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Entries Tagged as 'speaking'

Fun DELTA Activities

March 18, 2012 · No Comments · ACTIVITIES, grammar, speaking, vocabulary

Last Wednesday was my first day at DELTA. It was such a tiring but also a full day for me. Of course, from day one I involved in lots of various activities with my new friends. Here is a brief selection from those that mostly caught my attention.

Get rid of the cards (Relative Clauses)
You can use this activity to revise vocabulary or some grammar topics. Actually I preferred to use it to revise relative clauses in my class. The aim of the activity is to get rid of all the cards until the end of the game.

- Beforehand prepare the questions and the answers on the same card as in the example.

Question: I talked to the girl. Her car had broken down in front of the shop.
Answer: I talked to the girl whose car had broken down in front of the shop.

- Tell students to fold the paper so that the answers are not readable from the others. On the other hand, the question side is open to the other students. (On one side the question, on the other side the answer is written.)

- Give four question-answer cards to each student

- Tell them to stand up and mingle with others.

- While walking around and they show the questions to others The student who cannot answer any question correctly has to get that card from his friend. If they answer a question correctly, they keep the cards.

Clockwise Speaking
- Divide the class into two groups.

- Tell the first group to line up around the class in a random order.

- Tell the other group members to choose a student from the first group and stand next to him.

- Set a question so that they can start a conversation.

- Don’t forget to set a time limit.

- When the time is up, the members of the second group move in the clockwise and match with a new partner.

- Set another question to be discussed then.

Picture Dictation (How to Teach Articles)

- Have you ever used picture dictation to teach articles

- Tell the students to draw a big table on a piece of paper.

- Tell them to draw a pair of shoes under the table.

- Then go on dictating the picture in your mind.

- The important thing is to start drawing the new object repeating the previous one using “the”.

If you have any memorable activities from your DELTA years; please share them with us.

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Let Your Students Speak: Speaking Activities of The Week (Part 2)

December 3, 2011 · 2 Comments · ACTIVITIES, CONFERENCES, speaking, vocabulary

According to the communicative model of language teaching, we shouldn’t forget to optimize authentic practice for real-life communication situations. Here I want to share some activities that I presented in my last workshop. I believe that students always need such practices to enhance their  motivation and confidence to speak more voluntarily both  in and out of the class.
A fun ice-breaker activity
Suitable for all levels
No preparation
  • Draw a picture reflecting an important scene of your life on the board.
  • Tell the  students to ask you questions about tit.  (eg: Who is the man in the picture? How old is he? Where are you in this picture?) I enjoyed a lot while drawing the following picture depicting my last holiday in Croatia.
  • After this demonstration, divide the class into pairs and ask them to draw an important scene of their life on a piece of paper (birthday, last holiday, family etc..)
  • When they complete their drawings, they ask questions to each other about the picture in the given time interval.
  • Each student shares what s/he has learned about his/her partner with the others in class
Headlines (L. Meddings & S. Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, 2009)
Suitable for Intermediate +
No preparation
  • As a demonstration, display a headline involving a shopping disaster or traffic accident, and invite the class to ask you questions to get the gist of your story.
  • Then, tell the students to think of a story from their lives as in the demonstration, and write a headline for it on a piece of paper in large and legible script.

  • Half the class stands in a large circle around the room, holding their headlines. The other half (the interviewers) form a second circle inside the first one. Everyone positions themselves opposite a student who is holding a headline. then, they ask some questions to get the synopsis of the stories.
  • Call out “Change!” after a minute, and the interviewers move clockwise so as to read the next headline, and begin asking questions again. This process continues until all the interviewers have interacted with all the headlines.
Guess the word!
Suitable for all levels
  • Divide the class into groups of four/ five and give vocabulary-card piles (at least 20 cards) to each group.
  • Tell the students to draw four/five columns on a piece of paper and write the group members’ name onto each column.
  • The first student chooses a card from the pile and tries to describe the word referring to parts of speech, antonyms, synonyms and necessary examples. When one of the group members is able to guess the word, both the explainer and the person who could guess the answer correctly get a point.
What’s in a Blot? 
Suitable for all levels
  • The main aim of the activity is to foster the students’ creativity and assign a meaning to the blurred shapes prepared using the online tool “Splash Up”.
  • Divide students into groups and give some blurred pictures to each group.
  • Invite the students to interpret them using the target language:
        It reminds me of…                                                                 It looks like….
I get the impression of…                                                     It’s like ….

 

A snapshot from my workshop. Huge thanks to my participants!


 

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“Turning Challenges into Opportunities” Doğuş ELT Conference

November 29, 2011 · 4 Comments · ACTIVITIES, CONFERENCES, grammar, reading, speaking, TECHNOLOGY, WEB 2.0 TOOLS, writing

Last weekend I attended a great organization focusing on how to turn challenges into opportunities, held by Doğuş University.  It was a conference full of precious speakers, many hands on activities and various surprises.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

 

David Cyrstal’s Notes: David Cyrstal is an entertaining speaker, coloring his talk with demonstrations and movement. He started his talk with the question “How can you detect whether you are an internet addict” then, he offered his own criteria: “if you visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, does it occur to you to check your email on the way back to bed?” I think the answer is “No” for my case (just for now). It was also relieving to hear from him “internet addiction is ideal for the linguistic addict.”

Özge Karaoğlu’s Notes: I fell so happy to have such fruitful people like Özge in our field. She gave me very constructive ideas using the web securely and effectively. Here are some of them:
  • Delicious is a tool providing you to save, stack and share your favorite links and topics on the web.
  • Bloglines is an excellent site for you to find and track your favorite websites and blogs in real-time. This web tool allows you to follow the recent news and updates on the blogs or websites that you follow.
  • Cybaryman is a great online resource bank not only for teachers but also for students.
  • Linkedin is an e-portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system connecting users and creating online communities.
  • Me on the web is my favourite tool among the others since you can manage your identity on the web. When you set up Google alerts, you get email from Google whenever your name, email or any search terms you specify are mentioned on the web.
  • Goqr.me is a tool enabling you to generate QR codes. Özge mentioned that we can give the answer keys to the students in the form of QR codes so that they can scan and read them.
George Pickering’s Notes: I think he is one of the exceptional people who could capture himself as a monkey and put his photo together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
He mainly mentioned about framing issue during his talk, the filters we use to view ourselves and the world. I strongly believe that zooming into the frames changes the vision of understanding of our students. Towards the end of his talk, he showed the sentence “Opportunityisnowhere” and asked us to read it. I was the one who read it as “Opportunity is now here.” Well, I think I am a little bit optimistic.
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Michael Oneil’s Notes: At the beginning of the session, Michael shared a video of Bill Gates on creating great teachers. You can watch the video here. He explained how to improve teaching and learning establishing a taxonomy of successful teaching with 49 teaching techniques. He categorized this taxonomy into seven parts; Setting High Academic Expectations, Planning that ensures Academic Achievement, Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons, Engaging Students into Your Lessons, Creating a Strong Classroom Culture, Building and Maintaining High Behavioral Expectation and lastly Building Character and Trust.

 

Many of my friends were presenters at the conference including me (I will give more information about my workshop in my next post) On the first day, I attended a nice workshop given by my colleagues Merve Elbirlik Tülek and Emine Bülür Civanoğlu on “The Power of Images to Boost Learner Creativity and Motivation”. Many thanks for their practical ideas.
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Paul Seligson’s Notes: I saw that he had so many things to teach me. I wish I could have regular sessions from him during the term. He mainly informed us how to facilitate the learner’s fluency with enjoyable and creative tasks such as fluency role cards, Mexican wave but the most interesting one was his suggestion on giving a short break to the activity in the middle of the lesson and asking the learners what they think at that moment.
I have learned such valuable things and met many precious friends at this conference. It was also so fun to follow the tweets on #DogusELT during the conference.
 

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