Dictation redux
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A while back, I posted about using dictation in EFL classes. I recently gave dictations in my final exams, and reading the results taught me some further uses for dictation.
Students failed to notice how a falling intonation indicated the end of a sentence. I did not announce the punctuation, as I had not [...]
Read more »Timed writing
Blaine Ray wrote,
Having [students] do time writings without editing is an excellent way to assess fluency.
I’ve been having my students write for 5 minutes almost every class, usually at the beginning, sometimes at the end. Sometimes I set the topic, but most times I left them free to write whatever they wanted. I had them [...]
Academic Writing Part 2
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This is a follow-up to my previous entry on this subject.
If you are looking for a website to help you teach academic writing to university students (whether EFL students or native-English-speaking students), I recommend those by Gavin Budge (Writing for the Reader), and by Andy Gillett: Academic Writing.
As many of my students don’t [...]
TPRS Workshop in Nagasaki! – Cancelled
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Update: This workshop has been cancelled.
There will be a 3-day TPRS workshop in Shimbara, Nagasaki, Jan. 15-17. The workshop will be in English with interpretation in Japanese. The workshop will be led by Susan Gross, a TPRS veteran (Ben Slavic mentions her constantly on his blog as his inspiration and teacher), and Melinda [...]
Keeping track
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All new vocab goes on the board. I don’t care if everyone in the class understands and recognizes the item except one person; for that one person, it goes on the board (and I’m sure at least one other person is grateful).
I very quickly ran out of room on the board, but I [...]
What does dictation evaluate?
I have a question about dictation. I’ve been looking at various rubrics that Susie Gross and Jason Fritze have created to evaluate students, and I wanted to come up with my own that I could show to my department colleagues. I want to win them over to the idea of making fluency the main objective [...]
Read more »A month on TPRS
Well, almost a month. Time to take stock. What’s happened?
Today, I taught two classes of EFL, both without a textbook and in one I used a song. For the rest of the time, it was just me talking and asking simple questions, using information supplied by the students themselves. TPRS works.
And I haven’t even really [...]
The new autonoblogger
This blog started as a log of my attempts to introduce my students to the joys of autonomous i.e. self-directed language-learning. Basically, it’s the story of one failure after another since I started in 2005.
This blog ground to a halt in October 2007: I’d run out of steam, of ideas. I’d run into a wall.
I [...]
Read more »Funny ads
Via Google (click on “add more content” to your iGoogle page), I discovered Funny Ads. I’ve had it on my iGoogle page for a few days, but didn’t watch any of them until today. A number are in languages other than English (some of those have English subtitles), and a number are “silent”, where the [...]
Read more »Instructional objectives in university EFL classes
On Harold Jarche’s blog, I found a post about a book called Analyzing Performance Problems. Thinking it might help me analyze why my students don’t “perform” (i.e. study, learn, practice) as well as I think they should, I borrowed it via the inter-library loan and read it. Fascinating. Helped me look at what goes on [...]
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