Archive for the ‘Teaching teenagers’ Category

In a moment of inspiration fueled by low tolerance to the stimulating effects of real British “builders’ tea”, have come up with:

The pairwork magic formula

I have yet to teach a class that wouldn’t do and enjoy pairwork eventually. If the magic formula below doesn’t work, then you do indeed know to give up on working in groups. The magic formula is:

1. Make sure there are props and a game factor so you and they can easily see if they are doing nothing at all
2. Make sure there is a clear winner, e.g. the person who guesses their partner is lying more often, so that they know if they have completed the task successfully
3. Make sure some of the prompts are written in English, so that there is not a possibility of playing the game just in L1, e.g. cards with the answers they have to elicit from their partners written on
4. Try a simple, repetitive use of a grammatical formbut leave part of the form blank for students to add their own ideas if they wish, such as chain of First Conditionals that they have to try and make finish with the sentence ending they have been given
5. Try to give them preparation time before they start speaking sometimes, e.g. get them to write 5 pieces of information about themselves that their partner has to guess the questions for
6. If it is one or two students in the class that ruin their groups all the time by pausing too long etc, do pairwork activities as two teams of twos instead

*Well, actually it started with a comment of mine on http://insights-into-tefl.blogspot.com/, but that fact for some reason got the “classic” (i.e. horribly dated) Hot Chocolate song “It started with a kiss” stuck in my head and I could only get rid of it through the magical use of a meaningless blog title. Ah, relief…

You may have noticed that this blog is entirely emoticon free. Partly choice, partly old-fogey-beyond-my-years-ism. Couldn’t work out any of these either:

3:-o
@>–> –
~(_8^(I)   (more…)

Something from Japanzine manages to make me laugh again, and this time with something that isn’t really offensive at all:

AWAKENINGS A true story about a passionate and somewhat unorthodox English teacher who struggles to cure students of ‘Eigolepsy’, a speaking disorder which strikes many students rendering them motionless and seemingly catatonic.  Using an unconventional teaching technique, he succeeds in ‘awakening’ several of them. At first he is buoyed by the success of his treatments and several exciting encounters occur as the classroom is brought back to life.  But later he is saddened when he finds that eventually they all suffer a relapse of the disease and he loses interest in trying to communicate with them. 

More here: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/touristbusdown.htm

Not a big enough problem to worry Auntie Alex with, so will deal with this reader enquiry myself:

Some good-looking internet resources on said topic, have no more than skimmed them myself but the sites they are on are well respected.

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kilickaya-AutenticMaterial.html

http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/berardo/article.pdf

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/51/2/144

http://www.amazon.com/Motivational-Strategies-Language-Classroom-D%C3%B6rnyei/dp/0521793777/ref=sr_1_4/002-8179833-2881649?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185616833&sr=8-4

The last one is the Amazon page of a classic book by a great author with a great name- Zoltan.

Books I’ve been reading recently that I haven’t had time to review but would highly recommend (in no particular order):

Office Ladies and Salaried Men- Yuko Ogasawara (University of California Press). A real inside look on what goes on in Japanese offices between Japanese men and women. Surprising and fascinating.

Getting Wet- Eric Talmadge (Kodansha). More than you wanted to know about Japanese people getting hot and naked in onsen- it all starts to make sense after reading this.

Pre-school in Three Cultures- Tobin, Wu and Davidson. Unusual conclusions and unusual way of reaching them, interesting for those who have no contact with Kindergartens in either China, Japan or the US too.

See page on the right for many many more mini, and not so mini-, reviews.

Am I right? Am I out-of-date? Comments here please

“…teachers who have been told that their students are ‘high achievers’ (even if they are not) tend to get the kind of results associated with high achievement”. Scott Thornbury in An A-Z of ELT (Macmillan)- a very readable and accessible book 

Any comments? Any at all?? Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on

If there is one group of students who usually need to be warmed up before you can get going and almost always appreciate your efforts to do so, it is low level adults. Teenagers and higher level students can need to be convinced that a game is not a waste of time or childish and sometimes need easing into fun stuff slowly and with clear justifications, but lower level adults need to and want to start with a bang.

Despite the low level of language Beginner and Elementary students can produce and therefore sometimes the juvenile level that humour etc. in English can be reduced to, they will not necessarily appreciate you bringing in the beach balls etc. that you could use to liven up the simple syllabus with younger kids (although sometimes they do!). The trick, then, is to find sit down games you can play with little language and basic instructions and using the same or similar language week after week. Below are some suggestions of warmers you can use with the Simple Past, which should also give you ideas for similar activities you can fit into the language you are covering now.

Simple Simple Past Warmer 1: Guess when

After a brief “How was your week/ weekend?” chat, during which you elicit and write the days and dates on the board, tell the class one thing you did on one of those days. They must repeat the sentence back, but with “you” and their guess of which day you did it, eg. “You had a picnic on Sunday”. They then continue in pairs or threes.

The same game can also be played with months, years, ages etc. in the past- maybe in future weeks as more grammar such as ‘ago’ is introduced

Simple Simple Past Warmer 2: Then make the story of my life

Moving on from general chat (if possible), ask one of the students what time they got up on Saturday and get them to give a whole sentence reply. Try to guess their next action on that day (”Next/ then you had a shower”) and get them to tell you if that is really what they did next (”Yes, that’s right” or “No, I didn’t. Next I made a cup of tea”). Ask the class to guess later stages of that student’s day. Continue in pairs.

Simple Simple Past Warmer 3: Irregular tennis

In teams, students take turns ’serving’ with infinitive forms (go, do, want) and ‘returning’ with the simple past form. Mime the ball going backwards and forwards across the classroom to speed their responses up. Score as per tennis, but perhaps changing service after every point rather than every game.

Can also be done with scoring of other sports, such as volleyball, or even with a real beach ball.

There are many more just for this one grammar point, but it might be more useful to give the points that a good warmer has to have:

1. Links naturally into the chat etc. at the beginning of the class or has a prop, novelty value etc. that suddenly gets students’ attention.

2. Is easy to explain, or even better can just be demonstrated

3. Can be made as short as 5 minutes but extended if needed

4. Is fun

5. Uses the target language and/ or language from last week

6. Does not ask too much of students in terms of creativity or language while they are not yet warmed up
Any more warmers for this grammar point? Any classics for other grammar points? Any requests? Comment below:

Still not loving teaching the 18-20 year olds. Passing on my wisdom is all very well, but I prefer to have some passed back my way too. At least I’m having to research some stuff about Oz (where most of them are going next year) to plan their lessons and so getting some culture that way. Well I guess you could say culture, if you could also say Shane Warne is the Leonardo di Vinci of the antipodes. 

An almost entirely positive point about the classes, though, is the textbook they have chosen for me. Am loving teaching with Face2Face Pre-Intermediate and Face2Face Intermediate (both Chris Redston and Gillie Cunningham, Cambridge University Press). Seems to suit my way of teaching down to the ground. Bizarrely, also gives much more useful language for the IELTS exam than the designated book for that course- being the almost completely pointless book Step Up to IELTS (Vanessa Jakeman and Clare McDowell, also CUP). I also hear daily complaints from the other teachers about Achieve IELTS (Marshall Cavendish). Are there no decent IELTS textbooks out there????

Anyone else like these, hate them or want to know more about them?

The rainy season (tsuyu) is completely screwed this year. In fact, every year since I got to Japan I’ve been told that “The weather this year is strange”, same as “The cherry blossom this year is early/late”. This may well be true, but I think it is much more a case of the Japanese wanting the weather to be as predictable as the train timetable. At times the whole country seems set up to make sure there are no surprises- I wonder how many Japanese people would be able to tell that Radiohead are being sarcastic in the “No Surprises” song (but then again, how many Americans thought The One I Love by REM was a love song??)

And the same most assuredly goes for lessons. With anything less than a year of careful learner training, skipping around in the textbook is likely to cause something between a mild flurry and complete panic depending on the age of the students.

Primary school students are generally fine for the first few years, taking surprises and new stuff as all part of the fun. Then the Japanese education system gets to work and the idea of skipping reading the instructions and just doing what your teacher says brings on increasing incomprehension and stress. One theory has it that the Japanese establishment has decided to keep kanji (Chinese characters) mainly because learning it means learning this unquestioning approach. The good news is that as my teenage college students are learning to cope with all this new and unexpected stuff in class, I really think I am teaching them a skill they are going to need when they get to Australia, NZ and the UK.

Teaching (college student) teenagers again despite my best efforts to avoid it, there is one factor in the classroom that stands out more than other kinds of classes and, subtly or sometimes not so subtly, affects the classroom dynamic of almost every class. This certain something would, however, under no circumstances get a mention if my lesson was observed and is not written about in any books on teaching English I have ever seen. This is the totally taboo TEFL teaching factor X.

In this case, the X factor we are supposed to ignore manifests itself as a couple of starry eyed girls who are working hard in my class for reasons not connected to my lesson plans, whilst others no doubt perk up and do their homework much more for the blond teacher in their British culture class- and not due to his skills in using pairwork. And many of them are specifically planning to use their language skills to get a western boyfriend when they live abroad next year- you won’t see that written on your average needs analysis interview form!

Another more extreme example was a Belgian female student that picked up on every mistake a Brazilian student made after she saw us chatting outside the school gates. On the other side of the coin, I’ve had several very shy students who would most certainly come out of their shell a bit more if there were no people of the other sex in the class at all. I can think of one particular one-to-one student who I really wanted to tell my boss to find a female teacher for, but somehow felt it was something I couldn’t say.

Of course, I am not the first teacher to notice this and it does in fact get mentioned- by lecherous teachers who’ve had a few too many down the gaijin (ex-pat) pub. Which is one reason why the rest of us try our best to blank the whole factor out. But surely, if my female students want to be able to mix with their British counterparts in Liverpool or Folkestone on a Saturday night (ｇod help them) they are going to need to be able to say they “fancy someone”. In fact, if they want to bond with some of their British female sisters they are going to need to be able to mention specific pieces of body vocabulary that I will certainly not be mentioning near my students! But if I knew of a vocab book of slang that filled in the holes in my classroom syllabus I guess I could approach it that way?? I guess what I am thinking of is an all-female discussion class once a term or a book like “Taboos and Issues”, but with the topics chosen by what the students will need to be aware of and able to talk about rather than what teachers want them to be aware of.

As far as tackling difficult stuff in the classroom goes, slang for vomiting (you should see their faces when they click what a “pavement pizza” is) is about as far as I go, and probably further than my boss would like me to…

Other reasons to tackle this subject: differences in dating culture and personal safety when they go abroad. The most satisfying moment in the classroom is when you help a student understand something they had completely eluded them before and they will always wonder have they ever lived without- my best one being when one Russian student in London found out that “come up for a coffee” is very different from “would you like a cup of tea?”. We never learnt the story behind the look of shock and sudden comprehension on her face…

One other connected unmentioned taboo: some schools in Japan (not mine), only employ male teachers because they know it keeps the main housewife/ OL (”office lady”) customers happy. Whether they have to pretend to be single like members of a boy band I am not sure…

Comments? Advice? Disbelief that a 19 year old could fancy me? Write it all below: