Pictures for Teaching Happiness Idioms

        Quite a lot has already been sad about the importance of images in teaching idioms. The problem is not everyone can create them by themselves and there is not always enough time for doing it. I have recently come across an amazing source of pictures illustrating idioms: Kaplan. There are wonderful collections of pictures for various groups of idioms like music idioms, colour idioms, time idioms and so on.
         The best thing about it is that they permit not only sharing the illustrations but also embedding them to your site. There are also sentences going on with the illustrations if you don't feel like making your own examples.
         Here is a collection of Happiness Idioms Illustrations that I embedded from Kaplan. Nice pictures, aren't they?
Kaplan International English

 And here is my presentation of happiness idioms with pictures from Google! Enjoy!

Mindmapping as an E-Tool for Teaching English

         For the last weeks I've been taking a course in teaching English online and exploring e-learning tools that might be useful for English teachers. There are quite a lot of them but we shall take one thing at a time and look at Mindmapping tools. Mind maps are really good for visualising vocabulary, turning grammar and spelling rules into steps, organising brainstorms. You can either create mind maps yourselves to present the material to your students or you can ask your students to make mind maps as part of practising and share them with the rest of the class.
         One of the mindmapping tools  I've found remarkably useful is Coggle.it
         To begin with, it's completely free. Besides, it's really user-friendly and easy to start with. You log in with your Google account, click the plus signs on either sides to add branches to your mind map and click any item to edit it. You can move the branches by clicking and holding them thus designing the mind map the very way you like. When you are through with the mind map you can download it as PDF or as an image file. You can also share it with those you invite. Even more, you can allow your students edit your mind map if you wish.
        Here is an example mind map I created with Coggle it. It's devoted to green idioms and it shows their meanings and example sentences.

 

      The way to go for me now is to explore other mindmapping tools like Freemind, Mindomo, Vue etc. of which I've heard but haven't tried them so far. 

      Have something to say on the topic? Your comments, ideas and questions will be welcome and appreciated!

Teaching Idioms

      I think,  teaching idioms is a real challenge to teachers' abilities. They say it's rather difficult for native speakers to learn idiomatic expressions. For those who learn English as a second language it may be just an undertaking. So teahers have to to find some really powerful techniques in order to help their students.
     My teaching experience shows that there are two things that count. The first one is how convincingly you present the idiom to your students and the second is how active the students are while practising it.

     Let's begin with the presentation of idioms. If you want your students not only understand the meaning of the idiom but also remember it you have to introduce the idiom in context. And the context has to be very, very, very good. By 'good' here I mean: 1) authentic,  2) emotionaly powerful and 3) appealing to as many senses as possible (at least, hearing and seeing).
     The easiest way to provide such context is search for a good video illustration in the Net. My favorite collection of videos is the one, presented by the Teacher on BBC. This collection contains 6 series: body idioms, animal idioms, food idioms, colour idioms, transport idioms, sport idioms and some specials. All of them are presented with sparkling British humour and are very pleasant to watch.
     If you've made up your mind to illustrate  idioms on your own then you'd better think of authentic sentences or mini-texts, containing the idioms and some pictures showing their literal meaning. As for pictures you can either google them or draw them by yourself. However it may take a little more time to find authentic texts.  One of the methods I use for this is surfing the British National Corpus (BNC). It's a collection of samples of written and spoken English. When you type a word or a phrase you get up to 50 sentences  that have been randomly chosen from authentic sources.
Here is a presentation of happiness idioms with pictures from Google and examples from BNC.

     Providing active practice of idioms is as important as their vivid presentation. Students textbooks usually contain a number of exercises such as matching the beginning and the end of an idiom or the picture and the idiom. The tasks are done in written form and students are not actively involved while doing them. What I often do is ask students to make their own illustrations of idioms. Once being shown a picture or a video they may be asked to create their own ones on the model. It's rather motivating if later on they can see their works in the Net (if there are no other opportunities the teacher may use his google account to publish them). If students are asked to make a story with idioms they can sound it using Voki, a service that allows to make your own avatar and add sound to it.
    So, if you take pains to organise a nice presentation and an active practice of idioms your students are sure to remember them and make their English more fluent and natural.

Diagrammatic Approach to Teaching English

     I've recently watched a number of videos in which Rupert Lezemore, an independent language consultunt to the EFL industry, talks about a so called 'diagrammatic approach' to the teaching of grammar. Here is a link to the original videos.
       Inspite of the seemingly complicated terminology, the idea is rather simple: using chart, tables and flowcharts makes teaching English grammar and vocabulary more effective, especially for visual learners. It is also important to use variuos colours for presenting language items.
        Personally I love using colours in teaching English. Here is the way I colour the numbers' table to help my students remember the numbers' spelling.

0	zero (nought)	10	ten
1	one	11	eleven
2	two	12	twelve	20	twenty
3	three	13	thirteen	30	thirty
4	four	14	fourteen	40	forty (no "u")
5	five	15	fifteen (note "f", not "v")	50	fifty (note "f", not "v")
6	six	16	sixteen	60	sixty
7	seven	17	seventeen	70	seventy
8	eight	18	eighteen (only one "t")	80	eighty (only one "t")
9	nine	19	nineteen	90	ninety

Another example is introduction of a sentence stucture. Whenever we learn a new type of sentence we use the same colours for painting the same parts of a sentence. Subject is always red, main verbs are blue, auxiliary and modal verbs are green. Thus my students know that in every question there has to be something green before the subject, while in positive sentensces green is either follows the subject or is absent from the sentence.
What's your name? My name's Mary. 
Can you swim well? - Yes I can. I swim really well.