#eltchat summary: First Lesson Activities

First lessons are equally significant for teachers and learners, as it is here where the initial steps towards establishing a supportive group dynamic are made. So what can teachers do to ensure that their first lessons engage learners, and at the same time create a positive and productive learning environment? This was the topic up for discussion on Wednesday the 19th of September at 9.00pm GMT,

Icebreakers etc!

This chat was expertly moderated by Marisa_C, and the participants were: @vickihollett, @shaznosel, @SophiaMav, @klizbarker, @MarjorieRosenbe, @ShetlandEsol, @affreshair, @hmbaba, @eltknowledge, @cfozcavan, @SueAnnan, @chiasuan, @sandymillin, @steve4eld

  





"We have to show enthusiasm and jump right in" (@vickihollett)

This statement met with agreement from @Marisa_C and @shaznosel. But what of the old adage of not cracking a smile till Christmas? @Klizbarker and @vikihollet did not agree with this at all, maintaining that it was important for the teacher to let his/her personality shine through, and that maintaining  a stern grimace would be “very hard and very peculiar” @vickihollett. “Strong, but not mean” is surely preferable, said @klizbarker

Take time to learn names

It was agreed that any time spent learning names is a worthwhile investment. @Marisa_C suggested the activity “Guess my name – and why?” as a good and simple first few minutes activity. Meanwhile, @vickihollett has a great idea for classes with mixed Asian and European learners: Asian learners write their names on the board, and other Asian learners in the class work out characters: guaranteed to fascinate European learners.

Getting to Know You Activities

 Participants were happy to suggest their favourite activities, and agreed together that these activities perform several functions: to break the ice, diagnose, conduct an informal needs analysis, to establish rules and to motivate.

• @Marisa_C suggested the “tribes” activities from Jill Hadfield’s Classroom Dynamics, in which learners decide on a symbol, name, badge, motto song or rap for their group. Participants who had tried this out in class testified to its success in creating a bond between learners. @Marisa_C also suggested “three truths and a lie” as a good way of learners getting to know each other. 
• @SueAnnan likes to write information about herself on the board: learners have to guess the questions which elicit the answers. @MarjorieRosenbe creates a personal mind map and gets learners to ask questions about it. Learners then draw their own mind maps and do the same with a partner. In @Shaznozel’s “my world” she draws a circle with five bits of personal information in it, and then learners guess their significance, before going on to do the same for themselves – this is good for  eliciting wh – questions. A variation of this is @eltknowledge’s star; where the teacher draws things that define her at the end of each point – learners discuss their significance and then go on to do the same for themselves.
• @SueAnnan mentioned a speed dating activity which a colleague uses in first lessons. However, @ShetlandEsol had been on the receiving end of such an activity as a learner, and had not enjoyed it all. It can be interesting for teachers to experience “icebreakers” when they are themselves in learner mode!
• @hmbaba gets learners to set up edmodo accounts and post their favourite picture or clip from youtube, while @SophiaMav gets learners to create animoto videos about their summer holidays to present in class.
• @MarjorieRosenbe asked learners at a one week training course to bring baby photos and guess who was who. This led on to an activity in which learners created information sheets about who was who.

Establishing Ground Rules

This is an important feature of any first lesson, as learners need to be aware of what is expected of them. However, this does not need to be done in a stern, inflexible way: a spoonful of sugar can help this medicine go down a treat, and the #eltchatters had loads of good ideas on this front:

• @cfoxcavan uses a learning agreement in the first lesson. @Marisa­_C suggested making a poster of agreed rules or writing up a classroom contract. This works particularly well with younger students, and can utilise co operative learning techniques. 
•  @ShetlandEsol chooses her most important ground rule and turns it into a running dictation activity. 
•  @SueAnnan highlighted the importance of the local environment, by referring to beach safety rules she incorporates into her first lessons. @shaznozel thought it was a good idea to bring local issues into the classroom, as learners might feel more confident discussing local issues. 

Learner Training

The first lesson is the perfect time to encourage good learning habits, and #eltchatters  have no shortage of ideas on how to go about this! @hmbaba suggested brainstorming learners’ problems with learning English, and then facilitating a discussion on tips and learning strategies. @shaznozel suggested asking learners to share their email or facebook addresses so that they can continue to work collaboratively outside of class. @ShetlandEsol also asks learners to work together to list different ways in which they can learn English outside their lessons.

Writing in the First Lesson
Up until this point, the chat had focused mainly on speaking activities. However, it can be very useful to get learners writing in the first class. This gives the teacher something to take away and can be a useful diagnostic tool for planning future lessons.

@sandymillin asks higher level learners to do “buzz writing” by answering the questions “How have you learned in the past? What do you need English for? What kind of lessons do you like?” The texts the learners produce are usually about 150 words in length, so Sandy has plenty of useful information about her new learners’ lives and their linguistic needs.

Keeping things fresh.
First lessons with a new class are fun, aren’t they? As @shaznosel observes “every now and then when time permits, it’s great to throw in an activity that breaks the routine, not the ice!” It’s worth bearing this is mind, as we return to our teaching routines.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this most informative #eltchat. I’m sure we all came away with new first lesson tricks to store up our sleeves – or even just to keep for a those rainy days when teachers and learners need a little energy boost!

Further Reading:
Jill Hadfield 1992 Classroom Dynamics: OUP (great ideas for “bonding” activities)

Meddings and Thornbury. 2009 Teaching Unplugged – Dogme in English Language Teaching, Delta Publishing (some good Dogme first lesson activities)

Marisa Constantinides, Storming Out or Norming In: _http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org/?s=storming+out (Some great first day tips here.)

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/31878512@N06/4473880844/">Neal.</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>

Workplace ESOL: a break from the norm

It's two o' clock and I am assessing a group of new ESOL learners. Nothing so very unusual about that, you might think. But what is unusual is that I have swapped my usual classroom and white board for a corner table in  my local Nepali restaurant, and delicious food smells are wafting from the kitchen.

This is my first Workplace ESOL lesson: a day I have been looking forward to ever since attending a training day led by national ESOL development officer,  Mandy Watts.  Workplace ESOL is a truly brilliant initiative: tutors visit groups in their places of work with the aim of tailoring lessons specifically towards the day to day linguistic needs of learners (and their employers). As tutors visit learners in their places of work, and at mutually convenient times it is particularly suitable for those who find evening classes impossible to attend. (Evening classes in Adult Learning run from 6-8pm - perfect if you work nine till five, but hardly ideal if you work in a restaurant.)

Yesterday, I worked with four Nepali learners, and assessed them using the ESOL Initial assessment packs.: http://www.esolscotland.com/initialassessmentguide.cfm. We have only recently started using these assessment packs at work, and I find them very useful indeed. I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's session: next week I will ask learners to take me on a tour of their workplace, so we can start to prioritise the language they need to learn.

If anyone reading this has experience of Workplace ESOL or something similar I'd love to hear from you! Today is day two, and I'm off to The Great Wall  http://shetlopedia.com/The_Great_Wall to assess a group of Chinese learners.

Scottish Learning Festival (http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/slf/index.asp)

On a slightly different note, I will be  heading to Glasgow tomorrow to showcase the film my learners made earlier this year.  Living in Shetland, it is always great  to meet other ESOL teachers  - so if you are reading this, then please come along and say hullo!  

Listening To News Reports.

After having spent the summer moaning about course book listening activities, it is time for me to take some action. If course book listening tasks really are so grim, then why do I hypocritically insist on using them, week in and week out? Well, perhaps it's because they are ready to go and require no more preparation than popping a disc in the player. I also know they are geared towards the level of my learners. If all else fails, and the whole activity goes horribly wrong, I can direct the class to the tape script at the back of the book.

So course books listening activities have their uses, perhaps. But (and this is on top of all my most recent gripes), can I really expect my learners to muster sufficient motivation to listen to:

• a terrible cover band singing a terrible Travis song?
• an interview with a fictional romantic novelist? 
• an interview with a bland (and  fictional) band? 

Surely, my Shetland based learners would find authentic listening texts far more inherently motivating and useful to their daily lives than this nonsense.

News Reports in the Listening Class

I am often surprised by the extent to which my learners are unaware of what is happening in the local and national news.  They are not disinterested in current events, yet rarely watch the news in English, as they find it too difficult to understand.  As a result, they miss out on news announcements which affect them (such as weather related school closures for instance).  

On the occasions we have used news reports in class my learners have been interested and motivated. I want to make listening to news reports a regular occurrence, and over the next few weeks I will be exploring how I can help learners with this crucial, every day listening activity.

The ideas below will be my starting points. In my next post, I will  provide an outline procedure for a news report listening lesson. 

Using Visual Images to Predict Content and Generate Vocabulary

Lessons which teach learners to use their top down processing skills in order to make predictions about what they hear will challenge notions learners have about “the point” of a listening lesson.

An example of this is an activity I used last year with an intermediate level class. I selected an extract of a news broadcast about the riots in London, and showed the class the footage with the sound muted.  The class then worked in pairs and discussed their predictions for the broadcast’s content. After a feedback session we watched the broadcast again (with sound this time) and the learners were able to compare their predictions with the language actually used.  

This activity works well as a way of allowing learners to see how successfully they can predict content from visual information in a news report, and also generates useful vocabulary.

Developing learner Autonomy
Mark Lloyd used a dictogloss style experiment in order to develop learner autonomy in listening.  In this experiment, learners listened to a news broadcast every day in class for a week and the learners had to write down all the words they heard.  By the end of the week, learners had become better at selecting the most important words in the text: thus training themselves in a vital listening sub-skill. [ (Lloyd: 1997). 

Activities such as these focus on strategy training and take a step away from the “product” approach to teaching listening.  

Listening for gist

Higher level learners benefit from “confidence building activities” which show them that they can arrive at an understanding of a text even if the language initially seems very advanced. (Bowens, 1994 ) One such activity is a jigsaw listening style in which learners work together to arrive at a shared understanding of a text.

In this activity half of the class are asked to leave the room and the teacher plays short television news broadcast while the remaining learners make notes. Next, the teacher swaps the people in the room with those outside and plays the recording again. Finally, the teacher asks the learners to work in pairs (one learner from each half) and asks them to try to compile as much information as they can.  Finally, the recording is played one final time to check any points of contention.

I have found this task to be effective, as it visibly reduces any anxiety the “risk avoiders” may feel by side stepping the usual scenario in which listening is “tested”.  Instead, learners work together to arrive at a shared understanding of what they have head, and the role of the teacher is far less” interventionist”.   (Field, 1998)

Pace of Delivery

One of the most effective ways of improving learners’ ability to identify individual words from a stream of speech is through teaching them about word stress.  Goodith White describes an activity designed to help learners recognise words which are stressed in sentences and to consider the reasons why they are stressed . (White, 1998) 

In this activity, learners read an excerpt from an audio book.  Each learner marks the words in the excerpt which they believe the reader on the audio CD will stress, reading the text aloud to themselves as they do so.  Learners compare their answers in pairs, and then whole class feedback is conducted by the teacher, who elicits the idea that it is generally the content words which receive the stress. The teacher then goes on to discuss with learners how they can recognise stressed syllables within a word.  Finally, the learners can listen and check their answers against the recording. 

I have applied this lesson to a “test teach test” format, and found that the learners’ progress in recognising stressed syllables was measurable within the lesson. 

Background Noise

This activity is also suggested by Goodith White (White, 1998) and is designed to help learners cope with background noise. In this activity the class divides into two groups.  Working in the same room they listen and answer questions to a course book listening activity they have done previously.  The noise generated by the other recording in the room will give the learners practice in picking out important information over the top of background noise.  

While I have found this activity to be suitably challenging for high level learners it has been necessary to persuade learners of the usefulness of this exercise, and they can be ambivalent at the prospect of returning to work they have done before.  Although dealing with background noise is clearly an issue, it is difficult to find a way of helping learners deal with this that is not too contrived.

Bibliography

Field, J. 1998 The Changing Face of Listening ETP Vol 6 Jan 1998

Field, J. 2000 Finding Ones Way in the Fog MET Vol 9 Jan 2000

Lloyd, M. Dealing with Authentic Listening IHJ Issue 3 April 1997

Richards, J. 1990 The Language Teaching Matrix Cambridge University Press

Ridgway, T. 2000 Listening Strategies – I beg your pardon? ELT 54/2 April 2000

White, G. 1998 Listening Oxford University Press

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