Challenging Higher-Level Learners

It can be daunting to have a group of near proficient speakers in front of you; they’ve dedicated years to studying and perfecting their language. What’s more, you might find yourself faced with an advanced grammar-driven syllabus that your class would eat for breakfast. How do you make sure that they don’t finish the course feeling slightly short-changed? I’ve put together  in this post a few tips I’ve amassed over the past few years teaching advanced classes:

1. Get their hands on their own language

I bring my MP3 player to most lessons in case I’ve planned a discussion or a moment arises that’s suitable for recording the class. Of course, get their consent before recording – the first time can be a bit daunting. With the recording, you can play it back and correct as a class, transcribe it for a delayed error correction session or send it to your learners after class with a follow up activity. Either way, it gives your learners a great opportunity to get their hands on ‘their language’. At higher levels especially, motivation can be lower and there’s the temptation to become a bit complacent with their language. This added extra opens up a whole new dimension to working with what students provide you with.

You can also use this information for individual goal setting with learners or to give individual feedback on common errors or over-reliance on certain vocabulary/structures.

2. Take control of their own learning

I usually introduce my advanced classes to http://www.wordandphrase.info. I teach them about collocation and colligation and set them tasks to research new vocabulary and find alternatives across formalities, examples (with their grammatical patterns, e.g. I’m coming down with a cold – preference for the continuous). You can dedicate time at the start of class to sharing the results of the research.

3. Explore new contexts and functions for their language

Maybe they’ve done the same simulations a hundred times before. Change the paradigms a little by playing the angry client, the pushy boss, the colleague with emotional problems – these will put their linguistic skills to the test as they try and negotiate their way through new and challenging contexts.

4. Practice with longer turns

The safe zone – a collection of short turns negotiated between two or more participants in a conversation – that’s what I call it. C1 and C2 levels can comfortably remain here for a long time without pushing themselves to the limit. On the other hand, how are they at taking a longer turn? Describing a process, talking someone through the challenges of their jobs, filling someone in on the events of the previous week? Your learners will have to dig deep to find the right discourse features, vocabulary and grammar to successfully complete longer-turn tasks and feedback on this will be all the more immediate.

5. Listening

Your class can converse like pros, but can they follow a longer conversations, news programmes or a presentation and give feedback? These tasks are much more cognitively cumbersome and will add an edge to classes. You can even link it in to the recordings of previous discussions or longer turns and make comparisons between their language a more proficient models.

What are your tricks to make sure lessons leave your learners feeling challenged and satisfied with the content of your lessons?

 

 

 

Supporting a student-centred classroom through a blogging platform

I started nostalgically glancing over a map of Rome the other day and all of a sudden a wave of memories, charged with bitter and sun-drenched emotion, came charging into the window of my memory, opened by such a small gesture as briefly gandering at a map.

I dare to imagine that such memories are not too dissimilar from the creation of many different interactions and learning experiences in a learner-centred classroom like a Dogme classroom. Memory is a fickle being though, a fair-weather friend ready cut you out with time; after a period of time such seemingly unstructured learning is volatile to cracks. Thus, during an intensive two-hour per day course I created a wordpress blog as a way of giving learners the opportunity to write their own map for the the course, in the hope that some of them might look back in a few months and open a window in their memories.

The blog took form in my mind as a place in which we could extend our discussions outside of the classroom, a way of stimulating more discussion on topics we had enjoyed and a hub for gathering resources we wished to offer to class as input. Very soon off the mark, the class having responded very well to the amount of control I had given them of classroom content, I began using it as a quasi-report/practice stage, not dissimilar in my opinion to the task-based learning cycle.

One of the questions at the forefront of my mind was how I intended on using all the data; did want to exploit it as a diagnostic and running assessment of the class’s language competence, thus removing some of the spontaneity and enthusiasm – this is quite evident if you happen to glance at the articles we chose to translate – and diminishing the blog’s person value. I trod carefully in this area, correcting and offering suggestion upon request and devoting classroom time in which I could focus on individual teaching on a one-to-one basis as a way of giving learners a tangible outlet for this. Some of the class decided on the correction which came in the form of a discussion on their posts, which was done through a specially created email address and the ‘save draft’ option on wordpress (necessary to be in line with some of the rules of conduct on student-teacher privacy in place at school).

Translation

I will only briefly comment on the nature of this activity as it shall play a big part in a future blog post. After some discussion on how to translate a Spanish phrase correctly into English we decided to put our skills to the test and translate articles from students’ native tongues into English but attempt to be as accurate as possible in terms of tone, register, lexis and syntax.

Poster Presentations

After watching and being quite intensely engaged in a TED talk by Dan Pink on the science of motivation, the class designed poster presentations to adapt the idea to some of our specialist areas. As a listening task, I asked the class to concentrate intensively on one presentation in particular that interested them and to use their notes as a guide to write a review of the talks.

Marketing competition

Researching and working within a framework of constraints, the class designed holidays on a budget of £2500 that embodied the sense of a word they had chosen. All the data had to be researched and checked on the internet and the sales pitch came in the form of a blog post. Unfortunately we ran out of time on this activity and were unable to give oral presentations.

Learner training

I set the task of commenting on other classmates’ blogposts and after inputting their comment into the http://www.wordandphrase.info text analysis. Once inputted, students evaluated their style according to the frequency of the words as they appear in different genres. To some I gave the task of reducing the formality, increasing the formality, or making the comment more of an academic style. To those whose comments had a lower lexical density, using very frequent words and less pre-modification I gave the task of searching for collocates in the ‘collocate’ function on the site.

Perhaps it is idealism to hope that in a few months this group of motivated and fascinating people might look back on the blog they created and open that little window again in their minds. Of course, the process of writing the blog will have undoubtedly been an engaging experience which provided writing practice on a previously unknown social-media platform for some which lent itself nicely to the reflective and interactive content of the class – just imagine that at one point we became engrossed in discussion on the difference between a female escort and a prostitute and the current scandal taking place in France – nevertheless I hope it may play a role in the future for reactivating their learning. Here’s to hope.

Take a look for yourselves

Study Skills High

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.

Beating the Humdrum

Flicking through your courseboook, have you ever thought the reading texts all seem a little bit….

…Dry?

…Bland?

It’s hard to get teenagers to interact with a text about Prince Charles.

Exam course books with page-long texts sap energy from the classroom and tire students out.

Can students bring their cultural knowledge interact with an anglo-centrically themed text?

Read, underline, read, underline, answer questions… seems a bit repetitive, doesn’t it?

So here are some ways of adding a little zest to a reading text. They are not failsafe and obviously aren’t applicable to every text you come across but I have found them very useful lately to increase student participation in reading and make it a bit more than just the humdrum comprehension.

1. Rewrite

Take a more informative text – exam books are full of them, like on the founders of some juice company or how children spend their free time in the UK. Put students into groups and give them each a part of the text. They then underline five sentences they think express the opinion of the author. Discuss them as a group and check with the teacher. Ask each group to rewrite the part of the text using the 5 sentences (like a writing guide) but stress that it must be rewritten in their opinion! Swap and guess which part of the text the rewritten version comes from.

2. Interviews

Again making use of the numerous ‘informative’ texts or even a true story human interest text, ask your class to make three of four interview questions to interview the class with. To add some support for this activity you might use the same key sentences for opinions activity or perhaps by putting a question box on the board.

what would you say is______/let’s say you were_________, would you?

3. Pictures

This one works well with short-story or human experience texts or just a part of the text. If the text describes one scene, give students a piece of paper, if it’s a sequence of scenes, give them paper with boxes on. One reads the text and the other draws it unfolding. Compare pictures and explain their stories to different groups. Some groups will have understood different vocabulary and at this time they can explain these to each other, the teacher can also intervene to add to this and supply more information.

4. Game shows

Give the text to your class for homework to read: half the class reads the texts and creates 3 questions and the other half only has to read. In class, have the other half of the class write their questions on the board. Those who didn’t make questions now have to read the text one final time and will work in groups of two to answer the questions, like a game show with one point for sufficient detail, two for lots and three for detail plus opinion.

5. Jigsaw summaries with longer texts

Mark a number one each paragraph. Distribute parts of a text like a in jigsaw activity. Students summarise the paragraphs they are given. Having done this, they pass their summaries to the other groups, who read the rest of the text and match them to the correct paragraphs.

6. Character

Take a character from a short story or text from a course book. Make two questions about the character, ambiguous questions which students would have to infer information in the text in order to answer like “would X prefer a night in with friends and pizza or a wild night out on the town?”. Once students have answered these, ask them to make two of their to share with the class.

An average dogme day

I had a plan…

It was very well-laid out, I even had language aims and skill aims too. It looked beautiful. I’m sure it would have been an absofrigginlutely fine lesson. In fact, I’m so sure that I’ll do it tomorrow.

Two CELTA trainees had arrived, three or four minutes had passed by and it was about 9.03. M, one of my students, was asking me about my weekend and I was telling her about how it didn’t even seem like a weekend. She then said “owh, before I forget, I won’t be here in Friday, I’m going to Ibiza” and we talked a little about that. By that time two other students had arrived and I thought it was about time to move onto the first point in my plan. So, I wrote down the Ibiza point, in case I wanted to come back to it later, and asked students to pick some vocabulary cards and write a short story.
This is what emerged…

Now all the class had arrived. I asked them to think back to what we said at the start of the lesson. After a little sifting through the memory, the topic reemerged. What chatted a little about their trip.

Students then made a list of things that M and B should take on their trip and I boarded some of the ideas.

We discussed the differences in our attitudes towards a statement when using different modals and spoke about how in my learners’ languages they use different grammatical structures/lexical structures to express these.

Then I introduced some subordinating conjunctions and learners wrote some reasons why M and B should take these items.

We stopped around 10.30 for our break.

I decided to have a chat with the trainees in the break, to see how everything’s going on the course etc.

“You just made all that up didn’t you?” one asked me

“well, yeah, kind of… I mean, I had a plan, it just changed a bit” I replied sheepishly (she seemed to be cutting me daggers)

“I’m just shocked, that’s all, I didn’t think that was possible, I thought it HAD to come from a book and and be really planned”

Treading carefully, I responded “Well, it has been very well planned, I’ve researched these people sitting in the room a lot, I know their strengths, I know their weaknesses, so it helps me to know where to focus.”

I guess if I had seen that on my CELTA, I might have been a bit shocked too. Just for good measure, I showed them my original plan.

The final lesson plan looked like this:

My best dogme lesson always happen when I make a perfectly good lesson plan, walk into the lesson and throw it away.

Tomorrow, I’ll stick to my plan…

IATEFL 2011

IATEFL 2011 was not only the first teaching conference I have attended but also the first at which I have given a presentation. Now that the dust is settling from the experience, I can start gathering up some of my thoughts. The whole thing passed in a flash and there was barely enough time to draw breath between Peter Grundy’s talk on pragmatics, my talk on dogme and reflective teaching, and hopping from one party to the next along the Brighton seafront on Sunday evening. A big thank you needs to be said to all those who came to my talk, to those who contributed to the question-and-answer session after, and to all those amazing people I met during the course of the weekend.

All that good energy made a fantastic day for teaching, even if I missed the dogme symposium. From what I grasped from Twitter,  Luke Meddings outlined three things to expect in a dogme classroom: Conversation driven; materials light; focused on emergent language. This got me thinking about a lesson today: one of my students was asking me why I looked tired just before the lesson. I started telling him a little about my weekend and he told me a little about his. It turned out that he had had some problems sleeping the night before, his head full of ideas. Wide awake until the early hours, he was thinking about a question a friend had asked him earlier that day: “if you could, would you want to live forever?” We chatted for a bit about this together. When the lesson started, I wrote the question on the board and started to see if there was any interest in the topic. The choice to go with this topic was instant, like dogme autopilot had taken over.

We started by talking about the positives and negatives of living forever, moved onto religion, spirituality, friendship, love, and finally, holidays. My involvement in the conversation was scaffolding vocabulary when it was missing, asking and answering the odd question and scribbling down some snippets. After things had died down, I asked them to summarise everything that had been discussed in a list while I identified some areas to work on and areas to praise from my notes I had taken. These made up the content of the rest of the hour.  The lesson focus emerged from two sentences, which I had selected from about a page of notes:

“If you could live for ever, you would have to see all your friends dying”

“Imagine someone living through all those different times in history!”

What I took away from all of this was that curiosity is the catalyst that drives a dogme lesson forward. After all, it was a simple question that started it all. To sum up, The journey of the conversation was from “why do you look so tired?”, to a discussion on spirituality. Language emerged throughout the conversation, keeping a record of it not only serves to create a lesson focus, but also to look back on after the lesson, a week later, or the end of the month.

Getting the cogs moving

Last week in DELTA input, Luke Meddings was our guest speaker for a session. In his presentation, he brought up some very interesting points about teacher roles and lesson shape in a Dogme lesson. Sharing something simple about you, for example, at the start of the lesson or asking an interesting, open-ended question is enough to get things moving. It makes sense really that to activate genuine interest and get a more personal response, something simple and above all intriguing is necessary. The part the teacher plays here sets what Luke called ‘the cogs’ of the lesson in motion. The structure of a lesson is a kind of collection of moving cogs together, which, in a Dogme lesson, are better-aligned and easier to turn.

This got me thinking about how the cogs turned in my fist Dogme lesson and, after it was asked how a post-CELTA teacher could try this, I considered why one might be so apprehensive about the prospect of giving it a try:

• What if it goes wrong?
• I do not feel comfortable enough with grammar.
• How do you get ideas for it?
• What if I have no idea about what to teach?
• What will my learners think?
• How do I get them talking?

I’ll set about answering some of these by giving a brief outline of my first unplugged lesson.

My CELTA tutor, in the last lesson of the course, wrote Dogme on the board and told us we could go away and research this, if we wished. My research led me to trying it out with an intermediate group of students in my first week of teaching. I set out by choosing a class I felt comfortable with and familiarising myself with the grammar of their level. Basically, I put down the course book and picked up a grammar book.

For the lesson, I had prepared a plan B in case things went wrong and had asked everyone to bring in their passports. What I shared with the class was what I looked like in my passport photo, saying that I had longer hair and had a much younger face, adding a little more information about myself at the time. After my description, in groups, everyone talked about their passport photos and how they were different when the photo was taken from how they are now.

After we had looked at some vocabulary to describe our physical appearance, I wrote, “I don’t look like that anymore but I did”, which I had heard someone saying and used it to introduce ‘I used to look like that but don’t anymore’. We looked at meaning, form and pronunciation, just like I had done in CELTA lessons, however, this time I could feel the classroom atmosphere was much more positive, students seemed genuinely involved in what was being taught. The new language was used to describe other people passports to them after which, for consolidation, we wrote descriptions of different photos. The person-profiles we then stuck around the room to read, then, to finish off the lesson, everyone picked a description and read it to the class for us to guess the person.

Thinking about this experience, I have decided that, for anyone interested in giving it a go, the following hints might come in handy:

1.     Pick a class you feel the most comfortable with.

2.     Just in case, make a plan B.

3.     Think about your stimulus.

4.     Share a little about yourself. Give a little to get a little.

5.     Anticipate: seeing as used to was in their course book, I knew it would be relevant to teach. Since none of them used it, I concluded it was appropriate to teach.

6.     Keep an eye out for more positive vibes coming from students as these will take over cog-turning duties and free you up get more involved with what your students are saying and how you can add to that.

After the lesson, try to take some time to reflect on what happened and how it happened. You will have just had a bottom-up teaching experience and doing some thinking will provide a sense of perspective on your teacher skills.

Some interesting stimuli could be:

1.      Questions

Write a question on the board. Ask learners in groups to try and come up with the best answer. Make it something open-ended and see where it goes. For example, last week I wrote, ‘why are people always saying one thing and doing the opposite’, which really got people going. Others could include:

“I wonder if television/Christmas/Valentines’ day/the tube is the same in every country”

Or give them a question table to make their own questions:

I’d really like to know	why	Politicians
	what	People in London
	how	My mum/dad

Give an example, ‘I’d really like to know what politicians eat for breakfast’ and get them to ask each other their question.

2.      What is real

Bring in something real to class to talk about. I find something like a Big Mac box or a cigarette packet gets people talking. You could even combine a question and the stimulus or get half the class to look at it and explain it to the other half to start things off.

3. Chit-chat

Do what my friend Emi did and exploit some break-time chatter. Sit there and listen, see where it goes and set a task. She had students using functional language for advice to solve someone’s love-life troubles.

“Sarah Jessica Parker was seen rummaging through rubbish bins in New York”

I begin to shudder when I think about how many hours of my life are taken from me every year sitting on a commuter train every morning to work with the rest of London – at least that’s now the case since it is too cold and too dark to take my bike to school. The journey has one main benefit that is: I have access to a good source of stimuli – the Metro. Not renowned for its great writing or content, it provided the focal point to that days’ lesson.

With my pre-advanced learners – a mish-mash of abilities from upper-intermediate to advanced – we made personal profiles of people we had found and torn out of the newspapers. Each profile was then attached to the wall (including my own) and we wandered around and had a good giggle at the hilarity of some of what had been written.

At this point I noted some emergent language that I later wanted to use.

Learners then selected a profile each and worked in pairs to make a dialogue. I told them both the characters were meeting in Starbucks in Covent Garden nearby for a drink and a catch-up. While learners were writing, I was free to I input vocabulary and act as in an ‘on-demand’ way for intervention,  responding to error and focusing learners on form. Not only this, but I was also on-hand to provide personalised regulation to push learners into the very edge of their grammatical comfort zone. With one group the function of the grammar was to persuade someone (Andy Murray to smoke) and at the other end of the spectrum, Sivlio Berlusconi was subtly suggesting to a fashion designer to include him in next season’s catalog.

As a follow up, learners swapped dialogues and wrote different ends to the conversation based on what they read.

After the break, I wrote some of the emergent language I had noted in the profiles on the board

“Sarah Jessica Parker was seen rummaging through rubbish bins in New York”

We then discussed what relation ‘rummaging’ has to ‘seen’ in this sentence and, with some appropriate questioning, we established:

1. Rummaging was happening at the same time as seen
2. Rummaging refers to what Sarah Jessica Parker was doing
3. Sarah Jessica Parker is given information and her action is the new information (newsworthy)

I then drew a table on the board and asked everyone to complete it to make interesting headlines about famous people:

1.	Was caught
2.	Was seen
3.	Was heard
4.	Entered the roomLeft his/her house

I had anticipated that someone would try and use ‘dressing’ and sure enough, someone did. An excellent time to clarify the past participle clause in relation to the verb (action happened before vs action happening at the same time).

We finished by talking about the story behind the headline in pairs, then I drilled some good examples of emergent grammar and we finished the three hours on a big high.

What I can reflect on:

1. For me as a dogme teacher, providing reactive, on-demand, and appropriate feedback on form makes learners’ output more meaningful for their learning.

2. An ‘online’ dogme teacher (that is – one aware of learners’ grammatical comfort zone) is able to push learners to the edge, encouraging them to use language right on the periphery of their current ability.

3. Another possibility would have been to take the persuasive and subtle language from dialogues and make it into a classroom task where learners use second conditional to persuade each other to do things they do not normally do. Like in any emergent language classroom – the possibilities are endless.

My ideas for reflecting came from:

R. Bastone, Grammar, CUP 1994 (especially the parts on process grammar teaching)

Doughty, C., & Williams. J., Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition, CUP 1998, (especially the final chapter)