TESOL 2012 Presentation

If you are looking for my TESOL Presentation on using iPads and iPods in the classroom, please see my links page.

TESOL--Nodding with Kate Kinsella

I am at TESOL in sunny Philadelphia this week. I seldom find myself nodding my head while listening to a speaker, but I've nodded my head at all three presentations I've seen by Dr. Kate Kinsella this week.

If you aren't familiar with her work, check it out. Below are some links:
Many resources from the Santa Clara County Office of Education

Or do a search for her name.

I had the opportunity to speak with her briefly at a dinner hosted by National Geographic, and I was excited by our conversation about needing to find a balance between theory and activity. When you are at a conference like TESOL, you see a broad range of presentations--many very theoretically based and many activity based. True pedagogy, though, is somewhere in the middle between those two, and I think that's where a lot of teachers are lacking balance. They want to ask, "But what am I going to do with the students?" without thinking a lot about why they are doing what they are doing. Teachers often feel as if keeping the students busy is a sign that learning is taking place. On the other hand, teachers who spend all their time thinking about theory don't think about lesson delivery. Balance.

She is working with multiple publishing companies, and I have seen three programs of hers, and there is a common thread running through all of them--rigor for students at all stages of language acquisition. There is also a structure to the teaching piece. I love her push to have teachers be more thoughtful about the language of their instruction.

So here are the three programs:

From Scholastic: English 3D
From National Geographic: Academic Vocabulary Toolkit
From Oxford: Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas

If I get some time to do a more complete review when I get back from TESOL, I'll put those up here and link them in the other section, but I'm excited about all of these series.

Vocabulary Relay...a Friday wrap-up activity

This week, I wanted to close the door, ignore the lost top of my desk, turn off the phone, and shut off the email. I finally got to Friday. Second period. And I was there. My class was wrapping up a grammar-based unit on comparative and superlative adjectives, and I needed a closing activity. Vocab relay. 

We had a set of adjectives that we had been studying as a class, so I took the pictures that were representative of those adjectives and made three copies of each picture. Each adjective was marked with an A, C, or S. A=Adjective. C=Comparative. S=Superlative. And then we took the pictures and mixed them up on three different tables in the back of the classroom. By the time we were done, there were a total of 69 words for the students to consider. In addition to mixing up the pictures, we also mixed up the numbers assigned to each picture. So on any given table with 23 numbers on it, a group might have 2, 38, 47, etc.

Students were divided into three teams at the front of the room. One person was chosen by each team to be a writer for the first round.  The other team members were designated as runners. (The writer would change in each subsequent round.)

The game would be played in four rounds of five minutes per round. Each team was assigned to a table for each round. This prevented traffic jams and kept the students focused. After the first three rounds of being assigned to a particular table, the groups had the fourth round to run free to any table.

Rules were simple:

• Students had to be back in their seats at the time that the bell on the timer rang.
• Students had to work in English.
• Only the writer could write. Other students in the group could not take the pencil (or an eraser) to correct.

I've used this activity before in several different ways, but this was the first time I'd done it with this vocabulary. As I was going around the back of the room making up the master list, I became acutely aware of all of the layers of thinking that had to go on in order to have success. The mixed up numbers required that I remember one thing. The vocabulary word itself required that I come up with another. And then the label A, C, or S required that I determine the proper spelling for the word even if I knew what the base word was. And I was just making the master list. My students had to figure all of that out and then go back and report it to someone else who was desperately trying to write it all down. 

After we played the four running rounds, I gave them four minutes in their small groups to check and correct their papers. 

Wrap-up: I took their group papers and checked them. I made a copy of each group's paper for each student in the group, and I gave those back out to the students with the incorrect responses marked. Then, individual students went back to the tables and corrected the work that they had missed during the game. This gave me a chance to see who was still overly reliant on their vocabulary notebook. 

A few great things:

The language generated by this activity is awesome. When the students are under pressure from the clock to communicate with one another, the target language is not just the vocabulary from the back of the room but also the language of negotiation with a writer who is trying to understand what they are trying to communicate.

It's a great assessment piece without the students feeling the pressure of formal assessment. After watching my students go through all the rounds, I knew who understood the grammar construction intellectually, and I knew who understood it and could use it orally. I also knew who only got the basic vocabulary and did not yet have the comparative/superlative concept. 

The kinesthetic side of things made for an awesome Friday morning activity.