A Writing Activity: Big Numbers

The following is an activity from my activity book, The Activist, again (in the future, I will be sharing with you some activities other than the ones in my book). This game-like activity aims to raise students' awareness of the mistakes they commonly make in writing. I have benefited a lot from this activity whenever I conducted it in my classes. I hope you'll enjoy it...


Level: Pre-intermediate and above
Materials Needed: None
Preparation:
a.    Find two sample student paragraphs, which have both strong and weak points.Make sure these points are relevant to your students’ writing; for example, the mistakes in these paragraphs must be similar to those your students keep on making.
b.    Give feedback on these paragraphs with numbers instead of words; each number will signify a different point (see the sample paragraph in the attached worksheet below).
c.    Photocopy these paragraphs for each group before class.
Interaction Patterns: Group work, whole-class activity, individual work
Time: 50 minutes

Procedure:
-    Students work in groups of four.
-    Give each group a copy of the paragraphs.
-    Students read the paragraphs and try to figure out what each number signifies in terms of feedback.
-    After the groups decipher the coded feedback, elicit what each number signifies from the groups.
-    Ask students to select one of the paragraphs and improve it in the light of the numbered feedback.  

Variation:
•    For weaker students, you may give the list in the answer key in a jumbled order and ask students to match the answers with the numbers.

Personal Comment:
- Numbered feedback was something I was introduced to when I first started teaching at Bilkent University, School of English Language. I then adapted this useful feedback style into such a classroom activity and noticed that students enjoy decoding such feedback and learn a lot from giving feedback to these sample student paragraphs.

A Pronunciation Activity: Missing Boxes

This activity is designed to raise students' awareness of the silent letters in English. If you believe your students tend to mispronounce words with these letters, why don't you try out this activity in your classes?

Level: All
Materials Needed:  None
Preparation: Photocopy the student cards below or prepare a 4×4 grid for student A’s and B’s similar to the ones below.
Interaction Patterns: Pair work, whole-class activity
Time: 20 minutes

Procedures:
-    Students work in pairs.
-    Hand student A’s the student A card and B’s the student B card.
-    This is an information gap activity. Student A’s card is different from that of Student B. Thus, they need to ask each other questions to fill in the missing boxes on their cards.
-    Students in turn ask each other “What is number …?” and fill in their tables.
-    Remind students not to show each other their cards but to say those words so that they practice pronunciation.
-    Closely monitor the pairs to check they pronounce the words correctly. Provide help when necessary.
-    At the end of the pair-work activity, elicit each word and provide the correct pronunciation if needed.
-    Then, attract students’ attention to the boxes at the top of their tables.
-    Ask pairs to label the columns A, B, C and D according to common characteristics of the words in that column.
-    If students cannot find that common characteristic, highlight the silent letters in the words in that column.
-    Students give a title to each column (KEY: Column A will be titled SILENT B; column B will be named SILENT H; column C will be titled SILENT C and column D will be labelled SILENT W).
-    After giving a title to each column, check the pronunciation of a couple of words from the box to make sure students have understood the concept of silent letters in English.  

Personal Comment: 
- Turkish students tend to have difficulty in the pronunciation of words with silent letters and this activity is a fun way of raising awareness of this important issue.

For more pronunciation activities, you may read the chapter on Pronunciation Activities in my activity book, The Activist.

A Vocabulary Game: Vocabulary Dominoes

Interested in a vocabulary activity to help students improve their use of collocations?

Level: All
Materials Needed: Paper
Preparation: Prepare 28 domino cards for each group (see sample domino cards template below). Write a part of the collocation on one card and the other half on another so that students form meaningful and accurate collocations when they put the domino cards together.
Interaction Patterns: Group work
Time: 30 min.s

Procedure:
-    Students work in groups of four.
-    Give a set of domino cards to each group. Each student draws four domino cards.
-    The student with the domino card on which “START” is written starts the activity by laying that card on the table.
-    The student who has the domino card which completes the word combination on the table puts it next to that domino card.
-    Students take turns laying their dominoes when they find the correct matches.
-    The student who gets rid of all the dominoes first wins the game.   

Variation:
•    You may give the instructions of the activity in written form to make it more understandable.
•    Students may work in pairs.
•    You may design various domino cards. If you want, you may have word-definition combinations on the dominoes. Or, you may write word-word combinations on the domino cards, which will be a nice practice activity for collocations.
•    You may want to conduct this as an activity rather than a game. If done as an activity, there will be no winners or losers, which will enable students to work on all the dominoes and thus all the vocabulary items.
•    You may give students domino templates and they may prepare their own dominoes in groups. Then, they may swap the sets of domino cards they prepare with the other groups and play the game.  

Personal Comment: This is a fun activity designed to attract students’ attention to word combinations, while they are learning new words.

To find more vocabulary activities, you may refer to my activity book, The Activist.

A New Baby's Born...

Your belief determines your action and your action determines your results, but first you have to believe.

Mark Victor Hansen

Everything started with a dream... Then I believed this dream... And today my dream came true...

The book I have been working on since the moment I started teaching is born today and I am very proud to share it with you...

I'd like to thank everyone who has given me their kind and positive feedback today when they were introduced to my book.

In the coming posts, I will be sharing with you some activities I put in The Activist... If you share with me the activities you like using in your classes, I will be very glad... This is why I created this blog: To learn from each other...

Burçin H.

My Talk at METU ELT Conference

Today I had another enjoyable experience: I gave a presentation this time at 2012 METU ELT Convention titled Embracing Challenges. The title of my presentation was A Literacy Challenge: How to Teach Reading. I say "enjoyable" because I really like sharing teaching ideas with colleagues and engaging in discussions with people from different contexts afterwards.

If you are interested in the slides I used in my speech today, here is the link to my Prezi presentation:

http://prezi.com/maqke7tj9862/present/?auth_key=f2spzat&follow=3iubkuc5gd_h

In the coming days, I will be posting some more detailed stuff on literacy instruction at tertiary level. I believe we should all revisit our approaches to teaching reading and do our best to better address our 21st century learners, whose needs are somewhat different from the needs of the previous generations.