funny translation

Well had an interesting class today... as usual I had 'jelly knees" heading into the class... but needn't to have worried.... there were only five girls there today... Maria said many were away sick... We started the class of by playing "hangman". the girls hadn't played it before, so i told them the rules, did a few words with them, then let them all have a try. :) I made them sing the alphabet song too as they wrote out the alphabet in English for "hangman". It was great fun!! Then I showed them a news clip about a man falling in front of a train and someone saving him... discussed that for a bit...did a worksheet on storms in Europe, than asked them to write up a story based on one of the incidents mentioned in the worksheet. Some were very creative. Finished up by giving them a dialogue that my Ukrainian teacher had given me to translate into Ukrainian. It was such poor English that I wanted the students to see it and to translate it into better English. They laughed when they saw it and puzzled over it for awhile... but they finally figured it out.
Here is the dialogue... it is our dining room. She is opened at eight o'clock in the morning, and closes at eight o'clock in the evening. I breakfast I usually I at a home, and here to have dinner I I love in a dining room. I very like here. My friends have dinner here also. They also very like here. On dinner I take lettuce, soup, meat and juice or fruit compote. Near/beside there is a buffet. Here I take pastries, drink coffee, I buy apples or oranges. In a buffet always there are fruits. Sometimes I have a supper in a dining room. On a supper I like to eat a cheese with a sour cream and sparkles or to drink tea with pancakes. In a dining room I often I see John and Tom. They also have dinner and have a supper here. Now they in a buffet.
- Tome, that you will buy?

- I want to take milk and pastry and you?

_And I will take juice and potato.

- how many pastry costs?

It costs one hryvnya and twenty five copecks.

Take, please money. I thank.

Delicious.
Thought it might help the students understand the need to really understand English grammar... and they did appreciate it. Maria said it looked like a "google translator" job. I agreed!!!

more on articles

same class... same thing almost!! the dear things were all ready for me when I arrived... they had arranged their chairs so they could see my computer when i had it set up!! They are a smart bunch. We reviewed soem rules of when to use a, an, the, and when not to use them. Did a worksheet of 60 questions and they had them done in 15 minutes!!! So I gave them a second worksheet. We didn't have time to really finish this one.. it was on the news report of the bad weather in Europe. I think I may continue with it next week. As I want them to answer some questions on it. So today I showed a video on ESL articles... a ppp of the article, a worksheet on a memory stick. I know now the memory sticks can be used with their computers... I'm just not sure if I can get the test running for it. I want to do a test soon so I can do comparisons later on. No games today.... maybe next week!!! The students said they are writing exams right now... so may try a relaxing lesson next week??? the video used...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CiA9BCRPBk&feature=fvsr

level 2 uncountable/ countable nouns

Lesson # 2 .. teaching uncountable/ countable nouns... I used these samples of rice, beans, kasha, and nuts. Threw them tot he students and asked them to tell me what it was and if it was countable or not. Then I threw them on the table or floor and made sentences to identify the verb tense with countable and uncountable nouns. We watched an 8 min video on count/unc. nouns... then two worksheets.. one worksheet was about a trip to the Korean market. Students filled in the blanks with "a" or "an" or "some". The second worksheet was on banana splits. Students identified what were countable and uncountable...nuts, cherries, ice cream, cream, bananas. Then they answered questions on it. We finished with a question, " do you think banana splits are healthy or unhealthy" I told them they all had to give me an answer and each answer had to be different... so the first to answer had the easiest opportunity, because the others had to think more. They did well coming up woth unique answers though. The class felt like a success and students were asking if I could teach them again.

well... the inevitable happened!!! I finally had to enter the classroom and teach!!!! Still working on articles, even though RR says it's phrasal verbs... I just don't want to leave the old project!!!
Chose to start off with slang words... poor things. I don't know if they got much from the class but I tried to make it a little interesting for them. I did up some cards for them to match, they liked that and then finished the lesson off with a quick game. I YELLED out the English phrase and each team had to hold up the slang phrase that matched... they enjoyed that... helped to work out some frustrations also. We covered slang in a classroom environment. Here's a picture of the cards I used.... they had to match them for part of the class. I had intended to have them each read the dialogue first in regular English, then in slang, then in slang as it is spoken... but didn't have time for that... only time for a quick game of each team matching the slang to the English phrase.
( oh. I wore my heels.. the clicking on the floor as I walked around made me feel important!! Ha)

progress!

check out these charts!! I'm happy to see Trude's hard work is paying off!! Don't know if the students are improving in the spoken language, but they are more aware of it when they do the test!! check out the results below!!Progress IM43B Group5014

Third person simple present and present continuous

First and second years
The last two lessons of the year this week of teaching...I decided to go for the absolute basics, because that's where the trouble is.
To start out I drew a butterfly on the board and asked the ss "what is this", there reply: "butterfly", I scolded them roundly for not answering in a complete sentence, and managed to get them to come up with, "that is a butterfly" after a bit of mumbled discussion among the desks. Then I asked, "what does a butterfly do?", fully expecting, "he fly", or "butterfly fly", but they were right on and gave me, "a butterfly flies".
I had them come up to the board as well and they all drew a picture and we practiced this language.
The second years watched the Matty Goldberg video afterwards and we discussed that and I tried to get them to use present continuous, but it seemed a bit forced.
The first years watched part of Watership Downs
I also used exercises from Raymond Murphy Chapter 1 and 2 to fill in the extra time...Goodbye welcome good ol' summer time!

My last class with this group of first year students, so we watched this little video about count and uncount nouns, and did this as a fill in worksheet where students had to put in the proper article.  I think they are actually learning something!

More about Rosa

I want to use the video from here to discuss online dating with my group next week.
This page has good material on this subject as well.
http://www.eslpartyland.com/students/nov/dating.htm
Well, today we did a lesson about dating, I had the students learn the same expressions about expressing opinions as we did here.  Then we went over some of the discussion questions from Conversation Inspirations, a great book and good for getting students talking.
I had forgotten to bring the Rosa video, but we'll use it another time!

Definite Language in Mind

My last several lessons have been rather sloppy without a real goal of what language I'm trying to teach the students.  With that in mind I'm going to use the mobile phone etiquette lesson again but try to teach this language as well.  I may make some cards with the phrases on them and have the students use their phrases as they answer the questions in practice speaking.

Also for more activity this as a fill-in is also on hand.

Catching up post

The end of the year is upon us, and I've got some blogging to do...why do I do this to myself?
On May 17th, while Norwegians were celebrating independence day, I saw my 4th year students for perhaps the last time. I gave them the info for taking the quiz on line. The results of this quiz will show their progress and if they've learned anything about articles.

Zipcar lesson

Group IM43 and I went over our quiz today, just the part about zipcar, we saw this video after going over the fill in the blanks from the USA TODAY article.  
The exercise was to practice the English article.

Friday the 14th

Today with my first group: IM 21, second year students, we talked about cell phone manners, I found a nice questionnaire for discussion which my group seemed to enjoy.  Then I wanted to play a video, but my browser downloaded the wrong one which was absolutely inappropriate for my group, so we ended up doing a worksheet on non count nouns instead.  Glad for backup material in case plan A doesn't work!

talking about mothers and daughters

This video
was a good jumping off point for a discussion about the internet and relationships. I also wrote out the script without articles to give them as homework.
This lesson worked well with the Wednesday the 5th group as well as on the 7th with my Friday 2nd year students

MPORA Action Sports >>

more teaching

Well another interesting day... made it to the university to Vitaly's class today. I was supposed to meet him at 12:35... made it in time, but no Vitaly. When I called he said he was tied up at the Dean's office... anyway, class got under way around 1pm. 4th year students... very nice class... they seem to have a good rapport with each other and their teacher. The topic today was Narrative writing. I returned their tests to them and told them we would do more tests with them...Vitaly told me I could come in next week again... I told him I would like to come one more time in May.

This evening I was alone for our English study... it was interesting... A real work out as there was no translation into Ukrainian or Russian. They all worked hard to help me though, it was interesting. They were in no hurry to leave ...later, we had cake and tea.

Slang

Street Talk is a great book and I use it a lot when I'm uninspired, I always get a great lesson out of it! I used it today with a new group I hadn't seen before.

Three little words

No not the three little pigs!!!! Our presentation went well on Sat. Trude impressed them greatly and I stood by grinning and showing a chart or two!!! The teachers seem very interested in how to teach the article.. many asked for a copy of the presentation when we were done... I was impressed with a few of the charts... here's a picture of how our test was broken down. Article Breakdown Article Charts

a site for videos

click here for http://dotsub.com/

Tefl Conference today

We survived the conference today! It was brooding over me like an evil meanie, but we got through it.
I signed up for a 20 minute short talk, which was the minimum you could do, but they gave me a 45 minute slot! As I protested that one of the teachers told me, 'it's ok, you only have 4 people coming". That was a great relief. But I think we had more like 20 present...anyway, with Angela's great graphics we sailed through it. I was only missing an appropriate Dilbert comic strip (since we leaned so heavily on charts and statistics!)

A new group of Students...

Warmer:

have students brainstorm how many types of sports they can think of and write them on the board.

Presentation:

video WeeWiiMee, or a Wii review

Controlled practice:

give students an article the paper to fill in the blanks where articles are left out.

Free practice:

Students work in small groups discussing questions about sports from Conversation Inspirations by Zelman

Feedback: go over the handout correcting errors and go over speech errors.

Dog Squats - Watch more Funny Videos

practice with first year students

I'm having the first year students today since Easter holidays will unofficially start on Friday afternoon :-/

We'll do my restaurant power-point where we go over first mention, and count nouns, hope to be able to drag this out for the full class time....

Teen sleep again

I did this same lesson with the first year students, saves me time prepping.
I showed this group the video twice, and we talked about it some, which helped them to understand it better the second time.
This group seemed to relate well to the video I showed them.
Setting up the game went well as I remembered to bring dice and game men.

sleeping teenagers

1. warm up: Try reviewing words from last week using 'crosswords' from 5 Minute Activities by Penny Ur.
2. Presentation: a short video  
3. Controlled practice: Fill in the blank worksheet to supply missing articles.
4. Free practice: Students play a game based on Jim Scrivener's Resource 6 from Learning Teaching.
5. Feedback: Go over the worksheet, touch on errors made during free practice.

the article and the Proper Noun

I have a request to do this for next week, anybody have any good ideas?  I need your comments before March 26th, 2010... helloooooooo?

Carlos and the bandits

Today I worked with 1st year students. I introduced 911, and we discussed emergencies.  I showed them a news clip about Carlos, divided them into two groups and handed out a news writeup on the story and had the students list the nouns and determiners.  This took them about 10 minutes.  They wrote the nouns on the board each from their own group, then a member from the opposite group filled in the determiner for each noun.  Then I gave them a fill in the blank sheet, which they did perfectly because they copied from their notes :-/
We went over the sheet in class, then watched a different Carlos newsclip.
Students then wrote 5 questions and in 2 co centric rings asked each other questions.

Inspired by St. Patrick

I must have been inspired by St. Patrick!!! My first time to sit in on a class and observe the teacher's teaching technique. He was quite nice about it... a little nervous at first...and so was I!!! There were 13 students there and the topic was: Past perfect tenses. It was the first year students. I could tell some weren't very clear on the subject... so when I was invited to share with them a little about myself, I tried to use some past perfect examples. I was also asked to correct them when they made errors and suggest better ways of expressing themselves. There were a few errors using the article "the" especially when years were talked about. However, my ear needs to be trained to understand their accent because i did miss a lot!!! I like the kids... said I'd sit in again on their class. The teacher has offered an opportunity for me to sit in on a 4th year class, so may do that soon too... if I can fit it in with my lesson schedule!!!! One question stumped me... Does anyone know what you call a person who falls in and out of love easily????

St Patrick's day

the 4th year students learned about St. Patrick's day today.
I used this 13 page handout as a guide for the lesson.  It seemed to go ok, nothing here about the article however.  Students seemed to enjoy the last part where they interviewed each other.  I had them stand in rotating co centric rings for the interviews.  I was able to listen in and correct some errors in article use.

cancelled due to illness

didn't see my 4th year Ss today as Helen phoned me to say she was ill.  Natalia was to have both groups together and show them a film.

second mention

4th year students
I made a restaurant power point production using a picture from The Oxford Picture Dictionary to talk about the restaurant. 
I also made activity cards with pictures and phrases where the article was left as a blank for students to fill in and use for telling a story.
Class did an exercise from Azar's Fundamentals of English Grammar to review second mention.

International Woman's day

Is the 8th of March.  Seems that students start celebrating it today.  My class was nowhere to be seen when I showed up for our 16:45 lesson...

non count nouns

4th year students
We went over exercised from Fundamentals of English Grammar by Betty Azar.  We did this with lots of drills.  I also showed a power point presentation to review count and non count nouns

canceled due to testing

My 1st year students had a test to take, so I did not work with them today, unfortunately I arrived late, otherwise perhaps it would have different.

non count nouns

first year students
We went over exercised from Fundamentals of English Grammar by Betty Azar.  We did this with lots of drills.  I also showed a power point presentation to review count and non count nouns.

bubble testing

1st year students take my bubble test.  We spend days categorizing the errors, there has to be a better way...

From lurkingplaces

Slang

did more Slang with the 1st year students, chapter 3 of Street Talk  by David Burke

the o.v.i.r.

Is where we go to register so we can stay here and finish our project...

Slang

first year students love slang!
I did the first chapter of Street Talk with them.
This is the control group, I won't be teaching them about articles.

catagorizing errors...

We worked all day on correcting tests and categorizing the errors, hope to automate this process...

From lurkingplaces