I do have some exciting news to share with you about what's happening from mid-March onward.

I've accepted an online English language teaching position with EF English Live. The job will be based in Bali, Indonesia. After an initial period of training in systems, procedures, etc. and a month of online work based in the English First office in Denpasar, I should be authorised by them to work from home, which I'm planning I will make in Ubud. The position's focus will be mostly conversational English, either individually or in small groups, via the Internet.

If you know Bali, you will be aware that Ubud is its art, dance, music and cultural heart. It's also famous for its rice terraces and expansive views, not to mention the book and film "Eat, Pray, Love" which has made it a tourist draw-card.

After sorting through my health issues, I'm anticipating that my new home will be more stress-free. I've been there twice already and have a reasonably good idea of what I might expect. Amongst other things, I'm hoping for some massages, meditation, yoga, and to learn some Indonesian language. I might also see if I can learn to play Balinese music - perhaps gamelan.

Once I'm settled and have some more experience, I'll be ready to post some updates to this site.

In September, 2016 a brand new, fun English learning book hit Amazon. It's called "Have Fun Talking: 101 Informal Conversations in English".

My role was as editor & contributor to the book, the e-book (on Kindle), and as the creator of the related website http://www.havefuntalking.com. The publication contains dialogues dealing with a wide variety of life situations including Chinese translations of each conversation, as well as exercises to expand knowledge and vocabulary. It includes jokes on each page, idioms, and words of wisdom to promote thinking skills. The dialogues are also available on audio and CD formats.

That’s right, jokes! HUNDREDS of jokes! And why not? The name is HAVE FUN TALKING!, and we want you to have hundreds of laughs while you learn. There are jokes about cats, dogs, cars, banks, luggage, cheese, fish, teachers, monkeys, chickens, phones, motorcycles, airports, railroads and artists. You name it, we have probably included a joke about it.

What do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator.

The e-Book version of “Have Fun Talking” is now available for purchase on Amazon!!!  It features all of the same content as the actual book, but has a few extras.
You can make notes of anything you’d like to remember or practice.
You can build a set of your own flashcards for any vocabulary you would like to recall.
Our testing has shown that the e-Book will work on a wide variety of devices, including:
– Windows PC’s
– Apple computers
– iPads
– Android tablets
– iPhones
– Android phones
So, you can take the e-book with you everywhere and spend any spare moments dipping into the dialogues and exercises, or just enjoying the jokes.

More recently, all 101 Have Fun Talking conversations are now available to purchase and download in .mp3 audio format. Each conversation is numbered and listed in the table of contents, so you can easily find the ones you are interested in studying. Listen to native English speakers while reading along in the book or e-book, practice your pronunciation with them, or just listen for fun. Whatever you decide, these audio files will be a great addition to your English language learning.

Please check out the website and have a look inside the books on Amazon at http://amzn.to/2k3MKge.

​(That's me on the right, by the way.)

I realise it has been some time since my last post, but I would like to make up for that by offering 10 new resources that both students and teachers will find very useful. These are items I have created and used with real students in real classrooms, so I can be confident in sharing them with you.
Just go to my Home page and you will see them listed under "Updates".
Please enjoy them. Greg.

There are many possibilities for using word clouds in language courses. I've listed around 35 of them here with a few hints on what to do.

- preview a presentation or a text

- preview the current day’s lesson plan

- predict the content of a text e.g. topics, style, purpose, intended audience

- predict the content of a novel e.g. plot lines, characters, genre or themes as group work

- complete reading comprehension questions just from a word cloud, then comparing answers after reading the actual text

- summarise a presentation

- turn a text into a picture (essay, report, paragraph, article, etc.)

- identify the key words in a text based on their size in the word cloud

- expanding vocabulary (definitions, synonyms, antonyms, or brainstorm words associated with a new one, match parts of collocations)

- student-created flashcards of essential words (review, circle unknown, learn)

- discussion starter (student chooses one word from cloud to speak about)

- add to printed or online course materials

- use as a background for slides or online materials

- compare student responses (make one cloud, or separate ones to compare)

- explore a topic (students add own ideas to a question stimulus & build a cloud)

- take a quick class poll or track a poll over time (multiple clouds side-by-side)

- introduce new course, syllabus or module (provides an overview of content)

- introduce course objectives

- student ice-breaker e.g. all input hobbies, interests, future aspirations, family, pets, favourite films or books, country of origin, etc.

- highlight the main areas to focus on from rubrics to gain the best grades

- highlight examples of misspelled or overused words in student writing by inputting their own work

- illustrate contrasting ideas (show two clouds side-by-side), such as opposing arguments in essays or articles

- research texts from multiple sources then combine them into a cloud

- ‘find the words’ game (e.g. mix academic & non-academic in a cloud & identify)

- ‘guess the topic’ game, or combine two topics in one cloud and students separate them out

- ‘grammar game’ e.g. students classify words from a cloud into different parts of speech or different tenses

- ‘sentence structure’ game e.g. input a complex sentence or short series of sentences into a word cloud, and have students reconstruct them in the correct word order

- ‘memory game’ e.g. show a word cloud, take it off the screen, students write as many words as they can recall

- identify parts of speech (students highlight or underline in different colours)

- visual analysis of qualitative data (e.g. convert a table to a picture)

- curriculum mapping across multiple subjects

- checking the balance between course content and course objectives

Here is a multiple-lesson design thanks to http://tborash.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/designing-lessons-using-wordle/:

While not a flawless design, these six steps seemed paramount in increasing students' desire to learn:

• Students pre-assessing their own knowledge and understanding - "What does _insert topic here_ mean to me?"
• Students using Wordle to analyze the pre-assessment responses
• Students "doing stuff" to experience _insert topic here_ in real life - "What happens when I do this?" (this is the learning phase)
• Students responding to what they now know and understand - "What does _insert topic here_ mean to me today?"
• Students comparing the Wordle of their current thinking to that of their pre-assessment responses
• Students asking the question, "Given what I first thought, and what I now think, what do I think of next?"

Without the use of Wordle, we lose out on a central piece of this lesson design puzzle.

Benefits:

- assists with motivation

- assists with thinking skills

- enlivens course content in all macro-skills

- appeals to visual learners

Places to Try:

http://abcya.com/word_clouds.htm (for young learners)

http://www.literature-map.com/ (more for readers of English lit.)

http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/ (has iOS & Android apps.)

http://tagcrowd.com/

http://taggalaxy.com/

http://tagul.com/ (each tag is linkable with a URL for navigation)

http://www.tagxedo.com/

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/ (also has visual thesaurus!)

http://worditout.com/

http://www.wordle.net/ (very easy to use, MOST favoured by teachers)

http://wordsift.com/ (from Stanford University ELL)


The word cloud illustrated above was prepared by myself using Wordle.

I'm pleased to announce a new page on 'Teacher Greg's Education Home'.

The motivation for it came from my desire to engage the many colleagues with whom I work, in a conversation about ELICOS (English Language Intensive Course of Study) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes) programs and how they operate at my institution. Like many workplaces, the pressures of just keeping on top of the teaching have meant that opportunities for genuine discussion, sharing and reflection have become rare, formal meetings have become ineffectual, and inefficiencies have naturally arisen as a result.

'TESOL forums' will be a chance to recover lost ground, to re-ignite the discussion, and to move forward in more practical ways. It will take some effort to 'sell' the idea and overcome the hesitation of others, but I'm taking the first steps while hoping this will lead them to continue the conversation.

Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history. -Joan Wallach Scott
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. -Maria Robinson

One Response to IPA: The theory and beyond. Is knowing the IPA essential? Do you use phonemic script in class? Why or why not? #ELTchat Summary 22/02/2012

1. Greg says:February 27, 2012 at 5:55 am For the half of the world’s population whose first language does not use a Latin script, IPA is a waste of time.
   
   In my situation, I teach students in Taiwan 40 minutes per week. Their first language uses traditional Chinese script and its more than 10,000 characters take many years for them to master. As one of the speakers mentioned, IPA is just another level of complexity to impose on them, which is why we don’t do it.
   
   Students are quite capable of learning to speak reasonable English without IPA. For example, the excellent Synthetic Phonics approach used widely in the U.K. (and increasingly in the USA) offers a more straightforward system linked closely to English spelling.
   
   Once students know some reference sounds used within key words, they can use them to learn new words, rather than trying to recall isolated, decontextualised symbols.
   
   Although I had to endure some IPA as part of my own formal training, I see it more as a tool for professional linguists than for second language learners.
   

Are you looking for some useful resources for teaching elementary school EFL/ESL students?
Perhaps you want to know how to use Interactive Whiteboards or just need some resources for them?

Well, I have what you need - and FREE!

On the "Teach" link go to "Teaching Help" and you will find what you need. Select a tag that sounds like what you need and you'll be taken to my Pinboard weblinks page with over 2,500 pages categorised appropriately.


 

Principled Possibilities - Ideas for Teaching is a unique publication representing the summation of four years of graduate study, and my own experiences, discoveries, experiments and successes over eight years of teaching throughout Asia and the Pacific. Uniquely the book includes: - a wide selection of academic papers, conference and training presentations, and curriculum and planning documents, - links to websites and other resources for exploring the topics further and contacting the author, - ideas ranging from working with absolute young beginners to adult and upper-intermediate level students, - discussions of current challenges and controversies in teaching, - approaches to online and computer-assisted learning, and - suggestions in the field of English language teaching.  


Here is the full introduction to give you some more details:My transition from office work to education was a late one, and came about more by accident than design.

Having successfully trained as a classical musician, I realised that performance opportunities would be limited at my age, so it seemed that music education would be the most logical progression. Having successfully trained as a teacher, I discovered that music teaching opportunities would also be scarce, apart from those occasionally arising in outback Australia.

At the suggestion of a friend I decided to dip my toes into the field of English language teaching by working at a winter camp in Shanghai, China. It was the joy of that experience which sparked my desire to work and travel further.

Several training courses later I began my new career, at first in Australia with children and later with adults from Europe, South America and Asia. From there I have experienced life in the Sultanate of Brunei, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan, where I am presently located.

While there is much material available in the field of EFL (English as a Foreign Language), I feel that my own experiences, discoveries, experiments, successes and failures over the last eight years in a variety of settings, with children to adults, and with absolute beginners to upper-intermediate students, are worth sharing with others.

The present book, therefore, includes academic papers, conference and training presentations, and curriculum and planning papers to assist fellow educators. Many of these were developed in the context of formal tertiary training in Queensland, Australia, and refer to issues and cases from that location. Nevertheless, they are equally relevant in other English-speaking contexts.

There are also links to my Internet-based materials and websites where electronic versions of many resources included here may be found for the reader’s convenience and further exploration.

I don’t look on this publication as the final authority on all matters of English language teaching, but as part of the ongoing professional support and discussion so vital to our dynamically evolving and collaborative field. This is why I encourage readers to continue the conversation with me and others using the links given throughout.

How can you get this book? Click on the Lulu link on my home page, or go directly here.

Abstract: Online learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) face many unique issues in choosing which program to study. The present paper begins with a review of criteria developed previously, and reassesses these based on subsequent pedagogical and technological innovations, particularly the evolution of Web 2.0 tools and “communicative language teaching” approaches. A new set of criteria were then applied to programs reviewed previously and to newer courses. These exposed ongoing problems of providers failing to adopt newer approaches despite most being available at no cost, a lack of standards, best practice models and external accreditation, and neglect in establishing a sense of community through enhanced student-teacher and student-student communication, which in turn impacts student motivation and the sense of isolation. The author suggests that more research effort it needed to encourage industry players to move forward, and to reassure learners of the quality and value for money of programs they may choose to complete.

The videos by Nik Peachey and George Siemens will not play in a Slidecast, so if you would like to view them you will need to go here:
Web 1.0 http://db.tt/U6kEP7L
Web 2.0 http://db.tt/nZfnlZz
Connectivism http://db.tt/9eCA2ds
Sorry for any inconvenience. Greg Q.

The link to the full conference paper is here.