Try One New Thing in the New Year (Edutopia)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 5 | February 8, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

One of my favorite rituals of the New Year is putting up a fresh wall calendar. Like most of us, I rely on an online tool to keep track of daily appointments and deadlines. But the paper version, with all those blank pages, is a better reminder of the possibilities ahead as we start another trip around the sun.

Rather than listing resolutions (which tend to get forgotten by the time we flip the page to February), let’s consider inspirations for 2016. What’s one new thing you want to try in the coming year?

To warm up your thinking, consider these suggestions from Edutopia readers. Some ideas involve technology tools. Others focus more on classroom strategies. A few are healthy reminders to take better care of yourself. Whatever’s on your wish list, Edutopia has plenty of resources to help.

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Teaching speaking #1 – Conversational routines (Cambridge Conversations)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 5 | February 8, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second-language or foreign-language learners. Consequently, learners often evaluate their success in language learning, as well as the effectiveness of their English course, on the basis of how much they feel they have improved in their spoken language proficiency.

Oral skills have hardly been neglected in EFL/ESL courses (witness the huge number of conversation and other speaking course books in the market), though how best to approach the teaching of oral skills has long been the focus of methodological debate. Teachers and textbooks make use of a variety of approaches, ranging from direct approaches focusing on specific features of oral interaction (e.g., turn-taking, topic management, and questioning strategies) to indirect approaches that create conditions for oral interaction through group work, task work, and other strategies (Richards, 1990).

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Online video genres and student creation (Cambridge Conversations)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 5 | February 8, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

It is important to consider what’s new with video – more specifically, how online video has blurred traditional divisions and created new genres. As well as traditional genres such as romance, comedy or biography, we now need to consider new genres such as video memes, bloopers, how to guides, mash-ups etc. As more and more of these new styles of videos appear on sites like YouTube, students want to copy and imitate them.

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