Vicki

Teacher of professional and technical English, writer and teacher trainer.

It’s that Oscar time of year

Jan 162013

With the press full of movie award ceremonies, it’s a great time to be encouraging students to watch English movies.

You might want to begin with four movies that won Golden Globe awards this week. Can your students guess which category they won? What have they heard about them and have they seen them? Here are links to the trailers with clickable transcripts.

Best motion picture drama: Argo
Best motion picture comedy or musical: Les Miserables
Best musical score: Life of Pi
Best original song: Skyfall

(See here for links to versions that will play well on mobile devices.)

All four of those movies are up for Oscars too, along with lots of other movies such as:

Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Django Unchained
The Impossible
Frankenweenie
Paranorman
Anna Karenina
Hitchcock
Flight
See here for links to movies for users of mobile devices.)

Class activities:

Teachers can allocate different movie trailers to watch to different pairs or groups of students and then have them report back to the class.

In smaller classes, students could pick two or three to watch together and discuss.

Or it could be a homework task. Everyone chooses a movie to watch at home and then reports back on whether or not it should win an award.

Here is a .pdf worksheet with url links for all the videos: OscarTime2013

You can find all the movies that are up for Oscar awards and in what categories here: http://oscar.go.com/nominees.

Happy watching and may the best movies win!

Miss – Lose

Jan 032013

Ever had a student whose told you they lost a flight, train or bus? Here’s a 90 second video English lesson and worksheet to help sort the confusion out.

Clicking on the picture should take you to the video with a clickable transcript over at my Simple English Videos dot com site. (Be sure to get your students to check out the latest movie trailers while they’re there.) The video is also available here on my youtube channel.

And here’s a worksheet.

Obama – who? How to handle calls when you’re busy

Teaching ideas and lessons, Video and tech 5 Responses »

Dec 022012

Anyone for some telephone English? This 90 second video English lesson is very simple. It’s suitable for elementary or pre-intermediate general or business English English learners. It’s available with a clickable transcript (along with lots of other video English lessons) at https://www.simpleenglishvideos.com/language or directly by clicking the image below.

It is also available on youtube just here.

Click here for a downloadable classroom worksheet to go with it. I didn’t include a role play in the activities, but perhaps your students can think of celebrities they’d like to call them, what they might want to talk about and then role play the event? Enjoy!

Thanksgiving video lesson

Teaching ideas and lessons No Responses »

Nov 162012

Here’s a video we shot at last year’s celebrations in Philadelphia. It addresses the questions:
‘What do Americans do at Thanksgiving?’
and
‘What does Thanksgiving mean to Americans?’

The comments of the people we interviewed are particularly topical in the light of a controversy that’s broken out this year. Thanksgiving occurs on the fourth Thursday of November and it’s followed immediately by ‘Black Friday’ – traditionally the biggest day of the year for retailers. It’s when shopping for the holidays begins and large retailers such as Walmart and Target are now requiring employees to come in the day before so they can open the stores at 8pm or midnight. You can read more about the protests here. Just how soon is it OK for stores to start Christmas/Holiday promotions, and what workers rights should be sacrosanct in these times of austerity?

Free articles from the ELTJ

Research and curiosities No Responses »

Nov 142012

ELT Journal The October 2012 issue of English Language Teaching Journal was a special one looking back over developments in ELT over the last seventeen years under the editorship of Keith Morrow. Sadly Keith is resigning. He will be sorely missed but the good news is, to mark the event three articles are available free on-line at http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/current This link takes you to the contents page which will show you that the Editorial by Keith Morrow, Key Concepts in ELT by Graham Hall and Review of ELTJ reviews 1995-2012 by Alan Maley are all available free to read as HTML or a PDF. Just click and read!

Video news

Events No Responses »

Nov 102012

I had a fun encounter this month. A message popped up somewhere from Grant Duncan (a TEFL teacher and songwriter in New Zealand) about his band’s latest album. I asked if he’d like us to make a clickable transcript for one of the numbers and put it on www.simpleenglishvideos.com. ‘Yes please’, he said, so we found ourselves making a music video for The Audio Justice. Ha! See below for the result. My husband plays the part of the stressed out businessman – rather too well I think.

We’re celebrating our three month birthday over at Simple English Videos dot com with the launch of a new section to the site. We have a teacher in Japan to thank for the inspiration. The regular site was too dark for her students and we realized young learners (yl) needed their own place. We wanted it ad-free and self contained to avoid them clicking off to places we’d rather they didn’t go. So it has its own subdomain with a yl prefix. In the process we came up with what we hope is a neat way of switching between computer and mobile versions. Click here to check it out.

And finally we’re delighted to announce that our one minute video English lessons are now available along with with interactive exercises on the English 360 platform. Look for the course called ‘Action’. We have a big batch of scripts for new videos ready to go. Shooting starts next week.

Worksheets for One Minute Video Lessons

Teaching ideas and lessons, Video and tech 4 Responses »

Oct 112012

Simple English Videos dot com is two months old today! Wehey! As well movie trailers with clickable transcripts, we’ve been making one minute video lessons and someone suggested worksheets would come in handy. So we’re celebrating with some pdfs with simple follow on exercises – traditional homeworky-style things for jogging memories.

These links will take you to the pdfs and the pictures underneath will take you to the videos and clickable transcripts. Enjoy!
In Case Worksheet
Remember and Remind Worksheet
Raise and Rise Worksheet
Lend and Borrow worksheet
Last and Take Worksheet
High and Tall Worksheet
Hard and Hardly Worksheet
Fun and Funny Worksheet
Fall and Feel Worksheet
During and For Worksheet
Concentrated and Concentrating Worksheet
Check and Control Worksheet
Alone and Lonely Worksheet

In case

Remember – Remind

Raise – Rise

Lend – Borrow

Last – Take

High – Tall

Hard – Hardly

Fun -Funny

Fall – Feel

During – For

Concentrated – Concentrating

Check – Control

Alone – Lonely

P.S. Don’t forget to show your students all the movie trailers with clickable transcripts while you’re over at the Simple English Videos site. They’re a cool way to see natural spoken language in context.

P.P.S And if you’re think you might like to use one of the movie trailers in class, there’s another worksheet here.

P.P.S Come back soon because we have more of these lessons in the works.

A story telling lesson – the pay off

Story telling No Responses »

Sep 142012

The pay off is a crucial bit of a story, especially in business English. It reinforces your message. It might convey values you want to get across, deliver a point you want to teach, or simply suggest why you’re a decent, dependable or cool sort of person to work with.

And handily, one story can be used to deliver different pay offs. This means that if you can learn to tell one story really well, with a few minor changes, you can probably use it in lots of different situations, just changing the ending slightly to suit the circumstances.

I illustrate this in class by telling a short anecdote myself. Any short story would probably do it, but for example, this one has worked well for me.

An old lady was walking down the street when she noticed three young boys. They weren’t very tall and were struggling to reach a doorbell. Thinking they must be locked out, she asked if they’d like some help. ‘Oh, yes please’ they said, so she pressed the doorbell for them. ‘That’s great’, shouted the boys. ‘Now run!’.

Then I provide the phrase ‘So it just goes to show….’ and ask my students to come up some morals or pay offs for the story. All sorts of different ones are possible so they should be able to generate quite a few. And you can give them some of your own as well, such as:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

First appearances can be deceiving.

So I think it just goes to show that learning to tell one story really well is class time well spent.

Do you have any tips for storytelling lessons?

One Minute Video English Lessons

Teaching ideas and lessons, Video and tech 5 Responses »

Sep 112012

It’s www.simpleEnglish.com ‘s one month birthday tomorrow. Yay!

So far the site has had around 2,738 hits from 106 countries. I’ve no idea how good or bad those stats are but I love the idea of people from 106 countries being able to access the site. We’ve been adding new movie trailers steadily so there are now 60 available with clickable transcripts. (I think movie trailers are great vehicles for teaching – here are some generic lesson ideas to go with movie trailers. And for some homework tasks see here.) Plus – as of today – there are 10 one minute video English lessons. (More on that in a minute!)

We’ve learnt a lot this month. Dark colours might be cool in Europe, but Japan likes bright and cheerful. (Thank you Mrs B!) We now plan to build a separate section of the site for young learners. Also importantly I learnt that you may think you’ve switched off Google Adsense adult ads, but you need to double check. Eeek! Thank you for putting me right about that Charles! If anyone has any feedback, suggestions or thoughts about the website, please pass them along! What do your students think of it? We’re grateful for all suggestions.

So anyway, we thought we’d celebrate our one month birthday with some one minute English lessons. You can watch them with clickable transcripts here and I’ve also added them to my youtube channel. They’re low budget movies made by us, mostly in our living room. Ha! I feel uncomfortable seeing myself on camera, (understand how my camera-shy students feel) but I love the extra possibilities video provides for being able to site language in context. So overall they were fun to make and if they seem popular we’ll make more.

But here’s the puzzle – if we make more, what should they be about? We’ve targetted some easily confused words and expressions in this batch, but they could be about anything really. Time is the only constraint.

So imagine you have the full attention of your class – but for only one minute. What would you be able to teach? Any suggestions?

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