Can "doodling" or texting while listening in class help students to remember better?

I'm not a psychologist, so my thoughts here are just "doodlings." I wrote this post as a reflection on an uncontrolled experiment in my listening classroom.  I teach an intermediate level English class to foreign students in a 10-week intensive English program. It focuses on teaching listening skills for academic purposes.

After a year of teaching this course (our textbook is Listening Power 3), I find that one of the most difficult tasks for students is getting accustomed to taking notes. There is a challenging unit at the end of our textbook focused on taking notes and using shorthand techniques, but note-taking is not the primary focus of the course. However, because I have taught iBT Listening preparation classes for many years, I know that without notes, students will have difficulty recalling support points and details, for example. In order to insure that students really focus when listening, I now make them have a pencil and paper in hand.  They learn that they must practice some form of note-taking. They earn points or credit for making any attempt at writing while listening. For jottings of any nature, they get an automatic 5 points. I even had a Saudi student (who was actually a very good listener) who wrote her notes in Arabic, so I had no idea if the notes were on the topic. She explained that she wrote English words using Arabic script - i.e., she transliterated the listening. Did this activity help my student comprehend better? Perhaps.

Recently, I watched a short TED talk about doodling. To my delight, it seemed to support my mission. Consequently, I now back up my emphasis on note-taking or, now, some kind of doodling while listening with observations by business entrepreneur and TED speaker Sunni Brown.  She redefines doodling as "to make spontaneous marks to help you think" and found that "people retain more information from doodling." A quick Google search yielded more material on the topic, including a recent TV interview with Ms. Brown.

The school where I teach - like many others like it - has a policy of no cell phone use in class unless sanctioned by the instructor. Students often use their cell phones as dictionaries, but what if we asked them to use their cell phones to write or take notes? They would most likely have to use abbreviations, and maybe they'd have fun trying to figure out ways to do that and to read back their notes. Has anyone tried this?

This is a thinking-out-loud post. If you have any thoughts or reflections, please feel welcome to comment.

Buzzwords

What are buzzwords?  They are words or phrases that are popular during a certain period of time. Sometimes they're trendy technical terms that are used to make those people who don't keep up with technological or social trends feel out of touch with what "newsmaking" people are talking about or doing.  Should you pay attention to buzzwords?

If you're an ESL instructor, it's probably a good idea to notice buzzwords since your more ambitious students may hear them in the news or on a TV show or in a night club and ask you for a definition. The problem for most teachers is that it's impossible to monitor all media, so the best you can do is to send students to sites that attend to these new (or re-activated) words that regularly pop up. Cambridge Dictionaries Online has a useful blog that focuses on buzzwords. Another well-known publisher Macmillan also has a list by date of trending words.

At the end of the year, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article about words that "popped" in 2013. I often spend a bit of time going over these annual reflections and ask myself which words I heard or used last year.  They include expressions such as twerk, Obamacare, cronut, drone, selfie, Thanksgivukkah, bitcoin, and lean in.

If you're a real "wordie," you should check out lexicographer Ben Zimmer's blog.  There are numerous links to articles that he's published over the years (including the above Wall Street Journal article), and he often responds to tweet queries about origins of expressions. There is another article on buzzwords from WSJ entitled "Which Buzzwords Would You Ban?" but this is currently accessible only to online subscribers. Words from that list include expressions like push the envelope, out-of-the-box thinking, passionate, and viral.  For a look at another sample of words to banish from business use, you should examine LinkedIn's "Top 10 Overused LinkedIn Profile Buzzwords of 2013." You can also be a part of the next survey of "buzzwords to ban in 2014" by visiting and leaving your input at WSJ's "At Work" column.

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Attention, teachers!  Here's a link to several lesson plans using Macmillan's dictionary resources on buzzwords.

Icebreaker - "Find Someone Who…."

On the first day back to teaching after nearly a month-long winter break, ESL teachers are usually faced with classes filled with students who are unfamiliar with each other.  To give them an opportunity to to learn each other's names and to test their speaking and listening abilities, many instructors set aside time in the first class for an icebreaking activity.  What happens if the previous class already played "Two Truths and a Lie" (a popular icebreaker) with the same group of students?

Some years ago, I created a sheet of "Find Someone Who…" sentences to avoid that outcome. Because I have 30 different strips, even if students did exactly the same activity, they never receive the same set of sentences. This activity gets everyone up and out of their seats - reading, speaking, listening, and writing in English, and they don't think of it as an English lesson. I also have a strip and try to "Find someone who…."  It helps me to begin learning the names of my students.

Below is a photograph of my strips. I print the questions on sheets of colored paper (24 lb. paper) and add small sticky notes to each one. That way I can remove the notes and reuse the strips many times. The idea for "Finding someone who…" came from an old ESL game book (British publisher, I believe), but I adapted the sentences to suit the context for Southern California ESL students. (You can also see which students were listening to your directions! There are always a few students who write in ink on my strips.)

This activity works best with low intermediate to advanced level students. The instructor should demonstrate how to change, "Find someone who can surf" to the question, "Can you surf?" Sometimes lower level students do not know a word, such as whistle ("Find someone who can whistle.").  The teacher can move around the room, giving definitions when needed and making sure the students are not just passing the slip to another student to read silently and answer. Give the class about 10 minutes for the question-and-answer phase.  Then spend another 10 minutes going around the room, having students share their findings: "Abdullah is afraid of snakes," or "Amirah likes to cook."

As a follow up at the next class meeting, you can ask students if they recall any names and associate people with any activities. Hope that you find this fun and useful to use as an icebreaker - or at any time during a course when you need to break up a routine.  Here is a link to the document so that you can print out your own sets of strips.

*** You can also use this activity to reinforce the use of adjective/relative clauses using who.

Have you ever wanted to invent a language?

Have you ever heard of Klingon, xxx, or Esperanto?  Oh, you have heard of Esperanto! What separates humans from other animals - I must finally admit - is language.  Without getting mired in a huge discussion about the definition of language, I will simply say that speaking languages is what we mostly do.

For a fascinating look at what we can learn about human language from creating them, check out this feature article from one of UCSD's  newsletters. If you're a fan of StarTrek or the Lord of the Rings/Hobbits, you may have wondered if the strange languages spoken were just mindless, entertaining babble. Actually, they weren't. A lot of energy and creativity has gone into inventing languages for movies.

If you want to follow up on Klingon, or be one of the first in your neighborhood to speak it, there are books and websites to teach you, such as the Klingon Language Institute.  Goodreads even has a page devoted to the best books on Klingon and other invented tongues.