Icebreaker Activities

Icebreaker Activities

          I'll start teaching my 1st class next term after having MA in TESOL. I'm planning to start w/ using icebreaker activities. These activities,  I think, will be one of the best ways in introducing my teaching to the students as they will help students to:

- Communicate.

- Enhance students' fluency as they use their prior knowledge.

- Shift students role from passive to active.

- Motivate shy and hesitant students to participate as they use simple form of sentences and questions.

Icebreaker activities will help teacher in:

- Getting a general perspective of his students such as their performance, interests, individual differences...etc.

- Establishing cooperative learning atmosphere.

- Giving peer feedback (when grammatical or pronunciation mistakes occur).

- Teaching active listening.

Here are some sources for icebreaker activities:

40 icebreakers for small groups

icebreaker (fun games)

icebreakers

You can also search YOUTUBE for more icebreaker activities.

* pic from http://www.funicebreaker.com 

Characteristics of EFL Activities for Young Learners

 

Mohammed S. Alkhamali

2013

Twitter: @Alkhamali_M 

 

 

      Learners of an EFL respond actively to activities that touch upon their needs and interests. This active respond ensures good quality of outcomes as learners are fully engaged in such activities. The teacher has to pay attention to his designing or selecting of activities to make sure that it will work as planned with the target group of learners. Some characteristics of good EFL activities are:

1-    Interactivity: the activities should involve interaction with other peers. This will ensure practicing language in a communicative situation. It will help in sharing and exchanging ideas and opinions. Interactivity ensures the integration of skills as the participants communicate. It also prepares students for team works. In pairs and group work help students to discover his own ability for example, ability to write fast, speak in public…etc.

2-    Familiarity and variation: before assigning an activity make sure that your students are familiar with such type. Students effectively practice familiar activity. If you present new type of activity model it first then let learners practice it under your supervision. Familiarity does not contrasts with variation. You need to balance between familiarity and variation for instance, the first four chapters you teach vocabulary through pictures and grammar through filling-in activity, here you get the advantage of both characters aforementioned.

3-    Physical: psychomotor domain would be the only neglected one in our most activities. We usually concentrate on the cognitive and sometime on the affective ones. The young learners are eager to practice physical activities that are set for linguistic purposes for example, in teaching "imperative" you will see your students willing to practice physical response activities.

4-    Using technology: most of young learners now a days are wizard in using computer program. You can take the advantage of that by providing activities through the use of computer. You can design your own or adapt them. Adding multimedia to the activity makes it more attractive and interesting for the students.

5-    Difficulty: it should be taken into consideration that difficult activities will inhabit learners from learning. On the other hand, easy ones will make the learners feel boring. Again, as mentioned with familiarity and variation, balance is needed to keep the stream of learning through activities flows.

To conclude, making activities interesting for the students is the key to fully engage them and to get the full advantage of the activities. This can happen by touching upon the three domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Such comprehensive can be shown in terms of characteristics of the assign activities.

Some Tools to Assess EFL Young Learners

Mohammed S. Alkhamali

2013

Twitter: @Alkhamali_M

As an EFL teacher for young learners, you need to use different assessment tools to make sure that these tools provide reliable and valid results. Using different tools helps you to distinguish the individual differences among your students and treat them accordingly. Variation in assessment tools helps also learners in, for instance, self-reflection, critical thinking, learning… Here are some assessment tools that, in my opinion, should be used in assessing EFL young learner.

Peer assessment: it helps in increasing the learners' in-class interaction. One of the young learners' characteristics is that they are competitive, this can be seen when a learner commits a mistake others are eager to correct him. This kind of assessment provides an extra space to practice English in the class. It also develops the critical thinking of learners. Teacher can expand in using peer assessment by letting learners assess each other's homework or exam sheet. Although it is a good way of assessment, teacher needs to set some rules to avoid aggressiveness or subjectivity between learners. For example,  the teacher replaces students' names on exam paper with numbers.

Writing: Teacher can assess his students based on any kind of their writings. These writings might be in form of quizzes, mind maps, group work sheets… they reflect learners abilities in understanding the writing rules such as direction and spelling. I try as possible as I can to avoid mentioning "written tests" as they would inhabit the young learners from learning the new language.

Observation: the teacher can set an interaction context that allow him observes the learners' usage of the FL. For example, working in pairs or in groups, allow teacher observing an authentic use of the FL. This helps teacher to distinguish the difficulties that his learners face in pronunciation, listening comprehension… etc.

As young learners get more older, the teacher can use different kinds of assessment tools such as:

Self-reflection: this type of assessment helps learners to build higher cognitive skills as the learner will critically think about his performance and work to improve it. The teacher can set some criteria to facilitate self-reflection at beginning. For instance, the teacher wants his learners to reflect on their writing paragraph, he then sets numbers of criteria such as starting with indentation, writing the topic sentence… etc. This will help students to realize the way of self-reflection.

Portfolio:  Let your students collect their works; work sheets, writings, photos… etc. and from time to time let them compare the development in their performance. This motivate learners to do their best. It also fulfill their competitive tendency. The learners can use the portfolio as an archive of their works to use it again and again.

 
You can see that in the most aforementioned assessment tools, learners play an essential role. That because I am heading to deliver the message that assessments can be used as a learning tool. you can judge your learners' performance through these tools without putting learners under stress of taking exams. These tools also supports self-learning, learners' autonomy.

Stages of Learning EFL for Youngster

Mohammed S. Alkhamali
2013
Twitter: @Alkhamali_M

Young learners of a foreign language pass by different stages in their way of mastering the language. Although there are different views about these stages, they have something in common. i.e. the differentiation of the number of the stages does not change the fact that the represented ideas are the same. The period of each stage is determined by the level of the provided language and by the learners' age. In the following, I will discuss some of the views about such stages that are related to our context in terms of learners' age and level of the language.

Piaget divided the stages into two stages. The first one is called assimilation. It describes the state when the action happens without any change in the learner's behavior. An example from our context, as EFL, the use of an adjective to describe a noun, the learner may use the same structure of his mother tongue that is N+adj. The second stage is called accommodation. Where the learner in the same previous context learnt the use of such function and use it in an appropriate way. (Cameron, L. 2001. P3)

In contrast with Piaget view, Vygotsky considers learning as a social interaction. He divided stages into two. The first where the learner of a foreign language produces the language with a help of others, usually teachers, this stage is called interpersonal. The other stage is called intrapersonal where the learner becomes more independent and beings able to produce the language by himself. (Grow, G. n d)

Tabors and Snow (as cited in Phillip C. n d) identify four stages of acquiring a second language as follows:

1-     Home language use, where the learner shows resistance for the new language by using his first language.

2-     Nonverbal period. In this stage the learner realizes that his first language is not appropriate to this context. He becomes silent and communicate using nonverbal means.

3-     Telegraphic and formulaic stage. In this stage the learner starts using the new language but in ungrammatical / incomplete form.

4-     Productive language. In this stage learner starts to speak language relatively well with producing new phrases as he learnt more vocabulary.

Krashen and Terrell ( as cited in http://www.ascd.org) divided the second language acquisition stages into five however, the stages start from age of 0 month. We can adapt these stages to our context by starting the first stage in the fourth primary grade as follows:

1-     Preproduction. In this stage the learner has no or minimal understanding of the new language. He also nods by yes / no as a response. Instead of writing and speaking, he draws and points.

2-     Early production. Here the learner starts responding using one or two words. He has a limited understanding to the new language. He also uses the present form of verbs.

3-     Speech emergence. In this stage the learner shows a good understanding and can produce simple sentences however, he still makes errors in grammar and pronunciation.

4-     Intermediate fluency. The understanding of the second/foreign language increases and the produced errors decreases.

5-     Advanced fluency. When the learner masters the language and become a native-like speaker.

The aforementioned views describe the same stages in a way or another. In the following I will try to gather these views in three stages, with taking into account the context of our situation where English is the foreign language and the target group are the learners from the fourth primary grade to the third intermediate grade. Different variables should also be taken into consideration such as  motivation towards learning a new language,  ability of pronouncing sounds, their age …, as internal factors; curriculum level, teacher, the linguistic background of the parents… , as external factors.

The first stage is the pre-production. This stage shows a demonstration of the first language use. Learners still use the first language due to the difficulty in producing the new sounds and words, shyness of committing mistakes or the stereotype about the foreign language in the society. Teachers in this stage have to encourage learners by explaining ,in Arabic, the benefits of learning English. Teachers also should be aware to the importance of positive reinforcement as a way of increasing learners' motivation. Exposing learners to the English is the best way to make them familiar with the new language and its sound system. The learning in this stage focuses on sounds and simple vocabulary. This stage, in my opinion, will not last for a long time as learners in this age are eager to learn, less shy of committing errors and also competitive.

The early production stage is the second one. In this stage, learners start to use their previous acquired knowledge in learning the new ones. Arabic still affect learning and producing English. This can be seen in form of translating ideas from Arabic to English. As the level of the language increases in terms of the difficulty and the covered aspects and areas as well. This might inhabit some learners from mastering these aspects especially grammar. As English being considered as a foreign language in our context, lots of in-class practice is needed to fulfill the communication need. Teachers in this stage should be more tolerant with learners' mistakes to keep them on track of willingness to learn the language. This tolerance can be seen as teachers emphasis on fluency rather than accuracy.  This stage will last for a long period of time.

The third stage is the fluent production. Reaching this stage in this short time with such little exposing can be so difficult. We need well qualified teachers, in terms of language and teaching, to teach the learners during the whole grades. Also we need well planned and designed curriculum that is taking learners needs and interests into account. We also need authentic communicative situations that ensure language use outside the class.

To sum up, stages of mastering English for young learners are differ is terms of number and length depending on different factors. However, these stages follow the same processes in a way or another. Learners start with fully use of their native language instead of the target one. They then move to use the new language with help of their teachers or parents. After that, they become fully independent in producing the new language.

 References

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106009/chapters/The-Stages-of-Second-Language-Acquisition.aspx

Cameron, L. 2001. Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge university press.

Grow, G. n d. Writing and Multiple Intelligences. Can be found on http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/7In/Personal.html#sthash.6n7NaVzd.dpuf

Phillip C. n d. BECOMING BILINGUAL:FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Can be found on http://216.31.235.229/public/Education%20Binder%202012-2013/01%20Education/Dual%20langauge%20Learners/BECOMING%20BILINGUAL%20article.pdf

ELT for Young Learners; the Basic Principles to Language Skills and Learners' Characteristics

English Language teaching (ELT) to young learners has a different concepts and procedures from ELT to adults. These differences occur due to the kind of language skills we want them to deal with and to the nature of those learners. Teachers who deals with those children need to take into consideration number of things that are related to these aspects. Before talking about the principles of both language skills and learners' characteristics let us explore some definitions of the term young learners. According to Thornbury (2006) (as cited in Chi, 2010) this term "is used to describe children of pre-primary and  primary school age, although it is sometimes used to include adolescents as well." Phillips (1993) (as cited in Chi, 2010) defines them as "children of formal schooling (five or six years old) to eleven or twelve years of age." These definitions show that we are dealing with learners who have unique characteristics especially in terms of foreign language learning.

Should we really 'teach' children?

It is more effective, in my opinion, to spend time exposing learners to the language rather than teaching them the language. This exposure will deliver the same knowledge that the teaching will do but in more effective and motivating way. In our situation in Saudi Arabia, where teachers supposed to cover the subjects in the textbook, teachers can expose learners to the language of the subjects in different ways for example, presenting videos that cover the subjects in interesting and interactive way; and suitable pace, in terms of speaking and presenting items. After that, you can set scenes to let learners communicate with each other in the same language they are exposed to. Such communication provides young learners with the authentic language and way that are used in real discourse. the aforementioned information indicates that young learners need to integrate the main four skills with the language which help to create a real communication environment that is leading to produce authentic language.

What are the principles that we should take into account in teaching skills?

Here I will discuss some principles that should be taken into consideration while teaching skills. First, activate the roles of learners, in case of what is known as receptive skills. The roles of learners can be activated in reading and listening by integrated these skills with the active ones, speaking and writing. For example, in groups learners read to reproduce new sentences or to summarize. The learners listen to reply or to answer certain questions. Integrated helps in keeping all learners involve with active roles using skills. This leads us to the Second principle, which is, skills are not to be taught but they are to be used. Learners need skills to use the language to communicate. The best way of taking benefit of that is by letting them use the skills rather than teach them the concepts of these skills.  Third, language is a system. Any system consists of elements that interact together to make the system work appropriately. In relation to language skills, this shows that we should not teach skills individually. Lessons should be planned to make learners use the skills interactively this brings us back to the main goal which is making learners able to communicate in authentic situations.

The characteristics of young learners

As mentioned before young learners have unique characteristics that make them remarkable from adults. These characteristics need to be taken into account in teaching youngsters. Here I will present some of these characteristics with comments on each.

-         Youngsters interact better in familiar situations. Teachers should know what type of knowledge their learners have. The new knowledge should be considered as addition to the old one. The learners will find it easy to get the knowledge as they follow the logical order.

-         Youngsters are willing to interact. Young learners are more eager to interact using the new language either in class or in real life situations. Teachers need to keep the level of motivation by involving learners in authentic interactions in peers.

-         Youngsters have short attention span. This leads us again to involving young learners in practice the language in class. However, if the teacher needs to present some parts of the lesson by himself, he should vary his techniques to avoid boredom.

-         Youngsters are eager to present their knowledge in front of their peers. Giving opportunities to the learners to present their ideas and opinions help them to get more fluent in using English. In terms of personality, it helps learners to be more confident. It is also encourage them to learning and searching to find new information and knowledge to present. The teachers can get advantage of such eagerness by preparing small debate and discussion class, which will help in using some linguistic functions such as agreeing and disagreeing.

-         Youngsters are imaginative. This characteristic will help teachers in teaching some areas such as vocabulary by linking pictures with the concrete meaning. The teachers can develop creative thinking of their learners taking advantage of their wide imagination.

-         Youngsters are easy to be encouraged to learn. Presenting topic of interests encourage learners to interact with the content, teacher and their peers. Challenging learners motivates them to think and find solutions. However, challenges should not be represented in form of obstacles.

-         Youngsters are more willing to be native-like speakers. Young learners are good in copying the accent of native speakers. They are less shy in imitating natives in their speaking manners. The teachers should use audio materials that are presented by native speakers to fulfill learners need.

To sum up, ELT for young learners has special many principles that teachers should take into account. These principles either related to the skills of the language or to the learners' characteristics. The teachers should treat both types in a parallel way to ensure that the environment of the classroom represents a perfect environment of language learning.

References

CHI, N. (2010). TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING VOCABULARYTO YOUNG LEARNERS AT ILA SCHOOL. SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FORTHE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS (TEFL)

http://farwaniya03.tripod.com/id6.html

WILLIAMS, M. (1998). TEN PRINCIPLES FOR TEACHING ENGLISH TO YOUNG LEARNERS. Cambridge press.