Month: February 2015

Teaching Idioms to Young English Learners

Well-chosen children’s literature can provide an excellent opportunity to explicitly teach the concept of idiomatic language to young English learners.  Thematic units on friendship or feelings are an especially good way to introduce idioms and tie them to the lesson theme and a children’s book.

Here is a list of “heart idiom”s for these lessons:

  • to have a heart of gold – to care about other people
  • to wear your heart on your sleeve – to let everyone know how you feel about someone
  • to eat your heart out – to be jealous of someone
  • to have a change of heart – to change your mind
  • to have your heart in your mouth – to be scared or nervous
  • to have your heart set on something – to really want something
  • to have a big heart – to be kind to other people

When teaching young children, teachers need to introduce idioms in the context of literature. For intermediate 2nd- and 3rd-grade students, the concept of figurative language can be introduced by reading Pa Lia’s First Day.

In Pa Lia’s First Day, the main character in the story experiences a series of emotions that lend themselves to introducing figurative language. In a discussion after reading the book, students determined that Pa Lia had a big heart. They then brainstormed situations in which they had done something to show that they have a big heart. Using this heart pdf, students wrote their good deeds on the front of a heart-shaped sheet of paper and drew a picture on the second sheet.

Finding idioms in children’s literature

If appropriate to the ability level of the group, help students find the figurative language in a book that they are reading. Ask questions such as ” What does each expression sound like it means? What does it really mean? Can you tell the meaning from the context of the story?”  Explain how the author paints a picture with words.  Pa Lia’s First Day is a good  resource to demonstrate how to find idioms in a text as it has excellent illustrations.  Here are some of the examples of figurative language  that describe how Pa Lia felt:

  • “Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton” means she was so nervous she could barely talk.
  • “Her stomach felt like it was filled with one thousand fluttering butterflies” shows that her stomach felt upset.
  • “Pa Lia felt like a teeny tiny minnow in a huge, giant ocean” indicates how Pa Lia felt lost.

Teaching idioms to ELs in Grades 4–5

With intermediate ELs in Grades 4–5, students can review basic emotions and feelings needed to complete an activity that demonstrates the literal and figurative meaning of expressions that they come across in literature.  Literature about friendship or feelings can also be included in the introduction to this unit as it provides a natural way to talk about the language.  Provide a list of  the heart idioms to students from the list above. They then brainstorm what each idiom sounds like it means. For example, “to have your heart in your mouth” evokes a picture of someone with a Valentine-type heart in his or her mouth. By giving examples of idioms in a sentence, elicit from students what each of the idioms actually means.

Have students each pick an idiom to illustrate. They receive two copies of a heart-shaped sheet of white construction paper. On the first sheet, they draw a picture of what the idiom sounds like it means. On the inside sheet they draw a picture of the figurative meaning with a definition and original sentence . The two hearts are backed by a larger red heart.
In order to have a real audience for their work, ELs can take their idioms to a general education class. They take turns holding up their pictures for classmates to guess what the idiom is. If the idiom is not guessed, they show the second page.

Additional resources to teach idioms to students of all ages

What idiom activities do you use with your primary students?

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Perspectives on further development: the DELTA, or how I got out of a rut I didn’t know I was in

Looking back at my own career it’s struck me that there were a number of turning points that enabled me to take a fresh look at what I do, to feel I’m starting on a new path and moving in a new direction that will keep me from getting bored and jaded. Those turning points […]
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Disney Music for Business English Training

Hello, ESPers worldwide!

How do you get your students to visualize certain business situations when you are in the classroom? For such visualization, I have found Disney’s “Behind the Mic” video of the song “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen to be very helpful in my classes. (Actually, the students learned more from the video than I had intended.) In this TESOL Blog post, I will explain why and how I used the video. In addition, I will explain how the use of the video above led to the use of another related video.

First, let me provide you with some background information. In some of my classes, we focus on leadership. In this connection, we do various business case studies and role plays in class. In their leadership roles in the role plays, the students are asked to achieve various visions (or business goals). By doing such activities, the students are preparing themselves to succeed as global leaders.

In my Business English classes, I often use case studies (including role plays) in ELT Business English textbooks (e.g., Market Leader). In one of those case studies and role plays, the students are asked to plan a conference for an international team. Accordingly,  I showed to my students the video above from the movie “Frozen” in order to help them to “visualize” a truly international team.

The movie “Frozen” is well-known among young people in Japan, and my adult learners fell into two groups: 1) those students who were familiar with the song “Let It Go” from the movie and 2) those students who had never seen the movie or heard of the song.

The “Behind the Mic” version of the song “Let It Go” in the video above is sung in 25 different languages. In the video, you can see each of the 25 singers performing part of the song. Further, you can see from their body language and physical appearances how different these singers are from each other; in other words, together they would be a very international team indeed.

In connection with the video, my students talked about the skills that would be needed to lead such an international team. Not surprisingly, “communication skill” was mentioned several times.

What did surprise me was when one student stated that she was able to realize (from seeing the video) the importance of visualization for communicating in English. From her comment, it seemed to me that the student had assumed that the 25 singers were all interpreting the movie scene in exactly the same way. However, in view of cultural differences and differences in languages worldwide, I had assumed that there were some differences in the translations of the English lyrics (although I have not confirmed whether this is true). In other words, I had made the assumption that the singers could have been viewing the movie scene differently to some (perhaps very minor) extent due to culture and the translated versions of the lyrics of the song.

The importance of the effect of culture on communication also emerged in a class held a week later when one Japanese student asked: “How do you maintain harmony with others in the US when everyone is so different?” My response to him included the question: “Why do you think harmony is as important in the US as it is in Japan?” He was very surprised but immediately understood that everyone might not have the same cultural values.

In addition to a discussion of culture, the Disney video above also led to a discussion on pronunciation. After showing the video to one Japanese teacher, the teacher told me that she had learned American English pronunciation by repeatedly watching the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast.” She had thought the character Belle had such wonderful pronunciation and wanted to speak just like her. The teacher had memorized Belle’s songs, etc.

After speaking with the teacher above, I wanted my Business English students to understand the importance of listening carefully and imitating others as a means of improving pronunciation. With this aim in mind, I showed to my students a video in which the song “Let It Go” was sung by Brian Hull imitating the voices of various Disney characters. I then challenged my students to do the same with 1) a speech or a song of a famous Japanese person, and thereafter with 2) a speech or song of a famous English speaker.

Finally, if you show Disney videos in a corporate setting, you might want to keep in mind the advice of David Kertzner, former ESPIS chair and current ESP News editor. If the company manager of your students walked into the room, what would he think about the training activity? Would the manager consider it to be valuable? With this situation in mind, my advice is to be prepared to justify any training that you do.

All the best,
Kevin

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Redefining Communicative Competence and Redesigning ELT in the 21st Century

Jun Liu will moderate the James E. Alatis Plenary, presented by Drs. Lourdes Ortega and Michael Byram, titled “Redefining Communicative Competence and Redesigning ELT in the 21st Century,” at the TESOL 2015 International Convention & English Language Expo, 8 am, Thursday, 26 March 2015.

2015 keynote_liu-ortega-byram

In the James E. Alatis plenary at TESOL 2015, which features for the first time an interactive format, the moderator (Jun Liu) and the presenters (Michael Byram, Lourdes Ortega) discuss the educational contents for communicative competence in the 21st century. They agree communicative competence cannot simply be limited to the traditional instrumentality goals that motivated the well-known ELT focus on communication in the 1980s. Byram will argue for the importance of intercultural language teaching, or teaching inspired by educational values and goals that utilize as a cornerstone his proposed notion of criticality, drawing on intercultural education and citizenship education. Ortega will highlight that other dimensions to being communicatively competent in an L2 are also important, and particularly in English as a second language, related to the project of supporting students’ empowerment and the improvement of their social worlds, fueled by their imagination, their desires, and their awareness of the inseparability of language from power and identity struggles.

Byram will argue that educational values can provide meaningful, relevant goals for a new notion of communicative competence as criticality (Byram, 2008, 2012), or the capacity for reflection and evaluation of our own and others’ values, beliefs, and behaviors (“cultures”). He will invite us to imagine students who are never to use their English—or any other L2—in practice, and ask: What would be the value of teaching and learning languages then? In what sense, if any, would communicative competence be a goal relevant to teachers and students working together in many contexts where students study English for mandatory purposes or because of parental or societal pressure, without any real immediate need or intention to claim any use of English outside their studies? Criticality would be a central goal, and one that can be cultivated by engaging in intercultural language teaching.

The first stage is defining objectives related to criticality which would be feasible for language teachers in a given context. The second stage is implementing these objectives and purposes so they can be fulfilled in practice. This has been done in development projects, large and small, that he has been involved in. Refinements will also be needed at a third stage, which has been defined theoretically and is now being implemented in projects with teachers. At its best, Byram will argue, intercultural and citizenship education for criticality leads learners to become actively, critically involved in “action in the world.”

Ortega will argue that teachers’ efforts at helping students develop the ability to communicate well in English in the 21st century must go beyond supporting their capacity to use English for the transaction of information or the attainment of grades, jobs, or education. ELT classrooms must also support students to be seen, heard, and judged in desirable ways in their actual and imagined social worlds. Can they claim the right to speak (as Norton Peirce, 1995, called it) when they use English? Can they exercise the power to impose meanings (as Bourdieu, 1977, called it)? Their ability to do these things will never depend just on knowledge of language norms, the size of their vocabularies, the accuracy of their grammar and pronunciation, or the depth of their cultural knowledge—even if, of course, all these other things will help.

Learning to claim the right to speak and impose meanings in their nonnative English presupposes an awareness of both world Englishes and unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015) and of linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015). Strategies must also be offered that help our students disrupt and productively exploit to their advantage the experiences of otherness and oppression that come with being placed by others hierarchically (materially and/or symbolically) as a novice, a foreigner, an outside member, or a nonnative speaker. Likewise, a redesigned ELT pedagogy must also illuminate language as identity choices and communication as power struggles, and teachers and students must work together to raise action-enabling awareness of both.

How do we meet this tall order of criticality and empowerment? As part of the “deep-dive” follow-up session, Liu, Byram, and Ortega will analyze with their audiences further examples, offering big and small pedagogical practices that can help the diverse communities of TESOL rise to the challenge of meeting these contemporary goals for communicative competence, redefined in theory and redesigned in ELT practice.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Byram, M. S. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflection. Clevedon, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters.

Byram, M. S. (2012). Conceptualizing intercultural (communicative) competence and intercultural citizenship. In J. Jackson (Ed.), Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 85–97). Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 9–31.

Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2015). Linguicism. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Tupas, R. (Ed.). (2015). Unequal Englishes: The politics of Englishes today. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jun Liu is professor of applied linguistics and associate provost at Georgia State University. He is a past president of TESOL and a member of the TIRF Board of Trustees.

Dr. Lourdes Ortega is professor at Georgetown University. She has worked with language teachers and doctoral students since 2000 in Hawaii, Georgia, Arizona, and Washington DC.

Dr. Michael Byram is professor emeritus at Durham University, United Kingdom, and guest professor at Luxembourg University. He has been adviser to the Council of Europe Language Policy Division and is now working on guidelines for intercultural education.

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Towns & Cities

Hello!
My name is Peter and I am one of the co-founders of Towns & Cities Hip-Hop English Mobile App.

I’d like to thank Lori for providing us with an opportunity to talk about Towns & Cities. Lori is working hard to provide original resources and a community to discuss ESL and math instruction that is both innovate and effective and it’s an honor to introduce what we do.

Towns & Cities is a hip-hop English language mobile app designed for iPhone and Android. The app works as a supplemental language-learning tool for English learners around the world – of all ages – and uses original hip-hop music as its main channel for communication and engagement. Towns & Cities provides resources for strengthening grammar, conversation, pronunciation, and listening comprehension.

Feel free to preview a few of our songs on our Soundcloud account: http://ift.tt/1KFCSv3. Feel free to use any of these songs in your classes or with your students! http://ift.tt/1CLg6COThe inspiration for Towns & Cities comes from various experiences drawn as teachers, learners, and researchers, along with creative pursuits in music and art. We originally established our educational paradigm of “Hip-Hop English” in a primary school outside of Madrid, Spain. While working as a language assistant in 1st to 6th grade classrooms, I was approached by his lead teacher with a proposal to collaborate on a hip- hop track to use as a teaching and learning tool. After some initial in- class interactive performances with 2nd grade students (along with subsequent edits and tempo changes!) the first song turned out to be a hit. That first song eventually grew into what Towns & Cities is today.

We are aiming to expand this collaborative effort and idea to a global platform of English language learners at all age groups and proficiency levels. The music is all original music that we’ve created, and the lyrics aim to reinforce learning through rhyme, rhythm, repetition, storytelling, and other mnemonic devices. Additional content for each unit includes auto-correcting, interactive visual worksheets, written worksheets, and flashcards. Towns & Cities is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Our first version includes 18 units, and we’ll be uploading new batches of content throughout the coming months. For updates 
follow us @townscitiesapp on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Soundcloud for info and updates.

Please feel free to contact us by email at info@townsandcitiesapp.com. We are happy to discuss the app with anyone who is interested in using it or would like to suggest new ideas.

Thanks again to Lori and to you for taking the time to learn about Towns & Cities!

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7 Online Resources for Learning Vocab With Flashcards

One of the most common difficulties that students experience in writing is their lack of vocabulary. Unfortunately, we don’t always have time for vocabulary activities in a writing class. Today I’d like to share a few online resources that can help students learn vocabulary with the use of flashcards. Some of these resources offer premade flashcards on various topics, others help learners produce their own cards, and some have online activities that can help learners study their words in a more efficient—and fun—way.

Premade flashcards

Lanternfish ESL Flashcards

This vocabulary resource is perfect for beginners. It offers picture flash cards on a variety of topics, such as “Sports,” “Health and Safety,” “Classroom,” “Clothes,” and “Emotions.” The flashcards are colorful and fun, so they can easily be used with young learners. Along with the instructions the website also offers a number of classroom games with the use of these flashcards, but you can also refer your students to this resource for studying the words on their own.

ESL-kids.com Flashcards

This is a collection of premade picture flashcards on a variety of topics. They can be used both with younger learners and with beginners. Each flashcard set has two options—small and large, and each card comes with two versions as well—one with a word describing the picture, and the other without a description.

Online flashcard makers

Scholastic Teacher Flash Card Maker

This is an online flashcard maker. The instructions are simple and clear, so even beginning learners can use this flashcard maker without teacher’s help. And of course the teacher can use this resource for creating flashcards for a particular lesson. Great and simple resource!

Studystack

Another flashcard maker. Perfect for individual learning. It allows you to create sets of flashcards and learn them by using various online activities and games that are also provided on this website. To use this resource, you will need to create an account, which takes a couple of minutes.

Dictionary.com

And yet another great website for making online flashcards. Learners will need to create an account to be able to generate their own vocabulary lists. What I particularly like about this resource is that it provides you with dictionary definitions of the items you create. So learners can either pick the given definition or create their own. They can also practice their words by using one of the suggested online activities.

KitzKikz Free Printable Flash Card Maker

A quick and simple flashcard maker. All you need to do is type in the front and back of your card and download a PDF copy of your flashcards. The disadvantage of this resource is that it doesn’t offer activities for learning the words.

Quizlet

And this is, of course, one of the most well known online resources for studying vocabulary. Learners can create their own vocabulary sets, generate flashcards, and do a number of activities to learn those words.

Hope you find these vocabulary resources helpful! Do you have other resources—or flashcard activities—you’d like to share with us?

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AWW App: A SMART Board Alternative

Another gem from a recent training session I attended is the AWW app, which you can use to turn your regular classroom computer, projector, screen, and WiFi into a more interactive platform for free. The “AWW” stands for “a web whiteboard,” and that is exactly what this is. There is no sign-in or registration required, so getting started is as easy as going to the website and clicking “Start drawing.” It really could not be any simpler, and the uses are endless.

Options

Once on the site, you have some color choices, a pencil, eraser, and the option to just type if, like me, you find your handwriting to be somewhat illegible, but the main benefits of this site come from the “menu” options. From this menu, you click “clear” to get a clean slate and start over, “post” to share the image on a social media site, or “save” to download the contents of the whiteboard as a .png image file—which is handy if a student is absent or you want your students to review the material outside of class. Finally, there is “invite,” which is the absolute best part about the AWW app.

Collaboration and Sharing

Click “invite” to get a link for others to join your whiteboard. This is excellent for teachers who get started up at the front of the classroom, but then want to continue updating the whiteboard from another device, such as a tablet, while walking through the classroom. Additionally, students can join as individuals or teams so multiple users can work on the same whiteboard. You can use this with students if they have access to computers in a lab or other devices with Internet access. I teach at a university and all of my students are adults with smartphones, so they just use their own devices. Click “invite” again to stop sharing. You can use this just as you would a traditional whiteboard with the added benefit of being able to design your own interactive collaborative activities to better engage students with content.

Besides accessing the website, it appears you can download an app for Android devices. While I have not yet located it in the iTunes store, you can still use the AWW app via a web browser. Try it out in class today! The AWW app is so simple, that there is not much of a learning curve for teachers or students and, while it obviously does not have all of the features of a SMART Board, you can’t beat the price.

Let us know what you think or share any similar apps you use by leaving a comment below.

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Teachers Crossing Borders and Building Bridges

2015 keynote_nietoSonia Nieto will present the opening keynote, titled “Teachers’ Roles in Crossing Borders and Building Bridges,” at the TESOL 2015 International Convention & English Language Expo, 5:30 pm, Wednesday, 25 March 2015.

“I like to have parent conferences in laundromats,” declared Roger Wallace, a 6th-grade teacher in Amherst, Massachusetts. He continued, “If I know a parent goes to a laundromat on Thursdays, I show up with clean hands and a willingness to fold everything but the underwear! I’ll say, ‘Just sit down and look through the papers while I fold your clothes.’ It’s what I do. That’s why I think I thrive.”

When I interviewed Roger for my book, Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds (2013), he had been teaching for 38 years. An exceptionally talented teacher, he was loved by students, parents, and colleagues alike. Meeting parents in laundromats was one of the many strategies he had developed over the years to cross borders and build bridges with students and their parents because, as he said, “To teach kids of diverse backgrounds, you have to be someone who can shuffle a lot of cards.”

Angeles Pérez, a 22-year old bilingual teacher in the Sheldon ISD in Texas when I interviewed her, agreed that connecting with students is crucial. Without loving and respectful relationships, she said, teaching would be impossible. Yet young teachers like Angeles are often warned, “Don’t smile until Christmas!” If they smile, the conventional wisdom goes, they will lose the respect of their charges. But Angeles, wise beyond her years, was indignant at this advice, saying, “Don’t smile until Christmas?! That means you never really made a connection with them until Christmas!”

Angeles also instituted what she called “Hanging out time with Ms. Pérez,” a short 10-minute period at the end of the day where she and the students simply talked with one another about their dreams, or painted their nails, or complained about siblings. It was a time to get to know one another more a fondo, more deeply and personally. These are good reminders that teaching is always about relationships and about being oneself, whether on the first day of school or the last.

This is a lesson I learned when I was a young teacher and, later, teacher educator because whether one is teaching 3-year-olds or doctoral students, relationships are at the heart of the matter. The best piece of advice I received during my teacher preparation program many years ago was “start where the kids are at.” This advice almost seems redundant. Where else would we start? At the same time, I was urged to leave my “cultural baggage at the door.” That these pieces of advice were contradictory didn’t seem to occur to my professors, yet soon after beginning my teaching career in an intermediate school in Brooklyn, New York, it became clear that leaving my cultural baggage at the door—in essence, leaving my identity behind—was not only difficult but also impossible, because my identity, knowledge, and experiences were the best ways to connect with my students. This is true of all teachers, not just teachers working with students of their own cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. But for the connection to take place, all teachers need to truly get to know their students.

The question of crossing borders and building bridges becomes a particularly relevant one in multicultural and multilingual societies. In my research with teachers, I have tried to focus on the various ways they enact critical multicultural practices to overcome obstacles of difference, bureaucracy, and the current sociopolitical context of education, particularly because those contexts often contradict the very values teachers are trying to create in their classrooms (Nieto, 2013, 2014). Mary Jade Haney, an elementary school teacher in rural South Carolina, in her essay for my latest book, Why We Teach Now (2014), writes, “I want to inspire growth, creativity and inquiry each moment in the lives of [my] students, always beginning by getting to know the students and their families.” But Mary Jade also realizes that even if she connects with her students, some policies and practices are outside her control. What does she do? She focuses on what she can control, saying,

In my classroom, my world, the most important people are not the policymakers and textbook companies; they are my students and their families. This is how I navigate the stormy seas as I try to calm the national storm that rages against teachers like me.

Another example of creating strong bonds with students in the face of obstacles that make it difficult comes from Berta Berriz, a recently retired bilingual and ESL teacher from the Boston Public Schools. Reminiscing about her gratifying 30 plus years in the classroom, Berta was also acutely aware of the damaging context of public education in the United States (and elsewhere) today, saying,

Along with all these sweet moments that only teachers know, I am also reminded of the raw reality facing teachers today: ever-changing administrative mandates; bureaucrats who render teachers’ knowledge invisible in the policymaking process; the continuing marginalization of students in under-resourced, segregated classrooms; and whatever may be the latest “magic bullet,” which inevitably proves unresponsive and ineffective, with all of these chipping away at the time for quality teaching.

Building bridges and crossing borders is a tricky business, but absolutely essential if teachers working with students of diverse backgrounds are to make a difference. From holding parent conferences in laundromats to having “hanging out time” with students to the many other strategies and values teachers develop over the years, they remind us that, as Mary Jade Haney declares, teaching is “a profession that balances the universe.”

References

Nieto, S. (2013). Finding joy in teaching students of diverse backgrounds: Culturally responsive and socially just practices in U.S. classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nieto, S. (Ed.). (2014). Why we teach now. New York, New York: Teachers College Press.


Dr. Sonia Nieto is professor emerita of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has taught students from elementary school through doctoral studies, and her research focuses on multicultural education, teacher education, and the education of Latinos, immigrants, and other students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

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