BICS and CALP in a nutshell
BICS and CALP was an idea first proposed by Prof Jim Cummins in the early 1980s. BICS stands for Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills, and CALP is Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency. Here’s what they are:
‘BICS refers to conversational fluency in a language while CALP refers to students’ ability to understand and express, in both oral and written modes, concepts and ideas that are relevant to success in school’ (Cummins 2008: 108).
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Phrasal verb resource books you’ve used… GO!
Okay, so there was a good one on the bookshelf at LTC called ‘Illustrated Phrasal Verbs’. Me and Sketch used it so often that the student’s book fell apart (only one copy – a conference freebie), then we had to photocopy pages from the teacher’s book and tipex out the answers to make gap-fills. When I think back, the illustrations were sometimes ambiguous, and we were all too often test-teach-testing it. Not always the most effective.
Apart from that, well… There was ‘Test Your Phrasal Verbs’ (so so) and Phrasal Verbs in Use. Although more of a self-study resource, its concise explanations were great for teachers too. All controlled practice though, not a classroom resource really. Well, sparingly.
Here’s a welcome addition to my (admittedly limited) phrasal verb teaching toolkit – Work It Out with Phrasal Verbs, from Prosperity Education. It’s a neat teaching resource (aimed at B2-C1 level students) written by Billie Jago and Monica Ruda-Peachey.
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Just a few things this time. I’m out the loop at the moment, enjoying my teaching too much!
Facebook groups for writers
There are a lot of Facebook groups for ELT writers these days. If you would like to share a link to your group then please let me know (or do so yourself in the comments). I don’t know which groups are open to new members/restricted/etc.
ELTon results
Congrats to all ELTons winners, which you can find here.
ELT Footprint – probably the most odds-on victory since the awards started I’d imagine.
Taking nothing away from winners past/present with this comment: I think there are aspects of the ELTons nomination process that could be tightened – BC please get in touch if you’d like to hear my suggestions 🙂
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Onestopenglish is still free at the moment. This is a great opportunity to make the most of their awesome resources. There’s so much available on the site: lesson plans, articles related to methodology, resources created by the Onestopenglish community… they’ve also been teaming up with institutions like NILE recently to provide tips for teachers.
I’ve written a few resources for site over the past year which I hope you will find interesting and useful. Most of them are for the Everyday Life series. They’re print-and-go adult General English resources, complete with teacher notes and student worksheets. These are often task-led and typically suit 1 – 1.5 hour lessons.
Everyday Life Lesson Topics:
Article /resource for the Online Education series:
Lesson Share Winning Resource:
Instant Coffee, a Black Mirror inspired short story with resources (for approximately three hours of class time)
Feedback on any of these resources is most welcome! I hope they come in handy for your own lessons.
Russ Mayne suggested I should have a post or page listing all my reviews. So, here it is.
It turns out there are quite a few. As always, all views are my own and these reviews are highly subjective!
Before the list, some highlights…
Note: the * shows that at the time I didn’t give the resource a 5-star rating, so I’ve added it now.
Apps
2020 Teacher Tapp (Rating 3.8/5)
2020 Studycat (3.5/5)
2020 Learn Thai Duolingo-style (*4/5)
2017 ELSA Speak Pronunciation App (*4/5)
2017 British Council Apps (*Rating probs averages out at 4/5 but this one is a bit vague)
Online resource sites
2020 Read to Run (*Rating 3.5/5)
2020 EAL Hub (2/5)
2020 NILE Membership (*4.5/5)
2019 Wordwall for vocabulary games (*4.5/5)
2018 Fluentize video lessons (4.5/5)
2015 Newsmart (4.5/5) RIP ☹
Training courses/modules/providers
2020 PGCEi Module 2 (*4.5/5)
2020 PGCEi Module 1 (*4.7/5)
2019 Spoken Grammar (5/5)
2019 Evaluating Digital Materials (5/5)
2019 NILE Tech-assisted Language Learning (4/5)
2019 NILE Materials Development (4.5/5)
2018 ELT Training Library from Language Fuel (4/5)
2015 How to Teach IELTS (*4.5/5)
2016 Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching (4.5/5)
Books
2020 Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners (*4/5)
2020 Rosenshine’s Principles in Action (3.9/5)
2020 How Global Capital is Remaking International Education (3.5/5)
2020 Barry Reinvents Himself (4.325/5)
2020 Silly Shakespeare for Students (4.9/5)
2020 The Learning Power Approach (4/5)
2019 Play for the Planet (4/5)
2019 A-Z of ESOL (*4.2/5)
2019 Teaching English as a Lingua Franca (4.5/5)
2019 Egghead (3.5/5)
2019 Loving London (4.5/5)
2019 Vocabulary in Pictures (*4.2/5)
2018 Stories Without End (*4.5/5)
2018 ELT Lesson Observation and Feedback Handbook (4.5/5)
2018 Great Writing (4.6/5)
2018 Her Own Worst Enemy (4.5/5)
2017 Successful Group Work (*4/5)
2017 Community Classroom Builders (*4/5)
2016 Incredible English (*4.3/5)
2015 Punctuation..? (*3/5)
Other
ELT Publishing Professionals (*4.5/5)
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
WordAds… ah, go on then.
I didn’t want to make money from my blog. I had my reasons for that, which were basically…
What changed?
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Here are a couple of game-based resources you could use for EAL learners reading Varjak Paw. Our Year 4 students have really enjoyed the book (I did too, although I didn’t like the ending!).
Anyhow, here’s a Kahoot! to play at the end of the book:
Before reading, I found it useful to prime learners for some cat-specific vocab that might pop up!
Cat related words (one of my more random Wordwalls)
I anagrammed that one too, see here.
Also, here’s a hangman of terms from earlier in the book, things like Contessa, humiliation, fireplace, insect, guard, etc. I found that guessing these prompted some discussion, so you could use the activity to teach phrases for probably (It could be… Maybe it’s… It’s definitely….!).
Just a quick review resource for EAL learners. Our Year 9s were studying key events in WW2, including:
Here are a couple of Wordwalls to help with reviewing the events / keywords related to them.
World War Two events key facts
You might find them useful. Wordwall activities don’t seem to show up in Google searches so sharing some useful ones here might be best.
I had to induct a new teacher at school once. They were fairly new to teaching and unfamiliar with our in-house product at the time (called myClass). I thought that listening to me ramble on for half an hour about how to approach the planning would be boring. So, I decided a one-page ‘try it like this’ would be better. And a tad less condescending*. Here was that one page.
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What might be optimal ESL provision in international schools?
Alderfer and Alderfer (2011) state that there is no unifying set of criteria to assess ESL programs in international school contexts. Their research sets out to provide one.
The authors outline four categories through which ESL programs can be assessed:
