Health and safety - Framework for a discussion

Now, I usually like my posts to be about things that you could pretty much pick up and use straight away with your classes, but there is a bit more speculation I. This on of what I think might be possibl in the not too distant future… Bear with me here…

Not just for my learners….

I have just started as a student a fairly full-on full-on course (Cambridge DELTA at UCL) and I wanted to find a better way to organise my notes. I’ve probably never been taught how to take notes and generally have just written loads of stuff down. So far it has worked well enough, but I have this nagging feeling that there must be a better way to do it. After spending quite a while pointing out to learners how useful it can be to use mind maps and other graphic organisers to plan their work,I thought I might give it a try myself (see exploratree for some great ideas for using graphic organisers).

Notetaking

I’d found my iPad quite useful for making ‘write a lot of stuff down’ type notes and I could use the resulting scribblings (tappings might be a better word) to write blog posts with. This is a development from what I normally do with handwritten notes, which get stuck in a folder and occasionally skimmed through. Nevertheless I knew that there were some mind mapping apps available for the iPad and I thought that they could be a good use for my tablet. So far I’ve been impressed – it seems a really logical way of organising concepts and most crucially it’s easy to add new ideas in at different points when revising. It also allows you to create very large unwieldy maps and then zoom into the bits you need. In case you’re wondering how big you can make them, there’s an example of my course notes at the bottom of the post. I’d guess it is probably not for everyone, but I’ve been convinced to stick with it.

Killer App?

Having been trying this for a week or so, I’m starting to think that this might just be the “killer app” for tablets in the classroom. Mind mapping can be done very simply and cheaply with a pencil and paper – it’s probably the best way to do a quick, simple mind map. However they soon get huge, messy and generally unwieldy. One way to overcome this is by using an online mind maps such as bubbl.us which allows you to rearrange things and zoom in and out to look in more or less detail. This means that you can create massive mindmaps which are still usable. The problem is that you end up tied to a PC or laptop. Now, this might just be a generational thing, but I can’t sit in a lecture or class tapping away on a laptop or desktop without getting really self-conscious and to be honest I can get easily distracted (not coincidentally my most effective writing usually happens on an old laptop that has no internet access) . Mobiles could be less intrusive, but their small screens are not really ideal for complex mind maps (though there are plenty of apps available for them). Tablets, on the other hand, seem really well suited to this very visual genre. The touch screen makes it easy to manipulate the image and add ideas. It’s easy for learners to show and compare their thoughts. If tablets (not necessarily Apple-Flavoured) become accessible enough for them to be common in class, I suspect that this is something that will become widespread. This might be a way off for most groups, but I’ve been doing a lot of 1-1 support this year and I’ve found my iPad very useful. Tablets are great (and a bit more realistic) for that context.

iThoughts

The app that I’ve chosen is iThoughts for the iPad. I chose it because most reviews seemed to suggest that it was the best option and it comes out top when you google “iPad mindmapping”. At £7, it is a bit expensive for an app, but it’s still only seven quid. There are quite a few alternative apps out there (some free), so you might want to do a bit more research than I did.

Leaving the competition to one side, I would recommend iThoughtsHD in its own right for these reasons:

• it has a really intuitive & simple user interface
• There are plenty of features and editable options to create maps (colour, image, links, tasks, etc)
• It links smoothly with cloud service (I use Dropbox all the time, so this is a big bonus for me
• It has ability to export as an image, PDF (very useful) or as one of any number of alternative mindmap formats (not so useful for me – but if you use mind maps a lot this might be a crucial feature)
• You can cut and paste maps as text ( appears as a bulleted list in text)

However, there are lots of different apps out there, likewise I’m sure here are good options for android as well.

Classroom ideas

So if you are lucky enough to have a class full of learners with the required hardware (unlikely perhaps) what could you do? Please add your own ideas in the comments section below but these are a few that I’ve thought of:

• Great big vocabulary maps around a particular topic – get groups to compete to see who can make the biggest (but actively encourage them to steal each other’s ideas)
• Get learners to break complex texts down into mind maps, then ask them to reconstruct the original text orally or in writing
• Track learners free speaking in order to return to topics to add more content (the picture at the top of the post is an example of this).
• Working out what questions they want to “ask the text” before trying to use a long text or website for research. This could make learners less like to copy (or cut and paste) the source text.
• The old favourite – planning for writing or giving presentations.

Further Reading

http://www.teachingvillage.org/2010/02/10/mind-mapping-learning-and-teaching-with-both-sides-of-the-brain-by-hobie-swan/

http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/PTA/Volume-53-raj.pdf

http://hbo-kennisbank.uvt.nl/cgi/fontys/show.cgi?fid=4166

I’m sure you’ve got loads of better ideas than mine – I’d love it if you could share some in the comments below….

The big one!

Listen with your Phone

Decoding Sound

Since attending a talk on developing listening skills by Philida Schellekens, I have really been thinking about the way I teach listening. The talk is detailed in this post and is based on this report. The key part of Schellekens’ findings is that too much effort in language teaching (especially within the UK Skills for Life curriculum… another story) is spent on comprehension of spoken words, rather than on decoding the stream of language into those words.

Since listening to the talk and reading the report, I’ve been trying to think how I could bring more of this into my practice – this is clearly an important step in the listening process that I had been rather neglecting up to this point. In her report Schellekens gives some references for reading about this process – the suggested texts are:

• Field, J. (2003). ‘Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening.’ English Language Teaching Journal 57/3.
• Field, J. (2003). Psycholinguistics. London: Routledge.
• Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I am going to be honest – these look fascinating, but I haven’t been able to get to a library recently; as soon as I can I want to read these texts (and may have to come back and change this post… or at least write a follow-up). If you are familiar with Field’s work and it appears to you that I am labouring under a misapprehension please comment below, I think this is a crucial area for equipping learners to deal with life in the UK.

Awareness Raising

While I haven’t been able to read these texts yet, I felt that I could follow some of the advice that Philida gave in her talk. One of the approaches suggested was dictation – this is an activity that I feel I don’t use enough with my groups – not sure why, I have just never got that used to using it and so I haven’t thought about it enough to use regularly (perhaps like a learner who has just been taught a new language point, and is starting to understand it, without yet actually being able to use it in their own language practice.) The point that Philida makes is that if we look at the difference between what is said by the teacher in a dictation and what is heard by the learners, we raise awareness of the way that English sounds work, particularly in terms of connected speech and word stress.

Authentic Listening

My lesson was with a Level 1 ESOL group, who are looking at the general topic of ‘News’. You can see the unit from the DFES-produced ‘Skills for Life’ materials here. I use some things from the materials, but I find them a bit chaotic and uninspiring. Luckily for this topic there are plenty of authentic materials floating around, the problem is that much of it is at a high level and challenging for learners to access. I particularly wanted to develop learners’ listening skills but was concerned that authentic news clips could be tricky for learners at this level.

Being a ‘multimodal’ news platform, the BBC is a very good source of topical resources as many of the stories are accompanied by video or audio – I chose to look at this story: Scotland storm blackout hitting thousands. I wasn’t interested in the text, just the video.

Word Cloud of Transcript (created at www.wordle.net)

The first step I wanted to take to make sure that the recording would be accessible for learners was to create an introductory activity to ‘activate schemata’ and also to work on some of the vocabulary in the text. I transcribed the recording and created a wordcloud in Wordle. I gave this to learners and displayed some images taken from the Guardian’s coverage of the story. This allowed learners to predict what the story would be about and also ensured that they could identify some of the vocabulary that they would encounter in the text.

Taking on the machine

Following this, I decided to introduce the text by dictating the first section of the text to the learners. I had recently seen a learner use the Dragon Dictation app on their iPhone to help them in a lesson, and had been wondering if there was a way I could harness this in a lesson. I mention Dragon on iOS because I had the hardware and the app was is free… But it is far from being the only app of its kind and I am sure there are similar things available for other smartphones, tablets, PCs or whatever. Google particularly seem to be developing tools in this area. Having studied a tiny bit of language engineering on my Masters (click here for details) I remembered that when I did Machine Translation Error Analysis it was not unlike marking learner’s English – the patterns in the kind of mistakes made by the machine, can sometimes give you a clue about the way language works. I supposed that something similar might happen with dictation and wanted to try something out. I would pit the learners against my iPhone in a human vs machine contest!

Human Tape Recorder; Electronic Ear

I used the ‘human tape recorder’ process (described here) to dictate the first few sentences to the learners and as they were checking what they had written in groups I dictated the text for a final time into my phone headset, emailed myself the results and displayed the resulting text through the data projector.

That’s the far for a bridge behind me nothing is cross that bridge when of Scotland’s major bridges nothing has crossed it since 1030 this morning I recorded a gust of 84 miles an hour and that was enough of the people in charge because it down it had been close the high sided vehicles up to that point

A lot of the differences between the text Dragon created and the one I read out were similar to those in learners’ own texts and the highlighted certain features of spoken English:

• weak pronunciation of has
• differentiating vowel sounds in one and when
• difficulty in identifying final -ed
• weak pronunciation of for for the people
• differentiating between close and because

The text from Dragon was useful as it gave us a point to compare to the learners’ texts as it had been through the same process. Hopefully it was also re-assuring that the machine was no better than the learners at this task.

At this point I don’t feel I did enough to practice identifying these sounds on the lesson, but it raised awareness in the learners – they were then able to find answers to the listening comprehension questions from the original text. I also now have a better idea of what I should look at in terms of developing learners’ listening skills.

What’s next?

The question that this raises is whether there are any other applications of computational linguistics that can be simply and usefully employed in the classroom…. Here we tried to understand why the computer had made the mistakes it did – could this be done with Google translate? Would it work better with one of the more rule-based systems (usually powered by Systran)? Could learners use voice recognition to hone their pronunciation? Is it just a piece of pedagogically irrelevant techno-bling? I’d love to see your ideas…

Time for a new blog post… I’ve written before comparing Prezi and PowerPoint, then I didn’t have access to a projector for a year, so I couldn’t really use it much. Now I’ve got the kit again I can give it a whirl (and a zoom).

One of the things I’ve always thought Prezi should be good for is producing content for learners to self-access. I’m trying to think how I can improve this in the resources I produce. The Prezi shared here is based on the much-maligned Skills for Life ESOL resources. I think tat ‘s fine as a resource to display through a data projector, but I’m not sure how to make it a bit more suitable for independent study.

I’ve tried to make sure that these resources embrace the non-linearity allowed by Prezi by providing labels for each section and allowing users to easily zoom to the desired section. Adding useful links,that were not included in he lesson would be useful here for learners self-access should they wish to explore the topics further.

How would you use Prezi to promote independent learning?

Autumn again - time for a little reflection

It’s really easy when reading blogs to pay loads of attention to the latest post, but not go back through the older entries. This makes sense for a very news based diary-type blog, but I reckon most education-related blogs are full of still useful content all the way through.

As a result, I thought I’d just pull out some of the posts from this blog that seem to be popular. I admit that this is a lazy post, similar to one I did about 13 months ago, but I thought it might be interesting as a not-quite annual event. I’ve also added a tag cloud to the sidebar, hopefully that should make it easier to found old posts of interest.

Anyway here are the five posts with the most hits last year (Not including those on last year’s list)

1. Back to Basics: Mini Whiteboards – It’s not all about tech, you know! These are a fantastic resource and there are some ideas here….
2. Destination Impossible – This game from BBC Skillswise is great for teaching directions… The whole BBC Skillswise site has just be revamped and is well worth a look round – loads of English and Literacy materials for use online and in class.
3. IATEFL – On Tech – Ok, maybe you do all love the techie stuff (goes with blogs, I guess). This is a summary of the sessions I attended at IATEFL this year on learning technology – there are a number of links and comments there. I’d also really recommend having a look around the IATEFL Brighton Online website, which has loads of videos of the talks from the conference (a number can also be downloaded as podcasts via iTunes).
4. Authentic Materials – This post is a list of online sources of Authentic Materials for use in class – please feel free to add more in the comments section.
5. Moodle Forums for ESOL Learners - This is a guide with ideas for how to use online forums (not just in Moodle) with your learners as well as instructions for setting up forums in Moodle.

Away from these, I should also mention my Prezi vs Powerpoint post again, as it is by far the most viewed and commented post on this blog – feel free to join in!

Before I try to think what I’m going to write about next, I’d just like to say thanks for all the comments, retweets, etc – this is the first time I’ve managed to keep a blog alive  – so Grazie Mille to all of you!

Reflect Workshop

This post is to present a project I’ve been helping with: ESOL News has come from Reflect ESOL and Action for ESOL. Most of content had already been written by ESOL teachers and learners in London, but I was asked to add an online aspect to it, which you can see at www.esolnews.org

Background

Action for ESOL has led a campaign to get the UK Government to reconsider funding changes which would have excluded large numbers of the most vulnerable learners from being able to access English language tuition. The big success of the campaign so far has been the temporary U-turn regarding funding, however at present this is only due to run for one year and many courses could still have to close next summer. The priority for the campaign now is to ensure that this does not happen, as well as ensure that vulnerable groups such as asylum seekers are not overlooked.

ESOL News

The campaign has tried to involve learners at every point, there was a large number of learners who wrote to politicians and at the protests, as you can see below.

ESOL News is trying to further support this, by providing information for learners on the issues as well as acting as a platform for learners to express their own views. There is a clearly political theme to the materials which might be seen as controversial. Personally, I think it depends on how this is dealt with by the teacher – learners should be the drivers, if a class is not interested then these issues should not be forced upon them. Also it is crucial that learners are allowed to explore the issues, that all points of view are expressed and that learners are allowed to reach their own conclusions.

The issues in this campaign are of direct relevance to many ESOL learners in the UK. ESOL teaching in the UK is supposed to deal with citizenship content alongside linguistic ones – given that language is always embedded in a social context, this is necessary. The Action for ESOL campaign has been a great lesson in democracy as it functions in the UK: Learners have seen the direct response of an election leading to a change of government, they have seen how a change of government leads to a change of policy and the effects of this on themselves as members if a society, they have seen how their disagreement with these changes can be be expressed through peaceful protest and correspondence with their elected representatives and it now appears that they can see how this campaigning can have an effect on policy. The opportunities for allowing learners to express themselves have been very rich – the best example is of a student who could not speak English a few years previously, but who spoke on BBC Radio 4 to a nationwide audience as a result of the campaign.

The magazine started as a PDF but it was easy to create a newsletter website using WordPress, this way we can easily distribute the printable magazine while also having some online activities for learners to try.

Activities

We’ve tried to include activities that can be used in class or accessed by learners independently. There are some reading activities and a Lino online noticeboard for learners to share their views. There are also word clouds of all the activities, which tutors can use as they see fit. We want to have a selection of on and offline activities. While WordPress is a great blogging site, it hasn’t been designed as a learning platform. What we want to do is to find some more interactive customisable resources and link to them from the main site. All suggestions for this would be gratefully received, so if any of you readers (come on, I know how good you all are…) have some ideas, we’d love to hear them.

HELP!!!!

I’d really like to know how you would go about a project like this – have you got any simple ideas to improve the interactive side of a webiste like this? Do you think this could be an interesting resource for your learners? Do you have learners who might like to contribute? Please add some comments below if you have any ideas…

Skillsworkshop front page

I recently posted about how one form of crowd sourcing in education was the use of resource banks. I’ve already mentioned talent.ac.uk on this blog, now I want to look at a similar resource – Skills Workshop. This is a fantastic site, jam-packed with resources, which has grown through one person’s initiative together with contributions from many others.

A growing resource

This website grew from Maggie Harnew’s personal stock of basic skills teaching materials, but has now grown to include contributions from a number of practitioners from around the UK. The majority of resources have been contributed by the site’s users and it has become THE resource site for basic skills teachers in Britain.

It has been around for a while, but has recently undergone a major redesign, which has made it much easier to use (you can read about the history of the site here: http://www.skillsworkshop.org/about/history).

The site is invaluable as it covers an area where there are very few quality commercially-produced resources. As the onus on teaching staff  in these areas is to produce their own resources it is great that there is a way to share resources like this. It saves teachers’ time and through the sharing of best practice can also give ideas and inspiration for creating future resources.

Where this site differs from a number of other similar sites is that all resources are moderated, classified and formatted by Maggie before being posted. While this does mean that resources do sometimes take a while to go on the site once they are submitted, it does guarantee a certain degree of quality that can sometimes be missing on other resource banks.

Resources

The site is organised under the following categories:

Literacy - For learners of Adult Literacy (usually first-language English speakers, but may still be of use to second language speakers)

Numeracy - Maths resources

Pre-Entry – for learners who are beginner reader and writers

ESOL – Resources for ESOL learners from pre-entry up to Level 2 (Advanced)

ICT – Resources to develop learners’ IT skills

General - Resources which fit in to a number of categories.

Contextual - Resources which have been designed for learners following other courses, such as Health Care, Construction, Motor Engineering or Hairdressing. These resources are particularly useful for those teaching Functional Skills.

There is also a Useful Links section which is exactly what you would expect – there are loads of links related to language, literacy and numeracy which include resources, organisations and other relevant links.

Each of those sections are then arranged according to the Skills for Life Core Curricula; if you are interested in these you can find more details here: http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/sflcurriculum (Interactive, free registration required) or http://rwp.excellencegateway.org.uk/ESOL/Adult%20ESOL%20core%20curriculum/ (PDF, no registration required).

The codes may seem a bit bewildering (Wt/L1.2a, etc) but all resource pages on the site now feature the text of each descriptor, so it is clear which aspects of language or numeracy are developed by each resource. The search function also uses the text of the descriptors so you can use this to find a resource that concentrates on a particular aspect of language, literacy or numeracy.

Crowdsourcing

The key features of this site are that it is both free and comprehensive; the only way that this is possible is because people contribute resources to it. So if you have any resources which you feel are suitable, please donate them. Likewise if you know of any links that could be of use, add them to the Useful Links section – this way the site can continue to grow.

If you don’t feel that you have any resources or links to add, the site does give space to add comments to any of the resources featured there. If you find an activity that you really like, but have suggestions for other resources or websites to accompany it, once you’ve registered you are able to easily add them to the resource page once you’ve registered.

I’ve already written about how blogging and tweeting can be used to engage with professional development and find resources and Maggie Harnew maintains both a Skills Workshop blog and a Skills Workshop Twitter account that gives you the chance to keep up to date and engage with the site.

While this site owes an enormous amount to the determination and vision of its found, it is another great example of how crowdsourcing can build up a really impressive resource.

Blogging? (eltpics via Flickr)

Having recently updated my Twitter for Educators page, I felt that it was time that I did the same for my page on teaching blogs (Click on the link in the top right box). This is partly because there are a lot of good blogs that I hadn’t got around to adding yet, but also because, as with Twitter, following blogs has issues around signal-noise ratios and the sheer weight of information. As a result I’ve added a couple of sections looking at readers and mobile tools and the like.

Most people advise keeping bloglists short and well pruned – I can see the merit of that, but I’m wilfully ignoring it; the list is massive! However rather than just giving a page full of links, I do try to add some information about the content of the blogs I link to so people can have an idea of what they contain, and I don’t add anything that I think is of no worth. I’ve also had a think about the categories I sort them into and added a contents section with HTML anchors – if anyone know a more elegant way of doing this on a wordpress.com blog I’d love to hear it (my HTML skills are pretty basic).

Blogs are a great way of doing online CPD – following relevant blogs is a great way to stay in touch with different ideas and opinions around any area of interest – especially where there is a good level of discussion to participate in. I’d love to hear about any that I haven’t added to the list. Of course they are just one form of online CPD myself and Mike Harrison gave a presentation about online professional development last Autumn with a couple of other options, which you can see here*:

The three blogs that we chose to highlight were the following:

•http://e-blahblah.com by Sandra Pires which has simple to follow guides to e-learning approaches (and was probably the inspiration for this blog)
•http://mistermikelcc.blogspot.com by Mike Richmond-Coggin which is a great blog looking at many of the issues involved in teaching ESOL.
•http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com by Scott Thornbury – this is probably the best blog around for informed debate about English language teaching, I really like the fact that Scott always engages with the debate. Scott has now recorded a video saying what he uses his blog for:

I would recommend visiting the blog page to see the comments and replies, which are always fascinating on Scott’s blog.

We also talked about the ESOL-RESEARCH mailing list which is essential reading for anyone interested in the ESOL sector in the UK – it links professionals across the sector and can also be a great forum for debate or source of advice. The British Council’s Teaching English website has been slightly revamped since that presentation, but is a great source of resources for teaching and CPD (disclaimer – I have been working for the British Council, but I do genuinely like the site…)

*Also well worth watching Amanda Wilson and Callie Wilkinson’s contribution from the same event – http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/seminars/exploring-uk-esolefl-divide

Seeing as it had been up there for over a year and been overtaken by events , I thought that my Twitter for Educators guide needed a bit of a revamp – so I’ve updated it and you can see it here: Twitter for Educators. (or through the link in the top right box on this page)

Next up – the blog list…

Action for ESOL became a theme of the conference.

The first point was that the changing nature of migration to Britain, along with the diversity of media and communication available through the Internet has lead to an increasingly complex and rich multilingualism. This was illustrated by showing and playing extracts from a number of conversations recorded as part of a project looking at multilingual speakers in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Eindhoven & Birmingham as well as a project looking at complementary schools in Leicester, Birmingham, London & Manchester ; there is a vodcast describing the latter project on the Birmingham university website. The most striking point was the ease with which people in these communities effortless switch between languages and accents in a highly fluid way – Blackledge described this as ‘translanguaging’. This video is a brilliant illustration of translanguaging in today’s multilingual Britain.

Personally I do think that knowing English is empowering for people in the UK, what is more disturbing is how  the idea that today’s multilingual Britain is some kind of threat. The portrayal of the English language as some kind of cure-all just appears to be lazy politics, refusing to address the real problems in society. I won’t even mention the hypocrisy of making all these statements while presiding over the deepest cuts to English language provision that this country has seen for a long time (more of that later).

The implications of this are that we should try to develop visual literacy in our learners, whether this is because it is a new concept to them or just that elements of it can be culture-specific (as with the toilet signs).

The session considered a number of features of visual literacy that we would usually understand in our culture – this could be as simple as an up arrow meaning straight ahead, rather than straight up or the idea that different styles of bubble represent speech and thought in comics (and English teaching materials). These could be thought of as visual metaphors as they are not literal representations of what they purport to show. Dot also introduces the idea of visual grammar - an example of this being how speech bubbles in a cartoon usually start at the top left and then alternate sides downwards.

The final stage of the session was considering how the (in)famous Skills for Life ESOL teaching materials could create problems by assuming a certain level of visual literacy through the use of different logographic symbols, different typography, images etc. They can also be inconsistent in their use of these features, which can be confusing for learners. While these materials are often scape-goated, Dot pointed out that the reality is that this is the case to a greater or lesser degree with most English teaching materials.

We finished by investigating some of these teaching materials and pointing out the issues. As can be seen in the picture below, we managed to find a few…

Visual literacy in SfL materials

This session was really thought-provoking, I’ve been interested by the idea of multimodality and semiotics, since I saw a great lecture by Gunther Kress at SOAS in 2009 (see the videos at the bottom of the linked page). This session gave a bit more depth to my knowledge and pointed out how important it is to consider visual conventions and literacies when developing resources for the classroom. When I did my Masters in translation we looked at digital publishing skills - and that was when I first realised that design is a key part of the effectiveness/functionality of a text – it’s not just mere aesthetics. There is also a cultural dimension in this - there has been a number of papers written where Geert Hofstede’s dimensions of culture are used to explain the differences in web design between different cultures. I had studied this in the context of Internet localisation, but hadn’t realised the implications in terms of developing learner’s visual literacy.

The funding implications were set out in great detail by Nick Linford of Lsect, his PowerPoint here goes into this in great detail. There were also other sessions where student involvement in protests was considered. Some colleges have been concerned about the political content of lessons, however, it was pointed out that if we are teaching citizenship getting learners to write a real letter about a real issue that genuinely concerns learners is far better than basing everything on hypothetical textbook type texts.

Jennie Turner told us of her learner who two years ago couldn’t speak English and now appeared speaking on national radio. Also, learners at LSBU/LLU+ produced their own film, documenting the Action for ESOL day of action – consider the language skills developed in the productions of this:

This blog is probably not the best place to go into the campaign in detail, but I would urge people to get more information from the Action for ESOL website and also to sign the online petition (which has already collected over 20,000 signatures).

Anne Margaret Smith runs many workshops on Dyslexia in ESOL though her company ELTwell. She took us through a little bit of background of what Dyslexia is and its legal status under the equality act. The interesting point, and what makes it difficult to assess dyslexia in bilingual learners is that the difficulties that L1 speakers with dyslexia are very similar to those encountered by L2 speakers as they are learning a language.

The list of strategies that we were given was reassuringly similar to what is best practice for any ESOL teaching: Learning should be in manageable chunks, instructions should be clear, activities should be multi-sensory and build up learners’ confidence.

Tweeting Up

As always, the conference was also a great opportunity to talk to other people working in the sector. It is often difficult to discuss what is happening in different colleges and different  parts of the country, apart from on Twitter that is, but it was nice to meet up with Sam Shepherd, Molly Drake, Sarah Kinsella, Alex Stephenson, Jennie Turner, Mike Richmond-Coggin, Sarah Masters, and Russell Stannard. Twitter has its pros and cons but it’s certainly great for initiating and continuing contacts made and discussions had at events like this. This may be a relatively small event, but I reckon it is one of the most passionate and tightly-knit events – there’s a real feeling that everyone is in it for their learners and to try and make a difference. The weekend provided a nice mix of content around policy in the sector and the challenges that it is now facing, along with some sessions focussed on professional development. Next year’s event will be somewhere in the North West, and I hope to be able to go back.

http://natecla.org.uk/uploads/documents/doc_3285.pdf

English in Manchester

The theme to this talk was that learners can use video to express their identity and that in doing so they could develop their language skills. That the use of digital literacies could facilitate this in a way that learners were familiar and felt comfortable.

Richard has also blogged about the event here.

One thing that this talk made me think about was how Windows Movie Maker type videos could be a good alternative to PowerPoint. They provide a very visual stimulus, meaning that learners have to produce more language, as opposed to copy huge chunks of text on to PowerPoint slides. (see also Prezi vs PowerPoint).

Pete Sharma – Interactive whiteboard

Pete Sharma presented a session presenting techniques taken from his book 400 activities for the interactive whiteboard. These can be seen from his blog, which can be found here.

One use that I really liked, and hadn’t thought of before was the use of the ‘infinite clone’ feature as a voting tool.

As well as looking at IWB stuff, Pete whizzed through a number of ways that technology is changing education in general – many of which can be seen in his powerpoint: here. One interesting fact he pointed out was that while Germany hardly uses IWBs, Mexico has loads of them – there’s something to be looked at in more depth there…

David Byrne – ESOL & Poetry

David Byrne is an award winning poet and an ESOL tutor in Manchester – there is more information on his biography here. This session presented a number of ways that creative writing and poetry can be used with learners in order to reflect on and present the challenges that they felt in coming to the UK. These were accompanied by videos created using Windows Movie Maker or Powerpoint. This had a common theme with Richard Gresswell’s earlier presentation where the combination of new digital literacies with more traditional literacies, such as poetry allowed learners to express their identity.

David showed a creative writing exercise where learners are asked to imagine a person and come up with answers to questions that describe this person – it seemed to be a good stimulus for creativity.

Again this was pretty stimulating. Following the Skills for Life agenda, there is a lot of pressure for Functional lessons, this session was a reminder that language is for so much more than simple functional/transactional exchanges, and that it is our responsibility to develop this.

Overall this was a nice, well organised and very stimulating event, one I will have to look out for in future. I hadn’t realised before – but all the handouts etc, are available on the following link: http://www.natesol.org/conf-2011_18.html