My intermediate and advanced students  loved Whaddaya Say  because it presented  exercises on many examples of American English reduced speech (it’s so long ago now I hope that is the correct term).

I hope everyone is teaching English the way it is actually spoken.

I made an effort to teach students so they could speak to the people in their neighborhood or in their circles, Black English, teen talk, Latin dialects,etc. as well as the English they were likely to hear on the worksite which often isn’t standard English, either.

I taught a Khmer student who had just gotten a job as a carpenter.  I neglected to teach all the greetings that Americans use.  He came back to class very embarrassed when his co-workers laughed at his response to “How’s it hangin’?” which was that it (he meant his hammer) hit his knees.  He was stuck with the nickname he earned that first day from then on.

Michael Tate

From: englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Bonnie Odiorne
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 9:30 AM
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4301] Re: Using group games to teach the presentcontinuous

Proliteracy (Formerly LVA) used to have in its tutor training manual a quite clever quadrant with pictures: a clock to symbolize present time; a calendar to symbolize every day; pictures of Suzanne and Robert (?) watching television and washing dishes to differentiate simple present and present continuous. Another thing I noticed while tutoring: The expression "going to" (near future) is not recognized by students usually unless pronouncing as illustration "gonna." That's how they hear it. I wonder if that's true for other -ing tenses.
Bonnie Odiorne, Post University

________________________________
From: MaryAnn Florez <mflorez at dclearns.org>
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List <englishlanguage at nifl.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 11:56:00 AM
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4299] Re: Using group games to teach the presentcontinuous
This “study group” approach is a nice idea.  It reminds me of the kinds of conversations and sharings that would happen between teachers as we met in the resource room or at the copier and asked each other what a handout that was being copied was all about, or if someone had another idea for teaching a point that just wasn’t clicking for a student or a class. We’d end up building on each other and then continuing to follow up with each other whenever we came upon another good idea.   I know technology isn’t just about replicating face-to-face interactions, but in this case, it does in some ways, and it multiplies it by hundreds of potential ideas.

Betsy mentioned working with simple present and present progressive.  I often found myself teaching present progressive and simple present in a connected way, because they made a logical contrasting pair that seems to have helped students “get” each one (or get the difference between them).  I worked a lot with beginning level learners and because giving them explanations and parameters as concrete and clear as possible was helpful, using this sort of natural contrast between the two (simple present for everyday or habitual activities and present progressive for now, in-the-act activities) was useful.  As long as I kept the two clear, and clearly indicated what we were working with at any given moment (including using the appropriate markers---e.g., “now”, “on Mondays and Tuesdays”, “everyday”) learners generally picked the two up quite quickly.

I don’t know how many people use diagrams to try to help illustrate things like tenses, but one thing that I didn’t always find helpful with the present progressive was a diagram that I saw used in books and by other teachers when I first started teaching:

Now
  X------------------>   (here the “X” is “now” and the arrow indicates that the action is continuing, but still in the present)

I tried using it at first because it made perfectly logical sense to me, and I thought it would be one more way to reach some learners.  But many of my learners found it counterproductive because they thought it was showing the action going into the future and then confused it with a future tense. Or they just didn’t make the connection between the lines and explaining the use of the tense.  I had a lot more success with things like charades and pictures, as others have described.  Has anyone used anything like that successfully?

MaryAnn


MaryAnn Florez
Project Director
Adult Education Professional Development Center
D.C. LEARNs
1612 K Street, N.W. Suite 300
Washington, DC 20006
202/331-0141, x25 (tel)
202/331-0143 (fax)
www.dclearns.org/aepdc<http://www.dclearns.org/aepdc>
mflorez at dclearns.org<mailto:mflorez at dclearns.org>


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From: englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Betsy Wong
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 10:22 AM
To: 'The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List'
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4295] Re: Using group games to teach the presentcontinuous

There have been some great ideas on this listserv about teaching the present continuous. I’d like to second Cheryl’s suggestion of using visuals to teach the present continuous.

An easy way to do so is to use a picture dictionary – for instance, often there are pictures of people in different rooms of a house. In class, we ask each other, “What’s s/he doing?” “S/he’s watching TV/eating breakfast/cleaning,” etc.

I try and tie in visuals to contexts that are relevant to learners. For instance, I often have housekeepers and janitors in a class, so we practice vocabulary related to cleaning. Together, we look at a page from the picture dictionary that illustrates different cleaning tasks and ask each other what the people are doing (“He’s mopping the floor,” “She’s emptying the trash,” etc.)

Magazine ads are a great source of visuals, too. For the previous example, I might show magazine ads with people using housecleaning products; learners can say what people are doing (“He’s dusting”/”She’s vacuuming”), or they can match sentence strips (long strips of paper or cardstock with a phrase printed on them) to the pictures illustrating the action.

After this practice, we always play a group charades game: I write phrases of activities (such as everyday tasks) on strips of paper and put them in a hat. Each learner comes to the front of the room, picks a phrase (such as “cooking dinner”), and acts it out. The others have to guess what the learner is doing (“He’s cooking dinner”).  It’s always fun!

Janet and Cheryl made some really good suggestions about discriminating between everyday activities and “right now” actions. Another way to help learners with this is to have them work in groups to list things they do every day in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, they can each say one thing that they do at a certain time of the day (“In the morning, I go to work”) and one thing they are doing right now (“I’m practicing English”).

The instructor then asks the full group, “What does s/he do in the morning?”, and learners repeat the statement in the 3rd person (“S/he ___s”); then, “What is s/he doing right now?” “S/he’s ___ ing.” This is good practice for getting in the frequently-dropped “s”, as Steve mentioned!

I’d love to hear other suggestions …

Cheers!

Betsy

------------------------------
Betsy Lindeman Wong
Lead ESL Teacher
Alexandria Adult & Community Education
Cell (703) 862-1931

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