I’ve recently joined #ELTchat on Twitter, and came across a post entitled Four Activities I wish I knew when I started teaching by Michael Griffin. He plans to present this topic at a seminar next weekend at CAMTESOL in Cambodia, and invited readers to submit an activity that matches his criteria: “The activities are relatively…
Having carried out a number of different writing exercises last week, I’ve taken one flash fiction story (Sticks by George Saunders) and created a simple lesson plan that focuses on the use of adjectives, details and ‘showing’ instead of ‘telling’, while incorporating technology. It needs a bit of work, but here are the bare bones:…
Reflecting on Details for Creative Writing Other than my school text books and the readings for this course, I have very little time to read for pleasure. However, I did just pick up and glance at a book I would like to read, The Emigrants, Book 1, which was gifted to me by a Swedish…
This Week’s Creative Writing Exercise 2 Use this exercise to add a character to the previous scene. Choose only one of the following emotions and create a character who is feeling this emotion right now: He was afraid She was tired She was overjoyed /He was disheartened/ He was in love She was furious …
This Week’s Creative Writing Exercise 1 Focus on the senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing A hotel room: You have arrived in a very luxurious hotel room. Describe your room. Bring it to life. Include colours, textures, smells, sounds and flavours. The Hotel Room by Karina The door creaks open, slowed down by a…
Positive Reinforcement Schulze also draws to our attention the terminology employed for reinforcement. Terms such as “brilliant” and “excellent” are good, but if they are overly used they will become redundant. It’s hard for me to say now, how much praise I give. I see myself as a strict teacher – no playing until what…
Grammatical Errors and Feedback: Some Theoretical Insights by Mathias Schulze discusses different variables that influence the quality of feedback in Computer Assisted Language Learning: psychology and learning theories, second language acquisition and human-computer interface design. Reinforcement He puts forward the concept of reinforcement: the assumption is that feedback of a certain kind can act…
Recursion The Faculty of Language (2002) is concerned with the idea of recursion, the defining feature of human communication that permits combining a fixed number of words to create an infinite number of expressions, each with their own unique meaning. In terms of language acquisition it seems that children need only be exposed to a…
Experience of schools I have attended Likes – friendly teachers willing to extend Chinese communication outside of the classroom (e.g. in breaks and after class) – extra-curricula cultural activities. (However, these are often conducted through the medium of English, which, for me at least, reduces the Chinese language learning value). Dislikes – rigidly following the…
It’s All About the Details This week we turned to Flaubert for inspiration on how to tell a good story, and read a few selected pages to help us focus on the power of details. To set the scene, the part of the story we were looking at found a doctor, Charles, woken in the…