Board work

Question

TESOL Macedonia - Thrace - Northern Greece is doing their convention this year on "The Neglected Areas of ELT." I feel that board work is one of those neglected areas. Books have been written on how to make the most out of our boards in language teaching classrooms, but from what I understand, even the UCLES RSA Diploma (sorry, CESOL DELTA) nowadays has completely abandoned doing any kind of formal methodology training in how to use a board beyond one or two remarks in passing and a quickie reference (not that I'm getting anything more on my MA).

Still, how to draw a stick figure is beyond the majority of teachers of my generation that I work with, and it's a ridicuous situation considering how basic our conditions are here in Greece.

I'd like to do a talk on that subject at the convention called, "Visual Wars: The Return of the Chalky." I haven't sent in my proposal yet and I'm casting around for ideas.
Can anybody lead me to some articles on how to get the most out your board, or loan me some of their personal ideas?
Thank you for your time.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

On 7 Aug 2005 16:51:45 -0700, "credoquaabsurdum"
[nq:1]TESOL Macedonia - Thrace - Northern Greece is doing their convention this year on "The Neglected Areas of ELT." I ... to some articles on how to get the most out your board, or loan me some of their personal ideas?[/nq]
Not off the top of my head Credo, but I'd be interested to hear how you get on. My drawing skills are abysmal, but I can do smiley faces, cats, and dogs and usually manage to get a laugh out of students with them (preferable to them pointing out my onboard spelling mistakes to me). I used to have a colleague who left amazing full artworks on the board after her classes...
Do you belong to the TESOL-L list?
(http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~tesl-l/) - you'll definitely get ideas for articles from the folks there.
DC

Usenet · Answer

Is this what you're after? Maybe be too TEFL-ey/basic for your audience (sorry if you've thought of these already)
- clean up our board: after a particularly messy lesson, work with students to organise the board into a set of clear notes down the side, progressively rub off the mess. Good for revision at the end of a topic/lesson.
- memorising: as students repeat a boarded text over and over, progressively rub off more and more words.
- remembering vocabulary from a boarded list: point to a word and students repeat, jump around in the list (not top-to-bottom). Then begin rubbing out one word at a time, but still point to the empty space, until you are just pointing to empty bits of the board. (works for short-term memory)
- are you one of those people that remembers where something was on a page? Use left/right sides of the board (or different parts of it) to help ss remember e.g. countable/uncountable nouns (countable one side, uncountable the other) or phonetic minimal pairs.
- phoneme swatting, give ss fly swats and have them swat the phoneme or word you say (or a student says). I had some sticky ***** that were great for this too.
- any kind of personalised ex for ss, especially at the beginning of the lesson: copy up an exercise revising the past lesson and let ss get on with it as a class (small classes only) (leave the room or move to a corner and just watch what they do, do not intervene, it is fascinating to see how they actually understand things).
- again, small classes: have them do a writing assignment together on the board while you are out of the room, then give them feedback. - for budding artists: progressively build up a picture, Ss guess what it is.
- make deliberate spelling/grammar mistakes on the board, keeps students on their toes.
- let students be the artists (small classes). Coursebooks sometimes have nice cartoony pictures illustrating a list of, say, ten vocabulary items. Before the lesson, photocopy the picture and divide it into a grid, then give each student a square of the grid to copy to the board. As they are drawing, discuss the content (great cathedral!, hey, leave the hills for Mustafa!, etc.).
- of course there is always Pictionary, and board rushes.

Jan

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Is this what you're after? Maybe be too TEFL-ey/basic for your audience (sorry if you've thought of these already) - ... phoneme or word you say (or a student says). I had some sticky ***** that were great for this too.[/nq]
That sounds brilliant - could you tell us some more about exactly how it works please?
[nq:1]- any kind of personalised ex for ss, especially at the beginning of the lesson: copy up an exercise revising ... a picture, Ss guess what it is. - make deliberate spelling/grammar mistakes on the board, keeps students on their toes.[/nq]
I do that, then sit there and wait for the class to 'notice'. But being mildly dyslexic (not helpful for a career in TESOL), I also make a certain number of real spelling mistakes, which I've had to develop strategies to deal with.
[nq:1]- let students be the artists (small classes).[/nq]
And that one. I had an art teacher in class a few weeks ago - a very handy resource.
Cheers
DC

Usenet · Answer

Django asked about 'phoneme swatting': here is how it works:

- Write up a set of phonemes on the board, either as phonetic symbols, or minimal pairs, or however your students recognise them. - Divide the class into two teams (two is best for the two sides of the board).
- One person from each team stands on either side of the board wielding a fly swat.
- On an oral prompt (from you/from a student), the two team members have to swat the thing that matches on the board. You may need an independent judge for the scoring (!), though it's pretty clear who swatted first with the fly swats.
- you need to decide how to rotate the team members so everyone gets a chance.
This is how this game began with me but it's actually useful for any exercise where you want to check aural comprehension: get ss to swat the word/phrase when they first hear it in speech, choose the best word to continue a sentence, do sums and swat the answer...

I have known teachers do similar things with old dry marker pens: ss use them as darts to aim at the board (hence the old and dry: destroys the pens after a while). And I found some sticky ***** here in Istanbul: they had suckers on them and were supposed to be tossed between two specially-designed plastic bats, but they also stuck well to the whiteboard if thrown hard enough.
Have fun,
Jan
PS Credo I'm sure you could use chalk for this if you wanted

). I remembered another good use of the board yesterday: for keeping silent (as a teacher) during a lesson (written, not oral communication). Begin the lesson with two or three sentences written to the class, writing them up word for word and pausing after each word or so. Students call out what could possibly come next in the sentence but the teacher remains completelysilent, for example:
Write: Good morning students! Today we
Ss: study ... like ... are!
Write: are going
Ss: to!
Write: li
Ss: listen!
etc.
The silence thing is important, something different.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Django asked about 'phoneme swatting': here is how it works: - Write up a set of phonemes on the board, ... to be tossed between two specially-designed plastic bats, but they also stuck well to the whiteboard if thrown hard enough.[/nq]
Ah, I guessed you were teaching somewhere where flyswats were a bit more common than in Salford! And with young/teenage learers?
[nq:1]Have fun,[/nq]
I will - I'll definitely think about using a variation on this next time I do a **** class!
[nq:1]Jan PS Credo I'm sure you could use chalk for this if you wanted

). I remembered another good use ... word or so. Students call out what could possibly come next in the sentence but the teacher remains completely silent,[/nq]
[nq:1]The silence thing is important, something different.[/nq]
I love doing that sort of thing! When I read about 'noticing' in the literature, this keeping silent and challenging the group to find out why is exactly what I think about.
Cheers
Django

Usenet · Answer

Actually I taught Turkish adults in private language schools, but it's true, I needed to suss out the group before doing things like this.

Jan

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