Teaching Language in Context

In our last blog I talked about my belief in getting students to do most of the work. I believe that by actively engaging them in the material and giving them interesting tasks to complete, they will be more motivated and this will have a positive effect on their learning.

Since then, I have taught on three teacher training courses for European primary and secondary school teachers and have been made aware of how mainstream teaching in many European countries is still largely teacher-led with an emphasis on learning grammatical structures and teaching to the end-of-year test. Many teachers commented that while they had really enjoyed the different activities and they had also changed their perspective with regards their own teaching, implementing a more learner-centred teaching methodology would be difficult within their school due to student/parent expectations and also the constraints of external methods of assessment. They generally felt that parents, students and those in charge at their various schools would put grammar at the top of things to be taught and studied.

I would like to outline 3 activities that went down particularly well among the teachers I worked with. They all essentially have ‘introducing and practising grammar’ at their heart but I have tried to introduce a relevant context into the mix.

1. The Queen, David Cameron or both?

-  Choose 2 people who you think your students would be interested in and would therefore know something about. My group were interested in British culture.

-  Write 5 sentences about each person and jumble them up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a good source of biographical information.

Below are the sentences I used:

            This person has 4 children (B)

            This person became the youngest leader in the UK for 200 years (DC)

            This person's partner is English (DC)

            This person went to a private school (DC)

            This person parachuted from a plane in the opening ceremony for the London             Olympics (QE)

            This person used to ride a bicycle to work (DC)

            This person is the leader of 53 countries (QE)

            This person is a member of the Church of England (B, although you could argue that

            The Queen is the leader)                                           

-  Students work in pairs to decide which sentence goes with which person.

- After checking the answers / discussing surprises, the teacher could focus on any grammatical structures used in the sentences. I tend to focus on present and past tenses and therefore ask students to circle all examples of the present simple and underline all examples of the past simple.

-  Students could then, in groups, choose 2 different people and write 10 jumbled sentences for other groups to guess who they ‘belong’ to.

What do I like about this activity? There is a real information gap – students learn something about people they are (hopefully!) interested in. The activity covers all 4 skills (writing, speaking, listening, reading) and also provides a focus on grammar in context. Students then get the opportunity to use the language in a new, relevant context. This activity is also very student-focussed – the students do the vast majority of the work.

2. True or false?

This activity is a very simple expansion on the traditional ‘3 true sentences, 2 false ones’ activity. The stages are as follows:

-  Dictate (at normal speed) 5 sentences about yourself to the students. You may need to repeat the sentences 3 or 4 times but it is important that you do speak at normal speed. Below are the sentences I used for a ‘grammar-focussed’ lesson

·         I have lived in 7 different countries

·         I have never learnt to drive

·         I have hitch-hiked around Europe

·         I have done a bungee jump for charity

·         I have eaten grasshoppers – they were very crunchy

-  Once you have dictated all the sentences, get the students to compare what they have written in pairs.

-  During whole class feedback, write down the parts of the sentences which students have understood correctly. Mark a gap where what they understood is incorrect but don’t provide the correct answer at this stage.  An example sentence may be: I have ________ _____ 7 different countries or I have _______ in ___ different countries

-  Repeat the sentences for students to get the missing words. If they can’t, the teacher can guide them to the correct answer (what’s the preposition after….? What tense is it? What’s the past participle? etc.)

-  Once the students have 5 correct sentences, you could do some work on pronunciation (which words are stressed in the sentence? Where are the weak forms?)

-  In pairs, students now try to decide which statements are true and which are false about you. They could ask you questions in order to try and find out the answer (although you don’t necessarily have to tell the truth!!). If you don’t want to use personal information in class, you could always use that of a famous person or, alternatively, have 5 sentences about 5 different people in the class. For me, sentences 1, 2 & 5 above are true!

-  After feedback, ask the students to focus on the grammatical structure, underlining examples and checking that they are familiar with both form (has/have + past participle) and, more importantly, function (life experiences).

-  Students then write similar true/false sentences about themselves to discuss in pairs.

And the positive things about this activity? Once again, a variety of skills are covered (writing, listening, speaking, reading & pronunciation). The activity can be modified to focus on different aspects of grammar in a (personalised) context. It is also motivating and interesting for the students – they don’t feel as if they have been in a ‘grammar lesson’ and they also love finding things out about their teacher/each other!

3. Using texts – two-way translation

I use this activity to encourage students to look at different language areas that I want to focus on. The activity focuses on a range of skills and ensures that grammar is noticed and recycled in context. Once again, the focus of the activity is on the student and the teacher’s role is simply to support and facilitate.

-  Choose a text (from your coursebook) that students are familiar with and have previously worked on. This ensures that there are no questions or misunderstandings about content.

-  Choose 2 five-line ‘blocks’ from the text. Ask half the class to work with one of the ‘blocks’ and the other half to work with the other.

-  Students should translate their text into their mother tongue.

-  Students then swap their texts and translate back into English.

-  After this, they compare with the original and ‘notice’ the differences.

To summarise, the activities above all put the context before the grammatical structure. Students are introduced to language without perhaps initially realising that the focus on the activity is language and, through the context, should get a better understanding of how the language is learnt. They also work together and help each other to become independent learners.

Putting the context first means that the language simply becomes a ‘vehicle’ for learning (about) something else, which I feel is how it should be. Also, with the students doing the vast majority of the work in these activities, the teacher is free to listen, monitor and support, which is also how it should be.

What do you think about this approach to language? Would it work within your context?

A Screencast!

This week Dan explains an activity that you can (hopefully!) use with your students.

Your questions and comments are always welcome :) 

Facing The Summer

This blog has two distinct parts – firstly, how the busy UK summer period will affect me as a manager and then, secondly, thinking about different activities I have found useful as a teacher. Starting with the manager bit….

Life is about to get complicated! Here at Anglolang we are heading towards what will be a very busy summer period, with groups arriving from all over Europe and beyond, with a planned stay of anything from 1 week to 11 months! It will be my first summer as Academic Director in the UK and I am not sure what to expect, although I do know it will be somewhat different to my previous DoS experience in Madrid. This lead me to consider what I do expect and what the differences will be.

In the UK, English teaching is a lot more seasonal than it is in Europe. The vast majority of students tend to come to the UK during their holidays. In Spain, students go to class during their lunchtime or in the evening after their day’s work. However, they generally continue their studies for a nine or ten month period and then take a holiday during their holiday time! These differences lead to different learning expectations and different motivations.

 July and August are going to be very busy for us (and therefore for me!). There will be hundreds of students and a hugely increased number of teachers. There will be more classes, more social activities and the need for higher precision planning. I am expecting a summer which will be similar to the Septembers I used to spend in Madrid planning for the next academic year.

I have a long list of things to think about which includes, in no particular order (although the last point probably wins!):

ü  How to make sure that there are enough teachers who are qualified to teach the different groups/students we have (teenagers, teachers, business people, long term exam students, short term ‘holiday’ students, students wanting private classes, students wanting group classes)

ü  How to make sure that I am available to deal with the ‘day-to-day’: to talk to students, talk to teachers,  answer questions, provide exam support and generally be ‘visible’, given that we will have so many more students and teachers in the building

ü  How to not get bogged down with the day-to-day but to still have space in my head to plan, cogitate and keep up with the world of EFL.

ü  How to carry on blogging while doing all of the above!

ü  And, on a personal (and very important) level, how to get home with the necessary enthusiasm for 3 very small children who will be desperate to tell me what they have been doing during their holidays.

It definitely sounds like September in Madrid, with the added complication that the first time is always the most difficult. There are lots of unknowns or things that just don’t occur to you until you have done it once already! Wish me luck!

Now to part 2….

Many teachers reading this blog will be teaching on summer courses, be it on month-long intensive or two-week holiday stints, be it in an academy, a university or on a summer camp. Below I have included a selection of activities that I have used during the summer months (and indeed all-year-round as well). I hope they are useful.

1.   Mnemonics

Get students to write poems using the letters of a word. The word Summer, for example, might produce a poem like this:

Sunny days Under a beach umbrella. My family Madrid in the sun Eating ice cream Reading my favourite book

You could give the students a number of different words to choose from (beach, holiday, going away etc). You could also change the rules so that the different lines of the poem didn’t have to BEGIN with the letters in the original word but simply CONTAIN these letters. For example:

           

Sunny Days] Sitting under my umbrella etc

2. Adapt established games

The Price is Right is a show which, I think, exists in most countries. Contestants have to guess the price of various items they are shown in order to gain prizes. Why not adapt the idea to your classroom? So, if you are teaching international students in the UK, you can ask them to guess the price of various ‘local’ items (10 bananas from the local supermarket, a 3 course meal in the nearest pub). If the students are studying in their own country, how about the cost of a return flight to London/Edinburgh/Sydney etc or a day for a family of 4 to a well-known UK theme park? Teachers can easily find the price information online. Students can then research the cost of other items/packages, write descriptions and ask their classmates to guess the correct price.

Other popular games can be adapted in the same way:

Guess Who

 If you don’t have the original game, you just need 10 – 15 photographs of faces. You can easily get these from the internet. Students ask ‘Is it a man/woman?’ ’Has he got blue eyes/long hair?’etc in order to guess who you are thinking of. You could put a limit on the number of questions to make things more competitive.

Trivial Pursuit – Get students to write their own questions in teams before playing.

Cluedo

In this game, students have to work out who the murderer is, where the murder was committed and with what.

You need 18 cards in total (6 cards per category). Ask the students for suggestions and write one suggestion on each card (so the murderer might be the teacher, the doctor etc; the place might be the garden, the living room, the supermarket etc; the weapon might be a knife, a gun, a bowl, an icicle etc). 

Students should note down all the suggestions in their notebook so that they can cross out possibilities during the game.

Randomly choose one word from each category and put them into a sealed envelope. This is your ‘solution’.

Divide the remaining cards between the students. If you don’t have a board, the first student could simply make an accusation: ‘I suggest it was the teacher in the garden with the icicle’. If the person on the student’s left, has one of these cards, (s)he shows it to the student who crosses it off the list of possibilities. If not, play moves around to the next student on the left until a card has been shown.  Then the next student makes their accusation.

Play continues until someone has worked out the solution in the sealed envelope.

3.   A bag of stuff

This is an old favourite of mine. Basically, you need a bag (non see-through) into which you put a selection of random items. Students have 30 seconds to feel the bag and guess what is in it!

This is a great activity for reviewing adjectives (It is big/small/round/long), materials (it is made of plastic/metal/wool) and, for higher levels, modal verbs (it could/might/may/must/can’t be a ..). Good fun!

4.    Fold-over stories

I’m sure everyone is familiar with these stories – I love them because they include all the skills and can also focus on language practice.

Firstly, brainstorm with students the typical components of a horror story (although you could use any kind of story): people (vampires, witches) places (haunted house, maze), weapons (axes, knives) & sounds (creaky door, footsteps).

Next, give them the first line of their story (which the students write at the top of a blank piece of paper): It was a dark and stormy night. The student writes the next line, folds over the first line and passes the paper to the student on their left. Students continue the story, adding the next line and folding over the paper to hide the previous line, until they receive the paper they started with.

In small groups (3 or 4 students), the students read all the stories they have and choose the best story (together). They now improve it – make it more logical, work on linking the ideas/making the plot better, add more description, correct any grammar mistakes. Once they have done this, they think about how they could adapt it for a radio play: what sound effects they would need, what kind of voice they would use, how to make it sound ‘scary’. Students could then record the story using their mobile phones.

5.   Project work

Students could plan a 4-day tour around their town/city (or round the area of the UK that they are studying in). You could give the students different categories (places to visit, things to eat/drink), don’t forget to.. etc) that they could research on the internet/ by interviewing people. They would then choose their method of presentation, which could range from classroom posters to an information booklet to a class magazine to a video (made using their phones) to a presentation.

You could also ask students to take photos using their mobile phone – 10 activities to do in the town/city on a rainy day, 10 typical things local people eat, 1 beautiful place, 10 things you need to pack etc. This could be competitive if you divide the students into groups. It would also help with vocabulary development.

Those are some of the activities I have used over the summer (and in fact throughout the year as well!). I hope you find them useful.  It would be great to hear of other activities that people have enjoyed using.

Getting ‘techy’

Following on from Dan’s ‘techy’ theme last week, I want to talk about my (often limited) approach to technology. As Philip, Head of the Executive Department at Hyland Language Centre, Madrid, will tell you, I am fairly (if not very) incompetent when things go wrong. After 7 years of comments such as ‘Philip, my mouse doesn’t work/is stuck’ or ‘My page has gone big/small/won’t print’, at least that is one part of his job that he no longer has to do! Dan now has to do this job, only now it’s usually ‘Dan, I can’t get the listening to work from the IWB’ or (more than once) ‘Dan, how do I get the video link onto the IWB?’

However, I AM interested in technology and where technology can take teachers. I have been lurking for a while (just looking at other people’s blogs, not commenting and not being brave enough to write my own). Now, I find myself contributing to this blog at Anglolang, which is interesting, challenging and, at times, even a bit scary!

It was Sandy Millin who (inadvertently) got me thinking about this particular post. I saw her interview

at Harrogate 2014 and was interested in her advice about blogging. Firstly, she said that you should write about what interests you and write a blog that you would be interested in reading. So true! The blogs I’ve enjoyed have a chatty style that I like and encourage me to reflect on my teaching without being too academic or difficult to follow. They are blogs I am happy to read on the bus / train home, not too taxing.

Keeping things simple!

Secondly, Sandy talked about staying simple and practical. Again, so true! Of the blogs I have written on this page, the most viewed (by a mile!) was one entitled Getting students to speak, which is the only one with a list of practical classroom activities.

Thirdly (and this is the one I am working on), hone your writing style. At times I think I have been too academic and, more often than not, I am not sure how a blog reads. I always ask Dan to read through what I have written and sometimes find that I haven’t expressed things in the way that I intended.

Starting and contributing to this blog has been interesting both in terms of having a forum on which to share ideas (and sometimes even to talk myself into or out of an idea which may not have been fully formed) and also in terms of the actual mechanics of setting up a blog (all very easy). I am an experienced teacher but this introduction to all things techy has been great for my own professional development.

Something else that Sandy talked about (and this

might have actually been on her blog. I didn’t write down the reference) was the importance of sharing and how her own blog had a huge number of hits after the British Council Teaching EnglishFacebook page shared it.

Anglolang’s  previous blog, which talked about IATEFL 2014 in Harrogate, received 100 times more hits than previous blogs because Sandy shared it on her blog (thank you!).  I think that this was the first time I had really understood the power of sharing and creating networks online. Something I would like to think more about.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of giving practical information in a blog so, in the interests of being practical, here are the sites that I have lurked on most frequently on over the years:

1.    Jamie Keddie -  http://lessonstream.org/ . This site, with its comprehensive lesson plans, has been a lifesaver during many a standby class! Looking forward to the new Videotelling site. http://jamiekeddie.com/project/videotelling/  

2.    Ceri Jones - http://cerij.wordpress.com/.  Ceri was my first DoS in Spain so this seemed like a good place to start. Thanks, Ceri, for lots of reflection in language most of us can understand!

3.     Ditto Sandy Millin. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/ whose reflections have helped me to understand the possibilities surrounding technology.

4.    Sadly now no longer updated is http://sixthings.net/ .  I liked this because there were only ever 6 things – some were useful things for my classroom but others were just 6 things that made me laugh or random facts that I found interesting.

5.    Russell Stannard’s site http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ which gives step-by-step training videos in various things technological.

I’m sure my thoughts will develop as I get further down the road of becoming more technological. I’d be really interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience / similar concerns.

A Brief History of EFL Audio Equipment!

I began teaching English as a Foreign Language in the mid 90s and at that time listening activities were all about cassettes. (I'm not sure what preceded cassettes? 78s?) The first problem with cassettes, or tapes, was the machines that played them.

They looked something like this and came with two volume levels; a) so quiet nobody could hear it or b) so tinny and distorted that the whole machine vibrated and the audio sounded like somebody talking through a comb and paper.
They were also extremely temperamental. The player might randomly decide to jam closed, leaving the cassette marooned behind the smoked perspex, useless. This would ultimately lead to the cover being snapped off, giving the player a kind of stripped back, urban look. 


There was also a one in ten chance that the machine would chew and/or eat the tape and result in the dreaded ... tape mangle.

There was a nifty solution to this dilemma of course ... a good old fashioned pencil. 25 million twists later and voila! the tape is fixed. Crinkly, but fixed.

Next came the problem of queueing the tape up. Endless fun spent fast forwarding and rewinding the tape in a desperate bid to track down the starting point of the listening you needed. Trying to get into the mind of whoever it was who did the tape-to-tape in an effort to understand how Unit 5 appeared to come before Unit 4, while Unit 6 (the one you needed) didn't seem to be there at all. Unless it was on the other side. And all of this as the clock was inexorably ticking towards lesson time. Aaah, what sweet panic!

If you were lucky, your tape player may have had a counter on it so (if you could work out how to use it) you could queue it up more effectively. You may also have been able to access the master tape (rather than a copy of a copy of a copy) and so there was a chance that the quality might have been passable. And perhaps your boss even invested in a machine capable of filling the whole room with sound ...

Boom Box!

However, if your school was anything like mine then the chances of all of these factors coinciding was on a par with spotting Haley's Comet. 

Next, and from outer space, came CDs. Bright and shiny they promised a new beginning, devoid of background hiss. But, in the language classroom at least, they usually failed to live up to the hype.

The first problem was that there was often nothing to play CDs on. Tapes had existed for decades and no school could afford a whole new fleet of CD players.  So the older alternative was often favoured simply because it was what we were used to. CDs gathered dust. In addition, some of the books we exercises and units we treasure(d) were in books long out of print and with no prospect of ever being digitised. The answer lay in the CD / cassette / radio hybrid becoming the norm. 

Another drawback of CDs was that, if anything, they were even harder to queue up than tapes. If you wanted a separate track then that's fine, but if you needed to find a certain point in a track or to go back just a few seconds to listen again, fine motor skills were required. Pressing the button down long enough for it to register but briefly enough to prevent it from leaping too far forward or back was a frustrating art. 

I'm using the past tense here because we've moved on from the hi-fi era here at Anglolang. We spent a long time converting old cherished tapes to CDs and then ripping these CDs to mp3 files. These are now all stored on a central server that can be accessed from any of our classrooms. So no more mangled tapes. And no more cracked CDs. Marvellous!

It would be great to hear about your classroom experiences with audio equipment, or to find out how far down the technology road your school has travelled? Anyone?!

Food for thought – IATEFL 2014

I was at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate almost 3 weeks’ ago now and I just wanted to share some of the ideas that came out of the conference, things that particularly struck me.

I was surprised that Michael Lewis’ book The Lexical Approach is now 20 years old. The idea of students learning vocabulary in context and becoming aware of fixed expressions in speech is still very much part of my teaching philosophy. Michael Hoey, in his plenary, talked about the importance of lexis, about how, if you store words as part of a combination (like black and white or get married to), being able to recall one part of this combination will help you recall the other. Language, as he said, is not about having grammatical frames into which we slot words but about having a bank of expressions into which we slot grammar.

However, I wonder if this idea has been translated into syllabi around the world. Many of the teachers who come on our teacher training courses complain of very fixed grammar-led syllabi, stating that they often ‘don’t have enough time for’ vocabulary or at least to look at vocabulary within the context of a text.

Michael Hoey also talked about the fact that there is no single language, just languages with a number of variables. Kathleen Graves, in her plenary the previous day, had shown a clip of a class in which the children were transferring phrases from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) into the standard English required for schooling. Therefore ‘he funny’ (accurate in  AAVE) was transferred to ‘he was funny’. Kathleen Graves talked about how AAVE is considered substandard – but is it? Or is it just a variety of English? And who decides what the standard is anyway?

This AAVE class was a perfect example of a teacher using their students as a resource and also of that teacher effectively preparing the students for a standardised test. Very inspiring.

Later in the day, I attended the Cambridge Signature Event about LOA (Learning Oriented Assessment) in which the message was about putting learning and learners back at the heart of assessment through individualised goals and purposeful language activities. LOA is a combination of formal exams and class-based tasks which are assessed and then provide the teacher with evidence of strengths and weaknesses which can then be fed into the next stage of the planning / learning process. Learners also give feedback on their own learning.

The idea here is that the end-of-course test is not the ‘be all and end all’, which seems logical to me. Assessment also provides future learning targets. However, as the speakers pointed out, LOA relies on the expertise of teachers (who are not necessarily assessment specialists) and also formalises a process which most teachers currently do intuitively (we all know who the stronger / less able students in our classes are). This will lead to a heavier workload in terms of paperwork.

Jane Spiro also raised an interesting point. She commented that what teachers believe is a good lesson might not correspond to what students believe. I think most teachers know this but it was good to think about it again. Jane also asked who should decide how students learn: the students or the teachers?  Here at Anglolang we have a negotiated syllabus, which means that the students have an important input into what goes on in the classroom. This is important: if students are engaged in their class, they will be more motivated to learn and participate.

This brings me back once again to Michael Hoey’s plenary. He talked about what students expect in a class and what the role of the teacher should be. The term ‘manager of learning opportunities’ is slightly long-winded but today’s teacher is not expected to know everything. They are supposed to facilitate learning.  For me, this also means making students aware of where they can go for more information or practice (self-study) and also helping them to develop better learning skills (learner training).

Michael Hoey also stated that ‘classrooms reflect the societies they come from’. Some cultures are less communicative than others and therefore some classrooms will also be less communicative. Food for thought. Especially when I am trying to get my xxx (substitute as appropriate) to be quiet and my xxxxx (again substitute!) to say anything at all!

Many of the sessions I attended were fairly theoretical so it was good to attend a couple of practical training sessions. Sandy Millin’s session focussing on how we can help students develop real-life listening skills and how we can help them ‘transition’ to real-life listening texts was excellent. I was reminded of Mark Hancock’s excellent website (and the word blender – have a look!) and the micro-dictations activity (in which the teacher reads one sentence at a time and asks the students to write it down). I was also encouraged to try different websites (www.elllo.org, where there is a HUGE range of listening material divided by topic, level and country; and www.ted.com, which I had heard of but have never used. There are a variety of talks on different topics. Some of them are fairly long so they would need to be adapted. Alternatively, students could listen to the talks at home.

Jamie Keddie’s workshop based around a sneezing baby panda video was also excellent. He was looking at using videos to tell stories, getting participants to guess what the story was about (and initially giving no indication that the video would be about pandas!) and then to predict what happened next before retelling. It was good to come away with some practical low preparation classroom material.

I really enjoyed the conference and it gave me a lot of things to think about. Do you have any thoughts about what I thought?(!)