Glimpses of our school year in pictures!

Here's a link to a recent posting in our school blog, you don't need to know Finnish to check it out, since it's all about photos.

Click here to take a look at some moments from our school year 2015-2016!

Vanhankaupunginkoski in Helsinki (now that is a long word!). It's such a beautiful place to walk around!

A study programme for immigrants aged 17–25 without school leaving certificate

A new term is about to start in our school! This week we’ll be interviewing and choosing new students to our study programme which is officially called instruction for preparing for basic education. Basically it is a one-year-programme for young adults aged between 17-25 who have recently arrived in Finland and who don’t have a school leaving certificate from their home countries. They don’t need to have previous knowledge of Finnish but they need to be literate (if they aren’t, we also have courses for illiterate adult immigrants). I think this is an excellent opportunity for a young adult to start a new chapter in his or her life in a new country by learning the language, getting to know how the new society works and exploring what options there are for the future. We also have a strong emphasis on developing each student’s learning skills and helping them to find their true potential as learners. 

This is, in brief, what their their school year is made of:

• Finnish studies: starting level 0, target level A1.3-A2.2
• preparatory courses in mathematics
• preparatory courses in natural sciences
• preparatory courses in social studies
• preparatory courses in English
• fine arts
• field trips
• ICT-skills 
• introduction to the Finnish school system with the focus on the students’ own interests and study plans

I’m running out of superlatives when thinking about the students who completed the programme last May. I’m also so very pleased that they all are now carrying on with their studies, which means they reached the language level required for entering the basic education for adults. This is fantastic news given the fact that most of them started the term last September with little or no knowledge of the Finnish language. I was happy to see their skills develop in so many ways during the school year.

Before starting to write about this up-coming term, here are a few highlights of the last weeks of May with my highly motivated students I had the privilege to work with for the entire school year. I wish them all the best and all the happiness in the world!

Getting a hands-on experience on how to prepare Finnish bun at Fazer. 

Learning about the biggest chocolate factory in Finland.

Ending the tour with our goodie bags.

Learning about underwater world in Sea Life.

The students practised theme-related vocabulary on Quizlet before the field trip.

Celebrating and saying farewells at the end of the school year.

Studying vocabulary: plurilingualism, work stations and a field trip

In Finland, most Finnish as a second language teachers rely on the method of teaching Finnish in Finnish. In fact, this is often the only alternative when there may be dozens of different mother tongues in the same classroom, yet not a single language that everybody would understand, so the only option often is to use only Finnish, alongside with visual cues and, of course, acting out :)  This time, however, I wanted to try a different approach in learning the somewhat difficult vocabulary relating to Finnish society. This, in brief, is what we did.

Previous week we had studied some basic information on Finnish society and now it was time to revise the vocabulary. I arranged four work stations in the classroom and the students worked their way on them in pairs or in small groups. I didn't set any time limits for each stations. I was hoping the working would proceed smoothly and that the students would chance stations when they were ready for that. 

Our worksheet with vocabulary

Before the students started working at the stations, they teamed up with a student with the same mother tongue or with a student who shared a mutual language to communicate with. They then talked through a pile of Finnish terms in a language they knew well. I truly felt it was important for them to get support from their peers and to define the somewhat challenging vocabularies in their own languages or second languages before dealing with them in Finnish. The conversation was lively to say the least. The downside of this was that I couldn’t evaluate how well or poorly they defined the terms as I don’t speak the same languages as they do. Anyhow, if there were any mistakes, they got straighten out at the work stations. My aim here was, again, to encourage the students’ plurilingualism and make it a resource in their learning processes. I would be very glad to hear if you have any ideas on how to make the students' plurilingualism a resource in the classroom. Please share them with us.

Some terminology

Once the students were ready to carry on, they could in their own pace start working in pairs or in small groups at the following stations:

1)   Online writing practise: What do you know about Finland? Here the students practised writing sentences in Finnish. Now bear in mind, that this is a beginner’s Finnish course so the task was rather challenging. What I really enjoyed noticing was the lively conversation in Finnish that took place when they were discussing the spelling of the words and the formation of the sentences. We used OneDrive for writing and saving the texts, and we’ll carry on working with them later on. What I would love to have in my classroom is higher work desks. It would be great if the students could stand at some stations. This would also make taking turns in writing easier.

Students forming sentences together

2) Vocabulary practise: I’m a fan of word clouds, they are pretty, you can vary the font and the colours and you can use them for a variety of purposes. Creating them is an easy way to check how well your students know the vocabulary being practised. Again, the conversation was lively also at this station. It was great to follow how the students corrected each other and commented on each other’s work. This time we used a programme called Word it out. 

3) Speaking: Questions about Finland. Here the students had a chance to practise talking some key points we had studied the previous week and thus revise the vocabulary. 

4) Mind-mapping: The students used Popplet for mind-mapping the key aspects of what they had learned about Finnish society so far. We used the version that doesn't require registration. Perhaps that's why there is "your name" on each popplet...?

Popplet created as teamwork - still to be finished off

The best part of the introductory lessons came the same week: We visited the Finnish Parliament House. What is so incredibly great about these tours is that you can ask for guidance in different languages, in our case, the language was selkosuomi which means simplified Finnish. Our guide Lotta was great, she really made an effort to give her presentation in a way that was understood by the students. I believe they learnt a lot during that one-hour-tour. It was also great that the same words we had practised in the classroom came alive in a real world situation.  

Getting out of the classroom

What I liked about these lessons was that they included several aspects that I find important in learning and teaching:

• taking into account learners' previous experiences and skills
• working together in creating something new
• using the power of co-operation
• communicating with the target language
• practising IT-skills
• getting out of the classroom
• using the language in real life situations

Encouraging students’ plurilingualism

It’s been one of my busiest school year so far. Since my last posting, there’s been so much progress in the language and studying skills of my students in the preparatory class. For my new readers: After nearly 20 years of teaching EFL in high schools, I am now teaching Finnish as a second language to 17 to 25-year-old immigrants preparing them for basic education, along with other school subjects such as, for example, English, Mathematics, introductory courses to societal studies and natural sciences. The students come from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and in September they started learning Finnish from the beginning.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out ways in which they could truly use their full potential and personality to help them in the face of the enormous challenge of learning Finnish and adjusting to their new home country. With this object in mind, I also took an online course on multicultural learning and teaching (arranged by Open University of Jyväskylä, which, by the way, I can highly recommend to anybody interested in the topic, the information is in Finnish).

In a truly multicultural and plurilingual school, the appreciation of different cultures and languages doesn’t limit just in theme weeks or projects, but instead multiculturalism is a natural and visible part of every school day. I'm now working on how to take this into account in my teaching and make multiculturalism a resource in learning and teaching. To remind the students that they already know many languages and have many skills, we started off by creating a poster in which each student wrote Hello and Thank you in all the languages they knew. They also asked me to add these words in Swedish since Swedish is the second official language in Finland. Later, they found flags of their own countries and glued them on the poster.

Hello! Thank you!

The following day we started with khmer which is spoken by some 16 million people and is the mother tongue of my student from Cambodia. She kindly taught us how to say hello, goodbye and thank you in khmer. The pronunciation was easy, but the writing was a huge challenge. This is how it looks like (copy pasted from Google translator, my handwriting wasn’t very presentable :) 

hello ជំរាបសួរ 

goodbye លា 

thank you សូមអរគុណអ្នក

What a great reminder of how difficult it is to learn to read and write with the alphabet you’re not familiar with! Just imagine the challenges for students who are not familiar with the Latin alphabet!

For the coming two weeks or so, we’ll be using these three words whenever possible making the effort to really learn them. After that we’ll take another language until all the languages in the classroom are covered. Three words doesn’t put too much strain on anybody nor does it take too much time from learning Finnish. What I am hoping it does, is to show appreciation of each student’s mother tongue and culture. It also reminds the students that they are the native speakers and experts of their own languages. It’s great that they can, in turn, be teachers and guides and show their expertise. I hope that this will further increase their motivation to attend the classes and carry on with their language studies. All the information the students give also integrates well with the introductory geography course we are about to start.

I've already tried out some other ways of taking the students’ plurilingualism into account in their learning processes and in my teaching. More about this in my next posting. I would be very glad to hear any experiences you might have on the theme. 

For the Finnish-speaking readers

Isn't it always nice when somebody is interested in knowing what actually happens in your classroom?  Yesterday our principal came to observe my lessons as part of her own studies. This is the report she wrote about what happened in the classroom. The link is in Finnish: Tvt tiedonhaussa ja soveltamisessa

Three iPad apps for language learning classroom

It's been a busy autumn with my new group. The students have already improved their Finnish skills quite a bit and they have  also started a course in mathematics. There will be more school subjects coming as their language skills develop. 

This time I'm going to present a few more iPad apps that I have used with my students to encourage them to practise their pronunciation, speaking and listening skills:

Decide Now!

The app is designed for decision making but it turns out there are so many other ways to use it. My students, who are presently at beginners’ level in their language studies, have been using it for practising question formation, followed by discussion: Just add question words in the wheel and voilà, you’ll have a wheel that can be used in various contexts. Decide Now! is also a handy tool for practising vocabulary: Write the words in the wheel, students can then form sentences using them, define them or create a dialogue around them. Fun and effective, and when students work in pairs each one of them gets a lot of practice!

Dragon Dication

Pronunciation can be tricky. I am a supporter of each student’s own personal accent but I also encourage them to learn pronunciation to avoid misunderstandings simply because in the real world they need to be understood. I listen to my students speaking a lot, they also read aloud to me from time to time. I encourage them to use online dictionaries with audio as well as listen to the language around them. Yet another way to practise pronunciation is with Dragon Dictation. It is a voice recognition application. My students have used it, for example, for reading aloud short dialogues. Then they check the writing and see if there’s something to be corrected. In this way they also practise reading and spelling. The app can also be used for reading out easily confused words. For example, many Finnish language learners find it challenging to recognize between long and short vowels (tuli – tuuli) and double consonants (kuka – kukka).

Microphone and Recording Pro

So far we've only tried this app once, so there are yet many things to explore. The students were given a situation and they created a dialogue. The students then recorded the dialogue and later we listened to each one of them. A quick and easy way to practise speaking and listening skills. The students also like the idea of re-recording the dialogue if they were not happy with the final result.

Quizlet with photos

A few words about Quizlet: It is so great for learning languages!

As an EFL teacher, I have used Quizlet a lot with English-Finnish-English phrases and words. This term I am mainly teaching Finnish as a second language for young adults. I will be teaching EFL for them later in the spring term but as for now, the focus is on the Finnish language. They don’t all speak English so I had to give up using translations. Instead I am using photos, and it is working really well.

Using Quizlet image search is such a time saver! In addition, it is great how the photo sources are listed below each set.

I only now discovered the folders, which makes it easier to find a certain set. However, it seems to me that my folders are visible only to me, my students can’t see them. Can anybody shed some light on this? Is it so? Or perhaps the folder function requires logging in? So far, my new students haven’t done that.

The only disappointment with using photos instead of translations has been the reduced amount of study modes (Cards, Learn, Speller, Test, Scatter, Space Race) when studying the vocabularies on iPads. I was looking forward to the students having a go at Scatter but instead they got a notification “You cannot play scatter because there are images for every definition. Please try another mode.”

Having said that, I still think Quizlet is awesome. Easy and simple to use, very efficient and also so much fun for the students with the competitive side of it! And I love the idea of sharing!

If you want to have a go at practising the sights in Helsinki, click here. 

Or have a try with the colours in Finnish.

Helsinki sightseeing

Part V: iMovies for teaching and learning

Part V: Some highlights of the previous school year

Just a quick note on using iMovies. This posting will finish off the five-part-series of my reminiscing about the previous school year.

Last year I took a one-day-course on how to use iMovies. Teachers in Helsinki are very lucky to have so many opportunities to stay up-to-date with the developments in educational technology. Helsinki City Media Centre organizes a variety of courses with the focus on professional development.

So, there I was for one day and with friends who are teaching in other schools, and together we were learning on how to use iMovies. Since there are so many excellent instructions on how to use the programme, I won’t bore the readers with that. I just want to say it was so much fun!

I got somewhat excited about the possibilities to make my own teaching material and teach my students to do it, too. I definitely wanted to share my experiences with my colleagues, and happily they were interested in the topic. There are 20 Finnish as a Second Language (FSL) teachers in my school, and on one Friday afternoon 13 of us showed up to learn more about it and work together.

We had a great and productive afternoon. We created a YouTube channel for our work (so far it's private). The idea was that slowly but surely, whenever we would have time, we would add videos on our channel. These could then be used in our classrooms, and, of course, the students would also be learning on how to use the programme.

I was (and still am) excited about this idea. It's so much more fun and efficient to have many people working together. I believe in the power of sharing.

Here are glimpses in photos of the demo video I made. I asked our staff members to tell the camera what languages they speak. The result was a two-minute-video for a beginners' FSL course.

For the photos and speech bubbles I used an iPad app called Photogene.

What language do you speak? What languages do you speak?

I speak Finnish, English, French and also Swedish.

Part IV: Teaching illiterate immigrant stay-at-home moms

Part IV: Some highlights from the previous school year

Practising with verbs

Everyone knows that it’s not easy to study if you have small children and you are staying home with them. An ongoing project, organized by the Education Department and the Department of Early Education and Care in Helsinki, encourages immigrant stay-at-home-parents to study Finnish AND bring their babies and toddlers along. The children are taken care of on the same premises by trained staff. Isn't that just so practical and wonderful! No wonder the courses have been popular. The courses are offered at several levels starting from learning reading and writing skills to beginners’ and advanced level Finnish.

For the past two school years, in addition to my EFL classes, I was teaching two groups of illiterate women. I was very excited about this opportunity. I have been a language teacher for ages and I am also a qualified primary school teacher with the experience of teaching children to read and write. So I was interested in putting my experience into practice and finding out how it would be to teach adults to read and write in their second language.

To cut a very long story short, I can say that the two-year-time I was working with illiterate adults was definitely one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I have ever had. I feel my students were truly learning for life, and for me that was the best reward.

Some observations:

• The mother tongues of my students were Somali, Arabic and Mandinka to mention but a few. At the beginning of the course, the students spoke no or little Finnish. Thus, they were learning to read and write NOT in their native languages but in Finnish. I can’t even begin to understand how challenging this must have been for them. And yet, those students, who participated in the course actively, did it.  At the end of the course they could read and write! I am so proud of every one of them!
• As in all learning and teaching, I think it is important to create a comfortable atmosphere for learning. It was important that the students enjoyed coming to the classes. If they didn’t, they would simply not have showed up anymore.  
• The focus was both on the spoken language and learning to read and write.  It was important to practise skills that would help them to cope with everyday situations. As a guideline for my teaching, I used the curriculum for illiterate adults (link in Finnish). 
• I was very lucky in that I had the luxury of having a school assistant working with me all the time. This is something I have never had as a language teacher. It was great to share the work with another professional. What made things ever greater, was the fact that my assistant was studying Somali. That became really handy when explaining the meanings of some words and phrases. I have to say, it does take quite a bit of creativity to teach without a language in common. In addition, for most part of the courses we also had the services of a social worker available for the students. Together we were able to offer the students individual and differentiated instruction. 
• At the end of the course we discussed the future plans with each student, and helped them in finding a suitable course to continue their studies. This was easier said than done. Helsinki is a true haven for learning languages but there aren’t all that many courses for students with limited reading and writing skills.
• On a final note, as I mentioned before, the students took up a huge challenge in learning to read and write not in their native languages but in Finnish. I can’t help but wonder how great it would be if these illiterate immigrants could learn to read and write first in their native language. This would make a world of difference for their learning process. 

To finish off, a few more pictures of the teaching material I used.

Practising with the letter "j"

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Where are you from? Where do you live?