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tofit
Joined: 22 Oct 2006
Posts: 47
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 Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:42 am Post subject: The Best Book you ever Used? |
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If you have been teaching awhile in China you may have been around, and each school uses their own book and teaching system. Some are better than others. So this brings me to the question:
What is the best book, and teaching system you have ever used? Feel free to also list the books you didn't like. Don't just bash a book give some examples why it wasn't good.
Alright, here we go... |
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un
Joined: 09 Mar 2008
Posts: 670
Location: on-line china
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| Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 10:42 pm Post subject: |
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This past semester I had great results with the movie-novel of the musical Annie...combined w/having the students do Internet research of movie reviews. Now I'm in L.A. searching for more movie novels.
They had a great range of comprehensible/interesting INPUT...and did Role Plays/sang songs. Chinese students love such movies.
BELOW is from the Promoting Change thread on this Job-related page.
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*It has become evident to many teachers of ESL
students that most of the available texts and
materials are based on artificial sequencing of
grammatical structures and stilted, often irrelevant,
dialogues and topics.
(Rodriguez and White)
DVD movies will be an essential element for this project.
All members will share the experience of viewing the film, so conversation will have a common focus. In addition, we can offer:
*a wide range of movie reviews for each movie--promoting vocabulary development/critical thinking/active discussions
(available at www.imdb.com)
*movie scripts (available at www.script-o-rama.com)
Over the years, L2 teachers have developed a wide range of communicative techniques based upon the creative use of movie segments, such as:
VIEWING COMPREHENSION (with sound off)
DIALOGUE BUILDING (with sound off)
AURAL ONLY PREDICTION (with sound only)
PREDICTIVE VIEWING--What will happen?
REVERSE PREDICTION--What happened before the sequence seen?
JIGSAW VIEWING (Only half the viewers see the sequence, and they relate it to those who haven't. Replay it to compare.)
Such approaches can create an enhanced learning environment, in harmony with Krashen's principles:
*A RICH VARIETY OF COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT
*A LOW-ANXIETY SITUATION
*REAL MESSAGES OF REAL INTEREST
A short (1 to 3 minutes) close-captioned movie segment offers the learner a synergistic schemata of opportunities for comprehensible INPUT. The visual images themselves are comprehensible and are stored
in the students' memories as EXPERIENCES, rather than as a language lesson that must be "studied/learned" because the teacher will test the students for their ability to "remember" the lesson.
A schematic tapestry of English words becomes associated with the movie's images and emotions. Plot, character, emotion--these are the 'hooks' by which the language becomes comprehensible input and stored intake. This dynamic is quite different from the artificial approaches typically used--vocabulary lists, linear progressions in grammar complexity etc.)
To use another metaphor, the memories of the movie segment can be seen as gravitational schemata which can attract and retain words associated with the images. As the learner thinks of a scene, an
ever-expanding constellation of words and sentences can become linked in the memory with a pleasant (LOW-ANXIETY) experience, rich with REAL MESSAGES OF REAL INTEREST. As the learner thinks of one character,
a tremendous variety of adjectives and actions can become part of the schemata.
This is in harmony with the episode hypothesis, which states that:
"text (i.e. discourse in any form) will be easier to produce, understand, and recall to the extent that it is motivated and structured episodically...these ideas lead to the supposition that perhaps second language teaching would be more successful if it incorporated principles of good story writing along with the benefits of sound linguistic analysis." (Oller) |
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wulfrun
Joined: 12 May 2008
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 8:05 am Post subject: |
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have a search for the thread i started on 'oral english textbooks' if you want to see a recent discussion  |
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