A colleague gave me two great websites for listening:

A blog: English Teachers Everywhere - I particularly like the "Who's got what?" game and the looped dictation.

And a past blog post from a different writer: The Best Listening Sites for English Language Learners

Mr. Yuck Stickers

I have wanted to do a unit on poison control for a while since a majority of my students are also parents. I just found out that Bartell Drugs hands out Mr. Yuk Stickers for free. I could also have students write to the Pittsburgh Poison Control Center to get some free stickers. Their website also has a Mr. Yuk song!

The phone number on the Mr. Yuk sticker is 1-800-222-1222 and it calls the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Their website features good info, particularly the pages for children and teens. They also have brochures available in 13 languages, and free posters.

Mr. Bean

From the AEIS listserve, someone suggested using Mr. Bean videos as conversation starters and vocabulary builders. They said slapstick in general is good, which I agree with. It's easy to understand and there's not usually too much use of puns or word-play, but you still get authentic language. A great way to implement humor in the classroom.

Here's a link to a Mr. Bean full episode with 3 acts.

Act 1: Mr Bean sits an exam and is blissfully happy until, too late, he realizes that he has studied the wrong maths equations.

Act 2: Mr Bean tries to change into his swimming trunks at the beach without anyone seeing his bits.

Act 3: Mr Bean tries to stifle a sneeze in church.

With Mr. Bean, specifically, it is a British show, so there is a great opportunity for discussion about British vs. American culture and pronunciation. Also because Mr. Bean doesn't speak much, there's great opportunity for students to retell the story by generating their own language.

I'd like to also find something that is American so that we can focus on American pronunciation. Someone suggested Father of the Bride (trailer here) as they said that Steve Martin has pretty clear, slow speech.

I like that idea, but I'm also wondering if there isn't something else with shorter acts that might be better.

Pronunciation workshops

I'm playing with the idea of offering pronunciation workshops on the last 3-4 weeks of class next quarter. I have always wanted to do something to help the students in my class who all speak the same language or all have trouble with the same pronunciation issues. The problem has been, what do I do with the students for whom the pronunciation point is not an issue?

Well, I think I've got it. I have been taking my students to the computer lab weekly and I have them set up on work they can do independently. I sometimes use the class period to have them work on computer skills like sending emails in an easy format to follow, or searching for information about the community, but I think for the last few weeks, I would be able to work in a few very short pronunciation workshops.


Voicing:
Spanish
Korean
Khmer


W vs. V
Russian (and dialects of)
Spanish


/sh/
Spanish, Vietnamese, Khmer, Cantonese


/ch/
Vietnamese


Word-initial consonant blends (block, truck, strait )
Vietnamese, Cantonese, Korean


Word-final consonant blends (old, fist, cart)
Vietnamese, Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Korean


/th/
Spanish, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Khmer, Russian


I have found a website with countless lists of minimal pairs tha tcould be a good resource for developing more materials for students to work with.

Minimal Pairs for English RP: lists by John Higgens. It is RP (Received Pronunciation aka "The Queen's English") but I think it's a good place to start.



Also, my study buddy mentioned that a friend of hers is using IPA to help with learning English pronunciation faster. I looked up some websites to help her learn IPA, so here there are:
General IPA:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

IPA as it relates to English:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/english.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects

They reference this website for comparing English pronunciation around the world:
http://www.soundcomparisons.com/
It's probably not good for intermediate level students as they are still working on forming one recognizable pronunciation for each sound in English. However, it could be very fun for some more advanced students.

Teaching Tips/ Jazz Chants

I was just looking at some videos for improving your teaching http://www.teflvideos.com/ and I really liked one about "Breaking Bad Teaching Habits". It talked about

1. Talking to the board (don't do it 'cause your students can't hear you when you're writing)


2. Repeating what your students say (it's unneccesary)


3. Interrupting students (allow them think time)

I also liked the one about jazz chants.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_nPUuPryCs That video is with the inventor, Carolyn Graham and she explains how to create your own. I think I might try to work in a jazz chant once or twice a quarter. It's really good practice but some people will get tired of it very fast.

Songs with verb tenses:

http://youtu.be/TBpCxe4pK2E I just happened on this while searching for jazz chants. It would be great for practice identifying verb tenses. I need to type out the list for future use!

At the beginning of the quarter I'm always looking for resources to pass on to students and ways to collect info from them to get to know them and make the course specific to that group of students. It seems one of the most discussed ways to do this is to give students a learning styles inventory. There are lots of different kinds out there. Here are a few I found that I like.

Visual, Auditory, or Tactile? from educationplanner.org which holds lots of great info for students thinking about college.

What's Your Learning Style? Multiple Intelligences-based questionnaire from edutopia.org. My results from today are in the image above with the header "Learning Style Results". When you get the results you can click on each of the intelligences to see a description and suggested study strategies.

I like to do these with students, but I also am careful to make a point that these are not perfect scientific instruments, but rather guides to help suggest ides that may be a good place to start. Some of the questions make it really difficult to choose just one answer. Students should take time to reflect a bit on themselves, but be careful not to waste time agonizing over an answer to submit. I also like to have a short discussion with students about their results. It's interesting to see not only what their results are, but also whether or not each student agrees with their results. Lastly, students should reflect on the study strategies suggested for each learning style or multiple intelligence. Those should be the big take-away from the exercise.

Speaking Online

Speaking is one of those skills that I always find challenging to develop through homework assignments. I've come across 3 websites that I think have potential.

English Central
Developed by someone in the Google family, this site uses Youtube videos as a corpus for listening and speaking practice. Students can earn points for recording their voice through voice-recognition software which provides feedback on the student's pronunciation.

So far students really seem to like it (especially those that are shy to talk in class) and the biggest barrier is to get everyone registered with a username/password they can remember and registered into my class so I can track how many points they earn each week.

I like that they can choose which videos to watch and record themselves with. There truly is something for everyone there!

VoiceThread
You or the students create a video based on a still image, or a series of slides/videos. You and students record your comments with audio or text to respond to each area.

I haven't used this one myself, but am encouraged by the examples posted by other language teachers. Here's one example of students in Brazil:


Another lesson where you can learn Brazilian Portuguese:



VOXPOP
I know very little about this, but someone mentioned it on the CALL list serve so I'm interested. It looks to be similar to VoiceThread, but I need to investigate more.

Let's Take a Trip Lesson Plan by Sarah Sahr from TESOL Connections

I just browsed through it, and it looks like it could not only be a lot of fun, but also an excellent learning opportunity with potential to practice speaking as well as write up information to present to others.

Glad Syttende Mai alle sammen!

I'm back, with new resolve to log the resources I come across. I'd love to get a rating system going, but one thing at a time, right? I've become enamoured of Open Course Ware (OCW) and Open Course Resources (OCRs) in the past few months. I'm still not sure how to make practical use of them just yet, but they have a lot of potential.

Open Course Ware Consortium is one group working on getting the ball rolling.

Open Learning Initiative seems like they have actually set up a platform for delivering open courses and advertises their courses to be based on research which excites me a little further. I can actually see how I might sign up and use their materials if I were teaching, say, Biology. The big problem thus far is they don't have any ESL courses yet. They are also utilizing lots of other OCRs such as Merlot and The Realia Project that I didn't know were related to language learning.

What got me all excited about this is an announcement I came across on the Creative Commons webstie about the new TAACCCT Federal Grant Program. I'm proud that Washington State Community and Technical Colleges are the fore-runners in developing best practices and professional development around the use of OCW and OCRs. I went to Creative Commons originally to generate a license for some handouts I want to share around amongst some colleagues. I'm trying to get better at smaking a license on each thing I create with the hope that others will be encouraged not only to share my materials/adapt them to their needs, but to put licenses on their work as well. I'm headed to the CC Choose a License page next!