new classes!

I have finally launched out on my own, hired a hall and started my own Spanish classes for adults. It's a different experience but one that I'm thoroughly enjoying!

Sevilla , diciembre del 2010

Tapas

 

My beginners class had a memorable tapas meal last night. They thoroughly enjoyed practising their Spanish. I took loads of photos of them ordering, eating and paying for their food and they all practised asking the waiter questions about himself. Next, I shall ask them to provide Spanish captions for all the photos!

Chile and Argentina 2010

Another wonderful trip to Latin America, new friendships formed and inspiring life stories heard.

When I came back after Easter the six week summer course at Intermediate Plus Level started. This will prepare students for the advanced course in September, so we have been consolidating this year's work on the subjunctive mood. We've also had Isabel from Chile as a volunteer. Students wanted to know more about Chilean food, transport, history and the poetry of Pablo Neruda, so we have been weaving these topics into our classes. Six weeks is not enough!

class videos

This term our Intermediate Plus group have been preparing short videos about why they are learning Spanish and what the challenges of learning a language are for them. We have been working on increasing oral fluency and better pronunciation and imitating the 'music' of the language. The aim was to talk naturally and to rely on prompts as little as possible.

This sort of work takes a long time and several attempts each at the videos. We used inexpensive, easy to operate Busbi videocameras, so the picture quality is not the greatest, but acceptable for our purposes. Here's an example of a video clip one of the learners made.




If you listen to the video all the way through, I think one thing you won't agree with is when the speaker says she doesn't think she has the language skills to undertake a trip to South America. She is just being very modest! In fact another of my learners from this class made a solo trip around Venezuela for a month last November and managed really well. Her confidence in speaking Spanish has soared this year!

Our new language volunteer

In a previous post I wrote about the Adult Learning Language volunteers scheme in our area , which was awarded the Mary Glasgow annual award in 2009.

I now have another volunteer, Bea , who has just started helping with one of my adult classes. Bea is from Gran Canaria but has recently moved to England to live.

Here is Bea, (above, first left) reading some question cards in a new game ' Viaje a España', one of an excellent series of board games by the Eli company. This was excellent listening comprehension for the learners , testing them on vocabulary, grammar, and Spanish history, geography and culture.

And here's another view of our classroom with Bea and another learner. ( note : laptop, portable Smart Board- we're doing well with the technology hardware now in Adult Learning - we now use digital video cameras and recorders as well!)

In her first session with us, Bea also explained (in Spanish of course) how the Spanish of the Canary Islands differs from Castilian Spanish . I had been aware that the c before e and i and the z were pronounced as s rather than th, but I didn't know in the Canary Islands they used the 'ustedes' rather than the vosotros form, as in Latin America. The cultural and language enrichment which comes from having a volunteer in the class benefits us all, learners and tutors alike.

BETT 2010

As a first time ever visitor to BETT, the world's leading educational technology exhibition, I was struck by the immense size of it all and by the crowds that were there, even on the final day. For some years now I have been going to the Language Show, but this one is an order of magnitude bigger.

I have to say that my main reason for going was to meet some of my friends from ALL, Second Life and Twitter and only secondarily to look at the exhibits, as most of them are geared to school education and many entail the outlay of considerable investment in the cutting edge software and hardware. But I am always fascinated to see what is going on in ed tech in all sectors. How language laboratories have changed since my secondary school teaching days! In those days back in the earlier 90's taking certain classes to the language lab was something to be dreaded, as the pupils were enclosed in litlle closed off booths which afforded all kinds of opportunities for destructive behaviour such as inserting magnets or sticking chewing gum in the tape recording equipment whilst the teacher was trying to operate the very complex console. It all looks so much more fun, more creative and easier to operate now.

Like the Language Show in the autumn, BETT is also free to get in , and there are loads of interesting seminars, either bookable or just ones where you turn up . I just happened to be passing a talk by Stephen Heppell of Bournemouth University on 'Playful Learning', and stopped to listen to his animated presentation. There were some impressive interactive whiteboard exhibits and every other technology you could think of- this year I only had time to see a tiny bit and you certainly need comfortable shoes as there is a lot of walking involved.

Feliz Año Nuevo

Happy New year to everyone!

Snow has delayed the beginning of the Adult Learning term, so it´s time now to get back into blogging and reflect a bit on last term.

Things have been changing fast. We´re all having to adapt to new exam specs which have meant a large amount of extra paperwork. Learners now have to meet 100% of the specified criteria, rather than the previous pass mark of 70%. At least they can have as many attempts at the assessments as they need now, and we have a lot more leeway over the topic fields chosen.

I have been able to develop the Learning platform a lot more last term and this has been one of the most enjoyable and creative parts of my work. Most of the learners seem to appreciate it too, although it is always an uphill battle to get some learners to use it. Success in a language is just not going to come by some process of osmosis. It's like the inscription that my husband, with tongue in cheek, wrote in a book about Windows 7 that he gave me for Christmas :

'DISCLAIMER-Possesssion of this book does not, in and of itself, ensure the acquisition of the knowledge contained within!'

(hmmm.. I have still not put my iTunes music onto my iPhone despite having a book which has a whole chapter about it! )

Language learning requires perseverance, passion and self knowledge, knowing how you learn best and how to seek out what will help your learning. As tutors we are far more aware now of different learning styles. New technologies make it much easier to provide a greater variety of visual , auditory and kinaesthetic activities. I love to add a lot of visual material to the Learning Platform, and our 'Moodle' is to be updated this year so that richer media can be embedded. We now have new Busbi video recorders and sound recorders to eventually replace the old cassettes. So as long as we don't have another great snowfall (unlikely down here on the coast) my classes are going to be playing with some new equipment next week!

And finally, I'm looking forward to my first visit to BETT next weekend, and .. I have just booked flights to Chile this Easter!

texts, SMS,

We´ve been trying out some new things in the Intermediate class recently . There´s now a Wiki on the learning platform , which I hope will develop into a script for a podcast in a few weeks time. And last week I invited learners to send me texts (SMS) during the class, using textspeak if they wished. Here are a couple ! ( :-Q = acatarrado, full of a cold ! x =por)

1492 and all that - la Fiesta Nacional and the pitfalls of teaching 'culture'

One of my most important Personal Learning Networks is the mfl resources forum. Yesterday there was a link on the forum to this song by Mecano.




There's a link at the side of the original You Tube video to another series of clearly narrated videos about the history and culture of the Americas, in Spanish, from artehistoria.com.
This one is 'el descubrimiento de América'




Well, it seems a nice historical story which affords plenty of opportunities to recognise and work on past tenses, in a cultural context. And perhaps the lower level classes might find it difficult to go any further than that in the target language. Most of my learners were surprised to hear that Columbus was not actually looking for the Americas but for the spice-laden Indies.

However, other implications of the discovery cannot be romanticised. Because of course, this national holiday is not universally 'celebrated'. For many the overtones of colonialisation, and the spreading of 'Hispanidad' by force, are repellent, and no cause for celebration. That's why I 've put a link to this Wikipedia article in English onto my learning platform pages, which describes how the holiday in viewed in other countries and communities besides Castilian Spain. Indeed, some Catalan friends on Twitter yesterday told us they were going to work today as usual, and to **** with 'la Hispanitat'!

Trying to give learners just some small picture of the diversity of the Spanish speaking world is always a real challenge! What I can hope for is to give a few pointers and stimulate a bit of curiosity so that they can discover more for themselves.

¡Hola a tod@s!

We´re a few weeks into our term and classes are settling in well now. It is so satisfying to be teaching learners who really want to learn and who bring their unique contributions to the classes!

I heard somewhere recently that Web 2.0 is not a technology, it´s an attitude. An attitude of sharing and collaborating which crosses all boundaries, which is changing the whole way we teach and learn.

Talking about nationalities, I´ve just been looking at my ClustrMap, (scroll down, to the right)and I see that people from many parts of the world have been finding this blog recently. Welcome to you all and thank you for reading! I hope you will find some useful resources here (please check out some of the older posts too) and will get in contact and tell me about your adult language classes too.

hasta la próxima....

waiting for the beginning of term

Less than a week to go before classes start again. As always at this time of the year, some classes are nearly but not quite viable. Will we have a few late enrollers to bump the numbers up? Not to mention those who may just turn up on the night.
Adult learning is becoming more and more expensive for the learner as government subsidies are being gradually reduced year on year. This is having a definite effect on the numbers of beginners in Spanish. Years ago we used to have full beginners classes, now it's difficult to get a beginners class off the ground. But at least we have an Adult Learning service in this area- there are already large areas of the UK where there is no provision at all.

more visual aids to conversation - wordles and photo collages

Photo collages are easy to make using a free application such as Picasa and learners can easily make their own and use as prompts to talk about their holidays or free time activities or interests. Having the visual stimulus makes it so much more interesting for the others in the group and keeps their mind on the task!

Last September in this blog I wrote about Wordle This turned out to be popular with the learners from my intermediate group. We used 'wordles' to form a kind of learner 'profile'. Learners interviewed others early on in the course, practising question and answer techniques and writing a resumé of their findings which was then converted into a Wordle, printed up and laminated. A few weeks later, as an icebreaker activity, I gave the 'wordles' numbers and stuck them on the walls. I then asked learners to assign the right name to each 'wordle', using both reading and speaking skills to find out information from others. During the year the 'wordles' were used for other group conversation activities and finally learners took their own 'wordle' home at the end of the course.

Cute Alert!

This could be a nice Spanish song to use in class for beginners ..'yo soy tu amigo....'. Or look at this blog for activities and the complete text of the song - Asociación Argentina de Docentes de Español

It's got a simple catchy tune, just like this one which practises the days of the week.


It may be cutesy but all my beginners loved it. Music fixes language in the brain like nothing else.

Volver, Argentina and blipping

All my Wednesday classes have now finished for the summer and so there's a bit more time to catch up with blog writing and also spend a bit more time just doing fun things, like starting to put together a music compilation on blip.fm. I suppose blip.fm is like a musical version of Twitter- instead of 'tweets' you 'blip' music of any genre, which you can search for. You can make your own lists and listen to other 'DJ's'. I was interested to find this 'blip' today (scroll down and click on 'play')



In my third year class we have been watching the Almodóvar film Volver over a couple of weeks at the end of term. If you have seen the film you will remember Penélope Cruz singing this song. What I didn´t know was that it was originally a Carlos Gardel song. Carlos Gardel was *the* big name in tango music In Buenos Aires in the 1930's, and there is a small square named after him, where we went to a rather over-priced tango show when I was there at Easter.. but that's another story.

The European Award for Languages - success for Adult Learning!

We've heard so much gloom and doom recently about adult courses being cut. Some regions in the UK no longer offer any public sector adult leisure courses. So it's encouraging to have some good news for once and to be able to celebrate!

We recently heard that Dorset Adult Learning has been awarded one of the prestigious CILT European Awards for Languages for 2009. To qualify for these awards, projects have to be creative, innovative, have an international dimension and also be replicable - that is, the same kind of project could feasibly be carried out in other areas or even countries.

Just under three years ago, Corinne Middlemiss, our curriculum manager, had the idea for a new 'Volunteers in MFL' scheme. Secondary schools have welcomed language assistants in their classrooms for many years but the concept had never been piloted in adult learning classes in the UK before. Initially native speakers who had been learning English as a foreign language with Adult Learning were invited to become volunteers in language classes as an assistant to the class tutor. The first volunteer was a young lady from Chile who became a volunteer in two of my own classes. So far we have had French, German and Spanish speaking volunteers, and the scheme has been extended to include members of the wider community, both native speakers and those who have lived in another country for many years. Corinne has overseen the project, monitoring its progress and evaluating the outcomes, and volunteers are offered training and support.

Having a volunteer in a class does entail some extra preparation by the tutor before each class, but the benefits of having a volunteer are enormous. Small group, carousel activities are much easier to manage with the help of a volunteer. Apart from the varied types of language practice input that a volunteer can give to small groups of learners, there's an extra cultural dimension. Isabel from Chile helped my learners to appreciate that Spanish is a world wide language and that customs and ways of saying things can be very diverse on different sides of the ocean!

Have any readers outside Europe heard of any similar schemes in adult language classes, perhaps in EFL classes?

addendum - Breaking News 30.06.09 We have just heard that the same project has been awarded the Mary Glasgow Trust annual award of £2000 for the European Award for Languages which best impressed the Trust's judges!

El anuario de la clase

It's nearly the end of the year for most of our classes. My intermediate class has been producing a class yearbook, which we hope will be ready for the last class next week. One learner has done a 'Wordle'. Another has produced a page which is a lovely mash-up of a screen shot of one of their favourite internet Spanish sites and some class photos. There's a word search on one of our topics this year- Services and Emergencies. I've just received this contribution from a learner who has produced a 'glog' about imperatives, which she planned and directed unaided.

'Glogs' are an effective way for a learner to make a grammar point become alive, and to involve the rest of the class too. I'm hoping that in the next academic year we can start to use video too and hopefully produce some podcasts!

Animoto - Argentina and Uruguay

and here it is....

Animoto for Education

I 've wanted to try Animoto for some time, having read so much about it in other blogs. I signed up for an Education account a few days ago. This means you can make longer videos and it's free for educational institutions. Your students can also make theirs and share them with other students.
For the first one I just put in my Argentina and Uruguay photos again., just to see what happened. The idea is to encourage my students to make their own videos on Hispanic travel and themes and see what emerges.

Argentina and Uruguay Easter 2009

Here's just a selection of my photos from Argentina and Uruguay, i.e minus the ones of me trying to get on a horse - but including about half a dozen from a supermarket in Uruguay which have some essential food, drink and shops vocabulary and prices in Uruguayan pesos, the sort of photos that only teachers take!

My travelling friend Wanda (also a teacher, formerly of Spanish but now on a year's contract doing secondary Maths!) and I are already planning next year's trip.... Planning it all ourselves meant that we got to meet so many more lovely people and felt we could get much more under the skin of the culture this time, compared with our previous visits in groups to Peru and Cuba. We stayed in a variety of accommodation , including student digs for a week, two days on an estancia relaxing and horse riding (well, for half an hour!) , three days in an aparthotel on the coast in Montevideo, and even a five star hotel in Bs As for two nights, booked over the internet at a price which would have got you a Travellodge in central London.

Yes, we watched tango indoors and out of doors and even did an hour's tango class. We spent hours and hours talking about Argentine history, politics and psychology to people of very varied opinions. On Good Friday we watched a very moving Via Crucis, and noticed how the Easter procession was much more low key with very few statues compared with similar events on mainland Spain. We took the ferry from Bs As to Montevideo, met one of my friends from 'Second Life', Alicia , who owns a business English school in Montevideo. We also met a few cats , dogs horses and a tarantula along the way (health warning - the slideshow includes a photo which may upset arachnophobes!) And finally, we could not fail to notice the names of the two rival football teams in Buenos Aires are Boca Juniors and River Plate (that's enough football - ed. !).

the Twitterverse

Twitter has had a lot of publicity recently. Some say it's just a way of letting the world know what you're having for breakfast, others rely on it for keeping in touch with the most up to the minute information from all over the world.

I got myself a Twitter account at the end of the last year. I wouldn't say I am a prolific 'tweeter' and I certainly don't give a running commentary on what I'm doing throughout the day --well that would be too much like ...talk to cats, look at emails ... stroke cats.... make coffee... read book with cat on lap etc etc. I tend just to reply to other peoples' tweets and from time to time post a link which might be interesting to someone in my network of mainly language teachers or educationalists.

Recently I used Twitter in a beginner's class. I asked people in my network if they would like to say hello to my students


Fairly soon we got a few replies saying hello, including this one from a teacher in Ohio who has always been so generous in sharing resources. Recently we were both doing Food and Drink and Imperatives with our classes and we pooled our PowerPoints and other resources.


When we had got a few replies I asked our learners to compose a reply to one of them

and later on another tweet came back in Spanish commenting on the weather in another part of the world!

Twitter is very easy to use. More advanced learners could ask questions and seek opinions and see what comes back, and from where ! And the answers won't be too long... in this kind of 'microblogging' you can't write more than 140 characters.