Ebaby! Blog

YouTube in the classroom. Recently, I observed a class that used YouTube and saw a conference presentation by two ESOL instructors, John Armbrust and Alexandria Cesar, entitled: “YouTube: U Trouble?”

Both of these experienced have shown me the possibilities of YouTube in the classroom. While John Armbrust and Alexandria Cesar initially saw some problems with YouTube, their ESL class ended up developing a great way to evaluate YouTube videos for use in an academic setting.

Once we have some guidelines, YouTube can be integrated in so many ways. Armbrust used YouTube videos to enhance readings in his grammar class. Students read from a book, listened to a recording of the passage and then watched a YouTube video on the topic. What an exciting idea!

We just have to get over the fear of inappropriate content on YouTube. For your next unit, explore the possibility of YouTube. There is so much good content and the films are so short and easy to find. They can be perfect!

But before you let students do anything with YouTube, make sure you give them some guidelines. Some very clear guidelines, otherwise you will end up with a catastrophe like the first time I had students use YouTube. I ended up with a very sexy music video on our class wiki. Let me tell you, even though the student wrote a nice paragraph about the music, the YouTube video was not appropriate. That time YouTube was U Trouble. But Armbrust and Cesar have proven that it doesn’t always have to be like that. You just have to be very clear with your students.

I’ve noticed that around the site, members sometimes refer to themselves as “English babies,” which is funny because that wasn’t the intention of the brand at all. But if we were to have some sort of diapered mascot, I think this would be him.

This video is at the top of the viral video charts, and a big part of what’s so endearing about it is that the child (named Hero Ha) clearly doesn’t know English, yet manages to make the song pretty intelligible and deliver it with passion. Entertainment is how a lot of the world learns its first English words, and the amount Hero has been able to absorb from music makes him a linguistic prodigy. But interestingly, most other bloggers and commenters on the video seem to regard him as a musical prodigy. One Korean television show even compares him to Mozart.

Now, call me jaded, but for as much charisma as Hero has, he doesn’t seem to have as much skill as a musician or performer as the other kids who appeared with him on this Korean show.

Folks have suggested that Hero is the next Michael Jackson or a reincarnation of John Lennon, and time will tell, but I’d peg him as a linguist, because his ability to learn English pronunciation just by listening to music is what is most remarkable about him. I mean, I have a CD of Cambodian rock songs that I listen to all the time, but every time I try to sing along, it just doesn’t work. There’s no way I could sing one of those songs from memory like Hero does with the Beatles.

You were never supposed to see the photo to your left. It’s from a lesson that we shot in my semi-abandoned house that we decided never to use because it was “too dark.” But the plot development it inspired stayed in the English, baby! soap opera, much to Devan’s dismay.

See, when the cast arrived to film some scenes at my house–which has holes in the walls and very little furniture– we thought, “What can we do with this apocalyptic setting?” It occurred to me that Devan should be addicted to drugs. We already established her supposed propensity for substance abuse in this drunk driving lesson, and she was recently broken hearted.

So we threw a sheet on the ground and some empty bottles and did a really depressing scene where I come in to Devan’s apartment and discover that she’s sold everything for drugs.

I should say depressing in retrospect because it was actually hilarious at the time. First of all, Devan was supposed to be addicted to pot, which you can’t get addicted to. But in a lot of countries, pot a major crime so no one doe it, so we had a good laugh about people in Asia believing someone could get addicted to pot and sell all their stuff to buy it.

Second of all, Devan and I used to be roommates and I happen to know that pot treats her very poorly (like, vomiting for days) so she never ever smokes it. So it was a little inside joke for us too.

But then we got to the next cast session a month later, filmed on the streets of downtown Portland, and I told Devan we had to shoot a new scene about her being addicted to drugs. Suddenly she really didn’t want to do it! I finally convinced her that she should do it for the members because they need to know a lot of the good drug vocabulary that would come with the lesson and for me because I already had the rest of the plot build around it.

But it took four takes to get the scene we ended up using. Devan kept going silent when someone walked by because she was embarrassed. So if you see Devan around, tease her about her pot addiction for me, will ya?

Yesterday, my boss came to observe my class. It is such an interesting experience to observe another teacher and, of course, it can be stressful and exciting to be observed. I am always worried when people observe my classes because you never know what they are looking for. How do you know they will appreciate your curriculum? And how does anyone know when they have witnessed “the perfect class?”

Each teacher has such a different view that it is difficult to judge someone openly. Luckily, my boss used my definition of the perfect classroom in his observation. He used my teaching philosopy to make a rubric and then graded my class. I was held to my own standards for the perfect teacher. And he thought I did well. (As did I. )

But in most cases, we go into observations with our own thoughts on what should be happening. We use our own teaching philosophy to grade other teachers. This really doesn’t seem fair. Without the ability to read something or have them explain their rationale, it can be hard to appreciate other teachers’ methods. On the other hand, I have never walked away from an observation without learning something.

To end this post, I thought I would put in a picture of a great teacher, Anne Sullivan. She taught Helen Keller when she was just a child. She would tutor Helen throughout her school years.

I wonder, if we would have known she was doing something so extraordinary if we had sat in on one of her lessons.

We recently found a good article in the Shanghai Daily about how so many learners are taking the fun out of learning English. Does it have to be so painstaking, and is there proof that no-fun learning is more efficient?

It’s amazing to me that most people believe learning English and having fun are mutually exclusive. After years of painfully trying to learn the language by memorizing grammar rules, how often do students end up at the promiseland of fluency? Rarely.

People are trained that the harder they work at something, the greater the rewards. I agree with this principle and if your end goal is to be really good at diagramming sentences, then work hard and study them every night.

However, most learners aren’t studying English to analyze sentences or become linguists. They want to communicate, interact, and socialize - and here’s the key - with other people.

While books and rules remain important to build a sound foundation for the English language, genuine human engagement will take learners to the communication level they desire.

The best part about the social component of learning English is that it makes learning fun. Take any hobby or interest that involves other people and do it in English, making the language part of your lifestyle. Instead of spending nights memorizing arbitrary vocabulary lists, join a bowling league, hang out at a sports bar, or find your nearest hiking club. The possibilities for practice are endless. You’ll feel your improvement every day and even have some fun at the same time.

Our members are so smart. OK, they’re not smart all the time, like when we added the “report member” button to weed out spammers and everyone pressed it like crazy for no reason, but a lot of the forum posts are really intelligent.

Learning a language forces you to be creative. I remember when I got good enough at Spanish to speak fluidly but I didn’t have the vocab to be very straight forward. So I’d come up with interesting ways to get across what I was trying to say. I think that’s what’s going on in this comment on another soap opera episode about online dating in which Marni discovers her new boyfriend may not be as great as she thought.

Unless taxi-as-relationship is a common cliche in Viet Nam, that’s pretty original. Another member may have coined a clever phrase this week on our lesson about the phrase “ugly duckling”.

I can’t find that expression anywhere with Google and, although it may be an unintentional misspelling, I like “notty” for the double meaning of “not” and “naughty”.

For another member, “ugly duckling” is about more than looks.

Maybe she can meet up with this dejected countryman of hers, who doesn’t include a photo clear enough to determine if his sulking is justified.

As interesting as all that is, we’ll wrap things up with another common mistake on the site. A lot of times people mistake one of the English lessons for a member profile and comment on it like this:

So that wouldn’t be so strange…if it weren’t on our lesson about Alvin and the Chipmunks!

Until next time, stay beautiful like an animated rodent.

My students are not only from all around the world, but they all immigrated to the US at different times. Some have been here for years, while others just got here. So I was a little worried when I gave my students a list of American celebrities and politicians for a discussion activity.

I wanted groups of four to practice present perfect by doing a mock interview with a celebrity. They could ask some great “Have you ever thought/done/gone….?” questions in present perfect. But the activity hinged upon the group members all knowing and being interested in the same celebrity.

Out of my long list, I was shocked to find that Brad and Angela were the most popular couple to interview. I mean really, are Brad Pitt and Angelina that well-known and that interesting? Well, my students thought so. They were so excited to play movie-stars and ask really personal questions. Like, “Angelina, why haven’t you ever been pregnant?” The student playing Angelina had a good answer: “I haven’t had enough time. I am a busy woman!”

So their pop culture knowledge is a little outdated. Angelina has had a child, but it is important to notice that the students had something to say. They were really interested and engaged. I had honestly thought that people would interview politicians, like Hillary and Obama. But it was really hilarious to see my students get into the celebrity gossip.

It goes to show that we can never quite predict what our students will find interesting!

We were happy to discover that over the weekend we were named one of the top three sites for learning conversational English by Larry Ferlazzo, king of ESL website reviews and best of lists.

This is our first appearance on one of Larry’s lists and it makes sense since it’s a pretty general category, and like Larry says, we offer “the works.” A lot of the rest of the top eight was new to me. One site I particularly liked was ELLLO (English Language Listening Library Online). Their dialogs are pretty similar to ours and I think they’re improvised too. But their cast speaks a heck of a lot slower!

A commenter on the post brought up a good idea that I’d like to see on English, baby! someday: live chat rooms. Our chat rooms are one of the most popular features on the site, but they’re for typing. What if we had chat rooms that used a Skype-like platform so people could talk in real time? That would be cool.

Image: Larry Ferlazzo’s mug as seen on his site.

Almost every day I eat at the same Thai food cart a few blocks from the English, baby! office in downtown Portland. It’s called Thai Basil and they know me now and give me free spring rolls and tea.

As I wait for my food to be prepared, I often find myself staring at the menu between spacing out and sending text messages. The specials change daily on a white board next to the window, and for this reason, I always come back to the office with a black smudge on my forefinger.

I never realized how tricky it would be to figure out what foods you pluralize on a menu in English. But every day I erase the ’s’ on words like “pumpkins,” “brocolis,” and “shrimps.”

I’d mention it to the very nice woman who runs the cart (or her foxy granddaughter, but that’s another story), but I can’t figure out what the rule is for things like this. It seems arbitrary. I mean, “brocolis” is never correct, but “pumpkins” is a word if you’re talking about multiple pumpkins, but I seriously doubt there’s more than one pumpkin in their pumpkin curry. Then again, there probably isn’t more than a whole bell pepper in it either, but it is proper to say that a dish has “bell peppers” and not “bell pepper.”

If anyone can make any sense of out this and tell me what the rule is, I will relay it to Thai Basil.

Photos: Taken on my cell phone today, post erasure.

This week one of my coworkers shared a great grouping activity with me. I love this activity because dividing students up into groups can be so complicated. But sometimes all you need is a nice random grouping of students for an activity.

• Begin by selecting a subskill or theme, like simple past or pronunciation.
• Decide the size of the group, for example, groups of 3-4.
• Make words or sentences that deal with the theme. Words or sentence should clearly sort into groups.
• In class, tell students the theme and the size of group.
• Have students walk around and share their words or sentences.
• Students try to find a similarity in order to form the correct sized group.

Here is a specific example: This week, we were working on simple past. I wanted to make groups of three. I started by writing 3 sentences with one simple past grammar mistake in each. Then, I wrote 3 more sentences with 2 mistakes in each. And so on until I had enough for my class. During class, I gave each student a sentence. I had them read their sentences to themselves first and told them that they would be divided into groups of three. I told them to find the similarity in the sentences. I gave them a hint that the similarity had to do with simple past grammar. I gave students time to walk around and share their sentences. I gave them hints if they need it. At the end of the activity, they had found people with the same number of mistakes in their sentences. They were in perfect groups of three and they had already practiced simple past.

Here is another example for vocabulary: To divide your class into four groups, you could give each student a word (a noun, adjective, verb and adverb) and have students try to figure out what factor would divide the class into four groups. Give them hints and they should be able to realize that the form of the word is the important feature.

No matter what you choose to do, this activity is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, it easily divides students into groups. The groups can be random (if you hand-out the words/sentences randomly or the teacher can select the groups by assigning each student a specific word/sentence. Secondly, it is a good activity to prepare students for any type of group work. It gets them thinking and working with others. I loved this idea! It is so great to have nice colleagues to share ideas with. If any of you have classroom ideas, blog about them and give me a link. I would love to hear your classroom ideas too.