CD or no CD?

Most textbooks often include an audio CD. An audio CD is like a two blades knife. Sometimes it creates great effect but other times it might not be so effective.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of the recorded audio:

Advantages:

--- An audio CD allows students have the opportunity to listen to few different voices and accents instead of only one person.

---Audio CD is portable and ready to use. You don’t have to read through or be trained for the text. It is already there, all you have to do is to hit PLAY!

Disadvantages:

--- The volume and the quality of the recording could be tricky. There were a few times that the recording was simply not loud enough for everyone to hear it clearly or the quality was so bad and distorted. Nowadays everyone uses CD for recording, sometime there are might scratches on the CD and it just won’t play. These technical problems could go on for a full list.

---- Another interesting thing I observed throughout the years is that like all students have to ability to listen and comprehend at the same speed. Some students of mine, they understand the materials completely but it takes them a longer period of time or slower speed to react to it. Therefore using pre-recorded materials might restrict the possibility for your students to learn at their own speed.

Extensive Listening

As a teacher, sometime I found myself in the situation that my students struggled with listening. No matter how hard I try, they never seem to improve at all. Later, I learned that through extensive listening and intensive listening, students can improve their listening skills. So what is extensive listening?

Extensive listening is “where a teacher encourages students to choose for themselves what they listen to and to do so for pleasure and general language improvement.(303)” according to The Practice of English Language Teaching.

Extensive listening could be done during class time. However, it might take up too much time. As a result, extensive listening is best executed at home or outside of classroom. For example, I often assigned my adult students to listen to English radio one hour a day. They might not be able to understand it at first. But after a few months of listening to it on a regular basis, they start to pick up. They learn new vocabularies from it!

Another good example of extensive listening is Christmas caroling. Instead of simply teaching your students the lyrics, you can make a CD with all the songs you want them to learn and ask them to listen to it everyday. My young students learned how to sing the song before I begin to teach them!

However, there is still downfall for extensive listening. Extensive listening is only effective when your students have strong will enforce it. And the materials got to be exciting enough for them to follow through. 

More Christmas Craft Ideas

If you have seen or made all the crafts on my previous blog entry and want to tone the Christmas craftness up a notch. You go visit Marthastewart.com for up to 49 kids-friendly crafts!

Christmas Craft Ideas!

Do you want to make Christmas craft with your students and children but don't know where to start?
You can go to http://www.enchantedlearning.com for more Christmas crafty ideas!

Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan

Let the holiday spirits go to your students! Come download this Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan which includes the following vocabulary:

Christmas  聖誕節

Christmas carol  聖誕歌曲

Jesus Christ   耶穌基督

wreath   花環

decoration  裝飾

tinsel 金屬絲

Santa Claus  聖誕老人

chimney 煙囪

reindeer  馴鹿

mistletoe 檞寄生

Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan

Individual or group?

I often found myself battling in class about whether I should group my students and have them learn together or ask them learn individually. There are pros and cons for both approaches. As teachers, we need to fully understand the possible scenarios before we make out minds.

Pros on groupwork:
1. It increase the numbers of talking opportunities for individual students.
2. With more ideas and opinions, it would create a more complete learning experience.
3. It encourages boarder skills of cooperation and negotiation , and more private than work in front of the whole class. (See Lynne Flowerdew for more information)
4.It promotes students' self confidence and encourage them to develop their own rules.

Cons on groupwork:
1. It is likely to be noisy and possibly lost control.
2.Not all students enjoy it since some might prefer or require more attention from the teacher.
3. There are some students in the group would assume the dominate roles and cause others to lose their voice.
4.Groups requires longer time to set up in the beginning and wrap up in the end especially if all the students have to move around in the classroom.

How to choose the right materials for your students?

Hi, everyone! Sorry for the delay. I am currently in America spending some quality time with friends and family. I will try to put in more entry but you know how it is.....it's so hard to stay inside and work when visiting a new city!

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Ever since I start teaching, I often discuss with my school manager about what kind of materials I like or how do the students react to the materials, is it too hard or too easy. Then almost with no exceptions, I always ended up choose the materials for the entire school.

Here are few pointers I look for when choosing the materials:
1. Difficulty:
Usually I would choose the books that the difficulty level suits the whole class. So even the under-performance students could excel if they try hard. However, by doing so, the students who learn faster might get board easily. Therefore, if you decide to choose relatively easier materials, you should always have extra materials at hand for the more advance students to tackle on!

2. Illustration:
Illustration is important especially for beginners who have limited vocabulary. There are many vocabularies that are hard to explain by using language and it is simply if you simply have a picture of it.

3. Practice
I like the textbook, materials that have many exercises and questions to practice with. In my opinion,the only way to mater a  language is through drilling and practices. The advantages of having many practice questions or exercise is that teacher can choose freely whether they want to use it or not. Or even assigned it as homework.

Free Worksheets Website

During my teaching years, I often ran into problems of not having enough materials or the materials which the school provided is simply not good/interesting enough for the kids. When I have these kind of problems, I always try to look up online to find more resources and help. Soon, http://www.learningpage.com/ comes to my attention.

Learningpage is a free website. It is absolutely FREE to sign up for membership in this site. Once you have membership, you get to download a lot of great sample lesson plans, worksheets, and fun stuff. 

There is one time, my school gave me a very small book on space (18 pages) and asked me to teach my first graders about space in 4 months. If i only used that book, my students will eat me alive and be bored to death. So I have to do something. Luckily, they do have lots extra materials in learningpage.com. I use it with my students and they LOVE it. We learn so much more and had a lot of fun with it! They also have topics on ocean animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs, amphibian, spiders, calendar, money, senses,time, and measure. They also has a great variety of alphabet writing and cursive practice sheets.

Other than that, every month they will launch out new worksheets and lesson plans accordingly. Additionally, they provide their member FREE access to their achieve. Long story short, they've got lots of well made stuff and it's worthy to check it out!

Teaching adults or children?

Many teachers often ask me "Which one suits me better? Teach adults or children?"
If you have the some doubt and can't seem to wrap your head around it.  Here are four differences between teaching adults and children for you to ponder on:

1.      Adults are able to use their native language to understand English while children might need further explanations. For example, teaching adult about vocabulary most of the time once the teacher provides them with the corresponded meaning (in student’s native language,) they understand the vocabulary. However, when teaching children, it requires more than corresponded meanings, sometimes teacher has to go further into the details explaining and making examples.

2.      Adult students often ask to be included into materials, teaching style selection process.

3.      “Pride might often interference with learning,” according to my TESOL Tutoring Specialization Manu. Therefore it’s very important to constantly offer encouragement especially to your adult students. Otherwise, adult might easily feel demeaning and lack of confidence.

4.      Children often require more motivation for classes since they might be asked to be in the class. On the other hand, adults are usually more motivate since they usually initiate the class.

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream Lesson Plan

Do you like Katy Perry's song---Teenage Dream? If you do, then you can't miss this conversation lesson plan!

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream Lesson Plan