Vocaroo: Voice Recording Made Simple

Literacy Network ESL instructor Jen Sell has been using a website in her classes that might also help  volunteer tutors. Vocaroo.com lets people make digital recordings of voice that are as long as as you want them to be. All you need is a computer with internet and an internal microphone or a headset. Click the big red 'RECORD' button and you're in business. Once you have recorded something you want to share, Vocaroo gives you a link to a website that allows you to play the recording back as many times as you like. Here is a link to my recording of the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address: vocaroo.com/i/s1CyrKj1Sit6  You can send a link like that via email for your learner to click on at home or at the library. Try recording a half dozen lines from an assignment that you and your learner have been working on. Then send them the links between lessons for brief homework practice that can be done at a convenient time. You might also have a little fun—try recording tongue twisters for practicing pronunciation. Think, "Thirty three southern thieves sip thick shakes."

Something I just learned about is the ability to share these recordings via numerous third-party websites. The illustration at the right shows the options that came up after I finished my recording. Clicking the little blue 'f' in the corner made the link show up as my Facebook status, there for anyone who wants to hear me say "Four score and seven..." You may notice the other options for sharing via Twitter, Gmail and StumbleUpon. Clicking he red addition sign at the end of the row brings up more options, including Pinterest, Tumblr and Literacy Network favorite, delicious.com. 

Thank you tutors everywhere for what you're doing. Keep up the good work. Share the knowledge, share the love. And now share your voice. 

Homework that Works

Literacy Network tutor Emily Shea has been working with her learner for over a year. In a recent monthly feedback report she mentioned that she gives her learner homework that she can do. Always on the alert for good ideas from the tutor corps, I asked her to share her secrets of creating assignments her learner will do.  

In addition to giving assignments in the Ventures workbook that came with the Student's Book, she creates brief writing tasks by hand.  "I have her write a short story about either her family, favorite meals to cook, what she did over the weekend, etc. I answer the question as well and provide that as a short example, making bold the verb tense, question words (like who and how) depending on what she learned recently."  

Personalizing the homework in this way, Emily says, makes it more likely that she will take the time to do it. Her learner even seeks out some help from family members to get it done. 

Emily tries to keep the writing tasks brief and personal, focusing on skills they have just worked on. Below is one brief essay she gave her student when they were practicing past tense. She gave an example, making the verbs bold to help her learner pay attention to the lesson objective.

Write a Short Story About Your Easter Sunday

Write a short story about how your Easter Sunday went, remember this will be in PAST tense. 

What did you do? Where did you have it? Who was there? What did you eat? What was your favorite part?

[Exampe:] For my Easter Sunday I went to Andre's family cottage in Waupaca, Wisconsin. His whole family was there, aunts and uncles and his twin brother. We had lots of good food. We ate salmon, carrot cake and salad. There were a lot of appetizers like cheese, crackers, olives and wine too. We decorated Easter Eggs, that was my favorite part! 

Not Fast Enough

Below my response to a tutor's monthly report. She expressed some concerns about how her learner was not learning fast enough and having trouble doing worksheets for homework.  

I wanted to reply to your feedback as soon as I read it. It has been four months since you and H. got started.  Let me see if I can summarize your concerns and try to address them in some kind of coherent order.

1. Linda is not learning fast enough
2. It’s hard to get her to converse in English
3.  Explaining the exercises in English takes extra time, when you can do it in Spanish.
4. She may need easier assignments to do for homework. Audio resources may help because her vision is poor.

Well, one thing seems clear. You’ve gotten to know her pretty well in the time you’ve had together. I think you can be happy with the fact that she is working hard and trying faithfully to learn...Language learning is usually slow, there’s not much getting around that. The fact that she’s actively trying to do the work you give her is wonderful news.

                I might be able to answer several of your concerns...with one suggestion.  Given that she is not a quick learner, that explaining things is tough and that you were thinking about audio resources, why don’t you give her audio homework? Here is a place where you can find songs with accompanying videos and lyrics:  http://www.esolcourses.com/topics/learn-english-with-songs.html.  If you look across the top of the webpage you will see that you can choose songs from three lists—Easy, Medium and Hard. In the Medium category I heard the very slow-singing Rufus Wainwright version of John Lennon’s “Across the Universe”  Here’s a link to that, by the way: http://www.esolcourses.com/content/topics/songs/rufus-wainwright/across-the-universe.html

                You could think in terms of “easier or harder” assignments, but maybe the better question concerns appropriateness to her learning style. The academic approach—textbooks and worksheets—works for some. But most learners at LitNet don’t come from an academic background and mindset. It occurs to me that you could structure conversation around the Wainwright song.  Ask her to listen to the song and use her dictionary to look up one or two phrases that may have confused her, then try to bring what she learned to your next lesson. Ask her to think of how the song made her feel, and what it made her think of.  Again, she could look up the words for those feelings and then try to talk to you about them using new vocabulary.  Having an emotional content helps many learners process new language skills.

                In addition, you can also assign worksheets. You don’t have to stop doing that. It’s great that you’re assigning homework and she’s trying to do it.  Here is a link to where you might find some worksheets:  www.delicious.com/literacy_network/worksheets. One of the sites there had some worksheets on various topics, including count/non-count nouns, for example: http://englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Count_and_Non-Count.pdf. 

Thanks for being someone’s tutor

Everybody Loves Homework

A tutor asked me how to assign homework to an adult learner. In her new student interview she had said she could do two hours of homework a week. We try to find out how learners feel about doing homework when we assess them to get a tutor, but the question always needs more probing.

A tutor should ask more questions, such as, ‘When, in a normal day, can you find a few minutes to spend by yourself? In that time, how much energy do you have?  Where do you go?’  Ask most students whether they want homework and they’ll say yes, which is what they think you want to hear. The more productive questions aim at finding out when and where she has the means to do something related to English. An adult learner needs a reasonably quiet space to read and write or listen to some English. She needs the physical stuff, whether it’s a computer, a notebook, worksheets, a CD player or the TV, to make that happen.

The tutor mentioned that her learner wants to work on verbs. I recommended that she try sending her home with a game to play between lessons. Here is a link to a document you can download at the Literacy Network website.  Clicking that should get you a Word document that you can print out. It has irregular past tense verbs, e.g. make – made, take – took, come – came. You can print that on card stock and cut the verbs out to make a ‘concentration’ game in which she has to pair the irregular past tense with the present 

Literacy network tries to be realistic about the amount of homework an adult learner with a  brutal work schedule and a family to care for can do. For that reason I encourage tutors to give homework that can be done in the little bits of time that they can snatch away from their busy work and family lives. And to increase your chances of the assignment getting done, try to make it fun.

The Joy of Homework

If you feel this way, you're doing it wrong.

One of the most common questions tutors ask is, "Can I assign homework to my learner?" The answer is yes. What kind? Whatever your learner can do. Give homework that fits in with their free time, their resources, the kinds of things they like to do. Homework is anything that lets the learner get more exposure to reading, writing, speaking and hearing English.

For reading homework The Minnesota Literacy Council (www.themlc.org) has a site called Story By Story (mcedservices.com/phonics/phonics.html).  It has some wonderfully organized phonetic stories to help a learner by focusing on specific sound concepts. Better yet, it has a basic lesson plan that tutors can use. At the end of the lesson plan they advise tutors,

·         Assign homework (10-15 minutes per day after instruction). Encourage spending time at home to study or read; however, it should not be required. Greater frequency of practice keeps the mind working on learning between lessons.

·         Read aloud and/or spell word lists to someone at home

·         Read aloud phonics stories to someone at home

ESL tutors can assign listening homework for learner that follows the above guidelines, namely: short, ungraded, enjoyable tasks. Those tasks can include watching 15 minutes of a sanely-paced, clear-speaking news program like PBS' "The News Hour" when they get home from work. For the more beginner-level learner, Wisconsin Public Television has programming before 8:00 in the morning learners may watch with their kids. The Wisconsin Channel (wpt2.org/schedule.cfm) also has programs on outdoor sports and gardening plus documentaries on a broad range of grown-up topics. A homework assignment might follow a plan something like the following:

·         Watch program “X” for 15 - 30 min. on ___ before work with the captions on. Use a notebook to write down three interesting phrases you hear, whether you understand them or not.

·         Bring those phrases, exactly as you heard them, to our next lesson.

·         Don't worry about mistakes. We will talk about what you saw and the phrases you wrote down and try to figure out they meant.

Remember: the chances of homework getting done decrease with the amount of time they take but increase proportionate to the fun factor.