Get Organized!

Graphic organizers help readers with comprehension and retention problems by arranging the events, details and characters of a story visually. At the 2009 GED/HSED conference I got an introduction to a multitude of formats to make the abstract visible. You can choose one you think might help your learner and, if the first one doesn't work, try another. Here is one organizer from the website
graphicorganizers.com/:

It organizes a story by asking the Who? What? When? Why? questions a reporter asks and leaves room at the bottom to draw a conclusion. Below you can see a similar organizer that takes on Chapter 11 of Huckleberry Finn,
a relatively complex story. In this case each minor event has its own question at the top of the box and below it the learner fills in the answers as he reads or rereads the story. The site linked here has 41 organizers — Venn circles, character studies, branching diagrams and others.

Another very nice website is freeology.com. In addition to graphic organizers you will find worksheets and word games to play. Like graphicorganizers.com it has many different ways to arrange story elements visually. One of my favorites, for its simplicity and directness, is the cause-and-effect organizer. Here is a screen grab of that item:

I filled in this organizer with details from the Wikipedia entry for the topic of global warming. You and your learner might organize some of the thoughts as you see at left. You could just as easily run the organizer backwards, starting with effects and then listing their causes beneath them. Everyone's mind works differently, which is why it's such a good thing that there are so many different organizers out there. Please give it a look and see what might work for your learner's mind. You might try it out on your own first, graphically organizing a story from the newspaper before you try it with your learner. Best of luck, and have fun!

Hello, ELLLO

English Listening Lesson Library, or ELLO.org, is an extraordinary website for teachers and learners who want a chance to hear natural but easy-to-understand conversation. Four tabs across the top take you to four different areas.
The Views tab has literally hundreds of stories of real people sharing personal experiences on hundreds of topics. Each story has a transcript you can follow along with. The home page holds the most recent stories, but you can search for other topics you don't see at first. I searched for some very ordinary terms, e.g. childcare, safety, movie, dating. Each of those searches turned up more stories than I had time to listen to.
Speakers take care to talk at a leisurely pace and use clear diction. When a speaker uses an idiomatic expression a link pops up in the transcript. Click on that and an audio player pops up to give a concise definition. Here is a screen-grab of that audio player:

It's easy to pause the story for a quick explanation of the new vocabulary term.

Mixer, according to the site, is " a listening activity that features six speakers. Each speaker answers the same question. Students can listen to the answers for fun or test their listening comprehension by answering the questions."

Game lets you test your listening comprehension by clicking on one of four pictures. I, a native speaker, made a few mistakes on that one. The fact that some of the people have Australian, French or other foreign accents adds a measure of difficulty to the challenge.

STeP resembles a Voice of America program in Special English. It features someone talking with careful English teacher diction about a topic. Listeners can participate in a timed comprehension quiz.

News features a cartoon newsreader who reads imaginary news stories. Her lips move and illustrations change behind her while she reads each piece. Interactive quizzes test what the listener has retained.

In most cases you can download the stories to your computer or iPod as MP3 files . I downloaded one three-minute file in less than half a minute. Tutors or teachers should be able to download these audio files and give them to their students on CDs as homework, or simply as something to listen to while they drive to work or do the dishes. I often assert that homework is anything that gets your learner exposure to English between lessons. For those who don't have ready access to a computer with broadband, the public libraries are a great option. Elllo is here, its fun, it's rich with stories. I hope you get a chance to look at it.

Soap and Water

I learned something very important during October, also known as Health Literacy Awareness Month. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA asserts that frequent and effective hand washing is the single most important factor in avoiding the flu. Most diseases, they say, are spread by hand contact.

Of course, good washing also helps prevent other infectious diseases such as coughs and colds. Here is a link to a video for you to watch on your own and/or with your learner. The health educators on the clip speak slowly and clearly and the images help a lot.

So, tutors and teachers, consider a field trip to the sink with your learners. The embedded video suggests washing for the time it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" twice, which for me takes about fifteen seconds. Grade schools sometimes suggest the alphabet-in English, of course. What song can you come up with to keep your learner in the sudsy for the full fifteen seconds? My latest idea is to try doing an alphabet with some phonetic key words. You can print this list on a card and use it if you like:

A ant, B bag, C cat, D dab, E egg, F full, G go, H hand, I ill, J jar, K kid, L lip, M man, N nut, O on, P pill, Q queen, R rug, S suds, T tub, U up, V van, W wash, X ax, Y yellow, Z zipper

I kept the words limited to fairly concrete, easy-to-picture things for the most part, and you may notice that almost all the vowels are short. Short vowels are harder than long and need more reinforcement. As always, thanks for teaching someone.

Taboo, Taboo

Today's tip comes from brand new Literacy Network Tutor, Marjorie Matthews. In pre-service training last week she talked about her experience using the board game "Taboo" to build vocabulary and descriptive speaking skills. I asked her to write it up as a tip for you and she kindly obliged.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, "Taboo" is a word game that challenges players to guess what word is on a card that a player called the giver is holding. He or she gives clues but must not use any of taboo words also on the card. For instance, one card may have a word like tobacco but the giver would be fobidden to use the words smoke, cigarette, chew, cigar or pipe to describe it. It stimulates learners to find ways to work around a vocabulary gap, How much fun is it? Boatloads. Here's how Marjorie does it:

It had occurred to me that the game Taboo could be a fun way for my Saudi friends to learn some new words, so I took the game to their home. We did not "play" the game, but used the cards. First we talked about the meaning of the word "taboo." Then we went through some of the cards one by one. The word at the top of each card has five words underneath that are all closely related and act as clues to the meaning.

So either they would look at the "clues" and try to guess at the meaning of the word, or I would explain the meaning and they and I would discuss how the five clue words relate. Sometimes this got into culture, for example, the word tuxedo was followed by formal, prom, jacket, rent and wear, and we talked about prom (a uniquely American thing.) The word bench was followed by sit, play, judge, seat, and park.

After we played, I noticed that my learner used some of the words, which had been new words for him. He had written a story about walking by Lake Mendota, and didn't know the word bench, and replaced "wooden chairs" in his essay with benches. I think they enjoyed learning new words this way. It is always nice to try to think of new ideas and approaches to make learning fun. Pictionary cards might work too - except they have unrelated words, which don't act as clues.

Kudos and a big thank-you to Marjorie Matthews, This Week's Favorite Tutor!

On-Line Dictionary

Here is something new for you: an on-line dictionary for learners of English. Merriam Webster's Learner's Dictionary (click here for a link to the site) holds 3,000 of the most essential words a learner needs to get by as a second-language speaker. It also has audio of the word being read aloud. This can also be helpful for the native speaker who needs help figuring out the connection between how a word is written and how it sounds.

Users may look up any word they need and save it to their personal dictionary for future reference. There are several very nice things about this idea. First, there are some words a reader just keeps coming back to. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I have had to look up the word inchoate. It sometimes takes several repetitions to get a word down pat. And second, a learner can see his or her personal lexicon grow over time. Words can be added or removed from the learner's dictionary with the click of a button. Within a minute I had a personal dictionary that included the literal meanings of the words truth, bend and whopper, but also included the phrases to bend the truth and to tell a whopper. Mastering idioms like these two helps a second language learner sound more natural. Besides, it brings a lot of fun to language learning.
Additionally, the website will read aloud any words you ask it to. I like this idea for both ESL and basic literacy learners and for that matter, for tutors who need to settle arguments about how words are pronounced. I found, for instance, a good example for the pronunciation of the nearly unspellable words inchoate and ophthalmology.