Throw away whatever you have planned for today! Unless you have something Halloween-themed planned. You MUST take advantage of the holiday today and use it to introduce your students to a little bit of culture and fun!

Since it is such short notice, I am going to give you three good links to websites where you can download Halloween-themed worksheets and activities for free.

The first link is to ESL-Kids. You might not teach kids, but this website lets you create a worksheet, flashcards with pictures, word finds, bingo, board games and more. Just pick the Halloween vocabulary theme and select the exact words you want to use and print it out. Awesome!

The second handy Halloween resource is from English Raven. There you can find cards to play fun Halloween role-play activities and more word finds and flashcards.

The third website has reading activities that students can do online, but you could also modify and print them. In fact, the page has a lot of Halloween resources. Maybe because it is titled ESL and Halloween.

If you don’t have time to print out any of these handouts or games, consider handing out candy (a Halloween tradition) or doing something with scary stories. You could make one up as a class. You could read a scary story as a listening activity or students could write their own. No matter what you do today, don’t forget that it is a holiday…so have fun!

In the US, the holiday in honor of all things scary, Halloween, is Friday. Most people dress up in costumes and go to parties or take their children around the neighborhood trick or treating. But a Canadian woman named Ines Markeljevic organized a world-wide simultaneous performance of the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video that took place last Saturday.

Markeljevic’s goal was to have 200,000 people participate in Thrill the World. She may have over estimated a little–the final number was 4,177 people. But that was still enough to break the world record. Interestingly, the record was previously held by a prison in the Philippines which got 1,500 inmates to do the dance all at once. Crime rates within the prison plummeted as a result.

In an interview with the LA Times, Markeljevic jokes that the prison was feeling the “same global ‘Thriller’ consciousness.” It must have been an interesting feeling for the people involved to know that all over the world, other people were doing the same dance at the exact same time. And then they got to watch the videos later.

The idea that you can break a world record in 77 cities at once is a very cool use of the Internet and another global tool: pop culture. I love watching people all over the world interact daily on English, baby! but at present, it’s hard for them to dance together. But if doing the “Thriller” dance can bring peace to a prison, surely it can only do good for the world. And since this year the only non-English speaking country to Thrill the World was Germany, it seems a common language helps foster common moves, so we’ll continue to do our part.

Videos:

The Cebu, Philippines, Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center does “Thriller.” How do you think they picked the guy to play the girl?

The Berlin chapter of Thrill the World dances last weekend. To see all the videos, click here.

Part Ines Markeljevic’s tutorial on the step.

The Cebu, Philippines, Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center doing Soulja Boy. Why don’t American prisons do this?

Do you remember what it was like the first time you taught a class? Were you scared? Were the students wonderful or less than endearing?

Being a new teacher is hard. One of the best things to do is reflect. New teachers need to spend a lot of time reflecting on what works and doesn’t work with students. Even experienced teachers need to do that! But new teachers have so much to think about as they begin to guide students’ learning. And hopefully lead to their success.

If you want, you might share your experiences about when you first started. Leave a comment; I would love it. Otherwise, I have been reading two wonderful blogs by foreign language student teachers at the University of South Carolina (read this one or this one). As an adult ESL teacher, it is wonderful to hear their fresh perspective and hear about teaching in a wildly different context, like a bilingual Kindergarten.

So really this post is a “shout out” to the students at SC who are putting their stories out there for us to read about. It’s great!

As of last Sunday, Zeus and Kinski–the couple who met on English, baby!–have been married for a year. If it seems too soon it’s because we saved the video of their wedding for a Valentine’s Day release.

I wrote to Zeus, aka Faruk, to ask if he could write something brief about his anniversary for the site:

Hi Jason,
Thanks for your nice behaving for our first anniversary.Yes, if we were well we would do it but we are sick (flu) and on the bed, What an anniversary this is Just we can say, our marriage goes on perfect, Hope everybody has a marriage like ours Thanks God for this. And? what else? that’s all. Take care. Be happy and healthy.
Anastasiya and Faruk

It’s a shame they’re sick on their anniversary, but it sounds like everything is going well for them! I’m so glad that English, baby! not only produced a marriage, but healthy one.

Even though it’s been a year since I visited them, I still find myself talking about Zues, Kinski and Turkey to my friends at least once a week or so. I went hoping to get a few shots of their wedding and wound up spending four entire days with them. Since I had such an insider’s view on Turkey, I feel like a got a clearer sense of it than the short time I spent there would imply.

I mean, I rarely bring up Italy or the Czech Republic even though I’ve actually spent more time in those places. It just goes to show that it really pays to make friends before you visit a place. But you won’t find better friends than Zeus and Kinski.

Should your ESL students sound like Brits? Should they sound like Americans? Or does their accent even matter? Recently, I have been working with students on their pronunciation and it has really made me think about what our pronunciation goals should be. Most often, students want to sound like native speakers. Most learners will never get there. And they don’t have to!

I try to make it clear to my students that our goal is comprehensibility and intelligibility. I want people to be able to understand what they are saying. But I don’t see the need to linguistically hide their colorful backgrounds (like the one in this picture).

Accents are wonderful and beautiful. Sadly, in some situations you may be at a disadvantage if you have an accent. But I hope that in the future accents won’t hinder. If anything they should be looked at positively. It shows that someone knows two or more languages.

Still, I am not trying to make a political stand by telling students that they shouldn’t try to sound exactly like a native speaker.  I just would rather have them be understood (which requires using the correct intonation and stress), than know how to say individual English sounds. Honestly, the rising intonation in questions like this one is more important than the American r.

I am not alone in this thinking. The movement towards teaching larger pronunciation rules (called Suprasegmentals)  instead of little sounds is very popular in pronunciation teaching. But it requires teachers to explain that sounding like a native speaker isn’t that important. Which some students just don’t want to hear!

We’ve been keeping track of the global opinion of the US Presidential election for well over a year now, but the international angle has seen a lot of attention recently.

The US uses a system called the Electoral College to determine the winner of a presidential election. Basically, each state is worth a certain number of points based on how many people live there, and the candidate with the most points wins the election.

On their website, The Economist has converted the entire world into an electoral college system. The experiment is on-going but at the time of posting, the only countries supporting John McCain were Macedonia and Georgia. Last week I saw Slovakia turn red and then go back to blue.

This manner of scoring exaggerates the roughly 80%-20% split we have found in our polls. I would be interested to know what is making certain eastern European countries lean toward McCain since I can’t think of anything that would have that effect. Perhaps they like his policy on Russia? It seems both candidates support protecting Russia’s neighbors.

CNN recently released a video with short segments from more than a dozen countries about what they think about the election following the vice presidential debate between McCain’s running mate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska and Obama’s partner, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Except for Russia itself, none of these countries is in eastern Europe, so the questions raised by the global electoral college remain unanswered. But each of the responses are interesting and some of them are very funny. Below is a summary of each report and the video.

* South Korean moms don’t know much about Palin’s policies, but they like that she’s a mom.
* Iraqis are generally too busy with daily life to worry about the US election.
* Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf recently called Palin “gorgeous” which embarrassed some Pakistanis and made others like her.
* The Japanese are primarily concerned with the fact that Palin’s glasses were made by a Japanese designer.
* Both Candidates support Israel, so Israel is happy.
* It was a holiday in Germany the day of the debate, so no one really watched it.
* Kenya loves Obama because his father was Kenyan.
* China seems well-informed and has varied opinions on the election.
* Spain has been mentioned in two debates now as an example of an ally whose leaders McCain refuses to meet with. Naturally, the Spanish lean toward Obama.
* Russia has ridiculed Palin’s claim that living near Russia in Alaska gives her foreign policy experience.
* Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh seems to have taken Palin under his wing, so some Indians like her.
* Nigeria isn’t really following the election but likes Obama because he’s black.
* England is more worried about the US economy than its election.

Image: Sarah Palin surrounded by Vikings, another key global demographic.

“I don’t like the way it sounds,” my student proclaimed after listening to a recording of himself. I had to tell him that I felt the same way about mine.  It’s a little weird to put your voice out there. It can be so much more personal than the written word. But I want to talk about how much more powerful the spoken word can be.

So why do I say that? Because after a certain point in school, some people say fifth grade, students traditionally need to “read to learn.” In other words, they need to be able to read well in order to access the knowledge of math, science, history or even English. By using podcasts, products like Read Please (a software that reads text aloud) and other audio, we are allowing low-level readers to access high-level information. For example in my class, Mario was able to listen to his peers’ stories and edit them for content, which developed his writing skills, without having to struggle with the reading. But even better than traditional oral input, these high tech options allow students to go back and relisten to difficult/complex parts of a reading and make sure they understand what is being said. In essence, students get to learn more content. While this won’t specifically enhance their reading skills, it will build their understanding of the world. Then, they have more to build on when they read.

On the web, audio can be put in everywhere. It is good for directions and introductions, like on my class website. It can help students understand what to do without requiring them to understand written directions. So for all the teachers out there working with low-level readers or building web content for ESOL students, don’t forget audio. It is priceless!