EnglishBrno

by Nina

7.12.11

We´ve moved!

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: , , , , ,

Dear blog followers,

you will now find the blog AND my brand new website at EnglishBrno.cz.
You can switch between Czech and English languages.

Don´t forget to "Subscribe via email" under the blog post to be updated about new articles.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Nina

comments (0)

15.6.11

BEFORE and AFTER recordings

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,

From 12 January till 25 May I led a course called "Kurz zážitkové angličtiny" which I translated as "English Without Books" since we didn´t use any books and most of the activities were conversational, real-life events where students got to interact with native and international speakers. Apart from in-class time the students followed a self-study programme consisting of English Out There (EOT) lessons, English Central videos, graded readers, tv sitcoms and movies and posts on my FB page.

I recorded the students two weeks into the course and the last week of the course, exactly 4 months after. Judge for yourself how much they progressed, three of them gave me the permission to publish their recordings. Here they are:



Meet Tina - a secondary school student whose parents have been supporting her language education since her kindergarden years. Tina is a highly talented and motivated smart young lady who loves learning new things. Unfortunately she is quite unhappy about her English lessons at school, she says they´re a waste of time as the teacher never gives them the opportunity to speak, all they do is follow boring grammar/vocab exercises and write tests. Tina feels she has benefited from the course especially when it comes to promptness and fluency.


Zuzka was our sunshine. Always happy to talk to everyone, always smiling and full of positive energy. The teachers loved her and she easily made friends with the rest of the group. Zuzka works in a job where she needs to speak English on the phone and had always been shy to do so. She is also a big fan of movies and sitcoms but never watched them without Czech subtitles on. I believe recording over 160 short videos over at English Central played a big role in her listening skills improvement.



I have never seen anyone work as hard on their English in such a short period of time as Lenka did. At the beginning of the course she hardly understood what people around her were saying, she had troubles putting a simple sentence together and she was lost in all the coursebooks and courses she had attended prior to this one. During the course she was promoted at work and was offered to attend two training events abroad due to her English speaking skills improvement. Lenka quite rightly won the best student award (and 50% of the course fee back), don´t you think?


I´d love to hear your feedback on the students´ progress, please comment below.

Thank you,

Nina
_______________________________________________________________________________________

If you´re interested in learning more about the course, have a look at my other blog posts about the course. In September I am opening Kurz zážitkové angličtiny 2 so let me know if you want to participate. It´s women only :)

comments (0)

13.4.11

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: , ,

A few days after each session of the "English Without Books" course I send the students a revision email, with a summary of what we did in the session, links used in the lesson and the activities we did. 

Here´s the email I am sending them this week. 

Dear Lenka, Tina, Zdeněk, Zuzka and Léňa,

In our previous session we worked with the pilot (= first episode) of the popular British sitcom IT Crowd which I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Especially the last part where you took on the roles of the four characters, Roy, Moss, Jen and Denholm and revealed some acting talent! I am attaching a short video :)

  • First we read a short introduction text about the sitcom, with gaps for these missing prepositions:
The IT Crowd
The sitcom is written by G.Lineham
He is the author of another show
IT Crowd is set in London offices of a fictional corporation
It focuses on three staff members
The team consists of Roy, Moss and Jen 
The dirty office is an obvious contrast to the shining modern architecture
The view is enjoyed by the rest of the organization

  • Then we watched the whole episode with Czech subs on in order to better understand the story and the individual scenes. While watching, you had to answer 10 True or False questions (you can find the full list in the Comments) and learned the following expressions:
To take advantage of sb – „Roy and Moss think the company just takes advantage of them.“
To be disgusted by st – „Jen is disgusted by unisex toilets.“
To pretend – „Moss pretends he´s been reading Tolstoy.“
To tell on sb – „They go to Denholm with the plan to tell on Jen but in the end they never do.“

  • To make it a bit more fun, after we watched you paired up and with your partner you had to find answer to these questions:
Have you tried turning it off and...?
1) Who says this?
„I´m sorry, are you from the past?“
„Why are you giving me the secret signal to shut up?“
„It´s almost as if she doesn´t know anything about computers.“
„There´s no room for people who can´t act in a team on my team.“
„Ideas are coming, things are happening here.“



2) Write 2 facts you learned in this episode about each of the  four characters, e.g. „Jen doesn´t know anything about computers“
Denholm and Jen
3) Look at the transcript of the first scene and get ready to explain the meaning of the underlined expressions.

I find the best thing to do with a new employee is to size them up with a long hard stare….
Yes, really looking forward to getting to grips with... 
Well, you certainly seem to know your stuff. That's settled. 
Standard nerds!

  • After watching Scene 1 again, this time with English subs on, and clarifying the answers for everyone, we continued the rest of the activities using open-class and pair discussions. 
Roy and Moss, the "standard nerds"
Before and after watching Scene 2 again, with Eng subs on, we discussed these questions:

Can you describe the offices of the IT department?
What´s the first question the guys typically ask when someone phones?
When Roy is trying to solve the first person´s problem, he talks about a „button“. What „button“ is Roy talking about and which one does the person think Roy is referring to?
Moss is also trying to help someone on the phone. What is the problem with Moss´s help?
What does „hit it off“ mean according to Moss?



  • With Scene 3 we played the guessing game, where I paused the video several times and asked you to guess before the characters acted it out:
What does Jen say when she looks at the view? 
When Jen gets to the basement, what does she hear the lift repeat? 
When the guys find out Jen walked into the office what do they do and why? 
After Roy throws something at Moss, what does Moss say? 

The guys are planning to tell on Jen
  • The last, and I believe the most fun activity, was with Scene 6, where the guys decide to tell Denholm they don´t want Jen as their boss. We went through the transcript and then you each played one of the characters. We had a good laugh with Tina as Denholm, didn´t we? :)



I hope you had fun, you learned something new and I´m very much looking forward to your short summaries of the episode. It would be great if you could publish them here under the article.

Let me know if you have any questions or when something worries you. I am always here for you!

Nina

comments (5)

6.3.11

And the Oscar Goes to....

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: , ,


What´s the second best activity to learning English through conversation with others? Watching movies!

Why? Because they depict real life, therefore they provide perfect material for your self-study. And the amount of phrases, idioms and common expressions is massive! Click here to download tons of movie guides or here to accompany your movies with trivia quizes.




I love teaching with film and I am planning to open a new course "Learn English with Movies" soon. Because a lesson here and there is simply not enough. You can only do this much in 90 mins:

MOVIE LESSON inspired by the recent Oscars ceremony

Warm - up (15min)
  •  Before the lesson, I displayed all my favourite DVDs which were either nominated for or won an Oscar. I introduced the lesson´s main theme by  asking the students to guess what they all had in common. We  shortly discussed who saw which film and I encouraged them to borrow the movies from my library.
  •  I handed out a 1-min multiple-choice movie questionnaire with 5 simple questions about the students´ personal tastes (find the list below in the Comments), they ticked their answers and formed two groups in order to talk about movies with each other.

Oscar Acceptance Speech (25min)


  • I wrote "speech" on the board and made  the students guess 3 different ways it could be connected with our lesson. Some of them mentioned the film which just received an Oscar for Best Picture "The King´s Speech".
  • I wrote "Oscar Acceptance Speech" on the board and asked the students "What is it?" (Answer: when somebody receives an Academy Award, they come on stage and give a speech in which they thank other people)
  •  I told the students they were now going to watch a typical acceptance speech. We discussed the types of sentences they expect to hear. Then we watched this 3-min video. 
  •  Afterwards the students had 1min to write down everyone/thing the actor thanked in his speech. When they were done they compared their list with their partner´s while I listened in, surprised by how much they remembered.
  •  I asked for the name of the actor and then revealed it was a "spoof", explaining the expression by comparing it to a popular local show called Česká soda.
  •  We then watched one real speech, given by Natalie Portman, who won this year´s Oscar for Best Actress in "Black Swan". In her speech she talks about her first movie she was in when she was 11, Léon, so we then watched a short clip from this movie. We all had a good laugh.

The King´s Speech (30min)

  •  I first asked the students to name all the movies which were nominated for this year´s Best Picture award and wrote them on the board. I asked them which ones they had seen or were planning to go see.
  •  Depending on how much the students know, what their level is and how much time you have, you can watch this summary OR this review of the nominated films in order to complete the list of all the 10 nominated movies.
  •  While they were watching I wrote the films´ different genres on the board so after they watched (and knew more about the movies), they had to match the movies to their genres.
  •  After clearing that it was "The King´s Speech" which won the battle, I played the movie trailer and asked them what they knew about the historical background (one student had seen the film so she gave us some details and I quickly went over the situation in the British royal family before WWII).
  •  Then we watched a 3-min scene from the movie (the king´s first visit to his speech therapist Lionel Logue) with Czech subtitles on after which I gave a copy of the movie to each of the students, accompanied by both Czech and English subtitles. I suggested they watch the film with these trivia questions in hand.

Public speaking (20min)
  •  I asked the students: "How do you feel about speaking in public?" and "When did you last have to speak in public?" - they were eager to share their experience.
  •  Then we shortly discussed their personal advice to someone who has to give a public speech and I handed them these 5 lessons which you can learn from the movie. They discussed them shortly with their partner.
  • As the last activity I went through this presentation with my personal comments:
   

The students´ task for our next session (5min)
  • To watch one of the nominated movies and prepare a 2-min presentation about it. Next week they will each show what they´ve  got in our "Presentation Skills in English" lesson. They all agreed learning public speaking skills is very useful for them.
    _________________________________________________

    My lesson was inspired by this teacher´s blog. Please, feel free to use my lesson plan but be so kind to quote the source. Make sure the students do a lot of speaking.

    Any comments are welcome!

    Nina

comments (7)

20.2.11

Cooking in English

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,


Our second native speaker event of our English Without Books  course took place in my kitchen as it was time to COOK IN ENGLISH! 

My dear friend and teacher colleague Matt Bleson, who is a wonderful cook, originally from India, agreed to carry out a cooking lesson with my students.




And it went very well... Watch the video:


If you want to prepare the meal yourself, here is how (the recipe was put together by the students):

INGREDIENTS
2 small pieces of ginger
3 pieces of garlic
600 grams of the chicken (boneless)
Salt
Coriander
Red pepper
Chili
Shallot
Sunflower oil
Chopped tomatoes
3 cans of coconut milk
500 grams of Basmati rice
750 ml of water
1 lemon
Parsley leaves (herb)

THE CURRY:
    • Cut chicken into cubes
    • Crash the garlic and ginger into paste in a Martar with a Pestle
    • Peel the shallot and chop into pieces
Preheat a large enough pot
    • Pour sunflower oil into a pot
    • Add the garlic, shallot and ginger  into a pot and stir until the mixture is golden brown
    • Add  
            • a half of tea-spoon of coriander
            • a tea-spoon of red pepper
            • tiny bit of chilli
            • 6 teaspoons of chopped tomatoes
            • salt
    • Add the chicken and mix all the ingredients well so that the chicken is coated well with all the spices
            • 3 cans of coconut milk (450 ml)
    • Stir it and cover with a lid and boil for 15 minutes

THE SAUCEPAN:
    • Put 500 grams of Basmati Rice into a saucepan and add 750 ml of water
    • Add Salt
    • Cover with a lid and boil for 15 minutes (until all the water has disappeared)
    • After 15 minutes put 2 chopped Shallots into the saucepan, on the rice

THE PLATE:
    • Put a sliced-washed lemon on the plate (1 piece on each plate)
    • Chop herbs (parsley)
    • Put the rice into the middle of the plate
    • Pour the curry on one half of the Rice (one half is covered with a sauce)
    • Sprinkle some parsley on top

Enjoy your meal,

Nina, Matt, Zuzka, Léňa, Lenka, Zdeněk

comments (5)

7.2.11

Time Management and Effective Reading

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,


The 4th session of our course English Without Books was a soft-skills lesson on effective learning, with focus on Reading. 

Apart from addressing a few students´self-study issues  and hanging up their written out goals around the classroom, we all shared tips on time management and effective learning strategies.




INDULGE IN LEARNING
I believe in learning a foreign language by fully immersing yourself in the language. This is how I have been learning English my whole life. If you want to improve quickly and aren´t lucky enough to be living in one of the English speaking countries (like me),  do your best to maximize the opportunities to speak, listen, write and read in English (speaking being the most important of all). However, it is very important to choose ONLY those ways to learn English which you are comfortable with. Don´t read novels, talk to boring people or practise writing short-stories if you don´t enjoy it.

 
TIME MANAGEMENT
Time management for language learning can become a serious problem for many, especially if you have a family to look after or are extremely busy at work. There is a program out there, called Workflowy, which I have been using successfully for organizing my brain. You can  watch the intro video to see if Workflowy would be something for you when applied to language learning. Or you can start using Google Calender and sync it with your mobile phone/email. The key is to DO SOMETHING to organize your study time.


TIPS ON EFFECTIVE READING
A simple rule for any of the 4 main skills: the more you practise the skill, the better you become in it. Only by speaking will you improve your speaking skills, and the same goes for reading.

As I heartily agree with the "narrow reading" approach suggested by Prof. Stephen Krashen, I recommend the following guidelines for consideration:
  • Read only material that is genuinely fun and interesting. Read about your passions, read comic books, celeb magazines, detective stories, whatever it is that keeps you reading/coming back to it.
  • If the book or magazine is too hard, or not really interesting, stop reading and find something else. The goal is to find material that is so engaging, and so easy, that you will forget that it is in another language. You want reading material that requires no self-discipline to read.
  • Carry the book or magazine with you everywhere. You may feel that you don't have time to read, but if you carry your book with you, the world will conspire to give you time. Take your book out when you are standing in line, waiting for a bus, and when waiting for service.

Click on this link to access lots of reading materials for English learners.  

Or make these steps to start reading about your passions (we carried out this activity in the lesson):
  1. write down all the passions you have (sports, travel destinations, favourite singer/band, your profession, your hobby,...) 
  2. choose top 2 passions which you enjoy reading about in your native language
  3. choose one of them now and spend 20-30min looking for the best website (or blog) about that passion 
  4. do the same search on Facebook and join groups/fanpages which post links about your passion
  5. do the same for your second passion
  6. read about your passion regularly (print the articles out and take them to work, café or bed so you don´t feel you are spending too much time online)
  7. comment on this article below with sharing your passions/websites/fanpages with us!

To effective reading!

Nina

comments (5)

30.1.11

Pub Discussion

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,



The "Pub Discussion" session had to come early in our English Without Books course, since Czechs love going to pubs and so do native speakers living in Brno. 

So we agreed to meet at the Sherlock Holmes pub, at 5:30pm  as usual, and talked and laughed and drank/ate and discussed the English language. A few even partied till the wee hours (or so I heard :). 



I want to thank Glenn, Matt and Aaron, my native speaker friends, who kept the students busy all evening. They made sure everyone spoke a lot of English, while I was trying to  record parts of the  meeting. Why don´t you have a look for yourself... (please, be tolerant, this was my first video editing attempt with Windows Media Maker)



THE GAME

I chose 14 sentences which the Czech group had to translate from Czech into English. The "native speaker" group was not allowed to help the students; in fact, I gave them the same phrases in Czech and they had to show how much Czech they know by translating them into our language. After both groups were done, they got together in order to find the pairs, however they were not allowed to look at the correct printed version. This started quite a few language discussions, (e.g. "shall" x "should" in "Shall I open the window"). Here are the sentences:

I didn´t have to go to work this morning.
Are you even listening to me?
Are you having a good time?
I´ve never been here before.
I´ve been waiting here for ages!
Shall I open the window?
If you want, I´ll give you a lift.
Can you hear me well?
Do we have to go now?
I had to wait for a friend.
If I were you, I wouldn´t do it.
No worries, Tomáš is cool.
No pain no gain.
Don´t you dare!
 
If you were one of the participants, I would love hear your feedback and ideas for improvement. And share your favourite moment with us! Mine was seeing Matt after quite a long time. Looking forward to his Cooking lesson with us.

Nina

comments (7)

22.1.11

English Without Books: Self-study Jump Start

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,


After our first meeting last Wednesday I was extremely excited about conducting our second session and looking forward to seeing my new students again! We were in touch via Skype, Facebook and email but to meet them all in person, as a group, easily became the highlight of my working week. I have never met such motivated learners, full of dreams about their English!

From left to right: my teacher colleague Glenn, Léňa, Zuzka, Lenka, Zdeněk, Tina (in the front)

LANGUAGE GOALS
We began the session by discussing their language goals which they emailed me earlier. Here are a few examples:
"I will be able to read Paolo Coelho´s novels in English, without a dictionary."
"I will write an article for an English magazine or newspaper."
"I will be able to watch movies without subtitles."
"I will be able to correspond with my American friends in California without mistakes, using rich vocabulary."

They are aware of the fact that they have to work hard if they want to make their dreams come true. Not only should these dreams be fulfilled one day but also each of the four language skills should be continually improving, in order for the students to become  balanced langauge users, as Marek Vít stresses in his article "Co je na angličtině nejdůležitější" (in Czech). If you are good at Reading and Writing, how will it make you fit for Speaking or Listening? If your Listening is good but your Writing contains a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes, will you be considered a good language user?
ENGLISH CENTRAL
I am very proud of how focused the students are and how hard they seem to be working already. Especially with the new version of English Central where they all started recording their voice. Zuzka was the busiest bee of all, having managed to record 744 lines of text! English Central is, at least to me, a revolutionary  new software which will help thousands of people improve their listening and speaking skills. You just have to try and see for yourself how exciting this is. Do a demo lesson, follow the instructions for recording yourself and then register for free. Nothing is complicated, it´s so well-structured, so resourceful and so much fun. I can´t stop using it myself!

ENGLISH OUT THERE PROGRAMME
The point of this programme is to give students an opportunity to practise a lot of speaking on many different topics with real people. Each student will go through one lesson per week, revise it a few days later and then call their conversation partners and ask pre-structured questions from the task sheets. They should talk to 4-5 people a week, each for 5-10min, unless they want to talk  longer, of course. I decided to put a list together myself by contacting my friends, in order to give the students a hand at first. Later on when they are familiar with the programme, they can start adding their own convo partners to the list of language partners they were given.
Finding a language partner is easy, but can take some time. I highly recommend to talk only with people who are native or fluent English speakers (fluent = someone like me) and they should be from at least 5 different countries. It will help you understand different accents and new vocabulary from - British English, American English, Arabic English, Indian English, Canadian English, Russian English, Czech English, and others.

I called this session the "Self-study Jump Start" as it was an introduction to all the work the students are going to be doing outside of the classroom. It was less conversational and they might have been overwhelmed by all the resources and tools available. But they really have nothing to worry about - our next session is a Pub Discussion, so no computers, beer and lots of speaking time ahead of us, both online with the conversation partners and offline during the native speaker events.

If you are one of the students, please, do comment on how it´s working out for you so far. If you are a teacher and want to know more about our session, don´t hesitate to contact me via Facebook. 


Big thanks to Glenn, my dear friend and teacher colleague, for helping out with managing the lessons!

Nina

comments (7)

16.1.11

English Without Books: Intro Session

Posted by Nina Hanakova | Labels: ,


As an English teacher, I have always leaned towards non-traditional, conversational, playful way of learning. I used to organize movie nights, lessons in pubs and city trips, but I still taught from books when in the classroom. Then, when my daughter was born, I had time to reconsider my somewhat traditional approach in class and decided to quit. I am a freelancer, my own boss, I can afford to do this, so why not?

I don´t want to be a "teacher" any more, I never saw myself as one anyways. I want to be a guide, a helping hand and a true manager of my students´ progress!

So, I restructured my lessons and set up a brand new course - English Without Books or "Kurz zážitkové angličtiny" in Czech. Please, read more about it in my previous blog post. Here´s how the first lesson went.

SESSION 1

I couldn´t wait for the course to start, I could hardly sleep the night before and my stomach was so small I couldn´t eat lunch the day we were supposed to have our first lesson. But there was really nothing to worry about, the first meeting turned out better than I  had expected and I was quite happy about my lesson plan coming out well. The students were very easy-going, open-minded and enthusiastic to be part of this. And my teacher friend Glenn was a great help (thank you!).

I am not against all books, just the traditional coursebooks!

GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER

Tina
Since the students didn´t know each other, the main aim of the lesson was to give them a lot of opportunities to speak to each other. I couldn´t be more surprised to watch complete strangers, all Czechs, speaking English to each other with such an ease. I helped them with a few hints what to talk about and let them mingle. I think they would still be talking now if I didn´t stop the activity after 30min, they didn´t need me at all. There was no correction, no interruption and there was a lot of laughing. All they needed me for was to pour more tea in their cups.



SETTING LANGUAGE GOALS

Zdeněk
I also wanted to help the students understand goal setting, so that they would know how to set their short-term and long-term language goals. We first played a fun game "If you had any money in the world..." where they dreamed about being able to afford any car, house and holiday. Visuals always help, so I had cut out tons of pictures from magazines. After they chose their dream cars/homes/holidays, I hung them on the board for everyone to see. I then asked them to think what they are hoping to do within 1 year, in the same categories - maybe buy new speakers for their car, a better sofa for their living room or go on holiday to Paris. 

And then we switched to language dreams. You can dream big about your language skills! Maybe you want to be able to read Shakespeare in the original or speak to your favourite musician without blushing or write and give a speech at an international conference. Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. Write your big dreams down! And then go small and think short-term.
This video can help writing the goals down.




THE COURSE OVERVIEW

Zuzka

1) Session 1-6: focus on starting them think independently
    - helping them set their language goals
    - intro to the self-study process with the EOT programme
    - help them start working with English Central, English Attack, etc.
    - intro to the online/offline English speaking world
    - two native speaker events
    - one soft-skills lesson


Léňa
  
2) Session 7-12: focus on leading them through
    - diving into the EOT programme
    - making them feel more comfortable talking to their convo partners
    - two native speaker events
    - learning with video



Lenka

  
3) Session 13-18: focus on setting them free
    - they are able to work independently,  know how, loving it
    - two native speaker events
    - evaluation of the course
    - final garden party with announcing the best student



This is the students´ feedback on Facebook:

Tina: "It was great today! I'm looking forward to our next sessions!"

Zuzka: "I enjoyed our fist lesson and I am looking forward for the next one and to start using Englishcentral.com :)"

Zdeněk: "That was wonderful lesson girls :-).I'm delighted at study English with you. I'm looking forward to next Wednesday. Let's go on http://www.englishcentral.com/ !

Lenka: " Hello Nina, I had a great time with you as well:-) I am looking forward to next Wednesday."

Léňa: "Hi Nina, it was the great start of your course. I am excited. It was great fun, I met wonderful people and I look forward to the next leason to all and of course to use Englishcentral.com:-)"

If you want to know how we will evaluate the students and measure their progress, follow this blog. We will start making videos, photos and voice recordings and catching our language dreams!

Any comments or questions, please post them here or on my Facebook page.

Nina


comments (3)

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Subscribe