By Adam Simpson

Introduction

PowerPoint is an incredibly popular piece of software, mainly because it comes with Microsoft packages. PowerPoint files are easy to create and can be e-mailed as attachments. They can be posted on or downloaded from websites. Not only can PowerPoint presentations be traded and exchanged, they can also be modified to fit any individual classroom setting. Although PowerPoint has been around for years, it’s just begun to spread to schools and ELT classrooms as more and more classrooms and teachers have access to computers and the hardware to use PowerPoint. For these reasons, PowerPoint is becoming an increasingly popular medium in ELT.

Classroom Uses of PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentations can be used in many ways in ELT. For example, presentations can be used for presenting language structures, for practice and drilling, or for reviews.

Initial Presentation

PowerPoint can be used to teach new structures to students. Theoretically this sounds good; however, in practice there are problems. The teacher must anticipate areas of misunderstanding and difficulty. For this reason, the presentation must be clear. It should address anticipated areas of student difficulty in a chronological manner. Such a presentation is difficult to prepare, but it can be done. Once an initial teaching presentation is prepared, it can be saved and used repeatedly, and it can be shared with others.

Practice & Drilling

PowerPoint presentations lend themselves to practice and drilling. To do this it is necessary to have the type of material, which can be repeated many times. A presentation of irregular verbs is one example of something which can be repeated again and again. Other types of material can be repeated on a weekly or biweekly basis. Presentations using the correct preposition, or the correct form of an adjective, or verb tenses could be practiced and reviewed periodically.

Review

PowerPoint presentations are great for reviewing ideas which have already been taught. After the students have learned and practiced something, it is useful to see a presentation. Such presentations can stimulate visual learners in a way that traditional materials cannot. Not only do most learners find this interesting, but it is also a good checking that learners have internalized particular language points. Furthermore, PowerPoint presentations are a good, lighthearted way to review language before a test.

Creating PowerPoint Presentations

Anyone can create presentations if you have PowerPoint software. There are many good tutorials on how to create presentations. Some are listed at the end of this article.

Borrowing Presentations

There are many great websites where a teacher can ‘borrow’ PowerPoint presentations. These can be found by putting something like ‘English PowerPoint presentation’ in a search engine. You might also try “ESL/ELT/EFL PowerPoint’ and variations thereof. Again, some are listed at the end of the article.

Beware!

There are problems with downloaded presentations:

If the presentation was created on a different platform (Mac or PC) from yours you may have some font problems with specialised symbols.

Another problem is macros. You can pick up viruses attached to a macro. Be careful and download only from trustworthy sites.

Many are specific to a particular school or situation. When adapting be careful to make sure you catch all the small details.

Conclusion

PowerPoint presentations are easy to create, borrow and use. They are a great and versatile asset to any ELT classroom. Good presentations will take time to produce or adapt, but they can be shared and used again and again. They can be used for any number of purposes, and in numerous situations. It is likely that more and more PowerPoint presentations are going to be used in English language teaching in the future.

PowerPoint Tutorials

http://www.actden.com/pp/
http://www.electricteacher.com/tutorial3.htm
http://www.bitbetter.com/powertips.htm
http://www.teachers-connect.net/cc/99-00/advpp.htm

PowerPoint Downloads

http://208.183.128.3/ce/ppt.htm
http://oswego.org/ocsd-web/teaching/resources/resources-x.cfm?Type=P
http://www.elko.k12.nv.us/nntc/ppp.htm

About the author

The author has been living and working as an English teacher in Turkey for almost a decade and is a regular contributor to Horizons: The ELT World Journal

By Adam Simpson

During the recent conference at Bilkent University, an issue that was repeatedly mentioned was the dilemma of getting students to use language in real time situations. This article 1) discusses the implications of getting language learners to use internet chat rooms for language learning purposes, and 2) aims to prove that the author wasn’t asleep during the conference.

Advantages of Chat Rooms

Firstly, they allow learners to interact in an authentic context with native speakers without being restricted by location. In many ways, this is an unprecedented learning opportunity. Language students can use a chat room at any time to interact with any number of people anywhere in the world.

Secondly, Chat rooms can promote learner autonomy. This is primarily due to the fact that the teacher’s role is minimized. Transcripts are generated which are useful for studying the language used. Every line of conversation is recorded, and can be seen in full thereafter.

Another advantage is that students have the opportunity to observe the language used by native speakers. Learners are able to see how a conversation develops, and also to notice what kinds of response are suitable (or unsuitable) in given situations.

Chat rooms also promote active involvement. The learner is enticed into conversing with others, and yet can withdraw as and when they feel like it.

Learners are also given the opportunity for skills development and practice. Chat rooms offer the learner the chance to produce language which is somewhere between everyday spoken English and the language in its written form. Many learners may not have previously been exposed to such informal written English.

Finally, they allow communication to take place in real time. This is a truly authentic communicative device. The conversations are real and the frameworks around which they are built are extremely loose. They therefore necessitate a degree of spontaneity and adaptation. Also, the sense of real time is a little more forgiving than a face to face spoken encounter. Firstly, there is that all important thinking time between seeing what the other person has written and making one’s reply. Secondly, there is the factor of anonymity which potentially increases the learners’ confidence.

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Learners’ Difficulties with Chat Rooms

Learners’ keyboard skills in English are usually slow which means that they often miss part of the conversation thread. It is the nature of chat room dialogue for conversations to move very quickly at times, thus leaving the learner somewhat confused and downhearted.

Furthermore, the way the conversation scrolls down the screen requires the participant to read text very quickly. This is often difficult for EFL students, due to a deficiency of the type of reading skill which a native speaker would inherently possess.

Chat room participants also often use slang and abbreviations which EFL learners may not be familiar with. Having previously stated that students may benefit from seeing how native speakers use the language, it should be noted that an ‘internet language’ is evolving rapidly, which differs in many ways from spoken English.

Native speakers using chat rooms may discuss topics which are culture specific to the English speaking world, or inappropriate or offensive to some learner groups. This may lead to misunderstandings which have nothing to do with the learner’s knowledge of the language.

A Final Word

The author would like to mention that he has used chat rooms in his own language learning, and has found most of the advantages mentioned are generally realistic. Furthermore, the author has found that introducing himself as a learner of Turkish has proven beneficial in setting up the nature of the dialogue.

About the author

The author has lived and worked as a teacher in Turkey for almost a decade and is a regular contributor to the ELT World Journal: Horizons