EDU307: The English language

Lecture 10

Engaging games and activities to develop literacy, oracy and

listening skills

Dr Michael Carey

The importance of play

AIM

All children respond well to learning when it is associated with games. This workshop will present some popular games and activities from the ESL context to develop literacy, oracy and listening skills

Storytelling Children love to hear stories, so they are a

natural resource to use to encourage an interest in language.

There are now many stories available on the internet in Youtube video format that make excellent resources for Clozes, dictoglosses and writing narratives.

Here is an Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime story on Youtube: http://australianmuseum.net.au/movie/Min-na-wee-Why-the-crocodile-rolls

Building cloze listenings with lextutor Students need 98% coverage (Nation 2006) of a

text to be able to fully comprehend a text (i.e. 1 in 50 words not understood) which has important implications for the development of vocabulary acquisition exercises. For example, clozes (texts with words taken out and gaps added, i.e. _____ ) become more difficult when more than one word in 50 is missing. This means that 1 gapped word in 50 is a logical starting point for the design of a cloze activity, i.e. one word in 100 is too easy.

Click on this link to go to the online cloze building program: http://www.lextutor.ca/cloze/vp/

A clozed listening I prepared earlier with lextutor

http://www.lextutor.ca/cloze/n_word/users/Why_the_crocodile_rolls_Dreamtime_story.html.

The advantage of using this tool is that you can specify the type of vocubalury (academic or general) and difficulty (word frequency) very accurately.

Dictogloss

A dictogloss is similar to a dictation but it is not read slowly.

It is, however, read at natural speed and with clarity in much the same style as a lecture.

It can be read from the page by the teacher, or recorded and played, or a resource such as a YouTube video can be used.

DictoglossFocuses on close listening & grammar

The aim of the dictogloss is to:1. Give students an opportunity to work on their close

listening skills 2. Raise issues regarding speech and writing differences

when listening to natural speech at the phonemic “sound level”

3. Assemble meaning where words are de-stressed, elided or assimilated.

It also gives students the opportunity to recognize and discuss the finer points of grammar when reduced forms of structure words are not perceived, e.g., contrasts such as has/had/have, is/was; third person singular subject-verb agreement – play/plays, or singular/plural.

Dictogloss procedure1. Play the YouTube video through and then allow the students as

much time as they require to share what they heard with each other. Allow the students to write as they listen.

2. Repeat the process another four times.

3. The last time the video is played, stop after each sentence and allow one or two minutes for the students to discuss the sentence before proceeding.

4. Give each student a copy of the transcript and explain any new vocabulary or expressions as well as commenting on items they mis-heard.

5. If there is time, play or read the transcript and allow the students to follow the text.

Note: Sometimes dictoglosses are conducted without allowing students to write until they have heard the whole passage. This is more difficult and should only be done for very short and more simple texts.

The Rainbow Serpent YouTube video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFxGHPvWcu4

Narratives- e.g. Mr Bean on YouTube Mr Bean has no words and is very funny to

watch so is good as a stimulus for constructing narratives.

Draft a narrative from what you see in this Mr Bean movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3I7G-w3hTY

For more Mr Bean movies just Google Mr Bean YouTube

Vocabulary games Back to the board: make 2 teams and

place a person from each team in front of the board and facing away from it. Write a word or draw a picture on the board. Students must explain what it is, without saying the actual word. The first person to guess the word wins a point for the team.

Great for revision, consolidation and formative assessment of new vocabulary learnt during the weeek.

Vocabulary games Running spelling test: make 2 teams and

get the students to line up. Give each student at the front of the line a whiteboard marker. Say a word from the weekly vocabulary list. The students then have to run to the board and write the word and its part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.). The first person to write it correctly gets a point for their team. An modification of this is to then get them to write the word in a sentence and award a point to the best, most correct sentence.

Reading and writing games Make words game: write a few random

letters on the board. Have the students work in pairs/small groups to make up as many words from the letters as possible. (e.g. letters: g, h, a, t, p, e, c, l, o, b. Possible words: cattle, ghetto, gate, etc.). The more letters you put on the board, the longer the words they can make. The team with the most words is the winner. You can also give points for using more letters and lower frequency words.

Reading and writing games Scattegories: Give each student a grid like this

with categories for words they have learnt.

When you call out a letter the students must race to write down a word for each category. The first student to do this correctly is the winner.

Colour Animal Country/city

Food/Drink

Free word

(.e.g.) blue (.e.g.) bear (.e.g.) Berlin (.e.g.) bread (.e.g.) book

Reading, writing & listening games

Running dictation: Type out a simple story with up to 6 sentences, using a topic, words and structures that the students have previously studied. Now cut the sentences up and stick them around the room. Put the students into pairs, one student sits with a pen and paper, the other student runs around and reads/remembers the sentence. They run back to their team mate and dictate the sentence. The teacher should monitor and suggest when the running student needs to check the original text.

Speaking and listening games Who am I? (Reverse celebrity heads) :

Prepare cards with pictures of well known people, animals or cartoon characters on them (or write names on cards). One student sits in front of the class and is given a card and looks at it in secret. The other students try to guess the person/character/animal on the card by asking “yes/no” questions, e.g. is it an animal? Is it a man? Is she famous? Does she live in America? OR “wh” questions: Where does she live? What does she do?

References

Nation, I. S. P. (2006), How Large a Vocabulary Is Needed for Reading and Listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review / La revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 63(1), pp. 59-81