Grammarphobe

“Without grammar, little can be conveyed; without lexis, nothing can be conveyed”, David Wilkins

Various teaching practice spring cleanings in the past three years have cleared out a lot of clutter from my grammar teaching and while I wouldn’t go as far as saying I avoid teaching grammar (after all, it’s part of the language; it would be unwise to leave out a whole area of language from its teaching), I definitely avoid aspects of it. 

Spring Cleaning

“Use ‘must’ for an internal obligation and ‘have to’ for an external one”

 

 

 

Disclaimer: These results are two random samples I took from the BNC corpus using ‘I must’ and ‘I have to’ – they are not a fully fledged study into the use of modality. 

I’m not so convinced, I must say (or I have to admit?). Furthermore, I don’t think rules like this help students to make personal decisions on what grammar best expresses their opinion. For instance, make a ‘to do’ list in your head, what’s the most common modal that turns up? I swing between the semi-modals ‘have got to’ and ‘have to’. Now think about if there’s more external than internal obligation for each of these. All answers please include the start and the end of the thought process and send them stamped to 25, languagemoments street, London, UK.

But I think I am safe in saying that I make up part of a large pool of language teachers who have arrived at the same conclusion.

Use present progressive for a future action that has already been arranged and decided and use going to + infinitive for an intention

I know this to be true. I have experienced it to be of little help to students. In my personal opinion, the use of adverbs makes much more difference to the meaning of these two structures.

Temporal:

I’m seeing a film tomorrow

I’m going to see a film tomorrow

Attitudinal:

I’m hopefully seeing that new film tomorrow

I’m probably going to see that new film tomorrow

Can we say therefore that explicit rule-based atomistic grammar instruction should pack its bags and make way for holistic lexico-grammatical instruction? I am certain that this equips students with the analytical tools to analyse meaning as it occurs in real life; lexicalised and in context.

On that note, it’s worth taking a look at ‘have to’ and ‘must’ again. You’ll see that there are some great chunks in the two extracts from the corpus: I have to say/I really must say/I must admit.

The power of language

Not only does the idea of atomistic rules not chime with me, but also the way in which they are written I believe really disempowers the student. How many times do you hear “I must use/I have to use” in your courses? Does this make your heart sink? It does mine. It sounds like the learner is completely dehumanised in the language learning process; where’s the opinion? What about “I can use present perfect when I do not consider the time period finished, e.g. I’ve seen so much while living in Berlin” – I still live there. Swap musts, have tos, we use, you use for I can use, if I say___, it means I think____.

Gap-fills

I’m happy to say that they have very little place, if any, in my classroom. Shouldn’t language be introduced and practised in context? If so, then 12 different contexts, all different from each other, just for the purpose of practising a structure is not entirely conducive to this. What’s more, it’s a focus on form, not meaning. Any chance of focusing on meaning is dealt a serious blow from the constantly changing contexts. That said, I do give them for homework, woe betide me for bowing to student expectations.

I would be fascinated to know of any other grammar-teaching pet-peeves people have. Likewise, if someone wants to completely disagree with me, I’d welcome a bit of a grammar tussle.

Also, watch this space. I feel a number of skeletons coming on.

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.

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.

Culture

I am designing a mid-term speaking test for my students this morning. Up bright and early to get it out the way before the day begins. At heart, I’m a morning person, cycling 20km every morning at 7am for over a year had that effect on me and it’s hard to shrug off old habits. Anyway, the test.

The idea behind it is to give students a bunch of pictures as stimulus for conversation. Students have to ask each other questions or talk about their, elicit each other’s opinions on the topics – fairly standard really by any account.

The test is very informal, more an opportunity for me to give learners some feedback on their progress since the start of the course. The photos have been chosen according to the topics we’ve discussed a lot in class – the ones that have been of more interest to students. When picking the photos, I searched for examples from around their city and my choices were guided by the cultural associations students will have with them.

The set they will receive is this

1. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/39190124@N04/3620518038/">Tonale Dolomites Italy 16</a>, 2. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/53482656@N00/227007876/">Per cominciare...</a>, 3. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/42198533@N00/191703750/">Parmiggiana di melanzane</a>, 4. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/79986881@N00/2045075664/">Italy - Rome - Villa Borghese jogger</a>, 5. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/56990453@N02/6219546217/">La Rinascente di Piazza Fiume</a>, 6. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/58477968@N07/5495842069/">Metro de Roma</a>

 

Which got me thinking. What if I gave them this set instead

 

1. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/24905991@N00/6332189/">Ski class for school children</a>, 2. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/54037354@N00/1152617897/">John Lewis</a>, 3. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/19905141@N00/509792994/">lunch</a&gt;, 4. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/22654882@N00/1971047300/">Breakfast!</a&gt;, 5. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/23171307@N06/2343447413/">London Underground A</a>, 6. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/75849895@N06/6811825893/">Sports Training Katy Texas 2</a>

 

• Would output be the same?
• Would students discuss the same topics?

The topics are fundamentally the same. The cultural references however are slightly different. Would this affect anything? My aim is to get students talking about their daily lives and things they do outside of class. Would you use the first or the second set?

 

 

Monolingual classes

Today it’s been about three months since I stepped back into the monolingual class after over a year of multilingual classes in London and I’ll readily admit right now that it’s been a test to say the least. I want to dedicate this pre-christmas post to looking at what I’ve learned from teaching classes made up of just Italians. This post is going to focus on what I have observed in the Italian classroom, although I feel the observations can be applied to a number of different environments.

1. Repetition IS NOT boring

First off, let’s imagine you have a job or maybe you study at university. Chances are you work and study a lot and only go to English class once or twice a week. It’s fair to say therefore that you don’t come into contact with English very often outside of class. It’s also true that life gets in the way of studying outside of class and revisiting the vocabulary learned in class or copying into your vocabulary book might not take priority.

A slot at the start of the class cast your minds back to the previous lessons; a slot at the end to consolidate what happened in the lesson. It’s sometimes tempting to prioritise the need to plough on and cram in or rush students through something extra over revision or practise.

That said, there’s clearly something else to consider and that is making your repetition not seem repetitive. If an activity works one week then that’s not to say it will work the next week, so in this case it’s helpful to come up with a few activities you can slide in at the start or the end of the lesson to revise the content of the lesson.

2. Translation as an issue

In feedback from my latest official observation, my director brought this issue up with me as a general thing to consider. How can you trick your students into not translating every single word they are presented with? It’s obviously an unhealthy habit, converting every piece of information, piece by piece, changing it from one format to the other. My objective for the new year is to think up lots of activities that distract students from going through a sentence, word by word, translating it.

While I don’t blame them for doing this, they are Italian, their brains are Italian and they have gone through an educational experience that encourages such practice.

3. Translation as resource

Activities like contrastive analysis can, when executed well, be a very fruitful activity for the monolingual classroom. Knowledge of how your learners’ L1 might influence their usage of L2 is vital in this case.

4. Tolerance to ambiguity

Age plays a very important part in this; teenagers and younger learners are more likely to have a greater tolerance to ambiguity than adult learners. It’s worth talking to your students about what makes a good language learner and to stress the tolerance issue. Refer back to it when you can see them slipping into the I-must-understand-every-word trap and be patient with them when they do.

Students need to be encourage to take risks

My role: Not to be omnipresent, provide lots of context, provide opportunities for them to guess and share their guesses, include praise in feedback for taking risks.

Students need to check their risks against hard data

Make ‘hard data’ available for students. This can be a paraphrase, a synonym, a picture, a video, a sound. If it’s not provided but the teacher than it fosters more independent risk-taking.

Students need to be able to explain their hypotheses 

Student A explains to group B the meaning of a word, a teacher can meaning check (which makes the question much less contrived), teacher can add an example and question the appropriacy of the word in another context. Group B then explains to group C the meaning of the word, opportunity number 2 for the teacher to check again and scaffold learning by pushing learners that extra mile. If students aren’t explaining in the first place then the classroom remains a very teacher-centred place.

A teacher needs to provide lots of opportunities for learners to create different hypotheses about language use/meaning

5. Speaking is golden

In your own country it’s almost impossible to find regular opportunities to speak outside of the classroom. In an English-speaking country, on the other hand, with Brits or Australians or North Americans all around you, it’s hard to avoid these opportunities.

There are two things involved in my opinion when tackling a students’ ability to converse in English: 1. confidence and 2: practice. So far, from the feedback I have received, the majority of students is not used to speaking on demand, asking questions and generally carrying out the routine tasks of discourse management, they find it difficult. But, that said, not one has lamented the fact that the opportunity is available every lesson, quite the contrary, they have thanked me for my patience with them and for making it possible.

So here’s a few things I make sure I do in class to make this happen.

1. Questions

Instead of directly focusing on question forms, include them in your lesson at every given opportunity. Natural, spontaneous practice of forming questions is what students need. The problem for Italians is the difference between the English inversion of auxiliary verb and object and the Italian intonation rise in questions. In addition to this, they know how they should do it but the pressure of communicating sometimes distracts them from focusing on form. Start conversation with student-formulated questions, extend with students in control of questioning, praise good question formulation in feedback. The beauty is that at higher levels indirect questions or turn-taking devices can be the focus, while at low levels simple question-formation can take the lead.

2. Teacher’s role in the conversation

I teach a group of students that are used to a very teacher-dominated class; it’s Italian education. But that does not mean a teacher has to conform to the norms to satisfy students expectations of a teacher.

1. Scaffold when you need to. If the topic is running dry, revitalise it with some questions or a summary activity.

2. Slide in and out of conversations to let each student know that you can give them some one-to-one teaching time. This is a great time to elicit some corrections and encourage students to focus on accuracy away from the whole class, espcially if they are working in small groups.

3. When students don’t need you, take a back seat and let them get on with talking. You can make notes while they know they can ask you if they need help. This is magical time for them to experiment with conversation management and asking questions.

4. Make sure they know what’s expected of them and make sure you don’t expect too much of them.

3. Classroom layout

A communicative horseshoe is not always so communicative. To my mind, it seems like the plat-pack furniture instructions of communicative language teaching. Move your tables around, leave seats around available for you to swoop into a conversation, get students standing, moving, sitting in discussion tables, tables of two, tables of three. If your tables and hammered to the floor (Phil I know what you were about to say!) then rotate the students. The important thing is not to be static, especially at 8pm after a long day at work!

6. Lexical notebooks and grammar notebooks

In an post published in the summer, I sung the praises of lexical notebooks, using my own as an example of how it has helped me and as a basis for how I planned to encourage my students to use them. Not only encouraging the use of them but also good maintenance and revising and using new vocabulary and grammar.

Good language learning habits need to be fostered in the classroom and students need to take control of them outside.

1. Provide handouts for students demonstrating good ways of organising vocabulary, including collocation, useful phrases, functional phrases and pronunciation.

2. Check your students’ vocabulary books and correct them, add extra language to them.

3. Show them how to use online resources (google, online dictionaries, multi-lingual dictionaries) so that they can add information.

Here’s an example from one of my students’ books:

7. Pronunciation matters

Yes it does. But is there enough time in a short course to teach phonemics and practise them in each lesson? That’s up to you and depends on what your students consider as important. It can be a bit overwhelming to be presented with a whole different alphabet, another obstacle for them all to overcome!

On the other hand, I pick out what problems I can see them having with vowel sounds and make it very clear exactly where the tongue is in the mouth, where your lips are and how much the muscles around the mouth should be clenched, pinching, relaxed, pouting almost. I use the space in the classroom as a mouth and we point out where vowel sounds and consonant sounds are made.

Some knowledge of the phonemics of your students’ first language will go a long long way. Not only can you pick out problems that are influenced by L1, you’re also on hand to give them contrastive analysis in terms of pronunciation, e.g. “take your ‘I’ sound and move your tongue a little further back and a little further down and you have the English sound”.

Another matter where pronunciation matters is connected speech. Ninety percent of my students are not even aware that this exists in English and are still under the impression things will sound like they are written… TELL THEM! SHOW THEM! Take phrasal verbs for example, put on, take off, show up are going to sound more like ‘pu ton’ ‘sho wup’ and so on. Firstly, you don’t need phonemic to show this, secondly, it’s easy to raise your students awareness of this when teaching vocabulary, what’s more they’ll feel more confident listening to English when they know some of the tricks.

8. Learning language in chunks and not as singular words

Latin and Greek make up part of the Italian curriculum at school and students are given a very thorough education in translating from these ancient and highly prestigious languages into Italian. The method used to do this is grammar translation, and it seems right to me that a language that nobody speaks anymore is taught in this way. English however is not a dead language, it’s alive and spoken. The Latin and Greek based tuition doesn’t fit English language teaching; but in many cases it’s a bodge job the wrong method for the wrong language.

Students are therefore unaware of collocation, learning the meaning of chunks of language and are for the most part obsessed with deconstructing each phrase word-by-word in a thoroughly scientific dissection of the sentence. Considering this, it’s necessary to raise awareness of these features directly and at least try and fight the current.

Lesson Reflections: On the Phone

Today I decided to use the lesson skeleton I had drawn up a few hours before. In the post, I hope to give a bit of an insight into how the lesson went, looking at what my decisions were during the lesson, why I took them, how the learners benefited from the lesson. I would normally do a ‘retrospective’ plan like this in my journal but instead this time I want to share it online.

In my presentation at TESOL France, I outlined some of the benefits of writing a journal to reflect on lessons. At the end of the talk, groups in the audience came up with some frameworks with which to reflect on a lesson. I plan to use one of these to go through today’s lesson.

Here’s a quick run-down of what happened:

1. I followed the lessons skeleton until the extension activities. I picked out some problems students had with grammar and lexis and discussed them with the class, using question to help guide them to the meaning and also encouraging them to help explain.

2. I asked students to draw a graph showing on the vertical axis good time or bad time and on the horizontal axis the time of day for today. I asked them to fill in the good and bad times, explaining why. I did this to give them extra language practice. I repeated the stage and asked them to ask questions to stimulate more conversation the second time around.

So, here’s the reflection:

Level: Intermediate

Class size: 6

Time: 1900-2030

The teacher		The student
How long did I speak	Why?	How long did they speak
What I found easy to do	Why?	What they found easy to do
What I found difficult to do	Why?	What they found difficult to do

How much did they speak?

I wrote on the board the following question: Have you spoken on the phone today?

I also wrote some pointers to follow, to help scaffold their answers:

• What were you feeling?
• What were you doing?
• Was it an important person
• Did they have something good or bad to tell you?

Everyone started speaking, and continued for about 10-15 minutes before the chat died down.

After looking at some emerging language (past continuous, past simple and ‘be about to’), I set a task for students to do, which led to about another 20 minutes of speaking.

What did they find easy?

• They found it easy to explain what they were feeling at the time.
• They found it easy to use ‘before and after’
• They found it easy to speak with their groups about the question. By easy I mean comfortable to share information and ask each other questions.

What did they find difficult?

The million dollar question:

• Speaking: They are all new to the language classroom, especially one in which so much conversation drives the class.
• Past continuous/past simple with while.
• A few words they didn’t know, which they asked me in Italian and then I encouraged them to explain in English.
• Pronunciation of stress in adjectives and longer vowel sounds.
• Prepositions with ‘morning/evening/lunch/lunchtime

My board looked like this:

How much did I speak?

I sat down and shared a little about my day with the people sitting in the room. I normally do this at the start of the lesson and I find it can bring out some interesting discussion. Today in particular was a tough day because I’d got soaking wet while cycling from one of my lessons to another. When I arrived at the next school, the mother of one of the students brought me some clean clothes. The only thing is, they were quite strange, so my students were wondering why I was dressed so strangle.

When I boarded some emerging language, I spoke for about 10 minutes, which mainly consisted of asking students questions about the language, what they wanted to say and why they said this. When it came to checking the meaning of the emerging grammar, I used a mixture of gesture and jumping from the present to the past, and using bodily movements to help explain the meaning. I did this because my students, although intermediate, have a fairly low level of English. You could say it’s to lighten the cognitive load.

What did I find easy to do?

1. Identify emerging difficulties. While students were talking about the phone calls they had received that day, two of them asked me

“Can you help, I want to if this is right: While I had lunch or while I was having lunch?”. I went on to hear the rest of the class trying to use this structure. It makes sense really; you want to explain something that happened in the moment during another action which started before and finished after. The thing was, one student managed successfully and four tried to replicate it, modeling it to the others. I noted this down as an area for focus.

Another asked me, “how do you say ‘stavo per pranzare’” Which translates to ‘I was about to have lunch”.

I also heard lots of inaccuracies with past tenses, so the focus made itself fairly clear. I had also noted down from the last lesson that students had difficulty focusing on accuracy when talking about past actions.

2. Elicit meaning for emerging language. This is somewhat obvious as the students created the context, creating the concept at which they arrived amongst themselves, so extracting the meaning I find is never so difficult.

What did I find difficult to do?

1. I always find the first lessons difficult, especially when establishing a rapport with students. I feel nervous. Do they know what I’m doing? Do they understand what I want them to do? Do they understand my boardwork?

To this end, I made sure that at the end of the lesson I explained what my signs on the board mean, went through the lesson: what we looked at, why we did what we did. I think students felt more confident after this. I certainly did.

Concluding thoughts:

I think I made the right choice of language to focus on. Other possibilities were weather forecasting and giving advice. I feel I picked the most common area of difficulty for the whole class.

I can give the class practice on this language point using the distance learning materials the school provides.

I will definitely use this lesson skeleton again.

The reflection framework:

• I like it because it gives me the chance to look at things from both the students perspective and mine. Students’ difficulties can then be compared to the teacher’s, which encourages a less teacher-centred reflection.
• Looking at how much students speak places you back into the lesson at each phase.

Reflection

Today I went to class and learned something new

 

Since I have been ranting about post-lesson reflection lately, I thought it fitting to close my little red book of reflection and put my thoughts online. One of my learners came to me in the break and said “I speak lots today, it is good, you have much patience with us”, it got me thinking…

Class: Pre-intermediate

Age: Adults

Class size: 6

I started class with a headline about what had happened to me earlier that day. I wrote:

“Teacher stuck in a bus for an hour, he misses lunch”

I then asked myself: what sort of language might this elicit?

Modals of deduction?

Past tenses?

Chat about the transport system in Rome?

Interrogative adverbs?

Expressions for opinions?

I asked my learners to think about why and tell me. They stared blankly at me and looked confused. I let a minute or two pass and then mimed ‘stuck’ and reformulated ‘misses lunch’ as ‘did not eat lunch’

Still silence…

No panic… someone will say something

Silence…

Don’t panic Dale, someone will say something…

Still nothing…

Change of tactic

I gave each learner a post-it note and asked them to write a question to find out why I missed lunch. They were:

What’s your name? (added after)

What did you do today?

What did you do at lunchtime?

Did you take the lift?

What do you do when you don’t have a job?

Where do you live?

What do you usually eat for lunch?

I answered the questions and shared some information about myself. Explaining the story of how I had been in a waiting room for 2 hours in a queue for a tax code, then taking a bus at 1.30 in Italy is lunchtime rush hour. A few sprouts of conversation raises their heads from the silence.

Success!

I boarded the questions and asked students to interview each other. One learner asked to change did you take the lift to ‘di che cosa hai paura’ what are you afraid of. She could not manage the phrase in English so she said the Italian and we mimed and gave examples until we had it.

Given the silence at the beginning, I decided it would be best to write the questions already corrected on the board to save any losing of face (they seemed nervous enough already). I made a note of this for some language work later.

Learners interviewed each other, swapping partners when they had finished.

Difficulties I noted in their conversations were:

• Stressing prepositions more than verbs when pronouncing phrasal verbs “get UP”
• Start/Stop + verb (ing)
• Lack of prepositional phrases to express where they eat (at the canteen, at home, out, at work, on the bus)
• Adjacency pairs for agreeing/disagreeing (me too, me neither)
• Consonant cluster in ‘makes me’
• Pronunciation of /v/ sound
• Vowel sounds in ‘afraid’ and ‘scared’

Difficulties I didn’t focus on:

• Past simple formulation

There’s only so much you can do…

Strengths I noticed:

• Collocations for daily routines “I get out of bed”, “I take the bus”, “I go to work”, “I eat lunch”
• Use of adverbs of frequency “often, usually, always, hardly ever”

I then asked learners to write a half-page summary of their conversations while I wrote up some feedback on the board focusing on the above areas. Once finished, I checked the summaries for content and vocabulary but said I would check errors after (this was then set for homework). I then elicited pronunciation, drilled for stress and rhythm and discussed some of the language on the board.

Break

After the break I asked learners to look at an exercise in their books on question formation. Feedback included use of auxiliaries in question forms, intonation in questions, stressed and unstressed words in questions and pronunciation of ‘do you’.

What did they learn?

• Stressing prepositions more than verbs when pronouncing phrasal verbs “get UP”
• Start/Stop + verb (ing)
• Lack of prepositional phrases to express where they eat (at the canteen, at home, out, at work, on the bus)
• Adjacency pairs for agreeing/disagreeing (me too, me neither)
• Consonant cluster in ‘makes me’
• Pronunciation of /v/ sound
• Vowel sounds in ‘afraid of’ and ‘scared of’
• Reviewed question formation

What did I learn?

That silence is not to be feared in the classroom and I do not fear it. Perhaps something has changed in me since stepping back into the learners’ shoes that has given me more empathy. Before I might have panicked and started talking to fill the silence or tried to explain the activity again. This time I was calm, I had more trust, much more patience. I can prepare for these gaps when thinking about my lessons in future.

What would I change?

From now I will consider what kind of questions stimuli might elicit as well as what sort of language/topics. I want to continue on this line of patience. My learners here are different, they are not surrounded by English every day, some have not been in contact with English for months – which means they need more time to think, to open up and share. These things are not instantaneous.

To move ahead: activity for vocabulary recycling, focus on past simple formation… hmm food for thought.

Lexical notebooks

In a previous post, I talked about lexical notebooks without really explaining their make-up or meaning to me. I need to admit right at the start of this post that I am no expert in keeping a lexical notebook or linguistics, nor do I consider myself a good language learner. However, I have found that keeping everything in one place, using a few techniques which I hope to demonstrate below, and a bit of revision, I have become a better learner of Italian lately and above all more confident and secure in my learning.

1. Idioms

The learning of idioms, especially for exams like CAE and CPE, is vital for many of our students. I dedicate pages of my book to lists of idioms which have come up in conversation or which I know there is a corresponding phrase in English I use. What are the problems I have encountered when learning idioms in Italian?

The learning of idioms, especially for exams like CAE and CPE, is vital for many of our students. I dedicate pages of my book to lists of idioms which have come up in conversation or which I know there is a corresponding phrase in English I use. What are the problems I have encountered when learning idioms in Italian?

1. Lack of context 

I never remember idioms when I read them listed on a page of a book of idioms. To remedy this I type the idiom into Google in various forms (past, future, infinitive) and look at the different contexts in which it appears. I take a few examples and write them in my book.  The more information you have about a word, the more likely you are to remember it and reproduce it. 

2. They are not always clear

I either ask a housemate to give me a paraphrase of the idiom or try to think of one myself. This expands my vocabulary, utilises more of my linguistic resources and gives me a point of reference for meaning (in Italian) when I need to revise.

Learners of English are lucky enough to have a plethora of online resources available to them in the form of websites and corpora. In a recent development project a colleague of mine and I developed some materials using examples from The BNC and Google Corpora to encourage students to deduce meaning of idioms from context. There is definitely some promise in this idea, I would like to include this in my learner training this year, including exercises with idioms and teaching students to use these tools available to obtain more information about a phrase/idiomatic expression on their own.

2. Collocation trees

David Warr’s Language Garden blog and seeing a student of mine using these inspired me to start doing the same myself. It is visually stimulating and adds a little variety to my book.

In fact,  I found that I kept making mistakes with this word ‘cena’ and realised it was time to put things straight, so I dedicated a page of my notebook to remedying this problem. I am the sort of student that self-monitors a lot, correcting myself and being very aware of the mistakes I make. On the plus side, it gives me lots of material to learn by myself.

3. Colligation: The grammar contained within a phrase

One of the most challenging obstacles to overcome in Italian is when to use their subjunctive tense. Ask an Italian and they will rant for hours about the inflection of Italian verbs and how hard they are to learn, but I have certain reservations about the difficulty of learning verb endings; there’s no thinking required, no depth.

Having not had much success with the pedagogical grammar rules recited to me in Italian class a few years ago, I thought a new solution was needed. I came across something called colligation, which I understand to be the grammar patterns which are contained within the DNA make up of a chunk. E.g. ‘have an affair’ appears in the BNC in almost all cases in the continuous tense (past or present). It seems worth making a record of these syntactical secrets when teaching and learning to help students use phrases in the forms in which they are found. 

In this case I have opted for a longer distance colligation, based on general usage of the subordinate clause with a verb. I have heard the term ‘based on usage norm’ and this is what I have used.

So what does this mean?

I keep a record of what type of verb follows certain expressions (indicative or subjunctive) and base my usage upon that. 

It means I have a store of chunks I know are followed by a subjunctive, reducing the cognitive load while I speak and cutting out the need to learn too many confusing grammar rules.

I can keep a record of style-sensitive changes in the use of these two moods in Italian. That way I do not end up sounding like an academic in a chat with some friends when I am out and about. In English this could take the form of the stylistic differences between ‘will’ and ‘going to’.

How do I find this information?

Mostly on Google, looking at the context in which the phrase is used: facebook or social networking sites = more spoken, newspapers etc = more formal, interviews with political figure = more formal. I admit it is not fail safe, but for learning independently it helps.

4. Pre/post modification

Add an adjective before a noun and you pre-modify. A noun which has a pre-modifier can then be extended with a post-modifier. Students studying English who need to use more complex sentences could really benefit from this knowledge. OK, that is enough demonstration of pre/post-modification. If you have been seduced by them then I suggest reading Dave Willis’ ‘Rules, Patterns and Words’ (2003).

I keep a record in my book of the lexical and grammatical patterns of Italian syntax. Italian is a heavily post-modified language so I focus my efforts on noticing the types of structures that occur after the nouns. As I have no Italian teacher, I try and paraphrase the example to help me understand it more and ask friends to help me.

How does this help me?

1. I am better able to deconstruct complex Italian sentences.

2. I can contain more information in a spoken sentence.

5. Collocations in context

Words attached to a context are of course of great benefit to a learner of a another language. For this reason I make sure I keep pages of vocabulary I have found or heard concerning topics I usually talk about.

You might notice some highlighted areas. These are areas I need to be careful of because of mistakes I know I have made in the past.

How does this translate to my teaching?

1. I encourage students to find as much information about an idiom as possible, as it makes it more like to be produced. Training learners to find examples and decide which idioms are useful for them i.e. are they likely to use them? One does not buy films or books that are of no interest, so why idoms?

2. I teach ways of keeping vocabulary organised in a notebook, giving learners a push away from long list of decontextualized words and towards fewer words and kept in the company of their lexical friends.

3. Show students the importance of knowing the grammar contained within the phrases we use, where to find it and how it can help them learn fewer grammar rules and use grammar better and more naturally.

4. I teach and encourage students to improve their use of phrase structures, like formulaic expressions but formulaic structures.

5. I want to encourage students to ask more questions about the the grammar they find in use, noticing common structures and recording them in a sort of basic form to be called upon and used when needed.

6. I give homework that involves mining articles which interest students for lexis/collocations/phrases that interest them, hoping that this might become a habit.

In this post I have looked at form and meaning, using examples of how I have adapted what I have learned about language to learn Italian, translating my second language learning experience into how I teach. I have missed out pronunciation, which will form the basis for a future post.

A month of learning

It’s been a month since I last sat in a classroom in London and taught. Since then a lot has changed in my life. For one thing, my new home is Rome. Yes, I have swapped Buckingham palace for the Colloseo, and tea and toast for caffè and cornetto.

I’ve been learning Italian for almost three years. It was September 2008 that I arrived in Florence with a phrasebook and a six-month language course booked. Effectively, my teaching experience started as a student, sitting the other side of the desk, watching my teachers, thinking that this job looks quite fun.

My Italian went about as far as ciao and pizza. I remember my first trip to a bakery on my second day in Florence. I did not have a clue what to say… I paid attention to how others were ordering their bread; they were all saying ‘kwesto’. Without any idea of what this meant, I understood it was what I had to say to buy some bread, so I said it. It turns out ‘questo’, as I learned later, is a demonstrative pronoun.

What made me think back to this experience was the fear and taciturnity/reticence I felt. The latter fed off the former. It is a strange feeling, like staying silent despite knowing the words and having the desire to say them. I still feel it today after three years. Today for example, I was in the supermarket, doing the shopping, and I wanted to buy some ham. Instead of giving into the fear and picking up some pre-packed ham I went to the counter and threw myself in the queue, wrestled to the front and ordered some ham. Even if now I could easily hold a conversation about how the ham is made, the thickness of the slices or the merits of one brand over another, I still feel hesitant. The fear is still there, I have just got better at throwing myself into these situations.

Last week I spent a few days by the sea with one of my friends here. Every day, without fail, we all went to the beach and every night, like clockwork, we went out. After five days I was utterly shattered. I have to admit, keeping up with native speakers for that long is more than hard work; it’s mentally draining. What for them is a relaxed conversation with friends is for me intense speaking and listening practice. Following a constantly changing topic, full of references to friends and local culture, with a splash of local dialect thrown in for good measure is far from easy. What’s more, I wanted to make a good impression. I did not want them to think I was the quiet one, or that I was bored and did not like them, so I tried my best to involve myself in the conversation as much as I could.

‘Prendere la parola’ – taking the floor, for me, requires immense concentration, but at the same time, not too much concentration. I am not sure if that makes sense. What I mean by this is I need to keep track of the topic of the conversation to be able to get a word in. Think about it too much, try too hard to make a good contribution and the moment passes and you are stuck thinking about the past. Then, for an Englishman, there’s the added factor that Italians interrupt each other all the time, talk about meaningless topics and rant on and on before getting to what they really want to speak about, quite the opposite of conversational culture in the UK. It’s a long road with many blind corners and side streets, easy to get lost.

The good news is I have started to gain more confidence when speaking to two or more people, feeling more relaxed and like I can shift the topic, take the floor and actually have something to say, like more of an equal. Strange though that I should feel unequal when in the company of a group of native speakers, right?

Two days ago I was sitting with a friend in a park overlooking the whole of Rome. We were seated in the shade underneath the trees in an attempt to escape from the scorching sunshine. While we were chatting, my friend asked if I remembered any of the new words or phrases they had taught me from the weekend before, so I took out my notebook and showed her.  With each phrase, she said, “it’s like going back into a conversation, I remember where we were, what we were doing for each one of these”. It was what I imagined looking through one’s notes after a Dogme lesson would be like. There was a good two pages’ worth of vocabulary and expressions that had come up over the weekend, each born in a personalised context, because it was what we were talking about.

Personally, I find it much easier to grasp the meaning of a phrase and recall it having heard it in the context of a conversation in which I was involved. No higher order thinking skills needed, no elaborate text for it to spring out from. That is how I learn best.

In the past week I have filled the pages in my vocabulary book with new phrases from conversations, overheard while eavesdropping on the bus, from the news, DVDs, books, films, magazines, you name it. I revise it and add more information to it daily. What is driving my motivation? More than anything it is the satisfaction of saying a new phrase or hearing some vocabulary I learned the previous day in conversation. This is my positive feedback and I find it by myself. This is success: my internalised view of the achievement of my goals, it is the driving force behind my motivation.

How does this affect my classroom?

1.    More role play

At times I have thought it was boring or repetitive, going through the same scenario over and over again. But the only way I have got better at asking for bread and ham is by asking for bread and ham. Even if it is slightly contrived, in the sense that the other person in the role-play is unlikely to ever be a banker or a deli assistant, I think the practice is necessary. Repeating the transaction helps to make it more of a habit rather than something you have to think about, freeing you up to pay attention to finer details in the transaction, maybe even making it interaction?

In my classroom, there will be more role-play for transactional uses of conversation in the situations the people in the room are likely to encounter.

2.    More practice of interactional uses of conversation

I know the words Italians use to manage conversation but throw me I the deep end and they help very little. The people in my classroom will have more practice of rapidly changing topics of conversation, interrupting, taking and leaving the floor, adjusting to it and adding to the flow of topic in the hope that the cognitive demand of following the topic, inputting your opinion and moving on reduces to a point at which the conversation is enjoyable and effortless.

I did this back in London by splitting the class into different groups and asking them to go and speak about the topics attached to wall (at first recycled topics, to make things easier). Each group took a topic and started speaking. In the mean time I took a student from each group and gave them either the task of interrupting and changing the topic, requesting clarification, or simply catching the topic of conversation and joining in. After a few interruptions the group catch on and it loses its novelty a bit, but everyone agreed it was good practice. At first I thought the most challenging part was the actual interruption but actually it is the part before, when listening in and formulating your turn.

Another way of doing this was an activity we used to recycle vocabulary.

1. I wrote topics on the board, regularly changing while they discussed them, using chunks of language from previous lessons.
2. After a minute, or thereabouts, I tapped on the board, which meant there needed to be an instant change in topic. Whether the topic was stupid, serious, or had no meaning at all was not important (which is often the case in conversation). What mattered was that it was instantaneous to make the process of changing topic at speed natural like breathing.

3.    Lexical notebooks

I started using them a few months ago after a DELTA assignment. Some students took to them and some did not. From now on, they are compulsory. I understand that people learn in different ways and we should strive to match the individual’s style of learning. However, without an information-rich record of it, no matter how many pictures or frilly gizmos are attached, it is a lot harder to remember.

I also keep everything in chunks in my notebook. I rarely learn a word on its own. For teachers, this does not come as much of a shock. But I wonder how many students know about this? Of course, many materials are designed in that way and teachers try to teach vocabulary in that way. How many of them have sat down and said, “don’t learn the preposition ‘to’ and ‘from’ or the verb ‘get’, learn them as parts of larger chunks, your life will be much easier… It’s the same amount of effort for the brain to memorise this than one singular word.” I had this very conversation with a low-level class just before leaving London and they were shocked. It was like someone was letting them in on a massive secret. Certainly, I had no idea of this in those first few months of learning Italian, my vocab books were full of singular words with translations; nobody had ever told me otherwise.

4.    More memory training

I touched on this in a previous post on memory. I am no expert on linguistics or neurolinguistic programming but from what I have experienced, what I learn during personalised, meaningful interaction is much easier to retrieve from the dusty archives of my memory.

I have also learned that such a large part of language learning lies in memory. I was reading only the other day about this in Marcia Lima’s blogpost on the secret to language learning, which led me to writing this post. Learning a language requires a well-trained and persistent memory.

I want to find out which students use memorisation techniques, how they do it, if it works well for them and how it could work better. Then include more personalised memory training as part of my learning training. At the same time I would like to add more activities for memorisation to my small bag of existing tricks.

5.    Reticence

Maybe I am tired, maybe I just want to listen for a bit, maybe I am feeling a bit nervous today. What it doesn’t mean is I am afraid of making a mistake or I do not know Italian, that I am stupid or trying to be awkward. I just do not fancy speaking right now, OK? In my first language people accept it, so why not here? In my own language, if I do not have anything to say about a topic, I just say nothing, or I change it. Perhaps I just want to listen to you speak for a bit?

I like to think I have always had patience with people who do not speak in class. I have never complained outside of class about them or pressured them to speak more. I have chatted to them about it and gone through the different reasons it could be, attempted to provide stimuli for them to speak about. At the end of the day, it is hard being mute. What I mean by this is that when you are living in a foreign country, your voice is much quieter, every transaction is much more difficult. No wonder people walk into the classroom and find it hard to speak. Fear can manifest itself in a number of ways and does not always owe itself to making a mistake. I make mistakes regularly in Italian, it does not bother me in the slightest, but sometimes I am silent, sometimes I am afraid of something. That something is hard to locate but it is there. On the other hand, sometimes I have just need to get warmed up and then away I go…

I know that these issues are going to be at the forefront of my mind from now on. The reasons for silence depend on the person and can vary from one day to the next, I know for sure that mine do.

So this brings my post to an end. My first month in Rome has been an absolute pleasure, not only for the weather, the food and the company but also what I have learned and discovered about myself. Now I ought to start searching for a job again…

Emotion and memory

I was speaking with a few of my friends the other day in Italian when all of a sudden I realised that the word I was looking for was not there anymore. In my brain it felt like there had once been a link between the idea I wanted to express and the word available to call upon. I had known the meaning of the word, how to conjugate it, how to pronounce it, how to spell it, but I had simply forgotten it. It’s not an easy pill to swallow.

One thing that has been on the forefront of my mind for a while now is how to include memory in learning and teaching, which led me to discuss the subject with someone in my staff room, who talked about how she had written down some snippets of students’ conversations and at the end of the week stuck them on the walls of her classroom and asked students to share what they remember about it.

Which got me thinking, could there be a link between the emotions people feel when learning and the amount they remember afterwards? I had a look around the Library at work for Memory, Meaning and Method: some psychological perspectives on language learning by Earl W. Stevick (1976). A couple of things stood out to me in particular:

“Emotions do not merely expedite or inhibit memory… they actually provide the principles on which memories are organized”

“People learn best from utterances in which they have a strong personal stake, or ‘investment’”

These remarks, from Rapaport (1971) and Curran (1968) respectively, suggest that emotion may play a powerful role in the creation of memory. Just as adding the amount of information known about a word (its collocations, how it appears in a sentence, its pronunciation) can add to a learner’s understanding, increasing the amount of personal investment there is in the experience could result in higher retention. That said, the learner plays a passive role in this process, not realising at the time that these positive experiences forge stronger bonds in their mind.

So, I looked over the notes made throughout the week in class and, on Friday morning, took some small snippets from each of the conversations from which lots of language emerged. I wrote these on post-it notes and stuck them around the room at the start of the lesson. I asked my class to identify if they remembered the conversation from which the quote was taken and to share a little about what happened in that conversation. This part was to take them back to the experience surrounding the memory. After that, I wrote two questions on the board:

1. How were you feeling at that point?

2. What had you done before this conversation?

3. What did you do after?

Everyone returned to the fragments they remembered most clearly and journeyed back into their memories to retrieve some of this information. The results were varied; about a third of the class did not remember the parts of the conversations; either they had been absent or part of a different group. Those that did came out with a surprising amount of information. After I asked everyone to write down everything they now remember about one of the quotes. The results were quite interesting. What surprised me was the amount of extra information about learners’ days emerged: what we spoke about after, that one was feeling nervous at that point and that one thought Henry VIII was good-looking because he was ginger. In addition to which a lot of chunks of language looked at after the conversations and ones that came out during the conversations were recalled.

Could there be a link between the amount of emotional involvement in each speech act made during a Dogme class and the amount of memory students were able to access five or six days later by journeying back into their minds?

I’m going to try it again next week and see what the results are.

Are there any ways of enhancing students’ memories that have worked well in your classrooms?