reggae

lift your spirit

we are electric

a tune to get everybody electric

WATCHING A VIDEO...NOT ONLY ENTERTAINMENT by Luis Carlos Adàn

When the time comes to watch a video in the English class, many teachers merely think about entertaining students and probably catch up with some undone work. But, obviously, this is not really helping your students to learn or practice the use of the language. Here are some tips to keep in mind when planning an activity that involves a video or movie in your class.

1. Think of introducing a context or setting a mood before actually watching the film. Going straight to watching the film may not get students ready for what you have planned and might have you spend more time presenting the objective of the activity.

_________________________________________________________

2. Have while-watching activities planned. Just letting the film go by, and having students do a workshop later is not enough in the English class. If you only wait for the end of the film to do something with it you can be wasting valuable time. Try to pause the film in specific chapters or scenes and ask your students questions or prepare a while-watching hand-out.

_________________________________________________________

3. You do not need to watch an entire movie. Watching the whole thing is ok, but sometimes time is not enough. You can just focus on some parts and work them out as much as possible.

_________________________________________________________

4. Have post-watching activities planned. Closing the activity with some extension activities helps students to wrap up everything studied in the lesson. You can just take some of the topics from the actitiviy and have students research or give some personal comments about it.

_________________________________________________________

So, as you can see, these are only some tips for useful use of audio-visuals in the English, or language classroom.

*Please add at least four (4) more tips you think are relevant and interesting, and give an example of how to use them with an specific movie or piece of material.

STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING SPEAKING SKILLS

Students often think that the ability to speak a language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a crucial part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach students speaking strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using language to talk about language -- that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it. These instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use speaking to learn.

1. Using minimal responses

Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for beginners.
Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.

2. Recognizing scripts

Some communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.
Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.

3. Using language to talk about language

Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participants' language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.
By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.

Taken from: http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/speaking/stratspeak.htm

After having read this information, please share an experience you have had as a teacher or student in which applying any of these strategies was or could have been very helpful.

Later, please think of possible examples of language that can be used for each of the strategies.

1. Minimal responses

2. typical social scripts

3. clarification phrases

EIGHT STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING READING AND WRITING

In addition to selecting texts and compiling resources, a second part of planning the reading and writing activities of a tutorial session involves choosing an instructional strategy or approach.

Four Reading Strategies

Reading Aloud: Here, the teacher or tutor reads a text out loud to students. This allows tutors to model reading, engage students in a text that may be too difficult for them to read on their own, and let students sit back and enjoy the story.

Shared Reading: In shared reading, tutors and children read together, thus allowing students to actively participate and support one another in the process. Tutors point to text as they read to build word recognition. And tutors also read slowly to “build a sense of story.”

Guided Reading: Guided reading prepares tutees with strategies that allow for more independent reading. In guided reading, tutors create purposeful lessons that extend beyond the story. These lessons challenge tutees in a number of areas: vocabulary building, character comparisons, story structure comparisons, relating text to personal experience, and so on. The goal is to provide tutees with strategies that they can repeat independently.

Independent Reading: Even those who support transactional definitions of literacy typically also engage students in independent reading since successful independent reading strategies will help them succeed in school. Students read by themselves or with partners, choose their own texts, and employ strategies that they’ve learned through other reading activities.

---

Four Writing Strategies

Shared Writing: In shared writing, tutors and children compose texts together — often with the tutor writing the text down. The tutor-as-scribe can write words that challenge children just beyond their existing familiarity with words. This instructional approach is commonly used with children who are just learning how to write, but the approach is also valuable when introducing new words and new textual structures to older children. As with shared reading, shared writing lets tutors model writing lessons for tutees to imitate later.

Interactive Writing: This approach increases the active participation of tutees in the actual writing. Tutors again serve as models and supports, but this time tutees practice writing — practicing spelling, connecting sounds with letters, understanding how words work with one another, etc.

Guided Writing or Writing Workshop: With tutees increasingly gaining familiarity with writing, they can then be guided through more specific lessons. In this approach, they learn strategies that they can later use independently. This approach allows tutees more freedom to explore their imaginative ideas and their opinions.

Independent Writing: Finally, independent writing offers tutees opportunities to combine and practice the strategies learned in previously more supportive settings. Given their repertoire of writing strategies, tutees need to decide which textual organizations, which words, and which tones of voice are more appropriate to a given assignment.

Taken from

http://communityconnection.osu.edu/training/tutoring/strategies.htm

After you have read these strategies, decide Which Reading/Writing Strategy to Use of course, depends on the goals of your class session.

Consider the following questions:

• Do my students require more support or more independence in this session?

• Which strategies have my students responded to most favorably in the past?

• Do some strategies complement the chosen text more than others? For example, “reading aloud” may be more appropriate than “guided reading” when teaching a poem that imitates jazz rhythms.
  

How to Teach a Child to Read with Games Teaching Reading with Children's Rhymes

The ability to read is the key to educational achievement. Without a basic foundation in literacy, children cannot gain access to a rich and diverse curriculum. Poor literacy limits opportunities not only at school, but throughout life, both economically and in terms of wider enjoyment and appreciation of the written word.

This is an usefull example for teachers when they need to teach reading to their students, especially for children between 4 and 7 years.

After you have watched this video, please give a comment on what you think about it, and please submit another creative example of how to use rhymes to teach reading. Your example can be intended to be used not only for children but also for teens or adults.