Hello Friends!

This post has been inspired by those few learners who come to challenge their teacher's skills. It is for all my friends and colleagues who breathe only to cover their most difficult learners' educational needs, to motivate them and to help them improve their performance. It comes as a natural next step after years of work with inspirational and progressive colleagues, employers, and parents. 
And it is also inspired by my recent experience with dedicated and skillful MachinEVO2015 moderators and coordinators who have been focusing on the use of Virtual Worlds to facilitate learning languages. 
This post does not simply refer to gamification. It comes as a natural consequence to reflect on the idea that innovation and creativity have been taking place throughout generations and they never stop.

The average EFL learner may feel content with their books and (if lucky enough) an interactive whiteboard, but what about those who have been born with their finger on their game consoles? The majority of our students, especially the younger ones, have been playing Virtual reality games in their free time, so much so that they acquire new language from their favourite heroes - on a positive note - or get distracted from their school work -as a downside. However, Second Life® three dimentional virtual world gaming does not compare with other online or desktop experiences. So, why not try adding a totally new dimension in your everyday classes along with your coursebook or encourage your learners for some self access practice at their own time. 
You can get them to watch and make online machinima or, if they are adults, to 'go Inworld'.

Using virtual world senaria in the classroom can be a most illuminating experience for your learners or your trainee teachers. Through Second Life® you can give them stimuli on which to observe, conceptualise and experiment by using role-play simulations for instance, to introduce new language, to help revise, practise or consolidate.
Take my experience in Second Life® with the Gomez Family as an example. How would you feel if during the flight you fell off the plane and ended up at the bottom of the sea hairless, then having to fly after your plane? What language would you need to use to express frustration, amusement, complaint or anger to the pilot (Alfonzo Garavito Olivar aka Alfonzo Perfferle) or cabin crew? For language teachers, this inworld experience can inspire them to teach language connected with aviation or story-telling. For EFL learners, this simulation can stimulate their writing or speaking skills, for example. The future of storytelling has now changed through this medium which adds a new expression! 

You can use teacher-made or learner-made machinima for distance or blended learning, for in-class instruction or for learner/teacher self access. Or you could get your learners to make their own machinima but, mind you, it is not for inworld use with young learners as one needs to be 18 to enter Second Life. This may be a consideration for Second Life researchers and Developers to bear in mind if they are considering opening SL up to education. Still, to appeal to their young learners, teachers can use child avatars to promote their teaching aims.  

By using such a totally immersive environment as Second Life® (which is free and safe and should stay free especially for educational purposes), your classroom mirrors real life, promoting thus not only linguistic development but also social development, intercultural awareness, creativity, resourcefulness and multiple intelligences.  It helps them improve their concentration levels, build determination and creative thinking. However, you need to carefully prepare lessons with linguistically relevant tasks on SL experiences, to activate your learners' target language skills, to help them express their cognitive and healthy emotive capacities. In case this is disregarded, you are bound to end up with a class using their own mother tongue. 

With a group of like-minded, well coordinated and cooperative educators, new material (machinima), tasksheets and holodecks can be created to promote learner reflexion in all languages, on situations resembling real-life or even inconceivable experiences such as dancing the night away with 'King Osna' and friends at 'Castle Renoir',  flying to catch your plane, hugging the universe in a cosmic sci-fi galaxy or getting it off your chest at the Speaker's corner in Hyde Park - you name it. 

For those who are interested in the inside story, this very innovative medium of teaching has opened up horizons for scripting to build new scenes and to make your objects move, speak and interact like real life agents.  


So, what do you think? Get a Second Life®

and

Enjoy the experience

ErlinaAzure (& Baby Tux) in SL 
BBSoon


If you wish to learn more about machinima, you can read Christel Schneider and Carol Rainbow's 'Making and Using Machinima in the Language Classroom' on Scribd. Highly recommended!

Hi, I'm back!

I've just been thinking about an area a lot of colleagues and friends English Language teachers/tutors/educators are faced with everyday. Teaching Phonological Awareness. And why does a good number of EFL learners have difficulty in the Listening skills section of formal examinations?

To help novice teachers especially with this, I' ve decided to post some indicative tips that I bear in mind when preparing for my classes, but, remember, this text is not meant to be a Diploma level assignment.

As part of their EFL/EAP course, learners need help to improve their Phonological Competence and to activate verbal and non-verbal elements of speech. Whatever nationality they may be, they are bound to need some work with some sounds or another.

But why?

From personal experience, learners are not always aware of or cannot even hear certain individual sounds and differences (especially those not included in their mother tongue), let alone produce them.
Certain nationality learners are less aware of certain individual sounds. For instance, Japanese learners tend to confuse /r/ with /l/ or simply have difficulty pronouncing /r/ because they don' t have this sound in their mother tongue. Similarly, Greek learners of English as a Foreign language cannot articulate /ʃ/ for 'she' or /ʧ/ for 'cheese'.

Depending on the stage of learning, some indicative areas to focus on are: articulating individual sounds such as vowels, consonants, monophthongs & diphthongs; long - short sounds; voiced vs voiceless sounds; prosodic (suprasegmental) features & lexical stress; falling - rising intonation, sentence rhythm, stress patterns, phonological rules (assimilation, dissimilation, insertion, elesion, linking & intrusive r, metathesis, coalescence, gemination, 'silent' letters). 

Equipment you need

One way to prevent professional burnout is to experiment with new technologies to promote your teaching aims and keep your students on their toes!

If you get caught up in the day-to-day grind of teaching your materials in the same old way, try getting out of your comfort zone and spice up your classes with a bit of technology such as:
Online access
An IWB
DVDs
Songs, Rhymes, Poems
Online tools
Your laptop webcam or a similar device
(this list is inexhaustible. See Slideshow below)

Or, use no gadgets or tools whatsoever - your hands, mouth and whiteboard marker can do - simply employ Recognition, Matching, Odd-one-out and production activities. 

Depending on your lesson Aims and Stage, you can get ideas from the revisited Bloom's Taxonomy Pyramid for a plethora of Tools that can be applied, guiding learners through from Lower to Higher Order Thinking Skills around 'The Four Pillars of Education' by UNESCO. 
  
The best way to approach this is through four simple Steps: 

i. Step 1: Isolate the area of focus
To raise Phonological Awareness, first, learners need to recognise their areas of weakness on which to work. 
After you prioritise, isolate the point in focus and bring it to the attention of your student(s). For this to happen, use any visuals to help them locate the physical part (movement of lips, tongue) producing the sound(s), including the phonetic symbols chart. You could even help learners understand how a sound feels when it is produced.
 Segment words into phonemes explicitly or through elicitation.
Vary the pace and remember to point out common errors.
 

ii. Step 2: Modelling through Practice 
-  The earlier on in the learning stages you do this, the better.
-  Expose to a Variety of Speakers/Accents. Forvo.com, dictionary.cambridge.com, are indicative free online tools that can offer a variety of accents for the individual words you may need.
-  Vary the level of difficulty, from individual phonemes, to longer stretches, to stress, recognition of mood and attitude or purpose. 
-  In the early stages of learning, Syllabification can help raise young learners' phonological awareness skills. You could even employ clapping or hopping, tongue twisters, and short nursery rhymes (depending on the students' age and level)
-  Traditional as it may sound, individual or chorus repetition and controlled practice drills can make the    difference.
-  If you are using an Interactive Whiteboard, make it a point to go through the pronunciation of recorded lists of words with their examples available (at any stage of the lesson, depending on your Aims).
-  Don't skip the listening practice material in the publication you have chosen. 
-  Dig out whatever authentic material may give your students extra practice, such as songs, rhymes, poems, videos or recorded programmes.
-  Use Listening Practice Tests to focus on the purpose of the speaker, their attitude or the register (most appropriate for more advanced levels). Select the extract which is most filled with useful phonological points, extract it on your desktop and replay accompanied with comprehension question.

iii.  Step 3: Production
Once your students can recognise the sounds, words, phrases and articulate them, they can produce their own role play or story based on the topic/target language of the lesson which you can record on your desktop using your camera after rehearsing it many times (given the time restrictions). Allow them to bring in their imagination and personal preferences regarding the plot or scenario. Help them with the technical issues of typing, recording and make sure you have uploaded the required software (it works and you know how to operate it) before the lesson, to save precious time.

iv.  Step 4: Feedback & Self-development
After playing the recorded end-product on the IWB or through a projector you can elicit feedback or self-correction with ideas on what areas to work on next time. 


Limitations
With larger classes, you will need thoughtful planning and good management skills to balance group dynamics and prevent shy students from being inactive or extroverted ones monopolising during cooperation tasks. By shuffling students around the classroom and through clear-cut aims in every stage of the lesson, you inspire them not to use their mother tongue during group work and to activate the target language.
Another consideration might be technicalities with the use of the equipment and web tools and time restrictions but to balance this, you could allot each group/pair different times for the recording of their end product. Be prepared to invest some extra time out of your working schedule for this! 

Below is a sample of a video designed by a Young learner of English as a Foreign Language who also wrote the senario in English during her Pre-Juniors class. We hope you like it!

Making videos is always a pleasant experience for learners of all age.
Do let me know how you approach this and don't hesitate to leave your comment.

Best,

Helena



Further Reading

Education Origami on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and 21st century Projects associated with Web 2.0 technologies for learning. Available on http://bit.ly/1ipoa1Q 

(indicative tools suggested by Indiana State University (CC 3.0), Andrew Churches' Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano - CC 2.0), Mary Bertram's version of Bloom's Taxonomy for the Early Years (CC 2.5 Canada)

For my TESOL colleagues, I have made this Pinterest Board on 'Teaching & Education', with ideas to inspire and promote a more humanistic approach in the classroom.

Following recent discussion with a bilingual friend concerned about raising her five and two year-old daughters to acquire both languages (Greek and English) in a monolingual community, the issue of bilingualism and how this is best achieved in a foreign environment came to mind.

The question for new bilingual parents living in a monolingual country remains how to best help their offspring acquire both languages.  Some are even justifiably concerned that one of the languages will soon be overshadowed by the majority language until it remains completely dormant.  Others worry that their little ones will be mixing up both languages through incessant code switching, resulting thus in total confusion for the rest of their lives.

To tackle or prevent this in actual life, bilingual parents often have strict rules about their children using the minority language in the house and the majority one in social encounters and at school. Others adhere to the one parent-one language approach for as far as it takes. We should not rule out the cases of families who resort to using one language until elementary mastery and then switch to the second one after age three or four.

From discussions with friends, it appears that the second approach – as long as parents are prepared to stick to their linguistic choice – is what makes more sense to kids, as it allows them to clearly differentiate the two languages from an early age, thus preventing constant code switching as a form of linguistic fusion or even  … confusion.

However, this may not necessarily be the case. This switching between languages may simply be a form of expressing social solidarity to establish rapport (or even to exclude others), it may signal the speaker’s attitude towards the listener (friendly, ironic, detached, jocular) or it may automatically come as a result of fatigue and distraction caused by linguistic inadequacy.

The process of learning two languages seems to differ from this of learning one and, usually by the fourth year, children become aware that the two languages are not the same.

During the first stage of development in the process of acquisition, bilingual children appear to mentally construct word lists of both languages. In the second stage, longer utterances contain words from both languages within a sentence but the amount of mixing is rapidly reduced. The third stage of bilingual acquisition is characterized by the development of ‘translation equivalents’. A common grammatical system is initially applied in both languages but in the fourth year, children are clearly aware of the differences between the languages and therefore choose to use each with the parent who speaks it. (D. Chrystal, 1987, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, CUP)

In a recent study (2004), Petitto and Dunbar point out that although early 'dual language exposure is most optimal to achieve highly proficient and dual language mastery, children arriving late to bilingual context can and do achieve language competence in their new language. Full mastery of the new language needs to occur in highly systematic and multiple contexts that are richly varied involving both home and community and, remarkably, cannot be achieved through classroom instruction alone'. Childhood bilingualism, as they remark, 'is frequently not balanced and simultaneous but the age of the first bilingual language exposure impacts children's ability to achieve linguistic fluency in the later-exposed language' ( http://adelanteschool.org/Peitto.pdf).

But why insist on ‘bilingual’ upbringing so much?

Newest research from Gage, F. and Battro suggests that “The brain is plastic and it can change as a result of experience” while Petitto (2003) points out that bilingualism makes your brain better though it requires more cognitive load initially.  Children exposed to two languages from birth indeed experience cognitive advantages as they become more skillful 'multi-taskers' as compared to monolinguals (Petitto & Dunbar http://adelanteschool.org/Peitto.pdf)

There has also been a recent paradigm shift from old theory suggesting that second language learning was stored in a different part of the brain. Now it has been ascertained that L-2 is stored in the traditional areas of the brain for language including the Brocas area.http://faculty.coloradomtn.edu/blog/2009/07/tesol-2009-brain-based-language.html

Although studies on bilingualism are abundant, cognitive processes and neural foundations of language switching have received less attention.

Still, it is common knowledge that language “networking” and “mapping” subconsciously develop in the brain both prenatally and in early infancy. We all seem to be “wired” differently as human brains are very diverse and our individual learning experiences vary considerably.

So, whatever the choices parents make depending on their own unique circumstances, they need to be aware that bilinguals, being more experienced linguistically and also cognitively, can perform better in terms of focusing attention, while second and foreign language speakers find it more strainful to perform similar linguistic tasks.

On the basis of recent behavioural, neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies, foreign language learning and usage impose a cognitive load as they involve more neural areas and therefore multifaceted efforts such as analyzing, synthesizing, decision making, prioritising, activating previous knowledge, memorizing, making associations, sustaining attention, just to mention a few.

In her research, Dr Janet Zadina (http://pubs.cde.ca.gov/tcsii/video/Zadina1.asx) also suggests that the transition from thinking to learning involves a continuous process of repeatedly “firing” pathways in the brain.  She also suggests that these efforts should be rigorous, meaningful, relevant with spiralling exposure to the target language, gradually expanding on the basis of children’s pragmatic knowledge and schemata (the scaffolding technique). This constant, meaningful and therefore stress-free exposure can lead to “wiring” and creating neural networks to establish viable learning habits for life.

And what are the implications for language teachers?

The implications of this new perspective of language education from the standpoint of Cognitive Neuroscience are manifold affecting teaching methods, instructional materials and approaches to learning.

As our aim as language teachers is to reach all ages and types of learners (auditory, visual, tactile/ kinaesthetic), we may gain insight into the learning process and the ways to improve teaching practices from neuroscience research.  Although ‘our notions are still very primitive’, as neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran remarks,  (Horgan 2009 in NYTESOLhttp://idiom.nystesol.org/articles/vol39-01.html), Dr Zadina suggests guiding learners to ‘benefit from varied approaches and build connections to existing knowledge’ on the basis of ‘The Multiple Pathways Model” implicated in learning.  Therefore, learners need to be encouraged to take up an active pleasurable role in class in order to assimilate the language as in bilingual contexts and natural situations, by activating their knowledge of the world, their emotions, interests, social perception, visualisation & exploration skills,critical thinking, attention span and experience.  Dr. Joyce Nutta’s demonstration video (http://www.brainresearch.us/ESLvideo) offers an example of how these pathways can be incorporated in a language lesson to enhance learning.

This linkage between neuroscience and education, with its subsequent research, may be new and it may call for further investigation on educational strategies to activate the Multiple Pathways Model but it may also come as confirmation of the tenets of existing Approaches in Language Learning and Acquisition. But then again this could be the topic of a completely new Post (and further research).



*  (Picture released into public domain by Aramgar on commons.wikimedia.com)

Happy Academic Year!

The 1st of September signifies a new beginning for educators, teachers, academics and whoever is involved in education.  Soon you will be entering a new pace similar to previous years' or perhaps totally different in many respects.

Unless one is only keen on financial remuneration, most of us are embraced by the educational scenario created by the dynamics in our classes and the surrounding background.
For this blog, I would like to invite educationalists to pause their fast-paced rhythm a little in order to post memorable and outstanding reflexions from their own experiences at any level in education so far. They can be events, feelings, useful techniques or methods tried out, or even behaviours you have noticed which are commendable and worth pointing out here.

Please do not feel intimidated! This space is open to host your own contributions which are an invaluable part in the teaching process and can become a stimulus for colleagues to learn, process or reconsider notions, methods and techniques. 

It would be everybody's great pleasure and honour to provide a small reminder of the timeless, small and big values represented in education so you are welcome to leave personal contributions that are invaluable to you and other colleagues in the teaching profession. Without your testimony, this site would be like a pointless and lonely jog in an empty, vast desert.

You are my Guest of Honour,

Helena


PAEDEIA IS NO FALLACY!


Καλή Σχολική Χρονιά!

Η πρώτη του Σεπτέμβρη σηματοδοτεί ένα νέο ξεκίνημα για εκπαιδευτές, δασκάλους, ακαδημαϊκούς και οποιονδήποτε συμπεριλαμβάνει η εκπαίδευση. Σύντομα θα εισαχθείτε ξανά σ' ένα νέο ρυθμό, παρόμοιο με αυτό των προηγουμένων ετών ή ίσως κι εντελώς διαφορετικό από πολλές απόψεις.

Εκτός από εκείνους που ενδιαφέρονται αποκλειστικά και μόνο για την οικονομική αμοιβή, οι περισσότεροι από εμάς αγκαλιάζονται στην κυριολεξία από το εκπαιδευτικό σενάριο που δημιουργείται από τη δυναμική της τάξης μας και το περιβάλλον πλαίσιο.
Γι' αυτό το ιστολόγιο, θα ήθελα να προσκαλέσω ειδικούς στην εκπαίδευση να κάνουν μια σύντομη παύση στο γρήγορο ρυθμό τους για να αναρτήσουν στοχασμούς τους που αντικατοπτρίζουν αξέχαστες και ξεχωριστές     διαπιστώσεις από την εμπειρία τους σε οποιαδήποτε βαθμίδα της εκπαίδευσης.  Μπορεί ν' αποτελούν γεγονότα, συναισθήματα, χρήσιμες τεχνικές ή μεθόδους που δοκιμάστηκαν, ή ακόμη κι αξιέπαινες ή αξιόλογες συμπεριφορές που αξίζει ν' αναρτηθούν σε αυτόν τον ιστότοπο.

Μην δειλιάζετε λοιπόν! Αυτός ο χώρος είναι ανοιχτός για να φιλοξενήσει τη δική σας συμβολή που αποτελεί κομμάτι ανεκτίμητης αξίας στη διδακτική διαδικασία και μπορεί να γίνει ερέθισμα για άλλους συναδέλφους που χρειάζονται να μάθουν, να στοχαστούν ή ν' αναθεωρήσουν ιδέες, μεθόδους και τεχνικές.   

Θα ήταν μεγάλη χαρά και τιμή όλων να κάνουμε μια μικρή υπενθύμιση των μικρών και μεγάλων αξιών που προσφέρει η παιδεία διαχρονικά, γι' αυτό, είστε ευπρόσδεκτοι ν' αφήσετε και τη δική σας προσωπική συμβολή η οποία θα ήταν πολύτιμη και σε άλλους συναδέλφους στον τομέα της εκπαίδευσης. Χωρίς τη δική σας κατάθεση, αυτός ο ιστότοπος θα παρέμενε μια άσκοπη, μοναχική περιήγηση σ' μια άδεια, απέραντη έρημο.

Είστε οι Αξιότιμοι Καλεσμένοι μου!

Έλενα

Η ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ ΔΕΝ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΠΛΑΝΗ!