Next weekend and future tenses

Describing objects 20 questions and extended speaking

A report on weekends- Language of generalisation

or phonics picture flashcards

ee phonics picture flashcards

Writing reports in English useful links

New Cutting Edge Intermediate Modules 5 to 8 Rotating Revision board game

Guess the job 20 questions and personalisation (actually a polished up version of one from a couple of months ago)

Possible negative effects

• Becoming too dogmatic, e.g. when planning lessons or observing other people’s lessons

• Applying theories to the wrong situations, e.g. ones based on research on situations totally different to your own (different countries, different education systems, immersion rather than a few hours a week, different levels of motivation)

• Trying to apply a theory that is worse than the previous theory applied or just eclecticism

• Spending too much time researching theories and not enough on lesson planning

• A violent reaction against the teaching methods or materials of the school

• A violent reaction against the beliefs of the students

• Using a theory (related or not) to back up bad practices

• A loss of confidence

• Rejecting out of hand speakers and books that do not support that theory

• A rejection of teaching ideas because they don’t match the theory (maybe only to find that the theory was there all along in a book that you hadn’t read yet)

• Trying to apply a teaching idea that is in fact not related to the theory

• Trying to apply a theory that has no or limited connections to language teaching

• Being left with very few options in the classroom because it is possible to find theories to reject almost everything. Ditto with supplementary materials

• Rejecting classroom ideas and materials for trivial reasons when there are more important reasons (which you were distracted from or were unaware of) for rejecting the things you then end up with

• Losing respect for students’ own ideas on the best way of learning

• Paralysis when planning lessons because there are too many things to think about

• Overruling a good instinctive reaction to something

• The fact that all classroom activities are new to match your new theories meaning that little things like them being polished up and knowing how to use them well

• Too much experimentation in the classroom

• A rejection of experimentation in the classroom because you already know from the theory that it shouldn’t work

• The inability to judge what happens in the classroom in an unbiased way because you see it all through the prism of theory

• Ending up with a whole list of theories who are all accepted and rejected by various famous people for various reasons and having no way to choose between them except for the teaching instinct that you relied on before you started

• Convincing you that everyone is doing or should be doing something because the theory seems generally accepted, when in fact the reality is quite different (see Rose Senior’s The Experience of Language Teaching for examples)

Possible positive effects

• Reconsideration of beliefs

• Reinforcement of good beliefs

• Improved confidence because the theory backs up previous practices

• A desire to do more CPD due to an interest in the theory or a desire to adapt practice to theory

• Can justify your classes to students and potential students

• Can access previously overcomplicated and jargon filled research, journals etc

• Overruling a bad instinctive reaction to something

• Making teaching more interesting and therefore motivating, with a consequent boost in your enthusiasm in the classroom

• Consideration of non-intuitive ideas

• Theory could link to other interesting fields like psychology or neuroscience, making teaching more interesting and motivating

• New teaching ideas that are inspired by a new bit of theory (even if not actually closely related to it)

• Being able to justify your teaching methods to superiors, students etc

• Being able to explain and therefore argue for and pass on opinions about teaching that were there but unformed

• Being able to use that theory in other parts of your life too

• Understanding that theory leading to understanding of other theories

• Understanding that theory making sources such as ELT and applied linguistics journals more accessible

• Having the confidence to reject ideas that you were doubtful about but didn’t have enough evidence on

• Not being scared or intimidated by theory, e.g. the holes in most teaching theories giving you confidence in your own teaching instinct

• Help you rethink and polish up practical ideas

• Help you come up with your own theories

• Give you ways of testing your own theories and practises

• Provide useful metaphors

“Atkins points out that craftsmen in metallurgy have been successfully making metals for hundreds of years, with apprentices learning from masters. However, the science of metallurgy has not yet fully succeeded in explaining everything that goes on in this process. Atkins asks whether teaching is not at least as complex as metallurgy” page 7

“in the field of language teaching, it could be argued that the most ‘scientific’ method in recent times was the ‘audio-visual’ or ‘structural drill’ method. This methodology was firmly anchored in the ‘scientific’ basis of the dominant psychological theory of the time, namely Behaviourism

Many people now claim that this led to unmotivating and irrelevant learning experiences. Yet it is interesting that the ‘revolution’ which displaced this methodology did not take place at the classroom level (where the damage was allegedly being done), but at the academic level, with the advent of Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar (TG). This development, in its turn, led to some bizarre attempts to teach language through ‘transformations’, which fortunately only lasted a brief time.” pg 11

“… the workaday life of the professional depends on tacit knowing-in-action. Every competent practioner can recognise phenomena- families of symptoms associated with a particular disease, peculiarities of a certain building site, irregularities of materials or structures- for which he cannot give a reasonably accurate or complete description. In his day-to-day practice he makes innumerable judgements of quality for which he cannot state adequate criteria, and he displays rules for which he cannot state the rules and procedures.”

Schon 1983: 49, 50, quoted on pg 13

“One striking feature of classrooms is the sheer complexity, quantity and rapidity of classroom interaction. As many as 1,000 interpersonal exchanges each day have been observed, and the multiplicity of decisions which have to be made, and the volume of information relevant to each decision are such that for the teacher logical consideration and decision making would seem to be impossible…”

MacLeod and McIntyre 1977:266, quoted on page 13

Discussion question worksheets and games

All mine and all on Usingenglish.com:

Pronunciation what sound is it?

Phraselist for praising, encouraging and consoling

Classroom management language

Classroom language gestures game

Classroom language functions review

Classroom language for Elementary students

Classroom language determiners review

Classroom language collocations SNAP

Classroom language links Part One was a while ago and is here. Suggestions for other links always gratefully received.

On a recent BBC Radio podcast there was a very interesting anecdote of asking a room of hardcore Ecos whether they would reveal to the world an invention which would stop global warming tomorrow but take away the need for people to change their lifestyles to make them greener. Out of an unspecified roomful, two put their hands up to say yes- stopping climate change it would be. The rest would let us boil in our own juices in the hope that we would learn the live the “right” way.

Here are a few similar thought experiments for my fellow TEFLers and TEFLettes:

1. If it is was found that enjoyment in young learner classes actually led to less learning, would you scrap fun and games?

2. If you found a way of making your laziest students progress as quickly as your most hard working, would you use it?

3. If the most effective method was to set up an activity at the beginning of the class and leave your students to it for 55 of 60 minutes twice a week, would you happily “teach” that way and spend most of the time standing round twiddling your thumbs?

4. If following the instructions in the teachers’ book and students reading grammar explanations and instructions for activities was proved to be more effective than your attempts at lesson planning and explaining, would you do it that way? How about if that couldn’t be proven class by class but could be shown over the whole education system you work in and so you could be sure that voting for and using that straightforward system would improve the lot of students all over the country/ chain of schools, even if not in your own classes? (Voting for it and then secretly teaching your own way is not possible in this alternative universe).

5. If the Wall Street system of five hours with a computer for every one hour with a human was proven to work, would you advocate it?

6. If you discovered a form of self study that would make us all unemployed, would you publicise it?

7. If the business manager at the school where you were DoS proved that students would progress quicker by being given 50% more classes for the same price by employing cheaper and therefore less experienced etc teachers, would you support the decision?

8. If there was a drug that took away the dissatisfaction that drives you to constant CPD like reading TEFL blogs in your free time, would you take it?

As comment-hungry as I am, I guess you can discuss whether such things could be proven if you like, although I think the original question of whether you would do those things is more interesting. Alternatively, any other interesting thought experiments for us?

Agree? Do Diploma and MA courses help you develop “your own explicit theory”? Isn’t there a slight danger that analysing your teaching explicitly could make it fall apart like the style of a naturally gifted footballer with a naturally ungifted British coach? Shouldn’t “after considering all the evidence given in these quotes from books on the matter, my instincts are still telling me that the best way is to…” be an acceptable conclusion of a DELTA observed lesson essay? Rants, cheering and whimsy below please:

You can of course list their component bits (CD, exercises at the back, glossary, illustrations, list of characters) and judgements on them, but the main things are of course shared by every reader in history- simplified stories. As we are not likely to be able to judge that level better than the people at Penguin etc, it’s quite tricky to find much to say. Here is a random list of things I have written in my graded reader reviews or spring to mind now:

- Which of a range of titles was most popular with your students (or yourself) and why

- Childish or content that is too adult for some readers

- Quotes from reviews from your students

- Did or did not persuade your students to buy or borrow more?

- Genre(s)

- Unexpected plot twists

- Comparisons to film versions

- Voices on CD

- Online resources

- Some blurb from the back of the book, website or catalogue and how true it is

- Some theory behind the books from those places with comments

Here are some examples:

A selection of CUP graded readers (Was I really writing reviews eight years ago?? Really must get a hobby soon!)

Historical graded readers (also me)

New Penguin Readers (by Dave Allen on TEFL.net)

New Scholastic Readers (ditto)

National Geographic Footprint reading library (by Kaithe Greene on TEFL.net)

Graded readers- a survey review (elsewhere)

There are also a few survey reviews on ELTJ if you have paper copies or an online subscription.

Any other suggestions of things to include or links to reviews? Anyone else want a stack of free readers or other books by reviewing for TEFL.net? Comments below or email through “Contact me” please.

“In my opinion accreditation is now an anachonism. The path that most ’self-regulating’ accrediting bodies take is counter productive to their collective and continued good health. When you get a protracted period of protectionism masquerading as professionalism the end result is self-destruction. You just have to look at a few books on economics. It goes back to Adam Smith and as a professor of economics and political science at Columbia University has written recently:

“Economists typically have the national-efficiency case in mind when they discuss the advantage of free trade and the folly of protectionism.”

( Jagdish Bhagwati, “Protectionism.” The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. 12 January 2010.

OPEC only works because it really does have very tight control of a finite resource. The teaching of English is not a finite resource, nor is it controllable.

Scientific advances such as brain-imaging (see Kuh. P, ‘A new view of language acquisition’ ), are

showing us that the reality of language acquistion is quite different from the ‘best practice’ of TEFL teachers working under the umbrellas of most accrediting bodies. Their doctrines of what does and does not consitute a quality learning experience are, put simply, out of date. History is littered with the remains of industries and empires that sought power and profit through the prescriptive control of practice and supply.

Innovation, the life-blood of industry, suffers when fear of change and control of resources, power and influence is limited to a self-appointed and out of touch ‘elite’. In the age of the Kindle, iPhone, free global video calls and virtual and augmented reality how can you seriously shortlist a dictionary for an innovation award (UK ELTONs 2010 shortlist)? How can the majority of shortlisted entries to an innovation awards system, since it was launched come from just five or six of the biggest companies in the industry?

Edmund Conway, economics editor of The Telegraph newspaper hit the nail on the head this year when he wrote,

“Protectionism also goes hand-in-hand with nationalism and international political aggression, by giving an economic grounding to perhaps instinctual human fear of otherness”

In the context of ELT that is fairly ironic, don’t you think?

Whilst we contemplate the extinction of the dinosaurs of ELT in the after-shock of the technological hurricane that is about to hit us let us learn from this wise counsel,

“..protectionism simply isn’t as viable or practical an instrument or a tool as it used to be – one of the dividends of globalisation and global supply chains. Open trade remains the single most important way we know of expanding economic opportunity in our country, in Europe, and in the world, and lifting people and societies out of poverty… the real long term risk … lies in protectionism somehow taking on a new veneer of respectability in the current economic crisis. Open trade therefore needs defenders now more than ever.”

Those are words from a recent speech by Lord Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, and Secretary of State for Business for the UK.

Again, how ironic…or as Machiavelli once said, “Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime.”

Not sure what I made of all that, but bracing as ever- which is why I keep on nagging Jason for guest pieces. Comments on this one below, and more Jason West on TEFLtastic here:

Interview- Jason West dishes on Guardian languages and sets the TEFL world to rights!

You were probably thinking the last thing that PPP needed was another P, but I beg to differ. And the P it needs is…

pause

No no, I meant “pause” is the other P, not pause before reading on because it’s so dramatic…

I came across this idea through the classic beginner TEFLers mistakes of 45 minute warmers in a one hour lesson with a rushed grammar point at the end. Actually, I more became aware of it when I stopped doing that and started fitting PPP into one lesson as I was CELTAwashed to do and suddenly found it didn’t work half as well as presenting at the very end of the lesson, letting them do controlled practice and generally sleep on it for homework, and doing the spoken controlled practice and such like in future days, weeks or even months.

With Test Teach Test the pause is even more obviously necessary, as the New Newer Newest Headway trick (starting the lesson with a test that can’t possibly affect what you do from then on because you’ve already planned the class and are hardly going to skip the whole unit because the test shows that they know that point) is a total sham. What you need to do is test it at the end of a lesson, use that to really change what you teach, give them a decent amount of time to absorb it, and then test it again. Ditto with task based learning- which is basically the same thing as TTT, in my humble opinion.

Back to Andy’s question, I would not give any language input before a speaking task, unless they are so unconfident that they really can’t do it without. After the task, I’d present some language they could have used, but not do a similar speaking task to let them use is. This is partly because there is a lot of evidence that that version of TBL doesn’t work if the students think they achieved the task the first time (and with most of our classes we can hardly make them fail!) and partly from personal experience of that effect. Instead, I’d do some different controlled (mainly speaking) practice of that “could have used” language, with a similar speaking task following a week or two later. The secret then is to get them used to that cycle so that they know the language is important and you are not going to let them forget it.

Anyone else use PPPP and TPTPT? Any other unpleasant acronyms of your own? Any other answers to Andy’s question? Have your say below: