A Look at Language Teaching

Side-project

Not a proper post, this - just a note to let anyone intereted that I’m going to be undertaking a project with my Young Learner classes over the next few weeks, to create a wiki which will be filled with lots of interesting videos, slideshows, presentations etc.; with these “products” being the end product of tasks which will make up the syllabus.

If that doesn’t make sense, or if iy does make sense and you’re interesting in knowing more, please take a look at:

muscatwikiproject.blogspot.com

Which is a blog I’m keeping to document what goes on in the project; and

britishcouncilmuscat.wikispaces.com

Which is a wiki I’ve set up as an example of what can be done, so the students have a few ideas about ways to go during the first week or so.

Power and ELT

Had a great conversation with a class of three Indian and Pakistani business students last night. We came back after a break and drifted into a chat about IELTS. From there, the conversation moved through prices of language courses and onto discrimination. The students began to tell me about their jobs and how their white colleagues are paid more than them. One day, a Filipino colleague of their’s plucked up the courage to ask the boss why. He told them that it was, amongst other things, that important clients preferred a white face.

The most interesting part of this conversation, however, was that it was so balanced. My students were under no illusions - one thing that they were totally clear about was that they would prefer to work for a Western company - “I worked for an Indian company for three years before this job. I’ll never work for an Asian company again”, and “Western companies know how to treat people fairly. If your leaving time is five, your boss will make sure you can leave at 5. Even the boss is on time. If he starts at 7.30, he’ll be there by 7.10.”

One effect of the chat, for me, was that it made laughably absurd the idea of integrative motivation. These were highly motivated students; but there is little they’re motivated less by than the idea of integrating into British society. In fact, it seems like something close to the converse is true: they were forced to appear more British in order to qualify for the priveledges accorded to white people. They were motivated to learn English purely by the desire to be treated as equals.

I told them about the British Council’s policy of beginning to recruit more non-native speakers, and told them also some of the reasons I’d been told - to address discrimination against NNSs; to better reflect the multicultural nature of British society. The students themselves were smart enough to notice that this has started to happen at a time when large companies globally are being forced to look at ways of cutting costs. They also told me they felt it would affect business for the BC - “people come here because they know they’ll be taught by a British person” - but they also felt that the BC’s monumental reputation in Muscat would see it through; “people like to tell their friends they study at the British Council”, they said. “It’s a status symbol”.

It was so nice to talk to my students about these things. Often it’s not possible. These students had the freedom to say these things because they were not paying for their course (their company was). Perhaps if they’d chosen to come here, they would have been less willing to discuss the ambiguities of an institution like the BC. In fact, the only disappointing thing about the whole chat was that it was my last class with those students. I really regret that we’d not had that conversation in week 1. Perhaps then, we could have worked together at doing something about the inequalities they have to live with.

Alternative (?) principles for teaching grammar

There’s still no more divisive word in ELT (especially for novice teachers) than the “G” word. “How much”, “how often”, “how discretely”… or just plain “how” are questions for which there are plenty of answers from academia… but are still being answered in a million different ways at the chalkface.

So, in the spirit of debate, I’d like to put forward my own principles of grammar teaching - with which I invite you to disagree (after all, you almost certainly will anyway).

1. Always teach in context. By that, I don’t mean “put the grammar into sentences”. I mean a big, deep context. For me, this means finding or creating a text - written or spoken, though the latter would require a transcript - which uses the target form in as natural a way as possible. This is because, for me, it is discourse types which create the need for different grammar. So a simple film review might be useful for showing the past and present tense in an unusual light. A biography can illiuminate the past simple and the present perfect. So, when considering grammar… first consider discourse.
2. Make it short and sharp. Very short. Don’t get bogged down with questions, further examples,etc. Limit the usefulness of what you’re trying to say to the context you’re using to say it. Don’t try to cover all uses of a tense when you’re only illustrating one - and don’t try to teach more than one use at a time. Show how the tense creates meaning in that context: and then get out, do something else - have a chat, ask the students how they feel about the text etc. In general, don’t spend more than  about ten minutes on a grammar point.
3. Don’t try to mix receptive and productive practice. Don’t try to get the students using a form, PPP style, straight after they’ve been introduced to it. Their poor brains can only take so much. You have to allow the form to work its way, very slowly, into their cognitive system. Respect the slowness of the way the brain works when learning languages. Five ten minute exposures to a new form - at first receptive, later productive - are far more useful than a single fifty minute grammar-fest.
4. Having said that… I think it can be a good idea to do very relaxed mumble drills with grammar, even at the first exposure. This is not in the hope that students will then immediately begin using the form in free speech; it’s more that I feel that giving the students the chance to actually form the words with their lips, get them out of their mouths, even if so quietly that noone can hear them, helps the brain to focus on them, thus helping the cognitive gears to get working. So I’m not talking full-blown whole class drilling - just ask the students to say a few sentences from your text quietly to themselves.
5. Later, try to add some cognitive depth by creating matching activities (of the sort that Michael Lewis demonstrates in “Practical Techniques”. Ask students to make decisions about the order things happen in; rank sentences from the most to the least likely, etc, etc. Again, the purpose is not to get the students to use a form immediately - it’s has the much more modest aim of simply letting the students’ brains - their cognitive systems, again - come to the fore in the classroom.
6. Don’t bother with “controlled practice”. It’s a waste of time. What this type of practice is trying to do is simply substitute for all that cognitive development I’ve been going on about by forcing the learners into a situation whereby they have no choice BUT to use the form you’re teaching. But in the end there is no shortcut for all that brainwork. Let the students do that work in peace, give it chances to blossom (as in the above points) - and don’t burden your learners with false expectation (as in PPP). For grammar practice - simply have a chat. Get the students talking about what they had for breakfast, in groups, and then go round and do some error correction. Don’t try to force them to use the grammar of the day. If you feel they need to process things a bit more deeply, focusing on accuracy a bit more - ask them to write the very same conversation on paper. They can change partners later and repeat the conversation (unscripted) out loud.

And that’s your lot.

A colleague recently said to me, on the subject of grammar teaching, “I think that basically everything works”. If you take him to mean that the determined student will get there in the end, regardless of the techniques used by the teacher, then yes, I think I agree. But we don’t have to saddle our students with confusions and false hopes while we’re doing it. Take a low-key, (s)low expectations view of grammar learning, and you’ll find the whole thing a lot less painful.

On Teaching Well

In untypically symphonic fashion, I’m going to attempt to tie together a heap of random thoughts that have come to me over the past few weeks. Hopefully this doesn’t get too messy…

I’m going to start with Norbert Schmitt. You may remember that a few posts ago I wrote about the degree to which it’s helpful/necessary to control the input of vocabulary in class. Well, having got a few responses on that, I decided to try to get Schmitt himself to reply. Unsurprisingly, he suggested that it was entirely necessary to control the vocab taught, beginning with the most common 2000 words in English, and moving from there into areas of specific use for the students.

So far, so unsurprising.

But the Schmitt was pretty categorical about this. He suggested that is part of what students expect of teachers to guide them towards the vocabulary they need the most. Another thing that he suggested was that textbooks control vocabulary input to a very great degree - repeating words a number of times and creating opportunities for re-use. However, if I was designing my own syllabus, I would need to discover principles for vocabulary selection. And, since I am in fact currently teaching two classes with whom I’ve developed a syllabus, and with whom I am finding virtually no vocabulary learning to be going on, I am forced to agree with him.

This led me into thoughts of teacher autonomy. I thought to myself that if I were a truly autonomous teacher - I’ve long tried to reduce the need for textbooks in my classes and develop lessons out of the learners’ own needs - then I wouldn’t be in this situation of having to reconsider how and what vocabulary I need to get into my teaching.

At present I’m also teaching two classes of near total beginners. I am having problems. I followed the British Council syllabus for two months; then met Jane Willis, who told me I should give up on accuracy and go for loads of vocab and communicative tasks. So I split with the syllabus, paid only lip service to the textbook, and based my classes on conversation and vocab. Random vocab.

Cue mayhem. The classes filled up with Arabic, students fell out with one another, discipline became an issue.

That’s not all. Conversations with colleagues recently have made me feel that I don’t evaluate my principles deeply enough. I’ve realised that my relaxed approach to planning is not helping my students.

My battered instincts now in tatters, I’m wondering how many of my principles I need to re-evaluate, and how deeply?

I find that teacher development is full of peaks and troughs. I remember feeling, only a few weeks before all this began to happen, that I was teaching as well as I ever have. This is perhaps what I was thinking of when I posted on the IATEFL forums a while back about the similarities between teacher development and second language acquisition. Learners seem to have acquired things, then regress; they tests hypotheses, gain confidence from them, then find them to be flawed - so they go back, re-evaluate, and come back with a bigger and better model of how to do things… And all of this made me think of how Chinese history (and probably the history of other nations, too) ebbs and flows, and how the greatest art and literature is always produced in the periods shortly after great social and political upheaval - times when great and troubling thoughts have had to be thought, and changes made, and new realisations and ways of doing things have to be settled into.

So what do I need to add to my model in order to make sure my next step is a forward one?

Well, perhaps this is where you can help - what do you suggest? What seems to be missing from the way I think about teaching?

Personally, the only thing I’m sure of is that I must never allow my “principles” (especially if not that well thought through) have a bigger influence in class than my students do. I have realised that it is not realistic for me - and never has been - to say “I am a good teacher”. The most I ought ever to be able to say is, “I have taught this class well”.

Chaos and control

I’ve been reading about the history of vocabulary teaching as part of the latest module on my MA; and there I’ve encountered all these interesting ideas about vocabulary control. There was a whole movement, 60 years or so back, which led to the formation of basic English, and the General Service List - two attempts to control the vocabulary which students of English were exposed to. Basic English limits the English vocabulary to 850 words. Obviously, with such a low number (2000 is reckoned to be the number needed for most non-specialist conversational purposes), a certain amount of circumlocution is required - so much, in fact, that meanings like “want” have to be expressed as “I have a desire for”. Hmmm… sounds more difficult than just learning the appropriate words. The General Service list was more influential. It was a list of the 2000 or so most common words in English, along with their different meanings and the regularity of each meaning. It provided (apparently up until quite recently) a very good benchmark for what words to include in English courses. All this, however, confused me somewhat: because I have to admit that my approach to vocabulary teaching is sort of Taoist: “the principle of no principles”! I gloss a lot of vocabulary onto the board and basically let students choose what they want to remember. I go over it again in the next class (I find IWB’s helpful here - at the start of each class I just let the students look through the flipcharts from the previous few classes), but don’t test it in any way. I let the students decide what is useful and what isn’t - I think they’re better equipped to make that decision than me. I like this chaotic element to my classsroom. I like my classroom to be linguistically as rich as possible, with lots of opportunities for noticing language, and I encourage my students to be uninhibited in asking for further clarification or explanation. From a complex systems point of view, this is only natural: students’ needs emerge, and the students find ways to address those needs. This is why what is taught is not always what is learnt. Yet… two problems emerge. Firstly, Schmitt, whose MA module I’m studying, suggests that around 7 repetitions of a word are needed to give students a good chance of learning a word. OK - that’s easy to address - there are loads of “vocab bag” activites I could use. But… Scmitt and others also suggest that deep cognitive work needs to be done to ensure a deep understanding and memory of new words. OK, I can use the vocab bag activities for that but… it takes a lot of effort (for probably a limited reward) to design cognitive activities for words which are totally unconnected in meaning (as the words I normally gloss are). Secondly, how can I ensure that the words I gloss are the words my students need to be using? I tell myself “if the students tried to use them in class, they must be words the students have a need for”… but does this argument hold any water? Perhaps a particular word a student needed is one they’ve never felt any need for before, and are unlikely to again. Students can be fairly undiscriminating when it comes to vocab - “Teacher, what’s the word for this!? What’s the word for that?!” If I simply teach them all with the assumption that some will stick and others won’t, I have no way of knowing that my style of teaching vocabulary is actually helping anybody. So… should I take a more actively principled approach to vocabulary teaching? Should I attempt to control the chaos, pay less attentiopn to glossing and more to teaching words which are both common and connected in meaning? Should I begin teaching “vocabulary” lessons - although I rarely teach “grammar” lessons, “speaking” lessons, or anything else lessons..?

Researching the classroom atmosphere

A question Neil Forrest, IH Barcelona DELTA tutor, always asks his new recruits:

Which of these teacher roles is the most important - social, educational, or organizational?

At the beginning of the course, most groups are divided about this; but Neil takes pride in the fact that by the end of the course, most are unanimous that the social role is the key one. During my DELTA, Neil backed up his opinion by referring to a study done in Barcelona which found that they key reason students gave for re-enrolling to a particular school was the social atmosphere between the students at that school; they wanted to stay with their mates in class.

So I decided to do an action research project to find out if this was also the case here in Oman. I gave a survey to 159 students in my school, investigating firstly their opinions about the group dynamics in the class (with reference to Dornyei and Murphey’s ideas in this area), secondly their perception of the quality of the teaching/learning and their desire to re-enrol; and finally the reasons they gave for wanting to continue with the British Council rather than move on to another language school.

The results showed a lack of support for Neil’s theory. The class with the worst dynamics also had the highest rating for quality of teaching and desire to re-enrol. The class with the best dynamics had only an average rating for quality. Ona person-to-person level there was a very slightly different story; students who felt the dynamics were not good were slightly less likely to re-enrol than students who were happy with the classroom environment. In particular, with higher level students, opportunities to chat quite freely were a good determiner of their level of satisfaction with the teaching. However, the biggest reason students gave for wanting to re-enrol was the perception that the teaching at my school is simply better than that at rival language schools.

So was Neil wrong? Not sure. For higher level groups, it certainly seems that the social environment in class is very important. For lower levels less so.
And there may also be local reasons which can explain the results; for example, the local competition to the British Council is not especially strong, with the school’s reputation as the best and most prestigious in the country being absolutely unrivalled. When students feel that way, it seems that they are willing to ignore poor group dynamics in one of their classes; they know that in general the BC does it’s teaching well. In addition, Middle Eastern culture perhaps has implications for how much students value the social environment in class. The opportunities for many of the groups in class to socialize with each other are quite limited.

Still, for one of the teachers I work with, these results don’t really ring true somehow. Towards the end of the course, we get all sorts of “are you going to register for the next course? I’ll register if you register!” type chat…

So what do you think? Did my study fail to get at the heart of the issue? And how important do you think the social role is for teachers in your context?

Error Correction

Nick Bilbrough posted this video about error correction onto the dogme list, so I watched it. It reminded me so strongly of Neil Forrest, my DELTA tutor (and also the presenter’s) that I posted this to the dogme site myself.

I’m interested in error correction. Neil Forrest was so hot on it, insisting that we corrected students immediately and clearly, before putting students back onto the bike of communication we’d so unceremoniously knocked them off… I corrected errors far more, post-DELTA. I agreed, and still agree, that students want to be corrected immediately, and that, if done with enough sensitivity to the limitations of the human memory (as the video demonstrates) that it can be enormously useful (my own language learning experiences support that).

So why have I stopped doing it so much? Is it…

- that I’m so concerned by the idea of interaction and genuine communication that I don’t want to correct errors?

- that I’m too shy or afraid of embarrassing my students?

- that in some deep down, out of sight part of my brain, I don’t REALLY believe in error correction?

- that I feel overwhelmed by the idea that there are just too many mistakes in my classroom to correct them all?

- that I think that error correction should be better organized; i.e. rather than correcting every single mistake, I should concentrate on the most salient mistakes?

I think this would make a great action research project - to record myself teaching, and find the places where I error correct the most, and also where I neglect opportunities to correct. To investigate the patterns. However, in the absence of the time needed… what are your opinions? Do you have a particularly principled approach to error correction?

The Willises Visit

Earlier this week we were lucky enough to get a visit from Jane and Dave Willis, who came to do a session on task based methodology. An excellent session, with lots of material from one of Dave’s books - Rules, Patterns, and Words (itself an excellent book).

Even better than the session, though, was the chance to chat with Jane over lunch, and that’ll stay with me much longer than the session itself. While the ideas she left us with - task-based methodology, portfolio based assessment etc., were interesting and stimulating, it was Jane’s enthusiasm and desire to help that was most impressive. Her first question was “what are the biggest problems facing you here in your teaching?”, and this was no idle chit-chat, but a serious attempt to help us in the most significant way she possibly could in the short time she was with us. After we’d finished lunch and had to run back up to the teachers room to get on with planning lessons, both Jane and Dave stayed behind to help to think through some options for a new mode of assessment in our school. This was not something they needed to do, or were being paid for, but simply something they gave up their time for because they wanted to help. That desire to teach, change, improve our work was infectious - it would be wonderful to have that level of expertise and to be able to use it to such good effect.

Research, Theory, Practice

Which of the above words is the odd one out?

Van Lier reckons that 9 out of 10 people choose “practice”.

Why? Did you? I did.

Perhaps we assume that theories derive from research, or vice versa, with practice being the possible (but not essential) result of these two processes. Scientists make their theories, they do their research… meanwhile those of us practicing on the frontline go on trying to make it through the day.

Does it have to be that way? Is it possible for a more unified relationship between theory, research, and practice, with the practioners themselves working as (or in tandem with) the researcher?