ETP 82

ENGLISH EACHING Tprofessional

Issue 82 September 2012

The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

Expect the unexpected Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley

Managing your classes Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa

CLIL-ing me softly Erwin Gierlinger

Please leave a message Lindsay Warwick • practical methodology • fresh ideas & innovations • classroom resources • new technology • teacher development • tips & techniques • photocopiable materials • competitions & reviews

w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m

Contents MAIN FEATURE EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

BUSINESS ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL 4

Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley instigate improvisation

TELL ME A STORY

52

Louis Rogers maintains that narrative isn’t just for general English

MAY I LEAVE A MESSAGE?

55

Phil Wade offers activities involving voicemail

FEATURES ENGLISH TEACHING CONFESSIONAL

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Qiangba Yangjin gets to grips with groupwork

CLIL-ING ME SOFTLY

TEACHER DEVELOPMENT 12

Erwin Gierlinger counts his CLIL commandments

HIGH FREQUENCY HABITS

CLIL: FROM POLICY TO REALITY

56

Christa Mundin and Charlotte Giller help teachers to cope with a new teaching context

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Jackie Fung King Lee is convinced that context is the key to teaching question formation

OVER THE WALL

TECHNOLOGY 19

Alan Maley targets translation

PREVENT VIDEOS FROM VANISHING

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Gary Collins deals with the ephemeral nature of online video

THE SPEAKING CHAIN

25

Jane Neill finds speaking leads to writing

PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE

OUTCOMES-BASED LANGUAGE COACHING

29

Lindsay Warwick describes a variety of ways to use voice recording

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FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT: WEBINARS

59

Peter Zoeftig relates the coach to the language teacher

ART IN ACTION María Palmira Massi, Bettiana Andrea Blázquez, Zoraida Risso Patrón, María Angélica Verdú and Paola Scilipoti get visual

61

Nicky Hockly considers a new method of communication

WEBWATCHER

63

Russell Stannard applauds some new collaboration tools

A SECOND SELF 5

46

Jill Hadfield suggests activities for a motivational programme

TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES

REGULAR FEATURES 49

Aaron Deupree investigates L1 use in international schools

CHAT SHOW GAME SHOW

51

Richard Hillman proposes a winning activity

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS MANAGING YOUR CLASSES

22

Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa explains what classroom management is all about

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

34

LANGUAGE LOG

40

John Potts

SCRAPBOOK

42

REVIEWS

44

COMPETITIONS

41, 64

INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTION FORM

32

Includes materials designed to photocopy

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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Editorial M

any people believe that cooperation and collaboration – between teachers, between students, between teachers and students – are amongst the keys to successful teaching. In our main feature, Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley remind us that it is the interaction between teacher and students, all contributing to the same endeavour, that makes a lesson move beyond the confines of a lesson plan to an experience that is akin to a jazz performance. Qiangba Yangjin confesses that learning to work with fellow teachers on a training course and to contribute her own ideas in discussions, as well as taking on board those of others, changed her opinion about the value of groupwork in the classroom, a technique she has now introduced to her students in Tibet. Faced with the new challenge of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), teachers often feel the need to get together to support each other and share expertise. Christa Mundin and Charlotte Giller describe courses they run in Spain for teachers, some of whom are coming to English teaching for the first time. The level of cooperation from the participants is high: many are voluntarily taking courses in English at the end of a busy day’s teaching and they value the new ideas and classroom techniques that they are picking up at the same time as they improve their own language ability.

ENGLISH EACHING Tprofessional

To some, the idea of cooperation and collaboration in the classroom may seem like a pipe dream. So what can we do when there is little cooperation from the students? Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa reflects on the success of Mexican ‘dog whisperer’ Cesar Millan. By asserting ourselves with the same calm authority he uses to quell a pack of unruly dogs, we have to become ‘leader of the pack’, which will allow us to lead the students into more cooperative and collaborative ways! Good news! Personal subscribers to ETp now have free access to our new website eltknowledge.com. Use your old username and password to log in.

Helena Gomm Editor [email protected]

Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 434943

Email: [email protected]

Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308

Web: www.etprofessional.com

Editor: Helena Gomm

Cover photo: © iStockphoto.com / Thomas Vogel

Also in the field of CLIL, Erwin Gierlinger outlines his seven commandments, one of which is that CLIL teachers should not go it alone: successful CLIL involves the cooperation and collaboration of fellow teachers, students, head teachers, parents and educational authorities.

Editorial Consultant: Mike Burghall

Published by: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX

Editorial Director: Peter Collin

© 2012, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd

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Pages 39, 42–43 and 54 include materials which are designed to photocopy. All other rights are reserved and no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

M A I N

F E AT U R E

Expect the unexpected Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley shed light on the ‘dark matter’ of education.

ost of us seem to lead our lives somewhere between the two poles of certainty and the unexpected. For much of the time, we crave the comfort of certainty and view uncertainty as a threat. Yet there are also times when we delight in the thrill of surprise at the unexpected.

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Control and freedom These polar extremes are reflected in virtually any domain we care to think of. In philosophy, for example, we can generalise that Western philosophy, with its strong positivist flavour, with an emphasis on certainty, is in contrast with Eastern traditions, particularly Taoism, which allow a more ready acceptance of the multiple layers of reality, the unknowability of things, and the need to work with, rather than against, the grain of them. In politics, we can find examples of totalitarian attempts to impose various forms of certainty, and ‘liberaldemocratic’ systems where the freedom of the individual is prized, at least in principle, along with the uncertainty it brings. We can find examples of command and of free-market economies. In management, the tendency to micromanage every detail of a business can be contrasted with a more open style of cooperative management. The same polarity can be found in medicine (between interventionist and ‘natural’ forms of treatment), in music (between strict adherence to a score and improvisation), in literature and art (between ‘classical’ and experimental

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

forms), in child-rearing practices (between strict control and ‘laissezfaire’), in cookery (those who cook by the book and those who cook by instinct), in gardening, in relationships … in short, in almost everything. Even the way we distinguish between ‘work’ and ‘play’ reflects a division between control and discipline on the one hand (certainty) and freedom and spontaneity on the other (unpredictability).

Most of us seem to lead our lives somewhere between the two poles of certainty and the unexpected Language and education So we should not be surprised to find a similar kind of tension in language education. At one end of the scale, there are those who believe we are able to exercise control over learning, usually by means of tightly-defined syllabi, terminal objectives, textbooks, inspection schemes, examinations, lesson plans, etc. At the other end, we have those who assert the need for freedom, autonomous learning, learner improvisation, ‘natural learning’, ‘cooperative learning’, negotiated syllabi, and so on. (A caveat is necessary here – we are not suggesting that this is a clear-cut division. Most of us find ourselves somewhere between these two

extreme views, and may even shift between them at different points in our careers, in different teaching contexts or even within one working day!) Clearly, the ‘control’ position implies a belief that learners learn what teachers teach. Or, as N S Prabhu puts it, that teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin, that they are reciprocally related, like buying and selling. The ‘freedom’ position implies that we cannot predict what learners will learn at any given time. In this case, teaching is equated with what teachers do, not with its outcome. And learning is what learners do irrespective of results. In this view, teaching and learning are two currencies and the exchange rate shifts constantly. The connection is both tenuous and unpredictable. Learners may learn some of what teachers teach, but we cannot predict precisely what. They may also, as Dick Allwright points out, learn things which are not taught, or may not learn them until well after they have been taught, or indeed, never.

Prediction and planning In this article, we take the view that unpredictability is the ‘default’ position in the teaching/learning context. This unpredictability takes two forms: 1 The fact that we cannot predict over

the long term what, or when or whether any given learner or group of learners will learn from our teaching. (This is what Prabhu is referring to in his article ‘Teaching is at most hoping for the best’.) 2 The fact that, within any classroom

encounter, in the immediate term, we cannot predict how the individuals and the group will react to our input – nor how we will react to their behaviours and changes of mood and atmosphere. (This is what we refer to below as the dark matter of the classroom.) In the case of 1, perhaps all we can do is to make our teaching as relevant to the group as we can, and to hope for the best. This involves an act of faith: we do the very best we can in the knowledge that much of it will not have the effect we hoped for, but hopeful that it may have some sort of effect in the longer term. But what about 2? This is about how the teacher, instant by instant, micro-

second by micro-second, improvises to adjust to the unpredictable nature of the encounter. This improvisation has been compared by Peter Lutzker to what a theatre (not circus) clown does when confronted by an audience. It involves the ability to wait, to observe closely, to gauge reactions and to act appropriately in response to them. The key to this complex web of sensitivities is to have no plan, to be completely and utterly open to what will happen. This is of course anathema to orthodox views of teacher training, where lesson plans figure so prominently, and which act as the tools for control.

We cannot predict over the long term what, or when or whether any given learner or group of learners will learn from our teaching However, if we think about it, lesson plans rarely, if ever, work out the way they were planned. If they do, it is likely that the teacher has simply ploughed on, dragging the class along behind them, with scant regard to the exigencies of the moment. If we substitute lesson for play, this can lead to the situation described by Oscar Wilde, when asked how his play had gone the previous evening: ‘Oh, the play was absolutely brilliant but the audience was a total failure.’

Teaching What, then, does all this mean for the reality of teaching a class? When teaching, we probably start out by following a plan, developed before the lesson. While preparing this plan we may imagine a plausible lesson, but as things start to happen in the lesson itself – as the unpredictable starts to occur – we depart from the plan to attend to what needs doing (and of course we may do this well, or less well). The plan is still there, but the class becomes a living interaction, not just the enactment of a script. We don’t know what different students will do, say or need – or how we will best respond to and assist them. We are inquiring and reflecting on the wing, thinking on our feet, making

spontaneous decisions as we go along, according to how we see things (and fully conscious of the fact that we can only see part of what is happening). As in jazz, we are improvising, leaving behind the written notes, the sheet music, and playing variations on the original melody – or indeed new melodies altogether. At the same time, we don’t know precisely what will come, and yet we wish to respond usefully to whatever does come in a way that will make meaning for those that are there. We refer to this as the dark matter of teaching: rather like the dark matter that we are told makes up about 80 percent of the universe, but which we cannot detect or see, only infer from its influence on the things we can see. It is, for us, the ‘missing mass of the universe’. And so the dark matter of teaching may make up the bulk of the lesson, yet not be in plan, book or supporting materials. Within this, two of the variables are: 1 The extent of the improvisation:

How far are we able, or willing, to depart from the plan? Is it a variation on the original sheet music that is still recognisable as a version of that melody? Is it a less recognisable reworking in the light of what is needed? Or is the original plan/melody entirely suspended as some prior need emerges and is worked through? 2 The quality of the improvisation: With what quality is the first variable carried out in meeting the learning of the student? How do we know? And do the departures from the plan – the improvisations – fit the learning needs of the moment? Are they fresh responses tailored to the moment? Or are these improvisations more like teacher habits, well-worn actions, material from past experiences?

As in jazz, we are improvising, leaving behind the written notes, the sheet music, and playing variations on the original melody – or indeed new melodies altogether

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Expect the unexpected Training We propose that this improvisation makes up the bulk of most lessons. However, on teacher training courses we tend to focus on the language, the methods, the activities and the class management – on the myriad of idealised set-piece sequences. Yet even though we know that in the event they are going to be improvised, somehow we never look at it like that. When our trainers observe us and then give feedback, we do not usually refer to the quality of improvisation. Instead, we talk about meeting goals, maximising practice, checking learning, minimising TTT, etc, but not about the improvisation that is necessary for all this to happen, nor about the qualities of such improvisation. And we have a vast infrastructure of words and feedback points and criteria for assessing the worth of the lesson and the activities, but we don’t really have an intelligent way of looking at the performance itself, at the improvisation. And yet, as we’ve said before, this makes up the bulk of each lesson. So let us start to talk about improvisation, about how to make it as visible and discussible as it is in related performance arts such as music and theatre. Perhaps we rather shy away from such discussion (‘We’re not actors, we’re teachers, we deal with topic not performance …’). But the medium is the message, the improvisation is the event. So how come we don’t talk about that improvisation, the quality of the improvisation, and whether it is fresh

On teacher training courses we tend to focus on the language, the methods, the activities and the class management – on the myriad of idealised set-piece sequences

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improvisation or habitual hot licks (improvisations from the past that worked, got repeated and fossilised and entered the habitual repertoire)? The zone of improvisation is key to most performance arts, and that includes teaching. Many trainee teachers are traumatised – not by the teaching ideas, the drills, the correction techniques, and so on, but by the improvisation necessary to make all this happen in real time, the dark matter of teaching, the undiscussed beast with the big footprint. As in jazz, the questions are: Am I responding to what is actually happening here and now, in a way that fits the contours of the moment? Am I flowing with the moment as it unfolds, coming up with new variations that I may never have used before, yet which may be the best way to meet the learning challenge? Or, on the other hand, am I somehow relying on

Many trainee teachers are traumatised by the improvisation necessary to make all this happen in real time, the dark matter of teaching manoeuvres or tricks that I have used in the past, stock reactions that may have quite a useful effect, yet which don’t follow the exact contours of the present moment? Are they responses I have made before, hot licks that may be quite serviceable, but perhaps don’t quite fit the shape of the moment? And this applies equally whether I prepare lesson plans or teach without them.

Presence To be present, the teacher needs to be learning, just as the student is. There is a learning relationship in which the two protagonists are connected by learning, open to the contagion of each other’s learning. It is like a pas de deux, each leading, each following, and both on the same side of the learning fence. Such a relationship requires full attention and total presence, and an improvised flow that relates precisely to what is going on right here and now. In order to be open to this kind of learning, the teacher has to develop the quality of relaxed energy

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

which permits the ‘effortless effort’ needed to respond in the moment to whatever happens. Paradoxically, it often requires action to be withheld until an appropriate response comes forth. As teachers, we are compulsive do-ers. Sometimes we need to heed the sage’s advice: ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ To respond freshly to the needs of the moment means: – reading the situation as it is, seeing what is a going on (and that includes the adjustment necessary for our personal biases); – responding in a way that is as free as we can manage from past habits: not to make it more right, or better, but to be less in the grip of what was done last time.

Preparing for the unpredictable If we feel that we need to prepare teachers – both novice and experienced – for the encounter with the dark matter of teaching, how might this be done? In a sense, there is no way to prepare people for the unpredictable: the very idea is a paradox. Essentially, the best we can do is to raise teachers’ awareness of the issue and perhaps to develop a few of the qualities we need to turn unpredictability to advantage. But whatever we do will always be more about creating a mindset than providing a toolkit. With this in mind, here are ten suggestions: 1 Offer training in presentation skills: voice quality, gesture and facial expression, stance and posture, timing, use of space, language control, use of silence, rapport, etc. The advantage of this kind of work is that, while experiential, it can be done under ‘safe’ laboratory conditions. 2 Use improvisational theatre games to develop speed of response to the unexpected. There are many descriptions of activities in Keith Johnstone’s books, and there are plenty of other sources for theatre games and drama activities which help develop sensitivity to others, empathy, anticipation and group solidarity. Clowning techniques are particularly powerful and well-documented by Peter Lutzker.

3 Create an awareness of ‘presence’: learning to ‘be’ in every moment (without concern for the past, the future, self-regard, etc). This may mean learning how to stop ‘doing’. One way of achieving this is to create a space every day for reflection/meditation. Even 30 minutes a day of ‘quiet time’ can help to un-clutter the mind and make space for allowing ourselves to be who we really are when all the busy-ness and bustle are pared away. 4 Reflect on those methodologies which eschew pre-planning: Silent Way, CLL, Dogme, etc. What can they teach us about ‘letting go’, accepting whatever happens, responding appropriately in the ‘now’, using the unexpected to carry the class forward? 5 Set up reading circles where the

group regularly discusses an agreed book. For example, Daniel Pennac’s School Blues, Stephen Nachmanovitch’s Free Play or Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis would all yield extensive discussion of key issues. Of course, you cannot learn improvisation from a book, but reading and discussion can help raise awareness and develop a new mindset. 6 Provoke unpredictability in class by applying heuristics. Probably the bestknown of these is John Fanselow’s ‘Do the opposite’ from his book Breaking Rules. By deliberately doing the opposite of what we normally do in class, we break habits. This does not necessarily lead to an improved outcome, but to a different outcome – from which we can learn. After all, if students can be unpredictable, why not teachers too? The element of surprise in unpredictable moments can provoke extraordinary reactions from the students, provided it happens within a secure framework, a comfort zone based on trust. 7 Work on some of the activities in books on teacher development and classroom dynamics, for example those by Jill Hadfield, and Katie Head and Pauline Taylor. 8 Include improvisation as a topic in

post-lesson discussions, reflections and observation feedback sessions, simply with the aim of putting it on the experiential map and making it discussible. In time, useful headings, concepts and criteria may emerge to bring rigour to such discussions.

Demonstrate how it is done, perhaps through the use of wisdom stories or quotes (‘Doing the thing right or doing the right thing?’). Perhaps by using video clips of critical moments. Perhaps by reflective sessions on recent classes. Perhaps through simulations. 9 Be open to a teaching mindset that enables us to teach ‘as an act of inquiry’ rather than ‘in the hope of being right’. The former allows risk, informed spontaneity and intelligent improvisation as a form of inquiry, which can open up or expose a situation. Thus improvisation becomes a way of learning in the heat of the moment. The hope of being right tends to close down options in the search for certainty and control. 10 Try three small experiments:

a) Look for opportunities to spend less

time controlling people (in your class) and more time connecting people together – and then watching, waiting and working with what comes up. b) Think of yourself as an improviser,

and notice in what areas of life you can feel your improvisation. What is the ‘jazz of ELT’ for you? Are there moments when you can find yourself playing this jazz? c) Mistakes in jazz are not fatal. They

may even be a doorway into something new. Can you find examples in your teaching?

 Clearly, the ultimate aim is to create what Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’ states in our classes. In a flow state, we are so into the activity we are engaged in that time passes unnoticed and events take place in a seemingly effortless way, with all the elements complementing each other as in a dance. However, to achieve this state requires the sort of understanding of the dark matter of teaching we have been discussing here. This article is the result of many extended conversations we have had with each other over many months. What we have tried to do here is to articulate the essence of those conversations – themselves examples of improvisation, where we allowed ourselves to be carried along by ideas and experiences that cropped up, rather than having a plan or vision of a

predetermined outcome. So for us, this is not an end point. Rather, it is intended to encourage others to share their perceptions of this hugely important, yet so far poorly-described, area of our work. We welcome you to join in our ongoing conversation. ETp Allwright, R ‘Why don’t learners learn what teachers teach? The interaction hypothesis’ In Singleton, D M and Little, D (Eds) Language Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts Irish Association for Applied Linguistics 1984 Czikszentmihalyi, M Finding Flow Basic Books 1997 Fanselow, J Breaking Rules Longman 1989 Gallwey, W T The Inner Game of Tennis Pan Books 1986 Hadfield, J Classroom Dynamics OUP 1992 Head, K and Taylor, P Readings in Teacher Development Heinemann 1997 Johnstone, K Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre Methuen 1981 Johnstone, K Impro for Storytellers Faber and Faber 1999 Lutzker, P The Art of Foreign Language Teaching Francke Verlag 2007 Nachmanovitch, S Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art Tarcher/Putnam 1990 Pennac, D School Blues MacLehose Press 2010 Prabhu, N S ‘Teaching is at most hoping for the best’ Seameo RELC Journal 1998 Adrian Underhill is a freelance consultant and trainer, working on CPD and organisational development. He is a past president of IATEFL, Series Editor of the Macmillan Books for Teachers series, and author of Sound Foundations, published by Macmillan. His current interests include ‘postheroic’ approaches to leadership in education, and improvisation in teaching. [email protected] 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]

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ENGLISH TEACHING

CONFESSIONAL ... Qiangba Yangjin reveals how she became a convert to groupwork.

y educational background as an ethnic Tibetan who has studied in Lhasa and Beijing contributed to many of the difficulties I encountered during my time pursuing an MA in TESOL at the School for International Training (SIT) in Vermont, USA. However, it was during my studies at SIT that I came to appreciate the value of groupwork – though not without a considerable amount of struggle. Prior to my time in Vermont, my educational experience had been very teacher-centred: the students’ role was to listen to the teacher and take notes. When I became a teacher myself, I simply put into practice what I had been taught. Rarely did I encourage groupwork or discussion, and because of my lack of experience with these techniques, both as a student and as a teacher, I had a hard time adjusting to working in groups when I first arrived at SIT.

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Sitting on the sidelines During the first semester, my role in group discussions was quite passive. For one thing, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about my own ideas, as I thought my ideas might not have much value compared to those of others, and I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up in front of the other students because of my concerns about my ability to express myself in English. Also, I didn’t want to create an impression that I was showing off in public, which would have been the likely interpretation of classmates from Han Chinese and Tibetan cultures. Even when I had a different point of view that I thought important, I did not bring it up because I preferred not to create conflict in the group. Generally, people take disagreement as a personal attack both in Han Chinese and Tibetan cultures. Often group members use silence to maintain harmony in the group; I remained silent during classroom discussions for the same purpose.

Consequently, there were times when I felt I was left out of group discussions. Like other Asian students at SIT, I complained that groupwork only wasted time and that I learnt nothing from it. But as time went by, I came to realise that I needed to take responsibility for my own learning and, indeed, that groupwork did provide opportunities for such learning.

Taking the plunge From my second semester, I started to participate more in group discussions as I wanted to learn from working with others. I became more comfortable with speaking up in small groups and interacting with my peers. Slowly, I began to see the benefits of participating in groupwork. For example, I could improve my communication skills in the target language, develop my skills in cooperating with other members of the group and learn new ideas from them. Other people’s ideas triggered and clarified my own thoughts. By being forced to articulate and defend my ideas, I was able to acquire concepts and clarify items that I had not fully mastered. I also benefited from my peers’ explanations when I didn’t initially understand the concepts being discussed. I found that my ideas were often valued by other group members, which increased my selfconfidence. Even more, I realised that not everything worth learning is in books.

Behaving correctly However, since I wanted to make the most of my chance to learn in small groups. I was unaware of my own inappropriate behaviour, such as interrupting when other students were presenting their opinions or jumping into conversations in which I wanted to participate in order to achieve my own personal learning goals. I would sometimes cut someone off in conversation because of a new word I didn’t know. This slowed down

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ENGLISH TEACHING

CONFESSIONAL ... discussions and, because of time limitations, kept others from voicing their thoughts. Later, I realised that it was necessary sometimes for me to be tolerant of ambiguity in order to serve the group’s interest. Also I found that I became upset when I felt I was excluded from the group.

Grasping the principles When considering groupwork activities, it is essential to keep several principles in mind in order to make their use in the classroom effective. Groupwork should not just be a time-filler or an ill-thoughtout activity for use in checking homework or extra assignments. It should not be used as an opportunity for the teacher to rest, read or prepare other classes, and the teacher should not just use it in imitation of other teachers without really understanding what it entails. The real purpose of working in groups in an ELT class goes beyond the actual command: ‘Get in a group, please, and answer the following questions’, which, in most cases, turns out to be thinly-disguised individual work.

Spreading the word Aware of all the benefits I have obtained from groupwork, I have begun to use it as a teaching strategy in my classrooms at Tibet University. The dominant way of teaching here is still teacher-centred, and the students rarely experience working in groups. At first, it wasn’t easy for me to introduce the idea of groupwork because most of my students reacted negatively – as I myself had done initially. However, using my understanding of both Tibetan and Han Chinese cultures, I carefully designed groupwork activities, explained the benefits to my students and prudently assigned roles. The success of groupwork largely depends on assigning roles to the students effectively. As Spencer Kagan affirms, division of labour is often achieved by assigning task roles. As time went on, most of my students participated better than they did at the beginning, and they seemed to become aware of some of the benefits. Later on, the students were able to take responsibility for assigning their roles themselves.

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Reflecting the real world It is the teacher’s responsibility to provide clear instruction to the students. As Adrian Doff points out, in order to prevent activities getting out of control ‘it is important to give clear instructions, to give clear defined tasks and to set up a routine so that the students exactly know how and what to do’. Since participating in society involves working in groups, it is vitally important that students learn to deal with groupwork at school. As language teachers, we cannot leave this aspect aside. On the contrary, we have to incorporate it in our classes and teach students to get the best out of it. Groupwork helps both students and teachers to bridge the gap between input and output. It definitely helps students not only acquire language but also develop life skills, such as how to work with others, present ideas and listen to others. It also gives them the chance to experience a small piece of the real world in their classes by negotiating, turn-taking, suggesting and getting to a final result. All these skills will help them in their future careers and are essential elements for working effectively.

both academically and culturally, and I have also learnt to know myself better. Many people complain about working in groups because of the struggles this entails if it is alien to them or their culture. I, too, complained a lot about groupwork until I came to realise all the benefits I could get from working with others. Now I have fewer complaints and have started to observe and evaluate my own behaviour more actively. I am confident that our students will gain the same benefits if we, as teachers in nonwestern cultures, diligently incorporate groupwork in our classrooms. ETp Doff, A Teach English: A Training Course for Teachers CUP 1991 Kagan, S Cooperative Learning Resources for Teachers Inc 1994 Qiangba Yangjin is a Tibetan English teacher in the School of Tourism and Foreign Languages of Tibet University. She received her MA TESOL in the USA in 2001. She has been teaching at TU since 1992 and is currently also the vice dean. [email protected]



Would you like to enter the English Teaching Professional Confessional and tell our readers how and why you became the professional English teacher you are today? Do you have any amusing stories to tell. Please write to [email protected].

I freely confess that working in a group has not always been an easy thing for me. Nevertheless, it has been worthwhile to experience it. I have learnt many things from working with group members,

ENGLISH EACHING Tprofessional

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M E T H O D O L O G Y

CLIL-ing me softly Erwin Gierlinger singles out seven commandments for content and language integrated learning.

is a major buzz-word in Europe, and a vast number of articles and books have been published on the issue of what constitutes ‘quality’ CLIL. See, for example, works by Do Coyle and Oliver Meyer. While these attempts to establish quality indicators for CLIL make a great effort towards introducing some theoretical guidelines and focused thought into a hugely heterogeneous field with greatly varying contexts, they nevertheless run the risk of being dismissed as merely offering far-fetched, ivory-tower advice of relatively low value for practising CLIL teachers. This has led me to ask teachers what they consider to be difficult or challenging about their own CLIL approach. Adding the results to my own experience of CLIL teaching, I have devised a list of provocative statements intended to stimulate discussion on the nature of CLIL in particular contexts. I call this list ‘the seven commandments for CLIL’. By approaching CLIL from this angle, I hope to achieve two things:

CLIL

● Firstly, by not being positively prescriptive but still giving a focused direction for discussion, I hope to enable CLIL teachers to voice, discuss and defend their own CLIL quality markers. ● Secondly, by using language which is free of CLIL jargon and introduces an element of light humour, I believe teachers can relate the discussion better to their own CLIL context and interests. So far, my pre-service and in-service training sessions for CLIL seem to

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support the success of this endeavour. However, it needs to be made totally clear that the point certainly is not a religious or dogmatic one but, rather, by crystallising the issues into ‘grand’ statements, participants in an in-service teacher training CLIL course can sharpen their minds towards some of the most critical issues when implementing CLIL.

CLIL: the seven commandments 1

Thou shalt not think that language will take care of itself

When observing CLIL classrooms and talking to teachers, I often find that they operate on an underlying principle which assumes that giving enough subject input will somehow automatically lead to language comprehension and improved competence. Meaning-related language activities that direct the learners’ attention to grammatical or semantic features of the language (focus on form; awareness-raising of language form; implicit or explicit noticing of language form) are mostly seen as a distraction, a waste of time, and not as part of the content delivery. Furthermore, since the lexical input is almost exclusively driven by the conceptual understanding of the subject or topic objectives, hardly any preparation or classroom time is reserved for lexical issues such as, for example, use of the mother tongue, word frequency, ‘general’ versus ‘academic’ versus ‘subject-specific’ vocabulary, registers, collocations and word morphology. Closely related to this is the question of feedback. Should CLIL

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teachers also give language-related feedback, or is meaning-related feedback enough? Classroom observations and studies show a wide variety of ways of dealing with this issue. On one end of the cline, you will meet teachers who say something like ‘I’m not a language teacher therefore I don’t feel qualified to give any feedback on language issues. I will only correct the students when I notice that the content is not understood or delivered properly’. On the other end, there are teachers who emphasise the importance of corrective feedback. However, this is mostly restricted to pronunciation errors or inappropriate choice of words. Only very rarely can one see grammatical corrections or semantic feedback that goes beyond isolated words – feedback on lexical relationships, for example. Evidence is gathering that input is a necessary condition for language learning but not, on its own, a sufficient one. It is, therefore, of vital importance in CLIL teacher training to discuss the role of text enhancement measures, scaffolding activities and noticing tasks. 2

Honour thy forebears’ and contemporaries’ wisdom

One of the reasons for the popularity of CLIL amongst teachers may be that, from a historical point of view, it has been very much driven by practitioners who are enthusiastic about language. CLIL started off in many countries as a grassroots phenomenon, which is now becoming more and more institutionalised. Typically, schools would try to enhance their profile by introducing it, either because of popular demand, typically from parents, or in order to attract more academically gifted learners. This often led to very highly individualised forms of CLIL. While it is of great importance to acknowledge local constraints, knowledge and experience, there is also a growing concern that CLIL should be crystallised

CLIL started off in many countries as a grassroots phenomenon, which is now becoming more and more institutionalised

Teacher trainers need to create a climate of mutual respect in which theory and practice can feed into each other into a more theory-guided method. However, work on this is still very much in its infancy and some of the theoretical work is considered by practitioners to be too ‘airy fairy’, too hard to integrate into their daily teaching practice or simply not relevant within their local contexts. For example, recommendations and results from Canadian immersion programmes cannot easily be implemented in Austrian schools. Nevertheless, theoretical deliberations such as the CLIL matrix, the linguistic interdependence hypothesis, BICS and CALPS, dual comprehension (see the work of Wolfgang Butzkamm and John Caldwell), the two solitudes assumption, etc should be used to question and sharpen teachers’ grounded guiding principles for CLIL. When doing awareness-raising activities, however, teacher trainers need to be very cautious not to open up the practice–theory divide but, instead, create a climate of mutual respect in which theory and practice can feed into each other. 3

Thou shalt not change thy words

Probably the biggest challenge in CLIL, especially when dealing with low-level learners, is to bridge the gap between the learners’ poor linguistic knowledge in the foreign language and the much higher linguistic demands of the subject. How to do the ‘CLIL splits’ is the number one recurring theme in CLIL in-service training. One popular way of dealing with this dilemma is to simplify texts by rewriting them or by using authentic texts written for much younger learners. This practice, although understandable and often heavily defended, runs various risks. As Anne O’Keefe, Michael McCarthy and Ron Carter point out, the learners may receive a conceptually watered-down version of the content as both topicrelevant language, such as certain technical terms and, above all, typical

academic language will be missing. Furthermore, typical word partnerships (collocations) will have been replaced by more general and vaguer words, which will give the text a very different lexical quality. Needless to say, this will have the effect of slowing down rather than accelerating academic and subjectspecific learning. Since lexical richness and authenticity are vital for scholarly learning, text enhancement or scaffolding measures can be a way out of this conundrum. The underlying principle of an approach like this is that the text should remain as linguistically authentic as possible. However, everything around the text should be utilised to enable the learner to complete subject-appropriate tasks successfully. Experienced teachers provide, amongst other resources, word glossaries, keyword inventories, guiding questions, text visualisations, graphic organisers, academic word lists, morphology training and mother-tongue scaffolding. 4

Thou shalt use all thy skills

A further important tool when doing the splits and trying to reconcile linguistic reality with linguistic necessity lies in the field of skills training. The learners need to be taught how to become ● efficient readers; ● efficient dictionary users (real and web-based); ● efficient notetakers; ● efficient communicators (with interaction and negotiation skills); ● efficient researchers and data gatherers; ● efficient presenters in the target language. Therefore, providing them with strategies that will improve these skills needs to be an integral part of CLIL lessons or of training for CLIL. 5

Honour the virtues of the web

Traditionally, the written word has been very much at the centre of school-based learning. Books in all shades and forms of lexical density have been the backbone of scholarly socialisation. Linear, incremental and lockstep learning was at the heart of this approach. However, the advent of technology-based media has widened the scope of information gathering and

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CLIL-ing me softly processing. As a result, the learning styles of the net generation may pose a particular challenge and provide a particular opportunity for CLIL teaching. The following things should, therefore, be considered carefully by CLIL teachers: ● Visual information leads to faster and deeper comprehension. ● The web provides an abundance of multi-modal learning opportunities and has become an increasingly popular starting point for teacherproduced material.

typically collaborate a lot more intensely than in traditional classrooms. The ‘lonely cowboy’ approach of a teacher working independently and alone in the classroom is very much the exception in CLIL teaching. In numerous CLIL programmes, the subject teacher and the English teacher or a language assistant work very closely together in designing the course and creating the teaching materials. Furthermore, in countries with non-institutionalised CLIL programmes, such as CLIL modules in Austria, teachers have to go public by the need to ‘sell’ this bilingual teaching to their pupils, their parents and, possibly, their colleagues and the

In numerous CLIL programmes, the subject teacher and the English teacher work very closely together in designing the course

● Web-based learning dramatically changes the relationship between teacher and student in the learning process. ● Customised, collaborative and autonomous learning will become the norm rather than the exception in technology-mediated language learning. Obviously, this will force all educators to acknowledge the need for multimodal literacy in which the practice of conveying meaning involves the purposeful integration of resources, such as writing, images, speech, gestures, drawing and sound. As modern technology allows texts to become increasingly multi-modal, it is vital to move beyond overemphasis on the written word and recognise that the printed word is just one of the modes in a set of modes that represent meaning. CLIL teachers may be trail-blazers and innovators in this respect as there is a dearth of commercially available CLIL materials and this often forces them to design their own. 6

Thou shalt unite with thy CLIL brothers and sisters

According to experienced CLIL teachers, one of the characteristics and desired outcomes of CLIL is its quality of going beyond the individual, atomistic classroom. CLIL is widely regarded as favouring a whole-school policy, where teachers, pupils, head teachers, parents, language assistants and often educational authorities

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educational authorities. It can be widely seen that cross-curricular projects, international projects, school exhibitions and presentations, CLIL/bilingual areas, school exchanges, invitations to outside experts, knowledge demonstrations for parents or other visitors and web-based interactional activities are the rule rather than the exception in CLIL classrooms. This combination of professional collaboration and ‘public’ teaching techniques creates a unique CLIL dynamism. 7

● What resource materials and scaffolding structures need to be made available? and quite a few more need to be considered and negotiated before the actual start of any programme. Furthermore, it is essential to remember that any increase in language competence takes time and is markedly shaped by the input and the nature of the communicative situation. In other words, the specific discourse situation in a geography or history CLIL classroom will first and foremost encourage a geographic or historical discourse and may only slowly spill over to general speech situations. As Christiane DaltonPuffer puts it: ‘It is necessary to recognise that CLIL classrooms are one specific variant of a more general educational context which cannot be expected to “prepare” learners for other situational contexts in any direct way.’

 Going for CLIL has biblical support, as in the so-called ‘Matthew effect’: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Therefore, my advice is: Get CLILed. ETp

Thou shalt not kill CLIL

Effective CLIL needs time, patience and extra resources. It is unwise, unprofessional and unethical to sell it as a quick-fix, self-driving ‘let’s just speak English in the history classroom’ approach. Time and time again, teachers emphasise that careful planning and intensive cooperation before the actual implementation of CLIL is vital for its success. Questions such as: ● What subject areas will be covered? ● What is the role of the mother tongue? ● How will we deal with testing, evaluation and feedback? ● What materials will be used and what support will be needed?

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Butzkamm, W and Caldwell, J A W The Bilingual Reform: a Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching Narr Studienbucher 2009 Coyle, D, Hood, P and Marsh, D CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning CUP 2010 Dalton-Puffer, C Discourse in CLIL Classrooms John Benjamins 2007 Meyer, O ‘Towards quality CLIL: successful planning and teaching strategies’ Puls 33 2010 O’Keefe, A, McCarthy, M and Carter, R From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching CUP 2007 Erwin Gierlinger is a senior lecturer in EFL, working at the University College of Education of Upper-Austria. His professional interests include the sociocognitive aspects of learning in the foreign language classroom. He has participated in various European teaching programmes and has been in charge of several in-service courses on CLIL. [email protected]

IN THE

CLASSROOM

High frequency habits Jackie Fung King Lee has some effective ways to teach wh-questions. -questions, used to request specific information, are very important structures for students of English as the need to use them arises often. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that they are taught again and again at different levels, many learners do not have an adequate command of these structures. I will outline here the way in which I teach wh-questions, although the method described can also be used for other high-frequency grammar items. The key is, I believe, to select appropriate contexts and to develop a sequence of relevant activities to improve the learners’ understanding of question forms and to increase their ability to use them in effective communication.

Wh

A question of questions Consider the following grammatically incorrect questions, which were produced by students in the oral exam of the Hong Kong Certificate of Education (most of the students had had at least 11 years of instruction in English): Where are you usually buy it? Where you sleep? When you get your last illness? Where penfriend come from? Where did the party hold/held? Reports on this exam regularly include comments about the candidates’

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inability to form questions correctly: ‘Many examiners reported that up to 75% of candidates found difficulty asking correct grammatical questions based on the headings given.’ ‘One wonders why after learning English for at least 11 years, candidates are still unable to ask a proper question.’ Traditional grammar teaching in Hong Kong adopts a disjointed approach which is divorced from reading, writing, speaking and listening. A number of grammar books used in the schools are over-reliant on mechanical drills and the main teaching method seems to be memorisation of set patterns. Typically, after the teacher presents a grammar rule illustrated by several unrelated single sentences, the learners are asked to undertake a number of monotonous repetitive drills with little relevance to their daily lives. The following is typical of such a drill:

The impact on the learners of grammar manipulation drills of this kind is usually fairly limited. Marianne Celce-Murcia argues that sentence-level drills cannot give learners sufficient context to learn when and why to use the target structure. The exclusive focus on form by many teachers and textbook writers may be one reason for unsatisfactory learning outcomes, and the learners’ failure to achieve command of question structures is certainly evidenced by the poor questioning techniques they display in the exam.

A question of context It has often been argued (by David Nunan and Marianne Celce-Murcia, for example) that grammar items should always be presented in context. Only through learning activities that are richly situated and fully meaningful and contextualised will learners be able to perceive the situational meaning and use the structure for communication purposes, which in turn can strengthen their motivation for learning. So, when it comes to question forms, the first question that a teacher should think about is where and when wh-interrogatives are usually used. Some possible answers include: 1 In the classroom, when a teacher wants to find out about the students’ knowledge or to check their understanding (When did the First World War break out? Why do we say ‘an hour’, not ‘a hour’?), or when the students want to ask the teacher for clarification (What will be included in the test?) 2 At home, when parents want to request specific information from children, or vice versa (When will you come back for dinner tonight? Mum, where is my ball?) 3 In social contexts (What do you usually do in your spare time?)

Change the statements below into questions. 1 Mrs Lee praised Lily yesterday. Did Mrs Lee praise Lily yesterday?

.........................................................

2 Simon had left home before his mother woke up.

4 In the street, for getting directions

(Where is the nearest supermarket?) 5 In newspapers and magazines, for

advice seeking (How can I get rid of the oil stains on my dress?) 6 In a riddle (How do bees brush their

.........................................................

3 This film star is like a friend of mine. .........................................................

hair? With a honeycomb.) In this article I will use an advice-seeking letter as an example of suitable language

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input for the teaching of wh-questions. The letter shown here was written by a group of teachers working on a project on wh-question formation. The teacher can begin the lesson by reading the letter aloud with appropriate intonation to help the students understand the context: here, that a young girl with a number of personal problems is soliciting advice. The creation of a relevant and life-like situation such as this can arouse the students’ interest and get them ready to engage in activities based on this context. Dear Miss Wong I am unhappy because I have many questions but don’t know the answers. First, I don’t understand the meaning of life. My grandmother died in a traffic accident last summer. I was very close to her and still feel sad about her death. Why was she killed? Why did she leave us so suddenly? If there really is life after death, what is she doing now? If we all die one day, what are we waiting for now? Why do people die? I feel lonely in class. I have very few friends. Most of my classmates don’t like talking to me. Why am I such an unpopular student? I really can’t figure it out. What mistakes do I make? Why do they treat me like this? How can I make them accept me? Finally, I think I’m in love. I’m really interested in a boy in my class. Why doesn’t he take notice of me? I’m not sure if I’m too young to date a boy. Actually, when is the best time for students to start dating? What do boys and girls talk about when they are together? I really envy the girl sitting behind me in my class. She gets along with all the boys. Why is she so sociable? Where does she get her charm? Why am I so shy? I’m afraid I’ve asked too many questions. But I’m really desperate. I think it is the end of the world. Please help me! Yours sincerely Lonely Heart

Guided induction Instead of beginning the lesson with the teacher stating the rules for the formation of wh-questions and illustrating them with isolated sample sentences, the guided induction approach involves getting the students

Table 1 Distinction between be and lexical verbs Lexical verb

Be Copula be

Where does she get all her charm?

Why am I such an unpopular student?

to read the letter for themselves after it has been read to them, to understand the context and then to engage in grammatical analysis of the question forms found in it. The students can be asked to identify the questions in the letter and categorise them according to the kind of verb used – questions containing the verb be and those containing lexical verbs. They can also be encouraged to subcategorise copula be and auxiliary be, and to identify the verb form of the predicator following auxiliary be, as shown in Table 1 above. According to Mun Ling Lo, learning outcomes are related to how the content is structured – what is kept invariant and what is varied. Ference Marton and Ulla Runesson (cited by Lo and Pong) identify four patterns of variation commonly found in lessons: contrast, separation, generalisation and fusion.

Contrast Based on the questions categorised in Table 1, a teacher can use contrast, by changing only one element of the sentence and keeping the rest constant, Table 2 Contrast 1a Where does she get all her charm? 1b Where do they get all their charm? 1c *Where does she gets all her charm? 1d *Where is she get all her charm?

Auxiliary be What is she doing now?

to raise the students’ awareness of the distinction between the verb be and lexical verbs, and the following predicator, in a wh-question (see Table 2). By comparing sentences 1a and 1d, the students can see that the dummy operator do rather than be should be used before a lexical verb such as get. A comparison of 1a and 1b reveals that the third person singular subject she, in the simple present tense, should be used with the variant does, while the plural subject they is preceded by the variant do. Further, comparing 1a and 1c, the students can discover that the predicator following the operator do must be a base verb form (eg get).

Separation Teachers can also separate the different components of the wh-question to help the students discern the structure. The students can be asked to find examples of each category of wh-question, as shown in Table 3.

Generalisation Generalisation is another way to help learners understand wh-question structure. The learners can be presented with a number of wh-questions and encouraged to generalise the different structures, as shown in Table 4 on page 18. If the learners experience difficulty in identifying the structures, the teacher can ask guiding questions to help them

Table 3 Separation Wh-word + aux do + subject + lexical verb (base verb form)

1 Where does she get all her charm? 2 ........................................................................... 3 ...........................................................................

Be

Wh-word + copula be + subject + adjective phrase

4 Why is she so sociable? 5 ........................................................................... 6 ...........................................................................

Wh-word + copula be + subject + noun phrase

7 Why am I such an unpopular student? 8 ........................................................................... 9 ...........................................................................

Wh-word + aux be + subject + v-ing / past participle

10 What is she doing now? 11 ........................................................................... 12 ...........................................................................

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High frequency habits complete the tables. Using a guided induction approach, the learners and the teacher collaborate and interact to co-construct grammar rules together.

Table 4 Generalisation Wh-word + .............. + subject + .............. ?

1 Why do they treat me like this? 2 Why did she leave us so suddenly? 3 Where does she get all her charm?

Wh-word + .............. + .............. + .............. ?

4 Why is she so sociable? 5 Why am I so shy?

.............. + .............. + .............. + .............. ?

6 Why am I such an unpopular student? 7 When is the best time for students to start dating?

.............. + .............. +

8 Why was she killed?

.............. + .............. or .............. ?

9 What is she doing now? 10 What are we waiting for now?

Fusion Fusion takes place when the students’ attention is focused on several variables simultaneously. In language consolidation activities, it occurs when the students have to manage several variables at the same time and are, therefore, encouraged to see the relationships between them. Here, I will illustrate how the use of songs can enable students to experience fusion and how it can promote the learning of question forms. The lyrics of the song The End of the World include a number of whquestions containing lexical verbs (Why does the sun go on shining? Why do the stars glow above?). The teacher can consolidate the students’ knowledge of question forms by drawing attention to the language patterns in the song. This can be done by inviting the students to complete blanks on the operator and the predicator, as shown in Table 5. Table 5 The End of the World Why .......... the sun .......... on shining? Why .......... the sea .......... to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? ’Cause you don’t love me any more. Why .......... the birds ......... on singing? Why .......... the stars .......... above? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love.

As a follow-up activity, the learners can be asked to rewrite the lyrics, using wh-questions to express their own personal problems, real or imagined. Another song that can be used to provide practice of wh-questions is Papa

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Don’t Preach. The teacher can set the scene by telling the students that the song is a letter to her father, written by the girl who wrote the advice-seeking letter they studied earlier. The students are then asked to listen to the song to identify her problem: pre-marital pregnancy. They can be asked to imagine that they are the worried and angry father who wants to find out more about his young daughter’s pregnancy by asking her questions. Music and songs can help develop the students’ imaginations and create a relaxed learning atmosphere, in addition to performing the crucial function of providing opportunities for the learners to experience fusion and to practise the target language meaningfully.

 Experience shows that mere presentation of prescriptive grammar rules with repetitive, unchallenging and decontextualised grammar drills cannot help learners develop accuracy or fluency. Learners need to learn how to put grammatical knowledge to use in authentic contexts. While teachers can help their learners discover the appropriate forms through patterns of variation, they need also to provide reallife situations to exemplify the target language and choose authentic materials such as songs to create a relevant, relaxed learning atmosphere so that the students can then put the form to practical use in a meaningful context. ETp I would like to express my thanks to the teachers on the learning study project ‘Developing students’ ability to distinguish between ‘verb-to-be’ and ‘verb-to-do’ in wh-question formation’. Some ideas in this article come from them.

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Celce-Murcia, M ‘Towards more context and discourse in grammar instruction’ TESL-EJ: Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language 11 (2) 2007 Lo, M L ‘Learning study – the Hong Kong version of lesson study: development, impact and challenges’ In Matoba, M, Crawford, K A and Sarkar Arani, M R (Eds), Lesson Study: International Perspective on Policy and Practice Educational Science Publishing House 2006 Lo, M L and Pong, W Y ‘Catering for individual differences – building on variation’ In Lo, M L, Pong, W Y and Chik, P (Eds) For Each and Every One: Catering for Individual Differences Through Learning Studies Hong Kong University Press 2005 Nunan, D ‘Teaching grammar in context’ ELT Journal 52 (2) 1998 Jackie F K Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, where she specialises in grammar teaching. Her research interests include lesson study and gender in English language teaching. [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: ENGLISH TEACHING professional Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX, UK Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308 Email: [email protected]

Over the wall ... Alan Maley is certainly not lost in translation.

‘Translation is that which openeth a window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel …’ (Preface to the King James’ authorised version of the Bible, 1604)

ince the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, humankind has needed to find ways for people using different languages to communicate. One way was to learn the other language. Another was to learn a ‘global’ language, like Latin or English. But there is an even more time-honoured solution to the problem: translation. Of course, the whole question of the value or otherwise of translation in language learning continues to fuel controversy and debate. However, the books I am reviewing here are not closely concerned with teaching or learning languages, nor teaching translation as a skill; they are about translation in its own right, as a specific form of human activity. I have, however, added a few classroom books at the end of this article.

S

After Babel This must surely be one of the most influential books on translation ever

written. George Steiner was a remarkable scholar – both polyglot and polymath – and interested in the big questions about language and culture, which intersect at many points with translation issues. It is impossible to do justice to this 500-page book in a few paragraphs, but these are some of the key issues Steiner explores: Why are there so many different languages when they offer no adaptive evolutionary advantage? Can linguistics solve the riddle of a universal underlying language versus linguistic relativity? Is translation possible? How is communication – and translation – possible when everyone has a private language with uniquely personal meanings, even though social pressures force meanings into fixed moulds? Can translation be confined to inter-lingual texts, when every act of communication, even in the first language, involves interpretation, and is therefore a form of translation? Do polyglot bilinguals have different kinds of brains from monolinguals? Does translation in its widest sense involve ‘transmutation’ – texts in multitudinous versions, representations of written texts in other modes – in art, music, dance, drama, film, etc? If this is the case, is what we call ‘culture’ a gigantic network of intertextuality? (Or, as Steiner asks, ‘Is culture the translation and rewording of previous meaning?’)

He deals with these and other questions in highly complex arguments, drawing on a mind-stretching range of reference, from neuroscience to psychology, from classical to modern literature in at least four languages, from linguistics to literary criticism. He takes a rather dim view of the kind of mathematical linguistics which seeks to establish linguistic universals, quoting Dell Hymes: ‘Most of language begins where abstract universals leave off.’ His exploration of the Universalist/Relativist issue is detailed and finely nuanced – and he returns to it repeatedly throughout the book. If there is an underlying common semantic framework, then translation is possible. But if all languages see the world in uniquely different ways, then translation is impossible. In fact, he finds little firm evidence for either position. He concludes that translation is a paradox: it is theoretically impossible, yet practically – and miraculously – feasible. The greatest translators manage to balance the ‘resistant difficulty’ of texts with their own ‘elective affinity’ for those texts, and manage to produce new texts which deepen our understanding of both languages: ‘to produce a text which the foreign poet would have written had he been composing in one’s own tongue.’

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Over the wall ...

iStockphoto.com / © Steven Robertson

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The most exciting recent book on translation is David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? It covers virtually every issue raised by translation and is written in a highly entertaining and accessible style. He writes of ‘the irresistible desire of words to mean something else’. Yet for him, this is normal: ‘Using one word for another isn’t special, it’s what we do all the time. Translators just do it in another language.’ In one chapter he dismisses the myth of ‘literal translation’, pointing out that ‘a translation that makes no sense without recourse to the original is not a translation’. He also puts forward a spirited case for the use of translation in language learning. In Chapter 6, he offers a brilliant example of 12 stages in the translation of a four-line, seven-character-per-line Chinese shunkouliu, which gradually assumes the shape of English verse forms. As he comments: ‘When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance – when your mind is engaged in multi-level pattern-matching pursuits – you find resources in your language you never knew were there.’ He draws attention to translation up (from a small to a dominant language) and down (from a dominant language to a smaller one). This helps explain the dominance of writers translated from English on the shelves of bookstores throughout Europe. He continues with this theme in Chapters 19 to 21, where he discusses the relatively few languages ever translated and the regrettable dominance of English – in publishing, in international law, in the EU. Ironically, the regulations put in place to give linguistic parity actually led to a reinforcement of English predominance because of the need to use it as a pivot language. In the later chapters – 26 to 31 – he discusses the translation of literature and issues of style and ‘match’. He prefers ‘match’ to ‘equivalence’, and illustrates what he means by neatly translating the pun from French: Adolf Hitler – Fourreur into an English ‘match’ – Adolf Hitler – German Lieder. I have only been able to touch on

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some of the most interesting chapters but the whole book is fascinating – and can be dipped in and out of, unlike Steiner!

The Third Language Alan Duff’s The Third Language takes us into the mind of the translator at work. Duff argues that often the translation reads not like English but like a third language – ‘translationese’. In this book he explores why this is. Each chapter examines in detail different aspects of the problem: words themselves, words in grammatical structures, and idioms and cultural context. The book is a treasure-house of carefully-chosen examples, drawn mainly from French, German, Serbo-Croat and Hungarian. There is detailed and insightful analysis of each example. In Chapter 5, The Translator and the Text, Duff tries to show ‘what goes on in the writer’s mind while he is working’, for, as he states at the outset, ‘whatever goes on in the writer’s head must go on in the translator’s head as well’. For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of how meaning is carried over from one language to another, this is essential reading.

Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom. All contain stimulating and productive activities for classroom use. I should also mention Peter Newmark’s A Textbook of Translation, though this is more related to training translators than teaching language. For more theoretical discussions, Guy Cook and Wolfgang Butzkamm and John Caldwell are in the vanguard of a movement to restore translation to its proper place in language teaching after a century of monolinguistic domination.

 All too often, the judgement is made that something has been ‘lost in translation’. These books show the contrary, namely that much is to be ‘found in translation’. ETp

Other titles Susan Bassnett’s book, Reflections on Translation, I found very disappointing. It is cobbled together from articles previously published in The Linguist Magazine and the ITI Bulletin. Although some of the articles are interesting, the book lacks cohesion. Not so with Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, which is an eloquent and passionate plea for greater respect to be given to translators as creative writers, not mere anonymous hacks. And as the translator of Don Quijote, she knows what she is talking about. For literary titles dealing with issues related to translation, I would recommend Brian Friel’s play Translations, about the clash of cultures and languages in 19thcentury Ireland. Also Diego Marani’s novel (brilliantly translated from Italian by Judith Landry) New Finnish Grammar. This is about a man who has lost his language after a severe head wound. It is an anguishing account of his failed attempt to recover Finnish, presumed to have been his lost language, and his pathetically tragic fate. There are relatively few practical books on using translation to teach language. Three of the best are Alan Duff’s Translation, Françoise Grellet’s Apprendre à Traduire and Maria Gonzales-Davies’s

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Bassnett, S Reflections on Translation Multilingual Matters 2011 Bellos, D Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything Particular Books 2011 Butzkamm, W and Caldwell, J A W The Bilingual Reform: a Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching Narr Studienbucher 2009 Cook, G Translation in Language Teaching: An Argument for Reassessment OUP 2010 Duff, A The Third Language: Recurrent Problems of Translation into English Pergamon 1981 Duff, A Translation OUP 1989 Friel, B Translations Faber and Faber 1981 Maria Gonzales-Davies Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom: Activities, Tasks and Projects John Benjamins 2004 Grellet, F Apprendre à Traduire Presses Universitaires de Nancy 1990 Grossman, E Why Translation Matters Yale University Press 2010 Marani, D (translated by Judith Landry) New Finnish Grammar Dedalus 2011 Newmark, P A Textbook of Translation Prentice Hall 1988 Steiner, G (3rd edition) After Babel OUP 1998 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]

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS



Managing your classes Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa explains what classroom management is and why it is important.

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here is far more to teaching English to young learners (YLs) than teaching the language itself. Classroom management and motivation play such an important role that if these are not in place, there is little chance of teaching or learning happening. Naturally, a syllabus or curriculum states what is to be taught, but the how is where genuine communication takes place and, therefore, where language acquisition is more likely to occur: how you get the children into the classroom, how they get their materials out and how activities are set up and managed. Before reading the following article, take a moment to consider what classroom management means to you. Do you plan the management parts of your lessons? How do you give instructions? In which language do you give them? What routines do you have in place? How important are routines for young learners? What has worked for you recently? What hasn’t worked, and why do you think it wasn’t successful? Are there any areas that you feel less confident about?

can cover a broad spectrum of events and considerations that go on in the classroom, from giving instructions to organising the furniture. In the YL classroom, classroom management should not necessarily focus on implementing reward and consequence systems (and certainly should not include rewards and punishments).

Classroom management should be about ensuring that every child is cognitively challenged and cognitively engaged

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What is classroom management? Classroom management can mean different things to different people. It 22

Classroom management should be about creating an effective learning environment where the learners are actively engaged. It should be about providing plenty of opportunities to maximise the learners’ exposure to contextualised language as well as to the relevant target language. It should be about ensuring that every child is cognitively challenged and cognitively engaged so that the chances of their getting distracted (or being a distraction) are reduced considerably. Being pro-active rather than re-active means that behaviour and discipline issues are reduced to a minimum.

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS Classroom management is about communication Communication doesn’t come from listening to and understanding words; it comes from using every sense possible. It comes from monitoring body language; listening to the intonation, stress, strength and energy of the voice; and looking at facial expressions and gestures. These are all skills which children possess naturally and which they have expertly honed at a very young age in their first language. These skills develop so naturally that no one needs to teach them to us; but, for some reason, as soon as we are faced with a different language we focus so much on the words being spoken that we forget about interpreting the rest. There is much more to communication than words. If children are instantly provided with a translation or explanation of a new word or expression in their own language, they are being denied the opportunity to acquire language at a more accelerated, natural pace. Children who are given a direct translation become lazy and no longer try to understand the English instructions as they know an easier option is about to follow. They come to rely on the translations more, not less.

Classroom management is about leading the pack Cesar Millan, the Mexican-born dog trainer known as ‘The Dog Whisperer’, is able to take control of a pack of 20 or more dogs, including some which have been known to be vicious. How does he do it? He is unable to reason with them and he doesn’t believe in issuing physical injuries to dominate them. He emits calm assertive energy, which nurtures stability and creates balanced, centred dogs with placid submissive behaviour. In other words, he becomes the pack leader. Although perhaps not everyone would like to admit it, it could be argued that there are similarities between a pack of dogs and a class of children who don’t speak the same language as you (or are pretending not to). As the



teacher, you need to use calm, assertive behaviour in order to become the leader of the pack. But how is this done?

Classroom management is about your voice A noisy classroom is to be expected when working with large numbers of children. However, raising your own voice above and beyond the natural register not only results in the noise level rising, it can be very damaging, and vocal problems are not uncommon amongst teachers. Another reason why teachers need to be aware of how high their voice is in terms of pitch, tone and volume is that, once the high, nasal ‘head’ voice is engaged (as opposed to the more natural ‘chest’ voice), it may reach an annoying pitch/tone which many children deal with by switching off and simply not hearing.

As the teacher, you need to use calm, assertive behaviour in order to become the leader of the pack As Rowena Whitehead, quoted by Tessa Woodward, asserts: ‘The voice, “the muscle of the soul”, is our most personal musical instrument. As teachers, the voice is one of our most important tools. A wellmoderated voice enhances communication and can make a great contribution to the students’ experience of the classroom as a relaxed, calming learning environment.’

Classroom management is about your body language Children read body language quickly and easily. They can tell your mood and emotions by the way you hold your hands, stand and move around the classroom. They are also very visual learners. What better ‘visual’ is there than your own body language when you

Children can tell your mood and emotions by the way you hold your hands, stand and move around the classroom are trying to communicate with them? One of the first things I do with a new class, regardless of age, is to teach the gestures I use which accompany classroom verbs and instructions. It is totally satisfying when the children leave the lesson, smiling, having acquired new learning skills and useful vocabulary which will help them understand classroom instructions in future lessons. It is not really that important which gestures you decide to use. What is important is that you are consistent and use the same gesture every time. Different ages and different levels will require different sets of classroom verbs. To get an idea of the instruction verbs you will need, take a look at the coursebook you are using. A book that is used for eight-to-nine year olds might need verbs such as match, draw a line and complete; for younger children you may need touch, colour or draw. There is no need to spell out to the children what they are going to do by saying ‘First we’re going to learn the gestures then we’re going to repeat the words and do the gestures ....’; just motion for the children to stand up, do one of the gestures and say the word. When one of them copies you, react encouragingly until they are all copying the gestures. Soon, they will start to repeat the words as well. Try putting words that collocate into a short chant with the actions to make it more interesting: Listen, repeat, listen, repeat Listen, listen, listen, repeat Draw, colour, cut (clap) Draw, colour, cut (clap) Draw, colour, draw, colour Draw, colour, cut (clap)

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TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS

Managing your classes




Once you have presented the classroom verbs, remember to recycle at the beginning of each lesson the ones you are going to use. For example, if you are going to do some craft work, you will need to remind the children of cut, colour and stick (or glue if that’s what you have chosen to use). Having gestures also lends itself nicely to miming games such as ‘charades’, which can be used to help reinforce the vocabulary. Another positive point about presenting the instructions to the learners as gestures is that they can easily relay back to you what they have to do without resorting to their first language.

Classroom management is about you Essentially, the only behaviour you can control in the classroom is your own. You will be unable to make any changes, though, unless you first acknowledge what you are doing. It is much easier to make yourself aware of what is going on in your classroom than it used to be. As a teacher trainer, I had the opportunity to work with primary English teachers in Portugal. During the teaching practice lessons where I observed the teachers in action, I would video the lessons for the individual teachers to watch and listen to and then ask them to reflect on what actually took place in the classroom (as opposed to what they thought had taken place).

Having gestures also lends itself nicely to miming games such as ‘charades’, which can be used to help reinforce the vocabulary 24



One teacher was hardly able to recognise herself in the recording as she thought her high, shrill voice sounded ‘hysterical’. Needless to say, there was a vast improvement in her next lesson. Another teacher realised that not only had she drilled the language for the students, she was so focused on completing an activity that she was unaware that the children had not actually produced any language. As mentioned earlier, children’s lessons tend to be quite noisy, but it was the difference in the type of noise that another teacher noticed. In her first lesson, the children repeated and chanted and produced lots of language as they moved around the classroom.

You will be unable to make any changes to your own behaviour unless you first acknowledge what you are doing The noise was extremely productive. The second lesson was more sedate, but the noise production was just as high. However, this time it was the noticeably unproductive noise of fidgeting and chair scraping. Recording the lessons also helped the teachers see how long (and sometimes how boring) some of the activities were, which resulted in an improvement in their planning and their overall expectations of what is achievable. Most importantly, all of the teachers noticed their own classroom language and instructions. Some were trying too hard to speak only in English, which resulted in their using structures that were too difficult for the children to understand, while others kept changing the instructions and confusing the children. As a result, they all started planning in more detail their classroom management and the language they wanted to use. Given that many classroom routines and teaching strategies are applied almost

automatically, it seems to make sense to take the time to ensure that these habits are well formulated and considered good practice. Self-reflection task Make yourself aware of what you are saying and what your voice sounds like from the learners’ point of view. It is very easy to record yourself nowadays using a smartphone or MP3 player. How do you think you sound to your learners? Are your instructions clear enough? Do you react efficiently to different situations? What phrases do you say or noises do you make repeatedly? What could you do differently?

 I will leave you with a quote from Haim Ginott: ‘I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate, it’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations it’s my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanised or de-humanised.’ ETp

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Ginott, H Teacher and Child Avon Books 1975 Millan, C Cesar’s Way Hodder Paperbacks 2008 Woodward, T Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training: Loop Input and Other Strategies CUP 1991 Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa has been involved in teaching young learners both as a teacher and teacher trainer for over 15 years. She was involved in the rewriting and standardising of the International House Certificate in Teaching Young Learners (for more information see www.ihworld.com). For more ideas and materials for teaching YLs, see her blog http://jmhdr.wordpress.com. [email protected]

W R I T I N G

The speaking chain Jane Neill makes sure

Writing activities can be the bane of a teacher’s life:

her students have plenty to

● Do you plan short, sentence-level activities?

write about.

● Do you only teach with the end product, such as a letter of complaint, in mind? ● Do you tackle the question of style? ● Do you choose a language point and centre the writing around that? ● Do you try to do everything, all in one fell swoop?

Also, why is it that so many books will take you step-by-step through some extremely useful stages in working towards a final product, and then present the students with a task on a completely different topic to do for homework? Having done all the preparation for a letter complaining about a hotel – contextualised vocabulary, looked at paragraphing, sequencing, and so on – the follow-up task is a letter complaining about a car! What are the students supposed to do about all that unknown vocabulary? For many learners the problem is twofold: they struggle to think of ideas, and they have difficulties with grammar and lexis. I realise this may be a simplification, but it is what I set about solving.

The process I trialled the following process with an intermediate group, but I have since used the same approach with different levels of learners and the results are very encouraging. First of all, it is important to get the students to work in small groups in

order to generate ideas on your given topic. Then you need to ensure there is plenty of time for them to speak about these ideas and support them with examples, details or reasons why. There are two ways to encourage a ‘speaking chain’: set up a pairwork activity and then combine the pairs into small groups to exchange information, or ask the students to move around the class individually, telling each person they meet their thoughts. Both ways mean that the students will be working with different partners, exchanging ideas and justifying them to each other, but the one primarily described here is the second of the two.

For many learners the problem is two-fold: they struggle to think of ideas, and they have difficulties with grammar and lexis This amount of repetition brings a whole host of benefits: it will promote accuracy, give the students some fluency practice, make room in the lesson for peer- and self-correction and provide an opportunity for everyone to consolidate their thoughts and refine their statements. You may decide that some time needs to be allocated for the correction of common errors, but each successive time the students change partners, their language will improve. It is for these reasons that I have been a champion of repetition for a long time,

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The speaking chain




and there are many activities that give the students an opportunity to revisit and improve their production, which can be integrated into a lesson on writing skills. The speaking chain should be supported by notes and note-taking. This is the part of the lesson which promotes process, rather than product. The students jot down their initial ideas at the start, and they are then responsible for altering and adding to them, during the chain, without any direct teacher correction. This should encourage them to take risks, use their own forms of shorthand and just ‘get down and get dirty’ with the whole act of writing. It may even be the case that some students are working with a new alphabet, while others may not be used to doing more than sentence-level writing. It is, therefore, up to us, as teachers, to make the physical activity enjoyable and stress-free, not forgetting to design our lessons in such a way that we are constantly promoting the improvement of the students’ skills.

The class One example I can give you is of a mixed-nationality class at B1 level on the CEF scale. The students in this class had various problems: they ranged from Arabic speakers, who spoke confidently but were struggling with written script and spelling, to European students who were impatient with themselves and wanted to write at a much higher level than their structural knowledge allowed. Creating lessons which satisfied students at both ends of the ability spectrum was quite a challenge. The day before the writing activity, the class were asked to choose different categories for famous people in their country. The final list was sport, exploration, literature, art, music and science. Asking the students to create their own list underpins the activity with a sense of ownership, making it less something which is imposed upon them and more of a personal choice, thereby generating more enthusiasm for participating in the task. Their homework was to make some notes about a famous person from their

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country who fitted into one of their categories. This gave the students space to collect information and write without any fear of judgement. Equipped with this, the next day they had to tell a partner about this person. One very important detail was that the partner was allowed to ask questions. This meant that the descriptions became fuller, and the students were encouraged to ask each other questions to clarify details. At the end of the first discussion, the learners were asked to make any changes or additions to their notes that they wanted.

It is up to us to make the physical activity enjoyable and stressfree, not forgetting to design our lessons in such a way that we are constantly promoting the improvement of the students’ skills This cycle was repeated, until each student had spoken to every other person in the room and their notes were becoming more and more detailed. During all the speaking, I was monitoring, ready to lend a hand with any language problems which the students could not solve for themselves. By the end of the activity, they each had enough written information to start creating a profile of their chosen famous person. When the students were asking each other questions, a natural opportunity for spelling practice arose as they wanted to know how to write any unfamiliar names of people and places which came up. Furthermore, they were constantly looking at each other’s notes and helping with structures. This quantity of independent learning and skills development was much greater than I had anticipated – and what a joy it was not to have a teacher-led lesson! Returning to their desks, the students then worked on their notes for the remainder of the class time. I did a short round-up of correction on such things as prepositions of time and place, which was all that was needed. I singled

out errors for correction without saying who had made them so that the correction was done anonymously, with no one made to feel embarrassed about their mistakes.

The product The students’ written biographies were some of the best pieces of writing I had received from that class. Those who struggled with English script did not feel stressed during the lesson, and had enough accurate information from their notes to create a good piece of writing. As a result, their confidence soared. Those students who wanted to create more complex sentences also had the opportunity to develop their writing because there was time to play with their notes, making changes and improvements. This meant that they had a greater sense of achievement as well.

 Later in that term, we returned to the topic of their famous people and, this time, the writing activity was to make a biography of someone else’s hero. This meant that they had to ask a lot more questions and take notes about what they were hearing. It automatically created the maximum possible amount of peercorrection, and it was a huge success. Whether you are a devotee of product or process, give this a whirl and take the pain out of getting inky fingers. ETp

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Jane Neill is a teacher, teacher trainer and EAP lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has been teaching for 20 years, both in Europe and the UK.

[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: ENGLISH TEACHING professional Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX, UK Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308 Email: [email protected]

IN THE CLASSROOM

Outcomes-based language coaching Peter Zoeftig looks at how coaches can work with language learners.

s I stated in my first article (ETp Issue 81), coaching is different from traditional teaching methods which use pre-prepared coursebook or syllabusbased material. It is, instead, a collaborative approach, which develops self-observation, makes use of the students’ own resources and focuses on emerging patterns and opportunities for insights. A skilled coach has an awareness of the internal processes of surfacing language, and uses rapport, pacing and leading techniques to move the coachees towards their own desired outcomes. Employing a combination of appropriate questioning methods, essential feedback on emerging skills, consolidation time and repeated focus on areas that need attention, the coach begins from the starting point of the coachees’ own values and encourages them to come to an enhanced awareness of changes in their own performance. Since the focus is on creating better outcomes, we cannot separate these from the processes involved in creating them.

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The coaching of language Using a coaching approach in language teaching enables us to make use of powerful techniques, valuable insights and deeply challenging methods in order to bring out the best in our learners – but how do these fit in with students who are still learning the language being coached, and which techniques are strictly language and communication-oriented? Language coaching accelerates the processing of language, especially memorisation, auditory digital processing 1 and performance. These

features are brought to the fore through questioning techniques focusing on any ‘mistakes’ that express themselves in deletions, distortions and generalisations (often borrowed from another language). We emphasise action and performing real tasks rather than theory or textbook exercises, which have little place here.

The coaching of learners A coach helps to draw out the coachees’ own way of thinking and talking, at the same time as developing their language ability in order to produce better outcomes. This is not the same as therapy or the use of coaching

Since the focus in coaching is on creating better outcomes, we cannot separate these from the processes involved in creating them techniques in order to solve problems in other areas often covered by coaches and counsellors (such as stress, phobia, addictions or time management issues). For language coaches, the goal is to ‘shift’ 2 the coachees’ language awareness (and self-image within the language framework), but not to deal with other aspects of their lives by using therapy or employing theoretical models (though these other, more personal aspects may be influenced in the process). A coach does not need to be liked, to make a difference in every session, to

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Outcomes-based language coaching




psychoanalyse or to be responsible for the results. A coach doesn’t have to share the coachees’ problems, doesn’t need to know very much about the specifics of their business and doesn’t need to have control or to direct. If anything, it is the coachee who has control of the outcomes. There is no control (although there can be confrontation at times) but there will be very important outcomes and shifts of awareness.

Modelling A teacher can at times serve as a model, but there may be other or better models for the learner to follow. Generally, teachers should talk less – especially about their own language models – and, by creating rapport and drawing back in order to learn more about the learners’ world, allow the learners to develop their own models. Rather than setting up a ‘parent–child’ scenario, coaches use a non-directive, non-judgemental approach. The aim is to lead, using ‘L+1’ formulations (using a variety of contexts) that encourage greater selfawareness in the learners. The coach draws out conversation from the coachee by creating rapport through matching in a sympathetic way and mirroring both body language and verbalisation. The coachee can then begin modelling language utterances by the use of reflective listening and guided reformulation, A key idea from NLP – the realisation that the student’s own mental map is in a process of formation and change – helps to understand why this is likely to be effective.

Drilling and questioning Drilling and other reinforcement methods will be familiar to many teachers. In outcomes-based learning, I am advocating a change in the teachers’ usual framework towards enhancing the learner’s (coachee’s) own view of what is possible. Here, organisations may use activities which are part of the marketed product on offer and which their customers have willingly bought into, but the coachees first need to be engaged in real communication and brought to an enhanced state of

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awareness and openness with regard to their own language. Once this has been achieved, repetition, preparation and question-and-answer methods may be used to deepen and anchor the coachees’ desired outcomes. These methods can be more or less sophisticated, and some, such as initiation–response–feedback (IRF), are helpful, so long as they start with the coachees’ intended statements and work with them towards the outcome they were aiming at, rather than merely imposing a ‘correct’ outcome. When coachees attempt to describe their thoughts about something, begin to use

Through a question-and-answer process the coach can help the coachees to retrieve, process, compose and rephrase their thoughts more correctly different tenses and consult a dictionary or some other resource to find the words that express what they want to say, the coach needs to listen actively and may then start to intervene to correct mistakes in tenses, sentence structure, pronunciation or choice of words. Through a question-and-answer process the coach can help the coachees to locate, retrieve, process, compose and rephrase their thoughts more correctly. This process is designed to open doors in the coachees’ memories and to encourage visualisation and internal echoing of the language so that the aspects being led out suddenly ‘click’ in their understanding. This can be done by progressively shifting between visual, auditory and physical response techniques.

Possible methods Teachers are supposed to be experts in understanding and aiding communication, so it is ironic that so many just tell their students what they ‘should’ say – or talk over them rather than building deeper rapport and getting the students to where they know they would like to be but can’t quite manage

• Issue 82 Sptember 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

yet. Beginning with the coachee’s own words is important, followed by a supportive and reflective leading approach. Repeating, regenerating, reformulating and regularly revisiting the same language, over and over, once the goal has been identified will draw out deeper insights. This same principle applies to coaching someone to produce the perfect golf swing, dance step or management technique – endless repetition, with slight variations along the way until perfection is reached. Clearly, this is very different from the techniques applied in much language teaching where, each lesson, the teacher moves on to yet another discrete learning point different from the one before (often as a requirement of the syllabus), or where a student brings up a point only to be told that it is ‘not relevant at this stage’ or ‘will be considered later at a higher level’, etc. In a more conventional teaching approach, using input, elicitation, production, controlled practice, freer practice and feedback, one element that is often overlooked is generative or ‘cybernetic’ system modelling. A teacher who instantly feeds back the ‘correct’ forms overlooks the aspects of studentdriven quality that come from matching the language practice to the values and current vision of the students themselves. Thus, whatever approach is used must be in full congruence with the coachees’ developing inner dialogues and move them gradually into new zones, if necessary challenging them to leave their comfort zones by confronting lazy use of language or lack of attention to embedded bad habits.

The importance of shifts The key to outcomes-based learning is shifts, by which I mean shifts in behaviour, understanding, the experience of learning, the speed of change and in the coachees’ internal dialogue. Shifts and sudden ‘clicks’ of realisation are commonly experienced by those who acquire a language by living in and embedding themselves in the culture of a country. These sudden realisations occur when they consult their own inner map of the language emerging and compare it with that of the experts they meet and know. This immersion experience can, to a certain extent, be achieved in the language classroom, but this requires

that the communication that takes place there must be authentic at all times, and not reliant on pre-prepared materials – unless these have been chosen in unison with the learners and reflect very closely their own map of the world. Most importantly, at all times the learners’ vision of their own language learning experience must be paramount. The coach must learn how to identify from what the learners are saying the processes that are taking place in their minds. In a large class this may be difficult, so it will be necessary to explain to the learners that they need to challenge and develop their own insights. All the participants can be encouraged to reflect on what another person was trying to say. This is akin to placing members of a football team into positions for which they are currently only partly suited but which they wish to aspire to. Thus, a natural centre-forward might be put in midfield for a spell (if this is also their understanding of how they can better understand the game) in order to help them to be a better attacker in future. Everyone learns from one another in the coaching context.

step by themselves – not because they have been handed a list, a worksheet, an exercise, etc, but because they have actually used the language intelligently and seen a difference in how they have done it compared with previous occasions. This is where skilful language-oriented question-and-answer methods come in. I would argue very strongly for a written outcome that is produced voluntarily by the learners and done in a relaxed way. I personally favour written ‘model’ sentences or phrases that will be used for memorisation practice and generative work during the following

Giving feedback

lesson, and involve the coachee doing, organising, practising or preparing something – though other kinds of didactic ‘learning to learn’ workshops or talks about business skills, etc may have validity in another context). Above all, each session should aim to generate a clear outcome for the inner dialogue of the coachee. This means that everything in the coaching session must be very sensitively worked with to lead the coachees towards a better experience of using the language, including objective and subjective experiences.

The outcomes from the learning experience must be measurable, tangible and as clear to the coachees as they are to the coach

Very specific feedback is important, too. Not just saying ‘well done’ or ‘better use of tenses today’, but listening deeply to what each learner is saying and, from that, developing a clear image of that learner’s own mental map of the language, in all its meandering ways, and then discussing with the learner how this map seems to them, in what ways it is useful at the current time and how they themselves feel it needs to be developed. This can perhaps be done with beginners and with very elementary students in their mother tongue or by using a pictorial approach. In a group, this kind of listening to each other – as well as commenting on the emergence of language in other learners – is very valuable as it helps speed the process of discovery about the language.

Calibrating improvements It goes without saying that the outcomes from the learning experience must be measurable, tangible and as clear to the coachees as they are to the coach. The coachees need to have the sense that they have made a significant

 A coach is a leader and, therefore, has to develop a very strong sense of alliance with the coachees. Coaches thus have great responsibility and should be professional. The subject matter of the coaching sessions must be agreed and shared: this is not an opportunity for an intrusive discussion or chat about the coachees’ lives. The focus should be on language. The pace of the lesson should be relaxed, focused on the experience and the emerging outcome (not input from the coach) and it should always be leading to more performance-oriented outcomes.

The coach should match the coachees’ language by repeating and rephrasing words and sentences that they have started, and will then lead the coachees to a deeper language awareness and improved performance. The coach should sensitively guide the coachees away from any incorrect structuring or expression of the chosen sentences, by querying the way in which they have been formed. It is essential that plenty of time be given for reflection. In this kind of coaching, a reframing technique can be used or a further analysis of the students’ own language can be carried out. It is important to understand that quality is the key element, not quantity (this is the essence of good pacing). Giving feedback to the coachees on what they have said or written, is very beneficial, enabling them to make corrections themselves, but – importantly – allowing them to access their own value model or vision in order to do this, not simply acting as a commentary! Correction need not be given immediately or until, first, the coachees have assessed for themselves what the problems are, since an overload of spot-corrections can easily be forgotten. To sum up, then, the model to follow is of pacing and leading through a logical reconstruction of the desired outcome in the mind of the coachee, followed by a search for the required or possible tools that will contribute to such an outcome, followed by creative exploration of the ways of expressing this outcome. ETp 1

‘Auditory digital processing’ is an NLP term which refers to the turning of information from the senses into language.

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By ‘shift’, I mean the creation of a new awareness or understanding by taking a new perspective, experiencing a powerfully changed feeling or removing a blockage. Peter Zoeftig has over 25 years’ experience of teaching and coaching, having worked in France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. He has qualifications in NLP and coaching and is involved in both personal and business executive coaching, recently providing training for CERAN and Sherbourne Priors OISE, Warwick, UK. [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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09/12

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 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 the Apple Premium version of The IELTS Skills App, produced by Macmillan. This app provides exam practice exercises and interactive tasks for developing IELTS skills. Macmillan have kindly agreed to be sponsors of It Works in Practice for this year.

Vocabulary practice

How well do you know me?

Here are two activities which I use for improving group dynamics in my classes:

● Ask the other students to choose an object in the classroom.

By the time we have learnt and practised tag questions, I find that I know something (sometimes quite a lot!) about each of my students and, naturally, they have learnt something about me, too. When it comes to revising tag questions, I say to the students, ‘You know me very well, don’t you?’ and then get them to write down a couple of tag questions to ask me, using things they think they know about me but are not 100 percent sure about, or things they want to find out about me. I do the same for them (it’s a good idea to prepare your own questions before the lesson, especially if you have a large class, to ensure that everyone is asked a relevant question).

● Bring the volunteer back into the classroom and start asking questions, such as Is it the window? Is it my desk? to see if they can guess the object. The rest of the class will be amazed when the volunteer is able to identify the object straight away.

We then take turns to ask and answer questions. When they are asking their questions, I remind them to use proper intonation, depending on whether they are certain or not about my answer to the question. At the end I say ‘Now you can be sure that you know me well’.

● Higher-level students can then discuss in English how they think the ‘magic’ was done. Lower-level students can have the discussion in their own language.

Personalising what you’re teaching in such a way is not just an effective teaching/learning tool, it also helps to develop a good rapport with your students, which is essential to any successful learning process.

Ronaldo Adenilton de Lima Recife, Brazil

Nataliya Potapova Uzhhorod, Ukraine

Musical words This activity is good for reviewing and/or reinforcing vocabulary which has been studied previously. ● Play a song or a piece of music and ask the students to walk freely around the classroom. Pause the music and ask them to work in pairs with the person nearest them. ● Tell them they have around 30 seconds (you decide the time according to the level of the students) to say as many words in English as possible in a given category, for example adjectives.

● After the 30 seconds, start the music again and ask them to continue walking around the room. Then pause it again and tell them to work with the person who is now nearest to them. This time they have to say as many words as possible in a different category, for example vegetables. ● You can repeat the procedure with any number of further categories, such as English-speaking countries or action verbs.

Black magic This is another nice activity for practising vocabulary, which is good for both beginners and higher-level students. ● Tell the class that you are going to try a little magic. One student will stand outside the classroom while the others choose an object. That student will then come back in and try to guess the object. ● Ask for a volunteer to stand outside the classroom. Make sure it is clear to everyone that the student can’t see or hear the rest of the class, but while you are arranging this, secretly tell this student that the object will be the one you ask about after you have asked about a black object.

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Friday fun

Conjugation command

When you teach students every day, the last lesson of the week can often be rather tiring for everyone. You may also have completed all of your week’s objectives and may be in the mood for revision, or just something different. Here is a selection of tried and tested ideas you can use or adapt: 1

Activity tables

Ask the students what they would like to revise or work on and put them into groups, sitting around tables. Give each group a task, monitor them and at the end have them make presentations to the rest of the class on what they have done. The students can also swap tables when they have finished, and this can even be a timed game. 2

Student-generated quizzes

Get pairs or groups of students to make a quiz about the week’s work or a related theme. It’s also fun if they incorporate what their classmates did or said into the questions. They can also write some questions to test you. 3

Student news discussion

Ask one pair of students to bring in either a news article or a video clip (or, for the more creative, to write and/or record their own). They present this to the rest of the class and it is used as the basis for a class discussion. 4

Review of learning objectives

Put the students into groups and ask them to discuss what their learning objectives are, how they are improving and what they can all do to get better. You can then give further ideas and practice strategies. 5

Class project

To keep up motivation throughout a course and to develop class rapport, it is nice to have an ongoing project which the students can work on once a week in or after class. It could be anything from a class/school blog to a formal entry for a competition. 6

‘Dress down’ Friday

Use Fridays as a time to break down routines. You might try showing part of a film, not using your coursebook or having the students bring in something to eat or drink from their country, city or area. Even just making them a cup of English tea changes the atmosphere into one more conducive to conversation. Phil Wade La Réunion, France

This is a kinaesthetic and audio-lingual activity for the revision of conjugation, which is suitable for elementary and pre-intermediate students. It can be used at the beginning of a lesson – and is particularly useful for waking the students up when the lesson takes place first thing in the morning! Prepare a list of verbs that you want your students to revise. Ask the students to stand in a horizontal line at one end of the classroom; you stand at the other end. Tell the students that you are going to say some verb forms which may or may not be correct. What they have to do is to move a step forward and repeat the conjugation if they think it is correct. Any student who makes a mistake must step aside, and the last three or five students (the number is up to you) who stay in the line are the winners. Demonstrate the activity beforehand to make sure the students know what they are supposed to do. I have used this activity with students and also with trainee teachers. I use a military training style and tone when calling out the verbs and ask the students to move forward smartly with a firm step, as soldiers do, which really adds an element of fun. This activity requires quite good coordination between the mind and the body, so expect some fairly slow kinaesthetic responses from some students – and be tolerant of these. Mohammed Arroub Homs, Syria

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE Do you have an idea which you would like to contribute to our It Works in Practice section? It might be anything from an activity which you use in class to a teaching technique that has worked for you. Send us your contribution, by post or by email, to [email protected]. All the contributors to It Works in Practice get a prize! We especially welcome joint entries from teachers working at the same institution. Why not get together with your colleagues to provide a whole It Works in Practice section of your ideas? We will publish a photo of you all.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

35

IN THE CLASSROOM

Art in action María Palmira Massi, Bettiana Andrea Blázquez, Zoraida Risso Patrón, María Angélica Verdú and Paola Scilipoti give their students an aesthetic experience. rtistic expression is generally judged by experts, employing an array of perspectives which sometimes may wrongly lead us to the belief that art is beyond our reach. But what if we could get our students to form opinions on and judge aspects of art in our lessons? This article explores the pedagogical potential of different forms of visual art and their use in the ELT classroom. Artbased materials are recommended as the starting point for the development of creativity and imagination in the students. A worksheet with tasks that draw on the students’ senses and emotions will be given as a practical example of what can be achieved.

A

Art as input The word art embraces the creation of aesthetic objects in a wide variety of fields, from painting, sculpture and photography to music, theatre, dance, film, literature, architecture and the like. The place of art in education is wellestablished because art appeals to all our senses. Lawrence Baines favours multisensory learning techniques because they ‘provide an effective, highly adaptable method for addressing both student engagement and achievement.

When students invoke more than one sense, simultaneously or over a period of time, they tend to interact with the material more intensely and thereby retain what they have learned for longer periods’. If Baines is correct, then art has a natural place in the ELT classroom; it can be exploited in many different ways in order to engage students in sensory experiences and facilitate their learning of language. Activities incorporating art help to develop creative and critical thinking skills, and they are also motivating for students as they provide a change of pace in lessons. In addition, meaningful learning through the arts stimulates the students’ imaginations and opens their eyes to possibilities beyond their own immediate experience.

Art as impact Creativity Contemporary ELT authors such as Ben Goldstein and Jamie Keddie acknowledge the powerful impact of imagery on language learning. In particular, they stress the importance of the development of creativity as essential to any learning environment. Although fostering this skill takes time, the end product will not only be worthy

of praise but, above all, memorable for the students. Creativity arouses interest, and whatever students do out of a sense of curiosity will naturally yield meaningful and long-lasting results.

Agency The more involved the students are in the learning process, the easier it will be for them to learn. Agency – the opportunity for the students to have a say in their own learning – is another important factor. If students are given choices, there is a good chance that their imagination will spark off innovative ideas, making their learning experience more valuable to them. Imagination, understood as the capacity to construct alternative realities, has an inexhaustible potential which, if exploited in a systematic way, will bring out the best in our students. Visual arts in the classroom can stimulate their imaginations and engage their feelings,

Art can be exploited in many different ways in order to engage students in sensory experiences and facilitate their learning of language resulting in affective education (that which involves the emotions). Emotions inevitably shape and mould our students’ performance. So, by developing their creative and imaginative skills through the use of visual artistic expression, opportunities will be provided to involve not only their cognitive capacities but also their affective dimensions.

Art as teaching resource Visual arts can serve as the starting point of an ELT lesson. They can be used with various pedagogical and methodological objectives. Taking a particular topic as the starting point, a whole lesson can be designed on the basis of images – with or without verbal support – to generate discussion and debate, which may then lead to the students’ production of their own forms of artistic expression.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

37






Art in action




For reasons of space, just a small selection of genres of visual art – photographs, paintings and posters – will be explored in this article.

Photographs We will begin with photographs, which have been an important part of our daily lives for many years, serving a variety of different purposes – from simply capturing the essence of a scene, landscape, person or city to provoking an emotional reaction in the viewer. Society and its many facets have long been depicted through the camera lense, modulated by the artistic perspective of the photographer. A photograph, then, is a powerful visual tool which teachers can make use of to introduce thoughtprovoking image-inspired activities into the language learning environment. In particular, when dealing with people’s feelings and emotions, photographs can speak louder than words. There is often a discrepancy between what a photograph shows and what each individual sees, and this offers an array of possibilities for the teacher to exploit in class.

Paintings Paintings – of the sort that are found in art galleries and museums – have traditionally been divided into different categories: landscape, portrait, still life, abstract, etc. They are modes of expression that serve to channel, and give a concrete representation of, the artist’s thoughts, emotions and opinions. As such, they provide a fertile environment for narrative reconstruction, interpretation of symbolism and exploration of political meaning that can be put to good use in the ELT classroom. In a content-oriented lesson, the exploration of a particular historical period can be carried out through an analysis of the most outstanding paintings of the time, or the most relevant artists, the techniques they used, and so on. A virtual tour through online collections of paintings in museums all over the world can be quite stimulating

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and can be used to guide the students towards an awareness of how history is reflected in art, and vice versa. An alternative is to choose one particular artist as the focal point and then analyse that artist’s work in tandem with the socio-historical context of the time. Yet another possible course of action is to focus on a particular genre – for example portraits, which lend themselves to descriptions of people and their personalities, or landscapes, which are particularly useful for descriptions of places. Likewise, a comparison of artists and their techniques can turn out to be quite enriching and motivating – as can discussing the criteria by which we judge art.

Posters have real potential as materials for classroom use. Consciousness-raising posters are of particular interest in the ELT context since they are designed to be inspirational and thought-provoking. For example, organisations such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) or WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) regularly launch public awareness campaigns and issue posters which are available to download and use in the classroom. Such posters are generally concerned with drawing attention to the importance of protecting the rights of animals, saving endangered species, fighting deforestation, global warming and pollution, etc. Thus, they have tremendous potential for the discussion and analysis of controversial issues.

Consciousnessraising posters are of particular interest in the ELT context since they are designed to be inspirational and thought-provoking



Posters Posters have become a vital art form in many societies. Produced for a variety of reasons – both commercial and political – they exhibit a wide variety of artistic styles, representative of prevailing artistic trends at the time of production: art nouveau, symbolism, cubism, etc. Typically, posters include both textual and visually striking graphic elements, together with contrasts and bright colours in order to make their message clear.

There are several implications of a multisensory approach to learning. By being systematically exposed to visual art, the students’ creativity and imagination can be stimulated whilst a safe environment is provided for emotions to be overtly expressed. This can be achieved by means of diverse tasks with not only a cognitive but also an affective focus. Since emotions are intrinsically linked to those parts of the brain which words fail to reach, the students will be sensitised to other forms of artistic expression, both inside and outside the classroom. ETp Baines, L A Teacher’s Guide to Multisensory Learning: Improving Literacy by Engaging the Senses ASCD 2008 Goldstein, B Working with Images CUP 2008 Keddie, J Images OUP 2009

María Palmira Massi, Bettiana A Blázquez, Zoraida Risso Patrón, María Angélica Verdú and Paola Scilipoti teach English at Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Argentina.

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

[email protected]

Art in action • Photographs Level: Intermediate

Topics: Feelings and emotions; life stories

Objectives: ● To describe people in photographs as a springboard for discussion ● To arouse the students’ interest and involvement by appealing to their senses and emotions

Functions: Describing situations; hypothesising; asking and answering questions Skills: Speaking; writing Senses: Sight, smell and hearing

Lead-in Working in pairs, look at the photograph opposite and discuss the questions below. 1 Who do you think these hands belong to? Are they a woman’s or a man’s hands?

How can you tell? 2 How old is this person? 3 Think about his or her personality. What is this person like? 4 What have these hands achieved? 5 What smell can this image be associated with? 6 Would you like to have hands like this when you grow old? If so, why? 7 Do the hands remind you of someone you know? Who? What is/was this person like? 8 Why has this photograph been taken in black and white? What effect does this produce?

Hands-on

Extension

Working in pairs, look at the pictures below and think of four questions which can be used to generate a class discussion.

1 Working on your own,

choose one of the photographs on the left and write a paragraph about one person in it, explaining why you have chosen them. Think about what the photograph tells you about the person’s life story. Use any of the issues raised during the previous stages. Give your piece of writing a title. 2 Every photograph has a

1 ...................................................................................

2 ...................................................................................

..................................................................................

..................................................................................

3 ...................................................................................

4 ...................................................................................

..................................................................................

..................................................................................

story behind it. What about one of your own photographs? Choose one and be ready to share it with the class. Think of suitable answers to the following questions, and select a piece of music to accompany your photograph: 1 Why have you chosen this particular photograph? 2 Are there any people in it? If so, who are they? 3 When and where was it taken? 4 Who took it? 5 How do you feel about it now? How did you feel about it then? 6 Do you associate any particular smell with it? If so, what?

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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LANGUAGE LOG

Indirectness John Potts charts the intricacies and idiosyncrasies, the contradictions and complications that make the English language so fascinating for teachers and teaching. In this issue, he was wondering whether you might possibly appreciate an explanation of indirectness in English.

ust the other day, as I was mulling over this article, I

And finally, by moving from the immediacy of the present

received an email from a colleague that began

into the distance of the past:

J

‘Jenny and I were hoping you might be available to

‘Jenny and I were hoping you might be available to join us ...’

join us in Zurich for one of the following meetings ...’.

It’s a perfect and timely example of something that puzzles many of my students, namely the way that some English speakers don’t always state things directly. Here, we’ll look at how and why.

As the speaker moves away from ‘real time’ present forms into past forms, any potential pushiness diminishes. The increase in distance-in-time of the forms is reflected in an increased distance-from-immediacy of the request, which means more ‘space’ for me as the reader. As modern idiom

I know that googled results can sometimes be misleading,

puts it, the writer isn’t ‘in my face’ – there’s little risk that I’ll

but I thought I’d try googling this phrase and a few similar

feel imposed upon, and therefore there’s a greater chance

ones to see what happened. I was hoping you might ...

that the request will be successful and not declined. This use

received 4 million hits, while I was hoping you ... had 18

of the past forms in creating distance-from-immediacy results

million. When I googled the phrase I was wondering whether

in politeness, indirectness, tactfulness, discretion, deference,

you wanted ..., I received 12.5 million. Googling I was

and so on, depending on the context and the speakers.

wondering whether you knew ... added another 4.7 million – and I was wondering whether you could ... a whopping 238 million. Clearly, we do a lot of hoping and wondering!

Using indirect forms such as these is clearly a pragmatic strategy – we could almost say a rhetorical strategy. This is not to say that using such forms is always the appropriate

So what is the effect of using past forms, whether past

strategy. Sometimes, directness is needed because the

simple, past progressive, past perfect or second-form modals

context is urgent, for example. Perhaps the most extreme

like could or might? First of all, although these are past forms,

expression of indirectness I have ever encountered

they obviously refer to the present (at the time of speaking or

personally was on a very crowded rush-hour Northern Line

writing). My correspondent could easily have written ‘Jenny

tube train approaching Leicester Square, when one

and I hope you are available to join us ...’. That would be very

commuter said to another ‘Excuse me, but my foot seems

clear, and also very direct. But would it perhaps seem too

to have become accidentally trapped beneath yours’.

presumptuous, too pushy, even a little peremptory?

Other people would have reacted very differently, using far

Let’s reduce those potential elements a little by adding a

more direct language, so this raises the issue of the

modal form:

speaker’s personal language choices and consequently of

‘Jenny and I hope you will be available to join us ...’

his idiolect. I feel fairly confident that he would also say (or have said) things like the following:

And a little more, by switching to the progressive, which makes the verb feel less categorical:

‘Did you need anything else?’ ‘I had been hoping that I could leave at ...’

‘Jenny and I are hoping you will be available to join us ...’

‘Should we perhaps start rather earlier?’

Still a little more, by switching the modal to a more

‘I could do it for you if you wished.’

tentative form:

‘Might I ask you whether you knew where ...?’

‘Jenny and I are hoping you might be available to join us ...’

In contrast, other speakers would say none of the above

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

LANGUAGE LOG Indirectness things – these utterances would not be part of their repertoire.

Interpreting such utterances correctly can be very difficult, as

They might perhaps say:

it’s partly a matter of context and circumstances, but also one of language variety, age, culture, upbringing and personality.

‘Do you need anything else?’

What is perfectly clear to a certain British English speaker

‘Can I leave at ...?’

may be maddeningly vague to an American English speaker,

‘Let’s start earlier.’

while the directness of a bluff, down-to-earth Northerner may

‘I can do it for you if you want.’

seem abrupt to others. (Listening to the test match cricket

‘Where is ...?’

commentary on the BBC can be very instructive in this respect, with its mix of speakers from different backgrounds. The use of questions rather than affirmative statements can

I regard tuning in regularly over the five days of the game

also contribute to indirectness. For example, look at the

as essential field research, of course.)

difference between these three sentences: ‘Should we start earlier?’ ‘Shall we start earlier?’

As society changes, then some of the above influences will

‘Let’s start earlier.’

change, too, and there will be corresponding shifts in people’s repertoires and idiolects. Moreover, the spread of

The first question is quite tentative, offering most of the

English as a global language, and especially as the lingua

decision-making to the respondent, while the second offers

franca between non-native speakers of English, may well

at least 50 percent of that decision-making process. The

result in some of these more indirect uses diminishing: they

third is quite different: it takes command, and gives a

could be too opaque, too open to being misunderstood or

clear lead.

even risk being missed altogether.

And we can go further in each direction: super-tentative forms

‘I was wondering whether you were aware you were standing

like ‘Might I suggest that we start earlier?’ towards one

on my foot’ may not always be the ideal way to express your

extreme, and ‘We’re going to start earlier’ towards the other.

needs on a crowded train. John Potts is a teacher and teacher trainer based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has written and co-written several adult coursebooks, and is a CELTA assessor. He is also a presenter for Cambridge ESOL Examinations.

However, suppose the speaker who says things like ‘Should we start ...?’ or ‘Shall we start ...?’ actually really means something much closer to ‘Let’s start ...’. Is this person

[email protected]

asking us or telling us? How are we to know?

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Congratulations to all those readers who successfully completed our Prize Crossword 52. The winners, who will each receive a copy of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, are:

Shona Hagger, Vergiate, Italy Kate Howcroft, Shipton, UK Louis Jacobs, Tel Aviv, Israel Abdenour Khemiri, Beja, Tunisia Nawel Khemiri, Beja, Tunisia Magdalena Muszynska, Sosnowiec, Poland Patricia Rincón, Miranda de Ebro, Spain Helen Simpson, Glasgow, UK Emily Tinsdale, Paris, France Seda Can Yildiz, Kars, Turkey

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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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SCRAPBOOK

n the year of the 60th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, this issue of ETp takes us back a mere hundred years or so to the time of Queen Victoria, the only other British queen to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee, and looks at education in the UK in the Victorian era. As you will see, some things are very different today – although some haven’t changed much at all.

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schools for the general public. In Britain, though, a Public School, note the capitals, has always been a private fee-paying school and, therefore, very much not for general consumption!) Most poor children didn’t go to school at all on weekdays: they had to work in order to contribute to their family’s income. However, there was a system of education based in churches, the Sunday School, which had been started by Robert Raikes some years earlier. By the early 1830s, 1,250,000 children (about a quarter of the school-age population at the time) received some education in this way. In 1833, the government awarded grants of money to schools for the first time, and in 1844, a law was passed which required children who worked in factories to be given six half-days of schooling every week. Schools were set up to provide free basic education for orphans and very poor children. These were called ‘Ragged Schools’ because the children generally wore tattered clothes. Some of the people who ran the schools were themselves unable to read, so the standard of education was somewhat erratic! In 1870, Parliament passed the Forster’s Education Act, requiring all areas of Britain to provide schools for children aged five to 12. However, not all these schools were free so many parents could not afford to send their children to them. As attendance at school was not compulsory, many children didn’t go – not least because their earning power was valued by parents and employers.

History When Queen Victoria came to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837, education was still mainly for the privileged few. Children from wealthy families might be taught at home by a governess until they were old enough – if they were boys – to go to Public Schools such as Eton or Rugby. (A word of explanation here: in most countries, the term public school means just what it says,

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Teachers Many Victorian teachers had no formal training; few had even been in higher education; they just learnt ‘on the job’ as a kind of apprenticeship. When they reached school leaving age, abler children could stay on as ‘pupil teachers’ who would help the teacher in exchange for lessons.

Some larger schools used a monitor system. The teacher would choose some of the brightest pupils to be taught by the headmaster in separate lessons after school. The following day, each of these monitors would be assigned a group of fellow pupils and would teach them what they themselves had just learnt. In Victorian schools, the teachers were often strict and by modern standards very scary. Children soon learnt to do what they were told, otherwise they would get a rap across the knuckles with a ruler, or a clip around the ears. Victorian teachers would often use a cane to punish naughty children, hitting them on the hand or the behind, or sometimes across the back of the legs. In Public Schools, even prefects would carry canes and use them on younger pupils. Other favourite punishments were the writing out of ‘lines’ – either long poems or hundreds of repetitions of sentences such as ‘I must not be late for school’ (or whatever the offence had been). The tolerance level was pretty low and all sorts of things might attract punishment: being rude, answering back, speaking out of turn, poor work ... in fact, anything that displeased the teacher. Children who had been punished at school usually kept quiet about it because, if their parents found out, there was a good chance that they would be punished again at home!

Classes Many schools were rather grim buildings, often with classroom windows set high up to prevent the children looking out and being distracted. Drab by today’s standards, they might perhaps have a stern text as the only wall decoration. Boys and girls were usually separated; they used different entrances and had separate playgrounds. In smaller schools, both sexes might be taught in the same classroom, but they would still sit separately.

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Gems, titbits, puzzles, foibles, quirks, bits & pieces, quotations, snippets, odds & ends, what you will

For handwriting practice, a speciallyruled book was used: the copybook. The first line was printed, or copied carefully from the blackboard, then the children would have to fill the entire page with identical lines. They used dip pens, which they loaded with ink by frequently dipping the metal nibs into ink wells on the desk top. (Fountain pens had been invented, but were not very reliable and were not massproduced until the 1880s.) An overloaded nib would make a blot in the book, and this is the origin of an expression still used today: to ‘blot your copybook’ means to make a serious mistake. To do arithmetic, the children had to use the Victorian equivalent of a calculator: the abacus, a frame with sliding wooden beads. This tool has been in use for many centuries all over the world; seeing a proficient user at work is impressive – in many cases they can still out-perform today’s electronic counterparts!

Stories were used a great deal in schools to instil morals and to caution children about the consequences of unwise behaviour. These were known as ‘Cautionary Tales’. Some of the more extreme, such as the popular translation of the German Der Struwwelpeter, warned of very dire consequences indeed: such as not looking at where you are going resulting in drowning, and sucking your thumbs leading to impromptu amputation!

The school day The school day began at 9.00 am and finished at 5.00 pm. In the middle of the day, there was a two-hour break, which allowed enough time for the children to go home for lunch, although in rural areas where their houses were likely to be further away they might eat at the school. (Also in the country, many children took time off school to help with the harvest, dig potatoes and do other farmwork.) Although most of the Victorian child’s school day was rather boring, some playtime was allowed. Children had various toys to play with, including hoops, tops, skipping ropes and marbles. They also played team games such as tag, hopscotch and football.

Sickness Medical care was expensive in the Victorian age and few poor families could afford to see a doctor. Although children were often frightened of getting sick, some of the ‘cures’ were even scarier. For whooping cough, a common childhood disease, one recommended cure was to swallow a spider in butter! If a child felt ill at school, the teacher might administer a cheap ‘medicine’ such as James Morrison’s Universal Pill – said to cure every single ailment, but actually just a mixture of aloes

and cream of tartar! As you may gather, medical understanding in the Victorian era was rather limited. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician, philosopher and scientist, but not much good in any of these fields. One of his beliefs was that sleep could cure disease and that spinning around really fast was a very good way of inducing sleep. Later, the American physician Benjamin Rush adapted the treatment: he believed that spinning would reduce brain congestion and, in turn, cure mental illness. He was wrong – he just ended up with dizzy patients who were still disturbed!

Literature The view of schools as portrayed in Victorian literature ranges from the rosy to the tormented. Written towards the middle of the 19th century, the novels Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield all include terrifying accounts of the abuse and neglect of schoolchildren, while in 1857 the famous Tom Brown’s Schooldays triggered an avalanche of popular fiction set in schools, usually boarding schools (Public Schools). This trend for school-themed literature began to die down in the mid 20th century, but still appears now and again in various forms – perhaps the latest of these are the Harry Potter books (and films)! Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green

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© Chris Pole / Sutterstock © iStockphoto.com / Ian Huball

Many schools had very large classes. One school in Hitchin, for instance, had a classroom which seated 300 children! Large classes meant that everything tended to be done in a rather regimented way. The teacher would write information on the blackboard and the pupils would copy this into their books and learn it off by heart. A large part of education consisted of rote learning: memorising names and dates from history or reciting the ‘times tables’ (multiplication tables). Children were also expected to commit many other things to memory, such as poems – and Victorian poems tended to be many-paged epic ballads!

Reviews Read This! Fascinating Stories from the Content Areas by Daphne Mackey and Alice Savage Cambridge University Press 2011 Level 1: 978-0521747868 Level 2: 978-0521747899 Level 3: 978-0521747936 Teaching reading in an academic context presents particular challenges when the students’ language proficiency is at a low level. Furthermore, if they have never developed the habit of reading, it requires considerable effort to persuade them to actively engage with reading material. Texts to be used in such circumstances obviously need to appeal by presenting their content in such a way that the students can recognise the relevance to their own lives. The students also need to be motivated to read by the use of a variety of activities. Read This! is a three-level reading course (high-beginner, lowintermediate and intermediate) which tries to meet these concerns. The books include content areas such as communication, mathematics, psychology, sports and fitness, and the texts (also recorded on CDs) are non-fiction readings presenting true and interesting stories with an academic flavour. Each book contains five units, each one divided into three chapters. There is an overall unit topic, eg criminal justice, and each chapter deals with an aspect of it which is likely to arouse the students’ interest, eg the biography of a con man; the history and contested reliability of fingerprints; and how linguistics helped to prove the innocence of someone executed many years before. Each chapter, which takes three to five hours to cover, has the same structure. It begins with a preview, which provides the students with the opportunity to find connections to the unit topic and to discuss and predict what the text might be about. Next, vocabulary is introduced in three categories, two of which are related to the content area, while one contains

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words from the Academic Word List. An exercise (usually a gap-fill or matching words to definitions) completes the pre-reading section. The reading texts themselves, all of which are 600–700 words long, are accompanied by two exercises, the first dealing with the main idea, the second with reading for detail, taking the form of multiple-choice or true/false questions. Two more exercises then check and recycle the vocabulary introduced in the pre-reading stage. The heart of each chapter lies in the following section, ‘Applying Reading Skills’, which develops reading sub-skills, such as making inferences, finding cause and effect, detecting main ideas and supporting detail, or reading critically by distinguishing facts from conjecture. This section is particularly important since high-order thinking skills, whose role in reading for academic purposes cannot be underestimated, are addressed. After having done these activities, the students are given the chance to practise the newly-learnt vocabulary and also to put the content into a personal perspective in a closing discussion. A ‘Wrap-up’ at the end of each unit, with a vocabulary review, discussion sections, roleplays, writing assignments and a link to the excellent WebQuest, in which students have to find information from authentic websites, provides more practice. The CDs in the teacher’s manuals have recordings of all the reading texts. These teacher’s manuals, which don’t overload the teacher with more information than is necessary, also have separate reading tests for each unit. The identical structure of each chapter is both a strength and a weakness of the series. Whilst it provides the students with confidence as they know what will come up, it does not offer much variety or any element of surprise – as some of my colleagues who have used the books have pointed out.

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Reviews The same objection to the uniformity has been raised against the length of the reading texts as well as their level of difficulty. Indeed, the teacher’s manuals state that the units can be used in any order; thus, the language in Unit 4, for instance, is no more difficult than that in Unit 1. However, my students and I have generally found the texts so interesting that boredom is unlikely to set in. Read This! is a reading skills series ideal for university preparation classes where the students are not accustomed to the requirements of reading for academic purposes. Through its controlled sequencing of activities and presentation of language that is challenging but not above the level indicated, it is likely to develop the students’ reading skills, expand their vocabulary and – no less importantly – make reading a non-frustrating experience in the English classroom. Stefan Rathert Kahramanmaras, Turkey

Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith Multilingual Matters 2012 978-1-84769-619-9 This is a useful book for those unfamiliar with the subject outlined in its title, but also for those who have some experience in the field and are looking for inspiration. It provides a practical overview, tackling the thorny subject of labelling students with a learning difference unfairly, explaining the complexities of how language is acquired and providing much needed insight into how to teach language to those who have a specific learning difference (SpLD). It is a fact that one in ten learners ‘exhibits’ some form of learning difference (such as dyslexia), so teachers in the EFL/ESOL classroom, the authors argue, need to be able to provide the right kinds of support for these learners. To this end, the multisensory approach to learning is highlighted as key. The book is divided into nine chapters and is well laid out, with the contents for each chapter distinctively

presented on a white-on-black background. The chapters are then further divided into headings with flow-charts, diagrams and graphs to help assimilate complex ideas to do with how memory, procedure and automisation take place in the brain – how we learn – and to show how the performance of learners with different abilities contrasts with that of their more traditional peers. Each chapter then ends with the key points summarised and with suggested tasks and further reading. The authors go into some detail about how students with a specific learning difference find second language acquisition an almost Herculean task; so much so, that you begin to wonder if teaching them a second language is actually doable. It is, but you have to wait until chapters six and seven, which thankfully deal with the Holy Grail: techniques for teaching, in which many practical solutions and strategies are put forward to help improve L2 production among students with SpLDs. These include providing the right environment for learning; a breakdown of the four skills; suggested resources, including IT; differentiation, which I thought was particularly helpful, whereby text interpretation is delegated, based on ability groups clubbing together to find meaning; types of learning style; and getting students to think about their own learning processes out loud, which may sound unusual, but helps learners become cognisant of how they arrive at solutions. I think Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences would have worked better, however, if the practical side to teaching – the tips and suggestions – had been presented in a more digestible format, rather than tightly packed into linear blocks of text, as I found I had to untangle the reed bed to get at the treasure in the depths. But that’s quibbling; it was worth the effort. I particularly liked the descriptions of

different types of learners; we were presented with ‘grasshoppers’, who take in everything holistically, benefiting most from ‘mind maps’, and their cousins, the more analytical ‘inch worms’, who prefer their learning presented in more sequential, tabular form. There are useful strategies and methods on offer here, which is as it ought to be because being an effective second language teacher of students with a learning difference, as anyone who has had direct experience in the classroom knows, is all about thinking on one’s feet and finding the right methodology: one that helps the students to work things out for themselves. Ashley Chapman London, UK

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] for advice and a copy of our guidelines for reviewers. You will need to give your postal address and say what areas of teaching you are most interested in.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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IN THE CLASSROOM

A second self 5 I Jill Hadfield presents

a motivational programme.

n the previous articles in this series, I have explored the three pillars of Zoltan Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System theory and suggested some practical activities for each component. In this final article, I will make some suggestions for structuring activities into a ‘motivational programme’.

A motivational programme A motivational programme would need to consist of three modules: a short ‘Induction Module’ in the first week of a new course to raise the students’ awareness and create their vision of their L2 selves, followed by two ongoing parallel processes, ‘Operationalising the Vision’ and ‘Keeping the Vision Alive’, that involve a) weekly goal-setting and strategy-mapping activities and b) weekly activities designed to keep the Ideal L2 Self vision fresh and vivid in the learners’ minds. These specific motivational tasks would take place within the timetable of the course as a whole, alongside and integrated with other more traditional language learning activities. The third pillar of the L2 Motivational Self System, Enjoyment of the Learning Experience, would be provided by these language learning activities through a variety of means such as engaging tasks, teacher enthusiasm and rapport, productive group dynamics and work on learner experience of success and self-esteem.

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Induction Module: Imaging Identity This module is aimed at creating a rich yet realistic vision of the Ideal Future L2 Self, through activities such as visualisation of the L2 Self and discussion of what is feasible within the constraints of the course, together with discussion of what might help achieve that vision and what might hinder it. This module is best done in the first week of the course to create an inspiring vision and set goals for the course ahead.

Operationalising the Vision For the vision to be actualised and become a reality rather than remaining in the realm of daydream, students and teachers need to outline a route map together. They need to begin by identifying the long-term goals of both the class and the individuals within it, based on the learners’ vision of what they want to achieve but taking into account constraints such as the time available, the demands of the syllabus, etc. These goals can be divided up into those the class will pursue as a whole and those that individuals might set for themselves through self-study. Thereafter, weekly route-mapping sessions can focus on establishing shortterm goals for the week, breaking these

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

down into specific tasks and then organising these tasks into a study plan for work both in and out of class for the week ahead. Some time can be devoted at the start of each week (or possibly at the end of the week for the week ahead) to establishing the general goals for the week, and the students can be encouraged to make study plans for homework. Another useful ongoing thread is a strategies component: learning about a range of achievement strategies that can be used to improve study techniques, such as ways of memorising vocabulary, for example, and about a range of avoidance strategies that can be used to overcome obstacles to learning, for example learning time management or distraction avoidance skills. These could be introduced at the beginning of the course in a ‘Strategies fair’, or integrated into the programme on a regular ‘Strategy of the week’ basis. A final component should be some sort of record of progress and rewarding of success. When the students have drawn up their study plans, they could be encouraged to make a contract with a ‘study buddy’ to keep them on track and ‘sign off’ their contract at the end of the week as a record of success. More general records of success could be kept in the form of wall posters, recording class progress towards the goal.

Keeping the Vision Alive While the activities in ‘Operationalising the Vision’ are cognitive, based on analytic goal setting, strategy selection and recording of progress, the activities in ‘Keeping the Vision Alive’ are affective: designed to deepen and enrich the original vision, and to keep it firmly present in the students’ consciousness as a source of inspiration. The two strands thus complement each other. ‘Keeping the Vision Alive’ activities fall into two categories: those whose aim is to keep in touch with the vision, to develop it in more detail and make sure that it is not lost in the day-to-day business of doing grammar exercises and writing essays, and those whose aim is to use the L2 in real-life, virtual or simulated situations, sending the students into the L2 community or bringing the L2 world into the classroom to make the language and culture come alive.

Short introductory module at start of course

Activities aimed at creating a vision of an Ideal L2 Self, substantiating that vision and grounding it in reality, identifying what could help or hinder the vision from becoming realised and enhancing the original vision

Activities needing a short regular slot each week

Activities aimed at goal-setting, task identification, study planning, learning contracts, strategy identification and charting of progress

Activities as part of normal language work

Simulations, roleplays

Activities forming project work

Videos and interviews with the L2 community

Out-of-class recreational activities

Penpals and chat rooms

Routine breakers

Cultural evenings, guest speakers, film screenings, etc

● Activities in the first category, aimed at developing and elaborating the L2 Identity, could include detailed and precisely targeted visualisations of the students coping successfully in various L2 situations, contact – in real life, through the web or through reading texts – with successful language learners to increase the students’ awareness of what learning a language entails, and activities aimed at increasing the students’ selfesteem and belief in their L2 selves. ● Activities in the second category, aimed at making the language and culture come alive for the students, could include those aimed at getting them to interact with members of the L2 community, by, for example, sending the students out into the community with projects and interview tasks, inviting speakers into the classroom or setting up opportunities for online interaction through penpal schemes, networking sites and chat rooms. This could also use drama techniques: activities which simulate interactions with the L2 community, for example in a restaurant or at an airport, or roleplays where the students have to think themselves into an L2 identity. Finally, aspects of the L2 culture could be brought to life through classroom or extra-curricular activities, such as celebration of festivals, cookery classes or film screenings.

These multiple pathways share the goal of establishing a sense of the future L2 Self that is elaborate and detailed – and which is reinforced by experience and understanding of the L2 community. The activities will fit into the syllabus in different ways. Many, for example simulations and roleplays, can easily be integrated into language work within the normal syllabus. Some, for example sending the students into the community to make a short video or audio interviews, could form an ongoing project to develop speaking and listening skills. Some, for example the penpal scheme, could form an out-of-class recreational or homework activity, while others, like film evenings, guest speakers, festival celebrations, etc, can act as oneoff routine-breaker lessons.

 The table on this page summarises the different ways motivational activities can be integrated into the language syllabus. ETp Jill Hadfield has worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Britain, France, China, Tibet, Madagascar and New Zealand. She edits ELTmag (www.eltmag.com), and her books include the Communication Games series (Pearson), Oxford Basics, Classroom Dynamics and An Introduction to Teaching English (all OUP). [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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IN THE CLASSROOM

Talk amongst yourselves Aaron Deupree researches the role of the mother tongue in international schooling. ith so many demands on teachers, classroom action research often falls by the wayside. Yet not only can such research be an impetus for improving instruction and learning, it can be a fulfilling exercise in itself, exploring an issue that one is curious about. With that in mind, I set up a small experiment whereby I sought to evaluate the value of mother-tongue languages in my own ESL classroom, and what implications this would have on my teaching.

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The question My research question was: What is the role of the students’ mother-tongue languages in English-medium international school classrooms? English is today’s lingua franca, and in international schools – just as in society at large – it is the language of knowledge and power; and there are many implicit (if not explicit) structures in place in schools that underscore this paradigm. This has major implications for international schools, in many of which the majority of students are English language learners (ELLs) who need as much linguistic support as possible in order to be able to achieve academically. Research from Jim Cummins and many others has shown that second language (L2) acquisition, especially in an academic setting where L2 is the language of instruction, is most successful in environments where the students’ first languages (L1) are valued

both as a learning tool for accessing prior knowledge and as a way of validating student identity. Moreover, L1 is seen to be the basis of one’s cognition and the more it is developed, the more success the learner has in acquiring other languages, especially when it comes to achieving academic proficiency. Cummins refers to this as ‘cognitive academic language proficiency’ (CALP), and it is often the language of the classroom, textbooks and academic writing.

English is the language of knowledge and power; and there are many implicit structures in place in schools that underscore this paradigm Many international schools have become aware of the research of Cummins and others, and have developed after-school mother-tongue programmes, using teachers based in the local community. However, our boarding school is located in a small isolated village in the Alps with little access to the linguistic resources necessary for such a programme. This was the catalyst for me to explore my research question and design my experiment on mothertongue language use.

The research Some educators may view L1 as either an impediment to classroom learning or, at best, a nuisance. This recently manifested itself in a conversation with a colleague who observed me for our inhouse professional development programme. He noted that I ‘allowed’ my students to use their L1 to discuss and understand the texts they were reading. This is true, but the reality is more that students at our school often opt to negotiate meaning in the classroom by utilising their L1, rather than that teachers actively promote such a language policy. On the other hand, in some cases students have been penalised for using their L1 by losing participation points or being isolated from their same-language peers. In this particular case, my colleague felt that I was offering students an avenue to avoid using and developing their English language skills. It was with a view towards these types of discussions that I aimed to understand through action research whether L1 was valuable in my classroom as a tool for learning and could, therefore, be useful in other classes as well. My experiment involved two advanced ESL skills-based classes of 15 secondary students each, including speakers of Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Farsi, Korean, Hindi, French, Spanish and Portuguese. In my control group, the students were seated so that they were each next to someone who spoke a different

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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Talk amongst yourselves




language, and they were instructed to communicate solely in English for interactive activities in the class. The students in the experimental group were seated at tables in groups of two to four by same language, and they were encouraged to use their mother tongue for interaction in the classroom in order to help each other understand and learn. Heavy emphasis was placed on activities that facilitated pairwork or work in small groups. Over the course of several weeks of the autumn semester, both sets of students maintained these interaction patterns and were given a post-test to see how much their English usage and reading skills had improved from their original ESL placement test, which they had taken in August.

The results So who improved most: the students not allowed to use their mother tongue, or those encouraged to do so and grouped with that in mind? Well, both groups improved almost equally. In fact, the latter (the experimental group) improved by 2.5 points and the former (the control group) by 2.4 points – about a 7–8% overall improvement in their raw scores. Despite the obvious limitations of a small study like this one, I believe that if nothing else, the experiment suggests that using L1 in English medium instruction classrooms is not detrimental to improving English proficiency, counter to the belief sometimes held by many stakeholders in schools, not least teachers and sometimes parents. Indeed, it could be that, as the research suggests, it is an additional learning tool for students in international schools.

learning tool. We are currently undertaking an initiative to implement a self-taught mother-tongue programme, similar to the provision in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, for all students who are interested in continued cognitive engagement in their mother-tongue languages. In addition to looking at programme changes, these are a few basic strategies for teachers that we are striving to employ in our classrooms and throughout the school: 1

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Have the students log key terminology and vocabulary (either self-selected or prescribed) in a personal bilingual dictionary they create for each unit in each class, that includes English definitions and mother-tongue words, plus any other associations (images, etc).

3

Encourage the students to find sources and read about the content that is being taught, in their mother tongues. The internet has endless online resources such as encyclopaedias where students can first understand the information in their L1, then transfer that understanding. At our school, one of our ESL teachers has created an international collection of books in dozens of languages that students can access at any time in the library. These were purchased from or donated by students. These mothertongue sources can be used for any inquiry-based research projects, too.

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The strategies My classroom experiment has motivated me to explore the mother-tongue issue further. So, in what specific ways can English teachers employ L1 in their classrooms to optimise learning? Since carrying out the experiment, I’ve continued to read about and collaborate with my colleagues in the ESL department on ways we can use L1 as a

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Encourage the students to compare discrete language features and structures from their L1 to English, including identifying cognates between their languages and English.

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Allow the students to do pair- and groupwork in their L1 and construct dual-language projects and tasks where both the students’ languages and English are represented. Display these and share them with the community at large.

English language skills and content knowledge, they also encourage them to be cognitively engaged in their L1s. These strategies also reinforce the notion that students’ mother tongues are important for learning, and that we, as a learning institution, recognise and value their backgrounds and languages. One might even say that it is this recognition of ‘additive bilingualism’ that is an essential part of fulfilling the aims of being international educators.

 A second theme that has come out of this for me, as a classroom teacher, is that action research can be engaging and fun, and it can better inform our teaching practices (and hunches) so we can provide our students with the most effective learning environment possible. Indeed, if we, as educators, want to inculcate in our students a desire to become life-long learners, then, as teachers, we can and should continue to learn ourselves; and action research is a meaningful way to achieve this aim. ETp Cummins, J ‘Rethinking monolingual instructional strategies in multilingual classrooms’ Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Special 10 (2) 2007 Aaron Deupree completed his CELTA in Durban, South Africa and his MEd in International Education in Leysin, Switzerland. Since finishing university in 2000, he has taught in Japan, France and, most recently, Switzerland, where he balances teaching, outdoor pursuits and family time. [email protected]

IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

Display and present the students’ mother-tongue languages throughout the school. This could be as simple as putting up welcome signs or labelling the school library with signs that the students create in their own languages.

Not only do these strategies seem to help students in developing their

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

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]

IN THE CLASSROOM

Chat show game show Richard Hillman’s students get points for revising vocabulary and recycling grammar. ere’s a quiz question: What’s an exciting new way to revise new vocabulary and recycle grammar points? Actually, the technique I’m going to recommend is itself a retreading of a well-trodden path, but this does not diminish its excitement. Furthermore, there is minimal gapfilling involved! I call it ‘Chat show game show’ and here’s what is involved:

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Playing the game The class is divided into two or three groups, and each is given a set of questions or sentence stems which practise the target language. The language the groups are expected to use is given to them, and their job is to come up with an interesting answer to each question or an interesting sentence ending. Then comes the competition stage, where they share their answers and the teacher awards points according to how interesting the answers are. The technique can be used for General English, CPE level, preintermediate level, EAP, ESP, business English, and for practising grammar, vocabulary, collocations, colligations and many other things. For example, when practising ‘future in the past’, the students would be given a set of sentence stems, such as: ‘The girl saw that the man was going to throw himself off the bridge and ...’. The group with the most interesting sentence completion would get most points. Or a question from a vocabulary worksheet might be: ‘Name two things that deteriorate in us as we get older’. This could lead to a lot of different interesting answers.

Awarding the points How about the awarding of points? Take a question like ‘Who’s the most inspirational person you’ve ever met?’ Obviously, this is a personalised question, so each group would nominate the student from their group

with the most interesting answer. One group might say that one of them has met a famous celebrity. That’s definitely worth points. Or their answer could be their religious leader. That’s a serious answer meriting an award of a serious number of points. Then again, another group might say they’ve never met anyone particularly interesting. They can be given points for having high standards and waiting until someone really good comes along. Or a student from another group might say that their father is the most interesting person they’ve met. For personalising their answer, and for having an inspiring father, they should definitely get a lot of points. Yet another answer might be that their English teacher is the most interesting person they’ve met. Of course, if this group are already leading in the competition, you might want to deduct points for deliberately flattering the teacher, to put it politely. Alternatively, they might win the jackpot and get massive bonus points! Furthermore, lots of extra points should be available for students who justify their answer particularly well, or make cogent objections about the teacher’s awarding of points. Equally, points can be awarded for correcting another group’s answer, or for answering any follow-up questions that occur to the teacher.

What’s the point? This activity has many benefits: ● It’s fun! ● The students do a lot of speaking. ● The students are combining speaking with learning and consolidating vocabulary or grammar points, thus making the speaking all the more meaningful and useful. ● The students are engaging intellectually and emotionally with the target language items, thus making learning very effective.

● The students often become very creative; they get to play with the language and have their affective barriers lowered. ● It extends the students’ facility with how these language items can be used, as they get the chance to test out what works and what doesn’t work. ● Most of the questions are not of a strictly right or wrong nature, so alternative answers can be accepted, and it’s more of a collaborative comparing of answers. However, the team can’t get their point for that answer until they use the language item correctly, which aids accuracy (in this they can be helped by the teacher, or by other groups, for points, as much as is necessary). It takes away some of the pressure of coursebookstyle exercises where the weaker students will only get 60 percent of the answers correct – if they’re lucky! Here, they can get points for every answer!

Beside the point An alternative to this procedure is to dispense with the points and the game show, and just have a sharing of the groups’ answers. This makes the activity quicker, acts as a variation if you’ve recently had a game show, and also lends itself better to other types of topics and questions. Either way, it’s fun, involves lots of speaking and provides very useful practice of the target language. ETp Richard Hillman has taught English all around the world, in countries such as Brazil, Finland, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Japan. Now the world comes to him at Bell London, UK. His abiding interest is in group dynamics and how to foster a positive and fun atmosphere in the class to maximise learning. [email protected]

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B USINESS E NGLISH professional

Tell me a story Louis Rogers considers the importance of narrative in business English. t the ELT Connections conference in Leeds in 2011, I watched a very engaging and inspiring symposium from Alan Maley, Brian Tomlinson, Hitomi Masuhara, Jayakaran Mukundan and Ivor Timmis about the importance of integrating narrative into ELT materials. They put forward a number of arguments for doing this, and gave a variety of techniques for people to try. Since then, I have been trying to incorporate more narrative texts into both my own lessons and the materials I write for publishers. Commonly, the only unit of a coursebook that has a strong narrative angle is found in a general English course at an intermediate or upperintermediate level, where it serves as a vehicle for teaching narrative tenses. It is not surprising that narrative texts are used to teach these tenses as the frequency with which they occur in this genre is much higher than in many other methods of communication (as research by Douglas Biber and his colleagues reveals). However, it is perhaps surprising that narrative texts don’t play a more integral role across a number of units as they can be engaging and motivating for students, can play a key role in vocabulary development and can be used as a vehicle for a multi-skilled integrated approach to teaching. Unfortunately, the perception of narrative texts means that we don’t see them used very often in contexts outside

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of general English. However, they can play an important role in a much wider range of ELT contexts and can be particularly useful in business English courses. In this article, I will look at some of the common roles of narrative in a business context and the impact of extensive reading on incidental vocabulary learning. Finally, I will suggest some methods for incorporating narrative within a business English context. The article is then followed by a set of cards that models one of the techniques discussed.

Being a successful storyteller can be a powerful tool for any business person, as narrative can be used to engage with others, motivate people or simply to socialise and interact more effectively. We constantly write and rewrite our own personal and professional narratives in order to make sense of the decisions we make and to create our own life story. This real-life tool for business communication is exploited very little in business English materials. Yet not only is it an authentic approach, but it also has a number of key pedagogical outcomes.

Extensive reading Rod Ellis distinguishes between incidental and intentional learning as between focal and peripheral attention. In other words, intentional learning is where the learner is explicitly trying to commit something, such as new vocabulary, to memory, whereas with incidental learning, the learner is not actively trying to commit new words to memory. That is not to say that new lexis is not being noticed or attention is not being paid to it, but that the learner is not explicitly aiming to acquire new vocabulary.

Unfortunately, the perception of narrative texts means that we don’t see them used very often in contexts outside of general English

Storytelling in a business context Stephen Denning defines and describes a number of key areas within the field of business in which narrative plays an important role. Firstly, it can be used to inspire people to follow a course of action which will encourage them to ‘buy into’ a future direction for a company, department or project. Secondly, it is important in communicating who we are – describing our paths, our successes and failures – as a way to raise interest in a presentation, meeting or informal discussion. Companies are also increasingly using narrative to describe both their past and their vision for the future – essentially as part of a large brand identity that they are trying to create. Finally, it is also a way for individuals or organisations to impart knowledge and values to others.

According to Thomas Huckin and James Coady, most vocabulary learning occurs incidentally as a by-product of reading and listening activities where there is not an explicit focus on learning vocabulary. Consequently, extensive reading plays a key role in second language vocabulary acquisition. Huckin and Coady also argue that texts that have a high interest value for learners help aid incidental vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, creating absorbing narrative texts, or ones based on a real person’s life story, is potentially a method to both engage the learners and also enhance their linguistic knowledge.

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B USINESS E NGLISH professional

Methods for integrating narrative texts In the following section I will suggest three ways in which narrative texts can be incorporated into business English materials. 1

Skills and stories

Many business English coursebooks have reading or listening texts that centre around people, well-known or fictional, particularly in sections that are designed to focus on teaching grammar and vocabulary. However, one area where this is often lacking is in the functional language section of a book. This can often give the feeling of being little more than a phrase book; it can be quite uninspiring and fail to interest the learners. The better materials integrate these functional exponents into a narrative by establishing a context in which the exchanges happen and by creating a sense of putting the students ‘in the moment’ of the situation. 2

Case studies

One area where we do see some narrative entering business English materials is in the form of case studies. Case studies generally take a task-based approach to reviewing the skills and language taught in a unit, and the better ones tend to integrate a strong narrative into the situation. Unfortunately, many are quite formulaic and don’t exploit the potential for using narrative as a vehicle for teaching and recycling skills and

language. The Harvard Business Review case studies, which are suitable for more advanced learners – from upperintermediate upwards – are engaging texts, looking at a wide range of scenarios in a variety of business contexts. The longer nature of these makes them particularly good for incidentally developing the learners’ lexis when they are used as reading texts. 3

Business mazes

Business mazes, more commonly known as action mazes, are essentially stories broken up into sections, often on separate cards, each of which is followed by two or three options. Each option sends the reader down a different path of the story. Once the reader has chosen their option, they are then presented with an additional part of the narrative and three or four further options. Each of these routes results in a different outcome to the story. Such mazes are commonly found in science fiction and fantasy writing. However, they can also be used in the business English classroom. When done collectively in a class or group, these narrative texts can enable practice of a number of key functions that are taught to business English students, such as suggesting, agreeing, disagreeing, explaining, justifying, etc. They can also be created to link thematically to a unit or to a particular learner’s needs and context. There are some examples of businesses mazes at www.uefap.com and many more for both professional and

general purposes. Using business mazes for a reading task also works well via a digital platform. There is a free piece of software available online called Quandary that allows you to write your own mazes. Mazes can be as long or as short as you like: many of the examples available online have more than 50 cards. The example that accompanies this article (on this page and page 54) is a shorter one and is intended just to give you an idea of what a maze is and as a small example to try out. ETp Biber, D, Conrad, S and Leech, G Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English Pearson 2002 Denning, S A Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative JosseyBass 2005 Ellis, R Learning a Second Language through Interaction John Benjamins Publishing Company 1999 Huckin, T and Coady, J ‘Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language’ Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21 (2) 1999 Louis Rogers is a Course Tutor at the University of Reading, UK. He is the author of Reading Skills and Writing Skills, in the DELTA Academic Objectives series, and the Intermediate and Upper-intermediate levels of the Business Result Skills for Business Studies workbooks, published by OUP. [email protected]

Business maze: Quattro Lesson plan This business maze can be used as a fluency task following on from a number of skills-based lessons. If you have been teaching language related to meetings, or functional phrases for areas such as giving an opinion or making suggestions, then this will provide ideal fluency practice. You will need one set of cards per student or pair of students. 1

Copy and cut out the cards on page 54 and distribute sets (arranged in numerical order) among the students. Ask them to read the first card and to choose one of the options. Once they have made their choice, ask the students to tell a partner which one they have chosen and why. If they disagree on the best option, that’s fine, but try to encourage them to agree on one path.

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The students should now read the section on the next card that the option they chose tells them to read. ● If pairs have agreed on the same one, they should repeat the process from 1 together again. ● If they have chosen different options, they should explain their part of the story to their partner. They can then discuss again which option they will take and why.

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The students repeat each of the steps above until they reach the conclusion of their story.






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Business maze: Quattro

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Your restaurant, Quattro, has been open for five years. For the first three years the restaurant was very successful, but for the last two it has been losing money. If things do not change in the next six months, you will have to close your business.

When you look online, you see lots of bad reviews about the restaurant’s food. You decide something needs to be done.

You like the food, but your spouse thinks the food is the problem and refuses to eat there! Perhaps the food is the problem. Go to 2. You often see your staff standing around doing nothing and when they do serve customers they are quite rude. You decide you need to do something about the staff. Go to 3.

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You decide to hold a staff meeting to find out how people feel about working in Quattro. The meeting quickly turns into a big argument as the staff think you are the problem. Fire the staff. How dare they speak to you like that? You pay their salaries and they should respect you. Go to 8. Take on board their comments. Perhaps they are right? You decide to provide some training for your staff. Go to 9.

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Your chef adds 20 new dishes to the menu, but people still complain. One review says: ‘How can they add even more rubbish to this menu?’ Bad luck – Your business cannot recover and closes.

Lots of complaints are about the choices on your menu. You decide to ask your chef to create a new menu. Go to 4. You don’t like the chef and think he has become a bit lazy. Changing the chef, not the menu, might be the best option. Go to 5.

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You interview people for the head chef position and have to choose between two candidates. Juan has been a chef for over 25 years and has worked in some top restaurants. Leo has excellent references from his last job, and his current restaurant is one of the best in town.

You decide that staff training is needed. You want to provide good training but have limited money.

Experience is best, surely? You can’t take chances, so you appoint Juan. Go to 6.

You haven’t got much time and decide to pay a consultant to come in. Go to 11.

You decide to train the staff yourself. You have worked in the industry for ten years and used to train staff in a college. Go to 10.

It’s your last chance. You decide to take a risk and appoint Leo, even though he is young. Go to 7.

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Juan did work for some good restaurants – a long time ago. When he starts, he is lazy and arrogant. You try to fire him and get another chef, but it’s too late.

Leo turns out to be an excellent chef and really turns your restaurant around. The next year you win a ‘restaurant of the year’ award. Well done – You’re still in business.

Bad luck – Your restaurant has closed.

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You fire all the staff and hire new people. It starts really well and they are very enthusiastic, but three leave after a few weeks and one night two don’t come to work. One tells you he is embarrassed to serve such rubbish food.

Bad luck – The training session becomes one big argument as the staff think you don’t know what you’re doing. Everyone quits and the restaurant closes.

Well done – The consultant gets your restaurant onto a TV programme that helps improve restaurants. The food and service get better and your restaurant has become popular again.

Bad luck – It seems the staff were not the problem.

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

B USINESS E NGLISH professional

May I leave a message? Phil Wade finds opportunities for practice when no one is available. hanks to mobile phones, it is now common practice in the business world to expect that managers and even junior staff will be contactable 24/7. The only problem is that it’s nearly impossible for them to answer every call: they might be in a meeting, on another line or even on a plane. Thus, they find themselves constantly leaving voice messages, picking up their own messages and calling people back. Telephone skills have long been taught in general and business English classes, but how many coursebook activities actually involve leaving or responding to messages? Activities involving answer machine messages were one of my favourite tasks in the old days of language labs. I used to get my business students running round to each other’s booths leaving messages. Luckily for those of us who were language lab fans – and thanks to the internet – we can now apply the same ideas to the modern classroom. The activities below can be used to improve the students’ ability to listen to short messages, to develop dictation skills, to get them used to the repetitions and redundancies of natural English, to revise grammar or vocabulary and to leave short but effective messages themselves. They can be used as warmers, lead-ins or set-up stages for roleplays or simulated meetings and negotiations.

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Basic procedure Each student signs up for an account at www.voxopop.com (see Russell Stannard’s Webwatcher in ETp Issue 81) and opens a new thread (a chain of voice recordings) called something like ‘Bob’s message service’ or ‘Sony sales department’. The students (in the role of ‘receivers’) each record a short answer machine message and upload the link to their message/thread onto a class webpage, blog or wiki. Then, in the role of ‘callers’, the students visit each of their classmates’ links, listen to the original message and leave messages of their own. Returning to the role of receiver, each

student listens back to the messages they have received in response to their own message and then responds appropriately.

Variations The basic procedure lends itself to a number of different variations, which you can employ by giving the students specific instructions about how they should record or respond to the messages: 1 Unfinished messages

Instruct the callers to miss out key bits of information which the receivers have to enquire about in the next class. 2 Wrong number

Tell the callers to pretend to phone the wrong department. The receivers then have to find the right person to pass the message on to. 3 Fast speaker

Ask the receivers to speak quickly when they leave their messages so the callers have to replay the message several times. 4 Error correction

Get the receivers to make deliberate mistakes with the target language. The callers have to re-record all the messages correctly on a new thread. 5 Paraphrasing

Tell the receivers to pretend to forget the target vocabulary and to paraphrase it in their messages. The callers then have to work out which lexis it is. 6 Agenda

Ask the callers to leave messages to arrange a departmental meeting but with different requirements. The receiver then has to negotiate and finalise a set time. 7 No name

Tell the callers that they are various employees of the same company who leave messages but forget to say their names. The receiver has to use the content of the message and the sound of the voice to figure out who left each message. 8 Timed dictations

Give the students a time limit to note down all their messages and then check them with each other to see how correct they are. 9 You’re hired; you’re fired

Ask the callers to pretend to be bosses who call and sack their employee as

politely as possible for poor performance. The receivers (the employees) then have to try to win back their jobs. Alternatively, the callers are potential employers who offer jobs to an interviewee (the receiver). The receiver chooses which offer to accept. 10 The demanding boss and the PA

Pair up the students and ask them to pretend to be each other’s demanding boss and personal assistant (they each play both roles). In their boss role, they have to leave lots of messages before the next lesson as a normal boss would do to a PA. These could be instructing the PA to book plane tickets, checking if work has been done, enquiring about progress on a project – even asking the PA to pick up some dry cleaning. In the next lesson, in the role of the PA, they have to report back for one or two minutes to the boss in front of the class and say what they have done regarding the messages.

 As essential skills in business and life in general, leaving, picking up and acting on messages certainly warrant a place on any English course. One of the real benefits is that the students get used to listening to non-native-speaker English. Anyone going into the business world will, at some point, be working with international colleagues who increasingly use English as a lingua franca. Incorporating activities like those above can provide valuable practice in this area. If you prefer video messages, the same recordings can be done at www.voicethread.com or sent as e-messages using www.eyejot.com. Phil Wade has a Business degree, a PGCE, the CELTA, MA TESOL and DELTA Module 3. He has managed an MA business English course and has taught corporate, foundation, undergraduate and pre-MBA courses. He is a Cambridge examiner, materials writer, contributor to BESIG and member of the TESOL France editorial team. [email protected]

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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

CLIL: from policy to reality Christa Mundin and Charlotte Giller try to fill the gaps for Spanish teachers facing a new challenge. his article looks at the challenges facing teachers and teacher trainers in Valencia, Spain, in preparing for the implementation of a trilingual education policy (Valencian, Castillian and English) in primary and secondary state schools in that region. As teacher trainers and EFL teachers, we have been contracted for the last five years to deliver general English courses in modular format to improve standards of English amongst teachers in our area.

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The teachers Motivation For the most part, the teachers we are working with are subject teachers rather than language teachers, and within any one group of, say, 20 adults, there will be a mix of infant, primary and secondary teachers. The modules we deliver equate to a 60-hour course, or half an average textbook, and they are delivered after school in two sessions of three hours per week. Take a moment to imagine how motivated you need to be to sign up for six hours of unpaid overtime a week after a hard day at the chalkface! Spanish schools generally follow a nine to five timetable – and in some cases eight to five. Teachers on these courses finish at 8.30 at night. So, what exactly is their motivation for signing up? By and large, the driving force is job security. The Spanish Government’s infamous austerity programme has resulted in drastic cuts in the education budget across the regions. Significant

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increases in class size and working hours have been imposed at the same time as pay cuts, a recruitment freeze and staff transfers. In addition, teachers of various subjects are now required to have a B1 or B2 level of English. Despite opposition within the teaching profession to these measures, the Valencian government remains committed to rolling out a trilingual education model from 2012, following the example of other regions in Spain. The aim is for a third of lessons to be taught in English, a third in Valencian and a third in Castillian – and we are aware of at least one pilot programme delivering (at least in theory) 80 percent of lessons to pre-primary children in English. This is no mean task for teachers and students alike! Rationale We would wager that most parents and educators would agree that this is the way forward: that using language as a medium for learning content is using language in the most practical of contexts and, consequently, a powerful motivating factor. Almost unanimously, the plurilinguistic approach to learning is seen as the tool which will empower future generations of young people to widen their employment prospects, not just on the Iberian stage but on the world stage. Feedback So, how are those educators who are not from an ELT background expected to transform their hitherto monolingual classrooms into trilingual ones? Our particular remit is to provide general English courses for them. These courses

don’t lead to any certification other than attendance, and the entry-level tests and end-of-module exams are prepared by us. We always request feedback from our ‘teacher-students’ and the following four comments represent those most frequently made: 1 This is the first time I have been taught English this way (using the communicative method) and the first time I have enjoyed learning English. 2 I studied English at school and at university, but this is the first time I have been taught by a native speaker and had lessons which include pronunciation, speaking and listening practice. 3 I have learnt a lot on this course and want to continue. 4 I don’t feel either sufficiently prepared or confident enough to teach part or any of my classes in English.

As can be seen, the story so far has many positives. Almost unwittingly, a byproduct of these courses has been the opportunity for teachers to experience a methodology previously unknown to them and which they instantly perceive to be good language teaching practice. What’s more, our focus on the importance of pronunciation in terms of intelligibility rather than accent, has proved hugely effective and popular with groups at all levels. Finally, the teachers’ personal perception (and ours, too) is that considerable learning has taken place, but their common sense tells them that they are still not ready to teach their subject in English. And this is our concern as well. Are we really giving

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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT these teachers what they need to teach their subjects in English? What is more worrying is whether the policy makers actually believe these ‘successful’ general English courses to be equivalent to CLIL training and preparation. There are now several successful CLIL roll-outs in countries such as Austria, Germany, Finland, Norway and parts of Spain, and as the model spreads, so do the networking possibilities. The CLIL Cascade Network (www.ccn-clil.eu) comprises a Networking Zone, a Teaching and Learning Zone and a Professional Development Zone. The way forward for regions and countries which are embarking on this journey is surely to consult with those who have more experience and have had the opportunity to iron out the problems encountered along the way?

The strategy In the meantime, back at the chalkface, we looked at what we could do to add value within the given constraints. We decided on a practical, phased approach, very similar to the three phases outlined in John and Liz McMahon’s presentation ‘Training the CLIL Teacher’ given at the 2011 IATEFL conference in Brighton, UK. Phase 1: General language improvement via a mainstream coursebook We are currently doing courses aimed at improving general language ability. However, following consultation with our teacher-students, we have decided to take more of a lexical approach than a grammatical approach, the language being dictated by the subject to be taught. Realistically, we have found this needs to be restricted to two subjects during any one course. A good starting point is to choose two subjects which most teachers are called upon to teach at some stage in their career in addition to their specialist subject, eg environmental studies and citizenship. For intermediate levels and above, we now ask our teacher-students to present information to the class (based on the national curriculum textbook) using simple charts or diagrams containing the key language. The rest of the class are then given prompts to frame questions for the teacher to answer.

Phase 2: Classroom language Classroom language makes a brief appearance in the beginner and elementary levels of the coursebook we are using and, understandably, is not seen again. We therefore decided to dedicate one hour of each three-hour class to communicative activities using the social communication lexis and structures required to manage and run classes with confidence. This, after all, is language that they are used to receiving from us but not used to producing themselves. This skill can be developed in the safety of roleplay scenarios covering: ● ● ● ● ●

English for giving instructions English for presenting information English for asking questions English for monitoring and feedback English for solving problems

Teachers particularly appreciate the inclusion of useful collocations and set phrases for the classroom – they not only provide scaffolding but also boost confidence. However, this has flagged up the complexity of having so many variables in the target audience: the classroom language needed for infant teachers has little to do with that needed by a secondary teacher. To give a graphic example, an infant teacher needs to know how to ask the question: ‘Do you need to do a wee?’; the secondary teacher hopes they never will. There are also differences in the equipment used with different age groups and the instructions this requires. Therefore, where resources permit, we would certainly recommend that classroom language input for infant and primary teachers and secondary teachers is given separately. Phase 3: CLIL This final phase is the bringing together of Phases 1 and 2 to allow the teachers to learn the CLIL craft. Although we are currently unable, as individuals, to influence this final phase, we believe that teaching practice sessions (including those with the presence of a native speaker), CLIL lesson observation and a mentoring scheme would provide a sound working brief. We have had to recognise our own limitations in these courses and focus on those areas where our input can make a difference to the outcome, namely Phases 1 and 2.



The stakeholders in the CLIL process are many, starting with the policy makers and impacting the teaching workforce, the teacher trainer and the student. We believe that a suitable mission statement title would be: ‘Failure is not an option’. If this were to be the mantra for the CLIL approach, perhaps the how it is achieved would become as (if not more) important than the when. Language learning is a slow process and, therefore, not the kind of soundbite that makes a great headline. However – given the social, cultural and, in these troubled times here in Spain, the economic importance of the job teachers do – if it were to translate into a realistic, phased training timetable for teachers, delivered within a framework which promotes independent learning and critical thinking skills, we believe it would guarantee their commitment and cooperation as strategic partners. In fact, our teacher-students who have signed up, turned up and participated with good humour and great enthusiasm on these evening courses, and their own current and future students, deserve no less. ETp Further reading British Council and Ministerio de Educación Evaluation Report on the Bilingual Education Project, Spain 2010 Foord, D The Developing Teacher Delta Publishing 2009 Mehisto, P, Frígols, M J and Marsh, D Uncovering CLIL Macmillan 2008 Edge, J The Reflexive Teacher Educator in TESOL Routledge 2011 Christa Mundin is Head of Training at Asociación de Profesores Profesionales (www.appformacion.com) in Gandia, Valencia, Spain, and holds the Trinity DipTESOL. She has a particular interest in the teaching of pronunciation. She is currently designing a Trinity CertTESOL course specifically for non-native speakers. [email protected] Charlotte Giller is an English teacher at Asociación de Profesores Profesionales and a part-time lecturer at the Universidad Europea de Madrid (Valencia campus). She is interested in critical discourse analysis.

[email protected]

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T E C H N O L O G Y

Prevent videos from vanishing Gary Collins insists you can step into the same stream as many times as you like – if you are careful. xperienced teachers will know that there is nothing worse than giving a web link to students with the intention of engaging them in an attractive task, only to find that the website has moved, the URL is faulty or your favourite video stream has been taken away for good. This is why it is sensible to download material from the web onto your computer, and maybe even to convert it to a different codec or format, such as WMV or MP4, to suit the preferences of your institution’s computer system. You can then carry your streams around on a flash drive, nicely organised in subject folders, together with any relevant accompanying material such as worksheets, answer keys and teaching hints, so that you can use them whenever and wherever you like. There are several examples on my website (www.garycollins.ch) of short video clips downloaded from the internet which make excellent, reusable teaching material, together with worksheets that I have developed to go with them. Click on ‘Teaching Ideas’ at the top to take a look. The first example is a YouTube stop-motion clip showing a man’s life story illustrated by animated family photos. The accompanying worksheet requires the students to remember details of the clip and, as they become engrossed in this challenge, they will hardly notice the amount of target language they are practising.

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Downloading To download video material from the internet, first you need to get yourself a video downloader. I recommend the

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RealPlayer Downloader. I use a Mac so I got mine from http://uk.real.com/ realplayer/mac, but it is also available for Windows and Linux. Whenever you watch a video stream on YouTube, Bing or any other platform, the downloader will catch the URL of your stream. You then click on ‘Download’ and collect your stream from the download folder. Once it has been downloaded, you can rename the file or even convert it.

Searching for suitable material What you really want for use in class are short, high-definition clips. At YouTube you can filter your search. I usually tick HD in order to limit my search to streams that have a resolution of either 1080p or 720p: the streams are going to be projected using a beamer and laptop, and standard definition (SD) with resolutions of between 240p and 480p will not be of sufficient quality. Choose at least 720p from the drop-up window and then tick to download the largest file in RealPlayer.

window and see them on screen, but the Downloader will not receive this information. In order to get around this problem, you can capture the entire stream, including the subtitles, while watching it in full-screen mode. To do this, I use Screenflow on my Mac; this is available from http://en.softonic.com for about 70 Euros. Once you have downloaded a RAW version of your screen, you can export the data, converting it to WMV, MP4 or MPG4 format – but make sure you use HD settings before rendering your stream. ETp

Capturing captions You will get an even better teaching clip if you are able to capture any targetlanguage captions or subtitles that appear on screen. According to a study done by Holger Mitterer and James McQueen, using target-language captions enhances the learning process, while using L1 captions to support L2 audio is not to be recommended at all. Unfortunately, it is impossible to capture captions with the RealPlayer Downloader. You can choose English subtitles from a separate drop-up

• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Mitterer, H and McQueen, J M ‘Foreign subtitles help but native-language subtitles harm foreign speech perception’ PLoS ONE 4 (11) 2009 Gary Collins teaches English at a vocational training centre and runs teacher training courses for the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (SFIVET) and English staff all over Europe.

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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]

T E C H N O L O G Y

Please leave a message V Lindsay Warwick evaluates voice recording.

oice recording is not a new concept in ELT; it has been used for language practice for decades. What makes it relevant today is the increased use of voice recording to communicate in our everyday lives, from leaving a voice message to a loved one to recording a webinar for colleagues. With voice recording, English language learners: ● can communicate in English with people all over the world; ● get valuable rehearsal time (we often practise difficult conversations in our minds in L1); ● are encouraged to take more care about what they say and how they say it; ● have nowhere to hide and can’t let others speak for them; ● can work on specific weak areas at their own pace, gaining confidence as they go. Tools and equipment There are recording devices on computers and smartphones, with the option to email recordings. Free programs such as Audacity can be downloaded and used with a headset and microphone. Online recording tools, such as Vocaroo and Mailvu, allow voice or video messages respectively to be emailed privately. Audioboo uploads messages to the web and will sync them to a blog or social network. Screencasting allows you to record your voice and whatever is on your computer screen at the same time. Jing is a popular downloadable program; the website Screencast-o-matic offers the same free facilities online, and the Voxopop website allows you to create private talk groups where students can talk asynchronously.

2 Activities for range These activities can all be done using Audacity, which allows you to record several tracks at one time, making it a basic but free language laboratory. Half a dialogue: Record one speaker’s role in a dialogue, leaving gaps for the other speaker. The students listen and record in the gaps. This is a great way to practise using appropriate discourse, eg showing surprise, agreeing, disagreeing, etc. Guess the words: The students work in pairs and have a conversation for two minutes while secretly trying to use five new words/phrases chosen from their word lists. They listen back and try to guess what each other’s words/phrases were. Paraphrase it: The students record themselves talking about a topic. Another student listens and records a paraphrase of what they heard. This continues three or four times. The first recording is compared to the last. 3

Inside the classroom The following activities are great for language development in class. 1

Photo call: Give the students a photo and ask them to talk about it using a screencasting tool. What’s in the photo? Does it remind them of anything? How does it make them feel? Present it: Get the students to practise giving a presentation with slides or a website. A screencast tool can record the presentations.

Activities for fluency

Story chain: Give the students the first line

of a story and ask them first to record it and then to record a continuation (eg by describing the place). The students then swap recording devices and add more to the story (eg by describing the main character). They swap again, continuing until the stories are complete.

Activities for accuracy Describe and draw: The students describe something, eg directions, their living room or a photo. They listen to each other’s recordings and draw what they hear. Describe and guess: The students describe something, eg a word, person or object. They listen to each other’s recordings and guess what it is. Class survey: The students record themselves giving personal information or ideas using a particular language point, eg ‘what you’d do if you could travel the world’. They listen to each other and report back to the class. 4

Activities for pronunciation

Shadow speaking: Record a text

yourself and give the students a written copy. They listen and record themselves speaking at exactly the same time, copying your intonation. With

Audacity, they can listen back to both tracks at the same time and compare. Guess the sound: The students record words or sentences with a particular sound or minimal pair. Another student has to listen and identify the sound. Alliteration: The students write and record a poem with a particular sound for a class competition.

Outside the classroom These activities encourage meaningful communication in English outside class. Language exchange: Your students work with English speakers or learners in other countries. They interview each other about a different topic each week by emailing recorded messages and report back to the class. Use www.etwinning.net to help you find a school to work with. Project: Pair students from different classes and ask them to prepare a presentation to give at the end of term, using voice messages to communicate. Ask them to copy you in on some of the emailed messages, and include these in your final assessment. Summary: Pair the students according to their interests. Encourage them to read or listen to English texts regularly outside of class and email recorded summaries to their partner. The partners listen and email a recorded response. Anecdote: The students record themselves telling an anecdote. They email it to a partner, then share in class what they heard, choosing the funniest, most embarrassing, etc.

 Most of the above activities can be done face to face. But voice recording offers students the opportunity to hear themselves, recognise their strengths and weaknesses and think about how to improve. Used appropriately, it can create fun and engaging lessons, or motivate students to extend their use of English beyond the classroom. For more information on voice recording tools, and video tutorials on how to use Audacity, go to http://voicerecordinginefl.weebly.com. ETp Lindsay Warwick is a teacher and teacher trainer, working with students and teachers from around the world at Bell International College, Cambridge, UK. She is also a materials writer and is currently writing a coursebook for Pearson. [email protected]

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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T E C H N O L O G Y

In this series, Nicky Hockly

Five things you always wanted to know about

webinars (but were afraid to ask)

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Webinar? Can you explain what you mean?

Web + seminar = webinar. Essentially, webinars are online seminars, presentations or workshops, usually open to the general public, and often free. They take place in real time and last around an hour. Recorded webinars can be accessed asynchronously (at any time). Webinars frequently focus on one specific topic, although they can form part of a series over time.

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Where do you attend a webinar?

Webinars can take place in different ‘platforms’. You can have a webinar in a text-based platform, where the participants and the presenter interact via text. For example, the British Council Learn English Facebook page holds weekly webinars (or ‘chats’) about grammar for students of English. You can have a webinar in an audio-only platform, where you hear but don’t see the presenter and participants, although you can view the presenter’s slides. Education Week holds regular free audio webinars: go to www.edweek.org/ ew/marketplace/webinars/webinars.html. You can have a webinar in a videoconferencing platform, where you both see and hear the presenter – and possibly the other participants as well. With the spread of reliable broadband internet access, video-conferencing platforms tend to be the tool of choice for webinars, as it is usually more engaging to have video, audio and visual support (such as slides). See below for some examples.

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What webinars do you recommend for teachers?

In the last year or two, there has been a steady increase in the number of videoconferencing webinars on offer for English language teachers. Many publishers (eg Macmillan, Pearson, OUP and CUP) offer regular webinars, as do several English language teaching associations. These are all free and are an excellent source of

explains aspects of technology which some people may be embarrassed to confess that they don’t really understand. In this article, she explores a popular new way of exchanging information.

professional development for teachers. There are even online conferences which consist of a series of online presentations over several days. Here are some organisations that offer free webinars for English language teachers: IATEFL Several of the IATEFL Special Interest Groups (SIGs) offer monthly webinars on topics of interest. These webinars are free and open to the general public, while access to webinar recordings is usually limited to SIG members: ● BESIG (Business English SIG): www.besig.org ● LT SIG (Learning Technologies SIG): http://ltsig.org.uk ● YL SIG (Young Learners SIG): www.yltsig.org American TESOL Institute This organisation offers free webinars every Friday on a range of classroom-related topics of interest to English language teachers. Webinars are recorded and can be freely accessed on the website after the event. Go to http://americantesol.com/ tesol-lectures.htm. Virtual Round Table Conference This annual online conference provides a rich resource of webinars aimed at English language teachers. Have a look through the webinar archives from conferences over the past few years (www.virtualround-table.com) – and make sure you attend the 2013 conference!

4

What do I need to attend a webinar?

To take part in a video-conferencing webinar, you need a reliable internet connection and speakers (or preferably a headset) to be able to hear the webinar presenter. Most webinar participants contribute to the session via text chat in video-conferencing webinars, adding their opinions on the topic, interacting with each other or asking questions. Some webinars will offer you the chance to use audio (and possibly even video) to ask the presenter

questions, but given that public webinar audiences tend to be large (40+), most participant interaction is limited to the text chat room for logistical reasons. If your internet connection is unreliable or slow, you may be able to freeze or close the presenter’s video window, and just receive audio – this will take up less bandwidth and make for a more stable experience.

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What are the dos and dont’s for webinar presenters?

As a presenter, there are two main areas to consider when preparing for and running your webinar: technical issues, and how to involve or engage your participants. Technical know-how includes using a headset rather than a stand-alone microphone and speakers (which can cause echo for listeners), and using a cable broadband connection rather than Wi-Fi for video-conferencing if possible – the former is more reliable. Techniques to engage your webinar participants include creating short tasks that involve your audience, and looking at your webcam when speaking rather than at your computer screen. Take a look at these two short videos that include excellent advice from experienced webinar presenters around the world: ● Webinar tech tips – http://youtu.be/hebbpe6MVLw ● ‘Involving your audience’ tips – http://youtu.be/UcqoZRZOlDw And perhaps most importantly for webinar presenters, be interested in and engaged with your subject matter – that way, your audience is more likely to be interested in and engaged with what you have to say! Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. She is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, Learning English as a Foreign Language for Dummies, Teaching Online and Digital Literacies. She has published an ebook, Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators (the-round.com), and she maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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Webwatcher Web have often been disappointed with the so-called collaboration tools I find on the internet. I have from time to time picked up recommendations from tweets and blogs, but when I have tried the tools out, I have often found them quite clunky. However, there are some tools which have emerged recently which I think have real potential.

I

What do collaboration tools do? Collaboration tools are great for getting students to brainstorm, share ideas, plan projects and do groupwork. Sometimes I even use them in class. For example, if I have the students working in groups of four or five, I can have just one member of the group logged onto the internet, and that person can write up all the thoughts and ideas of the whole group into whatever collaboration tool we are using. If I then project it onto a screen, the whole class can see their own ideas going up and can also see what the other groups are saying. It’s a great way of pooling ideas and making the most of all the good points that come up in groupwork. Once I have all their ideas on the screen, I can then begin to focus on particular ones. As a class, we can look at all the things that the different groups have shared and I can ask the students to make further comments, elaborate on certain points, etc. I can then print out all their comments and add them to a blog.

Which collaboration tools work? TodaysMeet The most successful tool I have found so far is TodaysMeet. To use this, you go onto the site (todaysmeet.com) and you will be asked to create a ‘room’. You type in the name you want to call your room (which is really just to create a unique internet address for the page) and then you share the link that is displayed with your groups of students. One member of each group can then go to the link, click on the ‘Join’ button by adding in their name (or the name of their group – I usually name them Group 1, Group 2, etc) and then anything they write appears on the screen once they click on the ‘Say’ button.

PiratePad PiratePad is another simple tool (piratepad.net). You simply click on the screen and it will create a page for you. You can then share the address of the page with your groups and, as before, just one member of the group needs to log on. They can write in the name of their group or their own name, choose a colour to write in and then start writing on the screen. Again, anything that any of the group members write will appear on the screen. I used this recently for brainstorming vocabulary. I asked each group to think of all the words they knew which were connected with the topic of technology and we quickly built up an enormous list. There was obviously lots of repetition and I had to go over the odd spelling mistake, but it worked well.

Tricider Tricider (https://tricider.com) offers something a little more sophisticated. I came across this tool recently and I must say it looks really promising. In its simplest form, it is great for brainstorming and getting students to share thoughts and ideas. You simply type a question in the box on the homepage and it

Russell Stannard offers some simple tools to get your students collaborating.

creates a web link to the question. Students can then click on the link and add their answers. This is the simplest way to use the tool, but I have noticed other teachers are using it in a very interesting way. When the students write up their answers, other students can log on and comment on each other’s answers in the ‘Pros and cons’ column. So, some teachers write up a question and add five or six answers or ideas connected with that question. They then ask their students to come onto the page and not provide an answer, since the teacher has already done this, but to make comments on the answers that the teacher has supplied. Let me demonstrate an example: Question What are the benefits of living in the city? Answers (provided by the teacher)

Comments (added by students in the ‘Pros and cons’ column)

Access to amenities.

Tom – Yes, but it depends on the city. Some cities don’t have enough amenities for the size of the population.

Better transport system.

Tom – I agree. In London I don’t need my car. Fred – True, but public transport is very expensive.

More job opportunities.

Yasmin – So why have I been looking for a job for over a year?

I really like this idea as I think it encourages use of some of the higher-order thinking skills that we are always trying to develop in our students. Any questions you set on Tricider stay open for 14 days unless you change the deadline. After that, all the comments are summarised and organised for you to view. However, you can end a questionnaire at any time.

 I am writing this out of term time and I haven’t yet had a chance to try out Tricider myself (I am not even sure of the pronunciation) but I have been looking at many of the examples set up by other teachers and it looks to be an excellent tool. I think it would be especially helpful for students preparing to write an essay or presentation, as they could collect ideas and comments around a certain topic and then use these as the basis for an essay plan. I have provided free help videos which will show you how to use all three of these tools: TodaysMeet www.teachertrainingvideos.com/todaysMeet/index.html PiratePad www.screencast.com/users/Russell1955/folders/ Public%20Content/media/ba599651-fca6-42e9-93dd-4ead48d57d9f Tricider www.teachertrainingvideos.com/tricider/index.html Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon award, all for his popular website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.

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

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

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Prize crossword 55 ETp presents the fifty-fifth in our series of prize crosswords. Send your entry (completed crossword grid and quotation), not forgetting to include your full name, postal address and telephone number, to Prize crossword 55, 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 December 2012 and the senders will each receive a copy of the second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, applauded for its unique red star system showing the frequency of the 7,500 most common words in English (www.macmillandictionary.com). 18

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VERY FREQUENT WORDS *** Do Not ___ Gentle into That Good Night (poem by Dylan Thomas) *** To come out of or out from behind something *** A word used for emphasis *** ___ Mice and Men (novella by John Steinbeck) *** Something that happens, especially something involving several people *** Plural object pronoun *** Fewer than two *** ‘A stitch ___ time saves nine’ (English proverb) *** A fact, situation or intention that explains why something happened *** ___ The Lighthouse (novel by Virginia Woolf) *** A word used to say that if something doesn’t happen, something else will be true as a result *** ___ The Road (novel by Jack Kerouac) *** On one occasion only *** A medium-sized place where people live and work *** ___ Surrender (song by Bruce Springsteen) *** To think that something is true *** ___ I Ruled the World (song from the musical Pickwick) *** To be strongly attracted to someone or something *** Lacking the ability to do something *** ___ Time Goes By (song made famous in the film Casablanca) *** Without anyone or anything else FREQUENT WORDS ** A piece of kitchen equipment used for baking ** To disappear below the surface of the water

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.

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** A period of time with a particular quality or character ** A powerful emotion such as love or anger ** Unusual or unexpected FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS * A door that leads out of a public building * A long line of coral just below the surface of the sea * A small round purple fruit with a large hard seed inside * A dark-coloured beer without bubbles * Unhappy because someone else has something you want * To remove a part from something * A place where wild animals are kept in cages LESS FREQUENT WORDS – A very small hard piece of something – A sound people make when they are thinking about what to say next – A small child or a small amount of alcohol – An object that is perfectly round – A structure used to house honeyproducing insects – To make someone annoyed, confused or worried – Very strict and severe – Careful about or conscious of something – Behaving in a silly way in serious situations – Perfect as an example of a type of person or thing – The whole of time with no beginning or end – Very enthusiastic about something which you do regularly – Extremely ugly and strange – An old word used to draw attention to something

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• Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

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Charles Dickens