Korean Job Discussion Forums

[baldrick]

Always make the most of your pictures. You can get so much language out of even the most basic of pictures.....one with action and people is even better. Just asking simple questions will do it.
A couple of things I like to do with pictures:
1) Have 5 'speakers' who get to see a picture on my computer. Then they stand at the front and talk about the picture whilst the rest of the class draws what they hear. Then you can compare the end results....
2) Just stick up an interesting picture and elicit some sentences about what is happening in it.....I am lucky to have a machine that projects straight from my computer to the wall so this is easy.
3) Use a picture as a writing prompt.
4) Use a picture for practicing future tenses.

Here are some of the pictures I've used
http://www.df.unipi.it/~mannella/amazing.html

Anyone else love to use pictures in class....and if so......give me them! And also tell me the lesson. I'm always looking for 'busy' pictures, somthing with loads of stuff happening. You know those crazy puzzles made by Jan Van something.....look like this :



Picture like that could keep you going for weeks, but I can't find a clear image of one of his designs on the net!

[winnie]

I used pictures for my lesson last week. Ripped them out of magazines I had brought from home...good use for them.

If the kids are very low level, I divide them into small groups. And slap up a random photo....get the kids to tell me words to describe the picture. I will give them 3 minutes to give me as many words as they can. I write them down on the board, and count them up, award points accordingly.

If the kids can write, I will put them up there at the board to write for themselves. The kids will nominate the best writer and listener to copy down what the kids say about the pic. So you have one writer and 4-5 speakers.

For higher level, I do it with full sentences about the pic instead of words.
I only write down the sentence if it makes sense, if not, I tell them to fix it. After 3 mins, I count how many good sentences they gave and award points.

Highest level I make them write sentences themselves(3 mins only per team), and give them a point if the sentence is gramatically correct. So 4-5 kids can be writing on the board at a time. The sentences that aren't correct, I ask the other students in the class to tell me how to fix it, and the student that can tell me how it should be written will get a point for their team.

You can also give them synonyms, how to be more descriptive, talk about appropriate ways of expressing things. For example, lots of my students will say "the woman in the pic is fat" So I go on to talk about more pc ways of saying it......only with the higher levels of course.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Just as an aside, did you know that tons and tons of people just don't think of drawing a picture? How do I know this? Two things.

One, when I was doing my interview for TESL class on the phone, one of the questions was, "What would you do if a student asked what a whale was"? Quick as a fox, I said, "Well, if I knew the word was going to come up in class, I'd take a picture, probably of Moby Dick if I could find one. If the word just came up, I'd draw a picture on the board." The interviewer said, "Wow. Do you know how many people never think of that?"

Two, a couple of years ago I had the misfortune to work with a psycho Canadian female-type person who would spend 10 minutes drawing a dog. The students asked me why she couldn't just draw a stick dog like I do. I said, "It's because she is stupid." (That was after she spent two hours or so stomping and chanting outside my door 'praying' to god to forgive me for my sins--I know it was two hours because the downstairs neighbors told me. I'd left after 10 minutes of it.)

[SPINOZA]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Future tense: What will happen next?
The man is going to blow the squirrel's head off with that shotgun. Then the squirrel will fall out of the tree on that little girl's head and she is going to scream until her face turns red and she passes out.

[some waygug-in]

Interesting. I had a couple of kids yesterday who were describing a picture from their textbook. The picture is kind of a cartoonish version of a train station, with lots of people doing various things.

When I asked them to talk about the people in the waiting area, the students said,"they are homeless," and started laughing.

I found it quite funny too.

So I asked, why do you think so?

Because they are sleeping on the chairs and they have suitcases with them.


There was a girl sitting alone and they said she was a "throw away".
I think they meant runaway, but it seemed quite humorous.

I wonder how some Dali pictures would go over?

[EFLtrainer]

[OiGirl]