June MeetingThe June meeting took place on Sunday 21st June and was a MY SHARE session which encouraged audience participation:
and featured:
Jon Blundell introduced 'Social Diary' - As he mentioned, a recent visit to a teaching practice lesson based around grammar-translation techniques at senior high school had renewed his desire to see more communicative activities. His 'Social Diary' offered students the chance to practice arranging times, suggesting, and agreeing and disagreeing to those suggestions.
Andrew Kean introduced two activities. The first suggested making use of the 'scam' spam-mails that flood many of our computers. By looking at the kinds of language mistakes which occur in these mails and looking at the strategies their writers use to grab computer users' attention, student can try writing (but perhaps not sending!) their own. Andrew's second activity 'Art Critique' made use of Wikipedia resources to build up students' ability and confidence to talk about paintings.
Jim Matchett talked about finding source materials for a current affairs course he teaches. He particularly recommended 'The Student Times' as providing accessible articles. He also suggested sites which offer feature along the lines of 'the week in pictures' and the BBC World Service 'Learning English' site. Information gap activities including 'scavenger hunt' were introduced.
Anthony Robins introduced 'Split Reading' which involves selecting articles from newspapers published in English in Japan which offer a number of ready-made and contrasting viewpoints. Students' reading load is reduced by only reading one of the viewpoints plus some background information on the topic, with the example being 'freeters'. In the next class, they take the viewpoint and become the person whose viewpoint it is.
Jack Ryan targeted vocabulary and questions connected with jobs and occupations with his 'What's my line' style competitive group activity developed with a colleague. Jack kindly gave participants the materials to allow them to put the activity straight into action in their own classes.
