Archive for the ‘Alternative teaching techniques’ Category

1. Be good looking

2. Have good posture
Makes you seem serious and all the clothes you wear look smarter than everyone else’s.

2. Be amusing
Typical (mental) lesson plan for this kind of teacher: laugh at someone’s new haircut, page 13 ex 7b, a few little witticisms like changing the model sentences to make them about the students, ex 7c, laugh (again) at the Headway theme music, do listening, etc.

4. Dress well
Usually meaning smart and conventional. It will at least put some doubt into the minds of your students: “Why would a lazy teacher put the effort into wearing a jacket when they don’t have to?” etc.

5. Stay around even worse teachers (more…)

I thought so.  Try these with your classes, then:

Student A: How are you?
Student B: Old

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How am I? How should I be?

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How should I be, with my feet?

Student A: How’s your brother?
Student B: Dead

Student A: What’s doing?
Student B: Nothing
A: Nothing?
B: Nothing.

Student A: How was your weekend?
Student B: It should happen to my enemies

Student A: What time is it?
Student B: What am I, a clock?

In case you haven’t guessed they are all from Yiddish, specifically mainly from the surprisingly readable popular linguistics book Born to Kvetch. More good stuff from there coming on TEFLtastic soon.

Anthropological linguists- Studying the feuds and other interactions of linguists as if they were a Papua New Guinea tribe

Contrastive analysis- trying to work out what the picture on a bad photocopy is when asked to talk about it in class

Deterministic grammar rules- ones you are destined never to understand

Drilling- (more…)

Just in case you came onto the site looking for something useful today (sorry, what can I say, it’s the weekend) if you click on the links you can get some non-alternative definitions too

Community Language Learning- The theory that students getting together at break time to bitch about British food and their teacher is the best way of drawing them together and increasing their motivation to learn

DoS- Director of Studies. Often confused with the similar word “dosser”

Flaps- Chairs with flaps rather than tables started as a Japanese S&M love hotel accesory, but has now become a standard part of the average language school. Influences that led to this change of purpose include: (a) Suggestopedia teachers patenting the use of comfortable chairs and, (b) Early Humanistic Language Teachers reading in a furniture catalogue that they “help you open up and show your vulnerabilities” and taking its meaning to be metaphorical

Pairwork- Getting students to work together. The expression “pairwork” is used to illustrate that double (”pair”) the effort (”work”) is needed by the teacher (to explain what he wants the students to do) and students (to understand what the hell is going on) as compared with just doing it as a whole class

Peer observations- When your DoS* tries to see what you are up to from outside your classroom without being seen by you

School Principal- In a school where the DoS* only has responsibility for academic matters, “School Principal” is often used as the title of the school’s business manager. Please note from the spelling of “principal” that the duties of this job should not be confused with “school manager with principles”, an outdated concept that died out in the early 90s

Silent Way (The)- A largely unsuccessful attempt to teach a language by spending the whole lesson standing at the front of the class with your arms crossed staring crossly at the students like your school teacher when he’d given up on yelling as a way of making the class shut up. As with its original inspiration, the only things a silent way teacher was allowed to say were “I can wait all day”, “It’s not my time you’re wasting, it’s your own” and “Whenever you’re ready, gentlemen”. Other even less successful attempts to turn school teacher disciplinary tricks into entire language learning methodologies include the Hysterical Hissy Fit Way, the Throwing the Board Eraser Way and the Throat-clearing Way.

Suggestopedia- This method of putting language learners into a hypnotic state through comfortable chairs and relaxing music was discredited in the late eighties when the teacher scripts were discovered to consist mainly of repeated phrases like “You will not get stressed about learning nothing” and “You can increase your TOEIC score by buying your teacher a drink”

See here for the full Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary so far.

“Our profession is notorious for exploiting its most valuable asset – language teachers – for financial gain. I remember a teacher recalling taking a summer job where he and his fellow teachers struggled to teach competently in a school with sub-standard facilities and scant resources. He had a vivid memory of the owner arriving in a Rolls Royce and announcing that further cost-cutting measures were necessary. I think that says it all.”

Sounds like TEFLtrade is back on the case… (more…)

As a blogger and writer of articles on the internet whose technical knowledge stops at Word, as usual I feel half chuffed at churning out so many articles, including a good one here and there, and half guilty at creating so much work for those who can name a programming language more recent than BASIC. So, with many thanks to the tech sorts who made this possible and without further ado, here are the new bits and pieces on the web that I’ve been associated with:

The TEFL.net review pages I edit now allow comments on any of the titles reviewed there, which is a fabulous idea which I wish had been mine.

On TEFL.net too, there is a new Idea Thinktank of practical teaching games etc, on which I have about 12 (!) articles including 15 Fun Things to do with a Whiteboard (yes, that’s a whiteboard rather than an interactive whiteboard- showing my age??) and the 15 Most Fun Pronunciation Games.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also got some slightly more weighty ones up on the rejigged TEFL.net TEFL Articles Page, including Easy Ways to Improve Your TEFL Career.

And on Usingenglish.com in March:

Election- Second Conditionals speaking practice

101 IELTS Speaking Part Two Tasks about sports and hobbies

Why your students speak L1 in class

Why your students don’t do their homework

101 IELTS Speaking Part Two tasks about people, places, actions, things and times

Setting up workshops for teachers

Business English tense review

Business English silent letters and syllables

The language of trends spot the difference

I also had a review of a couple of BULATS books out in MET magazine this month, should you have a copy handy and fancy a look.

You finally come to the end of students staring at you blankly through the grammar explanation, and introducing pairwork brings on jokes, chat, imaginative use of language, and maybe even some flirting- unfortunately, little of any of it in English! Why do students switch to their own language in an English class, despite your best Basil Fawlty-like shows of displeasure every time they do it? (more…)

A huge change in the way English is being taught in Oregon, apparently:

“Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don’t miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.

‘For a long time, we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do,’ said Danelle Heikkila, who directs the English Language Learner program for Gresham-Barlow schools.

‘But the state has asked us to . . . make sure that we teach them about English, about the rules and forms and structures of English.’”

So the revolution is: teachers teach rather than “letting students discover themselves through the language” or some such 

And the results? (more…)

“What do you know about the Silent Way?”

“Not much,…

(more…)

“Why the Method is effective
Most people who learn English are more interested in acquiring a practical
skill than in obtaining intellectual satisfaction. They want to learn
English for business or professional purposes, and they need to acquire a
good working knowledge of the language as quickly as possible.”

…from the Callam website. I could explain why the Method (scary use of capitals!) wouldn’t work as either a marketing or a teaching method in Japan, but it might be quicker to just convert it into a version suitable for Japan:

(more…)