Listening supplement for beginning-intermediate elementary
Randall's Cyber ESL Listening Lab has an exercise called "Is your dad home?" that
would be good for beginning/intermediate level children to practice.
It's helpful as much for the content as for the skill practice.
Pre-activity: Talk about numbers and telephone rules. The website
has additional suggestions for the pre-activity.
Computer activity: Ask students to listen as often as they
need to and answer the questions. This type of activity often works well
in pairs.
Post-activity: Ask students to create their own dialogue and
practice it with each other.
Grammar supplement for beginning, intermediate, advanced
Quizzes at ITESL-J
and Dave's ESL Cafe are numerous
and varied. The key is to find the ones that match what you are doing in
the classroom.
Here's an example of a quiz to practice pronouns: www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/quizzes/js/ck/mc-pronouns.html
Writing for intermediate and advanced students
Haiku - www.uoregon.edu/~leslieob/haiku.html
This activity can be done by pairing English language learners with
English speakers.
Pre-activity: Ask students to read short poems. Poems with
illustrations are especially helpful.
Computer activity: Create a short poem or haiku.
Post-activity: Illustrate the poem and share it with the
class.
Translation via BabelFish into
Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Portuguese, or
Italian. While the translation is far from exact, it serves as a good
pre-reading activity for a subject area by giving students some sense of
the material before it is presented. This will be especially useful to
students in middle and high school, but could be used at any level.
Here's one to try - look at the following, then copy and paste the
URL into BabelFish: www.flmnh.ufl.edu/Public/exhibits/Virtual.htm
(but remember that text in graphics isn't translated).
Pre-activity: Elicit ideas students may already have about the
topic. Emphasize to English language learners that the translation is
not perfect, but that it should help them understand the topic you will
discuss.
Computer activity: Copy and paste text or open a website in
Babelfish. Ask students to read the text.
Post-activity: Ask students to take notes, print and
highlight, or write a brief summary of the translation. These can be in
their native language or English. A further step would be to see how
much of their notes or summary they can translate into English.
Lesson enhancement for middle and high school
Biology - Creating a model of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis - www.hhmi.org/coolscience/butterfly/index.html
(l). This isn't an activity on
the computer, but information from the Web about how to enhance an
in-class activity. The webpages could be printed out for classroom use.
A great resource for finding sites with information that can enhance
your topic is KidsClick!, a search
engine of sites for children. It is organized by topic and gives the
approximate grade level of each site.
Class or group activity for advanced students
Students create exercises with Hot Potatoes and Quia, exercise authoring programs. This
activity can be done by pairing English language learners with English
speakers.
Pre-activity: Have students try a sample of the type of
exercise you would like them to create. Both Hot Potatoes and Quia are
easy to use, so won't take much time to teach. Quia is especially easy.
Give students a reading (for Hot Potatoes) or a vocabulary list (for
Quia) to use as content for their exercise. Have them discuss the
content of the reading and the word meanings.
Computer activity: Ask students in pairs or small groups to
create a multiple-choice exercise to go with the reading or a matching
exercise to go with the vocabulary list. They can also look for graphics
to add to the reading.
Post-activity: Have students share their exercises with each
other and suggest improvements.
Writing enhancement for low-intermediate to advanced students
Nicenet is a free online
discussion website. Teachers create a class quickly and easily, then
subscribe students who use this as a discussion space.
Pre-activity: Set a topic and begin brainstorming or
discussion. The teacher should post a question in advance on Nicenet,
giving clear expectations for student responses. It is a good time to
discuss netiquette.
Computer activity: Students read and respond online to the
question. They can also be asked to respond to postings by two other
students.
Post-activity: The teacher (or student volunteer) summarizes
the responses for the group. The teacher can respond individually later
to student postings.
Writing activity for any level - keypals
Group projects are sometimes monopolized by one or two strong
individuals, where the teacher has little idea of who actually did what.
Using online discussion and keypals is one way to track activity in a
group project. A good overview and helpful links about setting up a
keypal project is by Kenji and Kathleen Kitao at ilc2.doshisha.ac.jp/users/kkitao/online/www/keypal.htm
(l). Initially, the teacher will need
to design a project that requires collaboration and either recruit
keypals from outside the class or assign keypals within the class. In
generally, it takes more work to recruit outside but the discussion is
more realistic.
Pre-activity: Decide who will take what role in the project.
Make sure the roles are evenly divided.
Computer activity: Discuss, write, and edit online. It should
be clear from the computer logs who contributed what.
Post-activity: Share the final project/report with the rest of
the class.
