Monthly Archives: March 2010

Reversyntaxing

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I was really amazed at the Lost Generation ‘play on syntax’.  Thanks to my EMU colleague Filiz Bodi for passing that on to me.  Watch this video from beginning to end…don’t stop half way through! (Visit http://www.youtube.com/v/42E2fAWM6rA if the embedded video doesn’t load.)

I wondered how difficult it would be to do, so I made a couple to try it out using the theme of ‘success’….it is an interesting language development activity:

============
Everyone knows it
is the secret to success
to know the right people
not
to be good at what you do
=============

Here is the second:

=============
Success is a state of mind
with the proper education and training
the wealthy and educated
are destined to rise above
the poor and the impoverished
===============

If you read these from the top down they have the opposite message as when you start reading from the bottom up.  Writing this as prose would demonstrate the function of punctuation.   Maybe there is some term for this in creative writing? I was in the maths and sciences stream, so I know little about such things.   I don’t know what to call it so I will coin a phrase: reversyntax.

  • It might be interesting to have an competition between students to see who can create the most memorable reversyntax?  The winner could get ‘published’ in the class blog. Maybe it could be turned into a rap song by other students? Even put to music an published on YouTube. Talk about creating an audience to write for! 🙂
  • Might be nice to challenge the really able students to do something creative with English–and it is probably something that even a lower level student could do with some simple structures.   A interesting twist on teaching the concept of inversion.

Make a wish on a wall…

Why I want to be an English teacher

Why I want to be an English teacher

Just wanted to share a concrete application of Web2.0 in ‘blended learning’ to perhaps show you where I am coming from when I look at applying a Web2.0 tool to the notion of blending learning in the class to a web resource.

  • The idea is not to duplicate what you do in either medium (which is the key downfall of many approaches and most publishers) but to accentuate or augment the language learning experience in different ways appropriate to each media.
  • And it doesn’t have to be a long or complicated task or activity. It can be very simple and short in scope, but with the potential to exploit in many ways.

Here is my take on ‘blending learning’ via Web2.0–thanks to the people in my EFL252 course at METU. It is based on using a very simple Web2.o tool called WALLWISHER.  Thanks guys!!

Here is a WALL I built for the people working with me in the METU EFL252 course: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/2bateacher

Here is how this developed:

  1. First I got them to produce a short ANIMOTO about why they want to be a teacher–in pictures and music.
  2. They posted this in the MOODLE with a discussion task to look at two of their peers ANIOMTOs and comment about the main reasons for becoming a teacher.
  3. I then extended this by asking them to produce a ‘gallery’ of the ANIOMOTOs in a wall on WALLWISHER as a ‘multimedia’ poster. Here they had to produce e a really concise and simple summary of their ANIMOTO–and they had already read their peers comments in the MOODLE so that helped focus them by seeing how their peers viewed their videos.
  4. This is something that simply is not possible to do in a f2f mode. And it is totally free and ever so easy to do. And it only took a few minutes of my time to set up, but involved the students in learning the tool, thinking creatively about a topic, and actually creating something they are happy to share on the web.

In WALLWISHER, they do have the chance to enter 160 characters, with a link to their ANIOMOTO. The link can be to anything…a web page, a video, a picture, etc.

Could such a wall could be something that you could get your students to use in a variety of ways? Would love to hear of any projects you come up with and links to your WALLWISHER walls.