Humor4u

Round-up My blog celebrates its first birthday today. It’s been a busy year so I haven’t blogged as often as I should have – probably below the recommended once a week average. But I hope you've enjoyed my posts or rather used in class some of my ideas and activities. It seems Would you like it gift-wrapped? was my most viewed post in 2011, followed by the Cycles of Recycling . Among the highlights of the year was speaking at two international conferences: IATEFL in Brighton in April and TESOL France in November not to mention a handful of local ones including the prestigious EnglishForum at the MOFET Institute. Another defining moment was finally joining Twitter. Better late than never – and apparently I am in good company because Simon Cowell, Christina Aguilera and the Pope have all joined this year too! (according to this review ). Thanks to Twitter I got to know lots of other enthusiastic teachers who, unlike me, blog on a more regular basis and are passionate about teaching

Those of you who have been to my workshops or read my articles on TeachingEnglish  are perhaps surprised why someone who advocates teaching vocabulary in chunks would even pose a question like this. However, several research papers I read a few years ago while doing my Master's in TESOL made me rethink the issue of contextualisation and try out new things. Besides, as you will see in a moment, learning  words in chunks and learning vocabulary in context are not the same things. In and out of context   Traditionally, in the first lesson of the New Year I discuss with my students the main events and news stories of the past year - a news roundup of some sort. This normally involves a quiz which I prepare based on various news items: politics, entertainment, sports, disasters as well as some quirky news stories -  (see the 2011 one  here ).  The questions in the quiz are not aimed so much at testing students’ general knowledge, but rather stimulating discussions, encouraging them to l

Video dictogloss A dictogloss is an integrated skills activity in which a teacher dictates a text at normal speed and students note down as much information as they can. Students then work in groups and try to reconstruct the original text. In the video version of a dictogloss, students follow a particular character in a scene and note down all their lines. Then they work with another student in order to reconstruct the dialogue. For this activity I use a scene from Love Actually (2003).  Procedure Pre-task Option 1: Freeze Frame Show students a short snippet of the clip and pause. Elicit where the scene takes place (jewellery section of a department store). Ask students what language they are likely to hear in this scene and tell them to write as many expressions, collocations and key words as they can think of, e.g.  “How can I help you?” “How much is it?” “Can I have it gift-wrapped please?” etc. Option 2: Sound off Play the whole scene without sound and do the same language elicit

Last month, Romain and I once again braved Bay Area rush hour traffic and gave a couple of talks at the SF Android user group. Those talks were recorded and are now posted online: An Introduction to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) This talk overviews some of the user and developer features of the new Android 4.0 release, through slides and demos. We also got side-swiped by a massive Q&A phase in the middle; always interesting to see what's on peoples's minds (and maybe even answer those questions sometimes). Sticky GUIs This talk discusses some principles, approaches, and techniques in graphics, animation, layouts, and performance that may help you create better and more usable UI applications. (The ICS recording has interesting audio. It reminds me of early efforts at "stereo" with the Chet instrument coming out of your left speaker and the Romain instrument coming out of your right speaker. But the recordings are very good otherwise. And maybe it's better

The tribulation is a purported period of a seven year misery for humanity--according to prophetic scriptures, or some translations of them. It is written "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be." Matthew 24:21" Setting religious connotation aside--we could be forgiven if we engage in idle conjecture around the topic of a "great tribulation"... for certainly in the fast waning days of 2011 we have been exposed to inordinate displays of misery inducing events over the past several years. Most notably... Ever escalating natural and man-caused Eco-disasters... Coupled with a seemingly inevitable total collapse of global economic structure... Garnished with a noticeable upheaval of many countries engaged in governance overthrow and replacement. Certainly these conditions and events could be viewed as conditions worthy of a tribulation period. If I had to guess I would

There is a widespread belief among teachers that collocations are only reserved for higher levels. Likewise, there is a popular misconception that authentic video can only be used with higher levels. This short and fun activity proves otherwise. It is based on a film clip, it focuses on collocations and it’s aimed at Elementary level students. Procedure Preparation You will need a DVD of the animated film “Flushed Away”. The scene starts at 1:17 (“when the cat’s away the mice will play”) and ends at 3:14 (“Goodnight”). Or use the Youtube clip below: Click here to download COLLOCATION CARDS or do this ONLINE QUIZ   Make a few copies of the page and cut it up so that you have at least one set for a group of 3-4 students. Pre-task Give students collocation cards and ask them to match the verbs with the nouns they go with. While watching – Watch & Observe Tell students to watch the clip and put the cards in the right order – the order the main character (the Mouse) does the activities.

It is the time of year when the ELT blogosphere celebrates its heroes – dedicated teachers who, with unrelenting enthusiasm and passion share with us their ideas, insights and inspiration. These are my nominations for these year’s Edublog Awards. Best individual blog -  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/ Scott Thornbury’s posts on  An A to Z of ELT  always generate a lot comments and provoke debate. Even though I am not yet convinced that Dogme is the ultimate way to go in the post-methods era, it is always a pleasure to listen to Scott at conferences and read his thought-provoking posts. He was very critical of the Lexical Approach once, calling it a journey without maps, but then went on to produce A Natural Grammar, best lexical grammar book ever penned! Best new blog -  http://allatc.wordpress.com/   I met Steve at TESOL France less than a month ago. He is just as passionate as myself about using video in the classroom, although our tastes and choices are somewhat different. Best

I spent last week at Devoxx , giving several talks with Romain Guy about Android (graphics, GUIs, performance, the latest developer features ... the usual). Now that I've recovered from a total system collapse over the weekend (apparently the body does insist on getting a little sleep now and then), I thought I'd post some thoughts and also the slides from our presentations. Thoughts Devoxx is my favorite developer conference. It is a perfect mix of highly technical (focused on developers, not business/marketing/PR), inexpensive (at 350-700 Euros, it's quite a deal for 2-5 days of full technical content of this caliber, even at the current exchange rate of 1 Euro == $97,000.02), and personal (it's a relatively small, single venue, so you're all together there in the talks, in the lobby, in the hallways, and on the show floor). And it's in an interesting venue (Antwerp, while not balmy in November, is a far more interesting location to return to than, say, San

I'm starting to prepare presentations for the ~8 hours of talks that Romain and I are giving at Devoxx in a couple of weeks. "Preparing" generally entails mostly worrying, followed by a mad rush of writing slides and code at night, on the long flight, after beers, between talks, and sometimes during the talks. It's a busy time of year. I realized that the organizers of Devoxx had recently released all of the recorded talks from last year into the wild (read: they're free on parleys.com ), so it seemed worth linking to them in case anyone wanted to see what we had to say last time around. I'll give a plug for the conference and the Parleys site here. If there were an ad banner, it'd go here. Not because I'm paid (I would make a poor ad salesman, apparently), but because I think that both the conference and the parleys site rock. The organizers do a great job of putting it all together, and the recordings and presentation of the talks on parleys.com

Another startling revelation - climates of planets SHIFT over time! WOW! According to a growing body of scientific work... it is now thought that planets are not isolated space bodies locked into a perpetual climatic state. After spending billions of dollars on research it is coming to light planets are in fact climatically dynamic and regardless of inhabitant activity have a tendency to move through what appears to be an endless cycle of climatic change. Here I was--being council-led that because I live and breath I was in fact the reason for change in our current "sweet spot" climate condition... and... if I did not mend my ways and/or pay exorbitant climate control taxes we would all surely perish from inclement and hostile climate conditions. I should have suspected a trick I suppose. That being said, humanity... or rather some human behaviors begat of stark naked greed and outright avarice have conspired over the years to rape, pillage and squander huge tracts of pristin

The 2011 global "Bribe Players Index" has been released showing a world economy greased by bribery! For some of us... that is hardly a startling revelation or surprise, it is fairly obvious to any student of corruption and shady practices--bribery being but one of these standard elitist greed plays. Bribe Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person's views or conduct. Something serving to influence or persuade.  Bribery, a form of corruption, is an act implying money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient.  Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty. The bribe is the gift bestowed to influence the recipient's conduct. It may be any money, good, right in action, property, preferment, privilege

Sometime in March the day after the Oscar ceremony, one of my Facebook friends posted: Mazal Tov to the King's Speech! to which I replied: Leo Selivan   and Strangers No More - the best short documentary about Rogozin School in Tel Aviv 16 hours ago   ·   Like (I was rooting for the film to win since a little over a week earlier I had visited the school with a delegation from the UK ).  My comment prompted a somewhat sarky reply from another Facebooker (the name has been changed): Sarky Facebooker   I didn't realise that there an Oscar category for documentaries about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv. Seems like a case of over-specialisation to me. 13 hours ago   ·   Like   ·    1 person Admittedly my sentence was not very well formed and had I been writing it, say for this blog, I should have written “and Strangers No More, a documentary about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, which won in the Best Short Documentary category” .  But considering the chatty nature of Facebook po