ELSTA as a start to a PLN

If you teach a language in Dublin and work with a school you should know about these guys or should I say girls.

They are the English Language Support Teachers Association here in Ireland.  Their membership appears to include teachers of Spanish and German here in Ireland as well as English Language Support and the occasional EFL teacher (me) and UCC's Séamas Kirkpatrick.  There seem to be a lot of links to TCD amongst the Exec group.  

I suppose the main reasons to join groups like this are to find out where you live and to find good resources.  But the best resources are always going to be people.  Despite my love for multimedia, hanging out with sharp people is one of life's great pleasures. 

They'll be having another conference in Dublin on the 15th of October.  If you come along and read their site first you'll be finding a whole lot of other people who are into what you do. And iron sharpens iron.  This is what my grandmother said years ago.  Personal Learning Networks is the more recent buzz word for it.  

These don't just have to be physical.  Twitter really can work for a for you in finding resources and materials and advice from working teachers like ourselves and the people who write our materials.  Loads of authors use it to stay in contact and keep sharp.  If you aren't using it try it for a month following the people on the list in this site on PLNs.    

I think you'll be glad you did.

Horrigan's Colour Coded Phonemic Chart for NEW TEACHERS

This is especially for the new teachers starting at the CES's ACELS Teacher Training Course this month.

Anne-Marie one of the teacher trainers knew of this simple way to associate those new IPA phonemic vowel symbols. The idea is actually an IH teacher's proposal (Margaret Horrigan) and here it is in a nutshell.


It's easier for our brains to associate to colours instead of to symbols, so let's associate each symbol with a unique colour.

So the æ which looks like a lower case ˈaˈ and a lower case ˈeˈ smashed together are associated with a colour instead of just a word like 'rat' or 'clap'. Ideally each symbol is memorized just with the sound it represents, but this is difficult in practice for beginners who have to learn these 20 symbols in about 24 hours. Horrigan's idea is to use the colour black to remember /æ/. It's the vowel sound in the word. So you recognise the colour on the field behind the symbol and as you say it you hear your example. This is simple and instinctive and it works across quite a few accents quickly.


Go through her PowerPoint presentation here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km15zMlFnnY


Thanks Anne Marie!