Halloween?

Here's something that may interest you and your kids -- activities for Halloween from the excellent British Council Language Assistant site.

On the equally excellent DevelopingTeachers.com site you have lesson plans for Halloween.

Q. What's a vampire's favourite fruit, by the way?
A. Neck-tarine.

Are your kids doing what they're supposed to be doing?

There's no reason why what you post on a blog has to be long: if it's something worth sharing it can be as short as you like. Here's an example, a quote:

If you ask me what to do about a kid being "off task"—one of our favorite buzzwords—my first response is going to be, "What's the task?"

-- Alfie Kohn (writer and speaker on education and parenting)

A variation on dictation: dictogloss

Kat's recent post, where she mentioned dictations (see also the comments on her post for more ideas), made me think of dictogloss, which is a technique I can highly recommend.

Dictogloss is, basically as follows:

The dictogloss is a teaching procedure that involves the speedy dictation of a short text to a group of language students. The students take notes during the reading of the text and then, working in small groups, proceed to piece together the text as a cooperative endeavor. This is achieved by the pooling of the group's notes and the making of grammatical decisions about the text: specifically about word choice, sentence formation, and cross-sentence connections. Finally, after each group has produced its own version of the text, the whole class reconvenes and the groups' versions are analyzed and corrected."

I quote there from this short article by Ruth Wajnryb, who has also written a book on the subject, "Grammar Dictation".

What distinguishes dictogloss from dictation is, thus, the fact that you are reading it too quickly for them to be able to copy it down, at say a speed just slightly below normal reading speed. First time round, I make people just listen, no note-taking. Second time round, note-taking is definitely encouraged.

You want to keep your text reasonably short, and preteach any really difficult words. I always write complicated proper nouns, names etc up on the board.

It's also a good idea to emphasise that they don't have to produce exactly the same words -- but that the information their text includes should be the same.

Wajnryb puts the emphasis more on the grammar (hence the title of her book, and the name she uses for dictogloss: "grammar dictation" is the same thing); personally, I think what recommends the technique is the cooperative bit, the combining of skills, the listening comprehension, the reusing of the information gathered, etc, etc, rather than merely the "grammar".

You can use dictogloss for many things. If you've just been working on connectors and conjunctions, you could -- for example -- either go round provide help; or give them another five minutes specifically to work on that; or get them to "notice" the difference between your text and theirs.

It's clearly not going to be appropriate for very young learners, and requires at least a sort of lower-intermediate level, but as I know at least some of you are teaching teens...

More ideas for dictogloss, in this second article.

New "Important posts" section

I've made a small change to the links on the left of our blog that I'd like to draw attention to.

One of the problems with a blog format is that it orders posts chronologically, so if the most important thing was said early on, it is eventually going to disappear into the archives and won't be easy to find.

For that reason, you'll see at the top on the left there that I've added an "Important posts" section.

Some of the links are in fact currently repeated in the (automatically generated) "Previous Posts" section -- but those will eventually (and automatically) disappear into the archives.

What I've thus done is created a permanent link to 4 or 5 posts that I think are important. They're important, apart from anything else, as I'm hoping that 2 or 3 more people are going to be joining the project shortly.

If you didn't read the "Writing on a blog" post, by the way, do -- I think it includes some good habits that we bloggers should get into!

I'll come back to how to edit your links later, in case any of you want to edit links on your own blogs. If you can't wait until then, you can find out how to edit links (and lots more besides!) in the Help section on Blogger.