Breaking News English

Read all about it...

Breaking New English (BNE) is a website that contains a huge resource of content, which provides thorough lesson plans for all types of learners. There will always be one level with all of the resources available, and then the materials are edited and moulded for lower or upper level students accordingly. For lower level students, the new creations of the material provides an opportunity for them to work up to the main version, as this will improve confidence and ease them in gently. There are usually 20+ pages of materials, so it's important to be selective, by picking and choosing the most relevant activities for your students. Listening and reading takes the focus of the 4 skills, but you can tailor your lesson to include the other skills if needs be. There is also a wealth of resources which promotes lexis and grammar. Moreover, the news stories are really engaging and quirky, as can be seen below:

How can this site be used?

• In the classroom - You could print out the PDF of the lesson that you like the look of, and identify the activities and tasks which you think are most beneficial to your students.
• Flipped classroom - You could get your students to read an article or listen to an audio at home, so they're ready to pull it apart and analyse it when they come to class.
• Outside the classroom - You could highlight the activities that you want your students to do at home, but it's probably wise to show them how to navigate the site, and where they can access the activities in class so they're prepared to do it autonomously.

Which level?

Some useful and engaging activities

Jumble

• After students have been exposed to the text, you could put your students in pairs or small groups to try and rebuild the text collaboratively.
• Although there might be some L1 usage in monolingual classes, the students use their language processing to complete the task effectively. Plus they'll be continuously debating, clarifying, questioning, and confirming, which are useful skills for learners to take outside the classroom.
• This will help students vocabulary, syntax and grammar by highlighting other skills such as collocation and colligation.
• The scoring system offers the opportunity for friendly competition between teams.

No letters

• Similar to how a dictogloss used to be. After being exposed to the text, students are required to input the words they think appeared in the text. Students will most probably think of articles (as can be seen above), and prepositions first but will have to cast their minds back to the text in order to recall all of the words.
• Perfect for pair or group work as students will have to negotiate and collaborate to rebuild the text from scratch. They'll be throwing out lots of vocab and previous knowledge too.
• The incorrect words and your score will show on screen which adds a competitive element to proceedings. You could encourage students to use dictionaries. For the incorrect words, as an extension activity, you could get students to think of synonyms or antonyms which obviously helps language learning.
• Helps with lexis, grammar, tests high level discourse analytical skills such as collocation (verbs and noun phrases), and encourages autonomy.
• Teacher's can look at the common words that students are getting wrong and make a point to teach this as a whole class.

A few final thoughts...

• This is a very dynamic site as it presents language in an innovative and non-static way.
• The feedback you receive on the site is instant...but fairly limited as it only tells you if it's right or wrong, but not why. This is where teacher intervention is very important to explain any ambiguity.
• The dictation function on the site is very good for learners to repetitively listen to an audio. For example, this would be great if they wanted to focus on weak forms from a US or British accent. However, non-native speaker accents aren't available which could be a limitation.
• The search function is very useful and can take you wherever you want to go.
• Listen A Minute  is the offspring of BNE - this site is ideal for lower levels (A2 - B1) as it takes the essence of BNE but contains less material, shorter texts, and the lessons are organised by genre/topic so it's easier to navigate.
• It's free and contains a ridiculous amount of resources. The most important things for teachers to be aware of is that you should be selective when choosing activities, and  expose students to the site by bringing it to life in the classroom before asking them to do activities outside the classroom.

Online Collaboration Tools - Stormboard and Etherpad

Advantages for learners:

• Co-construction of knowledge (Vygotsky,1978,p.90) and a community of practice - students are able to pool their ideas together and learn off each other. It's perfect for group work. Teaming up weaker students with stronger students would help the former as they're able to see the latter's thoughts on screen, then they can go away and research more if necessary.
• Process oriented approach which makes it easier and straightforward to follow
• They can challenge ideas in a faceless environment where they may feel more confident. Shy students are less likely to question things in a face-to-face setting so this gives them more licence to dispute ideas and notions.
• Potentially more L2 use online, than in a face-to-face setting where students could slip into their L1. Teacher intervention is important here though so they should monitor as and when required.
• Autonomy is encouraged in a learner-centred environment - students have real freedom to express themselves in a safe environment.
• Could be a really useful way of summarising something collaboratively that you did in class. It could almost act as an extra class. The teacher could nominate one student per week to review what they learnt, and then get other students to comment on it, in a forum-like setting.
• Cost and time effective - most tools (definitely the ones I mention below) are free, and as it's online, people don't have to travel for a meeting. This way, they can just brainstorm on an online platform where everything is permanently logged forever, and can go back to when needed. Ultimately this encourages learners to revise key concepts which helps with the language learning process.
• Increased motivation, which in turn makes students more engaged (but could this be down to how the teacher sets up the task?)

Potential problems for learners:

• They need to learn how to use such tools, and develop their skills - it involves patience both from the teacher and learner.
• Cultural and gender issues such as marginalisation - teachers should therefore keep tabs on this and deal with sensitive issues as they arise.
• Informal use of language is usually prevalent, which doesn't encourage 'academic' English per se, but they'd be using 'real world' English.
• Danger of some students dominating, or alternatively zoning out (a dangerous dichotomy) - teacher intervention is important here.

Essentially, with reference to most online collaboration tools, what this means is that teachers need to take responsibility for sparking debate, mediating issues and ensuring full class participation; teachers need to be judicious, show awareness, and know when to intervene in order for such tasks to be effective and successful.

Two examples:

Stormboard

Here's one I made earlier:

You can:

• Generate it in real time
• Capture it anywhere on any device
• Add, organise, discuss, vote, brainstorm and act on ideas
• Communicate easily
• Personalise your page
• Prioritise the best ideas
• Export final group projects or tasks

Etherpad (MoPad)

Here's another I made earlier:

You can:

• Jump straight into it as you don't need a login, and people don't need accounts
• Contribute in a group with colour coded contributions
• Use the chat box to talk informally or plan potential contributions
• Easily share the URL with people, and invite others 
• Use the time slider to review the progression of contributions
• Import/export other things
• Edit in real time

Both are free, easy to use, and really useful when encouraging your students to collaborate online. The former is very popular in the business world, so if you were to teach an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) class in business English then your students would most probably be familiar with this platform. The latter is similar to Google docs in some respects, but this offers a different platform with a potentially simpler interface. Give both a go!

Introducing WebQuests

A Complete Overview – The 5W’s and 1H

What

A WebQuest (WQ) is drawn from the internet, which is designed by teachers before a lesson, and it asks students to show high level thinking, progress their understanding and transform ideas in order to complete a task. They’re created using a number of different programmes such as Microsoft office which includes links to various websites online.

The structure of a WQ can differ due to time constraints, teaching context, culture, or one’s own individualism, yet the general consensus on QuestGarden seems to imply that a WQ contains 6 essential stages:

• Introduction – A brief presentation of the focus/task

• Task – A full and formal outline of what the students will be doing

• Process – A step by step break down of what the students are expected to perform, with examples and demonstrations, if necessary, to consolidate or clarify understanding

• Evaluation – A systematic model of assessment criteria

• Conclusion – Reflection, and possibly further discussion of extension activities

• Credits – Acknowledgements, author biography and permissions

A task focus can range from writing persuasive messages to policy briefings, or from creating travel plans to implementing genre analysis. Therefore the teacher can be as zany or wacky as they wish, but like any other task, they should always keep in mind lesson objectives and student goals.

An Example

There is already a wealth of resources on the web for teachers to use and modify. It's fine to adapt WQ's, but you should always recognise the original author/creator at the top of the page.

In terms of making WQ's, become a member and follow the on screen instructions. There is a really useful rubric which tells you exactly what you have to do, every step of the way. And it even stops you at different intervals in the creation process by asking if you're sticking to your aims and objectives...

Where

This a classroom-based concept, which is carried out online. However, as it's all online you could encourage students to proceed with their WQ at home, or during their own time for homework.

Who

Students are expected to show high order thinking when faced with WQ’s. Bloom's taxonomy (Krathwohl,2002,p.212) probably best describes who such a task is aimed at and what it requires – the upper levels (analysis, synthesis and evaluation) should all be shown – therefore huge emphasis is put on students being critical, analytical and hopefully creative! Most tasks predominantly involve group work, with various roles being split between members. If you have multi-levelled classes then it is probably best to team up the weaker students with stronger students to encourage peer learning, and collaboration.

Why

There are many reasons why teachers should incorporate WQ’s into their classrooms:

• It gets students engaged in notions and concepts which require higher level thinking. This criticality and analytical cognitive processing helps progress language learning.

• The resources are given to students therefore this avoids them searching for information online; where they could quite easily copy and paste useless information and not internalise the required aims.

• Authentic, genuine, and every day topics of focus are usually designed by teachers to avoid tasks being artificial, like so many mundane classroom activities…

• Giving students roles will help them to personalise and really embrace the activity. If there were weaker students in the class, you could assign the less taxing roles to those students. 

• Can be used to introduce, conclude or consolidate a topic/unit.

• Motivation tool to encourage independent reasoning and autonomy.

• Makes students more aware of, and to intensify their use of, technology in the classroom. Ultimately this will give them a very real and practical advantage over others.

• Encourages cooperative and collaborative learning through group projects. Getting students to co-construct knowledge and negotiate meaning are key pillars of language learning.

• Once groups have finished their WQ's you could get them to present what they've discovered to the group. Not only does this build confidence, but reflects everyday authenticity which is linked to the outside world.

• Offers students inspiration to go and create their own WQ’s, and be autonomous.

Why not?

• Clearly WQ's rely on the internet so make sure you have a secure connection.

• Not everyone is ICT savvy so training and patience is required.

• They’re not appropriate for every learning aim, so they could potentially be used sparingly to keep it fresh and novel.

• They necessitate competent reading skills so possibly not suitable for young/lower level learners, but teachers can simplify concepts and grade language to fit their students’ needs

How?

Get yourself to QuestGarden!

Check out the resources, examples and tutorials on their website. They offer a free 30-day trial, and once you're hooked you can sign up to a 2-year subscription for only $20. Watch the first video here, and the proceeding three for further information.

When?

Now! Create a WQ and send your students on a quest of the web that they’ll never forget.