Engaging Students in Active Learning

A commonly held assumption is that students like to take the easiest routes/short-cuts and prefer to be passive learners. Despite the fact that adult learners are busy individuals, research suggests that they do want to be engaged in active learning. They want their lessons to be interesting, practical and applicable.

Here are some of their suggestions for facilitating engaging lessons:

• use meaningful and purposeful learning activities
• ask stimulating questions
• use appropriate and relevant tools/technology to engage students
• incorporate real-life and application-based examples
• interact with students and effectively manage discussions

adapted from “Understanding Adult Learners’ Needs” by Dr. Nachamma Sockalingam, Singapore

Easy Reading

Many of you use the Westcoast Reader newspaper with your learner.  It’s available at the library each month and provides current, high interest articles to read and discuss.  The teacher’s resource can be printed on the web-site for worksheets to go with the articles.    Older editions of this newspaper are also available to print or read on-line at Best of the Reader.    As well, Alberta ESL services has a similar publication called English Express.   All of these provide great fillers during your tutoring time or can be expanded for an entire lesson.  Let me know if I can print them for you.

Blending Learning

I attended a workshop at the recent ESL teacher's conference on blending learning (classroom, computer based, on-line) and considered how this could benefit tutored learners.  Most of our tutors and learners use email and it's a skill newcomers need to do well but often find difficult.  An email conversation is great practice for your learner.  As well, you can assign homework or provide links to web-sites that will help them.  For example, you could ask your learner to watch a youtube video and write a summary to bring to your next session.  Let me know if you try this and how it goes!

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns are nouns which stand for a group or collection of people or things.  They include words such as audience, class, committee, crew, family, government, group and team.  They are treated as singular, with a singular verb. 

√ The whole family eats supper together.

√ The government is announcing an election soon.

√ He prefers an audience that arrives without expectations.

A common error for English learners is to use the plural verb because the word repesents more than one person.  For example, "My family are going on vacation."  Although these nouns consist of more than one person, the word represents one entity.

Tutor Training Web-sites

Need some new inspiration?  Visit the ESLSAP tutor training companion web-site for great links and ideas.
http://www.mytrainingbc.ca/eslsap/companion/

ALSO, you are encouraged to join http://tutela.ca/  Membership is free and resources extensive.

Why join Tutela?

Join our growing community to:

• Get access to tons of EAL and FSL resources, including learning activities, worksheets, templates, teacher training resources and much more; rate and comment on the resources you have used

• Connect and collaborate with like-minded EAL and FSL professionals and expand your Personal Learning Network (PLN) through public forum and special interest groups

• Suggest and share your own useful resources, whether these are classroom resources, research papers that offer insight into best practices, or policy documents

• Find out and participate in our events or organize and post your own event

• Post jobs. If you are an employer, you can be sure you’ll get immediate responses from a wide selection of qualified candidates in no time.

Your participation and contributions help make Tutela the go-to place for ESL/FSL professionals!

Get out of the Room!

One-to-one tutoring can be quite mobile. Ask your student to take you on a guided tour in English of the neighbourhood you’re meeting in, a store or other public place.  A change of environment is great for refreshing the mind, and there are plenty of topics for language study that you can get just from walking down the street.

 

Conversation Topics

Running out of things to talk about with your learner?  Introducing new topics is great to grow vocabulary, increase fluency and build confidence.  Check out ta great compilation by ESL teachers at
http://iteslj.org/questions/