Nik Peachey

Body language isn't something that naturally springs to mind when we think about developing our students' listening skills. After all, you can't hear body language. It does, however, play a key role, especially at the subconscious level, in communication and an awareness of it and how it can vary from culture to culture, can be particularly important in helping students to develop their ability to understand in a real environment.

It's a really simple website which asks a simple question. The rest of the website has images with accompanying lists sent in by visitors to the site. Each person's list and image has about 10 items.

I’ve found that in class most students enjoy lessons based around songs or music. More recently I’ve been trying to discover and develop activities that students can do online to actively engage with the vast variety of resources that are available. These are six things that I have discovered so far. Each one links to an example activity that I have developed for students

As so many people are already familiar with Wordle, I thought I'd also share a few similar tools that can be used instead of or alongside Wordle with other web based resources to create useful learning materials for students. I've also added these here for anyone who doesn't make it along to the workshop.

This is an activity that raises awareness of aspects of non verbal communication and which helps to develop students' understanding of 'mood' related vocabulary.

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.

Delivering teacher development content at a reasonable price via mobile devices would seem to be a great way to provide teachers with much better development references and resources that they could easily access at all times and drastically increase the potential market and number of copies of these types resources sold. What’s more opening the market to mobile content through teacher development resources first, will put teacher in a much better and more confident position to be able to deal with learner content such as digital course books and other digital learning materials when they do inevitably start to arrive.

For me, one of the most underexploited and neglected areas within language learning is humour. How many course books have a section on humour? How many syllabi include the ability to tell or understand a joke? Yet understanding the sense of humour of a people is a key element of understanding the culture and language and perhaps even more importantly of developing relationships with people from that country.

This lesson takes a process approach to developing writing skills. It is staged so that students are guided through the processes of collecting information and deciding how they will structure it within the text before they begin to write. They are then guided through the process of drafting, editing and redrafting the text to produce a final copy.
Nik Peachey, teacher, trainer and materials writer.