If you ever find yourself planning a lesson, looking up and realizing it’s already midnight, Toggl might be the tool for you. Toggl is a free time-tracking tool which you can use on the web, as a desktop widget, or on your phone. Keep track of the time you spent prepping or grading for each class, so you know where the time went! Use Toggl’s report features to see bar or pie charts of how your time was spent in the week. Just like a budget, Toggl might help you see where you are spending your time and help you improve your time management overall.
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This can be used as an ongoing activity throughout the semester. It incorporates a simple technique that motivated students can practice on their own to improve their speaking by recording their words and then creating their own transcripts. Evernote is used in order to help students more easily organize their audio recordings, as opposed to students having a large collection of untitled recordings on their phones. It is also used as the recording tool itself.
Preparation
A. Prepare appropriate questions for student use which will elicit a short 20-60 second response. These could be questions related to student life on topics where students can readily express their opinions. Example questions: What is the best way to improve your speaking? What are some things you like best about the place where you live? B. Students should be asked to download the free Evernote app onto their mobile devices before class. Introducing Evernote to the class There are two basic methods for recording audio in Evernote: I. Create a note first, then add audio.
II. Record immediately, then title the note (Android only)
An example of a recording I created in the Evernote app on my Android mobile phone is here.
Ask your students to each create a folder for their class recording within the Evernote app. This is where they will keep all of their notes and recordings. For organization, the best practice would be to create a new note for each recording and title it with the date and a descriptive title. Students are now ready to begin their tasks. Procedures 1. Put the students in pairs and distribute the questions. 2. Each student will record their audio onto their own phone. Partner A can be responsible for operating Partner B’s phone while he/she talks, and vice versa. Students should record a response that is no longer than a minute. 3. For homework, students first should transcribe their audio exactly, then go back and make any corrections in a different color. The transcript should show both the original recording and the corrections. If students have Evernote installed on their computers, it may be efficient for the student to transcribe the audio directly in the note which contains the recording. This note can be printed out for submission. 4. Additionally, students should write a brief, one paragraph reflection on what they learned from the task. This raises the students’ awareness of their speaking habits, and may also help students reflect on any personal progress. Related note Meet Evernote, your new best friend This activity uses Iconosquare.com (formerly Statigram), a website which can be used to search Instagram. Students will search hashtags for emotion adjectives and discuss the results.
Procedures 1. Assign a common adjective to each discussion pair. Examples: happy, sad, excited, amazing 2. Students use Iconosquare to search Instagram. As an example, type the word "happy" and then click the tag icon. The live results should look similar to the following: 3. Using these results, have students work in pairs to discuss whether the results are what they expected to find. Is there any common thread between the photos?
4. Students present their conclusions to the class. This step is important as it gives students motivation to do the task well. Note of caution There is no way to block any explicit content that could come up in the search results. In this activity, students caption digital photos of their family traditions in order to practice descriptive writing and to improve presentation skills.
Procedures 1. Ask students to find a photo which can be used to show one their family or cultural traditions. In class in pairs, have students share with one partner about their photos. This will serve as brainstorming for captions. 2. Ask students to spend some time in class writing short captions. 3. As homework, students should import their photos into PowerPoint and create captions using the drawing tools. Alternately, Mac users can use Preview’s drawing tools. 4. Students will present their work to the whole class by projecting their captioned photos and giving a brief oral presentation. Below is an example: Notes
Some students may lack the technological knowledge to complete this assignment. This may require extensive instructor support. Additionally, food and holiday related vocabulary is needed.
This activity has students searching Google News on their mobile browsers to generate ad hoc concordance lines for the purpose of discovering collocations.
Procedures
1. After reading an article or reading from the textbook, ask the class as a whole to decide on key vocabulary words. 2. Put students into small groups. Assign 2-3 key words to each group. Some example words might be: population, income, labor. (Note: income and labor are Academic Word List [AWL] words) 3. Each student group uses Google on their devices to search for each word, looking at Google’s “news” results. Ask students not to use newspaper headlines for their concordance lines, as these often omit auxiliary verbs and are not grammatically correct. The photo below shows the results of a search for the word “income.”
This search generates an ad hoc set of concordance lines made up of the following phrases:
4. Students report their findings to the class. For "income," Ss should be able to deduce from their quick Google news search that some common collocations for "income" are:
Note Some students may struggle to find patterns which are not immediately obvious and may require additional training and support. Related posts Which words do my students need to know? Which lists do these words belong to? You’ve already used LexTutor’s VocabProfiler to identify which lists the words in an article belong to and to see the percentages of high-frequency, academic, and “off-list” words. But when an article contains many names, VocabProfiler’s statistics may show a deceptively high percentage of off-list words, making the article seem more difficult than it actually is. The Text Readability Consensus Calculator from Readability Formulas is an excellent, easy-to-use tool for discovering a text’s reading level. Simply copy-and-paste a short sample from any text, check the “Yes” box and click the blue “Check Text Readability” button. The website shows the results of tests from seven popular reading indexes, followed by a readability consensus score. Below is the readability consensus score of a short article from Reader’s Digest: Once you get a feel for which American school grade reading level matches your students’ level, this handy tool may help you integrate more authentic materials into your class!
Related posts Which lists do these words belong to? Activity: Using word clouds for pre-reading This activity, in which the whole class helps complete an online grammar quiz, can be used as a short energizer for the whole class.
Preparation
Select a quiz from ESL Blues or another grammar quiz website which is suitable for your grammar teaching point. Here is an example of a quiz on stative verbs. Procedures 1. From an internet-enabled computer connected to a projector, pull up the quiz so that it is projected for the whole class. 2. Ask the class to nominate one student as the typist who will come to the front to field answers and type them into the quiz. 3. As a whole, the class completes the quiz with students suggesting answers. Notes If lack of student participation is an issue, try dividing the class into two teams to add an element of competition. The typist then takes on the role of MC, giving each team a chance to correctly complete a quiz item before the floor is passed to the next team. Source I observed this activity in Joann Anderson’s intermediate grammar class at Hope University in Fullerton, CA in Spring 2013. You know the situation: an English language learner is speaking to a native speaker of English. The language learner asks the meaning of a particular word and the native speaker replies with a synonym that is even more obscure and difficult to understand. Are we teachers any better at this? (Hopefully, yes!) Most of us rely on our experience and intution to use high-frequency words that we believe will be more easily understood. But how sharp is your word frequency intuition? Can you adjust your words according to the level of your students? And would you be able to distinguish whether a word falls in the 3K to 5K mid-frequency band or in the 11K to 15K low-frequency band? The LexTutor Frequency Trainer shows you exactly that. Think of it as a training game to refine your frequency intuition.
To generate a new quiz, go to the bottom left corner of the LexTutor Frequency Trainer and select whether you would like to be tested on frequency statistics drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC_uk) or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Click the “Build” button and begin! Use the radial buttons to guess which frequency band the listed words belong to and then click “Check.” Re-categorize the incorrect guesses and check again. If you can get 100% in three tries, LexTutor says your intuition is excellent. If not, keep practicing! LexTutor’s VocabProfiler is a powerful tool that allows you to identify which words in a text belong to the first 1000 most frequent words of English (K1), the second 1000 (K2), and the Academic Word List (AWL). Additionally, it identifies “off-list” words, a catch-all category encompassing less frequent words, technical words, and proper nouns. To use the VocabProfiler, simply type or paste the text you wish to identify, then click the yellow submit button. For comparison, here are results from two types of articles in the New York Times. On the left is the vocabulary profile of a feature article on bookstores in Seattle; on the right, an international news story on pro-Russian demonstrations in Ukraine. Here, each word list is color coded with K1 words appearing in blue, K2 in green, AWL in yellow, and off-list in red. As you can see below, the news article on the right contains comparatively less K1 and K2 words, and more academic and off-list words. As you scroll down in the results, you will also see your text reproduced and color coded. Additionally, all of the words are categorized into their respective word lists. For teaching preparation, VocabProfiler can help you identify potential vocabulary words or whether a text may be too difficult for your students. In the classroom, a live demonstration can be used to illustrate to your students the importance of learning academic words. All in all, a very powerful tool!
If you’ve been given the freedom to design the vocabulary portion of your curriculum, you may be wondering just where to start! Certainly, a well-designed textbook should contain words which are relevant to the learning needs of your class. Additionally, published word lists such as the General Service List or the Academic Word List can help you ensure your students’ time is well-spent on words which will be useful to their situations.
Please note that the AWL does not follow immediately on from the GSL. It encompasses specialized vocabulary for academic purposes. Students who are mastering the GSL will likely wish to learn words which are useful for their workplaces or future pursuits. In order to know your students’ vocabulary level, The Vocabulary Levels Test may be useful as a placement test. Several versions are available on the internet. Related posts Which lists do these words belong to? How good is your word frequency intuition? |
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