MORE ABOUT STORYTELLING...

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In my last post, CLICK HERE to read it, I dealt with an activity in which our students have to create stories from images or different prompts.

Today, I'd like to set some important aspects about this kind of activity, and analyse why storytelling is an ideal resource to develop and improve EFL students' skills.

Why is STORYTELLING such a amazing activity?

Taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr7-v2FdQw0

Telling stories in our digital era has turned into a powerful tool for our EFL classroom. There are many benefits which justify the use of this unlimited resource:

• It provides students with motivation, fun, curiosity, and favourable skills for the learning process.
• It helps us establish connections between contents, and also organise information.
• It promotes a great amount of values to be worked on in the classroom.
• It encourages the critical thought from story reflections.
• It develops social skills such as the active listening and empathy.
• It allows students to pay more attention and to get a higher concentration level. 
• It generates a link between the teacher and students, by facilitating a more fluent communication and bidirectional interaction.
• It contributes to a relaxed and participative work environment.
• It stimulates students' creativity and imagination.
• It causes an emotional involment which allows messages to be interpreted faster and in a deeper way.

There are many websites that can help us prepare a storytelling activity. However, I've listed what I do to make sure the activity to be a succesful one:

From https://medium.com/

BUT HOW?

• Draw a grid on the board and then write one word in each box. The more complicated you want the activity, the bigger the grid will be. You can use vocabulary to be reviewed  together with new words. Try to include a mixture of words of any category to help students enrich the text.
• Let students know that the activity goal is to create a story using all the words on the board. They can use whatever they want, but make sure they include all the written words.
• The first time you do this kind of activity you ca use a model to be followed.
• If students are high level, they will be able to generate their own vocabulary grid from textbook or classnotes.
• This is an ideal activity for pairing.

WHAT ELSE?

• Students can vote on the best stories at the end of the lesson, labelling different categories, such as
•  the most creative story;
• the most interesting story;
• the funniest one;
• the best-told story, etc.
• They can also rewrite other groups' stories as a radio drama.
• These can be recorded to be published as postcats.
• Or be performed as a short play.

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EVALUATION AND FEEDBACK

After listening all their stories, I like to give students feedback on every aspect of the activity. I always write down anything they have to improve or correct, regarding, not only formal part of language, but also any aspect of performing.

They get some notes from me after the first exposition of the story, so they can correct any aspect before the final recording or performing to an audience outside the class.

I hope you and your students enjoy the experience as much as I do!!!!

FLIPPING A GRAMMAR LESSON

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Some days ago I posted an infography on how flipped classroom can improve our teaching. I received some colleagues' comments on how it can be done. So, since a promise is a promise, here we go with some examples of how to do that in our English classrooms.

This sample post is about flipping a grammar lesson, but you can use it and adapt it whatever lesson you are teaching.

Let's say you are about to teach and explain your students the passive voice. 

First thing to do is to get them exposed to some examples of the grammar structure through some reading activity or any other you find appropriate to this aim.

As homework, they will be asked to watch some tutorials, videos or any digital resource you can think of. These digital contents have to be available on the net, or you can posted them on your blog, website or any digital device you use for your classroom. Sharing it by e-mail, Edmodo, etc., with your students can be also a good option.

Here you have two different tutorial examples you can find on YOUTUBE on passive voice:

LOWER LEVEL STUDENTS

HIGHER LEVEL STUDENTS

One of the fantastic and useful things of flipping the classroom is that you can load or post videos / tutorials which can match the different levels you have in classroom. Therefore, you can attend to diversity within the group, and students can set whatever pace they are comfortable with. For example, lower level students can view materials multiple times and higher level students can breeze through everything more quickly.

Next lesson will be used to check if they have understood how the passive voice (or any topic you are teaching) works. Once in the classroom you can form groups of 3/4 (click here to know about grouping in the classroom) whose members will help each other understand the grammatical structure. 

Pic taken from http://libjournal.uncg.edu

Each group will designate a chairperson and they will discuss for some minutes about the tutorial they watched at home, what they understood and misunderstood. All chairpersons will explain to the classroom their conclusions and the teacher will only listen to them without interrupting. 

Then, the teacher, or any student who wants to participate, will clear up all the doubts, using always examples as visual as possible in order to make the classroom more motivating. This activity allows teachers to see exactly where students struggle and adjust the explanation accordingly.

One of the resources that can be used to clarify questions about the grammatical structure is this kind of video

where students, still in groups, try to identify and understand the structure used in different popular TV shows.

Now it's time to start working with practice in the classroom. There will be different activities to work in groups, so students with different levels will help each other. In a traditional classroom, students of various level all have to follow the same pace set by the teacher and this is less than ideal for many of them.

The teacher goes round the classroom and try to help students do the activities, so they can finally understand how the passive voice works through practice.

There are different types of activities which are appropriate for this group work in the classroom

Exercises on line which the teacher can show on the digital board or students can do with their own electronic devices:

Englishteststore.net

Agendaweb.org

Games on line:

Eslgamesplus.com

Eslgamesworld.com

Speaking games and Worksheets:

Busyteacher.org

Teach-this.com

Songs:

You can also used traditional worksheets or workbooks which can be graded according to the levels in your classroom:

Busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-grammar-worksheets/

Superteacherworksheets.com/grammar.html

Education.com/worksheets/grammar/

For ESL/EFL classes, the flipped classroom approach is essential because it mazimizes the amount of time students speak English in class and minimizes the amount of teacher talk time.

So let's get it started ...

LET'S MAKE OUR OWN MOBILE PHONE!!!!

This term, students of the 3rd year group are working in a project in collaboration with the subject of technology.

We are learning new vocabulary about technologies, apps and appliances through different texts in our English classroom, so we thought it'd be a good idea to create something in order to put in practice these new concepts.

Image http://www.motionelements.com

After sharing our ideas with our technology mate, we decided to make a project in which our students will invent their own mobile phones at the same time they study and practice vocabulary and expressions about this topic.

Students will work with different materials and they'll have to improve a basic mobile model with apps and tools which will be invented or created. This part of the project will be developed in the technology classroom. The teacher will help students along the whole process.

Once they have finished their designs, they'll show them to their classmates together with a brief oral exposition about their functions and apps.

Then, students will produce a piece of writing in which they'll explain the whole process and basic information about the invention of the mobile phone, which they have previously searched in the Internet.

These two last tasks will be part of the evaluation which will be done according to the following rubric:

ORAL EXPRESSION
AREAS	ITEMS	DESCRIPTION	Always	Sometimes	Never
APPROPRIACY	Communication	Use their L2 knowledge to be understandable	2	1	0
	Interaction	Understand the questions and answer coherently. Provide and extend the information required.	2	1	0
ACCURACY	Grammar	Use the grammar structures with precision. (adj, past, future, etc.)	2	1	0
	Vocabulary	Show varied vocabulary and use it appropriately	2	1	0
FLUENCY	Pronunciation Intonation Volume	Clarity, intonation, and appropriate volumen.	1	0.5	0
	Fluency	They express themselves without hesitation, in a coherent and appropriate way according to the communicative situation.	1	0.5	0

WRITTEN EXPRESSION
AREAS	ITEMS		Always	Sometimes	Never
HANDWRITING	Clarity to facilitate reading		2	1	0
GRAMMAR	Word Order		1	0.5	0
	Verbal Tenses		1	0.5	0
	Appropriate use of pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc.		1	0.5	0
	Appropriate use of linking words		1	0.5	0
SPELLING	Correct spelling in words		2	1	0
PUNCTUATION	Appropriate use of punctuation signs		1	0.5	0
	Appropriate separation in sentences and paragraphs		1	0.5	0

With this cooperative project we have managed to work within interdisciplinarity and motivate students. Moreover, they have acquired the specific contents and achieved the main objectives in both subjects.