Using Wise Quotes with EFL ESL Students

I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.

You can search for quotes by keyword, look at quotes of the day, browse quotes by topic or just click for a random quote.


That isn't all, iWise is compatible with Twitter and allows you to re-tweet quotes or subscribe to and follow tweet feeds from your favourite sources of wisdom.


If you decide to search by topic etc, it even pulls in tweets from Twitter too.


So how about some quote activities with our EFL ESL students?

Here are some suggestions:

• Get students to find a random quote and translate it into their own language or find a parallel quote in their own L1.
• Collect 8 - 10 quotes on a similar topic and get students to discus them and see which ones they prefer / most agree with.
• Get 8 - 10 quotes and cut them in half to create a matching activity. Get your students to match the two halves of each quote.
• Get you students to match the quotes to the writer of the quote.
• Give your students a list of 6 - 8 topics and ask them to find their favourite quote on each topic, then compare them in class and discus / have a class vote on which is the best (students should try to convince others in the class that theirs is the best quote)
• Get two+ quotes on the same topic. Print them up and put them around the class get the students to stand by the one they most like / agree with and discus why.
• Choose 2 -3 people and get your students to find their best quotes, then compare that quotes and try to decide which of the people is the wisest.
• Give the first part of some quotes to your students and see if your students can write an ending to it.
• Find some quotes about someone and see if the students can guess who they are about.
• Use a single quote at the start of each lesson to lead in to the theme of the lesson.
• Use a single quote at the start of each lesson as a warmer and ask students if they agree / disagree with the quote. They could give it marks out of ten too. Keep a league of favourite quotes.
  

Why do I like it?

• It's free and really simple (but also quite complex)
• Some amazing features that really take advantage some Web 2.0 technology
• Lots of fast and varied ways to access the quotes
• There are loads of quotes from a real range of sources
• There is an iPhone ap which can enable you to get all this information via your iPhone or iPod Touch so great for mobile learners

What I'm not so sure about

• The site is so dynamic that you can see then loose quotes pretty quickly if you are just browsing.
• Some quotes can be a little abstract!
  
• The site is free, but the ap isn't, but it is very cheap (59p in UK). Here's a video showing how you can use it.

NB: I have bought the ap, but haven't tried it yet so this is NOT and endorsement of the ap.

I hope you enjoy iWise and the ideas here. Please leave a comment if you have any other favourite quote sites or suggestions for how you have used quotes with students.

Here you can find more online reading activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

• Get the News Through Images
  
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
  
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Create Image Books
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials

Text to Speech (TTS) technology has come a long way in recent years and this is nowhere more evident than on the Read The Words website.

I've just been having a look at the site and trying to decide whether it has real potential for helping EFL ESL students with their listening, reading and pronunciation.


As an experiment I decided to select quite a challenging text and see what the site could do. I also decide to select a British English accent, as in the past I know that TTS systems had struggled more with UK accents than US ones, due to the wider range of sounds in UK English.

Anyway, here are the results. The text is from Wikipedia.org at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_to_speech and is about the challenges of text normalisation in TTS.

• Click here to watch Elizabeth read the text to you.
  Or
  

• Listen using this media player

This is the actual text you should be hearing:

"Text normalization challenges

The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms, numbers, and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project".

Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are not reliable, well understood, or computationally effective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs, like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence.

Deciding how to convert numbers is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words, like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five." However, numbers occur in many different contexts; when a year or perhaps a part of an address, "1325" should likely be read as "thirteen twenty-five", or, when part of a social security number, as "one three two five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand a number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous.

Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from the word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs. "

What I like about the site

• The site is free though you do have to register.
• The site creates a number of options once it has converted the text to speech. This includes creating an Mp3 file to download, creating an embed code to embed the audio into a blog or website, or download to i-pod.
• They have quite a selection of avatars and voices
• The site can convert text from a number of sources including Word, PDF, a website (just type in the URL) or even an RSS feed!
• You can make the texts private or public
• There doesn't seem to be a limit on many you can create
  

What I wasn't so sure about

• I found it hard to get a link to the avatar reading the text. It would have been nice to be able to embed her into my blog, but I just couldn't get that to work.
• Processing the text can take a while.
  

I haven't added any teaching suggestions yet for this posting, as I'm interested to see what other teachers think about this before I do that.

So, if you've listened to the text, please do send in a comment and let me know what you think about the useability of a tool like this with EFL ESL students.

Related lnks:

• Dictation goes Web 2.0
• Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL

Activities for students:

• Listen and Write the News
• Listen to and Download Texts

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Product Reviews

Product review sites are becoming ever more popular on the internet, and why not after all? If you are going to spend money buying something, it's always a good idea to see what other people who bought that same product think of it.

ExpoTV is just that kind of site. It has a collection of, mostly home made, video clips made by ordinary people, mostly from North America, talking about the products they have bought. There is a huge collection of material here on a whole range of products from computer accessories to clothing, make up, cars, video games, children's toys and even trucks!

Here's an example product review. This one is of one of my favourite products, Apple's i-pod touch




What I liked about the site

• The clips are reasonably short and download quite quickly.
• It's free and you don't have to register unless you want to add comments or upload your own video.
• The site is rich with the kinds of language and vocabulary that students find quite useful in their 'real lives' especially if they do have to buy things from websites or while traveling in an English speaking country.
• The videos are made by real people so the material is very authentic with a wide variety of voices and accents.
• The site is well designed with a good search facility, so it's easy to find the kinds of products you are looking for.
• There is a brief guideline on how to make a good product review here which students can use as a guide. Also some how to video clips that are handy.
  
• There is a great potential here for real tasks as registered users can submit their own video reviews and even make money from them!! (I would be very careful about advising students to do this)
• There's an embed code for each video so if you don't want students wandering around the site, or if you want to use only specific clips you can grab the embed code ( as I have above) and just add the clip to a blog, web page or word processing document.
  

How should we use this with students?

• Get students to watch videos of a type of product and decide which one they would buy and why / which ones they wouldn't want to buy.
• Get students to create their own product video and include all the relevant information (this could be done very easily using anything they have with them in class from shoes to stationary, phones bags etc.) If your students don't have access to a video camera, you could still get them to do this for each other in class as a kind of short presentation. You could even make it competitive and see who can best convince the class to buy their shoes or phone etc.
• Get the students to watch 3 or 4 clips and make notes of key information about each product. They could then share this information in small groups and decide on the best product.
• Give pairs or small groups of students a budget and a shopping list and ask them to select the best collection of products within their budget. They should then use the product information to justify their choices.
• Ask the students to make notes of key word or phrases / sentence structures used when describing products
• Get some pictures of products and get students to watch / listen to one clip and decide which product was being described.
• Prepare a list of product features from a selection of videos, then get the students to watch the videos and match the features to the product.
• Give students a selection of clips to watch and ask them to decide which was the best made clip. Ask them to decide why. (This is a good activity to start with if you intend to get students to make their own clips or presentations)
• Have a class discussion about product review websites. Here's some possible discussion questions.
  
• Have you ever used a site like this before?
• Do you think the sites are useful?
• Do you know of any good sites like this (in English or other languages)?
• Are the reviews unbiased?
• How much confidence do they have in such sites?
• Why do people add videos to sites like these?
• How do the sites make their money?
• Why do they pay people to make video clips?
• Would you make a review of a bad product? Why / Why not?
  

What I wasn't so sure about

• Students can submit their own videos and get paid for them, but I would be very wary of encouraging this especially for younger students. Be sure to protect your students privacy and personal information and check on any terms of use before letting them register on this or any other website.
• The site carries a lot of advertising so be wary of letting students click round all over the place. It may well be better to create your own page that only uses the clips you have selected embedded into the page (especially for younger students).
• Students should be aware of the fact that not all the information given in the video is necessarily correct. These are just amateur video makers giving their opinion.
  

On the whole I think that sites like this are a really useful source of authentic materials, real language use and authentic real life tasks that can be useful to students beyond the classroom.

there are some things to be wary of when using them, but on the whole I think making students aware of the possible dangers, traps and pitfalls, is a valuable part of their education in itself, so I don't see this a reason not to use these sites.

Well I hope you find these tips useful, and please do add a comment if you have any other ideas for using product review websites, or if you have used them with your students.

Here's the URL of the site in case you missed it: http://www.expotv.com

Best

Nik Peachey

Immersive Image Environments

If you enjoy working with images with your EFL students, especially on an IWB (interactive whiteboard) or a data projector, then PicLens is exactly what you need.

PicLens is a plugin (small program) that works within your web browser (there are versions for Firefox, Safari and IE 7) and it converts many of the standard image sharing websites, like flickr, Photobucket, Google Images, Yahoo Images etc. into "3D immersive environments"!

To understand what that mean have a look at this short flash video tutorial which shows how to use PicLens.

Click here or on the image to view the movie (5Mb Flash)
OR
Download a version of this movie for i-pod / i-tunes here

At the click of the mouse the normal 2D web pages are converted into a wall of images which you can explore and enlarge.

How to use this with ELT students on your data projector or IWB

• Pull up a wall of images and describe one while your students try to guess which one it is. Then get a student to describe an image and the others guess which one. (This will work best with quite similar images). You can then get students to do this in pairs.
  
• Type in a search term and ask students to describe the connection / relevance of the image to the term (This works best when you enter abstract nouns like politics, alienation, paranoia etc.)
• Use the resource for any new vocabulary words that come up in your lesson. Simply collect the words, type them in and find images that relate to the word. (This won't work for every word)
• Get students to compare and contrast two images (A common task in EFL exams such as FCE)
• Play just a minute and select an image for each student, they then have to talk for one minute about that image with repeating them selves or pausing (This is difficult to do, so don't expect too much) award points for the student who manages to speak for the longest.
• Put students with their back to the images, select one and the other students (in two teams or groups) have to describe the image to the student who can't see it. The student then has to guess which image they described.
• Pull up a single image and ask students to think about the photographer's intention.
  
• Why did the photographer take the image?
  
• What did they want to say?
  
• What is their relationship to the image content?
  
• What were they doing before, after they took the image?
  
• Etc etc.
• Students can select their favourite image and explain why they like it, or the one they like least.
• Students can try to use their imagination to describe the space around the image that you don't see.
  
• What's happening around the photographer that you don't see?
  
• What is the photographer wearing?
  
• What's happening behind the photographer?
• Describe the photographer (age, gender, nationality, personality etc.)
  

What I like about it

• The Plugin is free and very simple to download and install and less than 2 Mb
• The interface is really easy to use and very attractive
• It really highlights the images and frees then from the textual distraction that you often find on a web page
• There's no advertising on it
• You get access to some really fantastic images in class without having to download them or violate anyone's copyright
• The most recent version also enables you to create immersive walls of videos from YouTube !!! Fantastic!
  

What I'm not so sure about

• As with any image sharing / search bank you have to be careful with younger students that inappropriate images don't appear. You can get around this though by setting up your own account on something like Flickr and only using specific images from your account. This could be time consuming, but if you got other teachers and students to help, it could be a fantastic resource.
• If you are on a slow connection it could take a bit longer for the images to load.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it from here:

• Version for Internet Explorer 7
• Version for Safari 2 + 3.0
• Version for Firefox

This is a really great tool for the connected ELT classroom and also great to use at home. I hope you are able to enjoy using it with your students. Do drop me a lne with any other ideas and activities you use with it.

Best

Nik

Goolge Maps for Directions

Love them or hate them, you have to admit that Google does offer us all manner of useful free tools. One of my favourites is Google Maps, especially useful on my odd trips to London (when I never seem to be able to remember my A-Z!)

So, I've been thinking about how we could use this 'real world' tool to help our EFL students and to develop their abilities to give and understand directions. It's actually quite simple to use. You just go to http://maps.google.co.uk/ or http://maps.google.com/ Click on 'Get Directions' and then enter your start point and destination. Click the Google logo below for a quick video tutorial that shows some of the features.

Click for flash video tutorial (1.4 Mb)

So how can we use this with students?

• Choose a location and destination and get Google Maps to create your directions, then print up a map of London with the two destinations on and ask your students to mark the route on the map.
• A variation on this would be to have the map printed with the route on and cut up the directions and ask your students to put them in the correct order
• Print up a route map and directions and edit out some of the key words, then get your students to write in the missing words.
• Give your students a map showing only the start point and read out directions for them to follow. They have to listen and tell you what the destination is.
• Print out close ups of each stage of the journey and use them as flash cards. Get your students to match each step of the journey to the correct flashcard.
• Print out a route map and ask students to write their own directions for the map (You could give two groups different destinations then get them to exchange directions to see if the other group can use their directions to find the correct destination.)
• To download an example set of directions + route map and blank map to print up and use for these activities click here: Example materials >> (500k pdf)
• To print up maps and directions for yourself just click on the Google maps 'Print' icon.
  

What I like about it

• Google maps is free and really simple to use
• If you have an i-pod touch or an i-phone, there is a fantastic Google Maps widget which you can install (great for mobile learning)
  
• Gives good clear instructions and easy to print maps (just use the 'Print' icon)
  
• A really useful 'real world' tool
• You can use it live if you have a computer room or data projector / interactive whiteboard in class, or just print up materials for use off line.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• The detail of the maps for some developing countries is pretty sparse

Hope you find this tool useful and if you have suggestions for other activities I'd love o hear them.

Best

Nik