ESL etc.

mp3

First, I talk about an anti-plagiarism activity that Kira came up with. She split her class into two groups, and prepared a paragraph. Two students from each group were asked to pass the paragraph on to their classmates. One group did this by summarizing the meaning of the paragraph, the other by memorizing the paragraph and repeating it word for word. Then, both groups were given a comprehension quiz. In all of her classes, the summarizing students fared better. Another variation on this would be to ask half of the students to restate a paragraph in their own words while the other half copied it, and then give a comprehension or vocabulary quiz. These types of activities can show students that copying and / or memorizing isn’t the best way to learn English and might help curb plagiarism.

Next, I introduce several the ESL / EFL professional organizations that have special groups dedicated to global issues. The resources I most recommend are JALT’s global issues in language education newsletter archive, IATEFL’s global issues Yahoo email group and KOTESOL’s Yahoo email group.

TESOL - TESOLers for Social Responsibility

IATEFL - Global Issues SIG - Yahoo email group

JALT - Global Issues in Language Education SIG - newsletter archive
Note: They are updating the site and some links are broken.

KOTESOL - Global Issues SIG - newsletter - Yahoo email group

No Impact Man - The blog of a man (and his family) as he attempts to move towards a “no impact” lifestyle. Within the blog are a lot of good links to environmental resources.

Learn English in Cornwall - An English school / bed & breakfast run by Julie Tamblin that incorporates a lot of green values.

Monbiot.com - The archives of investigative journalist George Monbiot. Contains a wealth of well-researched, well-referenced articles on a variety of global issues. In the podcast, I specifically mention this article on starting a fruit and vegetable garden.

Please feel free to email me or post in the forums if you have any questions or want to share some ideas of your own.

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