USA Learns Partners in Practice

1st Course U11: Clothes Shopping

Evelyn Fella — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:00:42 +0000

With shopping on everyone’s mind this time of year, here are 2 clothes shopping videos that might be a good fit in your lesson plans.

This is a fun little video from the Top Notch series that is posted on YouTube. (If YouTube is blocked at your school, try the next video.) You can go to the Pearson website to get information about the whole series. There’s a review of the verb “like” as the young woman asks two sports-engrossed guys about her new clothes purchases. After viewing have students retell the story, either orally or in writing.

Do you like this?

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Here is another video about clothes shopping from the Macmillan Inside Out series. (This is a sample posted on their website, not on YouTube, so this hopefully will work even for those of you with YouTube blocked at your schools.) This video is slightly more difficult than the Top Notch video above because we don’t see the clothes mentioned, just the shopping bags they are in. Also it is in British English, but the language is very clear. Again in this video, students get lots of practice with the verb “like.”

As an activity, ask students to make 2 columns on a piece of paper, one for Martine and one for Jamie. Have them watch the video and write down all the items each of them buys. Also ask them to write what activities each likes to do. Another possibility, especially if you show this video in class is to ask students to “narrate” the story. After several viewings and students are very familiar with the video, turn the volume off and ask a student to be the narrator and talk about what is happening in the video. For DL students who are set up with sending you audio files, you might ask them to record themselves narrating, and then send you the audio file. Of course, this could also be a writing assignment.

Do you like shopping?

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2nd Course: Everyday Life Skills

Evelyn Fella — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 02:38:12 +0000

This is yet another one of my favorite websites. GCF LearnFree.org Everyday Life has the coolest interactive Life Skills activities I’ve seen on the Internet. (and they’re all FREE!) Students get listening and reading/scanning for specific information practice with beautiful art. Students will need to drag and click locations or pictures to complete the activities, but there is a tutorial to help them with this navigation. However, showing them how to do it would probably be a whole lot faster. If you show them one activity, they should catch on to all the others quickly.

The link above will give you the entire menu of activities. I’ve listed some below that I think fit particularly well with the story lines, but it might be good to just let students explore the menu and make their own choices. They are all valuable Life Skill lessons. Each activity also has a printable handout. You could use it to pre-teach some vocabulary and concepts, or use it as review after they’ve done the activity online. Students may learn some of the more difficult vocabulary through the images and their exploration of the scenes.

USALearns tie-in stories would be U14: Women’s Changing Roles, where Benjamin promises to help Marta in the household if she lets him move back in. Benjamin really messes up when it comes to keeping house and paying bills, so these would all be perfect “lessons” for him. Also in U8: Men’s Changing Roles, Karina asks Viktor to take on more responsibility in the house. Any of these links below would be a nice supplement to either of those stories.

Reading bills and scanning for specific information: Pay Bills

Finding specific information on a receipt: Check your receipt

Filling out a deposit slip at the bank: Deposit

Reading labels and prices while grocery shopping: Grocery Shelves

Following a recipe to make a cake : Measure

Following the directions for baking a cake: Bake

Learning about safety when grilling: Grill Safety

…and many more good ones on the menu. Check them out and let me know which ones you like the best and how your students liked them.

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2nd Course: Workplace Roles Vignettes

Evelyn Fella — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:24:39 +0000

Here’s an interesting website (Vignettes Learning: Story Impacts) offering short interactive vignettes that fit well with the themes of sexual harassment and decision-making in the workplace. New stories are always being added, and they provide lots of interesting discussion opportunities for workplace themes. Vocabulary can be pretty advanced, so this is a good step-up activity for more advanced students. These stories are not designed for ESL students, (i.e. authentic language!) so you will want to do some pre-listening activities with your students

“The Compliment” vignette is the easiest of my 3 suggestions and it works well with the sexual harassment theme in U15: Women’s Work Issues. The vignette is presented in the form of a dialog, and I’d suggest asking your students to write the dialog as a listening activity. The vignette leads to thought-provoking discussion questions.

Consider using the vignette, “Too Much Break Time” or “Can you tell me if my job is safe?” in conjunction with U16: Women in Non-Traditional Roles to tie in with a manager needing to make tough decisions.

You have to click Next to go through each story, but be sure to get to the end where choices for different ways of handling the situation are presented. This is a good place to get your students discussing various options. Reading the posted comments is also a great reading activity for students and could inspire more discussion. After viewing and discussing the stories, students can write essays stating their recommendations for the situation. If you sign up (it’s free) you can get free links to the vignettes that you can post on your webpage, and your students could also post comments in the discussion.

Here are links if you’d like to show the vignettes in class to the whole group:

The Compliment

Too Much Break Time

Give students these links for work at home so they can read the vignette summary and comments.

The Compliment Page

Break Time Page

The Little Secret

And, keep checking back on the site because they keep adding new vignettes!

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2nd Course – Education and Information – Grammar

Evelyn Fella — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:11:29 +0000

As much as I love the video series in this course, I must admit to one issue that another teacher brought to my attention some years ago. The grammar is at a lower level than one would expect. This is especially true in this story about Tony Park and his struggles to keep his sandwich shop. The story was placed as the last story, but considering the grammar, I sometimes think it should have been the first story. WH-Questions and prepositions are fairly low-level grammar points. So I am motivated to provide some links that will provide more practice for your students in the grammar points of the stories.

I thought it would be easier if I put my grammar suggestions for all 4 units of a video story in a single post. It makes the post long, but let’s see if this works for you. At least you’ll have all the grammar in one place so you can always go back and have students review anything they may have missed in previous episodes of the story.

17: Accessing Learning Opportunities – WH-Questions

The first activity is based on the 3 Bears story, so you may want to be sure your students are familiar with the story before sending them to this link. Make sure they understand that the sentence is the answer to the question and they must chose the WH-Question word that would lead to that answer. The second activity is a straight-forward MC activity and the third asks students to type the question.

Three Bears WH-Questions

What-Which-How

Type the Question

For more practice on a variety of question forms go to the Road to Grammar site and scroll down the Quiz list to find: #261 Question Forms 2 and #262 Question Forms 3

Road to Grammar

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18: Involvement in Children’s Education – Prepositions

Here’s a quick little “type-in-the-answer” activity with 22 questions:

Type the Preposition

For a thorough review of prepositions and lots of exercises, send your students to the English Grammar online website. There’s a very extensive table of prepositions and many MC exercises that get progressively more difficult at the bottom of the page.

Prepositions on ego4u

Another good site from Germany offers type in the answer activities:

Prepositions in sentences

If you have students who really need a challenge beyond prepositions of time and place, move them into Phrasal Verb exercises. They’ll have to type in the correct verb and preposition in the next link.

Phrasal Verbs

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19: Transferring Professional Degrees – Past Tense Questions

Find a very easy 10-question MC activity: #214 Past Tense Question Form on the Road to Grammar site.

Road to Grammar

English Grammar Online has a detailed explanation of the past tense and there are lots of excellent exercises to choose from. For past tense question formation, send students to these exercises: Questions in Simple Past or Questions with Interrogatives in Simple Past or Pool of Exercises where they will choose Simple Past questions.

English Grammar Online

And again, Englisch-hilfen.de has good activities where students will have to type in the answer.

Questions in Simple Past 1

Questions in Simple Past 2

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20: Learning to Learn – Past Tense Verbs

The English Grammar Online link above is a great site for past tense practice. You can also click on the “Tests” tab on the left side of the page and the site offers 3 levels of tests on the Simple Past tense.

But for listening and speaking practice of the Past Tense, my favorite site is Real-English. Students see and hear real people speaking as they answer the question of what they did yesterday. The verbs are all pretty basic, but there are 19 pages of activities!

What did you do yesterday?

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2nd Course – Housing and Family Life – Grammar

Evelyn Fella — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 05:42:26 +0000

Students often ask for more grammar practice and here’s a site that will give them lots of activities. I found activities that fit with the grammar covered in 3 of the units about the Pushkins, but students who like grammar can find many more hours of practice here. Give students the URL for roadtogrammar.com and suggest the following exercises for each unit. You might also wait till the last unit of this story and have students do all of them as a grammar review.

Managing Family Life – Must vs. Have to — Road to Grammar #72 (10 MC questions on DON’T HAVE TO or MUST NOT)

Using Information Services – Can and Could – Road to Grammar #34 (25 multiple choice questions)

Men’s Changing Roles – Make vs. Do – Road to Grammar #150 (Make or Do 10 questions) and #125 Household Chores (10 Questions)

ROAD TO GRAMMAR

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This next 10-question exercise doesn’t really line up with the grammar lessons in this video story, but it provides students with more modal practice in sentences used in business situations. A good fit would be with Accessing Services when Karina needs to contact the phone company.

Telephone English

On the same site, there’s another activity for practicing the use of make vs. do to supplement the Men’s Changing Roles unit. These expressions go beyond just household chores. I always think having students write down new expressions and using them in sentences is a good way to help them remember these forms.

Make or Do

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2nd Course – Health

Evelyn Fella — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:11:09 +0000

There’s not a lot of content about Health in this course so you may want to divert your students to health literacy when an occasion arises. In the Workers and the Workplace story Alejandro lands in the hospital with a broken leg after an accident at work. This would be a good spot to direct your students to some listening and reading that will improve their health literacy awareness and health-related vocabulary.

This link will direct the student to the Emergencies topic. There are lots of good audio slideshows and you could let students choose one that interests them. But they will have to scroll down the list to find the one about the Emergency Room which connects to the fact that Alejandro was taken to the emergency room. Click English to see the audio slideshow and get the handout.

What to expect in the Emergency Room

This next link will direct the student to the Injuries and Wounds topic. The third one down is Bone Fractures. Click English to see the audio slideshow and get the handout.

Bone Fractures

In this story Alejandro’s wife announces that she is pregnant. There are also good presentations about pre-natal care for students that might find that useful. Just scan the list. Lots of great material on this site and the level is good for Second Course students.

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2nd Course – Renting Issues

Evelyn Fella — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:45:40 +0000

This is a great listening extension for the story of the Pushkin family and their quest to rent an apartment. All the audio is available in the form of a handout. The content reviews important vocabulary and renting-related issues discussed in the 4 units in “Housing and Family Life.”

Have your students practice note-taking with this audio presentation. Or, you might ask them to simply report back by listing 5 things a tenant is responsible for and 4 things a landlord is required to repair.

Click English and the audio-slideshow will open in a new window.

Renting Issues

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2nd Course – Finding a Job

Evelyn Fella — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:04:17 +0000

Here is another great slideshow presentation that students could use to practice listening and note-taking skills. It gives 7 ways to look for a job and also goes on to talk about the application process and questions that may and may not be asked in an interview.

You could also ask students to write down the 7 ways to look for a job and then compare them with the ways that Alejandro’s co-worker suggests in the video.

The text of the recording is available as a written handout so lots of things you could do with this.

This link should bring you to the Jobs topic. Just click English and the presentation will open in a new window.

Employment in the United States

1st Course Unit 9 – Filling Out Forms

Evelyn Fella — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:16:09 +0000

In Part 2 of the Family Unit 9, Ms Marquez teaches words to describe the marital status of family members. The unit also offers activities for filling out forms. Here is a link to even more practice on marital status words and many more words that are found on forms.

This is a great online resource from the Voice of America. They have a section called VOA Learning English The Classroom with lots of activities for various levels of English (and lots of other cool stuff for you to explore like an interactive photo word book, idiom dictionary, etc.)

The good fit here are the 3 activities called Filling Out Forms which include vocabulary, listening and conversation practice. I can only link you to the activities menu and you’ll have to scroll down the list to click on the correct set of activities. There are quite a few drag and drop activities, so make sure your beginning students know how to navigate those types of questions before you set them off on their own.

Filling Out Forms, Parts 1-3

2nd Course – Job Benefits Lecture Video

Evelyn Fella — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:09:57 +0000

In Workers and the Workplace, Alejandro gets a new job as a restaurant manager, but we don’t hear about any benefits or questions he may have asked during his interview.

This video is a very clear lecture listing 12 benefits job hunters should ask about. Good listening practice for intermediate students, and the lecture is a good format if they are wanting to transition to higher education. Lots of good vocabulary and discussion material here. There is a related exercise available on the growenglish.com site as well as the transcript and the YouTube link. The site offers courses for a fee, but they have this particular video available for free.

I’ve embedded the video and script below because many school sites block YouTube. If you are at a site that blocks YouTube, could you please let me know in a comment if this is a fix for you ? Can you view this video from my blog?

Benefits Video Script

Fringe Benefits Video and Activities

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