World Oceans Day, June 8th, is a time when people all around
the world do something to show their appreciation for the world’s oceans.
We are all connected to the oceans in some way.
Did you know:
Oceans cover over 70% of the earth’s surface
Ocean plants and organisms create most of the oxygen we breathe
Oceans absorb carbon dioxide, helping to regulate our climate
Many of our medicines come from the oceans
Our oceans bring
countless benefits to our lives, and now you can bring those benefits to your
classroom!
Our freely available lesson plans give you the tools to celebrate World Oceans Day with your students. These lesson activities encourage students to develop their vocabulary, to collaborate, and to speak about current issues.
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Assessment for learning (AfL) is a catchphrase with which many
teachers may be familiar and yet may not feel confident that they know what it
means in terms of classroom practice. Here I outline the basic ideas behind it
and the kinds of classroom practices AfL may involve.
At heart, it’s what good teachers do every day:
they gather information about where learners are
in their learning, what they know and don’t know;
they help their students understand what, and
why, they are learning and what successful performance will look like;
they give feedback which helps learners ‘close
the gap’ between where they are in their learning and where they need to get
to;
they encourage learners to become more
self-regulating and reflective.
The evidence is that, done well, these practices are among
the most effective ways of improving learning and outcomes.
Assessment in this process is essentially informal, the
information teachers gather comes in many forms, for example, through classroom
dialogue, following up on unexpected answers, or recognising from puzzled looks
that the students have not understood. Tests play a part, but only if they are
used to feed directly into the teaching and learning process.
What would we expect to see in an AfL classroom?
Diagnostics. There
would beevidence of teaching and
learning that is active, with
students involved in dialogue with their teachers and classmates. This goes
beyond simple recall questions and will include seeking out students’ views
(‘what do you think….) and giving them time to think about their answers –
often with a classmate (‘pair and share’).
Clarity about learning
intentions. This requires teachers to be clear about what is to be learned,
how the lesson activities will encourage it, and where it fits in the learning
progression. They then seek to make this clear to their students by linking it
to what they have learned already and showing why it’s important. Expert
teachers will use imaginative ways of introducing the learning intentions (‘why
do you think we’re doing this?’) rather than routinely writing out the learning
objectives.
Teachers will also clarify what a successful performance
will look like, so that the learners can see the standard they need to achieve.
Teachers may do this by negotiating
with the class about what the learners think a good performance might involve
(for example: ‘what would you look for in a good oral presentation?’). Another
approach may be to exemplify the
standard by using examples of work (best as anonymous work from other
students). A teacher may give the class two pieces of work, she may then give
the class the criteria for assessing the work (no more than two or three key
criteria) and ask them, in groups, to make a judgement about their relative
quality. This also provides a vital step in being able to evaluate the quality
of their own work and become more self-regulated learners.
Giving effective feedback.Providing feedback that moves learning forward is a key, and complex, teaching skill. We know from research that feedback is hard to get right. Good feedback ‘closes the gap’ between a learner’s current performance and the standard that is to be achieved. Some of the key features in quality feedback are:
It recognises what has been done well and then
gives specific advice on what step
the learner can take next. General comments such as ‘try harder’, ‘improve your
handwriting’, or 7/10, do not provide the detail needed.
It is clear
and well-timed. The teacher gives feedback
in language the learner understands and it is given when it is most useful.
It relates
to the success criteria and focuses on the key next steps. We may sometimes
give too much feedback if we start to comment on presentational features (e.g.
spelling) when these were not part of the learning intention.
It involves action
and is achievable.
In all this, the aim of
assessment for learning is to encourage our students to increasingly think for
themselves, and have the ability and desire to regulate their own learning.
Gordon Stobartis an assessment expert that has contributed to the latest Position Paper for Oxford University Press, ‘Assessment for Learning’. Download the paper today to learn about effective feedback, close the gap between where your learners are and where they need to be, and get access to exclusive professional development events!
Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. Having worked as a secondary school teacher and an educational psychologist, he spent twenty years as a senior policy researcher. He was a founder member of the Assessment Reform Group, which has promoted assessment for learning internationally. Gordon is the lead author of our Assessment for Learning Position Paper.
Storytelling in ELT is often seen as the preserve of the young learner teacher. Telling a story with lots of repetition, noises, and action is considered far too childish for teen and adult learners. But stories are in our soul, we grew up with them, remember them fondly and can learn a lot from them, so maybe stories can be part of language lessons for older students.
Why storytelling?
The benefits of grading reading are well documented.
Students reading for pleasure at their own level not only improve their reading
skill but also their grammar
and vocabulary level. But why is so little said about Graded Listening.
When we do a listening activity in an English lesson there is always a task to
go with it. This listen and answer approach often stresses students, no wonder
then that listening is often considered by students to be the ‘hardest’ skill
to master. We rarely ask students to just listen for pleasure. We rarely say don’t
worry about it; there won’t be a ‘test’ at the end. But could that be
beneficial for students? Could it help them to improve their listening skills
and their grammar and vocabulary like grading reading does?
Case Study
I’ve been telling stories with students for about three
years but at the end of 2018, I spent three months teaching young adults in
Japan and decided to do a little experiment. At least once a week I told them a story. Sometimes
I did nothing with it, just told it at the beginning or the end of the lesson
and moved on. Sometimes we briefly discussed the story and then moved on. Sometimes
I built a lesson around the story. I told the story using actions, pictures and
sounds if needed to help with the meaning but still in an adult way. The
students enjoyed the stories, and they produced some really excellent work
based on them. When I asked them at the end of the course if they could
remember the stories, they listed them and took pleasure in retelling them to
each other.
Here is some of the feedback that I’ve been receiving from students:
‘Thanks to the storytelling lessons, I got skills for listening, imagination and retelling.’
‘This definitely helped our listening skills…. we could communicate with each other and try to express our thoughts, ideas, and so on.’
‘Those stories let me imagine the view, place, person and a lot of other stuff.’
‘I learnt many expressions, including what I’ve never used to express myself.’
‘It’s motivating to listen eagerly.’
Some activities gave me a power of understanding.’
One student even asked me if I could help her to become a storyteller
like me!
Activities
The first activity I did after each story was simply to ask
students to retell the story to each other. This helped them fill the gaps in
each other’s knowledge, developed their understanding of the story, and gave
them a chance to ask me questions. Because I had a few artistic students in my
class, I encouraged them to draw the story at this stage. Here are three other
activities that I will look at in my Webinar.
Newspapers
Ask the students to make a newspaper article for their
story. Show them a narrative newspaper story, ask about the features, how the
story is told in the newspaper, who is being interviewed etc. Then ask the students
to work in small groups to create a newspaper front page based on the story.
Newspaper storytelling activity.
Prequel or Sequel?
Ask them to write a prequel or sequel to the story. Talk
about films like Star Wars or Harry Potter. How did the story move on? Then,
ask the students to think about the story and how the characters would develop
in 5, 10, or 15 years’ time. Put them in small groups and ask them to write
their new versions of the story.
Prequel or Sequel storytelling activity.
Twitter
Get them to write a twitter feed for each of the characters.
This is a bit more complicated to set up, but it worked like a charm. First you
need to break the story down into factual components. Then, ask them to think
how each character would respond to the event and how they would update their
twitter feed. Ask them to write the Tweets and then put them in order to create
a Twitter version of the story.
Twitter storytelling activity.
The last lesson
In my last lesson with the students, I asked them to tell me
a story from Japan. I put the students into groups and gave them time to plan
and then asked them to tell me the story. Their renditions were fun,
enthusiastic and brought a tear to my eye.
I genuinely believe that listening for pleasure has a place
in language learning and storytelling can give students a chance to listen to
something that is enjoyable and understandable, and this takes the pressure off
listening.
Gareth Daviesis a writer, storyteller, teacher, and teacher trainer based in Cardiff. He has been in the ELT industry for 23 years teaching in Portugal, the UK, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Recently he has been teaching and storytelling in Japan. Since 2005, Gareth has worked closely with Oxford University Press, delivering teacher training and developing materials. Gareth is also an examiner for the new Oxford Test of English and Trinity College, London. Outside of teaching, Gareth is an author of fiction, a poet and a storyteller. His first novel “Humans, Being”, will be published by Cinnamon Press in April 2019. He is interested in developing creative writing and story-telling ideas for the classroom.
It’s very difficult to say exactly how many words there are in the English language because it depends how you count them and, of course, language is changing and growing all the time. But even at a conservative estimate, there are well over a quarter of a million distinct English words. That makes the task of teaching vocabulary to learners of English seem a rather daunting one.
Thankfully, Zipf’s Law comes to our rescue. This states
that a handful of the most frequent words in the language account for a
disproportionately large chunk of any text, either written or spoken. The top 2000
most frequent words, in particular, make up somewhere around 80% of most texts.
That makes frequency a good rule-of-thumb indicator of the words we should
probably focus on teaching first.
The Oxford 3000TM:
then and now
With this aim in mind, the Oxford 3000 word list was
first put together back in 2005. Since then, the list has been widely used by
learners, teachers, syllabus designers and materials writers to help them
choose which vocabulary is worth spending most time over. Fourteen years on,
however, it was time for an update. The new Oxford 3000 has had a thorough
revision including a new look at the criteria for inclusion and the use of new
frequency data based on a much larger and more up-to-date corpus.
Frequency vs.
relevance
Whilst frequency is the guiding principle behind choosing
which words to include on the list, it doesn’t quite work as a basis for
selection on its own. That’s in part because there are a surprising number of
words that describe basic things in the world around us and that learners would
expect to learn quite early on that actually wouldn’t qualify for a top 3000 on
frequency alone. So, words like apple
and passport, for example, probably wouldn’t
make the cut.
Thus, the new Oxford 3000 balances frequency with relevance to the average learner. As
well as how common they are, the list compilers took into account whether words
are typically used to talk about the kinds of themes and functional areas
common in an ELT syllabus, and the types of tasks and topics needed in English
exams.
A core vocabulary
as a starting point
It would be wrong, however, to assume that 3000 words
will be enough on their own for a learner to read and communicate successfully
in English. The Oxford 3000 aims to provide a core vocabulary, that is, a solid basis that students can build
around.
At the lowest levels, words on the list are likely to
make up the bulk of the learner’s repertoire. So, for an A1 learner, for
example, 90% of their vocabulary might consist of basic core words. As learners
progress and want to read about and express a wider range of ideas, though, while
they will still rely heavily on that core, they will also need to supplement it
with vocabulary from other sources. The Oxford 3000 aims to provide a core
vocabulary for learners up to roughly B2 level. By this stage, more and more of
the vocabulary they acquire will reflect the unique interests and needs of each
individual learner.
Julie Moore is a freelance ELT writer, lexicographer and corpus researcher. She’s written a wide range of ELT materials, but has a particular passion for words and always gets drawn back to vocabulary teaching. She’s worked on a range of learner’s dictionaries and other vocabulary resources, including the Oxford Academic Vocabulary Practice titles.
Comic strips provide a unique and
exciting way to engage learners in the world of English. Check out these eight tips
for making and using them in your classroom.
1) Making comic strips as a group activity
Creating a comic strip is a great
group activity. Some learners can write the story, some can draw, and some can colour.
Learners should speak in English and work together. Start by teaching them functional
phrases like “Can I do the drawings?” and “I’d like to write the story”.
2) Using comic strips to teach vocabulary
If you’ve just given a lesson
about shopping, learners can write a comic strip about ‘going to the shops’. If
you’ve just taught them to use the future tense, they can write a comic strip
about ‘making plans’. Encourage learners to describe what happens in each frame
of their comic strip in English. They should make story notes before they start
drawing.
3) Creating fun characters
Keep your students engaged by
helping them to create interesting characters for their comic strips. Try
asking questions about their characters like “Has he got a long or a short
nose?”, “Is she wearing a shirt or a jumper?”, and “Is he happy or grumpy?”
Why not ask them to create a
‘character guide’ before drawing their comic strips? This could be a notebook
where they design and describe every character using key vocabulary.
4) Drawing and colouring a comic strip
Your learners should begin by
drawing the comic strip frames, speech balloons, and characters in pencil. They
should then draw over these lines in ink. Afterwards, they should write words
in pencil in the speech balloons. You can check these for spelling and grammar
before they draw over them in ink. When the ink is dry, learners can erase the
pencil lines and colour in the comic strip.
Are your students good with
technology? They could also create a comic strip digitally by taking photos and
adding speech bubbles with Photoshop!
5) Using comic strips to practice speaking skills
Once your learners have finished
creating their comic strips, there are many follow-up activities you can use
them for in the classroom. For example, you could ask each group of learners to
act out their comic strips in front of the class. Each learner should choose a
character and practice saying their lines before performing them with their
group. This will help learners practice their speaking skills.
You could also get students to
perform this activity with comic strips from a coursebook. If each group
changes three words in the strip before they act it out, listening students can
play ‘spot the difference’ between the text in the comic strip and the words
they hear.
6) Using comic strips as reading tasks
You can use your learners’ comic
strips to create a set of unique reading tasks. Ask each group to create a set
of true or false questions and comprehension activities to go with their comic
strips. Now you can share these out amongst the class, or save them to use
later.
7) Creating more activities with comic strips
Your learners can prepare even
more skills work and language tasks to go with their comic strips. For example,
they can design tasks like ‘Match these
six words with their synonyms in the comic strip’ or ‘Find the opposite of these seven words in the comic strip’ or ‘Look at these eight words and find places
in the comic to add them’. Groups can then exchange their finished comic
strips and tasks.
Why not try using coursebook
comic strips to create even more fun activities. Try creating a comprehension
task by photocopying a comic strip and cutting out the text from the speech
balloons. Now you can give your learners the pictures from the comic strip in
the correct order, and the text in a jumbled order. Ask them to match the
correct text with the correct pictures and put the story together!
8) Entering the Project Explore Competition
If you like these ideas and want another way to enjoy comic strips in your classroom, try entering The Project Explore Competition!
Engage your learners and win
great prizes by asking them to complete the story of The Ancient Statue with
their very own comic strip!
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