Podcast #2: ESL Reading Lessons

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips, Episode #2

Our podcast contains some suggestions of how to conduct an ESL reading lesson. We will provide activity ideas to help students to improve their reading comprehension skills. We hope that you find our podcast helpful.

The intended audience is ESL instructors, but we welcome all listeners.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when listening to the podcast:
1. In the podcast, we talk about activity ideas for all three stages of a reading lesson: pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading.
2. We recommend sequencing the during-reading activities from general to more specific comprehension tasks.
3. In order to guarentee 3-5 during-reading comprehension activities, we recommend using an authentic reading text of 1-2 pages.

Link to Podcast:
http://billharris.podbean.com/bill-and-sabahs-esl-podcast-2-reading/

Useful links:
http://esl-programs-lessons.suite101.com/article.cfm/improving_esl_reading_skills (pre-reading)

http://departments.weber.edu/teachall/reading/prereading.html (pre-reading academic)

http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/reading.html (reading activities)

http://iteslj.org/Lessons/ (more reading activities)

http://esl.about.com/library/lessons/bl_baker2.htm (sample lesson plan with pre-, during-, and post-reading activities)

http://home.earthlink.net/~cnew/research.htm (copyright laws and education)

Response to Tuesday's readings

The Chiu/Savignon article advocates the question-form of commenting on students' texts rather than comments that focus on form and point out that "The question-form comment fosters this process of meaning making with the essential attention to form that this implies" (110). What I take from this is that comments that question the writer about the content of their writing both helps them making their writing clearer and more "meaningful" when they revise, but it can also help direct them towards form as well. I would generally agree with this point of view based on my experience with responding to students' writing (both in an ESL context and with L1 writers). Asking a question that pushes the student to expand, explore and refine in general seems more powerful to me that "merely" pointing out surface problems with morphology or syntax (with the understanding that these obviously contribute to our ability to understand content).

The Gaskell/Cobb article suggests that concordances for grammar and not only vocabulary can help students explore language on their own and discover the language. Specifically, they say that using concordances can help them edit and revise their own writing by discovering patterns and rules within concordances. I have never used concordances in the classroom and can't speak to it effectiveness from experience but it seems like potentially a good tool to help learners take control of their own learning and research their own answers to questions that the teacher may pose or when the teacher highlights grammar errors without giving them explicit directions of how to fix them. The only thing that "troubles" me about this approach is getting students motivated to use them. I can see students potentially seeing it as a chore and an extra step between them and revising their essay. I wonder if any of you has any thoughts on this? Would you (as a language student) be willing and able to use condordances to help discover grammar and revise your own writing without explicit direction from a teacher or would you feel frustrated by that process? Or is my read of this totally off?

Teaching Tips Podcast: Using music in the classroom

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips, Episode #1

Our podcast contains some suggestions of how to use music in the ESL classroom. Using music in the classroom can make learning fun while using an authentic listening input. In our podcast, we talk about some of the activities that an instructor can design to address not only listening comprehension, but also grammar, vocabulary, reading, and speaking.

The intended audience is ESL instructors, but we welcome all listeners.

Link to Podcast:
http://billharris.podbean.com/bill-and-sabahs-esl-teaching-tips-episode-1/

Useful Links:

http://www.ericdigests.org/2002-3/music.htm

http://www.caslt.org/resources/english-sl/classroom-resource-links-music-teaching2_en.php

http://www.lingolex.com/userpages/music.html

Instructional Value of Voicethread

Based on the Chapter 6 reading from our CALL textbook, I feel like Voicethread could be a valuable tool in a language classroom. The first criteria that Chapelle and Jamieson use for deciding if a CALL tool is useful for speaking is if the sounds/accents are relevant for the students. Due to the fact that the teacher and presumably the other students in the class would be making contributions to Voicethread, this would necessarily mean that the accents are relevant (it would obviously be important for the students to understand the teacher as well as each other).

Another criteria that Chapelle and Jamieson use for judging usefulness is that the tool can "provide opportunities for oral practice through interaction with the computer" (159). Obviously, Voicethread provides students the opportunity to providing this opportunity though this must be qualified by the (perhaps large) assumption that the video that the students interact with/comment on provides them some kind of "meaningful context" (159) with which to practice expressions or formulaic phrases so that they might become ingrained.

Perhaps the criteria that Voicethread most fulfills, though, is the 4th one which "evaluate(s) learners' performance and provide(s) feedback" (162). I think it could be a good way for teachers and/or students to ask for clarification of something that was said or for more explication or even direct correction of pronunciation.

The main point I got out of the Robinson article is that there is more uptake and more "lexical and syntactic complexity" the more complex the task. The teacher could presumably use Voicethread for relatively simple tasks or could make the interaction more complex so this would have to be judged on a case by case basis. However, the nature of Voicethread is more interactive and engages more skills (listening, speaking, and potentially reading and writing though these seem admittedly used in a less complex way) than something like Youtube which only engages listening. In other words, the tool itself integrates different skill sets and is inherently more complex than other tools which, according to Robinson, would make it more effective or at least generate more uptake and ask the students to produce more complex speech.

Language Podcasts

The first podcast I reviewed was: http://www.codyscuentos.com/2009/11/los-musicos-de-bremen/ from the Cody's Cuentos website. The idea for the website itself (stories in Spanish) was great to me since I love books and storytelling and the selection I listened to was a Grimm's faerie tale (also a favorite) so my own "listener motivation" was high. I liked the fact that the interface was very user friendly: choose a story, click the play button and you're rolling. The transcript for each story was provided on the same page and I had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was nice to have on the first listen and it also gives the listener a chance to see/hear alternate ways of saying something on the number of occasions where the narrator diverged slightly from the script. On the other hand, it also felt like a crutch that the listener could (and probably would) be tempted to use since it was staring you right in the face. I think I might have liked it better if there were another link to click on to get the transcript and/or a way to hide the text so that it could be a pure listening experience. Overall, I thought it was good though and I may even use it in the future for my own personal use.

The second podcast I reviewed was: http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=8189978#. I think that the podcasts in general on the eslpod site are too long and boring thus lowering learner motivation. They tend to have a script that is "acted" out in a slow pace and then the narrator reviews the vocabulary within it. As a teacher, I feel like there are other ways to get the students to review or understand the vocabulary. There is no real deep processing needed and therefore retention is unlikely. After this vocabulary review, the "actors" go through the dialog again at a faster rate. I might be tempted to use the slower version and then the faster version and play them back to back (maybe the fast version first to see what they understand and then the slower version to let them hear words they missed at a slower rate) but I would definitely skip the middle section completely. One thing I do like about the site though is that they cover a broad range of topics and some vocabulary associated with it so if you supplemented this podcast with some other material it might not be a bad way to introduce a topic.

Vocabulary website review

The first site I have reviewed is http://www.vocabulary.com/.

This site is fairly extensive and has four different sections that you can use. The first is root word lesson plans which are divided into 3 levels of difficulty. In their words: "These free interactive vocabulary puzzle and activity sessions use Latin and Greek "roots and cells" to help unlock word meanings. There are eight exercises into each session and include: Interactive Puzzle, Fill-in-the-Blanks, Definition Match, Synonym & Antonym Encounters, Crosswords, Word Finds, True/False and Word Stories."

In addition to the root word lesson plans, there are thematic puzzles (which groups vocabulary into different subject matters/topics); word lists (which contains "alphabary" lists [not sure what "alphabery" means to be honest] in different subject matters like "Animals" or "Fine-Arts"); and test preparatory/assessment (which contains random lists of words that might be found on the SAT or ACT in particular but I'm imagining could be adapted to perhaps TESOL testing).

I found the site fairly easy to navigate and also pretty extensive in terms of the types of vocabulary available. It seems like a good resource when you are working with people who have a specific interest (say sports or literature) and you want to teach them vocabulary that deals with that interest. There are also business terms and so it could be used as a vocabulary resource for an ESP class.

A couple of negatives though are that this website doesn't seem geared specifically for ESL learners and is more general in nature. There also aren't any real opportunities for deep processing or making concordances. In short, it's a good site for general vocabulary use, but you would have to do some planning yourself on how best to introduce the vocabulary and/or use it in a class. It could simply be a website you give to students as a resource for their own personal use and outside study.

My Teaching Portfolio Site

This is my teaching portfolio site: http://tinyurl.com/yh8d6hw