2018 Presentation Handouts
Activities with a VOCABULARY FOCUS
To download the PDF, click the image of the worksheet. To see the original in Google Drawings and make a copy to edit on your own Google Drive, click the name of the worksheet.
Activities with a SYNTAX FOCUS
To download the PDF, click the image of the worksheet. To see the original in Google Drawings and make a copy to edit on your own drive, click the name of the worksheet.
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Pharmacy Labels - Syntax Activity 3
Activities with a DISCOURSE FOCUS
To download the PDF, click the image of the worksheet. To see the original in Google Drawings and make a copy to edit on your own drive, click the name of the worksheet.
Connectigram courtesy of Dr. Gianfranco Conti (see also Global Innovative Language Teachers FB Group)
Parallel writing is a materials-light, low-prep activity with a discourse focus. Please visit the BLOG to read all about doing parallel writing with a class.
Jumbled paragraph was mentioned in our 2014 Back to the Well presentation. The worksheets are still available. (See templates E1, E2, and E3 under Back to the Well 2014 below.)
Rationale: Engage students in working on various types of paragraph-writing tasks that foreground discourse structure. For example, work on jumbled sentences to restore a paragraph, or -- after building up skill and confidence through much practice -- jumble the sentences from two or even three paragraphs together, and challenge students to restore each original paragraph separately.
The target outcome would be something like this:
Toronto is the capital city of Ontario. It is also the economic centre of Canada, with the head offices of many banks and other companies. The city is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Many residents of Toronto swim, sail or fish in the lake.
-- give them a set of jumbled sentences like:
Or even:
...on the understanding that students will need to select only the sentences that actually work, because sentence (3) does not fit.
Jumbled paragraph was mentioned in our 2014 Back to the Well presentation. The worksheets are still available. (See templates E1, E2, and E3 under Back to the Well 2014 below.)
Rationale: Engage students in working on various types of paragraph-writing tasks that foreground discourse structure. For example, work on jumbled sentences to restore a paragraph, or -- after building up skill and confidence through much practice -- jumble the sentences from two or even three paragraphs together, and challenge students to restore each original paragraph separately.
The target outcome would be something like this:
Toronto is the capital city of Ontario. It is also the economic centre of Canada, with the head offices of many banks and other companies. The city is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Many residents of Toronto swim, sail or fish in the lake.
-- give them a set of jumbled sentences like:
- Many residents of Toronto swim, sail or fish in the lake.
- It is also the economic centre of Canada, with the head offices of many banks and other companies.
- Toronto is the capital city of Ontario.
- The city is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Or even:
- Many residents of Toronto swim, sail or fish in the lake.
- It is also the economic centre of Canada, with the head offices of many banks and other companies.
- Canada is located in the Northern Hemisphere.
- Toronto is the capital city of Ontario.
- The city is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
...on the understanding that students will need to select only the sentences that actually work, because sentence (3) does not fit.
ASSESSMENT
There is no need to re-invent the wheel. Conestoga College has created an assessment toolkit for each of the four skills and four competency areas for CLBs one through eight. I have edited these two for use with the pharmacist-patient role play. Don't forget to surprise the students. They should have seen and worked with the entire page of labels but not know which three they will get for their assessment at week's end.
speaking_clb_4.2_pharmacist.docx
speaking_clb_4.3_patient.docx
speaking_clb_4.2_pharmacist.docx
speaking_clb_4.3_patient.docx
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QUESTIONS? IDEAS?
Did our webinar leave you with unanswered questions? Have an idea you want to share? Come visit our Back-to-the-Well Club on Flipgrid. There's no password and no need to register. Just make a short video or respond to someone else's video. I will moderate to keep out the spammers and scammers. If you're not comfortable on camera, just aim the camera at the wall while you speak. No biggie. Flipgrid allows you to preview your video and re-record until you're happy. It's so easy, even my seniors and literacy learners have taken to it. |
Sending Them Back to the Well (2014)
This set of graphic organizers was developed as a result of my decision, triggered by a student's request and inspired by a TESL Ontario workshop, to slow down and guide learners more deeply into each oral or written text, as proposed by Chirawibha Sivell of Welland Heritage Council and John Sivell, TESL educator at Brock University. You can learn about the concepts on which these templates are based by reading the paper they published in the August 2012 issue of Contact Magazine as a follow-up to their 2011 TESL Ontario presentation. You can read about my year (plus) of SLOW and John's theoretical digest of why it works in the Spring 2015 (conference) issue of Contact Magazine.
The following FREE ONLINE TOOLS can support you as you take your students again and again into a text in myriad ways, offering students multiple meaningful encounters with the new lexis, and giving the brain rich conditions for L2 emergence.
- The "Back to the Well Toolbox" is an at-a-glance cheat sheet / guide to all the templates and tools; it is based on the Sivells' paper.
- Template A is for a collection activity whereby students find the main parts of speech in a text and then, over a series of classes, analyse the words in various ways.
- Template B is a semantic map that you can edit. Delete or change what you don't like or can't use with a give level. Email me if you have any difficulty with MS Word.
- Template C is a peer survey graphic organizer. Students mill about the class interviewing one another. When they are done, we write sentences in the third person at the bottom. We do that orally before we do it in writing.
- Template D supports a collection activity in which more advanced students find all the Subject-Verb / Subject-Verb-Object chains in a text as well as identifying the finite and non-finite verbs within a sentence.
- Template E1 is the first in a set of three that support students in becoming aware of discourse markers and paragraph structure. It is a warmer exercise offering a model for what they will later do with the classroom text.
- Template E2 is the second of the discourse templates; it guides students as they analyse the structure of a text. In order to prepare to use the next discourse template in a week or two, you may wish to have students--in pairs--cut the text into sentence strips. Collect these for redistribution with Template E3 at a later date.
- Template E3 is intended to be used a week or two after Template E2.
- Template F supports an activity in which students choose a few interesting words from a text, use dictionaries or thesauri (paper or electronic) to find synonyms for each term, then decide together and argue whether each synonym can or cannot substitute for the original word in the text. I have found this one to be A LOT OF FUN for CLB 4 and up!
The following FREE ONLINE TOOLS can support you as you take your students again and again into a text in myriad ways, offering students multiple meaningful encounters with the new lexis, and giving the brain rich conditions for L2 emergence.
- The MODIFY tool at GoRewrite can remove capitalization and/or punctuation from a text that you paste in.
- Cloze generator - This freeware for Windows or Mac allows you to remove the nth word or words of your choosing for a rational cloze worksheet based on your chosen text.
- The Teacher's Corner has a good fill-in-the-blank worksheet maker.
- I love the Teacher's Pet add-in for MS Word (Windows only) so much that I've paid for the premium version both for my home and work PCs. The free version has a lot of great features, too, though. With this tool you can scramble sentences, create matching tests, puzzles, etc., based on any text.
- Spelling and Vocabulary City is the cornerstone of my lab day for lower levels. Once you load twelve or so new words from the week's text, students can practice spelling them, play hangman and concentration with them. If you edit the sample sentences so that they are ones that students have seen through the week, then they can integrate familiarity with English syntax by playing Sentence Unscramble.<---update: no longer free as of 2015
- Quizlet is quickly winning me over as a vocabulary review tool for classroom and lab. It's SO quick and easy to set up a word list and insert the free images.
- LessonWRITER is a great tool for longer texts. (Short simple ones don't give the tool enough to work with, I find.) There is no end to the ways LessonWRITER can save you time as you stay with a given text day after day.
That's the end of the Back-to-the-Well workshop templates and graphic organizers. The following are just general blank forms and graphic organizers.
BINGO game template
(Click HERE to download MS Word document.) Edit the bank of 24 words at the bottom. To read about how and why I use this game in literacy class, read this blog post.
BOARD GAME template
This great template for a custom board game for vocabulary review was passed on to me by Val Baggaley, ELL Instructor at the Centre for Excellence in Immigrant and Intercultural Advancement. Click here to read my blog post about how I use this game board in every level from ESL Literacy up to CLB 5+ and how you can easily customize it. Val has also shared how she uses it. Tag: LITERACY
Peer Surveys
PEER SURVEY to practice lexical chunks - I use this graphic organizer to give intermediate and advanced learners an opportunity to use expressions, idioms, phrasal verbs, etc. that we have recently encountered. I left my text in for you to see, but I expect you to delete it and replace it with your own.
PEER SURVEY simplified - I use this type of peer survey to give literacy learners a chance to get up, move around, and ask each other some very basic questions tied to the week's topic. I blogged about how I use peer surveys HERE.
PEER SURVEY simplified - I use this type of peer survey to give literacy learners a chance to get up, move around, and ask each other some very basic questions tied to the week's topic. I blogged about how I use peer surveys HERE.
Student-made Tests
In this blog post you can read about why I LOVE this activity. Download the grid in MS Word.
Portfolio Based Language Assessment - My Trackers, Planners, etc.
- Inventory Sheets for Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing sections, colour coded w column to tick whether it's a RWT and another column to tick whether the Ss did self-assessment. This helps the teacher ascertain at end-of-term whether there is a balance of artefacts, how many are RWT, etc. I keep my own copy of each stapled inside my marking folder for each class in order to keep a master record of all assessments.
- Student Progress Tracker - can be used for on the fly formative assessment over a one-month period
- Weekly Planner (helping me remember to schedule a balanced array of assessments throughout the term)
- For rubrics and checklists, see FREE - Assessment.
GA
