Delitzsch course

ESL Projects English Team Trainers
1

Good morning Roberto,

Many thanks for your great start with the Delitzsch course. Please give us the following information to make the relay as smooth as possible:

  • How many people are in the group?
  • How many of them are beginners and how many are B1 students?
  • How are the desks arranged (in rows or as a conference table)?
  • What kind of materials have you used so far?
  • Anything else we need to know?

Good luck.
Best regards,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, photographs: A gondola[YSaerTTEW443543]

2

Hello Roberto. My name is Richard McMullen from Canada. I am hoping to do some work next month in Delitzsch and/or Nordhausen and I was wondering if you could provide me with some leads for a cheap pension or something?

Many thanks.

Richard

3

Hi, everybody,

a week is almost over in Delitzsch. We have been working hard every day, 9 hours per day, excepting at the beginning Monday 13th. We have covered different topics so far, such as: introduction, giving direction, origin, countries, cities, villages, giving a short opinion, clothes, shopping, time expressions, how to get to a place etc. We read a short text about fashion and another one about the town York in the book. A lot of phonetics, spelling and grammar exercises: regular verbs (routine verbs e.g.), ending s, some irregular verbs, personal pronouns (object, subject), possessive pronouns, question words (wh-words), numbers, cardinal and ordinal numbers. We did brainstorming exercises every day, explained the origin of very useful words, funny etymologies, false friends, interesting jokes or clever humo(u)r in the class - an essential part in my opinion, we developed and applied techniques to improve their efficiency in English. The role as a teacher is similar sometimes to the role of a psychologist or adviser, i. e. I listen attentively to the wishes of the participants, where they often fail and succeed so that I can help them. And the participants themselves should also help one another. Also similar to the one who sells or runs a business, thus, the students are treated like real customers, I act openly towards them.
In spite of all, they are a beginners’ course, with two absolute beginners and 13 refreshers that are brushing up their school English language skills. They should repeat and repeat those topics, telephone talking e.g.or giving directions in a city, describing a person (we learnt different garments of clothes, colours, also such words like checke(re)d or striped etc…). Differences between English in the USA and GB/Ireland and sometimes Australia. We played in the class (guessing names, recognizing someone’s voice, playing roles etc…). Next week we will read more texts, Unit 4 - 5- 6-7 in the book Take Off 1, They should be familiar with some of the topics considered in these units, since we have talked about them in the class already. Repeat and repeat: they should repeat all of these topics in other situations again - skill comes with practice!! I gave them a lot of practical tricks how to learn new vocabulary in English.
For example: we collected useful words every day following certain simple (etymological) patterns based upon contrastive linguistics studies, this is something I usually call “mathematics in languages”:
e.g.
German uses long a very often, written a, ah, or sometimes aa:
English speakers spell these related words - supposedly they are akin to each other- with ee, ea:
Schlaf = sleep Straße = street Stahl steel Aal = eel Saat = seed Nadel = needle
German uses “Umlaut-ä”, English still follows the above-mentioned rule:
Käse = cheese (I always give parallelities: cheese like ch in church = Kirche e.g.).

Or: German o in rot, Floh, Brot, Ohr, Tod vs English e [e], ea [i:] or ea [e] in red, flea, bread, ear, death. ETC.

I also laid stress on the advantages German speakers have when learning the basics of English. Reversedly, it is not that way. English speakers have to learn much more endings: grammar patterns such as conjugation, declensions, clear differences between dative and accusative. It is of course important to explain the practical meaning of these grammar structures, because not everyone is a language specialist or is aware of these terms at least.

O.K. We will keep in touch and next week I will give you more details about the D-class.

Regards,
Roberto

4

Hi, Richard,

I will ask some of the participants or other teachers that come from Delitzsch and live there what they can recommend. As soon as I get an answer for a cheap pension, I’ll let you know.

Regards,
Roberto

5

Many thanks for your update on the Delitzsch course. Unfortunately I couldn’t check it before I went there on Friday.
It wasn’t that much of a problem though. I totally agree with you when it comes to their level of motivation and willingness. I did not use the book but covered and hopefully further developed some of the topics you had been treating and that you advised me to focus on: since I was new we did introductions and went on collecting information from a partner and reporting it back to the class.
I was surprised about their eagerness to speak and we could cooperate in a favourable atmosphere. I do actually quite share your opinions regarding the role of the teacher although I wouldn’t call it that of psychologist; may be it’s because I don’t hold them in paricularly high esteem. But the conception you stated corresponds considerably with my one which you could just describe as the teacher being a natural person.
We also did a more explicit exercise on the present simple tense and third person-s involving negations and I explained the major pont another time on the white board. Questions were included and afterwards we practised them again in a quiz game involving country adjectives.
I don’t know when I will teach there again. Next Friday I’ll be in Eilenburg and the 31st that I was suposed to teach is a holiday. Anyway I wish you interesting and fruitful sessions with that group and we’ll certainly keep in touch.

Regards,
Daniel

6

Hi, everyone, hi Daniel, hi, Torsten,

It is Thursday again, another week is nearly over. We did as usual a lot of brainstorming and grammar exercises. Every day we repeated vocabulary regarding different topics such as family, clothes, shopping, animals, cities, time expressions, grammar points etc. (basic grammar and vocab).
We still continue using the book Take Off 1, of course, where we have covered the first 4 units already. Apart from this book, I copied some grammar exercises such as: Present tense vs progressive present (or present continuous), do/does/did questions, the use of any/some and indefinite pronouns (anything, something, anyone etc), the third person of the present tense in -s/es, plural in -s/-es (including spelling changes occurring in these structures: y > ies, double consonants etc.).
An average day looked this way: in the morning: warm-ups, brainstorming, repetition or summarizing of topics discussed the previous day. Then: Fresh copies for everyone: grammar exercises, explanation of the rules and comparisons with the German grammar. Text reading: spelling and pronunciation, learning new words, tricks to memorize a lot of vocab in an efficient way (association exercises, how to “convert” related words in German into Englisch and vice versa, also false friends,funny words, jokes, puns etc. ). In the afternoon: Translation of the read texts in the class: considering the differences between both languages German and English: word position, negative words, use of some particles, intercultural aspects. The pragmatics of the given text: the intended meaning/aim of the read text, usefulness of the information in our lives.
On the last two days I have begun treating business English more and more, thus we were quite busy reading some interesting business letters and pieces of texts related to job vocab (career, experience, training, trainee, unemployed, challenge, resign from, fire, dismiss, retirement, holiday entitlement etc. ) + exercises. On Monday we had a short “shopping” trip to the supermarket Lidl. On the way to Lidl, we repeated all words related to the topic “giving directions” (turn right, left, straight ahead, also traffic lights, road, street, river etc. ) and as we entered the supermarket, we changed topic: “shopping vocabulary” was to be practiced then! (fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, giving a price, origin of a product (Lidl is quite international). One of the participants said that Lidl is rather Russian than German. That is why, I decided to teach them some expressions concerning “giving an opinion”. We led a short discussion as soon as we came back into the classroom to give the participants the opportunity to ask questions and to find out what they learned and if they enjoyed the short outdoor activity. Of course, they did! Despite Mrs. Hintzsch’ approval, we were allowed to do these kind of outdoor activities only twice, because this could be disapproved by the Arbeitsamt - job center.
They should repeat grammar exercises such as “any and some” (actually indefinite pronouns), did-questions (and negative sentences in the past), perhaps "there is/there are and it is since some of them still confuse the use of there. Next week six of them are going to give a short presentation. Each one was assigned a specific topic regarding a certain vocabulary (family, cities, my hometown, pets, friends, my job, experience abroad etc. ). There are more than five participants whose birthday is in October, that is why we used the unit 4 (time and dates, birthday) to strike up practically relevant lively dialogues.

have a nice day!

Regards,

Roberto

7

Hi Roberto, hi to whom else may feel concerned,

Last Friday’s class as the one the week before tok place in a very good working environment. I was once more impressed by everyone’s efforts and commitment that made them follow class even in the afternoon when we had already done some hard work.
We started with a partner exercise where students were to epress assumption about a partner’s habits then find out if their assumption was correct and then make a statement in this respect. As grammar points it was a revision of all aspects of the present simple tense that some still need some practise to handle it more easily and correctly. Besides the exercise featured a range of vocab fields that you had covered: activities, food, frinks, clothing, times.
Once we finished this we did some brainstorming of office reated vocabulary and went on to practise describing an office which involved many of the brainstormed words and a couple of ‘there is vs. is’ problems.
In the afternoon I had some of them introduce their presentation topic to me and we talked about how they felt giving a presentation (only a few really seemed to be looking forward to it).
At last we reviewed the simple past tense by means of a team exercise that some were very active to contribute to. Some were comparatively secure in using the simple past, in general it still seems to be practised a good deal though.

Have a good week teaching,
Daniel

8

Hi, Daniel,

we have been working very hard this week again. Most of students are still eager to speak and practise English and I hope it will continue this way. I reviewed verbal aspects such as present forms (simple vs. progressive forms) and the use of the continuous form used for making arrangements for the near future (appointments, planning etc…). They are getting more and more familiar with the simple past of both regular and irregular verbs, but all of these verb tenses need reviewing anyway. Will- and would-forms have been introduced, but not practised enough yet. Also some modal verbs.
Today we did a brainstorming about animals, body parts, physical actions (breathe, smile, blow one’s nose, smell, smile, nod, shake etc. ) and did relevant exercises. As usual, we exercised spelling vs. pronunciation (according to various patterns). We read an interesting text about the importance of the English language in the world and how English students should learn English (suggestions). Yesterday we talked about numbers, dates, birthdays, months, time expressions etc. and learned a very funny mathematical trick: guessing someone’s birthday based on three simple mathematical operations (addition, subtraction and multiplication). Mrs. Blümle and Mrs. Lorenz (Angelika) read their presentations: Animals and My last holiday in Turkey respectively. I corrected one of them in the class. In the afternoon, we did a lot of listening comprehension exercises (from a CD I took to the class). We continued listening to the CD this afternoon too: covered topics:
booking a hotel room, accomodation (hotel, hostel, inn etc), travelling (means of transportation: bus, bike, plane, coach; journey etc.), invitation, inviting someone (decline and accept an invitation), idioms such as; what a pity! Never mind! Lovely to see you again!..Having dinner, a recipe (a kidney pie called pavlova: Mrs. Blümle wrote down the recipe and she will bake the pie on Thursday: so enjoy it!! There will be a piece for you!
Tomorrow I will cover the following topics:

  • irregular verbs: classified into different groups (send-sent-sent; cut-cut-cut; break-broke-broken etc. ).
  • Brainstorming: means of transportation; body parts; parts of a house, the office etc.
  • unit 6 in the book
  • grammar exercises: some and any
  • Listening comprehension
  • Review of the most important grammar and vocabulary (also business vocab) aspects that have been treated so far.

Regards!

Roberto

9

Hi Roberto and Daniel,

Many thanks for your excellent job – it’s great to see that you are keeping each other up to date and sharing your experiences with ideas with each other. Can you please tell me if the group is ready to understand and follow instructions and directions in English? I’m asking because at some point we should start using English only in the classroom. This means, it’ll be perfectly OK for some of the students to say something in German as long as you/we respond in English. To that end I’d like you to introduce and practice any phrases you need to give the group instructions such as ‘open your books’, ‘write down the following words’, ‘how do you spell that?’, ‘is that a verb, adjective or noun?’, ‘please read the text on page x’, etc.

Please keep in mind that one of our goals should be to prepare our groups to work with a native speaker who always sticks to English.

Let me know what you think.
Best regards,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, question-response: You still have my business card, don’t you?[YSaerTTEW443543]

10

Hi, Torsten,

I try to use English in the class as often as possible, changing also intentionally the speaking speed and voice. Thus, I speed up and slow down my voice and speed when I speak English with them. They are used to listening to different common classroom commands and directions used in the class, such as those ones you mentioned in your last mail. Other important aspect I sometimes consider is the variety of English accents (specially American vs. British): I have been using a CD with British pronunciation recently: texts used in class to consolidate their acquired vocab and show them their progress. I will incorporate another CD with North American English soon, so that they can hear the differences more clearly. In the class, we try to imitate both accents and every now and then I mention an important feature found somewhere in the English-speaking world (spelling, vocab, idioms, grammar etc). Some of them have a preference for the one or the other accent or form. The other essential point is language and culture reality:
e.g. Mrs. X says a bit frustrated: they speak too fast for me or I speak too fast for her: in such a case, I slow down my speaking speed, but if it is a CD or DVD, we repeat the words carefully again: first slowly, then more quickly and so on: thus, we intentionally speed up the speaking speed until we reach the speed of the speaker in the CD. Then I ask someone to translate the text into German and adapt it to a text that should be spoken in different situations: someone imitates a spontaneous situation where a German speaker uses the text (e.g. in a natural or animated way). After evaluating the result, I usually find out parallelities in German and English (also in other language courses I give): i.e.: students become aware of reality this way. If you pay attention to your own rate of speech, in a given day you may speak quite deliberately at times with careful enunciation, while at other times you may speak “a mile a minute.” The same is true for English/German/Spanish/Swedish etc. speakers.
I view my language class(es) as a “linguistic experiment” that elucidates me on valuable secrets of the language world and the use of language as an indispensable tool in communication, i.e. I want to join the students in a process of (critical) examination that will engage their interest and arouse their enthusiasm and lead them to worth-while discoveries about the nature of language. This should happen as natural as possible, of course.

Have a wonderful Halloween’s Day and a nice weekend.

Regards,

Roberto

11

Hello to all,
On the Thursday I went to stand in at the Delitzch class, I was very impressed with the class as a whole. At first when I announced to the class we would speak only English for the day, I received some quite worried reactions. I started slow and basic with them, obviously firstly with an ice breaker, so we did personal profiles, they told me their Names, occupations, reasons for doing the course, and their hobbies. Then we spoke about what they enjoyed or didnt enjoy on the course. I felt they were all very willing to try and participate with the oral side of things. We spent most of the day chosing a theme, ie restaurants, body parts, and England, with these themes we would brainstorm as many words as possible to try and help build their vocabulary. Once we had lists of words we concentrated on forming sentences in the past and future tense, and as I mentioned before they all did very well. To finish the day we had an informal Q&A session where i said they could ask me anything they chose. I really enjoyed the day there, and the feedback I got from the students was very positive also.
Regards
Scott

12

Hi, everyone,

we are doing pretty well, the class is making more and more progress. I praised the class yesterday because of their willingness, motivation and discipline, I mean that I also feel a good feedback. There is one participant though who doesn’t feel good in the class. The reason is that almost everything is new for him and he expected that we would start from the very beginning. Yes, I did it actually, but as soon as I noticed that most of them are not beginners, rather refreshers, I could not pay attention (let us say 100%) to him. I try to help him and also told the other participants to be helpful.
That is why I review a lot of topics we have dealt with already every day again and again, in different forms (crossword puzzles, songs, poems, listening comprehension, brainstorming, mindmapping, language cards etc. ). For example, today we wrote a lot of vocab on the whiteboard, then we classified them into groups according to their function (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, preposition, idioms etc) or to a specific topic or theme (clothes, woods, animals, food, giving directions, telephoning): we used the groups or columns for short dialogues and in order to find out differences in both German and English (aims: general communication in class and different word position in English e.g.). We counted all written words on the whiteboard on one occasion. Result: about 130 words. They were surprised. I explained the importance of the construction of a basic vocab scheme + language for special purposes (in our case: business language: letters, application, personal details, CVs, e-mails, computer usage etc. ).
Summary:

  • regular vs. irregular verbs: simple past
  • spelling and pronunciation: homophones, some typical endings- ture, -sure, vowels and consonants, mute h in some words etc.
  • singular and plural, irregular plural forms, feminine forms, irregular feminine. Use of feminine, political correctness.
  • interesting parallelisms between German and English in some words due to the partially common history: e.g. eng. /ou/ vs German /ai/ or /e:/: oath, alone, ghost, row, home, soap, dough, stone. loan, own vs. Eid, allein, Geist, Reihe, Seife, Teig, leihen, eigen etc. or go, crow, sow, mow, snow, roe, toe vs. gehen, Krähe, säen, mähen, schneien, Reh, Zeh etc.
  • the importance of “small” words such as: but, and, or, in etc… > Prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs etc.
  • the form “used to”, the future form “I will, I’ll”, and “am going to”.

I will keep you informed as soon as I can.

Regards,

13

Hi Roberto,

Thanks a lot for your excellent work. I think your idea to organize short field trips and other practical mini projects is very useful. As I told you, we did a similar thing with our Nordhausen group and you can read about here: English words in the German retails sales industry

Please let me know what you think.
Regards,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, talks: Announcing the collection of charity items[YSaerTTEW443543]

14

Hello Roberto, hello Scott, hello all,

all in all last Friday’s class went well too. They seemed slightly less focused than two weeks earlier though. The two ladies in the back, Angelika and Kathleen were absent. So was Cornelia who sits in the front.

In the morning I had them listen to a text which they read themselves afterwards too. It dealt with communication conceptions and patterns of American managers differing from those of Japanese ones. That led to a discussion about such differences in other respects like gender, age or individual outlook.

After that we spent a good deal of time reviewing the simple past tense focusing on regular and irregular forms as well as sentence formation with questions, positive and negative statements. This also involved explaining (certainly not for the first time) some basic features. I got a god feedback regarding this and some of the students said the felt like having better understood now. The vocab used was mainly business or office procedures related.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon talking about some interesting sayings and proverbs most of them also common in the business world.

That’s it for now.

Regards,
Daniel

15

Hi, Daniel,

thank you for your last report. I hope you will spend another satisfactory day with the D-group tomorrow Friday 14. We have been practicing present and past tenses the whole week, differences between simple and continuous forms, the use of some/any, do/does/did-questions and negative sentences, adverbs (frequency, general time adverbs), indefinite pronouns. As for business communication, they should continue reading more relatively simple English business letters (application letters, e.g.). As usual, we revised a lot of the vocab learnt in the past weeks, read a lot of different interesting texts about nature, age, weight, trouble or problems in your house, parts of the body, food, travelling, countries, means of transportation, routine, time expressions, weather, e.g. in Japan etc., listened to usual sentences, phrases from a CD and then had them write them on the whiteboard. A part of the grammar exercises focused on the above-mentioned topics were trained in form of jokes. Other important aspects:

  • telephone phrases: relevant vocab (words and idioms)
  • teleophone alphabet
  • spelling and pronunciation: vowels, consonants, silent consonants, homophones
  • text understanding
  • irregular verbs vs. regular verbs
  • prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, particles
    etc.

have a nice day tomorrow!

Roberto

16

Hi Roberto,

Relying on your last report I had initially planned to review a couple of points that the class has already been introduced to. It turned out somewhat diffently.
In the morning I had them listen to an employment interviewthat they also read and acted out in a basic way after that.
It contained examples of almost all the grammar points you had covered so we started reviewing simple and progressive forms in the present, the past and the present perfect tenses. Since for many of them there were still many points unclear we spent most of the rest of the day elaborating a kind of chart that juxtaposes the different forms for the different tenses and sorts of sentences. As an example we formed sentences with the verb ‘to travel’ went through the various usages of the above mentioned tenses.
At last we also talked about a joke that featured some of the aspects covered.
I had a little argument with Eckhard because he was receiving a couple of phone calls during class again but we didn’t really reach a result although (may be because) the rest of the class supported me.
In general it might be more useful to focus on a limited range of points to work through in one day so that students are less in danger of mixing things up.

Have a good week,
Daniel

17

Hi, Daniel, D-class teachers,

November is coming to an end. On the last days we have reviewed a lot of all important grammar aspects, specially verbs and pronouns (indefinite e.g: some, any). Please review the present perfect simple vs. simple past tenses as well as their corresponding progressive forms. I will give you more details this evening. In addition, they should be familiar with a lot of telephone phrases and the telephone alphabet used in GB.

Regards,

Roberto

18

Hi, Daniel, Hi, D-teachers,

this week is coming to an end again. Here is a short report about the covered topics this week:

  • business text: first impressions, your own business, enterprise, telephone phrases and more business vocab
  • present perfect simple versus present perfect continuous.
  • simple past versus past progressive
  • use of any/some and other indefinite pronouns
  • time expressions and some useful time prepositions: their use: at, on, by, until, till, for, since, throughout.
  • much/many; some comparative forms/superlatives
  • use of some collocations, verbs + noun: make/create an impression e.g. etc.
  • review of basic vocab and other grammar structures (frequency adverbs, word order in a sentence, negative sentences, questions etc. )

You should continue practising the present perfect vs. past, both simple and progressive forms, perhaps some simple business letters.

Have a nice day tomorrow!

19

Hi, Roberto, Hi D-class teachers,

You’ve noticed, Roberto that I copied your address line. One reason is that I don’t know what will be happening tomorrow. I was asked on Friday if I was coming.
We spent most of the morning reviewing simple and progressive forms of the past tense and the present perfect and their respective differences in use. We did this by way of jokes that groups of three or four studied, then somewhat acted out and presented to the class who in their groups had been workiing on different jokes.
Then we worked through a letter of acceptance sample from an employer that required them to fill in the correct prepositions most of which were part of time expressions.
In continuation of what we had done last week we added basics about the will- and going to-future tenses to the overview of verbal forms and roles in sentence structures.
At last we did a small exercise featuring some basics about the will-future and the composition of a short company memo.

Enjoy teaching them,
Daniel

20

Hi Daniel, Roberto and D-Class Tutors,
It was nice to be back and see the progress of the ss, as the last time I was there, even though some of the ss are quite weak in speaking English, there was quite a lot of willingness to take part in the tasks.
I began with an exercise, How do you say it? Which is included:

-Speaking on the telephone.
-Asking someone to explain something.
-Asking for time off work.
-Apologising

I then went a bit more in depth with telephone conversation.
I explained how to deal with native speakers who may speak to fast on the phone and how to be sure you get all the information correctly.

With the aid of a worksheet I took them through taking messages, which included the ss working in pairs and writing their own dialogue of a telephone conversation in a workplace, they then acted this out for the other ss to take notes.
I got them to think about the important factors:

-Ask the caller to slow down, POLITELY!
-Asking the caller to repeat things.
-Repeating the important information back to the caller like the Name and Tel. #.

It was a good day and as I said with the majority of the ss participating freely.