Tag Archives: orally

Model text-based lesson, Reading

HOMEWORK AS FLIPPED LEARNING, and CHECKING HOMEWORK

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‘Flipped learning’ means getting to know the content of the next lesson at home in advance. This is what Finnish student do at home. We have found it an excellent thing for 50 years now.

So, one thing in foreign language teaching in Finland that has never changed even if new methods and ideas such as CLT have been introduced is what the students do at home:

Finnish students have always had to ‘translate’ or ‘study’ the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home. It is a MUST. Much more important than having written exercises done.

The idea above may sound old-fashioned but the benefits are undeniable. There is no point in such a thing as working on a new chapter understanding half or even less of the content.

I have always first taught my students, especially if they are young, how the translation must take place in their minds . It is certainly worth a lesson or two. Usually there are always some students among 12 – 13-year-olds who learn this skill in groups for the first time in their lives. A good student is an ideal the ‘teacher’ in the group showing the others how the translation is done.

On some occasions doing a partial translation of the text into mother tongue can reveal massive gaps in the students’ reading comprehension. Even in some senior high classes some students have no idea how to translate the text. Remedial teaching for two weeks and they will get a hang of it. And then the foundation for learning is established. The final aim is to skip translation part at school altogether.

Reasons why advance home study / translations are vital

  1. First, there is no point in spending much time in the lesson checking the understanding of a text by translation into one’s mother tongue. Nevertheless, in the early stages of learning a new language translating the texts into the mother tongue is a must.
  2. Secondly, when we insist on the students doing the translation at home in peace and quiet at their own pace, precious time in lessons is saved for oral practices.
  3. Thirdly, as for the translation itself, the skill itself must not be taken for granted. It has to be taught separately since some students do not know how it should take place.
  4. To get started with translating a text the students have to know the meanings of the words in the chapter. In Finland we have always been lucky to have Finnish – English vocabulary lists for every chapter in the students’ workbooks. New words are introduced there and a lot of time is saved compared to using a dictionary every time a new word emerges in the text.
  5. What if the word is not in the word list or there is no such list available? We advise the students to consult a dictionary, a free one in the internet is the best option these days. The use of Google translator is an option too but it requires very little thought from the student’s part and deep-level learning suffers. Some modern electronic textbooks have an inbuilt dictionary as a quick tool.
  6. The best part in forcing the students to consult the wordlists is that by the time they have finished the ‘translation’ homework they will have done something with the new words half a dozen times learning them subconsciously. At least from English into their mother tongue.
  7. For the teacher it should not matter whether the translation is written in the notebook, translation of new words on top of the text lines or the student has the translation only in his/her head. As long as the student can promply give the translation in lesson, using a source or not, everything is ok.
  8. Once the translation skill has been learnt and the habit established less and less time in the lesson is spent on checking the understanding this way. It is taken for granted that the students have studied/translated the new chapter at home before the lesson.
  9. When the students come to class having studied the new text at home, they feel safe and confident. It is a long and boring lesson if they understand nothing of what is going on.

The foundation of every language lesson is studying or translating the new text beforehand at home (in the flipped learning style). It saves time and the students feel more confident in class.

CHECKING WRITTEN OR ORAL HOMEWORK

“Nothing new under the sun.” Not quite since my favourite, Number 2 Student-oriented checking of homework is very different from what I used at the beginning of my career.

When the lesson starts we tend to check the written and oral tasks that were part of the homework. This checking should not eat up too much of our time since the learning took place while the students were doing the exercises. Still, they need to know if their answers are correct or not and ideally this should also be a learning situation.

There are some ways to speed up the checking process and make it more efficient from the students’ point of view.

1 Teacher-oriented checking: The teacher does not get the answers at all from the students but correct answers are revealed little by little on the screen and the students quietly correct their mistakes. The teacher scrolls the text on the screen or he/she uses Power Point animations to hide the answers. Thus the teacher controls the time spent on each exercise. At the end the students are, of course, allowed to ask questions.

Of course, the old style ‘Checking written homework so that the teacher asks and one student at a time answers’ is also possible but it is more time-consuming.

2 Student-oriented checking: Each pair or group is given the correct answers on paper or on the screen and they do the checking themselves within the time given. What is good about this way of checking is that the students advise each other and checking becomes a learning situation too.

If this style is adapted, the teacher should tell the students why you are doing it and what the responsibilities of the students are. While the checking is going on the teacher has to go around the class to observe if someone’s homework is not done.

3 Checking can also be part of station work: If there are, for example, 5 stations/sets of tables, one can be devoted to checking homework. Station work or Work stations are effective as a special kind of group work. See how you can arrange a lesson like it.

N.B. Some teacher use a Google form where the students mark which of the exercises they have done. It is a public file within the class and the students easily point out if someone is trying to cheat. This file is also a document for the teacher and it can be taken into account when grades are given for the course.

The most important piece of homework: studying/translating the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home.

  • 1 Studying the chapter at home in advance
  • 2 Checkingwritten or oral homework exercises
  • 3 Working orally on the new words of the next chapter
  • 4 Listening to the chapter on a CD, DVD, via the internet or read by the teacher
  • 5 Checking if the content was understood, clarifications
  • 6 Reading the text aloud
  • 7 Questions on the text, or multiple choice, true-false, black holes …
  • 8 Doing oral (and written exercises/underlining the text) in class

Yleinen

VOCABULARY

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We are all different and learn words in a different way. That is why we need to let our students experiment and find their own style or strategy of learning words. Here the term ‘strategy’ simply means a certain way or approach to enhance learning new words.

Miniature N.Y. Brooklyn Bridge in a Bangkok mall. I am a very visual learner and therefore I love to use photos and pictures in my teaching

It is sometimes argued that new words should be learnt in a sentence/context first and I agree. Still, I believe they should be practiced in isolation as well since there are many things to learn about every word. In the approach I recommend below most of the learning takes place at sentence/utterance level:

The other articles under Vocabulary heading are

  • Knowing a word, What does it really mean?
  • Identify 22 strategies to learn new words
  • Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 1-10
  • Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 11-22

A summary of my philosophy on learning new words

  1. At home: in advance before the new lesson: New words are preferably first encountered in the sentences of new texts/chapters at home (as part of homework).
  2. At home: The students automatically try to guess/figure out the meanings of the new words. If they fail, they consult the workbook word lists or a dictionary. An excellent learning situation because a lot of thought is involved in the silent mental process.
  3. At home: If the student doubts he/she will not remember the words, I advise them to write the translation on top of the textbook line or in their notebooks. Still, occasionally we learn new words without knowing the exact meaning because the words are constantly repeated in a context.
  4. At school the words are repeated after the teacher to learn how they are pronounced and at the same time the meanings of the words are revised.
  5. The use of words is practised orally in pairs, preferrably by making sentences or even stories of one’s own using as many of these new words as possible.
  6. The chapter is listened to, read aloud and reading comprehension checked in many ways, all of it at sentence level.
  7. Invisible differentiation (the students choose freely from options what to do, no stigma attached on tasks) is involved all the time and the final stage for the best students is to produce ideas of their own making use of the new words under the topic in question. Even the weakest students learn new words in a relaxed atmosphere answering questions on the text in pairs.
  8. We all learn new words differently depending on our style and personal characteristics. That is why we teachers need to offer our students a set of options / strategies and then they can start using the strategies that appeal to them.

There is so much more we can do to learn new words than doing exercises in the workbook.

22 strategies to learn new words

Which ones have you already been teaching? Which one have you never thought about? Choose the 5 best ways YOU learn new words best!

I hope to be able to add some videos on these strategies later on.

  1. Link the new word with a picture or photo.
  2. Link the new word to your mother tongue.
  3. Write the unknown words of the chapter on a paper and make up a mindmap or a story.
  4. Associate the new word with another (funny) word, story or setting. Explain to your pair how the association works for you.
  5. Record a word list on your phone ( word in mother tongue – 1 sec pause– English word). Listen to it many times. (The favourite of my wife!)
  6. Make word lists (mother tongue – English), cover up the other side and say the words aloud or write them down before checking. (My favourite if followed by oral practice)
  7. Make or have a look at a word list (mother tongue – English). Then make an exam for yourself or others.
  8. Say or write a sentence where you use the new word.
  9. Tell a story in your group where you use the new words. (Humour is the best medicine!)
  10. Make two-sided word cards and use them in a game.
  11. Learn words in groups (linked with a topic, nouns, adjectives etc.). Write them down in a grid or an excel file.
  12. Use word formation technique. One word leads to a family of words.
  13. Find synonyms or opposites for the word.
  14. Make a gap exercise of the lyrics of a song.
  15. Consult a dictionary (online or hard copy).
  16. By doing various exercises (crossword puzzles, gap filling, hidden grid odd one out, etc.)
  17. Guess the meaning of new words on the basis of the context.
  18. Make use of free computer vocab exercises provided by publishers.
  19. Give a definition of a word and your pair has to guess which it is (e.g. it is an adjective which means the same as ‘adequate’ – well ‘enough’ or ‘sufficient’)
  20. Your say a word and your pair has to give a definition for it or explain it in another way (a vaccination – well, it is a shot given with a needle so that you do not get a disease)
  21. Make use of the free vocab learning computer programmes in the internet.
  22. When reading extra English materials such as magazines or books, take out your notebook and write down new words and phrases that you find interesting and useful.

N.B. I will give detailed advice what to when you ask your students to make exercises like the ones above. Here are the links Exercise types / Strategies 1 – 10 and Exercise types / Strategies 11 – 22

Let the students do a lot of vocab exercises orally. And – open up the vocab learning strategies, teach them how to write exercises of their own for themselves and others. Use free computer programmes. LEARNING BY DOING – WORKS HERE AS WELL!

Students learning new words by designing exercises

As you can see above many of the exercise types can be done orally and if the students move from word level to making sentences or stories of their own, we are beautifully applying CLT and differentiation principles. Instead of asking your students to do ready-made vocab exercises you can also teach them how to design vocab exercises for others.

As a result you, the teacher, do not have to come up with all the exercises if you notice workbook exercises do not work well. Start by going through the list of strategies little by little in your lessons and let the students then make the written exercises.

I don’t have the time, you say! Yes, you do. Leave out some of the workbook exercises and do these ones instead. The students enjoy these ones more than the workbook exercises. Or ask them to write the exercises at home and exchange them with each other in lessons. If you take copies of these student-produced exercises, you can use them in work stations, for example. Especially if you are rehearsing for an exam. It is simply a matter of organization.

There is no need to check all the tasks made by the students since learning takes place when they are writing the task. If there are problems, others will point them out. You, the teacher, just move about and offer help if needed. If needed, you can always take copies of the tasks or show them on the screen.

Students subconsciously learn the words they are working on while talking or writing vocab exercises. Why? Since they need to think a lot and make reasonable decisions.

Still, even if they never make any exercises themselves, knowledge of the vocab learning strategies will help them a lot.

  • The next article deals with what is meant by knowing a word and some other basic ideas on vocab learning
  • Then you will have a chance to practise identifying the strategies in real vocab exercises in my 3rd article.
  • In the following two articles I will demonstrate what you need to take into account when you make you students write vocabulary tasks themselves. (See the links above)