An ELT Notebook

Drill Bits

2011-11-22T13:01:00.017+01:00

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

2011-10-31T16:44:00.014+01:00

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.

2011-10-16T12:04:00.006+02:00

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

2011-10-08T19:23:00.004+02:00

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

Alderson, C.J., Clapham, C. and Wall.D. (1995). Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ball, P. “How do you know if you are practising CLIL?” Onestopenglish. Retrieved 29 March, 2011, from: http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/methodology/articles/article-how-do-you-know-if-youre-practising-clil/500614.article

Bentley, K. (2010). The TKT Course CLIL Module. Cambridge: CUP

Commission of the European Communities (2003). Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004 – 2006. Retrieved 29 March, 2011, from: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2003:0449:FIN:EN:PDF

Coyle, D., Hood, P., and Marsh, D.( 2010). Content and language Integrated Learning. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press

Dalton-Puffer, C. (2007). Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Deller, S. and Price, C. (2007). Teaching Other Subjects Through English. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Gibbons, P. (2009). English Learners Academic Literacy and Thinking – Learning in the Challenge Zone. Portsmouth: Heinemann

Hönig, I. (2010). Assessment in CLIL theoretical and empirical research. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag

Hughes, A. (2003). Testing for Language Teachers(2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krashen, S. (2002). Second language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Retrieved 25 April, 2011, from : http://www.sdkrashen.com/SL_Acquisition_and_Learning/index.html

McCarthy, M. (1991). Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mehisto, P., Marsh, D., and Frigols, M.J.( 2008). Uncovering CLIL. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Limited

Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T.S.(2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2nd ed.) New York: Cambridge University Press.

Swain, M. (1996). “Integrating language and content in immersion classrooms: Research perspectives”, The Canadian Modern Language Review, 52, 4, 529-48

Vygotskij, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Wallace, M.J. (1998). Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). “The role of tutoring in problem solving” in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 17, 89-100

Using the Internet in the Classroom

2011-01-30T20:27:00.011+01:00

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 where his tutor was a certain Sue Swift. 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.

Two ideas for the more “Luddite” teacher.

In an EFL world full of syllabuses, course deadlines, exams and student stress, we often forget that there is a world outside the classroom and it is in that world where we want our students to be focussing their language.

There are some very simple ideas that you can use in the classroom – or more likely, the Computer Room – where you can enhance your students’ imagination about what they can do with their language in the wider world.

The beauty of these two activities is that they are virtually (virtually!!) preparation-free! Also, they do not require you to be an expert in computers!

Idea 1.

Very simple.

1. Tell your students to “google” their own name. You can decide whether they limit themselves to English only websites. But they have a certain amount of time (20 to 30 minutes) to research what the internet has on them and others of their name. During this time, the students make notes.

2. After the allotted time period, you can all return to the classroom. In small groups, students give mini-presentations about what they discovered about themselves or about others with their name.

3. Change groupings to allow students to develop fluency and confidence in speaking. Most of the time, students will also find it very interesting to learn about others.

In an activity like this, there is the danger that they will find something they don’t like. Or you might find that that someone’s name will illicit the wrong type of websites (I did not do this activity when I had a Thai student called “Supaporn”). It may, therefore, be an idea to google your students’ names first – just to check that nothing too unpleasant comes up, either connected to their personal history or to someone of the same name. However, most of the time, students will act as their own censors. For example I found lots of predictable information about myself but also that someone of my name was in a low security prison in America for parking offences and bigamy!

This activity can take a whole lesson. A lot will depend on your available ICT facilities.

Idea 2.

In an act of generosity, tell your students you are giving them GBP700 per pair or approximate equivalent to spend on a weekend away.

1. Put students into pairs and ask them to come up with ideas on what they want to do and where they want to go. (15 minutes)

2. Take students to the computers and ask them to “book” their flights and hotels and “make” any other reservations they need – theatre tickets, restaurants etc. (30-40 minutes)

3. They will also need to “arrange” sightseeing tours, transfers from the airports etc. (10-20 minutes)

4. Return to the classroom and put students in different groups. Students give mini-presentations on what they have planned.

5. As with the activity above, you can ask the students to change grouping to allow them to develop their fluency and confidence.

A recent example saw a group of students arrange return flights from Seoul Gimpo airport to Jeju - an island in the south of South Korea. They booked a beach hotel, arranged bicycle hire, arranged a boat for shell fishing and also organised a hiking tour to Hallasan (South Korea’s highest mountain). They were so enthused by what they had done in the lesson that after the lesson they actually booked that exact weekend away. We await the photographs.

This activity can also lend itself towards giving students practice at more formal presentations. A separate lesson could be used for the students to turn their information and discoveries into a series on Powerpoint slides which they then present “formally” to the rest of the group. This will allow you to give students practice with the signpost language of presentations.

As I have already said, both of these activities can be preparation-light. They lend themselves to both being a scheduled part of a course or as an emergency cover-lesson. The beauty of the internet means that a lesson like these can be repeated as the information is likely to have changed.

English Consonant Sounds

2007-07-23T16:25:00.003+02:00

In the last article on Teaching Pronunciation, we looked at how individual sounds are made, and in particular talked about the way consonant sounds can be classified as voiced or unvoiced, by place of articulation and by manner of articulation. If you haven’t read the article, or don’t remember what the terms mean, it would be useful to have a look at it now, before going on.

There wasn’t time, however, to discuss all of the consonant sounds in that article. So here is a full rundown. I suggest you try making the sounds as you read, so that you get a feel for where and how they are made. We’ll start this time with place of articulation.

The diagram shows the names of the various parts of the mouth involved in the production of English consonants :

A = nasal cavity
B = alveolar ridge
C = hard palate
D = soft palate or velum
E = lips and teeth
F = tongue 1 – tip 2 – blade 3 – body
G = uvula
H = larynx and vocal cords

For each consonant, two parts of the mouth are involved, and the name given to it reflects this. Starting from the front, some consonants are made using both lips – try saying /p/ /b/ /w/ and /m/ - and these are called bilabial consonants (bilabial = two lips)

Now try /f/ and /v/. This time it’s the bottom lip and top teeth which are involved. These are labiodental consonants (labio = lip, dental = teeth).

For nearly all the other consonants, the tongue will interact with another part of the mouth. The name of the consonant doesn’t include a reference to the tongue however, just the point of the mouth which it meets. So for instance, sounds made by an interaction between the tongue and the teeth are just called dental sounds. These are /t/, /d/ and the voiced and unvoiced “th” sounds: / ð/ as in this and /θ/ as in thick .

If you run your tongue back behind your teeth, you come to a bony ridge called the alveolar ridge. Several sounds are made on or just behind the ridge - /s/ /z/ /t/ /d/ /n/ /r/ and /l/

Moving back from the alveolar ridge you come to a similarly hard but smoother zone – the hard palate. /j/ as in yellow is a palatal sound, are as the highlighted consonants in the words sheep, measure, cheap and jeep. There is also a palatal version of the /r/ consonant. If you found it strange that it was classed before as alveolar, you may have been saying the palatal version.

Notice that there is now a difference in the way the tongue is used. For the dental and alveolar sounds, it was the tip of the tongue which was involved. For palatal sounds, however, it’s the blade of the tongue, and as we move further back to the velum (the soft part of the palate, closest to the throat) it’s the back, or body, of the tongue. The velar sounds are /g/ and /k/ and the final consonants in sing and in bottle – often called the “dark” l.

This leaves only the consonant /h/ which is produced by air passing from the windpipe through the vocal cords, or glottis. It's therefore a glottal sound.

Place of Articulation tells us where the consonants are produced, but we also need to consider Manner of Articulation – how they are produced. The most important categories are :

Plosives : Plosive sounds (also called stop sounds) are formed by the air being completely blocked in the mouth and then suddenly released. For example, /k/ and /g/ are formed when the back of the tongue rises to the velum and momentarily blocks the air. These are therefore velar plosives. The other plosive consonants of English are the bilabial plosives /p/ and /b/ and the alveolar plosives /t/ and /d/. Some varieties of English – London English for example – also include a glottal stop which substitutes for the /t/ consonant between vowels. Imagine a London pronunciation of butter, for example.

Fricatives : Fricatives are formed when the two parts of the mouth approach each other closely, not completely blocking the passage of the air, but forcing it through a confined space. The air molecules start to bump against each other causing audible friction. Try the palatal fricative – the sh sound. You can feel your tongue up close to the alveolar ridge and the air passing through the small space left. The full list of English fricatives is : labiodental fricatives - /f/ and /v/; dental fricatives – the two "th" sounds; alveolar fricatives – /s/ and /z/; palatal fricatives - /ʃ/ as in in sheep and /ʒ/ as in measure; and the glottal fricative /h/.

Affricates : Affricates are really a plosive and a fricative combined. The air is initially blocked, and then released through a narrow passageway like a fricative. English has two affricates, the initial sounds in cheap and jeep - / ʧ / and /ʤ/. These are usually classed as palato-alveolar affricates, as they’re made in a position half way between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate.

Nasals : when a nasal sound is produced, the air is prevented from going out through the mouth and is instead released through the nose. There are three English nasals – the bilabial nasals /m/ and /n/ and the velar nasal /ŋ/ – the final consonant in sing.

Approximant : Approximants are a bit of a hotch-potch category, and contain some of the most problematic sounds in English. We’ll look at them in detail another time, but for now will classify them together as sounds produced when the airstream moves around the tongue and out of the mouth with almost no obstruction. The English approximants are the alveolar approximants /l/ and /r/, the palatal approximant /j/, as in yes, and the dark l – the velar approximant - as in bottle. Keep in mind, however, that this is a simplification.

This leaves the third distinguishing category which we discussed in the last article – voicing. If the vocal cords are vibrated when the sound is made, the sound is voiced. If the are not, it is unvoiced. Several of the English consonants come in pairs. They have the same place and manner of articulation and are distinguished only by voicing (1). For example /t/ and /d/ are both alveolar plosives, but /t/ is unvoiced while /d/ is voiced. In the summarising chart below, where pairs occur the unvoiced sound is always given first.

If you know where and how the sounds are made, you are in a better position to help your students (2). In the next article in this series we'll look at some teaching techniques to improve students' command of these sounds.

Notes

1. This is another simplification, and again something we’ll look at in detail another time.

2. For diagrams of the exact tongue position for each sound see this chapter from Philip Carr, English Phonetics and Phonology, Blackwell Publishing.

Further Reading

Teaching Pronunciation (M. Celce-Murcia et al, CUP) is one of the most useful books I've come across on teaching pronunciation. It manages to combine a thorough analysis of the phonology of English with a wealth of practical activities for use in the classroom. It focuses on the analysis of North American English, so teachers with a British accent need to be on the lookout for differences. But it's a book I wouldn't want to be without for its clarity and practical usefulness.

Using YouTube for Vocabulary Development

2007-07-06T11:12:00.000+02:00

YouTube now contains an enormous amount of material, some of which is highly exploitable in the classroom. One such category of videos are promotional videos. These have the advantage that they are professionally produced, and therefore the visual and sound quality is good, but you’re less likely to run into copyright problems. They’re on YouTube because the makers want people to publicise them – it’s known as viral marketing.

This lesson is based around two promotional videos – one on Australia, and the other on Newquay in Cornwall. It is aimed at mid intermediate level or above and aims to extend students knowledge of the language of tourism. It would be suitable for an ESP class of tourist operators, but could also be used with a general purpose class.You can find the videos at : Australia Holiday Guide and Newquay An Introduction

1. Warm Up - Activation of Language and Schemata

a. Divide students into pairs or groups. Allocate each pair or group a category of sports – water sports, athletics, mountain sports, equestrian sports etc – depending on their interests. Have pictures ready to give the students to push them on to less obvious sports if they dry up. Sports might include :

Water sports – swimming, diving, snorkelling, scuba diving, surfing, windsurfing, kitesurfing, water polo, synchronised swimming, sailing, powerboat racing, water skiing
Athletics –sprints, middle distance and long distance running hurdling, shot put, javelin, hammer throw, discus throw, high jump, long jump, triple jump, pole vault, steeplechase, relays, road running (including the marathon).
Equestrian – dressage, show jumping, eventing, carriage driving, endurance riding, steeplechasing, flat racing , harness racing, showing

NB. The real focus is on water sports. The others are included as a “distractor” so that this stage is not too much of a “giveaway” for stage c.

b. Ask Ss to tell each other if they’ve ever been to Australia. If so, when, how long for, did they like it, what did they see etc. If not, would they like to go, where exactly, what would they like to see. Group or pair discussion, followed by full-class content and language follow-up.

c. Tell students that they are responsible for creating a two-minute promotional video of Australia. What would they show on the video, and what image of Australia would they try and create? Group or pair discussion, followed by T-class content and language follow-up.

2. Viewing

a. First Viewing : Ss watch the video and compare what it shows and the image of Australia created with their predictions. With lower level students, this first viewing might be done with the sound turned off, in order that the high percentage of text which they won’t understand doesn’t distract them. In any case, tell students not to worry if they don’t understand everything, they can make the comparison just by viewing the images. T-Class follow up.

b. Second Viewing : Ask Ss to watch and listen again. Set gist comprehension questions -

- What sports are mentioned by the speaker (not shown in the images) ?
- Can you go surfing if you’ve never tried before?
- Why might you need your walking boots on an Australian holiday?

c. Third Viewing : What you do next may differ depending on the level of the students. Here are some options :

Intermediate students : Give out the complete transcript with any expressions you predict will be a problem underlined and a scrambled glossary below (as in the worksheet illustrated). Ask students to listen again to the video, following the text, and then to match the underlined expressions with their meanings.

Text : If it’s action and adventure you’re after, then a holiday to Australia will be just up your street. But don’t take my word for it—take a look for yourself. The waves are massive off the coast of Australia, making surfing the nation’s favourite pastime. If you’ve never tried it before, don’t worry — most resorts offer courses for beginners. Diving is immensely popular here too. With the Great Barrier Reef stretching all the way down Queensland’s coast, it’s the perfect place for an underwater adventure. If you’d rather stay above sea level, then try a sailing tour around the Whit Sunday Islands, home of the famous Whitehaven Beach. This is an experience not to be missed.

There’s loads to do on dry land too. The thrill of four-wheel driving across the dunes of Frazer Island or the barren outback is unforgettable. And for the view of a lifetime, get your walking boots on for the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb.

And if you need a drink to calm your nerves after all that excitement, head to any of Australia’s city centres for an action-packed evening.

Wherever you see Australia from, it’s a breathtaking experience.

Scrambled glossary : a lot / you want / you would prefer to / Australian countryside / port / go / exciting / excitement / exactly right for you / extending / leisure activity / don’t believe me / infertile / holiday town

Upper Intermediate + : Give out a gapped transcript of the text. Ask students first to predict the missing words, and then to listen in order to confirm or complete their answers.

3. Language Focus

a. Point out that this is a promotional video, and that therefore the text uses words and expressions with a superlative meaning or which create an emotional impact. Ask students to identify the first of these (action and adventure) and then to highlight any others (adventure, massive, favourite, immensely popular, the perfect place, adventure, an experience not to be missed, loads to do, thrill, barren, unforgettable, the view of a lifetime, excitement, action-packed, a breathtaking experience.) T-class follow-up - list the vocabulary on the board.

b. Show students the following web pages on London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Dublin and ask them to identify similar expressions – they may need to use dictionaries while they do so. Follow up : add the expressions to the board list.

c. Explain to students where Newquay is and what sort of place it is. Give out the gapped text, explain that it’s from a promotional video for tourism in Newquay, and ask them, in pairs to decide on a suitable word for each space.

Text : Welcome to the Newquay CD Rom where you can discover all that this ………………… on the Cornish coast has to offer. Whether it’s trying one of the many ……………………… water sports, experiencing the ………………………… countryside, relaxing on the seven miles of …………………… sands and …………………………… beaches, or simply enjoying the ………………………… array of facilities, it’s …………………… to see why Newquay has become the ……………………… destination for a family holiday.

d. T-class follow up : Elicit the students’ suggestions and eliminate any that are not grammatically or collocationally possible. Then play the video so that they can identify which words were actually used.

4. Application

a. Ask students, in pairs or groups, to decide the content (not, at the moment the text) for a two-minute promotional video on their home town or the town in which they are currently studying. They should decide what image they want to project of the town, and what they want to show in the video. T-class follow up : elicit ideas, and give language feedback as necessary.

b. Students write the text for the video. This stage can be done individually or collaboratively.

If time on the course allows, and if digital cameras are available, this could of course be turned into a real project, with the students making the film and recording it.

Further Reading

For more ideas on how to use YouTube, click here ....

and for ideas on the Internet in the EFL classroom in general ...

Teaching in Bucharest, Romania

2007-06-19T19:30:00.000+02:00

In this article from our occasional series Another Day in the Life… guest writer Michael Tate describes a day teaching in Romania, where he's been for the last three years.

I’ve always been an early bird and I’ve always appreciated free time in the mornings. I’ve never been one to fall out of bed ten minutes before a lesson, drag a comb through my hair, pull on last night’s t-shirt and stumble through the door toast in one hand, lesson plans in the other. I’ve known teachers like this and I’m not one of them. I’ve had students who’ve had teachers like this and I know the effect coffee breath and stale sweat have on your student attendance level. Being self-employed I like to be fresh, smart and well-presented. It’s true what they say – you are only as good as your last lesson. So, today, like every other day, I wake up naturally at about half six.

Kettle on, PC on, balcony door open and a little look outside. It’s a lovely June morning in Bucharest, the sky is blue and the air is yet to be overcome with the sounds of traffic, construction dust and car fumes. The kettle whistles and I pour a coffee and settle down to prepare my files for the day. I travel to my students’ offices so I rarely have time to come home during the day. It takes me about an hour today. I have almost a decade of exercises, lessons, reading comprehensions and handouts on the PC so mostly it’s a case of thinking, choosing and pressing ‘print’. The only lesson I have to prepare from scratch is for a complete beginner.

After finishing my lesson planning I make a decent breakfast (might not have time for lunch), a cup of tea and mail the day’s students to remind them they have a lesson and ask them to phone me if there’s a problem. Then I browse a few sites, read a paper online, and maybe catch the morning news on the box. Finally I head for the shower, shave, spruce myself up and put on my suit. As I visit people in their offices I find that a professional appearance makes a big difference. I try to portray myself as a ‘professional linguistic trainer’. It makes no difference. I do what we all do. It just sounds better and I can justify the higher fees!

I leave the house at about 9.15 and jump on the tram for the centre of town. I’m lucky today and I get a seat. There’s a bus that goes in that direction too but it’s always hot and crowded so I prefer to spend an extra ten minutes on the tram but have the luxury of a pew. I flip open my book and do my best to ignore the group of cretins behind me playing ‘manele’ (an abominable variety of music normally involving overweight short dark guys in shades singing songs like ‘I love my money’ and ‘Cash cash cash’ whilst surrounded by semi-naked 18-year old dancers) on their mobile phones.

I arrive at the office at 10 and start my first one-hour private. My student is an economist. She’s very dedicated, always does her homework, and almost never cancels a lesson and only then with good cause. If only they were all like her!

After her lesson I jump on the bus for two stations and arrive at another office. Two lessons here – the first a husband and wife team from IBM preparing for the FCE exam in June. Easy lesson and a little different to the normal slog through the grammar as it’s more skills-based. She has completed lots of exercises and prepared a list of questions, he has done nothing.

In the same location, after them, is a small group of three intermediate students. Absolutely lovely people and this time they have come laden with chocolates from their weekend trip to Barcelona. At the end of the lesson I get a call from the HR manager from the next client, a fashion company with whom I have 18 hours a week all contracted and paid for regardless of cancellations (excellent work if you can get it), to tell me that my student can’t attend. Fair enough as she had a baby only three weeks previously and despite this still makes at least half of her lessons!. That’s determination for you. Another accountant. I decide that I want more female accountants as students.

Now I have a minor problem. The time is two o’clock and the next lesson is at five in the north of the city. I could go home and potter about for an hour and then leave again but it’s hardly worth it. Luckily the group I’ve just finished with overhear my phone conversation and ask me if my next class is cancelled, and upon finding out it is they invite me to lunch. We all head out to a lovely local restaurant with a beautifully planted-up garden. I have a bowl of soup followed by a spicy grilled chicken. They have soup and pizza. They are very pleased to have the opportunity to spend another two hours practicing their English and I’m very pleased for the relaxing and free lunch. Everyone’s a winner!

After lunch I jump on the metro and arrive at my last student’s house. She’s a lawyer, married to the MD of one of my other clients (all my students have come through recommendations so in some obscure way I can connect any student to any other student). She’s the complete beginner. She’s making good progress after only a few months. She knows a lot of the theory now and is very clever and works hard on the exercises. The problem is that we knew each other before she became a student and so she knows that my Romanian is pretty good. I have to frequently turn stupid in the lessons to force her to try things out in English. She’s very smart…but needs a lot more confidence. Another reliable student though.

The lesson lasts an hour and a half and I get home about eight. It’s been a long day but I feel satisfied and nicely worn out. After the big and unexpected lunch I just make myself a salad (need to lose weight anyway), pour myself a cold beer (yes, ok, don’t say it!) and put my feet up for a while.

Today was a good day – busy and with the good students. Not all days are like this. Other days I get lazy reluctant students who rarely do any work and have be forced to attend by their superiors, I get bundled around on the buses and trams, sweating like a pig in my suit because the locals are afraid to open the windows because they believe draughts kills, even though it’s 40 degrees inside the tram. I get all the rude cashiers in the shops and I come home hating my job, the city, the transport and the weather!

At least every day is different. Monotony would kill me.

The Teaching Knowledge Test

2007-06-17T11:20:00.000+02:00

Want to improve your knowledge of teaching but don’t have the time or the money to take the CELTA? Consider the Teaching Knowledge Test!

Introduced by Cambridge ESOL (the CELTA people) in 2005, the Teaching Knowledge Test (1) was a response to requests by governments around the world (2) for an easily accessible way of training and certifying English Language teachers, including those who have previously taught other subjects and need to requalify. It is now offered by centres in 21 countries around the world.

A test of knowledge rather than competence (there is no teaching practice component), the test is divided into three modules :

Module 1 - Language and background to language learning and teaching

Describing language and language skills.
Background to language learning.
Background to language teaching.

Module 2 - Planning lessons and use of resources for language teaching

Planning and preparing a lesson or sequence of lessons.
Selection and use of resources and materials.

Module 3 - Managing the teaching and learning process

Teachers' and learners' language in the classroom.
Classroom management

Each module involves an 80 minute test consisting of 80 objective questions. The modules can be taken together in one exam session or separately, over three exam sessions, so that you can prepare yourself as intensively or non-intensively as you wish. You can’t fail the test – it’s graded from Band 1 (lowest) to Band 4 (highest) to show the level of your knowledge in each area. The sort of questions you’ll be answering are:

Module 1

Scanning is :
a. reading a text quickly to get general information.
b. reading a text quickly to find specific information.
c. reading a text quickly to discover the writer’s attitude.

Module 2

Which of the following is a lesson aim :
a. students will complete a role play.
b. reduce teacher talking time.
c. give students practise in listening for gist.

Module 3

What type of mistake is involved in the following sentence : I live here since 1999.
a. wrong preposition
b. wrong tense
c. missing article

Not all the questions are multiple choice – others include matching, sequencing and odd-one-out. Multiple choice are simply the easiest to demonstrate here. (3)

There are no formal entrance requirements for the test, although candidates are advised to have a language proficiency of at least B1 on the Council of Europe scale (pre-intermediate). Similarly, it is not necessary to follow a course before taking the exam (4), though many preparatory courses are available worldwide, often as short as 20 hours per module or less.

Notes

1. The Cambridge ESOL website gives full details of the test, lists centres where it can be taken and answers some FAQs.

2. For information on which governments have adopted the test see here.

3. You can see the full range of question types in the sample papers for each of the three modules.

4. If you're interested in preparing yourself for the test, try The TKT Course by Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness and Melanie Williams. Suitable for self-access study, it provides approximately 60-90 hours preparation, including practice tasks and tests.

Teaching Individual Sounds : Part Two

2007-06-11T13:54:00.000+02:00

In the final part of this article, I shall be talking about activities which you can use to help students pronounce individual sounds which are a problem for them. However, all the practice activities in the world will be useless if the students don’t understand how to produce the sound in the first place. It’s therefore essential that the teacher knows and can explain this.

A list of the phonemes of English was given at the beginning of the first part of the article. They divide into consonants and vowels. What’s the difference?

A consonant sound is produced by blocking or obstructing the path of the air in some way as it passes out from the lungs. Try any of the consonant sounds – for example /p/ /f/ /t/ /g/ - and you’ll feel that in each case two parts of the mouth are brought close together to prevent air passing straight out. Now try any of the vowel sounds and you’ll see that this doesn’t happen – the air flows straight through, unobstructed.

Vowel Sounds

Which vowel sound is produced depends on the exact size and shape of the mouth when it’s produced. The mouth acts as a resonance chamber. To understand this imagine having several different shaped glasses partially filled with different amounts of water. If you tapped them with a spoon or rubbed your finger around the rim, as in the photo, you’d get a range of different sounds. In each case the sound produced is dependent on the size and shape of the cavity within the glass. With vowels the size and shape of the cavity is formed by the position of the mouth organs.

There may be several variables involved in vowel production, but the most important are :

Is the jaw open or closed – or somewhere in between? This is sometimes described in terms of tongue height : is the tongue high in the mouth, close to the roof of the mouth or low - or somewhere in between?
Is the tongue positioned in the front or back of the mouth - or somewhere in between?
Are the lips spread or rounded – or somewhere in between?

Using these categories we can describe /i:/ as in meet as a close front spread vowel, while /u/ as in boot is close, back, rounded.

Consonant Sounds

Consonant sounds are also described using three variables – a) the use (or not) of voicing, b) the place of articulation, and c) the manner of articulation. What do these terms mean? In this article we’ll give a brief definition, and in the next a more detailed account.

Voicing

Half way down your larynx, behind your Adam’s apple, are the vocal cords – two bands of elastic muscle tissue which can vibrate as air from the lungs passes through them. Some sounds, known as voiced sounds involve vocal cord vibration whilst others, known as unvoiced sounds don’t. For example, place your fingers over your Adam’s apple and make a buzzing sound /zzzzzzzz/. You should feel the vocal cords vibrating. Now do the same with a hissing sound /sssssssss/ - the voicing disappears.

All vowels are voiced, and over half the consonants. Try for yourself with some of the other sounds from the chart. Be careful though. If you add a vowel sound to an unvoiced consonant – for example if you say something like “ker” rather than just /k/, you’ll feel the voicing from the vowel.
Place of Articulation

The shape of the mouth, and the position of its different parts (mainly the tongue and lips) are also crucial to pronouncing the sound, and the second way of describing sounds reflects this. If you say the sounds /p/ and /b/ for example, you can easily feel that they are made using both lips. They are therefore called bilabial sounds. Or what about /f/ and /v/ ? They involve the use of one lip (the lower lip) and the teeth. They are therefore known as labio-dental sounds.

Add to this what we’ve already said about voicing, and we can distinguish between the sounds in each pair : /p/ is an unvoiced bilabial, /b/ a voiced bilabial; /f/ is an unvoiced labio-dental and /v/ a voiced labio-dental.
Manner of Articulation

We’ve seen that /b/ is a voiced bilabial. Based on what we’ve seen so far, how would you classify /m/ ? try saying it in an extended form /mmmmm/.

/m/ is also a voiced bilabial – it’s made by vibrating the vocal cords and with both lips. To distinguish it from /b/ we therefore need a third category – a description of what happens to the air as it passes out from the lungs.

Try /b/ again. You should feel that the air is “stopped” – it builds up behind the closed lips for a moment, and then explodes out on release. Place your fingers in front of your mouth as you say it and you’ll feel it. The sound occurs on the moment of release. Because of this, /b/ is described as a plosive sound.

/m/, on the other hand, doesn’t release the air through the mouth at all, but through the nose. Say /mmmmmm/ again and put your fingers under your nostrils. Again, you’ll feel the air passing out. /m/ is therefore known as a nasal sound.

The three categories now allow us to distinguish between the two sounds : /b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive while /m/ is a voiced bilabial nasal.

In the next part of the article we’ll look again at the final two categories – place and manner of articulation – to see how the other consonants of English are formed.

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Stareja via flickr

The Final Five Minutes

2007-06-03T16:52:00.001+02:00

How do you close your lessons? In this article guest writer Chris Cotter suggests some useful activities for the last five minutes of any class.

A lot of experts have written about structuring a lesson, from the initial warm-up stage, through drills and practice, and on to an end activity that allows students to use the target language naturally. There's pace to consider, the type of drills to best make the language automatic, and how an early activity will tie into later portions of the lesson. But not enough attention has been given to ending a class effectively.

Many teachers simply ask: "Does anyone have any questions?" Even more teachers use the time to assign homework, collect assignments, and chat with students while everyone cleans up. But correction, review, and feedback offer a better use of the final five minutes.

Correction: In the perfect class, students don't make any mistakes after applying the language. But, of course, a perfect lesson simply doesn't exist. Correction offers a practical way to remind the class as a whole of the language. This is in preference to interrupting a group's flow in a role play, interview, or presentation with on-the-spot correction, which then won't even benefit other groups.

For example, one of my recent classes covered "going to" to talk about planned events. The end activity consisted of classmates interviewing as many people as possible about their real plans for the weekend. I observed, took notes, and wrote some mistakes on the board during the activity. Here was one that recurred several times: "I'm going to go to shopping." I wrapped up the activity with about five minutes of class time remaining, and asked the class to correct the sentence. I then drilled a few, similar examples orally, as in:

Me: "I bowl."
Class: "I'm going to go bowling."
Me: "He skis."
Class: "He's going to go skiing."
Me: "She drinks."
Class: "She is going to go drinking."

But correction isn't merely limited to today's target language. I can cover any previously studied words or grammar points, for example. I can also draw the class's attention to words which they know, but perhaps used or pronounced incorrectly. I can even teach a more natural phrase or expression than one which popped up in the final activity.

Review: Review focuses specifically on the material studied that day. I may reuse flashcards to choral drill vocabulary, particularly words that were troublesome for students early on. I may reread some questions from an earlier worksheet, in order to call for answers. I may reread answers from a worksheet, and call for appropriate questions. I may even ask for a response from part of the dialogue we studied. In other words, I can go pretty much anywhere as long as it reviews today's material. Whereas correction focuses on mistakes both with the target language and other points, review lets everyone take a final look at today's material. From a teacher's point of view, it's my final chance to make sure as many students as possible leave the class able to understand if not use the language correctly.

Equally important, though, review serves to boost confidence. If students entered my class completely unable to use the new structure, the review session demonstrates that they have studied, learned, and can now apply it. Because there's usually only one correct response, it's oftentimes easier for students to measure learning via review, than it is through an open-ended speaking activity.

Feedback: Whereas correction and review have a place in any lesson, feedback is a little more particular. Class size must be considered, because a group of twelve or more students makes individual feedback impossible. We must also think about how students will handle advice in front of their peers.

In large classes, a general comment on performance can effectively close the lesson. For example, from my "going to" lesson: "Everyone used today's grammar and vocabulary well--we can use 'going to' for any planned event. Remember to ask follow-up questions, because this makes conversation more interesting! Kenji said, 'I'm going to visit some friends in Kyoto.' Can you think of a good follow-up question?" I only commented on today's lesson, but I could just as easily have added: "Don't forget our long term goal. We want to have a conversation with a partner for five minutes without stopping."

I make the same general comments in small classes, too. However, I also add a very brief comment for each individual student. During the final activity, in addition to noting mistakes, I write down the strengths and weaknesses of each student. I only focus on one skill (e.g., fluency, grammar, listening, pronunciation, or vocabulary) to offer a positive statement, and one skill to offer a "needs work on" statement. My notes may look something like this: "V+ P- (th-sound)," which translates as good use of vocabulary, but poor pronunciation, especially with "th-." I can then spend fifteen or twenty seconds on each student, offering some personal attention to help them with their studies.

By closing a lesson with correction, review, and feedback, I'm giving the students a means to measure their progress. They measure today's learning with a quick review of the key lesson points. They also gauge their retention with previously studied material when we go over correction. Lastly, in order to fine tune individual needs, feedback allows the teacher to give some positive and negative comments, as well as tips or remedies for each student.

If you’re looking for lesson plans and materials to use with your upper-intermediate and advanced students, don’t miss Chris’ website Heads Up English!

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons licence by tata_aka_T via flickr

Teaching Mixed Ability Groups : A Solution

2007-05-22T09:13:00.000+02:00

One of the hardest types of course to deal with is one where the students are of mixed levels, of mixed learning ability, or even both. The teacher has to find a balance between boring the faster, or higher level students, and losing the rest.

One solution to this problem is to abandon lockstep teaching (1) for at least parts of the lesson, so that the teacher can work intensively with a sub-group of the class while the others work autonomously. This, of course means that suitable materials for autonomous study need to be available. These can be in any format, but if computers are available in the classroom, the easiest solution is undoubtedly the use of on-line materials.

The most radical way of using the materials would be to make them the sole basis of the lessons. Each student would spend the lesson working through a course at his/her own level while the teacher circulated – monitoring and giving individual help , explanation and practice as necessary. With some groups, containing students of widely differing levels, this may well be the best solution. But with others, where the difference is not too extreme, it’s also possible to incorporate the autonomous work into the regular class lessons.

Let’s take the example of a mixed level group containing students from upper-elementary to mid-intermediate levels. The next area to be covered in the syllabus is the present perfect for past to present events – for example, I’ve lived here for ten years. For the upper-elementary students this is completely new. They’re going to need not only a full presentation but also a lot of controlled practice before they can go on to using the structure. For the mid-intermediate students however, the lesson is only revision and consolidation.

Here is a possible outline for the lesson :

Stage One

The lesson starts with a warm-up activity consolidating the simple past, which all students have met previously.
Stage Two

The class then divides. The elementary and weaker intermediate students, who the teacher thinks need a full structured presentation, remain with the teacher while the stronger intermediate students work autonomously on a second simple past consolidation activity – maybe a short listening or reading activity.
Stage Three

After the teacher has completed the presentation, the class comes back together and completes a receptive practice activity which asks them to distinguish between the two verb forms – for instance the first activity mentioned in the article Receptive Practice Activities. This has the aim of checking whether all the students understand the use of the form. If the teacher finds that any of the higher level students in fact don’t, s/he can ask the lower level students to explain. This a) checks that the students who heard the presentation really understand, and b) aids motivation : one of the problems of a mixed ability group is that it is always the same, weaker or lower level students who “don’t know/can’t do”. This activity gives them the chance to be the ones who do know.

Stage Four

The class then splits again. This stronger students go back to the computer (or other materials) and work on consolidation activities for the present perfect at their own level. These may be grammar practice activities, a listening consolidation, or whatever the teacher thinks the students need. Meanwhile the lower level students remain with the teacher for some controlled practice work.

Stage Five

The groups then swap. The stronger students meet the teacher for some semi-controlled or freer practice, while the weaker ones work autonomously at their own level – which may or may not mean working on the same activities that the stronger students did in stage four.
Stage Six

The group comes back into lockstep and works on a final activity in which either a) students are paired high/low level with the stronger student having a more demanding role, b) students are again paired high/low and work on an activity in which the strong students help the weaker students or c) students are paired high/high, low/low and work on an activity at their own level.

This constant switching between lockstep and ability group work has various advantages :

a) Most importantly, the lockstep allows the students to develop a single group identity and collaborative working dynamic. However, this will only happen if the lockstep stages are productive and non-threatening for everyone. The split group stages ensure that when the students do come together they are all able to work on an activity which is the correct level of challenge for all members of the group. No-one needs to feel they’re wasting time waiting for the others or that they are “out of their depth” in comparison to other members of the group.
b) The lesson format also has the practical advantage, if you are using on-line courses, that you don’t need an enormous number of computers. Only half the group will be at the computers at any one time. If they work in pairs that means that three computers would be sufficient for a group of twelve.

Why though should you choose on-line materials over any other type of materials? They have two practical advantages:

a) firstly, they are specifically designed for autonomous study and staged accordingly, whilst “ordinary” materials tend to be designed for teacher-led classes and may not be suitable for students working alone.
b) putting together a sequence of activities taken from various sources, plus supplementing them with answers, explanations etc to make them suitable for autonomous study means a considerable amount of preparation for the teacher and can be very time consuming. A coherent on-line course will already have done most of the work for you – preparation is confined to familiarising yourself with the materials and choosing which activities you want each group to do at which point of the lesson.

Notes

1. If a class is working “in lockstep”, all the students are doing the same thing at the same time.

Further Reading ...

Teaching Individual Sounds : Part One

2007-05-20T10:40:00.001+02:00

Why do language learners have difficulty pronouncing specific sounds in the language they are learning? The answer lies, not surprisingly, in the contrast between their own language and the new language. We are born with the ability to recognise and to learn to pronounce every sound, but as we come to realise that some are meaningful and others aren’t, we filter out the non-meaningful sounds to the point where we may not even be able to “hear” them any more, let alone know how to form them.

The sound may not exist in the L1

No language uses every single sound that the human voice can make in order to express meaning. You can probably think of sounds which occur in other languages which don’t occur in English – like the double-l sound found in many Welsh words such as Llan (church).

A sound is meaningful for a language if substituting it for another word causes a change in meaning. In English /p/ is a meaningful sound – if I say peat you understand something very different from if I say beat or meat or heat. In Arabic however, the sound has no meaning – in terms of Arabic, it doesn’t exist. A sound like this which creates a meaning distinction is known as a phoneme (1) of the language. /p/ is a phoneme of English but not of Arabic. (2)

English uses a relatively high number of phonemes in comparison with many other languages, so there’s a good chance that our learners will come across sounds they’ve never used before.

The sound may exist in the L1, but be used differently

Alternatively the difficulty may lie in the position of the sound. Sounds may not occur in every position in a syllable in a specific language, or may never be combined with other sounds. For example, in English the “dark” /l/ found in words like bottle never occurs at the beginning of a syllable whereas in Turkish it may. English allows certain combinations of up to three consonants at the beginnings of words /spr / /str/ /spl/ but not others /sdn/ or /ksb/. Other languages will differ. They may allow fewer consonants to cluster together like this, or more. And they may be quite different consonants. Japanese allows only the possibility of consonant + /j/ as in Tokyo, whereas Croatian allows many more – try opskrbljivanje (supplying) for instance.

The sound may exist in the L1, but not be perceived

And finally, two sounds which native speakers consider to be “the same” sound, may actually be phonetically quite different. Take the words cat and cool. If you wrote them phonologically, the symbol used for the first consonant in both would be the same - /k/. But now try saying them. Put your tongue in the /k/ position as if you wanted to say cat, and leave it there a moment. Now put it in the position to say cool. You should feel that it moves back significantly. That means that the two /k/ sounds (I’ll call them /k1/ and /k2/) are phonetically quite different.

So why don’t we think of them as different? In English the difference never signals a change in meaning. If I say /k1u:l/ instead of /k2u:l/, it may sound a bit odd, but it doesn’t mean something different – as it does if I say /bi:t/ instead of /pi:t/. /k1/ and /k2/ are phonetically different, but in English are allophones (2) (or variants) of the same phoneme, whereas, in English /p/ and /b/ are two different phonemes. Another example is /p/ itself. /p/ may be aspirated, as in pill, or not – as in spill. But the difference between the two allophones never creates a meaning difference and, as such is not consciously recognised by native speakers. In Cantonese, on the other hand, the difference does cause a change of meaning. In Cantonese aspirated and non-aspirated /p/ are two different phonemes.

This is what lies behind the problem which Korean learners have, for example, with the /r/, /l/ distinction. Korean does have a version of the /r/ consonant (though not identical to the English /r/), but it only occurs between vowels. It also has an /l/ sound which occurs in other phonetic contexts. The two Korean sounds /l/ /r/ are therefore allophones of the same phoneme – they never occur in the same phonetic context and therefore never distinguish meaning. And therefore they are perceived by Korean speakers as the “same” sound, in the same way that for English speakers /k1/ and /k2/ or aspirated and non-aspirated /p/ are.

This means that in teaching the pronunciation of individual sounds we have to deal first not with production but perception. Learners have to learn to recognise the new sounds – and, even more difficult, to notice the difference between sounds that they previously considered “the same” –and then learn how to pronounce them. In the follow-up to this article we’ll look at strategies to achieve both these aims

Notes

1. For a good explanation of phonemes and allophones, see Wikipedia

2. The best source on the web for finding out which English sounds are liable to cause problems for learners from specific language groups is probably Ted Power's site English Language Learning and Teaching

Idiomatic English : Geographical Features

2007-05-08T11:16:00.000+02:00

Here’s another activity in our series on Teaching Idioms. This time it focuses on idioms referring to geographical features.

Quite often, idioms are fairly transparent in meaning. They involve a metaphorical use of language which it’s not difficult to understand in context as long as you know the literal meaning of the words. And this is often the main problem for learners – they have to cope at one and the same time with learning both the words contained in the idioms, and their idiomatic meaning.

When teaching idioms then, you often need to divide the activity into two stages and look at lexical meaning before presenting the idioms themselves. This activity, which looks at idioms referring to geographical features, does just that. The students have a handout similar to the one in the photo and are asked to match the objects in the pictures with the words in the centre.

Of course, given that you would probably be using this activity at an upper intermediate level or higher, some of the words in the idiom would already be known – they shouldn’t have much difficulty with mountains, ocean or wood for example. These are included in the preparatory exercises mainly to ensure that they will get at least fifty per cent of the answers right, and secondly to help them work out logically the meaning of some of the others : if they know hills they are halfway to recognising molehill.

Once the words have been checked, they can then be asked to infer the meaning of the idioms from contextualised sentences. This is made easier if they are given a set of synonymous expressions to match to the idioms, as below, or they can simply be asked to try and guess what the idioms mean.

Look at the nine underlined idioms in sentences 1-8 and match them with the correct meaning a-i.

1. I don’t know why you let David be so rude to you. If I were you, I’d tell him to go jump in the lake.
2. The company is on the rocks and will probably go bankrupt.
3. I’ve been offered two jobs and I don’t know which to take. One’s for a multinational – I’d only be an assistant manager, but the money is good and so are the career prospects. In the other one I’d be the boss! But there are only six employees - I’d be a big fish in a small pond. I’m not sure if it would lead anywhere.
4. I get really annoyed when I see my staff sending E-mails with spelling mistakes. They think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but I’m convinced it’s bad for our company’s image.
5. Although the country receives a certain amount of foreign aid, it’s only a drop in the ocean.
6. Trying to convince Geena that the proposal was a good idea was an uphill job! She was so focused on the cost that she couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
7. He invested all his money in one company and then of course, when its shares crashed, he found himself up the creek without a paddle.
8. Linda thinks she’s indispensable and that we couldn’t cope without her. But she’s wrong. If she goes on like this I shall fire her and get someone else. She’s not the only pebble on the beach.

a. the only person available
b. a small amount in comparison to what’s necessary
c. to go away and stop being unpleasant
d. in trouble
e. in trouble and liable to end soon.
f. an apparently important person in an unimportant situation
g. really difficult
h. to exaggerate the importance of something
i. to lose sight of the overall situation because you are concentrating on the details

Teaching British Culture

2007-04-26T16:21:00.001+02:00

If you teach teenagers, some of them may be planning on going to Britain this year for a summer course. Especially if they stay with a host family, they’ll be learning far more than the language – they’ll also be experiencing, possibly for the first time, what it’s like to live in a different culture.

What can you do to help prepare them for what they’ll find? One way is through a quiz. Here’s one that’s based on mistakes and incomprehensions that my own previous students have reported. They were predominantly Italian. The quiz obviously needs to focus on the differences between British culture and that of the students who you are teaching, so if you want to use the quiz with another nationality you may find that some of these questions are irrelevant and others need to be added.

You’re in Cambridge for a summer course, and you’re staying with a British family. Do you know enough about British culture to cope?

1. You’ve just arrived. What do you say and do?

a) Say Hello to every one in the family.
b) Say Hello and shake hands with everyone.
c) Say Hello and shake hands with the mother and father of the family.

2. Your landlady asks you if you’re hungry and if you like Welsh Rabbit. What is it?

a) The animal in the picture, cooked in tomato sauce.
b) Grilled cheese on toast.
c) A type of cake.

3. The next morning you come down and see your landlady in the kitchen. What do you say?

a) Good morning
b) Good morning Mrs.
c) Good morning madam.

4. You have to catch a bus to the language school. You arrive at the bus stop and wait next to the stop. Suddenly you see that all the other people there are looking at you angrily. Why?

a) You’re listening to your walkman and walkmans are not allowed in the street in Britain.
b) British people queue at the bus stop. The first person to arrive stands next to the stop, the second person stands behind the first person, the third behind the second and so on. And they get on the bus in that order. You went straight to the front of the queue. In Britain this is called “pushing in” and is very impolite.
c) Your mobile phone is ringing. British people always turn their mobile phones off when they’re in public.

5. Your lessons are from 9.30-1.00 and the school organises sports from 2.30-5.00 every afternoon. You need to get to the shops. When is the best time to go?

a) Before lessons – British shops are open from 8-12.30 and 1.30-5.30.
b) In the evening – shops in Britain stay open till 8pm.
c) At lunchtime. Shops in Britain are usually open from about 9.30-5.30

6. You notice that a lot of people seem to call you “love”. Your landlady said it, a shop assistant said it, and a person you asked for directions in the street said it. Why?

a) It’s quite usual in Britain to call people who you don’t know “love”.
b) They like you a lot.
c) You didn’t understand correctly. They really said something different.

7. After school, some other students invite you to go for a walk. But you don’t want to be late for dinner with your host family. Do you have enough time?

a) Yes, for an hour or so. Dinner will probably be at about 7.
b) No problem. British people rarely eat before 8.30.
c) No. Dinner will probably be at about 6pm. You have to go straight home.

8. It’s Sunday lunchtime – the most important meal of the week. You're having roast lamb, potatoes and carrots, a mixed salad and strawberries. On the table there’s a little pot of mint sauce – vinegar containing chopped mint leaves. What do you do with it?

a) Put a small spoonful on the roast lamb.
b) Put it on the mixed salad.
c) Put it on the strawberries.

What are the uses and limitations of a quiz like this? It obviously can’t prepare the students for every difference they’re going to meet. But some are more important than others. The questions include areas where there is a real possibility of creating hostility or offence – like the example of queuing – and here the quiz does aim to give information.

With some of the other situations, the aim is different. Take the questions on food – they may never meet either Welsh rabbit or mint sauce while they’re in Britain. But it is quite likely that the food in general, and the way it is presented, will be different. The specific questions are important only as examples and as a springboard for discussion : What would happen if you got something like this wrong, and what could you do to make sure you don’t. If they poured the mint sauce on their strawberries, it would be unlikely to offend anyone – but a reaction of amusement on the part of the host family could be horribly embarrassing. So the question leads on to a discussion of : What would you do if you saw something on the table which you didn’t recognise? What would be best – to keep quiet, guess and pour the mint sauce on your salad (how do you think the family would react and how would you feel?) or to say immediately “We don’t have this in my country. What is it?”

The quiz also risks making generalisations that may not be true in specific instances. Maybe the student will stay with a family that doesn’t eat until 8.30 – not everyone is typical. And what’s the answer to (1) ? In some families it might be (a), in others (c). Again, awareness of the dangers of stereotyping can be raised by asking them to think about stereotypes of their own culture – Italians eat pasta every day. True for many but not for all.

The aim of the quiz is therefore firstly to make the students aware that there will be cultural differences, secondly to forewarn them about some of the major areas where there is the danger of causing offence, and thirdly to lead into a discussion of how they can avoid misunderstandings and what to do if they arise.

Quiz Answers

1 c (or possibly a); 2 b; 3b; 4 b; 5 c (b on some days in large towns); 6 a, 7 c (possibly a); 8 a.

Notes

For a great discussion of the British use of the address form love, see this article from The Guardian

Teaching Intensive Courses : The Role of On-Line Materials

2007-04-19T17:43:00.000+02:00

For some students, learning a language gradually over an extended period is not an option. They need the language now – or even better, yesterday. This may be the case for instance with a student who has just changed jobs and needs a far higher language competence for the new job than s/he currently has. Or then there is the student who knows s/he needs to improve in English, but can’t or doesn’t want to commit to an extended period of regular lessons. These are the types of student who often end up on an intensive course. This type of course however presents two specific problems :

Overload : “Intensive” has different definitions, but may mean anything up to six contact hours a day – or even more on courses which include lunch and dinner with the teacher. Unless the course includes constant changes of activity and approach, such intensity can often lead to overload and fatigue - especially if students are at a low level and or perhaps in a one-to-one situation. The morning sessions may go well, but if the course then continues with yet more new material, and the same approach the “after-lunch dip” and late afternoon tiredness may make the intensity ultimately counter-productive.

Lack of Follow-Up : Another problem of these courses is the potential lack of follow-up. The students may end the course feeling that they’ve progressed a lot, but what has been learnt is then just as quickly forgotten. This is again especially crucial for lower level students, who may obtain no long-term benefit at all from the course if they do not have some way of consolidating what has been learnt. If they are not later going to follow an on-going course, they need to develop the ability to study autonomously as part of the intensive programme –so that they can then go on doing so afterwards.

One way of dealing with both these problems is to use an on-line course as part of the intensive programme – I usually use them in the hour immediately after lunch. On-line courses have the advantages that :

They provide a variety of approach and a completely different focus from the morning session.

They allow the student to work on material that recycles what s/he has been doing previously on the course, helping to reduce overload and ensuring immediate consolidation.

If it is a group course, they insert at least one personalised element into the programme – each student can work on activities which correspond to his/her individual linguistic or communicative needs.

They allow the students to work at their own pace for at least one section of the course.

They allow the students to continue studying after the intensive programme finishes, using an approach which they are familiar with and have already learnt how to use. The Netlanguages courses for example, which we use on intensive courses, allow the students access for at least six months after the initial enrolment. They can therefore continue working through the activities, completing those which they didn’t have time for on the course and taking advantage of the opportunity for contact with an on-line tutor for spoken tutorials (via Skype) and written work (corrected by E-mail).

I wrote about the problems of intensive courses previously, in Parts One and Two of the article Community Language Learning, where I suggested that two ways to inject variety into the course were to devote the afternoon firstly to self-access work and secondly to a session using a completely different methodological approach, such as CLL. The on-line work described here is of course just one way of organising the self-access period – but with the advantage that it does not have to end with the course.

Deciding What and When to Correct

2007-04-14T13:43:00.000+02:00

I live here for five years.

On hearing an incorrect form like this, you have to decide what to do about it. Should it be corrected immediately? Left to form the basis of a remedial lesson? Offered to the student for self-correction? Corrected “surreptitiously”? Or ignored completely?

What you decide to do may depend on any one or more of a number of factors :

First of all, what do you believe to be the nature of the language learning process? Will the incorrect form be reinforced if it is not corrected, with the risk that it becomes “fossilised” – that is, irremediably fixed in the learner’s interlanguage – his or her personal version of the language. Or is there a “natural order” of language acquisition for language items which cannot be changed or hurried along by correction or any other form of formal teaching (1)?

Secondly, what is the objective of the activity and what’s the relationship of the incorrect form to that objective? If the form above occurred during a controlled practice activity on the present perfect, it would be counterproductive not to correct it immediately. The objective of the activity is to ensure students understand the form and use of the structure, and can produce it accurately.

On the other hand, in a fluency activity instant correction would distract the students and might well work against the objective – communicating effectively with whatever language students have at their disposal, regardless of how imperfect it is. There may still be a place for correction at the end of the activity, but unless communication has broken down entirely, you probably won’t want to interrupt.

And a third example, if it occurred as a passing comment during a reading activity – The text says x about this town but I live here for 5 years and didn’t know – there would be no relationship between the error and the aim of the activity, and your decision would likely be based on one of the other considerations listed here. For example …..

What will be the effect on the student(s) of correcting or not correcting? If the student who made the comment in the reading lesson was a shy, weak person who rarely offered any contribution to the lesson, you might decide that correcting the error is less important than boosting the student’s confidence by reacting positively to the communicative value of the utterance. There is, however, always the possibility that by leaving the error you may confuse other students, who identified it as wrong but then, when you didn’t correct, weren’t sure. In this case, “surreptitious” correction can be useful – the teacher simply reacts to the student by parroting back the correct form . "Oh really? You’ve lived here for five years? I didn’t know that.” The student who used the incorrect form may not “notice” it, but those who are focusing on it, will.

There are also students who want constant correction and others who don’t want it at all. Correct too much and you annoy the second group, don’t correct enough and you lose the confidence of the first, who feel that you are not “teaching” them.

Is the incorrect form a “one-off” problem, or is it something you’ve heard recurring frequently – either from that individual or the group as a whole. If so, remedial work may be necessary.

And finally, is it an error or a mistake. In ELT, these are not synonyms but have a precise technical meaning. If the incorrect form is due to a lack of knowledge on the student’s part – for example, if the student is a beginner who has never met the present perfect – it is an error. In this case, simple correction is unlikely to be helpful and is in fact more likely to confuse the student. The form needs to be taught, and until the students arrive at that point in the syllabus, it can generally be safely ignored. The same may be true if students are at intermediate level and the teacher assumes that they have met the form. If correction draws a response of blank looks, then even if it has been taught, it has not been learnt. It may have been misunderstood, or simply forgotten, and needs re-teaching. (2)

On the other hand, an intermediate or advanced student might say the same thing but then, when the teacher indicated a problem, could self-correct. In this case, the correct form is a mistake – caused by the pressure of the communicative situation. A common example of this is the way students often understand a new form or use when it is first presented, use it accurately throughout the controlled and semi-controlled practice phases, but then become inaccurate in freer practice activities. In controlled and semi-controlled practice, students have little to do except concentrate on producing the form itself. In free practice (and fluency activities) this changes. They now have to understand what someone else has said, decide what they want to say in reply, and formulate their response in English – all in real time. This puts far greater stress on the brain, which responds by “simplifying” – and the result is a mistake.

Mistakes then are a sign, not that the students do not “know” the form, but that they have not yet fully acquired or assimilated it - not at least enough for it to be produced in spontaneous communication. If your students expect correction, or if your view of language learning is that constant “noticing” will aid acquisition, then you might ask them to self-correct. If they don’t, or if you believe that only time and further “authentic” exposure to the form can lead to natural acquisition, you might let it go.

Your decision of what and when to correct will therefore depend on a number of variables, and your decisions may differ from group to group, or student to student. This is also true of how you correct – something that we’ll look at in detail in a future article.

NOTES

1. For a view of error based on the idea of a natural acquisition order see James Trotta's article Understanding Learner Errors

2. In their book Correction, Bartram and Walton suggest that it is often impossible to distinguish between an error and a mistake and that it is therefore not a useful distinction. This is one of the very few things in the book that I don’t agree with. If you define, as I do, a mistake as something which the students can produce accurately under controlled conditions and can therefore self-correct, I find the distinction between an error and a mistake to be a criterion which I frequently apply when I’m deciding what, when and how to correct. Their own definition, which is vaguer, does however lead to more grey areas and I understand why they feel it to be less useful.

Making ESL Learning Fun for Preschool Children

2007-04-05T13:10:00.000+02:00

Preschoolers are cute and funny but they certainly have a minute attention span, and that can give pre-K teachers a headache if they do not have enough good ideas ready to hand. This article by Shelley Vernon will give you access to a wealth of great ideas, games and stories to make your preschool ESL classes more fun and effective.

The right ESL pre-k teaching tools can make learning easier and more fun. Take, for example, the research work of Dr. Howard Gardner who came up with the theory of multiple intelligences. This essentially rules out the idea that the best way for children to learn is by sitting at a table doing "desk work". Instead, Gardner pinpoints different "intelligences" which are essentially learning styles. Everyone has a specific intelligence (or a few specific intelligences) that defines how he or she learns best. This means that in order to reach all the children in a classroom, different learning methods must be made available to them. The multiple intelligences are :

Linguistic intelligence: Learning and using spoken and written language
Logical-mathematical intelligence: Logically analysing problems, detecting patterns, reasoning.
Musical intelligence: Performing, composing, and appreciating musical patterns.
Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence: Using the whole body or parts of the body to solve problems.
Spatial intelligence: Recognizing patterns of wide space and confined areas.
Interpersonal intelligence: Effectively working with others.
Intrapersonal intelligence: Understanding self and feelings.

By using games and other activities in your classroom, you'll be able to create a class period that explores various intelligences and reaches a variety of children instead of just the linguistic learners.

Additionally, it's important to remember that preschoolers simply learn best through play. Just think about how preschoolers learn to count. They may count how many cars they have lined up or how many blocks they've stacked.

Here is an example of how to transform a mundane activity into an exciting game that stimulates the children's imagination and encourages better retention of vocabulary. Imagine you are teaching colours. Tell your children they are pirates who have lost their treasure overboard and they must dive down and retrieve it. Spread coloured objects or cards around the floor. Demonstrate by taking in a big breath, hold your breath and dive down and pick up one of the coloured objects, then come up for air and ask the children to name the colour, or you name it, depending on whether you are doing a speaking or listening activity. Then tell the children which colours to dive down and collect. You could make it even more dramatic by dimming the lights when the children dive down and turning them up when they surface. The children can then sort the different coloured treasure by stowing it safely in treasure chests (boxes or bags - one for each colour).

Any paediatrician will tell you that the best way to encourage a large vocabulary in your children is to read to them everyday. For young children learning English you need super simple stories, and in an ideal world, stories that reinforce the language and vocabulary you are teaching in class. You can access a free ESL preschool story with games in the resource box below the article.

As well as using games and stories you'll need to take into consideration a few other things:

Preschool children have small attention spans so change your activities every five minutes or so because if they go longer than that, they'll start getting restless and you'll spend more time trying to keep their attention than actually doing the activity.

Teach a small amount of language in any given session. For this age group, try to introduce three words at a time and then add to the list as you see the children understand the meaning of the words you've already introduced.

Engage the children on multiple levels. This includes using fine and large motor movement, singing, talking, listening and looking. For example, you could have a game where the children need to move around the room to stand next to a picture or object of the word they heard you say.

Competition in the preschool classroom causes undo stress on the children. Avoid playing games or doing activities that have winners and losers. Either have the class work together to "win" as a group or do not distinguish between winning and losing. On the same note, be sure to be supportive and encouraging to all of the learners in your class.

Preschool children can get very excitable so vary excitable games with quiet ones to balance out the energy level in the classroom.

Preschoolers are very visual. Bring in real objects whenever possible. When it is not possible, find colourful and vivid pictures.

Preschooler children usually are not yet reading and writing (at least not to large extent) in their own language, so don't expect them to do it in a second language. At this age, you can expect them to listen and understand first. After a while, they will begin speaking individual words and short phrases.

Themes work well in the preschool classroom. Focus your vocabulary learning on groups of similar types of words such as foods, colours, numbers, animals, families and body parts. You can work in short phrases that are relevant to your theme.

Be well prepared, plan more than you think you will use and move seamlessly from one game or activity to another. Use colouring or similar quiet activities when the children need some downtime.

Repeat, review and revise. You need to frequently review the vocabulary that you've previously taught them or they will quickly forget it.

If you have a particularly naughty or rough student in the class, keep him or her close to you. Ask him or her to be your special helper and be sure to give a lot of praise when you see him or her behaving appropriately.

Above all, just remember what you liked to do in school. If you were bored, you probably didn't get much out of the class and the same is true for preschool and pre-k children. For free games and an illustrated story written for ESL preschoolers, visit the link in the box below the article. Help them have fun and before they know it, they'll be learning!

Shelley Vernon has helped 1000s of teachers be an inspiration to their pupils Improve the effectiveness of your lessons and enjoy yourself more. Receive free preschool ESL games and stories now on http://www.teachingenglishgames.com/3-5.htm

Acknowledgements

Article Source : Ezine Articles
Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Elton Lin via flickr

Further Reading ...

Using Balloons in the EFL Classroom

2007-03-31T12:29:00.000+02:00

One of the facilities on the hit counter that I use to keep track of the number of visitors to the ELT Notebook is the possibility to see what people have typed into the various search engines to bring them to this site. One search yesterday was for Using balloons in ESL.

The searcher ended up on this site because in the post Warm-Up Your Classroom! I’d mentioned the idea of using balloons to create a more fun environment in the classroom. But it got me thinking – how else could balloons be used?

Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with. If you’ve got any more, leave a comment.

Use them to present emotions : Draw different faces on each balloon to introduce She’s happy, he’s angry etc.

Dialogue presentation : There are occasions when you haven’t got, or don’t want to use, a recording of a dialogue you want to use, but students can sometimes get lost and lose track of who’s speaking if the teacher just reads it out. Use a different colour balloon with a face drawn on it for each character. Introduce the characters before you start, and then hold up the relevant balloon as each character speaks.

For practising numbers and colours with children : Take a large number of different coloured balloons into the classroom and put them in the middle of the room. Divide the class into three teams. They have three minutes to make as many balloons stick on the wall as they can, by rubbing them on their hair or clothes to create static electricity. At the end of the three minutes get them to count their balloons – the team with the most wins. And then take it on to other questions – How many red balloons are there? How many yellow balloons are there? How many balloons are there all together?

A general knowledge quiz for teens or adults (1), possibly as receptive practice for subject-object oriented questions : Write a series of general knowledge questions on slips of paper, fold them up and tuck one inside each balloon before you blow it up. Put all the balloons at the front of the room, and divide the class into teams of three or four. One person from each team runs to the front grabs a balloon and takes it back to the team who then have to burst it in any way they like. The team then tries to answer the question, writing down either the answer or We give up on the back of the slip of paper. Another member of the team then takes the slip of paper to the teacher, and goes to get another balloon. When all the balloons have been used up, the teacher reads out the questions which each team got, the other teams suggest what their answers would have been, and then the teacher reads out the original team’s answer. If it’s correct, they get a point. The team which answered the most questions correctly wins. (2)

A present perfect/simple past practice game: Before the game starts everyone thinks of a few questions they want to ask the group, starting Has anyone ever …… (for example, Has anyone ever climbed a mountain? Has anyone ever seen a UFO? Has anyone ever ridden an elephant ?) The students stand in a circle and the first person hits a balloon into the air and asks their question. Anyone who wants to answer steps forward into the circle and catches the balloon as it comes down. While they answer, explaining when, where etc they did whatever it was, they must keep the balloon bouncing gently in the air. When they finish they ask their own question, an if someone steps forward to answer, sit down. If no-one wants to answer, they must ask another question. The game ends when everyone has asked and answered a question and is sitting down.

To practise a particular lexical field – for example, fruit and vegetables, animals, clothes etc. The students are in pairs, and each pair has an inflated balloon and a marker. They write one word connected with the field on the balloon, and then at a signal from the teacher, everyone sends their balloons into the air and catches a new one as they come down. They write a new word and the balloons go up again. Each time they get a new balloon they must, of course, write a word which is different from those already written there. The game goes on till there are nine or ten words written on the balloon, at which point the teacher gives each pair a second, plain balloon. They then have to draw on the new balloon all the items that were written on the old one, and the picture balloons are then sent into the air and redistributed. At that point there are two possibilities : each pair looks at the pictures and writes a list of all the objects it shows. The first pair to take a correct list to the teacher wins. And/Or : the pairs then have to go and find the balloon with words written on it which matches the balloon they now have with pictures. (3)

OK, balloons aren’t strictly necessary for all of these games – you could do them just using pen and paper. But if you want to get your students moving around a bit, to add a kinaesthetic element to the lesson, then balloons can be a useful aid.

Notes

1. Games involving bursting balloons are not recommended for children’s classes.

2. An article describing another game along similar lines can be found on One Stop English

3. Another balloon game practising lexical fields can be found on Genki English

Preparing for Roleplays

2007-03-25T14:06:00.000+02:00

Why don’t roleplays always work as well as they might? Here I’d like to suggest that it’s sometimes because students are thrown into the activity without sufficient preparation.

What is a roleplay? It’s a label which can be applied to a lot of classroom activities from short What would you say? situations to much more complex activities which involve understanding a lot of background information. In a roleplay, the students may act as themselves, responding as they would genuinely respond in a similar activity, or they may have to take on a persona which is not their own.

Inevitably, the more complex the roleplay – the more information there is to absorb, and the further it is from the student’s real experience – the more difficult it becomes and the more problems are liable to arise. Some of the most common are :

Students can’t think of anything to say and “dry up” in the middle

They can’t remember the situation or the information which they have to convey, grab the rolecard and just read out what was written there.

Because they can’t think of anything else, they start saying things which are totally unrealistic for the situation and deflect the roleplay into a comedy sketch - which may be fun, but doesn’t provide the opportunity to practise the language you were expecting they would use.

Students are so focused on remembering what they have to do that they have no chance to think about how they want to express themselves, and as well as causing a natural drop in accuracy, any linguistic focus which you expected to come out of the roleplay is lost – unless in the follow-up stage you bombard students with their “mistakes”.

This last point is of course a normal consequence of any fluency accuracy – the more students are concentrating on what they want to say, the less they can concentrate on how they say it – and will happen in a genuine communication situation as well as in the classroom. But roleplays, which ask students to remember unfamiliar information or even to invent information on the spot, often present an even higher communicative challenge than the real situation would.

To reduce this level of challenge and avoid the problems listed above :

Ensure that the roleplay is not entirely outside the students’ experience. For example, if roleplaying a job interview, choose a job which the students know something about or might be liable to apply for – not usually a problem with adults, while with teenagers you might use the context of a holiday job in Britain (or wherever) to help them improve their English.

Make sure the language they will need is at the forefront of their minds. If the roleplay is being used as the final stage of a unit focusing on a particular language area ( for example, job interviews often crop up in textbooks linked to the present perfect), then the language preparation will take care of itself. However, if you are using it as just a general fluency activity – for instance in a conversation class – you will need to predict and revise the language that the students will need before starting.

Ensure that they have “learnt” the role and all the background information before they start. Give out the rolecards with the necessary information and pair each student with another with the same role. Once the students have had a chance to read the information through, student A turns his card face down while student B continues looking at hers and asks factual questions to test her partners knowledge of the facts. If A can’t remember, she tells him. At the end they swap, and A asks the questions.

As far as possible let them decide what they want to say. In a job interview roleplay, for instance, the interviewers might plan what questions they wanted to ask the candidate, and the candidates might plan what questions they want to ask about the job and the organisation. Both groups could also try and predict the questions that the other side might ask, and decide how they would answer them.

At this point the students should be ready to enact the roleplay. However, there is no reason that they should do it only once, and the first enactment can be seen as a sort of “dress rehearsal”, during which you monitor noting mistakes, and they find out just how well they have assimilated all the information. After the follow-up, and after they have had a chance to check any information that they weren’t sure about, they repeat the roleplay with a different partner. And by now the students should be confident enough of what they’re doing to perform the roleplay realistically and well.

Further Reading ...

Developing Bottom-Up Decoding Skills for Listening

2007-03-18T14:17:00.000+01:00

In the article Planning a Listening Lesson, I argued that listening involved both top-down and bottom-up (1) processing working simultaneously, and that we needed to focus on both when teaching listening. But given that, the lesson illustrated in the article remained decidedly top-heavy on the top-down side. Is there a place for greater focus on bottom-down processing skills?

First of all, what are bottom-up decoding skills? In the previous article I glossed bottom-up decoding as meaning moving from recognition of individual sounds to recognition of the meaning of whole utterances. Here’s a more detailed (though by no means complete) list.

· Recognising individual phonemes
· Recognising phoneme sequences which form words
· Recognising word boundaries
· Recognising stressed syllables
· Recognising intonation contours
· Recognising syllable reduction due to weak forms and/or elision
· Recognising catenation
· Recognising assimilation (2)

and so on. As you can see, they tend to be phonological (3), and I would argue that it is in focusing systematically on phonology during the course that we can best teach bottom-up processing skills. In Planning a Listening Lesson I suggested that a focus can, and should, be built into the listening lesson – but it will inevitably remain non-systematic, dependent on what “comes up” in the listening texts chosen.

We also need a more systematic approach, based on our knowledge of the difficulties our learners have, which will be largely dependent on the differences between the phonological system of English and that of their first language (L1). For example, Arabic speakers will need to work on the distinction between /p/ and /b/, Finns will have difficulty with /g/ and /k/, Germans will tend to pronounce a final /d/ as /t/ or /v/ as /w/ and so on. Problems will also arise with stress and intonation – e.g. Italians will have difficulty recognising the meaning of contrastive stress. (4)

In teaching phonology, we need of course to deal with both receptive and productive aspects. Students need to reach a productive phonological level of at least intelligibility. But I am here concerned only with receptive aspects – whether they are able to recognise these features when listening, and therefore fully understand what is being said.

Once we know what our learners problems are liable to be, we can then look at our syllabus and analyse which items which we are teaching will bring up those problems. And a phonological focus can then be built into the lessons presenting, practising and recycling those items, or in some cases planned as an independent section of the lesson.

How might you integrate a receptive phonological focus into the lesson? Here’s one example, based on a problem encountered by Italian beginner students – distinguishing between numbers such as thirteen – thirty - fourteen – forty etc. The problem occurs firstly because of difficulty distinguishing between the –teen and –ty pairs and, at beginners level is often due to a failure to recognise differing stress patterns- thirTEEN versus THIRty, differing vowel length and the final consonant in the “teens”.

However, the problem is made worse by the fact that there is also confusion between thirteen/fourteen and thirty/forty. Italians tend to hear both initial consonants as /f/ and do not distinguish between the two vowel sounds. Therefore, an Italian hearing thirteen may equally well interpret it as thirty, fourteen or forty.

While numbers are being taught we therefore need to focus on these problems. For individual sounds, one technique that can be used is minimal pairs : students are asked to distinguish between two words which differ only in the target sounds – for instance, free and three. The words are listed in two columns on the board : column A has all the words with one sound - free, Finn, Fred, fort, roof – and column B those with the others – three, thin, thread, thought, Ruth. The teacher then says one word and the students have to decide if it comes from column A or B. If you want to take the activity on to the productive level, the roles are then reversed – a student says a word and the teacher identifies it.

The problem with minimal pair work is that it is often difficult to find pairs which are known to beginners, or even useful to them, and if less common words are used the lesson tends to degenerate into a long explanation of the meanings of fug and thug and so on. An alternative is therefore to use a list of words which contain the problem sound, and which the students already know or which are easily illustrated: think – thing – three – thin – thank – bath – thumb etc. The teacher says each word in turn, sometimes pronouncing them correctly and at other times substituting the problem sound - “fank”, for example. The students listen and say if each word is correct or incorrect.

To go back to our number problem, the minimal pair technique can also be used to focus on the stress difference in the complete number. The –teen numbers are put in column A and the –ty numbers in column B. The teacher again reads out one of each pair and the students identify the correct column. This can later be extended to four columns, A – thirteen B - thirty C – fourteen D – forty, asking the students to make the full distinctions using stress and phonemic cues simultaneously.

Further practice can be given with the target words incorporated into sentences. The students have a worksheet with multiple choice answers :

A : What’s the time? B : It’s ten 13 / 30 / 14 / 40
A : What’s your address ? B : It’s 13 / 30 / 14 / 40 London Road.

Or alternatively a gap :

A : How much is this CD? B : It’s ………………………… Euro.
A : How old are you David? B : I’m ………………………….

The teacher then reads out the sentences with the missing numbers (40, 13, 30, 14 respectively) and the students listen and tick or write them down.

This last activity is, to all extents and purposes a targeted dictation. Traditional dictation went out of vogue for some time after the development of the communicative approach, and when it was brought back (5) tended to be top-down rather than bottom-up as in the traditional variety. However, bottom-up dictations can be useful when they are targeted to help students with one specific decoding problem – as here.

Minimal pair work and targeted dictations can be used with other phonological decoding problems – for example weak forms. Just two examples :

a) again at beginner level, students may have difficulty recognising the the difference between is and was, especially if the preceding pronoun is also weakened. Sentences like ……………… in Rome for three days; ………………… my best friend ; ……………………… very tired can be used, with the teacher saying at random he is or he was.

b) at a higher level, the same thing can be done to help students hear the weak form of have in sentences like She should have put it away. The activity uses various sentences which may be either she modal + infinitive or she modal + have done :

She should / should have put it away; It must /must have hurt a lot; She should /should have let me know; You should/ should have run home; They couldn’t /couldn’t have cut it up smaller; They can’t /can’t have shut the gate; They should/should have split the profits; It must /must have upset you.

For other features, different techniques are necessary. For contrastive stress, students can be asked to listen to a sentence and then choose the implied meaning. The sentence might be John can’t do it now and the choices a) … but he can do it later b) but Mary can. The correct answer will depend on whether the stressed word was John or now.

But what about traditional dictations where the teacher reads a passage and the students write it down? This can be useful as an occasional activity, if it’s used to revise some of the features which have previously been targeted individually. I generally use a short paragraph or dialogue which the students have already worked on earlier in the course and use a technique very similar to the one I described in Planning the Listening Lesson :

Start by reading the whole text all while the students simply listen.
Read the text phrase by phrase keeping to a natural speed, rhythm etc. Continue reading each phrase while the students write, until you see everyone has finished. If there are clearly problems, slow the phrase down and clarify the pronunciation until they get it, and then speed up again so that they have the chance to hear the naturally pronounced phrase again.
By the end they should have an accurate version of the text (disregarding spelling problems, which are not a primary objective here). However, if you have a very large class it may be difficult to be sure of this. In this case let them compare their version with a partner, asking them to underline anything which is different. Then reread the passage so they can check which was the correct version.
At the end, let them look back at the original text in their books and make any final corrections, including spelling.

Some textbooks, for example Intermediate Express (6), do attempt to build in a systematic phonological focus into the course. However, textbooks have the disadvantage of being aimed at a very wide target audience. They will inevitably focus on the most widely experienced problems, but will tend to ignore those which are specific to only one or two language groups. They also only have time to focus on something once – whereas if it is a particular problem for the learners, it will need to be recycled regularly. It is only the teacher who can decide what the specific problems of his/her students are and ensure that activities are built in systematically to deal with them.

Notes

1. For an explanation of both these terms, see the article Teaching Listening : Top Down or Bottom Up?

2. For an explanation of all these terms, see the article Why Don't They Understand?

3. For an alternative list and references to follow up, see the site of the publishing company Abax

4. The site English Language Learning and Teaching contains an excellent summary of the phonological problems of many major language groups.

5. Davis and Rinvolucri Dictation : New Methods New Possibilities (CUP)

6. International Express (various levels) OUP

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by tilman via flickr

Planning A Listening Lesson

2007-03-17T17:36:00.000+01:00

In two previous articles I looked firstly at the problems students have when listening to spoken English, and secondly at two approaches to processing the spoken word : top-down and bottom up listening. Briefly, bottom-up processing involves decoding sounds to understand words, words to understand phrases and so on, while top-down processing means interpreting the text in the light of background knowledge – whether of the world or of the language – in order to decide meaning, but if these terms are new to you I suggest reading both previous articles before going on with this.

In the last article, I suggested that focusing exclusively on either a top-down or bottom-up approach was insufficient when teaching listening, and that listening lessons need to develop the students’ competence in both areas. Apart from anything else, listening generally involves using both approaches simultaneously, with each one compensating for the deficiencies of the other.

How might we do this in the classroom? In this article, I want to look at a possible structure for a listening lesson which draws on both approaches. To illustrate it I shall use a listening text which is available on the web and which you can, if you wish, use with your own classes. The text comes from ESL Podcards (1). It is a scripted monologue talking about the life of the actor, Sean Connery and would be suitable for a class from about FCE level up. I suggest you listen to it, without looking at the transcript, before reading on. As soon as you finish, note down a) anything which was going on in your mind, relative to understanding the text, as you listened, and b) what you remember of the information given.

Listening to the text without the transcript is an essential part of planning a listening lesson. Unless the text in question is on a topic which they know more about and understand better than you, students are unlikely to be able to retain any more of the text than you are. You therefore need to identify what and how much this is. Similarly, if something causes a comprehension problem for you, it is unrealistic to expect the students to understand it without help. If possible listen to the recording in the same room and using the same equipment as you will during the lesson – acoustics and equipment quality can seriously affect the intelligibility of any recording.

As I listened to the text, I found myself first of all focusing on particular facts which either I hadn’t known and which surprised me, or which I had known but had forgotten. These were the details that I remembered after the first listening. Even these however were hazy. Immediately after listening I told my son that Connery had won the Mr Universe competition, convinced that that was what I had heard.

As I listened, I also found myself consciously recognising that I hadn’t understood certain words immediately, but that when I heard the following words I was backtracking to fill in the gap. This happened for example with the phrase And like in the first paragraph, which I initially decoded as unlike but then corrected as I heard the rest of the sentence. It happened again with the phrase he has been vociferous, where he has was an “acoustic blur” which I only actually decoded after hearing been vociferous. This is the type of item which you will only pick up if you listen to the recording before reading the tapescript, as once you "know" what is there, you will automatically "hear" it.

Once you’ve listened to the text and analysed it in this way, you can then listen again while you look at the transcript. This time you’re looking for items that may not have been a problem for you, but which you know might be for the students. This might be vocabulary items or structures which they don’t know, pronunciation features or any of the features of spoken English which were discussed in the first article.

As with any lesson, the activities you actually use will be determined by your objectives. Having listened to the text I decided that my skills objectives (2) for this text would be:

The students will :

a) use prediction of content to aid their gist understanding of the text.
b) practise extracting detailed information from the text.
c) improve their ability to understand various features of pronunciation such as weak forms, elision and assimilation.

The first part of my lesson would focus would be Listening for Gist and would focus on the first aim. During the Gist Listening stage the student is encouraged to listen for overall understanding of the message of the text without necessarily retaining all the minor details, or being able to repeat back the exact words the speaker used.

Warm-Up : This stage aims to activate the students knowledge of the topic. Show the class two pictures of Sean Connery, one from the Bond days and one more recent. Check the students recognise him, then divide them into groups of about three and ask them to tell each other everything they know about him. When they finish, elicit their ideas and write everything they say on the board without commenting on its accuracy. If they have contradictory ideas, both ideas go up.

Listening for Gist : Play the recording while the students listen to find out :

a) which of the facts on the board are confirmed by the text
b) which are contradicted
c) if the text gives any other information

The students may need to hear the tape more than once to complete the task - ask them after the first play if they'd like a repetition. Be careful however not to accept a 'No' answer just from the stronger students. Check with the weaker, less confident ones too and allow the listening phase to run at their pace.

Follow Up : After listening, the students discuss these questions in pairs before their answers are elicited at full class level. If there is any difference of opinion, the teacher again does not confirm the correct answer, but writes both ideas up. S/he then replays the tape pausing after it mentions each piece of information listed on the board. At this stage, the teacher’s focus is (surreptitiously) on the students who got it wrong or didn’t hear the information at all the first time. Often, once students know what they are listening for, they are able to hear the answer accurately. If not, the teacher puts a question mark next to the different ideas and tells the students they’ll find out later.

At this point the students would seem to be at the same stage as I was after my initial listening to the recording. However, there is a difference. Whilst I may not have retained all the facts in the text, and while my memory may even have distorted those which I focused on, as a native speaker I certainly heard and understood all the other information which the tape contained at the moment of listening. Understanding and retention are two different processes, and need to be treated as such in the classroom. The next part of the lesson therefore aims to check if the students can actually understand the information given without asking them to retain it :

Listening for detailed information : the teacher gives out a worksheet with questions such as : Connery is English; He wasn’t highly educated; Acting was his first job; He won the Mr Universe competition; His first job as an actor was in the theatre; and so on. Notice that the questions, although calling for more detailed comprehension than in the first stage, don’t call for understanding of any words, structures or pronunciation features which I suspect the students won’t recognise – for example the word undertaker, or the pronunciation features which I earlier identified as liable to be problematic.

Students first discuss the questions in pairs, marking off any that have already been answered and any that they think they remember the answer to. The tape is then replayed once or twice and the students confirm, change or complete their answers as they listen. The follow up is the same as for the gist stage.

So far the lesson has focused on what the students can understand. In order to improve their listening ability, however, I would argue that we also need to focus on what they don’t understand, and improve their ability to recognise it the next time. I’m not here talking about structure or vocabulary which they’ve never met and therefore are unlikely to understand unless the text contains clear contextual clues as to the meaning (in which case inferring meaning from context would be a useful objective for a lesson using that text). But rather about words or structures which they have met, but simply failed to decode.

The text contains a number of examples of pronunciation features of connected speech such as weak forms and assimilation. Some of these, as a native speaker, I was able to decode immediately using a purely bottom-down approach because I expected them to be pronounced that way – in the case of most native speakers this is, of course, a non-conscious expectation. Two examples of this are the pronunciation of would have been with the weakening of both have and been and the assimilation in had to which changes the /d/ to a /t/ sound. For others, like the examples of and like and has been mentioned above, bottom-up decoding was insufficient even for me and I had to use a top-down approach – deciding what must have been there based on my recognition of what came next and my knowledge of the language.

Students need to be encouraged to use this top-down approach, but we can also help by ensuring that they recognise these pronunciation features so that they too are expecting them. The final part of the lesson focuses on this aim :

Listening for language : the teacher gives out a worksheet which contains examples of the pronunciation features which s/he has predicted will cause the students problems. In addition, if any of the answers to the tasks in the first two stages are still unconfirmed (those with question marks still against them) the teacher writes that section of text on the board gapping the words which appear to be causing problems. Here is an example of the items I might gap from the final paragraph of this text :

Throughout ………….. career ……………. been vociferous in his support …………….independent Scotland …………. ambassador ………………. country. He received a knighthood ……………. Queen Elizabeth in July 2000 ……….. so now we …………………….. Sir Sean Connery.

The students look at the gapped sentences and, in pairs, predict what they think will be the missing words, leaving any which they can’t think of. The teacher then replays the recording, this time pausing after each gap. The students should have the chance to hear each phrase several times – repeat it yourself two or three times keeping the same intonation, speed and pronunciation features while they correct or complete the transcript. Elicit what they think and write it on the board. If everyone has understood, go straight to the next phrase. However, if some haven’t, put up alternative versions without confirming or correcting and then repeat the phrase again a few times – this time gradually slowing down and progressively clarifying the pronunciation. Then once every student has understood, progressively speed up again adding in the reduction. Add the sentence to the board and ask students how each element is pronounced. You can also model alternative versions with greater or lesser reductionsWrite the words in phonological script to give them a written model of the pronunciation. In this way, they are more likely to “expect” those words to be pronounced in that way the next time they encounter them, and their bottom-up processing abilities should gradually improve. (3)

What about other features of the text that might cause problems, such as unknown vocabulary and structure? There are various items in this text which I wouldn’t necessarily expect students to know - undertaker, reservations, suave, tight, tall order, tuxedo, suggested that he audition etc. But none of them really blocks comprehension of the text and I have chosen here not to focus on them – indeed my tasks were designed so as to avoid them. Keep in mind that you can’t do everything every single time. Select the objectives which seem most important and design activities to focus on those.

However, by the end of the lesson many students want to have understood everything, and I would always finish by handing out the transcript and letting students listen again while they follow it. They would then have the chance to ask about the meaning of any words or expressions which they did not fully understand.

Notes

1. A note about the choice of the text. I was not, in this instance looking for authentic material – I’ll write another time about using authentic material in the classroom. My first reason for choosing this text was that it is freely available on the web and can be accessed by everyone – had I chosen a text from a coursebook, it would have been harder for those people not using that book to check what I was talking about. I also discarded anything from the web which is video-based as not everyone has a computer in the classroom – podcasts can either be listened to straight from the computer or downloaded – and which did not provide a transcript. For the purposes of this article, I would have preferred to use a dialogue than a monologue, but couldn’t find anything which met all those criteria. If you know of anything suitable, please leave a comment with the web address.

Notice also that this text has a primarily transactional purpose – its main aim is to convey information. The features which it contains are therefore different from those which would be contained in a text which was primarily interactional in intent – ie which focused mainly on establishing or promoting the relationship between the speakers.

The lesson described is therefore one which is suitable for a primarily transactional, audio-only, monologue. Change any of those parameters and both the objectives of the lesson and, consequently the activities used, might change.

2. When teaching listening, which can so easily cause demotivation for students, I think it is important that the teacher also builds affective objectives into each sequence of activities. These will affect not only what is done but, even more importantly, how it is done. Discussion of this aspect would, however, make this article too long and detract from the other points. I will therefore come back and analyses this lesson again, from this point of view, in a future article Do they need to understand every word? For now, bear in mind that the rationale for how the various stages are carried out will often lie in this area.

3. This type of bottom-up work can also usefully be done in dedicated phonology lessons and I will look at this in detail in the next article.

An ELT Notebook Recommends ...

5 Classroom Management Tips To Silence A Noisy Class

2007-03-15T10:54:00.000+01:00

Every teacher has 'the class from hell' that just won't settle down. Rob Johanson suggests 5 tips to help you get silence from the worst kids in school...

1. The first thing to remember is that you are the boss.

Self belief is incredibly important in this job. You can’t expect pupils to respond positively to you unless you believe, really believe, that you fully deserve their respect and compliance. The thought that you are the leader in the classroom must be at the forefront of your mind.

If you give any sign at all that you are NOT in FULL CONTROL, children will sense this and exploit your weaknesses. You MUST project strength and the impression that you will not tolerate any disobedience.

All too often a teacher will enter a lesson filled with dread and give out the signal that they are beaten before the lesson even starts. Pupils sense this. If you’ve been having a hard time with a particular group they will come to expect that you will be a walk-over and get into the habit of talking freely with total disregard for your threats.

2. Have definite rules on noise

Once you’ve decided on your rules (preferably with input from the pupils) you need to ensure the pupils are totally clear what those rules are. There must be no ambiguity and therefore no room for argument.

We all know how important consistency is in terms of classroom management but unless you have a clear set of rules to work to in the first place, you can’t consistently apply them.

So, what is your rule on noise?

Mine is simple: If I say there is to be no talking, then there is to be no talking. I will not tolerate being interrupted without taking action. I seldom enforce this rule for longer than a few minutes – just at those key times when I am either explaining something, starting a new task or taking a register etc. - but if I tell a group that I want total silence, then I mean it. And any pupil who ignores this is dealt with straight away.

For example, never let a pupil shout out without reminding them to put up their hand. Never, allow pupils to continue talking at the start of a lesson when you’ve started explaining the objective. Never, let pupils interrupt you without reminding them that it is unacceptable to do so.

If you let them get away with it once, you have effectively trained them to try and get away with it again.

3. Control entry to the classroom

The ideal place to establish control over your pupils is outside the door - before you even let them in the room.You must start the lesson under your terms. And the lesson starts before they enter the room with you having them line up outside the door in an orderly manner.

This is the perfect time to gauge the mood of the group and indeed the individuals in the group. You can easily spot potential problems (unhappy pupils, cases of bullying, arguments etc.) and deal with them rather than letting them go unnoticed and having them escalate into serious disruptions during your lesson.

If the group won’t stand still and quiet don’t let them in the room. They must do EXACTLY as you say before you let them through the door. If they run to a chair bring them back again and make them walk. If you let them get away with anything at this important stage, you will set the tone as being one where they can get away with things. You don’t want that.

4. Have ‘settling work’ ready for them when they enter the room

If you have a group who just won’t settle try presenting them with some of the following ‘settling work’ as soon as they enter the room. But… make sure you add this little twist to ensure the pupils get stuck into it straight away…

On your board have the following written up…

“Complete the work detailed below. You have ten minutes. If you don’t finish it, you will return at break to complete it.”

Obviously you need to adjust individual work targets for less able pupils to make it fair. Once they’ve started you can go round the slow workers very quietly, out of earshot of the others, and tell them where to stop. i.e. give them a work target which requires less writing than the others –

“James, you can stop when you get to the end of this sentence”. (And put a pencil mark where you want them to get up to.)

The great advantage of this strategy is that it gives you a few minutes to get your resources sorted out. I do use this if I want to show a DVD clip and haven’t had time to set the AV equipment up for example.

On each desk you could have a quick topic-related puzzle, a review quiz of last lesson’s work, a cloze exercise or some text copying work. Nothing too difficult – you don’t want to confuse them because they’ll spend ten minutes asking questions instead of settling down. Choose something simple (and preferably light-hearted or fun) that requires no explanation or fuss.

As well as having the instructions written on the board, greet them at the door and say…

“Get started on the simple task on your desk – you have ten minutes to finish it.”

Once they’re in the room you can then add…

“Anyone not finishing this little task will finish it at break – there should be no talking. If you talk you’ll come back at break and do it in silence then.”

If you want them to copy notes from the board (or a book) make sure there isn’t a huge amount of text otherwise you will provoke complaints. You can ‘hide’ extra work by having five or ten lines of text for them to copy and then a note at the end saying “Now answer question 2 on page 46” which could be another five or ten lines of notes.

Comments like…

“It is entirely your choice as to whether or not you get break. If you want break, do the work. If you don’t want break, sit and chat.”

…can be used if they don’t settle straight away.

5. The Right Way To Ask For Silence

You may have been told that an alternative to shouting for silence is to simply wait for rowdy pupils to calm down.

And wait… And wait… And wait…

Teachers have mixed views as to the effectiveness of waiting for silence before continuing with the lesson because in many cases it just doesn’t work.

Some classes will respond positively to this strategy almost straight away but a hard class will test your mettle and try to push you way beyond 5 or 10 minutes.

They’ll enjoy watching your expression turn to desperation and laugh at the fact that your plan isn’t working.

At a time like this you need to bring in sanctions and make them see that their continuous disobedience will not be tolerated.

If you have a strong, commanding voice you can shout for quiet and explain what the sanctions will be if they continue talking. If you can’t be sure that your voice will cut through the noise sufficiently, you can communicate via the board by writing your instructions. Write up your instructions in bold, capital letters. You may need to give them slightly longer time to comply – allowing for the fact that they may not all read your instructions straight away.

This is what to say…

(You may think that these sanctions won’t work with your toughest class but they are phrased in a very specific manner as you’ll soon see. If you rigorously and consistently apply them you will win. Your class will settle. I’ve never known it fail).

“If you wish to continue talking during my lesson I will have to take time off you at break. By the time I‘ve written the title on the board you need to be sitting in silence. Anyone who is still talking after that will be kept behind for 5 minutes.”

Phrasing your instructions in this way when you want a class to be quiet is very powerful and almost always guarantees success.

Let’s examine why:

Firstly, you are being very fair and giving the pupils a warning…

“If you wish to continue talking during my lesson I will have to take time off you at break.”

When teachers try to issue a punishment without a warning…

“Right you’ve just lost your break!”

…they are often met with a torrent of abuse…

“No way, that’s not fair – we weren’t doing anything!!!”

I always find that giving pupils a fair warning about an impending sanction takes the sting out of a confrontational situation.

Secondly, you are telling them exactly what they are doing wrong, and exactly how to put it right…

“…you need to be sitting in silence.”

Thirdly, you are giving them a clear time by which you expect full compliance…

“By the time I‘ve written the title on the board you need to be sitting in silence.”

Fourthly, and very importantly, you are telling them exactly what will happen to them if they don’t do as you ask…

“Anyone who is still talking after that will be kept behind for 5 minutes.”

These key features are important if you want pupils to follow your instructions because they leave no room for questions, debates, arguments or confusion. The pupils know exactly what they’re doing wrong, what will happen if they continue and how to correct their behavior so as to evade a sanction.

N.B. I’m fully aware that timetable constraints do not allow teachers to keep pupils back after each and every lesson. For that reason you need to think about the sanctions you will issue. You could for example hit the class hard and tell them that any pupils still talking will receive a letter home but it may be better to start off with a small sanction (such as staying behind after school for 5 minutes) because you can then add to it if and when the behavior continues.

Rob Johnson is the author of Magic Classroom Management – How to get the most from the worst kids in school. He is Deputy Head Teacher at a special school in the UK and has been working with challenging young people for 15 years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Article Source: Ezine Articles Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2007 Rob Johnson http://www.classroom-management.org
Photo provided under Creative commons Licence by TAudiophile via flickr

Getting Started in TEFL: Finding Your First TEFL Job

2007-03-12T12:44:00.000+01:00

In this second article on starting out in EFL, Keith Taylor considers how to find your first TEFL job.

Probably the most common way to find a TEFL job is through one of the many TEFL employment websites. For jobs abroad, the process normally goes something like this:

1. The application

When you find a job which you like the look of, you'll need to send your CV. You should emphasize points which are relevant to the position you are applying for – your TEFL qualification, and any relevant skills and experience, should feature strongly. Too many CVs cram all this into a couple of lines, and then list two pages of technical expertise developed during five years as a Software Engineer. Instead, briefly highlight a couple of skills that you developed in that job that could be relevant to language teaching – maybe you led training workshops which required self-confidence and enthusiasm, or worked on a project abroad for a year which meant adapting to a new culture.

If the school is interested, they will contact you to arrange an interview (possibly by telephone), usually with the School's Director of Studies, or in larger schools, a Recruitment Coordinator.

2. The interview

The interview can last anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more (possibly influenced by the school's budget for long-distance calls!) You will normally be asked the types of questions you would expect in any job interview, about your qualifications, experience, strengths and weaknesses, and so on. If the job is in a culture significantly different to your own, you may be asked why you are interested in that particular country, and how you would cope with the types of cultural differences you could expect to face.

Some interviewers ask teaching or grammar questions. "How would you introduce the past simple tense to a group of 12 adults?" for example, or "How would you explain the word 'proud'?" These are difficult to prepare for specifically, but this is where your training course will come in!

The interviewer should give you an opportunity to ask any questions you have about the school, the city, the salary and so on. This is a good point to ask if you can talk to/email a current teacher. Teachers working at the school are a good source of what it's really like. What are the working conditions like? The teaching resources? The nightlife? The boss? The accommodation? Do you get paid on time? Is there internet at the school? And so on. Make sure you are clear about things which are important to you. If the school works on Saturdays and you want your weekends free, for example, it's best to find out at this stage!

3. The contract

All going well, the school will offer you a contract. A typical contract is for one year, renewable thereafter. Read this very carefully and don't be afraid to ask if anything is not clear. A reputable employer will appreciate the fact that moving to another country to live and work is a big step (if you are dealing with the Director of Studies, he/she was in the same boat once) and should be forthcoming with help.

There is no set format for a contract, but it should at least be clear about several important points:

Working days and hours, including the number of contact teaching hours - between 20 and 25 a week is normal.
Holidays – how many days? Are they fixed?
Probationary period – if so, how long?
Start and end dates of the contract.
Salary, overtime and any bonus – when is it paid, and how?

For jobs outside the EU and North America, many schools offer return airfare as part of the deal, often paid on successful completion of the contract. Some offer free accommodation, others provide it but not for free. All should at the very least provide help with finding it. Schools should also sort out paperwork and legalities for you, or tell you exactly what you need to do.

In the EU and North America, things are often very different. You will more likely be expected to sort yourself out in terms of getting there, finding accommodation and sorting out paperwork. A job is often very much just that – a job, without such a network of support.

Other means of recruitment:

Many schools, especially in some EU countries, use other means of recruitment, including TEFL recruitment agencies, newspapers and local expat magazines, and just relying on people to contact them directly or walk in off the street in search of work.

Some teachers choose to travel to the country where they want to work first, and look for work when they arrive. There are some pros and cons to this approach. On the plus side, some schools are more likely to hire you if they have met you face to face, and you are already established in a place. But the risk is spending a lot of time and money with no guarantee of finding a job, particularly if you are newly qualified and the majority of schools in that country require several years of experience.

If you choose this route then, get to know the typical requirements of schools first by looking at job adverts, or contact some schools directly before you go. (There is a link to lists of language schools in many countries at the bottom of this article).

Things to look out for

The great majority of schools are reputable businesses and, except for the inevitable mishaps and inconveniences (broken photocopiers, cultural misunderstandings!) most contracts go without a hitch. But of course, as in any profession, there are some disreputable schools who seek to take advantage of unsuspecting teachers. So, make sure you research a school as thoroughly as you can. Get as much information from the school, other teachers, TEFL websites and forums that you need to feel comfortable in making a decision.

Here are a few things to look out for with every job that you apply for:

Are they offering you a job without speaking to you first?
Are they unprepared to put you in contact with current teachers?
Are they expecting you to accept a job without seeing a contract?
Are they asking you to send them money?

All going well, you've survived the interview and accepted your first job in a country where you've dreamed of living since embarking on your TEFL career. So now it's time to get on the plane, meet your new colleagues, and start your new life!

NOTES

Keith Taylor runs eslbase, a website providing free information, advice and resources for TEFL teachers, as well as a directory of TEFL courses worldwide. Contact language schools directly with the eslbase directory of English language schools.

Article Source: Ezine Articles

Further Reading ...

Getting Started In TEFL: Choosing A TEFL Course

2007-03-11T10:49:00.000+01:00

How do you get started in EFL? What sort of training do you need and how do you go about getting your first job? In this article and the next Keith Taylor has some advice. In this article he looks at TEFL training.

The demand for English teachers around the world today is very high, as English continues to be the preferred language in many areas of life, from study and work to entertainment and travel. For the foreseeable future at least, you will never be short of a job if you choose English teaching as a career.

So, if you've heard tales from a returning teacher of the wonders of living and working in Thailand, Brazil or Morocco and you think it might just be the career for you, how, exactly, do you get started?

Well, the first thing to confront you may well be the minefield of acronyms, so let's work through that first of all.

ESL stands for English as a Second Language. Add a T, giving TESL, and you have Teaching English as a Second Language.

EFL is English as a Foreign Language. Again, add a T, and you have TEFL, Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

Traditionally, TEFL refers to teaching in non-English speaking countries, whereas TESL refers to teaching in English speaking countries, to non-native speakers living or working there. In practice, though, the two terms are often used interchangeably, and both are covered by the all-encompassing TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

During your training or job search, you might come across a host of other acronyms, asking you if you have experience teaching ESP or EAP, FCE or IELTS! Don't be daunted by these - there is a link to the most common acronyms at the bottom of this article.

Now that you know a little about some of the jargon you'll be facing, the next step is usually a qualification of some kind. The days of being able to secure an English teaching job solely on the strength of being a native speaker, although not entirely gone, are fading fast. A quick search on the internet for "TEFL courses" (we'll stick with this acronym for now) will return a mind-boggling selection, of varying content, duration, and quality, and it can be difficult to know what to go for.

It might surprise you to discover that most TEFL courses are short. The most internationally recognised and accepted are the "CELTA" (there's yet another acronym for you), run by the University of Cambridge, and the "Trinity Cert TESOL", run by Trinity College, London. Both of these are 120 hour, classroom-based courses, and include several hours of observed teaching practice. In other words, they get you in front of students during the course so that you can put into practice what you learn. These courses are usually studied over a very intensive four week period, and involve a lot of work outside the classroom, preparing classes and writing assignments.

You'll learn a good deal about teaching theory and methodology, and have some chance to put it into practice. You will learn some English grammar, but don't expect to be an expert by the end of the course - this mostly comes in your first few years of teaching.

An increasing number of institutions offer courses of similar length and content to the CELTA and Trinity courses, and you will find that many employers will accept these.

Very generally speaking, the shorter and less classroom-based the course, the less accepted it will be by employers around the world. There are some high quality online courses available, for example, but by definition these do not allow for any actual teaching practice, and so are often viewed in a less favourable light by potential employers. Some courses compensate by teaching theory and methodology online, and including a short classroom-based component to put it into practice.

You can take a TEFL course in many different countries. Studying in Bangkok or Prague, for example, can give you the advantage of the centre's connections with local schools when it comes to finding employment, and some course providers offer help with finding a job as part of the deal.

Another option is an MA in TESOL. As with most Masters degrees, these take one year or longer, and consequently tend to cover theory and methodology in greater detail.

So, to keep your options as open as possible when it comes to finding employment, the CELTA and Trinity Cert TESOL and equivalent courses, or longer MA courses, are perhaps the best options. But there are, of course, other considerations. CELTA and Trinity courses can cost upwards of US$2000. This may seem a big investment if you are not sure yet if TEFL is the career for you.

So a good first step is to have a look at some of the jobs available in countries where you are interested in teaching, to get an idea of the typical requirements. You could choose a shorter, cheaper course, if these are generally accepted where you want to teach, and then study for a CELTA or equivalent after a year or two, if you decide to pursue the profession further.

The availability of short, quick courses often raises the question of unqualified or underqualified teachers let loose on unsuspecting students! Here, the argument runs both ways:

Some maintain that a qualified teacher doesn't necessarily mean a good teacher, and that communicative skills and enthusiasm are just as important in motivating students. Even the CELTA and Trinity courses are, after all, entry level courses, designed to start you off, with the idea that much of your learning will come from experience during your first couple of years of teaching.

Others argue that just as an unqualified teacher wouldn't be allowed to teach at a secondary school in the UK or the US, why should it be any different in the TEFL field – students are paying to be taught by someone with solid training in teaching theory and methodology. And after all, as a teacher, you'll feel better equipped and more confident when you step into the classroom in your new job.

It's up to you which side of the fence you choose to stand on this one! But whether you study for a week or a year, it will in some measure prepare you for the next step in your TEFL career, when you walk in to the classroom for the first time in your new TEFL job.

NOTES

Keith Taylor is the founder of eslbase.com, providing free resources, information and advice for TEFL teachers, as well as a directory of TEFL courses worldwide and the latest TESOL jobs. Read the eslbase guide to TEFL acronyms.

Article Source: Ezine Articles

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licences by Michoslaw via flickr

Further Reading ...

An Easter Game

2007-03-09T11:35:00.000+01:00

Looking for an Easter activity to do with your children’s classes? Try an Easter Egg Hunt and revise colours and numbers at the same time.

If necessary, check that the children remember the names of the colours they’ve learnt up to that point, then give out the outline of an Easter egg and ask the children to colour it. Make sure the children understand that the eggs must be coloured with one colour only. The choice of colour can be left up to the children, or you can call the name of each child and say a colour – Tamara, blue. Stefano, red. If you have a very small class, give each child more than one egg to colour, or add some of your own. You are aiming to finish with different numbers of each colour egg – three red, six yellow, four pink and so on.

As they finish colouring, get them to place their eggs somewhere around the room. The eggs mustn’t be hidden from sight, but can be in slightly non-obvious places – for example on the floor, or propped up on someone’s bag.

Divide them into groups with as many children in each group as there are colours and give each child a colour to search for. They have two minutes to count how many eggs of that colour there are in the room. They then report back to their groups.

Use a toy rabbit to introduce the chant :

I’m the Easter Bunny,
Come and play with me.
How many (red) eggs can you see?

In turns, each group answers while the others chant. For each colour egg that they’ve counted correctly they get a point (but don’t confirm the answers or reveal the points until the last group has answered).

If the children have already learnt how to record numerical information graphically, they can then record the results in the form of a bar chart or pie chart.

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Cyclequark via flickr

100 Today!

2007-03-08T12:03:00.000+01:00

The last article meant that we have now reached a total of 100 articles on the site - not bad going given that we only started in September 2006. So today we're having a brief pause for a celebration.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has made the success of the site a possibility. Above all, a big thank you to all the people who have contributed articles. They've all been great and were very much appreciated (especially on the days when I couldn't think of anything to write about!) If there is a topic which you would like to write on, please let me know - I'd love to hear from you. You'll find more details in the Write for Us section, which you can get to from the sidebar.

An equally big thank you to all the people at flickr who make their photos available for use under Creative Commons Licence. You've brightened up the site considerably, and I apologise if I haven't always got the links right first time.

Next, thank you to everyone who has given us a mention or linked to us on their own sites. Your links have brought us a lot of readers and are very much appreciated.

And last but decidedly not least, thanks to everyone who has been in to read the articles - without you there'd be no point. Special thanks to everyone who's left a comment. I always try to reply immediately, but I'm afraid sometimes I just haven't had time. I'm sorry. But please keep them coming. And keep coming in to read. Our daily number of visitors is climbing steadily and I hope will continue to do so. If you've found the site useful, please tell your friends about us.

Plans for the future ... There are a few changes in the pipeline, which you'll see if you keep coming back regularly. Two of the most important will be a change in the font used for the blog and a reorganisation of the Complete List of Contents. Someone pointed out to me (thank you - it was really helpful) that, viewed with Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, the font is painfully small. As about a third of visitors to the site do use Firefox, we're obviously going to have to change. I'll be experimenting over the next few days, using a different font and character size for each article, and would welcome feedback as to what you think of each.

And if you have any other suggestions for how the site could be improved, topics we might cover, and so on - please let us know.

But for now, sit back and pour yourself a glass of virtual champagne (strictly non-alcoholic, just in case you've got to go and teach afterwards) and welcome to the party....

There is and There are

2007-03-06T11:15:00.001+01:00

There is/are is one of those grammatical areas which at first sight looks simple – after all, it’s one of the first structures that we teach to beginner level students. But is it as straightforward as it seems? Look at the following sentences. Are they correct or incorrect? And how would you explain them to students?

a) There’s a squirrel in the tree.
b) There’s the squirrel in the tree.
c) There’s the man I was telling you about.
d) There’s John!
e) There’s John in the tree.
f) There’s a letter and two messages for you.
g) There are a letter and two messages for you.
h) There are two messages and a letter for you.
i) There are a load of messages for you.
j) There’s a load of messages for you.
k) There are a lot of messages for you.
l) There’s a lot of messages for you.
m) There’s two messages for you.

Confused? You can probably recognise some of the mistakes made by your students in these examples. Yet there is often another sentence which seems structurally parallel which is correct. What text books often forget to point out, is that there are actually two separate constructions which begin there is/are, each of which has it's own grammar and intonation. These constructions are :

Introductory There

In English it is unusual to use an indefinite expression as the subject of a sentence. Sentences like A squirrel is in the tree or A bus is coming are possible grammaticallly, but are generally avoided. Instead, the "empty" introductory subject There is inserted : There's a squirrel in the tree. There's someone coming. There must be some mistake. There can't have been enough time.

As these examples show There can be used like this with any verb pattern which would otherwise have an indefinite subject and which contains the verb Be. It can even be used in infinitive and -ing clauses : I don't want there to be any mistakes. He was surprised at there being so many possibilities.

Back to our much simpler examples. The indefinite subject requirement explains why There’s the squirrel in the tree, There’s John in the garden, and There are your keys on the table, sound strange – at least, if they’re said with the same intonation as There’s a squirrel in the garden. The, John and your are definite expressions – they tell us which particular object or person we are talking about. So it doesn’t work. Definite expressions can act as subject with no problems and I would need to say John is in the garden, Your keys are on the table etc.

In this use, as we said before there is an "empty subject. It has no real meaning, and is always unstressed in the sentence. It certainly tells us nothing about the position of the objects. This is why the clause often finishes with an adverbial of place (unless this is already known from the context) : There’s a squirrel in the tree There are some messages on your desk. If we want to indicate that the place is “over there”, we need to say so again : I went to the zoo and there were some people there feeding the monkeys …

Notice that with this use the verb generally agrees with the first part of the complement. So :
There’s a letter and two messages for you is correct, as is There are two messages and a letter for you. But There are a letter and two messages … is incorrect.

What about There’s two messages for you ? Grammatically of course this is illogical. But the use of the singular is preceding a plural complement is common in informal spoken English. It’s not restricted to There is … constructions. Compare for example the greeting How’s things?

And what about There is/are a load of messages for you? or There is /are a lot of messages for you Here the following complement is clearly singular - a lot / a load – and so the singular verb is would seem to be correct. But notionally these expressions indicate a plural quantity – we know there is more than one message. With a lot of the notional meaning has almost taken over from the literal meaning and the phrase has become lexicalised as an alternative expression to many. There are a lot of messages for you is thus standard English.

Demonstrative There

But what about Look! There’s John! or Look! There’s the squirrel. ?

In these examples, the speaker is pointing out someone or something. There is no longer an empty subject but an adverbial of place - it signifies an exact position. If that position was different I might have to use here rather than there : Here's John!

This means that There, far from acting as subject is actually the complement of the sentence - what I'm really saying is John is (over) there. "Fronting" the adverbial gives the sentence a more dramatic feeling - the adverbial is given prominence (it is always stressed) and, if the subject is a noun, the subject and verb are inverted : There's John = CVS. Notice that this doesn't happen when the subject is a pronoun : There he is! = CSV

This can also happen with other adverbials (we've already mentioned here) and with other verbs : There goes John! Up went the sails!

As this is a demonstrative use, in this case it might well be a specific person or thing which I'm talking about. So a definite expression - a name, the definite article and so on -is possible : There’s the man who I was telling you about.

What happens if I want to tag on a more precise description of where the person/thing is? There's nothing to stop me, but the important thing to note is that it is "tagged on". It's no longer part of the same idea : There’s John! In the tree! There are your keys! On the table! In spoken English the intonation makes this difference clear. Compare the one tone group of : // There’s a SQUIrrel in the 'tree // and the two tone groups of : // ' There’s the SQUIrrel // in the TREE //

These rules are fairly complex, and we won't necessarily want to rush straight into the classroom to present them. But contrasting them with the rules for equivalent expressions in other languages can help us both to understand students' mistakes and to decide if and when it might be helpful for them to know at least part of the rules. Knowing that introductory there is restricted to indefinite reference, for example, can help Italian students, whose own language often uses the equivalent structure (c'è/ci sono) with definite expressions.

It can also help to separate out the two uses of there. The demonstrative use is rarely taught explicitly in textbooks, but can be explained as it comes up in dialogues and then practised using flashcards. Distribute flashcards of various objects around the room, placing some in front of the students. Start asking : Where are my (glasses)? The students pick up or point to the correct flashcard and reply here/There are your glasses. Once they have the idea the activity can continue as pairwork.

NOTES

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by MissBeckles via flickr

Teaching Parts of the Body

2007-03-06T09:15:00.000+01:00

If you teach children, one of the vocabulary areas which you cover will almost certainly be Parts of the Body. Here’s a fun way to practise the vocabulary after it’s initially been taught.

Draw a friendly monster or alien on an A3 sized piece of light card. Give it three legs, six arms, four eyes, five ears or whatever. Cut it up into jigsaw type pieces with each part of the body that you want to focus on on a different piece. (The pieces don't have to be "traditional jigsaw shape)

In class, distribute the pieces amongst the kids. Point to one and ask "What's that?" - the child replies "It's an ear" or whatever, comes to the table and puts it down. In turn each child says what their piece is, comes up and puts it in position until the jigsaw is complete.

Divide the children into groups and give out sheets of A3 paper. Each group draws their own monster/alien and cuts it up as before. They then pass their jigsaw to the next group.

The pieces of the jigsaw are placed faced down on the table. In turn, each child in the group picks one up, says "It's an eye" etc and puts it in position on the table to create the jigsaw.

They can then exchange jigsaws again and repeat the game with the jigsaw of another group - or you can take in the jigsaws and give each group a new one in the next, or a later lesson, to revise.

If the children are too young to be able to draw the monsters effectively, or if you don't have enough time, then draw extra ones yourself. You could also just do the outline and get them to colour it.

Further Reading ...

Teaching Polite Requests : Part Two

2007-03-05T15:39:00.000+01:00

In Part One of this article, I looked at how native speakers might make polite requests in a variety of situations, and the reasons why non-native speakers sometimes sound too brusque when doing the same thing : lack of any “face-saving” sequences, inaccurate intonation, and choice of an exponent which is too direct for the situation. I also looked at the factors which might influence the choice between a direct request and a more tentative one. I concluded by suggesting that the dilemma we face in the classroom is that the structural complexity of the exponents often means that we want to concentrate on them in isolation, but the social complexity of the situation means that, if we do so, we are encouraging the too-direct approach that we want students to be able to avoid. This article outlines a lesson for an intermediate level class which takes this dilemma into account.

OBJECTIVES

The Ss will :

Revise already known exponents for polite requests (request, agreement, refusal)
Know how to preface the request with a “face-saving” pre-sequence, and be able to decide if it is necessary to do so.
Know how to refuse requests in a “face-saving” manner, and be able to decide when it is necessary to do so.
Use the structure would you mind (not) V+ing to make polite requests

ASSUMED KNOWLEDGE

Students have already met :

Various exponent used to make and respond to requests including Can/Could you …, Do you think you could …, Yes certainly and I’m sorry, but
The expression I don’t mind to express lack of displeasure
Would + infinitive used to make hypothetical predictions. (1)

STAGE ONE

Notes

The first part of the lesson revises previously known exponents and focuses on the potential need for “face-saving”. This type of lesson, where students are simply extending their communicative range, is ideal for what is known as the “deep-end” approach. In this approach students complete a communicative task using any language they can, and this is then followed by a focus on how they might have improved their performance, including by incorporating new language.

Activity Sequence

1) PW : Students roleplay five situations, drawing on their previous knowledge of the language to do so.
2) Full class follow up : the Teacher asks various pairs to enact the situations in front of the class. What they say is written up on the board, grammatical and lexical corrections are made if necessary but no attention is paid to intonation or discourse structure.
3) Full class : The students listen to a taped version (2) of the first situation (asking for a favour) and compare it with their own. The teacher points out and does repetition practice of the pre-sequence, the exponent used (Do you think you could…), and the intonation, explaining why they are necessary and the possible effect of the students’ own versions.
4) PW : The students then repeat situation 2, attempting to build into it the features just focused. Again, one pair enacts the situation in full class follow-up before the students compare what they said with what was on the tape.
5) Full class : The teacher then draws attention to the next situation (asking for a service) and asks students if they want to modify their initial version and why/why not. The taped version is used to confirm that this time the more direct approach is appropriate.
6) PW : The students then repeat situations 4 (a service) and 5 (a favour), deciding for themselves how direct they should be.
7) Full class : This is then compared as before with the taped version. The request exponent in situation 5 is Would you mind + Ving. The teacher writes up and explains the structure (3).

Materials

a) Situations :

1. Your neighbour (who’s a very nice man) has parked his car in front of your garage, and you can’t get out. Ask him to move it.
2. You’re at work. Your printer isn’t working and you need fifty copies of a report for a conference tomorrow. Ask a colleague in another office to print them out for you.
3. You’ve just bought some petrol, at a garage. Ask the attendant to check the oil for you.
4. You’re in a hotel. There’s only one blanket on your bed and you’re cold. Phone the housekeeping department and ask them to bring you another one.
5. You are going on a business trip, but the date keeps changing. The office which makes the travel arrangements has already changed your flight and hotel bookings three times. And now you have to ask them to do it again.

b) Dialogues :

1. Hi Dave, how are things? / Oh, not so bad. You? / Fine … Erm, the thing is – I have to go out and your car is parked right in front of my garage. I’m sorry to bother you, but do you think you could move it? / Oh, of course. I didn’t realise … I’ll do it immediately. I’m sorry.
2. Ellen, I’m really sorry but my printer’s not working and I have to make some copies of the IBN report for the conference tomorrow. I’m sorry to be a nuisance but do you think you could print them out for me? / Oh, I’m sorry Pauline. I’m afraid I’m already late for a meeting. Why don’t you ask John? He’s free. /OK. Thanks
3. Unleaded petrol please. Fill it up. Oh, and can you check the oil please? /Yes, sure.
4. Housekeeping. / Oh, hello. This is room 673. Could you bring me another blanket please? / Yes, certainly. At once.
5. Sheila, I am really sorry to have to ask you this, but they’ve changed the date of the Paris meeting again./ What, again?/ Yes, it’s on the 6th now. I’m sorry, but would you mind changing the flight and hotel bookings again. / OK. Leave it with me.

STAGE TWO

Notes

This stage moves through receptive to productive practice. It also introduces and practises the negative request.

Activity Sequence

1) Full class : Repetition of the target structure. Substitution drilling using the first four situations from stage one – the request only, not the full conversation.
2) Full class : The teacher hands each student a card with containing an “anti-social” command. For example : Sit on Giulia’s desk / Open the door / Walk around the room / Whistle a song / Put your books on Belem’s chair / Draw on the board / Put your bag on my desk/ etc. Once the students are carrying out the action, the teacher starts making requests : Ali, would you mind closing the door. Philippe, would you mind moving your books off Belem’s chair etc. As the teacher makes the request, each student “obeys”. Towards the end (4) start introducing negative requests : Birgit, would you mind not putting your feet on the desk? Mika, would you mind not whistling? etc.
3) PW : With a partner the Ss try and remember, and write a list, of all the requests made by the teacher. Full class follow up : the teacher elicits the requests, writes them up and corrects and explains as necessary.
4) PW : The students are given a list of situations and, with a partner, decide and write the request (not the complete conversation) they would make, using Would you mind …. Full class follow up.

Materials

Situations :

1. You’re not feeling very well. Interrupt a colleague in a meeting and ask her to tell your boss (Paul), who is out of the office at the moment, that you’ve gone home.
2. You share an office with a colleague who always listens to the radio while she works. Today you’re trying to write an important report and you can’t concentrate. Ask her to turn it off.
3. Your sister always comes to dinner on Wednesdays, but today you’ve got a really bad headache and don’t want her to come. Ask her.
4. You’re in a meeting. One of the other participants interrupts you every time you start to talk, and it’s really annoying you.
5. While you were on holiday your company installed a new programme on all the computers. You don’t understand how it works. Ask a colleague to show you.
6. You’re in a hotel. The TV isn’t working. Ring reception and ask them to send someone to check it.

STAGE THREE

Notes

This stage asks the students to combine the new structure with what they have learnt previously.

Activity Sequence

1) Listening : At this stage of the lesson you could usefully insert a listening comprehension activity, taken from any book you are using, which includes the language which has been focused on up to this point. See note 3 below for one suggestion.
2) PW Roleplay : The students should work with a different partner from the one they worked with in Stage 2/4. They choose three situations (more if time allows) from the list they worked on in 2/4 and roleplay them fully. The teacher monitors noting appropriate and inappropriate versions.
3) Full Class Follow-Up : The teacher writes up mistakes from the inappropriate versions, and asks the class to correct them. S/he then asks various pairs who provided appropriate versions to enact them in front of the class.

NOTES

1. If students understand this use of would, then the literal meaning of would you mind can be made clear. If they have not yet met this use, then it can be taught as a fixed phrase or translated into their own language to explain the meaning.

2. There are three possibilities here : a) if you’re using a textbook which contains suitable taped dialogue, use those; b) write your own, similar to the ones included here but suitable for the needs of your own students, and record them with a colleague; c) if you can’t use a tape, you can act them out for the students yourself.

3. An example of a dialogue which would be suitable comes from Unit 6 of International Express Intermediate, Liz Taylor, OUP. The tapescript for this dialogue is available on the OUP website.

Teaching Polite Requests : Part One

2007-03-02T19:24:00.000+01:00

The first part of this article on teaching polite requests will look at why students often have difficulty with the area and the elements we need to be focusing on. In the second part, we'll look at a sample lesson plan for the area.

A : David, I’m really sorry to have to bother you, but my car’s broken down. Would it be awfully inconvenient for you to give me a lift home this evening?
B : Oh Helen – I’m really sorry. I would, but my mother’s in hospital and I have to go straight there after work. Why don’t you ask Jean. She goes your way.

A request – and a refusal. Now imagine giving that situation to your learners as a roleplay : Your car has broken down so you need to ask a colleague for a lift home. Your colleague refuses. What do you both say? The resulting conversation will probably go something like : S1 : Can you give me a lift home this evening? S2: No I can’t.

What problems do students have when faced with a functional area like making and responding to polite requests? Why is it that even when what they say is grammatically correct,as here, it often still sounds at best stilted and inauthentic, and at worse rude or aggressive?

One problem students have is simply the grammatical complexity of many of the exponents. Here’s a list of a few possibilities :

- Sign here (please).
- Open the window, can/could/will/would you (please)?
- Can/Could/Will/Would you open the window (please)?
- Could you just/ possibly open the window (please)?
- Do you think you could (possibly/just) open the window (please)?
- Is there any chance of you giving me a lift home tonight?
- Would you mind (awfully) opening the window (please)?
- If you will/would/can/could (just) sign here (please)
- I wonder if you could (just/possibly) open the window (please)
- I wonder if you’d mind (awfully) opening the window (please).
- Would it be very inconvenient for you if I asked you to give me a lift?
- I should/would be grateful if you could/would reply before March 10th.
- I should/would appreciate it if you could/would reply before March 10th.

Notice that most of these exponents use modal verbs, and the more indirect (or tentative) the request is, the longer it becomes and the more likely it is that the request is expressed hypothetically : Would you mind … I wonder if you could … I would be grateful if … and so on. Modality is, in my experience, one of the areas that students find most difficult to use spontaneously in English, and it is therefore not surprising that they frequently fall back to the simplest forms Can /Could you ….

However, by avoiding the grammatical complexity of the exponents, the students are also abandoning any attempt to match what they say to the situation. The choice of an appropriate exponent will depend on three factors :

Participant relationships (who says it and who they say it to ). If I want my husband to open the window, I may well use an imperative form. If I’m in a client’s office and feel desperately hot, I’m more likely to use a longer exponent. And it is not only the exponents which may need to change, but also the formulation of the request itself. In the client’s office I might also avoid making a direct request for him or her to act – ie Do you think you could possibly open the window? - by saying something like Do you think we could possibly have the window open?
The level of “threat” posed by the request (Am I asking for a service - Could you check the oil please? - where I have a socially acknowledged right to make the request, or a favour. If so, do I want you to lend me your bike or your Ferrari?)
The context of the request (is it the first time I ask you not to play music after 11pm or the tenth?)

The forms may also take on a different level of directness dependent on the intonation used. For example, the imperative I use with my husband may function as an order or a request. If I’ve burnt the toast again and the kitchen is full of smoke I may say /open the WINdow/ using a final falling tone. The situation is urgent and I am giving a command. But if it’s a hot day, I’m reading on the sofa and am just too lazy to get up myself, /Open the WINdow/ said with a lengthened first syllable in open and a final fall-rise tone will move my utterance much closer to a request. The same can happen with any of the exponents Would you mind opening the window? said by a Managing Director to the office cleaner is functionally an order, and liable to finish with a falling tone, even though it has the structure of a request.

The effect of intonation is something we clearly have to focus on in the classroom, but it is also an area that we know many students are going to find difficult. A native speaker can automatically increase or decrease the level of indirectness of an exponent by adding the appropriate intonation, but students don’t always get it right. As Hendriks, referring to Brown and Levinson, points out : the non-communication of the polite attitude will be read not merely as the absence of that attitude, but as the inverse, the holding of an aggressive attitude.

If students have chosen a fairly direct exponent and have also mistakenly used direct intonation, their listeners may not give them the benefit of the doubt.

Within the exponents, the use of politeness markers such as please can also cause problems. Learners tend to see please as “the” marker of politeness, overestimating its importance and also sometimes its function. They therefore feel that if they have included please in the sentence, they have automatically been polite. Yet the meaning of please will again depend on intonation, and also on its sentence position. For example, talking to my son, I might say /can you put your TRAINers away, please/ with please in final position. Five minutes later, when I see the trainers are still in the same position as before, the request becomes /can you PLEASE put your trainers away/. The shift in position of please and the added stress mark my request as considerably less “polite” than before. If another five minutes pass without action, I may well yell /PLEASE / can you put your TRAINers away/ - which I would argue is neither polite, nor a request. The situation is complicated though by the interaction of the two factors : stress and position. Even if please remains in final position the request again becomes more insistent if please is stressed /Can you put your trainers away, PLEASE/ while it is sometimes included in initial or mid-position but with weaker stress to emphasise that the request is important, but not necessarily to express displeasure. Oh, that reminds me – next week, please can you remember to bring all the tests we’ve done this term. In writing, please is often used in this way.

Related to this is the use of modifying adverbs – possibly, awfully, just etc. They often have a much more important role in enhancing politeness than does please – compare for example Would you just take a seat and Would you take a seat, please – but are often avoided by students.

And finally, but perhaps most importantly, there is the difference in discourse structure of the request sequence which is often apparent when comparing native speaker and learner English. As always, this will depend on the three factors mentioned above, but compare the sequence which started this article with the learners’ version :

David, I’m really sorry to have to bother you, but my car’s broken down. The sequence starts with a pre-request. Brown and Levinson (again quoted in Hendriks) suggest that utterances such as these are motivated by the need to maintain “face” – here, to retain the other person’s approval. The speaker therefore starts with an apology. Before making the request she wishes to assume a “humble” attitude, and to show that she appreciates that she is asking for something that might irritate or “bother” the listener. Her use of “have to” suggests that it is not her fault, she is obliged to do so, and she backs this up by giving the reason for the request. The request itself Would it be awfully inconvenient for you to give me a lift home this evening? repeats her acknowledgement that she might be causing problems for the other person, while the interrogative structure gives him a “way out” – the possibility of refusing.

For it is not only the requester who risks losing face, in Brown and Levinson’s terms. In a request sequence there are two possible replies : acceptance or refusal. But for the language (not necessarily for the speaker) it is acceptance which is the “preferred” choice. If you agree to a request, there’s no need to be subtle about it. Yes, of course will do. But a refusal is far trickier in terms of retaining “face” (ie approval) and also allowing the requester to retain face. I risk offending or embarrassing the other person. So, in our example we have first an apology Oh Helen – I’m really sorry. and then an assurance that the speaker would really like to agree but is prevented by a situation outside his control - I would, but my mother’s in hospital and I have to go straight there after work. He then does what he can to make up for the refusal by making a helpful suggestion that can resolve the problem : Why don’t you ask Jean. She goes your way.

Compare this with the straight request-refusal pattern of the learners’ discourse. Scarcella and Brunak, quoted by McCarthy (2) noticed the same difference between the two groups in the context of giving invitations :

The native speakers prefaced their invitations (e.g. I was wondering, uh, we’re having a party…), while the non-natives were sometimes too formal or too blunt (e.g. I would like to invite you to a party ….)

This leaves us with a dilemma. Request exponents are often complex grammatically, lexically and from the point of view of intonation, and learners may need to focus on them in isolation in order to understand and assimilate them. But if we are to promote their ability to use appropriate discourse patterns, these exponents cannot be taught in isolation, but must be presented and practised in the context of an authentic request sequence. In the next article we’ll look at how we might go about doing this.

Notes

1. H.Hendricks, Indirect speech acts, Politeness and the Civilising Process
2. M. McCarthy, Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, CUP 1991

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Matthew Weston via flickr

ESL Activities With Little Preparation

2007-02-27T16:47:00.000+01:00

You can never have too many fillers, warmers or ice-breakers up your sleeve - activities which you can slot into a lesson if you finish five minutes earlier than expected, or use if you see pace has dropped and students need an energising activity. In this article, Keith Taylor describes some of his favourites.

How often do you find yourself preparing a class, racking your brain for something different - a new activity to liven up a group of tired students, or just to bring something fresh to the classroom? If you are like most teachers, thinking of something new and exciting every day is not easy, and often we simply don't have the time (or energy!) So we revert to our tried and tested (and sometimes a little worn) ideas, or to following page after page of a textbook.

Well, it doesn't have to be that difficult. A lot of ideas can be adapted to many different language points, giving you something that can be used again and again. If the activity has a clear focus, motivation (students need to know why they are doing something - adding an element of competition to an activity is one way to achieve this) and, of course, clear instructions, then you're on to a winner.

There are many good resource books available with hundreds of quick and easy activities requiring little or no preparation. Have a hunt around your school's resources for books such as "Five Minute Activities" by Penny Ur and Andrew Wright, or "Keep Talking" by Friederike Kippel. Don't forget that your fellow teachers are good resources too - use them!

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1 You may know Backs to the Board, where a representative from each of two teams faces away from the board, while his/her teammates try to explain the word that you have written on the board to him/her, without saying the word or any variations of it. Well, why not extend this to whole sentences? The teams have a minute to explain the sentence to their teammate, without using any of the words, or spelling them, or using gestures. You can adapt this to any tense or structure that you want to practise.

2 Sentence reduction: Write a long sentence or a short paragraph on the board, rich in vocabulary. In teams, students take it in turns to erase either one, two or three consecutive words. The sentence must still make sense, gramatically, afterwards. If it doesn't, replace the words and move to the next team. Carry on until no further reduction is possible (your students will be amazed at how short the sentence can become, while retaining its grammatical sense!) The winning team is the one who removes the most words. (Variation: Do the opposite - start with one word and have students replace it with two or three, expanding the sentence).

3 For spelling and vocabulary practice, try this: Start with one letter on the board, say "S". The first student then thinks of a word beginning with "S" and adds the next letter, for example "ST". The next student then thinks of a word starting with "ST" and adds another letter, and so on. If someone in the group thinks there is no such word, he can challenge the writer to name his/her word. If there is no such word, the writer is out, but if he/she was thinking of a real word, then the challenger is out. The winner is the last student remaining.

4 If your students are imaginative, give each group four or five pictures cut out from magazines, and get them to create a picture story - you can keep the context very open, or have them focus on a particular tense or function. If you want to focus on oral communication, don't let them write their story down! If you also want to evaluate their writing, have them write it down as they go along. When they've finished, have each group tell their story to the rest of the class.

5 As a Getting to know you exercise, ask students to write three things which are true about themselves, and two which are not true (but believable). Students take turns to read their sentences to the rest of the group, who must discuss, and ask questions to the reader, and try to find out which of his/her sentences are true. A good ice-breaker is to do this yourself first so that they get the idea - write the five things about you on the board. (Variation: Write five one-word facts about yourself on the board, for example "32", "Liverpool", "Three", "Bloggs", and have students, in pairs, try to guess the questions which will give them these answers.)

6 Another one for imaginative students: Dictate the first line of a different story to each of several groups. They have a few minutes to continue the story, and then pass their piece of paper to the next group, who read the story so far and add the next part. Carry on until the stories reach their original groups, who then conclude and read out the stories. To focus on a particular language point or item of vocabulary, you can do this orally as a chain story: Give the first sentence, then have the first student continue the story. They must at some point use the tense, or structure, or word (allocated beforehand), that you want to work on. Carry on until all the students have contributed.

7 For some energetic writing practice, divide the board into three columns, and give each column a header with three structures that you want to practise (for example "first, second, third conditional", "yes/no questions, indirect questions, tag questions", "present perfect simple, present perfect continuous, past simple"). Split students into pairs. One from each pair is the writer, the other is the runner. Give each pair many small slips of paper and some blu-tac, and tell them that they must construct as many gramatically correct sentences as they can, in each of the three categories, and stick them on the board (with their initials to identify them). Set a five or ten minute time limit. The writer writes a sentence, then the runner takes the slip of paper and sticks it on the board. Shout "CHANGE" every so often for them to swap roles. At the end, have all the pairs look at the sentences and evaluate them. If they find an incorrect one, they tell you, and that sentence is not counted towards that pair's score. (Variation: You can make this activity more difficult by saying that each sentence must contain a minimum of 10 words, for example.)

8 Another favourite is to give each student a secret famous identity, which they stick to their back or forehead. They go around the class, asking yes/no questions to establish their identity. You could make sure they practise the past simple by making all the famous people dead (Did I live in the USA?), or present perfect, by making them alive (Have I acted in many films?), or future, by imagining that these famous people have not yet been born (Will I be an actor?).

9 Stand students up, and shout out two opposing ideas, or people, or concepts, or adjectives, or places. For example, "beach or mountains", "Spielberg or Hitchcock", "red or blue", "Playstation or Nintendo" depending on the age/interests of your students. Point to one side of the room for one idea, the other side for the other. Students move to the side of the room they choose - pick a few students each time to explain the reasons for their choices. If you like, you can let it develop into a debate between the two groups.

10 Do a grammar auction or gap fill auction with mistakes that students have made (and that you've made a note of) or with a language area that you want to work on. Split students into teams, and allocate each team $100, or 10,000 yen or any amount you like. If you can photcopy some real money, so much the better. For the grammar auction, give each team a worksheet with 10 (or more) sentences (based on the mistakes they've made or the language area you're working on). Some should be grammatically correct, others incorrect. Give teams some time to discuss whether they think the sentences are correct or not, and then have them gamble on that decision for each sentence. Then give them the answer - if their decision was right, they double the amount they gambled - if not, they lose their stake. For the gap fill, give them 10 or more gap fill sentences (again based on the area you're practising or their mistakes) and this time they choose the correct word to go in the gap and gamble on it.

You can find variations on these activities, and many, many others in the books mentioned at the beginning of this article, among others. Try one of them today for something different in your ESL classes!

Keith Taylor is the founder of esl base, providing resources, information and advice for TEFL teachers, as well as a directory of TEFL courses and TEFL jobs worldwide. He also maintains the eslbase language exchange, an easy way to practise any language online.

Acknowledgements

Article Source: EzineArticles

Photo provided by Matthew Weston under Creative Commons Licence by via flickr

An ELT Notebook Recommends...

Community Language Learning : Part Two

2007-02-26T15:41:00.000+01:00

I’ve never trained as a CLL teacher, and I’ve never taught an entire course through CLL. However, I have sometimes used it as a component of a course.

One of the courses which I remember best was a mixed ability course with a group of six students ranging from complete beginners to upper intermediate level. It was impossible to teach them as a “normal” lockstep class, and I decided to get them working on self-access materials each at their own level while I circulated, helping and guiding as necessary. But to do that for the whole course would have meant an incredible amount of preparation – I needed to prepare materials for four different levels at each lesson. So I decided to spend half of the time using a CLL approach, sometimes letting the most advanced student work as the knower to increase the challenge for her, while I just confirmed her input and handled the analysis and reflection stages. It worked well, as even when the lower level students heard more complex language than they were ready for, they had already heard the sentence in their own language, and therefore didn’t have to panic about meaning. The reflection stage also usefully allowed the students to express their feelings about being in such a mixed ability course (which had been imposed on all of us) – the lower level students discussing their insecurity and fear of looking stupid, while the higher level students talked about their fear that they would not learn anything. Together they reached the understanding that the method would allow them each to use and to ask for analysis at their own level. The higher level students would be able to confirm their own understanding of more basic structures, while the beginners realised that it would often be more sensible to focus on general understanding of the higher level language, without worrying too much about the details.

However, the group which I want to describe in most detail was a group of three complete beginners. They were managers from a company, ranging in age from early forties to late fifties, and were sent by their company to do an intensive course – six hours a day for two weeks. I was in charge of designing the course and teaching most of it, but I had the help of another teacher for an hour and a half each day.

My first concern when I heard about the course was its intensity – I was sure that the students would not be able to cope with six hours a day “straight” group teaching. My first concern was therefore to build in a variety of approaches, and above all, a change of pace at different points in the day. I didn’t think there’d be too much problem in the mornings, but I was worried about the “post-lunch dip” and tiredness in the later afternoon. I therefore decided that the two sessions in the morning would be “normal” teacher led lessons, but that after lunch we’d change approach. The first session would be self-access based. The school had a good self-access library which the other teacher was familiar with, and he therefore took charge of this session. The final session of the day was CLL.

On the first day, I explained the method to the students and they got started. Each of them in turn started a monologue – My name is … I come from … and so on. They stayed within a fairly basic range of language, but even so, there were things which I was dying to point out in the analysis stage. But they didn’t ask. In the reflection stage, they expressed general satisfaction with the method and welcomed it as a change of focus at the end of a long day, but said it had been a bit boring because they already knew everything which each person had said about himself. They therefore decided that they would each think of a more interesting topic to talk about the following day.

On the second day, the first student again started a monologue on his chosen topic – but this time did not stop. In the end, each of the other students had a chance to say something, but very soon the allotted twenty minutes ran out. Stevick (in A Way and Ways, cited in the first part of this article) says that he indicates to each student when they’ve had their turn, but I wanted this to be one of the things the students worked out for themselves. In the reflection period, they were clearly dissatisfied with how things had gone, and I started by asking the student who had talked the most for his feelings. He said at once that he realised that he had dominated and that it had been unintentional – what he’d planned to say had just taken longer than he’d thought. I then asked if they had any suggestions as to how they could do things differently so as to make things more useful. Almost immediately they suggested that they should stop monologuing, and start having a more natural conversation. They also came up with the idea of repeating some of the situational dialogues, roleplays etc that they’d studied in the morning in order to consolidate the language they’d been learning.

From that time on, there was no problem with the content of the discussions or the turn-taking. They came up with different ideas for conversations each day, but it was always something interesting and useful. On the other hand, I was never entirely happy with the analysis phase, which was the aspect of this particular course which most tempted me to revert to a “teaching” role. I felt at first that they were simply not “noticing” some of the language that was coming up, rather than that they truly did not want to take an analytical approach, as Stevick reported with some of his learners. But in retrospect, this may have reflected my own preferences rather than theirs, and probably had a lot to do with the time. By the time they got to the analysis stage they’d been going for nearly six hours.

This course, however, illustrates what I suggested in Part One of the article : CLL is not something which will work most effectively the first time you do it, and in my experience there are generally one or two sessions which the students are dissatisfied with before they truly make the method their own. If you want to use CLL, you therefore need to allot a sizeable portion of the course to the method, and to possess the skills necessary to “counsel” the students through any negative patches – in particular active listening skills, and the ability to support students while they work through their own reactions to the method, without imposing your own ideas about how they “should” be doing it, but helping them to find out for themselves.

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons License by ExtraOrdinary people via flickr

Community Language Learning : Part One

2007-02-22T21:11:00.001+01:00

Community Language Learning (also called Counseling Language Learning) was created by Charles A Curran, a Jesuit priest and professor of psychology, and Paul La Forge. Inspired by the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, it aimed to remove the anxiety from learning by changing the relationship between the teacher and student. In CLL, that relationship the “teacher” – who is known not as the teacher but as the “knower”, the one who knows the language – is seen as being in the same relationship to the student as the counsellor is to a client : the client has a “problem” (in this case not knowing the language) which is currently creating confusion and causing problems. The counsellor’s role is not to tell the client what to do, but to help him or her explore and resolve the problem while retaining personal autonomy.

In CLL, it is therefore the learner who to a great extent decides what is happening. The approach (at least in the beginning stages) is based around a set technique, within which the students are free to determine content. A typical CLL lesson using this technique would have the following stages :

Stage One – Investment : The students sit in a circle with a tape recorder in the middle. The knower is outside the circle. The first student who wants to say something calls the knower over, and quietly says what she wants to say in his or her own language. The knower repeats this in English, using a non-threatening and encouraging tone of voice. The student has the chance to repeat and practise the utterance, with help if necessary from the knower, before finally recording it on the tape. Another student who wishes to reply then repeats the process. This continues until a full conversation has been recorded – when I’ve used the approach we’ve probably spent about twenty to thirty minutes on this phase, though Earl Stevick (1) suggests that it should be limited to ten. He however was using it with a much larger group than I was - he describes a class of twelve whereas I only had three. In his situation each individual would obviously have been involved in the conversation relatively infrequently and a longer session could have led to a demotivating drop in pace.

Stage Two – Analysis : Between one session and the next (or possibly immediately, on the board) the knower transcribes the complete conversation, and the students then listen again to the tape while following the transcript. They then have the chance to ask for any explanation they want, and if they wish, to ask for practice activities on specific points.

Stage Three – Reflection : The students then have the chance to reflect on the whole experience, and to decide how useful it was, if they could have done things differently and so on. Again, the knower’s job is not to “tell them where they went wrong” but to help them discover for themselves how they could have made the session maximally useful.

The learner is seen as passing through five psychological stages as learning progresses, which Curran likens to progressing from childhood to adulthood :

1. Birth : the learners know nothing of the target language, and are completely dependent on the knower for everything they want to say.
2. Self : the learners start to get an idea of how the language works and to use it for themselves, but still seek the knower’s help. They may, for instance tell the knower what they want to say directly in the target language, looking to the knower only for confirmation or correction.
3. Separate Existence : they start to use the language without referring to the knower, and may even be resentful of his/her attempts to help.
4. Adolescence : learners continue to express themselves independently, but may be aware of gaps in their knowledge, and start to turn back to the knower.
5. Independence : learners can continue their learning independently. They no longer need the knower, and may start to act as counsellors for less advanced students.

Alan Maley (2) criticises CLL as being one of several humanistic approaches to emerge in the 70s which evolved separately from mainstream language teaching and which all imposed their own “fairly rigidly-prescriptive” method. Not everyone agrees - Earl Stevick (3) suggests that while there may have been a certain resistance to adaptation of the method at the outset "the followers of Curran were never inhibited from devising their own techniques withing the Counseling-Learning Approach." Stevick himself (1) talks of incorporating Suggestopaedic concert readings (4) into his CLL lessons, and virtually any writer on the method will describe a "typical" lesson as including features which are slightly different from the outline I've given here.

If a certain amount of flexibility is possible, is it also possible to incorporate CLL into your courses as just one technique amongst many which you use ? The answer to this will probably depend on your teaching situation :

At complete beginner level, the group needs to be fairly small or the students spend the whole time just waiting for others to record their utterances. Jo Bertrand (5) discusses the possibility of dividing large classes into groups and having them work simultaneously, but it is hard to see how this would be possible (without the presence of a second or third knower in the class) until the students have reached at least the “separate existence” stage.
If you teach students whose language you don’t understand, again the method will not be possible at beginner level.
How much time do you have to spend? CLL isn’t something that can be fitted into a lesson as a “filler”. Each session will involve at least an hour’s work, though this might be split between two lessons. And in my experience, it’s not something that works well the first time you do it – or for that matter the second or the third. It’s a method which involves the students in making their own choices about how to learn, evaluating their success, trying out something different, reflecting on that … and so on. It’s not until they’ve been through several sessions that things really start to work.

And obviously, if you want to use the method as it was intended to be used, you will need some knowledge of counselling. While there is nothing in the conversation stage of the lesson that precludes it being used as a technique in a far more teacher-guided class, bear in mind that if you intervene in a more "authoritative" way without being asked for help – for instance, by deciding who will speak and what they’ll talk about in stage one, or by giving unsolicited explanations and deciding what to practice in stage two – you are no longer using CLL.

In Part Two of this article, I’ll describe how I used CLL as a component of one particular course, what it meant to adopt a counselling rather than a teaching role, and the stages the learners went through as they “learnt how to learn”

Notes

1. Earl Stevick, A Way and Ways, Heinle and Heinle 1980. (Probably the best introduction to CLL, it contains two sections describing in detail a CLL course and the role of the teacher.)

2. Alan Maley : Community Language Learning

3. Earl Stevick, Humanism in Language Teaching, OUP 1990

4. You can hear Sue talking about both CLL and Suggestopaedia, as well as TPR, in the podcast interview Integrating Various Methodologies into the Classroom on ESL Teacher Talk

5. Jo Bertrand : Community Language Learning

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by SusanNYC via flickr

Teaching Young Learners : What Makes for Good Practice?

2007-02-18T14:09:00.000+01:00

Do you have trouble keeping your younger learners concentrated? Do they seem to get bored in your lessons? In this article Mark looks at what children enjoy and suggests some ways of making the lessons more fun and involving.

Mark lives and teaches in Japan, and also runs the site Mes-English.com where you'll find free flashcards, worksheets, lesson plans, games - and a host of other resources.

Aside from teaching have you ever played with children? I'm sure you have. We all have horsed around with nieces, nephews, your own children, friends children, etc. When you've made them laugh, what's the next thing the child says?

"Do it again."

This is an extremely powerful tool. When children are having fun or if they find something amusing, they will do whatever it is again and again and again. It's amazing. Not only will they want you to do it again then, but the next time you see them, they'll ask you, "Do that thing again." (Problem is you have to remember what it was.) In designing lessons plans this can be a key point for game/activity selection and/or creation, as well as presentation. If the students find something amusing they will want to do it over and over again (just ask Nintendo.)

The problem is other than tossing them around, tickling them, physically harming yourself, what do they like?

Funny sounds: If you are drilling, try raising your voice 7 octaves at the end and have the students model, sing the word, whisper the word, shout the word, dance to the word, what ever sells.
Funny words: Don't be afraid to make up words or combine words to make non-sense. Children do this and love it. Tell them you want an elephant-pencil. "An elephant-pencil? No, no a monkey-pencil! No, no. A ROCKET-pencil." "A pocket-pencil? What's that?" Children will jump in and start talking!
Physical comedy: Unfortunately this could mean physically harming yourself, but the pros just pretend. I do a lot of street side performance type material that really gets kids laughing and on my side. For example when I meet a child for the first time I may go to shake their hand, miss and run right into them. Then, do it again. And again. And again, until eventually I just deem that there must be something wrong with the childs hand and make him/her shake hands with another child just to verify that his hand actually works and repeat.

So, what makes for good practice? Is it clown type humor? Physical humor? Goofing off? I think the fun needs to be structural and can be any, all, or none of those. If you can plan a lesson that is structurally fun, not necessarily contextually fun, you'll find the lesson successful. That applies to the attitude of the teacher, the presentation of the material, and the execution. Interestingly enough, not necessarily the child or the material. When the activities are interesting in and of themselves, then the class is structurally fun. In that case the content doesn't necessarily have to be.

The answer is have fun on the way - or charm. Don't be afraid to digress a bit. Listen to Ken's story about his beetle in the middle of class. Don't be afraid to run into a wall (pretend to run into a wall) when Ken won't stop. Break into song. Pretend you're a bus driver swerving away from a deer if you're teaching them "I want to be a bus driver." Children (people for that matter) want to be led, not dragged.

When I design a game or activity the bulk of the burden lies in "how am I going to sell this activity?" How am I going to get the students to say the target language 100 times and come back and do it again next class? Usually, the answer is keep it simple. Some of the best and most popular games are the most simple; Checkers, Scrabble, Tic-Tac-Toe, Tag, Hang-man, Dodge-ball, Chutes and Ladders... When you are choosing or designing an activity or game please keep that in mind. You can always go back and add more later. But, not if it fails the first time. Also, ask yourself if the activity is interesting. It doesn't have to be a circus all the time but if it's not interesting, it's... boring. Is the information students are gathering / discussing/ learning about interesting to them? There is a time for learning for learning's sake but if it's always merely constructive for learning, you're going to have a hard time motivating some of the students.

Each teacher is different and teaching styles need to match the teacher. I can go on and on with endless examples of things that work for me, but those are things that work for me. You need to find some things that work for you. If you have the resources, spend time with children. Don't try to teach them, try to learn from them. See what things children like to do with you or what things you do they find interesting. Then apply those to your teaching methodology to make learning fun and effective.

Watch other teachers, parents, anyone and see what things work for them when they are around children. If you simply try to copy someone else you'll generally find yourself flat on your face. Don't try to mimic, but think about how you can incorporate similar things that will work for you. If you can learn from others and build yourself, you'll find yourself in a very powerful position.

Above all, have fun yourself and teach hard!

Happy teaching,
Mark

Notes

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Genki David via flickr

Further Reading ...

Colloquial English : Body Idioms

2007-02-17T15:09:00.000+01:00

This next article in our Language Snippets section looks at another group of English idioms. Like the previous articles in the series, it outlines an activity which you could use as a filler with more advanced classes.

A lot of English idioms are based on parts of the body. Here are some examples :

It cost an arm and a leg : It was very expensive.
They don’t see eye to eye : They don’t agree with each other
She’s got a nose for a bargain : She’s very good at finding ......
I was on my knees by the end of the day : I was very tired

There's no elbow-room : There isn't enough space

We did it by the skin of our teeth : We only just succeeded, we almost failed
He doesn’t have a leg to stand on : There’s no justification for what he did or says
I really put my foot in it : I said something by mistake that I shouldn’t have said
She gave him the cold shoulder : She rejected him; she ignored him.
He’s pulling your leg : He’s pretending something is true when it isn’t, as a joke
The car is on its last legs : It’s old and will soon be unusable
He welcomed us with open arms : He was very pleased to accept our help.
We soon lost heart: We became demotivated

.... and there are many more. Here’s one way you might present these in the classroom with a group of upper intermediate or advanced students.

Create a worksheet with a diagram of the human body (or a photo of a person) in the middle. Choose eight or nine idioms you want to teach and type them around it, but with the body words gapped. Make sure the context makes the meaning fairly clear. A line connects each idiom with the relevant part of the body in the diagram. If you think extra clarification is necessary, add the first letter of each word – this will help students distinguish between mouth and teeth, for example.
The students read the idioms, look at the diagram and try and work out the missing words. While they work, put a list of the meanings of the idioms on the board. Students then match them, and write the meanings in the spaces under the sentences. They could then highlight the idioms themselves to make them stand out.

Another Day in the Life of ...: Teaching in Bangkok, Thailand

2007-02-16T10:28:00.000+01:00

Barry O’Leary taught in Bangkok for seven months. Despite slaving away for the ‘Sister from Hell’, he will always remember the joys of teaching Thai kids.

6. 45 am. Where am I? Bangkok. What day is it? Tuesday, better get up. After breakfast in my flat provided by the school, I walk in. It’s only two minutes away.

As I turn the corner of my road I see the familiar traffic jam of parents dropping the kids off. I stop at the front gate to greet a fellow teacher. I place my hands together under my chin and bow.
‘Saawat dee Krap’ I’m finally comfortable with the ‘wai’ used to greet people. I sign in and then wait in the playground with the kids.
‘Do we have swimming today Mr Barry?’
‘Yes Nam, don’t worry.’ The rest of the kids cheer. Swimming is the highlight of their week. I catch up with the other teachers and we wait for the kids to sing the national anthem and then walk to class, ensuring the kids are well behaved for when they walk past the head sister. She stands at the top of the stairs, dressed in white like an angel, but she’s far from that. The kids bow as they go past her, more in fear than anything else.

I am free for one hour so I prepare my day. Sister is keen on everyone being up to date with lesson plans, which are vital for student development. Today I’m only teaching three hours, but during the week I have 22 contact hours which includes swimming and dance lessons. Today is Maths, Swimming and Art. I’m teaching English through subjects rather than direct English.

As I enter the class the students stand up to greet me. Now normally two things happen - if the Thai teacher is in the room they sit down and listen to me, if not then a riot can start. Luckily Miss Nitaya is there so they behave moderately and my lesson goes to plan.

Everyday I take the kids down to the dining hall with the other 3,000 students and make sure they finish their lunch before they head out to sweat their food away in the playground. You can imagine the noise in there with so many kids. Luckily there is a separate room for the teachers where I eat my meal, provided by the school. Today is phad thai, my favourite. To take away the spice I have an ice-cream whilst keeping an eye on the kids and stopping the occasional ninja fight amongst the boys. Now it’s back up for the afternoon.

Swimming as usual starts well. I co-ordinate the kids with another teacher and they practise various styles. Now games. This normally results in me dragging round ten kids on my back as they try to drown me. All good fun though.

At 4.45pm I’m free to go, a long day. In the evening I play football with the locals in a sports centre and then eat with other teachers in one of the many local restaurants. After chilling in my flat playing my guitar or reading, I’m asleep under my mosquito net at 11pm ready for another early start the next day.

Learning Students' Names

2007-02-12T21:28:00.000+01:00

At the beginning of the course you need to learn students’ names as soon as possible. Using names to call on students creates a more personal and involving atmosphere in the class, and also allows you to monitor progress much more effectively. The students should know each others’ names too. How can you achieve this quickly and easily? If you have very small classes there’s no problem, but with average to large numbers it becomes more difficult. Here are some ideas for average size classes (5-15 students) :

Before the first lesson, familiarise yourself with the names on the register. That way you don’t have to learn the names when you go into the class – you just have to connect them with the faces. If you’re a new teacher in a country where you don’t know the language, ask a colleague to explain the correct pronunciation to you before the class, and write it in phonemic script. The evening after the lesson, and every day before the next, go through the names again and try to remember the faces.
At the beginning of the first lesson, as all the students to write their names in large letters and felt tip pen on a “name tent” – piece of A4 paper folded in three - and to put it in front of them for the first few lessons. Each time you call on a student, make a point of using their name. Keep the name tents and redistribute them at the beginning of every lesson until you're sure you know students' names.
With beginners, teach Hello, my name’s …. immediately and in the first lesson play a circle game with a bean bag or sponge ball – student A says My name’s Michelle and throws the ball to another student who says Hello Michelle, my name’s Sergei.
In later lessons with beginners’ classes, the name tents can be used to present the interrogative and practise the negative of the verb BE.
a) For the interrogative, collect in the name tents and then redistribute them asking (wrongly) Is your name Michelle? The student replies No, my name’s Sergei. After four or five questions ask the students what you said (if you can’t or don’t want to use the L1, put on the board ---------- ----------- ---------- Michelle? And use gesture to show that you want them to tell you the missing words.) Once they’ve understood the SV inversion in the question, set up a chain drill. Give student A a name tent. S/he asks student B Is your name XXX? Student B replies No, my name’s YYY, then takes the name tent and asks student C. This continues until student G says Yes, my name’s XXX. The teacher then gives student G the next name tent and the chain drill continues.
b) To practise the negative, the lesson after it has been presented, start by distributing the name tents incorrectly. Each student corrects you saying Sorry, my name isn’t XXX. It’s YYY. and gets the correct name tent.
With intermediate + classes you can use more complex activities. For example :
a) right at the beginning of the class, introduce yourself and then ask the students to stand up and arrange themselves in alphabetical order (of first name if that’s what they’re going to be using in the class). To do this they obviously have to ask each other their names. The line then forms into a circle so that the first and last people in the line are next to each other. Ask the students to memorise the names of the people on each side of them. Later on in the lesson, in a break between activities, ask each student to indicate the two students who were next to them and to say their names.
b) ask the students to sit in a circle. Each student introduces her/himself and gives one interesting piece of information about himself. The next student repeats the name of the first, and the interesting fact, and then adds their own introduction : You’re Sergei and you once rode a camel in the desert. I’m Michelle and I have ten cats. Student three repeats the names and information of the first two before adding his/her own, and so on. The last person in the chain is the teacher, who repeats the names and information for the whole class.
For more advanced students, ask them their names and then list vertically on the board the initial of each name – S, M etc. Give students five minutes in pairs to brainstorm every adjective they can think of beginning with those letters – if possible give each pair a dictionary to consult. While they’re working think of a few positive ones yourself. Elicit their suggestions, and add your own if necessary. At the end, ask each student to choose one adjective beginning with the same letter as their name to describe themselves : Stupendous Sergei, Magnetic Michelle and so on. They can then write this on their name tents.

One to One : Content and Methodology

2007-02-11T20:03:00.000+01:00

Teachers are often justifiably nervous about taking on a one-to-one lesson. There is the feeling that it should be somehow “different” from a group lesson, and the fear that it will be much more demanding. So, how does the course content and methodology that you use in a one-to-one course differ from that of a group course? Should it differ at all?

At elementary and intermediate levels I think students need to follow a set programme, in order to provide a complete syllabus and a coherent course. If you are a beginner, it doesn’t matter how specific your needs are – you still need to learn the verb to be and then the other basic structures of the language, and you still need to do lots of practice exercises. This may be an ordinary coursebook, and/or an on-line course, presuming that there is a computer in the room where you are teaching. Including an on-line course in the programme gives you the chance to provide a change of focus during the lesson – particularly useful if you are with the student for any length of time, as you might be for example on an intensive one-to-one course. One which I’ve built into several intermediate level courses as supplementary material is Ten Days in Manchester from the BBC’s Learning English site.

Beginners also need to do all the things that they would do if they were working in a group. Teachers are often frightened, for example, of asking students to repeat phrases, to read or do written exercises in a private lesson. Don't be – they need repetition work as much as any other student and, especially if they're not doing homework, they also need written consolidation. Sometimes they benefit from working on an exercise with the teacher watching them as they write the answers and confirming or helping as they go along. At other times, however, they need to work independently. I always take an article to read or some marking to do while they work – so that they don’t feel I’m hovering and observing all the time. But they also need to know that they are my priority – as soon as they finish (or if they get stuck) they tell me and my attention switches back to them.

What about other aspects of methodology ? One commonly expressed misconception about one-to-one teaching is that “You can’t do pairwork!”. You can, and you should. Otherwise, the student will never have the chance to try out the language she needs to use in the real situation in roleplay and simulation activities. It's just that you have to be the other member of the pair! This obviously means that you can't monitor at the same time, but try taping the activity. You can then play back the conversation, the student can try to correct his/her own mistakes or reformulate the things s/he had difficulty with. Some pairwork activities can also be adapted to become individual activities in the one to one situation. For example a spot the difference activity with pictures, intended to be done with one student having each picture and describing it to his/her partner, can be done by letting the student see the first picture for ten seconds, then turning it over and showing him/her the second. The student then has to list, from memory, the differences. As the student is monologuing, the teacher is free to take notes as s/he listens.

Although I said above that I would generally want to follow a set course, the advantage of 1-to-1 is that you can also focus on things which are particularly relevant to the student. For example, with one beginner, I taught the simple past form of verbs (affirmative only) very early on. We then started each lesson with her telling me the things she had done in the preceding days. Because she was saying things like I went to a meeting about ... I had a problem with... the specific vocabulary she needed for her work came up almost from the beginning - which it wouldn't have done if we'd just ploughed through a standard beginners’ course. At this level, this often means using reformulation to help the student express his/her ideas. S/he tells the teacher what s/he wants to say (either in inaccurate English or in the L1), and the teacher restates it in correct English. If you do this keep two things in mind :

Firstly, simplify the phrase so that it can be expressed within the student’s current competence – for example. If the student wants to say I’ve known him since 1978 but hasn’t yet met the present perfect, rephrase the sentence as I met him in 1978.
Secondly, remember that if you say the correct form and the student just says “yes!”, she won’t learn anything. Always get him/her to repeat it. I also write it down in the L1 or in abbreviated form I - meet - my husband - 1978 and at the end of the lesson ask him/her to remember what they wanted to say and to say it again.At higher levels the course can be made far more specific by working on authentic materials based on the student's own interests - which may be professional or personal. One good source of listening material for example is Words in the News from the BBC Learning English site mentioned above. This covers a range of topics and comes complete with lesson plans. However, bear in mind that developing tailor-made materials is much more time consuming in terms of preparation than working on a coursebook, and if you’re setting your own fees, you need to factor this into the course price. You need not only to develop a unit around the material, but also to find it in the first place.

If you want to provide tailor made courses, where can you get your materials? At the moment, for example, I have one person responsible for energy issues - we're working on EU and other documents concerning initiatives on pollution (provided by the student or from the Net), as well as documentaries and news items from the BBC. Another, who I have been working with for about ten years now, has had two jobs in that time – both in local government but one concerned with vocational training and another with social services. Over the years we’ve worked on documents from British local government bodies, and documentaries and news items from the media.

Tailor-made courses don’t always have to focus on a student’s professional interests however. At the moment I am working with one person who is suffering from professional burn out and has asked to drop the job-oriented texts. He’s currently taking a high level sailing licence, so we're working on a diary of a round-the-world race, again from the net. In each case I divide the text into sections, and then turn it into a "unit" with pre-text discussion activities, general and detailed comprehension tasks, vocabulary study etc. As he wants to improve his listening skills, I again use short clips of video from BBC World which I work on in much the same way (we’ve just looked at a news item on the London Boat show).

Of course, you don’t always have to provide such detailed materials to personalise a one-to one course, and if you’re not being paid enough to make it worthwhile, you might decide mainly to follow a published course but occasionally to personalise without developing too many materials. For example, as Keith Taylor pointed out in his article on using DVD and video, you don’t always have to exploit the text in video material. Had my student been at a lower level, I might simply have asked him to watch the video without sound and to say what he thought it was about, before asking him to describe the last boat show he attended in his own country. Preparation time in this case would have been limited solely to the time necessary to find the material.

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by septuagesima via flickr

Practising Questions : Lateral Thinking Problems

2007-02-10T12:12:00.000+01:00

Lateral Thinking puzzles were first invented by the psychologist Dr Edward de Bono (1). They consist of a simple situation which at first sight seems strange, but actually has a very simple explanation, and were intended to encourage creative (or “lateral”) thinking. You tell the students the situation and they can then ask Yes/No questions about it until they understand what happened. In particular, it’s a great way of practising simple past and past continuous questions, but at a higher level students also have the chance to incorporate and practise the past perfect and other structures. Here are two such situations :

1. A man was lying dead in a field with a bag beside him. How did he die?
2. A woman walked into a bar and asked for a glass of water. The barman pulled out a gun and pointed it at her. The woman said “Thank you” and left. Why?

(Answers later!)

The sort of questions that the students might ask include (for the first situation) : Was there anything in the bag? (Yes) Did the thing in the bag kill him? (No, but it didn't save him either) Was it a snake? (No) Was the man carrying the bag when he came into the field? (Yes) Did he walk into the field? (No) Did he arrive by car? (No) Was there anyone else in the field? (No) Did somebody shoot him? (No) Was he alive when he first came into the field? (Only for a fraction of a second) and so on. As you can see, it’s not always necessary (or possible) to answer only Yes or No. Students do sometimes need a bit more help if the activity is to stay pacy. The important thing is that you don’t answer “give-away” questions like What was in the bag?

The problem with this activity is that after asking a few “obvious” questions, the students tend to dry up, and the whole point of these puzzles is that they don’t have obvious answers. The activity therefore has to be set up carefully so that students understand what they have to do.

Here’s the activity sequence which I use in the classroom.

Stage A : Explain the first situation above and the activity, and let students ask whatever questions they come up with.
Stage B : Tell them they’re going to hear a tape of two native speakers playing the same game- you can script this yourself and record it with a colleague. They should listen and find out what the answer is.
Stage C : In pairs, they try and remember and write down some of the questions that were asked on the tape. When they’ve done all they remember, replay the tape pausing after each question to ask and write on the board what the speaker said.
Stage D : Explain the second situation above. In pairs they have a few minutes to plan four or five questions to ask. While they work, the teacher circulates, correcting and helping as necessary but not answering the questions.
Stage E : The students ask the questions. If you have a large class, they can be divided into groups and one student in each group given the answer. With smaller classes it can be done in teacher/class format.
Stage F : When they run out of questions, ask them to recap on everything they’ve learnt so far before putting them back into pairs and asking them to write some more questions. If they seem really stuck, give them a clue – for instance, the woman wanted the water because she had a problem. This immediately gives them a new direction for their questions.

The activity goes on until either they guess the answer, or they seem to have had enough. If that happens, the teacher can give one or two more obvious clues so that within a couple of questions, they’ve solved it.

Oh yes – the answers. In the first situation, the man jumped out of a plane but his parachute didn’t open, and in the second, the woman had hiccups.

Notes

1. Dr de Bono’s personal website can be found here : http://www.edwarddebono.com/Default.php

2. For some more examples of lateral thinking problems (and their answers!), try here : http://www.increasebrainpower.com/brainteasersriddles.html

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Material Girl via flickr

Teaching Listening : Top Down or Bottom Up?

2007-02-09T11:33:00.000+01:00

In a previous article, I made a distinction between teaching listening and practising listening. Practising listening is just a matter of giving students constant and frequent exposure to the language, and presumes that this will gradually increase their familiarity with its sounds, rhythm, intonation etc, allowing easier decoding. An approach aimed at teaching listening, on the other hand, starts from the premise that the students’ comprehension is blocked by specific features of the language or listening process, and that in our lessons we can focus on those features one at a time and improve the students’ ability to deal with them. We looked in detail at what some of those features might be in the article Why Don’t They Understand? If we are teaching, rather than just practising listening, the focus on these features will form the objectives of our listening lesson.

In recent years there have been two major approaches to explaining the listening process – rather unfortunately called the top-down and bottom-up approaches. The bottom-up approach sees comprehension as a matter of listeners first decoding (or understanding) the smallest elements of what they hear – the sounds. /p/ is recognised as being /p/ and not /b/, /i:/ as being /i:/ and not /i/ or /e/ and so on. These sounds are then combined and the individual words are decoded – the listener recognises that s/he has heard /pi:t/ and not /pit/ /bit/ /bi:t/ /bi:d/ or some other word. The words are then combined into sentences and the listener works out the meaning of /pi:t/ : as in I saw Pete yesterday or I bought some peat for the garden. To this will be added recognition of features such as intonation and so on, until we finally reach the non-linguistic context.

The top-down approach starts from the opposite end : it sees understanding as starting from the listener’s background knowledge of the non-linguistic context and of working down towards the individual sounds. Listeners will actively interpret what they hear in terms of their understanding of the situation and the world in general. For example, imagine I tell you :

McKenzy brought me another present today. It was too late to save it so I buried it in the garden. I think I’m going to have to put a bell round his neck.

You will certainly understand all the words in this passage, but do you understand the meaning? Think back to what happened as you read. The first sentence probably went quite smoothly. But there was more than just decoding of words going on. Without your even being aware of it, subconscious expectations were forming in your mind based on your knowledge of the world – McKenzy is probably a friend, probably a man as only the surname is used, the present will be something nice etc. The existence of these presuppositions is shown by the fact that you probably did a double-take when you got to the second sentence – buried it? Eh?? And at that point you will have started to search quite consciously for the meaning.

Maybe by the end you’d worked it out. If so, then notice that it was your knowledge of the world which helped you understand – not what’s in the text. Or maybe you’re still in the dark. I can help you by giving you some contextual or situational knowledge : McKenzy is the name of my cat. Combine that with your knowledge of the world (the habit cats have of bringing their owners “presents” of half dead birds and mice which they’ve caught, and the fact that the noise of a bell will prevent the cat from creeping up on them unheard) and you have the meaning of the passage.

However much help you did or didn’t need, you can see that in understanding the passage a lot more was going on than just passively decoding the sounds (or in this case letters, as you were reading it - but the principle is the same) then the words, then the sentences. Your mind was working actively to interpret the passage, and using a large amount of non-textual information to do so. And how easy it was will depend on how close to the forefront of your mind that information was. If, as you read the passage, your cat was sitting on your lap, you probably tuned in immediately. If you have never owned a cat, it may have taken longer.

In recent years it has been the chief approach to listening comprehension in the EFL classroom, and has led to teachers telling students things such as You don’t need to understand every word, What would you expect him to say? or Try and identify the main ideas and guess the rest.

I’m not trying to suggest that this is not a valid approach. It is. The switch to a top-down approach was a necessary change from the exaggerated bottom-up approach which in some cases remained current in foreign language teaching as late as the 1960s. In this approach, the learner’s listening ability was seen as being evidenced by his or her ability to take down a dictated paragraph in exactly the same form as it was read out, or to answer detailed comprehension questions on a written passage read by the teacher. With no exposure to the natural features of spoken language, and with no training in the type of listening strategies emphasised in the top-down approach, it was little wonder that even supposedly advanced level students returned from their first trip to Britain, the States etc saying I didn’t understand a word anyone said!

Since the mid-20th century, things have changed. The advent of the tape recorder meant that recorded dialogues could be used in the classroom for the first time. Research into the spoken language and the invention of video as well as audio tape led to the use of authentic and semi-authentic materials which incorporated the type of features of the spoken language which I focused on in Why Don’t They Understand? And finally, research into the listening process itself led to our recognition of the importance of top-down processing.

But have we gone too far? Students still come back from their trips saying I didn’t understand a word and still frequently hate doing listening comprehension in the classroom. However often the teacher says If you’ve been able to answer the questions then you’ve understood the text, they don’t really believe it. They know there were chunks that they were unable to decode, and feel insecure – in the worst case scenario losing confidence in the teacher or the course.

Why is this happening? I would suggest that for a while we went too far over to the other extreme, and have often forgotten that, even if they start from the top, students still need to get to the bottom. Listening lessons have tended to stop half-way. We help students apply knowledge of the world and contextual knowledge to the text. We encourage them to focus on what they do understand rather than what they don’t by teaching them to focus on key words and infer connections. All this is valid and necessary. But what about the rest? I would argue that if we are going to help students improve their comprehension, we do need to focus on what they don’t understand. For example, if the item that blocked comprehension was a weak form we need to help them analyse the pronunciation features so that they will be more ready for it the next time. For while it is true that native speakers don’t “hear” every word either, there’s a difference. If, as a native speaker I hear a sequence of sounds something like umgernaseeyimlader or eelerbinsurprised, I have no trouble decoding those sentences as I’m going to see him later and He’ll have been surprised, even though I can’t be said, for example, to have heard the words to, will or have – they simply weren’t there. But as a native speaker I have a non-conscious knowledge of both the phonological features and the grammar of the language. The first, for example, means that I expect him to be pronounced /im/, and know that if /im/ is preceeded by a vowel, the linking consonant /j/ will be inserted. So when I hear what is apparently “yim”, I have no problem decoding it as him. Decoding “er” (the schwa sound) as have is also a matter of knowing that have is often pronounced like this in a unstressed position, but it is also helped by my knowledge of grammar : I know that if I’ve decoded will and been, then have must be in the middle, whether I hear it or not.

Non-consciously then, my native-speaker brain is working actively to interpret the sounds and to give them a meaning. It’s a bit like the picture above. What do you see? A face? Rubbish – it’s just two circles, a straight line and a curved line. Totally unconnected. But your brain puts them together and tries to make sense of them. Because it’s seen a lot of faces and knows that they have to have those elements, that’s what it sees. It’s the same with listening - the words don't have to "be there" for the competent listener to "hear" them.

The problem for our learners of course is that they don’t have native speaker competence and therefore their brains can’t “fill in the gaps” like this. Which is why, using the top-down approach, we need to help them develop other listening strategies to the full, to help them to compensate. However, by also taking a bottom-up approach, I think we can help them improve their ability to decode sounds , words and phrases

I’ll exemplify this in the next article in this series by looking at a possible structure for a listening lesson which incorporates both approaches. It starts with a top-down approach, but then moves on to activities aimed at improving students ability to decode sounds, words and phrases “bottom-up”.

Further Reading ....

ESL Exams: A Teacher's Guide

2007-02-05T17:10:00.000+01:00

If they intend to study or work using English, or sometimes just for their own personal satisfaction, students often want to take some sort of internationally accredited exam. But which one? Keith Taylor takes a look at some of the exams on offer.

It's the end of another class, and one student has stayed behind. No problem, you think, maybe an easy grammar question, or a comment on how they enjoyed the class (or not!)... or maybe it's a question about an ESL exam. "What's the difference between TOEFL and TOEIC?" "Should I take the FCE?" "Who recognizes IELTS?" So if you don’t know your BEC from your KET, or your CAE from your CELS, here's a brief guide to the most popular ESL exams.

ESL exams fall broadly into three main categories: General English, Business English and Academic English.

General English

Probably the most popular in this category are the Cambridge ESOL exams. One and a half million people in 135 countries take Cambridge exams every year. There are five General English exams, sometimes referred to as the "Cambridge Main Suite."

The first two levels are the KET (Key English Test) and the PET (Preliminary English Test). The KET and PET have reading and writing, listening, and speaking components, and are most often used to assess progress or to prepare for the next exam in the series. The PET is also recognized by some employers and universities. KET and PET have two pass grades, Pass with merit and Pass.

Next up from the PET is the FCE (First Certificate in English). The FCE has five sections, reading, writing, use of English, listening and speaking. It is widely recognized by employers and educational institutions and so is very popular with students who want to study or work abroad.

Many universities and employers, however, prefer the CAE (Certificate in Advanced English), which is the next level up. This exam shows that a student is capable of following a university course or can function in a range of business contexts.

After the CAE comes the CPE (Certificate of Proficiency in English), the highest level in the series. Students who pass this exam have the ability to function effectively in almost every English speaking context. The CPE is also a typical requirement for non-native speakers who want to train as English teachers. Students typically need 3 years of study after passing the FCE to reach this level (depending, of course, on how often they study and other factors).

FCE, CAE and CPE have five grades, A-E, of which A-C are passes.

Cambridge also has a series of General English exams for Young Learners aged between 7 and 12 (YLE). There are three exams in the series, Starters, Movers and Flyers. They are taken mainly as a means of measuring progress, and also as preparation for the KET and PET. There is no pass or fail - students are awarded up to five "shields" for each component (reading and writing, listening, speaking).

Other General English exams

Cambridge also offers CELS (Certificates in English Language Skills). These are individual exams in each of the four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking). Students can choose which of the exams they want to take, according to their strengths and requirements.

Pitman, part of the British City and Guilds Group, is another examining body with a series of General English exams. The International ESOL covers listening, reading and writing, and the International Spoken ESOL is a one to one structured interview. Both have six levels, from basic to advanced.

Business English

Every year four and a half million people take the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), run by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The TOEIC is a multiple choice exam in two sections, listening and reading, each scored out of 445, giving a total of 990. Many companies and government agencies use TOEIC as a criterion for recruiting or promoting staff, or for sending staff abroad. Some universities also use TOEIC, requiring their business school students to achieve a particular score prior to graduation, for example.

Cambridge also has a series of business exams called the BEC (Business English Certificate). BEC comes in three levels, Preliminary, Vantage and Higher. The types of exam task are similar to those in the Cambridge Main Suite, but test language ability in a business context. They are recognized by many employers worldwide, and students take them to demonstrate language skills required for international business. There are two pass grades for BEC, Pass with merit and Pass.

Other Business English exams

Cambridge offers BULATS (The Business Language Testing Service). BULATS is designed specifically for companies and organizations to test the language ability of employees who need English in their work, and for students and employees on language and business courses.

Pitman has a three-level series of exams called English for Business Communications, which tests business writing ability, and English for Office Skills, a two-level series designed to test the ability to carry out office-related tasks where accuracy in writing and following instructions is important.

Academic English

A common question from students is "What's the difference between TOEIC and TOEFL?" Well, both are run by ETS, but whereas TOEIC evaluates language skills for the workplace, TOEFL evaluates language skills in an academic context. It is therefore used primarily as a prerequisite for admission to universities and colleges. More than 5000 colleges and universities in 90 countries recognize the exam. During 2005 and 2006, TOEFL is phasing in a new internet-based test (iBT), which will replace the current computer-based and paper-based exams. The iBT has 4 sections, reading, listening, speaking and writing, each with a score of 30, giving a total score of 120. This is likely to cause some confusion for a while, as most students and universities are used to working with the paper-based total of 677, or the computer-based total of 300!

Cambridge also has an academic exam, the IELTS (International English Language Testing System), which they jointly manage with the British Council and IDP:IELTS Australia. IELTS is recognized by universities and colleges, as well as employers, immigration authorities and professional bodies. The exam has listening, reading, writing and speaking components. For the reading and writing, students can choose between an academic and a general option. IELTS is scored on a scale of 1-9.

Comparing levels

One of the most common questions from students is how exams in the different categories compare to each other. Is the FCE equivalent to one of the BEC exams? If I have the CAE, what TOEFL score can I expect? Luckily, we have a reference guide to help us here, called the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages" (CEF). The CEF divides language learners into six levels, and enables us to compare all the ESL exams according to these levels.

The six levels are A1 (Breakthrough), A2 (Waystage), B1 (Threshold), B2 (Vantage), C1 (Effective Operational Proficiency), and C2 (Mastery).

Here's a quick comparison of exams at the different levels. Bear in mind that this is a general guide only -- students' scores in different exams will of course depend on many factors, such as preparation time and motivation!

A1: YLE Movers, Pitman ESOL Basic, IELTS score 1-2.
A2: KET, YLE Flyers, Pitman ESOL Elementary, TOEIC score 246-380, TOEFL iBT score 32-42, IELTS score 3.
B1: PET, TOEIC score 381-540, BEC Preliminary, TOEFL iBT score 43-61, IELTS score 3.5-4.5.
B2: FCE, Pitman ESOL Intermediate, TOEIC score 541-700, BEC Vantage, TOEFL iBT score 62-91, IELTS score 5-6.
C1: CAE, Pitman ESOL Higher Intermediate, TOEIC score 701-910, BEC Higher, TOEFL iBT score 92-112, IELTS score 6.5-7.
C2: CPE, Pitman ESOL Advanced, TOEIC score 911-990, TOEFL iBT score 113-120, IELTS score 7.5-9.

There is of course much more information about these exams on the Cambridge ESOL, TOEIC, TOEFL and Pitman websites -- you will find the links at this ESL exams resource.

Keith Taylor is the founder of http://www.eslbase.com, providing free resources, information and advice for TEFL teachers, as well as the latest job opportunities and a directory of TEFL courses worldwide. He also maintains the eslbase language exchange, an easy way to practise any language online.
TEFL jobs, TEFL courses and ESL resources from eslbase.com

Acknowledgements

Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by sashamd via flickr

Further Reading ...

Practising Listening

2007-02-02T16:17:00.000+01:00

There are two possible approaches to dealing with listening in the classroom. The first, which I’ll call practising listening, is based on the idea that if students are constantly exposed to the spoken language, their comprehension will naturally, though gradually, improve. The second – let’s call it teaching listening - suggests that we need to take a more active approach to improving listening abilities, by focusing on the specific problems that the students have and planning listening activities which will help to resolve them.

When we think about a “listening lesson” we are probably thinking of the second approach. What your objectives are for this type of lesson, how it should be staged and what activity types you should use, will be the topic of another article. Here, however, I’d like to look in detail at the first type of activity : practising listening.

Every time the teacher speaks in English in the classroom - whether to give instructions, to explain a grammar point, or just to chat as the class starts to arrive - the students are in effect practising listening. This opportunity for constant exposure to the spoken language is one of the main arguments for using English rather than the L1 in the classroom - although, as the article Teacher Talking Time : Part One discussed, there may also be arguments against it.

Teacher talk may also be built into the lesson in a more conscious attempt to provide listening practice, and the third part of the Teacher Talking Time series suggested a number of ways that this can be done. Notice however that in all these activities, the students’ task is simply to listen for the gist of the conversation and to respond in some way. The activities may teach strategies to cope with non-comprehension, such as asking for explanation, but do not attempt to improve the students’ comprehension itself. It is the exposure in its own right which is seen as valuable.

Teacher Talk Listenings tend to be quite short, and are often broken up into even shorter chunks – as in interactive story-telling (described in TTT3) or TPR - described in the article Receptive Practice Activities. What about using longer stretches of recorded material for listening practice?

One of the problems here is time – with course time limited and a full syllabus to get through, we often don’t have the space for this sort of unfocused practice. It can however be usefully done for homework. I ask my lower level students to buy a simplified reader with an accompanying tape, and my more advanced level students to choose a DVD with an English soundtrack and subtitles, to work on one section at a time as the course progresses. The sections, which may be a chapter or sub-section of the book or a scene from the film, shouldn’t last longer than about two minutes. The students first listen to the tape/soundtrack without reference to the text/subtitles, and try to understand as much as possible. They then repeat the section while at the same time following the text/subtitles to see if their understanding was correct . On the third listening, they pause to check any unknown words or to replay phrases which they found particularly unclear. They then listen to the same section a final time, this time without the text/subtitles, concentrating on “hearing” the words they know are there.

If they are using this technique students must realise that the text is only as an aid to hearing the words. If they understand simply because they have seen the written form, they are not practising listening at all, but reading. The written form is used to give them confidence and to help them relate the sounds they hear to the words they know must be there. They also need to realise that to be successful, this technique has to be used frequently – the whole premise behind the “practising listening” approach is that gradual improvement results from constant exposure.

If there is time, this technique can of course also be used in class. It is, in any case, useful to use it once at the beginning of the course to demonstrate the technique, but it can also be used regularly:

In classes where for some reason you cannot ask students to buy extra material
In classes where you are looking for a fairly relaxed activity to provide variety of focus – perhaps as the day’s final activity in an all-day intensive course, or in a one-to one-lesson where you and the student know each other inside out and are running out of things to talk about.
In any class where listening is a prime objective – whether because of the students’ specific communicative needs, or because it is a major weakness – and you want to dedicate extra time to the skill.

Practising listening does not, however, replace the need to teach listening, which will probably take up most of the time dedicated to listening in the classroom. In the next two articles in this series we’ll look at what a "teaching listening" approach might involve, and the objectives, stages and activities that might be included in a lesson aiming to attack listening problems more explicitly and more actively.

Notes

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Susan NYC via flickr