Teaching and technology

I know I've talked about this idea before but I thought I'd show you how it works in practice. I teach two nine-year olds English using Chatterbox. Each unit has a comic strip which continues the book's story. As well as doing the usual kind of language learning exercises I ask them to act out the story which I record using a digital camera. We then play it back and discuss what went right and how they can improve their performance. As you can see they love being able to see themselves and really put their heart and souls into getting everything right.

So here is the original;

And here is Maria and Marianna's version;

Teaching with Chatterbox

I usually ask my students to act out the comic strips from the Chatterbox book while I record them with my digital camera and then play the recording back to them on my ibook. We keep on doing this until they're happy with their performance. Also they love finding props and ideas to use in the video.

It's a great way of improving their pronunciation and as they are acting rather than just reading it is a lot more fun, as you can see. Look out for Maria and Marianna in the 2017 Oscars.

Using video

This is an exercise which I did with my student yesterday. We were working on some vocabulary connected with rooms from Chatterbox 2 and he was having a problem with this is/these are so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and record this. We then put the video on his PC and listened to the playback, which a great help when seeing the errors in pronunciation and grammar he'd made. Afterwards we recorded it again a couple of times until he was happy with his performance.

I'll post the video on his blog in a short while.

Teaching young EFL/ESL learners

For the last three months Ive been doing private lessons with young learners, ten year olds with just one year of English. To tell you the truth, it's not something that I really wanted to do as teaching this age group requires a completely different approach and as I'm used to working with teens and adults I wasn't sure I could do it properly.However, my friends insisted and I felt that not to do so would mean letting them down.

Now, here is the strangest thing, I really love doing this. It's incredibly hard work and I have to work twice as hard as I usually do, but the pay off is the great deal of enthusiasm that my younger learners bring to the lessons. It's a real buzz. I'm lucky in that I have a course book that really is a joy to teach. The Chatterbox series embodies all the teaching ideas that I think are vital to language learning, irrespective of age; fun, engagement, use and action.

However, I thought I'd add my own hi-tech twist by using my digital camera in the lessons in order to record them doing the various songs and comic strips that the book has. I, then put them on my ibook and let them see them. If they are not happy with their performance then we do it all over again. It's great feedback

In contrast with older learners, my younger students love seeing and hearing themselves.