EFL Carnival of Lessons

Karenne Sylvester has just published the latest EFL blog carnival, dedicated to lesson plans. She's put the whole thing in a great looking presentation on her blog, Kalinago English.

I just had a look at them all (same order of sequence as presented) and took short notes on who did what:

• Sabrina De Vita - reviews the Present Simple and Present Continuous with a movie segment
  
• Mike Harrison - has students lipreading from a video, a new and interesting approach
  
• Nightwalker - is teaching students how to brainstorm most effectively
  
• Johanna Stirling - created a spelling code to crack / spelling puzzle to solve
  
• Shelly Terrell - presents Tagul, a tagcloud builder, and vocabulary resources to work with
  
• Anne Hodgson - uses 2 videos for business English (writing reports, small talk)
  
• Jessie Voigts - a collection of icebreaker ideas for YL and teens
  
• Larry Ferlazzo - does a class survey with activities about sleeping enough
  
• Mr. Foteah - is awarding medals for words
  
• Nick Jaworski - uses a video his students find funny to lead into creative writing
  
• Diana Diodati Konrad - is setting up the framework for negotiating in business Engl.
  
• Jeremy Day - is reflecting on how and how not to teach ESP
  
• Vicki Hollett - her dictation is "similar but different" to the listening comprehension
  
• Arjana Blazic - turns texts into Hotpotatoes gapfills, also has students writing
  
• Natasa Bozic Grojic - has nine roles to play in an argument over children using mobiles
  
• Barbara Sakamoto - uses the "sight barrier" information gap technique and realia with pre-intermediate adult learners
  
• Janet Bianchini - explores how to teach ppt from her own learning experience
  
• Eva Buyuksimkesyan - discusses the pros and cons of playing games in class
  

What a wealth of lessons! All the links here.

Özge Karaoğlu's Blog

Many members of MELTA (our Munich English Language Teachers Association, which this blog "belongs" to) are getting more and more interested in teaching young learners. Next to Business English, YL seem to be our main target group.

Now, if any of you YL teachers don't know her yet, there's no time like the present to meet Özge Karaoğlu, a kindergarten teacher in Istanbul whose blog ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org is a trove of technical innovations for teaching YL. She won the MEDEA Award for Creativity and Innovation 2009 for Daisy and Drago, a series of animated films her kindergarten pupils made. She had them develop and draw the story, and speak the texts and record their voices, so it is absolutely do-it-yourself, using high tech to create something absolutely delightful and original. It's the second feature of the MEDEA Showreel, following right after the Overall Award Winner 2009 (from 2:23):




She guest-blogged on this project on Ken Wilson's great blog, and I'd like to send you all to her post there. She wrote:

I do enjoy being a kindergarten teacher; it makes me feel I am important for someone else and it is very rewarding. Children inspire me every day. You can do as many projects as you can do with older kids. This amazes you and others more, because they are so young and enthusiastic and can do great things in spite of their limited world, with their limited language. This is the story of how we filmed and fulfilled our dreams.

Also: Visit the Daisy and Drago wiki, which contains information on the book Özge wrote and based the project on, and the making of!

Young Learners: Unravelling how children become bilingual so easily

We recently had an enquiry on this blog from Kira into how to teach children English. There is some GOOD news and some BAD news. First the GOOD news: Babies being raised bilingually by simply speaking to them in two languages can learn two languages in the time it takes to learn one. The brain tunes out the sounds that don't fit. More still, being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible:

"The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies."

The BAD news? "While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty." Meh.

Oops, but this is "Ask Auntie Web", right? So here is some more GOOD news: You can acheive similar success teaching elementary school children and even adults (!) by using "Motherese", the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies - and a computer:

"Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl."

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily, by Lauran Neergard (AP) 20 July 2009.

Thank you to Brooke Shanley-Hurtado (spkspanglish), who teaches elementary and middle school bilingual classes in Chicago, for this tip! Her blog SpkSpanglish is here.