20 Ideas for using Mobile Phones in the Language Class

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20 Ideas for using Mobile Phones in the Language Class

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podcast Teaching Babies ESL Poderato.com/lohana

podcast Teaching Babies ESL Poderato.com/lohana

Principle 5: Collaboration

By MEd. Andrea Rodríguez V.

Collaboration is the basis for bringing together the knowledge, experience and skills of multiple team members to contribute to the development of a new product more effectively than individual team members performing their narrow tasks in support of product development. As such collaboration is the basis for concepts such as concurrent engineering or integrated product development.

Effective collaboration requires actions on multiple fronts:

• Early involvement and the availability of resources to effectively collaborate
• A culture that encourages teamwork, cooperation and collaboration
• Effective teamwork and team member cooperation
• Defined team member responsibilities based on collaboration
• A defined product development process based on early sharing of informatin and collaboratin
• Collocation or virtual collocation
• Collaboration technology 

Some of the strategies that help students complete a task together are:

• Group work in which students complete a task together
• Pair work in which students share ideas
• Peer review in which students anlyze and comment on one another´s written work
• Buddy journals through which students write on possibly assigned topics

Listening as a Process

Listening is a complex process—an integral part of the total communication process.

Many of us aren’t willing to improve our listening skills. Much of this unwillingness results from our incomplete understanding of the process and understanding the process could help show us how to improve. To understand the listening process, we must first define it.

Numerous definitions of listening have been proposed. Perhaps the most useful one defines listening as the process of receiving, attending, and understanding auditory messages; that is, messages transmitted through the medium of sound. Often, the steps of responding and remembering are also included. 

There are six basic stages of the listening process: hearing, attending, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding. 

1. HEARING - it refers to the response caused by sound waves stimulating the sensory receptors of the ear; it is physical response; hearing is perception of sound waves; you must hear to listen, but you need not listen to hear.
   
   
2. ATTENTION- brain screens stimuli and permits only a select few to come into focus- these selective perception is known as attention, an important requirement for effective listening; strong stimuli like bright lights, sudden noise…are attention getters; attention to more commonplace or less striking stimuli requires special effort.
   
   
3. UNDERSTANDING- to understand symbols we have seen and heard, we must analyze the meaning of the stimuli we have perceived; symbolic stimuli are not only words but also sounds like applause… and sights like blue uniform…that have symbolic meanings as well; the meanings attached to these symbols are a function of our past associations and of the context in which the symbols occur; for successful interpersonal communication, the listener must understand the intended meaning and the context assumed by the sender.
   
   
4. REMEMBERING- it is important listening process because it means that an individual has not only received and interpreted a message but has also added it to the mind”s storage bank; but just as our attention is selective, so too is our memory- what is remembered may be quite different from what was originally seen or heard.
   
   
5. EVALUATING- it is a stage in which active listeners participate; it is at these point that the active listener weighs evidence, sorts fact from opinion, and determines the presence or absence of bias or prejudice in a message; the effective listener makes sure that he or she doesn’t begin this activity too soon ; beginning this stage of the process before a message is completed requires that we no longer hear and attend to the incoming message-as a result, the listening process ceases.
   
   
6. RESPONDING- this stage requires that the receiver complete the process through verbal and/or nonverbal feedback; because the speaker has no other way to determine if a message has been received, this stage becomes the only overt means by which the sender may determine the degree of success in transmitting the message.
   
   

Listening can definetely be a very stressful activity for language learners, especially beginners; who are often unable to process information quickly enough to make sense of what is said. As teachers, we have the challenging task of helping learners improve in a skill which involves processes that are not observable. We should encourage our learners to take an active role in their own listening development.

Language Learning: Why Most Fail and How YOU Can Succeed

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Language Learning: Why Most Fail and How YOU Can Succeed [COMPLETE]

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Authentic Materials and Cultural Content in EFL Classrooms

By MEd. Andrea Rodrìguez Vega

It is known that the English presented or given in our lessons should be authentic. For using authentic materials means using examples of language produced by native speakers for some real purpose of their own rather than using language produced and designed solely for the classroom. Anybody who takes into the classroom a newspaper article, an advertisement, a pop song, a strip of cartoon, is using authentic material.

The main advantages of using authentic materials are:

• They have a positive effect on learner motivation.
• They provide authentic cultural information.
• They provide exposure to real language.
• They relate more closely to learners ' needs.
• They support a more creative approach to teaching.

According to Richards, authentic materials present some disadvantages points like: difficult language, unneeded vocabulary items and complex language structures, which causes a burden for the teacher in lower-level classes. On the other hand, Martinez  mentions that authentic materials may be too culturally biased and too many structures are mixed, causing lower levels have a hard time decoding the texts. The question is: When then it should be introduced in a classroom and at which level ? 

Some authors like Guariento & Morley say that at post-intermediate level attributed to the fact that at this level, most students master a wide range of vocabulary in the target language.

Teachers may use authentic materials for the learners to listen for the gist of the information presented and also Martinez adds that by using authentic materials teachers will have the opportunity to encourage students to read for pleasure especially certain topics of their interest. Matsuta claims that using audio-visual materials aiding students' comprehension is beneficial since it will prevent students especially beginning ones from being frustrated about authentic materials. 

According to Kramsch (1998), culture is 'a membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and action' (p. 127). Goodenough (as cited in Wardhaugh 1992: 216) suggests that

A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves. That knowledge is socially acquired; the necessary behaviors are learned and do not come from any kind of genetic endowment.

Cultural content is a key to effective teaching and learning and successful language learning requires language users to know that culture in order to get the meaning across.

Cultural content is a key to effective teaching and learning a language  and successful language learning requires language users to know that culture underlying language in order to get the meaning across.

Variety and excitement are required when students are learning a language, since many of them lack of motivation; we should help them notice that learning a language is not just learning its grammatical rules.

McKay believes that there should be a variety of culture in the materials, besides, learning about a culture does not mean accepting that culture.

McKay identifies three types of cultural materials: 

• target culture materials, 

• learners' own culture materials 

• international target culture materials.

The international target language materials is the best for her, which supposedly covers a variety of knowledge from different cultures all over the world using the target language.

The key point  in introducing cultural content in our classrooms is that we should create a relaxing environment where our students can discuss their own culture together with the target culture. This will ensure that students are doing something with a purpose in their mind. 

As a conclusion, authentic materials are indeed a valuable part of the teacher`s resources. They must be carefully selected and controlled and besides all, authentic materials should be use to complete the gap between the competency and performance of the language learners.

Teaching Jazz Chants - Carolyn Graham

Funny Teaching style - I like it - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL Video - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL & Business - GLOBAL LOCALIZATION Network

Funny Teaching style - I like it - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL Video - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL & Business - GLOBAL LOCALIZATION Network

10. Finding Quality Supplemental Materials

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

Research Update

This research deals basically with significant features for evaluating instructional materials. We need to have clear that teachers make a big difference in students´ learning and that materials with effective strategies can support that learning or interfere its impact on learners.

There are two special cases for learning strategies.

• Expertise reversal effect ( refers to students who possess high levels of expertise and do not benefit from the same strategies of those average students )
• Powerful resistance to learning (  has to do with learners misconceptions in a subject area )

Learning review includes examination of  strategies in instructional materials:

Motivational Strategies

• Positive Expectations: It is setting the right climate for learning that contributes to student´s motivation
• Feedback: feedback about what is good and what is wrong and how to improve while they are learning
• Appearance: materials should be appealing and provide the integration of subject matter

Teaching a Few "Big Ideas"

•  Focus for Students: major themes help students organize what they are learning following a sequence
• Completeness: focusing on big ideas help students develop a deep and  more complete understanding of a major theme

Explicit Instruction

• Clarity of Directions/Explanations: the learning process is improved with clear objectives focused on specific problem-solving and the teaching of thinking skills
• Exclusion of Ambiguity: special attention should be put on materials that uses confusing directions or inadequate explanations

Guidance and Support

•  Level: it includes a variety of appropiate skills like organized routines, better thinking skills, feedback and other forms of guidance
• Adaptability: while lectures help "advanced" students, "average" students need scaffolding. Also material should accommodate differences in learning styles.

Active Participation of Students

•  Assignments: should be logical extensions of the content and will be more effective when organized
• Student Responses: they learn more when following activities like peer tutoring, discuss controversial issues etc.

Targeted Instructional and Assessment Strategies

•  Alignment of Strategies: taking into account that some strategies are more suitable than others, instructional materials should use strategies that have been proved to be effective in producing learning outcomes.
• Completeness of Strategies: the combination of instructional strategies should also be complete enough to achieve learning outcomes.

Teachers tend to fall into the trap of  "teaching to the test", according to Mestre. Student learning should emphasize applied learning and thinking skills, not just learning a collection of definitions and isolated bits of information.

 

 Three major principles, according to Bass&Glaser, make assessment informative to students and therefore improve the teaching and learning process.

• Models of competence
• Graphical tools
• Structured opportunities for reflection

 Quote: It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.  ~Jacob Bronows

Principles of Effective Materials Development

By: MEd. Andrea Rodríguez Vega

The author starts talking about the way ELT materials are written by other authors and the different procedures they follow. Most of them rely on their intuitions but very few are guided by principles.

As the author offers his opinion saying that materials should be coherent and guided by theories of language and principles of teaching, I may add that authors should pay attention to what teachers and learners believe because they are the ones who spend more time observing and being influenced by the language. As I later found out, Bell and Gower believe so; they discuss the need for authors to make principled comprimises to meet the practical needs of teachers and learners.

Tomlinson continues talking about the development of ELT materials saying that they should expose the learners to language, help learners to focus on features of authentic input and arouse their curiosity and attention.

He stresses the importance on principles and procedures of materials development; he states that each principle needs to be derived from principles of language acquisition and then used to create or develop frameworks.

Tomlinson states six principles of language acquisition and immediately he offers the principles of materials development  according to each one of them; he later refers to principles of language teaching as an important part of materials development.

At the end, Tomlinson states principled frameworks as a basis to achieve coherence in the application of theory to develop materials.

As teachers, we sometimes expect textbooks or any other material to do wonders in the learning process. Although we are not much into textbook development, we should be taken into account as a positive media, with the needs of learners and the learning process.