Category: Community College

Active Teach: Helping You and Your Students
“See the Language”

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SCAD Language Studio ? Professor Christina Cavage, Human Resources headshot, Fall 2013 ? Photography by Stephanie Krell, courtesy of SCAD Christina Cavage

Classroom teaching has evolved during my last 25 years in the classroom.  Our students have changed as well.  Long gone are the days of audiocassette recorders, and overhead projectors. Many classrooms today are outfitted with Smart Boards, smart TVs, and other digital tools. However, due to funding constraints and dated buildings, many classrooms are not fortunate enough to have these tools.  How can you appeal to digital natives, while at the same time work within the constraints of your classroom?

ActiveTeach is the answer. What is ActiveTeach?  ActiveTeach allows teachers to bring the text to life without the worries of a Smart Board. Take a look at this video of my colleague, Elizabeth Holland using the Active Teach for Next Generation Grammar during her class.

Notice how she is able to highlight text to draw more attention to the content. You also have the ability to enlarge, manipulate and annotate. These are great tools for any classroom, and can really appeal to our digital natives.

One great feature is the ability to do exercises from the text, right on your board, through the ActiveTeach.  My students love when I have them come up and complete information within the Student Book via the ActiveTeach. Take a look at the image below. You can see how to select an exercise, and have students complete the answers on the ActiveTeach.

The ActiveTeach also includes all the videos and audio files, as well as some great teaching tips, exercises and games.  Make your grammar come alive!

A is for Authenticity

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Ken BeattyDr. Ken Beatty 

Since the 1970s, teachers have been arguing about authenticity in the classroom. As a TESOL professor and textbook writer, I’m often asked whether I’m in favor of authenticity. It seems a simple question, but there are several related ideas to consider: How do we define authenticity? What is a continuum of authenticity? How does authenticity relate to materials, situation, and task? and Where and how do we locate authentic materials?

Defining authenticity
Most definitions of authenticity in the classroom can be reduced to the idea of something not created for use by language learners. In general, although textbooks can contain authentic materials, they are not authentic. On the other hand, we consider a local newspaper, menu, or bus schedule as being authentic; the language is natural and generally more applicable to the needs and interests of our students. This is one of the great strengths of exposing students to authentic materials: Outside the classroom, they continue learning as they encounter additional authentic materials.

A continuum of authenticity
The opposite of authentic materials are those that are inauthentic. Elementary school teachers and teachers of beginners use inauthentic materials such as simplified menus with purely descriptive names (hamburger) rather than confusing brand names (Big Mac®, Whopper®). Other aspects of the menu are similarly set in plain speech to avoid confusion.

But between authentic and inauthentic materials are constructed materials. In making constructed materials, teachers and materials developers usually start with authentic materials but simplify vocabulary, grammar, and even typefaces to make them more pertinent and accessible. In other cases, materials are constructed from scratch, based on different genres. As an experiment, I asked 56 experienced language teachers to review three passages and decide which were authentic and which were constructed. Only three teachers identified all three correctly (Beatty, 2015). If most teachers can’t tell the difference, well-written constructed materials are probably an acceptable alternative. Continue reading →

Back to the Future:
Low-Tech Activities for a High-Tech Classroom

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2013_Heyer_SandraSandra Heyer

I recently had the pleasure of teaching in a classroom renovated specifically for English language teaching. From a console at the front of the room, I could access the Internet, project documents, or play music with a few taps on a user-friendly touch screen. Even the students’ desks were carefully chosen with language lessons in mind. The lightweight ergonomic desks were on casters, so re-configuring their arrangement for pair work or small-group work was a breeze. In fact, the desks moved so easily that my students could move them without getting up—they just shoved off with their feet and glided over the low-nap carpet.

My students and I loved our state-of-the-art classroom. However, a few weeks into the semester, I realized it had one hidden drawback: It was making us all a little lazy. Because I was at the console a lot of the time, I wasn’t moving around the classroom as much as I usually do. And my students weren’t moving at all.

This lack of physical activity was somewhat troubling in light of recent research indicating that being sedentary is dangerous to one’s health; it is linked to serious illnesses like heart disease and type 2 diabetes. “Sitting,” Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic has famously proclaimed, “is the new smoking.”

My class met every afternoon from 1:00 to 3:30—a total of 2 1/2 hours of sitting. Was all that sitting adversely affecting my and my students’ health in a small but cumulative way? If so, what was the remedy? Jettison the high-tech console? Replace the sleek gliding desks with wood-and-metal clunkers? No way!

Fortunately, the fix was quick and easy. I looked through my repertoire of activities for ones that would get us all moving. Then I began incorporating one or two of them into every class. It’s hard to say whether the activities will have a long-term health benefit. But the short-term benefit was obvious. After just ten minutes of moving around, my students returned to their seats—and I to the console—with renewed energy.

In this newsletter and the next three, I’ll share the activities that worked well in my class. They are interactive, can be adapted for almost any level or learning environment, and—most important—get students up and out of their seats.

Activity 1: The Moving Line
Levels: All

This low-prep activity, which facilitates a lot of interaction in a short amount of time, gets the whole class out of their seats. Continue reading →

Smart Practice: Using Repetition to Improve Memory

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 Sarah Lynn 2013.1.1Sarah Lynn

 We forget 90% of what is taught in class within 30 days.

Over a hundred years ago the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) came to this conclusion after painstakingly exposing his human subjects to list of words.   He also discovered that most of this forgetting occurs just hours after being exposed to the new material.  It is called the curve of forgetting.

When we encounter new information, neurons in our brain activate, but the stimulation lasts only up to 90 minutes unless it is reactivated (Squire, Kandel, 1999).  We begin to commit the new learning to memory when we first practice it, but for learning to endure in our memory, we must return to it at intervals and in different ways over weeks, months, and even years.

Quick Learning

A popular model in education is “teaching to mastery”.  We often interpret this to mean that students need to practice a language point intensely until it is burned into memory. Indeed, while students are practicing, they demonstrate an easy fluency with the material.  That is because it is active in their working memory.  Teachers and students alike prefer this intensive kind practice because it produces rapid, if ephemeral, gains. Quickly students gain confidence in their control of the material.  It feels familiar and known.  If tested immediately after intensive repetition and in a way that simulates the rehearsal, students score well.

Quick Forgetting

It turns out, however, that intensive repetitive practice leads to quick learning AND quick forgetting.  (Dunloskey, 2013).  If students are tested on that same material just a day later, their scores drop precipitously. The challenge is to have students put the material aside and then return to it. Inevitably they will have forgotten some of the material, and that is ok.  The effort they make to retrieve and reconstruct the information each time they practice it anew will strengthen their memory. Continue reading →

Tax Time!

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Bill Bliss Photo 2014Bill Bliss

Here are three quotes appropriate for the month of April:
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
“Why did the colonists fight the British?  Because of high taxes – taxation without representation.”
“When is the last day you can send in federal income tax forms?  April 15.”

The first was penned by Benjamin Franklin in 1789. The second and third are among the 100 official questions and answers on the US citizenship exam.

Tax Tips

Filling out tax forms always seems to occupy too much time – and often it’s our evening time in April that we might otherwise be devoting to lesson preparation, correcting student homework, or other professional work. So in the spirit of helping you get through tax season, here are some tips to ease your lesson planning on those days you’re slogging through your 1040 form. I hope you find these helpful whether you are preparing students for the citizenship exam or you are incorporating civics topics into general EL/Civics instruction. Continue reading →