I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year break.
Even though I’m in Japan I was lucky enough to be invited to a traditional (Australian) Christmas dinner for about 20 people; with the turkey, the roast veggies, the whole nine yards… even brandy pudding, which was set on fire! Andrew Wallace from Kochi (check out his SUPER cool story here) and all of his helpers really put in a sterling effort (they were in the kitchen for a loooooong time!) and it was a dead set ripper!
The pudding was melt in your mouth stuff! Honestly. Puttin good ol’ Grandma to shame!
And, to boot, there were some awesome musoes playing and a wild collection of instruments: taiko of all sizes, djembe, guitars players a plenty (acoustic, electric, jazz, blues, bass), singers a plenty, bells, didgeridoo, sitar, that Chinese instrument with the single string and a bow, a shamisen, and probably a few I’ve forgotten! It was really quite a night.
I hope you did something just as fun.
I thought New Year was going to be quieter, but,… ah… no. Dancing till 3 and then fried chicken and more beer on the way home. If only I coulda gotten a kebab! Man do I miss a decent kebab: lamb, lettuce, onion, tabouli, sour cream, cheese, garlic sauce, BBQ sauce, and a splash of chilli; toasted of course. OH!
Anyway… now I’m back at work, putting together a workshop that I’ll be presenting in a couple of weeks. I expect you’re back at work by now too. Hopefully the break cleared your head and gave you the zoom-zoom-zoom to tackle another year!
>>>
A few people emailed me about the Christmas Pack and offered their thanks and some feedback–which I appreciate greatly! 
I also spoke to a few folks over the break who downloaded it, but either didn’t have time to use it or had already planned their Christmas stuff for this year. That’s okay, if that was the case for you, too, you can always use it next year. I realise that its release was very, very late in the season; like I said, it just kept growing and growing! And testing my skills with technology at every step! Ha!
I’m going to leave the Christmas Pack up for just one more week so if you didn’t get the chance to tell all your colleagues about it in the end-of-year madness, do them the favour now because in a week it’ll be gone. (Yeah, really)
Also, I could do with your opinion. (Not only about the Christmas Pack, feedback for which is most welcome <<click here>> but…)
You see, I’m not really sure in which direction to take the blog and the articles this year, to be entirely honest. There are at least thirty-seven dozen topics I think are worth writing about (!) and I guess I’ll get around to writing about them all at SOME point.
But what I’d really like is for you–as one of my valued readers!–to tell me what kinds of things YOU are most interested in and that YOU would most benefit from.
I don’t profess to know all the answers and, indeed, 100 people might write me back and nominate an area that I don’t have much (or any!) expertise in. And if that’s the case, then I’ll either learn it or find people more knowledgeable than I am and try to convince them to maybe do some “guest articles” or something.
Anyway, what I’ve done is put together a simple survey to find out a little bit about your background, along with what you’re interested in (re: EFL) and what you’d like to learn more about. Or if not learn, what you would get the most benefit from.
It should take about 10-15 minutes, I guess. I don’t know. If you write one-word answers, probably 2 minutes, but that wouldn’t be very helpful to either of us, really, would it? If you get called away, there is a “Save” option and you can come back and reload your answers later. But you shouldn’t need this; I don’t expect it’ll take you too long at all.
Also, I’m afraid I don’t have any “sweets” or “shiny things” to offer you for taking time out of your schedule to do the survey. 
I’m kinda hoping that you’ll see how this directly benefits YOU. I mean, I could just rave on about whatever I like on this blog, but that may or may not be what you’re interested in. And I can only know what my readers are interested in if they let me know! 
So, click here to have Your Say
I look forward to your insights.
Best regards and here’s to a terrific 2008!
That’s the precisely quantifiable number of people who have downloaded the Christmas Pack in the last few days.
Which makes me really happy! I hope you got some good mileage out of it.
Your comments, suggestions, funny stories, etcetera are all most welcome.
Just leave a comment below.
And if you came up with any interesting alternative ways of using the materials, please leave a comment so we can all learn! 
Cheers!
I hope you have a fun and safe holiday.
Talk soon,
Well, the Christmas Pack is… *groan!* …FINALLY ready!
Much blood, sweat and tears, let me tells ya.
I can only offer my (admittedly rather lame) apologies for being so ridiculously behind schedule. You have, no doubt, prepared all your Christmas lessons for this year.
Still, the Pack will probably come in handy in years to come. 
I think I sent an email out to the folks on the mailing list about a week or 10 days ago saying that things were taking longer than expected and that the project had grown into this gargantuan thing (You’ll see what I mean when you download the sucker! The zip file is 22MB!)… and that I had been sick, and that I had a bit of a weird, unexpected thing happen to me… and blah blah blah…
…and that it was going to be ready Saturday 15th.
Excuse, excuses.
Well, there were even more surprised to come this weekend. Let me count the ways…
* my internet connection running at 51kb (that’s slower than a regular dial-up modem)
* the router throwing a wobbly on me and needing the drivers reinstalled
* not being able to get any help from tech-support over the weekend
* the graphics card on my computer bowing under the pressure of loading all the images…
…and subsequently crashing my machine several times!
* installing new software to try and combat this (with pretty unimpressive results)
* running all my adware, spyware, and virus programs to see if there was problem (there wasn’t)
* pausing or unistalling RAM-hungry background applications
* defragging and cleaning up the hard-disk
* checking the registry for errors
* transferring it all to my memory stick and uploading it onto another computer…
…only to crash that one a couple of times too!
Then discovering (when it did finally open) that all the Christmassy fonts weren’t loaded on that machine, which meant going out and finding them all again and installing them and rebooting… *sigh*
* saving the document and then converting it to pdf only to find that hyperlinks had randomly mysteriously disappeared (and therefore having to do it again! Several times! And checking them all. Again. Aaaahh! Who knows if they’ll work in the pdfs you get?)
* installing a tell-a-friend script and mis-writing my .htaccess file resulting in all the pages on the site being parsed as php (okay for the blog, but it made a total mess of everything else!)…
…so being on Live-Chat with the tech support of my hosting provider (I’ve only been with them for about 6 months–because, well, that’s as long as I’ve been twiddling about with HTML and stuff… and several times I’ve destroyed something or gotten lost and every time they’ve had me up and running again quick smart! The Live-Chat support feature really is a Godsend if you live in a different time-zone to the US (like I do).
Want good hosting support? Go here.
* realising that there were a bunch of things in the Christmas Pack that needed some kind of explanation (like, pelmanism and karuta. I’ll try and do a video soon for my “Hello” & “Goodbye” songs, as well as the “Name Song”… sleep would be nice, though) … and therefore needing to write half a dozen blog posts with that information so the links in the pdf actually led to something!
* and finally… getting some sort of mystery interference in the way the images were being read on the large flashcards which resulted in this ridiculous blue-ish background, which I couldn’t do anything about. So I had to reinstall some stuff there to fix that.
* then realising what a dumb-arse I’d been the whole weekend by not just splitting the damn thing into smaller documents! THAT is what was causing all the problems! My computer just couldn’t handle the graphics load.
I think I know why it happened: I had this idea that the Christmas Pack would be kinda like the Halloween Pack, y’know about 15 or 20 pages of stuff and links to other resources.
But it just kept growing and growing…!
And I guess I’ve just been too tired and run down and under the hammer to see that I needed to re-assess the project and say “Hey, it’s not the same thing you started out doing, bucko. Better make some changes here.”
But instead, I just kept pressing on, trying to shoehorn this semi-trailer load of graphics and layers and weird fonts and formatting into this poor little garden variety OpenOffice document!
I can’t help but think of that great Australianism “She’ll be right, mate!”
Invariably used when we know things are highly unlikely to be alright at all. Love it.
Anyway, as soon as I realised this (at 5pm this afternoon!) I thought “Oh no! What if there are folks out there with slower computers than me? Eeek!”
So after dinner, a beer, and a brief brain-break/catch-up phone call with a friend this evening, I then sat down and cut the document into FOUR different parts!
* then I went through and edited it as best I could. If you find any mistakes like referring to XYZ and not finding it in the main document, that’s why! Ha!
* then uploading it and checking that the download worked okay. And that the download link points to the right place, etc.
**Phew!**
It’s been a loooooooong weekend!
(And I’m writing this at 1am Monday morning. Once I post this I’m off to check that the mailing system is working smoothly. Aaahh!)
In fact, how’s this for a festy confession: Yesterday (Sunday), I didn’t even shower or shave. I just got up, switched on the computer and worked through till 2:30am this morning in my (very same) pyjamas and then went back to bed again for about 3 hours. I felt SO gross this morning! Euuwww! I think I spent an extra 10 minutes in the shower! 
Anyway, you have probably already received the email with the download link if you’re on the mailing list.
(If you’re not on the mailing list, get over there right away and get the download link because this special resource pack offer will be taken down after Christmas!)
So… all I can say is ENJOY! and Merry Christmazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
First off, I’m really sorry if this article seems to be stating the obvious. Maybe I’m just a bit thick; You see, I learnt a number of these things the hard way! And given that making these little cards can easily eat up a LOT of your time, I’ve decided to spell it out step-by-step.
***VERY IMPORTANT GENERAL TIP***
You should ONLY make flashcards of things you know you can
use and re-use often! Or for special events that you know
will be worth the extra effort. Really.
If you’re not sure what Pelmanism is, please read my article What is Pelamanism? first.
1. Print out your cards and then cut out the main blocks (i.e. not individually; around the outermost border)
2. Turn on the laminator now; they take forever to warm up.
3. Stick them onto coloured paper. You only need a quick swipe of the glue stick through each box. They don’t need to have all the corners stuck down; remember you’ll be laminating them in a minute.
Also, the trick here is to have different coloured paper for each set of cards you want to make. So, for example, if you want 4 sets of cards, you’ll need, say, a green, pink, yellow and blue sheet of backing paper.
There are two reasons for this:
(i) It makes it much, much easier to keep the sets together. If you don’t do this then you will end up with the cards being all mixed up and you will spend a ridiculous amount of time preparing the next lesson because you’ll have to go through and make sure each set only has two of each card! With colours, you just count that you have the required number of cards and hey presto ready to roll!
(ii) The other reason is that without the backing sheet (which you can also do with white paper; just put a coloured spot in one corner of each card with a marker before you laminate them) is that you can see through single-layer cards when you lay them out on the tables! Which kind of defeats the purpose of playing the pelmanism game.
4. Cut out your cards individually at THIS step.
5. Find something rigid. A clipboard or folder is good. Put your laminating pouch on this ready to load your individual cards.
Now, what’s this all about? Well, this will make it easier to move your laminating pouch with your pelmanism cards in it to the laminator without it all going pear-shaped. It will also give you something to butt up against the laminator’s “feed platform” (like I know what it’s called!) so that you can feed your pouch through without the cards going everywhere—It’s too late once the machine is in motion! (Yep, I’ve done that one!)
One final precaution to help avoid the cards going everywhere and your having to start again: Take your glue stick and give the back of each card a quick dab as you lay them out in a grid (in the laminating pouch). Make sure it’s not that stupid purple glue stick because it won’t become transparent like it claims to do! So you’ll end up with these horrible purple smudges on the backs of your cards (which not only looks ugly, it again defeats the purpose of the game!).
6. Use the edge of the clipboard to keep your cards lined up so that they have more or less the same margins. Remember that the space you need between cards is double what you want the margin to be! So, for example, each card need a few millimetres space for the laminating to seal correctly. So… you’ll need to leave double that space so that both cards (i.e. to the left and the right, above and below) get a good seal.
7. Once you’ve fed your pouch into the machine, don’t let it just roll out the other side and flop down otherwise your cards will be permanently bowed—again not so good for pelmanism because students can then see under them and/or tell the difference! So lay the laminated sheets out flat ASAP. (Be careful if it’s your first time using a laminating machine; they can be REALLY hot!)
8. Cut them up and give them approximately the same margins. As you do this, make sure that you also round the edges of each card. This is really important when you work with little kids because… there’s always some boy (yes, a boy; no, almost never a girl) who wants to flick the cards at another kid. And if you’ve never made laminated sets of cards before for class, you won’t appreciate just how sharp they can be on the corners. No, really. Eyes are very easily damaged. Round the corners!
9. Get some of those magnetized sheets which sort of feel like linoleum and which you can cut with scissors. I also see it from time to time in rolls rather than sheets. Just cut off a small chunk and attach with scotch tape (you actually need much less than you originally think! Test whether it will stay on the whiteboard/blackboard by throwing it on the door of your fridge!).
10. Put elastic bands around each set, put them in a large envelope along with your set of larger Teacher’s flashcards and label the envelope. Put the envelope in an alphabetically arranged filing system of other flashcard envelopes (I just use a box and I prefer to file the envelopes by title of lesson or subject area).
That’s it!
As I said at the outset, a lot of these steps might seem really, really obvious, but they’re only obvious in retrospect or once you’ve omitted them a couple of times and had to throw your efforts in the bin!
And as for the filing system, trust me! This will save you time once you start to build up a large set of resources and need to be able to lay your hands on a particular set of cards. I couldn’t count the number of times someone has called in late or sick and my Director of Studies has asked me to cover a class, like “Now!” With your favourite games all nicely filed you should be able to select one or two envelopes and be off to class, ready to give a perfectly educational and fun lesson at the drop of a hat!
Best of luck with it!
P.S. If you like stress, feel free to omit the advice about the filing system.
Karuta is a Japanese word for a game that is, I’m quite sure, played everywhere. It’s basically “Snap!” but without turning the cards over.
It’s really quite simple:
1. Lay out all the cards face down on the table or floor
2. The students put their hands on their heads
3. The teacher calls out one of the cards
4. The first student to “snap” the card keeps it.
5. When there are no more cards, the winner is the person with the most.
That’s it, in a nutshell.
—————————–
Of course, Karuta wasn’t originally intended for teaching foreign languages! So, here are a few things you might like to consider when playing it:
* The way to play it outlined above is really just a “Receptive Skills” game. That is to say, all the students have to do is be able to process what the teacher says and correlate that to a particular picture. Listen –> Snap!
Nothing wrong with this. This is the way I play it the first couple of times with a particular lexical set.
But once you’ve done it a couple of times–unless you work with younger elementary kids–you’ll want to start getting them to practise PRODUCING the language as well. There are two ways that I do this:
1. I tell them we’re going to play Karuta. But first they have to go through the vocabulary and check, in groups, that everyone in the group knows all the vocab. I set a time-limit of 3-minutes for this. It always takes 5 because they realise after the first minute or so of “Yeah, sure, no prob, I know all this” swagger that, they actually DON’T know all the vocab and that means they won’t be able to win the game! Then as you start saying “30 seconds!” they start shrieking “No, no! We need more time!” So you comply after much frowning and give them another minute or so.
Ha ha! Too funny, huh?
You might also like to point this out once or twice to your class, letting them know that the reason you’re giving this extra time before you start playing is so that everyone has the chance to do some last minute revision and has a more even chance of winning.
2. Once you’ve finished playing and they’ve “snapped” up all the cards, the only way they can legitimately keep the cards for the final tally is to be able to SAY what they are (or whatever target phrase or sentence you set for this stage. An easy example might be with “jobs”, say. For this stage they have to say “S/He’s a ________ ” in order to keep their card).
The other members of the group monitor each other and if someone who managed to “snap” the card can’t produce the associated language, they forfeit that card. It DOESN’T go to another player who CAN say what it is, that player just loses that point.
You THEN tally up the final points.
2a. As an extra option–and this one needs to be done delicately (which I’ll come back to in a moment), you can also set a rule that anyone who scores ZERO (or one or two or whatever is reasonable with a large set of cards) has to come out and recite X number of cards chosen at random by the teacher.
Now, this note about doing it delicately: This should never be done in order to humiliate someone. And it should never, ever, ever be done as a “surprise!” at the end of the game. No, no, let them know this rule right up front if you decide to play it and let them know that the reason you’re setting this rule is because you want everyone to try their best. Nobody’s perfect all the time. Not even the top-scorers (what’s that thing about Babe Ruth? Struck out more times than he hit home runs or something…)
The POINT is to TRY!
Also, the “penalty” should be conducted in a light-hearted way, with a lot of:
Shucks, y’know, Peirre, that’s too bad! I know you know this vocabulary, but maybe you’re not a gunslinger, y’know… [obviously I wouldn’t use the word “gunslinger!]… so, uh, let’s see… you have to name any five cards…” [fanning the cards and hamming up the secrecy element, go to another group and get them to pick one]… then pick a couple of REALLY easy ones that you know the student will get… and then one more “secret crowd pick” and then another easy one….
And so on…. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.
Then END by saying something like
“Okay, not bad, Pierre. Next time I’m sure you don’t want to be up here again so, uh, y’know do a bit of study, eh?”
This last comment is somewhat barbed, and it’s meant to be. To show the students that I mean business; that if I’m going to go to the effort of preparing cards and props for fun stuff, they had better be bothered to actually do some study.
If they don’t want to do that, that’s okay, we can just work through the book one page after the next. No skin off my nose. They need to understand that it’s a two-way street. But this is stuff for another article.
The point is that you end with a “You need to pull your finger out, but it doesn’t mean I don’t like you as a person or I think you’re ‘bad’ in some way” kind of message to both the “penalty receiving people” and to the class as a whole.
Okay, another point that I think worth mentioning is whether or not you can play karuta with adults. Actually, I haven’t tried to be perfectly honest! But I see no reason why you couldn’t. I definitely would not have them put their hands on their heads, though! This is something children have to do and I would feel strange doing it (in fact, I demonstrate for the elementary kids while doing the gestures “hands… hands… on your heads… heads….” and even that makes me feel a bit weird as an adult!). So definitely no hands on heads. Maybe “hands behind your backs” or something?
Right, final point about Karuta: There is a penalty for “bezerker snappers”. This game in the language classroom should be about listening, processing the input, and then doing something with that input, in this case selecting the correct card before other players.
But there’s always some kid (adults are probably the same, I’ll have to test it and see) who just randomly snaps one card and then the next and then the next until the body language of the other students lets him (usually a boy) know that he’s hit on the right one. So…
… there is a rule of the game that says “If you snap the wrong card, you miss a turn”. That is, you have to sit out of the circle for the next round.
It’s a good rule. It reduces beserker-snapping and I use it to my advantage in the following two ways:
1. If there are items of vocab that are similar-sounding (e.g. “angry” and “hungry”) or which use the same starting sounds (e.g. “snow” and “snowman”), then I do the following:
(i) if, say, “snow” is left on the table (i.e. we’ve already done “snowman”), then I say “snowman!” There will always be one “beserker-snapper-in-training” who gets caught out on this. It’s never intended to make anyone look stupid or anything like that. In fact, the kids LOVE it when I do this! They giggle their heads off! But they then listen even harder for the remainder of the game and the next time we play.
(ii) I almost NEVER say the last card without doing a few “stooge” runs before it. Two or three is enough. They love this too because it’s down to the wire, y’know… it’s the last card… who will get it? They’re leaning in as close as they can… and then suddenly… STOOGED!
2. Anyone who misses more that X-turns (I usually set it to 3 or 4) has to come out the front and go through all the vocab with me! Of course this reduces the instances of little vikings on drugs in my classroom. But there’s often one so the way we do it is to show the card to the now more meek bezerker and if he can’t tell me what it is, I show it to the class and they all yell it out. Move onto the next one.
Once again, this should not be done in a way to humiliate the kid! It’s just a nice little way to kill two birds with one stone:
(i) it goes some way to reducing subsequent bezerker-snapping because he knows he
needs to pay attention when you’re drilling the new vocab
(ii) it makes for a nice little final-drill / wrap-up to the activity
And that’s it! How to play Karuta and get the most of it in your language classroom. If you have any other tips for making it even more effective and fun, please leave a comment!
Till next time,
This is known by various names, the most common probably being “The Memory Game”.
It’s a really, really simple game and I’m 100% positive you’ve played it before. But like Karuta, there are a few things that we need to take into account in order to maximise its efficacy in our foreign language classrooms.
1. Each group gets a deck of cards with pictures of the target vocabulary on them. No words. Just pictures.
The deck is made up of pairs of each card. For example, if we’re doing jobs, there will have two picture cards of each profession in each deck (and one deck for each group of 3 or 4 students).
2. Students lay the cards out any way they like (in a grid is good, but not necessary). The only requirement is that the cards are face down.
3. One student starts by turning a random card over and using it to produce the target word, phrase or sentence based on that vocab.
The inclusion of “phrase or sentence” in the previous sentence underlies a significant departure from the original game and reorients it very specifically for language learning.
The possibilities really are endless and you can use the same set of cards for different language points.
Don’t overlook this tip because it can save you a lot of time!
Set yourself a task for this week: Go through all your flashcards and make a list of all the different things you could do with them. I’ll write an article about this soon to show you what I mean.
Okay, let’s get back to Point 3. We’ll stay with “occupations”. Once the students have been introduced to the vocab, drilled it as a class and maybe done some kind of written activity to consolidate the vocab with the spelling, you play this game.
You model and drill the target sentence.
In this case it would be “He/She’s a/an ________ .”
So, the first student turns over a card (let’s say it’s a picture of a butcher) and says “He’s a butcher”.
4. Because this is correct, they get to turn over another card.
So, for example, if they turned the card over and said “He’s a brick-layer” or “She’s a butcher” (because at the level students tend to learn occupations, often the use of personal pronouns still causes problems), they get the buzzer from the other students and forfeit the chance to search again.
Once more, this is a slight alteration which results in students having to PRODUCE the correct language if they hope to win any points. I’ve seen this game played where students don’t have to DO anything.
What’s the point of playing?
But let’s move on…
5. The answer in our example was correct (”He’s a butcher”) so the student then turns over another card. If it’s a butcher, they win a “trick” and play passes to the next student.
(Sometimes students want to play that if you win a trick you get another turn. In my experience, this version is not as much fun for everyone. Also, very importantly, the weaker students don’t get as much practice, and clearly they’re the ones who need it the most! Outlaw this rule before the game starts otherwise they will just “naturally” add it themselves.)
6. If the second card is different, they have to say (for example) “He/She’s a whatever” before play passes to the next student.
Again, this is integrating a rule into the gameplay that forces them to drill as much of the language as possible. And that’s the POINT, right?
7. When all the cards have been won or (as usually happens) the time-limit on the activity is reached, you add up the “tricks”.
Simple, huh? I love this game. Kids love it; adults love it. And… it works!
If you’re not currently using this game, get started using it right away!
DON’T do it for everything, though. The prep-time is considerable so you will only want to do it for the most common lexical sets, things you can use over and over and over again and which can easily be whipped out for revision “warmer / filler / cooler” activities.
Before you start making (more) cards, you might like to take a quick look at this other article about laminating tips for pelmanism sets.
Oh, and a note on the time-limit: Let them know in advance what the time-limit is. Write the end time on the board. Other students will then hurry along those wasting time and going “Uh… uh… uh… I know it… uh…” because they want their chance to win “tricks”. Enact a 10-second thinking-time limit. Students LOVE to do the “3-2-1…buzzer!” thing, believe me!
An advanced rule: At point 6, if they get this second card wrong, they lose one trick (if they have any)! This rule is harsh (but quite fun with the right group) and should only be introduced once you’ve done a particular lexical set a number of times already. So I would never, for example, initiate this rule on their first time playing with a new vocab set; what a great way to destroy their confidence!
One thing I like to do with a fairly familiar set of vocab which we haven’t reviewed for a while is to introduce this rule and give them half the usual time-limit in which to play the game. If you can offer a prize of some sort, even better.
Tell them that the winners of each group will have to complete a “Bonus Challenge” in order to win the prize. When they come out to take a shot, they discover that the Bonus Challenge is being able to recite ALL the items of vocab! If none of them can do it, offer it to the other students. Give three attempts and then move onto the next activity. You might get to keep your prize for another day and you will have drilled the hell outta that lexical set!
Hope you like this game. I do!
This seems like the most basic thing in the world, right? And I guess there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to do it. I mean, drilling vocab is drilling vocab, right?
Well, sorta.
I’m going to outline the way I was taught to drill vocab when I originally trained as an EFL Teacher and having tried various other ways since, I’ve come to the decision that this is, in fact, the best way to do it.
Comments are most welcome!
Okay here we go!
Step 1: Gather your flashcards…
Actually, here we don’t go! Ha ha! Take a gander at this article first.
Also, there is no actual need to have flashcards for everything! A rough drawing on the board, a gesture or two and then something to remember it by is enough. But that’s another article.
——————————-
Right. You’re back. Let’s press on…
You take the items you want to drill and you present them one by one (obviously!).
The “trick” to this technique is in going back over the list every one or two items.
That’s it, essentially! Wow! Radical, huh?
It’s really, really, really simple, but…
(a) it’s really effective
and
(b) I rarely see teachers doing this (and I don’t know why; That’s why I’m writing this).
Let’s take an example so that it’s perfectly clear what I’m trying to say here.
Teacher: What’s this? [holding up a flashcard or prompt or drawing on the board]
Students: [blank look meaning “Don’t know.”]
Now, they obviously know what it is in their native language (L1)—providing the picture is clear and large enough—but what they’re saying is that they don’t know what it’s called in the foreign language (L2)]
T: It’s a tiger. [T gestures to listen again] Listen… tiger [T gestures to repeat]
Sts: [repeat] Tiger
T: Again…
Sts: Tiger
[insert individual drilling and one more choral drill here]
T: Okay, next one. What’s this?
Sts: Monkey!
T: Close, close. What colour is he?
Sts: Orange!
T: And he’s quite big… bigger than a monkey, I think. [gestures included here].
Any other ideas?
Sts: [blank look, meaning “Uh, no, Teacher, sorry…”]
T: Orang-utan. Listen… orang-utan. Everyone…[gestures to repeat]
Sts: Orang-utan.
T: Again [gesture to repeat]
Sts: Orang-utan.
[insert individual drilling & once more choral drill here]
T: And this one? [pointing to pic of tiger above new pic/flashcard of orang-utan]
Sts: Tiger!
T: Good! This one?
Sts: Orang-utan!
T: This one?
Sts: Tiger!
T: Okay, next. What’s this?
Sts: Penguin! [pronunciation not quite right]
T: Excellent! That’s right! Listen to me… [correct pronunciation] penguin. Listen again… penguin…
Sts: Penguin.
T: Again.
Sts: Penguin.
T: Good. Okay, what’s this?
Sts: Tiger!
T: And this?
Sts: Um… orang… orang…
T: Orang-utan. Again…
Sts: Orang-utan.
T: And this?
Sts: Penguin!
T: This?
Sts: Tiger!
T: This?
Sts: Orang-utan!
T: This?
Sts: Penguin!
T: You guys rock!
…and on it goes!
This seems like a very long and tiresome method for drilling vocabulary (and the example seems pretty tedious), but believe me…
…it is effective!
This is why an 8-item list can easily take 10 minutes or more to drill. Sometimes it flows really smoothly and the target vocab is easy for the students to pick up (for whatever reason). Other days it requires more work.
But the following basic procedure does NOT change:
1. Elicit vocab if possible—and if they don’t know it, just give it to them! (More on this in another article!)
2. Model the pron clearly. Twice.
3. Get them to repeat.
4. Listen carefully to the pron and correct where necessary
5. Go back to the top of the list of items and drill through—You will almost always find that they have forgotten the item you just introduced when you do this. That is, the most recent item. Almost without fail!
So you then re-drill the latest item, then do a couple of others at random, interspersing the latest item they’ve forgotten between each one (example, “penguin, penguin, tiger, penguin, orang-utan, penguin…”).
Then do the whole list from the start in non-random order (they’ll remember the most recent item now!)… and then you can move onto the next item.
Incidentally, it need not be tiresome and boring at all. You should keep a fairly brisk pace when doing this kind of drilling because if you don’t then I guarantee you that it will be boring.
If you keep moving fairly fast, it keeps them on their toes and they know that they have to really pay attention to keep up. The class will pretty soon get used to this way of introducing and reviewing vocab and this will also help it run smoothly.
Note: Depending on the level of the students, as well as their age, I would be unlikely to introduce more that 8-12 new items in a single drill session like this. The human brain just can’t take much more than that, it seems. Of course, when we’re studying by ourselves we manage to do so, but this is somewhat different and, in fact, I would argue that when we’re doing it alone we’re not learning those items as effectively.
Why I think that is a more in-depth discussion for another day.
But the main reason I think 8-12 items can be learnt very effectively in a single class (no, not long term retention, that takes more work–which is partly your responsibility as the teacher. Again, a topic for another day) is that I’m working on the presumption that these 8-12 items are then “activated” in some way in the lesson.
The students have to do some sort of activity or play a game that involves them producing the vocab from the prompts (without the ability to simply read the words).
We would be much better off when studying at home, to do our learning in “blocks” like this, where we learn a set of expressions and then concentrate on strategies and drills to commit them to memory. Instead, though, we just power on and try to learn the list of 100 items.
Of course, we can only remember a handful of them the next day and conclude that learning vocab is difficult. It is, but it need not be. I’m veering into another article here! The point I would like to make here is that by introducing around 8-12 items and then playing some kind of “activation game” with them or doing some kind of exercise that involves thinking carefully to find the answer (and ideally producing it as well, oral or written–and the latter before the former if you like) will help the vocab “stick” better in the first instance.
Subsequently, you can then focus on working the items into long-term memory.
Good luck with it,
Hey-o!
Here we are, Thursday night. I’ve just got one or two final formatting touches to put on the Christmas Pack. And then proofread it.
Phew! It’s turned out to be much more of a monster than I thought.
As I said before, it might actually be too late in the year for most of you to use given that there are only a couple of weeks of term remaining and you’ve probably planned your lessons already. But I’m doing my best to get it out there anyway.
Thank you to the people who have emailed me with kind comments and words of encouragement.
If you are waiting on The Pack, though, apologies. I did think it would be finished a couple of weeks ago, but… well, having never done anything like this before (it’s considerably bigger and badder and meaner than the Halloween Pack) , and not being a graphic designer/lay-out whiz (amongst other things), and blah blah blah… it has taken longer than anticipated.
I’m cooking dinner for a friend tomorrow night and taking a little head-space breathing room sanity get-that-sand-feeling-out-of-my-eyes break.
So it looks like Saturday afternoon is when it’ll roll out.
Once the pack itself is ready, I’ll have to check that the delivery system is working A-OK and when everything looks good to go, you’ll get an email letting you know where you can go to pick up the inaugural EFL Teacher Training Christmas Pack! yay!
Talk to you then,
P.S. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, scoot on over here.
Well, now that I’m back on my feet after the lurgie that struck me down a couple of weeks back, I’ve got the elves toiling away on the Christmas Resource Pack!
Actually, elves equals me, my computer, and a kerosene heater. And there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day! Aaahh!
Christmas is rapidly approaching and it may be that you’ve already planned your lessons for this year.
Nonetheless, I’ll knock the Christmas Pack into shape as fast as I possibly can and get it in your hot little hands as soon as possible. As promised. It’s already weighing in at well over 25 pages of material!
If it turns out that you can’t use it this year, well, maybe it’ll help you out next year.
And, in fact, I might not be offering it for free next year; we’ll see. Which means that anyone you know who might benefit from the Christmas Pack… perhaps you should send them to the site to pick up their own copy!
Cut, paste & email —> www.eflteachertraining.com/christmas
In the meantime, you should head on over to one of my favourite sites on the whole Net for cute craft resources (amongst other way cool stuff): Activity Village
They really do a great job over there. Most of it is aimed at elementary school teachers, but with a little imagination and adaptation, you might find something that you can use at junior high (and maybe even above).
In fact, if you DO manage to adapt something for another level, why not leave a comment so that others can do the same!
Okay… better get back to it!
Oh, and don’t forget that you can ask your most troublesome question about EFL teaching here.
Talk soon!
Wow! What a crazy week it’s been…
I had a bit of weirdness earlier in the week that I won’t go into here and then I was off work sick for two days, during which I just slept until 2pm both days!
But the Christmas Resource Pack is slowly coming together and should be in your hot little hands by the end of the week! Due to this week’s unforeseen events, though, I’m a week behind schedule; I was hoping to cut it loose today (December 1st).
This time I’ve got a full set of custom-designed clip-art images for you, which you’ll be able to print off and laminate and play games with for two weeks straight
Also, just like the Halloween Pack, the meat’n'potatoes of it will be for elementary kids: lessons for grades 1 through 6 with links to the best colouring pages I’ve found and other cool craft stuff. So don’t go spending four million hours online looking for this stuff unless you need it this week–because I’ll point you in the right direction and save you that time in the Christmas Resource Pack.
I’m also going to do some wordfinds and/or crosswords for the junior high kids. I don’t imagine too much precious class time will be given to you at this time of year (test time), although you may get lucky once tests are done with, I suppose. Still, to be entirely honest, despite teaching at JHS myself, I don’t have any really trailblazing ideas in this arena, I’m afraid. 
And finally, there is a project idea for senior high kids which would be easiest if you have access to a computer lab.
So basically, this is (a) a request for your suggestions, and (b) your last chance to hit me widdem! A number of people emailed me feedback re: the Halloween Pack and there were some good ideas. I appreciate that a lot.
Note: One of those suggestions was “Maybe get it out earlier next time”, which is an excellent piece of advice, I must say! Even if I’ve “failed” again on that account.
My “excuse”, however, is that I’m banging this out in my spare evenings and weekends, once all my other work and play is done with! I’m really sorry about that. I wish I could dedicate more time to this stuff because I love it so much! I really, really do. I get such a kick out of helping people become better language teachers–sounds kinda cheesy as I write it like that *eek!*–that I wish I really could dedicate more of my working week to it.
But I gotta pay me them bills, eh?
Anyway, point of this post isn’t to rave on about that. It’s to let you know about this blog so that you can post your ideas/recommendations/suggestions below and I’ll do my best.
I’m also about to create a QnA Page where you can post questions and answers to anything TEFL related (yay!)… so think about
the one thing that causes you the biggest headache as a EFL teacher
and post away–we’ll see if we can’t pool together and find you a solution, eh!
Talk soon,
P.S. Welcome to the brand spanking new EFL Teacher Training blog, by the way! I deliberately went looking amongst the themes for a really clean, sparse look. For some reason the orange buttons aren’t showing up, though, like in the example. Go figure!
P.P.S. Don’t forget to send those people whom you think might be interested in the Christmas Resource Pack to: www.eflteachertraining.com/christmas
