Saturday, March 31, 2018

An ESL Pen Pal Project for Adult Beginners in the Same School in Canada

"Interacting with others" is one of the competencies that adult immigrant and refugee students have to learn and practice here in Canada. Since they interact a lot with their classmates five hours a day five days a week, I thought it would be a good idea for them to exchange letters with students from other classes in our school. I talked to the other teachers and two of them decided to join the project.

Even though they are in different levels, the experience was very meaningful to everybody because they wrote about themselves to a real reader instead of just writing to their teacher. So it was a real world task since many people all over the world still exchange letters with their pen pals or e-pals.

Besides writing the letters, the students also followed instructions and learned how to address an envelope and to use the website of Canada Post to look for the correct postal code. As you can see, all these skills can be transferred to their workplace context.

Before the students wrote their letters, they read one that served as a model. We discussed the characteristics of a letter and checked the parts to be changed by each student according to their stories.

After that, the students wrote a draft of their letters and had a peer correction activity. Then, I checked the letters and they wrote the final version.


We kept the letters in this beautiful box 

A few days later, they got very excited when they received the letters from their pen pals. They read,  showed them to their classmates and helped each other to understand new words. This activity encouraged collaboration among the students and I gave support when necessary. 




After writing two letters and receiving three, we scheduled a day for the students to meet face-to-face and talk to each other. Before the meeting, we discussed and practiced the questions they wanted to ask and how they would answer their questions as well.

When preparing to meet their pen pals face-to-face, they created more complex questions and answers than I expected. For example: S1: Why do you like Canada? S2: It is good. S1: Why is it good? S2: Freedom... I was not expecting this question from a CLB* 1 level student. Maybe this happened because they were really engaged with the task, I think. Or maybe because they were talking about their own lives...

We also discussed about appropriate behaviour in meetings in Canada. We talked about shaking hands and appropriate questions as well.

The face-to-face meeting was an excellent opportunity for all the participants to interact and talk about their lives and experiences. The students enjoyed the moment and were able to practice their listening and speaking skills.


My students were very happy they could understand and interact with students from other classes. They felt proud of themselves and realized they were learning English a lot. Besides having new colleagues at school, they also have another person to practice English with during the breaks. As the results of this project were very beneficial and meaningful to the students, I will continue to provide these kinds of interaction with students from other classes.

Do you encourage your students to have pen pals too?

*CLB - Canadian Language Benchmarks - http://www.language.ca/resourcesexpertise/on-clb/

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Skyping in ESL/EFL classes for real beginners? An experience among newcomers to Canada and Brazilian undergraduate students

Providing a variety of opportunities for my students to experience "real life" is one of my objectives in my classes.

As my ESL literacy and CLB 1* students have chosen to learn about "Looking for employment" in their needs assessment, we are learning various things in order to help them succeed in this area in Canada.

First, they learned how to read a job ad. Then, then they learned how to fill in a job application form. After that, they learned how to understand a job interview invitation call (even though they are not required to use the phone in English at this level, they have asked me to learn it, so we decided to try it.). Finally, they learned what to say in a job interview.

It is important to mention that for each goal, the students have skill-building activities before performing each task.

So, in order to provide my students with the opportunity to talk to various people and provide the undergraduate Brazilian students of the Teaching English as a Foreign Language program at Universidade Federal do Pará with the experience of talking with ESL learners in Canada, Professor Walkyria Magno e Silva and I decided to create a project so our students could interact using Skype.

On November 1, 2017 they had the first Skype meeting and it was a huge success! The students introduced themselves and said something they liked to do.

Each student's turn to speak was received with excitement and joy by all of the participants. The students clapped the hands and showed signs they liked the experience and were able to understand each other. Both Professor Walkyria and I felt the contentment of our students. We also got extremely happy to see each other! Juliana Ribeiro, a great volunteer in Brazil, was also in the classroom in order to provide support. She had been my student and it was great to see her too!

The experience helped my students use discourse markers such as "uh", "well", and "um" with confidence and naturally. I felt very proud of them and the interaction made my students so excited that one student asked me if we could have Skype conferences every day. :-)

You can see some pictures below:





The second meeting happened on November 8th, 2017. We changed the layout of our classroom so all the students could be seen in the video. The students talked about their favourite sports and free time activities. We could see that the students felt more confident and they interacted more.

You can see some moments here:

 





Do you provide your students with Skype conferences too? I would love to read your experiences!
:-) 

*CLB 1 - Canadian Language Benchmark 1 - Canadian Language Benchmarks