Esl intonation is an issue for both teachers and students.  A teacher has to help his or her students with their intonation as it is constantlly a problem for someone learning a new language.

For a student intonation is very important because it varies from language to language and can dramatically change the meaning of a sentence.

• I told him I was going.
• I told him I WAS going.
• I TOLD him I was going.  and
• I told him I was GOING

can all have different meanings to a listener.  It all depends on where the stress and intonation is placed within a sentence.  An ESL student who can't accurately control their intonation can have issues with comprehension.

Keep this in mind as you work on pronunciation with your students.

Cheers,

Eric

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A few weeks back I wrote about a free powerpoint program alternative available online from zoho.com.  It is a very good and simple to use solution that you can easily direct your students towards. It is simple to use, and additionally, because it is online, you can access your powerpoint presentations from any computer with an internet connection.  This means that you don't need to worry about having powerpoint installed on a machine in a different location if you want to access your presentations.

As good as zoho's free powerpoint program is, it isn't perfect.  It does lack some of the features of the full Microsoft Powerpoint software.  For most people this isn't an issue, however if it is, there is another very good alternative in the free powerpoint program market.  It is called "Impress" and is a part of the Open Office suite of software which you can find here (Open Office)

As a free powerpoint program, Impress is a very good alternative of Microsoft's full price software.  The program is very simple to use, has many templates and master slides that you can use to develop your presentations, and is completely compatible with its retail cousin.  The main issue with Impress is that it is a desktop software - which means you need to have the software installed on a machine in order to work on or with your presentations.  However because it is completely cross-platform (and cross software) compatible, your presentations can be opened with any other Powerpoint software.

Another very interesting feature of Impress is that you can actually save your presentations as flash movies which means that they can be shown on any machine that has flash installed (which pretty much installed on any machine with a web-browser).  This really helps with transportability of your presentations.

So, if you're looking for a decent free powerpoint program and the one from zoho isn't quite enough, checking out Impress from OpenOffice is a really good idea.

Amazon has a really good selection of OpenOffice guide books and resources to get your up and running really fast.

Cheers for now.

Eric

Click Here! - if you'd like to learn more about how you can make a decent income using Powerpoint in your spare time.

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Hi again,

Sorry I haven't been writing so much the last few days, it is the end of our term here and things are getting a little nuts.  Exams, term papers, final assignments, students begging for help (just a little too late) - it all adds up to me not writing as much!

However all is not lost.  I have a few suggestions that you can use to help you smooth out the end of term crazies with a little help from your friendly PC.  Here they are in no particular order….

• insist on typed assignments.  This saves huge amounts of time wasted trying to decypher student's handwriting!
• make use of already existing online quiz materials.  This can be very good for listening and grammar review exercises and quizes.
• use grammar software (clarity makes a few good ones like Tense Buster) that allows for 'tracking' student progress and have your class to the practice on a PC
• use instant marking testing software.  I use a system called "Synchroneyes" in our lab which includes a built in testing platform.  It allows me to create tests that I send out to all students in my lab at the same time and then instantly marks them when students submit the completed tests.  This simply ROCKS!  However I have to say it isn't really effective unless you have a lab.
• Use a software system like "Hot Potatoes" from the University of Victoria.  It is free and lets you create a ton of different activities and tests.  Many of them are automatically managed.  Fair warning though - you do need to be fairly comfortable with techy stuff.

Don't have access to full on computer solutions…no problem.  Just do yourself a favour and create easy to mark exams.  Use

• multiple-choice (this of course included True/False)
• matching
• short answer with very discrete possible answers
• charts, tables, and graphs

Just some quick thoughts I thought I'd share.

PLEASE….if you have other suggestions leave them in a comment…this is something everyone can benefit from!

Cheers,

Eric

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Exactly what type of lessons your students will need to improve their typing skills really depends on a number of things

• how much English do they know
• how much typing will they do (a housewife may do very little, but a university student may do a lot)
• how old are they
• are they used to left –> right writing or not? (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese are some examples of langauges that go right –> left)
• are they accustomed to 'Roman' style letters on a keyboard?
• are they accustomed to an English style keyboard?  They layout of keyboards varies between languages.
• are they accustomed to English style typed writing conventions (double space after a full stop, single after a comma, indents for paragraphs, margings etc.)
• and probably a lot of other factors that are specific to your students and situation.

Once you have a bit of a handle on what your ESL students need in terms of typing lessons, you can start to design a programme around those needs.

There are many typing software tools available to help students develop their basic keyboarding skills.  Mavis Bacon is perhaps the most well known, but there are others that are very good as well. 

One that I particularly like is Kiran's Typing Tutor.  It is free, very simple to use and gets students up to speed on basic keyboarding skills very quickly with a series of activities and exercises.  My only complaint is that in some parts the lessons are a little text-dense (a lot of reading), but that can easily be dealt with by the teacher walking the students through the information.

Once more advanced topics are to be covered (formatting, spacing and other meta conventions), you can use free online tools like google docs and zoho.com to have access to full featured word processing tools at no cost.  Once you're at this stage you'll have to build your own lessons that target the specific skills your students need to learn.

Simple tasks could be:

• formating an unformatted paragraph
• fixing formatting errors you introduce into text
• having students type up their own work and providing feedback on their errors

Anyhow, ESL typing lessons don't need to be onerous or scary.  Just approach them as another skill set that students need to learn and you'll be hearing the keys clicking in no time.

Cheers,

Eric  

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