Multimedia in teaching

Why teach with video?

When students have access to video content to watch outside of class, class time can be used for comprehension checks, discussion, and reinforcement of content.

Multimedia content helps to vary and enhance the learning process, and leads to better knowledge retention.

Educational video can provide more opportunities for students to engage with the content.

Students around the world can learn from course content made available through video.

Video can sometimes demonstrate complex ideas and access other times and places better than speaking can.

Video can help instructors overcome limitations like large class sizes and limited time.

What can we do with video?

Instructors can use video to provide supplemental materials for their students. This can help reinforce content and give students resources to prepare for assessments.

Many professors have benefitted from using video to flip their classroom. A flipped course is one in which students absorb new material largely outside of class time.

Instructors benefit from flipped classrooms. When a course is flipped, professors have more time available to engage with their students, rather than racing through introductions to new content. Once an instructor has created video content, they possess a permanent library of learning resources which can be reused for new students in various learning contexts.

Students benefit from flipped classrooms. In a flipped course students have more opportunities to engage with their instructor and peers. Students also can take greater ownership over their education, and are allowed a level of flexibility that is unavailable in traditional class structures.

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are created largely through video. These courses consist of a series of learning modules that explain content, punctuated by comprehension checks at the end of each section. They are valuable for students around the world learning in diverse contexts.

Using Video at BU

BU supports multiple valuable platforms for creating and editing educational video. EdTech supports Echo360 as well as MyMedia (which includes CaptureSpace). Many BU faculty use their computer’s screencasting tools along with Adobe Creative Cloud products such as Adobe Rush, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, etc. to create instructional videos.

 

Assessment in Language Teaching

Definition of assessment:

Assessment is how we identify our learners’ needs, document their progress, and determine how we are doing as teachers and planners. That being said, how do we know we are doing it right? How do we know that the assessment tools we are using measure what we intend them to?

 

Reasons of Assessment:

Assessment shows the teacher the role of progress testing in the classroom and the importance of matching testing to instruction. I view testing as a tool that can help teachers identify student strengths and weaknesses and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs. I ensure that teachers must design or choose tests that are practical, reliable, and valid.  Assessment is perhaps one of most difficult and important parts of our jobs as teachers. Ideally, it should be seen as a means to help us guide students on their road.

Tools of Assessment:

Assessment measures the learners' progress in learning through the teacher's portfolio that includes various tools  like the following:

1-Oral discussion by the teacher.

2-Written tests done by the teacher.

3- The rate of participation played by the learner in class.

4- The involvement of learners in pair work and group work.

5-The role played by the learner in his group work.

6-Sharing in elicitation in class.

7-Self-expression and critical thinking by the learner.

8-The practical roles played by the learner in class.

9-The roles played by the learner in songs and games.

10-The activities done by the learner inside class .

11- The activities done by the learner outside classroom.

12- The activities done by the learner outside school.

13- The learner's involvement in using technology in class.

14- The tasks done by the learner in his workbook and his homework.

15- The area of the learner's interest in learning.

16- The learner's ability to think, pair, share, apply and analyze.

17- The learner's ability to do synthesis, evaluate and innovate.

18- The area of the learner's dialoguing with himself and with others.

19-Written exercises.

20-Observation forms to register learning outcomes.

21-Rubrics scale for self, pair and group work.

22- Feed-back sheets and observation sheet.

23- Learners' standards register and weekly reports.

24-Lesson plan and how the lesson objectives are connected with activities and assessment and how much the objectives are achieved through the selected methods and the teaching aids.

25- Classroom management and time management.

26- Learners' marks or grades register.

27-A Scope form.

28-The learner's portfolio.

29-Learner"s interaction with the teacher, course, peers and environment.

30-The learner's behavior.

Importance of assessment:

No single procedure can meet the needs of all learners and situations, so we need to remember to incorporate a variety of tools to help our students know how they are progressing and to gauge the effectiveness of our own methodology and materials.
In classroom assessment, since teachers themselves develop, administer and analyze the questions, they are more likely to apply the results of the assessment to their own teaching. Therefore, it provides feedback on the effectiveness of instruction and gives students a measure of their progress. As Biggs (1999) maintains, two major functions can be pointed out for classroom assessment: One is to show whether or not the learning has been successful, and the other one is to clarify the expectations of the teachers from the students .

Evaluation is a process that includes five basic components:

1) Articulating the purpose of the educational system.

2) Identifying and collecting relevant information

3) Having ideas that are valuable and useful

to learners in their lives and professions.

4) Analyzing and interpreting information for learners.

5) Classroom management or classroom decision making.

 

Assessment is a process that includes four basic components:

1) Measuring improvement over time.

2) Motivating students to study.

3) Evaluating the teaching methods.

4) Ranking the students' capabilities in relation to the whole group evaluation.

 

Purpose:

The purpose of classroom assessment and evaluation is to give students the opportunity to show what they have learned rather than catching them out or to show what they have not learned. 

 

ESL warm-up activities

 

ESL warm-up activities are essential in the English classroom. Students may be tired or have other things on their minds and diving straight into a textbook or grammar explanation can be quite jarring. With a good warmer you can put your students into English mode; attentive,  interested and ready to participate. A warmer can also serve to review language from a previous lesson or prime the class for a new topic.

Make the longest words

Write a topical target word vertically down the board, for example, WINTER. In twos or threes, students attempt to come up with the longest word that begins with each letter. Give teams a point per word and a bonus point for the longest.    Waterfall    Industrious    Nausea    Terrified    Empty    Retailer

What does your name mean?

Using a dictionary, google or any other resource, students find and write down an appropriate adjective that begins with each letter of their first name. For example: Flirtatious, Relaxed, Extrovert, Desirable

Mixed-up question

It’s always good to start the class with a question. Write a good one on the board but mix up the word order, then challenge students to reconstruct the question and then discuss it in pairs or small groups. For example: most item you have the ever expensive what’s bought?

What’s the missing word?

Find a group of compound words or collocations which share a common word. For example, bedroom, bathroom, living room, classroom, showroom, etc. Give students one of the word/collocation parts, such as bed and have them guess the missing part, add to the list writing bath, living, class, etc., until they successfully guess the word. Here are some more examples:

ear, boxing, diamond, finger, wedding  (ring)

tea, soup, table, dessert (spoon)

kitchen, tea, bath, beach (towel)

green, light, ware, boat, work, wife (house)

How many sounds can you hear?

Students sit in silence for two minutes and write down every sound that they hear. Let them compare their lists with their neighbours before seeing who has the longest list? If you like this activity try doing a guess the sound quiz.

Odd one out

Give the students a couple of examples to guess, then get students to come up with their own ideas. Here are some examples: apple, peach, banana, tomato – a banana doesn’t have seeds strawberry, branch, bowling ball, boat, iceberg – bowling balls don’t float window, river, envelope, client, oregano – client doesn’t begin and end with the same letter comb, champagne, knife, plum – the word plum doesn’t contain any silent letters Note:  There can be more than one correct answer.

Name ten

Have students think of 10 items that fit particular criteria. For example:

Jobs where you have to wear a uniform

English football clubs

Sports that are played with a ball

Foods that contain egg

Animals that lay eggs

Three letter parts of the body – eye, arm, leg, hip, ear, toe jaw, rib, lip, gum

 

Strategies for ELL Students

Teaching any subject to any student is often a challenging task.

When charged with reaching ELL students, we must be especially cognizant of the specific set of challenges intrinsic to the ELL student and how best to rise to those challenges.

Strategies that might be tried and true in reaching your native speakers could very likely be lost on your ELL students. Explicit and effective ELL strategies must be utilized in order for your students to gain a true understanding of the content being taught and the language associated with that content.

1. Purposeful Planning

This one is pretty obvious. Planning is always important.

However, when planning for your ELL students, there are some definitive guidelines that should be followed. Like every good lesson, ELL or not, there should always be:

• Content objectives: For instance, if you’re teaching about the solar system, you must determine what exactly it is that you want to teach. You decide you want to teach how many miles each planet is from the sun. This would be your content objective.

• Language objectives: This step in the planning process is key when preparing for the ELL student. They aren’t likely to be as familiar with the vocabulary associated with solar system as a native speaker. Specific vocabulary must be determined and explicitly taught.

It can be fairly simple to determine which words might be appropriate for your language objectives. Just choose words that are significant to the lesson being taught. In the above example you might select the words solar system, miles and planet to explicitly teach.

2. Utilizing Visuals

Visuals are universal. That’s what makes them such a great tool for use with your ELL students.

Visuals can be used in many capacities. It can be something as simple as a photograph or picture provided along with your vocabulary words, or something as involved as a whole theme planned around authentic video materials such as those from the vast FluentU library!

FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.

Be sure to request a free trial of the FluentU program and explore all the other incredible ways FluentU can bring native visuals and English language to your class. 

Though we may not always think of it, visuals can include things like graphs, maps and graphic organizers.

3. Scaffolding

Learning how to ride a bike was always a challenge for me. Several well-meant attempts were made in my childhood to help me attain this skill but, for some reason, I just couldn’t do it. I was finally able to conquer this complex task at the age of 26 with the help from my then-boyfriend-now-husband.

He took me to an abandoned parking lot and began by riding all around me. I watched as he slowly steadied himself and then built up speed. He made several passes through the parking lot using slow, exaggerated moves. It was then my turn. I hopped up on the seat and, just like a 6 year old, I performed the movements with his help. He guided me with his hand on the seat behind me while I pushed the pedals and worked the steering. After several minutes of this, he let go. It was all me. I had successfully learned how to ride a bike.

This I do, We do, You do theory of teaching is called scaffolding.

The term “scaffolding” was originally coined by psychologist Jerome Bruner in the mid-seventies. It really just refers to the belief that, in the beginning stages of instruction, a student will need more support to be successful. As the skill level is strengthened, the supports can be methodically eliminated until the student is comfortably succeeding on their own.

Scaffolding is effective with ELL students because it introduces skills and tasks in a slow and manageable manner.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed when learning something new. This can lead to a lack of confidence which could eventually shut down the learning, resulting in a frustrating and unsuccessful experience for everyone. Through the use of scaffolding, a student builds confidence while mastering a skill.

Visuals can also be used as a form of scaffolding. When introducing and learning new vocabulary, it’s beyond helpful to have a visual representation of the new words. As the students become more familiar with the language, the visuals can be removed. Soon they’ll be recognizing words and reading them all on their own.

There are many ways to use scaffolding in the ELL classroom. The best method for your classroom can be determined by assessing the specific needs and goals of your students and the exact content you’ll be teaching.

4. Working Together

Cooperative learning activities are always beneficial in the ELL classroom. Working with peers creates a low-pressure, confidence-building environment optimal for progress.

The peer interactions essential to cooperative learning help to develop language in a natural manner. Small groups of peers provide a safe setting for practicing language. Students learn the nuances of language through simple conversations with friends. Native speakers or more fluent peers are excellent models for ELLs who may be just learning the language.

Cooperative learning can take on many different forms. Interactive learning games are always fun and beneficial ways to interact with peers. It can also be helpful to use peer review activities. Corrections or revisions are often easier to take coming from a friend rather than a teacher.

Cooperative learning activities can vary greatly in content and objective. There are lots of great online resources for planning cooperative learning activities that can be tailored to best meet the needs of your students.

Teaching listening to young learners

 

Teaching listening skills is possibly the hardest part of our job as EFL teachers. It is much harder when you teach listening to Young Learners (YLs) in a non-English-speaking environment. With very little English exposure at home or in mainstream schools in countries where English is not widely spoken, YLs need thorough guidance in approaching listening, particularly, to authentic language. In an English-speaking-environment, where English is everywhere, it is still crucial to teach learners to be effective listeners. YLs need to be engaged and have a good reason for listening and understanding what is being said. Listening plays a key part in the YLs’ language development, simply because it is their main source of sample language and it constitutes the springboard for language acquisition and, hence, their future spoken production (Krashen, 1981). In this article, the focus will be on teaching listening to YLs aged 8-11 at A1 level (though some points made are transferrable to other age groups).

What Does It Take To Teach Listening Effectively?

In current ELT practice, listening skills are more often tested or practised than taught (Field, 2008). This is something I have noticed over the years when talking to newly-qualified teachers and many colleagues in a variety of teaching contexts. I admit I have been doing that for a long time myself with frustrating results. I used to pre-teach new vocabulary, to get learners to ‘recognize’ the words pre-taught and offer some sort of practice extension through listening comprehension questions and that was it. It took me a while before I realized that it’s not sufficient to play a CD track to get your learners motivated to answer a list of (rather unchallenging) comprehension questions about a fake conversation, in which one of the interlocutors sounds like a YL. Teaching listening effectively takes a lot more than that.

a. Motivation

YLs love visuals, animations, games, fun things to watch, listen and do. Their main motivation is expressing their world to others and sharing experiences with peers. Listening tasks and materials should raise learners’ interest and keep them engaged while they are doing things with the language they hear. Listening in class also has to be a chance for YLs to use all their imagination, creativity, curiosity and energy to learn.

b. Engaging Listening Tasks

What makes a listening task engaging for YLs? YLs are in the stage of their life in which they are gathering information from their world experience. They are gradually developing the abilities to listen carefully to get something done or just get the gist of what has been said for a purpose. In other words, learners are learning to decode messages purposefully and manage information with confidence. The teacher’s job is to create real-life conditions in the language classroom, as much as possible, in order to ‘train’ YLs to develop effective strategies for understanding oral messages that have some connections with their world. Listening tasks must therefore clearly reflect YLs’ real life experiences and everyday new discoveries.

How can teachers make listening tasks more engaging? Think of all the different situations when YLs listen carefully to people around them. In which situations would they listen up for important details? Possibly, when they need to follow instructions to make something, e.g. crafts, or to do something ‘fun’, e.g. playing a guessing game. In these situations, there is a clear purpose for listening and extracting key information. This is called transactional listening (Richards, 1990). In this case, YLs’ language knowledge can help them understand and select the information needed, which is called ‘bottom-up processing’ (ibid.). There is a lot YLs haven’t experienced first-hand yet, but, while carrying out realistic tasks, they can still activate the world knowledge they have gained through games, books, stories or simply from parents’ or teachers’ talk. This is called ‘top-down processing’ (Richards, 1990): the context and the listener’s background knowledge will help understand the message. New things will easily attract YLs. Selecting or designing materials that can feed YLs’ endless curiosity and spark their imagination is just vital to make tasks engaging. While keeping learners motivated, listening tasks also need to create the opportunity for meaningful language exposure and life experience.

c. Appropriate YL Materials

Teaching listening involves providing a fair degree of motivation, purpose and engagement to a range of listening tasks that YLs can relate to their real life or their world experience and that will provide training for effective listening. Listening tasks need to be manageable in order to avoid demotivation or information overload for YLs (Brown & Yule, 1983). Authentic materials can offer a chance for real language exposure though task grading will be necessary, e.g. through visual aids or pre-listening tasks, not necessarily vocabulary pre-teaching. For instance, you could choose to use an example as a pre-listening task with an immediate response as to build learners’ confidence before approaching the actual task (Lynch & Anderson, 1988). Listening materials surely need to feature motivating tasks, but also they need to provide interesting content and be visually attractive to a child aged 8-11. Selecting listening materials can be hard. You need to walk in your learners’ shoes and see the world with their eyes not your own. Talk to your YLs as much as you can to find out about their interests and make a list of topics that are age and culturally appropriate to your class, not YLs in general. Materials should always have a fun and competitive element to make the exposure to real language more enjoyable.

Five Practical Classroom Ideas

Having outlined what makes listening tasks effective, here are five classroom ideas based on these principles.

1. Listen & play

Topic: Weather/Countries Functions: Understanding key information Aims: Developing listening skills for details using icons, maps & weather report video Learning new weather words & countries around the world through listening

Activity: Listen to the weather forecast around the world Match the weather icons to the flags/countries

Pre-taught vocabulary: none

Follow-up activity: Make a video about your local weather today using weather flashcards

Resources: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/games/whats-the-weather

2. Listen & make

Topic: Making things Function: Following instructions Aims: Developing listening skills for live detailed instructions to make a fish origami Learning craft vocabulary e.g. fold, unfold, turn around, press

Activity: Listen to the teacher giving live instructions to make a simple fish origami

Pre-taught vocabulary: none

Follow-up activity: Listen & watch 3D Animation video ‘Once I caught a fish alive’ nursery rhyme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w49MQ6Wrqes

Resources: Square coloured paper

3. Listen & respond

Topic: Fruit & Veg, Food Functions: understanding requests Aims: Developing transactional/top-down listening skills in the context of shopping Learning quantifiers e.g. some, a lot of, and measures e.g. Kilo, a dozen

Activity: Listen to a customer (teacher) who recorded a message (video/audio) for the greengrocer (learners) asking to do the shopping for her and collect the items from the shelves (rows of desks in the classroom) Sample: ‘Hello there! I’m very ill today. Sorry, I can’t do my shopping. Can you please help? Can I have two kilos oranges, please? Then, I need some onions and a dozen eggs, please!’

Pre-taught vocabulary: Kilo/Pound; half a kilo; a dozen

Follow-up activity: Learners make their shopping lists in turn and get partners to do the shopping

Resources: Realia, toy fruit & veg

4. Listen & guess

Topic: Appearance Function: describing people Aims: Developing listening skills for selecting relevant information Learning new vocabulary and phrases to describe people through semi-authentic listening (different accents are featured in the text)

Activity: Listen to six people describing 6 other people they met in different situations Ignore irrelevant information. Focus on their appearance and match the description you hear to the face in the pictures

Pre-taught vocabulary: Beard, moustache, freckles. Other new items are taught in context through visual/aural input

Follow-up activity: Play ‘Guess who?’ game – one learner at a time describes a person from class/school/local town or celebrities. Other learners guess who they are

Resources: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/games/face-match

5. Listen & tell

Topic: Positions Function: describing places Aims: Developing listening skills and predict key information using visual and aural clues Learning basic prepositions of place and describing places

Activity: Watch the video. Listen to the conversation. Tell where Hero was/is now

Pre-taught vocabulary: None New items are taught in context through visual/aural input

Follow-up activity: Play ‘Treasure hunt’ – Teacher hides small cuddly toys or nice kids’ stuff in the classroom/school and sends learners on a treasure hunt. Learners in groups ask the teacher for clues. Good listeners usually win

Resources: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/grammar-videos/heros-adventure