How do you get there?

Self visualisation

I cannot begin to tell you how important this is in every stage of your life. Perhaps you’re well clear of the exams you had to take or the important match you had to play at secondary or high school, but challenges keep on coming. From the smallest deadline to the biggest exam; they fly at you like there’s no tomorrow. The only thing you can do is visualise yourself beating them.

This man inspires me beyond belief, Mark Cavendish, current green jersey holder of the Tour de France. The fact that this guy manages to reach speeds of 70Km/h in a finishing sprint after races of 250km is just beyond belief. Sometimes I think that everything is too much for me, then I watch this and realise there are guys out there pushing themself to the real limit. Now I really think that says something, picture yourself at your goal, watch someone you see reaching theirs and visualise yourself getting to yours.

Colloseum

When i did the Rome marathon, I walked past the colosseum a few times (the last 1km of the race) and pictured myself running that last 1000 meters. When the time finally came I was 100% ready to do it, even with 41 km behind me.

This is the song I connected my experience to

Good to have music to associate success to. Helps to add to the self-visualisation.

Role Models

I have already mentioned Mark Cavendish, but there’s also Michael Phelps, as he shattered the 200m record for butterfly in the 2008 olympics. He’s another role model. During DELTA, I used his four lengths of butterfly as four LSAs and watched it before each of them, knowing that the final length of the pool would take me home.

 

 

Basically

What I’m trying to say is, whatever the challenge: exam, conference, class, race, marathon, it’s all about how you tackle it mentally, how you actualise yourself finishing the challenge. Negative thoughts get you n0-where. Positive ones see you through to the finish line.

 

Who inspires you? Mine are Mark and Michael, famous sportsmen. I use music and my heros to help me through, what gets you through?

I am used to going to bed late

That is certainly how it felt after a 6-day holiday over Easter. Whether I was out or at home, with no commitments the next day, I fell into the trap of stay up well into the wee hours of the morning. Not a problem, until Thursday arrived and I was up and wide awake at 6.30am to teach at 9am at school.

Having read Chia’s inspirational accounts of the first few days of her Dogme challenge, I thought I’d try out one of her ideas in my classroom. The lesson was a group of 9 pre-intermediate learners, observed by CELTA trainees to make up part of their compulsory observations.

I sat down and introduced myself to the class, who, in turn, introduced themselves to me. I then asked them to make line up in order of what time they went to bed the night before. I listened carefully to the language they used to do this, they asked questions like:

What time did you go to bed last night?

Did you go to bed late last night?

Did you go to bed early?

Did you sleep lots last night?

They completed the task with very little trouble and we started talking about our sleeping habits, what time we go to work, what time we get up and have breakfast – this lasted about 5 minutes. After this, one student said

for me it’s not difficult to get up in the morning, I am…. (come si dice ‘abitudine’ in inglese?)…. urm… use it?

I CCQ’d the structure the learner was looking for. I asked “is it something you always do?” “is it difficult or easy?” and then wrote on the board:

I am ________ _____ get____ up early

We filled in the gaps to form:

I am used to getting up early

By now interest was at a high and everyone had clearly understood the meaning of the sentence. I highlighted the form (mainly the getting after ‘to’ and used as an adjective following the verb ‘to be’) and drilled the pronunciation. I also used the opportunity of creating some examples to correct some of the errors with prepostional phrases I’d heard in the previous activity such as “in the weekend, one time in a week, go in the park).

I then asked for some more sample sentences from the class and we made four on the board. After that, I asked students to go to their seats and make some more examples with their partners. During this time, I heard one group say “Americans are not used to the way we do things in Italy” and decided to pick on this topical aspect to extend the task.

I put learners into groups and asked them to discuss why it would be difficult for a foreigner to come to Italy (in the hope of eliciting ‘get used to’ as well).

Learners chatted and discussed their ideas, I inputted bits of vocabulary where needed and noted down some errors and also directly corrected a few. In my prioritisation of error I considered the following:

is it a chunk they are missing or is it language they already know which they are making mistakes with?

e.g.

They used to drinking large coffees (elicited the ‘are’) and asked what’s the difference between American coffee and Italian to put the learner back into fluency.

They have difficult when they read the menu in Italian (they find it difficult to read the menu) – I left this one for feedback.

By the end of the activity I had a list of pronunciation (mainly stress in words) and lexical points I wanted to look at. I decided to make correction more covert and wrote an email with the class on the board to recycle the language we used in the activity, extending students language by highlighting the use of the pronoun with be used to, e.g. I’m not used to it; an error I hear a lot from Italian leaners being ‘I’m used to’ and fill in some more lexical gaps, e.g. I find it difficult to…

25 minutes to the end of the lesson. We’d finished the email and I asked learners to write a quick email to a friend telling them about an experience they’ve had abroad to use the language we had looked at in class that day. I checked the emails and helped with some problems while students were writing.

The end of the class took the form of a review of the language we looked in class. I asked learners to draw a table with four parts: one for new grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and topics, which I’d seen in Teaching Unplugged. They filled in the parts of the table and class finished in plenary discussion of what we had learned that day.

On reflection perhaps introducing ‘get used to’ in the form of ‘I’m getting used to/I can’t get used to’ may have pushed learners further. The lesson was 1 hour 30 minutes however and I didn’t want to flood learners with too much information. It was my first time with the class and it seemed prudent to provide practice of one structure and the incidental lexis which accompanied it than provide an input tsunami.

It’d be interesting to see what trainees thought about the lesson. They all commented that students seemed very motivated, spoke a lot and clearly learned and processed a lot of language. I wonder if I should have told them what I was doing and why? Why bother?

DELTA Module One Exam: Paper One

Heads met in an epic afternoon-spanning planning sessions yesterday for a module one exam seminar my colleague and I are giving for the DELTA candidates at our school. This sessions will be dealing exclusively with paper 1 of the exam, to be followed by another dedicated to paper two a few weeks after. Basically, there is a way ‘things should be done’ in the exam, which is what we would like to focus on. Obviously, you need to know your present perfect from your ZPD, your subordinating conjunctions from your coordinating, but it would be a shame to see all that knowledge ruined by sloppy exam technique.

Question 1

The most helpful thing to remember for this part is the fact that it contains six marks. Therefore, avoid spending too much time. The fact of the matter is that either you know the word or you do not. A few pointers might consist of:

• Make sure spelling is correct
• Have clear layout and only one answer. If you change your mind about a word, make sure it is clearly crossed out.

How many basic definitions can you make for the words in the picture?

Alternatively, if your brain works in a more ‘schematic’ way, i.e. you like learning in mind-map style clusters of information with connections between words etc, you can take a topic area such as ‘pronunciation’ and start with the most obvious definitions like ‘phoneme’ or ‘intonation’ or ‘connected speech’ and then go deeper into each topic, creating more words stems with more definitions relevant to each topic.

Question 2

The secret to this part is clear, easy-to-read layout. Last year my tutor drummed this into me and it stuck. I found the following structure helped me in my exam; it’s very clear and highlights the point made. Make sure you give a key at the top too.

(D)definition; (F)further point; (E)example

With a basic structure down, you’re already half way there. Another important point to make is the candidates often confuse the basic definition with the further point. Make your definition too wordy, for example, and the points you could gain for a further point are already made, leaving you with nothing. Also, get the definition wrong but make a good further point and the marks available for the latter will not be given.

For example:

Audiolingualism: A method of second language learning that emphasises the teaching of speaking a listening over reading and writing (definition), discourages the use of the mother tongue, uses dialogues and drills, contrastive analysis (further point).

To which of the words in the word cloud above does this example pertain? Where is the basic definition/further point/example?

A type of consonant sound that is made through a restricted but not completely blocked release of air to create a turbulent airflow. It can be voiced or unvoiced. Sibilant or labio dental, alveolar consonant sounds. /f/ /v/ /s/ /z/.

There are a few examples on quizlet of how you could write basic definition/further point/example flashcards to help your revision.

Question 3

As the tasks get more complicated, the more one needs to be careful about what information to include and how to structure it. The clock starts working against you and there’s a whole load of information you need to communicate to the examiner. It’s no surprise then that candidates start making more and more mistakes. So, we’ve made a simple list of Dos and Don’ts for this section:

DO

• Give one example
• Give a wide variety of features including style, organisation, function.
• Avoid vague expressions
• Include very clear terminology
• Give one feature of writing or speaking subskills that can be grouped under the same heading. E.g. speaking skills- turn taking – language to take a turn.
• Give very specific examples to the text type.
• Focus on what the rubric instructs you to.
• Be very specific and narrow down your point. E.g. Present perfect question forms to talk about life experience.
• Give a very clear and organised structure.

Don’t

• Learn lots of language features that can be given for any question
• List lots (too many) of features pertaining to grammar and lexis
• Spend too much time on this task (15 marks remember!)

A good dos and don’ts list of course needs to be followed by some application.

 

The extract for this task is a writing activity for advanced learners (CEFR C1) level learners. Identify a total of five key language features learners at this level would need in order to complete the activity successfully. Provide an example specific to this activity to support each choice.

 

 

Kenny, N., & Newbrook, J., ‘CAE Gold Plus coursebook’ Longman, 2008

 

A good way to practise this task is to take a variety of speaking and writing tasks and brainstorm with your colleagues as many key language features as possible. What we came up with is in the appendices. Have a look, there are both good and bad examples; try to match the examples to the points on the dos and don’ts list. We’ll have a look at a few examples below:

 

1. Lexis: Compound nouns related to sporting sporting activities
E.g.swimming pools would be a good addition.

 

• Specific point made
• Clear example
• Relevant to the task
• Not relevant to the level: Advanced.

 

2. Discourse: Hedging devices to give the writer’s opinion
it could be considered beneficial to include a selection of after-school activities.

 

• Accurate use of terminology
• Point is narrowed down; does not seem like pre-learned.
• Example is relevant to the task
• Specific to the text type (report – making recommendations – writer’s opinion).

 

3. learners will need to be able to use the present perfect
e.g. we have seen a drop in numbers recently at the sports centre.

 

• Too generic. Not narrowed down enough; it seems pre-learned.
• Which present perfect? Simple? Continuous? To talk about what? Life experiences? Events relevant to the present? Not enough information.
• Good example, specific to the task.

Here are all the answers we came up with. We’ve annotated the bad examples.

 

View this document on Scribd

 

Practice: take examples from the coursebooks with which you regularly teach. Make extensive lists of key items. Not only will it familiarise you with the task type, avoiding the possibility of applying pre-learned points to the exam, but also there might be knock-on effect on your teaching; you willl know what to expect students to produce in a task and consequently you will be more able to find the holes in their language skill to fill.

 Question 4

The task which contains the most marks in paper 1 (40). Let’s start with another dos and don’ts list for part 4:

Do

• Include as much information as possible in part B, even if it seems superflous.
• State the obvious about language
• Use correct terminology
• Specify terminology e.g. pronoun  personal subject pronoun
• Give full names to tenses e.g. present perfect  present perfect simple
• Use the phonemic script
•  Comment on style of the text in part A
• Give an example of each feature
• Have a clear way of marking connected speech
• Use subheadings and underlining to signpost
• Consider doing this task first if you panic or have bad time-management.
• Spend a large proportion of your time on this task
• Refer to the context of the language in part B.
• Consider doing this task first if you panic or have bad time-management
• Spend a large proportion of your time on this task
• Use bullet points in part B

Don’t

•  Give more than 5 features of the text.
• Use very generic features
• Analyse everything: meaning, form, use, pronunciation; only analyse what they tell you to in the rubric
• Stick to ONLY features of connected speech when analysing pronunciation. Mention sentence stress too!
• Learn lots of problems students have in general and apply them to each question

Here is a task Giovanni made that resembles Task 4 paper 1.

 

View this document on Scribd

 

Part A

• The danger here is to spend too much time. Make your answers brief and relevant to the text. i.e. don’t reel off a load of generic pre-learned items like “using anaphoric references to make the text cohesive e.g. this and that”. NO.
• Include one point on organisation or layout. You need to include a variety.
• This question should not take up more than a page.

Part B

Let’s have a look at what makes a question receive higher marks in this section.

 

View this document on Scribd

 

The left hand column represents a set of weaker answers. Can you see which dos and dont’s they include?

• Less information throughout
• Not stating the obvious e.g. “third person plural” or “noun, uncountable”
• The wrong language is analysed e.g. the passive voice instead of ‘due to’.
• No reference to the context of the language e.g. “Students might fail to recognize the cause/effect relationship between park closures and missile testing, i.e.due to+ noun (prepositional phrase)”
• Less eloquent grasp of terminology, for example a stronger answer includes “Indicates the amount of people available in the staff (semantic field of the text); subject of the participle clause”

Here is a copy of a ‘higher marks’ answer key and a ‘lower marks’ answer key:

 

Higher marks

 

View this document on Scribd

 

Lower marks

 

View this document on Scribd

 

Quick disclaimer: Giovanni used Standard American phonemic script, which is perfectly acceptable in the module 1 exam. Also, we’re not perfect, so you may find some extra points to add to some of these answers. If you do, any feedback would be welcome. We don’t claim to have created ‘the perfect answer’ but a helpful guide to achieving it.

Practice: take a number of texts and analyse them for key features. Make sure you have a variety of genres. That way you build up experience examining texts for their features and improve on noticing the features rather than applying pre-learned features to texts. You could do as Giovanni did and make your own version of part 4, with a good key and a bad key to practice part B. Analyse language, don’t limit yourself to reading grammar books.

Question 5

 

In task five it’s just as likely that candidates receive a speaking text as a writing text. Make sure you feel very confident about phonology for this question, it could make the difference if it happens to be a speaking text like June 2011.

 

Part A

 

As far as organisation goes:

• Headings for each part. Consider underlining examples.

Here is a copy of the speaking text given in the June 2010 examiner’s report.

 

Identify three key strengths and three key weaknesses of the text. Provide an example of each strength and each weakness. Your answer should focus on some or all of the areas listed below:

Organisation and cohesion
Accuracy of grammar
Accuracy of lexis
Accuracy of pronunciation: stress, individual sounds and sounds in connected
speech.

View this document on Scribd

You may notice that:

• A strength can also be repeated as a weakness. Look for limitations in the students’ ability.
• Examples are given with phonemic script. Very important, this one.
• The topic areas are narrowed down e.g, “accuracy of pronunciation – individual sounds and sounds in connected speech’
• Only one accuracy of grammar weakness. Try to look beyond grammar and lexis and to discourse/organisation/task achievement (written) or pronunciation/organisation/speaking sub skills (spoken)

There are also four extra marks for stating how strengths and weaknesses could aid or impede the learner. I have listed those below the strengths and weaknesses for you to connect with them. In the exam, it is highly advisable to include them with the strength or weakness.

 

Here is an example of a set of answers that would obtain much lower marks

 

View this document on Scribd

 

The general problems are:

• Answers are too wordy. The candidate wastes time writing in prose when simple and accurate terminology would suffice.
• Errors are incorrectly identified
• The candidate focuses on errors that are not prevalent
• Candidate does not use the phonemic script
• Candidate does not give and example
• Further points are very generic and seem pre-learned.

Part B

 This is the section in which you have to choose an area to prioritise to develop. It’s important to choose a correct area to develop (i.e. one you’re sure you got right!). This part of the exam seems to be one of the only areas in which pre-learned reasons can be applied to questions (although, be careful).

 

Focus on these areas:

 

ineffetively

 

Practice:  record your learners and analyse their language. Take their writing and do the same, prioritising weaknesses to then teach. The positive backwash of this task is that the skills you use in the exam are relevant to your teaching.
A note on validity: we have noticed that a spoken text in the form of a written text is somewhat contrived. The skills it is attempting to examine are done so effectively, as a teacher would have to listen, note down language and analyse it as they hear the learner, not with a transcription in retrospect. A recording of a student would fit the purpose much more. Testing terminology anyone?

Useful websites: 

DELTA flashcards with definition, further point, example

Module 1 examiner’s report for June 2010 and June 2011

Lots of flashcards on quizlet on terminology for module 1

Another set of flashcards

DELTA Module 1

This time last year, my thoughts were mainly concerned with DELTA. A few months down the line I would be sitting the module one exam. So strange is it might sound, here I am again, thinking about the same thing one year down the line. This time however, a colleague of mine, Giovanni @GioLic1976 and I have the task of delivering two seminars to this year’s module one candidates.

A brilliant idea came to us the other. Why not involve our PLN in the planning of the seminar? Since we’re tapping the wealth of the experience and ideas around us, we thought we could also share our project on this blog so our research serves as a resource for anyone to access during their preparation for the exam.

My research questions have been as follows:

• What sort of exam techniques are there to boost and maximise marks in the exam?
• What are the dos and especially the don’ts of the exam.
• Revision activities that you have found helpful in preparation for the exam.
• Timing, structure, layout: how do you/did you do it?
• Activities/materials you find useful for teaching exam technique.

So far, I’ve been collating my findings on this google doc. It’s open to the web, so anyone can contribute.

Leave a comment, make a suggestion on the googledoc, tweet us, anything you can, add extra questions you think we’ve missed. We’ll include it in our seminar and add it to the collection here. We hope to build a resource that is relevant for candidates for years to come.

Thanks very much,

Dale

Emi’s IATEFL Wonderland

Dale: Unfortunately I had to miss this year’s fun at IATEFL Glasgow. I spent the 5 days glued to my computer screen, feeding on any twitter update that came my way. My good friend and fantastic contributor to this blog, Emi, attended the conference. It seems that one thread stood out to Emi throughout the conference. Is it Dogme? As more people come into contact with the idea, they redefine and rethink their own teaching beliefs, as we’ve seen in the past six months with the emergence of much hot debate on the topic. Emi asks some important questions in her reflections on the conference, and leads me to wonder, now that there’s a name for a set of beliefs and practices that were clearly in existence before being given a title, is the idea itself in expansion? Is this why so many new practices have started falling under Dogme, or just good teaching. Over to Emi,

Oh my God my first IATEFL  (Glasgow 2012) is over. What a week. I have no idea where to start. It’s reasonable to think that everyone was talking about Dogme all the time, which of course they weren’t – it’s just who I chose to hang out with and the talks I chose to go to. Have I joined a religion?

It seemed that many people had responses to Dogme embedded into their talks

Dogme theme

It seemed that many people had responses to Dogme embedded into their talks. Even people like Michael Swan and Catherine Walker commented on emerging or “pop up” grammar in their talk. Of course Dogme is hardly anything new – been around nearly 12 years now – but it is interesting that it still provokes such a buzz. The talk by Martin Sketchley from British Council Romania on Friday practically ended in a fight and the older lady at the back who was longing for a proper definition of what Dogme is and how it was any different from what she has been doing all the time since she started teaching 20/30 years ago had a very fair point. An argument ensued about whether you should teach “used to” to pre-intermediate learners, i.e. it isn’t in the course books at that level so therefore considered not a good idea to teach it. I say teach whatever the students need or want – don’t patronize them. They know what they want to say so our job is to help them say it in whatever way we can. Not wait until chapter 5 in the course book.

It does help to have this label Dogme – it helps us think if nothing else.

Or maybe the label should just be “good teaching”?.

Good teaching

Was the thread running through everything really just a “we want better teaching” thread? Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill are setting up what they call an alternative movement, Active Intervensionist teaching because, it seems to me, they are sick of seeing bad teaching. They are asking is Dogme really the only alternative? Isn’t there another way? Of course it all depends what your definition of Dogme is in the first place. Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill say that what is important is “teaching in the moment” or going from “it” teaching to “I” teaching as Adrian said in the impromptu talk about “High Demand ELT” on Thursday evening in the bar. Is “High Demand ELT” a reaction to seeing so much bad teaching in the same way that Dogme was a reaction to all the boring course book based lessons a teacher may have taught 12 years ago?

 A reaction to seeing so much bad teaching

Day One for me was Wednesday

How arrogant and casual of us to think about throwing them out when some dream of more access to them not less?

First I met Marcos, the winner of the Frank Bell Scholarship from Ivory Coast who has 100 students per class, with 10 classes per week and yes he does have to mark their writing and grade every single one of them. This put things in perspective pretty quickly. He has to teach Dogme style whether he likes it or not. His school can’t afford to buy new books all the time and they have one tape recorder for the whole school. Perhaps course books are well perceived by such students. Perhaps course books represent wealth and success for them? How arrogant and casual of us to think about throwing them out when some dream of more access to them not less?

Diana Laudrillard gave the Plenary session on Wednesday

 She presented the idea of the teacher being an “innovative learning designer”. She questioned how sensible it was to have people such as Rupert Murdoch beaming things through technology directly into schools and urged teachers to take control and engage learners with good use of technology – she pointed out that Britain has no e – learning policy – and then listed a number of ways  to use technology in a better way. One of the key things she mentioned was Collaboration and she talked about “a shift from class teaching to more personalized teaching” and “less class presentation and more small group work” and a lot about learner autonomy and technology providing opportunities for students to use digital interactive tools and get feedback themselves.

She talked a lot about sharing teaching pedagogy and teachers building on each other’s work which is brilliant if teachers egos don’t get in the way.

The basic premise being that there are a range of pedagogical ways of structuring lessons which are repeated over and over and the same pattern of a lesson can be used with any kind of content

She described her website called “The Pedagogical Patterns Collector” which seemed to me like a very posh version of Dale’s lesson skeletons. The basic premise being that there are a range of pedagogical ways of structuring lessons which are repeated over and over and the same pattern of a lesson can be used with any kind of content. She demonstrated this brilliantly by showing us a lesson plan for a lesson on dentistry and then inserted  language lesson content into the same lesson skeleton/pattern. The website looks amazing and I will certainly try use it. It frees the teacher up to focus on the students more and to concentrate on “in the moment, hands on teaching”. A set structure but varying content – Dogme anybody or just good teaching?

Then I saw Bill Harris  give a talk on Live Listening

 Totally Dogme. Personal – if the teacher is personally engaged then the students are more likely to be. Couldn’t agree more. Organic teaching they call it. The teacher can control the input much more and tailor it, make it relevant for the students he/she is teaching at the moment. Minimal preparation so the teacher can concentrate on other issues more. Communicating with human beings, authentic, real, low tech. Dogme anybody or just good teaching?

What are your students actually trying to say?

Then it was Paul Seligson on the 3 Fs – foster, fluency, faster

There is too much “Teachering.” Among a plethora of other useful things he talked about “spending time correcting what comes from the heart not from the course books”. Not always asking your students to make a sentence “worry less about sentences and more about messages”. What are your students actually trying to say?

He said correct less and give better models. He said we don’t give students time because we are so busy teaching the silly bus (syllabus). “avoid race track English .. don’t rush. Quality not quantity. More conversation driven classes – work more on emergent language. Learner autonomy, Students tape themselves, ask them to judge themselves. Less of the teacher being judge and controller. Positive feedback on language used not just error correction.” Dogme anybody or just good teaching?

Panel Discussion – British Council ELT

 80% of education projects fail. They must be more bottom – up. The stakeholders (i.e. teachers and students) must be consulted and collaborated with  all the way right from the start if any educational project is going to be successful. The stake-holders must have a sense of ownership. “Focus on the people not the policy” A bottom up approach is recommended for success. Dogme anyone or just good management?

Party

Then sin of sins I went to the Macmillan publishers party. We are obviously not so against course books that we can’t accept an invitation to the publishers party!. On a boat, a ceilidh. Really good fun. Got to meet all. Scott Thornbury, Luke Meddings, Chia – particularly enjoyed singing along to the Proclaimers with Anthony Gaughan. After a few beers I think I did suggest to Scott Thornbury that he should get together with Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill and they could sort it all out together. Dogme anyone or methodology revolution?

Day Two – Thursday

 Amazing plenary from Steve Thorne called “Awareness, appropriacy and living language use” where he shared with us his amazing research into language generated through the motivation of computer games. How we cannot ignore this medium as so many people play them and produce tons and tons of ENGLISH via them. Check out these amazing statistics – “Approximately 20 million players have spent 17 billion hours on Xbox Live. That’s more than 2 hours for every person on the planet.”. He gave amazing examples of texts generated by non-English speakers while playing the game. So he is promoting the idea of students learning through their own game playing, chosen by them, controlled by them. They create their own fiction and their own characters and their own texts. Dogme anyone or just learner autonomy?-

Adam Beale and Emily Bell – Dogme and blogging in three social spaces: classroom, staffroom and chat room

There were yellow cards stuck on the walls with things like “winging it, no planning, easy and other things commonly associated with Dogme”. We were asked to put them on two walls – one Dogme wall and one non Dogme wall – we argued, we disagreed, we kept moving the cards back and forth. So many misconceptions. Adam asked “What research needs to be done to validate Dogme?” He said “Take a leap of faith – experiment. Every class should be a surprise! “. He presented his findings, videos of students describing their Dogme experiences.

Take a leap of faith – experiment. Every class should be a surprise!

Scott Thornbury was there and he said at the end “every good teacher should be doing this sort of reflection”. Dogme anyone or just good CPD?

Then Niall Lloyd from The Anglo Mexican Foundation gave a talk called Dogme – learning without the pressure of technology

He began by saying “I don’t like Dogme because Dogme has rules and I don’t like rules” ! When I told Scott Thornbury this later in the coffee shop he said “Oh yes, everyone is always so worried about the rules. Can’t they see things change?”

Niall Lloyd talked about the idea of Dogme plus which is Dogme + using computers, materials and anything else you want. Sounds a lot like Chia’ Suan Chong’s “improvised principled eclecticism”. Chaz Puglieze said “it (i.e. the course book system) doesn’t work like that. Lesson plans are just teaching by numbers”

Dogme anyone or just good teaching?

 Then I had an interesting discussion with Richard Hillman, one of the teachers I work with in London who said “Dogme can be just as restrictive as using course books because students are restrained by their own lack of language and that of other students”. Food for thought. 

I don’t like Dogme because Dogme has rules and I don’t like rules

Michael Swan and Catherine Walker

 Not all grammar “pops up” – continuing on from what Richard said, Swan and Walker said sometimes you need to impose the language on the students. They said not all students need the same grammar at the same time. Very true. TBL is not enough sometimes. Students need “explicit teaching”. The moment when a grammar point does “pop up” , this is the moment for a pause (Luke Meddings) , or a “grammar focus”, which is very often a teacher led grammar presentation. Catherine Walker said that there is evidence that grammar presentation works and referred to guided discovery, examples, texts, short texts with relevant examples. Students make up their own grammar gap fills, personalize at all costs . Dogme anyone or just good grammar teaching ?

Then it was time for Renata Franco and Melanies talk “Who is a legitimate English speaker?”

They talked about power structures and students own communities. They talked about rethinking the traditional power structure of ELT. I thought about course books so rooted in western British culture – whose culture? – while I was listening to them. They focused specifically on delayed feedback to encourage confidence, “creating empathy is key” they said, giving students control over their own material, recording themselves. Student centred lessons. Dogme anyone or just culturally aware teaching?

I thought about course books so rooted in western British culture – whose culture?

Even the eminent Neuroscientist James Zull , the plenary speaker on Friday, said,in his talk “A brain-based model for human learning” that the most important thing for learning is “ownership”, “stimulation” and “practice”. He also talked about learning by forgetting, abandoning things that don’t work”. Dogme anyone or just understanding learning?

 Someone said to me later that day and I’m sorry I can’t remember who, that although he didn’t agree with everything connected to Dogme, he, “liked the buzz around it. The slightly dangerous edge which is evident even now in 2012”…. twelve years later. I know what he means.

 He liked the buzz around Dogme. The slightly dangerous edge which is evident even now in 2012

So is the word Dogme just being bandied about to describe good teaching, good management, free thinking, quality teacher training, sensitive response to students, intelligent syllabus design and so on? Is it a one-size fits all word? which anyone can use to describe whatever stage they are at in their teaching life ? Is it as Jim Scrivener says just “an attempt to answer everything?”. Or is it (or has it become) a kind of trigger word much like “hippy” or “champagne socialist” or “facebook” or “cunt” or “coffee coloured” or “fat” or “born again” … words which are sure to provoke a reaction and get a discussion going whether positive or negative?. It’s twelve years on and we still haven’t stopped talking about it …… people are still arguing about it. A bit like religion really.

Hmm, Dogme? Very young learners?

What am I thinking about at the moment? A quick glance at the previous posts list on my blog would suggest younger learners. An accurate guess.  In fact, the last six months has been a roller-coaster ride learning experience of teachingchildren ages 7-10 – an age for the most part alien to me until coming back to Italy.

Here it’s big business, young learners. While numbers in business and general English are falling, there has been some quite substantial growth in the number of younger learners whose parents or schools are taking the initiative and signing their children up for class. In short, it’s an area of teaching that an EFL teacher in Rome would be a fool not to start specialising in.

If you’ve glanced at my blog since its inauguration February last year, you may be aware that I’m part of the Dogme crowd, a dogmetician. You may have also asked yourself as I have, “but does this guy do Dogme with his younger learners too?”. Not yet, I respond.

“Does this guy do Dogme with his younger learners too?”

 Of course, that’s not to say that it would be impossible. Nevertheless, it appears rather necessary to err on the side of caution.

With very little experience of low levels at young ages, it would seem of paramount importance to to understand your environment before embarking on a Dogme journey. Absolute folly, some would say, “younger learners need structure”, “activities and worksheets add the all-important balance that settles”, “songs and rhymes make lessons more fun and interactive”, “learning styles and student preferences need to be catered for”. Well articulated arguments and very convincing, each one.

These are well articulated arguments, and convincing ones

 You might ask, what have you been doing then?

• Lesson structures: including feedback routines, classroom layout, stir-and-settle activities.
• Different activities to appeal to a variety of learning styles
• Techniques of using flashcards to teach vocabulary
• Using well-designed materials well: one sheet per one-hour lesson, preferably
• Using songs, chants and jazz-chants
• Drama and miming activities
• Helping students with different problems: behavioural, pronunciation, word formation (without using their more formal names).
• Classroom management: giving positive and negative feedback on behaviour
• Functional language for the classroom.

In this post, I suggested that a newly qualified teacher could and even should try a Dogme lesson. By no means am I planning on retracting anything. I do however think it is important to add that this post dealt with adult classes. Anyone experienced with both will agree with me that they are two completely different kettles of fish. Preparation is important.

I suggested that a newly qualified teacher could and even should try a Dogme lesson. By no means am I planning on retracting anything.

Last Monday, a Dogme lesson happened in my 8 year-old class of Quinta Elementare. I’d like to share it with everyone. I think it’s important to note that before the lesson, I had a plan and materials that I fully intended on using.

1. Last week students had cut out and stuck in pictures of furniture to make their bedrooms. Seated in a circle, I used a student’s book to review the vocabulary from the week before. First with pictures, then spelling the words on our backs, then lip reading.

2. When in the last stage, a student said, “I’m in my room, I sleeping”, another asked me from the same group “how do you say gioacare al wii in English?”. At that point, I decided on running with this language for a bit.

3. I split the class into four groups. Two groups were to wait outside the room (A + B) (there’s a hall-monitor to look after them outside) The other two thought of an action they do in their rooms (C + D). Groups C and D could ask me in Italian for the action if they needed it. Once decided, representatives from group C and D mimed their actions separately to students from A and B. One by one, each student came in, watched the action and copied it. Another student then came in to whom the previous student mimed the action. At the end we guessed the actions.

4. Sat students in groups of 4 and we mimed actions in our rooms together. I moved around helping with various difficulties and noting down some of the actions. I also made an effort to model the present continuous, which I would say 75% of students started using.

5. We then moved to the board and recalled the actions we had mimed. I wrote “I’m in my room” on the board and wrote the actions given to me by students:

“I’m in my room”

“I’m getting dressed”

“I’m playing on the computer”

“I’m looking at my A.S Roma poster”

“I’m reading my favourite book”

“I’m watching television”

“I’m playing on my Wii”

“I’m sleeping in my bed”

6. I then asked students to go and draw themselves doing three actions in their rooms they’d designed the lesson before and write what they are doing. I then gave them the question “what are you doing?” and they shared their actions with each other, asking the question and responding. I circulated helping students that had more difficulty with prounciation, using some cuisenaire rods to show the different words.

7. I had written a chant in the meantime and had some cuisenaire rods with me. At the end of the lesson we sat in a circle and sung the following song, with different coloured rods for (I’m) (watching) (television) for example.

The chant was:

In my room, In my room!

What are you doing?

In my room, In my room!

I’m getting dressed!

In my room, In my room!

What are you doing?

I’m sleeping in my bed!

In my room, in my room!

What are you doing?

In my room, in my room

What are you doing?

I’m playing on my Wii!

8. We finished the lesson by filling out our behaviour chart. All smiley faces for lots of English used. Students left the classroom still singing out chant!

Phil Wade’s comment:

WOW! This is good. It’s sort of a mix of kids after school English clubs, drama, music and English classes all mixed in.

From my brief studies at this level I do remember lots of worksheets because we had to cover lots of teaching points. If you take this lesson as covering and practising the present continuous it’s pretty TEFLish. In fact, it’s very much like the ‘foreign language lesson’ I had on the CELTA in that it creates physical and vocal production ahead of written. I think you chose the physical activity well, kids love doing and they need to be active. Physical stuff also goes well with musical activities as you did here. The movement from outside, to groups and mats is also very useful and keeps kids on their toes.

I would only add that maybe you could have had students taking turns in standing up, doing their actions and others copying. It would also be a good opportunity for working on question and negative forms, or maybe you did this at the end of stage 3. Turn this into a ‘guess the action game in 5 questions’ and you’re onto a winner. You could get small groups in circles to choose 1 and then all do it together with 1 student guessing.  Another is to turn it more drama and get students to create a moving scene in a part of the classroom. Then if you introduce the classic ‘freeze’ you can start on past continuous or use ‘change’ and then you get “I was dancing salsa but now I’m doing yoga”. But I think your action drawing was great. A flipbook is good for PC as they can draw things that move with just paper and a pencil for flipping.

Another song you could do is to line students up and ask each to do an action and then see how many people can remember or build it up like the 12 days of Xmas and students must remember the gestures too.

I love circle time, it’s a classic and stems from the beginning of civilisation and storytelling. It’s great to start the day and end it like that, especially with a book or a song. Kids then leave singing and will probably sing all the way home. There are lots of kid groups that teach with music and give kids CDs and song books to revise at home. Have you thought of this? Having a weekly song? They can make instruments and you can either make your own songs based on what you cover or use/adapt classics.

Emi’s Dogme Diary

Emi:

Wow, a lot’s happened since I last wrote. My cloak and dagger have been firmly ditched and I have officially signed my life away to my Dog. He is now definitely in the driving seat. I thought I had been tentatively dogging for a while but now I am not so sure. I feel like I am retraining myself all over again but without a trainer. I am starting to question everything I have been doing over the last 8 years and it’s exciting but hard.

At work we have to teach according to a linear grammar dictated by the book. It is not compulsory at my school to use the book but I am obliged to “do the grammar in the order it comes in the book in order to correspond with other teachers/groups etc”. Language clearly does not work like that and I still feel like I am dictating the form/line the conversations in my class take. I am either “forcing” the students to use certain grammar structures so I can fit with the order of the book or I manipulate the conversation to come round to that grammar structure. Is this so bad? Sometimes it helps, it gives me a starting point after all, but most of the time I feel the learners are not in the driving seat enough for my Dog to be happy. As I write, the pros and cons of this are of course being debated all over twitter and on all the fantastic Dogme blogs that seem to be mushrooming all over the place as well as by many esteemed grammarians of the ELT world.

 

So sometimes my dog runs happily ahead or beside me. Sometimes he is stubborn and difficult. It is, as I am always saying, so much about breaking through the fear and trusting yourself.

How I use language that emerges from my classes:

Testing

One thing I have started to do recently is have a regular Monday morning test. Hardly a radical idea but hard to do when there is rolling enrolment in our school and we have new students every Monday morning.

I often do the spoken vocab test described in Chia Suan Chongs’ IATEFL 2010 presentation where I explain the word verbally and give them the context within which we all heard it last week and the students write it down. New students can ask what we were talking about and everyone can find new contexts for the language that helps recycle it again.

Every Friday I make a written test of new language and grammar that emerged from the previous weeks lessons for use on the next Monday morning. I write gap fills written in the context of the conversations we had last week, scrambled lexis, finish the sentences so they have to remember what their fellow students actually said (I suppose a written version of“What did I just say” from Teaching Unplugged) and pronunciation exercises.

The Monday morning test gives the students an accurate record of the most important language that emerged the week before and it seems to motivate them and it also gives a gentle, calm start to the week. We have 3 hour lessons with the same students every day so there is a limit how interested they can constantly be in each other. Sometimes they don’t want to speak to each other.

Dictation

I have also started regular personal class dictations. This again is hardly rocket science but it works well with low-level learners. I am a great believer in dictation as it focuses students and also gives them a written record of our class conversations not to mention all the other usual advantages of dictation such as listening, spelling, punctuation and so on.

Mini lesson skeleton

Teacher writes summary of conversation held in previous class mentioning all students by name. Includes examples of

emergent new lexis, noun phrases, verb phrases, collocations, gerund/ infinitive agreements, aspect and anything else discussed. Also refer to funny things that happened while we were talking (one of my students fell off his chair in the middle of class last week for example).

·      This is good to do on an IWB or a OHP as low level learners will need to see the correct version.

·      Put gaps in all the relevant places.

·      In the next class (or any time you want to recycle) dictate the text, with beeps for where the gaps are.

·      Ask students to spell their names at the relevant moment. This tends to make them smile and sometimes they have to repeat which is useful especially for very shy and timid learners. A particularly good one to do with a new group so everyone can get used to each others’ names and of course good practice for the alphabet.

·      Depending on level and difficulty of text give them time to check together, show them the original with the gaps and then have them guess/remember what is in the gaps.

·      Then they have to tell their partner what the dictation was about without the text. This may or may not generate further discussion depending on the original topic, mood of students etc.

Here is an example of one I used with a low level class, as you can see there is a lot of repetition, sometimes the same language used in different ways. I have marked in red the language that had emerged from the previous class and was covered over on the IWB as a gap fill.

“ Yesterday in class we talked about future plans and jobs. Esra would like to open a café in Turkey. Emine is planning to renovate her grandmothers’ house and make it into a boutique hotel. Daviti hopes to be a detective, he likes reading Sherlock Holmes. Emanuela and Rustya both enjoy their present jobs but would like to improve their English to use at work. Charlotte is hoping to apply to university in London… etc etc”

I think you get the point. As I said it’s not rocket science but it works well and ensures a good record of the emergent language for everyone. Teacher included.

Dog lovers

I am lucky enough to work for an organization that allows me a lot of freedom and trusts its teachers. I realize not everyone has that chance. Some places you can’t even bring pets in the building. When I started writing

on this blog last August I thought our school was against Dogs – I couldn’t have been more wrong. There are many Dog lovers all around it seems. So much so that head office organized a conference (Open Space Technology) last December that had no pre-prepared timetable. It was arranged to respond to emerging ideas from the attendees (us, the teachers) and bent and adapted itself around these ideas. Some of the questions that came up were: the effect of rolling enrolment on learning and the tentativeidea that scrapping course books may go some way to help this. It had a very clear structure, was very well organized and the emergent language/ideas will provide a lot of material for post-planning but there was no lesson plan in advance. A perfect Dogme lesson methinks. Watch this space Dog lovers!

From the chalkface (part 2)

As some of you may remember, I posted a few days ago on my YLs class. I’d like to start by thanking everyone for their responses and encouragement:

Reaching out to students like A and B can be tough, Sadly, this is often because you are the only one prepared to do so. As you say, many parents prefer to wait for them to ‘grow out of it’ and this is often the attitude of other teachers as well

- Dave Dodgson

Apart from the fact that my brain wants to study these kids (dyspraxia, gifted, shy, … not that I like labels necessarily but by your descriptions it sounds like they need a bit of extra attention at their own particular level: not easy in a classroom full of peers!)

- Louise Alix

As for the ‘cloud-boy’. If he’s got strong logical-mathematical intelligence, some jig-saw puzzles might do the job. I make jig-saw puzzles myself and there are lots of options of using them. I guess anything that can make him focus would work. Snap! – may be for practicing voacbulary?

- Alexandra Guzik

secondly yes, absolutely, the best way to control the uncontrollable is to give them the control. If he is good with numbers, assign him as the “Maths Correspondent” of the class. Get him to do a poster outlining his duties in his post in addition to contact details, i.e; the best time to speak etc. Communication problems in language are mostly related to self confidence issues which explains the stuttering and withdrawal from classroom activities

- Tamara

Parents

Unfortunately, it would seem that many parents here are either unwilling to admit or unaware of the fact that their children have special needs. Of course, not when the issue is staring you right in the face, to be blunt about it i.e. serious problems with motor skills or physical disabilities. The question calls for sensitivity with their parents; they don’t want to be seen as having ‘the special kid’. Thankfully, my class contains fewer of these children than others, but Student B is a classic example of this kind of issue. His parents wish to remain unaware of his difficulties.

Behaviour is another difficult topic to broach with parents. Many parents tell our teachers, “you need to shout at them more, then they will behave themselves”. It seems that here, shouting is seen as the way of confronting negative behaviour. Of course, any YLs teacher out there will likely know that shouting lies among the least effective ways of dealing with naughty children. Here’s a conversation I had with a parent concerning her daughter:

“but why does she have a low mark for behaviour, is she a bad child, you say she winds up the boys”

“It’s not that she is badly behaved, but she antagonises the boys when she’s with them, especially Student X”

“Ah yes, Student X, she is always talking about him. You should just shout at her more when she does it”

“Yes, he is often the protagonist too. Listen, I think she may respond more to positive and negative feedback on her behaviour. This is why I have given a low mark for behaviour, hoping that she will take it as an incentive to improve in class, I feel she will respond. It gives her more time to think about what she is doing. I’ve also separated her from Student X to give her a chance to show me this”

I think it’s important to note as well that I don’t blame parents for shouting at their children. After all, I have them for an hour once a week, they have them for a lifetime. The situations are completely different. The mother of the student walked away smiling and happy. Her daughter was a little angel in class yesterday. I told her her after class to go and tell her mother that Dale said she was perfect that day. She did with a beaming smile on her face.

Extra attention

The criteria with which I planned my lessons yesterday arose from my previous reflections, advice from the assistant director where I work, and the comments left by visitors to this blog:

• Include touchy/feeling activities
• Give Student B a more ‘mathsy’ task to see how he responds to it
• Give Student A and student B some one-to-one attention
• Make the best use of the space in the classroom to keep students active for the whole lesson.
• Provide positive or negative feedback on classroom behaviour and language use in class.

Here’s a post plan of the lesson:

1. Started by sitting in a circle on the floor and reveiwed animal vocabulary and the chunks we looked at last lesson’snakes are long, sharks are mean’, using mimes and acting to elicit vocabulary. Praised students and asked them to mime an animal to guess as a reward.

Seated still in a circle on the floor, we counted to 40, each student taking a turn. After reaching 20, I wrote 21 on a student’s back for them to guess the number, to model the next activity. We carried on until reaching 40. After, students drew numbers on backs to guess. I got involved as well.

*At this point I made sure I watched Student B carefully. He was by far the most engaged in the activity.

** Student A was allowed to work with her friend as a reward for being so good. Students sat back in their places and completed the following activity with letters and numbers:

I then gave students the following activity to do to practise saying and recognising the spoken forms of letters and numbers, which they still have difficulty with. During the activity I noticed that Student B’s performance differed quite considerably between the two stages. In the first part of activity he needed to listen to letters and find the corresponding numbers. In the second, he said the letters and and listened to the corresponding numbers to write. He found producing the individual sounds very difficult. I helped him out and congratulated him on doing well. It was fairly evident though that he was frustrated.

After we finished the activity. I took some tap measures and put up a piece of card on the wall and we stood around it. One of the students said “quanto sei alto, Dale?” which is “how tall are you, Dale”, which I’d written, without my name, on the top of the card. Two students stepped forward and measured me. I then asked them to measure each other in groups and say how tall they are.

We lined up to take turns to mark our names and heights on the card on the wall.

In a circle at the end of the lesson, we filled out the behaviour chart. Every student received a yellow smiley face for outstanding behaviour. When I gave feedback, I gave it in L1, then English. I made sure also to have a quiet word on the side with Student B to tell him how impressed I was with him that day.

From success to success

This was one positive lesson. I need to think how I can build on this to make one positive experience for learners into another, make short term successes and small victories in long term development.

How can I go forward?

• Think about implementing a marbles in a jar style behaviour feedback system so that students can get feedback without my reliance on L1, even if it’s very little and rarely.
• Do not go over the top with ‘mathsy’ stuff. It worked once but that’s not to say it will work so well next lesson. Include snippets of it in activities.
• I need to continue with varying the activities in class, lots of moving, standing, sitting, pair-work, individual work, groupwork. Include more games too, with puzzels.
• Give students individual responsibilities and think about creating a rota for this. I could make student B responsible for doing a head count.
• Continue with positive feedback to build confidence in the class. I like how the classroom is becoming ‘our space’ and students are taking ownership of it, we have been really bonding as a group in the past few weeks.
• Find a time-efficient way of letting parents know about their children’s progress. We have very little time together, which can make it difficult.
• Do not focus too much on the special needs of the class. Remember the high-flyers and make sure there’s constant challenge for them too.

Reflection at the chalkface

“Oh my gosh that was an absolute disaster, I lost complete control, they (the children) were running circles around me” - 

An extract from my journal in December 2011, written after the YLs I teach on Thursday afternoon had a particularly rowdy hour. They were chatting (in Italian), distracted, not engaged in the lesson had absolutely no respect for their teacher.

“Little brats, why won’t they just behave themsevles”

“They are absolute terrors”

It was quite unfortunate that these were the thoughts occupying my mind on the walk back to school. Why, you may ask, were they so negative? It is perhaps a defence mechanism employed to mask whose responsibility it was to resolve this situation. In these cases, it is tempting to deflect blame onto the easiest targets. Fortunately, the brisk walk back to work was enough to cleanse my mind of these thoughts. By the time I arrived back to school, my thoughts had refocused on how I could take proactive steps to change this situation.

What is the cause of this problem?

How can I change my classroom to encourage more positive behaviour in my classroom?

In contrast, these are much more constructive thoughts, wouldn’t you say? With this question in mind, I set about preparing a rough action plan.  First I identified a few salient points to improve: classroom management, use of materials and grading of language. I figured that the reason for the lack of students engagement in class was because the language was too difficult, the lesson pacing was too quick, the structure of the lesson was not ‘stir-and-settle’ and tasks lasted too long.

In addition, without any system of giving feedback in place – I was relying on verbal feedback, which was useless, given that the learners are more or less absolute beginners – students had no way of knowing how they behaved.

• More engaging materials
• Classroom layout
• Lesson pacing
• Feedback

More engaging materials

The language school where I work is a veritable library of materials to use with YLs; they have everything from jazz chants to CLIL activities. What is more, the teachers I work with are seasoned pros when it comes to teaching young children.

• Read up on teaching techniques using flashcards.
• Team teach a lesson with my assistant director using cuisenaire  rods to make a song with new chunks of language.
• Take activities from resource books and plan how to adapt them to the class.

Classroom Management

• Abandon the classic ‘communicative horseshoe’ in favour of tables grouped together in squares; I can monitor and give on-to-one attention to those need it.
• Observe a more experienced colleague. Make note of any similarities with your classroom. Note any differences and consider the reasons.

Lesson Pacing

• Brainstorm stirring and settling activities.

Feedback

• Introduce a behaviour chart to be filled in weekly.
• Design a ‘classroom responsibilities’ chart e.g. English monitor, writing the date on the board, wiping the board, handing out sheets of paper.
• Draw up classroom rules, with Italian translations (to avoid any ambiguity).

After the Christmas break the class completely changed. By the end of January I had finished my first action plan and the class is going much better. Songs and visuals, new techniques and games keep students engaged. Feedback makesstudents happy that they are pleasing their teacher and doing well in class. New classroom management keeps students focused and makes the classroom more interactive. As a result, we have a fantastic rapport developing. Thursday afternoons are now a joy.

Recent developments

I flagged up four students as problematic in the past three weeks.

“what’s causing this behaviour?”

For two of them, it was a simple case of separating them and seating them in different positions in the classroom. The other two were slightly more perplexing however, and required a little more thinking.

Student A

Very disruptive behaviour, still not very engaged in class, plays, challenges the teacher’s authority in class whenever she can. It might seem a classic case of a badly-behaved child. I spoke to her teacher, who revealed to me that she has trouble producing words in Italian; her linguistic ability in L1 is far lower than her classmates’. It is therefore entirely possible that her rebellious behaviour in class may be a way of masking her low ability so as not to stand out and look like ‘the dumb kid’.

• Involve her more in class: give her tasks that give her responsibility like handing out materials or collecting in pens and glue.
• When the class is seated around the teacher, ask her to sit next to you to give her more direct attention and help her with her linguistic difficulties.
• Make tasks a little more open with easier language. This gives the stronger students in the class a chance to run with the language and frees the teacher up to give her some one-to-one teaching and engage her.
• Give very positive feedback on language and behaviour. Make her feel like she is achieving.

Student B

Unfortunately, this student is a bit more perplexing. He shares student A’s problems when it comes to producing words in English. He slurs and stutters, producing an incomprehensible blur of language. He is clumsy and spends most of the lesson with his head in the clouds.

• Sit him next to the boy with disabilities’ assistant. The adult figure is likely to regulate his behaviour so that I am not forced to give him constant attention.
• Give him the same one-to-one attention as student A.

The student is still alienated in class around his classmates. He rarely knows what he is supposed to do and seems very uninterested in taking part in class.

Not surprisingly, after chatting to his parents, it emerged that he is in fact lagging behind his companions in Italian. But interestingly, it also came to our attention that he is succeeding in maths. After talking to my assistant director, we decidedthat tasks with a lower linguistic load that appeal to more logical/analytical learners, using numbers, counting and mathsy things might appeal to him, give him a sense of achievement and engage him more.

At this point, I’d like to call on anyone who reads this blog to contribute their ideas on student B. Have you had a student like this? If so, what measures did you take to involve the student more in class? What activities do you know of the sort I outlined above?

 

Strategies in vocabulary learning

Last week I published a post on vocabulary. I’d like to start out by thanking everyone for their great responses, I came away with a lot of ideas and lots to think about. In the post, I gave a run-down of some of my aims for the next few weeks/months/years. since starting though my focus has taken me off in different directions and I’ve realised consequently that what I will actually publish might not resemble the initial post.

Vocabulary learning strategies are divided into categories by Schmitt (1997: 207-8),  Stoffer (1995), Nation (2001: 218) and Gu and Johnson (1996: 650-651). I came across these taxonomies here on Magda Kadubiec’s wonderful blog and I owe her a reference in this case. For more information I suggest you visit her blog or get hold of any of the literature mentioned above. I have sorted the strategies into a table and put it in the appendix and will try and link the strategies I’ve come across and thought of to this, just to keep it a little bit theoretical.

Strategies

1. Appealing to the senses

• This technique works especially well with young learners. A colleague of mine varies the pitch, the volume and the speed of her voice when introducing vocabulary. The difference in sound is thought to increase the chances of vocabulary retention. 
• Another colleague has young learners spell words on each others’ backs to help solidify the image of a words shape in memory. This technique is also useful with dyslexic learners because the mind creates a link between the sense of the word – feeling the word – and eliminates the block between hearing  or reading a word and making mental image of it.
• Young learners again: get learners miming actions, miming nouns (eat pizza, take the dog for a walk, do homework).
• Stange movements, for example, pronouncing a word while doing a funky yoga style movement.
• Using sounds for abstract concepts like feelings, music works very well for this.
• Alternatively, instead of making a connection between a word and a sense, you can use a sense to find connections to words. Place learners back in the situation in which they came across new vocabulary, establish how they felt, what they were wearing, how they were sitting, what could they hear. Give them a word that came up in class and see how much they remember. More detail on this idea  here
• Making a mental image of a word upon encountering it. Take 5-10 seconds just to visualise a scene to connect to the world, then visualise the word and spell it out in the air with your finger. For example, ‘mettere troppa carne al fuoco’ in Italian I made a vision of a bbq with a man panicking because there are too many steaks to fry – the idiom means to have too many things on the go at the same time.

I would categories many of these as ‘Encoding strategies’, ‘activation strategies’ or ‘Consolidation – memory’ strategies.

Organising Strategies

1. Encoding

The strategies below are focused on ‘encoding’ a word over ‘decoding’ a word; going from word level to a higher, more complex level of information. For example, searching for the definition of ‘extreme’ is decoding, while finding ‘extreme weather conditions’ or /ɪkstri:meʒəz/ would fall under encoding. To empower students, work on the following strategies is helpful:

• Monolingual dictionary training: teaching learners to go beyond just the definition and look for information on collocations, register, frequency, colligation, pronunciation, examples, derivatives and word class. Also, using context to select the most fitting definition, i.e. not taking the first example.
• Online dictionary training and paper-based dictionary training.Using bilingual dictionaries. Using suitable online dictionaries to find word information (mentioned above).
• How NOT to use google translate.
• Training students to use language corpora for their own research into language. Words and phrases is a good place to start. This strategy has the added bonus of providing practice of guessing meaning from context. There are drawbacks, beware of these. You can find many of them here.

2. Finding

• Practise mining texts for vocabulary in class, sorting them into collocations and storing them.
• Set homework for learners to find texts that interest them and repeat. It’s also worth highlighting the difference between mining and reading… so that they don’t see every time they read as an occasion for mining vocabulary.

More on texts in this informative and helpful post by Michael Swan 

3. Storing

• Creating word lists according to theme/topic/ or perhaps wordlists of words more similar to or different from L1 cognates.
• The writing of vocabulary cards at the end of class, the start of class, during class. Use these as store of vocabulary, available at all times to use as revision. Hand them out during activities for student to record new vocabulary as it emerges, use them for vocabulary input during activities and ask learners to explain to each other after or recall the context in which the lexis was introduced.
• Training in keeping a lexical notebook. See my post on lexical notebooks previously for more information.

These are strategies for students. I’ll be addressing strategies for teachers in my next post in which I’ll look at the topic under ‘rehearsal strategies’.

Below are a few lesson skeletons if anyone is thinking of implementing vocabulary strategies in their classrooms. If you have any comments or additions to make they’d be very welcome.

 

Lesson skeleton: Discussing strategies

Preparation: draw up a list of vocabulary strategies suitable for your learners.

1. Start the lesson by asking learners how they feel they learn English best, how they were taught at school to learn English and how much time they spend learning English outside the classroom. Push them hard to find out any beliefs or habits that might shape their views, e.g. teacher never tests them, learnt words with translations in school out of context, never kept a vocabulary book.
2. Explain what a strategy is and have learners draw up separate lists of possible vocabulary strategies. Have a representative of each group move another and explain their choices.
3. Make a consolidated list and compare to the list you have drawn up. Have learners compare and discuss which they think are useful/not useful for them and why. Finish off the activity by having learners make a list in their books of which strategies they are going to try out in the coming weeks.
4. Provide feedback or examples of any strategies discussed in class or make a list and make it the focus of the next lesson.

Advantages: 

• Having learners discuss strategies raises their awareness of the topic.
• Discussing the suitability of strategies involves them in the process and means the ones they choose are more likely to be tried.
• Discussing their previous learning experiences helps you to understand their current vocabulary habits and make appropriate suggestions in feedback.

To consider:

• Learners may be used to teacher-led instruction on this topic; explain the rationale of the activity before.
• Don’t expect too much from learners when they draw up their lists. They may simply not have any information to bring to the table. Mingle and input some ideas.

   

Lesson skeleton: Lexical notebook training

Ask learners to buy a notebook to be used as a vocabulary book and bring in a lexical notebook of your own (if you have one).

1.  Ask learners to discuss how they store vocabulary. Do they think it’s organised? Easy to read? What sort of information to they use?
2. Mingle and discuss, adding ideas.
3. Draw up a list of: what a good vocabulary notebook should/shouldn’t include. It’s helpful to do this after the dictionary training and discussing strategies as learners will have a better idea of what to include.
4. Discuss any interesting points like translation, L1 cognates, notes on grammar specific to learners’ difficulties, neat and tidy presentation/structure, use of colours, highlighters, pictures etc.
5. Ask learners to reogranise some vocabulary they have already stored on the first pages of their vocabulary notebooks they brought to class, input more information about the words and encourage learners to use dictionaries, Google, the internet, to find more examples

Extension: check vocabulary notebooks on a bi-weekly/monthly basis and give feedback on structure and language, make suggestions and add more vocabulary. Use notebooks in class to recycle language stored in them.

Advantages:

• A vocabulary notebook is a personal thing, therefore its implementation needs to consider also individual learning styles and the final product must resemble these. Each notebook will be different. Discussing this in the lesson helps.
• Doing this at the start of the course helps make sure learners have a record throughout the course.
• Fosters independent learning.

To consider:

• Learners simple may not have time to keep this up outside of class.
• Different learning styles need to be considered. Allow learners to reject the idea on valid grounds, i.e. not laziness.
• Lexical notebooks take time. Following up on the lesson is vital.

   

Lesson skeleton: Dictionary training

Preparation: Take some lexis looked at during the course until now. Bring in some dictionaries, some paper. Draw up a list of what’s important in knowing a word (see appendix 2).

1. Give learners appendix 2 and ask them to rank these in order of importance. Discuss answers and provide feedback according to your beliefs about language. I generally rank collocation among the top 3. See if your learners do the same.
2. Distribute some dictionaries and ask learners where we can find this information. Ask them to use a word they have already studies in class to lower the cognitive burden of the activity and avoid them randomly browsing the dictionary.
3. Ask them to create a mindmap of information about the word, containing as many categories as possible from the list.
4. Give feedback on students’ findings. Give them some freer practice of finding words and encoding them with a dictionary.

Extension: Bring dictionaries into class regularly and dedicate 10 minutes at the end of the lesson to encoding new words.

Advantages

• Learners realise there is more to knowing a word than just L1-L2 translation.
• Dictionary trained learners are empowered researchers of language.
• Reduces the workload on the teacher; learners are more independent.

To consider

• Monolingual dictionaries could seem a daunting prospect. Introduce them slowly and according to the level.
• Learners might not see the rationale of the activity; it might be worth explaining.

Appendix 1

Schmitt	Gu and Johnson	Stoffer	Nation
Discovery – Determination	Guessing - Using background knowledge/wider context Using linguistic cues/immediate context	Strategies with authentic language use	Planning - choosing words - choosing the aspects of word knowledge - choosing strategies - planning repetition
Discovery – Social	Dictionary Strategies -Dictionary strategies for compensation -Extended dictionary strategies - looking-up strategies	Strategies used for self-motivation	Sources - analysing the word - using context consulting a reference source in L1 or L2 - Using parallels in L1 and L2
Consolidation – Social	Note-taking strategies -Meaning-orienated note taking - Usage-orientated note-taking	Strategies used for organising words	Processes -Noticing - Retrieving - Generating
Consolidation – Memory	Rehearsal Strategies - Using word lists - Oral repetition - Visual repetiton	Strategies to create mental linkages
Consolidation – Cognitive	Encoding Strategies -Association/elaboration - Imagery - Visual encoding - Auditory encoding - Using word-structure - Semantic encoding - Contextual encoding	Memory strategies
Consolidation – Metacognitive	Activation strategies - memorising facts linking them to numbers or familiar words - remembering lists by picturing them in specific locations. - Establishing an acoustic and imagine link between an L2 word and another	Strategies involving creative activities
		Strategies involving physical action
		Strategies used to overcome anxiety
		Auditory strategies

Appendix 2

1. What the word means.

2. Collocations, .e.g. Take a shower, take a nap.

3. The grammar we often find with the word (e.g. articles, tenses, prepositions).

4. How we say the word.

5. How we translate the word.

6. Is the word formal or informal?

7. Common phrases in which we use the word.

8. Word class (e.g. noun, adjective, adverb).

9. How the word is spelt.

10. A written record of the word.