Two instant dictionaries for EFL students

Here are two quick ways how to help your students get the meaning of an unknown word provided they have a personal PC.

I have mentioned Lingro before and it is worth mentioning it again. You have 2 options for using Lingro.

Either you just go to the Lingro website and paste the address of the webpage in the address box, then Lingro will open this page where each word will be clickable and word explanations will be displayed. Or you can install Lingro as an add-in to Firefox browser and have it at your disposal on any webpage you visit.
It is extremely useful to older students who can understand the meaning of a word by reading its definition, not only by translating it into their mother tongue. A superb way of one's vocabulary development.

Another possibility is to add an extension Dictionary Bubble to your Chrome browser and be able to double-click ANY word on the page you have opened. The application will show you the definition of the word and also its synonyms. There is a transcript and an audio pronunciation available for each word.

Students won't have to look for any other dictionary (and they tend to be a bit lazy, don't they?) and they won't have to make excuses for not understanding the difficult words.

How to reinforce student vocabulary skills

This school year I am determined to think more carefully about the ways how I teach vocabulary to my students, as this is one of their weakest skills. The results of the state exams regularly show that the lack of sufficient knowledge of vocabulary leads to making lots of mistakes and getting lower scores.

One of the most efficient ways to reinforce students' vocabulary skills is to use videos.

Below is a great video showing a method of building students' vocabulary by using special word cards. The video is taken from Teaching Channel which is a fantastic site for teacher professional development.




The next is a video which explains the most common mistakes learners make. The presenter on the video is a teacher but not the one standing in front of the classroom, so perhaps they will listen more carefully?
(I have removed the video as it was really slowing down my site but you can click on the link.)
The Most Common Mistakes in English

Another helpful video deals with the most common pronunciation mistakes. The humorous way of talking and the presenter's personality may appeal to the students and make them remember the most important points.
79 Common Mispronunciations


Besides videos, there is another simple way to learn the new words, i.e. flashcards.
There are numerous sites for creating interactive flashcards. The latest I have tried and used with my students is ExamTime flashcard builder. Below you can see a flashcard set Clothes: materials. Students learn at home, at their own pace returning to the hardest words until they have been memorized.




More resources:
Edutopia have published a great article giving 11 tips on teaching vocabulary.
On Edudemic you can find another great article with 4 activities to teach vocabulary.
Learn English is a marvellous website for learning vocabulary. Each topic comprises some theory and online practice.
The article Presenting Vocabulary published on iTDi.pro website gives fantastic practical suggestions on teaching vocabulary.
Finally, read the post about 4 online vocabulary resources on WizIQ website.

Some ideas from the OUP conference

Today I attended ELT conference Motivating and Inspiring Teenage Classroom organised by the Oxford University Press and Dace Miska as its representative in Latvia, and the British Council Latvia. The speakers were brilliant Ben Wetz (OUP author), Martyn Clarke (OUP teacher trainer) and Joanna Gore (BC Barcelona).

Below I have listed a few ideas I jotted down while listening to the speakers (and I regret I did not write down more). The activities can be used in any lesson and they should work with all teenagers. Even though I knew some of the activities before, I realised this blog is a perfect place where to save and keep them because so often notes get lost and good ideas are forgotten. This post is basically a reminder to myself and anyone else who happens to read this.


1. Listen and react.
Revision of vocabulary. The teacher prepares a list of words and reads them one by one. Students have to touch their mouth if the word is food, pat their heads if the word is furniture, mime the action if the word is a verb, cough politely if the word is an adjective. The teacher can pick the word categories depending on the lesson theme. Fun is guaranteed!


2. Sentence drills.
The teacher prepares and reads aloud sentences with various language structures taught at the lesson. Students repeat the sentence if it is true about themselves but keep quiet if not, e.g. I love onions, I ride a bike, I am happy, I am scared of snakes, I enjoy skating etc.
The sentences can contain various verb tenses. A hilarious example by Ben Wetz:

Teacher: I've been to the zoo. (Students repeat it.)
Teacher: They've asked me to stay. (Laughter in any case, repeat or not repeat.)


3. Memory test.
Oldie but goodie. The teacher writes the words (taught at the lesson or before) on the board and wipes them away one by one asking the students to name the missing word. This activity can be easily done onscreen (using, for example, PowerPoint) or on the interactive whiteboard.
For creating this type of activities digitally, possibly the best online tool is Textivate.


4. Revision with songs.
Oldie but goodie. Students listen to the song, e.g. Why does it always rain on me? by Travis. They identify present simple, present continuous, present perfect, past simple verb forms, either by listening or by reading the lyrics.


5. Chinese whispers - a variation.
The class is divided into 2 teams. The teacher gives a slip of paper with a phrase or a sentence to the first student in each team. This student translates the sentence into his mother tongue and whispers it to the next student. The student translates the sentence back to English and whispers it to the student behind who in turn translates it to his mother tongue again, and so it goes on until the final sentence is said aloud. Then the first and the final sentences are compared and the differences are analysed.


6. Nonsense words by Martyn Clarke.
The teacher writes the sentence on the board and asks the students what they think the underlined word means.

I accidentally dropped the plunket on the floor, and it broke. The drapse ran everywhere.

Students try to guess what the nonsense words could mean, e.g. glass, vase, bowl, water, juice etc. The teacher can make a longer story including some nonsense words to make the students think about the importance of context.
 

7.  30 second speaking.
The students choose a letter of the alphabet. They are asked to name some words beginning with this letter. The teacher writes the words on the board. Then a student is invited to pick one word and speak about it for 30 seconds. Another student picks a different word and does the same.


8. Assessment of speaking by Joanna Gore.
The teacher shows the assessment chart to the students and explains how their speaking is going to be evaluated at the lesson.
0 points - the students uses only his mother tongue.
1-2 points - the students uses his mother tongue but also says a few words in English.
3-4 points - the student says some phrases in English.
5-6 points - the student says some sentences in English, no mother tongue.
7-8 points - the student communicates ideas in simple sentences.
9-10 points - the student communicates coherent ideas in longer, well-structured sentences.

Using pictures in language classes

Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, a phrase attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte although other sources say it has originated in ancient China. Be as it may, teachers use pictures in the classroom very often and with good reason. 

Pictures stimulate thinking, encourage creativity, boost learners' confidence, appeal to visual students.

Take for instance pictures of babies. The internet abounds in them, and you can find numerous images having their own story behind. Here I made a collage of extremely eloquent baby pictures. These images may be used for speaking about human emotions. Students would find it easier to identify themselves with a baby rather than an adult, recognizing familiar emotions easily.
Students can write a caption for each picture or they can simply name emotions/ feelings displayed by a baby in each picture.

Another win-win object in pictures perfect for speaking practice is an animal. As popular as the pictures of babies, and possibly even more favoured, are images of different animals caught in various situations. Animal "faces" are no less expressive than human faces. 

Students can devise a story based on the moment caught in the picture, or they can combine several pictures to use in one story. They can write an allegory where animals represent humans. Again, the pictures are fantastic for describing emotions, feelings, attitude.

 More resources:

Excellent ideas and tips on The eltpics ideas site for teachers Take a photo and... 
Picture This: 5 Unique Ways to Practice Grammar Using Pictures 
Picture Projects for Visual Learners
On Twitter follow the hashtag #eltpics.

Webquest: Festivals and Holidays

Image by OLD SKOOL Cora

A few days ago I did an activity with my students which has been a little disregarded lately - the webquest.

I remember at the dawn of using computers for learning, webquests were rather popular possibly because other web activities had not been "invented" yet. Webquests meant students could get access to the computers and have a jolly time online, especially because computers were rare in their homes.

A webquest is a creative and dynamic activity requiring some web search skills. Students usually like webquests because they get a chance to spend a lesson in the computer room (if it is not homework) and do what most of them like - browse the web.

My 16 year old students had just studied the topic of festivals and traditions and what seemed to me a logical follow-up was their independent work on summing up the basic info about the most popular holidays. We did the activity in the computer lab and the hardest part was that the students did not have any links provided but had to find the information relying only on their own search skills.
The chart they had to fill in asked for the date and place of the original holiday, traditional food, drinks and activities.

Take a look at one of the charts completed by the student.
 

Here is the handout. You may print or download it. If you feel like removing some of the festivals I have included in the chart or add your own, go ahead.

All in all, it was a productive and win-win classroom activity.

#ELTBITES Challenge

Richard Gresswell, the @inglishteacher, has invited the teachers to share their bite-size lesson activities. The activity should be done with minimal resources, just some paper and a pen. Great idea and useful at that!

Here is mine, adaptable to any age.

Spy Adam!

The aim of the activity – to practise describing someone’s daily activities.

1. Divide the students into 3 groups.  Try to put an equal number of students in each group.

Each student in the group has to describe Adam’s (pick whatever name you prefer) activities for a certain period of the day. Tell the first group the time – from 6am till midday, the second group – from midday till 6pm, the 3rd group – from 6pm till midnight. If you wish to include the night, stretch the period.

2. At the beginning of the lesson read an introductory paragraph about Adam. Give Adam’s background, mention some peculiar features, e.g. Adam is afraid of the dark, he is scared of bees, he hates hamsters, he plays the flute, he knows Swahili, etc. Students have to include this feature in their stories. Encourage them to make up funny situations and strange incidents.

3. Remix groups - pick one student from each group and put them together in new groups of three. Students read their stories to the other group members and they decide if they have got a realistic story.

4. At the end of the lesson, the teacher decides which story has been the most coherent or captivating.

Looking forward to new ideas from other teachers and Richard himself.

Creating online vocabulary activities

I have prepared this post with regard to the teacher training session when I am going to consult the teachers on creating online vocabulary activities for students to be used either in class or independently, at home.

There was time when only Hot Potatoes was available for creating interactive quizzes and it was a really cool program back then. Now we can choose from a vast variety of intelligent and user-friendly online tools and applications without the necessity of downloading the program.

One of my all-time favourite sites is Kubbu which lets the teacher create attractive interactive quizzes though you have to spend some time on it. There are different formats you can choose from, like Crossword, Match, Divide, Slider, Composer. Take a look at the samples (on the main page) to see what they look like.

Check out the activities I have created and used with my students.

Newspaper vocabulary for advanced students - multiple choice exercise to match the word with its synonym

Food vocabulary for elementary students - drag and drop exercise to sort the food nouns

Another website I have used for creating vocabulary lists is Wordstash which is a great site for learning vocabulary and in addition it makes some easy online activities from your word lists.

Teachers can choose from the ready-made lists or create their own which I did here. I prepared a short list of travel words (synonyms) which my intermediate students had problems to distinguish and made them practice until they knew the difference. Students can either first study the words in Learning Mode or go straight to Practice Mode and then play some easy online games with the words from the list.

My latest discovery is Word Dynamo website which is the youngest child of the Dictionary.com parent site, still in Beta.

I took to it at once because it looks cool and it does everything itself, you only have to provide a list of words. The presence of the dictionary ensures you have a choice of definitions at hand, you just have to pick the one that suits your needs. The choice of activities include Match, Crossword, Listen, Write and Flashcards for learning the word definition and pronunciation.

Have a look at the word list Travel synonyms which I made for the same class as above to check out how this site works.

The next website I plan to explore is Educaplay which lets you create various multimedia activities which can be placed on e-learning platforms, eg. Moodle. A pity its blog is in Spanish, so for me there are two options - either I don't read it or learn Spanish :-)

Updated on 02.10.2011.
I tried creating activities on the site but most things on it are in Spanish including the instructions for students, so I have to drop the idea of using it. I also found the instructions for making activities confusing even though they were in English. Bad luck!
                                

I also suggest you to visit Random Idea English website which publishes great grammar and vocabulary online and printable exercises to use with your students of upper-intermediate or advanced level.
                     

What to do with words that elude you

This may sound flimsy to a native speaker but there are words in English which do not stick around no matter how hard you try memorizing them.

Let me give you an example. Here are a couple of words which took years to settle down in my memory - procrastinate and serendipity.
Procrastinate has always sounded ominous and evil to me and for a long while my brain could not accept its simple and mundane meaning. I could not believe it is such an insipid word.

Serendipity is a word which up to now has not found a verbal equivalent in my native language. Well, even the English cannot define it properly, they need to use a sentence to reveal the essence of this cunning word. Serendipity, for me, is a whole paragraph, not a word.
There are words which sound plain ludicrous like pundit, and again I took pains to learn its meaning but I still find it funny, probably because it reminds a Latvian word pundurītis which means a dwarf, gnome.
Guru is not much better though.

Students encounter the same problems. Difficult words (gosh, most of them are difficult!) are a challenge to everyone and a perpetual cause of failed tests and bad marks.

Here is a method I used with my 16 year old students last year. They approved of it and we decided to use it next year again.
We picked the most difficult words that we came across at the lessons and placed them in certain spots around the classroom. Thus we placed according to on the green plant that grows in the front right corner of the classroom. We put the word diligent on the window-sill. We sat the word consequently on the OHP and every time I asked them the word (or they chose to use it) they would look up at the ceiling and remember it. Surprisingly, it was great fun and it helped too.
One guy was especially good at this game. He proved to me and his classmates that he could recall most of the complicated words correctly because he had placed them all around the room and he just had to take a look at the spot and the word would come to him.
This should work perfectly for visual learners but I am not so sure about the others.

How do you deal with difficult words?

Teaching food vocabulary with artist drawn recipes: They Draw And Cook

Since I first came across the website They draw and cook, I have often visited it and always found new and awesome picture recipes drawn by different artists from all parts of the world - India, USA, Brazil, Russia, Spain, France, Mexico and many more.

Not only are the recipes beautifully presented and easy to follow (in case you are ready to cook some new dish) but they can also be effectively used in teaching food vocabulary serving as attractive flashcards.

Take, for instance, the recipe Vegetable Stock by Nate Padavick.

One of the comments reads as follows:
Great color palette, nice 'hand-stamped' texture, appealing shapes, and a reminder to compost (nice touch).

The recipe contains the names of vegetables - onion, mushroom, carrot, turnip, tomato, squash, celery, asparagus, leek, parsley etc.
There are a few cooking verbs - chop, boil, simmer, strain etc.

Students learn the vocabulary in a fun way and they can also try out the recipe at home which is a great added value to the lesson. In addition, they can get inspired to draw their own recipe and share it with their classmates!

The site hosts a fantastic variety of recipes and you can search for a specific food or dish name. I can only imagine what a treasure this site must be to the teachers of cooking classes!

More brilliant recipes (click to zoom)

If you love great design and marvellous illustration, you will love the site and use it to your advantage as a teacher.

City vocabulary mindmapped with BUBBL

I had to find an attractive way to present city vocabulary to my younger students and I remembered bubbl which I had used a while ago, then forgotten. I had not been particularly excited about it and I thought it was rather limited regarding the formatting of the mind map. I still think so. And I am disappointed that it loses its elasticity when it is embedded. But it serves well for showing the colourful word clusters on the big screen.

I have also used it with my older students and I recall they really enjoyed playing with the tool because once they put something in it, it came alive in front of their eyes. They used to drag the bubbles around and watch them spring back, and I assume it was just another toy for them. Which it certainly is.

Here is what I made for my lesson.
Link to the mind map

Mini-books for everyone

Mini-books are popular not only among younger schoolchildren but they are also fun for older kids. Even adults make scrapbooks or family albums. Various kinds of mini-books include pocket books, envelope books, accordion books, flip books, origami books, pop-up books and many others.

Until recently I had not paid particular attention to this kind of activity but having read several great articles and tutorials, I realised that the process of making a mini-book may result in a busy and active lesson.

Here is a mini-book I made for 12-13 year old students which has to be written, coloured and then folded into a booklet.

Download this printable from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45227129/Christmas-Mini-book







If you are not familiar with the technique, watch this video which will show you how to prepare and fold the mini-book. You can use any paper to make it but for kids it would be better to use thinner paper which will fold more easily and the booklet will look neater. You can use coloured paper too but then the pictures won't look so good. This Christmas mini-book looks best on white paper coloured green, red, blue and gold.

Here is a fantastic collection of resources on all kinds of mini-books with tutorials, links and samples. You can download instructions how to fold the mini-books.
http://stamphenge.wordpress.com/minibooks/

Save the Words

I came across a truly fascinating site called Save The Words supported by Oxford Dictionaries (which is not new at all, as I found out later). You need Flash Player to view the site.

Its design is colourful and eye-catching, the background is a patchwork of English words which are no longer in active use and may soon be extinct. If you click the word, the site provides its meaning and gives an example of its usage.

The funniest part is you can adopt a word and get the certificate of adoption! You are asked to use the word as frequently as possible thus helping it return into active vocabulary.

The cause of the site is noble but dubious regarding its impact on saving the dying words. Yet it is a real gem for advanced students who are interested in lexicology. Might be used in classes as a fun activity.

http://www.savethewords.org

Lingro - the coolest dictionary

Recently I discovered this amazing translation technology Lingro which the creators call a dictionary.

At first glance it does not look like a dictionary because it is more than a dictionary! You can paste the URL of a website and then click on any word - Lingo will give you the translation. It translates words from / into 11 languages! And what's more - it will save the words that were translated for you in your history (to save the list you have to register). You can go back later to review the words and learn them. What an easy way to get the meaning of an unknown word instantly!
Lingro does it with a simple text file too! Just upload the file and start translating!

If you think you'd like to use Lingro services constantly, you can download the browser plugin (it offers Firefox extension) and you will be able to translate ANY word on ANY page you are viewing.

Great tool for learners of languages!

A new tool KUBBU

I just found an amazing and extremely practical tool for making online activities, exercises, quizzes, puzzles etc called KUBBU - a strange name (meaning nothing) but don't be put off by it.
It is free, you only have to register. I tried it out and was delighted. Something new at last!

Follow this link to see what you can create with this tool - 
http://www.kubbu.com/a1/2498_jobs_and_professions