Archive for the ‘Teaching methods and methodologies’ Category

… is something I won’t be doing in Korea. I was a bit worried about my lack of experience teaching teenagers going into the telephone interview, but I think when they told me “We don’t teach 12 to 17 year olds” and I screamed “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss! Yeees! Yeees!” was when I clinched the job. Adult classes are what I am trained to do and I get few complaints, but teaching little kids surprising amounts seem to be what comes naturally. Which hopefully makes up for my complete lack of training in that area…

Anyway, here is a link to everything I have learnt in the school of hard knocks* of the 2 to 12 year olds’ classes:

Young and iddybiddy learner articles on TEFLtastic and all over the net

Hope to have similar pages for my Business English and ESP stuff etc ready soon, but in the meantime here is the updated link to everything I’ve published since I lost 12 floppy disks of my first 6 years of worksheets:

Complete publications and links

* Quite often literally, like the lesson observed by parents where two kids ran into each other and then both got nosebleeds.

ARELS- Association of Reasonably good English Language Schools
 
BAAL- The false god of Applied Linguistics
 
Direct method- A system of language learning aimed at making Japanese students say what they really mean

Ditransitive- verbs often used with the object “Lady Di”
 
EAP- English for Academic Purposes- learning English to seem intellectual
 
Facilitation- Rather than leading the language learning process, teachers aid the students by standing there doing nothing and spouting stuff like “Don’t ask me, you are empowered to control your own learning”.

Feedback- Based on the similarity with playing an electric guitar, in ELT this term is used to express the teacher’s ability to produce discord and put people on edge with the use of error correction

FFI- Form focused instruction- designing your lessons just to get good marks on the categories you know are on the student evaluation and lesson observation forms

Fillers- breakfast foods suitable for teachers who will be photocopying through their lunch break

FL- foreign language. Pronounced “fleur”, with as outrageous a French accent as you can manage
 
Focus on form- The problem of teachers writing down all the things students tell them during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use during the last few seconds. Often contrasted with focus on forms*

Focus on forms- A teacher being distracted by the student’s figure during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use in the last few seconds. Often contrasted with Focus on Form*

Fossilization- The immobile face and blank stare that teachers who have been in the business too long develop

Gap filling- The favourite physical threat of drunk TEFL teachers

Grammatical terminology- “all these like little name things” (definition by an English Language Teaching Assistant in Hong Kong, quoted in Teacher Language Awareness pg 157)

IH- International House, the chain of schools formerly known by the less successful name of “Nationalism House”

Immersion language learning- A way of increasing student motivation to speak. See also waterboarding*

Implicit knowledge of language- Students hiding the fact that they’ve known that grammar since primary school in order not to seem like a swot or to save the teacher embarrassment

Inductive approach (the) - Giving students who pause forever before speaking an epidural injection to force delivery

Inflections- Passed on in the spit of Spanish people trying to pronounce /h/

“While many teachers may attend to the questions ‘Do you like this language? Do you like this class?’, perhaps the more fundamental question for a student is ‘Do I like myself in this class?’”

(more…)

Here are the links for stuff I have published here and elsewhere so far this month that you might have missed, in case the heat makes me lose the rest of my energy and I forget at the end of the month:

On Usingenglish.com (theeeeeeey’re back!)

Why does my teacher use games in an adult class?

Why does our teacher make us read difficult authentic texts?

How British is your English? Questionnaire and explaining unknown vocab speaking practice worksheets- one of my favourites!

Elsewhere on TEFLtastic

Korean speakers- common vocabulary mistakes in English

Determiners practice- starting presentations- designed to go with Market Leader, but also suitable for whoever else is unlucky enough to need to tie those two topics together…

Classroom language TEFL workshop notes- with accompanying teacher training worksheets below

Ranking classroom language- teacher training pairwork worksheets

Simplifying classroom language- teacher training worksheets, with tips on using gestures in class to give instructions etc.

Classroom language further reading and links

Teaching likes and dislikes and free time activities teacher training workshop plan

Business English pron worksheets section (the worksheets are old, but the section is new)

Intelligent Business Worksheets and Games section- also useful for other Bus Eng classes

Market Leader worksheets and games- ditto

My stuff elsewhere on TEFL.net

In the Idea Thinktank

15 games for the language of likes and dislikes

15 classroom language games

15 punishments for pre-school English classes

15 Business English games for describing your company and job

15 criteria for good kindergarten worksheets

In TEFL.net Articles

15 good reasons to write TEFL reviews

In TEFL.net reviews

A History of English Language Teaching Second Edition review

And if the heat is keeping you awake instead of making you sleepy, you can have a look at June’s links too (newly updated as I’d forgotten about the reviews):

New articles, worksheets and reviews June 2008

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…)

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.

I’ve been reading “English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity” (hence “the ELF” of the post title) by Jenny Jenkins, and although its a much easier read than that Pseuds Corner book title might make you think, the main reaction so far is “Who cares?”

To summarize 37 pages in 37 words, the concept of English as a Lingua Franca is that as more and more English is used between non-native speakers a new variety or varities of English are being created that are just as valid and important as Glaswegian English or even RP and SAE- and much more relevant than those forms to most students studying English. So far, so fascinating- if we are in the process of the language and teaching changing, you can probably tell from the post below that I’d be happy to have something to shake things up. The important little grammar word here, though, is “if”.

Let’s see what Prof Jen Jen has to say about it: (more…)

“Only half of the activations in the brain were to do with the speech and language areas. The voice is not just coming from your lips. It’s coming from the whole body and you need to think about that when you’re trying to change aspects of 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…)

“An American teenager was hitchhiking in Nigeria. A carload of locals passed him. The car screeched to a halt. The locals jumped out and promptly roughed up the visitor. Why? (more…)