here"). Ask them to find texts in their areas and look for nominalisation.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please do let me know.
Click here for the Lesson PDF
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Twitter and Summarising
I wanted to write a post on using Twitter in the classroom. I think I should preface it first by saying that I am hopelessly behind when it comes to using any form of technology in teaching. I've really only started using Twitter in the last couple of weeks and am struggling with the etiquette (should you email someone to ask if you can follow them?), the fear of missing something interesting if I don't check in hourly and the surge of joy when I get a new follower (up to 7 at the time of writing!).
There are plenty of other blogs with very interesting things to say on technology. Eltmakespace has some nice stuff on using Google Maps and pronunciation. 4C in ELT is always worth a visit. And I've only skimmed their webpage, but TheConsultants-E have a nice resource bank of technology based lesson plans.
So in saying all of that, I've tried to approach this post on Twitter with two things in mind. First, that there might be other teachers like me who wouldn't really be all that tech-savvy, but who might want to try something new. Second, to see if Twitter could offer anything of value in the EAP classroom.
I should mention that I was inspired in putting this lesson together by my colleague who teaches Mathematics - he uses the approach I am going to suggest, but with sums.
Recently, my students have been working on a project that involves them listening to a 20 minute lecture and performing various tasks. One of these is to write a summary of the lecture. In fact, so many of the tasks that they are required to do involve summarising. This is something that many students struggle with; the default setting being to include an excessive amount of detail so that the summary ends up not really being a summary. As a result, they may miss out on the global sense, the main idea that the text is trying to convey, seeing it instead as a long list of facts that they cannot engage with. Essentially, they get bogged down in the details.
Perhaps this is where Twitter could come in. The limitation of 140 characters makes it ideal for summarising.
Possible lesson
1. Provide students with the text that you are working with that day.
2. Their goal is to read the text and tweet a summary of it in as few characters as possible.
3. They use a hashtag that you create (e.g. #'textname'sum). That way, you can see all the summaries on your feed. Also, the students can see each other's.
4. To make it competitive, they have to click favourite of the summary that they think is best. The one with the most favourites, wins.
This could be done in class or as a homework assignment.
Potential problems (and some get arounds)
1. Some students may not be on Twitter. Might be worth checking out if they are before rolling in with this lesson. If some people are not, then perhaps it could be a group exercise and the one with the Twitter account tweets her group's summary.
2. Difficult to define what a "best summary" looks like. Perhaps if there is a section of your lesson on the features of a good summary, they might feel better placed to judge each other's work. Also, if you gave them specific instructions for the summary, the "favouriting" would be less subjective (e.g. avoids repeating phrases/language chunks from the text; is most concise; is clearest....)
3. You would have to have wireless in the classroom. Bit harsh to expect students to use up their data when they're already paying to be there. If no wireless, set it as a homework to be completed in the vicinity of a ubiquitous coffee shop.
4. The student voted the best may want something, other than the satisfaction of writing a good summary and the admiration of their peers. A bag of Maltesers should do the trick.
There are plenty of other blogs with very interesting things to say on technology. Eltmakespace has some nice stuff on using Google Maps and pronunciation. 4C in ELT is always worth a visit. And I've only skimmed their webpage, but TheConsultants-E have a nice resource bank of technology based lesson plans.
So in saying all of that, I've tried to approach this post on Twitter with two things in mind. First, that there might be other teachers like me who wouldn't really be all that tech-savvy, but who might want to try something new. Second, to see if Twitter could offer anything of value in the EAP classroom.
I should mention that I was inspired in putting this lesson together by my colleague who teaches Mathematics - he uses the approach I am going to suggest, but with sums.
Recently, my students have been working on a project that involves them listening to a 20 minute lecture and performing various tasks. One of these is to write a summary of the lecture. In fact, so many of the tasks that they are required to do involve summarising. This is something that many students struggle with; the default setting being to include an excessive amount of detail so that the summary ends up not really being a summary. As a result, they may miss out on the global sense, the main idea that the text is trying to convey, seeing it instead as a long list of facts that they cannot engage with. Essentially, they get bogged down in the details.
Perhaps this is where Twitter could come in. The limitation of 140 characters makes it ideal for summarising.
Possible lesson
1. Provide students with the text that you are working with that day.
2. Their goal is to read the text and tweet a summary of it in as few characters as possible.
3. They use a hashtag that you create (e.g. #'textname'sum). That way, you can see all the summaries on your feed. Also, the students can see each other's.
4. To make it competitive, they have to click favourite of the summary that they think is best. The one with the most favourites, wins.
This could be done in class or as a homework assignment.
Potential problems (and some get arounds)
1. Some students may not be on Twitter. Might be worth checking out if they are before rolling in with this lesson. If some people are not, then perhaps it could be a group exercise and the one with the Twitter account tweets her group's summary.
2. Difficult to define what a "best summary" looks like. Perhaps if there is a section of your lesson on the features of a good summary, they might feel better placed to judge each other's work. Also, if you gave them specific instructions for the summary, the "favouriting" would be less subjective (e.g. avoids repeating phrases/language chunks from the text; is most concise; is clearest....)
3. You would have to have wireless in the classroom. Bit harsh to expect students to use up their data when they're already paying to be there. If no wireless, set it as a homework to be completed in the vicinity of a ubiquitous coffee shop.
4. The student voted the best may want something, other than the satisfaction of writing a good summary and the admiration of their peers. A bag of Maltesers should do the trick.
Tuesday, 9 December 2014
Dictionaries
My post today is a shameless declaration of love for the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.
Like many teachers, I have a notion that using monolingual dictionaries is better than the bilingual ones. I did a bit of googling to see if I could find some evidence to back me up but the only articles I came across were either a bit suspect or blocked by pay-walls (if you have come across any, I'd love to read them).
So despite the fact that when learning languages myself, I tend to use bilingual dictionaries (or Google translate), I will persist with the intuition that mono is best.
If you accept that premise, then the best, and freest, monolingual dictionary is the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (I won't link again in case it looks like I am fishing).
This is why:
1. The definitions are much clearer. Compare these three definitions of the word fundamental
Dictionary.com: serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis; basic; underlying
Merriam Webster: forming or relating to the most important part of something
Oxford Learner's: serious and very important; affecting the most central and important parts of something
2. They give you lovely extra stuff.
Nice Collocations: fundamental difference; fundamental change
Nice Examples: Hard work is fundamental to success
Nice clickables: British and US pronunciation; Academic Word List; Word Families; Share on social media (not sure why anyone would ever feel the need, but still, nice to be hip)
3. The page is clean and unfussy. Compare Merriam Webster and Oxford.
Apart from that, it is a really good, free resource.
With that in mind, here is a little lesson (taking a recent article from the Irish Times which will be of interest to students from outside Europe and living in Ireland) that involves some dictionary usage.
It is a really interesting article so I am kind of throwing it away as the only thing they do is dictionary related. My goal with the lesson was just to get students on to the dictionary website, play around with it, see the different elements and see what they make of it, but you could do more interesting stuff like vocab predictions, discussions, debates.....
Also, the article isn't the most EAPy but I think getting students onto the monolingual dictionary is; and one of the questions in the lesson relates to the Academic Word List which is no bad thing to mention to students.
A nice companion for this website might be the British Council Word Book App that students can download to their phones and use as a kind of a personal vocab builder (you can put in definitions, examples, pictures, recordings - very cool and recommended by Gavin Dudeney at the recent Digital ELT Ireland conference)
Click here for the PDF lesson plan
Monday, 8 December 2014
Introductions
Nowadays, the issue of _______________ is extremely controversial. It is a double-edged sword with both positive and negative sides. In this essay, I will examine this subject and offer my own opinion.
If you have ever taught an IELTS class, then you've probably seen an introduction that looks somewhat similar to the one above. I know introductions are not all that important really, but there is something depressing about these copy and paste style introductions.
I have done some small experiments in class where I give students two introductions and ask them to choose the one they think is best. Below are two samples in response to a question about whether rich nations should be obliged to help developing countries (just to mention, I wrote both in case it seems like I was trying to shame a particular student):
If you have ever taught an IELTS class, then you've probably seen an introduction that looks somewhat similar to the one above. I know introductions are not all that important really, but there is something depressing about these copy and paste style introductions.
I have done some small experiments in class where I give students two introductions and ask them to choose the one they think is best. Below are two samples in response to a question about whether rich nations should be obliged to help developing countries (just to mention, I wrote both in case it seems like I was trying to shame a particular student):
- Nowadays, rich nations should be required to share wealth is a controversial issue. This is a double edged sword and has both positive and negative aspects. This essay will look at both sides of this controversial issue.
- Many countries have more money than other countries. In rich countries, people worry about mobile phones while in other countries, there is not enough food. In this essay, I will argue that rich countries have to help poor countries.
Invariably, the majority of the students will say that (1) is better. There are no obvious grammar or vocabulary problems. They like the double edged sword phrase. And it starts with nowadays. Nowadays. :(
There is some resistance to the idea that (2) is better. The language is more simple, less academic. Even the ideas seem simple. But I think this is the key - the ideas may be simple, but at least there are ideas. In (1), there are no ideas whatsoever. There is no interaction with the question, no evidence of any sort of thought. It is a collection of memorised phrases with the topic shoehorned in.
I understand why students like these introductions. They make it easy to get started. They offer a form that you can rely on, that you know is correct. But I have a worry that if there is so little thinking going on in the introduction, then there may be a similar lack throughout the rest of the essay.
One thing I have started doing is to build planning time into in-class exams. I work with Biology, Physics and Chemistry teachers. I noticed that in their exams (which are more UK style), the students are given 10 minutes at the start to read the questions. They cannot start writing until that ten minutes is up. Now, when we do in-class writing exams, ten minutes for planning is built into the exam. They can think, plan, muse - whatever, just as long as there is a delay that might stop them charging into a copy/paste intro.
I know they can't do this in the IELTS exam, but it seems to work better than just recommending that they plan. I should know in a few months how successful it has been and will repost on the topic.
For now, here is a short little class, the main focus of which is a question analysis, trying to think a good bit before writing. Again, it is very IELTSy, but this time writing part 2.
Saturday, 6 December 2014
Peer Correction
I recently asked a class of students to write a short paragraph and then email me the finished work. The only catch was that they had to receive feedback from 3 people in their class before sending it to me. The hope was that this would lead to a more polished piece of work before it reached me. Needless to say, this somewhat lazy, unstructured approach to peer correction didn't really work out. There were glaringly obvious problems that I knew other students would have spotted, yet they were still there. With many students, I think, there is a certain discomfort (whether personal, cultural or social) with giving opinions on the work of their peers.
I was reading around on peer correction recently. The British Council give a short little piece on peer correction and manage to point out a way of doing it, the benefits and possible problems, all in a very short piece. If you haven't come across it, the BALEAP website is quite good. They are especially generous in putting up slides and notes from conferences for free. I found this one (by Mary Martala-Lockett & Claire Weetman) and this one (by Jane Sjoberg)which deal specifically with peer correction and make some very good points.
I also found this lesson plan (by Ania Rolinska) which talks about peer correction using Wikis. She uses a really clever colour coding system (highlight green for grammar, yellow for vocabulary, etc.) which is ideal for students working with computers, either inside or outside the class.
For those who are working in an IELTS preparation class, I have put together this peer correction lesson. The idea is to ask students to peer correct with very specific goals. It is based on a part 1, graph writing task that I took from Writefix and uses the Public IELTS Writing Band Descriptors.
Click here for a PDF of the Lesson
A follow up could be to ask students to rewrite the task, bearing in mind peer feedback, and submit to teacher.
I was reading around on peer correction recently. The British Council give a short little piece on peer correction and manage to point out a way of doing it, the benefits and possible problems, all in a very short piece. If you haven't come across it, the BALEAP website is quite good. They are especially generous in putting up slides and notes from conferences for free. I found this one (by Mary Martala-Lockett & Claire Weetman) and this one (by Jane Sjoberg)which deal specifically with peer correction and make some very good points.
I also found this lesson plan (by Ania Rolinska) which talks about peer correction using Wikis. She uses a really clever colour coding system (highlight green for grammar, yellow for vocabulary, etc.) which is ideal for students working with computers, either inside or outside the class.
For those who are working in an IELTS preparation class, I have put together this peer correction lesson. The idea is to ask students to peer correct with very specific goals. It is based on a part 1, graph writing task that I took from Writefix and uses the Public IELTS Writing Band Descriptors.
Click here for a PDF of the Lesson
A follow up could be to ask students to rewrite the task, bearing in mind peer feedback, and submit to teacher.
Tuesday, 2 December 2014
In-text referencing
To carry on from the previous lesson which introduced the idea of Harvard referencing and recognising the elements in the bibliography, this is a short little lesson which acts as an introduction to in-text referencing (According to Smith (1990, p. 5), blah, blah, blah, blah).
I think a lot of students struggle with this concept and can end up inadvertently plagiarising because they may not really get the why and the how of using references. I think there is scope for a nice general, introductory, discussion based lesson on referencing - the purpose or need for it - which I might do later. And actually, that kind of lesson would be really suitable at the start of a course; to get students to buy into the concept of referencing and to see the need for it.
Unfortunately, this lesson isn't that kind of lesson (I will do up something on that lesson in a later post and put a link to it here). Instead, this lesson focuses on the nuts and bolts of in-text referencing.
It should take about 30 minutes and gives students a chance to practise creating accurate, Harvard style, in text references. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
Click here for a PDF of the lesson
I think a lot of students struggle with this concept and can end up inadvertently plagiarising because they may not really get the why and the how of using references. I think there is scope for a nice general, introductory, discussion based lesson on referencing - the purpose or need for it - which I might do later. And actually, that kind of lesson would be really suitable at the start of a course; to get students to buy into the concept of referencing and to see the need for it.
Unfortunately, this lesson isn't that kind of lesson (I will do up something on that lesson in a later post and put a link to it here). Instead, this lesson focuses on the nuts and bolts of in-text referencing.
It should take about 30 minutes and gives students a chance to practise creating accurate, Harvard style, in text references. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
Click here for a PDF of the lesson
Monday, 1 December 2014
Introduction to Referencing - Harvard Style
There are some amazing tools out there, like Zotero, that can really cut the drudge out of referencing. However, I think there is still an argument for a few lessons on referencing with students. It's important for them to understand the basic idea of referencing - that it exists for a reason, not just to make their life difficult. And maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I also think it is worth knowing where all the words, numbers, commas and full stops go, just in case this whole computer malarkey doesn't work out.
I put together this short lesson as an introduction to two things for students. First of all, it introduces them to the wonderful Anglia Ruskin referencing webpage and gets them to explore it a little bit. It really is such a helpful webpage and answers almost every referencing question you can think of.
The second part of the lesson breaks down a typical book reference and gets students to recognise the little bits and bobs and then try to do one themselves.
The lesson is only one page and might take about 20 - 30 minutes. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.
Click here for the lesson PDF
I put together this short lesson as an introduction to two things for students. First of all, it introduces them to the wonderful Anglia Ruskin referencing webpage and gets them to explore it a little bit. It really is such a helpful webpage and answers almost every referencing question you can think of.
The second part of the lesson breaks down a typical book reference and gets students to recognise the little bits and bobs and then try to do one themselves.
The lesson is only one page and might take about 20 - 30 minutes. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.
Click here for the lesson PDF
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