Summer Stew

It's summer, and I'm cooking up a stew of

• how to use corpora in class
• better whiteboards
• Personal Knowledge Management
• syllabus-writing skills

But, it's okay, because I'm enjoying a few lessons and sitting back, letting the above mentioned topics come and go, some simmering (PKM, whiteboards), some in need of stirring:  syllabi and corpora.

Last week, I pulled out the old Scrivener "Learning Teaching" and Harmer "The Practice of English Language Teaching" and looked up 'syllabus'

I read the entries, made notes, and created two syllabi, one for an adult IT specialist aged 40, the other for a 42-year-old mother of two who is between jobs. I created syllabi and started implementing them in class. Feedback solicited from my DOS ("teach expressions for clarifying and asking good questions').

Scrivener gave me a plethora of syllabus types such as 'functional' 'grammar-based' and '4 skills' and from Harmer came 'make lists!' Lists of tasks, activities, needs, etc. I did select a functional syllabus with long lists of everything from board games to silent video.

The goal here is to learn theoretically sound syllabi writing skills that I can use when time is short, this autumn.  So far, the project is going well.

I'm doing something with corpora too: creating gapped sentences around phrasal verbs. I used the 'collocates' search in corpus.byu.edu for a basic exercise.  Will do more in future (in August, that is!).

Summer in Bohemia, Czech Republic (on a hike during the annual teacher camp)