Ebaby! Blog

ESL students spend a lot of time online and it can be a great opportunity for them to meet native English speakers. I mean, 85% of American college students are on Facebook and the majority are active members. Our ESL/EFL students could be meeting a lot of Americans online.

But more than the obvious social benefits, social networking can improve students’ English. Just look around English, baby! and you can see how social networking lets learners experiment with language in a friendly, communicative setting. Still, not many people are convinced that social networking can or should be integrated into the classroom. It’s a nice extracurricular activity, but most teachers can’t see the teaching potential.

Well, the truth is social networking is great reading and writing practice! And I am going to take advantage of that in my ESL class. I am integrating social networking sites into a reading strategies lesson. One important reading strategy is inference. Inference means interpreting beyond what is actually written and making bigger conclusions. Look around any social networking site and you’ll find there is a lot to infer. People say one thing, but they mean another. My students are going to use this handout that I found online. The handout wasn’t developed to be used with social networking profiles, but it helps students separate what people say from what they mean. And it seems to fit perfectly with the activity. Students will write a few quotes from a profile and say what they think they mean on the handout. Then, they will write a paragraph about what they think about the person.

Here is an example of inference from lastbreath. His profile was the first one I read today. He says, “Things I Like: romantic dinner” He means, “I like romance. I want romance.” He says, “Favorite Movie: romantic and romantic comedy” He means, “I am a good boyfriend and I really want romance ,” and maybe, “I want a girlfriend.” You could even infer things from his screen name.

The point is that as teachers we need to monopolize on our students’ free time. They spend a lot of time online and an English social networking site will really help their English. It will improve their reading skills and maybe it will make it easier for them to make inferences.

This is just one idea. And we need to think of more ideas because online social networking is a great way for ESL students to practice reading and writing.

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.

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.

It’s no big secret that rhymes help people remember things. Kids can learn using nursery rhymes, so why not ESL students too? Perhaps that’s what EnglishToday had in mind when they set out to produce a series of video limericks to help you learn English.

It’s a valiant attempt, but rhyming is harder than you think. Sure you’ve got “right, tight; lefty loosie” useful mnemonic devises, but rhymes aren’t usually that convenient. You commonly have to compromise meaning or word choice pretty heavily in order to get the job done.

This limerick about Maggie the Millipede is one of the best ones. I had to double check if it was already an existing limerick, but I think it’s original.

Some of the limerick videos are just this very, very British man talking into the camera in funny hats, which is pretty endearing. They did a good job of structuring these for YouTube. The meat of the video (the limerick), is at the beginning and there’s a bunch of silly stuff afterward in case you want to keep watching.

The only problem here is that the limerick is almost a tongue twister and is actually pretty tough to follow (Is “nobbled” a common word in the UK? I had to look it up. Spell check doesn’t even recognize it as a word.). This one about a three legged cat is pretty tough as far as English vocab goes as well. But the extras after the limerick are hilarious. I burst out laughing when clip art started landing on the cat’s back near the end.