Early learners want to play!

by Ariel Hudnall

A guest post by Ariel Hudnall, an English teacher in Kyoto, Japan. Ariel graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Japanese Languages and Cultures and is currently producing a mini web series on Kyoto's history and culture. Her website, Peach Press, chronicles her adventures in teaching and living in Japan.

To teach English is the primary objective of an EFL teacher. As professionals in our field, we all understand this. It is clearly useful to teach the complexities of grammar, syntax and nuance to older learners, as they have the educational background to understand what it is we are explaining. But this is not true for young EFL learners. The resources available for these students dwindle, and as frustrating as it is, often the final recourse of a new or even experienced teacher is repetitive drilling or flashcards.

Of course, flashcards and drilling are not terrible things, and used in moderation, can be a useful way to introduce and practice vocabulary. With a school like mine, where students come for, at most, one to two hours a week, flashcards have become integral to the reviewing process. However, it is essential to not to let the fact that they are “convenient” lead to overuse. Why? Young learners crave diversity. They want to move, and to take part in activities that engage every sense possible. They want to play!

When I first began working at my small conversation school (otherwise known as an “eikaiwa” in Japan), I was taking over roughly eleven kindergarten classes. My predecessor had left due to a family emergency at the end of the previous school year, so there was no curriculum to follow, and I didn’t have a clue where any of my roughly 60 students were in level. Their ages ranged from three to six years old. As far as I could tell, the only resource the school actually had was hundreds upon hundreds of flashcards that had been laminated and shoved in the desk of the previous instructor. So, I pulled them out and organized them a bit. But, what I found, across the board, was that even the most well-behaved students, who sat properly and listened the whole time I had them chant or repeat the words on the colorful cards, were bored.

I began brainstorming ways to make the classes more entertaining for them. After all, what isn’t fun for me isn’t fun for them. My school is quite small, so anything that I wanted would need to be either paid out of my own pocket or handmade. Eventually, I settled for handmade. The school had lots of craft supplies, as well as a laminator. Also, since I live in Japan, toy stores are often limited to something called chara toys, or character toys. It is almost impossible to find toys that do not have a brand character plastered all over them, so I decided to avoid them completely, not wanting to distract the children with a picture of Pikachu when the point of the class is to learn English.

One of my first projects for the kids was to build a crepe shop out of cardboard and felt. I simply covered an old cardboard box with colorful paper and made a felt burner, with a set of felt yellow “crepes” and laminated slices of fruit for the children to build crepes “to order.” This worked out surprisingly well, and the kids adored it. The situational vocabulary and grammar was simple enough that I could explain it as they played.

I would give each student a handful of money, and use ordinal numbers to tell them what order they would get to go in. “First” always gets to be the first to make the crepes. There is a colorful menu on the front of the box, which students choose their crepes from, and the chef explains out loud what s/he is doing. (ie- “Cook the crepe,” “Add whipped cream,” “Three kiwi” etc.) Customers ask how much the crepe is, the shop owner answers and then waits to be bpaid before saying "Thank you! Come again!" More advanced children are encouraged to use “slices” as well. It has become an activity that completely avoids L1 discussion.

The benefits of the crepe shop were that it had the students, of every level, practicing full conversation with the shop keeper, and using polite language. And the biggest benefit of all: they forgot they were learning. They were just kids, having fun and playing together.

Following the success of the crepe shop, I created another fast food station. This time the food was burgers. I went to an art store to get cork board and spray paint, and made the burger patties out of that. Then I used felt to make the hamburger buns and condiments. I fashioned the stand out of an empty box and found a dollar store for ketchup and mustard containers, as well as a spatula.

This time, the grammar focus of the activity was “Do you want....?” The chef would ask “Do you want tomatoes?” and the customer would reply “Yes, please.” or “No, thank you.” If they said yes, the chef then asked “How many?” The children have mastered this grammar far more quickly than they would have through flashcards! I consistently have my kids running up to me at the beginning of class saying “I want to play burger shop!”

I use it as a reward for good behavior during writing and phonics review. Again, it is an activity that can be played entirely in English. I usually had to make the first burger to show them how it was done, but after that, there were no problems- even with two year olds! For older children, I encourage them to use the counters for the vegetables, like “4 slices of cheese, please.” or “Extra lettuce, please.”

I was determined to turn everything I could into a game or activity that would engage the students on a level they could understand and want to do without prompting. I used colored electric tape to make a hopscotch for the numbers 1-10, 11-20 and another for counting by 10s. This was used as a class warm-up exercise. The children would line up at 1, and go up to 10 (either with my help or on their own once they knew it), then run to the next wall to jump 11-20. Finally, they would hop the 10s hopscotch, where I would stress the difference between how 13 and 30 sounds (and every other “teens” number compared to their 10s counterpart.) My only regret about having to use the electric tape is the residue it left on carpet.

I also used the letters of a foam ABC puzzle to make a lily pad hop to use while the younger children were still learning their ABCs. This was set up during a coloring activity so that they were engaged and not distracted. I would lift the kids in small hops between the puzzle pieces so they couldn’t run the course, until they could sing the alphabet completely on their own. Of course this track can be used for phonics chants and other vocabulary as well, and be any shape the teacher desires it to be. You can even use flashcards to make the track- I just prefer the foam puzzles because they are less slippery and more durable.

I made a felt board with felt face pieces so children could practice all of the different emotions they were supposed to learn. I would have the children start with a blank face, and instruct them to make “happy” or “sad” or “scared." The children when then take variously shaped mouths, noses, eyes, ears and eyebrows to make that emotion. Naturally, their favorite part was when I would tell them to make “silly!” You’ll get all kinds of ridiculous faces that way. If felt is too hard to come by, you could also laminate pieces of a face and have the kids shuffle the pieces around a larger blank head to make the emotions you call out.

Another thing I made was a magnetic fishing game with leveled phonics. I have one envelope of fishes for uppercase letters, one for lowercase, and one for consonant digraphs (ch, th, sh, ph, etc). On the back of the lowercase lettered fish are CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words for children who are a bit more advanced than their peers, and the consonant digraph fish also have related words on their opposite side. I used the same felt board I used for the faces (it’s light blue) to make a sort of pond, and scatter the fish across the board. I found some magnetic fishing poles at a toy store (but you can make them from scratch with magnets, yarn and sticks) and stuck paper clips through all of the fishes’ noses. This was a good activity to use during our phonics review when kids start to get restless with chants or flashcards review. I let each child catch one fish at a time. They could “catch” whatever fish they wanted, as long as they could identify the letter, sound or word. I don't suggest letting all of the children fish at the same time, as you'll have fishing poles getting tangled and other general chaos. This game was even implemented into the elementary level at my school with great success by another teacher.

I even created brand new board games to help the children learn new vocabulary. Below is an example of one of them, Little Red Riding Hood, with one of the vocabulary items from the story in each space. The children roll a die, and rather than count the spaces, say the vocabulary on the space before proceeding (I don’t suggest having them say the vocabulary as they go as they will lose count of the spaces they are allowed to move.) If they land on a flower space, they lose a turn and take one of the laminated flowers from the board, but, if they land on the wolf and have at least one flower, they’re safe. If they don’t have any flowers, they must return all the way back to the woodcutter space (about a third of the way from the beginning of the path), as he was the one that saved Little Red Riding Hood in the story. The children love this and frequently request to play it again and again. Unfortunately, I did have to use some L1 in a few classes to have them understand the rules- but if you have a native speaker teaching assistant or a particularly bright student, it will be easier to explain the rules. One of our other kindergarten teachers had a student’s mother explain the game.

There are innumerable ways a teacher can transform the act of learning into an act of play, and the resources online are numerous. If you get stuck finding new materials, simply look up teaching methods for children your age, rather than EFL techniques. I recently found a host of ideas, like setting up relay races, making a clothing game out of paper dolls and repurposing ABC puzzles for more challenging games by accidentally stumbling onto a random Early Childhood Education podcast on iTunes U, and a website for Girlscouts of America.

There are games that require no props, though props always help, as your students are more likely to remember something when they have held it than through a chant or even a song. The key lies in the teacher’s own imagination and willingness to commit the time. You need not be a great artist- clip art and a printer will do. Simply remember back to your childhood days- what do you remember about your earliest school experience? What did you remember as fun or boring? What did you wish you could have had, or made for yourself, back then? Then, remember that your own children are in a different generation, a different generation with new interests and emotional triggers, and work with that, to engage them in a way they can enjoy and use- in play. If you are feeling short on ideas, visit online forums for help, or browse your local toy store to brainstorm on how you can create something similar for your classes. All of your efforts will pay off- your children will come into your class ready to play… and by play, I mean learn.

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Drill Bits

Another guest post from Lee Shutler. Until recently Lee has been working as an Academic Manager for the BC in Korea. He is now teaching in East Kent in the UK and co-authoring on a Middle School textbook for the German market.

In a teaching generation so-called drilling seems to have shifted in its position on the EFL agenda. When I did my CTEFLA, drilling was considered part of the main menu in a lesson. Most modern CELTA courses seem to regard drilling as a side dish – to be consumed as part of the meal that leads students to learning and practice through tasks. Others go further and dismiss drilling as a relic of the bad old audio-lingualism days. However, I believe that like most EFL techniques, an eclectic approach is by far the best way to go.

I wish to write to defend and promote the drill as a way to increase students' confidence with language, as a way to engage students in the lesson and as a way to strengthen the bond between teacher and student. I base my ideas on me and my experiences – as a teacher and as a (frustrated) learner of language.

To be clear, for this article I wish to define a drill as an opportunity for students to practise a word or short chunk of language based on a stimulus. This stimulus could be a picture, a trigger word, a mime or repetition from the teacher.

While I was living and working in Asia, I was pleased to see that teachers here regard the drill as a core tool in their teaching – especially when teaching YLs. However I have used it in multi lingual classes in the UK where it has been met with surprise and enjoyment, both by the students in the class and by the teachers next door who tend to say something like “I haven't done that in ages”.

The benefits of drilling

• It is part of the learning process. When we learn how often do we mutter a new word or phrase to ourselves under our breath? It is our way of internalising.
• It is confidence boosting. The student, when they get it right and gets praise for having done so, feels good about themselves.
• It is good for pronunciation work. A short drill early on in the language journey can save a lot of problems and correction time later on.
• It is (or can be) high energy. Students and teacher interacting in a short intensive buzz of language. With YLs this can be exploited with some TPR games or some movement around the classroom (see below).
• It cements the bond of trust between the teacher and the student. The teacher has what the student wants – the knowledge and the know-how of the language. A short drill with appropriate praise and feedback is probably the purest teacher-student interaction that there is.
• There is variety. It is not just a teacher holding up a picture and saying “It's a lemon...together? It's a lemon” Again we will examine these possibilities later.
• It can be fun: Short and sharp; and not too frequent, a drill stage can be fun, interesting and different – for both teacher and student.

A particular buzz topic at the moment is learner-autonomy – helping the student to help themselves. I agree. However, those of us who work in the private sector have to understand that the student has paid for us to help them first. Drilling helps to fit with this equation. The student will learn from your model and will build from it. In my case I am proud to say that there are now a number of students around the world who speak English with a hint of a Herefordshire accent!

Variations on the drill theme.

The most obvious and traditional drill is for the teacher to hold up the flashcard and say “It's a ...” which the students then repeat chorally.

But let's look at variations on this so as to keep the idea and the action fresh.

The couplet: This is a question and answer drill.

For example, to practise the form “think + will”

The teacher holds up a picture of a cinema and asks “What will you do at the weekend?”

Students respond “I think I’ll go to the cinema”

etc

The humanists (of which I regard myself as one) will argue that this is not real communication. To an extent I agree. However I do not believe we can have a completely top-down approach in the classroom – especially at lower, or younger, levels. We do need to have some bottom-up work in order to give the students the tools and the foundation they need for later work.

The direct approach: “Is it a ...?”

Again using flashcards, you hold up a picture of a cinema and ask “Is it a supermarket?” The students should respond with “No it isn't. It's a cinema” etc. With this drill you will need to pepper the activity with a few questions where the answer will be “Yes, it is.”

This works well with YLs because you can put a piece of paper at each end of the room – one with YES and one with NO on it. When you ask the question, they then run to the appropriate piece of paper and then give the response. 2 minutes of this will tire the children out nicely!

Drills for verb forms: You say one form, the students say another.

In this activity the target form is the one said by the student.

Teacher (holds up our cinema picture again): I am going to the cinema.

Students: Yesterday I went to the cinema.

Making language sound more natural: For example don't just drill “I will ... “ Drill “I think I'll ...” ,“ Maybe I'll ... “, “Perhaps I won't” etc

The silent drill: Not all drills needs to be shouted out at the top of students' voices. A short reflective time when the students can get their tongue around a word while whispering it or mumbling it to themselves can be a useful way of getting shy students confident with the target language. This can then develop into a more open drill. This is also a life-skill technique. when we are in a foreign country and we need to communicate something. we often rehearse it silently to ourselves before we approach the shop/ticket counter etc

The Silent Way drill: In this drill, the teacher will say the target sentence once only. The student repeats and the teacher shows his/her feedback through gesture and nothing more until the student's performance is deemed accurate. The teacher will show this through a smile! With this drill approach, the student is very much at the centre of the classroom event.

Seeing the word: Conventional wisdom suggests that the target language should be drilled before the students sees or writes the words. From my own experience of trying to learn Korean, I felt more confident with the drilling process once I had seen the word. The word took on meaning as I was able not only to visualise the object but also to visualise the shape of the word in Hangeul (Korean script).

Indeed with classes where the Roman alphabet is not the alphabet of the mother tongue, drilling with the written word on the flashcard rather than the picture is a natural thing to do.

The order of the drill: Do we just drill a word and then move on? How about the two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach? This means that we don't just drill our pictures once and never again. We will maybe drill two or three new words, then go back to the first word, then go to the fourth word and so on. This will help with memory.

Communicative drilling

The above drills and ideas are based on the interaction between teacher and student. This need not always be the case. A questionnaire could be seen as a drill where the question is repeated frequently but where the answers will become freer language.

Ideal questions for this with lower levels could be:

How often do you...?

Have you got a/an...?

When did you last...?

Have you ever...?

How long have you...?

Do you like … ?

What’s your favourite …?

However I would still see these types of activities as the 'next stage'. I think these activities will work best when the target language has been drilled traditionally first.

How to drill

With YLs it is useful to have a variety of techniques on how to reveal the stimulus. Turning the card over slowly to reveal part of the word or picture increases anticipation within the class. Cognitive skills will come into play as the children make guesses before they get all the information they need.

Alternatively, have the cards placed around the room and the children have to follow you to the card. This is a good way to increase pace in a small class. Obviously, if you have 40 children in a room with fixed tables, this might not be a good idea. However, you may be able to use a corridor or a hall and have the pictures in there. This will allow you to exploit the space for running games as the children move into a more productive phase of the drilling / controlled practice stage

Powerpoint: if you have this facility, putting the stimuli on a powerpoint (or google docs) slide and varying the ways that slide can be revealed will again keep children interested and ‘alive’.

Useful yet perhaps unlikely sources

For flashards and games that focus on very controlled practice, www.mes-english.com is a boon for teachers. The pictures themselves have a memorable comedy value that allows the image and meaning to stay with the learner.

An old course book called “Meaning Into Words” (Doff and Jones CUP 1983) must have been a tough book to use as a course book. However as a book to adapt and use as a source of functional drilling it still has a value.

A personal word

I enjoy drilling. I find it refreshing and the students find short bursts of it rewarding and useful. I don't advocate a return to audio lingual learning. However, as I say at the beginning, we live in an EFL world where an eclectic range of activities and approaches is open to us. Drilling should be seen as a useful part of that.

Acknowledgement

Photos are provided by Rex Pe under Creative Commons Licence, and can be found at :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldendragon613/sets/72157594295677848/with/250121409/

Another Day in the Life of .....a Teacher in Extremadura, Spain

Here's another contribution to our occasional series Another day in the life of... Will Peach teaches in the town of Cáceres in western Spain. He is one of the site editors over at Gap Daemon, the gap year community website for backpackers and gap year travellers.

Can any day in TEFL truly be regarded as a “normal” day? The nature of the industry, its dependence on students of all shapes and sizes, motivations and intentions, means these days are usually rather hectic ones.

That chaos is no different here in Extremadura, Spain, where the sun coats the towns and cities, the arid landscape stretches on and some student, somewhere, struggles, his tongue in knots, with the tough pronunciation of those tricky English ordinals.

Describing a normal day here is about as easy as teaching me to dance the flamenco (talk about two left feet), or taming a wild, fuming, bull.

Escaping the London Grind

My story, however, needn’t dwell on my dance floor or bull-fighting shortcomings all that much. It began not so long ago, after having got out from under my London desk (having spent the last two years working 9-5), uprooting myself and relocating to a small city called Cáceres, close to the Portuguese border, just over a month and a half back.

Nowadays my life varies in this charming city and its resplendent old part, just as much as the wind blows. One day I’ll be heading for morning coffee on the terraces, another hotfooting it up to Spanish class, sometimes even rushing around topping up my income with a few private classes here and there.

But thanks to a TEFL position teaching in a tiny academy in the city suburb of Mejostillas, I have, with my schedule, a certain kind of stability. With that I don’t have to worry too much about private work drying up, too many morning cafes or funding those much-needed hours of private Spanish tuition!

Lessons can be tough, especially when facing a bunch of teenagers who have had their arms twisted to be there. Yet if I persist and lay down a consistent set of classroom management procedures I can usually get them going. Adults and young kids on the other hand are a dream and always come to class raring to go.

My teaching hours? I work from 4pm-10pm, Monday to Thursday, which means the first half of the week is spent preparing, teaching and, erm, stressing (but I’ll let you be the judge of that!), while the rest is spent enjoying a leisurely three-day weekend.

Mornings are Mine

Now your average English teacher, with such a late-starting schedule, would probably, more often than not, take as much advantage of those early lie in hours as possible right? Not me. I’m up at 6am every day for a brisk walk around the centre of the city (where I’m lucky to be renting a room in a shared apartment) before returning home for a bit of breakfast followed always by a lovely, mouth-watering, Spanish Magdalena (their fairy-cake like equivalent of a muffin). Or two!

These hours are when I’m at my most productive. This is when I can plan for the day ahead with a clear mind, usually perched on a bench in the park, browsing the course material and jotting down a few ideas before fleshing out a plan into something that little bit more concrete afterwards. More often that not I’ll strike up a conversation with one of the many abuelos too, those old yet amiable Spanish gentlemen, who relax in the park enjoying the early morning breeze. They usually have a few things to complain about!

After some early morning planning, exercise and breakfast I head for a coffee with my Spanish grammar and vocabulary books intent on knuckling down for a few hours and practising “la lengua”.

Easier said than done though. The trouble with this part of the world is that there are always so many distractions! Sampling delicious café delights, to chance meetings with people about town (Cáceres is a small city of about 90,000 people), means getting the work done can often be a challenge. Still I press on usually until about midday, just as this sleepy city begins to wind down and the shops begin to draw their shutters.

Siesta Time

Like many, more traditional parts of Spain, Caceres takes its siestas seriously. Most shops and services shut from around 1pm, when the sun is at its fiercest, only to draw back the curtains again a few hours later.

It can be annoying when you need to go out and do things. Even the library turfs out all its residents.

Yet if you can’t beat ‘em join up right?

That’s where I play catch-up with the early rise, returning home to my apartment, walking through the quietening town, arriving at my door with a happy “hola” for my “compañeros” and then retiring, at a gradual pace, to my bed for a lazy snooze.

It isn’t long before I’m up again, quickly fixing some food to sustain the coming 6 hours of teaching and then marching down to the bus stop for the five-minute ride to the residential neighbourhood where the school is.

Starting School

I usually arrive at school a little before the madness starts and the neighbourhood toddlers, kids and their parents wander into the little three-classroom building. This gives me enough time to write my goals on the board, layout the classroom and cast a quick glance over my lesson plans.

Then my Tuesday and Thursday first class of 7 rowdy 10-year-old boys shows up and the next hour and a half is spent trying to calm them down after heated competitive squabbles over which team won the most points during a game practising possessive adjectives. It wouldn’t be a problem but for the 3 Carlos’, whose names I usually have to shout from the back of the classroom.

The rest of the day however? That tiny bit easier. My other classes roll in, each an hour and a half at a time and involve taking energetic kids through their paces with the present simple and past, reading simple stories and putting new verbs into writing practice. Sometimes a lot of shouting.

At the end of the day however I enjoy a one-one class with a beginner-level adult called Sonia, who always has a smile on her face, despite the fact she’s been working like a Trojan from 8am in her day job!

As for my chaotic day, by the time it reaches 10pm and I’m heading back home on the bus, I can barely keep my eyes open. Thankfully my colleague is there to give me a quick-run through of her day, just as crazy as mine, save, of course, for her leisurely morning too.

Thursday nights however? Now there’s a feeling to be savoured. Roll on that relaxing three-day weekend. Recuperation is only four days away!

Making Writing Bearable.

This is a guest post written by Lee Shutler. Lee is currently working as Academic Manager for the British Council in Incheon, South Korea. He has an MA TESOL from Canterbury Christ Church University and a DTEFLA (now the Delta) taken on a course run by Sue more years ago than she cares to remember. He has been a teacher and school manager for 20 years in Italy, Japan, Korea and the UK. His professional interests include materials creation and helping a student develop as a person not just as a language learner.

It’s funny. In class we get the students to talk to each other – to communicate with each other, usually in groups of 2 or 3. We tell them that this is the best way for them to improve their communication skills and to develop in a classroom environment. Usually, even the most “high maintenance” of students accepts that this is probably the best way forward for them and adult classrooms across the world echo to the sounds of pair work and group work conversations.

Why, then, do we usually get students to do written work where, we, the teacher, become the only audience? If we truly believe that students sharing ideas with their colleague and partner in the spoken form is the best way for them to develop speaking skills, why not with writing, too?

I would, therefore, like to suggest the following activity.

Step one: the students are paired up – either randomly, or through the class list. Not, however, with the person sitting next to them.

Step two : the teacher asks the students to write a letter to that person. The topic can be about anything they wish but there must be some information sharing involved in the letter. Tell them they have about 20 minutes to write.

Step three : the students give the letters to you, the teacher/postman(woman), and you pass the letter on to whom it is addressed.

Step four: the addressee reads the letter and replies in kind – again they need about 20 minutes for this.

Step five : you act as “postperson” again and pass the letters back to the original writer.

In the early stages, you act purely as the facilitator. At this stage, do not read or correct the letters. Watch for the students’ body language. You will never have seen students read something so eagerly in class as they do these letters. The smiles will also be a clue, as shared private jokes and ‘in’ gossip get passed around. Your knowledge of the students will help you to decide whether such freedom is ‘safe’. A lesson with prison inmates may not be the best place for such an activity. There you would need to have more control both on subject matter and monitoring.

Most students are proud. They will not want to produce a piece of work that looks scruffy, badly written etc., especially if it is being read by their peers. They will want to be judged by them in a more positive light than they would like you to judge them. Peer pressure is a serious thing!

In order to avoid any form of “cliquiness” developing, I would recommend this activity be done with a variety of pairings over a period of time.

Initially, I steer away from marking (or even reading closely) these letters. There may be things in there I do not wish to see! However, once students have the idea of the activity, I do warn them if I intend to read or correct their work. This allows them to exercise some measure of censorship. This is similar to when they are doing a speaking activity. Students will often modify what they say and the way they say it when the teacher is in earshot.

Through this activity, students will rediscover an innate desire to communicate through the written form. It makes the act of reading and writing more interesting and more enjoyable. It is interesting to note that in this world of texting and email, students still need to be given practice at writing. I found that this is an example where innate L1 language and communication skills do not necessarily transfer in to L2.

Obviously students need to be able to write more than just semi-informal notes to their friends. However, this activity does help students focus on the notion of ‘audience’. They do want to produce something that the reader will want to read. This will then spill over more naturally into the types of activities they may have to do for a PET or FCE type writing activity. Again, it is a skill most students will probably have instinctively in their own language – but not necessarily in L2 or L3.

This activity has worked for me from an Upper Elementary level upwards. I have done it with teenagers and with adults and have seen normally quiet, reticent students enjoy the freedom of being able to express themselves. Very often the correspondence will continue after the class – through emails or through texts. Teenagers especially, so often mono-syllabic mumblers, can find a ‘voice’ through a non-threatening activity that can allow them to express their feelings without the fear of being judged. For teenagers, this may become an activity that can develop into wall-charts and displays. A group I once had in Korea turned their letters into a display that looked like a giant I-phone screen. It was very impressive and far more imaginative than I had anticipated!

As a variation, you might like to ask them to email each other overnight and then get the emails printed out at school. If students are wary of passing on email addresses, it is easy enough for them to set up a temporary address or even a class group. At the British Council in Korea, we have set up a class portal for all adult classes so that students can interact with each other if they wish.

In conclusion, I also say to the teacher – here is an activity that can take upto an hour of total student involvement which requires very little preparation! It is intense with student activity and rich in productive language. Now that, on its own, makes it a winner!

CLIL - Some Problems and Some Solutions

by Flavia Zappa

An English teacher at Italian Secondary School for over twenty years, Flavia also has experience in teaching General English and ESP to adults and in preparing students for Trinity and Cambridge exams. Since 2005 she has been training Italian Primary School teachers, and in the last few years has been involved in planning and co-teaching Physics CLIL courses. In 2010-11, she followed a Delta Module Three course with Business Talk, presenting CLIL as her specialist subject. Here she discusses some of the issues which need to be taken into consideration when planning and teaching a CLIL course.

What is CLIL ?

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is “a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (Mehisto, Marsh & Frigols, 2008:9). In practical terms, this means that a curricular subject, such as geography, mathematics or any other generally non-linguistic subject, is taught and learnt through the medium of a foreign language. The European Commission, which is strongly supporting the introduction of CLIL in secondary schools, sees in CLIL the opportunity for greater “exposure to the language without requiring extra time in the curriculum” (Commission of the European Communities, 2003:8) and a way of improving the otherwise generally poor results of language teaching.

Ball, (n.d), describes two possible approaches to CLIL :

1. The “strong” or “content-driven” approach is for some writers the only possibility. (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010:1). In a strong approach, the syllabus is dependent solely on the specific subject-content. There is no language grading, and language is introduced as and when it is necessary for the topics to be studied and the tasks to be performed, in a “just in time” approach.

2. The “weak” or language-driven” approach, on the other hand, will take account of more traditional language grading and modify content and tasks to suit the current language level-

However, in practice, classroom research shows that CLIL can take various forms and be positioned at any point along this continuum. And in addition to the “strong/weak” continuum, differences may be caused depending on whether the CLIL course is of low or high intensity”(according to the number of lessons per week), and short or long-term (referring to the duration of the course) (Mehisto et al., 2008:12).

The need to integrate the teaching of both content and language means that the identity of the teacher and the competences s/he possesses becomes a major issue. CLIL is generally implemented in formal educational contexts, but content teachers, who are supposed to be the CLIL teachers, may not be proficient in the target language, while language teachers may have problems with content. At primary level, language and content demands may be more easily coped with, but at secondary level they are usually high and difficulties relevant. Both language and content teachers can also encounter problems with methodology (Deller & Price, 2007:6,7) since three types of methodology have to be taken into account : the methodology of the specific subject; the methodology of language teaching; and, in particular, the specific methodology associated with CLIL.

To be successful, a CLIL course is probably built around pedagogical and academic tasks engaging students in learning by doing, which comprises acting, observing and reflecting on the data collected, while exposing them to the target language . This should lead to affective and cognitive involvement and, as a consequence, to better learning. Learning by doing will consist of concrete experiences related to IT or laboratories, as well as experimentation with oral and written text types focusing on both comprehensible input (Krashen, 2002), and comprehensible output (Swain, 1996). “Comprehensible input” involves exposure to a language which is comprehensible because of the context, but which is at a slightly higher level than the learners’ competence and should automatically promote acquisition. “Comprehensible output” implies that the learners “need to be pushed from semantic into syntactic processing mode by requiring them to encode comprehensible messages” (Dalton-Puffer, 2007:261).

The 4Cs Framework and the Role of Language

But how does the integration of content and language actually work? While belonging to the tradition of the Communicative Approach, CLIL finds its identity in the 4Cs framework. Coyle et al. (2010:41-43, 54-56) explain that dealing with content (subject matter) means creating knowledge and understanding, and developing skills. This process relates to cognition (learning and thinking processes), which cannot exist without communication (language learning and using). The fourth element is culture, meaning the development of intercultural understanding and global citizenship. The major issue is therefore to identify the language necessary for effective content and language learning, to specify thinking skills, and at the same time to plan the development of self-awareness and responsible citizenship, which may be promoted through projects inside the school, but should greatly benefit from school/materials exchanges with foreign classes.

Research into Content-Based Instruction, e.g. Immersion Education in Canada, supports the assertion “that in formal educational settings, second languages are best learned when the focus is on mastery of content rather than on mastery of language per se” (Richards & Rodgers, 2001:209). However, the CLIL language should be seen as “language of, for and through learning”, which corresponds to the language necessary to access information and develop skills, to operate in a foreign language environment, and to interact in the classroom to articulate understanding respectively (Coyle et al, 2010:36-38). In other words, students need to develop not only “Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills” (BICS) i.e. “skills needed for social, conversational situations” but also “Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency” (CALP), i.e. the abstract and formal language needed for academic study (Cummins, cited in Bentley, 2010:8). This means understanding and learning to use grammatical structures, functional language, and a great quantity of vocabulary, which is “content-obligatory”, or specialist, and “content-compatible”, or general but topic-related (Bentley, 2010:11). This is why it is strongly recommended that the design of a CLIL course starts from an analysis of the language of the curricular subject. The course designer can then create tasks and activities suitable for focusing on the target language as well as on the subject content.

But what happens if the language demands of the task are simply too high for the learners? Is the use of the L2 always compulsory? While Mehisto et al. (2008:105-106) support the teacher’s consistent use of and encouragement to use the target language, Coyle et al. (2010:15-16) argue that in some CLIL forms “translanguaging”, i.e. “the systematic shift from one language to another for specific reasons”, may occur.

This use of code-switching has a number of positive effects : it contributes to lowering students’ fear of failure; it allows the development of academic language proficiency in both languages; and it ensures spontaneity when discussing course results.

A Constructivist Approach for Cognitive Challenge

Learning content and language at the same time undoubtedly represents a cognitive challenge. For the subject content, learners need to develop specific operating skills such as solving problems, together with low-order and high-order thinking skills such as describing, classifying and matching (LOTS) and analysing, interpreting and applying (HOTS) (Bentley, 2010:21). And all this has to be done in a language which is not their own.

Inevitably, this may cause anxiety and demotivation stemming from fear of failure. To combat this, the literature suggests an emphasis on short-term learning goals to build student confidence, and highlights the students’ need for support within their individual “zone of proximal development” (Vygotskij, 1978) - that is, “the distance between what they can achieve alone and under guidance” (Gibbons, 2009:15).

This is also why theorists advocate, alongside learning by doing, a constructivist and participatory approach, based on the idea that learning should start from the present state of knowledge and develop out of social interaction (Dalton-Puffer, 2007:7-8). This means that in schools, such as many in the Italian state system, which often encourage individual performance goals, it might be necessary to train teachers and students to develop the ability and a willingness to either plan or participate in activities developing collaborative study skills. Pair- and group-work become essential in most steps of the CLIL class, from vocabulary learning to content analysis and processing.

This change means that the role of the teacher in a CLIL course is not so much that of “knower”, but rather that of learning facilitator and of manager of interaction (Dalton-Puffer, 2007:24). Interaction in CLIL, whether oral or written, should not be limited to typical discourse pattern of many classrooms, in which the teacher initiates by eg asking a question, the student responds, and the teacher then follows up, often by evaluating (McCarthy,1991:16). but should involve students in genuine discourse aiming at discovering and mastering meaningful content.

Authenticity and Grading of Materials and Tasks

When planning a CLIL course, we will probably find that there is a lack of suitable ready-made materials. It is therefore our task to produce them. Authentic texts, whether videos or written presentations accompanied by visuals, are highly motivating and offer the opportunity to develop a multicultural dimension. If they are too difficult, they can sometimes be simplified or, rather, “scaffolding”, i.e. interactional support (Bruner, Wood & Ross, 1976), can be provided and task grading applied. For this purpose, the CLIL Matrix adapted from Cummins (1984) by Coyle et al (2010:43-44) is a useful tool which enables the teacher to balance linguistic and cognitive demands, generally aiming to avoid either low or high cognitive demands on both content and language at the same time, and thus to prevent demotivation being caused by tasks which are either too easy or too difficult

The matrix consists of four quadrants organized as follows:

• Quadrant 1- LOW linguistic demands and LOW cognitive demands


• Quadrant 2 – LOW linguistic demands but HIGH cognitive demands


• Quadrant 3 – HIGH linguistic demands and HIGH cognitive demands


• Quadrant 4 – HIGH linguistic demands but LOW cognitive demands

While the level of quadrant 1 is only suitable for building initial confidence and may be used as a warm-up, it is essential to focus on quadrant 2, which ensures that “the language of the learner does not impede learning” (ibid). The level of quadrant 3 seems to be appropriate only when learners show they can cope with a targeted progression in language learning as well as with high cognitive challenge. Finally, quadrant 4 refers to a transitory step which aims at promoting the learning of language which is essential to progress in content learning (ibid).

When preparing materials, we can create some which exclusively deal with vocabulary learning, e.g. pre-teaching vocabulary (Quadrant 4), but we will generally focus on those where content and language learning is really integrated (Quadrants 2 and 3). Here attention to vocabulary (pronunciation, spelling, collocations) and grammar structures (use, meaning, and accuracy) may be ensured by:

• teacher-led brainstorming for language activation


• pair- or group-work for content-processing during which the teacher scaffolds and corrects language


• teacher-led classroom talk during laboratory activities or at the end of academic tasks


• creating gap-fill, matching, ordering, and open question tasks for authentic materials or for the teacher’s explanations, alongside content-focused activities

The Challenge of Learning Assessment and Course Evaluation

The principle of the integration of the four Cs causes testing problems too. Field research (Hönig, 2010) studies the difficulty of distinguishing beween content and language proficiency, and questions the appropriateness of traditional testing tools. School policies inevitably require formal testing, which in CLIL should be content-based with a score considering both content and language performance. Marking by the different teachers separately and then together, if the course is co-taught, would ensure an acceptable degree of scorer reliability (Hughes, 2003:43), but may still cause problems as for face validity, i.e. “surface credibility or public acceptability” (Ingram, cited in Alderson, Clapham & Wall, 1995:172), as the results will not reveal whether a failure is due to language or to content difficulties or both.

On the other hand, although testing must be done and reliable ways found to measure the results, recommendations are given regarding monitoring for formative assessment (Mehisto et al., 2008), which, according to general good practices, will consist, among others, of self- and peer-correction, self- and peer-assessment, and the creation of a portfolio. This should give the students greater confidence and provide more reliable data, because it can measure individual progress and check a wider range of competence.

Course evaluation is a related issue. Here the ideal path to follow would seem to be Action-research, i.e. “the systematic collection and analysis of data relating to the improvement of some aspect of professional development” (Wallace, 1998:1). However, if this is too big a challenge initially, it would sufficient to start by devising and implementing tools to monitor the quality of CLIL teaching and learning, such as student questionnaires at the end of each module to evaluate the felt effectiveness of the activities and teaching action. On the other hand, teachers’ self-assessment could involve writing a diary to record their perceptions about the lessons, their own problems and progress, and their impressions about the impact of activities on the students. The analysis of the collected data should give on-going crucial feedback, which should serve the purpose of improving the present course and probably of planning more effective future ones.

Conclusion

Will CLIL become the standard language learning method of the future, at least in the educational system? Starting from the coming academic year, (2012-2013), the Italian State school system will introduce CLIL courses in the third grade of “Liceo Linguistico” (the Secondary School specialising in foreign languages), and this will be continued in the fourth grade the following year, before being extended to the fifth grades of all types of Secondary School from 2014-2015 onwards. My teaching experience shows that CLIL has the potential to enhance motivation for language learning by rendering its purpose more authentic. It also seems likely to produce better learning results, especially when students feel they lack aptitude either for the language or for the content subject, as they can rely on their strengths in the other field to compensate for their difficulties. I also believe that the focus on content will affect curricular language teaching positively, since it seems to increase the teachers’ and students’ ability to create meaningful learning contexts for more genuine interaction.

In the long term, therefore CLIL may well become successful common practice in formal education, provided that teachers are given opportunities for learning, experimenting, and collaborating.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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