continuing what was supposed to be a “Writing and …” series showing how I use writing and hopefully persuading others to write more, that started with Writing and Teaching, but took a break while I got distracted by Random Ideas and Cambridge DELTA stuff.

After giving several hundred workshops and TEFL course input sessions myself, I find it quite difficult to sit still through other people’s, however good they are. The solution I’ve come up with is to take notes with the thought that I’ll turn it into an article or blog post. Doesn’t always happen, but makes me pay a lot more attention anyway. Here’s one that did happen:

Giving students individual attention

Many thanks to the person who gave the workshop for permisssion to nick his ideas like this, especially as I can’t name him or my school in order to remain an international man of mystery and avoid online stalkers, and this is apparently a totally neglected area in ELT writings.

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Worksheet for MyStoryMaker online storytelling (see Sean Banville’s blog for more details on using that site)

Company buffet meeting (if they can talk about food, they can do the language of meetings- with a little bit of culture sprinkled on top)

Famous Australians subject questions quiz

Household countable and uncountable guessing game

Talking about photos extended speaking

People around you vocabulary

Korean cultural codewords language of generalisation

National theme parties will for offers game

Testing vocabulary definitions game

IELTS university vocabulary sequencing

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I finally realised a couple of years ago that there was so little chance of me following through on any of my ideas long enough to make money on them that I might as well just give them away, hence the scrappy but hopefully useful worksheets on here and telling a publisher who had finally accepted my book proposal “Can’t you just give the idea to Jon Marks to write?” Hence also blog posts on Big Teacher, the TEFL legal fund and whathaveyou. The Speed Mentoring post has prompted me to write a few more that I’ve had in my mind for a while.

The idea behind TEFLstats is that, in contrast to all other TEFL sites, it would only include numbers. These numbers would be submitted by the readers and the site owner, and could be of any kind at all, e.g.

- Numbers of teachers in particular countries, schools or chains

- Numbers of schools in particular cities, countries or chains

- Ditto for students learning English

- Hours of English studied in particular countries and school systems

- Ages students typically start and finish English

- Cost of courses

- Pay for teachers, e.g. in a particular school, from a survey of a jobs page

- Pay increments, e.g. for having a diploma

- Classroom hours

- Results of surveys, e.g. reasons people are taking the CELTA, what percentage of schools advertising or phoned said they accepted online certs when recruiting teachers

- Pass rates for particular TEFL cert, EFL exam etc.

- Data from TEFL research

- Published or personal estimates of any of these for the whole word

- Rankings of countries (e.g. by TOEIC score- as meaningless as that is, students taking international exams, countries international students are from, by entrance test level in a school in London)

- Graphs, e.g. of number of job listings on the 5 most popular sites

There would be places to put the name of the person submitting the information, source of the information, details of who exactly it refers to (e.g school and branch name) etc, but those can be left blank by people who want to retain some kind of anonymity, or could be given but made only available to the site owner (i.e. three possible privacy settings). Apart from that, all the information would be available to everyone who visited the site, both as raw data and as pages of analysis by the site owner or readers.

Anyone fancy setting that up, then? I’d be happy to submit numbers as I come across them, but otherwise will be flitting onto my next passing fancy and so you’ll get no other help from me…

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Some originally written for Onestopenglish but went missing during an editor change, so now available here for free:

Technical and Medical English definitions game lesson plan and worksheets

Technical English measurements lesson plan and worksheets (superlatives and number review)

Medical English articles definitions game

Technical English articles definitions game (no instructions, so please ask if you can’t think of a way how to use it)

Technology quantifiers things in common (polished up version)

Technology relative clauses definitions game (based on an earlier worksheet)

Computer jargon abbreviations

English for shipping and chemical distribution vocabulary

Office automation vocabulary

OA past tenses

Tech Talk Unit 3 error auction

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People around the world seem to love movies. One way or another, most of my students, no matter where they live or what their budget allows, always seem to to know about….

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When God sent a great flood to destroy almost all his own creation, he chose Noah to save the animals and preserve life on Earth beyond the great disaster. The story of how humans, through their own folly, bring catastrophe upon the world has always struck a deep cord. And the theme of saving of animals from mankind’s mistakes appeals greatly to children, and to everyone who cares for the natural world. Noah appears in both the Bible’s Book of Genesis and in the Quran.

This reading by Natasha is a “vintage” recording from our most secret treasure trove. We made it in 2007 and have not previously released it on Storynory. We also have another version of the story read by John Le Mesurier

Read by Natasha. Version by Bertie. Duration 6.32.

When the world was still very young, it began to fill up with people and all sorts of creatures including fury four-legged ones, birds, fish, fluttering butterflies, slithering snakes, creepy-crawly spiders, and insects.

In those days there was a man, called Noah, He was 600 years old. Noah was hard-working, honest and loved God with all his heart. However, the whole world had become very mean and evil. Everyone was lying, cheating, and stealing. People often got into fights, and sometimes they even killed each other.

God saw all this, and was sad that men and women had become so evil. God decided to send a great flood and drown all of his creation under the waters. That way, He wouldn’t have to look down on all the wickedness that upset him so very much.

He told Noah of his plan. God told Noah, “You must build a huge boat out of gopher wood.” It was to be called an “ark’, which means a place of safety. It was to have a great door, just one window, and three floors inside, filled with clean straw and plenty of food. He was to make it water-proof by putting black tar between the planks of wood. The boat was as big as a cruise ship (but not that nice of course). Next Noah was to tell his family to come and live in the ark, and they must also bring one male and one female of every type of creature. Noah understood his job of building the ark and saving the animals, two of every kind.

And so Noah and his three sons, who were called Shem, Ham, and Japheth, set about building the Ark. Other people saw them working hard in the hot sun, and thought that they were wasting their time. They laughed at Noah and his sons and teased them. But still Noah kept believing and building,… believing and building..everyday. Till one day, the ark was completed. Noah and his sons collected the animals, two of every kind and gathered them in the ark.

They did not need to keep them apart, because the Lions understood that they must not eat the deer or the sheep on board the ark. The foxes didn’t eat the hens, and wolves left the sheep alone. They all lived on grass and leaves, and although the larger animals became a little thin, they were content to lie down and leave the other creatures unharmed. Only the insects had to look out, incase an elephant or a horse trod on them by accident, but fortunately, that didn’t happen.

Then just as God had promised Noah, it began to rain. The rain began to fall by the bucketful and the skies emptied out all their water. It rained and it rained. In fact, it never stopped raining for one second. It rained for forty days and nights. The whole world was covered in water, and everybody drowned, except for the fish and Noah’s family and the animals who were safe in the Ark.

Everyone on the Ark was dry and safe, , but the food was running out, and the people and animals began to look at each other hungrily. The wolves began to howl, and the lions prowled up and down. Noah was worried in case one of the wolves decided to have lamb for dinner, and then there would be no more lambs, ever again. But he need not have worried, because the wolves remained well behaved.

Only after 150 days did the water start to do down, and the bottom of the Ark came to rest on the top of a mountain called Ararat. Noah looked out of his window but all he could see was water.

He wondered if there was any dry land anywhere in the world, and so he released a black bird called a raven into the air. But raven could not find any land or trees, and it flew back to the ark. A week later, he sent out a white dove, but it came back with an empty beak as well. A week after that, he sent the dove again, and she flew around until she found a tree to rest on. She returned to the ark with an olive leaf in her beak, and Noah knew that there was a tree above the water. After another week, he sent the dove out yet again, and she did not return, so he knew that she had found a dry place to live. Everyone on board the ark celebrated, because they were all longing to leave the ark, which to tell you the truth, was becoming rather smelly.

And it happened that after an a year, a month and a day, Noah opened up the ark and he, his family, and all the creatures stepped out onto dry land. What a day that was ! How the animals bounded around full of joy. It was the springiest spring in the history of the world.
Stretching above the sky was a beautiful rainbow. And God said to Noah, I have placed a rainbow in the sky as a sign of a promise that I will never destroy the earth and its creatures by a flood again. So go forth, have children and fill up the earth again, and enjoy the world in all its beauty.
And that’s exactly what Noah and his family did.

Now every time a rainbow appears in the sky, it is a reminder to all of us of the promises God made and the great faith Noah had to believe.

When the world was still very young, it began to fill up with people and all sorts of creatures including fury four-legged ones, birds, fish, fluttering butterflies, slithering snakes, creepy-crawly spiders, and insects.

In those days there was a man, called Noah, He was 600 years old. Noah was hard-working, honest and loved God with all his heart. However, the whole world had become very mean and evil. Everyone was lying, cheating, and stealing. People often got into fights, and sometimes they even killed each other.

God saw all this, and was sad that men and women had become so evil. God decided to send a great flood and drown all of his creation under the waters. That way, He wouldn’t have to look down on all the wickedness that upset him so very much.

He told Noah of his plan. God told Noah, “You must build a huge boat out of gopher wood.” It was to be called an “ark’, which means a place of safety. It was to have a great door, just one window, and three floors inside, filled with clean straw and plenty of food. He was to make it water-proof by putting black tar between the planks of wood. The boat was as big as a cruise ship (but not that nice of course). Next Noah was to tell his family to come and live in the ark, and they must also bring one male and one female of every type of creature. Noah understood his job of building the ark and saving the animals, two of every kind.

And so Noah and his three sons, who were called Shem, Ham, and Japheth, set about building the Ark. Other people saw them working hard in the hot sun, and thought that they were wasting their time. They laughed at Noah and his sons and teased them. But still Noah kept believing and building,… believing and building..everyday. Till one day, the ark was completed. Noah and his sons collected the animals, two of every kind and gathered them in the ark.

They did not need to keep them apart, because the Lions understood that they must not eat the deer or the sheep on board the ark. The foxes didn’t eat the hens, and wolves left the sheep alone. They all lived on grass and leaves, and although the larger animals became a little thin, they were content to lie down and leave the other creatures unharmed. Only the insects had to look out, incase an elephant or a horse trod on them by accident, but fortunately, that didn’t happen.

Then just as God had promised Noah, it began to rain. The rain began to fall by the bucketful and the skies emptied out all their water. It rained and it rained. In fact, it never stopped raining for one second. It rained for forty days and nights. The whole world was covered in water, and everybody drowned, except for the fish and Noah’s family and the animals who were safe in the Ark.

Everyone on the Ark was dry and safe, , but the food was running out, and the people and animals began to look at each other hungrily. The wolves began to howl, and the lions prowled up and down. Noah was worried in case one of the wolves decided to have lamb for dinner, and then there would be no more lambs, ever again. But he need not have worried, because the wolves remained well behaved.

Only after 150 days did the water start to do down, and the bottom of the Ark came to rest on the top of a mountain called Ararat. Noah looked out of his window but all he could see was water.

He wondered if there was any dry land anywhere in the world, and so he released a black bird called a raven into the air. But raven could not find any land or trees, and it flew back to the ark. A week later, he sent out a white dove, but it came back with an empty beak as well. A week after that, he sent the dove again, and she flew around until she found a tree to rest on. She returned to the ark with an olive leaf in her beak, and Noah knew that there was a tree above the water. After another week, he sent the dove out yet again, and she did not return, so he knew that she had found a dry place to live. Everyone on board the ark celebrated, because they were all longing to leave the ark, which to tell you the truth, was becoming rather smelly.

And it happened that after an a year, a month and a day, Noah opened up the ark and he, his family, and all the creatures stepped out onto dry land. What a day that was ! How the animals bounded around full of joy. It was the springiest spring in the history of the world.
Stretching above the sky was a beautiful rainbow. And God said to Noah, I have placed a rainbow in the sky as a sign of a promise that I will never destroy the earth and its creatures by a flood again. So go forth, have children and fill up the earth again, and enjoy the world in all its beauty.
And that’s exactly what Noah and his family did.

Now every time a rainbow appears in the sky, it is a reminder to all of us of the promises God made and the great faith Noah had to believe.

“Live listening is where students are listening to people in a face-to-face situation – or whom they can physically see (such as in the theatre, etc). Different from listening to RECORDED EXTRACTS.” (the entire!) ELT Wiki live listening page.

More extensive quotes and links, in approximate order of usefulness when researching before doing a lesson with live listening:

“…it would be helpful to give learners more opportunity to listen to ‘live’ voices – visitors to the class, if feasible, or, most obviously, the teacher. This, of course, goes against recommendations to ‘reduce teacher talking time’. But the teacher’s voice is a neglected resource in providing listening practice in which the speaker can continuously monitor the listeners’ interest, attention and apparent comprehension, adding any necessary repetitions, reformulations and explanations, and where the listeners can give the speaker signals both non-verbal (e.g. nodding, frowning) and verbal (e.g. “I see”, “So, do you mean …..?”, “I’m not sure what you mean by …..”) – so that the listener is not just a passive, more or less successful, receiver, but understanding is mutually constructed.”

from a great article by Jonathan Marks on New Ways to Teach Listening, including criticism of the old ones, on Onestopenglish.com

“More than ¾ of the world’s population do not have regular access to the internet. Learners of English in the majority of the world’s classrooms actually have very limited exposure to pre-recorded listening material of any kind. Can listening skills still be developed in these kind of contexts? Of course they can! People were successfully developing their second language listening skills a long time before the advent of the internet, and even well before the idea of coursebook cassettes came into being. In fact they have been doing so since the beginnings of human interaction, in situations where the only material used is the human voice.”

and

“Even for those learners with access to the wealth of both on and offline listening material, natural, face to face interaction with more advanced speakers, is still very highly valued as a source of language input. I was once frustrated by a learner in one of my classes who seemed to take an age to get started in the pair work activities I had set up. He always seemed to be writing things down whilst his partner waited for him. What I later discovered was that he was actually writing down bits of language that I had used to explain what they had to do. If learners are using our classroom instructions as input, it seems logical that we should also be exposing them to other, more natural, forms of teacher talk as input too. In many situations we may be the only real speaker of the language that the learners have a chance to talk to. Perhaps we should be starting to prioritise this more interactive form of listening as a positive use of class time, and moving towards setting up more extensive kinds of listening as homework activities. Extensive listening is, after all, like extensive reading, for the most part a solitary experience.”

and loads more good stuff, from Listening Unplugged by Nick Bilbrough on Humanizing Language Teaching

“The students’ responses speak for itself. Observers were generally very positive and impressed by the concentation, commitment and involvement of our students. We, the teachers concemed, have no doubt of the value of what we were doing. The atmosphere was wonderful. There was a great deal of humour, and, perhaps surprisingly for listening-orientated activities, noise and spoken communication! We were constantly delighted by how much our students were coming to understand and we feel certain that there was no adverse effects on the quality or quantity of their speaking.”

from Live Listening for Beginners by Alastair Banton, on page 7 of The International House Journal of Educational Development Volume 1. Also lots of practical ideas there. He also mentions Brown, J . M. and P almer A, . S. 1988  The Listening Approach (London, Longman), which seems relevant, if rather old.

“Live” listening: Making Listening Comprehension More Inspiring by Leo Selivan- just one lesson idea, but some discussion of advantages and disadvantages, and this related source:

Lackman, K. (2007). ‘The teacher as input’, in English Teaching Professional, Issue 48, January 2007, 52-55

“Live listening: This could be the teacher or a special guest. Students react well to listening to someone speaking especially for them. Body language assists comprehension. The speaker can moderate the speed of the language and students have the opportunity for immediate response and questioning, that is. they have an opportunity to interact with the speaker. Speech is spontaneous and therefore contains all those features of real language such as false starts, repetition, and so on.”

from Teaching English at Advanced Levels by Dan Bruce, on the British Council Portugal site. Plenty of other relevant stuff there on the problems with textbook listenings, plus these probably relevant items in the bibliography:

Field, J . Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening ELT Journal – 52/2 April 1998

Field, J . Finding one’s way in the fog: listening strategies and second language learners MET – Vol 9/1 Jan 2000

White, G. Listening (OUP) 1998

“Did you know that ‘live listening’ started in the early 16th century as a described teaching methodology, but was consigned to the dustbin until the 21st?” (from this list of IH Barcelona workshops- no further information there, unfortunately)

Apparently also a whole section on live listening in Chapter 4 of How to Teach Speaking by Jeremy Harmer, or so Google tells me.

Any other good sources or comments on this approach, anyone?

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While listening to a recent Radio 3 programme on Speed Dating with a Thinker, it occured to me that the speed dating format would make for a great break from workshops at a TEFL conference, and also maybe help people find mentors.

Each person has to come with a question or problem (e.g. “What’s the best book about…?” “How should I…?” or “What can you tell me about…?”) and they go around swapping questions and answers, noting down people who they wouldn’t mind mentoring with again at the end, to be matched up if it works out that way.

Alternatively, and closer to the original, each person comes with a piece of advice for all teachers and the people they speak to question them further or challenge them on them, then vote and match up.

Worth a try? Any other ideas to compete with Pecha Kucha for breaking up the tedium of wandering past the book stands again to be asked to mingle in yet another workshop? Any other thoughts on mentoring? Have your say:

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