Morfo and the role of an audience

I want to be a L2 environment simulator

Last year I taught English in a friendly, small town family daycare in Hungary. From September to June I spent there 60 minutes a day,  30 minutes we use as a 'structured lessons' 4 times a week, the rest was my playtime: I engaged in the games played by these kids of 1,5-6, trying to communicate with them in English, which seemed more efficient to me than the lessons I attempted to cram with songs, rhymes, stories, games, flashcards and TPR.

Sometimes some little guys appeared who were fluent in English, they had been attending international kindergartens abroad or lived in an English-speaking country and there were always some kids who were exposed to communication in other languages.
For both kinds of children English was a means of communication, they had the experience of communicating in languages other that their mother tongue.

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In our linguistically homogeneous world I often wonder how I could enhance my little students' foreign language acquisition. Being a non-NEST creating real needs for them to communicate is not easy.  I just simply can't pretend I don't understand their Hungarian :))), so why should they bother with trying to tell me anything in English? They understand me and I'm in heaven when someone asks me to help in the bathroom with a "Barbi, come!" and they are usually generous enough to say "see you" when I leave.

Language awareness and learner autonomy in the cradle?

Since a workshop by Osváth Erika I've been thinking about to what extent and how awareness and learner autonomy can be a part of so little kids' learning experience.
I'd be satisfied if they somehow knew it is a 'secret code' in which other people in distant countries communicate.
One day one of the girls came to me excitedly explaining in Hungarian "Barbi! Only Andris and you speak english!" I was thriller! (Andris lives in the US anyway.) But how should I do this without Andris??



This phenomenon (students' comparative lack of exposure to authentic communication in English) is dragged along to later phases of formal education.

With school kids it's all easier, the Internet helps me a lot. Kids understand that there are lot of people in the world who live far away from here, speak different languages that we don't understand and they don't understand Hungarian either. On the Internet we have tools to show them all the distant places and the people who live there.  Kids can also be taught that lots of those people in the distant places share a common language, English. So apart from being a school subject it is a way to express yourself so that other people of the world can understand it.

That helps me a lot when I want to make them speak. YouTube is a magic word, they'd love to be on there, it is somewhat like being on TV. There are privacy issues however and parents are not always enthusiastic about their kid being 'on display' which I can partly understand.

The possibility of being presented to the world creates he magic that is enough to make these little fellows not only speak but work hard to record a video that is almost perfect.

Now there are easy to use and cool apps and websites that help you create fancy videos.

Mobile apps drive youngsters crazy anyway, one of these is Morfo.

Using the  app is a driving force, young learners are willing to do the most boring drills just to get the chance to use it.

Activity

Level: elementary
Language aim: vocabulary (parts of the face), speaking: (a short monologue)


1
The app
I showed  my student a video created with this app, I gave  him the tab, I asked him to try to figure out how it works. In no time he found the settings (screenshots)  As he enjoyed changing the sizes, width, etc. of the face. I grabbed the opportunity to explain him what is what, it had no real point as he was in picture but at least he heard and saw the  words at the same  time..... acquired some language, hopefully not in LOLcat  English.

2
The content and the procedure
I told him that the video we can make with the help of this app can be shared with the whole world. I gave him 5 options of what sort of videos he might make: a joke, an anecdote/story, a message, a poem, a warning.
He wanted a warning :). Then I gave him another couple of options he could choose from and it went on and on, finally we had the idea of the warning in the video below :)

Drill
I handwrote the text, he copied it in the iPad. (Gosh, how much they love typing on a touch screen!!)
It the meantime I scribbled a hasty close test.
While he was completing that I made it into a disappearing text at memorizenow.com.

After plenty of practice we recorded the video, he needed about three rounds for the perfect outcome.

Odds
We also made a paper and pencil activity to practise the parts of the face.
That can go into a picture dictation with any drawing app.

Follow up
I made my own message to the world.
It can be turned into a listening or dictation task, also a  "describe a person" activity.





It was fun and the boy was surprised that the lesson was over, he hadn't realized time passing by, real good flow ;)

Lipdub

I know

I know I know I know, I've got to keep myself away from the lure of tech. Tech is just the tool, priority should be given to my teaching objectives when teaching English. 

But... I admit.... when I find a webtool or an app that I enjoy using I can hardly wait to play with it in my lessons too. (Same applies to magic tricks, Peppa Pig videos, collaborative and free writing, I enjoy them myself.)

I know I know I know, this is a tail-wagging-the-dog attitude...

But I can't help it! 

If I am enthusiastic about  a tool and use it in my lesson, my enthusiasm will get through to my student, won't it? (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says something about flow that is contagious.)
On the other hand I still feel a bit guilty when I use a tool for the tool's sake (again: not only webtools, apps but paint, magic trick, fancy crayons, ....)

Check it

That made me develop a habit of thoroughly checking the efficiency of using that particular tool, rather explaining/making excuses for using these funky tools. It means when I use a tool for the tool's sake I try to set up a for-and-against list of professional/methodological reasons and contraindications about whether the tool is an efficient way of teaching EFL or not.  The against list is somehow always the same: it takes more time than completing a grammar practice book page, it is a source of distraction, students may lack the skills needed.
These are gradually less and less defendable arguments as we are moving deeper into the 21th century, tech tools are easier and faster to use, people get more and more techy. Different story is using art or magic tricks--well, in a country where the Prussian traditions of education are still very strong-- it is pretty controversial, I should be careful, some parents still want us to teach word lists and grammar rules :D:D

Lipdub

Lipdub and video manipulation tools are some of my favourites <3


Lipdub is a silver bullet in teaching speaking. Small wonder Chuck Sandy has already written about it in here, thanks for that!

What is lipdub good for in ELT?

1 You have to know the lyrics by heart, no mistakes, no errors! (Let's say you are a student and your homework is to learn a paragraph from a textbook by heart. Enjoyable? Hmmmm.... What if your performance in the test is not perfect? What's the risk? You'll get a bad mark. What if your performance in the video you produce is not perfect? The video will be baaad baaad baaad! Awkward!)
You can as well read it, but then avoid looking into the camera or wear sunglasses. If you know the lyrics of a song or just a verse or the refrain it will obviously make you acquire patterns, collocations, multi-word phrases, chunks of the language that will increase your fluency as well as your accuracy.


2 Your pronunciation must at least "look" perfect. Even if you are a (non-native) teacher of English, it needs to be worked on, believe me:) Even if you just whisper the lyrics while recording the video, utter everything loud while you practise.


3 If you want to keep up with the pace of the song you have to practice pronouncing the lines hell a lot of times. (I bet you wouldn't do it if you just had to learn a couple of lines by heart.)  I wonder if it enhances your fluency...


That sums up my account of language development gains.

Tech 

The tech side ensures you won't waste time and you don't need to be too techy to do it.
How can you maximize the students' work and language development and minimize faffing about with technology by making a video similar to the one above in a mini-project (even in a one-to-one lesson)?


Tech gadgets you need:

• something that plays music (computer, mp3 player with speakers, cassette player :D:D)
• a mobile device (smart phone, iPhone, iPod, iPad or other tablet with a video-manipulating app like Mega Photo Booth, I uded this on an iPad)

Non-tech ingredients:

• a song that your students like (right level of difficulty, appropriate contents, etc.)
• ample practice of the text using various tecniques like reciting, dictation, dictocomp/dictogloss, cloze (OUP Cloze Maker, free after registration), disappearing text ( MemorizeNow), etc.
• students' plan of the process of producing the video. 

While making a video like this students need to do certain things many times and there's the urge to rough draft, evaluate, feedback and refine it so that they can share an acceptable video in their own online social network. (Hopefully they will want to do that.)  An excellent 21st century learning activity!

I do recommend that you should just make your own first lipdub video before trying it with students and you will see!

This is mine:

 

Variation:

Here is a lower-tech version where my student was singing and I was just playing the guitar and moving my lips. Then we swapped. 

Screenshots and videos

Aim:
   telling a story, speculating
Skill:
   speaking
Age:
   teens, adults
Level:
   pre-intermediate, +


What I wanted:
With two pre-intermdiate students we were doing restaurant-survival English, to wake them up, put them more on the ease and reduce anxiety before actually speaking (ordering, asking about the menu, etc.), eliciting what they were supposed to have learned I used this activity.


Steps:


Before the lesson (preparation about 10 minutes) :
1 choose a prank video.
2 watch the video and take screenshots at certain points. (8-10 pictures)
3 open a collage creator (I used Collage Creator Lite, free) and put 6-10 photos on the canvas, not in the original order.


The lesson:
1 Give your students the tablet, tell them these photos are taken from a video. (Thanks Jamie Keddie:))) Ask them to study the pictures, they might say what they can see.
2 Tell them to try and guess the story by dragging the photos in the order they think they were originally, and tell the story.  They might want to use 'maybe', 'perhaps'.)

3 Retell their stories just to check if you understood everything clearly.
4 Show them the video. (See their faces :D:D, no more yawning.)

5 Ask them to tell the original story.




Follow-up:
grammar: negatives (correct their original ideas: 'the man isn't angry, the guests aren't explorers', etc.)
writing: they may write a short paragraph telling the story itself, the original story or another prank.




What happened:
It worked out fine for us, ice broken, brains shaken up, smiles, recycling of vocabulary, soaring fluency, ..... 
As I hadn't shown this couple any prank videos beforehand they were really surprised. I was a bit scared when I saw their reaction during the video... hmmmhmmm :D:D
They (in their mid-thirties) just love touching the tablet, dragging images, doing whatever with it.)