Comments for macappella

Comment on About by swisssirja

swisssirja — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:54:30 +0000

Hello Fiona,
I discovered this space thanks to Carol Goodey who told me about your blog. It is my first year teaching older teens and the transition from teaching adults to teaching teens can be quite a bumpy road. So here I am, eager to learn from you, eager to grow and eager to make it all work!

Spring greetings from the Alps!

Comment on A place of greater safety by A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:55:09 +0000

[...] card, making my kids ‘really different from the tribe’. This whole area is the area I call The Twilight Zone. Activities that require students to think about what they have – ‘Compare your mobile phone [...]

Comment on A Matter of Confidence by A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:55:06 +0000

[...] your house……. Image by Sandy Millin at eltpics In the intro post above (or rather ‘below’, this being a blog), I gave the example of the ‘Ay se eu te pego’ (or [...]

Comment on A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:55:02 +0000

[...] A Matter of Confidence: Personalising [...]

Comment on A place of greater safety by A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:06:39 +0000

[...] great way of reaching emotions via sensory stimuli. I’ve already blogged about the power of the voice and visualisation, but every time I do this in class, I am… oh, I can’t think of a ‘cool’ word, but [...]

Comment on A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:06:33 +0000

[...] Light and growth I said in the first of these posts that learning and confidence are like chicken and egg, though perhaps they’re more like light and growth, the one not happening without the other, though whether confidence or learning is the sunlight is impossible to say. In order to boost confidence we have to boost learning and vice versa. Factors such as environment, integration within the group, rapport on the part of the teacher, self-confidence and self-image all contribute to confidence, of course – and I optimistically hope to be able to blog on them at some point in the future – but for now, and for this series of posts, theaides-memoires I’m looking at, if you’ll pardon the slight distortion of the term, are personalising, emotional response, repetition and ‘Complete learning’. For my rationale, take a look at the introductory post to the series. Emotional response: or “I want you, I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you”. Life is not all about loving or hating annoying Brazilian ditties (see earlier post), catchy earworms which get stuck on our mind’s turntable, repeating themselves over and over as we have subconsciously absorbed every tooth-sensitising note. And although psychologists say that emotional response heightens learning, we don’t need to have read their work to know that that’s true. We all have our own personal examples of learning ‘via’ emotion, language or otherwise. Here are some of my moments, but as you read, you may like to reach into your own memory-bag and rummage around for some of your own, based on the same emotions mentioned and marked in bold. Of course, in true ELT teacher-awareness workshop fashion, you could then track down a partner and compare your experiences, but see a couple of posts ago forthe risks of ‘personalisation’… [...]

Comment on A Matter of Confidence by A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:06:30 +0000

[...] and growth I said in the first of these posts that learning and confidence are like chicken and egg, though perhaps they’re more like light and growth, the one not happening without the other, [...]

Comment on A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… by A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… by Fiona Mauchline « Tesol Greece Blog

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:06:25 +0000

[...] A Matter of Confidence: The quest continues… [...]

Comment on A teenage kicks diversion by Tyson Seburn (@seburnt)

Tyson Seburn (@seburnt) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:24:50 +0000

1. Do you encourage the use of colloquialism and idioms etc. with teens?
Rarely. I deal with them as them come up in a text, but never teach them in groups of by animal or anything like that. I loathe teaching idioms for the sake of teaching idioms.

2. Any tips for teaching online?
I have rarely done this outside of being in connection to a f2f course. I would, however, look forward to blending various tools to engage the learners and expose them to a wide variety of online tools that lend themselves to certain kinds of practice.

3. Do you take the coursebook as the basis for your lesson or do you use other materials?
Never. In fact, we don’t actually ever use a coursebook from start to finish. We do employ chapters from Writing Academic English (Pearson Longman), but more as a supplemental to what we teach.

4. How do you feel about using online corpora to help sts with language?
I love the idea, but who has the time to research this? Haha. I do introduce just-the-word.com and give Ss homework to use it to lookup frequencies, but I doubt they continue to do so. I probably could invest time in recycling this as a task.

Comment on A Matter of Confidence: Personalising by A bouquet of favourite blog posts | elt-resourceful

A bouquet of favourite blog posts | elt-resourceful — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:28:15 +0000

[...] love this post by Fiona Mauchline on Maccappella on the frequent problems with ‘personalised’ [...]