During my first practical at school, I was asked to give a lesson on speaking skills. The class had planned an exchange to England and should know be prepared for understanding and speaking the language properly. In the lesson before, they were asked to make suggestions what they would like to improve. Two of the topics nearly everyone agreed on were small talk and figures of speech.

So, the first half of the lesson dealt with the small talk. The students got together in groups of two or three and were given role cards. In short role plays they had to perform certain everyday situations like “You are in a restaurant and have been waiting for your food for about an hour, now. Call the waiter and complain about it.” Or “You wanted to take a shower but it seems to be broken. Go tell your guest father about it.”

This worked out very well, so that we could come to figures of speech quickly. Since some of the pupils did not know any figures of speech at all, I introduced the topic with a little excerpt from The Simpsons Movie (which is only available in a very bad quality on YouTube).

After watching and discussing the scene and the expression (“Between a rock and a hard place”), they did a little internet research on figures of speech and we talked about the different expressions they found and if there is a German equal to them. 

All in all, this was a very productive lesson and everyone had a lot of fun as well. Another source that I used in other lessons on speaking skills proved to be very profitable. We watched some clips from the British TV series Mind your language, which was quite popular in the late 1970s and 1980s and focuses on adult students of EFL. 

Listening to some of the migrants is very difficult, so I would only recommend this for grade 10 or higher. Nevertheless, it is very entertaining and correcting their mistakes also proved to be very profitable for students.

Additionally, watching these series is a good motivation for teachers since you get to realise: No matter how hopeless the situation in your English class may seem, it can always get worse!

After the last very media-critical posts, I want to write about the positive aspects of new media in the classroom. Referring to the interview with Reinhard Donath and my experiences during the seminar I would like to give you some good reason, why one should use videos, podcasts, e-mail projects, etc. at school.

First of all, the media belongs to our everyday life. Most people watch TV or surf the internet in their private life but many people are also using the computer in their job. Therefore, school cannot ignore that students need a certain competence with the media to be able to get a job. School also provides the opportunity to learn about and with computers for those students who cannot afford to buy a computer.

Secondly, the internet has become a major source for information and students use it for research frequently. In general, this is not a problem but it belongs to the field of media competence to learn how to do proper research on the internet. They need to be aware of the fact that not every source is a good source and how to separate the reliable ones from the unreliable ones. My friend Verena made a very useful checklist that can be useful for students. You can find that on her blog: verenaelsbecker.wordpress.com.

Another important point is the fact that copyright and data privacy problems come along with the internet. Additionally, social networks like schülerVZ are very important for the social life of young people and should therefore be a topic in class. Many social networks even provide material for teachers so that they can teach the proper usage of these platforms.

In comparison with the book, new media provides different and sometimes even better ways to convey certain contents. It often speaks to many different learner types since it appeals to many senses at once. Keeping this in mind, new media should not be seen as a potential thread to the school book but as a necessary and useful supplement.

Of course I could list many more reasons for the use of new media in the classroom but to me these are the most important ones. I find them very convincing and combining them with a proper amount of media criticism will give you a good idea of how to deal with new media in school and why.

All good things go in threes. Therefore, I am going to end my series of media critical posts with a report on the movie Wag the dog. I had never heard of it until I did a research on the Lewinsky affair and stumbled across it on a list of topic related links. The short plot summary got me immediately and I was astonished about the parallels to the Lewinsky affair, although the movie was shot beforehand. For those who do not know what the movie is about: you can use this link to the IMDb to read the summary.

I found out that the movie is based on the book Wag the dog-a novel by Larry Beinhart and thought that it might be a good idea to deal with the story in class. Since media and movie versions of books are in the curriculum for grade 11, I could imagine reading the book and watching the movie in future classes.

What makes the story so interesting to me is the thought that this really could be political reality. Comparing the story to political events that did happen in the last years, fiction does not seem to be that fictional anymore.

As I already mentioned before, people saw certain similarities to the events surrounding the Clinton sex scandal and the War on Iraq in 2003. Although I am usually not the type of person who gives much about conspiracy theories, this thought experiment holds a true gist, namely that we are manipulated by the media every day. Beginning with the hierarchy of the news reports or certain advertisements that make us want certain products we don’t really need, no one can say where this manipulation ends.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no opponent of the media but I think that many people are way too uncritical about what they are getting served. Therefore, I see it as a part of media competence to become a responsible user who is aware of the fact that not everything we see or read or hear in the media is reliable and true.

To come back to the movie, it could be one possible medium to make students aware of this danger, even though it happens in an exaggerated way.  So, to cut a long story short, I would really like to use the movie in combination with the book in class one day and hope that I will get the opportunity to do so.

Originally, I wanted to post some ideas for the classroom concerning the Twilight series but I stumbled across some essays and articles (you can find them in my list of interesting links) that changed my mind. Before I read them, my idea was to read New Moon in comparison to Romeo and Juliet or something similar to that. Reading them really gave me a new perspective on the books.

As the topic of the post already reveals, these articles stated that the Twilight series is anti-feminist. To give you a short overview, I summed up the strongest arguments and sorted them:

Gender roles in general:

• The books have a modern setting but traditional gender roles.
• Men seem to be stronger, more intelligent, funnier, better looking than their female partners.
• All the women who play bigger parts in the books fulfill the clichés of female roles (Alice: loves fashion, shopping and parties; Rosalie: judgmental, vain, materialistic; Esme: typical mother figure; Renée: seems to be helpless without Bella or Phil to care for her; Leah: can’t let her ex-boyfriend go; kind of a drama-queen; Jessica: always after boys; Angela: the only interesting character but she is not mentioned that much)

 

Bella’s character:

• She is weak, clumsy, needs to be protected by male characters.
• To the men in her life she is very fragile and they often decide what is good for her.
• She is threatened with violence in each of the first three books and only Jacob or Edward can rescue her.
• Whenever she uses a car, even her own truck, together with a male, she only once gets to drive on her own.
• When Edward leaves her in New Moon she only finds happiness in being together with another male, Jacob.
• She nearly kills herself several times because of her relationship (e.g. when risking her life to hear Edward’s voice or when she decides to have the baby although it might most likely kill her).

 

Her relationship with Edward:

• Edward is a stalker: he is watching her sleep without permission, eavesdropping on her conversations and reading her friends’ minds.
• Edward occupies her thoughts completely.
• Their love seems to be more like a drug addiction than a healthy relationship.
• She leaves her family and all her friends behind to be with him and to become a vampire.
• When talking to each other, Bella and Edward never seem to have a typical relationship conversation concerning hobbies, philosophy of life or world-views, but only about books or romantic stuff and their deep love for each other.
• When Edward leaves Bella in New Moon, she keeps telling herself that she wasn’t good enough for him. She even becomes depressed and seems to be in some sort of an abstinence delirium for more than three months.
• In Eclipse, Edward is jealous of Jacob and prevents Bella from seeing him for a long while. He even takes the engine out of her car to make her stay away from him. Although she gets upset, she never stays angry with Edward for long and tells herself constantly that he only decides for her to protect her.

 

 

Looking at this list that does not even contain all the anti-feminist issues that are in the books, I was quite shocked. How could it be possible that I read over all these things? And then it came to my mind, when I did not realise all these aspects, many girls and young women would not recognise them, either.

So now, I am thinking about confronting a class with some of these observations and let them tell their opinion. But since I experienced how knowing about these facts changed my mind about the books, I am not sure if I could do this to my students. On the other hand I see it as some kind of “duty” to simply make them aware of the fact that the gender roles in the Twilight series are old fashioned.

To work with a class on a topic like this could also be profitable for their view on media in general. They could in the end gain from this – for some pupils painful – experience and learn to be more critical with what they consume every day and that media often provides not only entertainment but also conveys norms and values that might not always be good for us.

Additionally, I think that it is possible to enjoy the books after knowing about these arguments. It might not be easy for some, but being aware of gender issues and enjoying the series can go hand in hand. In the end, I believe that it is better to be conscious and critical about these things and having a slightly less enjoyable read than being unaware of them and adapting to these gender roles.

Erstaunlicherweise ist der heutige Eintrag in Deutsch verfasst. Das liegt schlicht daran, dass wir in dem Seminar, in dessen Rahmen ich dieses e-portfolio gestalte, ein Interview mit Reinhard Donath geführt haben. Um die Sache nicht künstlich zu erschweren, haben wir in unserer Muttersprache kommuniziert. In dem heutigen Eintrag würde ich gerne über dieses Interview und meine weitere Kommunikation mit Herrn Donath berichten. Um durch die Übersetzung ins Englische den Inhalt nicht zu verzerren, wird dieser Blogeintrag auf Deutsch verfasst.

Das Interview im Rahmen des Seminars „Neue Medien im Fremdsprachenunterricht“ fand bereits am 09.02.2010 statt. Hierzu hatte sich die komplette Seminargruppe eine Woche zuvor Fragen überlegt und diese im Blog unserer Dozentin gepostet. Für das Interview wurden dann zwei Sprecher ausgewählt, die diese Fragen dann stellen sollten. Nach Möglichkeit sollte aber jede TeilnehmerIn eine Frage stellen.

Etwa eine Woche nach diesem Interview hatte ich im Rahmen des Seminars „Kritische Erziehungswissenschaft“ eine mündliche Prüfung zum Thema „kritische Medienpädagogik“ mit dem Schwerpunkt „Internet“. In diesem Zusammenhang habe ich Herrn Donath noch ein weiteres Mal kontaktiert, um die Meinung eines Experten einzuholen, der auf ein Menge praktischer Erfahrung zurückgreifen kann. Nachfolgend werde ich daher lediglich einen Teil seiner Antworten zusammenfassen, der sich auf die „kritische Medienpädagogik“ bezieht und nicht auf alle gestellten Fragen eingehen.

Betrachtet man die Medien im Kontext der heutigen Gesellschaft, stellt man schnell fest, dass sie aus dem Leben nicht mehr wegzudenken sind. So spielt auf der einen Seite die Unterhaltung eine große Rolle, aber vor allem auch die Pflege sozialer Kontakte in Netzwerken wie schülerVZ. Technisch gesehen ist die Kompetenz im Umgang mit Medien, vor allem dem Computer, für fast alle Berufe unentbehrlich und aus der Arbeitswelt nicht mehr wegzudenken. Schule sollte sich darüber hinaus immer bewusst sein, dass die Medien den SchülerInnen eine Parallelwelt bieten, die in ihrem Leben fest integriert ist. Dies darf nicht einfach ausgeblendet werden. Medien und der Umgang mit ihnen sollte vielmehr als pädagogische und didaktische Herausforderung gesehen werden, die es anzupacken gilt.

Von diesem Standpunkt gesehen, hat die Medienpädagogik zwei Probleme, die überwunden werden müssen:

1.            Viele selbsternannte Experten äußern sich zu diesem Thema, ohne wirklich Ahnung davon zu haben.

2.            Lange Zeit hat die Medienpädagogik nur auf die negativen Aspekte und die Gefahren des Internets hingewiesen, ohne auch die positiven Seiten wahrzunehmen.

Die unter 2. genannten positiven Aspekte und Chancen sind z.B. die Individualisierung des Lernens, die Autonomisierung von Lernprozessen und die Nutzung des WWW in konstruktiv gestalteten Lernarrangements.

Die Medienpädagogik sollte daher beide Aspekte im Fokus haben, also sowohl die konstruktiv-positiven als auch die destruktiv-negativen. Dabei sollte vor allem den Verteidigern der Bücher klar sein, dass auch diese Medien ambivalent sind: es gibt gute und schlechte Bücher, genauso wie es gute und schlechte Fernsehprogramme gibt und das Internet ist sowohl Porno- als auch pädagogisches Medium. Daher sieht Reinhard Donath die Aufgabe der Medienpädagogik in erster Linie darin, selbst eine skeptische Distanz zu neuen Medien zu wahren und diese auch zu vermitteln.

Erste Vorschläge für die schulische Umsetzung kamen bemerkenswerter Weise auch nicht von medien- sondern von allgemein pädagogischer Seite. Heute gibt es allerdings schon einige praktische Hilfestellungen für LehrerInnen die dieses Thema in der Schule behandeln möchten, wie z.B. den Medienbrief der Medienzentren der  Bundesländer. Herr Donath selbst behandelt in seinem Unterricht u.a. die Themenbereiche „Privates in sozialen Netzwerken“, Copyright-Probleme und Cybbermobbing.

E-learning hält er allerdings für keine gute Methode und würde diese auch nicht anwenden. Es sei besser, direkt zu unterrichten, um Präsenzlernen zu ermöglichen. Generell sollte elektronische Kommunikation nicht künstlich sein und im Unterricht besser von einer direkten Kommunikation Gebrauch gemacht werden. Dies bedeutet auch, dass er auf Dienste wie twitter oder Chatten im Unterricht verzichtet.

Wichtig ist, dass er im Einsatz von Medien im Unterricht nicht das Ende des Schulbuches sieht. Neue Medien sollten das Schulbuch sinnvoll ergänzen, wenn durch sie z.B. Inhalte klarer dargestellt werden können. Daraus resultiert, dass die Arbeit mit Medien nicht um der Medien Willen geschehen soll, sondern um den Fachunterricht sinnvoll zu bereichern.

As I already mentioned before, I am a great movie fan. During my time as a student, we only watched movies in comparison to books and I found that very unsatisfying. So apart from the idea of using movies for grammar purposes (which I already discussed), I have thought about the possibility of a kind of school cinema were movies could be watched just for fun. Of course, the contact with authentic language material would be a nice side effect.

The school cinema would then take nothing more than a classroom with a TV and a DVD player or a computer and a video projector. The movie screening could take place once a month in the afternoon. The selection of the movies could either be made by the teacher who is responsible for this project or there could be a vote by the students in the beginning of the term. Depending on the costs of renting a DVD, the pupils could pay a small entrance-fee which might include some refreshments as well.

If your students are interested and you are willing to lead this project, I am sure that everyone will have a great time and some fun as well. So, go ahead and try it out and if it does not work at all, you can just close the school cinema without any loss.

Today, I stumbled across an interesting (fake) twitter account. The person calls himself “Guido Westerwave” and is making fun of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Guido Westerwelle. He or she writes about current political topics and uses the English language which is also the funny part of it. Since everyone knows, Mr Westerwelle has some weaknesses in the use of the English language, and to show this, most of the words are translated one to one, meaning that e.g. the word “Nachteil” becomes “afterpart” instead of “disadvantage”. If you are interested, go visit Guido Westerwave at twitter.com.

 You might be wondering already, why I post this here in my blog on ideas for the EFL-classroom. Well, I actually thought about how to integrate this in a lesson on false friends. Of course I am aware that this bears some problems since you should not show wrong things in school as they might be memorized as correct. So I decided that one could use one or two tweets that are obviously wrong and let the students explain the problem and the correct translation. To cut a long story short, one could use the tweets as an introduction to a lesson on false friends or maybe grammar mistakes.

 Since I am not too sure about this idea, I would appreciate if you could leave a comment on how you think about this idea. I hope you had fun reading the tweets!

I recently read a book which I would like to present to you. I had already read it three or four years ago and it made such a deep impact that I decided to read it again and I can tell you, it touched me even deeper. The book is called The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom.

The story is about a guy called Eddie who dies in an accident on his 83^rd birthday. It seems to be the tragic ending of an unimportant life but after his death he meets five people who had an influence on his life or whom he influenced. Their stories show him the deeper meaning of his life and help him to make peace with his fate.

After reading the first few lines, the story already grabbed me. The idea of an afterlife that has no religious connotations and makes us see our own life from a different perspective is an interesting thought. The message of the book which Albom states in the last chapter is that everyone has a story and that all the different stories are connected somehow.

To sum up, this story “teaches” us a lesson about life without being pathetic. And I think that makes it a good subject matter for English lessons. Additionally, it is not very hard to read and is divided into many short chapters. With a length of about 200 pages, it should be manageable for students to read it in a short time span. To visualise some of the key scenes, one could use the film from 2004.

All in all, I like this book very much and I cannot wait until I get to teach a 10^th or 11^th grade, so I can make my first experiences with teaching it.

In this post I am going to present you with an idea that came to my mind when I visited the musical “Buddy – Das Buddy Holly Musical”. Ever since that day the story of Buddy Holly, his sudden death and of course his great influence on music really grabbed me and I began thinking about how to integrate this into the EFL classroom.

Before reading about my ideas, please note that this is only a raw outline. About some of the points I am not absolutely sure and I know that they are debatable.

First of all, I had a look at the curriculum and decided that this topic would best fit to the 12^th grade unit on the USA. In specific, one could use the story of Buddy Holly and his influence on popular music to talk about the American way of life and the feeling of the 1950s and 1960s.

As a medium to introduce this topic I would choose the song “American Pie” by Don McLean. I am not quite sure if I would use it in the original version, since I prefer the version of the German singer Matthias Bollwerk. I think that his version creates a certain feeling that is more “appropriate” to carry the massage of the song. You might want to decide this for yourselves and listen to the different versions of the song:

Don McLean “American Pie”

Matthias Bollwerk “American Pie” (song starts at 2:11 min.)

Link to the lyrics: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+mclean/american+pie_20042099.html

Since this song is very allusive and contains a lot of hints to the popular music culture of the fifties and sixties, it is nearly impossible to speak about every detail of the lyrics. After listening to the song at least twice, I would hand out the lyrics and speak with the class about the unknown vocabulary. Afterwards, I would divide the class into six groups that are supposed to do an internet research on:

Group 1:         Buddy Holly and The Day The Music Died

Group 2:         Elvis and Bob Dylan

Group 3:         The Beatles and The Rolling Stones

Group 4:         Woodstock and Hippie movement

Group 5:         The term “American Pie” and Rock ‘n’ Roll music

Group 6:         Important dates of the 1950s and 1960s in America

This information will later serve as the basis knowledge to understand and interpret the lyrics. For the research and the presentation I would schedule three to four lessons, before one can start with the actual interpretation of the song. I know that this is a quite difficult task but I am confident that at least a Leistungskurs would be able to find out about the meaning of the song. What a “professional” interpretation could look like in the end, you can find out here:

http://user.pa.net/~ejjeff/pie.html

http://understandingamericanpie.com/

Of course this is way to detailed and I would not expect my class to find out about every little hint in the lyrics but a general idea about the popular music culture of the 1950s and 1960s and their effect on the American way of life should become clear.

Please feel free to comment on my ideas. Every constructive feedback is welcome and might help to concretise my ideas so that I can realise them in school someday.

Dear readers,

I finally found an interesting topic for my first post. Last week, I finally found the time and motivation to have a closer look at my course instructor’s webpage. She is also blogging at wordpress and provides us with a lot of helpful information concerning our course and the e-portfolio. Among a list of interesting blogs we could possibly read, I found this one about how to use movies to teach grammar in the EFL classroom: http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/

Claudio Azevedo, who himself is a teacher of English, offers a wide range of movie segments in combination with grammatical tasks. For teachers who want to use these exercises, he also explains for which grammatical purpose they can be applied. For example, a scene of the movie “The Happening” is combined with an exercise on modals. The reader of this blog is also provided with a lesson plan, printable worksheets and helpful hints on how to make up exercises with their own DVDs.

After a quite extensive examination of this page, I came to the conclusion that it is simply great. From the very beginning I was very curious about how to use movies with grammar because I myself am kind of a movie-freak. So, I have always wondered how one could use movies in the classroom except for showing them e.g. in comparison to a novel.

Of course one has to decide if the given tasks are appropriate for the class you are going to teach them in. This is also true for the movie itself, although most of them will not bring you any trouble. The combination of exercises and movie segments is also chosen quite well, so that the complexity of the tasks and the movie ratings more or less match.

Additionally, every movie segment is provided with English subtitles so that it is easier for your students to understand the scenes. To make the work of the teacher easier as well, the tasks are also available as a printable worksheet, which you can copy an give to your students. Every worksheet contains an answer key for teachers.

If you find the tasks too easy for your class, you can also find tips on how to create exercises yourself. You may also just change the degree of the given tasks.

Some might be afraid now, that they have to buy or rent the movies which are dealt with on this webpage but this is not necessary. Every scene is embedded in the page and can be played from the internet without any problems. So in class, you can accesses it via the page and show the scene to your students. Of course you should be careful not to show them the tasks or answer keys as well.

To sum up, I really appreciate this page and will certainly use it in class during my teacher-training. If any of you have already experience in using the moving segments in class, they are welcome to tell me about it in a comment to this post. I hope that my post was helpful for you and that you are curious to explore the webpage yourself, now.