The World of Learning Languages: self-directed learning

Showing posts with label self-directed learning. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 June 2016

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!

Saturday, 19 March 2016

Good old learning stations!

I’m a big fan of learning stations. They are great for letting students choose what to do, in which order and they are also a very natural way to differentiate teaching. I also very much like that students work in small groups and help each other. Learning stations naturally also allow the teacher to go around and be of help when needed.

Since September my students have been learning Finnish at an overwhelming pace. This week they started to study vocabulary on Finnish nature. Here are a few glimpses of our Friday’s stations.

Increase your vocabulary with Quizlet. Choose the themes you wish to practise: nature, trees, birds, animals in the forest, insects
Study the vocabulary and play a game of domino.
Start studying the text (challenging).
Go out and find the following trees. Photograph them and show your findings to the rest of the group. Test if they know which trees you captured.

My favourite station this time was the one that took the students outside the classroom to explore surrounding nature. It was a sunny day, too!

Speaking about nature, can you believe that Finland has 187 888 lakes!

A game of domino

Learning vocabulary with Quizlet. A picture of one of the 187 888 lakes in Finland.

Do you know what this tree is in Finnish? Check it out here.
Photo taken by a student in my group.

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

Listening comprehension summer course: Links for EFL learners!

Greetings from our summer courses!

For more than a decade our school has organized high school summer courses in various subjects such as English, Swedish, Finnish, Biology, Geography, Health Studies, History, Chemistry and Mathematics. This summer we had 24 courses with approximately 25-35 students per course. Now this is what I call motivation!

Here in headphone land. Photo thanks to clemsonunivlibrary

This summer I was in charge of the listening comprehension courses which are one of my favourite ones (well, they all are to be honest). To cut a long story short, the during the two-week-course the students practised for the up-coming national examination. We covered all possible exercise types listed by the National Board of Matriculation Examination. This includes:

multiple choice questions both in English or in the language of instruction ie. Finnish or Swedish

open questions in English or in the language of instruction

a summary based on what you hear

I enjoyed planning and teaching this course. All EFL teachers in Finnish high schools know that it is seldom possible to concentrate on one particular area throughout the whole course, but with this course it was possible. The main focus was to improve students' listening skills and expand their vocabularies. The students who took the course were there for this specific reason so clearly they were very motivated and ready to learn.

Our school organised 24 summer courses for high schoolers in June 2015.

We concentrated on one exercise type at a time and students had the opportunity to test different techniques when carrying out the exercises. In addition, we practised previous years' listening comprehension test. The students had a chance to listen to the tests independently at their own pace, which got great feedback from them. They also frequently commented how they feel more confident to face the challenging exam now that they are prepared for it and know what to expect.

The national listening comprehension test. You can also find them on the net.

We also used some material on the net. Here are some links with brief descriptions of each site. I think they are great for practising listening skills and expanding vocabulary:

BBC Learning English: Words in the news video stories: A great site for EFL and ESL learners scroll down a bit for the video stories and see for yourself!

English in a minute: Short videos that explain idioms and often also their origins.

BBC Learning English: The English we speak: Dialogues that shed light on the English idioms and colloquial expressions. I advise students to listen to these with the scripts.

Yle news in English. Yle is a national Finnish broadcasting company.

LBC 97,3: A talkradio that focuses on everyday news and issues.

An example of the national matriculation examination test. This test is from 2006, soon this test type will be in history as the national exams will be reformed starting from autumn 2016.

English Lab: Students can choose the level they want to practise: easy, medium, difficult

For students preparing for the Finnish matriculation examination there are also a variety of listening comprehension exercises available. One of the best known is probably abitreenit.

There is an excellent blog for preparing students for the national exam, it also includes a posting on listening skills. Studying this was one piece of homework in our listening course (the blog is in Finnish). Additionally, if students wanted to practise test-related vocabulary, they could do that with the help of Quizlet.

After these intensive courses it feels great to start the summer holidays!

Wishing you all a lovely summer! See you again in the autumn!

Have a relaxing summer!

Monday, 17 November 2014

Word Clouds

For the past week or so, our theme has been home. Today the students collected the key vocabulary under titles such as Home, Rooms, Furniture, Household appliances and Decoration (they are learning these in Finnish) and created word clouds. Students then made a poster where they put their work to be seen every day.

They used three word cloud generations:

WordMosaic: The site offers some free features such as heart, clover, smileys, arrows, etc, a variety of fonts as well as background and text colours. You can also create your own feature which some of my students did.

WordPack and Tag Cloud (IPad apps): Both have a selection of styles or features, see the photos below.

Word clouds are handy tools for practising vocabulary. What we did today was pretty simple but, nevertheless, it helped the students to revise the vocabulary and they learned how to create word clouds which make nice adds to presentations and draw focus to particular words. Instead of listing separate words, the students can also make word clouds of the websites they are studying and use it as a starting point for reading comprehension and vocabulary expansion.

Koti - Home

Sisustus - Decoration

Tuesday, 4 November 2014

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.

Saturday, 16 August 2014

Part III: Experiences with Tabletkoulu

Part III: Some highlights from the previous school year

Last year my colleague from another school and I decided to take a challenge. We started creating an online EFL course with a Finnish start-up company called Tabletkoulu. The pedagogy and underlying guidelines behind this company are inspiring to say the least. The courses are based on methods such as flipped learning, phenomenon-based learning, game-based learning, project-based learning, co-operative learning and self-directed learning. I have always been excited about the possibilities that educational technology has brought to language learning, so it seemed like a natural step to be involved in creating learning material that would benefit from these developments.

What fascinates me are the opportunities to make language alive through authentic learning material and learning experiences, the almost overwhelming world of interacting and sharing, and learning from others. In addition to this, I can see the potential that educational technology has in truly embracing all kinds of language learners with so many individually tailored ways to study.

In the spring term 2014 our course ENA3 Study and work was still under construction but I wanted to test some parts of it with my students. To cut a very long story short, here are some random observations on using the material:

The students worked either on computers or iPads. They worked either on their own, in pairs, in small groups and at times I was instructing them.
This is what the table of contents of the course looks like:

Table of contents
Because of the time restrictions we only had time to study sections two and three. In addition to this, we studied grammar whenever it felt natural. For example, the course material has several interviews with direct questions. They were easily converted into indirect questions, and we observed what it did to the word order. Similarly, when writing a CV or a covering letter, you naturally use adjectives. This is when we also studied how to use comparison and quantifiers.
Not all my students enjoy speaking in English, thus writing their comments on discussion forum encouraged them to use the language without being too stressed about the pronunciation, for example.
The material has many exercises that encourage students to co-operate and get out of the classroom, for example, to make interviews, record them and use the target language. Each exercise has also a discussion forum. This turned out to be really handy because it made the conversation visible if needed.
I was surprised to see how engaging the exercises were. As the students were doing them, they were able to gain points after finishing each exercise. This motivated them to collect more points. Encouraged by this, we then decided that the exercise points would be added to their course exam points (course exam consisted of a listening comprehension test and four short theme-related essays). Thus, the actual work done during the course became a visible factor in the student evaluation.
While some students were really quick in moving from one exercise to another, others struggled with them. I found myself being more aware of the difficulties the students had as I could follow their progress in their portfolios. As many students carried on doing the exercises independently, I had more time to help those who had difficulties.
The platform allowed teachers to add their own material in it. This was a great feature! For example, when studying school related vocabulary, I thought it was important for my students to be able to speak about their own school in English. So I was able to add material that was specific for my students. The students themselves also participated in searching the material, for example, finding relevant vocabulary on our school English website.
The material also includes exercises which introduce the students to the use of, for example Twitter, LinkedIn and Khan Academy.
The platform also enables collaboration between the teachers who are using the same course material. You can start a conversation not only with your own group of students but also nationwide with all the users. I had no chance to try this out. It would be interesting, though and I very much like the idea of teachers sharing their ideas and experiences.
The theme-related vocabulary on study and work for the course can be found on Quizlet. Click here to see the vocabulary sets.
My students are big fans of Quizlet (well, most of them are :) At some point there was a huge race of the gold medal in Scatter and Space Race. The students got so into practising the vocabulary that it was their wish to have more vocabulary testing. For this purpose I used, for example, Socrative or pair work with word definitions.
All in all, I enjoyed using the course material and the feedback from the students was mainly positive. However, some students told me after the course that they would prefer to have “something concrete to hold in their hands” after the course. Some of them printed the vocabularies on Quizlet to ease this anxiety.