Archive for the ‘Teaching EFL exam classes’ Category

…from the Analects’ very opening lines:

“Isn’t it a pleasure when you can make practical use of the things you have studied? Isn’t it a pleasure to have an old friend visit from afar? Isn’t it the sure sign of a gentleman, that he does not take offense when others fail to recognize his ability?” 

Whoever would’ve thought that the average TEFL teacher had already achieved at least two of the first three things mentioned in the Analects of Kung the Master? We confucianally rock!

If you haven’t managed two out of three yet or would like help reaching all three, luckily the Sage’s disciple Te-fu Ta-tsutik wrote up some more practical advice based on the Master’s words:

Practical use of what you have studied

Few of us have TESOL as a first degree, and even English Lit rarely comes up in the average TEFL class. One solution is to study so much TEFL stuff that it outranks your degree as what you have studied. If you’ve done a TEFL Certificate and aren’t ready for a Diploma or MA yet, there are short courses on teaching Business English, young learners and one to one classes available. Alternatively, set yourself a personal study schedule of books to read. You can add to your motivation by aiming to read all the books in your school or local library by the end of the year in case you decide to leave then, or by volunteering to review for TEFL.net reviews.

The other approach is to change your classes to include whatever your first degree or other studies were about. Getting into ESP or EAP can be a good way of doing this. Even if it as very general class like Business English or IELTS, there should be some connection to your chosen specialist subject. For me, the best thing has been moving into Technical English by using parts of or all the whole of Tech Talk with my engineering students.  

Friends visiting

Move to Rome. Well, worked for me… Seriously though, choosing somewhere with good and cheap flight connections is something always worth bearing in mind.

Not taking offense

Two things have helped me in my usually successful quest for this one. One was climbing the slippery slope early on in my career, so that when I gave up ELT management etc I knew it was my choice rather than a lack of ambition or being left out for promotion. Another is to have a sideline that is at least as important as your teaching.

…ETS is crap! I mean really, you’d only need to look at one TOEIC test, an exam that claims to test all skills but has no speaking component, or its history to see that ETS is a company that has turned educational incompetence linked to juicy undeserved government contracts into an art form.

The moral of the story is obviously that governments everywhere need to employ more people with TEFL experience to stop them making such elementary mistakes. It’s a big, bad world out there, and no one knows that better than a TEFL teacher!

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

SLA- Second Language Acquisition- The theory that you are guaranteed to learn a language if you just spend enough money on it

STT- Stupid Talking Time- How long you should let a student talk after you realize they’ve got completely the wrong idea of what you are trying to elicit or the topic of conversation.

TLA- In his book “Teacher Language Awareness”, Stephen Andrews controversially claims that “in order to do their jobs well, teacher must be aware that there are languages”(pg.1729), to which the famous repost on the Humanizing Language Teaching website was “Hey Stevie man, chill out! Fascist!”

TBLT- Task Based Lettuce and Tomato The “strong form of TBLT” includes English mustard, while the “weak form of TBLT” only has mayonnaise

TEI- Teacher Effectiveness Index- Not to be confused with TIE-Teacher Index Effectiveness- a number to represent a teacher’s ability to put book in the teachers’ room back in order.

TOEFL- Test of English with Fluency Lacking- A test of English in which you can get full marks without speaking one word. Originally developed only for people who have physical problems with their voice box, eventually having been through an East Asian education system was accepted as a disability and it soon became one of the leading tests in Japan, China and Korea

TTT- Teacher Talking Time. According to modern SLA* theories, the amount of TTT should be reduced, preferably at the same rate as TEFL wages are going down. This is so that the amount of effort you put in per pound remains stable.

Universal Grammar-formerly “Miss Universal Grammar”

vocatives- the functions on a karaoke machine

Vygotskyan sociocultural theory of learning- The idea that if you tell students your classes are “Vygotskyan” and manage to pronounce and spell it right, they will trust everything you do from then, even if you and they have no idea what it means

Warmer- An activity that fulfills the role of classroom heating, such as star jumps, group hugs or burning vocabulary lists they have learnt

Weak interface position- A Japanese handshake, or the idea that pointing out how much contempt it gets could result in them learning a decent grip

ZPD- Zone of Proximal Development- The short period of time during which it is acceptable to ask a student out on a date

The whole dictionary (my life’s work!) is available here, now with links to more conventional definitions, if you are unlucky enough to be doing the DELTA or MA TESOL

If the amount of new stuff I learnt from the new book “Academic Vocabulary in Use” by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell is anything to go by (a book for students from “good Intermediate level”, not for teachers!), the answer about whether I should be teaching English for Academic Purposes is a resounding “No!”, although several things make me feel better about that:

- I detest universities as institutions and don’t want to work in one anyway
- I studied Physics, so the longest thing I ever had to write was 1500 words and no one expected me to have basic human communication skills, yet alone a grasp of academic prose
- With authors like those, I was hardly going to know everything they know
- Ditto with the Cambridge International Corpus, and anyway the whole idea of a corpus is that it is supposed to give counter-intuitive results

With those provisos to make you feel better about your results, without any further ado here is the “Should you be teaching EAP?” quiz.

Answer the questions below to see whether you should be getting into or out of the world of EAP. My own score was very nearly zero (which is why I picked them, but the first question is an easy one to get you started), so good luck. Answers in the comments section. Only the answers from the book are acceptable, so if there are several possible answers you will need to think of all of them before turning to the answer key. One point per answer, total possible score is 38.
The “Should you be teaching EAP?” quiz

Collocations

1. Pick out the two collocations that are not given in the book “Academic Vocabulary in Use” and so are presumably not common in academic English

“gently fondle”,  “intermittent contact”, “animated debate”, “excess energy”, “recent phenomenon”, “conflicting role”, “efficient way”, “conflicting role”, “break off contact”, “with the fashion sense of a physics grad”, “differentiate the elements”, “emerging phenomena”, “strengthened roles”, “important difference”, “major point”, “enormous amount” and “widespread assumption” are common collocations in academic English

British and American Academic English

2. List 20 verbs that always take -ise (and therefore never –ize) in both British and American English.
 
3. Give four words that are spelt with ae in British English but e in Am Eng
 
4. And two with oe/e

5. How many words can you think of with a -our spelling in British English but a -or spelling in American English? (you only get points if your answer includes the one word that from the book that I didn’t know)
 
6. How many words can you think of with an -re spelling in British English but a –er spelling in American English? (you only get points if your answer includes the one word that from the book that I didn’t know)

7. Can you explain when we use the spellings “humor”, “honor” and “glamor” in British English?

8. Can you explain when we use the spelling “meter” in British English?
 
9. What’s the difference between the British and American meanings of (exam) rubric?
 
The original meanings of words

10. Sophomore comes from the Greek for…
 
11. What did the “hyper” in hyperrealism originally mean?

12. What did the “quasi-” in quasigovernmental originally mean?

13. What did the “-ant” in “coolant” and “accelerant” originally mean?

14. What did the “-cy” in “accuracy” and “literacy” originally mean?

15. What two meanings does “-ism” have?

16. What did the “-ics” in “genetics” and “electronics” originally mean?

Abbreviations

17. What does e.g. stand for?

18. What does “i.e.” stand for?

19. What does “et al” stand for?

20. What does “ibid.” stand for?

21. What does “cf.” stand for?

22. What does “q.v.” stand for?

23. What does “LLB” stand for?

24. What does “FRS” stand for?

25. What does “CUNY” stand for?

26. What does “FAAFP” stand for?

27. What does “MRCS” stand for?

28. What does “AMA” stand for?

29. What does “ACA” stand for?

30. What does “FASB” stand for?

31. What does “AICPA” stand for?

Formal and informal English

32. What are more formal versions of recap, be based on, deal with, promise, write about, almost

33. What’s a formal way of saying ‘although’?

34. What’s a more informal way of saying ‘nevertheless’?

Misc

35. Why do the words “discipline”, “underline”, “solid”, “generate”, “turn”, “confirm”, “identify”, “character”, “pose”, “nature” and “focus” all appear in the same section of a book on academic English?

36. Rewrite the sentence ‘Radiation was accidentally released over a 24-hour period, damaging a wide area for a long time’ in a more academic manner and identify the general feature of academic grammar that it illustrates.

37. Rewrite the sentence “Marx’s contribution is very significant” in a more academic manner and identify the general aspect of academic English grammar that this illustrates.

38. What other expression does the book give instead of “mind map”?

For those of you who haven’t been on the Worksheet pages yet (although surely no one would waste their time reading the blog when they could save planning time by using the worksheets??) and the many more of you who are going to end up here after the error messages because I’ve shortened lots of html names (because good names are good apparently), here is where the worksheets are now:

Medical and Pharmaceutical worksheets

Business English and ESP Games and Worksheets

Telephoning Games and Worksheets

Technical English and Numbers Games and Worksheets

EFL Exam games and worksheets- IELTS, TOEIC etc.

Travel English, Tourism and Study Abroad worksheets

Writing Games and Worksheets

Vocabulary Games and Worksheets

Functional and Social English Games and Worksheets

Video worksheets

Song worksheets

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

Grammar games and worksheets

Jonnyboy is the cartoonist behind the often amusing Langwich Scool (if you think that is faint praise take a look at how much I’ve struggled and repeated the same jokes in my own attempts at TEFL humour) and the author of the life saving books At Last, Photocopies You Can Give Your Kids’ Classes Without Them Groaning. And now he’s released a book that makes IELTS fun. No, that is not another failed attempt at TEFLtastic humour- it really is so. Check out the book IELTS Resource Pack with free samples hereon the Delta Publishing website. I’ve only tried out a few pages, but as a certified photocopiable materials sommelier I can guarantee it is going to be full of all kinds of fun stuff. Quite a lot looks useful for EAP and Technical English classes too.

What is perhaps even more surprising about Jon Marks is that he has become a Delta Publishing regular author without being, to my knowledge, a member of the Pilgrimsmafia. Or at least if he is, he seems to have a bs detector that stops any of his games getting self indulgent and silly.

BIELT- The British Institute of English Language Teaching, set up with the goals of establishing a framework of professional qualifications and a professional code of practice. It failed.

BULATS- EFL testing euphemism for “bollocks”

Cloze- (more…)

This post might just seem like a list of links, but actually this is the good stuff- TEFLtastic was started as a way of linking to my much more serious and useful stuff elsewhere on the web, and to be honest the actual blog entries just remain a bit of padding between the links. So, click away and see if you agree that I am capable of more than vaguely funny attempts at satire and self-indulgent musings on the meaning of TEFL:

On Usingenglish.com

Worksheets

Business English- Words that can and can’t be shortened

Articles for students (but hopefully of interest to teachers too)

Why does my teacher make me use an English-English dictionary?

Why does my teacher make me learn English grammar words?

On TEFL.net

Games and other practical teaching ideas in the Idea Thinktank

15 uses for guessing games in any pre-school English class

15 problems and solutions for large pre-school classes

15 variations on TPR for little kids

The 15 stages of teaching numbers- for everyone from 2 year olds to financial analysts

15 ways to simplify reading texts

15 ways to reproduce exam conditions

15 ways to make EFL exam tasks fun

15 ways to make EFL exam tasks easier

15 fun ways to score points

Slightly more general and theoretical stuff in the TEFL articles section

15 problems and solutions for large pre-school classes

15 ways to judge an EFL textbook for adults

15 criteria for a good pre-school English class

15 reasons why PPP is so unfashionable

And if all that ain’t enough for yer, here’s the link to all my publications on the Net since 1874.

According to an article today in the Korea Times, of the 10,000 people who applied for the 70 new recruit jobs available in the Korea Exchange Bank this year, “Twenty-nine applicants scored full marks in TOEIC, and 1,086 scored over 900 points.” 900 points is impressive, but a perfect score is something a native speaker would rarely achieve- although due to your attention wandering for a second during the listenings (which you get to hear once only) or a pen slipping into the wrong multiple choice box rather than to obscure grammar questions, which TOEIC doesn’t have.

Although I’ve had a poke at people comparing countries by TOEIC score before, here goes with my attempt. I can confidently predict that no job in Japan ever had 29 people with perfect TOEIC scores apply for it, and it has nothing to do with the differences in education systems (not sure what they could be anyway- not enough beatings in Japanese schools?) and all to do with motivation. In Japan, no one needs a perfect TOEIC score, and as the supply of graduates shrinks as the population shrinks and the remaining motivation of the post-post-post war generation to make their lives even more comfortable dies away, the world can globalize all it likes without affecting English language learning in Japan one little bit.

In other TOEIC News, ETS are looking for raters for the TOEIC speaking test- they pay 15 dollars an hour but you need to be resident in the US and according to this Usingenglish forum thread it leaves a nasty virus on your computer. Odd if true…

And to finish with TOEIC (I only mean to finish with it on the blog, unfortunately, although to wipe it off the face of the earth would be better), a lovely TOEIC metaphor involving trees. Not something you hear everyday, and I don’t just mean the word “lovely” used on TEFLtastic without sarcastic intent…

In other TEFL news, something else you don’t hear everyday- a school in India is specifically looking to recruit an English teacher from Cumbria. Even dating ads in Japan don’t get that specific.