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ELT - A Journey from A-Z

Posted by #d169#Guest452651 30-Sep-2010

Welcome to the blog! Over the coming months we will be taking a trip through the alphabet of Teaching English, and discussing the elements that we need to consider to provide effective lessons.

Before we begin, a couple of important points:

1) My A-Z of areas is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. Please feel free each month to add you own!

2) I will comment only briefly on each of my areas. Please expand on them or discuss them as you wish!

So the idea of the points I make are for them to be seeds of discussion, and for the blog to be truly interactive. I know there are many great teachers out there who will be able to contribute to make this a living dialogue with benefits for all!

A is for…

Aims

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it!” A good lesson – and indeed a sequence of lessons will have an overall linguistic and communicative aim. We need to think not just about the language we are going to introduce, but what the students are going to do with it by the end – debate something? Write a story? Make a presentation? Tell an anecdote? Within the lesson, each stage too should have an aim – in what way does the stage contribute to the overall outcome of the lesson?

- How do you plan a lesson and define your aims?

Assessment

This is a massive area, and one that we will revisit when we get to ‘E for Exams’ and ‘T for testing’. Here I would like to draw out the distinction between formal assessment (tests and exams) and informal assessment. We should be assessing our students informally all the time. So what does this mean and why should we do it? Taking a speaking activity as an example, keen monitoring by the teacher will reveal common areas of success and common areas of difficulty. An awareness of these is vital in influencing future teaching – and ensuring that we are really teaching the students and not just following the book.

- What means do you use to informally assess your students?

Attention span

A good rule of thumb is that the younger the learners, the shorter the attention span. Boredom can set in quickly with younger age groups, and of course boredom means disruptive behaviour… so short activities are the order of the day, longer activities becoming possible as the students get older.

- If you have any favourite short activities that you use with young learners, why not share them?

Attention – Getting It

My memories of primary school include the teacher always shouting to get us to listen. A tiring and stressful approach to getting silence if ever there was one! Silence itself is one of the greatest classroom management tools we have. To get the attention of a class, issue one clear instruction, then stand still, make strong eye contact and… wait. The energy level will fall rather than rise, and very soon the group will be silent. Shouting a) increases the energy and noise levels and b) leaves the teacher with nowhere to go when they really need to make a ‘special’ impact on the class!

- What other means have you successfully used to get the attention of a rowdy class?

Authentic Materials

Materials that were NOT written with ELT in mind can be a great motivator if used effectively. Thanks to the internet, as well as to the more traditional sources of authentic material like newspapers, video and songs; we are now totally surrounded with opportunities for authenticity in our classroom. How to use them and why? Many teachers are put off using authentic materials because of the potentially high content of ‘difficult’ language they contain, and the effort involved in exploiting them. An important point to remember is to gear the TASK to the level of the students rather than expect them to understand every word they contain. Authentic material such as DVD or YouTube footage can be used as a stimulus to get students to talk using language they know (they can discuss what they SEE rather than what they hear). In this instance, they need not understand a single word of the audio! Students get a real sense of achievement from successfully interacting with a piece of authentic material.

- It would be great to hear of success stories you have had in this area. Write and share them!

That’s it for this month and for my list of ‘A’s. What do you think? What ‘A’s have I missed? Let us know! Until next month, and the letter ‘B’, happy teaching!

2307 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: tips, teacher_training, techniques, authentic_materials, attention, attention_span, assessment, lesson_aims, a-z

From our man in Switzerland...

Posted by #d169#Guest452651 31-Mar-2010

Last week I was on tour in Switzerland, where I had the pleasure of not only witnessing ‘Chocolate Box Scenery’ in the country where it was invented – but also of meeting a large number of great teachers with a variety of interests and backgrounds.

The workshops I ran were equally varied – covering topics from grammar to functions, task based learning to motivating teenagers. Diverse though the sessions were, one recurring theme was that of helping students to communicate in English in the classroom in readiness for using English in the outside world.

Many teachers commented that with a group of monolingual students getting students to complete group speaking tasks in English can be tricky, and I agreed, but some tips and ideas worthy of sharing did come out of discussions at a number of the workshops. Briefly, here they are:

Some students dominate an activity; Quieter students say nothing.

Some suggestions for dealing with this included

- grouping all the dominant students together (using the logic that eventually someone will have to let the other speak…) and similarly putting the quiet students together. This can have the effect of removing the perceived threat of the livelier ones (sometimes seen as the ‘better’ ones) and can provide a less threatening environment for the shy students to contribute.

- in situations where a chairperson or a secretary is needed in a group activity, quieter students can often respond well to this. They remain equally involved in the activity, but in a way that suits them better than having to say too much.

It is worth remembering that quiet students are sometimes quiet in their own language too, and that our job is not to change their personalities. We can create the right conditions for communication, or to quote the ancient metaphor: ‘You can lead the horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.’

Another (more controlling suggestion) was from a workshop in St Gallen: Give each student a limited number of sweets, and each time they contribute to the discussion, they have to eat one. When they have run out of sweets, they have to wait until all the other group members have eaten all theirs before they are allowed to join in again. Make sure your students all like the kind of sweets you are giving them tough, or the whole idea will have the opposite effect!

Students doing the activities in their own language when they are meant to be done in English.

I’m sure that every English teacher on earth has experienced this at some time. One comment was that our coursebooks have such exciting speaking activities that the students (especially at lower levels) get carried away with the content of the activity more than with using English! It was generally agreed – and quite comforting to a number of teachers - that beyond ensuring that the activity is achievable and that the students are given adequate linguistic preparation and planning time, we have limited options when dealing with this.

- One comment was that we shouldn’t stop doing speaking activities because of this problem, but firstly rationalise the activity with the students in terms of what it is meant to achieve. Secondly, and importantly – always remember that as with anything in life, practice makes perfect, and as a student moves up from one level to the next, so should the amount of English they use in class.

That’s all for this month. Join me next month with an update of what Great Teachers are doing in Ukraine and Russia.

Until then, Happy Teaching!