Finding the balance between games, learning and communicativity.

1. Finding the balance between games, learning and communicativity. Presented by Martin McCloud martin@martinmccloud.com

2. Introduction • About the workshop • The main aim of this workshop is to show you how to improve the activities used in the classroom • About me • Martin McCloud • 3rd Year ALT • based at Tsunan Chuto • Lessons of 20 or 40 students

3. Activity Demo 1 • To help you see the lesson from the students point of view • Give us something to improve • Wake you, the attendees, up!

4. Dengon Game • Teams arranged in lines down the classroom • Person at the front gets a message from the ALT • The message is passed to the person behind them • When the message reaches the last person, the last person must run to the front and write the answer on the board.

5. Dengon Game GO!!!

6. Dengon Game Analysis • A) How many rounds did we play? • B) How many times did you speak during one round? • C) What where the answers needed to win the rounds?

7. Questions I Ask Myself (1) • Why did the students not like an activity? • Why did the one of the activities ruin the atmosphere? • Why didn’t this activity work, but the others did?

8. Questions I Ask Myself (2) • How can this dull activity be more interesting? • Can I make it more fun? • Can I make it more educational? • Can I make it fun AND educational?

9. Why should we question our activities?

10. Why should we question our activities? Because we re-use our activities

11. Why do we re-use activities? • Saves time • We don’t have to spend time thinking of new ideas • Can re-use materials we have already made • Less risk • we know the activity ‘works’ • we know the benefits of the activity • But, we also know the problems of the activity

12. Main benefit of re-use

13. Main benefit of re-use But, by re-using activities, we will have an opportunity to improve the activities. Use Activity Make Changes Find Problems

14. What are the problems? (1) 1) Losing the student’s attention (i.e. not fun) • The activity is boring • Students have no interest in the activity • Activity is just dull • activity fatigue • Activity goes on for too long • Activity has been used too much • too much to learn • Students shocked by the amount they must learn and give up

15. What are the problems? (2) 2) Students not acquiring enough English (i.e. not learning) • Not enough English used in class • Students waiting for the translation • Not enough practise • Students need to process language to learn it • practice constructing and expressing their own sentences

16. What are the problems? (3) • No immediate feedback • after giving an answer, students need to know if it is correct or not as quickly as possible. • Too much to learn • students shocked by the scale of the task and just give up

17. Solving these Problems (1) 1) Keeping the students attention (more fun!!) • problem: activities are boring • Make the activity entertaining • Students are very competitive. Distract the students by making activities competitive • problem: activity fatigue • Don’t let an activity run for too long • Don’t do the same activity too often • problem: too much to learn • Limit the amount of new vocabulary

18. Solving these Problems (2) 2) Increasing the amount of English students acquire (more learning!!) • problem: Not enough English used • try to use only English in the classroom (on materials, during explanations, checking answers etc.) • problem:not enough practise • try to use activities that encourage speaking as much as possible. • have students speak with the ALT and JTE

19. Solving these Problems (3) • problem:no immediate feedback • try to use activities that provide instant feedback (quizzes, short interview style dialogues) • problem: too much to learn • Limit the amount of new vocabulary

20. In Summary… To improve a lesson, we want to add: • Entertainment • Competition • Limits on the vocabulary • More practice and feedback • More interaction

21. Competition Types of competition • Student versus Student e.g. Pair Quiz, Pen Race • Student versus team e.g. Karuta • Students versus class (mixed) e.g. “Find someone who” • Pairs versus class e.g. questionnaire T/F • Team versus class e.g. King and Servant, Dengon Game, Quiz games Avoid having a single student against the whole class.

22. Limit the vocabulary • A psychology theory, “The Magical Number Seven”, describes the limits of short-term memory • Humans have a working memory of around seven elements. Elements can be anything, such as numbers or words • So, when we introduce new vocabulary to students, and we want them to use it, we should limit the number of words to about seven at a time

23. More Speaking • TT lessons are an opportunity for students to use spoken English. • Try to introduce speaking as much as possible • Dialogues between students • Passing messages • Answering questions

24. More Feedback • People learn from their mistakes and successes. • But feedback has to happen quickly to reinforce learning • Proof? It’s why flashcards are effective

25. More Interaction Try to encourage students to talk with lots ofpeople: • Mixing pairs after an activity • Combining pairs into groups • “Find someone who” games • Make chances to speak with ALT and JTE • . This is the communicativity part!

26. The Ideal Activity So, the ideal activity would • be entertaining • be competitive • limited to a practical amount of new material • provide lots of practice, with instant feedback, using old and new material • encourage interaction with other students, the ALT and the JTE

27. The Aim of Improvement • A typical activity will cover some of these qualities. We should aim to improve the activity to cover ALL five qualities. • And if an activity covers all five qualities, we should aim to improve the way it covers the five qualities.

28. Improving “Dengon Game” Activity – Analysis How does the Dengon Game fit our expectations for the Ideal Activity?

29. Improving “Dengon Game” Activity – Analysis We should improve ‘Practice and Feedback’ and ‘Interaction’

30. Improving “Dengon Game”– Changes • Have two messages; one going backwards and the other forwards. • Have the messages make a small dialogue • Have answers at the back for last student to find Whose camera is this? Answers Start Finish! It’s Mark’s camera

31. Activity Demo 2 • To see if the changes we’ve made have improved the original activity • Wake you up after sitting through 20 minutes of slides! • Pad out the workshop to last 50 minutes!

32. Dengon Game v2.0 • Have two messages; one going backwards and the other forwards. • Have the messages make a small dialogue • Have answers at the back for last student to find Whose camera is this? Answers Start Finish! It’s Mark’s camera

33. Dengon Game v2.0 GO!!!

34. Dengon Game v2.0 Analysis • A) How many rounds did we play? • B) How many times did you speak during one round? • C) What where the answers needed to win the rounds?

35. Improving “Dengon Game”– Analysis of Improvements X : Original Dengon X : Dengon v2.0

36. Improving “Dengon Game”– Analysis of Improvements Overall, an improvement!! X : Original Dengon X : Dengon v2.0

37. Conclusions (1) • We should think about our activities after we use them • We might re-use the activity in a future lesson. We should learn from our mistakes and improve the activity.

38. Conclusions (2) • Good TT activities should have these five qualities: • Entertainment • Competition • Limits on the vocabulary • Practice and feedback • Interaction

39. Any Questions?

40. More information • Slides for this workshop can be downloaded from: http://www.martinmccloud.com/teaching • Any other comments or questions can be sent to: martin@martinmccloud.com