• A Technique For Getting Students To Perform Better On An Assignment (Research Based)

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In a study, researchers used a technique with half the participants but not with the other half (the control group). The results: the ones who experienced the technique made half as many mistakes on the task as the control group.

We teachers could apply a variation of this technique during our lesson-introductions as a way to motivate our students.

Here is how the study was carried out by a psychologist, Dan Ariely. The participants were asked to read words in a room with extremely bright lights. They were all give sunglasses, but half of them were told they were wearing expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. The other half were told that theirs were just ordinary sunglasses. However, both groups were actually given the exact same type of sunglasses.

The researchers found that the participants who thought they were wearing the Ray-Ban sunglasses read twice as many words correctly as the “ordinary” sunglasses group. Also, they completed the task more quickly.

Scientists call this the expectation effect. People tend to perform better when they expect to do so.

In a similar study, half the participant were told that they were going to listen to a task through expensive headphones and half were told they had cheap ones. Actually, all the headphones were the same, but the expensive-headphone group performed much better at identifying distorted words than the cheap-headphone group.

Applying this technique to our classrooms Continue reading →

• Pain-Free ESL Speaking Placement-Testing Process: Reliable, Time-Efficient and User-Friendly REVISITED

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(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your colleagues.)*

At first, all the teachers wanted to administer the oral test for placing students into one of the four levels of conversation classes. But that enthusiasm waned once they discovered what this commercially-made placement test would entail.

Two major problems with many speaking placement tests (commercial and in-house)

1)  The testing process in labor intensive. The scoring rubrics are onerous, ineffective and require time-consuming training.

2)  Rather than just focusing on the skills being developed in speaking/conversation classes, the interviewers have to evaluate several peripheral aspects of speaking at the same time.

A Speaking Placement-Testing Process That Addresses Those Problems.

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• Learning Grammar Inductively (No Teacher-Talk)

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                        • Leading Student to Understand It
                                    •  He It is easy to do math.
                                    • Was raining at noon.

Cover It is raining

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

Pointing to this sentence: “It started raining during the game,” Sylvia asked me what the word “it” was. “How can I know when to use it?”

I told her the grammar term for it (‘non-referential it’), but I didn’t tell her any rules. Instead, I led her to understanding it through a set of inductive exercises. This meant that she “formulated the rule” correctly on her own by working with examples.

Some typical problems students have with this are when they write sentences like these:
• Was raining after work.
• He is easy to do math.

Inductive exercises to lead students to understand non-referential “It” as the subject of a sentence.

(This post includes a short form of the exercises. On the handout in the link below, you can see more items for each exercise.) Notice: This does NOT involve any TEACHER TALKING.

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• Stimulating Small-Group Discussion Activity 2: Loneliness Might Not Be What You Think (Including Paraphrasing Exercises.) REVISITED

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Cover read for discussion SHOT

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*

Some reasons why students seemed stimulated by this discussion:

1) Since almost all the students were living away from home, they were able to relate to the challenge of connecting to new people.
2) They seemed interested in hearing how their classmates were coping with living away from home: some loved it and some felt lonely.
3) They enjoyed discussing how social media is both helpful and harmful especially concerning making connections to people.
4) They seemed surprised that some of their classmates are not especially connected to their family members.

Here is the basis for this discussion: According to research, loneliness has little connection to how many people are around us.  In his book,  Lost Connections,  Jonathan Hari explains that loneliness is caused by a loss of connection to others. To end loneliness, according Hari, we need two things: other people and a feeling that we are sharing something meaningful or something we care about with another person or other people.

This and future discussion activities include four parts:

1) A one-page article usually including a brief summary of a high-interest research study.
2) Ten true-false comprehension questions.
3) Pre-Discussion Exercise in which students read and think about several questions about their experience and opinions about the topic before discussing them in groups.
4) Small-group discussions of the article in which each student is given a paper with different content/personal experience questions in the form of Student A, B or C.

Bonus for this Discussion Activity 2: Paraphrasing exercise.

About Discussion Activity 2: Loneliness Might Not Be What You Think and the handout.

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