April 29

Sleeping in

Or actually not, in my case!  It’s Saturday but I woke up at 6.30 so I figured I may as well get up and do something useful with my time and blog about yesterday’s lesson.

A bit of background to the lesson itself: we’re just starting TP2 with the part-time TESOL trainees and so yesterday the tutors were teaching.  Although I always feel nervous when being observed on the course, I generally feel better at the start of TP2 as I’m more familiar with the learners.  As such, I’d planned yesterday’s lesson with the original B1 group in mind and they were, generally speaking, a strong B1 group.  Unfortunately, as I found out when I arrived at the school yesterday, only three of the previous group were continuing and I had five new learners that day.  As soon as they walked in, I knew the material would be incredibly challenging for them, especially as a couple felt more like A2 learners.  But, c’est la vie!  We did the tasks a little more slowly and stronger learners were able to support their peers well and although the material was challenging, the tasks associated were simple, as you’ll see below.

We did some initial chat around the three questions below and a collocations task from the book which also provided space for learners to personalise the language and gave me further opportunity to gauge their level.

Do you find it easy to get to sleep?

Are you a heavy or a light sleeper?

What do you do when you can’t sleep?

We did this prediction task before watching the video – the first time they watched, I asked them to check their predictions, we did a quick pair-check, then I asked them to watch again and then tell a partner what they found interesting or surprising about the video.  The text is fast, but the predictions task was simple and the answers for those statements were clearly given.

For the next stage, I’d done a little crowd-sourcing and asked my friends in the UK what time they go to bed and get up – I mapped their responses onto a chart and then got all the learners (and trainees) to add their times.  I pointed out that the difference in the times that people in the UK and Spain get up was fairly minimal and asked them to discuss in pairs why they thought Spanish people go to bed so much later.

 

This then led on to reading a shortened, graded version of this text from The Guardian, which explains that Spain is in the wrong time zone.  There was an activity to match some tricky lexis from the text to definitions and while I’d originally planned for learners to share their opinion on the text (similar to the video – what did you find interesting or surprising?), I felt that because of the shift in level, the group would benefit from a more structured comprehension/reaction-to-the-text task, so I wrote some statements from the text on the board and asked them to discuss whether they were true.

The reading text led on to the final task – a debate.  I divided the group into two, mixing up learners a little so that a) the original three members were split up, b) there was an even number of stronger/weaker learners in each group and c) the stronger learners who had supported their weaker peers before were paired with someone different.  Group A had to discuss reasons why they thought Spain should change its time zone; group B had to discuss why they felt Spain should stay in its current time zone – I had prepared some points for each group to think about such as how the change might affect businesses or Spanish traditions, amongst others.  After a few minutes to get some ideas together, we did a quick task to look at language of agreeing/disagreeing and then mixed up the groups so learners could debate whether or not to change time zone.  Although I was happy with this final stage, I feel that it would have been more successful if I had made everyone in groups A and B to make notes as then I could have paired people off to debate.  As it was, in group B, only one person had made notes – as I felt that the weaker learners in that group would feel very uncomfortable doing the debate task with no support, I decided to have two people from each group against two from the other, which inevitably meant that some people spoke more than others.

So, what did I learn from this lesson?

I think the main tip I’ve taken away is to plan lower rather than higher for a first lesson with (what could be) an unfamiliar group as it’s much easier to extend simple tasks for stronger learners than it is to adapt materials on-the-spot for weaker learners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 25

“genuine and meaningful communication”

Genuine and meaningful communication between learners takes place

This is one of the criteria in the DipTESOL assessed teaching unit – what does this mean and how can we ensure it occurs in our lessons?

Perhaps we should first look at the two adjectives used in the criterion: genuine and meaningful.  By genuine, I understand natural, honest and authentic communication; by meaningful, I understand that there is a purpose for communication.

The question is whether the communication which takes place in our classes is genuine and meaningful.  It could be argued that communication which takes place in the EFL classroom is meaningful as we are practising TL, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that the language being produced is genuine.

The key is to find ways of personalising the TL and context of our lessons.  Here are some ideas:

  • In grammar activities, such as Las Vegas Grammar, use the learners’ names in the sentences – this increases their engagement in the activity and you can extend the task by guessing whether the sentences are correct or not after correcting them.
  • Provide identifiable contexts for language – a group of Spanish teenagers may not be interested in what Japanese teenagers like listening to in their free time, so either change the context or allow the learners space and time to give their opinions or contrast the context to their own.
  • Make all TL personal – this is easier than you may think.  Whatever the TL, you can generally ask one of the following questions: “Do you have…?”, “Do you like…?” or “What do you think about…?”

A second aspect of the DipTESOL criterion worth mentioning is the word between – depending on the age of your learners, there may be more or less interaction between them and I do know people who have chosen YL groups for their DipTESOL assessed lessons.  It would be interesting to know whether classroom language qualifies as “genuine and meaningful communication between learners” as there may be more natural communication in this respect than in practising the TL of the lesson.  This also leads on from my previous post on making the class less teacher-centred as by encouraging communication between learners we can give them more of a voice and more responsibility for their learning.

Here are a couple of other blogposts worth reading on the topic of personalisation:

A Matter of Confidence – Personalising

P is for Personalization

May 7

What’s a ziggurat?

I learnt a new word in English the other day.  One which is sure to pop up in my everyday conversations this week and one which I’ll wonder how I ever survived without before.  The word…well, it’s fairly obvious from the title of this post, ziggurat.  And where did I learn this wondrous new word?  From the English coursebook of a 10-year-old.

It really makes you think about the vocabulary we expose our students to and as well to what extent we expect them to use and remember it.  Will she have to remember this word for an exam?  If so, it’s likely to be one of the easiest to remember as it’s so unusual.  But as we all know, remembering vocabulary for a test is not the same as being able to use it.  And how often does a 10-year-old talk about ancient temples; if they do, are they more likely to use the word temple than ziggurat?

So, a challenge for you this week – can you get the word ziggurat into an everyday conversation (without the conversation being about the random vocabulary EFL coursebooks expose our students to)?

January 5

What are you singing?

I started using lots of British nursery rhymes with my early primary learners last term.  It was a great way to get them up and using a bit of energy before settling down to do a quieter activity.  I found I could remember a lot of the actions from when I was a child and, if there were any I wasn’t sure about, I just invented something which seemed to fit.

Here’s are some of the songs I’ve been teaching them…

Incy Wincy Spider

If you’re happy and you know it

I’m a little teapot

The wheels on the bus

The Hokey Cokey

Anyway, as I was singing and doing the actions, I started thinking whether it actually meant anything to the students and whether by singing and miming they were actuallyy learning any new vocabulary.  It made me question whether I was doing the nursery rhymes for a good reason.  But then I thought back to when I was a child and some of the songs which we used to sing which, thinking about them now, didn’t make much sense to me at the time.

Take for example, “Ring a ring of roses” (if that’s even the correct title).  The lyrics to that make more sense to me now having studied a bit of history, but twenty-five years ago, it was just a song we’d sing and dance to.

 

A seven-year-old has much more fun in class standing in a circle and singing the Hokey Cokey than filling in a worksheet of body parts.  So perhaps teaching English should be more about enjoying using language in as natural a state as possible.