Tag Archives: mobile phone

IATEFL 2016 Birmingham – Instant messaging with learners – Talk summary

Here is a summary of the talk I gave at IATEFL 2016 in Birmingham; Instant messaging with learners: chilled out chatroom or creepy treehouse?

The talk was based on research I carried out while teaching a 10-week pre-sessional course to a group of 16 of multilingual post-graduate students. I set out 4 learning objectives that I wanted to achieve during the course, but I needed to find a strategy to meet them.

The 4 learning objectives were:

  1. Boost student motivation for academic writing.
  2. Increase student collaboration.
  3. Establish a sense of community in the classroom.
  4. Improve academic writing skills.

I chose to harness the affordances of student smartphones as a learning tool and using a cross-platform mobile instant messaging app, I set up a class group on WeChat. I specifically chose this app, because students could sign up using their Facebook accounts and therefore there was no exchange of telephone numbers or infringement on privacy.

I wanted to make a correlation between the constant Tweeting, social media updates and instant messages my students were writing all day long, and academic writing, while also trying to bring a motivational and fun element to the learning.

The students were guided through a range of activities both inside and outside the classroom and were required to share their ideas and collaborate with peers as they interacted using WeChat.

Synonym race

Using a selection of high frequency words in academic English, I sent words one by one to the group. Each time I sent a word, the first group of students to reply with a synonym got a point. This motivated students to think quickly, and added a fun element to the activity. It also helped widen their lexical range and they were able to refer back to the messages during the course to find and use lexis they needed.

Lecture summary

This was a collaborative writing task where students shared their notes from the weekly lecture and wrote a summary together in no more than 100 words. The four groups wrote their summaries on WeChat and sent them to the group. Each group read the summaries of the other groups and made a note of any inaccuracies, points they wanted to question, and things they liked. Each group read their summary aloud open class and as they did this any student could shout stop at something they wanted to question, and it was discussed openly. Because the writing had been carried out collaboratively, no student felt pinpointed or undermined.

TED talk summary of main ideas

For homework I gave the students a TED talk to watch in their own time over the weekend. I asked them to post a summary of the main points of interest for them personally supporting them with evidence and reasons why (one of the tenets of academic writing). They sent their summaries to the WeChat group and I moderated them. This was not time consuming for me, and gave the students a sense of ownership over their learning because they were free to do it at any time during the weekend that was convenient for them. This worked well, so I continued to do this throughout the course to help the students develop their listening, summarising and having to explain why.

Feedback

I asked the students to carry out an anonymous questionnaire, to gain an insight into the usefulness of the class instant messaging group from the learners’ perspective.

Here is a summary of the most common responses the students gave:

  • The activities were fun and interesting and transformed a task we dreaded into something we enjoyed.
  • I communicate more with my classmates and learnt from them.
  • I compared my work with our classmates and adopted a competitive approach to impress them (This was reflected in the quality of the writing the students produced).
  • I feel the gap between the teacher and me has narrowed, because she is a part of the chat group.
  • I feel more confident to write now, so I am more motivated also.

 The benefits of having a class chat are:

  1. It is student-centred, interactive and communicative.
  2. It creates dialogue amongst students and nurtures a social atmosphere
  3. It increases motivation and shifts the motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic.
  4. It encourages sharing and extends learning.
  5. It creates a personalised learning platform that students can refer to both inside and outside the classroom.

If you decide to try out any of the activities mentioned, please let me know how it went!

 

 

 

Learn English with Bennet Miller & Little Miss Puffytail

Although Bennet Miller films are not my taste they are acclaimed and there is no denying that he is a good director. I actually prefer is adverts to be fair, especially Little Miss Puffytail which is one of a series of three 30 second toilet paper ads that he has recently produced for Quilted Northern.

I recently used the Little Miss Puffytail video in class, to draw learner awareness to intonation and its relation to attitude when speaking. My students have a habit of talking in long monotone stretches of discourse, without pausing or chunking, so I also wanted them to consider these features.

Here are the stages of the activity:

  • Show the first frame of the advert on pause. Students describe the picture using as much specific vocabulary as possible, with the teacher providing any unknown lexis. (This is particularly useful for the Cambridge speaking test part 2 where students are asked to describe 2 pictures).
  • Students predict what they think is going to happen in the video, where the video was shot, and for what purpose. They can also talk about the plot and any other characters they think may appear.
  • The first playback is silent for students to see if their predictions were correct. They usually detect that it is an advert. I get them to script it out using their imagination!
  • The second playback is with sound – subtitles can be turned on if desired. Once it has been viewed, the students brainstorm adjectives for how Miss Puffytail is feeling. I get them to think about why she is feeling this way, and how they were able to detect this . This highlights the point that they were able to discover the feeling from her solemn intonation.
  • Open class, attitude, intonation and pausing are discussed, and the teacher boards phrases from the ad with the intonation and pauses marked in red.
  • The students do the same to their scripts, but they do it firstly for feeling sad, and secondly for feeling happy and enthusiastic. Teacher monitors to help with doubts.
  • Students practise both versions of their scripts together in pairs and record one sad and one enthusiastic version using their mobile phones.
  • The students playback the recordings to listen for the differences in intonation in the two attempts – hopefully there are some!

I found this was an interesting and useful activity for the learners to make them aware of the significance of intonation in the delivery of what we say, and to encourage them to vary their intonation when they speak. It created a lot of interaction and emergent language.

 

 

 

An app a day! Day 10 – English Idioms Illustrated

Screen shot 2015-03-11 at 22.25.36English Idioms Illustrated are memorable comic images to learn and remember idioms, as the proverb goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”…

Not only are the images that accompany the idioms laboriously created but they also appear with a detailed description about the history of the proverb. So while the pictures enable visual learners to store and retrieve the idioms, the text enables analytic learners to put logic to the origins and lexical meaning of the proverb.

Available for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Video activities

Using the video recording function of a smart phone or iPod Touch is a fun, interactive and engaging way for learners to practise their speaking skills. Video activities can help with fluency, confidence and presentation skills in English.

In each of the activities below, you can decide how much ground work is involved before the final video is created. This could involve research at home or brainstorming in class, depending on the learning goals.

About me (Individual task / Pair task with students being interviewed by a classmate)

Students create a short video (1-3 minutes) and talk about an interest they particularly enjoy.

Points to include:

  • What is the interest?
  • How did the interest come about?
  • How much time do you spend doing it?
  • Why do you enjoy it?
  • A demonstration of the interest, if possible?

Welcome to our city / region / country (Collaborative task)

Students create a 2-3 minute video with a partner or group showing visitors a place they would like to take them in their city, region or country.

Points to include:

  • Why is this place is worth visiting?
  • Background history
  • Access
  • Opening hours / best season to visit

Advertisement

Students create a 1-2 minute promotional video about a product they use, or an invented product.

Points to include:

  • Picture of the product if invented, or the product itself
  • Description of the product
  • Why is it useful?
  • Where can it be bought?
  • Price

Mobile phone photo discussion

Ask your students to take a picture of something with their mobile phones in their own time outside class. The next time they come to class, they talk about their pictures in pairs / groups and discuss the reasons why they chose to take this particular picture, and their classmates can ask questions to find out more information.

You can set different picture taking tasks:

  • Something the students see on their journey between their homes and school
  • A scenery picture
  • A picture including people
  • A picture of something they have seen in a magazine or shop that they found interesting / curious
  • Something the students could not live without
  • Something the students don’t like
  • A meal / food dish

The possibilities are endless, and the task can be as short as long as you want, with extension possibilities including:

  • Short presentations
  • Students describing the picture for their classmates to draw
  • Students describing the object for their classmates to guess
  • Explaining how to make the recipe of a meal / dish (can be in the style of a cookery programme demonstration)

If you try this activity, let me know how it goes in the comments!

Fun mobile phone dictation activity for beginners / pre-int

  • Pre teach lexis related to the functioning of phones: To turn on, Password, Where are the notes? App etc..
  • On a piece of paper students write a question or short sentence, e.g. “What is your favourite thing about learning English?”
  • Students dictate their question/sentence to the person on their left in letters without any punctuation or spaces (double u, aitch, a etc) for students on their left to type into the notes or a message on their phones.
  • Students pass their phone to the left and the next student has to ask questions to turn the phone on, find the dictation and decipher it.

For a longer version students could pass the phone between each other and dictate several sentences, or they could dictate using lexical items as an amended version of the NATO phonetic alphabet. So instead of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, students could use random lexis (Ant, Biscuit, Canoe), or lexis from a particular subject area for examples food, animals, countries, fruit (Apple, Banana, Cherry).

 

If you try this activity, let me know how it goes in the comments!