English Teaching Professional

Issue 92 May 2014

The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

Self-directed language learning Brian R Morrison

C is for creativity Brian Tomlinson

The amazing gapfill Margaret Horrigan

Ludicrous language Chris Payne

• practical methodology • fresh ideas & innovations • classroom resources • new technology • teacher development • tips & techniques • photocopiable materials • competitions & reviews

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Contents MAIN FEATURE

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS

SELF-DIRECTED LANGUAGE LEARNING

4

Brian R Morrison fashions frameworks for facilitating learner autonomy

GETTING THE KIDS ON YOUR SIDE

23

Paul Bress suggests strategies for developing rapport

CONFIDENCE RULES, OK?

24

Greg Davies knows we need to work together to promote speaking

FEATURES THE AMAZING GAPFILL

9

Margaret Horrigan mines the gap

TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

THE GRAMMAR SHOCK

13

Anna Kamont faces the fear of the unknown

HEAT UP YOUR WARMERS

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

54

Olga Filatova outlines the strengths of native-speaker and non-native-speaker teachers

16

Ever Malvesi puts the warm into warm-ups

SOUNDS FUN!

20

Robin Walker promotes pronunciation with young learners

TECHNOLOGY CHOOSE YOUR BLEND

57

Linda M Hanington and Poh Foong Kwah show how blended learning can be used in teacher training

OVER THE WALL

25

Alan Maley investigates detective fiction

TAKE FIVE

61

29

Nicky Hockly says it’s not what you’ve got, but how well you can use it

30

WEBWATCHER 63

Chaz Pugliese interviews Alan Maley

DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT WITH YOUR COURSEBOOK 5

FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT: THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Russell Stannard pins his faith in Pinterest

Rachael Roberts increases the impact of listening activities

PREPARING STUDENTS FOR EXAMS 4

34

Claire Hunter presents teaching tips for IELTS exams

QUICK, QUICK, SLOW

40

REGULAR FEATURES IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

38

REVIEWS 44

Ted Kelsey analyses the way we make decisions

SUGGESTIONS FROM THE STAFFROOM 2

43

COMPETITIONS

Sasha Wajnryb compiles teacher-tested tips on teaching materials

LUDICROUS LANGUAGE

SCRAPBOOK 46

50

22, 64 Includes materials designed to photocopy

Chris Payne finds a good use for invented examples

C IS FOR CREATIVITY

52

Brian Tomlinson begins an extended article on the benefits of breaking the mould

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Editorial

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ost teachers would agree that learner autonomy is something greatly to be desired, and we have long known that no one can really learn anything just by turning up for an hour’s lesson once, or even twice, a week. It is the students who also spend hours practising at home and make learning part of their lives outside the classroom who tend to be the most successful.

However, so much emphasis is placed these days on language learning outside formal lessons that there sometimes appears to be an expectation that the bulk of the learning will occur outside the classroom, with actual face-to-face lessons being simply there for mopping up any lingering linguistic problems and setting the next tranche of work for the students to go off and do by themselves. This is an exaggeration of the concept of the ‘flipped classroom’, of course, but it is interesting that Linda Hanington and Poh Foong Kwah report that, whilst the students on their blended course gave a 100% endorsement to the online option, they still attended as many face-to-face sessions as they possibly could. They liked the fact that they had the choice of online learning in their own time, but they still really valued face-to-face contact with a teacher and their fellow students.

and implement a learning plan so that they can take control of their learning in a structured way. Unfortunately, it seems that wherever there are goals, achievement and progress, we can’t get away from the urge to test them. Greg Davies identifies the commercial need for progress to be quantifiable in the competitive world of private language schools as a negative factor in encouraging students to speak. And just how good are we at evaluating people, anyway? Ted Kelsey uses the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman to raise doubts about our capacity to take rational decisions, and he explores the effect this may have on the judgements we make about our students. Ted’s article was so interesting that I bought Kahneman’s book – recommended also by Alan Maley in a previous issue. And if you want something to read while your students are off engaging in self-directed language learning, take a look at Alan’s suggestions for detective fiction in this issue. The Dr Siri books by Colin Cotterill are amongst my personal favourites.

Whether we favour the flipped classroom or not – and whether the ‘digital divide’ that Nicky Hockly explores in her article actually gives us the choice, anyway – learner autonomy is here to stay, and the question for many teachers is how to achieve it.

Helena Gomm Editor

In our main feature, Brian Morrison takes a systematic approach, offering frameworks to help the students map out

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M A I N F E AT U R E

Self-directed language learning Brian R Morrison supports SDLL through PIME and PURE frameworks.

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elf-directed language learning and learner autonomy are commonly mentioned in curricula, syllabuses and articles about teaching and learning. Sometimes these terms refer to what goes on during class but, more and more, they are being used to refer to what happens away from the classroom and away from the teacher. The reasons for seeking to promote this type of learning with your students seem obvious when you know that the students who make the most improvement are the ones who make the best use of their language learning time, in and outside the classroom. As teachers, we can have a lot of influence in class, but what happens away from the classroom is in the students’ hands. Nevertheless, we can use time in class to offer our students guidance and feedback on what they do in their own time in pursuit of their language learning goals. My colleagues and I have adapted, developed and use frameworks for helping us to support our students in their self-directed language learning. These are adaptable to many different teaching and learning environments, and they are set out in this article.

students’ self-directed language learning, ie the language learning they do outside the classroom, away from their teachers and away from me. In my current position, this might mean working with students to look at strategies for selecting language to learn or to consider emotional aspects of learning, such as confidence, motivation or anxiety. While I often have a number of ideas to introduce to the students, much of the content comes from the students themselves. My role, therefore, involves setting up activities and finding ways to access the knowledge of the whole class so that the students share, compare and talk through how they might improve their language learning experience.

Two perspectives

I now see that there are a lot of opportunities that, as a teacher, I could have taken to incorporate self-directed language learning activities in class, so

As a learning advisor, I am a qualified teacher who has specialised in guiding

My previous teaching practice was very much focused on delivering the syllabus content in a way that was student-centred. Homework was invariably to finish up what had not been done in class, and to memorise what had been done. In recent years, I have been in the fortunate position of being able to devote all of my time at work to focusing on self-directed language learning.

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that my students would have been better prepared to learn effectively outside class. The significance of this should not be overlooked because, while a lot of emphasis is rightly put on the teaching and learning that occurs in the classroom, there is little doubt that language learning success requires students to engage in learning outside of lessons.

Two frameworks To demonstrate better how teachers can facilitate meaningful engagement, I will outline a couple of the frameworks that the learning advisors at my workplace use. As I see it, these can inform student-centred, class-based activities which are integrated into courses; and then ‘homework’, or at least some of it, can be linked to student-led, out-of-class learning. Courses in self-directed language learning at my university use two frameworks to help organise and support language learning: The first is a PIME framework (planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation). This involves an initial planning phase – ie goal-setting and learning plan development – and then works through a cycle of learning plan implementation, monitoring and evaluation. As the cycle continues, the learning plan may be adjusted, to fit each student’s experience of using it.

PIME and PURE

As their teacher, you can support this activity by providing a framework for self-assessment, such as the simple one below. The students can then integrate their findings from this activity into their goals, to add clarity and focus. For instance, the previous goals may develop – to become something like this:

Plan

Prepare

Use

Evaluate

Implement Evaluate

I want to be able to read newspaper articles related to my country without using my dictionary. I need to develop my vocabulary, particularly the way synonyms are used in an article.

Review

I want to be able to chat with my friends in English about my country. I need to develop my fluency so that I can say what I want to say. I know a lot of words, but I pause too much when I try to remember them.

Monitor

Within this PIME cycle, another framework is used: PURE (preparing, using, reviewing and evaluating). PURE is not necessarily a cycle – it is more of a tool for categorising activities, so that the balance of activities can be attended to when planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating. To sum up PURE: Prepare (to use) could involve the

students learning new language, or preparing to use specific language in the context of their goals. Use is about using the language which

has been prepared, in the setting of the language learning goal. Review is there to check what has been

remembered, and whether anything has been forgotten. Evaluate clarifies that the goal-oriented language skills are improving, and is to verify that there is a connection between Prepare and Use – ie that what is prepared is then used later.

PIME: Planning At the Planning stage of PIME, students have to consider their language learning goals and come up with a learning plan. To keep everything simple the first time we do this, we limit the students to choosing one language skill – ie reading, writing, speaking or listening – and ask them to consider the genre and situation. This can be done as a class by brainstorming the activities the students currently do in English, and by taking into account what they want to be able to do in the future. Sample goals may be: I want to be able to read a newspaper article without using my dictionary.

I want to be able to chat with my friends in English about my country. I want to be able to get 6.0 for IELTS writing.

I want to be able to get 6.0 for IELTS writing. I need to become faster at thinking of ideas, and faster at writing the ideas down.

I want to be able to watch a film and understand most of it. At this stage, it is feasible for the students to come up with a learning plan, but we have found that a diagnostic activity can guide them to focus more on their needs. A diagnostic activity involves asking the students to do the following:

I want to be able to watch a film and understand most of it. I can understand the subtitles, but I can’t catch the sounds of lots of words – it’s too fast. I need to get used to the way words are used in connected speech.

Try the goal activity (read an article; chat with friends; write an IELTS essay; watch a film).

Having produced a more specific goal, the students can now map out a learning plan. They often need help to create one for the first time. Ideally, they will pool ideas and select from these, so the role of the teacher is to oversee and facilitate while the students share ideas about the activities and resources they have used. However, an alternative approach is to ask the students to search (online or in their immediate communities) for alternative activities and resources to the ones they have used previously, or

Analyse and assess their performance. Consider what they have to do to improve. Prioritise these improvements. Students who have a goal which involves speaking or listening are likely to benefit from recording what they say or listen to. The recordings then allow for a thorough analysis of what was going on as they listened or spoke. How well did you do? (As a percentage)

What was good about each category? What could be improved in each category?

Overall task achievement Fluency Vocabulary Grammar Phonology Which of these do you want to prioritise? Why?

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Self-directed language learning for you – the teacher – to consider ways of introducing a range of resources and activities that may be useful to them in their planning. The next step is for the students to come up with learning plans connected to their goals, with at least one activity for each part of PURE. These plans provide a schedule – which potentially helps with time management – and a reference document to check both what to do and what has been done. Below is an example of a learning plan for the following goal: Goal: I want to be able to chat with my friends in English about my country. I need to develop my fluency so that I can say what I want to say. I know a lot of words, but I pause too much when I try to remember them. Prepare Keep a diary about my life here – compare what I do here with what I do in my own country. Use a dictionary when I can’t think of the words. Keep a note of the words I check at the back of the diary. Use Talk to my friends in English every day at lunch time – compare what I do here with what I do in my own country.

PIME: Implementing

PIME: Monitoring

At the Implementing stage of PIME, the students try out the plan. It is likely that the implementation stage will vary somewhat from the original plan, as students differ in the degrees they are able to find suitable resources, people to interact with and environments for learning – as well as balancing language learning with the other demands on their time. Such challenges may have an impact on the frequency or length of time they spend on each activity, or the amount of time apportioned to each PURE category. In other words, students may end up focusing their learning on prepare and review, and the lack of use is likely to have an impact on the effectiveness of their language learning. The role teachers can take here is twofold:

Although Monitoring and Implementing are separated, they often co-occur: Monitoring happens during or just after the time when the learning plan is being implemented. So, to take the example from the student with the speaking goal above, as she speaks, she may realise that she has an idea she is having trouble enunciating – she therefore has several options, including:

The first is to make sure the students are aware of the balance of activities, and the effect this is likely to have on their progress. The second is to encourage peers to give each other an insight into the activities and resources they used, as well as to share their experiences of these, so that what works well or what is deemed less beneficial is circulated amongst the students. The possible ways of fulfilling these roles depends on the context, but much of this could be done at the beginning of class as a group-discussion activity, with guided questions provided by the teacher, such as: How much time did you spend on each section of PURE?

Use my diary vocabulary notes if I need to.

How satisfied are you with that amount of time?

Ask friends more about their countries.

What would you like to change next week?

Evaluate Record myself once every two weeks, and compare with the previous recording. Check if I can speak for longer. Check if I can speak with fewer pauses. Review Read through my whole diary every Sunday evening – the daily entries and the checked words.

How are you going to make the change happen? What activities and resources did you use this week? How satisfied were you with the activities and resources you used? Are there any activities and resources you want to remove? Why? Are there any activities and resources you want to add? You can ask your group for ideas. If you would like to change anything next week, how are you going to make the change happen?

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Ignore the thought and continue the conversation. Attempt to paraphrase, using available language. Stop speaking, and check a dictionary. Use L1 and rely on others to translate it. Something else. In many ways, monitoring is similar to students noticing what they do, but it goes beyond ‘being aware’ and requires additional steps. When monitoring, it is not enough to notice what is being done well or what needs to change (this is just the first step). The act of monitoring implies taking some kind of practical action when change is required. This action is then reflected on, and can be integrated into, subsequent planning and implementation. So, monitoring happens as the plan is being implemented, and starts with noticing what is working well and what is not so effective. It is about identifying strengths and weaknesses, adjusting, modifying, continuing, transferring and halting specific learning activities (and the use of resources and materials) as the language is being used. The monitoring process can happen during almost any part of the learning, once it is underway. It has been shown to be particularly successful when learners talk or write about their learning activities in light of their goals and weekly objectives. This is why monitoring and reflection are so intricately connected. Asking your students to get into groups in class to share their reflections on their learning outside the classroom can be one way to do this, but using a question template to encourage monitoring and reflection that can be considered straight after their language learning activities both helps students remember what they did, and allows time to reflect before they come to class and share their thoughts.

A monitoring template

Time management

What was your weekly learning target for this week?

10

Goal-setting

5

What resources did you use? How did you learn? Why?

5

Write (P, U, R or E) beside each language learning activity you did. Write the amount of time you spent on each activity (in brackets). How successful was your learning? Did you achieve your learning target for this week? What progress did you make towards achieving the goals in your learning plan? What did you do well? What could you have done better? Based on your experience this week, what will you do next week? Write your weekly learning targets for next week. Why have you chosen these targets?

It is worth reiterating that, although reflection suggests ‘looking back’ on learning activities, reflection – like monitoring – should also include a consideration of the changes to implement as the learning progresses.

PIME: Evaluating Evaluation occurs in both the PURE and the PIME models. The former is associated with checking the language learning progress, while the latter is concerned with the language learning process. In other words, with PURE evaluation, students are being asked to check their language development, and with PIME evaluation, they are checking how various factors have contributed to (or prevented) that language learning from being effective. For this, the following material – The Wheel of Language Learning, adapted from Kato and Sugawara – has worked well as a way of guiding students to think about factors beyond studying grammar and vocabulary.

Reflection

Resources

Write what you did step by step, and give the reasons for what you did.

Learning strategy Prepare, Use, Review, Evaluate

For this activity, the students first draw a line in each section to indicate their level of satisfaction in that category, and talk about their choices – describing the impact these categories have had on their language learning. They then consider which categories they would like to change, and what level of satisfaction they would like to achieve by a specific time (we tend to use this wheel every four weeks on a course, so we use that as the time frame). The final question for the students to consider is how they can make the change happen, ie what they have to do, to improve their level of satisfaction. The categories in this particular example reflect the areas that are highlighted at my institution when working with our students, but these can be adapted to what your students have been focusing on. For example, confidence and anxiety reduction may be more important for your students than goal-setting and reflection. As long as the categories reflect aspects of the language learning process, then this works well as an evaluation activity which can feed back into the planning stage of PIME. With the Evaluation, the students are always asked to talk through their ideas, so that the person they talk to can ask questions. This is to encourage more considered and thoughtful responses to emerge during the activity. The conversations are recorded (on mobile phones) and the students use their recordings to write up their evaluation, with the audio to support and guide their written evaluations.

Teachers are regularly called upon to develop learner autonomy, to personalise

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Motivation

or individualise learning, and to take account of individual differences. There are a variety of ways that this call is answered, both in lessons and away from the classroom. The activities above give an indication of one way of doing this – whereby what is done in lessons allows for a sharing of ideas and experiences to prepare for learning outside the class, with the aim of encouraging and supporting self-directed language learning. In whatever way teachers choose to support their students’ language learning, frameworks such as PURE and PIME can be used as tools for students (and teachers) to check what kinds of activities are occurring, and to consider the influence these are having on learning outcomes. Contexts and expectations may impose restrictions on what is possible but, by bringing aspects of self-directed learning into the language classroom, the move towards the students taking more responsibility for their own learning becomes not only a positive one, but also a practical one. Kato, S and Sugawara, H ‘Action-oriented language learning advising: A new approach to promote independent learning’ The Journal of Kanda University of International Studies 21 2009 Brian R Morrison, co-author of The Autonomy Approach for DELTA Publishing, took a CTEFLA course in 1994 and has taught in a variety of countries from Macedonia to Equatorial Guinea. He now lives in Japan and is a Learning Advisor at Kanda University of International Studies. [email protected]

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IN THE CLASSROOM

The amazing gapfill Margaret Horrigan sings the praises of an enduring activity.

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his article has been brewing for a long while. In the many times I’ve sat down with colleagues or trainees for the planning of something or other, I have always returned to the gapfill at some stage of the planning session. When asked recently to contribute a comment about when I first started out teaching, I mentioned the gapfill once again. So, here it is … my take on the amazing gapfill and why it has endured the test of time.

Why gapfills? To be honest, there are as many answers to this question as there are lesson stages and gapfill types. Whether you are testing or revising, practising or presenting a specific lexical set or grammar item – or just randomly gapping a text for every nth word – the purpose of the gapfill clearly changes. Let’s say, for example, you taught past simple irregular verbs in the previous lesson and you need a quick revision task. A quick gapping of irregular past tense verbs in a previouslycovered reading text might serve as a useful revision or consolidation task, maybe at the start of the lesson. If you intend to teach discourse linkers, you could devise a gapfill to test the learners’ knowledge of these – and this could be used in both test stages of a Test–Teach–Test lesson. In reality, then, the rationales for using gapfills in the language classroom are so many that this short text can’t do them justice, and that is the best rationale of all for using gapfills and the

rationale behind this very article. Let me point out that up to now I have been referring to a basic ‘open cloze’ gapfill, such as the one below, but this will soon change. This article has been (1) _______ for a long while. (2) _______ the many times I’ve (3) _______ down with colleagues for (4) _______ planning of something or (5) _______, I have always returned (6) _______ the (7) _______ gapfill at some (8) _______ of the planning session. (9) _______ asked recently to contribute (10) _______ comment about when I (11) _______ started out teaching, I (12) _______ the gapfill once again. (13) _______, here it is ... my take on the (14) _______ gapfill!

What to gap? The easiest gapfill to create is a random open cloze one like the example above. Which words you gap is up to you, and is dictated by the aim that the task is attempting to achieve. However, you do need to start out with a clear rationale of what you are gapping and why. The above example mostly has random gaps of every fifth word, so it is testing general language knowledge. Most randomly-gapped texts are in fact tests. On a task design note, however, just imagine for a second that I did not

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The amazing gapfill indicate where the actual gaps were in the above example but, instead, removed the lines and numbers and presented it like this: This article has been for a long while. the many times I’ve down with colleagues for planning of something or, I have always returned the gapfill at some of the planning session. asked recently to contribute comment about when I started out teaching, I the gapfill once again., here it is ... my take on the gapfill!

It is the same text, but with a different task. Obviously, this one is far more challenging than the first one – which is a perfect example of the old saying that it is not the text, but the task, which creates the level of difficulty for the learners. Although there are a number of cases where that saying doesn’t hold true, it is certainly a good starting point for all teachers when planning tasks around texts – and worth restating here for that reason and in relation to the gapfill, where the task is 100 per cent linked to the level of challenge.

How to gap? So far, we’ve considered open cloze tests, but these represent only one type of gapfill. The moment we introduce the actual gapped words to the task, we have lowered the level of challenge again. Cloze tests where the missing words are given are found in many formal testing tools, ranging from the Cambridge exams to TOEFL. Such tests probably gave me my first real awareness of how valuable gapfills can be in language teaching. What took me a while to appreciate fully, however, was the importance of how these words appear around the gapfill. Huge differences in the level of challenge can be caused by the actual formatting of the gapfill. Consider for a moment something as basic as the type opposite:

It probably won’t take you long to realise that the task is completely redundant, as it involves writing the words in the gaps in the order in which they appear on the right. So, number 1 is brewing, number 2 In, number 3 sat, etc. The problem here is obviously that the words need to be jumbled up ... or do they? What about presenting the words, still in their exact chronological order, but coded in some way? You can code these words by using a symbol font like Wingdings or by shuffling the letters about so that the learners have to produce the correct spelling. You could also present the words in phonemic script or use numbers for letters. For teachers in a last minute rush, the Windings font is the way to go. Clearly, here the purpose of each task is different and for the most part consists of exposure to spelling of some sort or recognition of phonemic words – an excellent skill for learners to have. So, even putting the words in chronological order has value. What about putting them out of order?

other languages so that the learners are potentially duped into negative L1 transfers if they try to guess the answer. However, this is not the only way to do it.

What if? Here the fun begins in earnest. We are probably all familiar with the multiplechoice type cloze test where the learners have to choose from four options for each gap. This is actually quite a difficult type of gapfill to create. The distractors are generally based on knowledge of

What if we took out the capital letters in the word list? This would obviously be more challenging than leaving them as capitals – the learners wouldn’t see immediately which words go at the start of sentences. We could remove any double entries, like amazing in the example above – again making it much more difficult. What if we provided the first or last letter of each gap to make it easier? We could also add a ‘red herring’ to avoid a ‘domino effect’ if a learner makes an error. Without a ‘red herring’, if there are 13 gaps and 13 different words and a learner gets one of these wrong, they are automatically pushed into getting two wrong. What if we decided to provide a list of synonyms or antonyms of the gapped words? Again, there is a clear difference in the level of challenge between an ordered list of synonyms or antonyms and a jumbled list. And obviously, an ordered list of synonyms is more challenging than an ordered list of misspelled words. What if we provided definitions of the words? Lots more reading would be involved and this would probably be much more challenging than a list of

This article has been (1) __________________ for

brewing

a long while. (2) __________________ the many

In

times I’ve (3) __________________ down with

sat

colleagues for (4) __________________ planning

the

of something or (5) __________________, I have

other

always returned (6) __________________ the

to

(7) __________________ gapfill at some

amazing

(8) __________________ of the planning session.

stage

(9) __________________ asked recently to

When

contribute (10) __________________ comment

a

about when I (11) __________________ started out

first

teaching, I (12) __________________ the gapfill

mentioned

once again. (13) __________________, here it is ...

So

my take on the (14) __________________ gapfill!

amazing

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3 KEY 1 / bru*âÑ / 2 / ân / 3 / sæt /

Gapfills



How do you use them in class?



What do you (dis)like about them?

4

This article has been (1) ________________ for a long while. (2) ________________ the many times I’ve (3) ________________

first

down with colleagues for (4) ________________ planning of

in something or (5) ________________, I have always returned

stage

4 hte

(6) ________________ the (7) ________________ gapfill at some

when

5 reoth

(8) ________________ of the planning session. (9) ________________

a

6 / tu* /

mentioned

asked recently to contribute (10) ________________ comment

7 incredible 8 tasge

sat about when I (11) ________________ started out teaching, I

brewing

9 hnew

(12) ________________ the gapfill once again. (13) ________________,

to

10 / eâ /

here it is ... my take on the (14) ________________ gapfill!

amazing

11 rsift

so

12 said

the

13 Therefore

other

14 incredible

2 1 Not the last

8 To leave something, usually a liquid, to develop for a long time

2 The opposite of ‘out’

9 The opposite of ‘from’

3 A component of a lesson procedure

10 A synonym for ‘incredible’

4 The question word we use to ask about dates

11 A very informal ‘therefore’

5 The indefinite article

12 The definite article

6 The past of ‘to mention’

13 To refer to something or someone briefly

7 The opposite of ‘stood’

jumbled words. Again, the list of definitions could be presented in order or jumbled, and this would greatly affect the level of difficulty.

variable in the creation of gapfills. Look back at the example gapfills in this article and consider the section with the list of words.

What if instead of using words, you used pictures? This is great for younger learners. For particular gaps, you could even consider using sounds; these could be embedded into the gaps for learners working on computers.

You could fold this back so that only the gapfill can be seen, and instruct the learners to unfold it only in order to check their work or reduce the level of difficulty.

How to present it? However, let’s move beyond the actual gaps and consider what our handout or material could look like – this is also a

You could alter the position of the list and have it on the left or the right, at the top or bottom or on the reverse side of the gapfill. Alternatively, you could not have the list of words on the handout at all, and get someone to

dictate it to the class instead. You could do this yourself, or get the learners to mill around the room spelling individual words to each other. You could divide the list into two or three, giving different words to different learners, and then get them to define and guess the words in pairs or threes. You could display the words on the walls, on an interactive whiteboard or overhead projector, perhaps in phonemic script. Any number of options are clearly possible.

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The amazing gapfill If you start out with the list of words, you could get the learners to predict the content of the text based solely on this list. Obviously, the success of this will depend on the words you have gapped – a list of prepositions is not indicative of likely content, whereas a list of nouns is far more revealing. But why not have a couple of schemataactivating questions at the top of the handout as in the example on page 11? There are four possible positions for the actual gapped words, with the text in the centre. These are numbered on the example: 1 top, 2 bottom, 3 left and 4 right. (Note: in the example, position 1 has questions rather than the gapped words.) We could, therefore, be very ecological indeed and have a number of tasks on one sheet. The handout might look something like the example shown when it is unfolded. As follow-up tasks, the list of words (shown in position 4) could later be matched to definitions (position 2) or pictures or phonemic script. I won’t go into the origami of how to fold

this: I’ll leave you to experiment. I would, however, like to point out that the various tasks can be cut out and delivered to learners as needed during a lesson. The key in this particular example becomes a task, and gives me an opportunity to point out that different gapfills can, of course, be designed for individual paragraphs or single sections of texts so that there is a gradual increase of challenge level. Be realistic, though – don’t expect your learners to cheer when they see a multitude of different types of gapfills stretched over three pages. However, if you are working from a single gapfill type on one sheet of paper, as I have been doing in the examples here, you should always start from the most challenging task when asking your learners to complete texts, and design your handouts accordingly, as it is impossible to increase the challenge level once you’ve started off very low.

The learners Your learners are the most important variable in the language classroom, so when designing gapfills, it is fundamental to consider your audience. Whatever type you use, keep content, task and cultural appropriacy in mind. A text about learning the guitar might be interesting for some but not for others – worse still, a text about a Hollywood starlet’s antics

may not go down well in a business environment. Cute pictures indicating gapped words will certainly work with children, but not with legal English students. The more you know about your classes, the more you can meet their needs and interests in the your lessons.

On a final note, don’t be afraid to experiment, but don’t have a gapfill in every single lesson either … every second one perhaps! Derwing, T and Munro, M ‘Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: a research-based approach’ TESOL Quarterly 39 2005 Kenworthy, J Teaching English Pronunciation Longman 1987 Walker, R ‘International intelligibility’ English Teaching Professional 21 2001 Margaret Horrigan is a DELTA, CELTA and CELTYL trainer and assessor, and a teacher of EAP courses at the LUISS University in Rome, Italy. She holds an MA in applied linguistics and is currently the head of teacher training at International House Rome. [email protected]

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IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

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IN THE CLASSROOM

The grammar shock Anna Kamont looks to

avoid anxiety and alienation when introducing unknown structures.

T

eaching grammar often proves a daunting task, especially when a new grammar structure differs significantly from that in the students’ L1 – or doesn’t exist at all in their L1. Students are often left with the feeling that this ‘foreign’ grammatical construct is some kind of peculiarity; it doesn’t correspond to any familiar concepts, and seems useless from the perspective of effective communication. When someone who visits or emigrates to a different country feels disoriented by the unfamiliar way of life, we call the experience culture shock. Students may experience the same disorientation on a linguistic level when faced with new grammatical structures. This ‘grammar shock’ doesn’t just affect students at the beginning of the language learning experience; it may also happen to those who have already progressed beyond elementary level, and yet still seek a one-to-one match between newly presented forms and their own language. Many students may question the usefulness of a new grammatical structure, claiming that their native language seems to function perfectly well, and convey the same message equally effectively, without it. Good examples are the complex system of English tenses (particularly the perfect aspect), modal verbs which take on different forms depending on their function (eg the modal verb must, with its divergent past forms had to or must + have + past participle) and English articles. Some might argue that this state of affairs is the result of applying ineffective learning strategies (using L1 to acquire L2), yet more and more people claim, as Hugh Dellar does, that the learners’ L1 will always be a part of L2 acquisition

(both directly and indirectly), regardless of whether practitioners or policymakers are favourable to it or not.

The ‘lenses’ technique Aiming to counter linguistic alienation and anxiety and, at the same time, convinced that genuine understanding of a structure translates into productive and effective usage, I have tried to equip my students with the ‘lenses’ of a native speaker, through which they can see the reality that a grammatical structure reflects. In other words, instead of following up the introduction of a new

Many students may question the usefulness of a new grammatical structure, claiming that their native language seems to function perfectly well without it structure with a typical controlled-practice activity, where the input is an exercise with the new grammatical structure missing (a gapfill, sentences to be completed, choosing the right answer out of a set of options, etc) and the expected output takes the form of an utterance with the missing information inserted according to the L2 rules, I offer an intermediary stage that involves literally translating the message from the L2 grammatical structures into L1 reality, and only then revealing the grammatical tools needed to express this message. I call this the ‘lenses’ technique.

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The grammar shock The aim is to reveal the information which is encoded in a given grammar point; in other words, to try to provide a lexical definition of a grammatical form and prove that, as Scott Thornbury says, ‘grammar adds meaning’ and ‘reflects the world which we experience’. The technique is designed to show how applying a particular grammar structure reduces the need for lexical descriptors to convey the intended meaning, and thus makes language more compact and communication more efficient. The practical application of the technique, based on a lesson devoted to English articles, is presented below.

The technique in action This example comes from a lesson with Polish university students at CEFR level B2 to C1. The aim of the lesson was to extend the students’ knowledge of English articles and help them to use them successfully in their writing. Polish lacks an article system, so using them correctly poses a real challenge. The students seem to regard them as a linguistic ‘nuisance’, which they see as redundant (their own language conveys meaning just as effectively without articles), yet they are permanently reminded of their existence by the fact that they keep reappearing in red in their corrected essays. A cycle of traditional approaches – such as filling gaps with appropriate articles, crossing out unnecessary articles or choosing the correct article option – proved unsuccessful. The students did remember the most ‘bookish’ examples, such as using the with certain geographical names and locations or ‘zero article’ before titles with proper names, but they missed the most crucial role of articles: their function in discourse. They certainly didn’t perceive articles as tools of communication between a speaker or writer and the audience. As a result, they kept making mistakes with articles when faced with any task involving longer written or spoken production. I tried, therefore, to provide my students with an insight into a native speaker’s grammatical reality, and to illustrate what a native user understands

by the use of a given article. In this way, I hoped to promote a deeper understanding of articles as message conveyors and, consequently, to diminish the ‘grammar shock’.

Stage 1 I chose a short text from a professional magazine whose content was relevant for my students (in-training teachers). This was to ensure that the language reflected the subject matter they were required to read or produce in their studies. Instead of showing them the original text, with its combinations of nouns and articles, I first provided them with a descriptive definition of the message conveyed by each article (in blue) and simultaneously capitalised the nouns, to emphasise their functions as labels for given concepts, not the concepts themselves. This text is shown below: People seem to be reading less and less these days. Generally speaking all SCREENS, whether on a tool for distance communication which is labelled MOBILE PHONE, a glass part of a computer which can be referred to as DESKTOP or a device which people use to watch television which is called TELEVISION SET seems to have replaced PRINTED PAGES in general. When people aren’t watching a thing which you can find on many different types of electronic devices which people call SCREEN, they are listening to MUSIC in general on their headphones. Is this true? If it is, what is this special EFFECT that the above-mentioned fact (ie reading printed pages less and less) has on language learners? Jennifer Schumm and Elisabeth Poelzleitner explore just one out of many WAYS that possibly exist to foster reading in young adult learners using culturally relevant books for native speakers. In today’s increasingly globalised world, they see a specific NEED out of many needs of today’s world, ie just the one that has the function subsequently described – to develop learners’ intercultural awareness and competence while, hopefully, improving their language skills.

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Having presented the students with this version of the text, I explained that the text attempted to represent literally what a native speaker of English had in mind when producing each capitalised noun with an appropriate article. I read the text aloud to emphasise the length of the lexical ‘definitions’ which I had used instead of the original articles.

Stage 2 Next, I asked my students to analyse the text and try to convey the same message in a more compact manner, using articles (definite, indefinite and zero), together with the appropriate forms of the capitalised nouns. To enable a more focused approach to the task and avoid the distraction of the surrounding text, we used PowerPoint to present the phrases one by one. Thus, the students analysed each noun phrase line by line and, keeping in mind the target audience (teachers) and the register (formal), they tried to find the most appropriate forms. People seem to be reading less and less these days. Generally speaking all SCREENS, THE SCREEN whether on a tool for distance communication which is labelled MOBILE PHONE, A MOBILE PHONE a glass part of a computer which can be referred to as DESKTOP or A DESKTOP a device which people use to watch television which is called TELEVISION SET A TELEVISION seems to have replaced PRINTED PAGES in general. THE PRINTED PAGE When people aren’t watching a thing which you can find on many different types of electronic devices which people call SCREEN, A SCREEN they are listening to MUSIC in general on their headphones. MUSIC Is this true? If it is, what is this special EFFECT that the above mentioned fact (ie reading printed pages less and less) has on language learners? THE EFFECT Jennifer Schumm and Elisabeth Poelzleitner explore just one out of many WAYS that possibly exist to foster reading in young adult learners using culturally relevant books for native speakers. A WAY

In today’s increasingly globalised world, they see a specific NEED out of many needs of today’s world, ie just the one that has the function subsequently described – to develop learners’ intercultural awareness and competence while, hopefully, improving their language skills. THE NEED

Stage 3 The whole cycle closed with the presentation of a slide with the original extract which, thanks to the use of articles, was much shorter and, therefore, far more readable. The strong contrast between the first version and the final version left the students amazed at how relevant and meaningful articles actually are. An overwhelming majority of the students said they found this technique illuminating. They acknowledged that, although they had practised articles before, they had never thought of them as being loaded with so much meaning. It was only by being introduced to the native speaker’s mental picture of article usage that they gained an insight into the nature of the English system.

Following up the technique Awareness-raising should always be followed by activities which facilitate the transfer of formal knowledge to the development of productive skills. For the lesson described above, I chose two activities, both of which contributed to an improvement in the students’ performance. The first featured a text with all the noun phrases translated into Polish (which, as mentioned above, has no articles). The students were asked to translate these into English, adding articles where appropriate. This was followed by a written task, which involved making a critical response to a video extract shown in class. The students were told to summarise the content of the video, presenting their viewpoints on the topic. Doing this provided each student with a text sample which they could then work on to make a conscious choice of articles (definite, indefinite, zero), underline all the examples they had used and say why they had opted for each one. Both these tasks appeared to minimalise the ‘grammar shock’ experienced by an

Text in Stage 1

Text in Stage 3

People seem to be reading less and less these days. Generally speaking all SCREENS, whether on a tool for distance communication which is labelled MOBILE PHONE, a glass part of a computer which can be referred to as DESKTOP or a device which people use to watch television which is called TELEVISION SET seems to have replaced PRINTED PAGES in general.

People seem to be reading less and less these days. The screen, whether on a mobile phone, a desktop or a television seems to have replaced the printed page.

When people aren’t watching a thing which you can find on many different types of electronic devices which people call SCREEN, they are listening to MUSIC in general on their headphones. Is this true? If it is, what is this special EFFECT that the above-mentioned fact (ie reading printed pages less and less) has on language learners? Jennifer Schumm and Elisabeth Poelzleitner explore just one out of many WAYS that possibly exist to foster reading in young adult learners using culturally relevant books for native speakers.

When people aren’t watching a screen, they are listening to music on their headphones. Is this true? If it is, what is the effect on language learners? Jennifer Schumm and Elisabeth Poelzleitner explore a way to foster reading in young adult learners using culturally relevant books for native speakers. In today’s increasingly globalised world, they see the need to develop learners’ intercultural awareness and competence while, hopefully, improving their language skills.

In today’s increasingly globalised world, they see a specific NEED out of many needs of today’s world, ie just the one that has the function subsequently described – to develop learners’ intercultural awareness and competence while, hopefully, improving their language skills.

encounter with English articles, and contributed to a significant boost in the students’ comprehension and appreciation of their function.

Dellar, H ‘Translation: tackling the taboo’ TESOL Madrid 2012 Francis, D ‘Editorial’ Modern English Teacher 22 (1) 2013 Thornbury, S How to Teach Grammar Pearson Education 1999

The full effectiveness of the lenses technique in terms of effective future production, and against the backdrop of other techniques, is yet to be researched. Grammatical structures, especially at higher levels, seem too complex to be fully grasped by just looking at their lexical meaning in a sample of a text. However, I do believe that equipping students with ‘lenses’ which give them a native speaker’s perception contributes to heightened awareness and comprehension of target structures and, as such, invites reflection, which in the short or long term can lead to more accurate production.

Anna Kamont is a teacher trainer and an EFL teacher, working with adult learners. She is a reviewer for The Journal of Teaching English with Technology. She has published articles on ELT, mainly on the role of memory in language learning, technology in ELT and improving accuracy. [email protected]

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Heat up your warmers IN THE CLASSROOM

Ever Malvesi gets his

students fired up and ready for the lesson ahead.

Y

ou walk into the classroom, greet your students and ask them how their weekend was. They briefly tell you their stories. After this quick welcome-to-class moment, your lesson is on, but have you planned a proper warm-up activity? The first minutes of your lesson are precious. This is the time when students are usually much more eager to learn and willing to practise their English skills. Teachers need to take advantage of the moment to reinforce some previously-taught material and make it stay in the students’ memories for as long as possible. With this in mind, how about rethinking the way you start your classes? Here are some ideas.

Using the board Whether it be a chalkboard or a whiteboard, the board is a vital teacher’s aid. And it can be used to start up a lesson with practically no preparation. You can begin by getting your students to write up vocabulary from a previous lesson. This can be done as a competition. Split the class into two or three groups, set a time limit, and ask them to write as many words as they can remember in a given category. When the time is up, count how many

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words they have written, see how many different words they were able to come up with, and perhaps practise the pronunciation of these words.

To make the activity go even further, have the students take turns to produce a sentence using a word from the board. To add some fun, get them to choose the words by throwing a soft ball at the board. Each student has to make a sentence using the word they hit. Use the words to play ‘Bingo’. Get each student to draw a bingo card with three rows and three columns and write one word from the board in each square. You call out the words in random order, and the first student to cross out three words in a line shouts: ‘Bingo!’ You can add a level of challenge by getting the winner to produce sentences using the words they have crossed out. ‘Slap’ is a popular game, particularly with young learners. Once the words are written on the board, you give a definition of one of them, or say what it is used for or just mime the word for them to guess. The students compete to be the first to run to the board and ‘slap’ the correct word. The winning student then takes your place, miming or giving a definition of another word for the others to guess.

If the range of vocabulary you have to review is not very wide or you don’t have much time available, playing ‘Hangman’ is easy, fast and fun. It can help students remember vocabulary items and can also work as a lead-in for the activity that follows in your lesson plan. Play a sentence-building game. Start with quite a difficult word. One at a time, the students have to add verbs, nouns, pronouns, modifiers, adverbs, etc to make a logical and grammatically correct sentence.

Using cards, slips and flashcards Cards, slips and flashcards require some preparation. However, they can come in handy when you want to do some revision, and they also cater to visual learners. Picture cards can trigger the students’ memories of topics, words and contexts. The cards can be any size you like, depending on the size of your classroom and the number of learners you want to show them to. You can make them with pictures from magazines or print them out from a website. The simplest activity is to show the students a picture and get them to tell you what it is. The great thing about cards is that you can use them any number of times to revise different teaching points. For example, if you show the class a picture of a man holding a glass of water, you can ask: What’s the man doing? or What’s he going to do? You can say: This is Joe at 8 pm last night. What was he doing? and so on. Slips of paper can be used to focus on form. They are usually smaller than picture cards, and you will probably need a large flat surface to spread them out. They also require some preparation time and they are easily damaged, so, if your budget allows, printing them on card or laminating them will make them last much longer. You can make slips with words that form a sentence. Put the students in groups and get them to put the slips in order. Once a group has made the sentence, they should shout ‘Stop!’ and everybody has to stop what they are doing. You can get another group to check whether the sentence is correct or not.

You can also create slips with whole sentences containing one or two missing words. The students have to use their knowledge and imagination to come up with words which fit and make a logical sentence. If time allows, get the students to make their own slips. This can work as a competition. Each team writes a sentence on a slip, cuts it into separate words and gives it to another team to reassemble. In this activity, you can monitor the students’ performance while they are writing the sentences and also when they are reassembling them. Large flashcards can easily be seen by all the students in a classroom. You can write or print cues on them, such as ‘Student A / volleyball / every Monday?’ to prompt the question ‘Does Student A play volleyball every Monday?’ This question can be asked to other students – and you have a mini-exchange to begin your lesson. Flashcards can contain scrambled words which the students have to reorganise to form a sentence. You can also put a definition on the front and the corresponding word on the back.

Using simple multi-purpose props A range of objects can be turned into wonderful teaching materials. Soft and hard balls, dice, a spoon, a stick, a piece of fabric, a stuffed animal and almost anything else you can think of have the potential to make the beginning of your lesson more lively and help you activate your students’ prior knowledge. ‘Hot potato’ is another classic activity that brings life into the classroom. The students rely on their memories to stay in the game and enjoy the thrill of not being caught with the ‘potato’ in their hands. The potato can be any object that can be thrown without hurting the students or breaking anything. Choose a category, and tell the students what it is. They then pass the potato around while you play some music. Keep your eyes closed while the potato is being passed around and then at some point pause the music. The person who is holding the potato has to say the name of something in the chosen category. To

make it more communicative, you can ask related questions or get the other students to ask questions. If music is not available, ask the students to pass the potato around and each time they receive it, they have to say a vocabulary item in the chosen category. Any student who repeats a word or fails to say one in a given time-limit is out of the game. A fun adaptation is to have a rule that when the music stops, the students have no more than two seconds to say a word or they ‘explode’. There is no thinking time. Children especially love to say ‘Kaboom!’ and this makes the game more lively and more exciting. Objects such as a spoon, a stick, a flute, a brush or a teddy bear can be used to practise and reinforce grammar structures. Give an object to a student who then has to mime an action using it. For instance, a spoon could be used to brush hair, to turn off the TV, to play the guitar, and so on. The other students produce a sentence that corresponds to the mime. To get everybody participating, the student who is miming can actually say what they are using the object for, and the others then say what the object is. For example, one student says: ‘I’m taking this object because I want to turn on the TV’ and the others say: ‘It’s a remote control!’ As an extension, have several objects and ask the students to say what they use them for and to make up a story using them. This takes longer, but it is amusing and gives you an opportunity to monitor their production. Make this into a warm-up activity by telling them that their stories must contain the elements you wish to emphasise in the lesson.

Using authentic materials Finding authentic materials is not always easy for busy teachers. However, I have learnt that you just have to keep your eyes open! There are dozens of good examples of language that can be used in our classes, but sometimes a potentially more meaningful lesson doesn’t happen, because we didn’t keep our eyes open!

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Heat up your warmers The internet is the biggest source of information available to many teachers. Sometimes, accounts of current events can be used to substitute reading passages from our regular teaching materials. (Of course, we need to pay attention to the level of the text and the level of our students, to avoid frustration.) For example, once, I was supposed to teach the simple past passive, and the topic of the unit was natural disasters. In the same week, a super-storm hit the east coast of the United States. I used the situation to show authentic texts to my students. I did use the simpler text from the book, but also had my students find examples of the target grammar point in

One reason for using a warmer is to recycle something your students have seen in previous lessons, so having a text in which they can do that is essential my authentic handouts. To their surprise, they were able to find many examples and that made the lesson much more meaningful: they saw that what I was teaching took place in real life. Sometimes, you may not like a text in the material you are using and feel that it could be substituted. Once again, keep your eyes open! Use a search engine and you will find numerous websites on any topic. It just takes time and patience to find a text you like and that you believe your students will profit from. One reason for using a warmer is to recycle something your students have seen in previous lessons, so having a text in which they can do that is essential. If possible, take your students to a computer room and ask them to find a web page on a particular topic which contains examples of the language you want them to focus on.

Nothing beats the use of authentic materials that students are really familiar with. Find out what books they are reading at the moment and if they like any particular author or series. Then try to come up with material using this information. If you have a class in which most students have read a certain book, select some passages from this book which contain the language you want to focus on and get them to notice how it is used. Students are often more engaged when they are seen as the ‘experts’.

Using games Board and card games can be the source of lots of fun. If properly used and linked to something you want to focus on in the class, they may be the start, the lead-in and the development of your lesson. A simple generic board can be just a table with squares on a sheet of paper. Students throw dice and move from one square to another until they reach the end. If you have time and drawing talent, the board can be made more elaborate with different paths, traps and advantages – a good example is a ‘Snakes and ladders’ board. This certainly adds more fun to the game. You could put symbols, such as a star, on some of the squares of your board. Every time a student lands on a star, they have to say a word, a sentence, or something related to the lesson topic. One variation is to prepare a set of cards beforehand. Each card has a question, a definition, a sentence to be completed with a missing word, or any other task you like. To make the game more exciting, set a time limit. The students will do their best to reach the finish before the time runs out. ‘Scrabble’ is a popular game among native speakers. However, it can be quite difficult. One way to make it easier is to pre-select the tiles the students use, so that they are almost forced to form the words you want them to. The game is still fun and the vocabulary is revisited. Intermediate and higher-level students can play ‘Taboo’. They have to give a definition of a particular word for their team to guess what it is, but are forbidden to use certain items in their

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descriptions. For example, if they have to define apple, they cannot use fruit, round, red or Adam. This is a really good exercise for making them think creatively and for expanding their vocabulary. Cards with ‘hot topics’ are also popular. Basically, these are used for a variety of ask-and-answer activities. You can increase the benefits by demanding that students give their answers using particular structures or vocabulary items, thus revising whatever you want to. One idea, which focuses on revising vocabulary, is to have a card with a question, plus two or three words the person answering the question doesn’t see but must somehow be persuaded to use in their answer. For example, a card might have the question ‘Is it OK if a really hungry person shoplifts a loaf of bread?’ and the words illegal, dishonest and acceptable. The conversation continues until the person answering the question says one of these words. The student who asks the question and guides the conversation has to be resourceful in leading the other student to use one of the words. Once you have played some of the games described above two or three times, you can get the students to create their own cards using the vocabulary they have learnt. By doing this, you save yourself some preparation time and you can check their progress while they produce the game, as well as when they are playing it. Young learners in particular enjoy playing memory games which they have made themselves. You can get them to write a word on one card and draw a picture on another. The game is to match them up. The cards can then be used by other classes, too.

Using technology Technology is all around us. Many students come to class with smartphones and MP3 players, all equipped with cameras, voice recorders and access to the internet. Why not take advantage of this material, instead of prohibiting it? Students will welcome the opportunity to use their devices in class. Get your students to walk around the school and take pictures on their phones of people doing different

activities. (Setting a time limit is important so you don’t ‘lose’ them.) When they get back to the classroom, ask them questions about the pictures. To practise the present continuous, ask: ‘What is this person doing?’ For the past continuous, ask: ‘What was this person doing?’ If there aren’t many people available to photograph, the students can take pictures of each other pretending to do various activities. Instead of taking photos, ask the students to make a 30-second video of themselves performing as many different actions as they can and saying what they are doing. Ask the students to give you a list of their favourite songs. Choose one you can exploit for language work, and ask them to put it on their MP3 players and bring it to class. Make copies of the lyrics and assign a task while they are listening to the song. For example, get them to circle all the verbs in the past tense.

Using nothing at all Busy teachers don’t always have the time, resources or money to create their own materials. So, how about using nothing? Say a word, and ask a student to form a sentence with it, using at least seven other words. Then get the students to challenge each other by saying words that their partners have to use in sentences. Give a definition, and ask the students to tell you what the word is. Then give them a list of definitions and get them to do this in pairs. Play the ‘sentence game’ described above, but don’t use the board. Doing it orally is a greater challenge because the students have to remember what has gone before in order to stay in the game. For example, you say ‘I like’, a student then says ‘I like tomatoes’, the next student says ‘I like fresh tomatoes’ and so on. To practise question formation and revise verbs, play ‘Coffee pot’. Think of an action verb and get the students to ask yes/no questions to discover what it is, using the words coffee pot in place of the target verb. For example: Do you coffee pot every day? Do you wear special clothes to coffee pot? Do you coffee pot in water? and so on,

until they guess the verb. This can then be done in pairs, giving you the chance to monitor their performance.

Games in general play an important part in getting students to socialise. They are motivating and entertaining; they help the students sustain the effort of learning; they increase cooperation and lower anxiety; and they can make learning more memorable. However, we sometimes need to be careful. Some students are more fiercely competitive than others, so instead of having competitive games, it is often a good idea to have cooperative games in which everyone is contributing towards achieving a common goal. This way, you avoid chaos and the potential for disappointed students. On the other

Games help the students sustain the effort of learning; they increase cooperation and lower anxiety; and they can make learning more memorable

This is your magazine. We want to hear from you!

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE Do you have ideas you’d like to share with colleagues around the world? Tips, techniques and activities; simple or sophisticated; well-tried or innovative; something that has worked well for you? All published contributions receive a prize! Write to us or email: [email protected]

TALKBACK! Do you have something to say about an article in the current issue of ETp? This is your magazine and we would really like to hear from you. Write to us or email: [email protected]

hand, having a competitive game from time to time won’t hurt, and your students may benefit from it. It may show them that sometimes they may have to think faster, think more creatively or become more organised. Knowledge of your students is key in deciding what is most appropriate. It is extremely important to begin your lessons with a proper, fun, meaningful warm-up activity. A good warmer will set the mood of your lesson, give the students a chance to experience success in using language they have already learnt and will fire your students up before your next lesson actually begins. Ever Malvesi has been a teacher since 1998. He has taught all age groups but focuses on young learners. He has a degree in languages from University of São Paulo, Brazil, the TKT and ICELT.

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Writing for ETp Would you like to write for ETp? We are always interested in new writers and fresh ideas. For guidelines and advice, write to us or email: [email protected]

It really worked for me! Did you get inspired by something you read in ETp? Did you do something similiar with your students? Did it really work in practice? Do share it with us ... [email protected] English Teaching professional Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX, UK Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308 Email: [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

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Sounds fun! P R O N U N C I AT I O N

Robin Walker considers pronunciation for young learners a matter of importance.

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hen my Spanish niece was very small, she would say Buenas noches (Good night) to us all on her way to bed. We would all reply, but she’d giggle when I wished her good night because there was a small difference in the way I made the /tÜ / sound of noches and the way everyone else did. At the age of three, Alba’s ‘innocent’ ears were perfectly equipped to detect that difference. Young learners bring many advantages to the English language classroom, not the least of which is the awareness that English sounds different from their mother tongue. Moreover, they are still young enough not to be embarrassed about ‘sounding’ English, unlike many adolescents and adults. So without a doubt, this is a golden age for pronunciation work. However, what should the pronunciation focus be with young learners, what techniques and activities can we use, and should we teach pronunciation if we don’t have a good English accent ourselves? These are the kinds of questions teachers of young learners have asked me in training sessions around Spain and in other countries. Let’s try to answer them.

What should I focus on? With so much to do in the YL English class, it is important to focus on what matters. In ETp Issue 91, I offered guidance about what matters for each of three different goals (sounding like a native speaker, being comfortably intelligible to native-speaker listeners and being internationally intelligible). But it is also important to have a clear idea about what is different between your learners’ mother-tongue pronunciation and the pronunciation of English. These differences can offer us a good guide as to what to focus on. Some of these differences might come up naturally in class in much the

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same way that my niece noticed my English ‘ch’. This is the ideal situation, because it is then the children’s awareness of how English feels/sounds different that drives any work you do in that area. In his very holistic approach to working on the ‘sound’ of English, for example, Clement Laroy suggests that young learners be invited to draw what English sounds like to them. This is a good way of getting them to think in general terms about what is ‘strange’ about English. One child, for example, drew her own name several times, and a

Young learners bring many advantages to the English classroom, not the least of which is the awareness that English sounds different from their mother tongue picture of a boy and a girl. The pictures may not have any obvious special relationship with English, but drawing them allows young learners to express positive and negative attitudes towards the new language. When an important feature of English doesn’t come up naturally in class, the teacher has to raise the learners’ awareness of it. For example, it is easy to demonstrate the aspiration that accompanies the /p/, /t / and /k/ sounds in words like pen, two or call by holding a small piece of paper in front of your lips as you model each word. This allows learners to ‘see’ the aspiration. Similarly, if you need to introduce the idea of word stress, you can deliberately say the names of children in the group with the wrong stress. Calling a student pauLA instead of PAUla, or steFANo instead of STEfano, could bring about a

number of reactions. The children might laugh at your strange pronunciation, or they might try to correct you. Paula and Stefano might fail to recognise their names. Whatever the reaction, your ‘mistake’ gives you the chance to begin to explore word stress in English, and is a memorable reference point if you want to return to it in the future.

What activities should I focus on? Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences has had a lasting impact on teaching everywhere, but would seem to have little place in teaching pronunciation since, on the surface, pronunciation is about sound, and so is most closely related to musical intelligence. However, with young learners it is important to use activities that stimulate other intelligences, too. Getting children to draw objects that are the focus of pronunciation work is one way of appealing to visual learners. If we are working on a sound like /Ü / as in ship, cushion or fish, then we can get the children to draw and colour the different objects. We can then put the drawings into a box in a suitable place in the classroom and, as the term goes on, add new drawings for new words with the /Ü/ sound. From time to time, the teacher (or the children) can go to the box and pull out a random selection of pictures and practise saying the /Ü / words. Colour is another obvious way of appealing to visual learners, and there are entire courses that relate each sound of English to a different colour. For young learners, it is enough to have a set colour for each of the sounds that they find difficult and that you need to focus on. If they find it hard to differentiate between the vowels in feel / i* / and fill /â /, for example, then relating / i* / to green and /â/ to pink can help. The teacher can then refer to sea or eat as ‘green words’, and children or it as ‘pink words’, and as before, the children can make class collections of green words and pink words. Kinaesthetic learners are easily catered for when working on pronunciation because of the huge amount of rhythmic material used in teaching young learners. Nursery rhymes, songs and chants are basic tools for teaching English at primary level, and they are also good for helping children to acquire the rhythm of English, especially

Getting children to draw objects that are the focus of pronunciation work is one way of appealing to visual learners if this is significantly different from the rhythm of their mother tongue. The performing of the actions in ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’, for example, is not just reinforcing new vocabulary. It is also establishing the rhythm of English – with its alternating strong and weak syllables – in the minds of the children as they perform the actions and sing at the same time. One of the key components of the rhythm of English, of course, is the weak sound schwa /P /. However, because the schwa never occurs in a stressed syllable, it would be a mistake to focus on it when working with songs, chants or raps. Some young learners will use the schwa naturally because it is a sound in their mother tongue. But even for learners who don’t naturally produce the schwa, it is more important to focus on the stressed syllables in the song or chant, and to get the children to stress the beat successfully, than to become obsessed with a perfect schwa in the weak syllables. Word stress is another feature of English that can be dealt with kinaesthetically. For a long time now, American pronunciation expert Judy Gilbert has recommended using elastic bands to get learners to ‘feel’ the stress pattern of a word. Actions such a clapping or stamping their feet will also make stress more tangible. Alternatively, you could try putting the children into pairs and threes and invite them to ‘do’ a word by standing or squatting to represent stressed or unstressed syllables. So football, balloon and computer would be:

FOOTball

baLLOON

comPUter

Once a class gets used to the stand/ squat representations, different groups could compete with each other to listen and ‘do’ the words as fast as possible. A very kinaesthetic activity for working on sounds is classroom

basketball (an activity I learnt from Agnieska Otwinowska, a teacher, trainer and materials writer from Poland). For this game, the teacher puts two boxes on the floor. Each box is labelled in some way, preferably with a guide picture or word for the target sound. If your learners find it hard to hear the difference between /p/ and /f/, for example, one box would be labelled pan and the other fan (IPA symbols are best avoided in YL pronunciation classes). The children have paper balls and work in teams. They throw the paper balls into the box that corresponds to the sound they hear in the words that the teacher pronounces. In general, it is not a good idea to work on individual sounds. Instead, we should try to work on two or three sounds in contrast, as with classroom basketball. The ‘feel’ and ‘shape’ of a

It is important that young learners hear target sounds as part of words, and as part of words that are useful to them and that they will use regularly sound is usually easier to perceive if it is met in the company of other sounds. Nor is it good to spend too much time working on sounds removed from the context of the words they are found in. In natural speech, sounds change to fit in with the sounds around them, and so it is important that young learners hear target sounds as part of words, and as part of words that are useful to them and that they will use regularly. We should use pronunciation to recycle vocabulary, rather than to introduce new words. A question I often get asked is about whether it is better to work with coursebooks open or closed. With very young learners, who may still be learning to read in their mother tongue, meeting words in their written form in English can be confusing, because of the complex and often irregular relationships between English spelling and English pronunciation. But sooner or later, if we want our young learners to read well in English, they need to be able to deal with both the regularities and the irregularities. As I pointed out

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Sounds fun!

mean that YL teachers should become obsessed with native-speakerness as their goal. It’s true that the CDs that accompany primary English coursebooks always use a standard English accent. But the CDs offer a model for both teacher and learner to focus on, as opposed to a goal that the children are obliged to reach. In addition, we cannot forget that the person who will most influence the way young learners pronounce English is their teacher: the person they see on a regular basis, whom they love and respect, and whose pronunciation they hear in every English lesson. We can look at this issue another way. If the goal of pronunciation for young learners were a standard nativespeaker accent, we would need speakers of this accent to do the teaching. Apart from the fact that, at a world level, there simply aren’t enough native speakers with standard accents to go round, what would native-speaker teachers do who were from Birmingham or Belfast, Cardiff or Edinburgh? Should they work on pronunciation with young learners if they have a regional accent? Clearly they should, unless, of course, they have such strong regional accents that nobody understands them anywhere outside their own region. Similarly, non-native-speaker teachers should not worry if they don’t have a standard native-speaker accent,

in ETp Issue 90, poor pronunciation is behind a lot of the difficulties learners have when reading English. In that respect, there are clear advantages in allowing the children to hear a word and see the written form of the word whilst seeing the thing the word refers to (or a picture of it). A colleague here in the north of Spain, a skilled and very experienced primary and pre-primary school teacher, trainer and consultant, told me of her surprise one day when she invited her very young learners to bring their favourite soft toys to class for a tea party for the class teddy bear. One small boy brought a toy racoon, which in Spanish is a mapache. But as the boy introduced the racoon to the teddy, he said: ‘Hello, Teddy. This is Mr Mapach.’ Because of the work they had done in class on the magic ‘e’, the child had deleted the final ‘e’ from his English pronunciation of the Spanish word.

What accent should I focus on? As we have just seen, children have a special receptivity to pronunciation, and can often imitate what they hear remarkably well. However, this does not

provided that they, too, have seen that their own ‘regional accent’ is also widely understood when they use English to talk to people from other countries. The long-term effect of not doing any pronunciation work with young learners is far more detrimental to their English than the danger of them not sounding like a native speaker. This is something that all teachers, native speaker and non-native speaker, would do well to keep in mind.

Pronunciation matters, as we saw in ETp Issue 90, and to avoid teaching it because you don’t have a standard accent would be to do your learners a great disservice. Gilbert, J Teaching Pronunciation: Using the Prosody Pyramid CUP 2008 Laroy, C Pronunciation OUP 1995 Robin Walker is a teacher, trainer and materials writer. He is editor of Speak Out! the newsletter of the IATEFL Pronunciation SIG, and is the author of Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca, an OUP teacher’s handbook. His website is www.englishglobalcom. wordpress.com. [email protected]

COMPETITION RESULTS 5 13 2 26 17 20 5 16 18 11 15 5 16 12

A U D I O B A C K S P A C E

16 12 20 5 21 9 18 20 17 22

C E B A R N K B O X 16 5 15 1 12 11 26 12 11 25 5

C A P J E S I E S T A 17 17 21 12 12 6 13 26 15 12 4

O O R E E Q U I P E G 23 11 5 16 8 15 11 26 9 4

M S A C Z P S I N G 15 17 26 9 25 24 12 11 11 16 24 13 12

P O I N T L E S S C L U E

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L T E C A S H N R

Congratulations to all those readers who successfully completed our Prize Crossword 62. The winners, who will each receive a copy of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, are:

Françoise Bouty, St Sauveur, France Amanda Brookland, Ann Arbor, USA Elena Guerin, St Laurent des Bâtons, France Duncan Levels, Halifax, UK Julia Peduzzi, Beckenham, UK David Romain, Paris, France Angela Sadrin, Cleres, France

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Madelene Shepherd, Cardiff, UK

16 5 20 5 24 26 16 17 24 25

Arthur Swortfiguer, Saint Gervais La Forêt, France

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Sandy Trumpington, Bergen, Norway

I M E T E O R O F A C A B A L I C O L T

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R U L E R W E R E

F T U S E G R R A M

J D V G A Q F Z N Y S E U H P C O K W B R X M L T I

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R E A L I S T O R I G A M I

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A L O F T Y W A D V T

U L A E U N O T E R D A Y D R E A M T R A N C E

A D I F F E R E N T L A N G U A G E

I S A D I F F E R E N T V I S I O N O F L I F E

22 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Federico Fellini

Getting thekids onyourside Paul Bress has some advice for establishing a good working relationship.

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lthough many teachers are trained to teach adult students (on courses such as CELTA, for example), the vast majority of learners of English around the world are, in fact, children. Although there are significant cultural differences between young learners in different parts of the globe, there is one issue that prevails: how can you get your students to cooperate? Put another way: how can you get the kids on your side? Let’s look at five main ways of doing this. For each, I’ve considered the possible consequences of not following the suggestion, and outlined how following it can improve your rapport with your students. In addition, I’ve given some examples of classroom practice (and of classroom dialogue) where appropriate. 1

Get them to see that you care

Of course, all students want their teachers to care about them but, in the case of children, this is even more important. If children think that their teacher doesn’t care about them, they are much more likely to be sullen, intransigent and reluctant to participate – perhaps as a way of exacting revenge. If teachers show that they care (particularly by listening carefully and empathising), young learners are much more likely to play ball. 2

Don’t get angry

Even experienced teachers find that things can sometimes get a little out of hand in a large class of children. The decibel level can be much higher than the teacher wants, and the students may not appear to be concentrating at all. It’s quite common, in such situations, for teachers to lose their temper. If students see a display of anger, though, they are likely to feel that they have

scored a victory over their teacher. As the teacher has just behaved in an undignified way, they think that they can now treat them with less dignity. However, if the teacher calmly and politely gets attention (for example, by using individual names, as in ‘Lucia, please be quiet – I need to say something important’), then the students are much less likely to lose respect for them. 3

Get the situations right

Lazy teachers will not bother to think of target communicative situations. They may ask their students to take part in conversations that are completely alien to them. Consequently, the students are likely to have zero interest in the lessons. Instead, teachers need to consider their students’ needs very carefully. If they are being taught in an English-speaking country – on a summer holiday course, for example – a restaurant roleplay could be useful. It all depends on where they are being taught and what their immediate (and future) needs are. If teachers are in doubt about what these are, they should ask carefully-worded questions to ascertain the information they need. Once realistic target situations have been established, the students are likely to participate with much more enthusiasm. 4

Get them to be creative

In my experience, children don’t mind a certain amount of stimulus–response work, especially if it’s done in a fun way. However, if it goes on and on and on, they rapidly lose interest and start daydreaming, chatting to their neighbours and generally messing about. That’s why it’s very important to encourage young learners to be creative. So, for example,

instead of giving them a menu with which to practise restaurant language, you could ask them to create their own menu. By doing so, they will be investing much more of themselves, and the language learning experience will feel much more alive. So my advice is: whenever it’s possible to get children to use their imagination, do so. 5

Get the level right

If you ask adults to participate in a task that isn’t quite suited to their level, they will probably make a good attempt at it. However, if you do this with children, they will soon lose interest. They will get bored if it’s too easy, and they will get frustrated if it’s too difficult. Very soon, the whole lesson will grind to a halt. The secret is to ask them to do something they have done before, but to keep notching the challenge level up a fraction. Introduce a new variable which increases the level of difficulty; ask a less-confident student to risk doing something they haven’t tried before; or increase the length of time the students have to speak. Gradually increasing the level of difficulty is a complex business, but you will soon get a feel for when you’ve got the level right (or not).

It is important to point out that all of these suggestions apply to adults just as much as they do to children. The difference is that adults are more likely to cooperate, even if they have a teacher who is not brilliant at communicating, motivating and delivering carefully-designed lesson plans – while children are more likely to demonstrate a natural resistance to these deficiencies in a teacher. However, if a teacher is able to demonstrate the competencies described above, the kids are likely to be highly cooperative! Paul Bress lives in Herne Bay, UK, where he teaches English to overseas students and also writes novels and paints. His novels are: The Man Who Didn’t Age, The Dysfunctional Family, For Adults Only, The Check-out Operator and Life Swap, all published by Fast-Print and available on Kindle. His paintings can be viewed at www. artfinder.com/paul-bress and http://paulbressgallery. blogspot.co.uk. [email protected]

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Confidencerules,OK? Greg Davies wonders how we can encourage children to speak.

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xpressing your ideas and opinions is what language learning is all about. If learners can’t communicate effectively, then have their teachers done a good job? Is it really as simple as that? My experience as a teacher in Mexico suggests that encouraging students to speak is a real challenge; there are many multidimensional issues that we not only need to be aware of, but also need to tackle proactively. The process undoubtedly starts with young learners. What is speaking? At the most basic level, a situation where the teacher asks a question and a student answers could well be considered speaking. However, learning to collaborate, to solve problems, to work in teams and to be creative (what are being termed the skills needed for success in the 21st century) and all of it in English is a much more attractive proposition for students. Imagine how dynamic and exciting your classroom would be if your learners were truly engaged in resolving issues and working together, all the while using English.

Schools Firstly, schools have an important role to play in encouraging students to speak – or, rather, in not discouraging them from speaking! As achievement and testing become more important, especially in regions where competition between private schools to attract fee-paying students is intense, the focus on results means that teachers need to get their students to perform well and deliver the results the school demands. Learners will contribute their ideas in a discussion if there is a relaxed classroom environment where everyone feels free to make mistakes – and perhaps even feels encouraged to do so, as making mistakes can provide great opportunities for learning. However, if the focus is only on results, are the students going to feel comfortable enough to speak out if they’re not sure that they’re right? We need to

make sure that our learners feel supported and that they know that it’s OK to make mistakes. For most effective results, this should be done at an institutional level.

Teachers Next, let’s consider the busy teacher. There is continued pressure to cover a syllabus, and there may not be time for a focus on activities or aspects and areas that aren’t being evaluated, such as phonics. When was the last time you saw an internal school test that included pronunciation? We rightly focus on grammar and vocabulary, as these are the elements that are likely to be evaluated in exams, but if teachers don’t teach and practise the real sounds of a language, how are the students going to learn to speak? The answer is that, very often, they learn through error correction, which can in itself be demotivating. Put yourself in your students’ shoes: if you were trying to explain a point, but someone constantly interrupted you to correct your pronunciation, how would you feel? Frustrated! So, next time you were in the same situation, what would you be likely to do? Would you try to put your point across again, or would you keep quiet? Teachers need to dedicate class time to teaching pronunciation; the value for the students is immeasurable, even if it is only two minutes per class.

Working together One good suggestion, which combines the role of the institution and the teacher, is to create a set of class rules that promote speaking. Often when coming up with class rules, we focus on things like ‘No food or drink in the classroom’, but better rules might be ‘Try, try and try again’, ‘Don’t be afraid of making mistakes’, ‘Respect everyone’ and ‘Listen and don’t interrupt when your classmates are speaking’. Creating confidence and ensuring respect for all, now that’s a supportive environment that I’d like to learn in. Students have a part to play, too –

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especially young learners because they are just starting to develop an ego, are becoming self-conscious and are beginning to be aware of their place in the world. These changes have an enormous impact on their self-confidence, and if we take young learners out of their comfort zone (either intentionally or unintentionally) then their confidence can plummet. This may, in turn, have knock-on effects on their future willingness to speak in class. Furthermore, young learners are constantly looking for approval from their teacher, which is why they shine when you say a few words of sincere encouragement and, conversely, they slump and withdraw when criticised.

Getting young learners to speak isn’t an easy task, and various stakeholders – institutions, teachers and the students themselves – all have an important role to play in making it happen. Creating rules for students to stick to which allow them to be creative, to collaborate and work in teams in a supportive classroom where the teacher is conscious of all of the dynamic undercurrents is fundamental. Focusing even a small part of our lessons on phonics and pronunciation, and demonstrating how to say new words, all the time being conscious of the impact of our errorcorrection strategies, will allow our learners to feel confident, and will encourage them to speak out and try to express the great ideas that they all have. Greg Davies is the Academic Supervisor at OUP, Mexico. He has taught students of all ages and levels and has been involved in teacher training for the past nine years. He has given talks and seminars nationally and internationally. His areas of interest include classroom management and professional reflection. [email protected]

Over the wall ... Alan Maley wonders whodunnit?

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n previous articles, I have ventured into genre fiction in the areas of travel writing and science fiction. This time, I shall be looking at one of the most popular of all genres, the detective novel.

The tradition It is interesting that the detective or crime story is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although some writers trace its origins back to The Arabian Nights and to ancient Chinese stories, the fact is that it only really got under way in the 19th century with Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and with Charles Dickens’s investigator, Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House. The genre truly took off, however, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the prototypical psycho-investigator Sherlock Holmes, G K Chesterton’s whimsical Father Brown stories, and Dorothy Sayers’s suave sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey in the early 20th century. And from there into the Golden Age of crime fiction, with its uncontested queen – Agatha Christie – and her perennial characters Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot, there was no stopping it.

The modern detective In more recent times, we have seen the success of characters like Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, Patricia Cornwell’s Dr Kay Scarpetta, P D James’s Adam Dalgliesh – and a great many more. The American tradition has tended to focus on the tough-guy private eye, with writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler (creator of the unforgettable Philip Marlowe) and, more recently, Sara Paretsky and Elmore Leonard. And, of course, there are the phenomenally successful (and prolific) Perry Mason stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. The success of the genre has been compounded by the fact that it lends itself easily to the cinema and TV, so that many of the books have been made into films or TV series. Moreover, the appetite for exotic crime locations seems unabated, as the recent TV series The Killing, The Bridge and Montalbano demonstrate.

The attraction What makes crime fiction so attractive to readers? Fairly obviously, by setting up a crime to be investigated, there is an immediate compulsion to find out

‘whodunnit?’ It is a puzzle to solve, and also a kind of competition to beat the author at their own game. The more intriguing and ingenious the plot, the better we like it. Readers are also drawn by the possibility of vicariously sharing the lives of both the criminal and the investigator. (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley is a good example of crime seen through the eyes of the criminal.) And the success of many crime writers rests on how successfully they have been able to create a detective who has enduring appeal. Once hooked, we look forward to the next book to renew our acquaintance with our familiar favourite detective, confident that we will find again all their endearing characteristics and idiosyncrasies as the plot unfolds.

The location There is, however, another feature of many detective novels which adds to their appeal, namely the way they open up new landscapes, cultures and contexts. I am thinking here of writers like Michael Dibdin, whose Aurelio Zen takes us into the world of Italian police work, with authenticseeming places and faces. Or of Nicolas Freeling, with his Dutch backgrounds to many of the Inspector Van der Valk novels,

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Over the wall ... or the French and European settings of his Henri Castang titles. We not only enjoy the novelty of these settings, but we actually learn, incidentally, quite a lot about the world outside our own normal lives. At their best, they offer ‘edutainment’ which enriches our understanding of the world and of what makes people tick. So, below, I shall mention the work of four writers who take us into even more exotic locations.

Alexander McCall Smith The first is Alexander McCall Smith. His setting for the Mma Ramotswe stories is Botswana, ‘a good country’. Mma Ramotswe has set up the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency. Her cases are not particularly spectacular, and usually involve resolving problems with personal relationships. What makes the novels memorable is Mma Ramotswe herself – a lady of ample proportions, a great capacity to draw out confidences from her clients, and who radiates gentleness, good humour, big-heartedness and understanding. A sub-plot, in the form of her relationship with Mr J L B Matekoni, her ‘fiancé’, runs alongside the main plot line in the stories. He runs the neighbourhood garage but can never seem to bring himself to pop the question. The stories are delightful to read and make you want to visit Botswana.

Southeast Asia – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia. His superiors find him embarrassingly unconventional, so they send him off elsewhere to get rid of him. He is an unprepossessing man, somewhat overweight, unfashionablydressed and overly fond of cold beer, but with surprising powers of observation, deduction and psychological acuity. In his Cambodian case, we learn a great deal about that country and its tragic recent history, as well as enjoying the company of Singh himself.

Colin Cotterill Finally, there is Colin Cotterill, whose coroner, Dr Siri, is perhaps my favourite of the four. The setting for the Dr Siri stories is Laos in the 1970s, shortly after the country had been taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao. Dr Siri is already in his seventies when he is appointed as state coroner – for which his only qualification is that he is the only doctor left alive in the country. He has fought with the guerrilla army and knows his way around, but he is an inveterate nonconformist and is constantly in conflict with his, largely incompetent, superiors. In the first book, The Coroner’s Lunch, the bodies of three tortured Vietnamese soldiers are retrieved from Nam Ngum Lake, the dead wife of a party leader is brought in, and poor Dr Siri finds himself in the middle of a tricky situation. But with characteristic aplomb, acuity, disrespect for authority – and the help of his shamanic self – he gets to the bottom of the case. Siri is supported by a cast of equally colourful characters, and the descriptions of the Lao locales is totally accurate. I cannot recommend Cotterill’s stories strongly enough. Long live Dr Siri!

Eliot Pattison Next comes Eliot Pattison, who takes us into the remote mountain landscapes of Tibet. His detective, Shan Tao Yun, is, in fact, a former investigator for the Chinese government, disgraced for unmasking corruption at high levels and exiled to a labour camp in Tibet. In The Skull Mantra, he finds himself co-opted to solve a series of murders of Chinese officials. The mix of realistic description, religion, superstition, violence and mystery is compelling, as is the character of Shan himself.

Shamini Flint Shamini Flint has created the character of Inspector Singh of the Singapore police, who investigates in locations around

Cotterill, C The Coroner’s Lunch Quercus 2004 Flint, S Inspector Singh Investigates: A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree Piatkus 2011 McCall Smith, A The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency Abacus 2003 Pattison, E The Skull Mantra Arrow Books 2000 Other authors referred to (I have suggested just one title per author for reasons of space.) Chandler, R The Big Sleep Penguin 2011 Cornwell, P Book of the Dead Penguin 2008 Dexter, C Last Bus to Woodstock Macmillan 1975 Dibdin, M Ratking Faber and Faber 1988 Freeling, N The King of the Rainy Country Bloomsbury 2013 Gardner, E S The Case of the Perjured Parrot Pocket Books 1939 Hammett, D The Maltese Falcon Vintage 1930 Highsmith, P The Talented Mr Ripley Vintage 1999 James, P D The Lighthouse Vintage 2006 Leonard, E Get Shorty Phoenix 2009 MacAndrew, R Man Hunt CUP 2012 Paretsky, S Breakdown Hodder 2003 Rankin, I Noughts and Crosses Orion 1987 Rendell, R The Babes in the Wood Arrow Books 2003 Alan Maley has worked in the area of ELT for over 40 years in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, China, India, the UK, Singapore and Thailand. Since 2003 he has been a freelance writer and consultant. He has published over 30 books and numerous articles, and was, until recently, Series Editor of the Oxford Resource Books for Teachers. [email protected]

In the teaching context, extensive reading is now acknowledged to be a key factor in acquiring a language. But such reading has to offer what Krashen calls ‘compelling’ content. What better than detective fiction for hooking our novice readers, particularly when the genre is already so familiar to them in their L1, and when they may already have read some English titles in translation? And if the originals are ‘too difficult’ – as some of them undoubtedly are – you could do worse than try one of Richard MacAndrew’s graded readers, such as Man Hunt, which offer authentic crime fiction in accessible language.

26 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE Do you have ideas you’d like to share with colleagues around the world? Tips, techniques and activities; simple or sophisticated; well-tried or innovative; something that has worked well for you? All published contributions receive a prize! Write to us or email: [email protected]

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TAKE FIVE

Chaz Pugliese poses five questions to people involved in the world of ELT. In this issue, he talks to Alan Maley.

1

Alan, what have been the most significant changes in our profession over the years? Well, I suppose I would have to say the whole communicative movement, that got under way in the 70s and continued into the 80s. If you weren’t there, it’s difficult to convey just how exciting it was. It was almost like a religious revelation. Everybody was suddenly talking about Wilkins and notions and functions, to begin with, and then the new courses came along: the Strategies series, for example, which was completely new at the time. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see that what has happened is that it’s become rather normal, and nowadays everybody reckons that they’re teaching communicatively, even though they may be doing something completely different. Those were really exciting times, and you felt everything was possible; everything was changing in the 60s – in all domains – so the times were ripe for that sort of shake-up. Come to think of it, I wonder if we don’t need another shake-up, not only in ELT, but also in education in general, which has become too institutionalised and control-oriented. One recent initiative to resist this tendency is the Creativity group (http://the creativitygroup.weebly.com and see page 49), which is trying to articulate a more creative approach: trying to get people to realise that education is going down the wrong track and to understand that there are other ways of doing things.

2

Is there anything that you think showed promise but didn’t deliver? One of the things to remember is that teaching is a profoundly conservative profession; it tends to develop rituals that are very long-lasting. People have invested their lives, and their beliefs, into doing things in a particular way, and it’s very difficult to change them. So, although there was this excitement about the communicative approach and alternative methodologies,

Alan Maley has worked in ELT for over 40 years in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, China, India, the UK, Singapore and Thailand. Since 2003, he has been a freelance writer and consultant, and he has published over 30 books and numerous articles.

and so on, these have tended to be subverted by the existing routines. I think that once the classroom door is closed, you actually don’t know what’s happening inside. In fact, some of the long-lasting ideas may have a certain validity, and may be worth re-examining. There are things that have been labelled ‘traditional’ – which tends to be a negative term these days – which are still valuable. Translation and dictation are two good examples: both have been labelled ‘traditional’, but if done right, they’re both very powerful learning tools.

3

You referred to ELT as a ‘profession’ earlier. Can it be considered a profession? I think that parts of ELT have become more professionalised. In regulation and certification, for example, by having CELTA and DELTA, the MAs, and so on, as some kind of label that you stick on yourself, that gives you a degree of credibility, which many people didn’t have before. But, of course, there are thousands out there who are happily going along without having any certification at all, or the bare minimum. That said, regulation has its own in-built disadvantages, too, in that it tends to fossilise people, if they’re not careful. We’ve also become more professional thanks to the strengthening of associations. One of the characteristics of a profession is that it tends to have its own regulation, its own gatekeepers. However, there still doesn’t seem to be a common core of knowledge. So, to sum up, I think it’s a very inchoate mass, with parts of it professionalising and other parts gaily going their own way.

4

Could you tell us something about your creative writing project? Well, I started being interested in this 15-odd years ago: I was using very simple techniques that seemed to light the students up in ways that other things didn’t, in that what we were doing was valuable in terms of language learning as well as personal learning. By writing creatively, the

students were finding things out, both about the language and about themselves. This seemed to me a very powerful way of working. I’m not saying that everyone should be doing it all the time, but I think it’s valuable to set up circumstances when students can do it. I’d taught writing before on one of the MAs when I was in Singapore, but it was more pragmatic writing. Then, in Bangkok, I set up an MA module for Creative Writing. One of my colleagues suggested that we should run a seminar for people from Southeast Asia. We did that in 2003, and we formed a small group of teachers of English in Asia, agreeing to meet once a year in a different country, to write poems and stories which could potentially be used in classrooms around the region. We have a website: flexiblelearning.auckland.ac.nz/cw.

5

I know you’re very fond of using literature and poetry in class. Could you give us a taster of a classroom idea for using poetry? Well, one idea I like is asking students to perform poetry. There’s nothing earthshattering about this, but I put the students in groups and give them a text. First, of course, they need to come to terms with the poem. The task is then to perform it as a group. They need to decide how loud they’re going to be, how fast they’re going to read it, where they’re going to make pauses, how many people are going to be speaking – and they can add in things like sounds effects and action. It’s amazing what happens when they do this, because you can’t do a performance if you don’t understand the poem, at least on one level, and so they get inside a poem in a way that wouldn’t happen by simply talking about it. It’s a way of experiencing it and, provided you choose the right poem, it’s never failed with any group so far! Chaz Pugliese is an independent trainer and author, living in Paris, France. [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

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RESOURCES

Do something different with your coursebook 5

Rachael Roberts continues her series on adapting your coursebook to suit your classes. In this issue, she does something different with listening activities.

F

or a long time now, listening activities in coursebooks have tended to follow a fairly set formula: set the scene, pre-teach vocabulary if necessary, listen to the recording and ask some comprehension questions. There are some good reasons for working in this way: it follows the format the students will find in exams, and it can be good for developing top-down skills, such as prediction. However, it can also become rather tedious lesson after lesson and, even more importantly, it ignores some vital aspects of the listening process.

Top-down, bottom-up As well as understanding literal meaning, connecting ideas and making inferences, learners also need to work from the bottom up, decoding what they hear by recognising sounds, understanding where words begin and end, recognising chunks of language, and so on. Good listeners are able to use both top-down and bottom-up skills simultaneously. If they can’t decode a word, they can predict the meaning from

their knowledge of syntax. But listening is a complicated process. Learners need to be able to identify and discriminate between sounds in a continuous stream of speech, and recognise their stressed and unstressed versions. They also need to be able to recognise where one word stops and another word starts (particularly hard to do in English, with linking, elision and assimilation) and they need to understand the meaning conveyed by stress and intonation. It’s no wonder that less efficient listeners have to put so much energy into decoding that they can’t use their meaning-building skills effectively. They simply can’t hold onto enough of the meaning to make connections between different parts of the text. So adding some bottom-up, or decoding, activities to your coursebook listening activities can not only provide a bit of variety, it can really help develop your learners’ listening skills, rather than simply testing them.

Discovery listening A good place to start might be by

30 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

carrying out what Magnus Wilson calls ‘discovery listening’. He builds on John Field’s idea of using dictogloss, where students note down all the words they can catch while listening, and then discuss their understanding of the overall meaning afterwards with a partner. Wilson takes this idea further by getting the students to try to reconstruct the text (or a part of it) completely after listening. They then carefully compare their versions with the original. Where they haven’t heard correctly, they try to decide why. For example: I couldn’t hear what sound it was. I couldn’t separate the sounds into words. I heard the words but couldn’t remember their meaning quickly enough. This word was new to me ... Alternatively, the students could listen again to an audio recording (perhaps after comprehension work) with the transcript in front of them, underline the parts that they found difficult to follow, and then discuss why. And finally, here’s a classic activity, which is usually referred to as ‘the teacher is a tape-recorder’ (which tells

you just how old it is). It’s a bit silly and light-hearted, but actually really useful for identifying problem areas. Simply read a text aloud, at a natural speed. To make it a bit more challenging, try turning your back to the students so they can’t use visual clues. The students listen and carry out some kind of comprehension task or a dictogloss. Whenever they want, they can shout ‘pause’, ‘rewind’, ‘fast forward’, etc. Of course, you could equally well do this with an actual machine, but believe me, it’s much more entertaining with a teacher doing it. I think students (of all ages), just love being able to bark commands at the teacher! The serious side of this activity is that you can use it to identify chunks of connected speech that the learners are having difficulty with, and then look at the linking, weak forms, assimilation, etc with them afterwards. While I wouldn’t suggest carrying out this kind of task too often, it can be a great way of helping your students to understand the importance of bottomup skills, and pave the way for the other activities described below.

Pausing and predicting As well as pausing at the students’ request, there are a number of other ways in which we can use pausing to develop listening skills, both top-down and bottom-up. To focus on the more top-down aspects of prediction, we could pause the recording while playing, and ask for predictions. For example, you could stop a recorded dialogue after each thing said by person A, and ask the students either to say or write down what they think person B might say. They can then continue listening to check their ideas. Alternatively, stop the recording about halfway through, and ask the students either to continue the conversation or, if it is a monologue, to write down what they think the person will say in the rest of the talk. This could work very well with a well-signposted monologue of the kind found in more academic English. The students could then listen to check their predictions. For a more bottom-up approach, try the following activities (which might work better after using the comprehension activities in the coursebook), as a way of encouraging the students to notice certain aspects of language.

1 Having previously picked out some

useful expressions from the listening, pause the recording halfway through an expression, and ask the students to complete it from memory. For example: I was thrown in … (at the deep end ). 2 Using only a short part of the

recording, pause at the end of each sentence or longer phrase, and ask the students to write down what they heard. This can work really well for identifying difficulties in decoding connected speech. 3 Pause the recording after ‘referring’ expressions, and ask the students to identify what they refer to. For example: Albert Einstein is widely considered to be a genius. However, his education did not start off so well (pause – who does his refer to?). He didn’t learn to speak fluently until six or seven, and one of his teachers wrote on his school report (pause – who does his refer to?) ‘He will never amount to anything’, meaning he would never be successful. How wrong he was! (pause – who does he refer to?)

Starting in the middle In real life, we often start listening in the middle of a conversation, or when we turn on the radio or TV in the middle of a programme. In a very simple, but remarkably effective, idea, John Madden suggests actually starting in the middle of a recording, to help the learners to develop the confidence and skills to deal with real-world listening. The learners tune in as best they can, then discuss with a partner what they understood and what they think might have been said before they started listening. They can then listen to the entire recording to check their predictions. Again, you probably wouldn’t want to do this every lesson, but it can make a fresh new approach from time to time.

Using transcripts The transcripts of the coursebook audio recordings can be extremely useful for helping to develop bottom-up listening skills. Obviously, the learners can use the transcripts as a way of checking what they have transcribed after a dictation or dictogloss activity. However, they can also use them to work on specific bottom-up skills. 1 The learners could look at a transcript

while they’re listening, and mark the words in each phrase or sentence which

carry the main stress. More confident learners could try to predict the main stresses and then listen to check. 2 Students could mark pauses in the

speech, using slashes. A well-known example of the importance of pausing in understanding comes from Peter Roach: Those who sold quickly/made a profit. (= a profit was made by those who sold quickly) Those who sold/quickly made a profit. (= those who sold made a profit quickly, not slowly) Again this could be a while-listening activity, or the students could predict and then listen to check. 3 To focus on vocabulary, the students could look at the transcript and pull out groups of words that often go together (formulaic chunks). They could then listen again to how they sound when pronounced naturally, and you could also drill them. 4 You could choose a short section which contains a minimal pair of sounds that your students struggle with (for example /â / and /i* /) and ask them to mark the two phonemes on the transcript, before listening and repeating.

While some would argue that we should be carrying out these kinds of activities instead of the more traditional comprehension activities, I think that they can sit very happily alongside the activities found in the coursebook; and they will not only give us more variety, but will also help to develop our students’ listening skills in a more rounded way. Field, J ‘Not waving, but drowning: a reply to Tony Ridgway’ ELT Journal 54 (2) 2000 Madden, J ‘Helping ESL students adapt to authentic listening situations’ The Internet TESL Journal XIV (1) 2008 Roach, P English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Coursebook CUP 1983 Wilson, M ‘Discovery listening – improving perceptual processing’ ELT Journal 57 (4) 2003 Rachael Roberts is an ELT teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer, and has published a number of coursebooks. She is particularly interested in ways of exploiting published material, and has a blog, www.elt-resourceful.com, with more practical ideas and downloadable material. [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

31

T E S T I N G & E VA L U AT I O N

Preparing students for exams 4 Claire Hunter has tips for getting students ready for IELTS.

T

he International English Language Testing System is the world’s most popular international test of English for higher education and global migration, with two million tests taken last year. It is accepted by over 9,000 institutions around the world as an accurate marker of a test taker’s level of English. There are two test versions, Academic and General Training, with the former being widely accepted by universities and professional registration bodies, and the latter by immigration authorities and employers. Both test versions assess the four skills: listening, reading, writing and speaking. The listening and speaking papers are the same for both test versions.

Challenges for teachers and learners For teachers, it can be difficult to maintain the motivation of some learners, particularly those who have been preparing for IELTS for a long time. Keeping classes dynamic and engaging can be a challenge, especially when some learners seem only ever to want to do test practice. In addition to linguistic problems, learners frequently struggle with exam strategies, such as generating ideas for the writing and speaking papers, analysing the information in Writing

34 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Task 1 and time management in the reading and writing papers.

Lesson planning In an IELTS preparation class, there is an important balance to be struck between linguistic improvement, test strategies and test practice. How teachers strike that balance depends on their individual teaching contexts: the number and level of the learners, the length of time before the test, timetable fit, etc. To keep motivation up, particularly over a longer period of study, it can be useful to focus the learners on what they plan to do after the test, and its impact on their lives. When asked about their goals, IELTS students often answer: ‘To get a 6.5 overall’. It may be useful to remind them that a certain band score at IELTS is probably not their end goal; they need to think about what comes next. Teachers should try to bear this in mind while planning lessons and communicating lesson aims to the learners. The possible differences between the aims of a general English class and an IELTS class are illustrated in the table on page 35. By relating the purpose and highlighting the relevance of activities to the learners’ overall objectives, many dynamic and engaging activities often used in general English, but sometimes avoided in exam classes, can be used.

Preparing learners for each of the four papers Listening The best preparation for this paper is to listen to as much English as possible. Radio and television programmes can be extremely useful, as the learners will only hear the recording once, as they will in the test. However, pre-recorded material that can be repeated is also valuable, and there are a great many sources of this type of material. Podcasts are one example, but there are also many websites, such as TED.com and the BBC’s Six-minute English, which can be exploited for listening practice. Prediction is an important part of preparing for the IELTS listening test. Learners can practise predicting not only the type of answers to specific questions, but also the type of information likely to be tested in various texts. One activity to practise this is ‘Think like an examiner’, where the learners write questions for their classmates based on a listening text. This also draws attention to distractors, hopefully allowing the learners to identify them more easily in the test. (This exercise also works well with reading texts.) A variation would be for the learners to write the script for a given set of questions. This works particularly well with Section 1 tasks. The learners could also be given a copy of the transcript and asked to select the information they think is likely to be tested, and then compare that to the original questions.

What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?

Why are we going to do it?

Why?

Another challenge for learners in IELTS listening is the diversity of the accents used. It is, therefore, useful to practise listening to as wide a variety of accents as possible. For example, if learners are unfamiliar with the Australian accent, they could be encouraged to watch Australian soap operas in their free time.

Reading In the IELTS reading paper, the learners need to employ a range of reading skills, including skimming, scanning and reading for specific information. Given the time pressure that test takers are under, skimming should be used for more than just getting the general topic. It should also be used to gain an understanding of the structure of the text. Any headings, as well as the first and last sentences of a paragraph, can be useful for this. Learners could make a ‘map’ of the text by writing a few words beside each paragraph, summarising the main idea. These summaries can help them locate answers quickly, which is key in IELTS reading. They are particularly useful when matching headings to paragraphs, as the test takers have a quick reference point with which to match the heading. One way of highlighting the importance of this skill is to give one student a novel and another a dictionary and ask them to find the word over. Obviously, the learner with the dictionary will find the word more quickly, because they know the structure of the dictionary, whereas they do not know how the novel is structured or what is in each chapter.

General English

IELTS

Reading to identify and report factual information in a text Content-related comprehension questions, summarising a text, reporting it, discussing the issues

Reading to identify and report factual information in a text

To make it easier for you to read and understand newspaper articles and help you discuss them with other people

Because they are in the exam

Yes/no/not-given questions

When reading an article for essay research at university, you will have to differentiate between fact and opinion

Once test takers know which paragraph an answer is likely to be in, they can then narrow it down to a sentence or two and locate the answer. Learners should also read as extensively as possible. Some useful resources are New Scientist, The Economist, National Geographic and various newspapers. New Scientist’s ‘Upfront’ section, which consists of a number of short articles, can be used for skimming and scanning practice by setting a time limit to skim the articles and then asking skimming- and scanning-based questions. For example: ‘Which article would you look at if you got a question about health?’ or ‘Where does Dr Smith work?’

Writing Both teachers and learners should become familiar with the criteria used to assess test takers’ writing. These are: Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Task Achievement (Task 1) or Task Response (Task 2). A public version of the band descriptors is available online from IELTS.org, and these are a useful tool for teachers when marking writing, allowing them to give specific targeted feedback. They can also be used to allow the learners to assess themselves and their peers. Task 1

Many learners struggle with analysing the visual information in Task 1 and are not sure how to approach the task. Providing the learners with a list of questions to answer can help them break the task down into manageable chunks and approach it in a more systematic way. The table on page 36 shows one possible set of questions for a chart or graph, along with the aspect of the answer it is relevant to and some more information about why these questions may be helpful. Likening Task 1 to the description of a picture can help the learners distinguish important points from details. For example, if you were describing a picture of a group of children playing in a cornfield, it is extremely unlikely that you would include the number of corn stalks. You might, however, include the number of children, and you would most likely only describe one of the children in detail if they were particularly prominent or significantly different from the others. It is important to remember that the

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

35

Preparing students for exams 4

Question for the learner

Aspect of the answer this question is relevant to

Is the chart static or dynamic?

Language

In order to answer a Task 2 question well, test takers need to understand exactly what is being asked. This is an area in which learners often underperform, owing to a partial or complete misunderstanding of the rubric. Task 2 questions are written in the form of a statement, followed by an instruction or question. One of the ways learners can ensure their answers are relevant and appropriate is to turn the statement into a question, and answer that question in their essay. For example, the statement: ‘People are living longer than ever before and many old people are unable to look after themselves. Some people believe it is the responsibility of families to look after the elderly, while others say governments should provide retirement homes where they can be looked after properly.’ could be rewritten as: ‘Should families or the government look after the elderly?’ Task 2 requires a lot more independent thinking than Task 1, so brainstorming and critical thinking skills may need to be introduced. Some learners find it difficult to generate ideas, so gathering ideas prior to the test can be extremely useful. One approach could be to ask the learners to watch a persuasive talk on a given topic (TED.com is a rich resource for this exercise) and to turn that talk into an essay. This exercise is also useful for highlighting the differences between spoken and written English. A more challenging exercise could be to write an essay from the opposing viewpoint. Another idea-generating exercise, which is also useful for ensuring learners support and extend their arguments, is ‘chain essays’. In this exercise, one learner provides an argument, their neighbour adds an explanation or reason, the next a supporting example, the next an opposing argument, and so on.

Helps the learners choose appropriate verbs and structures Dynamic charts – verbs showing change (eg increase) and comparative language

learners are asked to summarise the data in a minimum of 150 words, and it is generally advisable that they not write much more than that. Task 2

Why is this question useful?

Static charts – comparative verbs and structures What tense should I use?

Usually requires the past simple Dynamic charts – possibly past perfect structures with by + time Possibly language for predictions

What is the chart about?

Introduction (rephrasing the question)

What do the labels tell me?

Allows the learners to rephrase and restructure the question better Labels can also help the learners paraphrase eg ‘how much oil was produced’ ‘the amount of oil produced in millions of barrels’

What are the general trend(s) and exceptions?

Overview

Sometimes both Sometimes they are the same thing (especially if there is an exception to the general trend)

What is the most striking feature? What groups could I divide the information into?

Sometimes only a general trend or a striking feature

Main body

What data (numbers) do I need to include?

Speaking As with the writing paper, both teachers and learners should become familiar with the band descriptors for the speaking component. Teachers should ensure that some class time is devoted to each of the four criteria: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. Learners can then use the descriptors to assess one another and give feedback.

36 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Helps the learners decide how many paragraphs to write, and what to compare within paragraphs Two or possibly three groups is probably best Helps the learners decide which data to include in each paragraph, eg beginning/end, highest/lowest, change in rank, noticeably different, changes more/less than the others

To help ease any nerves on the test day, the learners should be familiar with all parts of the speaking test and know exactly what to expect, including the timings of each part. It is also useful for them to get as much practice as possible in speaking for two minutes, so they know how much they can expect to say in that time. Having a bank of set phrases and ‘hesitation devices’ can allow the

learners time to generate ideas, as well as improve both their Lexical Resource and their Fluency and Coherence scores. It is important, however, that the learners are provided with ample practice using these expressions. They need to be so familiar with them that they can use them without thinking, as that will allow them to concentrate on the content of their answer. Another technique which can help learners answer, even when they have a ‘mental blank’, is the AREA technique. This is a skeleton structure for an answer, whereby the test taker provides an Answer, a Reason, an Example/ Explanation, and then reiterates the Answer. Using this technique can help extend an answer, even when a test taker is nervous. For example: ‘Do you like living in Edinburgh?’ ‘(A)Yes, (R) because it’s such a beautiful city. (E) For example, the architecture in the Old Town and the New Town is totally different, but both are incredibly beautiful. (A) I guess that’s why I love living here.’ One way the learners can improve their accuracy is to record themselves and then transcribe their recordings. They

IELTS assesses the English language proficiency of people who want to study or work where English is used as the language of communication. Test takers can choose between two versions of the test – Academic or General Training, depending on their academic or professional aims, or visa requirements. All candidates take the same Listening and Speaking components but different Reading and Writing components. The IELTS Speaking test is a face-to-face interview with a certified examiner. It is interactive and as close to a real-life situation as a test can get. For more information on the IELTS exam, visit www.ielts.org.

can then correct any errors that they find, before re-recording. This is a time-consuming exercise, but it can draw attention to frequent slips in the learners’ speaking which they might not otherwise notice. The internet is also a valuable resource for self-study. The BBC Learning English page has a section devoted to pronunciation, which includes videos, and EnglishCentral.com allows learners to listen to speeches before recording themselves performing them. Websites like Voxopop.com allow teachers to set up class groups where learners can record themselves and listen to and give feedback to their peers.

Claire Hunter is the Academic Manager at Edinburgh School of English, UK. She has been preparing learners for IELTS for a number of years, and has previously been involved in syllabus and course design for IELTS preparation courses. She is also a British Council IELTS UK Product Champion, and has delivered presentations on teaching IELTS at events in the UK on behalf of the British Council and the IELTS partnership. [email protected]

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Saturday 21 June 2014 Holiday Inn, Brighton

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For programme and booking details see page 53 or go to www.etprofessional.com

More tested lessons, suggestions, tips and techniques which have all worked for ETp readers. Try them out for yourself – and then send us your own contribution. Don’t forget to include your postal address. All the contributors to It Works in Practice in this issue of ETp will receive a copy of Writing Skills, by Sam McCarter and Norman Whitby, published by Macmillan. Macmillan have kindly agreed to be sponsors of It Works in Practice for this year.

Get in the picture

Trendy sentences

As teachers, we all know how difficult it is to keep teenage students talking in English. This is a brief ten-minute task which is aimed at getting them to talk freely. It could be used as a warm-up activity or as the main speaking focus of the lesson. You will need to find some interesting pictures on topics your students are likely to be interested in, such as technology, society, gender, nature, etc. Ideally, some of the pictures should be a little strange, with odd colours or cropped so the perspective is different from the original. Use a computer and projector to display the pictures on a screen.

The worksheet on page 39 can be used to practise the language used to describe trends in charts and graphs. This is particularly useful for students taking the IELTS exam, as they will need this skill in the Writing paper. Make copies of the worksheet and cut each one up into a set of separate cards. There are several ways you can use these. 1

Use the cards for a standard gapfill. Give pairs of students one set of cards and ask them to work together to match the words with the correct sentences.

2

Play a competitive game.



a) Put the students in groups of four. Divide one set of cards per group into two piles: sentences and words. Give each student in a group five sentence cards. The word cards are put face down in a pile in the centre of the table.



b) The first student turns over a word card. If it matches any of their sentences they put the sentence and the card down on the table, and the other students have to agree that it is a match. If it doesn’t match, the card is put face up on the table next to the pile of word cards.



c) The next student can take the face-up card if it matches one of their sentences and put the completed sentence on the table, again getting the others to agree that it fits. If it doesn’t match, they take the next card from the face-down pile. If that card matches one of their sentence, they put the completed sentence down on the table. If it doesn’t, they put the card down face up next to the pile of word cards.



d) Each time a completed sentence is placed on the table, the other students have to agree that it is correct. The winner is the student who completes their sentences first.

Try to elicit as much vocabulary as possible about each picture. Then, get the students to imagine that each picture is a mirror and that they are, therefore, inside the picture. Get them to tell a story about where they are and why, and to describe what they can see around them. You can also ask them to give each picture a title and say why they have chosen it. Finally, they can talk about whether they like or dislike any of the pictures, and why. Graciela Juretich Guatraché, Argentina

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE Do you have ideas you’d like to share with colleagues around the world? Tips, techniques and activities; simple or sophisticated; well-tried or innovative; something that has worked well for you? All published contributions receive a prize! Write to us or email: [email protected]

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Alexandra Jelobenko Almaty, Kazakhstan

Trendy sentences In recent years, there have been wild ........... in the production of sugar in the region because of unstable weather conditions. The ........... in ice cream consumption during the summer months was attributed to the fact that the weather was boiling hot one minute and freezing cold the next. The development of new products dropped ........... when the entire research team was headhunted by a rival company.

Sales of games consoles levelled ........... at the end of the Christmas shopping period.

There has been a slow ........... in the import of manufactured goods as the country’s own manufacturing industry has started to recover. Sales of the Talking Hamster reached a ........... in December last year when it was the ‘must-have’ Christmas toy. The company hopes sales will recover when it is relaunched as the Talking Meerkat. Sales of Farmer Brown’s Deluxe Vanilla Ice Cream ........... significantly when it was revealed that it contained neither vanilla nor cream.

The consumption of coffee rose ........... from an average of four cups a day to five.

By 2020, it is ........... that all the hotels in the area will be using solar energy to heat their swimming pools.

The number of people out of work rose from ........... 65,000 to 78,000 over the period.

fluctuations

fluctuation

sharply

The financial crisis has meant that there has been a sudden ........... in research investment.

DVD sales went ........... suddenly when people started watching films online.

Sales of flat-screen TVs tend to ........... significantly before major sporting events such as the Olympics.

decrease

down

rise

off

There was a ........... decrease in the sales of bananas following newspaper reports of poisonous spiders found in banana crates.

sudden

decline

Sales of the company’s products fluctuated considerably over the year, but the CEO said he was happy to announce that the trend was generally ........... .

upward

peak

The quality of the food in motorway service stations has ........... in recent years, and more people now say they are willing to stop and eat there.

risen

fell

The consumption of chocolate ice cream rose ........... when a fashion magazine claimed that it could make you look younger – some shops had to limit sales to one tub per customer.

dramatically

slightly

expected

approximately

Sales of banana ice cream will ........... considerably next year if the company’s marketing strategy is successful.

By 2020, scientists ........... that many of the animals on the endangered list will have become extinct.

Sales of tours to the region have ........... recently. The increase in the number of cases of malaria has been blamed.

rise

predict

fallen

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Quick, quick, slow TESTING

Ted Kelsey sees the benefits of understanding the decision-making process when undertaking evaluation.

F

or a number of years, our school has used speaking examinations to assign levels to incoming students. Recently, a new version of the exam was developed, with new procedures to follow. Because staff would be given additional training, it was also an opportunity to look at speaking exams with fresh eyes. At the time, I was reading the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. In it, Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman documents research into the ways people make evaluative decisions – very similar to the decisions that speaking examiners make. The central thesis is that there are two systems at work in any decision. Kahneman is careful to note that the two systems are simply metaphors: it is impossible to X-ray the brain and identify where they are. However, they are a useful way to describe what happens when people need to solve a problem or make a choice.

Two systems Think of your brain as a classroom: System 1 is the student who raises his hand immediately and practically jumps out of his seat for every question. He always has an answer and gets all the easy questions right. He may get the correct answer to harder questions, too … kind of. Sometimes his answers don’t exactly match the questions the teacher asks. For example, when the teacher asks how much money they should contribute to save endangered species,

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System 1 may say how he feels when he thinks about dying dolphins. His answer is so passionate and convincing that even the teacher forgets the original question. System 2 is the quiet deliberative student who thinks about the answer carefully. When it is time for maths, fast System 1 does the simple addition problems, while slow System 2 does the long division. However, System 2 is lazy. If he doesn’t have to work, he won’t. Put slow System 2 into a group with fast System 1 and he is happy to use System 1’s answers, whenever they seem reasonable. In the past, we essentially instructed our school’s teachers/examiners to use fast System 1 for speaking tests. We gave them a question bank of progressively more difficult questions, but their final level recommendations were largely based on experience and gut-feeling. Teachers knew the level system and our students well. System 1, although quick and dirty, seemed accurate enough. The teachers’ System 1 evaluations were aligned to a standard by using two examiners, scoring independently and then comparing answers. The multiplechoice test that the students also took was our proxy for the deliberative process characterised by slow System 2. The teachers were, in effect, only double-checking the results of this test. It was proposed that our new evaluation test would be given by one teacher, not two, and I thought about how Kahneman’s insights might help us to increase the new test’s reliability. His

book seemed to suggest specific exercises in the training of examiners that might improve their results or, as part of professional development, help us to think about what was going on when we evaluated students.

Heuristics According to Kahneman, our snap judgements are often faulty. One of his most salient examples involves a description of an imaginary person named Julie. Julie is currently a senior in a state university. She read fluently when she was four years old. What is her grade point average (GPA)? The fact is that no one can really answer the question about her GPA. There are many reasons why she might have a low GPA. A little extra information, such as the idea that Julie has problems with authority and traditional education, or has poor study skills, or is terrible at maths, changes the results completely. But most of us find ourselves ‘filling in the blanks’. Our System 1 quickly decides how clever Julie must be, based on her childhood reading level, makes an estimate of the degree of her cleverness, such as ‘higher than normal’, and applies that idea of ‘higher than normal’ to the question about her grades. In effect, we are answering a totally different question. The substitution of one question for another (usually an easier-to-answer question) is called a heuristic. According to Kahneman, heuristics are a key reason why many tests lack validity. He provides the further example of an evaluation of Israeli army officer candidates. The candidates were in a leaderless group and had to organise themselves to scale a wall. Members of the psychological unit would then make recommendations about their leadership potential, based on their observed behaviour. In fact, most members of the psychological unit knew that their recommendations had little validity and that they were often wrong. It was a poor heuristic. The way that the soldiers performed on the challenge of scaling a wall did not match the demands that they would face as officers. Despite this, the examiners continued to use this method of evaluation, and spent a great deal of time and energy deliberating on

their answers, despite being fully aware of the test’s problems. This shows the risk of inaccurate heuristics becoming institutionalised and relied upon. Educational institutions should stay conscious of the fact that how well people perform in a brief interview may or may not predict how well they will perform in class. I tend to think it can be a good estimate. However, we have to admit that it is a heuristic, whatever its face validity.

The halo effect To illustrate another phenomenon, Kahneman cites research by Solomon Asch and asks the reader to consider the personalities of two people: Alan: intelligent – industrious – impulsive – critical – stubborn – envious Ben: envious – stubborn – critical – impulsive – industrious – intelligent

Reading the same words in a different order, the chances are that the reader has a better feeling about Alan than Ben. Each word provides a ‘halo effect’ on the word that follows. Most people create a kind of narrative in which industrious Alan has a reason for being stubborn, while envious Ben has been up to no good from the start! This halo effect is stronger because the words are emotional and are reacted to by System 1, the part of the brain that makes snap judgements. In our speaking exams, we have to be sensitive to the same dynamic. Our first impressions can potentially have a halo effect on our subsequent impressions. When training a group of teachers, I presented half the group with this description: Smart – fluent – good vocabulary range – average listening comprehension – inaccurate grammar – poor pronunciation The other half received this: Shy – poor pronunciation – inaccurate grammar – average listening comprehension – good vocabulary range – fluent I asked them to score the student according to how quickly they would progress in our school. Even if the halo effect was not always dramatic, when the teachers compared sheets they quickly saw how first impressions and other factors could change our evaluations. Some people talked about seeing the values as a full

picture, while others found themselves focusing on certain descriptors that they felt were more important.

Affective heuristics This led to a discussion of another potentially misleading heuristic – charm. I think we would all admit that sometimes we are in danger of augmenting our impression of a person’s aptitude, based on their personal charm and how much we like them. As in the example with Ben and Alan, System 1 steps in most commonly when the issue has some emotional resonance. The trend is known as an affective heuristic, when feelings are substituted for subtler judgement. As examiners, the danger of the affective heuristic may be worse when we allow fast System 1 to change the question. In the above example, How quickly will this student progress? has been substituted for What level is this student now? The second question is the stated purpose of the exam and is, therefore, the question the examiners should be thinking about.

Anchoring The results of the written test were known in advance for some students, because other schools had decided to share these results with the speaking test examiners. Kahneman’s arguments against doing so are convincing. He illustrates a phenomenon known as anchoring, using an experiment in which some subjects are asked to consider two questions and answer the second one, and others are asked the second question without seeing the first: Was Gandhi more or less than 144 years old when he died? How old was Gandhi when he died? The patently absurd first question about Gandhi’s age has an interesting effect on those questioned. When the misleading question is included, people tend to guess an older age for Gandhi. No one thinks he died as a young man, yet 144 years is clearly too old. Nevertheless, considering the idea that he might have died at 144 colours people’s responses, so that people who read that number are inclined to guess 80 years old rather than 60 years old. Other examples of this phenomenon include judges asked to roll dice before pronouncing sentence, with those who see a three giving lower sentences than those who see a nine; and

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Quick, quick, slow estate agents making significantly higher estimates of the value of a house after reading a booklet with a high asking price on the property. What is perhaps most unsettling is that Kahneman found experts to be the strongest deniers of the effect of anchoring, with most insisting that they don’t allow it to influence their decisions, even when the evidence indicates otherwise. Anchoring is exactly the phenomenon we might want to avoid when giving examiners the scores in advance. However, there are administrative reasons for overlooking, perhaps even exploiting, its effects. Often a school simply wants to check whether a score is accurate. The student’s programme of study may even have been set in advance of the speaking test, and the test is only meant to identify large discrepancies between oral and written abilities. One would hope that awareness of anchoring would be enough to counter it. However, that does not seem to be the case. The only compensatory technique that Kahneman offers comes from the psychologists Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler’s studies of negotiations. If a person searches their memory for arguments against the anchor, and keeps those arguments in mind, the effect is reduced or eliminated. System 2, the more deliberative system, wakes up and takes over. As an administrator, I considered different methods that might counter the effect of anchoring while keeping the administrative value of sharing the results of the written test in advance. I could give instructions to ‘find ways that the level is wrong’ to examiners. Alternatively, the students could be put into conversation groups based on their test scores, and the examiners could be instructed to identify those students who did not fit in. Following feedback during staff training, we decided to keep the written test scores secret and did a blind test. Before even discussing anchoring, our teachers preferred blind tests, based on their own experiences in the classroom and as examiners. Regardless of Kahneman’s findings about the inability of experts to recognise the influence of

anchoring, our teachers seemed aware of the dangers of having preconceptions before actually meeting the students.

Objective evaluation Kahneman tells the story of another psychometric test in use at one time in the Israeli military. An interview was used to determine which branch of the military best suited the personality of each candidate. The interviewers asked a wide range of questions before making a recommendation. Kahneman added a simple statistical measure to the process by asking the interviewers to rate the candidates according to six personality traits. After considering these traits separately, they were instructed to close their eyes and give a recommendation. In his experience, the intuitive System 1 ratings became more accurate as a result. By rating the traits separately, the examiners consciously employed slow System 2, and this checked, perhaps anchored, the results from System 1.

Just as with predictions about the weather or the economy next year, experts are often wrong The idea of a rubric or statisticalbased evaluation is not rare in education. Kahneman proposes that in most situations, almost any commonsense rubric is better than a purely System 1 judgement. In our school, we could include scores for pronunciation, vocabulary, understanding/listening and grammar accuracy that were already used in school in another context. However, there was another dynamic at work. The Israeli military examiners were told that their score would not be the final judgement. It was one score among others, evaluated by an outside party. They were making a recommendation, with the understanding that it would be considered together with other factors. According to Kahneman, this was an important dynamic. When people are called on to make an evaluation based on expertise, they are inclined to create narratives that overweight some factors. Evaluations become predictions, and studies show that predictions about the

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future are almost always fated to be less accurate. Just as with predictions about the weather or the economy next year, experts are often wrong. They can be good at forecasting the immediate future, but often overestimate their ability to predict the future at any distance. Therefore, once a subjective test becomes a prediction of future success, it becomes less valid. So examiners have to concentrate on the moment, and must be discouraged from creating stories in their minds (she is very talkative, she is sure to make friends and learn quickly) that play upon the natural inclination to remember exceptions and exceptional stories. I thought it was important to free our teachers from the idea that they had the deciding vote, by deliberately reminding them that their interview was only one factor among others that determined a student’s level placement – not just because this was true, but because it could lead to more valid assessments. It is one way to keep the examiner’s eye on the student in front of them – not who that student might become tomorrow. In fact, it seems speaking examiners need to take their examinations seriously, and at the same time, make a decision lightly! This is a fine line to tread, I think.

Using System 1 for evaluation can work well when the decision-maker is experienced and well-trained, but I believe that an important part of training is looking at the thinking process itself. If your institution employs a speaking test, reading Kahneman’s book may or may not revolutionise your exam. However, I recommend it to anyone looking for new insights into what may be going on psychologically in the moments in which we make a decision about a student’s level. Kahneman, D Thinking, Fast and Slow Penguin 2012 Ted Kelsey is a writer and teacher with ESOL experience in a variety of contexts. He is the Curriculum Manager for EF International Language Center in New York, and a Cambridge English Speaking Examiner for the FCE, CAE and CPE.

[email protected]

S U G G E S T I O N S F R O M T H E S TA F F R O O M

2

Sasha Wajnryb offers some classroom-tested tips to invigorate your lessons.

T

Teaching materials

he staffroom can be the source of a wealth of knowledge for all teachers. Both new and veteran teachers can take advantage of the years of experience and the varied teaching styles that other teachers can offer. This series mirrors a friendly staffroom environment where teachers share and access useful tips on how best to meet the needs of their students. The ideas you read here have been proposed by experienced teachers from a busy ESL college in Sydney, Australia. The tips in this issue of ETp concern your teaching materials.

Many pre-service training courses focus on the valuable skill of designing and creating your own materials. However, sorting through existing materials and deciding if you can use them with your learners is equally important. With such an enormous variety of materials available, there is often no need to reinvent the wheel and create your own lessons from scratch. Reviewing materials and determining whether they are ‘ready to go’, ‘useful but need to be modified’ or ‘not appropriate’ will enable you to save time preparing materials, as well as helping you teach a wide variety of lessons. Start by reviewing the existing course materials. Will they serve your learners well? Are they authentic? Interesting? Stimulating? Where possible, speak to other teachers who have used them and find out what they think. Do you have the autonomy to adapt the set materials, or even select your own materials that meet the course’s stated goals? Many popular textbooks have accompanying teacher’s books and websites that offer additional resources. Teacher’s notes can help you to make the most of materials, but do not feel constrained by them. Exploring ‘tangents’ in the classroom can create valuable learning opportunities.

1 File everything! Store hard-copy materials in folders. File soft-copy materials carefully (and make a backup!). Keeping a copy of materials in

the cloud allows you to access them anywhere you have an internet connection. Find a filing system that works for you, such as categorising by coursebook, by level or by skill/activity. You’ll be grateful when you can easily find and reuse the materials you have already filed. Of course, as you reuse them, you can also improve and customise the materials.

2 Share lessons Talk with other teachers who are teaching the same level as you, or those who have taught it previously. Work together, and share your lessons. You’ll end up trying lessons that you normally wouldn’t have thought of. In some staffrooms, three or four teachers who are teaching the same level might prepare a lesson each and then share them, significantly reducing each teacher’s preparation time.

3 Less is often more It can be tempting to use many different materials during a lesson. While bouncing from one set of materials to another may boost the energy of some classes, it can also create an unconnected sequence of activities. Instead, by designing a series of related activities around one set of materials, you can fully exploit the learning opportunities they offer. For example, a reading comprehension can be preceded by a warm-up discussion on the topic, and followed by getting the students to act out new vocabulary, debate an issue from the reading, complete a dictogloss activity on the topic and attempt some relevant guided writing.

4 Be selective It is better to familiarise yourself with a smaller number of materials than try to look through everything. Which ten books would you take with you if you were teaching on an island in the middle of nowhere? Ask other teachers about their favourite books.

5 Do some careful analysis If you have a set book that you have to use, analyse it carefully! No single book is perfect for all students in all contexts. However, a good teacher can extract the best out of any materials – though sometimes it can be a challenge!

6 Download materials Many websites offer free ELT materials. Do some googling and find some websites that you particularly like. As you download materials that appeal to you, don’t forget to file them! Label them clearly – you may remember now that that ‘bucket list’ lesson with 50 things to have done before you are 30 is fantastic for revising the future perfect. However, you may not remember it in six months’ time.

7 Personalise your lessons Find out what your students are interested in. Use this information to customise your existing lessons. If you choose topics your students are already interested in, they are more likely to be engaged by your lessons.

8 Survey your students periodically Find out what lessons and materials your students like. Anonymous surveys can provide valuable and genuine feedback. These can include questions on whether your students want more, less or the same amount of different types of lessons. Higher-level classes can do a ‘critique the coursebook’ activity.

9 Keep your students’ needs in mind Work towards meeting your students’ goals. If they need to pass an exam, show them that your grammar lesson will benefit them because one of the criteria for the exam is variety and accuracy of grammar. By ‘selling’ your lesson as meeting your students’ needs, you are more likely to get them to believe in its value.

10 Work backwards Find out what your students’ goals are for when the course is over. What do they want to have achieved? What will they do afterwards? Ensure your materials help them to meet these goals. Sasha Wajnryb teaches adult international students in a large college in Australia. He has worked in ELT for 15 years as a teacher, academic manager and consultant.

If you want to share an idea in the ETp community staffroom, feel free to email it to [email protected].

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Reviews Visual Grammar (Elementary) by Jim Scrivener Richmond 2013 978-84-668-1529-1 This very attractive book, aimed at elementary-level students and intended for both self-study and classroom use, addresses the important question of how we can get our students to understand and internalise the grammar that we teach them. Each section is headed by a statement beginning I can ..., thereby mirroring the ‘can-do’ statements of the CEFR, and presenting the learning of grammar in terms of achievement and success, rather than as an uphill struggle. The fact that the sections are short (usually one page, sometimes two) also makes the information ‘bite-sized’ and easily accessible. However, where this book really succeeds is in the quality of the illustrations, photographs and diagrams, which give a visual representation of how English grammar works. As the author says in his introductory address to the student: ‘Grammar practice doesn’t have to be boring!’ This book even gives the impression that it might be fun! The timelines which demonstrate the sequence and meaning of the different tenses are particularly successful, and teachers who have struggled to draw their own timelines on the board will find these invaluable. The text explanations are clear and helpful, too. Returning to the section headed ‘To the student’ at the beginning of the book, I think this was a really good idea. Here, the students are given a simple but unpatronising explanation of why grammar is important and what they need to know; it also includes a clear explanation, aided by visuals, of some of the terms that many other textbooks assume that students already know and understand: collocation, chunks, contractions, third person, comparative, etc. This section is followed by an explanation of the different features of the book and how it works. Each new section has a selection of the following elements: A blue grammar box. This shows the students how to ‘make the grammar’. The boxes contain rules and examples.

Example sentences. There are plenty of these, usually accompanied by eye-catching and relevant photos, which help demonstrate the meaning. Diagrams. These show how the language works – for example, where word order changes. They include the timelines for showing the meaning of tenses. Exercises. A range of different exercise types give the students a chance to practise using the language and encourage them to be creative in their use of it. About you. Exercises with this heading require a personal response from the students, using the target language. The tough one. Exercises with this heading are more challenging. Internet quiz. This heading indicates that some online research will be needed to find the answers. Wordpool. In these exercises, the students have to make sentences from a mixture of different words. The book includes a code, giving access to the Richmond Learning Platform, where the teacher can assign and track activities. A Teacher’s Digital Book is also available for use on an Interactive Whiteboard. Louisa Judge Toulouse, France Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount on this book. Go to the ETp website and quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.

Writing: Learn to write better academic essays by Els Van Geyte Collins 2013 978-0-00-750710-8 Part of the Collins Academic Skills series, this is essentially a self-study book aimed at international students studying or preparing to study at English-medium colleges or universities, though it could

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also be used with a teacher on study skills courses. Learning to write well-structured essays, reports and case studies in the style expected by academic institutions is probably one of the hardest tasks that such students face. This book takes the students step-by-step through the process of producing an acceptable piece of writing, from the basics of interpreting an essay question or understanding a writing task set by a tutor, through to structuring a piece of writing correctly, getting the register right, referencing sources, avoiding plagiarism and tailoring the writing to the expected reader. Along the way, the book also addresses language issues, such as punctuation, the use of articles and common errors. Throughout the book, there are examples of good writing style, and poor examples to be corrected. However, examples alone are seldom enough to help students navigate the minefield of academic expectations. They need to know why they are required to present their work in a certain way and why one expression or sentence is better than another. The explanations here are very helpful because they are not only easy to understand, but they also go into the reasons why something is wrong or why

Reviews another way of expressing it would be preferred. The answer key also provides full explanations, rather than simply listing the answers. The annotated essays in Appendix 1, which is called ‘Taking your writing up to the next level’, will be extremely useful to academic students. There are both positive comments and negative comments in the margins of these essays, so students can see both what they can use as a model and what they should avoid. There is also help in Appendix 2 on interpreting marking criteria and understanding and responding to feedback received on a piece of writing. The emphasis is always on making it clear what university staff expect from their students and how the students can make sure that they meet these expectations to the best of their ability. Because of this, I believe that this book will be invaluable in helping international students take on the challenge of academic writing. Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount on this book. Go to the ETp website and quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.

Reading for Advanced series editors Malcolm Mann and Steve Taylore-Knowles Macmillan 2014 978-0-23-046204-5 This is one of the books in the Advanced level series of Macmillan’s extensive Improve your Skills range, which helps students develop their skills for a number of international exams. The Advanced level series is edited by Malcolm Mann and Steve Taylore-Knowles, and the books are aimed at helping students who are preparing to take the ‘Cambridge English: Advanced’ exam to develop their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The books can be used for self-study or with a class, and the units focus on developing particular skills, which are then related to an exam practice exercise. Mastery of the skill in the first part of the unit helps a long way towards accomplishing the final task. In the course of its 12 units, Reading for Advanced teaches reading for gist, distinguishing main ideas from supporting details, understanding attitude and opinion, understanding implication and deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words, together with a host of other important reading skills that most teachers would acknowledge that their students need to acquire – sometimes without having a very firm grasp of how that acquisition can best be accomplished. By breaking the learning of each skill down into small manageable chunks and enabling the students to practise on small discrete sections of text first, the book both demonstrates the finer points of how the language works and prepares the students well for the greater challenge of doing the exam practice task which ends each chapter. These tasks have been carefully chosen to provide an opportunity for the target skill to be used, demonstrating clearly how

acquisition of that skill has an immediate pay-off in enhancing the student’s ability to answer the exam question correctly. The answer key provides full explanations as to why the answers are correct, something that is particularly useful with gapped-text exercises, where even native speakers like me often struggle to decide which missing paragraph goes where – and why. At the same time as teaching the various reading skills, this book also exposes the students to vocabulary on a range of topics which they are likely to encounter in the exam. There are also Skills tip boxes, giving useful information about the exam and ideas and strategies for approaching the exam reading tasks. Andrew Dupré Lancaster, UK Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount on this book. Go to the ETp website and quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.

Reviewing for ETp Would you like to review books or other teaching materials for ETp? We are always looking for people who are interested in writing reviews for us. Please email [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

45

It quite literally colours our thinking; it has great cultural and emotional significance. Most of all, it gives rise to colourful and illustrative expressions that shade our language. It refers, of course, to colour itself, as you might have guessed! In one sense, the scientists tell us, it doesn’t actually exist! The appearance of the things that surround us in everyday life is governed by the reflections of light off them in selective wavelengths, which our eyes and brain interpret and call ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, etc. However correct that is, it’s distinctly unhelpful, and a lot less fun – so we shall continue to assume that it does exist!

One of the most recognised sequences of colour is that displayed in traffic lights, where red means stop, yellow means caution and green means go. (We often speak of someone being ‘given the green light’ when we mean that they have been given permission to go ahead and do something.) The three colours, representing stop, caution and go, are used extensively to cover all sorts of subjects. So that’s all fine, then! Except … … in Japan, although their traffic lights look identical to those in other countries, the word used for the ‘go’ colour translates as ‘blue’ and is the same word they use to describe the colour of the sky on a fine day. … and to some folk, such as those who suffer from one of the forms of colour-blindness, what most of us call ‘red’ might actually appear quite differently.

Colour on the brain Some brains don’t deal with colour very well, giving rise to the expression colour-blind. Contrary to the sound of this description, it doesn’t mean that people with that condition see life as if on an old TV set! There are various kinds of colourblindness, which make the distinction between certain colours hard. One of the commonest problems occurs in distinguishing between red and green, which apparently take on different tints of the same colour. Very confusing! One consequence of this was that the colours of the insulation in wiring in the UK had to be changed: originally the ‘live’ cable was a healthy warning red, while the ‘earth’ was green and the ‘neutral’ was, well, neutral brown. However, because that gave some people problems in distinguishing between them, the live was changed to brown, the neutral to blue, and the earth acquired some fetching yellow stripes! At the other end of the spectrum (sorry!), there are those whose brains work overtime in their response to colour. These people are ‘synaesthetes’, and there is a wonderful direct cross-reference made in their brains. While this can occur between any two senses, it is most commonly found between colour and either characters (letters or numbers) or sound, usually music. It means that when the synaesthete sees a particular character or hears a particular sound, they immediately ‘see’ a colour associated with it. I am green with envy of such a gift! However, there are some colour associations which are not so happy. Some time ago, experiments were conducted to see the effect of colouring food in different ways. It was found that blue mashed potato ‘tasted terrible’. A dish that had blue meat and various bright blue vegetables on it didn’t even make it to the tasting stage!

46 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

© Vorobyeva / Shutterstock.com

There is hardly a conversation when it doesn’t come up.

There is much colour symbolism in many cultures, with some interesting reverses. In some countries, black is the colour of death and, therefore, of mourning. In others, a common colour for mourning is white. Similarly, in some countries brides often wear bright clothes, whereas in others, white is the traditional colour. Here are some examples of the connotations that colours have in different cultures. Which are closest to the way they are regarded in your culture?

Red Positive: Excitement, energy, passion, power, happiness, prosperity, courage, wealth, good luck Negative: aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, anger, violence

Yellow Positive: joy, happiness, sunshine Negative: betrayal, cowardice, deceit, illness

Purple Positive: royalty, nobility, wisdom Negative: cruelty, mourning

py). so called chromathera es used in therapy (al tim me so are ers or rs ord lou Co have brain dis effect on people who ge hu a ve ha to em They se calming effect and The colour blue has a . led ub tro ally on oti ect. who are em d has the opposite eff d blood pressure. Re bed tur dis lowers respiration an ally on relax emoti green to soothe and Some therapists use on. m anxiety or depressi people who suffer fro

Colour jokes 1 What’s red and bad for your teeth? 2 What’s yellow and doesn’t float? 3 What’s blue and smells like red paint? 4 What’s bright blue and very heavy? 5 What’s bright orange and sounds like a parrot? 6 What’s black and white and red all over?

Colourful language

The English languag e has many idioms tha t involve colours. Can you correct the following idioms? I told him until I was pin k in the face not to mi ss the yellow opportu it only came along on nity as ce in a grey moon. He replied that I was jus t beige with envy, and just because he had be born with a golden sp en oon in his mouth, I sho uldn’t be purpled off wit h him. I told him until I was blu e in the face not to mis s the golden opportunity along once in a blue mo as it only came on. He replied tha t I wa s just gre en wit h env y, and just because he had bee silver spoon in his mo n born with a uth, I shouldn’t be bro wned off with him.

Synaesthesia or no, many colours trigger emotions in us, often by association. The combination of red, white and blue symbolises patriotism in the UK and the USA, by association with the colours in their respective flags. Seasons also have their own ‘flags’: Christmas is often conjured up by the thought of reds and greens together, winter is evoked by the colour white (for snow), and the oranges, yellows and browns of the turning leaves signal autumn.

Colour in medicine and therapy

Answers 1 A brick 2 A bulldozer 3 Blue paint 4 An elephant holding its breath 5 A carrot 6 A newspaper (red = read)

Colour on your mind

Answer

4 made up

5c

6b

B Body parts

1c

2b

3d

4d

5c

6a

7a

8b

A In colour 1 c 2 d 3 a (a horticultural term; some bulbs should be transplanted in the green, ie with leaves on) 4 b Answers

Positive: prestige, power, elegance Negative: mystery, evil, anger, death, mourning, depression

3a

Black

2d

Positive: freshness, nature, good luck, hope, safety Negative: jealousy, greed, inexperience

There is a photocopiable quiz on page 48 that you might like to do yourself or use with your students. The answers are below.

1 made up

Green

Colour in class

C Colour completions 1 blue (black and blue = bruised) 2 white (black and white = printed and, therefore, official) 3 pink (tickled pink = delighted) 4 green (given the green light = given permission to go ahead) 5 red (red tape = bureaucracy) 6 grey (a grey area = a situation where there are no clear rules or answers)

Positive: reverence, purity, peace, marriage Negative: death, cold, winter, cowardice

D True colours?

White

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

47

Colourful language quiz The English language is full of idioms that involve colour. See if you can do this quiz. When you have finished, discuss with a partner any colour idioms in your own language. Translate them and their meanings into English and teach them to the rest of the class.

A In colour

7 To wear rose-tinted spectacles

Match the idioms 1–4 with their meanings a–d.

a to view things in an overly optimistic way

1 in the black

a with leaves on

b to have red eyes after drinking too much alcohol

2 in the pink

b in debt

c to have failing eyesight as a result of growing old

3 in the green

c with money in the bank

d to have very poor fashion sense

4 in the red

d healthy

8 To get a golden handshake

B Body parts

a to make friends with someone who is rich and famous b to receive a lot of money when you leave a job

Choose the correct meaning for each colour idiom.

c to negotiate successfully in a business deal

1 To do something until you are blue in the face

d to win something (eg a lottery) when you didn’t expect to

a to exhaust yourself by taking too much physical exercise b to work hard until you have paid off your debts c to do something again and again without achieving your aim d to work outside until the weather forces you to give up 2 To have blue blood

C Colour completions Can you complete these sentences with the right colours?

a to have the ability to withstand very cold temperatures

1 I fell off my bicycle yesterday and now I’m black and ____________ .

b to be born into an aristocratic family

2 I won’t believe it until I see it in black and ____________ .

c to be a very cold and unemotional person d to be a teacher’s favourite student 3 To be a blue-eyed boy a to be sad and depressed in character b to be very surprised by something c to be a weak child in an otherwise healthy family d to be given special favours by someone in authority 4 To have green fingers a to be jealous of other people’s good fortune

3 I was tickled ____________ when I won first prize for my painting. 4 We were delighted when our building application was given the ____________ light. 5 Getting permission from the authorities was very complicated; there was a lot of ____________ tape involved. 6 This is a very ____________ area; there are many possible answers.

b to be very good at art

D True colours?

c to be very good at making money

Match these animal idioms with the meanings below. Be careful – two of the idioms are made up.

d to be able to grow plants successfully 5 To be green around the gills a to be fresh and new b to look like a fish c to look sick d to be a good swimmer

1 a goat with a yellow tail 2 a white elephant 3 a red herring 4 a blue toad 5 a horse of a different colour 6 a black sheep

6 To be caught red-handed

a a false clue, intended to mislead or distract

a to be discovered doing something bad or illegal b to be tricked into doing something you didn’t want to do

b a disreputable member of an otherwise respectable family

c to be arrested for making counterfeit banknotes

c something that is another matter entirely

d to lose all your money to a swindler

d a possession that creates more trouble than it is worth

48 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green

From the publisher of

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Ludicrous language IN THE CLASSROOM

Chris Payne irons his platypus.

‘A

s far as possible, teachers should try to avoid inventing examples in class. Do you agree? What justification can you offer for inventing examples?’ (Michael Lewis)

Sweet memories The question of whether we should invent language examples is a longstanding talking point in ELT circles. As long ago as 1899, in his book The Practical Study of Languages, the English scholar Henry Sweet mocked the use of invented sentences. His disapproval of ‘insipid, colourless combinations’ had an enduring effect on language teaching. At the time, Sweet was an eminent and influential phonetician, so much so that he was believed by many to be the inspiration for Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, written in 1913. If we fast-forward to 2000, we can find further opposition to invented sentences from Michael Lewis, who laments the fact that language teaching has a history of inventing examples – and warns that if you invent examples consisting of a one-clause sentence, they are surely very poor examples. More recently, in Issue 73 of ETp, Peter McFarlane questioned the usefulness of example sentences such as ‘I was having a bath when the phone rang’, indicating – correctly – that it is language which you would seldom hear used. Except, of course, in the classroom.

Sweet’s memory In his thought-provoking book Translation in Language Teaching, Guy Cook uncovers contradictions in Henry Sweet’s criticism of invented sentences. Sweet refers to made-up sentences as unlikely examples of actual language use which, in his view, ‘do not stamp themselves on the memory’. He quotes the following example from one of his former teachers of Greek: ‘The philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen.’ Quite clearly, this outlandish sentence is not representative of idiomatic usage. However, it was imprinted indelibly on Henry Sweet’s memory, as his own words bear witness: ‘a sentence which I remembered long after I had forgotten all the rest of my Greek.’ Thus, Sweet’s argument about the lack of memorability of invented sentences does not apply to his own memorable example! ‘The philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen’ would be a ludicrous example of English. Yet, interestingly, the more absurd the meaning of a sentence is, the more likely it is to be memorised verbatim. This holds true for much bizarre language, whether it is made up or authentic. Now that you have read the example ‘philosopher’ sentence twice, there is a strong possibility that you will remember it. Recollection of the exact words in an excerpt from a book is a tall order, but anyone who has read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will

50 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

probably be able to recall the absurd question: ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ Adults living in the UK in the 1980s will surely recognise this newspaper headline: ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’. It was published by the tabloid The Sun on March 13th 1986, and the unexpectedness of the last word ensured it stood out – making it one of the most memorable headlines of its decade.

Memorable words A brief digression into the field of memory experiments may perhaps provide us with a partial explanation for why ludicrous language is often so memorable. Read the following list of words once only. Then cover them up and, on a separate piece of paper, write down as many words as you can remember – in any order.

!

cat

house

door

bone

hand

shape

pear

back

goat

ball

rain

hill

cut

Von Restorff

rose life wind The chances are you were able to recall Von Restorff because, as a two-word proper noun, it stands out from the other one-syllable words. The tendency to remember outstanding or surprising items on a list was identified by Hedwig Von Restorff in 1933 during memory experiments that she was conducting. The effect known as the ‘Von Restorff effect’ has since been found to

be true in other situations in which items stand out in some way from those around them. It has been suggested that the outstanding elements increase a person’s attention, which in turn leads to better retention.

Memorable teaching What bearing does the observation described have on language teaching? Examples of language could be chosen for their memorability. Teachers could exploit the fact that learners can often remember the precise words in a bizarre sentence – by embedding useful grammar and chunks of language in their crazy created examples. Such unexpected examples of English can be presented to learners alongside other more conventional ELT sentences and authentic language, in an attempt to highlight their saliency and activate the Von Restorff effect. For example, the teacher presents a number of sentences that contain Would you mind plus verb with -ing, which is used when making polite requests: 1 Would you mind telling me what you’re

doing? (authentic) 2 Would you mind ironing my pink

platypus? (invented)

flower comes not from the L2 classroom, but from the real world of board games that are played by native speakers who are learning English. Silly Sentences and Very Silly Sentences, sold by DK Games, are board games in which players are encouraged to make sentences – ‘the sillier the better’. The games are fun and they help children to learn about word class and syntax, as well as complementing the National Curriculum. ELT author Nick Bilbrough also espouses making tenses memorable by challenging learners to create silly examples in his activity Silly Grammar, in which the students brainstorm words in various categories (such as animal or person, object, past form of intransitive verb), complete a table with them and then compete to write down the two silliest sentences they can come up with, using these words.

Teachers who favour real instances of used language but fail to select carefully can unwittingly provide poor examples

3 Would you mind opening the window,

please? (ELT material) In these examples, the learners are being exposed to a frequently-found and useful pattern of language, even in the bizarre invented sentence. If the Von Restorff effect does indeed aid retention, then students will remember ‘would you mind ironing my …’, which is a perfectly natural use of English when combined with other words like shirt, skirt, etc. The object of the exercise is for students to recall, in the short and long term, that Would you mind is commonly followed by a verb with the -ing form. If it turns out that Von Restorff has no effect in this instance but, instead, the students remember the authentic or typical ELT example of the target language, the aim of the exercise has still been fulfilled.

Silly sentences The notion of using bizarre language for pedagogic purposes is not as contrived and inauthentic as it first appears. The sentence The banana jumps over the

Reality rules! There is no doubt that learners need to be exposed to examples of real or authentic language, so we should keep a close check on the content of our lessons. But this does not vindicate the assumption that examples of language that are unlikely to occur in a noninstructional setting are always bad examples in the classroom. An analogy may help to illustrate this point. We all unquestioningly accept the idea that airline pilots need to carry out part of their training in a flight simulator. While we are aware that a flight simulator is not the same as an actual aeroplane, we acknowledge the benefits of using a simulator to help pilots to learn to fly. Similarly, invented sentences that simulate actual language use can serve as a good model for students – if chosen wisely. In fact, authentic is not synonymous with appropriate, so teachers who overwhelmingly favour real instances of

used language but fail to select carefully can unwittingly provide poor examples. Also, much everyday ‘real’ language is so prosaic that it is instantly forgettable, unlike bizarre made-up sentences, which stand out.

A high percentage of the language used in classrooms comes from the teacher – some estimates put the figure at 70 per cent. It is only natural for teachers at the coalface to use ‘bespoke’ sentences some of the time, especially if we consider that many of us have to teach with coursebooks whose content needs adapting and tailoring for our classes. A hypothetical teacher who never used invented sentences would be denied the possibility of any kind of spontaneity and would be unable to personalise language for a particular class. In addition to authentic language, typical and bizarre invented sentences can also contribute to the learning process. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Bilbrough, N Memory Activities for Language Learning CUP 2011 Cook, G Translation in Language Teaching OUP 2010 Cook, V Second Language Learning and Language Teaching Hodder Education 2008 Lewis, M Teaching Collocation Thomson Heinle 2000 Russell, P The Brain Book Routledge 1980 Chris Payne is the owner of Paddington School of English, Linares, Spain. He is an experienced teacher and a former Cambridge English oral examiner and oral examiner trainer. He has written several published articles on ELT. [email protected]

It really worked for me! Did you get inspired by something you read in ETp? Did you do something similiar with your students? Did it really work in practice? Do share it with us ... [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

51

C is for creativity Brian Tomlinson begins a new extended article on ‘creativity for change’.

T

his is an extended article which has been written by a group of language educators who are all part of The ‘C’ Group: Creativity for Change in Language Education, whose aim is to facilitate creative change in language education. It will be published in ETp over several issues. Each author wrote a part and then passed the article on to the next author, and so on until the article was complete. We hope we’ve achieved some coherence and, most importantly, a stimulus to be creative.

What does creativity mean to me? To me, creativity involves transcending the conventional norm. This could result in something universally unique, or just in something which has never been done in that context before. In language education, not everything conventional needs transcending. But some of it does, and we need to keep on transcending, anyway, in order to produce something new – not necessarily to replace existing approaches, but to refresh teachers and learners and stimulate them to think and behave creatively, as well.

What can creativity do? When you are creative, you think and do things differently. When you produce things which are different, you can get other people to think and do things differently, too. If you are a creative curriculum developer, materials writer, teacher, teacher trainer or examiner, you can stimulate language teachers and language learners to think and do things which are usefully different. You can spark vital energy and enthusiasm. Here are some examples of language educators who responded creatively to unsatisfactory situations:

slowly turned the rolling pin, and the engaged learners read the story as it was gradually revealed on the screen. After a while, she turned it faster and the learners increased their reading speed. 2 A teacher in an Indonesian secondary school with no books staggered into class carrying an apparently heavy box. She invited her class to come and look at their new library. When they complained that the box was empty, she told them that for homework each of them should find something interesting to read to put into the box. All 40 learners did this (some by finding people with English-sounding names in a telephone directory and visiting their houses). By the end of term, there were 400 ‘texts’ in the library. 3 In a teachers’ college in Vanuatu, I got a group of lower-intermediate domestic science teachers to throw their unsuitable English coursebook out of the classroom window and then to spend three hours a week for ten weeks writing a novel (beginning by visualising somebody interesting in their village, and then writing about what the person was doing). My role was to give supportive feedback and provide language when it was needed.

Namibia then produced a text-driven coursebook to implement the syllabus described above. This featured texts on topics requested by the learners, including such normally taboo topics as drug abuse and marital violence. 2 Teachers in a university in Oman replaced the conventional writing skills coursebook with their own experiential course of locally relevant materials.

Creative examining 1 In Kobe University, examination candidates had to think about ways of solving the problem of water shortages, rewrite a page on water shortages aimed at primary pupils, design a water-saving device, and then write a letter and give a presentation about it ‘to an international company’. 2 In Vanuatu, the primary school leaving examination was changed from a conventional discrete-item test to a series of communicative tasks. We then got the teachers to write booklets of communicative tasks at workshops around the country, and the methodology of teaching English in the primary schools changed almost overnight.

Creative teacher training 1 On the PKG Project in Indonesia, groups of teachers met every Monday at somebody’s house for coffee. They reviewed the materials used in class in the previous week, and wrote their own materials for the following week. 2 On an initial teacher training course at Language Resources in Kobe, in order to raise the trainees’ curiosity about ways of teaching and learning language, we got them to develop their own materials at the beginning of their course, before they received any instruction.

Creative teaching

Creative curriculum and materials development

1 A teacher in a primary school in Vanuatu, without any books, told her class that they had a television. She then sat them in front of a cardboard box where she had painted knobs and cut out a screen. She inserted into the box a rolling pin on which she had rolled up a piece of paper with a local myth translated into English. She

1 In Namibia, a secondary school syllabus was produced which didn’t present an inventory of teaching points, but provided a stimulus for the development of such skills as creative and critical thinking, whilst engaging learners in ‘projects’ with local relevance and educational value. A group of 30 secondary school teachers in

52 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

None of the creative enterprises described above resulted in miraculously increased language acquisition, but they all provided increased enjoyment, whilst stimulating both teachers and learners to think and do things differently. The products were creative but, more importantly, the processes were creative too. This article will continue in Issue 93 of ETp, with contributions from Jane Arnold and Rod Bolitho. Brian Tomlinson has been a teacher, teacher trainer, curriculum developer, university academic and football coach in many different countries. He is now a TESOL Professor at Anaheim University, USA, and the President of MATSDA, the Materials Development Association. His numerous publications focus mainly on materials development. [email protected]

Only £59.00 to attend, book now! Saturday 21 June 2014 Holiday Inn, Brighton

A one-day conference packed full of practical ideas to improve your teaching practice

In conjunction with

ETp Live! brings the practical approach of English Teaching professional to a one-day event, focusing on enabling you to improve your practice. Programme

: : : : : : : : : :

Jeremy Harmer – opening plenary Philip Kerr – The brave new world of adaptive learning Mark Almond – Drama: all bases covered Dennis Davy – London calling: practical ideas on how to use London (or any other city) as the theme of a series of language lessons Mike Hogan – Addressing the challenges of working in international virtual workplaces

To make sure you don’t miss out, book your place today:

Catriona Johnson – Transposition: reworking original texts into new versions

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Anna Musielak – How to incorporate drama games, literature and popular culture in the classroom

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Chia Suan Chong – Creating the right impression: the politeness and pragmatics of ELF Antonia Clare – Love and the art of language learning Ken Wilson – Ten ways to get your students to DO something

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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

The best of both worlds Olga Filatova

demonstrates what nativespeaker and non-nativespeaker teachers can learn from each other.

S

ince English is the most widelyspoken foreign language and is the language of international business communication, fluency in English is a requirement in many job descriptions around the world. As a result, there is a high demand for English teachers, both native and non-native speakers of the language – and the same is true of all language teaching: those teaching a particular language may or may not be native speakers. In this article, I will discuss teaching English as a second language to international students participating in intensive language programmes. These students will go on to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees at American universities, as well as teaching foreign languages to American college students. I believe, however, that my findings will apply to a broader category of language learners in a variety of countries around the globe. Teachers vary enormously in their personal qualities, their teaching style and the amount of preparation they do. Student preferences vary too, and all these things have an influence on learning outcomes. I am a native speaker of Russian. I teach English as a second language to international students and Russian to American students. I have a number of colleagues in a similar situation. I started to wonder what a native-speaker teacher could learn from a non-nativespeaker teacher and vice versa – and what I myself could improve in teaching both my native and second languages.

Explanations Non-native-speaker teachers who have learnt a language as a result of mental effort, both in a natural and artificial

54 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

(classroom) environment, have learnt it as a system of grammar and spelling rules that they have understood and internalised, and can, therefore, easily explain to other language learners. Native-speaker teachers who learnt the language naturally in childhood don’t necessarily view the language this way. Even if they know the rules well, they may have difficulty explaining them to language students because their ways of internalising them differ. I was a little puzzled when the students to whom I teach Russian viewed the language as an artificial way of communication and required an explanation for many language phenomena. At times I didn’t have one, and the phrase ‘because that’s what we say’ didn’t satisfy them. Teaching English, on the other hand, I am able to share with the students my own learning process, breaking the rules into sub-rules and schemes, and showing them the formulas I used to memorise and understand certain language phenomena.

So, what can a native-speaker teacher learn from a non-native-speaker teacher? View the language through your students’ eyes, and be ready to explain things that do not require explanation from your perspective.

Empathy The teacher’s ability to relate to the students has an influence on the success of learning. However, people who come from different cultural backgrounds don’t always share the same values and ideas. When teaching a foreign language, a non-native speaker can use easier examples from the home culture to teach vocabulary and grammar, and can choose texts and topics of discussion that the students are better able to relate to. A

TEACHER DEVELOPMENT non-native speaker is more likely to have similar ideas to the students about the foreign culture and its current political and economic events than a native speaker is. A non-native-speaker teacher living in an English-speaking country and teaching international students has already gone through the same process of adapting to a foreign learning environment that the students are now experiencing and can, therefore, better help them to identify the differences between their culture and the one they are living in, or want to function in. So, what can a native-speaker teacher learn from a non-native-speaker teacher? Be ready to explain what you expect from your students during and after the lessons, and be sensitive to their values.

Culture Native-speaker teachers will have a deeper innate understanding of the local cultural traditions than someone who didn’t grow up there. They will understand the importance of historical events, the geography and cultural development of the country and the area; they will know its social and political structure, its sports, holidays and celebrations, the ways things are done, new tendencies, the development of popular culture, including music and movies, food, fashion, popular activities and hobbies, and so on. As a result, they will be better able to explain cultural phenomena – and their explanations will be more interesting to international students. A nativespeaker teacher is also better equipped to teach idioms, informal expressions, sayings and slang than a non-native speaker. Native speakers will also have a better insight into the kind of behaviour that the students will need to exhibit in order to be successful in that culture. In an educational setting like mine, examples of the kind of culturally inappropriate behaviour exhibited by some students may include being late for lessons, maintaining constant eye contact and violating personal space, or attempting to negotiate grades or assignments with the teacher. Other students may come from cultures which are often viewed by people from the US as reserved and non-sociable. They may be used to taking notes while a teacher lectures them, and there may be no

tradition of active discussion in the classroom in their culture. As a result, students like these usually don’t participate unless they are specifically called upon to do so. It may take them some time to warm up to the idea of taking an active part in discussions. Another cultural difference lies in definitions of plagiarism and attitudes towards it. In my experience of teaching writing to international students in the US, it is necessary to explain precisely what plagiarism is and practise using references and quoting sources properly before getting students to write academic papers. So, what can a non-native-speaker teacher learn from a native-speaker teacher? The same thing the students need to learn – a better understanding of the local culture and its traditions, and other cultural and language phenomena necessary for successful integration.

Translation It is arguable whether translation plays a positive or a negative role in second language acquisition. Language teaching methodologies such as the Direct Method, the Audio-lingual Method, and Natural and Communicative Approaches, tended to neglect the role of translation. Recently, however, it has been suggested that translation is helpful for language learners. During the early stages of language learning in particular, students seem to prefer to use translation, and feel more comfortable with a teacher who can translate words, phrases and instructions for them. They may also feel more confident if their teacher can explain where their errors may be coming from, as well as favouring teachers who show an appreciation for their own culture. So, what can a non-native-speaker teacher do better than a native-speaker teacher? Translate important concepts, instructions, directions and key vocabulary, and check for comprehension, especially with beginner learners. If they have a native-speaker teacher, however, especially one who doesn’t speak their language, students are more motivated to use the target language to communicate. So, what can a native-speaker teacher do better than a non-native-speaker teacher? Motivate students to use

target language for communication and form direct connections between new concepts and foreign vocabulary. To redress the balance, non-nativespeaker teachers should ensure that they use communicative strategies in their instruction.

Pronunciation Pronunciation and accent reduction play an important role in the success of communication. The goal for many foreign language learners is to be able to listen and understand and to be easily understood. A non-native-speaker teacher who shares the students’ first language may be easier to understand, which can be helpful for beginner language learners, and, by speaking in English, acts as an inspiration and a role model, demonstrating what is possible. However, a native-speaker teacher may be better able to model correct pronunciation, and also provides an opportunity for the students to listen to the way the language is spoken in the natural environment, outside the classroom. So, what can a native-speaker teacher do better than a non-native-speaker teacher? Model correct pronunciation which, in the long run, will be more beneficial to language learners. So, what can a non-native-speaker teacher do better than a native-speaker teacher? Provide a model of successful language learning and an inspiration.

There is no doubt that students benefit from both native-speaker and non-nativespeaker language teachers. Working together, side by side and in collaboration, both types of teacher can build on each other’s strengths to enrich their students’ educational experience and improve their learning outcomes. A native Russian speaker, Olga Filatova has taught English as a second language and Russian as a foreign language for 15 years. She has worked in intensive English language programmes, community colleges, private tutoring companies, and universities in the USA, Russia and Turkey. [email protected]

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Choose your blend TECHNOLOGY

Linda M Hanington and Poh Foong Kwah describe three ideas for blended learning in preservice teacher education.

T

he term blended learning seems to be on everybody’s lips these days as a way to integrate ICT with traditional approaches to teaching. Blended refers to courses that combine online components with traditional face-to-face (F2F) components, but it encompasses many possible combinations. Some reasons for its popularity are because it offers new pedagogical opportunities, allows the students greater flexibility, capitalises on widely-available technology and, finally, because it might prove more cost effective. This article briefly describes and evaluates three ways in which online components and F2F classroom teaching are blended on courses in the Teachers’ Language Development Centre (TLDC) at the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore. TLDC conducts a suite of courses relating to language content knowledge and communication skills for pre-service teachers across a range of programmes. Increasingly, teachers in Singapore are expected to integrate technology into their teaching as part of a goal which NIE describes as ‘to develop students to be knowledge-driven, collaborative and technologically savvy learners’. These courses act as potential models as to how this can be achieved. While the courses described here are all offered during pre-service teacher education, many of the ideas can be applied to other contexts.

Different blends? When we choose a blend of coffee or tea, much depends on the context; it could be the time of day (first thing in the morning or later in the day), the company (family or friends) and the purpose (a caffeine boost or a relaxing drink). In the same way, context – in this case, the type of course, the audience and the learning outcomes – determines our choice of approach to blended learning.

Blend 1: The flipped classroom This is the first of the approaches, and is perhaps the one receiving the most attention currently. As Glen Bull, Bill Ferster and Willy Kjellstrom see it, a flipped classroom ‘dedicates more class time to hands-on learning, replacing lectures with supplemental materials, such as screencasts and videos, that students can view outside of class’. On a number of courses at NIE, this approach is taken. Students view e-lectures, either using a split screen with talking heads and presentations, or simply with presentation slides and a voiceover lecture. The lecture package usually includes some quiz elements and the related tutorial tasks which students need to prepare in advance for the F2F component. It may link to further resources, such as videos that illustrate or explain items. The F2F tutorials then provide an opportunity for the participants to discuss findings or issues

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Choose your blend with their peers and the tutor. Figure 1 shows a typical flow for a flipped classroom. Flexibility is a positive feature of this approach. The course participants can view the online materials where and when they want, allowing them to manage their time. It may reduce the opportunity cost represented, for example, by travel to a centre for lectures. Even on a small island like Singapore, some course participants have journeys of over an hour to the Institute. Furthermore, although they cannot interact with the lecturer immediately, the participants can control the flow of information and review sections if they have not understood. We have found that this feature is particularly useful for those who are not very proficient in the language of instruction. This approach also allows the participants more time to consider what has been presented and what questions they may wish to raise during tutorials. Finally, the ability to integrate other activities, such as quizzes with instant feedback, into the e-lectures helps the students check their understanding. However, this approach doesn’t guarantee that the information has been transmitted or understood, any more than being physically present in a lecture hall does. It is probably still the F2F discussion that helps to embed learning. In reality, the participants seem to prepare in different ways and to different degrees for F2F sessions, just as they did in pre-computer days. While ICT offers ease and flexibility of access, potential richness of resources and instant feedback, much of what is required in our approach to the flipped classroom is not very different from traditional tutorial preparation in a university context. In other contexts, such as schools, however, the flipped classroom has the advantage of taking the transmission of information out of school, thus freeing up valuable time for interaction in class. For large or repeat courses, e-lectures are also a costeffective approach because, after the significant initial investment in quality online materials, they can be re-used for several years.

effective. If, however, participants are expected to improve their own grammar proficiency, the next approach described in this article may be more appropriate. E-lectures

Pre-tutorial preparation (further resources)

F2F tutorial with discussion and extension activities

Figure 1 The flipped classroom

The key factor, just as for lectures, seems to be engagement and motivation. These factors relate to the topics themselves, the quality of the materials and, primarily, to how the content is delivered. One programme at NIE currently uses a computer-generated voice to relay the text accompanying the slides. This has the unfortunate effect of making the narration soulless, as it lacks features such as pauses, stress and expression. Better examples show real lecturers who, through their individual styles and narration, bring their subjects alive and have far more potential to engage their online audiences. The flipped classroom seems particularly suited to content-focused courses. For example, on a course about grammar, it can help the students learn about word class, sentence components or how, for example, the active and passive voice are formed and used. If the aim of the course is knowledge about grammar so that the participants can subsequently explain such features and use accurate terminology, as it is on this course, this approach seems

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Blend 2: The ‘smoothie’ This section focuses on a course that helps pre-service teachers improve their language skills and, at the same time, allows them to experience and reflect upon the kinds of methodologies they will, hopefully, later introduce in their own classrooms. It is an example of how online and F2F components, blended throughout a course, can complement and enhance each other. The vehicle chosen for the course is the production of a digital story. As Jason Ohler points out, storytelling is a traditional technique that is ‘highly regarded as a powerful tool for helping students develop literacy skills’. Digital storytelling simply merges traditional and emerging literacies in the storytelling process. As it integrates digital, art, oral and written literacies, it reflects today’s multi-modal world, and also allows students to draw on multiple intelligences. Allowing pre-service teachers to explore what is potentially such a powerful modern educational tool and having them develop digital stories for themselves can be seen as a way of fostering the participants’ own language skills while exposing them to target teaching methodology. The course, therefore, takes a ‘process’ approach both to writing and the production of the final piece of work, and to learning in general. Crucial to this are participant collaboration and feedback, and reflection. Both the classroom sessions and the online components support these aspects of the programme. The F2F sessions precede the online ones, and are primarily used to provide instructional scaffolding and prepare the participants for work on the components of their digital stories: the story, the audio file and the final digital production. For example, in the first F2F session, the features of an effective story are discussed in class and practised through a piece of group writing. Giving constructive feedback to peers is scaffolded and modelled, based on this initial piece of writing, and the groups review each other’s work. The original authors finally evaluate the feedback they have received and decide on revisions to their stories.

The online sessions represent the application of work done in class. Following the sessions described in the previous paragraph, the participants write their individual stories and upload them on the course site so that members of their group and the tutor can read them and give feedback. The participants then evaluate the feedback, revise their work and complete a reflection task. This F2F/online cycle is repeated as they move through the course (see Figure 2) with the two components complementing each other and forming a seamless learning experience. Feedback from course participants on this approach has been very positive: ‘I like the making of the digital story because the idea is fresh. It allows us to “make a movie” and enjoy learning the language at the same time.’ ‘It opened my eyes to the different media through which language can be mastered.’ This kind of blending requires the course developer to consider carefully what is achieved most effectively in F2F environments and what is best done outside class, and the amount of preparation the participants need in order to complete online components successfully. As an important feature of the online work is giving and responding to feedback, there also have to be clear deadlines for posting items, so that each person can make a contribution. The online platforms that have been used for this course are PBworks and Google Sites. Both allowed the development of a similar interface and

have supported the kind of interactivity required for the course, such as being able to upload documents easily, to collaborate and to give and respond to feedback. Google Sites was implemented in 2013 because it is a platform the participants are familiar with from other programmes at NIE. This particular course also requires the participants to use different types of software, so training sessions are offered that allow them to learn about applications with which they are not already familiar, such as Audacity and Windows Movie Maker. Importantly, support is available for those who encounter problems related to technical issues. Feedback from participants shows that they appreciate being required to use different software and online platforms and recognise how they could do the same later with their own students.

Blend 3: An individual choice Our final approach to blended learning allows the participants to personalise their individual blend of online and F2F components. Each year, over 1,000 pre-service teachers studying for Postgraduate Diplomas in Education at NIE are required to take the Communication Skills for Teachers course. The individuals on these programmes vary hugely in terms of their previous experience; some are fresh graduates, while others have had extensive experience in other careers before moving into teaching. They also represent a wide range of disciplines from, for example, physical education

teachers to English language and literature specialists. Some will later be teaching Chinese, Tamil or Malay, but need a good command of English to communicate in the school environment. Many have attended communication skills courses previously, as part of earlier education or career training. A major revision of the Communication Skills for Teachers course and the integration of blended learning allowed the developers to review the materials and take an approach that catered better to the participants’ different needs. All the materials in the revised version of the course have been made available online and are divided into five discrete modules (see Figure 3). The participants use the materials in the modules in one of three ways, based on their individual preferences and experience: They can attend tutorials and use the online materials as directed by the tutor in conjunction with discussions, practice activities and other classbased materials. They can study the materials online, selecting those aspects most relevant to their needs. On completion of a module online they submit a reflective blog. They can attend tutorials and then use the online materials to extend or reinforce work done F2F. The participants can choose to do a minimum of one and a maximum of three modules online. This ensures that all the participants experience working online, but also allows the tutors to

Figure 2 F2F and online learning (the ‘smoothie’)

F2F

Online

F2F

Online

F2F

Online

Scaffolding of writing, practice of writing and of giving and receiving feedback

Creating an individual story and revising it based on peer and tutor feedback

Scaffolding pronunciation and effective reading aloud

Narrating an individual story and revising it based on peer and tutor feedback

Creating a storyboard for the digital story

Creating and assembling a digital story with images, narration and music/sound effects

Reviewing language issues from previous activities

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Choose your blend maintain contact with them throughout the course and gives the students opportunities to participate in classroom discussions with their peers. In addition to the modules above, there is one compulsory F2F tutorial at the beginning of the course, with a general overview and orientation to the materials and choices. When this course was introduced, there were several surprising findings. The first was that the majority of the participants still chose to attend as many F2F sessions as was allowed. This seemed to be for two main reasons: firstly, because they liked the interaction with their peers and the feedback from the tutor on this skills-based course, and secondly, they were often on campus anyway and found it convenient to attend class. The next surprise was that they were not as technologically savvy as the developers had expected, which resulted in the materials being moved from Moodle to Blackboard, a Learning Management System with which the participants were already familiar. A third finding, which might seem to contradict the first, was that there was 100 per cent endorsement of the online option in feedback surveys, even though only a minority actually availed themselves of the option. We think this may be because they actually appreciate being allowed to choose and also value the possibility of combining the two options. The big advantage of the kind of blend described in this section is the way the participants can tailor it to suit their individual needs. It is also quite convenient for the tutors to have all the materials on one online platform: this makes updates much easier to manage and communicate. This blend is highly suitable for participants who understand their own learning needs, and are mature and confident enough to make informed choices about their studies. On the downside, one issue for the tutors is that different numbers of participants attend tutorials, depending on how many have elected to study a particular topic online, and there is an increased workload involved in conducting tutorials and, in addition, giving feedback online to those who have chosen this option.

Pronunciation

Oral Communication Skills

Classroom Interaction

CST Voice and Vocal Health

Written Communication Skills

Figure 3 Communication Skills for Teachers (CST): Five modules

This article has explored three different approaches to blended learning in different contexts within a tertiary-level educational setting. Exposing future teachers to different kinds of approaches that support learning – and, particularly, to those that integrate ICT in a pedagogically sound manner – is vital in enabling them subsequently to harness such technologies in ways that will help ‘revolutionise education’: one of NIE’s stated goals for the next five years.

Linda M Hanington is a teacher and teacher educator with extensive experience in Europe and Southeast Asia. She particularly enjoys helping learners improve their listening and speaking skills and is interested in using relevant authentic materials to support language development. She is currently working at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she has been involved in the development and delivery of blended learning programmes. [email protected]

The authors wish to acknowledge the many members of TLDC staff who have been involved in conceptualising, developing and implementing the courses described in this article.

Bull, G, Ferster, B and Kjellstrom, W ‘Inventing the flipped classroom’ Learning & Leading with Technology 40 (1) 2012 National Institute of Education 3:3:3 Roadmap 2013–2017 NIE Singapore 2013 National Institute of Education A Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century NIE Singapore 2009 Ohler, J Digital Storytelling in the Classroom Corwin Press 2008

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Poh Foong Kwah is a lecturer at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and has taught academic writing, grammar and language development courses. She also has extensive experience in teaching English as a second or foreign language at different levels, from high school to university. Her teaching philosophy is to engage students in their learning processes to enable them to become collaborative and independent learners. [email protected]

TECHNOLOGY

In this series, Nicky Hockly explains

Five things you always wanted to know about the

‘digital divide’ (but were too afraid to ask)

aspects of technology which some people may be embarrassed to confess that they don’t really understand. In this article, she explores the division between the technological haves and have-nots.

1

3

The term digital divide is used to describe the divide between people who have access to new technologies and those who don’t. In the field of ELT, it is often used to talk about the divide between those who live in ‘developed’ countries (and therefore, the argument goes, have access to technology) and people who live in ‘developing’ countries (and therefore don’t have access to technology). But stop and think for a minute, and you’ll realise that this isn’t always the case. Even if you live in a resource-rich country (let’s say Switzerland or Australia), where in theory technology is affordable and available, not everybody always has access to new technologies. And equally, if you live in what might be called a ‘low-resource’ environment, it isn’t always the case that nobody has access to any technology. Even in contexts where technology may traditionally have been beyond the means of the majority, the rapid spread and affordability of low-end mobile devices and connectivity means that large numbers of previously disadvantaged sectors of the population now own or have access to mobile technology, at the very least.

Indeed there are! Another is the one between teachers who have the skills and training to use technology to enhance and support their students’ learning, and those who don’t. In other words, there is a divide between teachers who use technology well and those who use it ineffectively or not at all. And although, at one time, ineffective or non-use of technology may have been due to lack of resources and infrastructure, as we’ve seen above, this argument no longer holds, since technology is now so ubiquitous. If we look at the digital divide from this perspective, we can see it as a pedagogical issue – and therefore one that teachers can be equipped to overcome. In fact, training teachers – and learners – to become digitally literate is not only achievable, but should be a fundamental consideration in any training programme, both pre-service and in-service.

What is the digital divide?

2

So the digital divide no longer exists?

To a certain extent, older ideas of (rich) ‘haves’ versus (poor) ‘have-nots’ is becoming increasingly irrelevant. But the digital divide can exist on a number of levels. For example, within a highresource context, we may have disadvantaged groups (such as migrants or the homeless). We may also have a considerable divide between urban and rural areas, in terms of access to technology and infrastructure. In a single city, we may have schools which are very high-tech and schools with little or no technology. And even at the level of the individual classroom, we may have students who have access to technology at home to help them with their homework, and students who don’t.

Are there any other digital divides I should know about?

4

But I teach in a school with no technology – what can I do?

I come across teachers all around the world who work in contexts with little or no technology in their schools. Some of them throw up their hands and claim that nothing can be done. However, others have worked within their (limited) contexts to integrate an appropriate and context-specific use of technology into their English classes.

5

How do teachers in contexts with little or no technology do it?

Let me share with you just two inspiring examples of teachers using low-end technology with their students: Example 1: Nergiz Kern Nergiz was working with taxi drivers learning English in Turkey. Not all of her students were always able to come to class, because of their work commitments. She noticed that all the students had basic mobile phones, so she decided to provide them with extra learning materials that they could access outside class, via their mobile devices. She produced a series of podcasts

(online audio files) of useful language for taxi drivers, which her students downloaded to their phones and then listened to whenever they wanted. In Nergiz’s words: ‘The technology – their mobile phones – was already available, and they knew how to use them ... and no additional cost or technology training was needed.’ You can read more about Nergiz’s project at http://taxienglish.nergizkern.com/ for-teachers, and in ETp Issue 71. Example 2: Ayat Tawel Ayat was working with young learners in Egypt. She had no technology in her classroom – or, indeed, her school. The coursebook unit they were working on dealt with South America, and Ayat was keen to put her students in contact with learners of the same age in a country in South America. Via the Webheads online teachers community (www.webheads.info), she contacted a teacher in Argentina, and her students carried out a Skype interview, using Ayat’s own laptop and 3G connection in class. The two classes then used a closed Facebook group to communicate and find out about each other’s countries, languages and customs. You can listen to Ayat talking about the project at http://goo.gl/RGhGuV. In both of these projects, the teachers’ use of technology came out of the learning aims of the class. With these pedagogical aims in mind, both teachers found the technology that worked in their context, incurred no extra costs, and was immediately and easily usable. These projects are both excellent examples of appropriate technology supporting sound pedagogical principles. After all, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning. Nicky Hockly is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. Her most recent book is Digital Literacies, published by Pearson. She has published an e-book, Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators (the-round.com), and is currently working on a book on mobile learning. She maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com. [email protected]

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ETp at IATEFL T

his year, the ETp stand welcomed visitors from all over the ELT world, as delegates flocked to pick up their ETp bag. These proved so popular that nobody at ETp managed to take one home! Pictured are some of the people we met at this year’s event, with their bag – or with the other star of the show: Isabelle Hogan, daughter of Chia Suan Chong and Mike Hogan. We are looking forward to seeing you all at IATEFL next year. And if you missed out on a bag, then why not sign up for ETp Live!, which we are hosting on the 21st June? All delegates will get an ETp bag of their very own.

Ken Lackman

Jeremy Harmer

Adam Simpson

Rita Baker, Isabelle Hogan and Marisa Constantinides

Chia Suan Chong, Isabelle Hogan and Fiona Richmond

Rachael Roberts

Mike Harrison

Nik Peachy and Andreas Grundtvig

Andrew Chilvers and Rob Mair

Justine Arena

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Chia Suan Chong, Isabelle Hogan and Mike Hogan

Dale Coulter

Webwatcher Y

ou will often see the icons of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ScoopIt, Google+ and many others at the top of blogs, on web pages and on social networking sites. One other icon that you may have seen around is that of Pinterest. After seeing a presentation about it recently, I thought it was finally time to sit down and find out if it has any uses for teachers – and, particularly, for English teachers.

What is it? Pinterest is really a social bookmarking tool: a way of keeping a systematic record of interesting pages that you find on the internet. It allows you to organise them into ‘boards’. Within your account, you can create as many of these as you like, and each board will deal with a different topic. So you might have a board about using iPads, another about interesting blogs you read and another about interesting research articles. You can add as many links to each board as you want. This is done by ‘pinning’ the link to one of your boards. For example, let’s say you create a board about interesting grammar sites for learning English. If you find an interesting page on the web about grammar, you copy the link and then open up Pinterest and add it to your board about grammar sites. It is like having lots of corkboards, each dealing with one topic, and each having lots of things pinned to it.

Does it offer anything new? You can pin all sorts of things to your board – not only websites, but also videos, articles, pictures, etc. Pinterest produces a visual display of all your ‘pins’. So if you pin a blog you like to your ‘blog board’, then it doesn’t just show you a link to that blog, it shows a picture of it, which you can click on. Each time you pin something to a board, you are given a number of pictures related to that particular pin, and you then choose the picture that will most remind you of what the pin is about. You can also add a description. I am not sure that I feel comfortable about saying that this is especially good for visual learners, but the visual element is powerful and I think it is a good way of organising interesting content for anyone.

Social bookmarking Where I think Pinterest could be particularly useful is in project work. Let’s say your students are working on a project to produce an article about the Acropolis in Athens. One of the students can create a board called ‘Acropolis’ and then share it with the other students in the class. As long as the students are all signed up to Pinterest, they can all add pins to the ‘Acropolis’ board. So each of them could be at home, working on their computer and collaboratively adding pins. Of course, they could create various boards: one for ‘Acropolis articles’, another one for ‘Acropolis videos’, etc. The result would be various boards, all with lots of related pins on them, and all visually displayed.

Russell Stannard shows an interest in Pinterest.

Follow other people’s boards and pins One thing I find quite useful is the search facility. You can search other people’s boards and then ‘follow’ them. For example, you could search for ‘English vocabulary games’ and then find that someone has created a board with lots of useful pins on it on that topic. You can choose to follow that board, and each time the board is updated with a new pin, you will be informed. You can follow up to five people, and all the latest pins from the boards you are following will be displayed when you open up Pinterest. This can be a good way of looking for material to use in class and, if you find someone who regularly updates their board, then it could be really useful to follow that board. Remember, each person who has an account might have many different boards; you don’t have to follow all the boards from that particular person, you just follow the boards you like. You can also have a Pin It button added to your browser. This means that any time you see an interesting article, video, website, etc, you can simply click on the Pin It button. You will then be asked to choose an image to represent the page you want to ‘pin’, to choose which board you want to add it to, and to add a description if you want. I have started making use of this as a quick way of bookmarking.

What are the disadvantages? Pinterest doesn’t do anything particularly new, but it does do it in a slightly different way. If you like the idea of having images to help you remember and organise your bookmarks, then this might be a tool that you or your students will find very useful. I have started using it with my classes, and I find it interesting when working on specific projects. I have not tested the collaborative bookmarking system yet, but I do intend to and I think that could be quite an interesting way for students to work together, though they will all need to sign up to Pinterest. One big problem is that it doesn’t seem to work with PDF files. Remember, when you pin a page, video or picture onto a board, Pinterest generates a picture to represent the link you are pinning. It doesn’t seem to be able to generate an image from PDF files, so it doesn’t allow you to pin them. If you are searching for academic pages and references, this can be quite a limitation. Help videos for using Pinterest: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/pinterest/index.html Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.

Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell: [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 92 May 2014 •

63

Prize crossword 65 ETp presents the sixty-fifth in our series of prize crosswords. Once you have done it successfully, let your students have a go. Send your entry (completed crossword grid and quotation), not forgetting to include your full name, postal address, email address and telephone number, to Prize crossword 65, English Teaching professional, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove, BN3 5JR, UK. Ten correct entries will be drawn from a hat on 10 August 2014 and the winners can choose one of these titles: Macmillan Collocations Dictionary or Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus. Please indicate your choice on your entry. 23 8 4 4 8 20 7 9 25 25 15 2 8 16

N

8 8 20 6 13 7 18 23 2 20 25 21 20 11 25 25 22 13 4 25 21 21 7 6 8 13 8 24 16 25 25 22 20 10 5 8 13 7 4 26 4 8 13 25 4



23 16 25 6 20 25 4 23 7 16 25 1 23 8 8 24 8 22 24 10 10



21 2 6 1 16 7 5 25 9 25 4 11 21

Y

13 4 25 25 7 10 23 25 10 25 11 25 12 25 8 4 6 7 20 8 26 25 16 6 8 8 8 16 25 26 16 7



2 13 22 8 4 5 25 20 19 25 12 25 16



16 13 16 8 26 14 25 8 10 8 22 2 21 7 23 3 7 4 5 25 26 15

I

20 17 25 16 23 7 25 2 25 17 17 25 4 9 25 21 6 25 23 20 24 11

To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents. You can keep a record in the boxes above. The definitions of the words in the puzzle are given, but not in the right order. When you have finished, you will be able to read the quotation. VERY FREQUENT WORDS *** To record something on a cassette *** At a time before the present *** Able to do something *** Used for saying who or what does something *** Without a job *** The same in value, amount or size *** Used for emphasising adjectives *** Frozen water *** A scientific test *** To try to prevent something happening *** A country with its own land and government FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS ** A story or account of something that has happened ** Funny or entertaining ** A large meat-eating bird ** A valuable stone that has been cut and polished ** To make a guess about why something has happened ** Dark-coloured beer without bubbles LESS FREQUENT WORDS – Electronic equipment that produces light in computer screens (abbreviation) – A light thin sword used in fencing – To walk through shallow water – Abbreviation for British and brother – Informal word for pictures – Abbreviation used to say you should pay attention to what follows – An atom with an electrical force created by adding an electron – Communicating over the internet and replying immediately (abbreviation) – All the people in your family (formal)

– Someone who sells cloth – Producing a lot of small gas bubbles – To cut rock or wood into a rough shape with a heavy blade – Modern or new; used especially with music styles that exist in a different form – A sloping surface where you put your notes when you give a speech – Easily annoyed and impatient – A castle, built to defend a city – A tool for cutting and shaping wood – A British organisation for controlling air traffic (abbreviation) – A badly-behaved but attractive child (humorous) – An African animal, like a giraffe without a long neck – Annoyed (formal) – A tall tropical plant used to make furniture and fencing – A speech in a play where a lone character talks about their thoughts – Glasses and contact lenses – Not usual or typical – A short high sound made by a dog – A ship that can break through floating ice – A chemical element that is a blue-white metal – An accident and emergency department in the US (abbreviation) – Used to describe goods designed for rich people – Used to refer to things of the same kind as those you have already mentioned – A bright shiny appearance – A small hollow cake filled with cream – Used after some company names (abbreviation) – A woman who rules an empire – Concerning, regarding

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

7 17 8 20 17 7 4 21 20 20 1 25 7 26 25 8

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

7 21 23 10 20 8 24 21 2 4 26 20 1 25 4 25

I Y N



,

7 21 23 10 1 10 13 25 17 10 4 7 20

. Albert Einstein

64 • Issue 92 May 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

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detection  bandwidth No more than 10% of the signal strength is lost in the con nection to the amplifier input. sig·nal2 /ˈsɪɡnəl/ verb (-ll-, US -l-) 1 [T] to be a sign that sth exists or is likely to happen  IND ICAT E (2) : ~ sth The proposal for a new, loo ser union of sovereign states signalled the end of the old USSR.  ~ that… The crisis signalled that some importa nt changes were taking place in English political culture . 2 [T] to show sth suc h as a feeling or opinion through your actions or attitud e: ~ sth His government signalled a willingness to abando n the UK's national veto.  ~ tha t… The company rais ed its prices significantly, signalling that it did not want a prolonged costly price war. 3 [I, T] to make a movement or sound to give sb a message, an instruction or a warnin g: The other ship signalled back.  ~ to sb He was wa ving his arm, signalling to his wife.  ~ (to) sb to do sth The emperor signalled his chamberla in to show in another dele gation.  ~ sth The charge wa s signalled by trumpets.  ~ that… As the driver could not see the road behind him, it was the duty of the conductor to signal that the road wa s clear. sig·na·ture /ˈsɪɡnətʃə(r)/ noun 1 [C] your nam e as you usually write it, for exa mple at the end of a letter: Two weeks later, the newspa per delivered a petitio n to the Prime Minister contain ing 1.5 million signatu res.  sb's ~ The artist's signature

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sig·nifi·cant

/sɪɡˈnɪfɪkənt/ adj. 1 large or importa nt enough to WO RD FAM ILY have an effect or to be significant adj. noticed: These voters could hav e a significant significantly adv. effect on the outcome of the election. signify verb  Althoug h population ageing is significance noun a global phenomenon, the signification noun re are significant regional differen ces.  ~ for insignificant adj. sb/sth The contributio insignificantly adv. ns of Islamic civilization proved to be insignificance noun as significant for the West.  it is ~ that… It was significant that its nearest rival only had a 5.5 per cent share of the market.  INSI GNI FICA NT  thesaurus note at IMP ORT ANT 2 hav ing a particular meani ng: The lighting of a candle may be symbol ically significant if it den otes the bringing of light, that is, enlightenment.  it is ~ that… It is particularly significant that Branagh selected Belfast for the play's United Kingdo m debut. 3 (statistics) hav ing statistical significance see  also SIGN IFIC ANC E (3) : Afte r 3 years, results for 

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