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?

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.

Teaching Mixed Level Groups

Three students, beginner level – an easy class? 
In many ways, it is. I have plenty of time to give the students individual attention, they are making good progress (and have a good sense of their progress) and the lesson content is fun (lots of personalisation, spelling games, looking at numbers, talking about families). However, one of the students is a complete beginner (no numbers, letters or any of the classroom language that I need to teach the class in English). The other two are false beginners (and have all of the above).  I also don’t speak Arabic, the mother tongue of two of the students and so have no linguistic tools of my own to help. 

So, how did I manage my class of false beginner & real beginners? 

First of all, I established routines and now start every class with ‘What’s the date?’, ‘What time is it?’ and ‘What did you do at the weekend / yesterday?’ Yes, I am aware that we haven’t ‘reached’ the past tense or the time yet in the normal sequence of things but it is natural for me to ask all my students about their weekends / the day before and it is natural for them to want to share this information with me / other students. We treat this language as vocabulary and, while the false beginners are now able to give quite detailed information (I went to.. / I saw… / I ate… / I liked…), my complete beginner is still able to answer the question with a simple ‘I went to’.

Similarly, to end the class, I ask the students what they are going to do this evening / this weekend as well as tell them what their homework is. Slowly but surely, they are all building up a bank of useful expressions and, hopefully, when we come across ‘going to’ (as well as the past tense and the time) as a structure to be taught), the students will make the connection and feel more comfortable with the language. 

At Anglolang, we have a negotiated syllabus which lends itself well to this way of teaching.


Secondly, we did a basic matching exercise with classroom language followed by a worksheet in order to help the students communicate what they needed from me / each other in the classroom. Once again, by treating the language as vocabulary and encouraging the students to use the complete expression just expands their bank of language and helps with general communication despite the mixed levels.


Thirdly, we build on grammatical structures with differentiated vocabulary. For example, we looked at the structure ‘there is / are’ as an extension of classroom language. The students wanted to know how to say different items in the classroom (stapler / hole punch / folder / pencil case) and so we worked on producing the complete sentence - ‘there is a hole punch’. While the complete beginner student was working on this language (using a dictionary to check meaning, recording the vocabulary, writing complete sentences), the stronger students had moved onto the house (in the living room, there is a sofa / rug / an armchair). I simply provided the sentence frame ‘In the __________, there is a(n) ___________ ‘ 

Fourthly, we personalised a lot of the different activities: looking at maps (where are you from? Where is that? Can you show me?), asking questions about the students’ countries and about the UK. Hopefully, the students (and I) have learnt something about each other’s culture. I, for example, knew nothing about Riad and, while I knew it was hot, I didn't know that the temperature reaches 55 degrees in August!

Finally, I give the students time to work individually and to assimilate the information at their own speed. Four hours is a long time to be in class so I also try to incorporate ‘chat’ time with simple questions: ‘Is England different to Saudi Arabia / Italy?’, ‘How many brothers and sisters have you got?’ The answers may not be grammatically perfect but we do manage to understand each other and the students enjoy being able to talk about ‘real’ things. 

While I have been referring to a beginners’ class, I do feel that this blog could apply to any group of mixed ability students. My students are now working together in the same class and we have been able to take away the additional classroom support we initially offered the absolute beginner. Things are getting better. 

Do you have any other suggestions for dealing with mixed ability classes?

Dan's Favourite Warmer

As a follow up to my ‘throw the ball game’ blog entry, I thought I’d say a few words about my favourite warmer. It’s called (drum roll, please ...) ‘have a chat’.

It’s where I chat. With the students.

You could consider that this isn’t really an activity at all as such but rather just an insignificant start of a lesson. I would beg to differ!

The classroom is often not a place where real English conversation often takes place. We ask our students to do role plays and practise conversations that mirror the outside world but are not actually ‘real’ when they are doing them. 

We create false environments (at the post office, in a job interview, in a meeting etc.) so our students can practise safely within the confines of the classroom in preparation for the outside world. The informal chat that we conduct at the start of a lesson, ‘How are you?’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘Is your leg better?!’ etc. is one of the few times that we engage in real conversation. This;

•          Improves student confidence
•          Shows that the teacher cares about the student as an individual
•          Provides an opportunity for the students to improve / brush up their small talk skills
•          Provides an opportunity for the teacher to identify, for example, pronunciation and grammar weaknesses
•          Allows time for late comers to arrive and get settled
•          Is fun!

The irony of this activity is that we often feel compelled to end  the chat and get on with the lesson. ‘I’m not teaching, we must start soon!’ But by cutting the informal conversation short (which by now may be involving more members of the group and becoming increasingly animated) we move away from real communication. 

We then spend the next ten minutes setting up a completely false speaking environment ‘Ok everyone, I want you to imagine that you’re at the airport and you’ve lost your boarding card’ that can be less personalised and potentially less motivating.

I do, of course fully appreciate the need for role plays in the classroom and consider them an integral part of the English language learning process. And I know the conversation won’t always flow and that we shouldn’t force it, but I also believe that time spent ‘chatting’ is not time wasted and that we shouldn’t rush to finish it.

N.B. Students may also potentially feel that chatting is a waste of time and not ‘real learning’ so it might be worth summarising what has taken place before moving on, e.g. ‘Thanks everyone, that’s a great start to the lesson. We’ve already had the chance to practise our speaking and listening skills together and made a note of a few new words too.’

Chat’s all folks! (sorry!)

Dan

Ice Breakers & the Defence of an Old Classic

We do a lot of teacher training here at Anglolang (mainly teachers from the EU on Erasmus+ programmes) and I often start my first methodology session with a look at ice-breakers. 

These activities, of course, help the students to relax and allow them to find out a little about one another by communicating in English. When we brainstorm what methods the teachers use, the most popular activity by far is the ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ (not the catchiest of titles, I know!!) activity. 

Just in case you teach on Mars (!!) and are not familiar with it, here’s a quick summary.

On day 1 of a new class, the teacher asks the students to stand up and form a circle. Desks and chairs may need to be shifted or the class could always temporarily decamp. The ball is then thrown and (sometimes!) caught between students. The language element involved is, of course, up to the teacher and will depend on the perceived level of the class, but it normally includes some form of basic personal information. For example;

The teacher says their name and throws the ball to Student A. Student A says, ‘Hello teacher, I'm Amy. Nice to meet you!’ and throws the ball to student B. Student B catches (!) the ball and says ‘Hi Amy. It’s nice to meet you. I'm Abdullah’. And so on.
The possibilities for communicating are endless and could involve students’ ages, favourite things … anything!

What a great activity! The students are up and out of their seats and communicating together right from the start. Throwing and catching is endless fun (Even President Obama likes it!) and the students will barely even notice that they are using English – perfect!

I think that as we gain more classroom experience and find out about different ice-breakers, classics such as the example above can end up being left on the shelf. We perhaps see them as boring and ‘old hat’ and prefer a new idea we have learned about. But it’s important to remember that the students probably haven’t done this activity before and we shouldn't drop it just because we’re bored of it! The ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ game is great – cheap, cheerful & perfect for getting the students working together in English right from the start, so why not give the old classic a go next time you have a new class.

‘My name is Dan and I'm a teacher – catch!’

p.s. Choose a soft ‘friendly’ ball as you don’t want students leaving their first class looking as though they've been involved in a rugby match!

Dan

Hello & Welcome!

Hello & welcome to the Anglolang blog!

Andrea Sweeney is on the left, our Academic Director and Dan Methven, Head of Online Learning, is on the right. Hi!