Quiz #2: Questions

Hi there my wonderful students. Here are the test questions for next week, as I promised:

1) With regards to classroom teaching, what is the difference between inductive and deductive teaching strategies? Why would an inductive strategy generally "be favoured" by teachers?

2) What is meant by intrinsic motivation? Why is it is important for teachers to cultivate intrinsic motivation in students?

3) Explain the speaking and listening pedagogical issues that we discussed in the class.

4) Define and give examples of strategies used during reading activities, including strategies used before, during and after a reading activity.

5) What are the steps in teaching essay writing? What key skills should be enforced in students during this process?

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You can choose 4 of the 5 topics listed above! See you Monday. (and if you have any questions, just give me a hollar)

At home ESSAY

Hi Class! What a beautiful day today. I'm really enjoying some much needed R&R with my family in Bellevue, a quiet and beautiful suburb of Seattle. We try to come here every year for 2-3 days. it's a great place.

In my presentation on Wednesday night I threw a lot of information at you, I know. Please remember that I have numerous worksheets in the dropbox related to writing introductions, conclusions, thesis statements and essay writing in general. Feel free to check those at whenever you want.

As for your assignment, I would like you to write a 5 paragraph essay on the topic that I actually discussed in my presentation: Do you feel students should wear uniforms to school? Remember that the intention is for you to take only 30 minutes to write this, so NO CHEATING!

Have a great long weekend and I look forward to hearing about your essay writing experiences next week.

M

Spring is HERE!

Hi Class,

It was great to see everyone again last night. I hope you are well rested, and it seemed that way last night. We only have a handful of classes left, which is hard to believe.

For class tomorrow night we will be talking about grammar unit 8, and we will be focusing on some related pedagogical issues. Also, I will be doing a presentation on essay writing and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Great stuff.

So enjoy the sun, but buckle up. We're going for a ride over these last few weeks.

Marc

Tech Resources

Hi Class,

Here is a list of the resources we looked at last night. Have a look! Play and see what works for you.

www.surveymonkey.com - easily create on line surveys for free
www.docs.google.com - collaborate in real time or asynchronously in the creation of documents, spreadsheets, presentations.
www.tinyurl.com - make a long web address smaller (even customized)
www.keepvid.com - allows saving youtube + other online videos to be downloaded
www.weebly.com - easy and intuitive web site designer
www.prezi.com - an alternative to power point. online but also downloadable
museumbox.e2bn.org - a project box of cubes - you can design the sides of up to 24 cubes
www.dropbox.com - cloud storage for your active documents
www.evernote.com - cloud storage for notes, pictures and videos
Firefox PDF Download – Save websites as PDF
www.wordpress.com and www.classpress.com blogging applications
www.glogster.com - online poster creation site
www.mixbook.com - create books on line for free (and pay to have them printed)
www.animoto.com - make videos online
www.sumopaint.com - powerful online photo editing site
www.poplet.com - mind mapping online
www.historypin.com - allows users to pin historical photographs to world locations
www.edmodo.com - "a do it all" for teachers
www.panoramio.com - allows users to pin photographs to a world map
www.commoncraft.com - "plain English" explanations of thechnologies
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ - a garage band equivalent for Windows
www.toondoo.com - comic strip creation site.
www.bitstrips.com - as above
www.quizlet.com - online flash card creation and studying software
www.touchgraph.com - a search engine that also builds "mind maps" to show connections among sites
www.classpress.com - blogging site for students
voicethread.com - allows users to respond by text, voice, or video to postings

Practicum Placements

Hi wonderful class! Sorry for the delay in sending out the notices for the practicum placements. The practicum sponsor teachers have been slow in getting back to me, but I've heard back finally (today) from the teachers and I'm ready to talk to everyone. And tonight is our tech night too! See you all later.

Good afternoon everyone...  It's pouring rain outside so I thought it would be a perfect time to blog about English Consonants:

Problem #1:                               Aspiration:  p   t   k

Many second language learners do not aspirate the voiceless stops of the above letters...  So words like plot, tot, and cot may come out sounding like blot, dot, and got...   Our group thought of an easy way to teach our students the best way to create these sounds.

P:    Using a feather as a prop, we can explain to our student that the soft sound of the letter P is created by putting our lips together , not needing our tongue or teeth, and to lightly blow.   The breeze from our mouth should be light enough to allow the feather to gently move...  Therefore the P sound is light like a feather.

T:    To create the T sound, our Tongue is used To Touch the Top of the Teeth...  (a nice memory jogger eh!)

K:   How do we let our students know how to pronounce a K sound?    Our mouth is partially open and the sound resonates from the bacK upper part of the throat...   Remember the word BACK and you'll be able to pronounce the letter K!


Problem #2:    Voicing of Final Stop Consonants:     b    d    g

Many second language learners will not voice final stops, but will substitute a voiceless stop for a voiced one.  For example:  a word such as cub becomes cup...   When teaching final voicing, keep in mind that the preceding vowels are longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants.

Using minimal pairs is highly recommended.    The shorter sound of the word tap sounds much softer than the longer vowel word of tab!   So, use light, airy words like tap, pat, and back to emphasize the shorter vowel words.  Say them softly!   When you want to let them hear the louder, heavier sounding vowels, speak the words tab, pad, and bag in a loud voice, emphasizing the b d and g sound!

Pronunciation Unit 5 Problems (Group: Celia, Joanna, Lorena)

Hi everyone. I am posting the two pronunciation problems our group covered in class as well as ways to teach them. You can reference pg. 39-42 in the second tab of your binder.

Problem: Distinction between tense vs. lax 

Some examples of this include
/iy/ vs. /I/ ('beat' vs. 'bit')
/ey/ vs. /E/ ('bait' vs. 'bet')
/uw/ vs. /U/ ('boot' vs. 'book')

• A great way to teach this is by simply exaggerating your pronunciation of the vowels of these words. You can hold the sides of your cheeks or place the back of the hand under the chin to physically feel the difference when pronouncing the words.
• You can get students to write a short list of the two different vowel sounds. For example: bit/beat, ship/sheep, slip/sleep. This can provide students of a visual distinction between the words (short vs. long).
• To expand on the point above, pair up students. Get them to read/ask each other short sentences which include the words above. Their partner will have to listen for the distinction then answer which one is the correct word. For example: "John bit the dog." vs. "John beat the dog." 

Problem: /E/ vs. /ae/ vs. /ʌ/ vs. /a/ as in 'bet', 'bat', 'but', and 'pot'

• As previously mentioned, a great way to teach this is by actually pronouncing the word, and using methods such as placing the hand under the chin to feel the difference. 
• Make columns of different vowel sounds. For example: bet/bat, set/sat, pen/pan, men/man. You could have a picture of one of the words in the pair, then get the student to decide which word belongs to the picture. 
• As a teacher, create sentences repeating the same vowel in the sentence. If you can, get your students to make sentences as they become more advanced. Examples include: "He sent the letter.", "She lent me ten dollars.", and "Ken did his best on the English test." Get students to dictate these sentences so they becoming more used to using them by repetition.