Reading Crisis

Every class when it comes to reading I feel hopeless, useless and desperate. How to teach reading in a way that doesn’t seem boring, difficult and frustrating? Am I the only one who faces this reading crisis?
Looking at the texts offered by the authors of popular communicative coursebooks for upper-intermediate students I always think of how those authors imagine they read the texts in class with their 12 students in a group. And I picture a silent classroom, all focused and tense, spending 15 minutes of a 90-minute class underlining the new vocab, trying to figure out the meaning, answering the questions or deciding if the statements are true or false… and I do understand that this is precisely the way I wouldn’t want to be taught reading.

Listening vs. Reading

The new poll is on, which means it’s time we analyzed the results of the most recent one. Actually, they came as a surprise. I don’t mean the fact that listening beat them all astonished me. No, I kind of agree with those 48% of participants who believe it to be the most difficult skill to master. And I do not imply that speaking shouldn’t be on the second line of the chart as 40% of respondents insist. Writing came third with 12% in its favour, which is again not that astonishing. What got me stunned was the fact that nobody voted for reading.

In my humble opinion reading is definitely underestimated. It is a fantastic source of vocabulary and grammar. Unlike listening, reading appeals to understanding based on our knowledge of vocab items and structures in which they are used. And if we fail, the tasks become a guessing game. However, success in Reading fully depends on us and our knowledge.

The Thing I Hate About Teaching

After I started teaching I noticed one thing that appeared to be quite unpleasant. I cannot simply watch a movie without chunking it into episodes and thinking of which class to apply them to. Sometimes the topic of a particular episode coincides with the topic the coursebook offers (It was “Notting Hill” with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts that I used for one of my first classes when we were discussing our life experiences). Often a relevant grammar pattern is observed in a dialogue of the heroes (I will always love “Freaky Friday” and the most emotional episode ever when Lindsay Lohan talks to her mum (Jamie Lee Curtis); their dialogue just makes my day when it comes to discussing emphasis). From time to time the video proves totally hilarious and I attempt to build all of the class around it (“Star” by Guy Ritchie is one of the examples; I liked the commercial so much that decided to make it the core of the class that was supposed to be all about gerunds and infinitives…which it was, but it was not that straightforward).

I guess you can imagine how challenging my movie life has become! :) The last few weeks I have spent watching “Desperate Housewives”. I am not a big fan of either soaps or sitcoms, nevertheless I found myself hopelessly involved. Having spent three hours watching four episodes in a row I finally understood what charmed me away. It was the fact that the “Housewives” offer any story you want for your classroom!  The first episode provided me with at least two ideas: an unconventional example of socializing and getting acquainted (at a funeral) and a fantastic 2 minutes on Past Simple with a few catchy expressions (“…I completed my chores, I ran my errands…”).

Coursebooks. Let Them Be

The week of a traditional poll has passed and the results appeared to be quite predictable to me. Most of my readers believe that an ideal class is the one based on the topic from a coursebook and supported by additional materials, like communicative games, authentic videos or recordings. 57% are voting for this approach.

Memorizing and Activating

Nothing is easy. Memorizing the words is no exception. It does require some work. Even if you are lucky enough to have fantastic memory, you might remember the meaning of the word but you might never “activate” it. Memorizing should not be just about the meaning, it’s more about remembering and understanding of how to use the word. So, the first step on the way to enhance the vocabulary is to understand the meaning, the second is to remember the context in which the word can be used and the third is to apply the newly acquired word to life!

Memorizing
I. Flip cards
Write the word on one side and the meaning/translation/collocation with this word on the other. Use the cards each day for several days to firmly learn the words. Don’t overload yourself with too long a word list!

II. Pictures
Draw small pictures that show the meaning of the word if you can. Make a funny picture – it will help the brains to memorize the word easier. We tend to retain more “unusual” pieces of information than the “usual” ones.

III. Opposites
Learn words with opposite meanings (antonyms) and words with similar meanings (synonyms) together. For instance, learn thick/thin (antonyms) and thick/fat (synonyms) at the same time. It will be easier to remember similar and opposite things because they “stick together” in our minds.

IV. Running list
Note down all the new words while you read, do a listening exercise, watch a video etc. Later on define all the words and write down the definition in front of each of them. When the list is ready, you can use it as a kind of flash card. Fold it and check if you remember the definitions. Fold it the other way and see if you remember the words.

Make a Class Out of Fun

"If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it"

I remember the class when I offered my students to discuss the most recent breaking news and gave them some printed articles under unintentionally funny headlines. At first they didn’t realize that there was something wrong with the headlines but when they did our discussion took a completely different direction. The class appeared to be much better than I expected. The students were so involved and eager to share their own experiences of encountering weird slogans and misspellings on billboards. Remembering that, I decided to surf the Internet looking for examples of funny stuff that appears in newspapers, ads, shops, hotels, restaurant menus. Enjoy!

Newspapers:

• Reward for schoolgirls who don’t get pregnant
• Cockfight ring is air conditioned
• One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers
• Puerto-Rican Teen named mistress of Universe
• Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years In Checkout
• Local High School Dropouts Cut In Half
• Eastern Head Seeks Arms
• William Kelly was fed secretary
• Milk drinkers are turning to powder
• Quarter of a million Chinese live on water
• Tiger Woods plays with own balls, Nike says
• Meeting on open meeting is closed
• Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25 

English Pronunciation

You bet you never get confused when it comes to pronouncing English words. OK. Try the poem below. I was given it as a student and I failed then... well, I keep failing now:)
Good luck!

***

Dearest creature in creation,
Studying English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer.
Pray console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it.

Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say - said, pay - paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I durely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say break, steak, but bleak and streak.

Learning Thru Not Singing

I was trying to come up with my personal list of Top 10 Best Songs Ever. And you know… I failed! A lot of names, melodies, the lyrics… What are the criteria that should be taken into consideration when choosing the best song?

Pondering over it for a while I appealed to Google’s help. And it did show some patience and interest in my request. The usual 100500 links totally dazzled me. I looked through a few pages and got stunned. None of the charts were the same. In some of them I could find same names and same songs, in others – same names and different songs. Some of them appeared to be mysterious - the names I’ve never heard, the music I’ve never listened to.

As a result I decided to gather the in-my-humble-opinion-best of the best list according to my personal preferences. Here goes the most biased best baker’s dozen of songs ever:

1. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin

2. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd

3. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen

4. Hey Jude - The Beatles

5. What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong

6. Imagine - John Lennon

7. One – Metallica

8. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan

9. The Winner Takes It All – ABBA

10. My Way - Frank Sinatra

11. I Just Want You - Ozzy Osbourne

12. Sweet Child of Mine – Guns’n’Roses

13. If Today Was Your Last Day - Nickelback

Ten Linguistic Commandments

by Worldwide Renowned Hungarian interpreter, translator, language genius and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world Kató Lomb

I.

Spend time tinkering with the language every day—if there is no more time available, then at least to the extent of a ten-minute monologue. Morning hours are especially valuable in this respect: the early bird catches the word!

II.

If your enthusiasm for studying flags too quickly, don’t force the issue but don’t stop altogether either. Move to some other form of studying, e.g., instead of reading, listen to the radio; instead of assignment writing, poke about in the dictionary, etc.

III.

Never learn isolated units of speech, but rather learn words and grammatical elements in context.

IV.

Write phrases in the margins of your text and use them as ‘prefabricated elements’ in your conversations.

V.

Even a tired brain finds rest and relaxation in quick, impromptu translations of billboard advertisements flashing by, of numbers over doorways, of snippets of overheard conversations, etc., just for its own amusement.

Pre-School Ants in My Pants

The studies are about to start and I am so very confused... which methods to choose, which coursebooks to use, which topics to cover... Every year it is the same and the closer it gets to the beginning the more unprepared I feel despite piles of handouts, worksheets, tons of videos and folders of recordings.
This year seems harder than all the previous ones. I believe I got to the point when a teacher understands that they know nothing! The principle of "knowing more equals not knowing even more" becomes tangible as soon as one starts reading through hundreds of pages of newly-discovered and old-but-renovated approaches.

Today I spent hours putting down the advantages and disadvantages of Dogme, TPRS, Case Method, CLIL, PBL. I have even watched some "power" language classes, looked through materials celebrating "efortless" language learning, which I am not going to advertise here since I am pretty sceptical about the idea.  I got so enthusiastic that I completely forgot about my initial goal and instead of getting practical ideas I moved to reading through endless theories of "progressive" teaching. Now it's almost midnight and I will have a lot of time to proceed this information to come up with some unexpectedly brilliant idea tomorrow. Let it be an idea for a new course, or for a way of blending different approaches, or for a new approach! Hoping for the best, I'm going to have a long conversation about all the above with the pillow now... Good night!

Happy New Year!

September... September is always promising. It promises a lot of hard work and a great number of students. Most of them are usually good! Well, some of them are ... also good. They say there are no bad students. OK, let's hope this year I will still believe that.
Happy New Year to you, too, my favourite students!!!