You didn't think your students were reading, did you?
As promised, the list of songs I used in my History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP-ME) class is below. The class was taught over 20 days in 5 weeks with each week devoted to a different decade of popular music. We covered one song per day usually beginning with watching a video of the song, examining the lyrics and something linguistically relevant (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.), talking about the meaning of the song, and then listening to the song again and singing along.
A much more exhaustive (and exhausting!) resource is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet also contains several songs I considered but didn’t use. Each entry has the song title, the artist, the year it was released, the genre, information about it’s popularity (#1 for four weeks, for example) as well as links to the lyrics, video, and Wikipedia articles on both the song and the artist. I also have my notes on relevant or ESL-appropriate features of each song.
I delivered all of this information to students using Moodle, an open-source online course management system. I hoped to present as much information for students to explore as I could and several students took advantage of this opportunity by logging in and exploring many of these resources. They were also able to listen to each of the songs via our streaming server. (Simply giving them the .mp3 files would have created copyright issues.)
Overall, the class was very well received for it’s novel approach and interesting subject. I included a wide variety of musical genres so that no student would have to suffer through a prolonged period of country or R&B. Students also appreciated touching on grammar points and new vocabulary words in the more relaxed context of an elective class. They were exposed to more English without having to worry about a final exam.
If I were to teach the class again, I would probably eliminate a couple of the longer songs, or at least find a way to devote more time to them. The class really enjoyed Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) and Parents Just Don’t Understand, for example, but we had to rush through them a bit in order to completely cover the lyrics. In fact, I would like to teach this class every quarter, and could by changing up the songs so that they wouldn’t be repeated if students take the class in back-to-back quarters. The class included students from all five levels in our program and I worked hard to ensure that all students were able to gain something from the class. According to my student evaluations, I was successful.
In the table below, the names of the songs are linked to the lyrics (on sing365.com) and the artist names are linked to their page on Wikipedia. As I mentioned above, you can view more information at the Google Docs Spreadsheet.
An idea I’ve been thinking about for a while recently came across my Twitter feed: The Reverse of Homework. A little digging brought me to the original article referenced in the tweet. Essentially, the idea is to take the lecture portion of a class and put it online. Class time can then be used for problems and activities that had been relegated to homework. While not everything in an ESL context can be put online, there are some areas where this strategy can be used.
In my own intermittent attempts in grammar classes, I’ve run into some of the issues described in the article, most of which had to do with students’ adjustment from the traditional homework paradigm. But the benefits included students being able to review the material as much or as little as they chose (which may also constitute an “issue”) and having much more class time to answer the most difficult, challenging and interesting questions which students often run into by themselves at home and then forget to ask the next day.
Another benefit is that this approach can accomodate multiple learning styles. When I was in college, I had trouble doing the background reading for lectures, but found it easy to read the material after the lecture. Similarly, in language classes, I would rather build my knowledge by attempting things and making mistakes because I have to find the reason for learning a particular structure or set of vocabulary before I am motivated to study it. My teaching often reflects my own learning style, but I recognize that not everyone prefers to learn the way I do. Reversing homework allows students to prepare for the activities by listening to the lecture in advance or to attempt the activities and then go back and use the lecture as a resource.
The biggest downside is that it can take a long time to develop and adapt lectures to an online format. But, if they are developed in a modular way, components can be shared and reused, eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel each time a course is taught. By combining original resources with preexisting resources, students may be given a wide variety of options which they can use to meet their goals and the goals of the course.
I read an interesting article in Time magazine this week called Can These Parents Be Saved? It’s about helicopter parents, parents that hover over their children, and the growing backlash against this style of parenting.
My wife and I, parents of two girls under 4, have discussed our parenting strategies for longer than our kids have been alive and lean heavily towards the backlash side of the debate. We intend to avoid scheduling dance classes, and soccer leagues, and art classes, and piano lessons (at least all at the same time) so that our kids will have some time to be bored, to daydream, to create their own games. As the article points out, this down time can help brain development and be useful for developing “leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience” and more. Anecdotally, the recent generation of over-scheduled kids now entering college tend to lack problem-solving skills and creativity, possibly as a result of their parents making too many decisions for them.
I think helicopter parents are well documented and widely discussed, particularly in higher education in North America, but I wonder how widespread this phenomenon is in ESL and EFL? Of course, the answer likely varies as much as the field does. For example, I teach in an intensive ESL program at a major research university. Most of the students in my classes are over 18 years old and live without their parents. If the parents want to be helicopters, they have to do it via email across an ocean, and it doesn’t typically affect teachers in our program directly.
Although I don’t yet feel the need to brace for an influx of helicopter parents and their precious offspring, I wonder if my colleagues in other areas of ESL and EFL do. Do other ESL teachers encounter helicopter parents, or is this parenting style a product of U.S. (or perhaps Western) culture? Where do parents of generation 1.5 students fall on the helicopter spectrum? What kinds of parents to EFL teachers in other countries typically encounter?
Communication technologies such as cell phones and webcams have been blamed for the rise in this behavior, or at least enabling it, because before these technologies, it simply wasn’t possible for parents to keep such close tabs on their children. As these technologies spread around the world, will helicopter parenting follow?
Care to leave a comment? I’d like to read it. If not, I hope you enjoy the Time article.
Sing, floss, stretch. But trust me on the sunscreen.
I wrote recently about the elective class that I am developing and teaching on popular music. I’m covering a decade per week and a song per day. Within each song, I highlight an interesting grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation point.
Developing this class has meant combing through many online resources including lists of Billboard number one hit songs on Wikipedia and best-of-the-decade lists such as AOL’s radio blog, which is a good place to start because you can listen to most of the songs on the list. I’ve also found that the website sing365.com tends to have the least errors of all of the lyrics websites that are returned in Google searches.
I intend to post the list of songs I’ve used at the end of the quarter (I might even link to the Google Docs spreadsheet that I used to record all of the songs I considered for each decade) but for now I thought I would post the following music video, which I plan to use tomorrow, the last day before Thanksgiving break.
The song is actually a spoken word piece which has an interesting story. While not a traditional pop music video, I think the message is inspirational without being cheesy. Plus, there are lots and lots of examples of advice using the imperative. It might not get you through the last two weeks of the quarter, but it doesn’t hurt.
At the time, work was being done on automating the process because it takes several hours to transcribe the text and then synchronize it to each hour of video. Manually captioning all of the video that exists online or even that is currently being created is simply not possible. What a difference a year makes.
YouTube recently announced the addition of an automatic captions feature. This announcement picked up by Mashable and it echoed through the Twittersphere. My first reaction was, “Finally!” Followed by the question, “I wonder how accurate it is.”
Ken Petri, Program Director for the Ohio State Web Accessibility Center, addressed these concerns in an email to the OSU Exploring Learning Technologies community:
If you have ever seen the results from Google Voice’s automatic transcription you know they are usually not perfect. For an educational context, a perfect or close to perfect transcript is usually necessary. This and the fact that most of you will not have access to the automated transcription feature in YouTube means that, while it is an exciting announcement, it is not a panacea.
Fortunately, you can opt to upload your own transcript and have YouTube auto-align it to your video. If the video is scripted (as opposed to improvised) it can be easy to obtain a trascript. Transcribing a video can take a long, long time, but automating one step in the process is helpful.
In general, every step that is automated will increase speed and efficiency while lowering costs, but will also introduce inaccuracies. As each step in improved, we will get closer and closer to the goal of captioning every online video.
The gist of it is that children are given the choice of taking one marshmallow or waiting a few minutes and taking two. At around 4 years of age, many people develop the ability to delay their gratification. Not all, but many.
More interestingly, when researchers followed up with the children who had been tested years later, those that were able to delay their gratification were more successful on a number of measures ranging from SAT scores and GPAs to whether they were overweight. Fortunately, these skills can be developed, so even if a four-year-old swipes the marshmallow at the first opportunity, she is not predetermined to be an obese dropout.
As a teacher, I’m thinking about how this skill translates to my classes. I suspect that I can identify a few students in my class who are instant-swipers and some who are probably still waiting to take the second marshmallow in case they will be rewarded with a third marshmallow. Some students cram for tests, while others forgo fun in favor of studying and reviewing.
I find it encouraging to learn that these skills can be honed, but I wonder if this is true for the adult students that I work with. How can we help this message reach them? How can we help them to apply this information to their academic and, eventually, professional careers?
Maybe I need to bring a bag of marshmallows to class.
Think this image looks good? Click on it to see it actual size. Yikes!
I made a presentation at Ohio TESOL last week about how to make better PowerPoint presentations. I’m going to add the audio to my slides by the end of this week (currently, you can only view the original slides sans audio).
Overall, the presentation was very well received. In fact, I even inspired some people to overcome their fear and give PowerPoint a try. One such brave soul emailed me the following question about blurry images, which I think is worth sharing here. It’s a problem that many beginners face when adding images to PowerPoint presentations as well as print documents. You won’t be an expert until you can fix it. My response follows.
I loved your presentation last week on PowerPoint. Being technically challenged, pp has never been at the top of my list to try. But, after listening to you last Friday, I have put together a small presentation for a listening and speaking one class. My question is…After I paste and stretch photos from Flicker, they are blurry. I realize it is probably a simple click, but I cannot find it. Please help!
I’m glad you enjoyed my presentation and I’m glad you’re diving in and trying things out in PowerPoint. I think this is a really good way to learn this technology.
Stretching an image to 900% of its original size will result in a blurry or pixelated image.
The issue you’re dealing with is a common one. It has to do with the size and resolution of the original image you’re trying to add to your presentation. When you are in PowerPoint, double-click on the image you’re working with to pull up the “Format Picture” menu. Choose the “Size” tab at the top to see if you’ve stretched your image past it’s original size. If the height or width under “Scale” is more than 100%, you will probably experience some blurriness or you will start to see all of the pixels that make up the image. (To really see this, try using a really small image from a website and stretching it to fill your entire slide. It will get really, really blurry and pixely.)
Click on "all sizes" to find larger versions of images in Flickr.
So, that’s the problem, but what’s the solution? Well, you need to start with larger original images. Once you find an image in Flickr, you will see an “ALL SIZES” button right under the title of the picture. This will take you to the original picture and often give you several different size options. By choosing the original, you can usually find a version large enough that you will be able to stretch it to fill your slide. I suggest you double-check after you stretch it though (double-click again to pull up the Format Picture menu) because if it’s more than about 110% of the original size, your picture may look stretched when projected onto a screen even if you don’t notice any problems on your computer.
Something else to consider is the file size of the picture you use. If you just need a small picture, try to avoid using the largest size. Using larger pictures increases the size of the file for your final presentation. While finding room on a hard drive usually isn’t a problem for new computers, on some machines PowerPoint can get bogged down and run slowly if many large photos have to be loaded for every slide. So, if you only need a little picture in the corner, try using a smaller size image.
I hope that’s pretty clear. Give it a try and let me know if you’re still having trouble. Incidentally, I hope to upload an updated version of my presentation complete with audio in the next couple of days. Watch for it here: http://www.slideshare.net/eslchill
Next week I begin teaching a class that I designed called the History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP ME). It’s a five-week class that will feature a decade of popular music each week. The class meets every day and each day will feature a different song. We will listen to the song, review and analyze the lyrics, and then listen to the song again and sing along.
There are many goals for this class. First, it will expose students to songs that everybody knows to give them a foundation in popular cultural. When a song comes on the radio, I’d like students to be able to say, “Isn’t that the Beatles?” just like a native speaker might. The class will also include some linguistic content from each of the songs. It could be a specific verb tense, idioms, pronunciation or whatever, but this will be an English class. Finally, through the changing periods and genres of music, we’ll be able to talk about history. Many changes in our culture are reflected in popular music.
Here are a few songs that I’ve identified for inclusion in the class:
Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones – A Stones song has to be included, but many have very repetitive lyrics. Paint It Black has lots of English to work with including colorful metaphors that students could be asked to interpret. It could also be contrasted with What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, which also has colorful metaphors.
I have a few others, but that’s a start. Do you use music to teach ESL or EFL? What songs do you use? Share them in the comments below. I’d like to know. If there is enough interest, I’ll share my final set list once the class is finished.
Another recent resource that came across the Twitter stream (thanks @NikPeachey!) is Vorbeo, a custom online poll generator.
The most amazing thing about this tool is how simple it is to use. The question, answers, and even the text for your “vote” button are customizable. But, the best part is that there is a live preview of your poll that changes as you customize your poll. When you’re finished, copy and paste the code generated by Vorbeo into your moodle or other web space. Easy!
Making a poll with Vorbeo.
Now, you can poll your students, students can poll each other, and students can even poll the general public, if they can put enough people in front of the poll.
As an edupunk who likes to tinker with code on occasion, I also appreciate that the code changes as the poll is customize. This is a great way to learn what each line of the code does. (Incidentally, if you’d like to learn more about HTML, CSS, XML, and other scripting languages, try w3schools.com which has many examples and tutorials with live previews.)
Update: As slickly as Vorbeo generates web polls, it appears that these polls are not compatible with WordPress blogs. Perhaps this is because WordPress already has it’s own polling feature using different technology or because it strips out HTML forms for security reasons. Either way, trying to post a Vorbeo poll to a WordPress blog will neuter it (see below). My other comments still apply, but check that Vorbeo is compatible with your application before counting on it in the classroom.
Do you like online polls?
Yes, the more the merrier! Yes, occasionally No, not really No, I never respond to them!
I came across Twurdy the other day and thought it was interesting enough to share. In fact, I came across it on a blog post by someone that was recommend via Follow Friday on Twitter. If I still had that electron trail, it would make an interesting story, but I don’t.
So, back to Twurdy. This search enging is Google-based, but it also analyzes search results for readability using a proprietary algorithm. The results are color-coded into the list of results. If an item is determined to be easy-to-read, it is light in color. Harder-to-read items are progressively darker in color.
Does it work? I haven’t used it enough to be sure yet. It’s certainly an intriguing idea, but the results will only be as good as the algorithm, the details of which are not shared on the Twurdy website. But it may be a useful for learners with limited ability to start with the easiest-to-read pages or, conversely, for students to analyze the differences between easy- and hard-to-read texts. I’m not suggesting students reverse-engineer the algorithm, but finding the features that make a page “hard-to-read” could start an interesting process that could aid students in their writing.
