English for refugees - Recipe dictation and cooking together

This lesson plan is based on a idea from Teaching Adults Second Language Learners by McKay and Tom

Aim - To help refugees use cooking vocabulary, write recipes

Materials - Cooking equipment and ingredients, access to a kitchen, photocopies (see below)

Level - Elementary/intermediate.

1 - Ask students what verbs/words we use to talk about cooking. write some on the board and mime them to ensure understanding. Otherwise ask students to use smart phones for translation.

2 - Elicit words and write them on the board, use mime to ensure understanding.


3 - Hand out this photocopy from Englishwsheets.com

4 - Students copy down any words they didn't know, check comprehension.

5 - In pairs, student mime words from the photocopy and the other s have to guess them.

6 - Now explain that you are going to give them a recipe (or write it on the board) and that they have to copy them into their notebooks but some words and/or numbers will be missing. (Just choose numbers for beginner students).

7 - Read the recipe aloud and have students fill in the missing gaps.

8 - When you have finished reading have students take turns in completing the dictation on the board or in groups of 3-4

9 - Now get students to use this as a template for their own recipes, encourage them to use their smart phones to find ingredients and names of cooking equipment

10 Tell students that next lesson we will be cooking together in Oikopolis's kitchen, ask students to say who would like to cook something simple for the class, e;g salads, dips etc that take less than an hour to make. Take students on a tour of the kitchen to check that it has all the equipment they need.,

English for refugees - word games for the revision of vocabulary

Last time we played this game to lighten the mood and revise some of the vocabulary areas we have covered recently.

1 - Divide the board into a grid, On one axis write the categories you wish to cover, I also included easier categories such as cities and names in order to help the less advanced students.

2 Divide the class into teams - The size will depend on how much English your students know, with elementary/beginner students, use bigger teams.

3 - Ask students to shout out some (5-10) letters of the alphabet.

4 - Write them in the grid and go through some examples.

Letter           Name           City               Part of the body       Something in the home

F                  Fay               Florence        Face                         Freezer  

5 - Set a suitable time limit (2-10 minutes) - encourage students to use their notes from previous classes and their smart phones.

6 - The winning time is the one who complete the grid or has the most correct entries when the time limit is up.

7 - Elicit answers from the whole class, write them on the board,
                       

English for refugees - Describing homes - finding accomodation

  PART ONE

Aim - To help refugees with some grasp of English describe and find accommodation Greek city of Thessaloniki

Materials - Photographs of different kinds of housing  either from magazines or via  via smart phone.

Level - Elementary/intermediate.

1 - Ask students to think of their dream/perfect home. You may need a photograph to help get your message across and then describe the place and say why you want to live in this place.

2 - Now elicit suitable vocabulary for describing a home;

Type - e.g. flat/house/villa etc

Size - e.g in  square meters or number of rooms/bedrooms

Location e.g in the centre/suburbs/countryside

Amenities e.g.garden/swimming pool/utilities room/garage etc

3 - Write these on the board elicit further terms from the students.

4 - Now students look for a suitable dream home on their smart phones or simply describe it to the person next to them. Students then ask each other why they want to live in this place.

5 - Now draw a floor plan of your own or one you have found on the internet. Label the rooms and facilities, check comprehension.

6 - Students then draw their own present home/previous residence floor plan or for their dream home.

7 - Students then describe their plan.

e,g, It is/was

       It has/had

       I like/liked etc

PART TWO

Aim - To help refugees with some grasp of English describe and find accommodation Greek city of Thessaloniki

Materials - Photographs of different kinds of housing  either from magazines or via  via smart phone and a map of the city..

Level - Elementary/intermediate

1 - In the next lesson recap the language used to describe homes (see part one)

TYPE

SIZE

LOCATION

AMENITIES

2 - Now divide the students into two groups landlords/landladies and tenants - explain terms.

3 - Now in their groups students think of questions the landlords/landladies and tenants would ask.

Landlords/landladies

e'g How long do you want to stay?

     Do you have pets?

     How many people are there in your family?

     How will you pay the rent?- cash/credit card/direct debit?

     etc.

Tenants

e.g Where is the apartment?

      How big is it?

      How many bedrooms does it have?

      How much is the rent?

      Howe much is the deposit? 

      etc.

4 - Write these and any others on the board so students can see them during the following exercises.

5 - Give out landlords/landladies and tenants role play cards (cut into strips)

6 - Work on vocabulary issues and either assign roles at random or ask student to choose their own roles. 

7 - Students write down/copy suitable questions and practice them in pairs.

8 - Now students stand up and the landlords/landladies go to one corner of the room and tenants to the other. Explain that the tenants are looking for accommodation and the landlords/landladies have properties in and around Thessaloniki. Remind students that in Greece prices are often are negotiable so they can haggle/negotiate things such as cost of rent.

You may also need to pin up a large  map of the city to help students understand where the properties are located

9 - Student try to find suitable property/tenant. Encourage students to try more than one option.

10 Students then explain how they made their choice to the class.

11 - If time permits students swap roles.

In the next lesson students can repeat the exercise using their real life details in order to recap.

City and Guilds - Show me the money

I have decided to go public with this complaint as I seem to be getting nowhere with this. At the beginning of June I did some work as an interviewer for the City and Guilds ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) exams here in Thessaloniki. A tough weekend in which I did up to 37 interviews in one day.

As anyone who has done similar work will understand you have to follow their guidelines to the letter. This means being absolutely focused on what you are doing for hours on end with no room for error as everything is recorded. Things were not helped by the fact that at the first school I worked in we were not provided with so much as a class of water despite the fact that temperatures were 35C. Nor was there any place to get something to eat or drink in the vicinity.

To add insult to injury I still haven't been paid. I checked my bank account and they have no record of any deposit from City and Guilds and although I have sent many emails I have had no reply so far. I have worked for many other examining bodies and this is the first time I have had such problems.

Has anyone else had a similar experience either here in Greece or in other countries? I would welcome ideas about what to do next.

Latest update.

Yet more emails and still no reply let alone payment. The good news is that if you are looking for City and Guilds Greece on Google this blog entry is the first thing you will find. I think they are about to get a crash course in the power of social media. They enough money to pay for endless TV ads but not enough to pay staff?

POSTSCRIPT

I finally did get paid by City and Guilds in September, just four months late and frankly I am not working with them ever again. I just got a measly sum in my bank account and absolutely no paperwork on how my pay was worked out and what deductions were made. Tax? Health insurance? I have no idea. The amount in no way comes close to being considered a fair wage for working such long hours over a weekend in a difficult, mentally taxing job.

So, do yourself a favour avoid them if at all possible.

Learning English with Yahoo

Here is a good place to practice your listening and reading skills is to listen to the Yahoo People of the Web site which has a short video accompanied by an article. If you were teaching you could do;

1 Some warm up exercise based on the subject. E.g. Ask your teen students how they could become a millionaire at their age.

2 Then show the video and ask the students to write down as many details as possible.

3 They then work in pairs to share their notes and then write up an short summary of the piece.

4 Finally, they compare their version to the article that goes with the video.

This could be used as a warm up exercise for a debate or discursive essay writing lesson.

Getting started

Over the last couple of weeks I've been starting new classes at the school. So, once again I tell them about the different ways they can practice and use their English outside the classroom. Usually I start the lesson by putting a DVD, book, magazine, CD, mp3 player, mobile phone and printed web page on a desk at the front and ask students to think of how these can help us.

Then I give them this handout and go through it explaining anything they may not have heard of;

This is a list of different things you can do to improve your English outside class.

1 Use the internet - How ?

a Surf the web on a regular basis - 10 to 15 minutes a day is enough.

b Use chat rooms - Mirc or Yahoo have easy to use (and FREE) chat services.

http://www.mirc.co.uk

http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/chat/chatbylycos.html

c Listen to radio or download podcasts from the net.

www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/
www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

Or download a book and listen to it. It costs nothing.

http://freeaudio.org
http://www.scottsigler.net
http://librivox.org

d Set up your own blog (web page). It's easy and costs nothing. Also it is a great way to practise your writing skills and come into contact with others

www.blogger.com
www.myspace.com

e Use Skype (www.skype.com), which allows you to make free phone calls over the internet in order to find speaking partners from all over the world. MSN and Yahoo also have similar services.

www.kantalk.com is a good place to start.

f Watch Youtube (www.youtube.com) in order to see clips in English. There are plenty of videos aimed at those learning English, e.g

http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/.

For longer programmes see;

Google Video (http://video.google.com)

2 Watch DVD's - without subtitles - at least once a week. This is a great way of preparing for the listening test.

3 Read something other than your course books. Literature, short stories, magazines, newspapers; In fact just about anything you can find in English. All reading is good practice for the Reading Comprehension part of the Cambridge exams. All these things can be found at the kiosks in Aristotelian square or in central bookshops.

4 Record yourself. If you have a cassette recorder, mobile phone that can record or a microphone for your PC, record yourself speaking. It's a great way of correcting errors in your spoken English. You can record part of a film you've seen, a page from an audio book, a listening exercise from the course book etc. Listen to the original and try to copy it as closely as possible.

5 Speak only English in class. This is probably the only chance you'll get to speak English before the exam so make the most of the opportunity.

Nobody expects students to do all of these things but if you try some of them during the course of the year then you'll see a great improvement in your language skills and of course you'll greatly increase your chances of getting a good grade in the exams.

Radiohead - pay what you like

"In Rainbows, the seventh studio album by alternative rock group Radiohead, has become available for download from their official website.

The band have let fans decide what to pay for the 10 MP3 files - from nothing to £100."

Click here to read the rest of the BBC report.

I decided that this would provide the perfect excuse to practice our writing and debating skills over the pros and cons of downloading music.

Lesson plan

1 Explain about what Radiohead are doing and ask students;

a Why do you think they are doing this?

b Would you buy an album in his way (not necessarily one of Radiohead's)?

c How much would you pay?

2 Students write down their answers individually then discuss their answers in groups.

3 Elicit answers from the class.

4 Now, ask students if they have ever downloaded music from the internet without paying for it.
Why/why not?

5 Do you consider such downloading theft? Why/why not?

6 Divide the class into two groups. Those who will argue that downloading music without paying is wrong and those who think it is acceptable.

7 Each groups writes down as many reasons as possible in 5 - 10 minutes.

8 Then divide students again into two groups with representatives of both sides and organise a formal debate.

9 As a follow up this could be used as the basis for a discursive essay lesson. Click here to see Teachit.co.uk ideas page on writing. It is full of useful activities and handouts.

Unphotographable

"This is a picture I did not take of a woman in fitness workout wear; running shoes, shorts and an active top; standing by herself in a deserted aisle of a flourescent-lit supermarket, her arms crossed in front of her chest, tears smearing her cheeks while she unwaveringly stared at the store's selection of baby diapers."

copyright 2004-2007 Michael David Murphy

I came across the Unphotographable site a few weeks ago and thought that it would be a great way to teach my students story telling skills. Michael David Murphy gives a short description of something that he has seen recently. A word picture of beautiful intensity. In addition he has recorded these in the form of a podcast (click here) which are wonderful.

Lesson Plan

This is aimed at upper intermediate and advanced ESL/EFL/ESOL students.

1 Give the students a copy of the story above and ask them to read it. deal with any difficulties in vocabulary etc.

2 In pairs students discuss what the background to the situation might be.

3 Elicit answers from the class.

4 Divide the class into two groups. Ask one of the groups tp leave the classroom for two minutes.

5 Tell the other group that they are going to hear a description similar to the one they have just read.

6 Play one part of Micheal David Murphy's podcast (twice if necessary) and ask the students to listen carefully and write down as much as they can.

7 This griup then leaves the classroom and compares their notes.

8 Ask the other group outside to come back in and get them to listen to another short section.

9 When both groups have had enough time to discuss their answers everyone comes back into the class and gets into pairs (one from each group) and discuss what the other person heard.

10 Play both sections again and ask the students to comment on how accurate their partner's description was. If necessary give them a printout of the descriptions.

Follow up exercises could include;

A Their own descriptions which could be writtean and recorded on their cell/mobile phones.
B Finding a picture on the internet which could go with the text.

Using mobile - cell phones in the EFL/ESL classroom.

phones, originally uploaded by Phil Sharp (Hog).

Unlike the internet which is still a novelty for many in Greece, the mobile - cell phone is king. It is rare to find anyone who doesn't own at least one. Therefore, people are familiar with the technology and most importantly for me as a teacher, it is the one thing I can guarantee that my students will bring to class with them.

The latest generation of phones have mp3 players, a half-decent camera and video recording capabilities. Put all these together and what you have is a language lab that fits neatly in the palm of your hand.

So, some ways to use your mobile to help learn English.

1 Use the mp3 player to listen to podcasts.

2 Use the player to listen to audio books while following the printed version.

3 Record yourself doing the second section of the FCE/CAE/CPE interviews. Then transcribe what you actually said.

4 Listen to small section (1 min) of a film you like on DVD (easier if you put on the English subtitles) and act it out. record your performance and then repeat until you are happy with what you hear.

5 Use the video camera on the phone to record a short segment which can be posted via Youtube to your blog.

6 Make your own music video. This can be done with either video footage or still photos. You can either use Windows Movie Maker or Photostory 3.

5 Use the camera to video sections from your course book e.g. the dialogues.

6 Get a friend to record/video you doing a FCE/ECCE/CAE/CPE interview.

7 Students video a recipe.

8 Students video a tour of their home/school/neighbourhood.

9 Students use audio recordings to create a podcast. Ideas include movie reviews, my favourite cafe, a typical day etc.

10 Record your own news story. Take a news story off the internet and change the details so that it is about you. For example, change the names, place etc so that you were the hero who saved the cat from the burning building. Then record the story.

In this way students can use digital technology even if they don't have access to a PC.