Teaching Very Young Learners Course

I am very excited about the opportunity to be developing and then running a teacher training course on teaching Very Young Learners for International House Budapest from May, 2012.

I have taught little ones, including my own kids, for so many years and I've learnt so much from it. I know that a lot of people argue against the effectiveness of teaching foreign languages at this age. However, from my own experience of growing up in a bilingual environment - which I know is different from having classes in the foreign language once or maybe twice a week, but still presents similar traces of the type of skills being developed during this process - and my own teaching experience prove all the positive results that such a second language environment can have.

Michael did go to the IATEFL conference

8 ways of using Jing with your students

I have been inspired to write this post after I won the scholarship announced by Russell Stannard winning USD 600 to help me attend the IATEFL Glasgow conference. The task was to send in details of a lesson in which Jing is used.

When I saw the requirements of the scholarship I felt my hands tied as wasn't sure which idea to send in as I had been using Jing for so many different purposes. So in this post I will list some of the ways I have been using this wonderful tool, including the idea that I won the scholarship with.

The Jing-lesson that won the Teacher Training Videos scholarship

I was very happy to find out that one of my lesson ideas I have used with my pre-intermediate teen class has helped me win the Teacher Training Videos Scholarship to attend the IATEFL Glasgow conference. I'd like to share it with you hoping that Jing will inspire you just as much as it has inspired me.

So here's what I sent in:

Where to get your ELT rap tune from?

Rap and hip-hop songs have become one of my favourtite teaching tools to all ages, from Very Young Learners to adults. It is unbelievable how all the students who rap along the songs I and/or we put together can use all the language chunks from these texts with so much ease.

And all the preparation I had to do for the lesson was usually no longer than 10 minutes, including the following steps:

• coming up with the target vocabulary/functional language/whatever chunks I thought would be useful to practice
• coming up with a short repetitive text (dialogue, poem, ...)where the above language would occur naturally in real life
• typing it all up on a handout for later use in various ways in the classroom

There was only one thing that took much longer and that was to find the right tune: appropriate in style to the topic, long enough, repetitive and simple enough without words spoken over and FREE.

Christmas with Bear - teaching children unplugged

"Is it possible to teach children unplugged?" - this a question I've often been asked on twitter. And of course, the answer has always been "Yes!". And then the next question came: "Ok, but how". Difficult to answer on twitter, innit?

Anyway, I finally had the opportunity to do a workshop on it at the local OUP conference in Budapest and it was entitled "Christmas with Bear", the materials of which are downloadable from this post. I thought that it would be useful for all of you who are already working with puppets and might be looking for Christmasy lesson ideas.

Alright - ELT training RAP with subtitles then ...

Just because so many of you asked me for the words of the ELT Training Rap I wrote, I made a version for you with subtitles.

Now you can rap it to or with your colleagues :-). Have fun!

ELT Rap - Lesson framework

Here goes the lesson plan I had promised in my previous post. I taught my first lesson with one of my YL groups (age about 8-9) at the beginning of September based on this and after 50 mins we also did the recording, which you can have a look at here, in their class blog.

ELT Rap

This is a post I owe to a lot of teachers who keep writing me to post the videoed workshop I did as part of the OUP teacher training course at the end of August. I did warn everybody that I had my sessions filmed merely for self-development purposes, but I gave in and decided to make parts of it public.

I must admit that I had a lot of fun planning and doing this workshop and it seems that this enthusiasm was catching, and I was glad to see it happenning :-)

To give you a bit of insight into what this workshop was about here are the main things we covered:

Who doesn't know teaches

... and that is exactly what I did ... with my blog.

A colleague asked me via email how to change settings on blogger so that only invited people can see the blog. Well, I made a screencast for her and I set my own blog to being private. Of course, because it was a demo, I invited mysefl as the "other reader". Isn't that ironic :-).

So that is why, my dear reader, my blog disappeared for five days. But we are back.

And here's the infamous screencast, this is how I did it. (It's in Hungarian)