Last week, we started working on a new project in my 4º ESO class. In this project, the students have to research a journalistic style and report three news stories according to their chosen style.
Here you have the presentation I used in class:
First of all, the students got into groups, and before choosing a style, we discussed some common characteristics of each of them together. We discussed things such as bias, neutrality, focus, the importance given to personal commentary by the person reporting the news, the general tone, the role of the audience, and some other generalities. Then, each group chose a style and they started working on their scripts.
Although I have given them three stories to report and examples of raw news to my students, I've actually given them the freedom to develop their stories as they like. In other words, they all have to talk about an oil spill, a new vaccine and a celeb becoming a mother, but the stories described by each group can differ.
I am really excited about this project because, although we are working on fictional news, the students will gain a deeper understanding of the role of the media in news reporting, and hopefully, this will make my students a little more critical when they read or hear the news, by asking themselves the same questions we discussed at the beginning of the project: is this biased? What political agenda does it have, if any? Is this news or opinion? ...
All the groups have decided to record a video, and one of them has asked to use Touchcast. As I write these lines, however, we're still at the script-writing stage of the project. I shall update again in a few days.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the surveys on role models, which my 4º ESO students had made. These surveys were filled out by other students at school. Once enough responses had been received, the authors collated and analysed the data and presented the results to the class.
Google Forms is great because it simplifies this job for you. It makes pie charts and and bar charts, so it makes the job of interpreting data easier. The open questions (short or long answers) yielded different results, sometimes unexpected or even wasteful, as the students who took the surveys didn't always take the questions seriously. I think my students learned a lesson there.
Finally, the results were interpreted and analysed. My students used Google Slides to make their presentations, using some of the graphs provided by Google Forms, and conclusions were drawn in insightful ways, which made this part of the project meaningful and informative.
The general feedback from the class was positive. They had never done a project like this and they relished the challenge. It was nice to create a questionnaire that was treated like a real one (by most people, anyway), and not like a classroom activity that stays within the same four walls where it was created. They did say that making three different surveys about the same topic (role models) was a bit samey, though, and that it would have been better to have used different topics instead. I have to say that I agree with this, and for next year I will probably ask my students to make surveys about a few different topics, such as stereotypes, independence, the rights of young people, and so on.
The next step is to do a writing on the back of this. We're working on reports and proposals at the moment. I'll write a post about this once we get there.
Last week I started a new project with my 4º ESO class. The project consists in writing a survey, analysing data from answers and presenting the results to the rest of the class.
Here's the presentation I used for this project:
One of the conversation topics for ISE III is role models, so I decided to use this as the topic for the survey. I asked my students to create a survey in order to find out what their peers consider role models and how they choose their role models. To make it a bit less abstract, I established some areas in which people normally find them: sports, entertainment and close personal circle. Within these categories, I allowed them to use sub-categories, such as the world of cinema, music and technology/design.
The first step was to get my students familiarised with the term 'role model' and to give them a more neutral point of view. I gave them links to several sites so they could read about role models and what it means to have or to be a role model. These are the links I gave them:
Link to Diversity Role Models, a non-for-profit organisation that promotes role models from diverse sexual orientations.
Rolemodel.net, a website about the importance of role models in general, focusing on celebrities and their influence on others.
A class discussion about what they had read ensued. The students had realised that having a role model meant something slightly different to what they had initially thought, and their understanding of the influence a role model can have on young people was deeper.
Then, the students were arranged into groups. I used TeamUp for this. I asked each group to choose a team leader, who would be in charge of keeping time and assigning jobs. I usually find that students don't always make the most of the time I give them for projects, so a tight deadline, a reporting system like Team-Up and a manager within each group normally take care of all this. As usual, the students had the assessment rubric at hand, so they had a fairly clear idea of the quality that was expected.
They used Google Forms to make their surveys. I love the Google suite because its apps enable collaboration, and since I always ask my students to share their documents with me, I have visibility all the time. I can check progress, praise students, make comments and so on.
At first, the students weren't very clear how to start making their survey. I had asked them to include some questions for statistics (age, gender, background ... ) and then, I suggested grouping their questions into sections, each section dealing with a particular sub-topic of their chosen category. This would allow the students to interpret answer results more easily.
The students could use all different types of answers, but most of them used multiple choice, tickboxes and short answer. I helped them fine-tune the range of answers available, reminding them that surveys are purposeful questionnaires-- this proved a bit harder than I had expected, but then again, making surveys isn't an easy task.
When they were happy with their questionnaires (and so was I), I suggested adding pictures to the questions in order to make them more appealing. After all, students from all different year levels are going to take the surveys, and teenagers like to look at pictures as well as reading questions.
This is how far we've come. Once the surveys have been answered by enough people, the students will complete part 2 of the project, which will consist in analysing the answers and presenting their findings to the class.
There are a lot of difficult accents and, I'm not going to lie, the Scottish accent is one of them. It's not only the pronunciation that makes it a bit hard to understand, but also the fact that there are a lot of Scottish words most other native English speakers have never heard of, and they are used widely. This is because in most informal situations, people use a variety of English called Scots, which a lot of people from Scotland consider a language in its own right (and a lot of visitors do, too), and many Scottish people take pride in their distinctive sounds and words.
They do say that one of the clearest varieties of English is spoken in Scotland. In Inverness, for example, people speak in a recognisable Scottish accent, but one which is clear enough for anybody to understand without trouble. Go to Glasgow, on the other hand, and you may well need an interpreter.
What are the main characteristics of the Scottish accent, then?
Pronunciation
Broadly speaking, this is what makes it different from standard English:
- Scottish speakers roll their 'r', and it's a strong 'r', not the soft sound Americans make. It's sharp, it's short, and it's there. As a result, a word like 'girl' is not pronounced 'gal', but almost 'gerrrrral', with a small vovel sound between the 'r' and the 'l' (unpronunciable otherwise). Words like this include 'curl', 'whirl', 'Carlsberg'...
- Scottish long vowels are far less frequent than in standard English. 'Bath' contains a short /a/ sound, whereas in RP it's long, /a:/. Thus, there are some words that become homophones, like pull and pool.
- Some dipthongs become long vowels. For example, house is pronounced 'hoose', about is pronounced 'aboot'... and not all dipthongs stay the same. Home is commonly pronounced 'heim', toes is 'teis'... And some words turn short vowels into dipthongs, like head: 'heid'.
- In some areas, speakers drop the sound /t/ when it's between vowels: be'er instead of better.
- The sound /x/ ("j" as in "jamón" for Spanish speakers) exists, although it is a bit softer. Common words include loch (=lake), dreich (=wet, damp weather), och (sound people make to express annoyance)... it's very common in names of Gaelic origin, which are ubiquitous once you venture into the Highlands.
Vocabulary
There are a lot of common words that don't resemble regular English:
aye = yes
nay = no
ken= know
gie = give
bonnie = nice
kirk = church
bairn = child
lass, lassie = girl
blether = chat
braw = beautiful
haar = mist
how? = why?
crabbit = grumpy
loan = alley
wifey = woman
In Scottish English, it's common to use 'no' as a shortened form of 'not', although the word order is not always the same as in standard English.
'I'll no tell ye any lies" = 'I won't tell you any lies"
'Don't' is often pronounced 'dinny', and 'didn't' is 'didny', with the stress placed on the first syllable.
'I dinny ken him' = 'I don't know him"
It's also fairly common to use 'ye' to mean 'you', or 'yes' and 'youse' to mean 'you' in plural.
'I'll meet youse outside the pub' = 'I'll meet you all outside the pub'
All of these make it quite exciting (and, if you're new to the country, quite nerve wrecking) to decipher what people are saying to you.
Once you get used to it, it's quite alright, really.
Here are a couple of videos to illustrate some Scottish accents.
First, David Tennant reads Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. Tennant comes from Renfrewshire, in the West of Scotland.
Next, a short clip from Brave, the Pixar film. Merida is played by Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald, a Glaswegian actress. Her mother, Elinor, is played by English actress Emma Thompson, who does a sterling job at speaking with a broad Highland accent.
The trailer for Sunshine on Leith is a good example of the accent generally found in Edinburgh.
Finally, in these videos you will find out some of the problems some Scottish people face because of their accent.
I've come to realise that, no matter how old my students are (ahem, ahem...), they always enjoy celebrating foreign holidays such as Halloween. Last October, I decided to humour them, but I had my rules.
1-. They were going to read a poem.
2-. The poem was long.
3-. It had lots of strange words.
4-. I wanted to record their voices reading it.
Their enthusiasm somewhat subdued, I showed them the following video:
Some of them were touched by this point. Most of them, though, still had their suspicions. It was long, it had a lot of long, difficult words, and the subject matter wasn't all that clear. Who was Lenore, anyway?
Printed copy of the poem in our hands, we went almost line by line, focusing on the rhythm and the sounds, just getting used to the cadence and the images conjured up by the extensive use of alliteration, repetition and rhyme. Even those students who still didn't understand the poem were starting to let themselves get carried away by the intricate, elaborate and resounding mechanics of the poem.
OK, then. Death, loss, insanity, obsession... the themes started to fly around in class. Written on the board, bubble diagram covering the white surface. The words started to gain meaning, up until then unclear. Mythological figures became more concrete and significant. Most students were on board and started to make decisions about how they were going to read their lines.
They wanted to read their lines in pairs, so I gave each pair of students two stanzas. We went over difficult words, drawing their attention to internal rhyme so they could predict their pronunciation. Without saying they were turning into actors, the students were interested in the speaker's frame of mind in order to give their performance some substance. And then, the big day arrived.
I used WavePad, a voice-recording app on the iPad, and recorded stanza after stanza. The students felt satisfied after we finished, our 10-minute long recording testament to their efforts, to the journey they had to make to reach the master of horror literature, even if it was only with their fingertips.
When we finished, the general comment was... we should do this more often!
I agreed.
Have you used Poe's masterpiece in class? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments below!
Here's one of those accents most people would be happy to understand. However, few English learners try to sound Aussie when they try to sound 'natural'. At least, that is the case in Spain, where most native English teachers come from either the USA or the British Isles and, naturally, teach their students their own accents.
There are two main differences between dialects: vocabulary and pronunciation. Grammar tends to stay more or less the same in every dialect, although we could make some generalisations about this as well and say that such-and-such a dialect is similar to British English or to American English.
I'd say that Australian English is similar to British English, as far as grammar is concerned, and thanks to TV series like Neighbours, a lot of Brits have adopted some Aussie words, and even some of the intonation typical of speakers down under.
VOCABULARY
This video illustrates some differences between Australian English and American English.
In this video, you can see how Australian speakers tend to shorten words in colloquial speech.
PRONUNCIATION
Well, it's been a bit of a challenge to find good videos to illustrate pronunciation... most of them were either really boring, or had been made by non-Australian people. Anyhow, here we go.
An Australian comedian, Simon Taylor, goes over a few Aussie accents.
Here, you have a comparison between Canadian English and Australian English.
I hope you enjoyed this post... see you next time!
As far as speaking activities go, class debates are both entertaining and educational. I like them because you can work a lot of skills, some of which go beyond the purely linguistic ones.
This week, I have done a class debate on the subject of ambition.
We looked at a couple of quotes about ambition, highlighting both its positive and its negative side.
Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in. Bill Bradley
He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain its ashes. Proveb.
Then, the students were divided into two groups-- those who would argue that ambition was mostly a positive quality, and those who would defend the opposite. Not every student was going to argue according to their belief, which made it all the more interesting. I have an odd number of students, so one of the teams had one extra member.
We agreed on a few different subtopics: the business world, historical figures, people in our own personal circles, etc. Each team would research these to fit in with their position. I gave the class two periods to prepare, and we established the debate would last between 30 and 45 minutes.
Finally, both teams chose a main speaker, who would start the debate by stating their team's position and a short but strong supporting reason.
On the day of the debate, the classroom furniture was arranged in such a way that all students were sitting down in neat rows, each team facing each other. I had prepared a rubric measuring the 5 main aspects I wanted to assess:
respect for the other team
quality of the information used
relevance to argument
presentation (voice, body language, eye contact)
language skills
The students were made aware of the standards required. We tossed a coin and the debate began!
After the debate, I assigned the students an opinion essay with the following quote by Thomas Morton to discuss: "Where ambition ends, happiness begins."
I think that having done the class debate prior to the writing assignment works well to help students generate valuable ideas to use in their essays. A lot of them suffer from writer's block when it comes to talking about abstract ideas, so doing an 'undercover' brainstorming by way of a debate is an effective way to get those creative juices running.
I am really happy with the result because students have
researched a topic they had some pre-conceived ideas about
worked as a team in order to build solid arguments, in some cases anticipating counter-arguments
listened to each other in order to rebuff arguments effectively
put into practice some complex language, such as second and third conditional sentences, reported speech, relative clauses, modal verbs...
used both speaking and writing skills
How about you? What is your experience with class debates?
I would like to share a classroom experience that I feel particularly happy about.
Last year, I tried out a creative writing activity with my 4th year students. During the week leading up to Halloween, I asked them to write a horror story set in school, the reason being that the creepiest stories are always those that happened near the place where they are being told. I gave the students a few pointers, asked them to get into groups of three, and gave them a bit of time to work on a basic horror story. They were a fairly strong class, and they delivered the goods.
This year, I have a slightly weaker class in the same year level. Weaker in their language skills, but really imaginative and with a high level of commitment to any 'different' activity I bring to class. I pitched the task to them by first reading a horror story set at school (with some characters they recognised even after a name change, and some locations they could identify without trouble). Then, I explained the basics of story writing (rising action, climax, denouement), and gave them a target of two pages. This time they would work in pairs, and just like last year, I gave them time to work on their stories in class.
Their response was amazing. They threw themselves into it- they weren't just completing an assignment, they really wanted to create scary stories, and they really wanted their classmates to picture their characters and what they were going through in no uncertain terms. They researched vocabulary I would never have dreamt of teaching them at their skill level, they used grammar structures we had just been working on the week before to express uncertainty and speculation (and if I may say so, successfully as well), and they even were a bit worried they would have to go over the 'limit' of two pages because their story just needed that extra bit of development, or to create a certain effect on the reader.
To them, this was a writing assignment, yes, but it was also a chance to imagine something and bring it to life.
To top it all off, we read the stories in class, curtains drawn and creepy music playing in the background.
The general comment? "We should do this more often!"
You can check their stories (with some minor editing and corrections) clicking here.
