A matter of choice!

To be able to choose is a wonderful thing. As a kid growing up in the UK, the choice of 'jelly or ice-cream?' at a friend's birthday party was just so tantalising (and a really tough decision, even though it's just a 50/50!)

I have endeavoured to take this idea of choice into the classroom and wherever possible let the students have a variety of options or a say in things.

In class, for example, I often write up a list of the activities that I am planning to cover in the lesson (e.g. discussion, vocabulary, reading, sentence completion) and then let the students decide which order they would like to cover them in. Of course, this is often not possible as lessons are built around a theme or involve a task and so the stages are rigid. However, when the opportunity arises, I let the students decide (they usually prefer to get what they consider the bad activities to be out of the way first!). It doesn't matter to me the order in which we approach these activities, but the students, I believe, are more motivated during the class because they know they have had a say in how it is run.

Another example is when we are going through the answers to, for example, a gap-fill exercise. I clearly remember at school being confident about all of the answers except for, say, number 5. The teacher would then proceed to ask me the answer to number 5 - I believe it's called sod's law! 
In an effort to avoid this I ask the students to answer any question they want. 'It doesn't have to be number 1, it can be number 5 or number 8, choose whichever you want!' Interestingly, the confident students always choose number one while less confident members of the class will pick numbers much lower down the order!

When giving homework I often ask the students to do, say, 8 of the 10 questions. Any 8, and I'll do the 2 they leave for them. The difference between answering 8 or 10 questions is minimal with regard to the learning process, but it empowers the students and helps to take some of the pressure off them.

Another idea is to have too many (!). What I mean is, rather than handing a student a newspaper article to read or a portrait to write about, the teacher has a surplus and the students are free to choose which one appeals to them. The difficulty here can be finding enough material but the internet is usually a great help.

I think that these small classroom differences motivate the students in a big way. The picture your student chooses becomes personal to them and therefore special. A student is far more likely to take pride and care over something that they feel positive about.

As a final example, I have asked my students to look through the series of pictures at The Guardian's Eyewitness photograph  series. Looking today, there are 1568 different images to choose from, so hopefully!! every student will find a picture that they like. I then ask them for a piece of writing based on the picture. It can be as many or as few words as they like (nobody has ever written less than around 60) and their writing can be in any form they want (on the board we brainstorm different types of writing e.g. letter, dialogue, diary entry, poem, news story etc.). The students never fail to complete the task and some of the work they have done has been exceptional.

Do you have other ways of letting your students choose?

p.s. My answer to jelly or ice-cream was always 'a little bit of both, please'. ;-)

Monolingual vs. Multilingual

I spent over 10 years teaching largely monolingual groups in Spain. The students were generally either university students or working professionals who wanted to learn English to improve their job prospects.

I have recently moved to Scarborough in the UK and now work with mainly multilingual groups. We currently have students from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Qatar, Spain, South Korea, Israel and Libya. We will have new students arriving in the next couple of weeks from Thailand, Italy and Portugal.

So, what have been the main differences between teaching monolingual students in their home country and teaching multilingual groups in the UK?

Firstly, English is the common language for students in multilingual classes. They need English to communicate with each other and with their teacher.

In Spain, I constantly found myself pointing to the classroom language chart on the wall as well as gently reminding students to speak in English. During error correction, I routinely asked my students to think about how much English they had spoken during the speaking task and often asked them to repeat the activity with a different partner… and speak more English.  I saw colleagues in Spain effectively use the ‘envelope of doom’ (an envelope passed to students who use too much Spanish. The student holding the envelope at the end of the class gets extra homework). With lower level classes, I was also very clear about when I expected them to use English (anything on the classroom language poster had to be expressed in English, for example) but I did allow some Spanish in the planning of a presentation if not in the presentation itself.  Having said all that, with all the students sharing the same mother tongue, it was much more difficult to motivate them to speak in English.

With multilingual groups, this is less of a problem (except when I have groups of students from the same country, at which point I go back to the techniques I used in Spain).  What I now have in my classes are students who generally speak English out of a need to communicate with each other. On a personal level, I do feel better about this than having to force my students to speak English!

Secondly, multilingual (and therefore multicultural) groups provide a natural information gap. Students can find out how their country is different from that of their classmates. This week in my upper-intermediate class, for example, we have talked about the age at which people learn to drive in different countries, important world events and how they were perceived in different countries (9/11, the Arab Spring and the death of Princess Diana, for example) and also the best beaches to visit around the world.  Many of these conversations were started by a student asking a question or commenting on something said by one of their classmates. I had to do very little. When I was teaching in Madrid, the information gap was often between me and the students. However, after ten years, it was wearing pretty thin and I often had to feign ignorance so that the students could practice their speaking!

Thirdly, it is strange not to understand the students’ mother tongue! I am not advocating teachers using L1. However, my knowledge of Spanish did help me understand why students were making certain mistakes (I am agree, for example, is a translation error) and therefore pick up on / correct the error quickly. Nowadays, however, I have to ask the students questions like ‘Do you have the present perfect / past perfect in your language?’ which are quite technical questions for many non-teachers.

Fourthly, monolingual students also share a culture and, as a teacher immersed Spanish culture, I fully understood the environment I was working in. Working with so many different nationalities, many of which I have never worked with before, I find myself unsure of where the limits are (‘will that idea / comment be offensive to…?’). I have also discovered that my own world knowledge (and I considered myself a seasoned traveller after working in Spain, Mexico, Kenya, Indonesia, France and Italy) is not as broad as I thought it was and that this world knowledge is massively Eurocentric. 

Finally, the students in my current classes in Scarborough are actually living in the UK and are therefore themselves fully immersed in the language and culture. They go home, talk to their host family, go to the cinema, watch TV, talk to each other, go shopping, get on trains and visit other cities. They pick up incidental language that is very difficult to ‘teach’ students in monolingual classes living in their own country. I know from living in Spain that I picked up Spanish expressions that I won’t find in any dictionary!

My students in Madrid generally came to class during their lunch break or after school / university / work. For many, the three hours of weekly classes was their ONLY exposure to English and therefore progress was much slower. I spent more time on reviewing material, on recycling vocabulary, on trying to encourage them to watch TV, read books, read an online newspaper.

Monolingual vs. multilingual is a HUGE topic which I have barely covered here. Does anyone else have any thoughts? It would be great to hear them.

What we hope this blog will be (and what we we hope it won't be!)

By starting this blog we aim to, in the first instance, increase Anglolang's online presence. We are also beginning a second Facebook page exclusively for teachers, a Google+ account, a YouTube channel and a school intranet. Wish us luck!

At the same time we hope that this Another Angle blog becomes a place where both native and non-native teachers of English as a foreign language can come to share ideas & activities, chat about life in the language classroom and (hopefully!) share a laugh or two along the way.

We don't imagine this blog will be overly theoretical, but more a reflection of life at the chalk face, teaching English to students from around the world and all that it entails. Should be fun! 

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!