English, Fun & Living in HK, Japan and Taiwan

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” – Dr. Seuss

This picture is taken from one of our students’ writing samples. It shows good content, good development of the main ideas in the story. There are grammar mistakes, but these can be fixed easily. One of the reasons I picked this is because the content seems unusual and challenging.

As a children’s ESL teacher, I’ve long enjoyed making worksheets for students of all levels, using the main course book New Parade as a jumping off point. Over the years, though, I have refined some principles that still hold true to making a work sheet for students, especially younger learners.

This post has a downloadable: Learner’s A ~ Z Writing Worksheet

1. Use Bigger Clearer Fonts

Sounds obvious when you think about it, but younger learners and those learning Roman script for the first time can be easily confused by the curly g’s in New Times Roman, as well as the odd looking ‘a’ in New Times Roman. So for most of my worksheets, I do use Comic Sans MS as my standard. And the default point size is usually dependent students’ ages and ability. So for the youngest learners, I use 16 or even 18 points, and never less than 14 even for teenagers.

2. Lots of Space

Given the problems younger learners have with smaller fonts and sizes, I also balance the exercises by leaving as much space on each page as reasonably possible. Crowding can be confusing for the younger age groups, but also poor layout will make it less enjoyable and more frustrating for them.

3. Focus, Focus, Focus

It’s hard to produce good worksheets consistently, but one of the biggest problems is when you are at the computer, you often get carried away with the worksheets and produce 2 or even 3 pages where one would do. It’s best just to focus on one key point for the worksheet for the youngest learners, whether it is vocabulary or sentence practice. Also, worksheets need to avoid complexity in the set questions if they are to be successful. You can avoid complexity by restricting vocabulary and task type, while keeping exercises challenging enough to avoid repetition and boredom.

4. Learners in Asia

Never assume that learners are comfortable using Roman script! In fact, for many millions of learners Roman script is a whole new system of writing: for Russians, Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, … Many skills that are taught in the first language classroom in Europe, Americas and elsewhere really do transfer to ESL quite simply, so students there need less practise in spelling skills, for example. But in Asia, teachers need to teach the forms of writing, the phonics, and the spelling skills. These can’t be assumed, and when doing worksheets for younger learners, you need to remember this: make space for those learning letters for the first time (esp. those with poor pencil control), and provide guidelines showing where the letters need to be written.

5. Teach the worksheets before they go home!

For many learners, completing homework tasks in addition to school work can be an extra burden. But nothing makes that worse that unnecessary frustration caused by inability to complete the worksheet. Young learners tend to deal poorly with frustration, are less able to use external resources, and can easily become dependent learners if parents help with homework. So I’ve been going over worksheets before students go home at least orally to make sure that students know how to answer the questions in class. Additionally, if the worksheet is more repetitive in nature, then I usually let students write the first couple of answers so that I can see if they have problems.

I’m attaching a PDF for teachers to printout as a base writing sheet for the very youngest of learners in my classes.

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This post has a downloadable: Learner’s A ~ Z Writing Worksheet. Visit http://www.tesolteachers.com/resources to get the worksheet. Kenneth is a successful teacher with many years of experience in ESL for both kids and adults in Taiwan. For TESOL advice and help, check out his column at http://www.tesolteachers.com and subscribe today.

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A presentation by our students who wrote the script, directed the show, and made the set!

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This was based on an item in our course text book, New Parade, the City Mouse and Country Mouse is a very traditional story that was taught originally in book 2. However, in Book 4 of Parade, students come back to the theme of story telling and put together their own version.

The brainstorming, writing, editing and production of the work was all done by the students with occasional input from the teachers. It took them quite a few weeks of work to put the show together.

But it shows what can be done with the right instruction, a little space, and lots of time!

Word Searches are a popular form of entertainment in Britain for adults. It’s pretty easy to use more limited vocabulary sets and create searches for ESL and EFL students.

But there’s a quicker way. With PuzzleMaker online.

So create your wordlist. Then you can go to the Puzzlemaker Website and paste your list.

The instructions are pretty clear on the page itself. But what I typically do with the results is paste them into a table in Word and create a complete worksheet itself. Once you make up the standard block in Word, it’s pretty easy to copy and paste the results into it.

I’ve included a sample Word Search created with this tool as a PDF http://www.hkjtefl.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/wordsearchfoodsweeat.pdf .

At our school, we’ve been publishing a newsletter for the past year or so. It’s been an interesting experiment and there is a certain excitement in the children every time we distribute it. We always feature our students best works in the first page. In this issue, we featured a piece of creative art, and an online video made from writing that students did: Bob and Pig Go To The City.

I only have two regrets with the newsletter: that we’re not able to source more Chinese Language content, and that the newsletter we hand out isn’t in color (it’s made on our photocopier!). Other than that, I think it’s exciting and acts as a good way to reach out to the local market.

Teachers should really give OpenOffice.org a look: Office XP compatible, lots of extra features, Mac/Win/Linux variants, and PDF export functions. It is also multi-lingual, multi-system, and uses openly accepted formats.

It is a highly suitable tool for Teachers everywhere and well worth the download from OpenOffice. Its website says: “Ooo is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.”

I’ve been using it on and off since version 1.1 and our school is now solely using Ooo as our shared platform. It takes a little while to get used to it, but reports from Office 11 is that the new ribbon takes even longer. There are one or two problems that we noticed: the Word Table Drawing Tool isn’t there, and I find it very useful for drawing regular grammar tables! Oh, well. And Ooo has some funny errors that reset font changes for some words or others every time you open it.

But for our school, it’s generally the right match for our needs. The conversion process from Office isn’t plainsailing as tables, paragraphs and so on have to be redone. But with such good software, and a flexible licensing program, we’re not going back to Office.

For me, though, the licensing is the part I like best: no activation needed, no problem on installing the same copy on my home machines, my school machines or on my USB Key. Now trying doing that with Office 11! You might manage one or two depending on the licensing, but a USB Key install – hah! Not likely.

As itinerant teachers, we travel from country to country, we build up our book collection, our material collection and our experience. All of these are portable. They can be used with varying degrees of modifications in different countries.

How annoying it is that when we build up a collection of DVDs (legally), that we use as source material for our students, we can’t use them in different countries, too. So, I have found some toys that you might like to try to help ease these difficulties.

Remote Selector can be downloaded and run before you play the DVD you want. I’ve installed it in XP and 98SE and run it with both WinDVD and PowerDVD. I tested it with Region 1 and Region 3 DVDs and it seems to work just fine. I have no idea if it works with Vista, but then why would anyone use Vista?

Other solutions are available: DVDgenie and DVDIdle.

Kenneth

Scott Sommers on the new education law regarding kindergartens and nurseries, and the increasing amount of government interference in this end of the market

I predict that we are seeing the demise of the freewheeling days of bushiban teaching and the introducing of the modern regulation and control of private education

This is not the only area of ESL in Taiwan in which the government has been taking quite big steps, if anything, the introduction and promotion of the GEPT is also part of the government’s stance to increase the standards of English in high schools and above, while to some greater extent standardizing the learning of English throughout the country. It is increasingly being used as an additional measure of selection for students in private schools and universities, and also as an exit criteria.

I do predict that the government will if anything continue to increase the amount of interference in the ESL market at the sub-18’s level to a greater extent, and at the post university level to a lesser extent.

For some of us, this means extra opportunities, but for others, it means a drying up of traditional options for teaching. Some give, some take.

Kenneth

Windows and Piracy Microsoft is due to release its new Vista operating system either toward the end of this year or at the beginning of next year. Will this new operating system be as successful as Microsoft’s other offerings?

Interesting discussion here because of some of the points that people have raised regarding piracy as an alternative form of advertising/promotion esp. in countries that are quite poor. The theory is that getting people hooked on M$ will be good for their own business as people increasingly turn to legal copies…

It’s certainly an interesting argument, though M$ has to talk tough to prevent everyone doing that, I suspect that they do somewhat condone this. Linux could really dent their long term ‘dependency’ relationship, as could open source software in general. Once you’re hooked on, say, OpenOffice… why would you ever pay for M$Office?

Kenneth