Teaching English Radio

Today I wanted to mention a section of the Teaching English website.  (Another of the sites I'm subscribed to and visit regularly.


Teaching English Radio

There are 15 minute radio programmes on a particular theme.

9 themes have been covered so far:

1  Planning your lessons
2  Teachers supporting each other
3  Finding and creating worksheets
4  Using group work in larger classes
5  Pair and group work in practice
6  Developing teachers' language
7  Using English in the classroom
8  Teaching new language
9  Teaching reading

Then, they can download a worksheet which summarises the ideas discussed in the radio programme and also contains some ideas for thinking about/discussing.  For example, this is the Programme Summary from  Finding and creating worksheets:

Programme Summary: Using real-life materials is motivating for students. It provides a very real context for practising English. Our students are also a rich resource as we found out in this programme.

Teachers can use songs, humour, real objects and simple drawings and if we need to find colourful images for posters or flash cards we can cut them out of magazines. Newspapers are a very cheap resource and provide material for craft, as well as a variety of written texts. We hope you’ve heard some ideas to adapt for your teaching situation                                                                                                    .

These programmes would provide great material and stimulus for teacher training and development.  They would also provide useful language input for trainees.

Learn and play!

As I write this post, my computer is playing some jazzy music to me.  Why? Because I've just been trying out Academy Island!  What exactly is that, you may ask?  It's a game!  I'll paste the description provided by Cambridge ESOL (I couldn't describe it better myself!)

What is the game about?

An unknown alien life form who landed on earth today has had to learn the English language to get by in a range of social situations... Don't panic, it's just the plot of Academy Island – a new social media game from Cambridge experts designed to help learners improve their English language ability.

Where can I find the game?

Academy Island is a free educational game aimed at English language learners. It’s available from the University of Cambridge ESOL Examination’s (Cambridge ESOL) official Facebook page – which currently has over 120,000 fans.

What do players have to do?

Players of Academy Island have to progress through different difficulty levels by helping the alien use English in a range of situations such as shopping in a bakery and visiting places such as an art gallery and library.

Who wrote the game?

A team of language experts from Cambridge ESOL who work on the actual exam papers came up with the questions and tasks to ensure they were pitched at an appropriate level for learners of English. They worked closely with TAMBA – an award-winning digital marketing agency who specialise in social media games. Players who take on the Academy Island challenge can post their scores on a global leader board through their Facebook profile.

From what I have seen (I haven't had time - yet! - to visit all the places on the Island - the language level is quite high - I would say that for students preparing for Cambridge English: First and above.

Try it out and post your results!

Olympic sports

If like me, you like interesting facts that you can share with your students, then I think you will also like the Olympic Sports page of the London 2012 website.

You can click on any of the sports listed on the left or on the blue icon for it.  This will take you to a new page where you can read about the dates the event will take place in London, the venue.  There is a video illustrating figures about the number of players taking part, etc.

For example, for Table Tennis:

Key facts

Venue: ExCeL

Dates: Saturday 28 July – Wednesday 8 August

Medal events: 4

Athletes: 172 (86 men, 86 women)

I particularly liked the 'Did you know?' box on the page.

Other names for Table Tennis include ‘Ping Pong’, ‘Whiff Waff’ and ‘Flim Flam’, reflecting the sound of the ball being struck and bouncing off the table.

There is lots of material here for all levels, including lower level classes.  And as sport usually features in most coursebooks and on most syllabuses, it should fit in - especially this year of the Olympics.

Funny consular requests

In the past here in Cantabria, teachers at the school where I used to work and myself too were often asked to help out tourists in difficulty.

Incidents included putting up a couple who had missed their ferry till the next one because they had spent all their money and could not pay for a hotel room.

I was asked to interpret for a poor woman who had been involved in a tragic motorbike accident and she and her partner (and the doctor treating her) needed someone who could help them communicate and also help make the arrangements to get her back to the UK.

At the time, we had a British Consulate in Santander (no longer though), yet for some reason or another, people in need of help were directed towards us.  And none of us felt we could refuse to help in such situations of need.

I was reminded of all this when I watched William Hague talking about bizarre requests received by consulate staff around the world.

A fun video to use in class to introduce the theme of helping others or problems that can occur when on holiday?

Do you have any similar stories to share?

PET Speaking materials on Writefix

While I was looking at Writefix, a website designed generally to work on the area of argument and opinion essays and describing graphs, I came across a section of the site that focuses on the Cambridge English: Preliminary speaking test.

If you move your mouse over the photo, you can see tabs of text with suggestions for things you could say about this photo.

There are also some Part 2 materials for you to use with students.

I think this could be VERY useful for class and for self-study for Preliminary students.

Hope you're finding my suggestions useful!!!

British Council Seminar on choosing and using resources

Yesterday, I received my weekly newsletter from British Council Teaching English.  (Another site I'm subscribed to).

If I have time, I look through the areas mentioned in the newsletter as soon as it arrives and click on the links to find out more about them.  (If not, the email gets transferred to my 'subscriptions' folder

and stays there till I have time to look at it properly!)

I decided to have a look at the email this morning when I switched on my computer and clicked on the link to

Choosing and using resources with ESOL learners Dot Powell, manager of the British Council's project to create a portal for ESOL teachers and learners, looks at criteria we use to make judgements about ESOL materials.

This took me to the Seminars section of the Teaching English website.  I clicked on:

I then watched Dot Powell, Project Manager for ESOL Nexus in a seminar with teachers discussing the criteria we need to apply when we are choosing and/or preparing resources for students.

Dot then provided examples of resources and applied the criteria with the teachers at the seminar.


The seminar lasts just under 20 minutes, but I found it so interesting and well-presented, that the time just flew by.

I then paid a quick visit to the ESOL Nexus website.

The site is targeted at a particular group of ESOL learners:

ESOL Nexus Welcome to the ESOL Nexus page for learners. The materials here have been specially designed and identified for learners who are working and making their home in the UK. We are sure you will find lots of interesting and motivating activities here which will help you to improve your English in lots of different ways, understand more about UK culture and learn more about UK society and work.

But I have just tried out a couple of activities from the site and I think that many of them would be useful and relevant to our students.
There are many listening activities and the Magazine articles seem interesting.
I liked the several of the poems in the Poems and Stories section.  I hadn't come across the No poem before!

I hope you will visit the Nexus site too and find it useful.  (Most of the stuff there is for higher level learners.

In a few minutes, I will look at the teachers section of the site - maybe for a future post......?


The British Council has lots more seminars on its website.  Here is the direct link to the start up page.

Toptenz.net and Toptenzphotos

As you know from previous posts like Camera Obscura, Camara Obscura 1, Life on the Edge, Compare and congrast challenge , I love sites with great photos for use in class.

A little earlier, I was looking at various bits and pieces on a site I like to browse from time to time (http://www.toptenz.net/).  The name says what it is - a wide and varied collection of 10 things on a theme.

To give you an example, here are four photos taken from their list of the top ten Strangest Hobbies.  What do you think the strange hobbies are?

Extreme ironing, soap carving, milk bottle collecting and mooing!!!  Never tried any of these myself!!!


I ended up at the toptenz.net sister site:
http://www.toptenzpictures.com/

When I clicked on one of the categories (Top 10 Live Moving Cinemagraph Pictures), I loved what I saw!  Here's one of the photos from the collection:

The term cinemagraph was invented by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg.  They used the technique in their fashion photography.  Check out their photos here:
http://cinemagraphs.com/


Hope you enjoy toptenz.net and toptenzphotos.com!

The Big Egg Hunt

Some of you have already started your Easter holidays.  In Cantabria, we start on Wednesday :·)

I was preparing a few suggestions for some friends who will be visiting London next weekend, when I came across the Big Egg Hunt.

Next weekend (Easter weekend), 209 giant Easter eggs will be on display in Covent Garden. Up until yesterday, they were 'hidden' around London and people went round hunting them.

Want to see more of these beauties?   Visit the Fabergé Big Hunt webpage.

Unfortunately (?) my favourite - the Egg Letter Box has already been sold!!!

And for a very usable video to use in class or to ask your students to watch at home, I suggest this one from  SightseerTV:

It has an interactive transcript so that students can choose to read and listen at the same time - or you could use it to design a listening/viewing task.

Happy Easter!!!!