I am used to going to bed late

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

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

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

What time did you go to bed last night?

Did you go to bed late last night?

Did you go to bed early?

Did you sleep lots last night?

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

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

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

I am ________ _____ get____ up early

We filled in the gaps to form:

I am used to getting up early

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

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

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

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

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

e.g.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Lesson Skeleton: On the phone

The conversations we have during the day can reveal a lot of fascinating information about what we do, our relationships with other people, our daily vicissitudes or just the hum-drum boredom of daily life. Like I have said before, I find interest in the mundane because, let’s face it, the mundane is never what it seems. These moments can be great topics for teachable moments or entire lessons. Think about the telephone conversations you have had today? What do they reveal about your daily life?

1. Put this question on the board:

 

Who have you spoken to on the phone today?

Ask learners to answer the questions. Give them some prompts for their conversation:

How did you feel?

Were you busy/free?

Was it someone close to you?

What sort of relationship do you have with this person?

2. Monitor for some interesting bits of conversations, mainly the themes emerging, but keep in mind also some of the language difficulties or bit missing from learners’ conversations.

3. Board some examples and discuss them with the class:

“X spoke to her mum to tell her she was late”

“Y arranged a good time to meet for football training”

What if nothing comes from the conversation?

You can add a few more questions for learners to answer:

Do you get annoyed when someone calls you all the time? Is there ever a good time for your parents to call? What is the worst time of day for someone to call you?

4. By now there should be a few different topics buzzing around: family, friends, work, free-time activities. Choose one to extend on or a language point. You could do it like this:

Language

• Ask learners to brainstorm collocations/lexis for one of these topics and board them.
• Take some language for corrections and make it into a reformulation activity, allowing for lots of discussion about language use. Elicit different ways of saying these to extend learners’ knowledge.
• Ask learners how they would carry out the same function on the phone in English (arranging, canceling on someone, asking for information etc). Create a dialogue on the board together as a class. You could do this by eliciting correct responses or allowing them to write the dialogue then adding extra phrases in a second part of the board for learners to substitute for what they said. Ask them to practise it then create another for a different situation.

Theme

• Take a theme, e.g. Having dinner at home, playing sport as a leisure time activity and ask learners to brainstorm their opinions for and against the topic. This could be extended into a for-against debate.
• Ask learners to draw a graph of the best and worst times of day to receive an important phone call and explain why, which extends the conversation further and goes deeper into our daily routines.

Lesson Skeleton: what was unusual about this morning?

I have Mike Harrison to thank for this one as it was his reverse reading activity that gave me the inspiration for this skeleton. He took a reading text from a different perspective by giving students comprehension questions to answer first to make a story, which could then be compared to the original.

1. Create five or six questions that make the basis of a story. Last week there was a flood in Rome and everyone got soaking wet and was late for work… so I thought questions on the topic might connect with students. I also wanted to get to know a little more about their daily routine but go beyond the usual questions like “what do you do after school” etc, which had until then not been received with much interest. The idea could be adapted to any age group though, to get to know the ups and downs of someone’s day.

1. What was unusual about this morning?

2. Why were you late for school?

3. What was lucky about when you made it to school?

4. What happened at lunchtime that was lucky?

5. Why were you happy to get home?

2. Ask learners to respond to the questions, creating a story of their day. Move around looking for interesting pieces of their stories that might be interesting later in the lesson.

or

Ask learners to draw 5 boxes and put their day into pictures – using the lesson skeleton on YLs and drawing to continue the activity.

3. Put the stories up on the wall and ask learners to move around the move and write two questions to ask about what they read. Note down any problems for a language focus later in the lesson.

4. Allow for some time to discuss students’ questions. In the lesson last week this led to a discussion about what sorts of behaviour are punishable at school and whether this is right. We then looked at phrases to make suggestions on how to make school a fairer place for students.

5. Use language from stage 2 to do a delayed error correction/reformulation activity with the class.

Possible extensions:

1. As this sort of activity will produce lots about the highs a lows of someone’s day, there is always the opportunity that a letter/email suggesting improvements for a problem is possible. I asked my learners to write a letter to their headmaster for homework.

2. Add some synonyms to the board and ask learners to find the corresponding words in their stories.

3. Put some adverbs appropriate to the situations in the text and ask learners to find them. e.g. “it was raining” “it was raining heavily’ ‘the bus was late” “seriously delayed”.

4. Create a dialogue with the class and practice it as a role-play. For example, someone mentions they had to wait in line at the post office for thirty minutes to renew their driver’s license or someone’s friend called to cancel a meeting. How would you do this in English? There could be a range of functions learners would need in situations in which they need to use English.

What I like about the skeleton:

• The questions dig deep and rely on the little moments in people’s days like when they arrive at work/have lunch/chat to colleagues.
• For lower level or YL (teen) classes, the form of a story of a bad day gives them time to write about their day that I have found difficult to facilitate through conversation.

What to consider before the lesson:

• There’s always the chance that nothing happened that day.
• Learners need to be clear about why they are making questions.
• Consider the jobs of the people in the room when making questions or if they are students. A group of university students may have slept all morning.
• Does your class have a preference for drawing or do they prefer writing to prepare? Do they need preparation time, if so, how much?
• A language focus may arise from the initial activity or the discussion after, be prepared to wait for ‘the wave’.

 

Dealing with emerging language

One of the many bits of Dogme terminology that perplexed me in the first year of teaching was exactly this, ‘dealing with emerging language’. I mean, if you consider that dealing with a problem generally means finding a solution to it, the whole idea seems kind of counter-intuitive if you ask me. Emerging language isn’t a problem, is it?  This issue perplexed a number of my colleagues on DELTA  during the experimental practice. Keen on trying Dogme, there was some doubt about the language focus even if there was great success in facilitating learner-centred, conversation driven lessons.

I got the impression that the easiest way to do this would be reformulation. During my first year and a half of teaching, this issue led me to ask myself whether dealing with emerging language meant only reformulating it to make it sound more natural. If this were the case, then surely it would become rather frustrating if every effort to engage in classroom discussion resulted in reformulation?

The questions that led on from those questions concerned how to expand my repertoire of ideas for dealing with emerging language. In addition to this, I thought about if my choices regarding which language and which topics to focus on, but that’s another story for another post. Now I’d like to share the ways of extending emerging language which have worked best for me in the past 6 months in hope that there might be of some use and that others out there might contribute their favourite ways too.

Gap-filling

For form

Ask everyone to close their eyes and rub off all the verbs for verb-noun collocations or all the prepositions in chunks. Ten should be challenging enough for any level. Although some classes have wanted as many as twenty! Ask everyone to write the answers then give them the pens to take turns filling in the gaps.

This was my board after a conversation on our favourite things to do in London. At the end of the lesson, about 20 minutes remaining, I gap-filled the board.

On the left hand side are some expressions recycled from the previous lesson written on cards.

Language from a debate

Alternatively, after a classroom debate, the gap-filling can be done in teams; one for each side of the board.

Tables can also be good for a focus on word formation using suffixes if I’ve heard a particular problem with suffixation of nouns. I use the emerging language as a basis for the activity and then continue it with dictionaries.

Collocations 

I also find that collocation webs can be a way of extending language from a conversation. If I hear difficulties with common collocations, I write them and put the words on the board, or in the case of a mistake, put the right word (I then mention the mistakes and ask them which is the correct way of saying what they said). The words are copied and joined to make as many collocations as possible.

Form for noun modifiers 

After a quick explanation of noun modifiers, I ask everyone to think of nouns and verbs on the topic of the conversation just had, then we add them to the board and make noun phrases with noun modifiers in groups. They can be as long as as absurd as possible, the only rule is that the person who makes it must be able to explain the meaning of it. These are then written on cards and passed around for groups to guess the meaning.

“a dancing sandwich box”

“A sandwich box which dances”

“an eye removal safety department”

” a department to make sure that eyes are removed in a safe way”

Good for helping students create and make sense of chains of long and complex noun modifiers. At lower levels it fits in well with situational vocabulary, for instance in a hotel. You might get phrases like “hotel swimming pool service”.

2. Pronunciation

When I’ve covered pronunciation, I often take a photo of the board and then remove the stressed syllables, schwas or weak forms and ask students to fill them in, working in groups so that they have to say the phrases to each other to guess. I find it’s sometimes better to leave it a while before doing this to revise, perhaps at the end of the lesson.

Another thing that has worked really well, which I adapted from an idea my DELTA tutor gave me involves take chunks from emerging language written on the board and writing the stress patterns for students to match. This can be done on the board or on strips of card if available.

Here’s an example of the board

Since then, I’ve found that the activity works better with as outlined above with small cards. I sometimes put them around the room for students to match or dish them out to individuals for them to find their pair. Either way, it gets them to focus on stressed and unstressed syllables and keeps thing a bit more student-centred while you’re free to monitor and do a bit of one-to-one pron teaching.

Other times, I’ve drawn a table on the board to focus on past-participle endings and asked learners to mark the consonant sounds, doing the first as an example to help

In this case we also focused on elision of final consonant sounds in past participle endings. I got the class to create every-day phrases where these might appear, for example I missed the bus, a missed call, you’re not allowed to etc.

3. Focusing on meaning

Lexis

1. If I have lots of vocabulary on the board, I ask people in pairs to write a paraphrase of the word/chunk and then the word on the back. I monitor during this stage and make sure paraphrases are not too difficult and do some one-to-one clarification if needed. Cards are then collected and distributed, paraphrase-side up and pairs guess the phrase and check.

2. Alternatively, with higher levels, I write down on card some good phrases said during conversations and reformulate some less accurate phrases. While I’m doing all of this I’ve asked everyone to make a list of the topics they spoke about. I then distribute the cards to groups and ask them to match them to the topic. This will often throw up phrases like “Yeah, we were talking about X and I wanted to say something like this” or “I remember that X said this when we were talking about Y, it means Z”. As a teacher you’re then free to monitor any problems in connecting the meaning to the context and can ask other people to explain.

What I really like about this activity is that it really connects meaning to context, forcing people to think back to the context in which the utterance was said or the context it could be said in. Make sure the phrases aren’t TOO difficult, as it the task is quite challenging already. At lower levels, the reformulated phrases could be added to one side to help. This activity has only worked well for me when the whole class has been in the conversation, otherwise it’s better to make group-specific cards.

Grammar

What I try to avoid is standing at the board explaining grammar. I imagine myself in my students’ shoes when their teacher explains a load of grammar to them and this usually stops me. Although, having said that, it’s nice to have your questions about grammar answered, which is why I often devote time to questions about language. I ask everyone to write one question about the grammar on the board. In groups they try and answer it, the ones that cause difficulty or don’t get answered I then answer after.

Exchanging modals

Exactly what it sounds like, ask them to exchange the modal in the sentence and discuss how this changes the meaning.

Time lines 

I normally put some sentences said on the board and some timelines and we match them. The discussions are always full of questions and beliefs about grammar… it’s possible in these cases to highlight personal preference or stylistic preference. I’m lucky to have intelligent and curious students who ask lots of questions… when asked by them, they are always more meaningful.

The drawback of this is that it has a tendency to draw out lots of rules, some of them helpful, some of them not so helpful. I do however encourage students to make theories about grammar and suggest possible alternatives, making sure not to accept anything absurd or just plain wrong.

Not that reformulation doesn’t play a part in my classroom, it just seems to me that ‘dealing with’ means more than just changing it but also ‘extending’. I guess this falls into the category of ‘doing language work’ too. Also, I want to point out that not all the dealing with emerging language takes place on the board, its just I have the most pictures of this!

So this leads me to ask you: how do you deal with emerging language?