Grammar Tools in Communicative Language Teaching

I am taking a class at the University of North Dakota that asked us to do an action research project. Part of that project is to share our research and finding with other teachers. So, being the Flipped Learning teacher that I am, I created a video.

The video overviews the problem, my interventions, and the results that I saw. If you are interested in some tools that will help you teach English Grammar and you use the Communicative Language Teaching approach, you may find this helpful.

 

If you have any comments or questions about this research, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks!

Stories One Word at a Time

I know that I usually post about Mathematics Education, but I am getting a Masters Degree in Education with an emphasis on English Language Learners. I also teach a free English Conversation Class at my church once a week. This class has a 60 minute lesson and then a 30 minute game. Last week I took a game that I learned from my Drama Students (oh year, my wife and I also run the Drama program at my school).

The students sat in a circle and told a story one word at a time. One of the teachers wrote the story on the board so everyone could see it. The story didn't make much sense. It started off with one of the teachers sleeping and then her bike was flying and then a plane flew between football goal posts, etc. It was all over the place. One aspect of this game that I really enjoyed was that it required students to think about grammar and word choice. We had to corrected the grammar as we went and have short discussions about what is correct and why and it was a great way to emphasis basic grammar including articles, which my students struggle with. My students were initially taught English in a very structured setting with worksheets, this was a very open activity which stretches their abilities.

If you have an ESL class, I would encourage you to try a game like this.

English Conversation Lesson #4 - Picture Conversations

I was so happy with my lesson last night!! The best part about the lesson is that each student was speaking English for about 45 minutes straight! The topic was on "Helping."

Warm Up: "Do a good turn daily"
I wanted them to discuss with their partner a time when they helped someone recently. I intended for them to turn to their partner and start talking, but I found that they wanted to start the conversation with a question and the students had a hard time formulating that question. Even I had a bit of a struggle to find the wording. This is what I came up with on the spot. It isn't the best, but it worked: "When did you help someone recently?"

After discussing for a few minutes, I asked if there were any questions. For example, things that they wanted to say, but couldn't. I got a few questions about how to say "summer homework." I could have spent more time here and talked to each of the eight students about the good turn they did, but I wanted to move on to the lesson.

Lesson: Picture Stories
I prepared about a dozen clip art pictures of helping that had two people (either one helping the other, or two people working together). I found the pictures from the Microsoft Office Image Search and a Google Image Search.

I introduced the task by showing all the students the dozen pictures about helping. I then explaining that they would talk about:
1) What is happening in the picture?
2) What happened before the picture?
3) What happened after the picture?
4) Write a dialog between the two people.

I then went to each pair, starting with the lowest in ability, working my way (discretely) around the room to the pairs that are higher in ability, and let them choose the picture that they wanted. I believe that choice in education is powerful.

I then asked them to talk with their partner about the first question: "What is happening in the picture?" I then gave them a few seconds to start their conversations and I circled the room helping students. After a few minutes I asked them to talk about the second and third questions. I again circled the room helping each pair.

I loved that every group took some artistic liberty with the picture. For example one group with the picture of two people planting a tree, decided that it was the anniversary of their town and these people are going to plant lots of trees so during cherry blossom season everyone would come to see these trees and it would make their town famous. Another group who had a picture of a daughter helping a mother with cookies decided that the mother's mother in law was coming to visit.

After the groups had discussed the three questions above and created a context and story with their pictures. I then challenged them to write down a dialog between the two people. The lower ability groups wrote some very simple dialogs and the more advanced groups wrote some more complicated dialogs. It was great.

Conclusion:
Again, I loved that they were talking in English and discussing for about 80% of the class. There was also a lot of critical thinking that was required and they did a great job with it! I am so happy with how this lesson went.

English Conversation - Lesson #3 - Questions about Work

My third lesson went much better than my second. My class was much smaller this time which facilitated more student to teacher conversations. I also made sure that my lesson was scalable for the abilities of the students.

The topic of the lesson was work and jobs.

Questions:
I started out by asking the students as a whole class what questions they ask about someones job here are some that I remember:
- What is your job?
- Who do you work for?
- Where do you work?
- How long will you work?
- When do you work?
- How often do you work?

I added:
- Why did you choose your job?
- How long does it take to get to work?

I was surprised that my students quickly moved to asking who/what/where/when/why questions. I wasn't expecting this. They were very good at generating questions.

Answers:
I then had the class break into partners and we did some Think/Pair/Share. I would have partners ask a question like: "What is (or was) your job?" Then after a few minutes I went around the room and asked each student about their job. And then we moved to another question.

I frequently paused and answered questions and corrected English.

It was a good lesson.

Second English Lesson - Too Abstract

My confidence was boosted by my first lesson that went well because my students were much better than I had prepared. Prior to my lesson I decided on a new goal for teaching this course: "Try something new every lesson." I think I will stick with this goal, but probably not a drastic as I was for this second lesson.

The topic for my second lesson was on friendships and forgiveness. I decided on having them draw pictures on that topic and then discuss as a class. I had them sit in a circle around a few folding tables. I just wanted to do something very different from the week before.

Instead of having 5 students, I had about 13 and the abilities were very different. This week the majority of my students were definitely "beginning" students and I wasn't prepared to modify the task to fit lower ability students. My launch of the task was horrible. They all looked at me confused. One student commented that friendship and forgiveness are very abstract, so it is hard to draw a picture of them. I agreed with them. So I changed the task to draw a picture of one of their friends. We then went around the circle and talked about their friends. They were pretty embarrassed at their art abilities. The drawing task ended up being a hindrance instead of aid.

At the end of each student's explanation of their friend, I summarized and had the class repeat. I don't like repeat activities because I want to push them more to creating their own sentences. But  I also want them to talk more than listen.

I'll be less abstract and be more prepared to adapt my lessons for lower ability students.

Teaching English to ELLs

I am going to start breaking away from my math education blog posts. I am working on a masters degree from the University of North Dakota on teaching English Language Learners. I hope that this program will help me to be a better math teacher, but I am also learning about how to teach English.

I live in Japan and my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) offers free English Conversation Classes (Eikaiwa). I have taught these classes off and on since 2004. I have decided to return for me to practice teaching English and to serve the amazing people in my community.

I am teaching the beginning class and my first week I prepared a very pair conversation oriented lesson. The topic was families. For my records here is the flow of the lesson:

1) I asked the question: "Why do you want to learn English?"
This is the first question I always ask a new (to me) student. It is important that I know why my students are studying English. The common responses are:

• To watch American movies without subtitles.
• To talk to foreigners at work or family
• To use in international travel

2) I presented a family tree that I created with family relationship vocabulary. My students were all familiar with this vocabulary.

3) They were sitting in pairs, so I had them talk with their partner about their mothers. I then ask each partner to tell me about their partner's mother. I also asked about their oldest child.

4) We concluded with having partners discuss why families are important.

The lesson went very well! I walked away feeling like I wasn't teaching a beginning class, I was teaching an intermediate class. Which was my downfall for my second lesson.