Archive for the ‘ESL Materials’ Category

100 Questions for Halloween

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Enjoy :-)

Here are 20 questions from my ESL Discussions site.

  1. Do you celebrate Halloween?
  2. Do you think all countries should celebrate Halloween?
  3. Do you think it’s dangerous for children to go trick-or-treating?
  4. Why don’t Christians celebrate Halloween?
  5. What do you think is the best costume for Halloween?
  6. Do you think Halloween was better a few decades ago or is it better now?
  7. How old is too old to go trick-or-treating?
  8. Do you think Halloween is scary?
  9. What would an alien think of humans if it came to Earth and saw Halloween?
  10. What do you think the black and orange colors of Halloween mean?
  11. What do you think about Halloween?
  12. What do you know about the history of Halloween?
  13. How does Halloween affect American culture?
  14. What do pumpkins have to do with Halloween?
  15. Why do people trick-or-treat on Halloween?
  16. Do you think it’s dangerous these days to open your door to a trick-or-treater?
  17. How did Halloween get its name?
  18. What’s the best Halloween movie you’ve seen?
  19. What are the best Halloween games?
  20. What is the best Halloween food?

And here are another 80 sent to me here or on Twitter. Thank you for sending me these questions:

  1. Why couldn’t carved pumpkins be used for Halloween in Ireland in the 14th century? *
  2. What is your preferred method for eating candy corn?
  3. How would a person inspect the candy a hold brings home from trick or treating to be reasonably assured it is safe for consumption?
  4. Candy, toothbrushes, or pencils: which one is the best choice to hand put at Halloween?
  5. If you were to visit a haunted attraction in Halloween, where would it be and why?
  6. Has anyone ever played  pranks on you? If yes, How did you react?
  7. If you were to add another symbol to Halloween, what would it be?
  8. If you owned a Halloween costume shop, which costumes would you sell?
  9. What would happen according to a 19th century belief, if unmarried women sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on a Halloween night?
  10. Which is the strangest Halloween costume you have ever seen?
  11. Where do you usually buy your Halloween costumes?
  12. What wouldn’t you like to get on a trick-or-treat?
  13. What do you think of religious schools who ban Halloween? (happens at mine)
  14. What vegetable was originally used for jack-o’-lanterns? The answer: turnips.
  15. A hair-splitting question. What is wrong with a jack-o-lantern? **
  16. Which Halloween activity: ‘trick or treat’ vs ‘guising’ has any real cultural significance?
  17. Have you ever eaten pumpkin? Did you like it? Why (not)?
  18. How do you say Halloween in your language?
  19. Where in the world do people have picnics by the graves of relatives? ***
  20. Where in the world do people light a fire and place chairs for deceased people around it? ****
  21. Where in the world do people put knives away before going to bed so that the spirits of the dead don’t get hurt? *****
  22. Where in the world do people celebrate a festival similar to Halloween in August? ******
  23. Where in the world do people eat a type of pastry called Bones of the Holy? *******
  24. What is the trick of trick-or-treat?
  25. Do you decorate your house for Hallowe’en?
  26. Have you seen a Halloween movie?
  27. If so, which one?
  28. What kind of movie is it?
  29. What’s the plot of the movie?
  30. Did you enjoy it?
  31. What is your favourite Halloween party food?
  32. When do Halloween items come out in the shops in your country?
  33. Can you describe your ideal Halloween party?
  34. Can you think of a word connected to HALLOWEEN using each of the letters in order? (Eg Hallow, Apple, Lantern, L…, . Orange, Witch, E……, E…., N………)
  35. What do you know about this spelling – Hallowe’en?
  36. Are local traditions changing because of globalisation? Do you see this as a positive or negative thing?
  37. What can you do with a carved pumpkin after Halloween?
  38. What do you think people do on November 1 in Lithuania? ********
  39. Have you ever been in a haunted house e.g. at a party or at an amusement park?
  40. Have you ever bobbed for apples?
  41. Do you believe in ghosts?
  42. What was the best costume you ever made?
  43. Do you prefer homemade or store-bought costumes?
  44. How do Hallowe’en and harvest celebrations overlap?
  45. Do you prefer friendly or scary pumpkins?
  46. Do you prefer the face paint and make-up or the costumes best?
  47. Is Halloween like Christmas in the sense that it is now celebrated in countries where it did not originate?
  48. How do you feel about the word ‘celebrate’ being applied to Halloween?
  49. What word can we use instead of ‘celebrate’ to mean ‘I do/don’t celebrate Halloween’?
  50. Do you believe in ghosts?
  51. Would you walk around your town at night on your own on Halloween?
  52. Do / Would you always open your door to trick or treaters?
  53. What would you do if a trick or treater got nasty?
  54. What do you think of the idea of “Happy Halloween” cards to send to people?
  55. What’s the best Halloween activity?
  56. What’s the most scared you’ve ever been?
  57. Who would you like to haunt and why?
  58. Should Halloween costumes only be about scary things, or can they be any kind of costume?
  59. What do you think of the idea of “trick or treat or money for a charity” as a way of making Halloween more useful?
  60. What’s the best song for Halloween?
  61. Is it a spooky coincidence that the world’s 7-billionth person will be born on Halloween?
  62. Why pumpkins?
  63. Do you save the seeds from the pumpkin to eat or to plant?
  64. Do you bake pumpkin seeds in the oven?
  65. Do you use spicy or sweet seasonings with pumkin seeds?
  66. Trick of treat?
  67. Halloween is a great tradition in Scotland. What is the Scottish link to Halloween?
  68. What fruit is in season in Europe at Halloween and therefore commonly used to fill the looty bags of the revellers?
  69. Some countries like Spain do not traditionally celebrate Halloween. However, it is becoming a very popular “imported” celebration. Why do you think Halloween is so popular?
  70. What must everyone know about Halloween?
  71. What is the story behind the legend of Jack-o-lantern and where did it get its name?
  72. Is Halloween celebrated on the same date all over the world?
  73. When did Halloween start to be celebrated?
  74. What is the connection between Salem and Halloween?
  75. Should Halloween be a national public holiday?
  76. Are witches around nowadays?
  77. Which famous person would you like to go trick-or-treating with, and why?
  78. Ghost hunting programmes on TV – Are they real or fake?
  79. Should Halloween be “celebrated” only on Friday or Saturday, and not the 31st of October?
  80. What would you do if you saw a ghost?

This will be the fourth “100 Questions” set I’ve done. Many thanks to @vickyloras, @clivehawk, @eltbakery (Eduardo Santos), @derekrobertson, Gita Assefi, Arianna Basaric, Runswbooks, @MarylouMurray, Janet Bianchini, Marisa Pavan, William Chamberlain, Hannah,  esljokes.com, GetWordLayer, Marylou, Virginia, Louise Alix, english-teacher, Lisa Beebe and @English247 (Sue Lyon-Jones) and @nickelnoisy.

I also made

Perhaps I should start a new site :-)

Halloween and me

I’m English so I don’t know a lot about Halloween. I knew from when I was a kid that it was an American thing that involved pumpkins. Then I found out about trick or treat and wearing costumes. I loved the idea of dressing up in scary costumes and walking around the streets. Another early memory I have is watching the horror movie ‘Halloween’ round my friend’s house on video. I remember being scared to walk back home that night. The first time I took part in Halloween was at a school party in Japan. I shaved my head, covered it in white face paint and wrapped myself from head to toe in toilet paper. Riding a train to Osaka for the party dressed as a mummy was great fun. I still need to find out more about the history of Halloween though.

(A 9-page listening lesson with printable classroom handouts and online activities is here.)

About Halloween

This is taken from my ESL Holiday Lessons site. More materials on the text, a listening and online stuff here.

Halloween is celebrated on October the 31st every year. It originated from a pagan holiday and the Christian holiday of All Saints’ Day. The name Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Eve. Today, it is more of a fun day for children and has largely lost its religious roots. Halloween is probably most famous in the U.S.A. Irish immigrants took it to America in the mid-1600s and it slowly spread across the country. Halloween is not celebrated in many countries around the world although many people know about it. Some Christians are not so happy that people celebrate Halloween. They believe the holiday is un-Christian because of its origin as a pagan “festival of the dead.”

Halloween has many easily identifiable symbols. The colours orange and black are widely used. In particular, orange pumpkins and fires and black witches, cats and costumes are common features of this day. One of the biggest Halloween activities is trick-or-treating. This is when children knock on doors and ask for a small gift. If they don’t get anything, they’ll play a trick on the person who opens the door. Food also plays a big part of Halloween. Toffee apples are very popular and so is anything made from pumpkin. Halloween is also a popular topic for Hollywood. Many horror movies have been made about it. Because of this, Halloween is now known in many countries that never actually celebrate it.

Happy Halloween, and don’t forget to send me questions :-)

Answers to some of the questions

* Carved pumpkins could not be used for Halloween in Ireland in the 14th century because pumpkins are native to America and did not really get cultivated in Europe till the 16th century.
** An apostrophe is missing.
*** Mexico
**** Czech Rebublic
***** Germany
****** Korea
******* Spain
******** go to the cemetery and light candles. Is it a public holiday? (yes!) In Lithuania, the night of November 1 is All Soul’s Day. It is a reflective day, not sombre or spooky but a dignified time to remember. It is really beautiful to see the cemeteries at night.

 

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Pronunciation – The Skill Course Books Left Behind

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

This was the subject of my Master’s dissertation, which I finished in 2003. To be more accurate, my focus was on communicative pronunciation and how 14 best-selling elementary level course books almost completely ignored it. Seven years on, the same is happening with today’s courses.

Yesterday, I came across an article by Adrian Underhill who argued similar sentiments. He said:

“… pronunciation teaching has been neglected and that … In spite of the development of interesting teaching materials … it remains the poor relation of language teaching, poorly related to the rest of what happens in the language classroom.”

Underhill compares how pronunciation has been left behind, compared with other skills:

“While much has changed in the last few decades in how we teach grammar, vocabulary, collocation, context and meaning I suggest that pronunciation is still rooted in an essentially behaviourist paradigm of listen, identify, discriminate and repeat.”

His most striking comment for me was this:

“Teachers do their best to integrate pronunciation but for many it remains a supplement to the main diet of most lessons, often relegated in lessons and course books to ‘pron slots’.”

The research in my dissertation (51 criteria applied to the 327 pronunciation activities in the 14 course books) showed the coursebooks did relegate pronunciation to “pron slots”. More worrying for me is that the way the coursebooks covered pronunciation ran counter to their back-cover blurbs that they present “communicative pronunciation”. This was not evident in any of my research.

A brief summary of my findings shows:

Key indicators supportive of this are that in most activities there was…

  • a minimal regard for communication and communicative competence
  • a massive segmental to suprasegmental imbalance (80.43% to 16.21%)
  • an extensive use of listen-and-repeat and other mechanical techniques and absolutely nothing on analyzing discourse
  • a more or less total disregard for discourse competence and intonation – no activities contextually based on the listening activities in the books
  • an isolated and fragmented nature of pronunciation
  • a lack of comprehensible input in listening activities
  • a non-communicative design and presentation method

How this manifests itself in course books:
A few very short activities per unit that are based on sounds, word stress and a formulaic sentence stress. Rarely are any of these related to anything else on the page.

What should happen:
The above, plus elision, juncture, intrusiveness, etc, weak forms, intonation, and most importantly (?) the function of intonation in discourse and the reason for taking intonational choices.

My recommendations for change:

  • pronunciation needs to be integrated with the listening activities in coursebooks rather than being standalone, isolated activities
  • activities on intonation focusing on making intonational choices with confidence and success
  • moving from the overuse of minimal-pairs to working on sounds in communicative contexts
  • a greater focus on observing rapidly spoken speech
  • focus less on prescribed patterns in sterile contexts and more on real patterns in real speech
  • move from word-by-word citational forms to tone units
  • less mechanical recitation to increased awareness of what constitutes the linguistic blur of streamed speech (elision, juncture, etc.)
  • from reciting syllables to counting syllables, from making a sound longer to recognizing its saliency of length, and from guessing to recognizing rises and falls in intonation
  • from alphabetized transcription devices to ones involving greater sensory involvement, especially phonemic charts

True? How can we rectify this?

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People Making Free Lesson Plans

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

People Who Save Teachers Time and Help Students – For Free

Of all the English teaching materials in the world, the ones I like best are those that are online and free. Not that I mind paying for good materials, mind you – it’s just that online materials are better (imho) than those you pay for – both those online and in textbooks.

Why is this?

The guys providing lesson plans for free…

  1. are doing it because they love writing and creating materials. They aren’t doing it because it’s their job.
  2. have a clear vision of what they want to do and then get it done.
  3. are not constrained by editors who require materials to fit within a global, generic textbook mould.
  4. are dedicated and talented materials writers.
  5. know what motivates students.
  6. appreciate what busy teachers need.
  7. can create materials publishers are too afraid to touch.
  8. are in the classroom day in, day out.
  9. have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t with today’s learners.
  10. can and do very regularly produce materials based on what happened one hour ago (almost) or on that day.

I am writing this post to congratulate some of my favourite materials writers for the valuable work they do in providing millions of teachers and students around the world with top quality, free and very regular lesson plans. They do so despite having full-time jobs. I know at least one has a full-time and several part-time jobs and a side job or three.

I make a few lessons myself and receive a few e-mails from busy teachers and happy students thanking me for them. I guess the good people below also receive similar mail:

Sue Lyon-Jones

I would love to produce the visually appealing and pedagogically well-thought-out materials Sue produces at http://www.esolcourses.com/. She has built a beautifully laid out site that is easy to navigate. Her links entice us to click on them. When doing so, we are constantly rewarded with some of the best materials available anywhere in the world. Sue hits the spot ever time with her grading of language, ability to arouse interest and her use of multi-media. She currently has me in a panic that I’m not using video :-o   Sue also has a lovely blog (http://the-pln-staff-lounge.blogspot.com/)and is an enthusiastic, sharing and ever-supportive tweeter (http://twitter.com/esolcourses)

Chris Cotter

A quick skim through Chris’ site (http://www.headsupenglish.com) leaves one in no doubt Chris is a man dedicated to the cause of providing high quality materials on topics that will motivate learners every time. Chris creates weekly all-skills, X-page lessons on current news for high-intermediate and advanced learners. He also has mini-lessons on extremely original and stimulating topics. Another facet of Chris’ site is his weekly newsletter in which he provides tips and ideas for teachers. Chris has also written a book full of practical and reproducible ideas for the classroom: http://www.betterlanguageteaching.com. Chris also tweets: http://twitter.com/cotterHUE.

Todd Beuckens

Todd’s incredible http://www.elllo.org is my favourite site for listening. It is simply unbeatable. There are over 1,000 excellent listenings on all manner of topics. Each listening is accompanied by lovely flash activities and games that engage students with the transcript. It includes dialogues read by voices from all over the world. Todd also has a blog ELLLO-ology (http://ellloblog.blogspot.com/)

David Deubelbeiss

A visit to the Site Map of David’s ning (http://eflclassroom.ning.com/directory.html) is a jaw-dropping experience. It is unbelievable how someone with a full-time job can create something so incredibly all-encompassing. It is the candy store (of Willy Wonka-esque vision) of EFL teaching – everything you want is here. David has obviously worked tirelessly to create a learning and teaching community based around high quality materials, discussions and everything web 2.0. When I grow up I want a site like David’s. Catch up with David on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ddeubel.

Sandy and Thomas Peters

Sandy and Thomas are behind the excellent Topics Online Magazine (http://www.topics-mag.com), which started way back in 1997. It is a wonderful resource for reading. The couple have amassed a wonderful wealth of inspiring readings written by students from all over the world. My students love it. I love it for its cosmopolitan nature and the fact my students can peek into other cultures via very accessible readings. The striking photos on the site enhances its attractiveness.

It is my hope these people continue to create and be happy with what they do each and every day.

It is also my hope they get suitably rewarded one day, perhaps commensurate with their considerable efforts day in, day out over many years. J They don’t charge $29.95 or more to subscribe to or access their lessons, nor do they earn commissions, speaking fees and royalties from the big publishers.

Follow them. Bookmark/Favourite them. Use their resources. Recommend them.

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