Teacher's Guide

Background

You’re welcome to plunge in and check out the exercises for yourself and see how you can use them. This guide is provided to 1) provide some better understanding of how and why the exercises were developed and 2) to offer ideas on how to adapt and expand what is here to meet your particular needs.

The ideas and templates behind these interactive lessons and exercises date back to the mid 90’s before remote learning became the widespread phenomenon it is today and when few teachers or students were familiar with what was then referred to as The World Wide Web, or the possibilities it offered for teaching and learning. They were not intended as substitute for what is done in the classroom or as a syllabus for study. Quite the opposite. They were meant to free up time in the classroom for more valuable, stimulating and interesting communicative interactions and relegate the more boring and repetitive grammar drills to outside of the class.

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

 

Some of the benefits of lessons of this kind over traditional methods are:

  • the immediate feedback provided by interactive quizzes as opposed to textbook homework helps prevent wrong answers from sticking in the student’s mind until the next day when homework can be reviewed in class;
  • such exercises allow students to make their mistakes in private and not be embarrassed about them, or worse, avoid taking risks in the future;
  • online quizzes, even on subjects like grammar and vocabulary can be appealing and inviting than the same questions posed on paper;
  • teachers don’t have to grade or correct the work because that’s already been done.

In truth, I questioned then and still do now, the need for grammar study in the process of language learning. It may do more harm than good in that attention is diverted from important aspects of communication – students unable to express themselves adequately to order a meal at a fast food restaurant shouldn’t worry about whether “It is I” or “It is me” is correct (not a linguistic issue but a socio-linguistic one) or how to form the future-perfect, which they would never use in speaking and rarely, if ever in writing. But even if one is convinced that teaching grammar isn’t necessary, curricula and schools demand it and students themselves clamor for it. It’s more productive to give what students want, (while providing what they actually need), than to try to argue them out of their demands.

If you approach the lessons and exercises on this site with these ideas in mind, you will be more likely to make better use of them. They can certainly be assigned to students but they are meant more as templates and a jumping off point for teachers, to look at what’s provided and find ways to improve and expand them for their particular circumstances. The source code for the exercises here can be copied, but these days it’s easy create computer-based exercises with the plethora of programs and apps available (Hot Potatoes authoring software can be downloaded free at https://hotpot.uvic.ca/). The mechanics of creating quizzes is the easy part. It’s developing ones that are actually useful that’s the challenging part. I hope that having these materials as a starting point will prove helpful.

Notes on the specific materials available on the site

The short and extended readings, augmented by narrated versions, have introductions with suggestions for use which I will not repeat here. My only other advice is think up your own ways to use them and not settle for a simple “Read this story and be ready to answer questions about it.” Note that all these texts have been adapted and the language simplified.

The comprehension exercises contain passages, (like the readings above modified and simplified), in a modified cloze form, requiring students to think about the text in order to choose the correct answers. If students show interest in these passages, they may be motivated to read the original texts.

The speed reading module derives from an idea that the fast moving captions on a TV or movie screen are a great help in increasing reading speed and focusing on meaning. All of these exercises attempt to get students to focus on larger rather than smaller elements. In the first set of exercises, words briefly flash on the screen and the student is asked to recognize it. The aim is to pay attention to the whole word rather than the constituent letters. Short phrases flash on the screen in the second set of exercises, to shift the focus from individual words to chunks of words. In the third set, a question flashes on the screen and the student is asked to respond appropriately and focus on the meaning of a full sentence rather than individual words or phrases. A sentence flashes on screen in the fourth set, and students are asked to identify the grammatical subject, helping them focus on sentence structure.

The grammar section contains a module on parts of speech consisting of lessons and quizzes. Since the language of the lessons may be difficult for students needing instruction in this area, it may be more useful as a guide for teachers and help in planning how to introduce the different categories. The quizzes on parts of speech and the other grammar topics may help gauge students’ knowledge and provide feedback about where attention is needed.

The listening and pronunciation exercises include work with minimal pairs to help non-native speakers distinguish between sounds which may seem identical to them. The introduction provides information and a menu to choose which sounds to work on. In listen & respond, students are challenged to respond to questions spoken at normal speed with typical elisions and idiomatic expressions. Newcomers to the culture need to learn that seeya later is another way of saying goodbye and not an invitation to meet again.

The vocabulary exercises feature random words. More useful would be the words specified in a syllabus or that appear in text being read. The value of these quizzes is providing a template and ideas for creating such materials.

The culture activities page offers ways to get students to meaningfully interact with one another and can be adapted for a wide range of purposes, levels and ages. The section contains instructions for their use.

The module for the novel Chance may be worth taking a look at for its activities as well as the pedagogical perspective offered.