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You can find out more about my experience by exploring this blog, including the About Me, Presenting and Writing pages.
I finally made it to IATEFL Brighton and was able to enjoy talks on the final day 🙂 I spent most of the rest of my 24 hours at the conference chatting to people – one of the things I most enjoy about being together with friends and colleagues from around the world!
Rose’s talk is about criticality as an analysis of power. You can watch the plenary yourself on YouTube after 8pm today [I’ll add the link later].
Language, power and education
There are different kinds of power according to Waring:
Political power
Personal power: the individual power we have based on the roles we play in society: a parent, employers, etc.
Social group power: associated to class, gender, etc. This is about the statistical likelihood of having power according to your group, even if you as an individual belonging to that group don’t have that power.
Power is fluid and dynamic. Anywhere there is a social relationship, there is power, including schools. Schools are not politically neutral, and education does not take place in a political vacuum. Watch the video to see the range of headlines associated to power and education.
Everything we do in the classroom is value-laden. This can contribute to reinforcing the status quo or seeking to challenge it. Failing to act, the things we overlook and ignore, also reflects our values.
Paulo Freire argued that education can be transformative in its nature, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
One of the ways in which change happens is through language use. Power is embedded in language.
Rose gave the example of this headline:
I teach in secret, defying the Taliban ban and fighting despair
A first-person singular pronoun emphasises the isolation of the teacher who wrote this opinion post onAlJazeera .
The assonance of ‘teach’ in ‘secret’ emphasises ____
Emotive language and figurative language position the writer as a fighter and seek to influence the reader. There’s an -ing with a positive act of resistance.
Other examples are the rule of three – they’re supposedly more memorable, and have more impact. This can be three words, three ideas.
Here are some examples of languages Rose overheard at IATEFL which reveal a relationship of power through the use of language:
Sir David Crystal…big boots to fill! > ‘Sir’ as a marker of status
Delegates are asked to follow the IATEFL ethos of respectral exchange, of focusing on topics related to ELT and of being an inclusive and supportive community. > passive obscures the agent
An example of interrupting or overlapping speech > Dominant participants in a conversation take the lead, choose the topics, etc. Less dominant partners follow the lead, don’t get to choose the topics, etc.
Put it on the tab! > imperatives for giving orders, people with more power giving orders to people with relatively less power
Language teachers do more than just teacher the language. Language can be emancipatory.
Critical literacy
Concepts of this are influenced by the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, and Freire from the 1940s onwards. The way we read any text is mediated by our day-to-day lived experiences. Literacy has moved from being seen as a concrete set of skills towards a perspective for what we do with literacy.
Research on critical literacy in ELT is quite rare. ‘Taking on Critical Literacy: The Journey of Newcomers and Novices’ is the study Rose focussed on, and Lewison’s framework is how she’s referring to it in her talk.
What is it? Lewison et al (2002) say it includes:
Disrupting the commonplace
Interrogating multiple viewpoints
Focusing on socio-political issues
Taking action and promoting social justice
Disrupting the commonplace
Asking: ‘How is language used to keep things as they are?’ We need to be able to identify the commonplace or the everyday: the assumptions we make that we believe to be self-evidently true. Narratives like ‘The pursuit of more and more wealth will make us happy.’ Or ‘Your wedding day should be the best day of our lives.’
Interrogating multiple viewpoints
Exploring texts from our own viewpoints and those of others, noticing which viewpoints are missing. This can be applied to visuals as well.
It prompts us to question written, spoken and visual texts and to go beyond words or visuals to read texts as situated within wider societal discourses.
Living, non-human, voiceless beings, plants, animals, is also part of this.
Focusing on the socio-political
Education often takes place without any acknowledgement of the political side of the education system we are in. It’s about stepping outside our own context and understanding concepts like ‘linguistic gatekeeping’ – controlling and limiting access to resources or spaces through the use of language. Language can be used as a gatekeeper for inclusion or exclusion.
It involves investigating and critiquing how language is used to create and maintain unequal systems.
Taking action for social justice
This is often considered the definition of critical literacy, but the authors say you need the understanding of the first three parts of the framework to be able to do this.
Critical literacy shouldn’t just be a one-off event, it should be an ongoing stance to question power relations. The way we communicate has changed hugely in this century, and we’re only just catching up. We’re exposed to a much wider range of genres and sources of texts, including now the inclusion of the source of generative AI. We need to be able to read texts critically to manage our understanding of this information.
How can we apply critical literacy to language education?
The framework can also be applied to management, recruitment, conferences and more, not just what happens in the classroom.
Practice
This is Rose’s framework, starting with practice in the middle:
The idea that there’s ’one best method’ for teaching and learning has long been questioned. One of the main critiques of the idea of methods is that it privileges ‘expert knowledge’ overwhelmingly located in the native speaker West, and pushes aside teacher knowledge. Now we’ve generally accepted that there is no one best method. Instead the search for the best method, it could be argued that we’ve replaced this with the search for the coursebook. What the majority of teachers teach and how they teach is now determined by coursebooks, more than any other factor.
This means an ability to critique and deconstruct our teaching materials is a key part of our understanding. We also need to critique dominant understandings of materials creation, such as the idea that PARSNIPS in creating materials (Politics, etc). Who decides what is taboo? Who decides what is ‘controversial’? We should stop treating them like this, and start calling them ‘critical’ instead: it’s critically important that learners can write and talk about these ideas. We can take action by supplementing or changing our course materials so that learners can learn about these topics and learn to talk about these areas. Moving beyond just ‘safe spaces’ to classrooms as ‘brave spaces’. Another key area is the idea that teaching and learning materials are value-neutral, which is definitely not true. We need to be able to identify hidden curriculums in materials, working with our learners to do this: who is included? Who is excluded? What relationships are included and excluded? How are materials constructed and situated? A third narrative connected to materials which we know isn’t true: ‘Native’ speakers make the best models of English. Include a much wider range of speakers in our materials. Possible sources, all of which are freely available, including The Hands Up Project podcast:
Assessment
Do our learners have any agency in when, how often, and how they are tested? Could testing could be made more democratic? Can learners choose more about who assesses them (and more – see the video)? Do our assessments acknowledge that learners might have different life experiences (like being able to go on holiday, spend time with family, etc.).
Interactions
‘Students as teachers’ and ‘teachers as students’ can eliminate the power dynamic between teachers and students, according to Freire. To what extent can we learn from our learners?
Consider how your classroom management reinforces power dynamics. How much agency do your learners have about how and when they study and the rules they are expected to adhere to?
Does our teacher talk encourage enquiry and questioning? Whose voices are heard most in our classroom apart from our own? In which situations are they encouraged to speak? Do we invite participation from female and male speakers equally? Do we help learners to realise that their voice has value?
Institution
Teacher training
Taking a critical approach to teacher education doesn’t mean adding content to a packed timetable. It can be woven into the development we do. It should be seen as a way to encourage teachers to question the training materials we use.
Are we ensuring that our reading lists showcase expertise from a range of backgrounds and teachers working in a range of different backgrounds?
Our own practice as trainers should be a model of showing how to incorporate voices from different participants. We can share articles which critique mainstream teaching practices which teachers learn.
Management
Recruitment and native speakerism – we need to call out native speakerism wherever and wherever we can. This is the responsibility of all of us. If you are financially able to, boycott schools which only want native speaker teachers, letting them know why you have done this. State clearly that you celebrate diversity including linguistic diversity when recruiting. Share and discuss policies with students, staff and parents that address native speakerism.
Teacher pay and working conditions: poor wages, precarious contracts, expectations of unpaid labour, a lack of pay transparency. Talk to each other. Share and compare rates of pay. Do this within and between schools. If you can, join a union. If you employ teachers, invest in us. Advertise a clear, transparent pay structure that takes account of qualifications and experience. Pay us for planning, admin and CPD, not just lessons. Put us on permanent contracts on a fair wage so we can afford to get a mortgage and start a family. Show your teachers appreciation: we don’t want to go to work to feel burnt out, devalued and unappreciated.
Field
Critical questions
[There were many more which I missed – please watch the plenary as they are all so important!]
To what extent is English now just another ‘product’? What is the impact of the commodification of English on what we do? W
Whose English is it, anyway? Exactly how much clout do some of these powerful organisations have? How inclusive is international education and research when English is the dominant medium of education?
How can we de-center English language teaching? How can we diminish the feelings of insiders and outsiders?
Who benefits from the ELT industry in its current form? What does the use of English mean for other communities? In what ways have some of these bodies contributed to some of the problems they now purport to be solving?
The full framework
As a field, it does seem we are now questioning power more.
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Rose reminds us of the unique power of language education to change the world.
I finally made it to IATEFL Brighton and was able to enjoy talks on the final day 🙂 I spent most of the rest of my 24 hours at the conference chatting to people – one of the things I most enjoy about being together with friends and colleagues from around the world!
Niki’s workshop is on CPD (Continuous Professional Development). Her first activity was to complete these sentences:
A CPD programme should be…
A CPD programme should not be…
Niki has noticed that some schools have absolutely no CPD programme, some have occasional meetings with no thought in them, or some are very top down and look like a CELTA course. Her workshop is about putting teachers at the centre of the design of the CPD programme.
Frames frame our existing knowledge.
Windows give us new perspectives allow us to see things in a different way.
Mirrors help us to reflect.
Niki has been working a lot with the English Australia self-assessment tool, as well as the OUP self-assessment tool and the Cambridge English INSPIRE professional development guidance.
Frames
Niki put some of the descriptors from the English Australia framework around the room for us to look at, with post it notes to create a running dictation to get different descriptors. This was one of the ones we did as a running dictation:
Develops, models and shares with colleagues techniques to control timing and the pace of the lessons and keeps learners on task.
This is one of the ways we can help teachers to get their heads into the words of the frameworks because they’re quite dense.
We then had to decide whether our descriptors were from lesson and course planning, managing the lesson or assessment, feedback and reporting.
This is a simple way to help teachers get into a framework: Teachers are exposed to a framework in a manageable way.
Windows
You can ask teachers to film themselves teaching a class. As they watch it back, what different aspects can they watch for?
Think, Pair, Share is a way to approach this.
One person in the room mentioned a triad system: three teachers observe three lessons with three students in each group observed intensively, then decide how to do the feedback together.
Some ideas:
Who is talking?
Instruction giving
Dealing with a tricky question
Where are you? Standing up / sitting down / scrolling?
Teacher language? Do you always say the same thing?
Pace of lesson
Variety
Engagement
Transition from activity to activity
Our group also talked about body language and thinking about teacher position, as well as who is talking to who in open class (is everybody only addressing the teacher or are they talking to each other?)
The lesson observations can then feed into the CPD programme, making the teachers the centre of the CPD programme.
Before we design a CPD programme, we need to know what is relevant: needs analysis is key.
Mirrors
We are responsible for our own CPD and we can do this ourselves. This is an OUP framework which Niki refers to:
Niki gave us a dice and we played this game:
1. Activities in a school/institution
2. Activities online
3. Activities within an association/teaching organisation
4. Activities in other contexts
5. Choose any category
6. Throw again!
Examples:
Workshop
Professional book club (read a chapter or an article)
Watching videos of others teaching
Watching webinars as a group or alone
Reading blogs
Volunteer for organisations
Meet up with your friends for a chat
Learn new skills – put yourself in the position of learners
Work together to localise materials – you have to understand why you’re creating materials in that way
This activity can be used to help teachers to choose what they do in their CPD.
At the end of the activity we looked back at our post-it notes to see if there was anything we want to change.
Other thoughts from the floor: CPD programmes should not be overwhelming – if it comes from the teachers, it can feel more manageable.
I watched Zarina’s IATEFL Brighton plenary from Wednesday 17th April 2024 on YouTube. You can watch it yourself here:
Zarina is representing diversity, equality and inclusion. She chose this slogan because unfortunately it is only applied to some people, not all people. Not everybody is made to feel that they are worth it – their value is seen as different by different people. Who decides our worth?
The way someone looks at you, their tone of voice, their approach to you: they can all determine how you see your worth, and what sides of yourself you decide to portray to persuade people to see your worth in different ways.
Zarina described a lot of examples of when people misinterpreted who she was, or when she was made to feel invisible. I recommend watching her talk to see these in her own words.
Our worth can be defined by:
Our environment
The way we’re dressed
How we manage ourselves
The language we speak
The words we choose
Our tone of voice
Our body language
It also depends on what other people think about us:
The perceived notion of oneself
Our assumed role/position
Our assumed nationality
Our assumed education
Our perceived message
Our perceived confidence
Our past experiences affect how we carry ourselves, and these are all important things to support our learners with. We need to help learners to be aware of what they’re going to face in the world – not just grammar, language, but how people will treat them and whether and how they will be perceived as an English language speaker.
Online you’re up against a firing squad of abuse.
Davina Pindoria, about gender, race, and other areas – because she is an Asian women with opinions about football (and a highly successful football broadcaster!)
A single step out of line can mean that people get pushed down, overlooked, and have their worth questioned – how does that affect their motivation?
Our worth can change over time. Zarina used the example of Mo Salah, the Liverpool football player. She talked about a study of 15 million tweets made by UK football fans before and after Mo Salah’s arrival at Liverpool – anti-Muslim tweets were reduced by over 50% after his arrival. This tells us that football fans gained empathy for somebody who they had no personal contact with and felt compassion for somebody they didn’t know: they had learnt something and even wrote a pro-Muslim song (see the video – worth watching!) This tells us that representation matters: we can make people feel empathetic before they ever actually meet somebody. The images we show, the voices we showcase can influence our views.
We should stop talking about English as Foreign Language, and talk about English as an International Language: most people use English this way.
Examples of discrimination
Hair is an important issue, including teachers telling Big Zuu that his afro was distracting other learners, so he cut it off: he wishes he’d never done that. Michelle Obama didn’t let her hair be natural while Barack Obama was president: she didn’t feel the US was ready for her hair.
Names is another area: Zuu is Zuu because people couldn’t pronounce his name correctly. Zarina became Zee at university because she was frustrated that people kept pronouncing her name wrong. If people don’t hear or cannot recognise what is familiar, they will make things up about you (that’s why I get called Sunday sometimes). That’s what happens when people are not familiar with your world.
In some places in the world, if you’re wearing indigenous dress, you’re not allowed in. People can also make assumptions about people because of what they’re wearing.
Health is impacted by assumptions. Light shining through your skin to check oxygen levels in your blood: people with darker skin were shown to have higher levels of oxygen than they actually had because the light shines through in a different way.
So what has ELT got to do?
…encouraging young adolescents to explore complex perspectives and emotions can have profound effects on their brain development and overall well-being, advocating for educational approaches that promote such thinking
Centre for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE), 2024
There’s a physical change when learners are asked to think about things, rather than just to look at them. If we ask people to think about things we’re developing brain structures. The greater the brain network, the greater the sense of identity about who we are as people – especially important for teenagers. The study followed these teens and found that these teens felt more confident as adults: well-rounded human beings who can think before their biases act.
In ELT we can use any topic we like, so we can take advantage of this to push learners to think.
If we think about this as ‘a bit heavy’, that’s what we used to say about the environment. The same is true of Sustainable Development Goals: they’re starting to appear in material. We need to be developing people who do the right thing when nobody’s looking, who do things because they are the right thing.
Starting with these ethics discussions, we then start to think about the systems around us. Are they working correctly? Are they doing what they should be? Teens especially are a great age to be thinking about this and discussing this, as there’s a natural sense of rebellion at that point.
DEI can be about what seems to fit within your culture, but also thinking about how your culture is perceived by others. It’s a two-way street. It doesn’t have to be about set topics.
These discussions give deeper meaning to discussions, showcase historical contexts, and show learners civic significance: helping them to realise which communities they’re part of, and that it’s natural and normal to be part of different communities.
PISA have been assessing Global Competence since 2018, lpoking at socio-emotional skills, global competence and cognitive reasoning about global and intercultural skills. At 45:45 into the video, you’ll see a QR code taking you to a questionnaire Zarina has set up about cultural perspectives in ELT coursebooks.
In the survey results so far, most teachers think that ELT coursebooks teach intercultural competence a little too superficially. Most felt like coursebooks promote Western culture. We’re not really teaching intercultural competence. What we see in films, on TV, in social media…this doesn’t reflect interculturalism.
There are some cultures I’ve never seen in textbooks e.g. from the Balkans or African cultures.
Examples where different cultures interact thanks to English language.
More realistic situations that students can relate to e.g. Our students cannot afford to take holidays (abroad) or check in a hotel because they come from economically disadvantaged social groups.
Countries with different traditions and fests, without those countries being depicted as not modern enough.
I’d like to see more detailed examples of both native and non-native speakers of English.
Taboos in different countries or more focus on stories and articles from the Global South or using accents from Outer Circle countries in listening tasks.
What survey respondents would like to see more of in materials
We need to be careful to show respect, and not exoticise other cultures. Indigenous knowledge is not respected, and Zarina thinks this is linked to how we represent people, and the representations we are used to seeing.
The Inner Circle (based on Kachru’s model) is still in charge of materials, and yet the Expanding Circle are the ones who are using most of the materials. We need to be including them in the materials. AI data is also coming from the Inner Circle, and yet is supposedly representing everyone.
English as a LIngua Franca has two possible directions: an inferior route, leading to denigration, marginalisation and ultimately exclusion. It can also be towards privilege, the creation of stereotypes, bullying and intolerance. The part of our brain that is triggered by bullying is the same part that is triggered by physical pain.
The whole of society is responsible for what we do as societies. We are all responsible, and we can all make changes collectively.
Do your part: make change happen, make attitudes happen, change the values of the students that you work with, because you’re all worth it.
Since I can’t attend the full conference this year, I’ve been taking advantage of the live channel on the IATEFL YouTube website. This was the coverage from 17th April, day 2 of the conference. Today I enjoyed the insight into poster presentations that was about an hour into the live feed.
Here are some points that stood out to me from the coverage:
Julie Moore talked about dictionary research done as part of the Hornby Trust ASHDRA Dictionary Research Awards. It sounds like there are some fascinating projects conducted with funding from the Hornby Trust, including brand new dictionaries being made from scratch, investigating dictionary usage, and more.
Matt Ellman and Rachel Jeffries mentioned how much the IATEFL conference is about being able to take time and take a step back and reflect on what we’re doing. (I agree!) Matt also mentioned the Cambridge sustainability framework and the activity cards which you might find useful in your classroom.
Two Hornby scholars (I missed their names unfortunately) reminded us of the importance of context, and how the issues that are important are so context dependent. They also reminded us about the privileges we each have and how important it is to remind ourselves about them.
Carol Lethaby reminds us that we need to make sure we’re treating female and male students equally in our classrooms. We might think we are, but when we record ourselves we might realise that we’re being unbalanced in our treatment. There is also increasing misogyny and harassment in schools – it’s on the rise again. We need to call it out when we see it.
Shaun Wilden is stepping down as Digital Chair and as an IATEFL trustee (we’ll miss you Shaun!) He talked about how much of the work of IATEFL is founded on volunteering, as well as how much he’s got out of being a volunteer, both professionally and in terms of his learning (I have too and I would definitely recommend it – if you’re interested and you’re a member of IATEFL, here are the current calls for volunteers) ‘IATEFL is made up of ordinary people. It doesn’t matter how famous you are, you’re still an ordinary person. You’ve got a skill you can bring to IATEFL and to SIGs.’ [I agree!]
It was really interesting to hear the story of Laurent Ahishakiyet’s journey from an English literature degree to being a professional English language teacher, one who’s currently doing a PhD. He’s a Hornby Scholar. He also talked about the shift from invited experts presenting to teachers in his country to teachers speaking to and supporting each other, and how much they enjoyed this shift.
There was another hour or so of the livestream after this, but I had other commitments which meant I couldn’t watch it. I’m sure there was interesting stuff there though!
I watched the recording of Vicky’s plenary from 16th April 2024. You can watch it yourself here if you want to (it’s just over 45 minutes):
My own feelings about AI are mostly apathy at the moment. I know that there’s a lot of fuss about it, and I know that it will be one of the tools that will affect my work now and in the future, but I’m waiting a little for the fuss to die down before I start exploring it much myself. If I’d attended the full conference in Brighton, I would have probably avoided AI talks, but I would definitely have attended Vicky’s talk, so I was glad I still get to watch it from home 🙂
These were some of the most interesting points for me from Vicky’s talk:
There’s an AI for that is a repository for AI tools to help you find what you need for specific tools. It has 12,261 AI tools on it at the moment – we can’t possibly keep up with that!
The carbon footprint of generative AI is huge, both in terms of training it and in terms of using it. This is the report Vicky used as one source for her talk. Image generation is particularly large. The environmental impact is energy usage, water usage, steam produced in data centres, and more. Vicky quotes one statistic: ‘ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (a 16-ounce water bottle) for a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions’ (from this article on AP News).
Where do you stand? Vicky says there are 4 groups of responses to AI based on how it affects us: Deniers/Resisters, Indifferents (I’m here), Cautious optimists, Enthusiasts/Preachers. This definitely reflects what I’ve noticed about people’s responses to AI.
The ‘AI job impact index’ displays an impact score as a percentage: 0% = AI has no impact on the job, 100% = this job could theoretically be fully automated using AI based on current capabilities. The impact score for teachers is 20%.
AI is data driven, but unfortunately most of this data is WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (a Stodd, Schatz and Stead 2023 coining). WEIRD curators and creators of AI are over-represented, leading to discrimination, sexist views and more in (some?) sets of AI data. Visual and historical models that feed into AI are outdated and don’t reflect the modern world.
Generative AI is standardising languages and ideologies, according to a British Council report. Most data is in English, and most models are trained on this.
Copyright is another issue. Who owns the copyright of AI-generated content? It’s not yet clear. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been trained using copyrighted data – it’s being debated in many courts.
AI detectors return a high frequency of false positives and have been shown to discriminate against non-native speakers of the language being examined.
Unequal access to AI is likely to further the digital divide.
Since I can’t attend the full conference this year, I’ve been taking advantage of the live channel on the IATEFL YouTube website. This was the coverage from 16th April, day 1 of the conference. It was an interesting mix of interviews with speakers from the conference, clips that were recorded elsewhere including with delegates from the conference, discussions between the hosts and (perhaps less interesting!) adverts from IATEFL sponsors.
Here are some points that stood out to me from the coverage:
Lucie Cotterill mentioned how much the Sustainable Development Goals are mentioned in the programme this year.
Fiona Dunlop talked about keeping things in balance in our heads when we feel overwhelmed and considering how we can make changes as managers when working with our teams. ‘There must be fun in our work and there must be fun in our lives.’
Emma Gowing described creating a mission statement collaboratively with all of the staff in the organisation. They brainstormed ideas for it together, created the mission statement, then revisit it every year with new influxes of staff to check all staff agree with it and stand behind it. This is a key step in engaging staff within the organisation and helping them feel valued, supporting their wellbeing as they feel like they have a voice in the organisation and feel like they’re listened to.
Mohammad Etedali talked about digital divides when using AI, in terms of access and training, which he breaks down into 4 levels:
Level 1: no access to AI
Level 2: access, but no training with it
Level 3: access, training, but don’t know how to do anything meaningful with it
Level 4: access, training, can weave AI into what they’re doing with students without any problems
Shaun Sweeney mentioned that ChatGPT isn’t really good at writing texts at A1 / A2 levels, so it’s useful to use a second tool to check the level.
Kuheli Mukerjee talked about how starting to do teacher research herself helped her to move past a feeling of burnout.
Sam Rich recommended using escape-room type puzzles – we don’t have to create a whole escape room from start to finish. This could be things like creating a simple puzzle with a message on the back, or using a letters on plastic cups which learners rearrange. These add a bit of fun to the classroom as well as increasing cognitive challenge. Escape rooms are also a good idea because you tell learners what the end result needs to be, but they have to work out how to get to that end result – it surprises them. Sarn calls it ‘creative floundering’ – a phrase I like 🙂 Learners realise they can work their way through difficulties if they experiment.
Peter Fullagar mentioned his new book ‘Existence‘ which has 8 LGBTQIA+ resources which teachers can use. Representation of many other areas is also covered in the book. It’s Peter’s way of showing how representation can be done within materials. I definitely recommend taking a look at it – Peter’s resources are always professionally developed and I think they could be great to use in the classroom (sadly I don’t have a class to try them out on!)
Monday 15th April 2024, IATEFL Brighton, the day before the main IATEFL conference, was the 10th pre-conference event run by MaWSIG, the Materials Writing Special Interest Group. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but I was still able to join in the hybrid event, helping to run the online side of things.
There were six talks and workshops. This was the programme:
Following Elly Setterfield’s advice, I’ve summarised a few interesting points from each of the talks which I’d like to remember for the future.
Carol Read – Paradigm shifts in writing materials for children
I was surprised that magic and anthropomorphic characters aren’t allowed in stories in YL books in some cultures.
Carol described the amount of market research which goes into new YL projects, including the amount of ways information can be gathered, but also acknowledging both the fact that this can maintain the status quo (the same people say the same things) and that there is research that says course books aren’t always the best way to teach.
Research-based approach to creative speaking – this is a really interesting model by Becker and Roos (2016), starting with Level 1, reproducing language you hear, then Level 2, starting to use controlled situations to create your own language, then Level 3, where you’re completely creative with the language:
Carol said the Levels 1 and 2 are compatible with a coursebook-based model, but Level 3 isn’t what teachers and institutions want as it feels quite risky. This is one example of the gap between research and practice in YL materials. Teachers don’t have easy access to research, and therefore they’re not necessarily pressuring publishers for this research to be reflected in materials.
Paul Talbot – Using AI to create a framework for developing ESP materials
I haven’t really used AI / ChatGPT at all yet, apart from a couple of times playing with it. Paul gave me ideas for prompts I could use to exploit it in a range of ways.
Suggesting areas to cover in a syllabus
Text creation for 3 different audiences with comparable length, style and complexity Prompt (on the 3rd attempt): Write a 180-200 word technical product description on (PRODUCT). Include information on the product’s features and functions, physical characteristics and component parts. Write the text in 2 or 3 cohesive and well-connected paragraphs. Do not use subheadings. Use a range of cohesive devices. The 3 audiences were: a technical audience, a non-expert audience, a business audience. Here’s an example:
As Paul said, sometimes it sounds a bit cliche, but this type of language is also quite common and can be studied and compared.
Question design based on texts you’ve created
Lexical extraction – pulling out words from texts and creating definitions for them
Discourse analysis – ask it to identify particular features, then create templates from them which students can work with. Here’s an example of phrase templates and examples:
Problems that ChatGPT had:
Overestimated student knowledge – what students would know at that level and age
Accuracy of the texts (a tendency to ‘hallucinate’)
Repetitive comprehension questions, sometimes leading to the same answer
Lexicographically weak, sometimes selecting very low-level non-technical words, and with some definitions containing the target word
This meant Paul realised you need to know your criteria really well and play around with the prompts until these criteria are met.
Paul was open with the learners so they knew the source: co-created by Paul Talbot and OpenAI. This was also a way of teaching learners that they need to be aware of these areas.
Elaine Hodgson – Authentic materials for beginners: challenges, opportunities and success stories
I was amazed that the Brazilian national coursebook programme uses authentic materials throughout. The writers are allowed to use up to 1 minute of audio at normal speed, without any slowing down at all. The activities were all achievable for beginner level students. For example, this task:
…is used with audio from this video, which feels very fast to me even as somebody with English as my first language! But I can also see how the task is perfectly managable, obeying the mantra: grade the task, not the text.
It was also great to see tasks dealing with characteristics of texts and reading strategies too. For example, this one is connected to genre analysis:
They also mix the use of English and Portuguese within the books to make sure all learners are able to access the information. For example, some of the reading strategies are written in Portuguese to make sure all learners can use them.
Jo Sayers – Materials writing for sustainable futures
It’s possible to use our materials writing to influence how we would like the future of our world to look. It’s difficult to add anything else from Jo’s talk here as it was very self reflective!
Richard Chinn – Developing materials to support learners’ emergent language needs
Richard Chinn and Danny Norrington-Davies (2023) define Emergent Language (EL) as:
Unplanned language that is needed or produced by learners during meaning-focused interactions. This language is then explored, through reformulation, clarification, and support from the teacher.
Rather than comprehension questions, we can ask learners to answer personal response questions or evaluative questions about texts. These generate more emergent language than comprehension questions would, which you can then work with and reformulate. Here are some examples:
Materials can also support teachers to develop emergent language needs, particularly through teachers’ books and teacher’s notes. We can remind teachers that it’s OK to ask learners what they mean, as in the yellow highlighted section above. We can also point out different options to teachers for working with language – there are lots of choices. There are vertical extensions, focussing on lexical choices. There are syntax patterns, with horizontal extension:
Other tips for the teachers’ book could include what you might write on the board, or how to take notes about emergent language to make sure it doesn’t just disappear into the ether. You could also include tips on what you might be listening for. Here’s an example:
Sentence Frames: Have you considered/It might be beneficial to/It would be twice more efficient to/When it comes to… xyz/ It all stems from /boils down to
Words and collocation: Allocate money/Pour money into/Take advantage of/socially responsible
We could include a guide like that in notes for teachers to support them when working with emergent language.
Kath Bilsborough – Materials writing: mistakes and lessons learned
I’ve learnt so much from making mistakes that I’m thinking of making more.
Attributed to Cheryl Cole, Goldie, etc.
I really like this quote 🙂
Things Kath reminded us of a few areas where she or other colleagues have made mistakes:
Always ask what abbreviatgions and acronyms mean if you’re not sure – don’t make assumptions!
Don’t write work based on an artwork brief if you don’t know for sure that that artwork will be purchased.
Hourly rates are not always appropriate.
Any text in images should be really carefully checked.
Spot the difference images: make sure there actually are differences!
Copying people into chains of emails which they’re not supposed to see. (This has happened to me, though thankfully the comments about me were nice!)
Always ask for clarification, always, even if you think you know the answer. There’s no such thing as a silly question!
The rest of IATEFL Brighton 2024
I’m not sure if there will be any more IATEFL posts from me this year. I’m not attending the conference because my immune system is currently not very happy, but I plan to attend whatever I can online. If you attended, I’d love to know which talks you went to and what you learnt!
In March 2010, I did my very first conference presentation at a PARK conference in Brno, Czechia, and I’ve been back many times since, so I really didn’t want to miss this special 30th anniversary conference.
This was the abstract for my talk:
What do successful readers do?
As teachers, we’re often guilty of testing our students’ reading abilities through comprehension questions, without actually supporting them to become better readers. But where should we start? How can you move beyond a comprehension focus and help students to become the best readers of English that they can be? What might be stopping them from developing? In this webinar, I’ll aim to answer all of these questions, by looking at what good readers do and demonstrating how to support students to build those skills for themselves.
I was very happy to be invited back to ELTABB in Berlin to do a talk as part of their 2024 AGM. The last time I was there was around 2016 or 2017, when I did a workshop on lots of different options for how teachers can develop themselves professionally. This time, I ran a 90-minute workshop based on my competency framework for language learning materials writing. This was the abstract:
If you’re anything like me, you’ve produced a lot of materials for your learners, whether that’s a worksheet, a PowerPoint presentation, or a video. You’ve also had very little training in materials writing, and have learnt what you know by trial and error, with the occasional bit of feedback from learners, other teachers or maybe even an editor.
This is why I put together a competency framework specifically dedicated to materials writing for language learning. In this session, we’ll look at what the framework is and how you can use it to produce better quality materials for your learners.
The workshop was a variation on a talk I’ve done a few times this year. You can watch a recording of a previous version of the talk here.
[Hopefully this will be an embed at some point if Slideshare and WordPress ever fix their integration!]
I’ll be doing a 30-minute version of the talk at IATEFL Brighton, on Tuesday 16th March 2024 as part of the IATEFL MaWSIG Showcase Day. Maybe I’ll see you there?
From 11th-15th March Rachael Roberts is running the third version of her incredibly useful (and free!) Festival of Freelancing, and I’m very happy to say I’ll be presenting at it. [Note: unfortunately I had to cancel as I lost my voice. However, there are still so many other useful talks there that I want to leave the link here for others to find it later!]
While spreadsheets might not seem like the world’s most exciting topic, I think they’re one of the single most useful things you can use to help you manage your business. In the session, I’ll show you various ways I use spreadsheets and you’ll have the chance to try them out as we go along.
In February 2024, I saw a post in the DELTA & DipTESOL Candidates and Survivors facebook group from Ha Truong. She shared how she had prepared for the DELTA Module 1 exam in 3 months and managed to achieve a Distinction. I asked her to write it up as a guest post for my blog to share her tips with the wider world and save them for posterity. Well done to Ha for your Distinction, and thanks for sharing how you got there!
Note that I have a page of Useful links for DELTA if you would like more advice / help.
Over to Ha…
In December 2023, I achieved a distinction in the DELTA Module 1 exam after dedicating almost three months to preparation. While the Distance DELTA M1 prep course undeniably played a significant role, I want to highlight that there’s more to my journey than meets the eye. This is a brief account, framed around the structure of a receptive skills lesson.
PHASE 1: PRE-PREPPING
1. Start with “Why”
Before diving into DELTA, I made sure to do my homework, talked to people who’d been through it, and even had a lengthy coffee chat with Zach Pinson, a local DELTA tutor and a kind ex-colleague. He cleared all of my doubts and gave me the courage to jump in. When things got crazy tough during DELTA, I’d flashback to that Starbucks chat, reminding myself why I signed up in the first place. It’s been a wild ride, but that initial “Why” is what keeps me going.
2. Decide on “How”
After committing to DELTA, I toyed with the idea of self-preparing for M1. I’ve got a background in ELT and over ten years of teaching under my belt. But I wasn’t sure if that would cut it. After doing some snooping on the DELTA Facebook group, asking around, and checking out Cambridge’s reading list, it turned out that going at this crazy tough exam alone would be a risky move and eat up a ton of my time. So many people with stronger backgrounds than me have failed this exam, even after completing a prep course. So I went for the safer bet and started digging around to see what options were available.
3. Find out “Who”
Considering only online courses, I narrowed down my choices based on format (synchronous or asynchronous), timing, and costs. I then created a quick Google Sheet, weighed the options, and went for the Distance DELTA with my Module 1. While preparing for M1, I was teaching about 10 hours a week and promoting my book, so I needed a course with flexible timing. When choosing your DELTA path, think about your situation: Are you in a full-time job, part-time, or on a break? What about your time zone? Are you into reading or more of a lectures person? Do you have a budget constraint? Prefer a certain class size? Need a hands-on tutor? Making an informed choice at this stage ensures your learning aligns with expectations and increases your odds of success.
PHASE 2: WHILE-PREPPING
4. Read and take notes strategically
During the first month of prep, I felt swamped with new info every week. Even in the second month, it felt like I was just going through the motions without really retaining anything. To tackle this, I read Distance DELTA’s concise and well-written input readings, then condensed 20-50 pages into 1-3 PPT slides. Before the exam, I skipped the readings and focused on reviewing my summary slides. A week before the test, I reinforced my learning by creating mind maps on A3 paper. Writing things down with my own hands helped lock in the info. [You can see some of Ha’s mind maps here.]
5. Make the most of peer learning
Out of 45 trainees in my class, around 5 of us hopped on Zoom to go over mock tests as often as we could. In the end, 3 of us got a Distinction. Group study was super helpful for me because we filled in each other’s knowledge gaps and gave each other a confidence boost. Explaining concepts to peers clarifies your understanding and highlights areas for fine-tuning. On exam day, especially P1T1 & 2, about half the questions I nailed were from what I learned (and remembered) from my friends, not just reading.
6. Familiarize yourself with the test format
To ace DELTA M1, you’ve got to nail two things: ELT knowledge and exam techniques, both equally vital. A solid knowledge base won’t cut it; you need to master exam strategies too. After reading and summarizing input, I focused on past papers to get a feel for the test. This helps you understand examiner expectations, your strengths & weaknesses, and develop a suitable test-taking strategy. My order, for reference, is P1: T1, T5, T4, T3, T2; P2: T3, T1, T2 – high-mark, faster, easier tasks first. Timing-wise, I followed Sandy’s rule of thumb: about 1 minute per mark.
7. Figure out your aces
After a couple of mock tests, I realized I aced P1T5, P2T1, & P1T3 (thanks to my IELTS Writing & Speaking teaching experience), but struggled with other high-scoring tasks like P2 T2 (since I rarely used a ready-made coursebook) & P2 T3 (because I hadn’t ever delved deep into these topics). The common advice for M1 candidates is often “Do Scott Thornbury’s About Language book and you’ll be fine”, but I found that somewhat misleading. About Language was handy for P1T5, but not for me since I was already strong in that area. To boost my weaker tasks, I took a different approach.
For P2T3, I explored Scott Thornbury’s blog and his ebook Big Questions in ELT [Amazon affiliate link / Smashwords affiliate link], listened to the Teacher Talking Time podcast, and brainstormed ideas for common topics from previous papers. For P2T2, I browsed coursebooks in a local bookstore, analyzing them P2T2 style (purposes, assumptions, linking). Despite initially hating this task, the more I practiced, the more I enjoyed it. In the end, it not only improved my wording but also enhanced my ability to sequence a lesson plan, especially for M2.
8. Don’t spend too much time studying terminology
DELTA M1 quizlets can be a thousand terms long. Memorizing all of them seemed impossible to me, especially when P1T1 is only worth 2.5% of the total marks. So I decided to focus on a more manageable set of 200+ key terms isntead. I also opted not to invest too much time in P1T2 (writing definitions) because the allocated marks didn’t seem worth the effort. Also, to me it seems to be the least practical task in M1. Anyway, the 200+ key terms were enough for me to tackle T2 on test day, relying on my understanding rather than rote learning.
9. Practice handwriting at speed
If, like me, you’ve gone digital for as long as you can remember, you might not realize the physical strain of handwriting for three hours during the DELTA exam. There’s no time to ponder; you’ve got to spill out as many words as possible and hope it’s enough to get you through. Many fail because they can’t finish tasks within the time limit. Personally, this aspect of the exam terrified me, so I intentionally did most of my prep work by hand in those three months.
I took notes and wrote mock tests with a black pen on A4 papers, using every tip and trick I could find (bullet points, starting on a new page, phrases over sentences, concise writing except in P2T3), mimicking the real test as much as possible. While prepping for P2T2 at the bookstore, I even bought a couple of comfortable black pens to ease the physical strain of speedy writing. On test day, I wrote like crazy, leaving 5 minutes at the end of each paper to revisit my answers.
PHASE 3: POST-PREPPING
10. Prep yourself to maximize performance on exam day
With the exam center 18km from my place in Vietnam and an 8:30 am start, I opted to stay in a hotel the night before. Being just 200 meters from the venue, I could stick to my usual routine, enjoy a relaxed breakfast, and even review my notes before the exam. I dressed in my most comfortable and weather-appropriate attire, and packed a bottle of water and snacks for the 30-minute break between papers. Fifteen minutes before the exam, I was still in my hotel room giving my notes a final glance, trying to cram in a few more terms, and desperately avoiding sneezing or coughing, fearing an unexpected knowledge purge. To ease nerves, I practiced some breathwork and repeated to myself, “Trust the process. Trust yourself. You’ve got this.”
So there you have it, my top 10 tips for earning a Distinction on Module 1. To candidates reading this post: Trust the process. Trust yourself. You’ve got this!
Ha Truong, an English teacher based in Vietnam, holds a CELTA qualification and has recently achieved Distinction in DELTA M1. She is working towards obtaining a full DELTA qualification, documenting her journey on her blog https://truonghaiha.wordpress.com/. With over a decade of teaching experience, Ha has primarily focused on adult learners in exam preparation and Business English courses. She holds a bachelor’s degree in ELT, graduating as valedictorian, and a second B.A. in Law. Notably, Ha previously scored an overall 9.0 in the IELTS and has authored a book on IELTS Writing Task 2 published in Vietnam (here’s the link, though it’s only available in Vietnam!) She also holds an international certification in Human Resources Management (SHRM-CP) and has a keen interest in expanding her expertise to teaching ESP.
On 9th February 2024, I presented a plenary at the Educast online conference. It was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was a 45-minute version of the talk I did in January at the IH AMT, sharing the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. Frameworks exist for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise Santos’ IATEFL 2022 talk, I created one for my MA dissertation. I will share what it is, how I created it, and how you can use it.
These are the slides from the presentation (as a link at the moment as the embed function isn’t working!):
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
I’ll add the recorded version of the presentation when the link is available. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
IATEFLTDSIG is the Teacher Development Special Interest Group. They have an excellent podcast called Developod (find more podcasts for ELT teachers here). I was very happy to be invited to chat to Christian Ludwig about the future of Teacher Development from my perspective, especially focusing on the power of blogs and social media. You can listen to the 36-minute episode here or by clicking on the link below.
Join us for a special celebration of 50 episodes of Developod! In this episode, we look back on our recent future of teacher development episodes, introduce our new host Helen Slee and say farewell to the man who's been there since day one, Christian Tiplady. James quizzes them on their knowledge about podcasts, and Helen interviews Christian about his time with TDSIG.
This is part of a series of posts showing you all the different ways you can approach the Cambridge DELTA. They are designed to help you find out more about the course and what it involves, as well as helping you to choose the right way to do it for you, your lifestyle and the time you have available. If you’ve done the DELTA (or any other similar higher-level teaching course, including a Masters), and you’d like to join in, let me know by leaving me a comment or contacting me via LinkedIn. If you’re interested in doing DELTA yourself, I run Take Your Time DELTA Module 1 and Module 3 courses.
This is Zhiwen’s summary of his experience:
I hold CELTA, DELTA, Train the Trainer, IH COLT Independent English language teacher (mainly teaching online) Teacher trainer (e.g. CELT-P/S trainer) at a Cambridge English Assessment centre in China
How did you do your Delta? How did you arrange the modules? (i.e. in what order and did you do them in different places?)
I did my DELTA part-time through International House Distance DELTA and International House Bangkok. During that time, I deliberately chose to teach in different institutions, schools and universities to help my DELTA study. I started my DELTA journey by taking IH Distance DELTA 3 course starting in September 2017. After achieving DELTA Module 3, I took a break and did my DELTA Module 1 course through IH Distance DELTA starting in March 2019. Right after passing DELTA Module 3, I soon took the full-time face-to-face DELTA Module 2 at IH Chiang Mai campus in Thailand.
Why did you choose to do it that way?
To be honest, I had no other choice at that time. After I heard of DELTA , I soon started to find relevant information, but only found that no DELTA course was provided in China. Then I browsed DELTA centres through the official website to find appropriate course providers in nearby regions or countries. Then I found IH Distance DELTA and decided to take DELTA through it because of the flexibility and professionalism. Through IH Distance DELTA courses, I did not have to resign from my job and travel to other countries for DELTA learning. Additionally, I could learn at my own pace via distance learning, allowing me to make a good balance between my teaching and DELTA study.
I planned to do DELTA Module 2 online through IH Distance DELTA. However, a local tutor was required to sit in to monitor and assess my teaching practice at that time. (This could be done online after the outbreak of COVID-19.) As I could not find a local tutor for IH Distance DELTA online DELTA Module 2, I searched for others and found a face-to-face one in Chiang Mai. This turned out to be a wise choice, because Barry, Giac and Adam, my DELTA trainers, were excellent and professional.
In terms of the order of doing DELTA, I did not follow the recommended or normal order of it, which is DELTA Modules 1, 2 & 3, but did Module 3 first because of my working experience. Before doing DELTA Module 3, I was often required to design a brief curriculum by my supervisor to get approval for teaching the courses. That is why after reading the official DELTA handbook, I decided to do Module 3 first. If I selected to do Module 1 first, I definitely would not pass it right after the DELTA Module 1 course because the DELTA Module 3 learning helped me a lot in understanding some theories and concepts tested in DELTA Module 1.
Therefore, this choice is appropriate for me or candidates who have similar working experience. I normally recommend those who want to do DELTA by following the 1, 2 and 3 order.
What do you think you gained from doing the Delta?
I gained tremendously from DELTA and a part of what I gained is beyond the outcomes that DELTA is supposed to bring.
DELTA Module 3
I learned a lot from my tutors and peers on the online discussion form. Through this course, I learned how to design an appropriate questionnaire and had a more in-depth understanding of diagnostic tests. The questionnaire and diagnostic test I used and adapted before taking DELTA M3 were appropriate for designing IELTS and EAP courses, but after the course, I know why these questionnaires and diagnostic tests were appropriate, their weaknesses and how to improve them. Additionally, I learned how to become a self-reflective teacher, which indirectly helped me to initiate my CPD and guide other teachers to plan their self-directed Continuous Professional Development in the future.
DELTA Module 1
Chinese English language teachers are normally considered to be grammar nerds and masters in phonology and phonetics. However, I did not follow the typical path to become an English language teacher in China so those areas were my weaknesses. I gradually picked up knowledge in those fields through my teaching but never had an opportunity to systematically study and explore them in detail.
DELTA Module 2
This is the most challenging course I have ever met and I learned so much from other DELTA Module 2 candidates and my tutors. Completing background essays, lesson plans (especially comment section), observations and post-lesson reflection in a semi-academic style indirectly guided me to have a more in-depth understanding of theories, assumptions, and other knowledge in ELT I learned by connecting them to my real teaching. This is probably why I heard that many DELTA survivors say DELTA Module 2 is the essence of DELTA.
Beyond the DELTA
Through the DELTA study, I experienced online education or distance learning for the first time. This experience taught me how to teach or tutor fully online, helping me to smoothly adapt to the sudden shift from face-to-face teaching to online teaching after the outbreak of Covid-19.
What were the downsides of the method you chose?
The only downside I think is that I should not have rushed to DELTA Module 2 after I passed Module 1 and chose the full-time face-to-face DELTA Module 2. I should have waited for a longer time to find the local tutor or the fully online mode of DELTA Module 2 to emerge. When the British Council China emailed me that they found an available local tutor who was close to where I lived, I had already paid the tuition fee for the full-time face-to-face DELTA Module 2.
The full-time face-to-face DELTA Module 2 was super intensive. Due to the high level of intensity, in some cases, I was overwhelmed, so I was able to only quickly browse a few reading materials and just seemingly understood the reading materials and trainers’ lectures and guidance. It took me a long time to review and absorb what I learned during the DELTA Module 2 study.
What were the benefits of the method you chose?
The major benefit of taking DELTA via distance learning or online is its flexibility. I could learn at my own pace. This means after a day’s work when I felt exhausted, I did not have to attend the input session on time and learn less effectively, but could choose to learn in my best mood or status as pre-recorded lectures are provided and when there are theories or ELT knowledge I do not understand, I could contact my trainers on the online discussion forum. Without this learning method, I definitely could not make a balance between my work and study and could not study well because I prefer and learn best through ”learning by doing it” approach.
What tips would you give other people doing the Delta?
Right after doing DELTA comes to your mind, you would do well to embark on reading books and papers from the official reading list. When reading, try to relate ELT knowledge, especially those arcane one, to your previous teaching or ask other teachers for help if you have no teaching experience in contexts or environments mentioned in the books.
Then analyse your situation by referring to, for example, SWOT analytical method. This will help you choose what method to take DELTA and better make an appropriate study plan.
For DELTA Module 3 ELT path, I would suggest choosing a specialism that you are familiar with. Do not try to explore a totally new specialism, for example, that you are interested in or will teach in this context in the future.
In retrospect
Apart from choosing fully online DELTA Module 2 via IH Distance DELTA rather than full-time face-to-face DELTA Module 2 via IH Bangkok, I do not think I would do it differently if I could travel back in time. However, I might choose to not take DELTA Module 1 right after I completed the online course because I never thought that I could pass it on my first attempt. As I did not major in ELT-relevant fields, much ELT knowledge in Module 1 was totally new for me so if I spent more time digesting and absorbing after the course, I might get a good grade in Module 1. I might also change my specialism for Module 3 as I didn’t know what all of the specialisms meant, and some of them are closer to what I actually do in my teaching than the one I chose.
On 19th January 2024, I presented at the IATEFL Young Learner and Teenager Special Interest Group (YLTSIG) web conference. The theme this year was ‘Each child, every child and the whole child’.
I was invited to speak about Girlguiding. This was the abstract for the session:
I’ve been part of Girlguiding in the UK as both a child and an adult, and it’s contributed a lot to who I am as a person. As a girl I was a Rainbow and a Brownie, and as an adult I’m Snowy Owl, a volunteer working with Brownies. Girlguiding improved my confidence, taught me how to work with others, and added extra skills beyond what I was learning at school. It also made me part of an international family, and was probably one of the first ways I became aware of the world beyond my country. In this session, I’ll share how Girlguiding inspired me and how it continues to inspire girls and women around the world. (Note that Scouting does the same!)
This is the recording, which I believe will be available during February 2024:
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to John Hughes about the competency framework for language learning materials writing, which I created for my NILE MA dissertation. Watch the video to learn more about it.
You can download the framework and see the research behind it here. You can also find a presentation I did about it here.
On 13th January 2024, I attended the plenary day of the International House Academic Managers and Trainers (AMT) conference, as I was the final presenter of the day. My talk is summarised here, in which I introduced my competency framework for language learning materials writing.
These are my notes from the other talks I attended on the day.
The wellbeing of educational leaders – Dr Kate Brierton
‘A psychologist with a passion for compassion’ – if we could be more compassionate, we could all be healthier (a focus on health, rather than happiness)
Trying to bring more compassion into education
Kate’s challenge: set an intention to make one small change because of listening to Kate’s talk…and see how it goes. Mine is continuing to work on managing my physiology and particularly my breathing to manage my stress.
Small changes can make a big difference. No need to meditate for an hour every day!
What is compassion: Kate’s definition is from Professor Paul Gilbert.
Compassion is a sensitivity to suffering in self and others, combined with a commitment to alleviating that suffering in self and others.
It’s not an emotion. It is without harsh judgement, does not involve blame or shame, but it does involve taking responsibility. It isn’t weak and often it isn’t easy, but requires courage, strength and wisdom.
Compassion can go out to others, it can flow into you (how good are you at receiving it), and it can be sent to yourself. The last is the focus of the session today.
Do you accept yourself or reject yourself or parts of yourself?
Why can leadership be challenging?
1. We’re leading humans.
Humans like being in control. Our wellbeing is best when we are in control, but leaders have to take away some of that control and people don’t always respond well.
Humans are wired to be in social groups, but they are very complex. Just one person can upset the balance or dynamic.
Humans have tricky brains, with strong emotional responses, and easily become trapped in cycles of unhelpful thinking, behaviour and emotion.
2. You have to implement changes that might not agree with your values or make you feel uncomfortable.
This is called ethical labour:
Ever-increasing drive for efficiency in schools due to market-driven nature of educational systems.
Produces a huge strain on leaders and managers – trade-off is needed.
3. Social pressure to perform well.
The pressure or meritocracy in the 21st century – we’re not allowed to be average any more.
Anyone can achieve anything. Therefore our brains think if we don’t achieve highly, it’s our fault.
Kate referenced Alain de Botton’s ‘Status Anxiety’ – he thinks this might be one reason why we have so much anxiety and depression in the world now.
We’re supposed to be agile, positive, and so on, but if we don’t feel like this – it leads to self-criticism and negative emotion, and imposter syndrome.
If we can work on self-criticism, we can feel huge changes in our lives.
[There are lots of links related to mental health in ELT on this post from my blog, including ones about self-compassion and self talk.]
The things we say to ourselves are things we are highly unlikely to say to our friends.
But most people in the room we were in said if there was a big button to remove all self-criticism, they wouldn’t want to remove it.
[I stopped responding to Kate’s questions after a while, as they all assumed we have self-criticism which isn’t necessarily true. I think that I talked myself out of it a long time ago, and I’m happy that I did that. It doesn’t mean I never criticise myself, but it now happens so rarely that I don’t feel it particularly affects my life. The difference since I accepted myself is huge.]
Kate asked us to become more compassionate to ourselves, as she has seen it transform people’s lives. [This is how I feel!]
How to become more compassionate towards yourself
1. A different internal dialogue
Choose a different thing to say: you’re doing your best. I’m only human [this is what I say!]
But not: I am fantastic! (You might be sometimes, but you aren’t always!)
This is non-judgemental and encouraging and gives you realistic expectations. You forgive mistakes and begin again with the knowledge you’ve gained.
[I partly did this by banishing the word ‘should’ – every time I thought ‘You should do X’, I started to ask ‘Who says?’ I realised that these were restrictions I was placing on myself because I imagined other people would think that. I then decided that I would rephrase things as ‘I want to X’ or ‘If I can, I will X’ – that reduced a lot of the pressure I was giving myself in my internal dialogue.]
2. Validate your emotions
It is always OK to feel the way we feel – we have no control over it. Don’t be ashamed about how you feel. Practice moving through emotion so you learn to respond not react.
Notice the emotion, pause, and decide how to react.
3. Change your physiology
Aim for a calm environment, relax your body, breathe and smile. If you purposefully change your body, it can have a really beneficial effect on your mind.
Open up your chest, lift your chin, breathe – the out breath is where you get the relaxation response, so this is where the focus should be to help your relax [this is something I’m working on now!]
4. Be curious
You’re open, non-judgemental, ask questions, and this helps you to learn and grow. How did that happen? What can I do differently next time? [I think this carries me through life!]
Kate and Christina Gkonou have written a book called Cultivating Teacher Wellbeing, starting with understanding your own minds, understanding those of others, and building a culture of compassion in your organisation [Amazon affiliate link / BEBC non-affiliate link].
Making connections: trauma-informed language teaching in challenging times – Orsolya Dunn
Orsi is an ESOL lecturer and teacher trainer in Scotland.
She started by asking us to finish this sentence: One thing that has made me smile today is… [being back with my IH family!]
This is an activity to focus on positive things at the start of a session, counteracting our negative biases.
Efficiencies needed in all areas due to business focus
Cultural perception that teaching is unproblematic and straightforward (Brookfield, 2017)
Lack of training for challenges we face
Teaching ESOL in FE in the UK
Demographics have changed: now there are lots of refugees compared to settled populations in the past
Teachers are on the frontline of the global refugee crisis.
(Sowton, 2018)
What is trauma?
Reminders: Orsi is a teacher, not a psychologist. Not all of these trauma factors will affect all students equally. But trauma-informed teaching is good for everyone, not just trauma-impacted learners, because it is human-informed teaching.
Trauma and the brain
It changes the brain completely.
Trauma shatters the brain’s belief that the world is good.
(Brierton, 2022)
It makes your brain hyper-vigilant, leads to fear and alarm reactions, affects cognitive functions (memory, focussing attention), difficulty with self-regulation.
Trauma in the language classroom
All or nothing thinking: if I make one mistake, it’s not worth it
Bruce Perry (2006) says first and foremost what we need to help learners with is self-regulation: movement, rhythm, breathing. They need to recognise their responses.
Next they can relate to those feelings
After that they can access reason. They need safety and can be curious at that point.
Basic trauma-informed principles
Safety
Offer choice: agency and voice
Belonging and connection
Valuing of identities – giving opportunities to express who they are, and recognising that
Empowerment
Compassion
Recognition of strengths
Cultural sensitivity
We only need 7 minutes of real connection with another human being to start forming a new psychological pathway.
Basic trauma-informed strategies
Scaffolding
Predictability – this gives students control. If you know about changes, let students know in advance so they can feel in control.
Clear boundaries and expectations
Collaboration
Minimise triggers – they can be everywhere. Jessica Miniham wrote about thinking about students’ fear reactions like a soda can: we don’t know how many times it’s been shaken or what shook it. We need to see reactions in context. We don’t need to feel guilty about students’ fear reactions, but we need to observe and be compassionate and notice what triggers. Homes, health, work, family, journeys can all be triggering topics, especially for displaced students.
Don’t force personalisation. Students have need for others to bear witness, but some of them really don’t want to talk about themselves. Offer choice. The better the relationship you have with students, the more you can see this. You can also negotiate with students: what topics do you want to stay away from, what topics do you want us to skip. Tell them: you give as much as you want. Talk about yourself or somebody you know (third person personalisation).
Well-being topics in the syllabus e.g. stress, sleep, emotions and their connection to the body
Grounding activities. Orsi wasn’t a mindfulness person, but as she did more research she realised she needed to include those activities in her sessions to help learners regulate. Students are surprisingly open to these activities. She contextualises these activities as how she manages to stress, and there is a lot of buy in. These help to build learners’ psychological resilience. 5 minutes of mindfulness can be really helpful, and now her learners being activities to share with others. She likes the book Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness [Amazon affiliate link], which has a reminder that we think of students bringing their whole world into the classroom. We also do that too as teachers. We need to recognise how things make us feel in the classroom and why we react in the way we do. Compassionate, non-judgemental discovery can help us.
Trauma and its institutional implications
Training needs to be provided on trauma-informed approaches
Ecological approach to trauma, across all areas not just in the classroom
Trauma-informed disciplinary policies: compassionate policies, not just punishing reactions. Drive to understand why things happen and how we can help
Nurturing a culture of staff wellbeing
Minimising internet-base solutions – making personal connections, connection is soothing, face-to-face teaching wherever possible
More physically safe learning spaces
Trauma-informed physical environments
Are directions to exits clear and available?
Does it foster a sense of belonging or does it other the student?
Restorative learning spaces
White and beige are institutional colours, which you see in hospitals, lawyers, interrogation rooms.
Furniture needs to be moveable. Students can make a choice about where they can sit. Can they see exits?
Remove overhanging objects.
Let learners put their artwork on the walls to foster a sense of belonging. But avoid too much visual clutter and complexity.
Re-examine art in the room and what the symbolic significance of those images is.
Red, yellow and orange can be problematic. Our reactions to the environment is a whole science which you can learn more about if you’re interested.
Plants and animals reduce stress, even if it’s only a picture.
Trauma and language teachers
You can’t pour from an empty cup
Vicarious trauma – feeling overwhelmed by another person’s trauma
Emotion labour – nobody asks you if you’re thinking about your work when you’re cooking dinner, and people don’t necessarily care, but this is very real labour and tiring
Higher levels of stress – foreign language anxiety, high energy methodologies, complex intercultural demands
Boundaries – both us and our institutions need to allow us to set clear boundaries
Signposting/referrals – make use of anything that can help
Peer support – we’re very good for each other. If you share enough and connect with your peers, you can forge emotion capital and grow as a person. It’s OK to show vulnerabilities
Self-care activities
Here are 11 activities you can do to look after yourself:
Do an audit: which of these do you do? Which don’t you do? Which could you do?
We MUST look after our wellbeing.
Your best is enough.
Your day will never be enough and you’ll never get to the end of the ticky boxes. And that’s OK.
Join the dots: get the full picture – Jennifer Holden
Jenny is talking to us about making connections. How can we make connections and get them working in our favour?
Jenny showed lots of the connections made at the conference. But why are connections so fundamental to life?
To be a great leader, you need to be able to see patterns and discern order in chaos and complexity. This quote is attributed to ChatGPT, as is the one below 🙂
Can pattern-spotting skills be learnt? Are they innate? Is it just a question of experience?
We can develop these skills, and once we have them they can be turned into intuition and it gets better.
Learning to spot connections / patterns
Practice pattern spotting everyday: for example by playing Only Connect [Jenny had made a version of this for us!]
Once you can start making connections, you can start thinking about consequences.
Love creates Love. That helps us with connections, teacher retention, student retention. Emotional intelligence needs to underpin everything we do.
What non-social connections do you observe in your school? For example, students complaining about the lack of vending machines after the pandemic. Poor internet connections causing problems.
Here are some connections Jenny has thought of, demonstrating how messy our jobs as managers are:
Jenny showed us the McKinsey 7S model as a way to help join the dots and help us analyse and improve organisations.
All of these areas need to be aligned for an organisation to be successful. You can use it as a way of framing your thoughts about your organisation.
How can we strengthen our awareness of connections?
Jenny suggests the use of simile.
This conference is like…
My job is like…
My school is like…
A problem I’m dealing with at work right now is like…
That can help us to understand what is salient to us.
Embrace opposing thoughts
Top tips for being sh*t at your role 🙂
Thinking about the opposite can help you realise what you should do. It also helps you to get different perspectives on things. And it makes people laugh!
Other ways to see the bigger picture
Truth is related to our own perspective. This means we need to value other perspectives. Otherwise it is liked the parable of the blind people touching an elephant to find out what it is and drawing lots of different conclusions:
MWBA: management by walking about. Estelle Helouin’s question: what have you learnt that I don’t know about?
Go on a customer/teacher/admin staff walk around your school. See it from their perspective.
Ask the right questions
Use focus groups
Reflect on past experiences
Experience the best: go to places where you can experience what you’re aiming for
Work-shadowing
Speak to a critical friend
Raise awareness of the importance of connections with others e.g. You said…We did…
AI can only see existing patterns. It’s up to our human brains to connect new ones. But we also need to be aware of our own limitations and notice problems with our own pattern recognition.
Try things out beyond what you’re used to. New art, new podcasts, people in different industries. A narrow perspective limits your learning.
She left us with a new word:
Pareidolia: the tendency to see patterns where they don’t actually exist
On 13th January 2024, I presented a plenary session at the International House Academic Managers and Trainers (IH AMT) 2024 conference. When I was the Director of Studies at IH Sevastopol and IH Bydgoszcz, I used to attend the AMT regularly, so it was lovely to be back. Follow this link for the notes on the talks I attended.
My own talk was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was the first official public outing for the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. At IATEFL 2022, I saw Denise Santos question the lack of a competency framework for materials writing. Frameworks existed for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise’s talk, I decided to create a competency framework for language learning materials writing for my MA dissertation, recognising that it’s not only materials writers who need this support, but teachers too. I will share the structure of my framework, how I created it, and how you can use it.
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
Subscribe to my blog to see a video version of the presentation over the next couple of months, as I’ll presenting it a few more times in the first half of this year. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
While I can’t give you Hermione Grainger’s Time Turner so you can travel back in time, I can give you tried and tested ways of getting those things done which demand your time and attention, or which you just never quite get round to, helping you to manage yourself and others and make the most of your time.
This is the third time I’ve presented on this topic, but as the previous two times were in 2016 and 2017, a lot has happened in between! The 2016 version is fully written out if you’d like a text version of the talk. I’ve added a few notes below where things differ. The 2017 version was recorded by British Council. Here are the slides from the 2024 version:
My life has changed quite a lot since I first put together this presentation. Now I have a partner (and we’re organising our wedding), live in the UK with him, and work for myself. That means that I work less and take more time off.
In my personal life, of the six different things I mentioned on slide 9, I actually only do physio daily now. I’ve recently started Duolingo, so languages are daily too, but cross stitch and 10,000 steps are much less common, reading blog posts is planned every week but rarely happens, and ELTpics has closed to new submissions. Instead I volunteer as a leader for Girlguiding (of which more in a couple of weeks!) and enjoy birdwatching.
I’m also mostly only managing my own time, not that of a whole team (as I was in Bydgoszcz). I run my own courses for Cambridge DELTA and do various other freelance work with different organisations. That all means that I shifted to an online calendar, as it was much easier to plan 9-12 months ahead (necessary when running long-term courses) and to share my availability with others via Calend.ly. There are screenshots of my online calendar showing how I use colour-coding for different things I do.
I track my time using Toggl to help me reflect on how I’m using it and to notice how many hours I work a week: it’s down from about 45-50 hours to a much healthier 32-36 hours. Now that I’ve moved to an online calendar ‘R’ in ‘ORGANISE’ stands for ‘Reflect on what works’, not the ‘Refresh every week’ tip I included when using a paper planner.
What tips do you have for managing your time? Are there any tips you’ve tried from my suggestions? Did they work for you?
This competency framework for language learning materials writing is the culmination of my NILE MA dissertation, the final part of my MA in Professional Development in Language Education (MAPDLE). I was very proud to get a distinction overall. I’m very grateful to everybody who contributed to my research and made the whole framework possible – you know who you are!
The framework is Version 1.0: it has not yet been piloted. Despite this, I would like to release it here so that people can start to get use out of it. Watch this space for future updates (I hope!)
I would be grateful for any feedback you have about the framework, either as comments on this post or by emailing me at sandymillin + dissertation at gmail dot com.
The introductory information in the rest of this post is taken directly from the pdf of the competency framework. For the framework itself, you can download the full pdf above.
Introduction
This competency framework is designed to draw together all of the knowledge, skills and abilities which may be needed to write effective materials for language learning. The competencies are designed to be observable in the real world, measurable against accepted standards (though these standards may differ depending on your context), and improvable via training and development.
Who the framework is for
This framework is for a reference tool for anybody involved in writing materials for language learning. Users of the framework might be:
writing materials for learners in their own classroom
writing materials for colleagues at their school
writing materials to share on a blog or other platform
writing materials to self-publish
writing materials for a publisher
training others to write materials
Many of the competencies are also relevant to those involved in other areas of materials creation, not just writing. For example, editors and publishers could also find inspiration within the competencies listed in the framework.
While my background and most of the research I did are within the field of English Language Teaching, this framework could also be used for the writing of materials for other languages.
Compiling the framework
The framework is based on research conducted as part of my dissertation for the NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) MA in Professional Development for Language Education, accredited by the University of Chichester. I drew on data from questionnaires, focus groups and a wide range of literature to compile the framework.
Providing feedback on the framework
This is the first draft of the framework, so I would be grateful for any feedback on how well it works for you as you use it and how I might be able to make it clearer in future. Please send any feedback to sandymillin + dissertation at gmail dot com.
The structure of the framework
The framework is divided into three sections, each made up of separate categories. There are fifteen categories in total. The sections and categories are:
1 Background knowledge
1.1 Understanding learners
1.2 Understanding language
1.3 Understanding methodology and theory
2 Creating materials
2.1 Meeting learners’ needs
2.2 Activity design
2.3 Sequencing materials
2.4 Providing variety and balance
2.5 Assessment
2.6 Layout
2.7 Teacher support
3 Professional skills
3.1 Writing skills
3.2 Digital skills
3.3 Understanding how you work
3.4 Professional relationships
3.5 Working with publishers
Each category contains subcategories which are further divided into descriptors of specific competencies. For example, Category 3.1 Writing skills includes five subcategories:
3.1 A: Clarity
3.1 B: Checking their work
3.1 C: Expanding their range
3.1 D: Research skills
3.1 E: Understanding copyright
The subcategory 3.1 B: Checking their work contains six descriptors:
3.1 B1: Can edit their writing
3.1 B2: Can proofread their writing
3.1 B3: Can ensure language learning materials are factually accurate
3.1 B4: Can work with editors to improve their writing
3.1 B5: Can seek feedback on language learning materials, including through piloting
3.1 B6: Can update language learning materials based on feedback and piloting
All descriptors are written as can-do statements, finishing the sentence ‘Effective materials writers…’. For example, 3.1 B4 would be ‘Effective materials writers can work with editors to improve their writing.’
Note that not all of the descriptors are equal and some may take longer to master than others. Mastery may also mean different things in different contexts.
A note on terminology
You may find there are some terms used in the framework which are new to you. On pages 22-24, there is a Glossary defining key terms. These key terms have a grey background when they appear in the framework. Three terms are included in the Glossary, but are not highlighted in grey: competency, materials, and target learner.
How to use the framework
Each user of the framework is likely to have mastered different competencies, and to add to these competencies at different rates depending on where they are in their careers. It is not expected that any one individual will be able to achieve a high level in every competence within the framework. Instead, it is designed to be used in different ways by different users. Here are examples of how it might be used.
Zeynep: a new teacher
Zeynep has just started teaching English. She would like to create materials for her lessons, but she is not sure what makes good quality language learning materials. She looks through the framework and decides that Category 2.6 Layout, feels like a good place to start. She thinks about some of the materials she has created so far, and how challenging it sometimes was for her students to find their way around. She decides to look at examples of other materials to see how they manage navigation around the materials (Descriptor 2.6 A1) and how they use colours (Descriptor 2.6 A3) and icons (Descriptor 2.6 B2) to make the materials more engaging and useful for learners. She then takes what she has learnt and applies it to her own materials.
Hadiza: an experienced teacher
Hadiza has been teaching French for many years. She would like to share French materials with brand new teachers who are joining her department. Hadiza is confident that her materials work well with her learners, but she knows that her colleagues don’t always understand how to use the materials she has made. She looks at Category 2.7 Teacher support to get ideas about what to include in teacher’s notes. She puts together instructions for how to set up and run the activities in her materials (Descriptor 2.7 B1), adds some notes about a cultural topic she has mentioned which they might not be aware of (Descriptor 2.7 B6), and includes some suggestions for alternative activities if the group of learners is different to the kind of group Hadiza is used to teaching (Descriptor 2.7 B7). While doing this, she thinks carefully about the fact that new teachers are likely to need more support than experienced teachers when using materials (Descriptor 2.7 A2). Afterwards she carefully checks that she has used terminology consistently throughout (Descriptor 2.7 A3).
Taylor: a professional materials writer
Taylor uses the framework to do an audit of their skills as a materials writer to help them decide which areas to focus on next in their professional development. They realise that over time, they have successfully developed their knowledge, skills and abilities related to most of the more practical categories in Section 2 of the framework, ‘Creating materials’, and Section 3, ‘Professional skills’, but that they lack confidence in some areas of theory related to language learning materials writing. They decide to focus on ‘Theory related to learning’ first, by learning more about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory (Descriptor 1.3 B1) and Special Educational Needs (SEN) and neurodivergence (Descriptor 1.3 B5).
Kofi: a teacher trainer
Kofi would like to put together a training course to support the teachers in his school. He decides to focus on Can help them to produce better quality materials. He uses the framework to select six areas to focus on across a series of sessions. He decides to draw from all three sections, though he mainly focuses on Section 2, ‘Creating materials’ as he feels it will make the biggest difference to the learners at his school if teachers are able to improve in these areas. He decides to include sessions focussing on ‘Understanding individual learners’ (Category 1.1 A), ‘Understanding skills’ (Categories 1.2 B-F), ‘Activity design’ (Category 2.2), ‘Sequencing materials’ (Category 2.3), ‘Providing variety and balance’ (Category 2.4), and ‘Clarity’ and ‘Checking their work’ (Categories 3.1 A and B).
Joanna: recruiting for a school
Joanna’s school would like to create in-house materials to use with teenagers studying at the school. They want to recruit a materials writer to create these materials. Joanna uses descriptors from the framework to help her compile a job description highlighting the key competencies the materials writer will need to be able to work at the school. She changes the wording of some of the descriptors to make them more specific to her school. For example, she takes Descriptor 1.1 A7 and changes it to say ‘Can understand Chilean culture’, as her school is based in Chile. Descriptor 1.1 A3 becomes ‘Can understand teenage learner’s interests’ in her job description. The job description then forms the basis of the recruitment process, helping her to create a job advert, a suitable interview task and appropriate interview questions.
Xu: venturing into self-publishing
Xu has been creating materials for language learning for many years for his own learners. He would like to self-publish materials to help learners improve their reading in Mandarin. Xu has completed a course which helped him to develop his materials writing skills, so he feels quite confident in most areas in Section 2, ‘Creating materials’. However, this is the first time he will be self-publishing his materials. He realises that he needs to build professional relationships to help him to market his materials (Category 3.4). He looks for a course to help him learn how to publicise his language learning materials (Descriptor 3.4 C3) and to develop and grow his professional network (Descriptor 3.4 A1). He also starts working with an editor to improve his writing (Descriptor 3.1 B4).
Maria: working in publishing
Maria works for an international publisher. The publisher has put together a team to create a new coursebook series, a large project which is likely to last a few years. Early on in the process, they ask Maria to use the framework to audit the knowledge, skills and abilities across the team, and to identify any potential gaps. She asks all writers and editors working on the project to look at the descriptors and tick whether they are ‘Not confident at all’, ‘A little confident’, ‘Quite confident’, or ‘Very confident’ with each descriptor. She averages the results and uses this to identify gaps across the team.
This is part of a series of posts showing you all the different ways you can approach the Cambridge DELTA. They are designed to help you find out more about the course and what it involves, as well as helping you to choose the right way to do it for you, your lifestyle and the time you have available. If you’ve done the DELTA (or any other similar higher-level teaching course, including a Masters), and you’d like to join in, let me know by leaving me a comment or contacting me via LinkedIn. If you’re interested in doing DELTA yourself, I run Take Your Time DELTA Module 1 and Module 3 courses.
This is Charlie in his own words:
I’m from Bath originally but I left a long time ago and am now happily settled in sunny Spain. I began my journey as a young whippersnapper TEFLer in no other than….that’s right, Thailand! I taught for over 2 years in a local public school before making the move over to South Korea.
I spent a year in South Korea in a city called Busan, before deciding to do a CELTA course at Bath College. It was an intense 30 days but well worth it and I felt I could teach in Europe. With that in mind, I jumped on a plane to Spain.
I arrived in Cadiz, Spain in the year of 2012 (I think). I spent 3 years there before moving to Seville and once again returning to Cadiz into the position I still hold as Director of Studies of Foreign Languages at CLIC IH Cadiz. I am now DELTA-qualified and have set up the Charlie’s Lessons website and YouTube channel in order to share my experience and know-how on teaching English and on educational technology, which is a passion of mine.
How did you do your Delta? How did you arrange the modules? (i.e. in what order and did you do them in different places?)
I did all my DELTA courses in the following order: 1,3 and 2. With Modules 1 and 3 I attended some face-to-face classes on site at CLIC Sevilla and then the rest of the course I could do from the comfort of my own home. With Module 2 I did the entire course online. The online courses were all contained on a Moodle, but I think the course content has now been shifted to Google Classroom.
Why did you choose to do it that way?
I did the courses with CLIC as I was able to get a discount! I also decided to cover the theory first by doing Modules 1 and 3 before 2. I was also advised to do this by my course tutor. I decided to do Module 2 online as I would have found it time-consuming to travel to and from Seville or even Malaga to do their courses face-to-face. It was also the first time they had run a fully online Module 2 course so I thought I would give it a go. Once I had completed most of the work online I also preferred that my final assignment was also done online too although I did have the choice for my observation to be in a face-to-face class in my current school.
What do you think you gained from doing the Delta?
Something that teachers often complain about is the ‘imposter syndrome’. I don’t think we ever lose this feeling but doing the DELTA course has definitely helped to feel more confident in what I do and more importantly, why.
When you start out as an English teacher you often see DELTA graduates as people we put up on a pedestal. However, being on the course, especially on Module 2, you realise that we all still have the same reservations, concerns and doubts that all teachers have. I guess I gained the knowledge that despite receiving such rigorous training that the DELTA provides, it won’t fix all your problems and often you still finish the course with improvements to be made.
What were the downsides of the method you chose?
I personally do well in an online environment but I can imagine for some other teachers it could be a hindrance.
One big downside is the fact that the students who attend classes online are often not prepared for the experience. Issues arise such as poor internet connection, audio and video problems, and students dropping in and out of class. These can have serious effects on your performance during an assessed class and can cause some stress. However, the tutors will keep this in mind.
What were the benefits of the method you chose?
Obviously doing any course online has certain benefits, no commuting, having access to all the course material digitally etc.
I had worked with the tutors on previous courses so having that confidence with them made the process a lot easier.
What tips would you give other people doing the Delta?
Plan ahead, especially if you’re going to be working a full-time job at the same time. Too many times I found myself cramming an assignment before the deadline when if I had just sat down and mapped out each task properly, I would have had plenty of time.
Make sure you pick a skill for your final assignment where you can demonstrate how students have improved. This is most easily done with speaking and writing and to a certain degree with listening. However, demonstrating progress in reading skills in a 60-minute lesson can be extremely challenging.
Finally, make the most of the time with your tutors and fellow trainees. They can be a treasure trove of information and ideas and you’ll only be with them for a short period of time.
This was a joint event which ran on Sunday 26th November, with the following programme:
Here are notes I made during the presentations. They are by no means complete!
Luis Carabantes – How do we learn to write materials?
Luis was talking about the Chilean context.
As part of his research, he analysed teaching handbooks, including Ur, Harmer, and Scrivener, the three most popular handbooks used at universities in Chile as part of ELT training courses. He realised that they framed teachers as textbook users, rather than as materials developers.
As a separate piece of research, he worked with teachers to discuss materials they had created. He discovered four things that learner teachers had in mind (unconsciously!) when they were creating materials:
Assuming learner limitations: they sometimes thought the learners could do more but sometimes less, and they created materials which reflected the lower end of their expectations.
Teaching English as teaching the textbook: they created materials which reflected what textbooks look like. There was an impression that the objective of the lessons was the cover the textbook. Practising teacher mentors also influenced these concepts, making comments which pushed learner teachers in certain directions. For example, asking where the information on the worksheet is in the coursebook, as they have to cover the contents.
Teaching English as teaching reading and listening: most of the materials Luis received from the learner teachers in his study were focussed on reading, then listening, then grammar. There was very little to work on speaking and writing. The lesson plan structure taught by the university prioritised reading and listening, so learner teachers’ materials did this too.
Subordinating topics to discrete language: there was a feeling that developing the language was far more important than the topic itself. Because of testing, grammar takes a leading role in instruction. The content of the National Curriculum does this too, as it’s a list of discrete language functions.
Luis offers a series of sample questions based on the activity system of materials design:
Subject(s) Who are the people involved in the design? What are the materials designers’ knowledge/beliefs/assumptions about teaching and learning?
Tools What educational theories are mediating the design? What are the available resources to design the materials (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, online learning environments, etc.)?
Rules How is the material expected to be used at the institution (e.g. through an online learning environment, as printed worksheets, etc.)? Is there any examination affecting how the material is designed and used?
Community Who will be using the materials? What are the materials users’ educational and cultural backgrounds? Are there any stakeholders?
Division of Labour If designing materials in teams, what will each individual do (e.g. design, give feedback)? How are the teachers expected to use the material? Are teachers expected/allowed to adapt the material?
Object What is the material going to be used for? How does the material contribute to the curriculum?
[I think this is a useful set of questions to think about when planning any materials design, and when thinking about
Heather Buchanan – Materials, theory and practice: can we close the gap?
There is often an entrenched theory/practice divide, with a lack of agreement between researchers and materials writers. Heather would like there to be a middle ground, with agreement and interaction between the two groups.
Heather asked us four discussion questions:
What is more important for you in materials writing: theory or practice?
What theories and/ research underpin your own materials (or teaching)?
Why these theories/ this research?
How can we see them in evidence in your materials?
She then showed us some research-informed materials, including the Touchstone series by Mike McCarthy et al. This series was based more on corpora than a traditional grammar and vocabulary syllabus. Here’s an example:
She also shared VocabKitchen as a lexical profiler you can use to check the level of your text.
Heather then considered whether theory brings clarity to materials development, using the example of authenticity. There are lots of different possible types of authenticity (based on Gilmore, 2007):
tasks
texts
participants
social or cultural situation
purposes of the communicative act
some combination of the above
Authentic texts are used in Speakout and Global, for example.
Sometimes the challenge can be that the text is authentic, but is so decontextualised that it doesn’t work well, or the text is authentic but the task isn’t. There’s also the problem of choosing things that are interesting for the teacher, but not necessarily for the learner. Authenticity is therefore not always the holy grail.
What are the challenges of developing research-informed materials?
Which research should we use to inform materials?
Some research is more palatable than others
Innovation v. tradition (e.g. the tradition of using lexical sets v. the research finding that this makes it harder to remember vocabulary)
Heather talked about decisions they made when putting Navigation together, particularly in terms of integrating decoding skills based on the work of John Field. They decided to include ‘Breaking the code’ boxes, like grammar boxes, introducing different sub-skills.
At the end of the talk, Heather asked us:
Where do your beliefs/ principles about language learning and teaching come from?
Do your materials reflect your beliefs/ principles? How?
What theory/ research would you like to see applied more to published materials? Why?
Those questions felt like ones we could discuss for a long time!
In conclusion, Heather said that balancing theory and practice is a dynamic model. We need to be looking at both and trying to filter them, for example through commercial considerations, professional intuition and experience. It’s important for us to disseminate findings, and consider how much time and access we have to look at research (for example through MaWSIG!) There are negative perceptions on both sides about understanding, and we need to move past these. Final questions:
Can all theory translate into practice?
Is it obvious that writers have tried to take on baord theory in their work?
Do we need a new term, like ‘practice-informed materials’, not just ‘research-informed materials’?
Bruno Albuquerque – Adding that extra oomph to your coursebooks
Bruno shared a few activities with us, and asked us to be angels (considering the benefits of it) or demons (considering the problems with it), an idea he borrowed from Jeremy Harmer.
These are some of the reading activities Bruno suggested as alternatives to choosing the correct answer, true/false, answering the questions or matching sentence halves:
Jigsaw reading
Complete the Venn diagram
Use the template to take notes – e.g. read first to note the main ideas, read again to add commentary, put them together to create a summary
Draw an alternate cover for this book/story
Plan and record and audio summary
Draw a mindmap
Draw a flowchart
Some of these might be more useful for developing reading and listening, in contrast than the usual testing of those skills. Bruno commented that because these activities are open-ended, writing an answer key might be challenging, so you could include some ideas in the teacher’s guide. It could also be a challenging activity for novice teachers who aren’t familiar with these kinds of activity.
For writing, Bruno talked about creating realistic writing tasks, such as emails in the context learners are actually in. He showed an example of a teacher coordinator writing to teachers on a course he created for language development for teachers.
For vocabulary and grammar, he suggested extending activities:
Complete the sentences with words in the box.
Listen to the sentences to check your answers.
Listen again and notice how the highlighted words are pronounced together. What happens?
Change the sentences so 3 of them are true for you and 2 are not.
Share your sentences with a peer. Ask and answer questions to find out which are false.
Bruno’s alternative thought (with A. C. Ramos) about self-assessment is that learners might not want to circle a sad face. Instead of having a happy face, a middle face and a sad face, they have ‘I can do it with my teacher’, ‘I can do it with help’, and ‘I can do it’. In every case, the learner can do the task, but they might need a bit more support.
Lilian Montalvao – Navigating the Brazilian Market: Opportunities and Responsibilities in Writing Coursebooks for Bilingual Programs
This is a growing area in Brazil. In 2017-2018, English became mandatory from Grade 6 onwards – before that, schools could chose the language they offered. At this point, English became seen as a Lingua Franca, and that changed how people saw the language. Reading and grammar were prioritised before this, and now speaking and communication have become more important. This meant that bilingual education started to appear everywhere, although there weren’t regulations for this. In 2020, standards were created in the form of the National Guidelines for Multilingual Education.
Bilingual education can be done through an integrated curriculum, an additional curriculum (via private language schools, including sending teachers and trainers into schools to support this), or an optional curriculum (after-school). Additional / optional curriculums are largely based on CLIL. Lilian focussed on the additional curriculum in the rest of her talk.
These are some of the challenges of bilingual education in Brazil:
A lack of research in the Brazilian context
A lack of legislation, as schools don’t follow the same parameters at the moment
Market pressure and competition, as the market doesn’t realise that bilingual education doesn’t happen overnight
Poor knowledge and understanding of what bilingual education entails
The need to build a bilingual education culture within the school
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to put bilingual education into place, and people need to willing to do it!
The ideal would be to transform the whole culture of a monolingual school into that of a bilingual school, rather than the bilingual programme being something that only some of the staff do, or something tacked onto the current programme. This is a challenge though if some members of the staff don’t speak the second language. Teachers are also tired and experience many challenges, and the schools might not be able to afford it. The schools also might not be able to support the teachers in creating the bilingual programme.
To overcome these challenges, Lilian would like to see:
Research on Brazilian contexts
Legislation development
Collaboration to develop a shared view of bilingual education
Professional development in how to teach within this context and use these materials
Tailoring materials to match the needs and expectations of the schools
Community engagement so people understand what bilingual education is and how to do it, and expectations can be aligned (including with parents/families)
Monitoring and engagement of the programmes
Sergio Pantoja – Intregrating decision-making tasks for effective vocabulary practice
According to Schmitt (2017), for us to listen to everyday conversational English, we need to know 6,000-7,000 word families. [That was a lot higher than my guess of 2,000!] To read a range of novels and newspapers, it’s 8,000-9,000 word families. To watch films aimed at children (e.g. Shrek), it’s 7,000 word families. This therefore means that more classroom time should be dedicated to vocabulary teaching, according to Sergio.
In Sergio’s context, students study for about 2 hours per week, meaning about 80 hours per year. Optimistically, if they study 10 words per lesson, they might get 800 words per year, which would take 7 years – a long time! Of course, they can learn vocabulary outside the lesson too, but learners need to take ownership of their learning to do this.
It’s not just teaching, reviewing is also very important. According to Uchihara (2019), the number of encounters needed to remember a word is anywhere between 6 and 20 times, though there is a lot variation. Regardless of the number, once is never enough!
Students think that learning vocabulary is about learning new words, especially at higher levels when they might think they need to learn obscure, formal, sophisticated words. We need to help them understand that it’s about taking more advantage of what they know: learning familiar words in new situations, like ‘right’ (by right…).
We also need to go beyond single words: idioms, collocations, lexical chunks… so not just the new word, but the word(s) it goes with.
Thornbury (2005) says that ‘There is a greater likelihood of a word being integrated into our mental lexicon is many decisions have been made about it.’ This really struck a chord with Sergio, and made him think about what he can do to help learners do this.
These are some examples of decision-making tasks, according to Thornbury:
identifying
sorting
matching
selecting
ranking/sequencing
We can see examples of these in coursebooks:
Sergio used these tasks to inspire him to create tasks to supplement his lessons. He considers how cognitively demanding the task is. Ranking/Sequencing is likely to be the most cognitively challenging, because they need to make many more decisions to do this. He moves from less to more cognitively challenging tasks.
He showed us an example based on a text he found:
Find the adjectives that describe behaviour and personality in the text.
Put them into groups (positive/negative).
Match them with common collocations.
Think of 3 people you know. Choose 3 adjectives from the text to describe them. Think of reasons why you chose those adjectives. Tell your partner about them.
This lesson includes four decision-making tasks, moving from less to more cognitively demanding.
Sergio recommended using the Oxford text checker to check the level of difficulty of a text.
Catarina Pontes – Five ways to bring more relevance to materials design
As a new teacher, Catarina didn’t receive any training in materials development. When she was doing the Cambridge DELTA, she started to do course design at her institution. She was able to put into practice some of the theory she learnt on DELTA. Last year, she and her team were nominated for an ELTons award for innovation in learner resources, for materials for an immersion course in English. She’s come a long way!
She has five tips for us.
1. Know your audience
For example, with children, what is their stage of development, the age range, how well can they write, how challenging are the activities, what approach can we use, how will we keep them engaged, will we use songs, storytelling, play… For adults/older learners, what can we add that is meaningful to the learners, how do we meet their needs. They also pilot materials with small groups whenever they can. To do this:
carry out desk/field research.
hold focus groups with different stakeholders.
adapt to different audiences.
test and adapt.
welcome feedback.
Do this with materials for teachers too, not just for materials for students!
2. Inclusion matters
Think about font colours and sizes, and colour combinations in general. Do some research on the types of fonts that require less from learners.
Including images of people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different abilities, different ages, makes the materials richer and helps learners to be able to identify with the materials they see.
Take into account different learning needs.
Account for a range of body, skin and hair types.
Portray different age ranges.
Make learners feel represented.
3. Think global, design local
Catarina shared an activity from Lindsay Clandfield, describing an image from different perspectives. For example, a busy city centre street described from the perspective of somebody who has just bought a flat on the top floor, a bus driver who is worried who’s going to be late back home, the people who need to cross the street and can’t find a pedestrian crossing though they’re late for an event across the road.
Another example might be showing learners an image, and asking learners to compare it to their reality, thinking about what might be the same or different where they live.
Look at world issues, but suggest local solutions
Bring the use of the target language closer to learners’ reality and needs
Invite them to think critically and go beyond
4. Allow for personalization
Give students the chance to share their voice
Invite students to contribute with their ideas and opinions
Make learning meaningful by welcoming learners’ real-life facts
5. Use and abuse of corpora
Linguee is an English-Portuguese (and other languages) dictionary which uses corpora to suggest translations.
Find out whether something is grammatically correct / frequently-used (or not!)
Textbook English v. real-life English
Refer to sources like BNC, COCA, Linguee and Youglish.
Bonus tip: Make sure you include a range of accents
This is part of the decolonisation of the English language, exposing learners to a wider range of Englishes. Catarina showed us maps of British accents and American accents. ‘You want to speak British English…choose one!’ 🙂 She reminds us that learners need to be familiar with a wide range of accents, and that accent is identity. We need to help learners feel less concerned about the variety they speak, and more concerned about how they’re going to get their message across in the global world, how to be respected in the language, and how to get things done in the language. We can use this to fight linguistic bias. Catarina’s team wants Brazilian speakers of English in their materials, not least so that learners feel less stressed about how they sound.
English varieties go way beyond British and American.
Include a range of accents in your materials.
Make good use of streaming services to broaden your repertoire.
On 11th November 2023, I attended the Future of Training Conference at International House London. These are summaries of the talks I attended. Please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes or misrepresentations!
Rose Aylett – Language, power and education: embedding critical pedagogy within teacher education
Rose has always been interested in the social and ethical impacts of English teaching. When she did her MA, she realised there was a whole academic field dedicated to this:
Why are certain topics included/excluded from the classroom
Should teachers be politically neutral in the classroom
(One more)
Paolo Freire is most commonly associated with this – critical pedagogy is the field. The classroom can’t be separated from the wider social context.
For a critical pedagogue, the purpose of education isn’t just to think or reflect on the world, but to create the potential to act in it. Teachers should be trained to reflect and act on issues both inside and outside the classroom. They should be trained to question ‘In whose interests am I acting?’
Five principles for critical pedagogy training
Rose came up with these principles as part of her MA thesis. She came up with a critical pedagogy course.
1. Adopting a dialogic approach
Dialogue and dialogic teaching appears frequently in Freire’s work, and is central to understanding critical pedagogy. Freire criticises the banking metaphor for teaching, where knowledge is ‘deposited’ into learners. He proposes that knowledge should be mediated by the teacher rather than owned by them. There is an equalisation between the teacher and student, and the ‘expert’ idea is challenged. There are teacher-students and student-teachers.
Process
Education is conversational, incorporating meaningful dialogic. It shouldn’t be Socratic – there should be space for genuine discussion. There is no one ‘right’ answer, but instead multiple possible responses and perspectives. We need to reflect on why we disagree. It’s egalitarian: power is shared, with all perspectives acknowledged and challenged. We need to leave more space for in-depth, meaningful dialogue.
The decentralisation of decision-making, and a more participatory approach – teachers should be engaged in curriculum design and decision-making. For example, participants could look at the list of content and decide what they want to spend more/less time on, what they want to eliminate from the course, etc. Teachers evaluate and critique the course, and they get ownership over the course content, even though the curriculum and content might be pre-determined. Exit tickets can also be used to feed forward: teachers can have a say about their upcoming CPD, to make small changes to curricula. If there’s a fixed syllabus, like pre-service courses, there can be some open sessions, with candidates given the chance to select what input session they would like to do for that session: candidates can choose what the final week of the course looks like, for example.
Bottom-up approaches help here: teacher development should be teacher-led where possible. For example, team training, reading groups, classroom clinics (informal drop-in sessions for teachers to brainstorm solutions to current classroom problems).
Content
Dialogue can also be the focus of the discussion. Introducing content about critical pedagogy and acting as loop input. We could cover:
Setting up and managing effective dialogue – classroom layout, drama improvisation, classroom contracts
Teacher talk and classroom discourse analysis – how our talk maintains or challenges power dynamics, and how we can do this more constructively
Effective questioning – how can we ask questions to lead to more expansive discussion
Classroom interaction patterns – how can we balance interaction, who participates more/less and why, how can we address imbalances
For Freire, the beginning of education should be the students’ current local context. We also need to empower learners to evaluate aspects of their culture.
In training, it should be oriented towards the teachers’ environment. TT materials need to encourage reflection on teachers’ existing contexts, for example by examining beliefs about language learning.
An activity: ‘Everyday thinking’ about ELT curricula. What is the mainstream, dominant narrative that finishes these sentences? My answers in [square brackets]
Complete the following sentence stems:
Learning English involves access to [the internet, classes, materials, and teachers – I wasn’t completely sure here].
ELT curricula should enable learners to [make progress in their education and careers].
The curricula should be chosen by [probably the mainstream answer would be the government or the school / the teacher].
It should include topics that are [relevant to the learners’ needs, useful for their futures].
Linguistically, it should include [improving their language knowledge, most people would probably say grammar].
It should be organised by [not sure of the kind of answer here…maybe the teacher? Or the institution?]
The best materials are produced by [for most people, I think the answer would be publishers].
These materials should look [professional and well-designed].
The best models of English are [international models, which the learner might need to use].
Learning should be measured by [exams, I expect most people would say].
Rose shared her ideas of the everyday thinking in these areas, and they matched fairly well with mine, though not always. (You’ll have to ask her for the differences!)
Teachers would compare and contrast their ideas to help them uncover the dominant narratives and assumptions that influence ELT. They can then start to question these.
Another area to critically examine is our own privilege within the context of wider society. One activity is a privilege walk. It raises awareness of privilege and impacts on our everyday life experience. Participants stand along a line in the middle of the room. The trainer reads a series of statements, and trainees step forwards or backwards depending on whether its a privilege or not. Here are the statements Rose read:
Forwards: if English is your first language
Forwards: if either of your parents are university graduates
Backwards: if there are times in your life when you skipped a meal because there was no food in the house
Backwards: visible / invisible disabilities
Backwards: felt unsafe walking alone at night
Forwards: if you studied the culture or history of your ancestors in primary school
Backwards: bullied/made fun of based on something you cannot change e.g. gender, sexuality
Forwards: offered a job because of association with a friend / family member
Backwards: raised in a single-parent household
Backwards: stopped or questioned by the police because they felt you were suspicious
Forwards: if there were more than 50 books in your house as you grew up
Forwards: legal right to work in this country
I ended up 4 steps forwards. By the end of the walk, you’d all be standing at different positions in the room.
These are a very impactful way to highlight privilege visually. However, it’s really important to highlight that these walks are criticised – those with less privilege are required to share their lack of privilege. It may contribute to and perpetuate an ‘us v. Them’ divide. You need to know the teachers you do this way and create a safe learning environment. You also need to remind people that they don’t need to share anything. We did it with our eyes closed and imagined the walk, which might be a way of allowing people to choose what they share.
3.Navigating socio-political issues
The aversion to dealing with controversial issues is deeply embedded in teacher training. Critical pedagogy asks us to question the legitimacy of the exclusion of these challenging topics. Rose includes an input session on critical thinking and critical pedagogy on her CELTA courses. For example, they have a debate: PARSNIP topics should be included in ELT curricula and materials. PARSNIP topics are frequently
Pork
Alcohol
Religion
Sex/sexism
Nudity/narcotics
Isms / ideologies
Politics
Teachers really reflect on their own teaching and learning experiences through this session.
Another activity is ‘the traffic light task’. Teachers are asked to indicate which topics they would be happy to discuss with students are green, ones they might need caveats or extra preparation for are orange, and topics they would never discuss are red. They then discuss the differences, and think about the way different topics could be approached. These are the topics Rose gave us and my responses:
Climate activism [not sure, possibly green or orange]
Assisted dying [orange]
Migration [orange – depending on the learner backgrounds]
Swearing [green]
Poverty [orange – depending on learner backgrounds]
In the training room, Rose would follow this up with why teachers feel more of less confident, determined by teacher / student attitudes, support in the context, teacher knowledge about the topic, or whether it’s something else about the issue. This can then inform approaches to further development.
4. Integrating inclusive practices
Teacher-students who feel a sense of belonging are more engaged in the learning. We want to nurture and sustain a non-judgemental approach. As trainers, we need to model inclusive practices, for example inclusive terminology. Also through classroom management, keeping classroom interaction as balanced as possible. We also need to promote varied and inclusive representation in the materials we use, and avoid stereotypes. We also need to provide teachers with the tools to engage in critical materials analysis. Looking at an image they’ll use in class and interrogating it, for example:
Who or what is included?
Who or what is missing or marginalised?
How are different people and places representated?
Who has power/agency? Why?
Who has less power/agency or none at all? Why?
What assumptions are made?
How are readers/listeners/viewers positioned?
Rose asked us to discuss these questions about two images from published coursebooks. This activity is called ‘Problem posing’ and is aimed at getting the viewer to consider power in the image, and understanding features of graphic representation, layout, dress, interests of the author in selecting this image. It can also help us to question how learners are pictured / portrayed in language learning materials.
5. Incorporating a bias towards action
Teacher education often advocates neutrality in the face of challenge, and can shut down conversations, and is also quite top-down. Rose believes we can support teachers to challenge this, manage a conflict of ideas, and challenge appropriate language or behaviour (she said much more here!)
Agosto Boal devised interactive theatre, where the audience are spect-actors, who can stop the performance and shift it at any point. It is called ‘forum theatre’. The audience are empowered to act in different ways outside the theatre. These techniques can be brought into the training room, enabling reenactment of critical incidents to better prepare teachers to deal with and challenge inequality outside the classroom.
You can watch an example in a TED talk: Shannon Ivey and STATE of Reality – it’s a recording of live forum theatre on stage.
Critical pedagogy prioritises social transformation and positive change. Akbari notes that critical pedagogy is focussed on hope and understanding: if we don’t hope things will change, why would we do this? [My very poor paraphrase!]
Rose invites us to reflect:
Think of a teacher training activity you were involved in.
Does the training incorporate these five principles of critical pedagogy?
How might you apply these principles more fully in the future?
Becky Winstanley and Ben Rampton – Participatory ESOL: What’s its relevance beyond migrant language teaching organisations?
Becky and Ben would like to explore connections between ESOL and the broader ELT sector.
They’ve just finished a 16-month project called Participatory ESOL: Taking Stock (PETS), looking at the question of what Participatory ESOL is nowadays. They will refer to insights from this study today.
We started with an activity discussing this picture:
And these were the questions:
– Describe: What do you see? Who’s in the picture?
– Define the problem: Can you see a problem? Who is this a problem for?
– Personalise: Do you recognise this problem? Has this happened to you or anyone you know?
– Analyse: What causes this? What are the consequences? Who is affected?
– Change: Is it possible to change this? What could we do? Do we need to find allies? Who needs to act?
Steps in participatory ESOL
1. Identify a theme/issue of collective importance to the group
2. Personal experience
3. Critical discussion and analysis
4. Action for positive social change
Background
ActionAid’s Reflect projects were originally done in the Global South, then brought to the UK for ESOL.
English for Action
They are a small ESOL charity, and have taken on the role of developing Participatory ESOL in the UK, working with King’s College London. They’ve worked on two main areas: community organising (working with Citizens UK) and working with multilingual and repertoire approaches to focus on a range of languages, not just English.
Community organising means understanding where power lies in communities, developing student learners, developing a demand for effective ___.
They’ve tried to develop ideas of multilingual pedagogy.
English for Action do lots of work related to Participatory ESOL:
Queries and complications
There is some anxiety around ‘action’ or ‘activism’ for some teachers. Perhaps you don’t need to use a full model of it, but can use a weaker model of it.
Features of a weaker version of Participatory ESOL:
Rejecting the ‘banking model’ of education
A fundamental interest in students as participants in a changing world
Other areas where these changes towards a more participatory / critical approach might be happening in ELT:
Our discussion questions for the end of the session:
Can you connect to anything from this talk?
This was in an ESOL context, what about other contexts?
What about workplace cultures? How important are they when it comes to the kind of language teaching we’ve been talking about?
So what? What does this mean for us in the future?
Further link
Clare Webster – Processing DELTA
Clare is a trainer at IH London and an experienced DELTA trainer. She’s talking about working on a flipped DELTA course.
On a traditional course, participants do work that requires support at home, like on lesson plans and writing essays. They do input in class time, which is where they probably need processing time and less support. It’s quite a transmissive model.
On the course Clare (and Melissa Lamb) recently ran, trainees had a website for input at home which they accessed in their own time with guided tasks. Normal ‘input’ sessions were actually background essay workshops, lesson planning workshops and lesson rehearsals. They brought research they’d done at home into the training room. It’s a constant process: prepare at home, get feedback at school, prepare, get feedback, write the essay at home.
Clare first talked about a background essay workshop. This is about helping trainees to think about problems and solutions for the background essay. The evening/weekend before the session, at home trainees mind-mapped a range of different contexts they were familiar with. Next, they thought about problems of learners in those different contexts with the topic they were focussing on for the LSA. Looking at the input site, they thought about issues identified on the site, their questions about those issues, and an example from their own experience of that issue. In the workshop, based on that research, participants took part in a mingle. They asked other trainees about issues their learners would have with that topic of the LSA, and asked other trainees for ideas for issues related to that topic, collecting as many ideas as they could.
Clare found the atmosphere to be fun and relaxed. Teachers were confident in what they were sharing, and it made the BE feel more concrete and less abstract. Participants were discussing genuine problems and genuinely sharing learner contexts, and this activity filled gaps related to their lesson for trainees and highlighted other gaps they might have neglected to cover in their BE and lesson plan. In feedback, participants could then identify their next step, and allowed for personalised and tailored training. A caveat though: this process needs to be planned and set up well for it to work. Because of the preparation time before the workshop, trainees were able to get much more from it.
Another element of the flipped course is rehearsing lessons for LSA 1, 2 and 3. They were encouraged to rehearse a specific stage of the lesson which they felt less confident with, for example the guided discovery stage or a feedback stage. Trainees had to come prepared with a specific stage of the lesson, orient other trainees to where they were up to in the lesson, and ‘teach’ the lesson to the trainees. Each rehearsal lasted for about 15-20 minutes. The rehearsal Clare showed us highlighted that the activity the trainee had prepared didn’t actually achieve the aim she wanted it to, so that trainee was able to change it before the LSA itself. After the rehearsal, there is peer group feedback and reflection, and the trainer joins in afterwards.
Lots of training points came out of the rehearsals:
As a trainer, Clare found it quite nerve-wracking originally, knowing that she would have to summarise what she’d seen without much time, but she got much better at this across the course. Clare also thinks it’s much more powerful if the feedback comes from the trainees themselves, rather than the trainer.
At the end of a rehearsal, they would have a set of rehearsal points / takeaways / key tips, then take a photo of these and add them to the website afterwards.
Trainees felt the rehearsals were very beneficial, including some believing it was the most valuable part of the course.
Clare’s reflections on the rehearsals
Trainees needs to be prepared – they have to have something clear to teach. They should choose just one stage / task / procedure in their lesson which they feel less confident with. They need to see the rehearsal as a process, not the finished result. CPs needed and wanted to support their colleagues, and it was a clear collaborative effort. It helps CPs to assess and be critical of their lesson plan and task design so far. It gives the CPs valuable experience of being a learner. It helps them to see the flaws and/or the effective elements of the lesson before they teach it. It helps in promoting independence of CPs to arrive at conclusions, make planning decisions themselves, and the whole process boosts their confidence.
For the trainer, it was sometimes difficult to refrain from interrupting. The trainer gains confidence in stepping in and doing a little demo teaching.
We watched clips of some trainees on the course. One CP said that the focus shifted from the plan to the learner, and helped them to become more critical. Another talked about how it was sometimes quite challenging when other trainees ‘ripping apart the lesson’, but actually they ended up with a much better lesson in the end. A third mentioned the amount of information and ideas they got from their colleagues on the course, from a learner perspective. The final trainee talked about missing her first rehearsal for LSA1, and noticing the effect of not being able to rehearse, and how different it was in later LSAs when she did have the chance to rehearse.
Clare’s reflections on flipping DELTA
Pros for trainees
Workshops and rehearsals allow for more developmental feedback, allows time to build confidence and develop teaching skills. It developed more criticality amongst the CPs. The ‘abstract’ became ‘concrete’, and therefore the BEs and LSAs were more valuable. It encourages everybody to be experts in the room, not just trainers. It removed the fear and fostered more independence, as CPs take more ownership of the lesson and task design. It uncovers and addresses individual needs of CPs, and gets more powerful messages across to the CPs. There was increased collaboration, and increased reflection of CPs, which is valuable beyond the course.
Pros for trainers
A more collaborative experience for tutors. There is a more clearly defined role for the trainer. It was more enjoyable and fun, partly because trainees were less stressed. We’re setting trainees up for a more successful teaching experienced because it’s more developmental from the start. This process reflects real teaching more, and marries practice and theory together more concretely, fostering skills beyond the Delta.
Things to consider
The trainers does need to be confident, consistent and follow through. They need to be strict and follow through. Guided research needs to be set up well and CPs need guidance. You might need to reassure CPs and make sure they trust you. They have to see how the background pays off. Be patients, hold back, and allow trainees to be critical or offer feedback. It can be time-consuming for trainees. Not all CPs are team-oriented, and some just want to be directed.
Discussion questions:
Can we achieve this level of criticality / analytical thinking on more traditional courses?
How long before a trainer might be confident in leading workshops / rehearsals?
How can we fit in rehearsals in more traditional input courses?
In the discussion afterwards, Mel mentioned that earlier in the course they have a discussion about critical friends and the benefits of taking on that role.
Danny Norrington-Davies – Exploring SLA research findings on pre-service courses
The QR code will take you to Danny’s slides.
Danny is talking about a CELTA, but he thinks this could apply to any pre-service course. He’s looking at research findings mostly drawn from the book on evidence-based teaching written by Lethaby, Harris and Mayne.
Jordan and Long mentioned that there is a lack of SLA research in teacher education. [Neil Harris mentioned in the talk that Steve Hershorn (sp.?) has written about this.]
Danny did an SLA input session in week two of a full-time flipped course, so he gave preparation as homework. He uploaded five questions, and gave teachers five summaries of research from a variety of sources. There were fifteen candidates with one card each (three candidates per card) – at the end of week 1 each group took home one set of research findings and thought about how it might impact on their classes. ‘How might this research influence my classes?’ On Monday of week 2, they made posters with the other two members of their group. They then presented their posters and had a big open-class discussion about the findings. Danny then made a (three-page!) handout out of what trainees came up with: ‘What did we think these research findings mean to us?’ (A point about the flipped approach – you make handouts for the session that has been, rather than for the session that is coming.)
[We discussed this in the session, and it was fascinating. We also talked about the fact that discussions like this can be richer on a CELTA course than on a DELTA course – an interesting thought on that people think there might be a ‘right answer’ to teaching on higher-level qualifications.]
Based on the discussions they had in the session, Danny and the trainees started changing the names of some activity types. Rather than ‘guided discovery’, they would call things ‘diagnostic activities’ to highlight that it was about finding out what learners already know. Because of the idea of dual coding, trainees realised that drilling was important and got much more invested in it, as they understood that it was a form of dual coding. Thinking about schema, one trainee (Aleeza) came up with the idea of a cookie jar metaphor – students have to open up their cookie jar and show you what cookies are in it 🙂 – this meant trainees were listening better to what students said in lessons too.
For example, prior knowledge:
Trainees started to consider ideas like what their role should be during freer practice.
Danny interviewed one of the course participants about the possible impact of the session. The trainee said it was just another input session (trainers sometimes think ‘they won’t get it’, but this isn’t the case!) He said that he thinks about this research in his own planning, and it triggers him to think about things in different ways when he’s in the classroom ‘Let me try that another way.’ He can see the value in activities he has learnt because of the theory he’s learnt.
Danny’s suggestions:
Don’t make a big deal about the SLA theory session, it’s just input.
Flipping the session does create space in the timetable for it.
Refer to the findings and applications in feedback and planning.
(From Rose:) Think about where the research comes from – is it all from Western Europe?
Panel discussion on AI with Jasmin Silver, Neil Harris and Magnus Coney
This included 3 smaller talks:
Jasmin Silver: Can AI help us solve some age-old problems in teaching and learning?
Neil Harris: The integration and evaluation of AI into teaching and teacher training
Magnus Coney: The Rise of SkyNet? Using VR and AI in teacher education
Jasmin
Jasmin is an educational consultant and researcher. Her specialism is applying research to improving teaching and learning. She’s got a background in language teaching, general education and psychology, which she brings together in her work now. She’s using a framework from the Insight Application Team at Cambridge, who she used to work for.
Cambridge has been working with CRELLA (Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment). This research was with 386 teachers from different contexts around the world. It will be published soon. They found:
There is high familiarity amongst teachers with and use of Gen-AI. One said: ‘Any teacher who’s not using AI is already behind’
AI can be efficient, creative and act as a collaboration partner.
There was no fear that it might replace teachers, but there was concern about shallow learning or diminishing critical thinking of learners.
There was a strong desire for training in using Gen-AI well, but most of these training needs have not been met. 25% of teachers believed they needed ongoing, monthly training in it. Nearly half said at least a few days a year.
Some age-old problems Jasmin wanted to think about are engagement (how can we engage all of the students in the classroom), progress, and transfer (what they’re learning in the classroom to what they use outside the classroom). So what does the research say about these areas? And what have our problems been in the past with implementing these findings? And can AI plug these gaps?
Here’s a Cambridge framework for what makes effective language learning:
Relevance, curiosity, agency and ownership are important factors in learner engagement. But the challenge is that what is relevant and sparks curiosity for one learner, might not be of interest to others. Giving learners choice means needing access to a large bank of content.
How can AI help? Through personalised learning, as it allows learners to choose or even create learning content of real interest and relevance to the learner/ But: this removes the social aspect of learning in a group and the energy of a class that the teachers and learners create. (Social relatedness) We therefore need to find a balance between personalised learning and social learning: deciding what is best suited for each of these two areas.
Problem 2: Progress
Consolidation is a key factor in effective learning and retention of language. Learningscientists.org is a useful resource for learning about evidence-based learning techniques. But the challenge is that for a teacher it is difficult to keep track of what has been learnt and build in enough opportunities for effective and systematic review. It’s also difficult to encourage learners to revisit materials regularly by themselves. And retrieval practice can be boring!
How can AI help? Regular quizzes automatically delivered on a systematic schedule. These could be personalised quizzes based on things I’ve learnt and my interests, not just as flashcards, but moving beyond it to multimedia too. But AI coaches won’t necessarily have been trained with effective language learning in mind – sometimes questions might not help with learning at all. We need to think about what teachers need to know to be able to evaluate AI tools and how teachers can get more involved in the design of these tools.
[New term for me: ‘prompt engineering’]
Prompt 3: Transfer
Situated learning and experiential learning may aid transfer due to the real-world nature of the learning tasks. A promising type of learning for ELT is ‘Problem-Based Learning’. But the challenge is that it can require a lot of skill and be very time-consuming to create materials for effective problem-based learning.
How can AI help? It can create realistic simulations of real-life simulations. But learners might lose track of what they’re learning, that there’s not enough structure, and that it’s hard to notice their progress. We have to support them with cognitive load and learning behaviours. We need to consider how to support students in developing skills needed for this less structured type of learning and how we can use these methodologies in combination with other, more structured methodologies to get the best of all worlds.
Conclusion
AI can help us solve problems to the extent that it enhances factors that we know are important for language learning, but we need to make principled choices about how and when to use AI, supported by our understanding of effective language learning. Teachers need to keep questioning, experimenting, researching and sharing to ensure that AI is used appropriately.
Cambridge have a position paper on Language Education in the Age of Generative AI.
Neil
Neil is a director of teacher training, a teacher educator, and a teacher. He felt behind in January about AI, so forced himself to do a talk about it, and has learnt a lot about it since then. It’s constantly changing, and it’s not going to go away.
Neil did a survey in the room about our teaching: 10 have solid experience with AI in teaching, 24 have basic experience, 15 are green, 0 consider themselves an expert.
There are lots of areas people in the room are currently using AI for in our teaching:
When considering AI use in our training, 27 are completely green, 11 have some basic experience, 4 have some solid experience, 0 are an expert.
What we’re doing with our teaching is what trainees might want to do in their teaching too, so Neil will start with looking at AI use in teaching.
Generative AI tools include ChatGPT, Bard, Mijourney (?), Dali 2 / OpenAI, Adobe Firefly. Generative AI takes an input (prompt), puts it through the interface (the tool), and creates an output for you.
One of the first challenges is creating a successful prompt.
Some of the things we can use generative AI to do as teachers:
One training idea: Neil asked ChatGPT to create a lesson plan for PPP, then to use the same lesson plan as TBL. This helped trainees to see the difference. He then asked them to critique the two lesson plans and think about the differences between them.
Trainees might lack the skills to know what is good or not from what AI produces. Neil wants to emphasise that using a tool like http://www.Twee.com could help trainees to learn the skills they need to use generative AI.
AI is a great opportunity to develop trainees’ digital literacy. Whether we like it or not, our trainees are going to use ChatGPT. So it’s our job to help them to understand digital literacy and AI literacy. This is a potential flipped model for AI-enhanced pre-service teacher training:
Neil would like the model for pre-service courses like CELTA to be TP-led, rather than input-led. Perhaps week 1 is more fixed, but week 2 onwards is based on the challenges our trainees are actually facing.
Trainees may increasingly expect AI integration in pre-service and in-service training. We can meet these needs by embedding AI literacy in our courses, and perhaps embedding AI into flipped training. We can evaluate the impact of AI through teaching practice and the Lessons from the Classroom assignment. And maybe we can set up a community of practice.
Neil suggested we look at the Russell Group principles on the use of generative AI tools in education.
This QR code will take you to Neil’s slides:
Magnus
Magnus is working at the INNTELT project, based in Norway. Innovating teacher education with new learning technologies. It’s a collaboration between the learning department and the gaming department. They already have a simulator for practising teacher-parent meetings, and one for dealing with conflict situations.
Why simulate a classroom? An area for you to practise without having an impact on learners, opportunities for repeated practice, you can pause the experience, reflect on it and learn more, and it can bridge the theory-practice component of training.
The lowest cost option is 360-videos of real classrooms. Relatively low-cost ($450 for the setup), but no interaction with the classroom, and there’s a potential for improved reflective skills. Headset or no headset – some studies found just watching it on a laptop and moving around is fine.
SimSchool is accessed on a desktop. There are lots of different scenarios you can follow, such as diverse classrooms. Students and student responses are AI controlled. It’s self-access. AI responses seem to be move behavioural rather than content-related. There are reported increases in multicultural awareness and self-efficacy of teachers.
Breaking Bad Behaviours was created by a university in Germany. You were a headset, and you can move around within a yellow box at the front of the classroom. Student avatars are pre-programmed with certain behaviours, but then the student responses to teacher’s efforts are controlled by a human researcher. It’s still in development. Research shows teachers improve classroom management abilities. There are issues with realism of avatars, and there are no opportunities to use non-verbal classroom management techniques.
TeachLive/Musion was developed in America, and quite a few people have used this. There are 5 avatars and they’re all controlled by a trained interactor, and it’s displayed on a screen. Mursion is the commercially available version. It’s a mixed-reality simulation. Generally positive findings about self-efficacy, observed teacher behaviours, both within sim and in real classes. There are issues for the need for specially-trained interactors, and issues with the avatars: there are only 5, and teachers don’t really like how they’re controlled.
Possible directions for the INNTELT project:
Panel discussion
Two teaching AI tools:
Gallery Teachers NEO model
Khanmigo on the Khan Academy
At Warwick University, they say that students have full responsibility for everything they submit academically. For example, if they include an AI-generated reference, they have to know it exists and actually says what they think it says. But there is an issue of inequality, with trainees who have never come across this struggling to assimilate new
These are random thoughts cataloguing the process of putting together my NILE MA dissertation. The dates at the beginning of each section show at what point I had these thoughts. I hope they’re interesting / useful for anybody going through the same process, or deciding whether they want to.
(23/10/2023 update: this post is incredibly long! There is no obligation to read it, but I’m happy to have it to look back on my dissertation journey. Hopefully I’ll share the dissertation itself once I have feedback on it, and I’ll definitely share the framework after my upcoming holiday. Watch this space!)
Before I started
I didn’t write a dissertation at undergraduate level, and although I write a lot, I’m not hugely confident about academic writing – this has generally been the area I’ve had the most feedback about/action points for during previous MA assignments.
I had no idea where to start, but I knew that I needed to set up systems to make the process easier right from the beginning, and to choose a topic which would be interesting enough for me to want to work on my dissertation for the next 18 months or so.
Preparing to do my dissertation
(April 2022) Ruth Clark’s NILE webinar on how to access the University of Chichester resources was very useful. Although I’d looked at them before, I hadn’t appreciated how much was available, or which were the most useful resources. I’d definitely recommend talking to a university librarian / attending a university library webinar to find out what is available to you, and how to make the most of journal sites for example.
(May 2022) I wanted to set up workflows which would make the dissertation process easier. I put a call out on facebook for advice, which gave me a set of possible tools to investigate.
I also searched for recommendations for “project management dissertation” and “referencing software dissertation”. In the end, I’ve decided on:
A Trello board for day-to-day tasks, with Evernote and Google Drive power-ups added to the relevant boards (inspired by this article and this article, from which I took a journal article reading checklist)
Zotero for managing references (I hovered between this and Mendeley, but after reading this and watching this, decided Zotero would probably be best for me)
Evernote for managing all of my notes / reading (I’ve used diigo bookmarking for years, but wanted to have something super flexible that was only for my dissertation, and it also integrates with Feedly, another tool I’ve used for years. I set it up using this article)
It took me 2-3 hours to do the research and set up all of these tools, but a) it’s worth it to save me time and stress later if they work, and b) I’ve done some of the research so you might not have to, though I recommend doing comparisons yourself to find out what’s out there!
At this point in time, that feels like everything I might need – I’ll report back on whether it worked or not later on in this post!
Choosing a topic – initial thoughts
(May 2022) Having recently worked on a couple of projects related to teacher training through the medium of WhatsApp, I thought this would be an interesting area to investigate. However, I had no idea what the focus might be – it felt very woolly.
Then at IATEFL 2022, I attended a talk by Denise Santos called IATEFL Belfast 2022: CPD for materials writers: in search of a framework, which inspired me. I feel like this could be a great way to integrate what I’ve learnt from the teacher training and materials writing modules on the MA course, and to create something which would be useful for others in the future. There are frameworks for teachers, trainers and managers, but nothing for materials writers, despite the fact that they are very influential within our profession. This feels like a very useful gap to fill.
MAPDLE Dissertation preparation module
Terminology
I initially found reading about research theory to be quite frustrating, as I couldn’t see how this might apply to what I would really like to do: create a framework. I know I would need to do research as part of it, but the theory felt incredibly abstract to me at this point. The fact that there are no specific examples connected to the terms makes them quite challenging to wrap my head around. And then I found the term pragmatism, and I’ve found the research approach for me:
Research is undertaken to answer particular questions or help solve specific problems; these questions or problems determine the choices made about the research methods used
From the NILE Dissertation Module, Activity 1b, commentary
Sample proposals / My first draft proposal
Looking at the sample research proposals made me a little depressed – it felt like so much work, and not really what I’m interested in at all! However, once I saw the sample artefact proposal things seemed to fall into place. I paused working through the module and had a go at writing my own proposal. It took about an hour to produce a first draft, using the framework of the sample proposal. I’m not sure if it the research question is tight enough, or if it’s too broad, but at least now I have an initial proposal which I can send in for feedback, and start the process of narrowing it down to something I can actually work on.
Completing the preparation module
I found the example documents to be the most useful part of the module, and have also downloaded and bookmarked various things to come back to when relevant, like the full ethics guidelines for the university. Overall it’s taken me about 4.5 hours to work through this, but I know I’ll be back multiple times as I re-write the proposal and put together my dissertation.
Submitting the proposal
The first draft I submitted seemed to be along the right lines but had too much in it. I reduced the scope of my proposal ready for the second draft, and felt more confident it was along the right lines, but I also felt like I was somewhat in limbo until I got feedback on it. I knew I had a lot to do for it, but I didn’t know where to start without the proposal being officially accepted. I tried to get ahead with other work instead so that as soon as the proposal was accepted I could dedicate as much time as possible to it.
(23rd August 2022) My proposal has been accepted 🙂 The second draft was fine, pending approval by my dissertation supervisor once they’ve been allocated. I now feel like I can start making progress! Step 1: figure out the dates of each section, and add them to my calendar. Step 2: break down each of the large tasks into smaller ones, and allocate them to the ‘dissertation days’ I already have marked in my calendar, adding more of them if necessary to make sure I have time to do everything.
Other things I did once I found out the proposal had been accepted:
Go through this Twitter thread of 15 tools to help you manage your writing to find any extra ones I hadn’t seen before.
Along the top I have the dates for every ‘dissertation day’ between now and my submission date. Down the side I have each of the main tasks I need to do, with yellow sub-headings to categorise them. The dark blue boxes show a period to complete a particular section of my needs analysis or framework creation. The light blue boxes show a particular task for a particular day.
If I complete the task, I turn the box green. Ditto if I successfully have a proper ‘dissertation day’. If something is with my tutor to check it’s orange. If I didn’t do a dissertation day, it’s red. This is really helping me to manage my time and see what’s coming up, and so far I’ve managed to pretty much keep up with the tasks, even if I haven’t managed all of the days (the two red ones so far were during a course which was more intensive to train on than I expected!) I find watching it gradually turn green to be quite motivating 🙂
So far I’ve been doing some preliminary work, analysing existing competency frameworks. These are mostly from teaching but a couple are from other fields. I’m using them to get an idea of possible designs, layout, wording, and categorisation, as well as to see what areas connected to materials writing might already be covered within existing frameworks. It’s actually been quite therapeutic – I’m not anticipating that the rest of the dissertation process will be quite this straightforward! First I decided on a set of things I wanted to look for in the frameworks, then I created a table with a row for each area. I have a blank template which I copy and paste as I start analysing each framework. It changed a little as I looked at the first two or three, but now I’ve looked at eight I feel I’ve got everything covered which I might find useful.
So far I’ve learnt that there are many possible ways to word a framework, and many ways of designing the final product. I’ve got lots of inspiration and ideas for my own framework already, and am excited about starting it. As I come up with possible needs analysis questions or framework ideas I’m dropping them into running notebooks on Evernote. I also drop any links or reading I’d like to follow up on into a single notebook – at some point I need to set aside time to go back and read them!
Yesterday I hit Amazon quite hard to get a few books, the first of which is two inches thick and arrived today (!) – there is an ebook version of it available via the University of Chichester eLibrary, but I was really struggling with navigating it and decided it would be easier with a paper copy. Now I’ve seen it, I’m wondering it that was wise! Definitely going to improve my muscle tone… I’ve also ordered books on designing competency frameworks in general, as they’re commonly used in Human Resources departments, and a book by Jack Richards which has been mentioned in many places I’ve looked at so far.
Doing some actual writing!
(11/10/22)
I’ve added in Thursdays as Dissertation Days as well from now on, as I’m currently pretty excited about my topic (very unlike what I expected would be the case!) and I think I should take full advantage of that while it lasts. That gives me some extra reading time too, which I don’t think I’d given myself enough of before.
I started this Tuesday by looking at feedback from my supervisor on potential interview questions which I’d put together as I analysed frameworks. This was really useful in helping me to refine the questions, and add a couple which I hadn’t considered.
I then moved on to trying to do set word count limits for myself, so that I know roughly how much I can ‘spend’ on each section of my dissertation before I start writing. This took about 2 hours, but I feel like it was time well spent. I copied section headings from Evernote to a new tab in my dissertation master schedule, and made a guess as to how many words I think I might need for each section, using formulas to automatically add up (to) the totals in the yellow boxes and the overall total as I readjusted the numbers.
I then went through the NILE library of dissertations to find other artefact-based dissertations, converted 4 of them to Word, and looked at their word counts:
As you can see, each of them has a quite different breakdown of categories and use of words. However, all of them have a dedicated separate literature review, which I originally thought would be included in my background and rationale. Having looked at those dissertations, I think it would be clearer as a separate section in my dissertation too, and would help me to frame my thinking more clearly. I also realised that I need to add a summary of findings at the end of my needs analysis findings. Based on what I’d seen, I renumbered my chapters and reallocated my target word counts:
By the way, so far I’ve found that using a range of notebooks in Evernote where I add everything I’m thinking about as I think about it, plus having my Dissertation Master Schedule, seems to be enough in terms of organising myself – I haven’t used Trello at all.
I’m adding references to Zotero as I go along, and have experimented with downloading the reference list a couple of times – I think that tool will probably stay. Today I experimented with the feature where you can input an ISBN and it finds the book. This made things a lot quicker, but you still need to check the info, as Penny Ur appeared twice as the author for one of her books, and only one author appeared for another book with two joint authors.
By the end of the day, I’d had a go at Chapter 1 and written almost 1000 words (1/15 of the whole total!). Looking back at the sample dissertations I’d downloaded earlier in the day was useful in helping me to work out what I could write in each part and how I could word it. Despite that, I wasn’t really sure what to include in the rationale which might be different to the background, nor the overview of stages that would be different to what was in the introduction (a summary of chapters). I decided to send what I had to my supervisor and ask for help.
That meant I’d done about 5 hours on my dissertation, which felt like a good day’s work 🙂 Seeing the word count add up was also very motivating:
On ethics and interviews
(18/10/22)
Lindsay’s feedback was very useful in helping me to restructure the first section of the dissertation. I started by doing this, but left comments for myself rather than doing the rewrites at this point, as I think it’ll be easier to rewrite once I have a better idea of other parts of the dissertation.
Today I focussed on needs analysis methodology. Lindsay suggested that I add a general section about ethics, so I started with some ideas about this. As you can see, my aim when writing is to get something on the page, adding questions and comments to come back to later, rather than trying to get it perfect straight away.
I’ll be conducting my first ‘real’ research tomorrow (or it feels like it as it actually involves another person!), doing an interview. I’ve been on the other side of dissertation interviews before, but it’s quite different being in the driving seat, and having to check that I’ve got everything in place for the interview to be as successful as possible.
As recommended by Jason Skeet, the coordinator of the dissertation module for NILE, I’ve been using Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link] to help me to understand the research side of the dissertation.
I started off by using the electronic version, available via the University of Chichester ebooks platform, but found it to be quite frustrating as I find ebooks challenging to use for reference. I decided to buy my own copy, and it’s a beast – 961 pages, nearly 2kg (yes, I just weighed it!), but I still find it easier to be able to flick back and forth in a paper book, and highlight relevant bits.
Today I read the chapter about interviews in depth, having already read a few other sections last week, including one on mixed methods and another on ethics. I used that to write a summary of why I’ve chosen a mixed methods approach, and the methodology behind my semi-structured interview, as well as to create an ‘interview schedule’ (a new term for me today!) ready for tomorrow. I already had the questions I wanted to ask, but now I know exactly how I’ll start and end the interview.
I’ve written over 1000 words, and realised that I’ve underestimated how many words I need to explain the methodology, but that’s a problem for another day…
Reviewing the literature
(25/10/2022)
Last week I interviewed one of the creators of a framework I’m analysing. We spoke for an hour, and it was incredibly useful. It validated some of my approach to researching for my framework, particularly the idea of examining existing competency frameworks, and challenged my thinking on other areas, for example what the top level of my framework should cover. I took notes during the interview, but also recorded it and uploaded it to Otter.ai for transcription. If you don’t already know about Otter, it’s an amazing bit of software which automatically transcribes audio. The results aren’t perfect, but they certainly save a lot of time compared to transcribing from scratch. My mum is going to help me tidy up the transcription (with the permission of the interviewee) and I’ll then write up my findings from the interview.
Today I planned to write as much of my literature review as possible, ready to compile my needs analysis questionnaire next week. I started by working out the headings for the section, and just writing those and a couple of introductory sentences came to 125 words!
Probably unsurprisingly, my initial ambition to ‘write as much of my literature review as possible’ hasn’t been realised! After 5 hours of work, I’ve produced 1190 words, mostly focussed on defining professionalisation (which hadn’t even appeard in my initial outline this morning!) and considering it in relation to materials writing, with lots of changes in the sub-headings I’ve come up with, which you can kind of see here:
I’ve found lots of sources I’d like to explore further, and somewhat as expected there’s a lot of rabbit holes I’ve gone down and probably will continue to go down on Thursday, when I’ll continue with the literature review.
The thorny nature of definitions
(27/10/2022)
Today I’ve spent almost four hours grappling with definitions of materials and materials writing from a number of sources. I’ve ended up with just over 1000 words justifying my final definitions, and added bits and pieces to sections on the effect of materials on learning and my background for the whole dissertation as I’ve read around today. I’ve brought the total for the literature review up to 2600 words, which is already 600 above my proposed amount and I’m nowhere near finished yet!
I ended up being super motivated and came back later in the evening (normally I stop at about 5pm!) to write another 475 words defining competencies and competency frameworks.
Compiling my questionnaire
(01/11/22)
Today I’ve spent 7 hours reading about questionnaires and surveys in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link], then compiling my bumper needs analysis questionniare. If you filled it in, I salute you. Thank you! Because I’m really not sure what I might need to include in my overall framework, I’ve tried to keep the NA questionnaire as open as possible, with the aim of getting a range of answers from a range of different people to inform the framework. I know it’ll involve a lot of data processing afterwards, but I’m not sure how else I can make the framework as representative as possible, rather than making it something I have produced by myself.
(29/11/22)
If it looks like a long time without doing anything, that’s because I’ve spent most of November on an amazing work / play trip to Australia, but now it’s time to get back to work on my dissertation. I’ve missed it!
I only had 4 hours today, so I spent the time using my tutor’s feedback to edit my questionnaire. I managed to make it a bit shorter, and have made more of the questions compulsory. However, as the aim is to get ideas for what to include in the framework, and I want to help people to think about a range of different areas of materials writing, I think there’s a limit to how short I can make it. After an hour or so of reorganising it, I sent it to a few people to pilot it this week, with the aim (hopefully!) of making it public next week.
I also put together the blog post and social media posts I want to use to publicise the questionnaire and try to get responses.
My first big hiccup
(06/12/22)
Today I’ve only been able to spend a couple of hours on my dissertation again – time seems really tight right now! Based on the 6 responses I got to piloting my questionnaire, I realised that it really didn’t do what I needed it to in terms of offering ideas for competences to include in my framework. I’ve therefore completely rewritten it to make it shorter and focus on qualititative data that could feed into possible competences. I’ve also clarified what I mean by knowledge, skills and abilities, partly with the help of a driving metaphor from this website.
(13/12/22)
I started the day by messing about on social media, which is quite common for me, but today it was actually useful! I came across a post from the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group (RESIG) which shared a tribute to Zoltán Dörnyei: a recording of him speaking about five issues in designing a questionnaire. I started my day by watching these videos, but it wasn’t so relevant to my questionnaire as it’s much more geared to quantitative research, and mine is more qualitative. Still useful to know about though!
In the morning, I created a third draft of the questionnaire and sent it to a few people for a last-minute pilot, with the aim of getting it out into the world today. I know Christmas isn’t an ideal period to send out questionnaires, but waiting until after Christmas would mean a huge delay in my dissertation as a whole. I’ve tried to work around this by adding extra time after Christmas (though it doesn’t factor in things like the Spanish Epiphany holiday on 6th January). Hopefully there will still be enough data to give me plenty of ideas to feed into the competency framework, which is the ultimate aim of this questionnaire.
Because of the problems with the questionnaire and the need for 3 drafts, I needed to reshuffle my overall schedule. It now pushes my predicted end dates to within a week of the submission date, rather than 3 weeks before. Some of the red dissertation days are planned, like a trip to Australia, Christmas, and the IATEFL conference, but there are more red days than I’d like :s Hopefully I can get some of that time back, but we’ll see! This is what the whole thing looks like now:
At the end of the day having received responses from a couple of people who I asked to pilot the questionnaire, I decided it was time to let it loose on the world. Thank you very much if you were one of the people who completed it or shared it!
Today I also shared the transcript from the interview I did in October with the interviewee for approval.
Collecting data
(20/12/2022)
I spent a couple of hours this morning sharing my questionnaire in as many places and with as many people as I could think of. I already have 44 responses, and the ideas shared have already made me think about new things to include in the framework which I hadn’t considered before.
Next I finalised the interview transcript and put it into my ongoing dissertation document, which already ran to 105 pages before adding the transcript. The document has many page breaks already in place – I haven’t written anywhere near that much, but it’s still great to see the document coming together.
I spent the rest of the day summarising findings from the interview, and the methodology for the questionnaire, as well as shaving about 100 words off the rest of my writing – every word counts!
(5/1/2023)
I’ve had 124 responses to the questionnaire, only 4 or 5 of which don’t have any data in (!), so thank you so much if you contributed. Today I started to work out how to analyse the data, beginning with reading the relevant chapters on analysing qualititative data in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link]. This afternoon I started playing around with a spreadsheet where I can analyse the results based on the one that Google Forms automatically generated (which makes life so much easier!) I’ve added a few new tabs, and spent a couple of hours analysing data from the people who volunteered to be in focus groups (thank you!) to work out how many groups there could be, and who might be in each group. I know there are currently too many groups, and that not everybody will be able to participate, but that’s a job for another day!
Organising data
(24/1/23)
Due to other commitments I haven’t been able to spend as much time on my dissertation as I wanted to, only managing 2 out of the 5 days of analysing results which I’d planned in the past three weeks. Having broken down (to some extent!) the answer to two of the qualitative questions I asked, I know I’ve already got loads of useful ideas for the framework, and plenty of things that would never have occured to me if I hadn’t done the survey. Very pleased to see it’s served its purpose 🙂
I decided to read each answer and use it to come up with headings. Every time I see a similar answer I add a ‘1’ to that column, so that I’ll be able to see which headings come up most frequently across each question. Some people have put all of their answers under the first question, or have grouped them differently to how I might have done, so I need to consider when it’s acceptable to recategorise them. I think this should be acceptable as the aim of the whole survey was to generate possible ideas for the framework, rather than to come up with definitive answers to any of the questions I asked. I’ve set up conditional formatting to change the colour of cells with answers in, and a calculation column to help me check how many separate ideas I’ve pulled out of each answer to give me a rough idea of whether I’ve covered everything. My mum is checking my classification, and yet again I’m really grateful for her help!
It looks something like this (very, very zoomed out!):
I started to colour code some of the headings to make it easier to find my way around.
(31/1/23)
It’s taken me about 2 hours to group potential focus group participants from the list of volunteers from the survey. I’ve decided to group by approximate levels of experience, and that has thankfully given me similar sized groups, and a good mix of backgrounds. I’ve updated the consent form, information sheet and debrief sheet and sent them all off to my supervisor to check. Now for more results analysis…
I’ve started to notice patterns in the results, and have therefore been reusing some of the headings I’ve based on the answers to previous questions. As I started the third question, it made sense to paste the colour-coded headings directly as these seem to be the ones which are recurring most often. I’ve also made a separate list of all the headings I’ve used so far to make it easier to find them when I want to reuse them, rather than producing original wording each time. This is what it looked like after analysing just one question:
(07/02/23)
I’ve started today by finalising the focus group ethics documentation based on feedback from my dissertation supervisor. I sent out the invites and have already had quite a few responses.
The other half of the day was about continuing to analyse data from the questionnaire. There’s so much of it! But I’m starting to see patterns, and there are so many seeds for potential descriptors in there for the framework. It’s fascinating.
I finished the third question, copied the answer headings to a descriptor overview spreadsheet, and decided to reorganise them. Sometimes I know there’s a heading connected to a particular topic, but even using CTRL + F I can’t always find it. I gave each heading a category, then regrouped them by these categories and colour-coded them again. I then transposed those headings back to the spreadsheet ready to analyse the fourth question (of six…still some way to go!)
(19/2/23)
The last couple of weeks haven’t been great for my dissertation, with a lot of other things going on, meaning I’m doing a bit of work at the weekend to at least get something done. I’m away from home and feeling motivated, so why not?
Tomorrow is the deadline for people to reply to me about participating in my focus groups, so I followed up with all of the people who haven’t replied yet. This was absolutely worthwhile, as I’ve had at least 10 replies today, including a couple of people who thought they’d replied to me but hadn’t 🙂
I also managed to do some more processing of answers from my questionnaire – it’s much faster now I have consistent categories, and I really wish I’d settled on them much earlier.
Focus groups
(7/3/23, 09:45)
Work on my dissertation for the past couple of weeks has been somewhat spotty, and has mostly consisted of following up on potential focus group participants. I ended up with all but 2 replies from the 59 invitations to participate which I originally sent out, and based on those who replied later I suspect those 2 invitations probably ended up in spam. 38 people have said yes across 6 groups, so even if some people pull out I should still be able to get quite varied input into this stage of my research.
I haven’t quite finished analysing all of the data from the questionnaire, but so far the last small section seems to be falling under the same headings as previous sections. This meant I was confident enough to turn those headings into slides for the focus groups to discuss. I sent out a preliminary email with some areas to consider: information about competence frameworks in general, what levels might work for my framework, and the headings on the slides.
I ran the first focus group yesterday, and have already realised that a lot of the loose categorisations I came up with to group the headings don’t make sense. They suggested a lot of ways to regroup the headings, which has made me think that the focus groups should be more iterative, rather than every group discussing the exact same set of data. I’ll run focus group 2 with the same set of data but looking at the slides in reverse so that the inevitable fatigue of looking at so many areas will hopefully kick in at a different point.
When thinking about how to write up this iterative idea, I’ve been sent a journal article which includes the sentence:
CPL potentially provides iterative adjustments for optimal approximations of intersubjective meaning-making, repeatedly testing and calibrating the research instruments, throughout the duration of measurement.
Murphey and Falout (2010: 818)
I’ve read this sentence multiple times, and even in the context of the whole article it’s pretty challenging to understand. It hurts my head somewhat!
(4/4/23)
March has been a whirlwind! I’ve spent the last month having some of the busiest weeks of my freelance career so far, while also fitting in 6 dissertation focus groups. Following on from my thoughts above, I decided to recreate my slides after each pair of focus groups. That meant focus groups 1 and 2 discussed the first set of slides, 3 and 4 discussed the second set, and 5 and 6 discussed the final set. At one point that involved me working until after 10pm to get the slides ready so that participants would have at least 24 hours to look at them before we met. I don’t normally work in the evenings now, so it was all pretty intense!
Having said that, it was completely worth it. I got so much useful information from the 32 participants (thank you!). The way the slides evolved through the discussions in the focus groups means I have a much clearer idea in my head now of what I think the categories should include, and while they’re still not perfect a lot of the categories make a lot more sense now than they did when I created them based on the 70% or so of the questionnaire results I’d managed to analyse before the first focus group. Some individual topics have also been clarified and/or refined for me, and I’ve also added more possible topics based on the discussions.
Today I watched the video of focus group 1 and realised just how much I missed (!) when taking live notes during the session. I’ve now sent those notes to the participants for them to sign off on what they discussed, ready for inclusion in my final dissertation.
I didn’t manage to have any dissertation time last week, and today I’ve only had 3 hours (including writing this) so I’ve fallen quite far behind my schedule. I was supposed to be compiling the first draft of the framework last week, this week and for a couple more weeks. However, I estimate that I’m at least 6 weeks away from being able to do that, not least because I need to write up more of the actual dissertation itself based on what I’ve done so far! Luckily I’ve still got 6 months until I need to hand it in, but I can’t keep losing dissertation days. Let’s see what happens!
Hiatus
(25/4/23)
The busy, busy period continues. I’ve spent 8 minutes on my dissertation today, including writing out this action plan with the next steps for my supervisor:
Write up the focus group notes and send them to participants to approve.
Summarise all of the focus group information within the dissertation, both the process of setting them up and the findings.
Go back to the questionnaire and finish fully analysing those results.
Summarise the questionnaire information within the dissertation – both set up and findings.
Go back to the frameworks I analysed, finish doing that, and summarise the results.
Send you my dissertation with all of the research part ‘completed’ for you to check.
Go back to the background reading / literature review and tidy that up, including making it shorter, while also adding the (some of the many!) things I’ve come across since my first pass at it.
Send that section to you for feedback.
Compile the framework – I’ve already got lots of ideas, but want to go over everything again before I start properly.
Write up my justification of my ideas.
Send the framework and the justification to you for feedback.
Present the framework in a webinar and ask for feedback (perhaps accompanied by a proper questionnaire to get quantitative results?)
Write up the feedback from the webinar(/questionnaire?), plus a summary of possible changes to be made in a second version.
Send that to you for feedback.
Rewrite any/all sections which need to be done to fit the word limit.
Submit the whole dissertation for marking.
Go on holiday for a week 😉
Now I just need to find time to do all that!
Getting back down to it
(23/5/23 – 10am)
I’m way more excited than I probably should be that (shock horror!) I actually get to focus on my dissertation all day today. The last few weeks have been full of conference preparation and attendance, All The Marking, and a brief bout of COVID, but now I’ve finally emerged from the other end. Now to catch up on everything I was supposed to do…
My Google calendar tells me that my original plan was to be putting together the framework itself at the moment – I should be on day 87 of 90 of doing that, but I’m not close to starting yet. Let’s see how long it takes me to get to that stage!
(23/5/23 – 6pm)
Today felt very productive in the end. I was able to summarise notes from three of my focus groups and send them to participants to comment on. I couldn’t manage any more as I stopped being able to concentrate a couple of hours ago. Since then I’ve been adding to my appendices. I’ve put in all of the documentation for my focus groups and the interview I did, including sample emails of invitiation, the information sheets and consent forms, the debrief sheets, the schedule (a kind of ‘script’ for an interview), and various other samples of communication. I’ve also added screenshots of the Google Forms from all three drafts of my questionnaire, and started to collate the ‘easy’ bits of the questionnaire results: the profiling statistics like gender and languages spoken.
The main body of my dissertation runs to 24 pages and currently doesn’t contain much actual information, just a lot of headings and page breaks. The appendices are a somewhat crazy 240 pages, and I’m nowhere near the end of creating them!
I’ve downloaded a copy of the whole dissertation so far from Google Docs – I think I’m going to start doing that regularly now to make sure I’ve always got copies of it in a couple of places, just in case!
(6/6/23)
Today I’ve finished writing up the notes for the final focus group, and finished my first pass at the questionnaire data. This is what my two screens looked like while I was analysing the questionnaire data. The top screen had the raw data, organised by question. I had a Word document open to copy longer answers and delete the relevant information as I entered it into the spreadsheet. I did this by putting a ‘1’ into a cell in the relevant column, adding / editing columns as necessary.
The bottom screen had a list of the rough descriptors I’d come up with, organised into approximate categories a couple of months ago. As I updated descriptors, I edited this list. It was also much easier to scan or search this list to find a specific descriptor I needed, as you can see below with ‘weaknesses’. I could then find the relevant column in the main spreadsheet to add the ‘1’.
The next job is to collate all of the questionnaire findings into a single spreadsheet. I originally analysed them one question at a time and the descriptors evolved as I went along, meaning that the list has got longer and more organised question by question. There’s also a risk that I’ve logged one respondent as saying the same thing multiple times depending on how they answered the questions in the survey. I need to remove that duplication to be able to see how often each answer was given, respondent by respondent. That might take a while!
(25 minutes later)
Step 1: Add a ‘Question number’ column to the spreadsheet so I can easily re-sort everything later if I want to, and a ‘New column’ column (!) so I can show where descriptors need to move to. Add another column to number the descriptors because otherwise ‘F’ will appear later than ‘AA’ when you sort them later.
Step 2: Filter for descriptors from ‘Other’ (the last question I looked at) and ‘Language systems’ (the first question.
Step 3: Put the descriptors in alphabetical order.
Step 4: For any descriptors which are clearly the same, write the column from the ‘Other’ spreadsheet into the ‘New column’ column for the ‘Language systems’ spreadsheet. Add ‘0’ to the ‘New column’ column for the corresponding ‘Other’ descriptor so you can easily hide the ones I’ve already done later. Like so, where the right hand side shows the New column, and the one before shows the column letters from the original spreadsheet:
Step 5: Work through the remaining ones and try to match as many original descriptors to final descriptors as possible.
Step 6: Try not to cry when it gets super complicated and nothing seems to match 😉
Questionnaire and more questionnaire…
(13/6/23, 3pm)
This morning I met my supervisor and she agreed that it’s enough to analyse my data and create the framework from it, without needing to present it and get feedback on the first draft as well. That’s really useful as it gives me more time to play with to compile the framework, and more words to play with when describing my findings and justifying the framework. I still want to present it and get feedback, but now I can do that after the dissertation itself is complete.
I spent the rest of the day working on collating the questionnaire results so that they are in a more usable format. I spent 3.5 hours finishing what I started last week and described above, so that now all of the answers are on a single spreadsheet. Now I’m trying to make sure that the responses aren’t skewed so that if one person said the same thing multiple times it’s only recorded once. This is where spreadsheets, formulae, and conditional formatting are my friends.
At the bottom of the full answers spreadsheet I’ve added one numbered row per respondent. The number is copied into column C so I don’t end up with a circular formula if I decide to use the whole of column A in my formula. Then I’ve used this formula in all of the cells at the bottom of the column, copied once per respondent:
=SUMIF($A$2:$A$745,$C746,E$2:E$745)
What that does is look at the cell in column C to check which respondent I’m asking about, find the relevant rows by matching that respondent number with the same one in the top part of column A, then checks whether those rows have any data in the column I’m asking about, in this case column E. For respondent 1, there is 1 data point in column E, so I get a total of 1 in cell E746 where the formula is placed.
I’ve then got conditional formatting set up, so that if the answer is ‘0’ I get a blank cell (white text in a white cell), if it’s ‘1’ I get a green box, and if it’s more than 1 I get a red box. That shows me where I need to check for possible duplication within the same person’s answers. For example:
I can then filter by respondent number to check the answers and remove any duplication. For example, respondent 6 has two answers in column F, so I need to check their specific answers to see whether they are actually duplicated. That’s my job for the rest of today.
(13/6/23, 5:30pm)
Done 🙂 That worked nicely, and now I know how many people mentioned each descriptor without having any duplication in their answers. I’ve copied those numbers to another tab in the giant spreadsheet. Next time I sit down to do my dissertation I need to see whether the possible descriptors taken from the answers of only a handful of respondents need to be separate descriptors at all, or whether they can be removed. That would be helpful as I currently have 2002 data points and 130 possible descriptors.
Back to frameworks
(27/6/23)
Today I re-read everything I’d written in my analysis of frameworks before, then analysed three extra ones. I ran out of time before, and didn’t manage to do these ones. Interesting to see how I look at them differently now I’ve thought so much more about my own framework!
(11/7/23)
I was away for work last week, and this morning I couldn’t get on the internet while I was at the hospital for my regular medication, so I only managed half a day today. I analysed two more frameworks, and started on the last one I plan to look at, which will bring me to a total of 13 frameworks from all over the world and from a range of different domains.
(18/7/23)
I started today by reading two articles from the latest issue of ELT Journal – I’m really enjoying having access to journals through my university login! They were Miso Kim on Decolonizing ELT materials: a sociomaterial orientation and Suresh Canagarajah on Decolonization as pedagogy: a praxis of ‘becoming’ in ELT. The first article gave me a couple of ideas for possible descriptors in my framework, and the second gave me some background to understand the first one, though I think I’d need to read it a few more times to fully understand it!
I analysed my final existing framework – and discovered at least one more I could analyse in the process, but I really need to draw the line somewhere.
I then went back and re-read everything I’ve written in the body of my dissertation so far. I tidied up some of the wording, and looked at three more books on competency frameworks, as I’d previously only referenced one of the four I have.
(20/7/23)
It was nice to be able to do a couple of hours on a Thursday this week, not just on a Tuesday. I worked my way through re-reading more of my literature review, and realised about 1500 words I wrote before are probably irrelevant. I’ve added a comment to ask my supervisor to comfirm this before I delete it or write anything else there.
I tidied up what I’d written about the ethics of my research and the semi-structured interview I conducted, then wrote up the section on the methodology of analysing other competency frameworks.
Making progress!
(1/8/23)
Today has been an excellent dissertation day, and I feel like I’ve achieved a lot. I’ve written about 3000 words of actual dissertation (!) I summarised the results of my analysis of competency frameworks and the implications for my framework and detailed the methods and summarised the results for my needs analysis questionnaire.
(3/8/23)
This morning I’ve been able to finish writing up my research results, summarising my method and findings for the focus groups. I’ve tidied up my dissertation document and sent it off for feedback to my supervisor – I’m feeling quite good about what I’ve achieved, but there’s definitely work to be done, especially to the literature review where I went off on a bit of a tangent! I’ve got 11420 words so far, out of 15000 in total, so it feels like an achievable target to get the whole thing finished within the word count.
Since I scrapped the idea for a webinar and a follow-up questionnaire to get feedback on the framework, by master schedule has become a bit pointless. It mostly only exists now to show me how many ‘dissertation days’ I have left until my deadline, as according to my original plans the full framework should have been completed by 9th May – I haven’t even started it yet!
It’s also useful for monitoring my current word count, though my calculations don’t quite match the total word count when I check the whole assignment.
I’m feeling good about my progress so far!
It’s framework time!
(10/8/23, 9:30am)
The day has finally arrived: I’ve now got everything I need (I hope!) to actually start compiling my framework.
(4:10pm)
I’ve got a first draft of the framework. I started off trying to do it on pieces of paper that I could move around, but very quickly decided that would be too much writing. Instead I created a spreadsheet. I copied all of the descriptors from the slides for the final focus group onto a single sheet, including the category names which the focus groups had seemed to agree on:
Visual design
Activity design
Learning design (possibly combined with Category 3)
Content
Technical writing skills
Creative writing skills (possibly combined with Category 5; potentially ambiguous – the creativity of the materials writer or the ability to do creative writing?)
Learner experience (of activities)
Understanding the learner and learning context
Sequencing materials
Understanding the classroom
Assessment
Teacher’s notes
Theoretical background
Professional skills
(Not a clear category – could be combined with Category 14)
Characteristics of a materials writer (though these may not have a place in a competency framework)
Language awareness
Next I created a series of new sheets, one per category. I used a mix of category names from before and ones which felt right to me. In the order in which they came to me, these are the 15 categories I now have:
Working with publishers
Creating teacher’s notes
Language awareness
Professional relationships
Understanding how you work
Theoretical background
Digital skills
Writing skills
Layout
Assessment
Understanding learners
Meeting learners’ needs
Sequencing materials
Activity design
Providing variety and balance
As I went along, I copied descriptors from the focus groups list and edited them for clarity and consistency. I decided to start all of the descriptors with an -ing verb, to finish the sentence ‘Writing effective materials for language learning means…’
Here’s an example of the descriptors I have for ‘Meeting learners’ needs’, currently the longest category:
As you can see, I have various notes to myself as I consider how the framework might be streamlined.
As I created the descriptors, I realised that I can’t see how to break any of the descriptors down into different levels, so the framework will serve more as a ticklist of areas to develop in than a series of levels to progress through. I’m currently not completely convinced that it’s possible to demonstrate competency in every area I’ve listed as a descriptor.
At this point, I think I need to step away and let the descriptors sit for a few days, then come back to them with fresh eyes. I’ll go back through the questionnaire and focus group results and my analyses of other frameworks to see if there’s anything which I’ve missed. After that I’ll go through the long list of reading matter I’ve collected which could potentially inform the framework, and see if there’s anything I could add.
During that process, I also need to decide what order the categories should appear in, and what order the descriptors should be in within each category. Plenty to keep me busy!
(22/8/23, 10:50am)
I’ve got feedback from my dissertation supervisor on everything I’ve written so far, apart from the framework itself which wasn’t part of what I submitted. I’ve had a quick look through, and am pleased to see that I seem to be largely on track. As expected, there are some parts which I need to remove or tidy up – there are always things that make sense when you write them, but don’t make sense to other readers (one reason why it’s important to have editors and to pilot materials you create!) I’m going to put that on hold though, and keep working on my framework today.
I’ve started by looking back through the descriptors from 2 weeks ago and tidying them up a bit. For example, ‘Meeting learners’ needs’ now looks like this, with some loose grouping:
(22/8/23, 5pm)
I’ve worked through about 400 of the 650 questionnaire responses I received. In the process, I’ve moved around and reworded a few descriptors as well as adding a few new ones. Some of these changes were prompted by the responses, others by ideas that occured to me to clarify some of the competences.
(24/8/23)
It’s just occured to me that rather than including levels in the framework itself, framework users could give themselves a rating from 0-4 for each descriptor to help them decide which areas to focus on for their development.
(1:50pm)
I’ve just finished going through all of the questionnaire responses – I hope I did them all justice, as at times my mind was wandering and I was going cross-eyed. It’s a lot of information to process! I did take regular short breaks, but still…
Responding to feedback
(29/8/23)
Today’s focus was responding to my supervisor’s feedback. I rewrote some of the literature review to get rid of the focus on the professionalisation of materials writing – watch out for a blogpost version of it at some point in the future. I did all of the minor edits, and a few of the more major ones, but with an hour of my working day left I couldn’t concentrate any more. I decided to use this time to reorganise the interview transcript to make it more user-friendly and update the timestamps for the interview I did months ago – a time-consuming task that needs to be done at some point. Unfortunately Google Docs won’t do it automatically for me, unlike Microsoft Word!
Clarifying coding
(31/8/23)
I only managed 90 minutes of dissertation this Thursday, as I’ve got marking deadlines and my next Take Your Time Delta cohort are about to start – lots of applications and admin to get through, which is a good problem to have! I started learning about types of data coding and realising that my initial ‘figure it out as you go along’ approach needs to have proper terminology applied to it if it’s going to be clear to people reading my dissertation. I also tidied up the section describing the design and distribution of the questionnaire, including adding more references to survey design theory.
Wishes and regrets
(5/9/23)
Today I’ve spent a long time reading parts of three books I probably should have looked at a long time ago:
Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers by Judith Bell and Stephen Waters (buy on Amazon)
Developing a questionnaire by Bill Gillham (buy on Amazon)
Research Methods for Education by Peter Newby (buy on Amazon)
They’re all available on the Chichester e-Library via VLE Books, a source I’ve been somewhat neglecting but need to explore further. If you want your own copies, there are Amazon affiliate links in brackets above.
Reading the books and looking again at my data made me realise that I probably should have piloted my questionnaire much more intensively to make the data analysis stage more effective. On the plus side, my survey rationale now includes references to a wider range of literature, and I’m more aware of survey design issues if I ever do something like this again in the future (hmm!)
I’ve also realised today that I probably should have held off on running the focus groups until I was much further through the data analysis of the questionnaire results and perhaps had also started to create a framework. That would have allowed me to use the focus groups to refine what was in my framework and clarify doubts, potentially getting a lot more out of them by reducing the amount of data I took into them and focussing the discussion questions a lot more.
What does the literature say?
(7/9/23)
Today I’ve been taking advantage of the University of Chichester VLE Books access to ebooks, and working my way through The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching to find out what they say makes effective materials, and by extension what materials writers need to know. I’ve read/skimmed the first half of the book, and there’s still plenty to look through. I’ve written about 600 words about it so far, and that’s without looking at any other books! I expect I’ll have to get rid of some of that at some point…
(12/9/23, 2:30pm)
I’ve spent three hours today reading relevant sections of The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldana [Amazon affiliate link] I bought a paper copy of it last week when I saw it referenced multiple times in a talk by the NILE MA coordinator, but couldn’t find it in the ebooks library. I’ll ask for it to be added, but as there are only 6 weeks to my deadline I needed it faster! I’d definitely recommend this book if you’re doing any kind of coding. It is a very readable, accessible introduction to coding qualitative data, one which I wish I’d found about 8 months ago. I’m going to rewrite the methodology sections of my results analysis based on what I learnt. For example, now I know that I used in vivo coding (quotes from the voices of the questionnaire respondents) to generate my intial codes, then I put them into categories. If I have time before I submit my dissertation, I might recode my data properly using the ideas from the book. Unfortunately I need to prioritise other things right now, like making sure the framework is in a user-friendly form and creating a justification for how I have structured it. Before I do that though, I’m going to keep working through the literature to see what it says about the skills a materials writer needs. That’s my job for the rest of today, after the results analysis rewriter.
(14/9/23)
I carried on working through the Routledge handbook today, and realised quite quickly that I was ending up with a long list of points from the book which would give me one or two thousand words of dissertation with no chance to really analyse it. I decided to change my approach. I copied my framework and added relevant references I found next to each descriptor, adding or editing descriptors slightly where necessary. This is one example for the activity design category:
(21/9/23)
On Tuesday and for most of today (Thursday) I’ve continued with this process, and I have to say I’m going a bit cross-eyed at this point! I decided to stop an hour before the end of the day, and instead take another look at my appendices to see what I can streamline. When I looked at the competency frameworks originally I included lots of excerpts in the appendices, but I’ve now realised they don’t really add anything to my framework, not least becaue there’s already a sample section from each framework. I’ve reread the excerpts in case they inspire any other editing in my descriptors, and then deleted them. This has made my document 31 pages shorter!
My framework looks pretty!
(26/9/23)
The wording of the framework isn’t 100% ready yet, but since I have 29 days until I have to submit the dissertation, I thought it was probably about time that my dissertation supervisor could see a version of the framework to give me feedback on it. I spent the afternoon creating a document version of the framework, including 6 possible use cases to demonstrate how the framework could be used by different people or groups. It’s got colour-coding for each section to hopefully make it a bit easier to navigate.
I think this is what I have left to do:
Write a full first draft of the rationale for the design of the framework so my supervisor can comment on it – I’ve started picking away at it, but there’s not much there yet
Finish updating the literature review (+ ask for feedback)
Update the focus groups method and summary of results (+ ask for feedback)
Update the section describing my analysis of existing frameworks (+ ask for feedback)
Respond to any remaining feedback
Finish adding references from the literature to the table (the literature review may change slightly as a result, but I think it’s better to do this last as it’s something of a rabbit hole!)
Add all the appendix / table / figure numbers to the dissertation
Check it all
Submit it!
Go on holiday 🙂
By my reckoning I have about 6 full working days to do this in, though some weekend days may be added if necessary!
(28/9/23)
Today I compiled a rationale for my framework design and sent it to my supervisor to check. I also spent an hour at the end of the day continuing to add to my references.
My current word count is 16,329 words with at least 837 for tables (which don’t count) out of a possible 16,500 – 15,000 words + 10%. I definitely need to tidy up some sections though so hoping I can stay within that word count without having to do too much painful cutting!
The end is in sight
(10/10/23 11:40)
Two weeks to go until my dissertation is due, and I’m starting to reach the slightly panicked stage of wondering whether it will all be done in time. Due to travel last week I didn’t manage to do any of it at all, so now I have 4 full and 2 partial days (including today) timetabled in to finish it, and I need to send the whole thing to my supervisor by the end of this week to get feedback on a full draft. I’m going to do as much as I can for the rest of today and on Thursday and send it to her after that.
(10/10/23 19:00)
I’ve managed to update all parts of the assignment which had feedback on them (I hope!), including making the section about analysing existing frameworks much clearer by adding in more images from frameworks and tables summarising key information. It’s very helpful that they’re not in the word count!
I also went through the framework and changed all of the gerunds starting the descriptors (Understanding, Aligning, etc.) to can-do statements (Can understand, Can align, etc.). I think this makes it clearer and easier to understand. Doing this prompted me to reword some of the descriptors which made them more actionable. Three people have read my framework so far, so I was also able to update some areas which they found potentially confusing. In the process I have managed to get rid of the two sections which were labelled ??? as I realised that the descirptors could be better placed in other parts of the framework. Every time I read it again, something changes!
(12/10/23)
6 hours 45 minutes of work on my dissertation today, and I’ve just sent an (almost) full final draft to my dissertation supervisor for feedback. I still need to do a bit more on the literature review and go back over focus group results to see if I’ve missed anything in the framework, but the end is definitely in sight. Today I added numbers to dissertation sections and appendices, captioned all of the figures and tables, removed a load of comments and yellow highlighting from my dissertation, added finishing touches to the framework document including finishing the glossary, and added screenshots of the framework to the document. It looks much closer to finished now than it did this morning! 🙂
(17/10/23)
I was very pleased to get feedback on my draft today and realise I only needed to spend about an hour responding to it, as things are coming together nicely and my work is generally clear. I clarified a couple of points, then started looking back through my focus group summaries to add references to what they said to my table of descriptors, literature and references to my research.
Almost there!
(Fri 20/10/23)
My deadline is Tuesday 24th October, so not long left now! Yesterday I spent nine and a half hours on my dissertation, mostly adding references from the literature and my survey results to form Appendix 6 of my final dissertation, in which I back up every descriptor based on my research. It’s quite a rabbit hole, but an interesting process because I’m still making some tweaks to the framework based on what I’m finding, including adding and removing descriptors and rewording them.
I’ve got a couple of hours today to do some more of that, and I’ll probably have to work at the weekend.
(Sat 21/10/23, 16:00)
I managed 3 hours on Friday, and I’ve now spent 8.5 hours on it today, including finding some really useful sources last minute. Kind of glad I didn’t find some of these earlier though as I think I would have tied myself in knots trying to include all of the skills other people mentioned, whereas at this point I can see how they fit into the framework I’ve created. I’ve just finished copying and pasting all the references into Appendix 6 of my dissertation. There are 4 descriptors with no references from the literature, so I’ve put out a call on social media to see if anybody can help me fill those gaps.
(16:30)
I’ve added the proper cover sheet for the dissertation, and changed the line spacing from 1.3 to 1.5 – thankfully by modifying the ‘Normal’ style I could change it in one place and it updated throughout my document.
I’ve turned all of my tables into images, as the words from them don’t count in the final word count (such a useful tip from my supervisor!) My word limit is 15,000 words, which means I can have up to 16,500 words in total (up to 10% over). How happy was I when I saw that I’ve got 15,997 words! 🙂
(17:00)
I’ve added my bibliography from Zotero, which is pretty magic. So glad I spent time finding a bibliography tool at the beginning! Tomorrow I need to check that references which are lettered, e.g. 2022a, 2022b, are consistent throughout my dissertation, and add screenshots of the updated version of my framework. That’s it for today though as we’re off to a Clive Carroll concert this evening 🙂 (and I think (9h45m of work is quite enough for a Saturday!)
(Sun 22/10/2023, 10:30)
3 hours again so far this morning… I’ve added references from the last couple of books I had on my desk. I realised that Zotero has some small flaws: in APA, it only adds date accessed/retrieved for documents, not for web links (where they’re generally more important!); it doesn’t put chapter titles, blog post titles or journal article titles in apostrophes (though as I write this I’ve just double-checked with APAstyle.org and it looks like they don’t actually need them any more – that was a waste of 20 minutes…); it doesn’t include the name of a podcast / YouTube channel in some entries; and some of the entries aren’t quite in the right date order when one author has written multiple things. I’m cursing John Hughes for producing so much useful information about materials writing in such a short period of time 🙂
(12:15)
In an attempt to find sources for the last couple of references I need for descriptors, I thought I would try an AI tool which a Delta Module 3 candidate recommended to me. I asked the question I thought would find me references to literature, but it didn’t help. While there are the roots of a potentially useful essay outline (5 ideas that seem logical), all the ideas come from two sources, neither of which mention group dynamics at all, and it’s pretty repetitive. The tool isn’t there yet… Think I’ll just have to give up on finding references for those two areas. But happily my request on LinkedIn last night netted two links to references for the other two descriptors (lots of twos there…I started with four descriptors with no references, and now I’m halfway there!)
(12:35)
Arghhh! All the last-minute things. Thankfully I noticed in time that I need to update the case studies in my frameworks to reflect the final descriptors before I submitted it!
(12:45)
Rather than taking slow screenshots of each page of my framework to add to the final dissertation, I realised that I can save it as a pdf, then convert the pdf to images. I can then drag and drop each image into the correct place in the dissertation document. So much faster than the first time I tried it!
(14:40)
I had a brief break for lunch, but apart from that I’ve been going since 7am today again. However, it was worth it. I’ve just finished my final read-through, and now it’s ready to send to the two lovely ladies who have volunteered to proofread it. I’m pretty confident that it’s all ready to go now.
Woohoo!
(Monday 23/10/2023, 10:20am)
After a final hour updating my dissertation and framework based on comments from the proofreaders (thank you Lottie and Emma!), I have just emailed the final dissertation to my supervisor. That means I’m officially done.
To celebrate, Paul and I are going to Athens for a long holiday a couple of days from now. So glad I had that to look forward to, especially after the weekend/week with all the work. This is what my time tracker told me this morning about my hours Monday-Sunday last week:
If you made it through to the end of this post, well done 🙂 It’s been a long journey, and one I’ve enjoyed far more than I expected to at the beginning. I’ll definitely be sharing and talking about the framework in the future, and hopefully sharing the dissertation itself too once I’ve had feedback on it. But for now, it’s time to get back to some normal work before the relaxation of a long holiday 🙂
This was a LinkedIn Live organised by Sarah Smith and Lottie Galpin, and was session 3 of 4. The next session on 23rd October 2023 will be about sensory overload and rejection sensitivity. I’d definitely recommend watching it. I learnt a lot!
You can watch the recording here, which will give you a first-hand account of what I’ve taken notes on below – it’s definitely better to get this from the source!
October is ADHD awareness month. This is how the LinkedIn lives were introduced by Sarah Smith originally:
October is ADHD Awareness Month and to mark the occasion, Lottie Galpin and I will be running a series of short LinkedIn live discussions about the topic with ELT educators and students living with ADHD.
The live discussions will take place every Monday at 14.00 UK time throughout October. We will be talking about common symptoms of ADHD and how these manifest and how to cope with these, as well as busting some common ADHD myths!
Lottie Galpin and I both have ADHD, but we’re aware that everyone experiences ADHD differently. For this reason, we’re looking for other ELT educators and students who have ADHD to join these discussions. If this describes you, we’d love to have you join the conversation. You can either appear in the live discussions (one of them, some of them or all of them!) or share your story anonymously with us so we can include them in our discussions.
The participants in the session all live with ADHD, and listening to them share their experiences was very valuable. Many women in particular are being diagnosed as adults (include various friends of mine). The speakers in the session were mostly diagnosed recently, and had developed coping mechanisms before they realised they have ADHD.
This is a summary of what I learnt from this very useful session.
Please note these are all true of some people with ADHD, and may not be true of all of them. Different people have different experiences. It’s also important to seek advice from medical professionals if you think you may have ADHD.
Concentration
Silence can impede concentration for some people. Having things going on in the background can energise them to want to work: programmes to watch, podcasts or audiobooks to listen to. But the other media shouldn’t be something too distracting that would completely pull your attention away – it should be something familiar.
Describing / Narrating what they’re doing can keep people on track with tasks, which might mean they’re either voicing it in their heads or out loud.
Doodling can help concentration.
Moving around can help people to listen better. Sitting still means being distracted by being distracted – looking around for something else to do.
Looking around all the time doesn’t necessarily mean somebody isn’t listening to you. Being forced to look at you / stare at you all the time can require a lot more concentration and mean they actually can’t remember what you say.
Being interrupted during tasks can be problematic for some people. They might struggle to come back to the task. For others, it can even be an almost physical/emotional response of frustration with the interruption, just like the feeling when you stub your toe. There was a question about whether there is a good way to go about the interruption to support those with ADHD. Advice includes talking to colleagues to find out about their own attitudes to interruption, asking yourself: Does this person really need to be interrupted? or asking Have you got a moment? to give somebody the option. There is a difference between giving somebody information and asking them to do something is important – asking somebody to do something can be frustrating, especially if somebody is hyperfocussed – they might feel they have to do something right now.
Hyper focus can sometimes be controlled, with people deciding when it’s OK to hyper focus and feel when it’s coming, deciding whether to go with that hyper focus stage or whether to ignore it. Not everybody can do this!
Organisation
Writing down everything can help keep things in order. Planning takes time, but planning the planning also takes time.
Losing control of one thing can lead to a very stressful domino effect. This can lead to the rest of the day being a write-off.
For some people, having a clean, tidy workspace can be important, and once this has gone they then can get stressed and be completely unable to focus. Sometimes taking the first step of tidying can help to get focus and concentration back, but not necessarily.
Buffer zones: Building in extra time can be useful. For example for a three-day project, planning it for five days can allow for slippage. By doing this you can avoid the sense of negative drain of failing at something. (I think this tip is useful for everybody to reduce stress levels, not just those with ADHD!)
It’s possible to be organised in one part of life because you have to be, but this can require so much focus and energy that it’s not possible to do this in other parts of life. For example, work can take priority and personal life can suffer. This can lead to a feeling of shame sometimes – why can’t I do this?
Even if something really matters, it’s still possible to forget about it. That doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Many of these things require a lot of energy, concentration and mental effort. Keeping up a facade like this can lead to burnout.
One important point to remember is that just because it can be a challenge, it doesn’t mean that people haven’t worked out tips, tricks and coping mechanisms to manage their lives. It’s important for employers to recognise this and work around what people need to do. The result will be really good if we work with what people with ADHD need.
ADHD interacting with health
ADHD can be made worse by other health conditions. It can also be affected by hormonal cycles, for example the menstrual cycle. Tiredness can make things a lot worse.
Supporting learners with ADHD
Find out what their personal struggles are.
Have an open attitude in classes so learners can talk about their needs.
Be sensitive to how you ‘organise’ people. It can feel like criticism or shaming people with ADHD.
Let learners who need to move around, move around.
Body doubling: Pair up with somebody who the learner can sit and work with. If somebody else is concentrating, it’s easier to concentrate. The participants in the group mentioned this as being a very soothing, useful intervention for them.
Deadlines: for some people, having a strict deadline can be much more useful than a flexible deadline. If it’s flexible, it can allow learners to keep putting off the work.
Thank you to the speakers for sharing their experiences.
From 6th to 8th October 2023 I attended the IATEFL Hungary 2023 conference, the 33rd annual conference. I presented a plenary and ran a workshop, which you can find the details of here (published on 7th).
In this post you’ll find summaries of talks I attended at the conference on Sunday 8th. I tried to pick sessions on areas I don’t know much about, or where the titles intrigued me. Any errors are my own.
Topics include: creating space for learners to express themselves in English, and learning from Winnie the Pooh :). There’s also a brief summary of my conference experience.
Hugh Dellar – Space is the place: Making magic in the EFL classroom
Why are we still teaching? It’s because magic sometimes happens in the classroom.
Hugh started by telling us a story about an elementary class who struggled to remember new language. One day a learner arrived late and told a story, which Hugh then upgraded for them:
The learners loved the phrase ‘I thought I was going to die’ – they said ‘very useful, many stories!’ This was the first time they’d shown enthusiasm for any particular English in the classroom. Hugh put them in pairs and they shared stories and they worked with the language. [Note that my recounting of this presentation is very dry compared to Hugh’s presentation of it!]
One learner shared a traumatic story, and the other students gave him a group hug, after they hadn’t really interacted much previously.
Sharing and working with the stories wasn’t the magic part though.
A week after this lesson, Hugh heard a student from the (elementary) class recounting the whole story to a student from an intermediate group, almost word for word. They had remembered the language and were able to explain the more challenging language successfully.
Telling the stories also created a whole new dynamic in the group. They started to have group in-jokes and to socialize together outside the class.
So how do we make space beyond controlled and freer practice activities to allow this kind of magic to happen?
Leave space in our lessons for chat, small talk, stories, banter, sidetracks, tales…
Accept that students sometimes say things that break conventional taboos in the classroom
Remember too that sometimes we have to deal with unpleasant ideas in your classroom, often in response to the most mundane questions. If this happens, you can provide language for students to say what they want to say and also explain why you disagree with them and don’t feel comfortable with what they’ve just said.
When you work with learner language in this way, grammar is rarely an issue. It’s lexis, and learners can learn it through set phrases rather than grammatical structures. Here are examples of language from a single lesson, showing quite simple grammar but wide ranging vocabulary. Learners need to know how to grammar the vocabulary, but they need the words first:
As teachers, we need to learn to travel off the map more. We need to recognise the tyranny of formal planning and know that course books aren’t straightjackets. Course books take as long as they take: sometimes a page can take a lesson, sometimes 3 hours…it all depends what happens in the lesson, where the students want to go, and whether you want to and are able to go with them.
Learn how to chat with students, enquire about what they might mean, and explore their meanings. As new teachers we are often worried about having dead time in lessons, but chatting and working with language is much better than one more worksheet. Questions like ‘Any other reasons why (you thought you might die)?’ Or ‘Any other times when (___)?’ Can be great for eliciting stories and working with language.
New teachers are often so stressed about the next steps in the lesson. You only get better at turning student output into whole-class input with practice.
Hugh says we might ask: aren’t you just talking about Dogme? Well yes, in a way, because you’re working with emergent language. But Hugh believes this is much easier when you’re working materials – they provide a jumping off point for you to ask them questions. Those magic moments are perhaps more likely to happen with materials – we can find the Dogme moments in it.
Why work the language this hard? You get different answers from different groups. Talk about language can lead to talk about people – if we ask students a direct question we might not get an answer, but if we ask about language and leave space for stories, learners might be more willing to give personal responses.
Anita Jokic – What can we learn from Winnie the Pooh?
[I love this title!]
This is a class project Anita runs with her groups over 4 lessons using a handout printed as a booklet.
They start by listening to short clips from 5 songs and identifying the artist and lyrics if they can:
The Beatles – Help!
Cyndi Lauper – True Colors
Bruno Mars – Count on Me
The Rembrandts – I’ll be there for you (to recognise in one second!)
Bill Withers – Lean on me (though she doesn’t expect them to know this!)
They use this to guess the topic: friendship and being kind to people.
They match up the Winnie the Pooh characters to the pictures:
They learn a bit about Winnie the Pooh and the story behind it by guessing, then watching the video – not all of the answers are in the first video!
They watch one other video divided into two to broaden their knowledge of Winnie the Pooh and where it came from. Anita pauses the video and discusses key points with them, like comparing Christopher Robin Milne to the celebrity children of today.
Then they move on to a reading text about Winnie the Pooh characters and their potential mental health issues and neurodiversity, and discuss these questions. When they talk about question 6, Anita asks them ‘If you were to wake up tomorrow as one of these characters, which might be the most difficult situation for you?’ By doing this they are talking about themselves rather than others. For example, an extroverted student said ‘Imagine me being socially anxious, I talk all the time!’
There are materials in a booklet as a handout, and others in a PowerPoint, for example creating their own word formation exercise using words related to mental health.
They look at quotes from the book and discuss them:
The ‘activity’ part involves learners coming up with an activity to help children deal with a similar situation. Here’s an example of real learner answers from one of Anita’s groups:
The conclusion of the lesson is that we should be a friend regardless of what people are like (see the materials for a more detailed version of this!)
They do Lean on Me as a gapfill.
In the 4th lesson, they talk about celebrity best friends and whether they should have celebrity or unknown best friends, match celebrity best friends, and think about which celebrity they would like to have as a best friend.
They finish by thinking about their own best friends (and therefore practising tenses!)
There’s an exit ticket activity in the materials too (see the QR code at the start of this summary).
My IATEFL Hungary conference experience
I’ve really enjoyed the last few days, and am very grateful to Laci and the team for inviting me to the conference. It’s been well organised and smoothly run throughout. I learnt something from every talk I attended and the evening entertainment has also been fun. I was on the winning pub quiz team 😁 and really enjoyed trying out Hungarian dancing last night. The international event was also a great idea, with people sharing food and drink from lots of different countries. If you’re in the area, I’d definitely recommend attending a future IATEFL Hungary event.
It was a huge privilege to be asked to deliver a plenary at the IATEFL Hungary conference in Siófok on the shores of Lake Balaton. I was very happy that my voice came back enough to be able to deliver the plenary as it was touch and go for 10 days or so before it happened!
László Nemeth, the current IATEFL Hungary president, had asked me to present something about materials writing. I’ve been talking about it a lot recently, as well as researching it for my dissertation (watch this space: 17 days until I hand it in!) The title of this year’s conference is ‘FLOW’, so that gave me the idea for focussing on flow in materials. I originally tested out the presentation at the BRAZ-TESOL Pre-Conference Event earlier this year – you can see a fully written out version of the presentation here. Here are my slightly updated slides from the IATEFL Hungary version of the presentation:
Richer Speaking: How to get more out of speaking activities
Later that same day I gave a workshop. Long-time followers of blog will know that I’ve delivered this talk a few times before, but I never get tired of it – it’s so much fun watching teachers become more engaged the second time they try each task, and I enjoy sharing these simple ideas for upgrading existing speaking activities. Most of the ideas in the book were collected from colleagues at in-school workshops and at events similar to the IATEFL Hungary conference, so it’s great to be able to pass them on to a new group of teachers.
You can find out how to buy Richer Speaking, ELT Playbook 1, and my other book, ELT Playbook Teacher Training on the My books page of my blog. There is a 10% discount on the ebook version of ELT Playbook 1 if you buy it from Smashwords and use the code NH87X by 31st October 2023.
If you’re interested, I shared a few other posts from the talks I went to at the IATEFL Hungary conference.
From 6th to 8th October 2023 I attended the IATEFL Hungary 2023 conference, the 33rd annual conference. I presented a plenary and ran a workshop, which you can find the details of here (published on 7th).
In this post you’ll find summaries of talks I attended at the conference on Saturday 7th. I tried to pick sessions on areas I don’t know much about, or where the titles intrigued me. Any errors are my own.
Topics include: media literacy, wellbeing, engagement, and the website ‘5 Perc Angol’.
Rebecca Svetina – #TRACES – A media literacy mystery
(Rebecca has postcard sized profiles of different characters which she is shuffling at the start of the presentation – intriguing!)
Rebecca started by setting up a situation: Suzy is popular on social media, but a fake photo means she might get kicked out of the conference. Our job is to work out who took the fake photo – they’re at the conference, and we need to find them. We get a card to become a new character. When we mingle with others we can’t lie, but we can elaborate. Here’s mine:
We had to mingle and to find out names, motives and alibis of all of the suspects and make notes about them.
They then showed us a QR code to take us to some evidence to help us decide who did it.
We voted on social media to say who we thought had done it. The top three people who we thought had done it then had to defend themselves against the accusation.
Finally they revealed who was guilty, but I’ll keep it a secret!
In a classroom, after the game they’d focus on vocabulary afterwards, then discuss the media literacy topics with the students, for example about posting altered images on social media, legal and emotional consequences, and whether this has ever happened to them.
This is the game we were playing:
In the box there are instructions for the game, four different colour coded scenarios and a guilty card to reveal who is guilty in that scenario at the end. There are 24 character cards, six of which are essential to the scenario. The game can be played in 45 minutes with all of the cards, but it can be rushed. It can be a mingle or a speed dating scenario where they talk to everyone.
Online there is an extra evidence sheet they can print out to add notes to.
Follow IATEFL Slovenia social media to find out more about the game – it’s not for sale at the moment. It was created as part of a grant from the US Embassy Ljubljana and they plan to keep working on it in the future, and news about how they do this will be on their social media in the future.
Boglarka Koch and Eniko Takacs – How can boundaries lead you to your wellbeing?
We have a psychological immune system, just like our physical immune system. We can’t avoid stress, so it’s important to learn how to cope with it.
There are 5 pillars to this immune system:
Optimism: faith that you can deal with problems
EQ (Emotional Intelligence): dividing up what is about you and what is about others
Confidence: knowing that you can control your life
Self awareness: knowing what is and isn’t good for you
Resilience
Focussing on resilience, this is the ability to adapt and recover from challenges. It includes flexibility and being able to bounce back from setbacks. Consider a tree in a storm, which can bend and then bounce back. We can develop our resilience.
Being resilient helps prevent burnout, set boundaries, manage relationships more efficiently, and more.
Here are four questions to develop resilience:
What are you proud of? Remembering these situations can boost your confidence when you realise that you’ve got through difficult situations in the past, and therefore you can again.
Who can support you? Different people can help you in different situations.
How can you relax? If you know what can give you energy and recharge you, this can help you.
What are your goals for this year? Just considering this year can feel more achievable, which then gives you energy to work towards longer term goals.
To build your resilience:
Don’t compare yourself to others
Try multiple perspectives (thinking about situations from different angles)
Use relaxation techniques
Keep a thank you diary / a gratefulness diary (helps you to focus on positives)
Remind yourself about when you coped with difficulties in the past
Get professional support
Setting boundaries is one of the most important things you can do for your mental well-being. Set clear and healthy limits, defining what you’re comfortable with. You can try creating a ‘role cake’:
Roles might include teacher, partner, parent, colleague, friend, etc. Each slice should be the size of how big that role is in your current life. Then create a second version: what is your dream ‘role cake’? How big would your ideal roles be? Roles might appear and disappear. Compare the two versions: it should show which roles you would like to invest more in, and how to set better boundaries in those roles.
To help you set boundaries:
Self reflect: what made you feel stressed? Frustrated? (Don’t argue with emotions, because you can’t! But let them guide you)
Identify your boundaries
Be clear and direct – tell others what your boundaries are. We can’t expect others to know without us telling them [Nobody can read your mind!] If you do ___, it makes me feel ____.
Set limits – if we don’t, our bodies will tell us! [This happened to me!] Make sure you can say no. If you’re worried about how others will feel if you say no, think about how bad it would really be if you say no – how would you genuinely feel if you were in the shoes of the person you said no to? Would you be understanding? We’re much stricter with ourselves than with others.
Self-care
Practice, and don’t give up. Change isn’t easy!
Adjust needs. Be patient with yourself and with others – you might need to do it gradually.
Boundary journaling. Note situations where you set boundaries and whether it was a positive or negative situation. Perhaps you’ll realise that setting boundaries isn’t as difficult as you think.
Remember that we can’t change everything, but we can change how we think about things.
The QR code will take you to a booklet of ideas:
Andreja Mandeljc – Focus and manage your classroom through infinite drawings
The table we were sitting at:
This is a psychological tool Andreja learnt to support her with a learner who lashed out whenever he was frustrated. They are based on fractal drawings.
Fractals are complex geometric shapes that follow rules. You can find them in the leaves of trees, in snowflakes etc. In drawings, it can be considered as drawing with a purpose.
There is a similar principle to colouring mandalas, but you create the basis yourself as well.
Why use them? They improve emotional health. They enhance focus in the classroom environment and when doing longer tasks.
For example, before doing a test Andreja asked the students to arrive a few minutes before a test to do this drawing. They then performed better on the test. She thinks this is because they were more centred and mentally present in the room, without worrying about anything else.
There is a process with doing these drawings for therapy, which would be done over a number of sessions. We did three drawings.
Start in the middle, cover two thirds of the page. Close your eyes. Draw without leaving the page, doodling however you like. 60 seconds
After one minute I had:
Then connect the start and end of the line with a wavy line.
We did this 3 times.
Choose one, then grab a colour and colour the spaces, not with any particular colours. You’re not searching for any particular patterns. You can’t have spaces next to each other in the same colour . Use 5-6 colours in total.
In class, Andreja does this with smaller pieces of paper and drawing for less time. Even when it was 20 seconds, some students were still finished too fast.
First session: any colours.
Second session: contrasting colours e.g. yellow and blue, but you can use different shades / brands of those colours. This helps children to realise that things are not always stark contrasts, but there can be shades.
Another way of colouring it: try to find a pattern in it using two colours.
Students who struggle with focus they press the pencils really hard. They learn to be more gentle with time.
After 25 minutes we compared our drawings and they were very different, which was a great discussion point. We all wanted to carry on at the end of the session!
10 minutes after the session, mine looked like this:
Nora Szalai – The history of ‘5 Perc Angol’
5 Perc Angol is a hugely successful Hungarian site for learning English. 5 Perc Angol translates as 5-minute English. These are magazines they produce.
Nora started with a language school, which grew into an online portal, a publishing house, and an online language school.
They started in 1999 with Millennium Language Centre. At the end of the 1990s, there were more than 400 language schools in Budapest, most using the same teaching methods and the same kind of books. Peter started the school, and Nora was the first teacher to be accepted, and ended up marrying Peter 🙂 They built the brand together.
To promote their brand, they reached out to Hungarian celebrities and pop stars across the country and asked them to mention the name of the school. This worked and they ended up with 80 teachers and 22 classrooms. They created course materials based on what the students wanted. They wanted to give the learners extra materials, so they started to send 5-minute lessons to the learners’. Learners liked them and sent them to their friends, and today they have over 130,000 registered users. They send a lesson every single day that lasts for 5 minutes, and have done for 20 years. Nora writes the materials for those lessons.
They started sending a newsletter to their students in 2003, then created a website in 2005 which was originally a newsletter archive. They now have an Italian version of the site too.
The lessons are based on weekly topics, are completely free and suitable for all ages and levels. They get advertising from some companies which can be incorporated in the content.
They have also created lots of grammar books, other books, and cards with different situations on them.
From 6th to 8th October 2023 I attended the IATEFL Hungary 2023 conference, the 33rd annual conference. I presented a plenary and ran a workshop, which you can find the details of here (published on 7th).
In this post you’ll find summaries of talks I attended at the conference on Friday 6th. I tried to pick sessions on areas I don’t know much about, or where the titles intrigued me. Any errors are my own.
Topics include: pronunciation errors, burnout, the teacher’s voice, motivation of rural high-school students, and going with the flow.
Agnes Piukovics, Noemi Gyurka, Katalin Balogne Berces – A comprehensive classification of pronunciation errors in ELT
They said they’re the only pronunciation teaching researchers in Hungary that they know of!
Intelligibility is the target for pronunciation. Comprehensibility and accentedness can also be considered (Munro and Derwing, 2015). Accentedness doesn’t necessarily contribute to intelligibility, but it can influence how people respond.
The Lingua Franca Core can also be considered, but some features of British and American pronunciation are considered problematic here.
They want to propose a framework called PPL, based on the work of Nadasdy (2006). There are three categories of error:
– Phonetic: the learner can’t produce a specific sound, so they substitute an L1 sound
– Phonological: the rules of phonology differ between L1 and L2, so learners follow L1 rules not L2 ones
-Lexical: pronouncing words based on their spelling
Here are three characteristics to think about:
– Teachability: the method required to teach the feature
– Learnability: how difficult is it to acquire
– Contribution to intelligibility: how might this impede intelligibility
Phonetic features have low teachability, low learnability, but also have a limited impact on intelligibility
Phonological ones are more teachable and learnable, but make little contribution to intelligibility.
Lexical errors are highly teachable and highly learnable (though learners have to unlearn before they relearn), and they contribute a lot to intelligibility.
They therefore contest that phonetic features might not be worth focussing on too much, whereas lexical features should receive a lot more focus. Phonological issues – you can pick and choose more whether to spend time on these.
By using the framework, the teacher can rank errors and use this to decide whether or not to correct errors within a given context. The pronunciation curriculum can be tailored to the learners’ age, level and goals.
Pronunciation errors are not an indivisible whole, but can be divided up.
http://www.proneng.btk.ppke.hu is a website they created – not directly related to what is above, but free and contains some materials.
Veronika Derecsky – EFL teacher burnout affecting engagement in the secondary school classroom
Teacher engagement is a positive and fulfilling state of mind. Klassen et al (2013) proposes a framework of areas contributing to teacher engagement: cognitive-physical, emotional, social with colleagues, social with students.
Some areas contributing to burnout are:
– depersonalisation (when you care less about people)
– emotional exhaustion
– reduced personal accomplishment
Depersonalisation affects the personal connections of the teacher. Reduced personal accomplishment reduces commitment to tasks and engagement.
Veronika did her research with 31 teachers. She interviewed them about stress and burnout. Teachers experiencing burnout found it difficult to concentrate on work, they reduced time spent on preparing materials, both Cognitive-physical effects. Their emotions related to teaching didn’t change much. Their main feelings were related to social aspects, particularly with colleagues.
Veronika asked about coping strategies too. There were positive and negative coping mechanisms. Positive coping was when they wanted to do something about burnout. Negative was when they felt they couldn’t do anything about it and quit.
Positive strategies included getting social support from family and colleagues, free time activities and also seeking professional help if it was more serious. One person mentioned keeping a journal.
Teachers who tried to re-engage themselves during burnout said they could do this through new tasks.
At the end of the session we talked about the challenges of managing burnout, training teachers to recognise it and giving teachers coping strategies.
Barbara Lukač Patarčec – The voice of a teacher
I came to this session because I lose my voice a lot. In fact, I had no voice for 7 days up until 4 days ago.
Before Barbara was a teacher, she was a singer. She learnt how to warm up her voice and sing properly, but this still didn’t help her as teacher. She had a cold, then shouted at one particular group of students, and this triggered an experience where speaking caused her physical pain like broken glass, and she couldn’t talk or sing for a couple of months. Her doctor said her vocal cords were fine so she couldn’t get sick leave. When this happened a second time, she was added to a speech therapy group. She wants to share ways to help our voices.
We started with a questionnaire about vocal hygiene to find out our starting points.
In order to talk without straining our vocal cords we should talk as if someone beside us is sleeping, so quite softly. The louder we speak, the more likely we are to get nodules on our voices.
Speaking when we have a cold is really bad for us. For women, when we have our period everything in our body swells, including our vocal cords.
Any type of coughing or throat clearing is incredibly bad. Instead of clearing your throat, push your tongue a long way out and swallow, and that should clear any mucus in your throat. [I’m now super aware of the sheer amount of throat clearing I do, and which I really need to stop!]
Teachers should constantly have water on our desks and rehydrate constantly.C
Coffee, chocolate, smoking and spicy food inflame things in your body, straining your vocal cords.
You shouldn’t lie down for 3 hours after eating. The acid in your stomach can come back to your throat and damage your vocal cords. Acid was one of the issues that affected Barbara.
If we are in a car or bus, we automatically speak more loudly, which is bad for our throats.
As soon as you have a group of 5 or more people, you start projecting and be louder than our groups. Microphones are really helpful here.
Good vocal hygiene really helps to keep our voices. Breathing properly alleviates stress and stops you from squeezing your throat muscles. We need to relax our muscles through massage. Vocal warm-ups are vital – we’re like athletes running marathons every day.
A breathing exercise: sit super relaxed on a chair. Put one hand on your chest under your neck, and one on your tummy under your belly button. Breathe in through your nose, 7 in. Then out for 7 through an O in your mouth, making sure you can hear your breath. Another is 4 in, 7 hold, 8 out. Do this at least 5 or 6 times a day, and over time your muscles will be more relaxed.
Slow stretching. Tip your head towards your shoulder for 5 seconds gently, hold for 5, then the other way, then the other way, then forward. When you go back, put your hand behind your neck and lean back gently until your head is resting on your hand, and your mouth will open slightly.
Massage: find your jaw. Put the palm of your hand at the side of your mouth and press down gently. Your mouth will start to open by itself.
Exercise your mouth as if you have 3 chewing guns in your mouth. Use your tongue inside your cheeks and at the front.
Yawning repositions and realigns everything in our jaw and throat.
Vocal warm up. Trill, first with no sound, then with a comfortable tone. (Look up how to do this properly!) Then trill, break, trill, break. After that siren trilling, on a comfortable note.
Articulation warm up (this one is for Slovenian speakers):
You might feel silly doing these things, but they can save your voice. Learning to do these things can make a huge difference, even though they might take time to learn to do. This will relax your muscles and really help.
Gargling warm water can help.
Another thing to do is put a straw 2cm into water, then blow into the bottle, including making notes and noises, and this will help too.
Greta Sopronyi – Second language learning experiences of rural Hungarian high-school students
Greta wanted to concentrate on student motivation and the L2 experience. Studying motivation for learning languages is popular, but the research is not very diverse: it’s mostly about learning English, and with not a huge amount of participant diversity, which is why Greta wanted to focus on rural learners. She concentrated on an area in eastern Hungary, bordering Romania and Ukraine. It’s 5.5 hours on the train from Budapest, and 3 hours on the train to Nyiregyhaza. There’s very high unemployment.
She spoke to students at 3 schools. She has 6 from school A, 3 from B, and 5 from C.
She ran in-person interviews to collect her data.
There was a lot about English and German in her studies. Even in school C, some students expressed a strong preference for English. German is important because a lot of people plan to move to Germany to work.
The teacher was an important factor for learners in their motivation. Helpful teachers help, but when their teachers keep changing learners don’t know what to do with the language.
Half of the students have never been abroad before. Those who have learnt English spoke English for their families when they went on holiday. Learners didn’t count Romania or Ukraine as being abroad. Learners who did have experiences of being able to speak when abroad had positive ideas.
Only 3 of them said they had never interacted with people who don’t speak Hungarian outside school. Those who had met others who were not Hungarian spoke about experiences they had in Budapest and Debrecen.
Greta also asked about media use. Only one of the 14 students watched without subtitles, one accessed learning content, and one person who has only learnt German watches in English but can’t learn anything for it. None of them sought out German content, apart from one who had watched some films for preparing for an exam, but then stopped.
Overall, English and German are generally considered to be a subject. English is sometimes a tool, but even then, only rarely so. They need to travel to meet non-Hungarian speakers.
So Greta asked why is language learning important? All of them said they think language learning is important, but as a tool to move abroad (to Germany), to finish school, maybe go to university, to ‘get ahead’ (without knowing what they mean by this). They seem to mean getting away, rather than getting ahead. We need to further establish the motivation of L2 learners.
Greta’s tip for researchers is to seek out underrepresented groups in your own field. You will learn a lot from them.
Claudia Molnar – Trust the process and go with the flow
Claudia is an accidental teacher and fell into teaching. She fell in love with teaching from day one of her CELTA course, and it’s a love affair that has continued to this day despite difficulties.
She talked about the balance between teachers having autonomy in the classroom, and some teachers feeling isolated through a lack of collaboration and communication.
She also found herself feeling isolated by the term ‘native speaker’: she was asked questions about language, but never about pedagogy.
Teaching and education are in crisis all over the world.
But teaching has amazing positives: a feeling of community. We are the teachers that give our colleagues their parachutes. We share our experiences at conferences like this, then take them back to our schools.
Claudia asked us:
– What motivated you to become a teacher?
– How did you envisage the job?
– In what ways did your perception change during and following teacher training?
(These were fascinating questions to discuss – I’d encourage you to consider them for yourself)
And the last question, with our answers:
What happens when things are complicated?
High levels of stress
High intercultural and linguistic demands
Frequent use of energy intense methodologies
Working conditions
Status of the (ELT) profession (do you feel respected by students? Teachers? Society?)
Precarity in terms of the job and future prospects
What can/do we do to stay on this road as teachers? Thank you! Thank yous from teachers, from students, from colleagues…they all keep us here.
Issue 51 of the IH Journal has just hit my inbox, and it includes an article by me about How to improve your materials writing. I wrote it based on ideas I’ve had as I write my MA dissertation, which I know have just under a month left to finish. I’m putting together a competency framework for language learning materials writing – watch this space to see what I come up with!
Some of the other articles I enjoyed in this issue of the IH Journal included:
A call to arms by Jeremy Barchus to make sure International House is truly international
Kata Ujvarosi discussing realistic goals for learners regarding the kind of English(es) they might want to speak
3 practical techniques for setting up guided discovery with learners, from Pilar Capaul
Thankfully, in the last three years or so I’ve only had one flare-up of about two months and have mostly been better thanks to the magic of Vedolizumab. To get it I spend a couple of hours at the hospital having an infusion every 8 weeks. I’m lucky – it doesn’t work for everyone. I also take 6 mesalazine tablets every day. Between those two medications, I’m currently in remission, and hope to be for as long as possible.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve learnt more about my body than I perhaps needed to. I’ve spent a lot of money and time on my health, and been to medical professionals all over the world. I’ve explained my illness countless times, and will do it many more times – as many times as I can in fact, so that people understand what it means for me and the many other people who have this invisible illness. I’ve gone through phases of being on very restrictive diets and experimenting with food. I now eat a much wider range of food than at any point before the colitis started. I’ve come to appreciate my health, and particularly my digestive health, so much more, and now have a much more balanced life. And I’ve realised that the information on the Crohn’s and Colitis UK website is fantastic.
All in all, life is good and I’m very happy. Of course, I’d rather not have colitis. But I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t been diagnosed with it. Here’s to a cure in my lifetime!
P.S. I’ve just learnt about GriefSick, a new newsletter exploring the grief that comes with chronic illness, and which I’ve definitely experienced.
Recently Jane Ritter interviewed me for her show on Teachers Talk Radio, a community radio station for teachers and educators.
This is the blurb for the interview:
How do you help your learners become better readers? This morning I spoke with Sandy Millin about what successful readers do and how we can better support our learners. Sandy has wide-ranging experience as a teacher trainer, a CELTA trainer, a DipTESOL tutor, and working with teachers from around the world on many different projects and through many different platforms. She is passionate about CPD and has some strong views about how we need to provide better training for newly trained teachers, particularly when teaching skills such as Reading.
On 13th July 2023, I presented a talk as part of the BRAZ-TESOL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE) for the 2023 BRAZ-TESOL online conference.
As teachers, we can feel a difference when we’re teaching from materials which seem to ‘flow’ perfectly compared to materials which don’t. However, when we create our own materials, it can be difficult to find that same flow. In this talk, I’ll show you techniques to make your materials flow, including through the use of scaffolding for productive tasks, and the exploitation of a single exercise in a range of different ways.
As part of the research I did for my MA dissertation topic, I conducted a survey about the knowledge and skills people need to create effective materials. The second most common response was that creating materials that flow in a logical way is an important skill in materials writing, with 58/124 respondents mentioning it. The only thing that was more common was understanding the target language.
What do we mean by ‘flow’?
I started with definitions of the general meaning of ‘flow’ from two learner dictionaries, and I highlighted some of what I believe are the key concepts relating to flow.
Cambridge starts with (especially of liquids, gases, or electricity) to move in one direction, especially continuously and easily. Oxford says that when flow is related to speech or writing it is the way that words, ideas or themes are linked together in speech, writing or music and when it is related to ideas or conversation to flow is to develop or be produced in an easy and natural way.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a psychologist who wrote and spoke a lot about the psychological concept of flow. I used various internet sources to compile my own summary of the factors which he thought contribute to us feeling like we are in the middle of a state of flow:
Clear goals
Immediate clear feedback
Total focus on task
Balance between skills and challenge
Sense of control
No worry of failure
Altered perception of time
Action and awareness merged
The activity is an end in itself
Based on those ideas from beyond ELT and this article by John Hughes, this is how I understand what ‘flow’ could mean when we relate it to materials and materials writing:
Clear objectives and activity aims
Easy for learners and teachers to navigate
Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
Challenges learners
Gives learners a feeling of control
Sets learners up for success
In the rest of the presentation I looked at each of these areas in turn and offered thoughts and suggestions on how to improve your materials so that they flow better, according to my breakdown of what flow might mean. I’ve included some examples of what I mean, but if you’d like more, please do leave a comment.
1. Clear objectives and activity aims
The objective is what the materials as a whole should help learners to achieve. This should be communicated concisely to users of the materials. For example: ‘By the end of the lesson, you should be better able to get help when trying on clothes in a shop in English.’ After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve got there?
The activity aims are how each activity contributes to the objective and moves learners towards it. These should provide step-by-step support to learners to achieve the overall aim, and (if time) improve further at it. In our clothes shop example, some of the activity aims might include:
To identify what problems the customer has (when listening to a conversation between a shop assistant and a customer in a clothes shop)
To practise polite intonation when making requests
To understand typical responses a shop assistant might make to your requests
You may have come across the acronym SMART to describe what makes a good aim or objective. This is how I equate each of the words in SMART to how learners should feel about each aim or objective in the materials they are using in lessons:
Specific: I know what I have to do
Measurable: I know how to assess my progress
Achievable: I can achieve this (perhaps with help)
Realistic: This will help me in the real world
Timed: I can do this in the time available to me
+ each activity will help me to improve
If you look at materials you’ve produced and don’t feel they meet these criteria, it’s perhaps worth reassessing the objectives and aims to see how you can make them SMARTer.
2. Easy for teachers and learners to navigate
This draws heavily from John Hughes, who has been a huge influence in making my own materials more easy navigable through advice he’s offered in blogposts, workshops and webinars. Thank you John!
To make your materials easier for teachers and learners to navigate, consider the following:
Use clear, unambigious headings
Number activities and questions
Reference relevant grammar notes, vocabulary lists and other exercises
In instructions / rubrics, use consistent wording, consistent fonts (or bold, but not italics – this is harder to read), and include examples.
Use an uncluttered layout, with clear constrats between colours and easy to read fonts and text sizes.
Even if they’re only for you, include teacher’s notes and answer keys. Writing them can often help you to identify problems you might not otherwise notice.
3. Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
To some extent, this links back to objectives and aims in point 1 and navigation in point 2, but I think it’s worth highlighting this as a separate point. As John Hughes says,
You need to make sure [the exercises] fit together in a logical order. In practical terms, this means that if you have six exercises or stages on a worksheet, then any teacher should be able to pick up that worksheet, take it into class, start at exercise 1 and finish at exercise 6. Yes it’s important that the material is also flexible enough for those types of teachers who like to miss some parts out, change the order or even add their own supplementary materials, but its primary function is to offer a complete lesson.
Look at your materials from the perspective or a learner or another teacher using them. Can you easily answer these three questions:
Can I see where I should start and why?
What are the next steps I need to take?
How will I know when I’ve finished?
4. Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Have you ever used materials where…?
The topic keeps changing: one minute it’s about holidays, then food, then learning languages, then… (particularly in controlled practice activities!)
There are sudden jumps of focus: from reading, to grammar practice, to learning some new vocabulary, to writing…
Learners are asked to suddenly asked to start reading, listening, speaking or writing, with no warning or preparation, and then are given little to no support to complete it.
To avoid that yourself, do this:
Stick to a consistent topic throughout the set of materials and throughout each activity.
If you write materials which integrate skills and language, make sure everything you include contributes to the overall aim. No grammar / vocab ‘just because…’!
Provide support (‘scaffolding’) for skills work.
For all skills = lead into the topic first.
For writing / speaking = provide thinking time, useful language, and time to upgrade their work, either by redrafting for writing or task repeition for speaking.
5. Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
To think about how to make your materials engaging, I would highly recommend one of my current favourite methodology books:
Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms by Sarah Mercer and Zoltán Dörnyei [Amazon affiliate link, BEBC, Bookshop.org affiliate link] includes a wealth of ideas for what engagement actually means, any of which you could attempt to build into your materials to help learners approach a sense of flow while they’re using them. This is a slightly different approach to flow and materials, but still an important one! Here are just a few ideas:
Use stories
Activate emotions
Start small and build up
Make progess visible
Build in learner choice
Teacher learners how to learn
Provide appropriate challenge
Include surprise, mystery and puzzles
Build rapport between learners
Built teacher-student rapport
Provide support for pair work and group work
I’d highly recommend reading the whole book if you can!
6. Challenges learners
The challenge about challenge in materials is that it looks different in every context, so to some extent you’ll need to decide yourself what challenge actually means for the learners you’re writing materials for. However, these four activites are simple ways to add a little challenge to any set of materials:
Cover the sentences / words. Can you remember them?
Test your partner: what can they remember? Can you help them remember more with pictures or acting?
Race yourself: how fast can you do it? Can you do it again faster? [for pronucniation practice, reading, speaking, writing, or completing a controlled practice exercise – note that it’s important that learners are racing themselves and not each other]
Can you write down these 3 super-fast sentences? Now can you say them yourself? [accompanied by an audio with some connected speech, or teacher’s notes for a teacher to read the sentences as fast as they can]
7. Gives learners a feeling of control
Again, this is more about helping learners to approach a sense of flow when they’re using your materials. Here are a few ideas for how you can hand over control to learners within your materials:
Offer choice:
Do you want to work alone, in pairs or in groups?
Do you want to write or speak?
Include how to learn:
Dictionary skills
Making use of online translators
How ChatGPT can help you
Include tips on approaching tasks:
Why not try…?
If it’s difficult, you could…
8. Sets learners up for success
If you’re able to incorporate a wide range of the tips above in your materials, you should be well on the way to setting up learners for success. Here’s a summary of some of the ways you can do that:
Maintain the focus
Include how to learn
Scaffold for skills work
Support learners to remember new language
All of this leads to learners going from a feeling of ‘I can do this’ to a feeling of ‘I did it!’, and to teachers enjoying teaching from the materials.
But…
…I’ve shared a lot of different ideas in this talk and post. Don’t try to change all of it at once in your materials if you feel they’re not there already!
Choose one area at a time to work on, try it out and reflect on what does and doesn’t work for your materials and your learners. When you’re ready, choose another area.
I’d be really interested to know where you choose to start and how it goes. Please do leave a comment!
8 hours from when I’m writing this, I’ll be a guest on Volkan Iner’s Instagram channel, @creativeenglish18. He’ll be interviewing me about a range of different topics, including teaching speaking and staying updated as a teacher. I’ll share a link to the video when it’s ready, but you may also wish to join us live. See you there!
Update: Here’s the link if you want to watch the recording:
This is a summary of what we discussed, taken from Volkan’s YouTube page:
Tonight we listened to Sandy Millin’s personal experiences, philosophy of teaching, turning points about her education, interesting moments that she faced during her training,encouraging sts to speak, assessment of speaking skills, creating classroom environment for speaking, overcoming fear of speaking, generating ideas and thoughts for writing, staying uptaded,technology and ELT, 21st skills, latest development and trends in ELT, suggestions for the new teachers, motto, etc.
Tonight’s motto is; “Enjoy what you are doing and Just do it!”.
…and 2 days, I submitted my Cambridge Delta Module 3 assignments.
I remember the feeling of relief when I finally pressed send, marking the end of 9 months of hard work, stress, and (somewhere in there!) learning. I still had the Module 1 exam to go, which happened 6 months later, but it felt like the worst was over.
At the time, I found my Delta course to be very challenging, and I wasn’t convinced I’d really learnt anything from it. With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, I know that I actually learnt a lot:
The usefulness of methodology books, and the readability of many (though not all!) of them – in turn, this has opened up huge amounts of information to me
The difference between testing and teaching listening – largely thanks to John Field’s Listening in the Language Classroom [Amazon affiliate link, BEBC], this has become a particular area of interest, and over time I’ve improved my ability to develop learners’ listening skills
Why assessment can go wrong (lack of validity, reliability, etc.) – this helped us to improve testing and assessment at IH Bydgoszcz
How to do needs analysis, at least a little – I still needed to do more reading, but it gave me the foundations
A better understanding of how materials in (well-designed) coursebooks fit together
…and probably much more!
What I also realised was that the high levels of stress that I experienced while doing my course, and which I know many others also experience, are really not necessary. There is no reason why working towards Delta (or another diploma-level qualificationlike DipTESOL) needs to be a traumatic experience, leading to tears, illness, and (for some) a desire to leave the profession. That’s why when I went freelance, the first thing I did was to create much more relaxed Delta courses.
My aim with Take Your Time Delta is to give Delta trainees the time and space to absorb what they’re learning, and to experiment with it during the course. I want to create a human course, where stress is minimised and there is support from the tutor and the course participants through live sessions and really getting to know the people on the course. I want a course which recognises that life happens and some weeks are going to be busier than others, so when it’s not possible to keep up with the homework for a week or two it’s not the end of the world. I want a course where you can pay on the plan that works for you: in one go, in two payments, or in monthly instalments. And ultimately I want a course which means that trainees feel confident that when they walk into the Module 1 exam or submit their Module 3 assignment, they’re definitely going to pass because they’re fully prepared and know that they’re able to meet all of the requirements.
If that sounds good to you, course days and times are now available for September 2023 to May 2024 courses for Delta Module 1, Module 3 ELT-Specialism, and Module 3 ELT-Management. I’m looking forward to helping you complete your Delta qualification!
The latest edition of the Educast interviews podcast is now out, featuring me 🙂 Mohammad Nabil interviewed me about online professional development. The episode is 11 minutes 26 seconds, so nice and quick! You can find it on Spotify, and you can look at Mohammad’s LinkedIn post about it if you’d like to add any comments. Thanks to Mohammad for inviting me to take part!
I presented this workshop at the TWIST 2016 conference in Warsaw, and I’ve just realised I never put it on my blog. Better late than never!
About my presentation
Every staffroom I’ve been into has a huge pile of scrap paper in it somewhere. We’re responsible for the death of a lot of trees! Don’t let those deaths be in vain: try these activities to energise your classes, diminish the pile and assuage your guilt.
The ‘my’ is in inverted commas, because they’re probably adapted from activities I’ve learnt from other people. If you think that person was you, please do comment!
Do you like…?
Good for: getting to know you, introducing functional language, extending conversations
Give each student a piece of scrap paper.
They write three things they like, e.g. chocolate, taking photos, learning languages.
When they have finished, they screw up the paper and throw it towards a spot you indicate.
Elicit and drill the phrases: Do you like…? What about…? And…? along with the answers: Of course, who wouldn’t? and Sorry, no.
Demonstrate the activity. Take one piece of paper from the pile, open it, and ask a student the first question, e.g. Do you like chocolate? The student should choose one of the two answers. If they say Of course, who wouldn’t? ask the next question. If they say Sorry, no move on to another student and restart the process. Stop once you’ve demonstrated with two or three people (and hope you don’t get it right first time!)
Students take one piece of paper each, exchanging it if they have their own. They mingle and find the person who’s paper they have, writing their name on the paper. Once they have both found their person and been found, they can sit down.
As a follow-up, students work in pairs, telling their partner who they found out about (preferably without looking at the paper).
Russian roulette
Good for: revising vocabulary, testing what students already know, last-minute cover lessons
Choose a category, e.g. food.
The teacher writes down (in secret) a word from this category on a piece of scrap paper, e.g. apple.
While doing this, students work in small groups to brainstorm as many words as they can in this category, writing them on scrap paper, and try to guess which word the teacher has.
Nominate one student from one group to say a word. If it’s the same as your secret word, they lose a point. If it’s different, they gain a point.
Continue with other groups. If they repeat a word or can’t think of one, they also lose a point.
Good for: revision of vocabulary sets or prepositions, introducing a topic, speaking practice, laughter!
Give each student a piece of A4 scrap paper. Make sure they have something to lean on.
Students put the paper on their head. They can’t look at it.
Dictate a scene to the students. To make it more challenging, move around the picture. For example: My living room is large and rectangular. In the bottom right corner if you look at it from above there is a door to the hall. The door to the balcony is in the top left corner. Next to the balcony door there are two windows, also on the left-hand wall. In front of the window there is an armchair. Facing the window is a fireplace. In front of the fireplace is a table with four chairs. Under the window and next to the armchair there is a small square coffee table, with another armchair on the other side of it. The bottom wall, near the door to the hall, has a sofa next to it. [Other possible topics: a monster/robot, a Christmas scene, a desert island…]
Students compare their pictures and try to remember the teacher’s description.
Error correction running dictation
Throughout the lesson, collect some of the mistakes the students have made. Write each one on a piece of scrap paper with enough context to make it easy to work out what the correct sentence should be. If you want to, include some examples of good language.
Stick the paper to the walls/board on one side of your classroom. Arrange the students on the other side, so the room looks something like this:
3. When you say go, the running student goes to one of the errors, remembers the sentence, runs back and dictates it to their partner as is. Once they have done this for half of the errors (e.g. four out of eight), they switch roles. When they have finished all of them, they work together to correct the errors.
4. When finished, allocate one error per pair. They should write the correction on the paper they dictated from. After you’ve briefly checked them, pairs walk around to confirm they were right.
The last week has been so full of laughter, and I’ve enjoyed it so much.
The video below will give you a taster of that laughter.
I’ve been at the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 conference, and everywhere I looked I saw laughter, the laughter of people getting to know each other, the laughter of realising what we have in common, and the laughter of old friends reunited.
Sandy and Marjorie
I’ve always found the IATEFL conference to be the best week of my year, but this year it felt like something truly special. After 2 years of cancelled face-to-face conferences in 2020 and 2021, then the IATEFL Belfast conference where it seemed we were still trying to work out how to be in the same spaces again and what the impacts were of the previous two years, this year felt like a huge sigh of relief at a return to being able to really enjoy being with our community again. And enjoy it I did!
Chia, Sandy and Peter
Learning from sessions
Of course, I also learnt a lot. I’ve been blogging the talks I’ve been to all week, and I’d like to summarise some of the ideas I’ll be taking away with me. These are my interpretations – the speakers may have intended something different!
The language in our coursebooks, our classrooms, and our exams doesn’t match the language that many users of English produce and need to understand when they go into the workplace. (Evan Frendo)
Teachers are amazing in the ways that they support each other and their students. (Divya Madhavan and Lesley Painter-Farrell) [Of course, I knew this already, but it’s always good to be reminded!]
ELT teaching is like no other field of teaching, because most of us start teaching and then get qualified, rather than the other way around. Even those who study it at university have probably already done some tutoring at some point before they start studying. (Divya Madhavan)
ESOL teachers need a lot more support from our industry, support in terms of consistent training, understanding of the challenges they face, and managing the mental load of the traumas in their classrooms. They need this support so they can continue with what they’re already doing, an amazing job supporting their learners. (Lesley Painter-Farrell)
We’re not born part of a particular race, we learn to be part of that race by learning the ‘language’ of what it means to be a member of that race. There are no black people in Africa – they only become black once they go to a country where Black becomes an over-arching label, where all of the other individual identities are subsumed in one, removing all of the individuality and variety. (Awad Ibrahim)
Learners coming up with their own rules for why language is used in a given context can give us insights into how language is used that we might not realise if we remain bound by the rules we repeat from what we’ve learnt. (Danny Norrington-Davies)
Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats are a useful tool for learners when planning extended writing, though it will take time to help them understand how to use them. They can provide independence and broaden learners’ understanding of topics. [though the white / black colour choices are problematic] (Chang Liu)
The future of English learning is in completely different spheres to ones I know about. Making materials for Instagram and TikTok audiences requires a whole set of skills and knowledge which I had no idea of before. (Claire Bowes) [I feel like Claire embodies the next generation of teachers coming after me, and it really excites me to see where this will lead] It’s all part of ‘microlearning’ (Evan Frendo) [something I already did, but had no term for]
When creating teacher training materials, one approach is to take activities we use with learners and change the content so it has a teacher training focus. (John Hughes)
What we’re currently doing in the majority of teacher training isn’t actually having a huge impact on what happens once teachers go into the classroom. The apprenticeship of observation is still very strong, and we need to change our approach if we really want to change teacher cognitions (beliefs and ideas about teaching) and therefore teacher actions in and beyond the classroom, and give teachers the tools they need to keep developing on a deeper level. (Gabriel Diaz Maggioli, Ben Beaumont)
We’re assessing teachers on the language learning materials they develop, but we’re not actually teaching them how to develop materials effectively. (Luis Carabantes)
The ‘curse of knowledge’ can stop us from understanding what it’s like to not know something when we are in a position of knowledge already. This has a particular impact as teacher trainers, and we need to get back in touch with our novice selves (among other things) to understand what it is that we should focus on in our training. (Ri Willoughby and William Morrow)
There are many ways we can build the confidence of pre-service teachers, particularly young ones, to help them realise that they can take on a teacher role. If we don’t do this, we’ll lose them and we’ll lose TP students. (Laura Khaddi) [Another one I knew, but good to be reminded.]
The design cycle is a potentially useful tool for teacher training. You could ask teachers to bring problems they (might) have in the classroom, hand over those problems to others to come up with potential solutions, and then bring the solutions back to the original teacher. (Kim Chopin)
Delivering training via WhatsApp is a hugely underexploited area, and could reach so many teachers who aren’t being served by our current teacher training models. (Kristina Smith and Anna Young) [Having worked on WhatsApp projects last year, I know this, but I wanted to state it explicitly here!]
There are a myriad of different ways of finding out what your teachers actually need in terms of professional development [and I wasn’t really using any of them as a DoS!] (Jim Fuller)
Digital materials have many affordances which paper materials don’t, but we’re still creating most digital materials as if they were purely interactive coursebooks. There’s so much more we could and should do to increase engagement. (Laura Broadbent and Billie Jago, Nergiz Kern)
There’s a lot that materials writers can learn from lexicographers in terms of approaching the writing of definitions and example sentences in our materials. (Julie Moore)
We need to think really carefully about the implicit messages we include and assumptions we make when creating materials, including but not only materials related to science (James Taylor) and money (Lottie Galpin).
When helping learners to create videos, there’s a huge range of potential materials we can make to support them in the process. (Armanda Stroia)
Having a mentor can have a huge impact on your professional development. (Shilpa Pulapaka and Fabiana Crispim) [I need to find myself a regular mentor who I can meet up with]
Learning beyond sessions
For me, one of the best parts of a conference like IATEFL is the learning that happens beyond the sessions. It’s in the conversations you have in the corridor, in the exhibition hall, over dinner. Often these are about other sessions, but they’re also about people’s backgrounds, how they came to ELT, and the interesting things they’re working on now.
Mark, Sandy and David, and the book we worked on together 🙂
Here are some of the things I’d like to remind myself of later, with the sources if I remember them! Some of these might be somewhat corrupted in my memory, so feel free to correct me.
‘Personal information management’ is a term you can use to summarise how you deal with all of the information that comes in. Academic managers have two strands of PIM to manage: the practical side, for example who needs to be where and when, and the inspiration side, for example ideas about how to develop the CPD programme. The techniques you need for each strand of PIM in this case are different. (Mike Riley, via Pippa Wentzel)
It’s not often we given learners the opportunity to produce something genuinely funny that can be easily shared beyond the classroom. Memes can provide this opportunity very easily. (Ciaran Lynch)
When creating social media content, if you want it to be effective you need to really analyse how it’s being used and viewed. You need to consider ideas like what’s in the picture, what direction people are looking in in images, whether there is a clear ‘call to action’, what time it’s posted, and many more factors. (Marcus Morgan and Karen Waterston, via Ciaran Lynch and Paula Rebolledo)
An interesting and informative session by Karen Waterston & Marcus Morgan at #iatefl2023. Considerations when creating engaging and meaningful content in social media. pic.twitter.com/SecQenGaI4
Many of the books of photocopiable materials which were created for discussions 10-20 years ago are very out-of-date and wouldn’t / shouldn’t be published today. They really need to be updated. (Peter Fullagar, via everyone who saw his talk and thought it was brilliant, including Jo Szoke – sorry I missed it!, Richard from the University of Chester) [I knew this, but again, worth the reminder. Check out Peter’s blog and Raise Up! if you’re looking for replacement ideas.]
The position of women in ELT has improved, but there’s still work to be done. (Julie Norton and Heather Buchanan, via Jo Szoke)
Women in ELT: Where are we now? by Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton #iatefl2023
There was an interesting question from the audience: is it just men who tend to make negative comments or are a woman’s worst enemy another woman? pic.twitter.com/pFMXtjS9ZK
There’s a growth in awareness that online learning materials need their own guidance, different to paper learning materials. These are now being shared. I went to Billie Jago and Laura Broadbent’s talk, and Jo Szoke supplemented what I learnt with her notes from Carol Lethaby’s talk.
Thank you to Chang Liu for her enthusiastic endorsement of my How to present at an international conference talk. She came last year in Belfast and again this year in Harrogate, and said that it was the reason why she was presenting this year, and that my post about writing an abstract helped her apply to present. Another attendee this year said she was presenting later that same day and it had relieved her nerves. If you appreciate what a presenter has done, please don’t be shy to tell them – it really does leave a warm glow!
Thank you too to Ciaran Lynch and Claire Bowes, as well as Vicky Margari, for telling me that my blog and hearing about IATEFL from me encouraged them to apply for a scholarship (Vicky) and apply to talk (Ciaran and Claire). Look at the IATEFL website and conference pages to find out more about upcoming conferences.
Thank you to the many people who’ve mentioned my Delta content.
Thank you to everybody who’s mentioned my IATEFL 2023 blog posts. I first experienced IATEFL through the tweets and blog posts shared from the IATEFL Brighton 2011 conference. I got so much out of them, and it’s wonderful to be able to pay it forward now.
It’s always lovely to hear about the impact of things that I’ve done – it really does make the time and effort worth it.
Thanks to the MaWSIG committee for being such a lovely group of people to work with, and especially to Clare and Jen, who are leaving the committee. We’ll miss you!
Thanks to Thom Jones for giving me a very entertaining start to Wednesday morning.
Thanks to James and Jo for being wonderful flatmates and making me laugh so much. Thanks to Jo for share beautiful sketch notes and showing me the Bamboo app.
Thank you to all of the IATEFL staff and volunteers who have put so much effort into keeping IATEFL alive throughout the pandemic and the huge financial challenges of recent years, and who have worked so hard at putting this year’s conference together.
Thanks to all the people I had lunch and dinner time conversations with, and to everyone I had corridor chats with.
I can’t wait to do it all again in Brighton next year!
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Awad looked back at his abstract and realised that it wasn’t quite right. He changed his title: What exactly has race got to do with a very nice organisation like IATEFL? Intersecting race, identify and the pleasure of (second) language learning
Hip hop people don’t clap their hands, they snap their fingers.
Awad says that he has really enjoyed the conference and wondered why he’s never been here before.
There is a lot of focus on teaching techniques this week, and Awad wants to flip the script – go upside-down. He wants us to focus this presentation on us, the teachers. The best gift we can give our students is ourselves.
Race works like a language
1. Blackness works like a language = race is language = mythology = language of the monster
Awad started by showing us a clip from a video of hiphop. Powerful line: ‘I do not look to society to affirm my worth.’
Stuart Hall argues that race works like a language. Signifiers gain a meaning based on the relationships between things. Their meanings can never be permanently fixed. There is always something about race which is left unsaid.
Awad is interested in the idea of race as language. How we speak it. What we say through our bodies. What our bodies say to others. We don’t have control over what these bodies say. They can be read in different ways.
What does this mean?
1. Blackness is an empty signifier. It has no inherent meaning. Objects do not mean. People put meaning onto them. Blackness is a symbolic capital whose meaning and value can only be determined within a particular market: ‘symbolic markets of linguistic exchanges’. Blackness in the UK, US, Canada, blackness is the marked signifier and whiteness is the unmarker signifier.
2. Blackness is not a possession. It is only relational. It only has meaning in relation to other categories: whiteness, browness, to other signifiers: gender, etc.
3. Blackness is a discursive catergory, so a social script, a role we play, a plot, a representational language that is beyond our individual control. It’s a performative category, a language we speak every day in how we dress, speak, walk, in our hair, makeup etc. It transcends the individual, and is a norm, and through repetition and many other acts, one eventually becomes black.
4. No one is born Black, one becomes Black. Language also forms as much as it performs identities. We speak blackness from birth, and this also forms our identities. Language has the double task of both representing and forming identities. This also means no one is born White. Whiteness is also a language that white people speak from birth. White people need to ask themselves what is the language we speak? How do we speak it? What is the history of that language?
5. Blackness is not just a free-floating signifier. This is because power intervenes in closing its meaning. Blackness becomes a closed canvas – an already signified signifier. When power intervenes and closes the meaning of blackness: blackness finds itself sealed into objecthood and it’s multilingual, multicultural nature is negated and it becomes one; blackness is defined and hence treated as a lack, a negative capital, an Other, that which is not White (the transcendent) – after George Floyd, white people discovered their ignorance in thinking and white people need to take this ignorance seriously; when the meaning of blackness is closed, it becomes a representation of the history too [I think I missed this].
6. We need to expand the meaning of language, take it away from Saussure and bring it closer to semiotics/semiology. In semiotics, language doesn’t work in a mimetic way – there’s no 1-to-1 relationship between language in the real world, like a mirror image. Meaning doesn’t lie in the object or the event. ‘Things don’t mean, we construct meaning using representational systems’ (Hall, 1997) – language lies at the borderline between [missed this!]
7. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we should take blackness from a meaningless perspective – i.e. that it has no meaning. That’s not what happens: Blackness is now a narrative, a mythology, a monster in need of control. Compare what happened after George Floyd’s murder with the January 6th insurrection in the Capitol. A black person becomes part of a mythologised narrative. The idea here is: if the black body is not controlled, there is no knowing what it can do. The black body also points to the African presence, the history of the Middle Passage, the history that people prefer not to see and brush under the rug.
8. This grammar is performed every day, and is fixed through an external exercise of power. Awad’s emphasise in his research isn’t about race per se, but is on racialisation – the act of becoming, and on racism. Blackness is a complex morphological and syntactical system that is forever dual.
Awad’s own work: rhizome of Blackness
When people came from Africa to America, they fell under an umbrella of blackness. However, they had no idea of what it meant to be black in America when they first arrive. They find themselves becoming black. They end up creating a third space that does not fully belong to America, nor to Africa, but the two combined.
The rhizome are the roots of the tree which we can’t see.
The eye might show you somebody who looks black, but under the surface there is something more complicated: multi-dimensional, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-national. The rhizome disrupts the single notion of blackness.
Research findings
There are no Black people in Africa. Once in America, all of these descriptors are subsumed under black.
Black immigrants have no solid comprehension of the grammar of Blackness. As they do this, they complicate the notion of blackness by adding their ideas to it.
They learn BESL: black English as a second language. [missed the extra points here]
BESL is an expression of identify formation, becoming Black. When they are locked out of other spaces where they can’t see themselves, they then invest themselves in other areas – hip hop, BESL. ESL students are no longer ESL in the classrooms, but through media: films, music, etc. So what are we doing in the ESL classroom?
BESL and hip-hop become sites of a null curriculum. These are sites of learning.
Immigrants are refugees. We tend to mix the two, particularly in the US.
We watched this video. You should stop now and watch it. It’s important.
‘Home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun.’ The woman performing was in tears – you could hear them in her voice. Audio by Warsan Shire.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Chang is a PhD researcher at Newcastle University, and this is related to the topic of her PhD.
Chang is a super enthusiastic presenter, and this was a lovely way to finish the main strands of this year’s IATEFL 2023 conference. There was a lot of laughter in her session – not what you always get at this point in the week 🙂
Three questions think about:
Do you students have difficulty in generating ideas?
Do your students have difficulty in using relevant evidence to support their arguments?
Do your students have difficult in organising ideas in a coherent manner?
The audience said yes to each of these.
What are the thinking hats?
Each hat represents one mode of thinking. De Bono is a pioneer of lateral thinking: thinking of ideas from different perspectives. Parallel thinking is taking one mode of thinking at a time.
Black = devil’s advocate role = cautions, problems, potential risks
Green = grass, hope = creativity, solutions to problems
[Note: this is the first time I’ve realised the problems of the white / black colour choices for the thinking hats!]
Each thinking hat represents one thinking mode. People can use the hats flexibly, there’s no rigid mode.
Empirical studies about six thinking hats
Most of them are in science subjects. There’s very little research into in EFL contexts.
There’s been a focus on product before, but Chang wants to focus on six thinking hats and process.
Research process
These are the data collection procedures:
Chang wants to be able to compare the difference between before and after the inventions.
Integrating six thinking hats into academic writing
Here are some ideas for how to use the hats in the classroom.
The hats each have a set of language functions. For example, the black hat:
Chang also uses exploratory talk, with these pictures:
Students say they want exploratory talk, but say they’ve bad at it and good at quarrelling talk!
They use prompt cards with one prompt for each hat too.
An example
They plan their essay by analysing the task.
In the exploratory talk, there is a set of ground rules.
The students then generated their own guiding questions based on the topic, with different guiding questions based on each kind of hat. It’s fine to use hats more than once as well.
Once they’ve got their questions, they create their own individual writing plan.
As they leave the classroom, they use an exit ticket. This is version 1, but they struggled with reflecting:
Version 2 is more relevant to the six thinking hats:
Findings
When Chang starts using the six thinking hats, they have physical hats to wear and use to prompt them. As they got further through the programme, they didn’t want to use them any more – they were able to analyse the six modes of thinking.
At the beginning of the intervention they were able to generate their own language functions. Things moved from teacher provided to student generated.
At the end of the teaching intervention, the students asked to have their photos taken with the thinking hats on.
This is what the students said about the intervention:
Things to consider when using STH
Weak and shy students might not contribute as much as the active ones.
Students who don’t understand their roles might speak for the other roles – they might be confused.
It takes time for the learners to be familiar with the hats – you might need several weeks.
The limited time available might limit their ability to use the hats to their full potential.
The audience asked whether it was worth thinking about extra hats – a 7th or 8th hat?
Students said that brainstorming before writing can be a challenge, but using the hats can give them direction in their brainstorming.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Many factors lead to a lack of confidence for these teachers. This leads to a lack of teacher presence. This can impact on success in TP, and this can become a spiral – one TP is less successful, they feel less confident going into the next TP, etc. It can also impact on other trainees in the group – they’re not providing such a useful model for each other. It can also impact on numbers of TP students.
These are things that York St. John University have donee.
Pre-course: before applying
The trainers go into the TESOL course and do occasional sessions so the future trainees can get to know them.
They run general English classes at the university, and everybody on the TESOL courses can apply to be teaching assistants. This gives them the chance to try somethings out.
They’re encouraged to join groups at the university like the Korean society to build greater cultural awareness.
The trainers give a presentation to potential applicants to manage their expectations.
Pre-course: after applying
They cap the number of internal places on the courses, so there’s a range of types of trainee. It’s not just another university module.
They monitor the pre-interview tasks and give feedback.
There is a rigorous selection procedure. There’s no automatic place on the course just because they’ve done the TESOL course. Sometimes they suggest different course types or going away to build knowledge in a certain area before they join the course.
They do language workshops for internal trainees before they join the CELTA. These are ‘language for English language teaching’ – some areas they would need to know.
During the course
(In addition to the normal CELTA courses)
At York St. John, they have a maximum of 10 trainees, capped 50/50 internal and external. There are 2.5 tutors per course. When they have online courses, they leave meetings open during and in between input and TP so that students can continue informal discussions if they want to. They also try to involve professional links, for example somebody coming in to do a Q&A about future careers.
New features they’ve tried to add:
More unassessed TP, with some quite simple tasks given to them by the trainers to develop the confidence and try new things (without all the heavy lesson planning)
‘Copycat’ teaching – using lessons the trainers have delivered in input, which they’ve analysed in input, taking those and delivering those in one of the free TP slots
Increased observations – live observations of the trainers working with the students the trainees know
Input on preparing to teach: ‘What if…’ – case studies, what their actual fears are
Considering what actually makes a good teacher – things they need to know beyond the CELTA
Post-course
University of Sanctuary – they have an ESOL drop-in group, a conversation group. It’s not run by the trainers, but there a lot of links. A lot of CELTA graduates volunteer there.
They also run ongoing TP sessions, which CELTA graduates can volunteer to keep teaching. This is especially useful if they haven’t got a job to go straight into. The people who’ve taken up that opportunity have tended to be from the external half of the group.
They’re looking at setting up a ‘buddy system’ with CELTA graduates and current undergraduate and post-graduate students. Laura has seen that working well in nursing and state education, but they haven’t managed to try it yet.
What did trainees say about building their own confidence?
These helped trainees already:
This is the same slide with their wish list added:
What boosted trainee confidence? The more yellow there is, the more helpful it was for them.
Slightly worrying: reflecting on own progress and student reactions in TP aren’t very helpful. Question from the audience: were you able to go back and investigate those areas further? Is it perhaps because they’re not very good at doing those things?
Ideas from IATEFL 2023
Analysing the criteria and getting trainees to understand what they actually mean in real life (rather than developing their own).
Ring-fenced TP rehearsal time without the tutor, but rehearsing with each other.
Sharing trainee lesson plans with each other. Cathy’s trainees used those to fuel online chat after the lesson.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
We entered the room and saw this on our chairs. What do you think we’ll do with it?
Kim is a teacher educator working with teachers who will go on to teach in the primary and secondary classroom.
What is the design cycle?
When we think about design thinking, we can look around ourselves and find things which are designed.
This is a more elaborate definition:
It’s a non-linear, iterative device that you use to come up with solutions to a problem. You go in circles and revisit stages.
It’s also a methodology for creative problem solving.
What problems might it solve?
A ‘wicked problem’ is a problem that is known for its complexity. It’s often difficult to actually define the problem, and therefore it’s hard to find solutions. Because it’s so complex, because it’s large-scale, it’s difficult to test things out – you have to just jump and try things, and you may find you cause problems as you solve them.
Climate change is a typical example. It’s a ‘super wicked problem’ – an extreme example of this.
What other wicked problems can you think of? There are lots and lots of them!
Design thinking is also useful for ‘everyday’ problems. For example: design the perfect pizza. It might not be a wicked problem, but it is an important problem 🙂
Designing is a process, and there are lots of versions of design cycles.
Let’s design something!
We did a task from the Stanford design school’s website: d.school. It was called the ‘foil challenge’. They have lots of activities you can try in the classroom. This activity is designed for younger learners.
We had 8 minutes to interview each other (4 minutes each) about a favourite food, perhaps one with cultural significance. I learnt about biscuits made in Egypt for Eid, baked together with the whole family and eaten after prayers.
Next we have 2 minutes to sketch a custom eating utensil for our partner to eat their food.
Then we had 2 minutes to create a prototype of our item.
Then 3 minutes to share what we built and get feedback.
Here’s my idea and my partner, Nashwa’s:
This is a complete design cycle.
How can we use this in the language classroom?
For me (Sandy), this cycle feels very useful in a training situation. Teachers can share a problem from their classroom, another teacher can design a solution, then bring it back to the first teacher for feedback.
This is one example of a design cycle (there are many!):
Steps:
Empathise first. Find out needs first: what problems do they have that can be addressed? This is the phase of data collections – interviews, observations, surveys, etc.
Define the problem. Frame it – the way it’s defined will determine possible design solutions. Example: children aren’t moving enough in school. ‘A problem well stated is a problem half-solved’ – Charles Kettering
Ideate. The brainstorming phase – come up with as many ideas as you can that might address the problem that you’ve defined. How many ways can you imagine to address the problem you’ve defined? Example: in-school activities? Out of school activities?
Prototype. Jump in and building something. Design thinking is a bad name. Really is should be called ‘Design action’. Example: A sketch of a school-wide ‘activity trail’
Test. What works with your prototype…and what is lacking? Let your design recipient try it out…and be prepared to find out what is lacking. Then move onto the ‘empathy’ stage for the next cycle. Example: What works with the activity trail? What could be improved?
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Ri and William are talking about the Teacher Portal, a new product from IH London, designed to help new teachers in their development. They’re talking about what they learnt while creating the portal.
William tells a story about feedback he got about training. Your training sessions are like trying to cross a river on stepping stones. As you get more into the input session as a trainer, you start jumping 3-4 stones ahead. By the time you get to the other side of the river, you turn around and everyone is gone. They’ve fallen into the river.
Ri tells a story about doing a CELTA session. A trainee came up and said she didn’t understand reading for detail, but didn’t get the difference between skimming and scanning. Ri replied, don’t worry, nobody understands that. The trainee was understandably frustrated with this and asked Ri why she didn’t change her session. Ri had really internalised that difference and found it really difficult to clarify that difference for somebody else because she’d been working with those concepts for such a long time.
What is the ‘curse of knowledge’?
We did an experiment in pairs. One person tapped a song, and the other person guessed what it was. In an experiment in 1990, only 2.5% of the listeners guessed the song. 50% of the tappers thought the listeners would guess.
When you know something, it’s really hard to imagine not knowing something. As we become more expert, we become much more interested in the complexities and nuances involved.
Why is it important to recognise this?
It has impacts in many areas.
It affects our ability to empathise with people who lack the knowledge. Ri tried to empathise with her trainee, but struggled to understand the confusion.
It affects communication, and the language we use to convey new concepts.
It becomes very difficult to predict other people’s behaviour, especially if they’re an early career teacher. You might think you’re doing something that will make things easier, but you can’t predict their response and can make things harder.
When we look at our own past behaviour, we don’t see it clearly. We are standing in the knowledge that we have now. We don’t necessarily even have empathy for ourselves and our prior experience (how silly was I to do that!)
All of this is a cognitive bias. We’re making assumptions about knowledge, talking to them like they’re experts, and we’re creating a chasm between experienced teachers and early career teachers. They want to be able to bridge and even close this gap.
Some informal research
Ri and William decided to do research into this. They asked experienced teachers to tell them what they wish they’d had at the beginning of their careers. They said:
Help with planning
Learn more about language
Lesson ideas
Mentoring and support
Time to discuss lessons with peers
Peer observation
But in more depth, it was:
The things that were being suggested turned out to actually be the things that the experienced teachers were working on right now. You’re so fixated on what you’re doing now that you can’t look back now.
Even on a four-week course, in the final week teachers will say that they wish they’d had certain input in the first week. They can’t reflect on how little they knew then.
How did they find out more?
An online questionnaire, but also analytics from the teacher portal. The time is how long they’re watching the videos for. It’s minutes at time as that’s all they can take in.
VOW = video of the week
Has professional development met your needs?
Early career teachers said no: they wanted more practical examples of things, real classroom examples, and a limited emphasis on theory.
What is the greatest barrier to your development?
Time!
Because they’re spending all of their available time planning lessons. Spending hours, and for lessons that are potentially not that long.
What would you most like to develop?
There’s no theme here. Different teachers want different things, because they’re all different people.
How do we address the curse of knowledge?
Ask yourself – what am I assuming here? What do we assume about the early career teacher and where they are? Am I predicting what the answer to their question is? Am I really hearing what their question is?
Ask them – guide them towards pinpointing the issue more precisely. Ask them more questions to help them understand their own issue more precisely. Help them figure out what they’re asking about or where their problem is. This helps both them and us communicate more effectively.
Watch behaviour and match what we do to them. For example, if they’re only watching short videos on a portal, we can provide short videos.
More responsive CPD to really explore learning.
More flipped models of CPD (continuous professional development) – less time-bound. For example an hour over the course of the week, rather than a one-hour block. Give them more freedom to develop.
More individualised CPD provision.
Really focus on our own novice experiences. Being very clear with ourselves when we’re learning something new of how difficult that is, and how we feel when we’re struggling to learn new concepts, making notes about the learning process.
What are they providing on the teacher portal?
Shorter, more practical courses. They started with 15ish hour courses. They’ve decided to reduce these. The first and last course are two hours long, the middle one is longer but very practical. They’re modular within that so they can do bits at a time.
They provide a time slot with time to talk. It’s a drop-in session and anybody can come at any time. Anybody can come with any question, and you can deal with them at the point of need.
Short classroom observation videos that they put out once a week, mostly 1-2 minutes. These provide practical examples.
They’ve got practical webinars.
There’s a community where people talk about what they learn.
There are resources created based on what’s in the community.
Summary
If we can reflect back on our own skills, communicate in a more empathetic way, then we’ll have more empathy for our teachers and our past selves.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Laura and Billie are the owners of Otter ELT.
What do we mean by digital materials?
These include many different things: videos, language learning apps, (Busuu, Babbel, Mondly), gamified language-learning apps (Duolingo, BBC bite size games), interactive eBooks, web-based language learning platforms and assessments (FlashAcademy, BlinkLearning)…
It doesn’t include programs on your computer which we use to write things (Word, Excel, Google Docs) or teacher-made resources to use in the classroom (Kahoot, Quizlet, etc.)
The benefits of self-study language apps
Why focus on these?
They give learners:
Independence
The ability to choose their own pace
Choice of how they learn
Opportunity to reinforce learning
A way to experience things they may never be able to in reality
Time to focus on pair/group and consolidation work in class
Learning methods closer to their daily life – meet them in their world, because they’ll be much more engaged
A customised learning experience
Things to consider – print vs. Digital
The learning experience is different: e.g. student’s book, teacher’s book, workbook, vs. Student-facing materials only
Accessibility – screen size, visuals, audio, limited information on screen, overload of information etc.
Learning objectives: must meet the same LO’s with fewer items or activities
User experience and user journey – thinking intuitively, with no teacher! This is particularly important with self-study apps.
Pedagogically it’s likely to be more modular and more bite-size. Nobody will sit on an app for 2 hours with a 15-minute break. It’s completely different staging.
Making our own self-study digital materials
Create your own materials:
Task types
‘Replacing’ the teacher
Rubrics (task instructions)
Accessibility (if it’s not accessible, nobody can do it!)
How would you change this into a digital activity?
There’s no right or wrong activity.
Task types
Which task types might work well in a typical language learning app?
From the audience:
Multiple choice
Drag and drop
Matching activities
Hear words and click on the right spelling
Record yourself speaking
Ordering
Have a selection of different sentence endings – choose who would say what
From a coursebook and turned into digital:
This digitises what already exists, so why are we doing the same thing? We’re not taking into account what digital can do.
For example: throwing letters across a screen to be caught in the right order to make a word. It doesn’t have to just be unscramble the word. As you do this the character catching the letters getting better.
The coursebook-type activities aren’t interesting. Learners will get bored.
‘Replacing’ the teacher
How many questions does a teacher ask each day? 400!
How long does a teacher give students to answer a question? 1.4 seconds
If a teacher asks that many questions, you can see why we give so little time!
There are three types of questions:
How are you? What’s your name? Etc.
Retrieving information
Tell me what you think about your own learning
Question type 1 needs 3 seconds. Question types 2 and 3 need 10 seconds.
Students need more time to learn, and a teacher is often unable to give this length of time. Self-study apps give you this time.
What else do teachers do? From the audience:
Inspire learning
Motivate
Behaviour management
Monitor
Give feedback
Help learners
Explain
On the left are things the app needs to do that the teachers does. On the right are things the app probably doesn’t need to do.
How can we do this on a self-study app?
Use a narrative thread: acts as the teacher to link with previous learning, give any comments or tips, and sets the context for learning. This sets the tone for the lesson. E.g. ‘In the last lesson, we looked at different jobs. Now, let’s see what you remember!’ – This is different to the rubric!
Have clear rubrics – acts as instructions for the activity ‘Type the job in the picture’
Use tips boxes – pop-up help that would typically appear in a teacher’s book ‘Remember to check your spelling!’
What narrative thread, rubric and tip box would you add to these materials?
Accessibility
Font (especially if it can be changed)
Contrast (black on white = not great; giving options)
Photos- only if they carry meaning, no decorative text, one photo per screen, and add alt text (to convey exactly what the photo should be conveying)
Horizontal / vertical (can they use one thumb, or will they need two)
Character / word length
Rubrics (ideally one line long, the fewer words the better)
Task type
Explanation
Scroll down / up
Connecting information and questions
Don’t use colour to convey meaning because we all see colour differently – you can use bold, you can put a different background, you can animate it
Signal specific screen purposes
Dual coding – have an image that has the meaning of the word
Automated marking responses – think about what it says, be encouraging, inspiring and motivating to the students, include tips to help them get it right
Show the materials to other people to make sure it works for them too. There’s no teacher to explain these if a student can’t understand.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Lottie has chosen to talk about money today. She’s experienced financial instability in the past, and she felt like she didn’t see her realities reflected in her educational environment. In her job now, she reviews materials for publishers, but one of the things she sees in materials is certain money myths coming up again and again. At best, they’re inaccurate and quite harmless, but at worst they can be quite harmful.
Writers like Scott Thornbury and John Grey have talked about money before, but through the prism of class. She’s decided to look at things through money to see if it can be more accessible in more contexts.
Global North v. Global South:
Myth in this case is something of a stereotype.
What myths (or stereotypes) about wealth or the lack of it do you think ELT materials perpetuate?
Audiences said:
People live in big houses and excellent gardens
Clothes: global North can afford new clothes/secondhand is a choice, global South don’t
Jobs: ideas like builders aren’t there often
Whenever there’s a ‘real person’, they’re always somebody exceptional: rags to riches, or some adventure that people who could do this because of their privilege
Myth 1: The best thing you can be is an entrepreneur
There’s an overemphasis on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. There is an absence of (admiration for) other jobs, for example more manual and service jobs. There’s a subtle implication that entrepreneurship is ideal.
For example:
Why does it matter?
Implies wealth and financial ambition is an ideal.
Only shows limited realities / options.
It devalues other realities.
It doesn’t reflect all realities.
It may alienate or demotivate students.
If you don’t have the language to talk about your reality, why would you be invested in those materials in any way?
How do we do better?
Include a range of jobs and training options (not just going to university, but apprenticeships, or not going through further training)
Value those jobs
Treat them as something to respect and admire
Examples:
They’re all on an equal footing, and all equally valuable.
Another example:
We’ve got an older person who’s retired, and her job is shown as being enjoyable and valuable. It’s OK to do those jobs for your whole career. It’s not obligatory to be an entrepreneur.
We tend to represent one thing as normal, and others as not.
Myth 2: Everyone has a pretty good standard of living.
‘Everyone’ = people from the cultures which are centred in the materials, which tend to be in the Global North.
Representations
Jobs and life choices
Homes and places represented
Lifestyles, hobbies and experiences represented
Assumptions about students (and teachers)
About what they’ll have
About their lifestyles and homes
For example:
Vocabulary: holidays:
We’re asking students to talk about something they might be able to talk about.
Functional English lessons: going to the cinema and having some food first for example, requires a certain level of wealth. There’s an assumption that there’s a base level of wealth.
Why does it matter?
Feeds into hidden curriculum about money ( a middle-class reality is normal and appropriate, and anything else doesn’t belong)
Teaches unrealistic view of certain countries (people arrive in the UK with the idea it’s wealthy, for example)
Excludes some activities
Makes activities unachievable
Doesn’t involve all students
Why can’t we show this kitchen?
Increase our vocabulary set:
Allow students to add their own vocabulary
Allow them to talk about something abstract, not personal
Add a critical question – there could be a longer task here, considering here e.g. disability access, safety for LGBTQIA+
Why not teach this as a functional phrase?
So…
Not having money is currently only shown as extremes at the moment.
Myth 3: Everywhere except ‘the West’ is poor
This isn’t true for all textbooks, but they are common stereotypes.
Countries in the Global South are seen as places where people go in their gap year, or go on holiday. Or there’s a specific relationship of charity. If this is the only view we have, this is misleading.
Why does this matter?
If a student only sees that representation of that country and they never see anything else about it, the only idea they’ll have is that that country is poor. It tells a story of poverty without any context. It reinforces myths about the Global NOrth and Global South.
How can we do better?
Show different financial realities for a range of places.
Show people helping themselves.
Tell other stories incidentally about other places.
(+ 1 more)
An example of materials by Dr. Amina Douidi:
There are lots of things here we could use in our materials, in different kinds of units. Telling different stories about places can break the false narratives.
Conclusions
Inclusion 101 = don’t tell single stories!
Lottie will be running a course about writing inclusive ELT materials.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
The talk title was slightly different but I was a couple of minutes late!
Management are at the top, with teachers at the bottom of an organisation. Top-down, we prioritise management needs. Bottom-up, we prioritise teacher needs. IN Jim’s organisation, they’ve tried to meet both sets of needs.
Here are other ways of conceptualising the LTO:
For example: Front line: teachers are where our business is.
Identifying needs – Top-down
Mission statement
When Jim joined the LTO, they didn’t have a development programme. He wanted to look at the mission statement, but the one they had wasn’t very informative for the organisation, the customers or the teachers. Teachers had separate goals.
They wrote a much more in-depth one. It took about 6 months to draft this collaboratively, and then they started to share it. Their mission statement should collect everything they need as an organisation to move forwards, conveying their goals.
If the organisation doesn’t have one, you should put it together: have a workshop to do it collaboratively. If teachers have a say in the mission statement, there’s more of an element of buy-in.
This is not a static document – it’s updated every year.
Parent / Student questionnaires
We normally collect data on satisfaction. They wanted to go deeper into the experience. This reveals faults in management, e.g. communication.
They have about 400 students. They send out Google forms at least once a term, and get about a 3% response rate. They take a 10% sample from each teacher and chat to the students. They also use FlipGrid to give time to spontaneously respond.
Teacher end-of-course feedback forms
These give teachers voice in how the courses are implemented. The teachers are the ones who understand how management processes are implemented on the grounds.
These forms are useful for collecting data on the materials, was the syllabus clear, was there enough support from management. They do it at the end of every course, including individual courses which they plan the syllabus for.
Identifying needs – bottom-up
Development programme preferences
Jim has adapted a form from John Hughes. They give them a list of potential themes for workshops, and give them a certain amount of marks to allocate to the different possible workshops. He included questions about theory v. Practical solutions.
Teacher self-assessment
Jim adapted a form from ELT Concourse. They self-assess to say their level of knowledge in different areas.
Jim gave them some things that they should know at each of the levels to help them come up with a more realistic score.
The teacher I’d like to be
They consider ‘the teacher I was’ and ‘the teacher I’d like to be’. On these forms, they put a cross to show where they think they are. These forms are collected and handed back at the end of the year so teachers can see how they’ve progressed.
With all of these tools, no single one is perfect. Use them together.
Evaluating the programme
Termly SWOT management meetings
When you have a SWOT meeting, focus on teachers, management and administration, and learners. This is good for both evaluating and for identifying potential new needs.
End-of-term questionnaires
There’ll be a question on each of these which changes every term based on something specific which they’ve done that term in the PD programme. These questionnaires are given to both teachers and students, for example on using the coursebook if that’s the training focus.
Observations
Jim believes observations are really powerful, but only when they’re based on co-constructed criteria.
The observations can tell us whether there’s evidence of learning.
We need to collect data from the learners too about how they feel the lessons went.
This is where the co-constructed action points are essential too in terms of providing control to the teachers and identifying other needs. Our job as managers and trainers is to guide teachers to their own action points.
Bringing it all together
Prioritising bottom-up needs leads to happier teachers and better teaching, which leads to better learning, which leads to more business.
Development costs money, but if done correctly, it makes money. Tell the school owners!
Process 1: start of the year
Most of these things can be done in induction week, apart from the snapshot observations.
Based on the data they collect here, they create development programme aims for Term 1 and create the management calendar.
The workshop preferences form is created from the needs the teachers identified.
This is their management calendar:
Process: End of term 1/2
They collect the data, send out the workshop preferences and update their plans for the next term.
Process 3: End of the year
The ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ is an end-of-year meeting to encourage teachers to reflect, in person if possible.
Some evaluation questions
These will change depending on the content and the aims you’re trying to meet.
What about the learners?
We need to be careful about how we perceive and ‘value’ accountability. If we’re investing money in something, we need to see results over time.
Areas you can possibly consider:
Exam results (maybe!)
Learning behaviour (attendance, learning strategies – for acute problems, such as issues with a specific class, this really helps)
Satisfaction (data collection is your friend!)
More learners (hopefully this will happen over time!)
Reflection
A summary of the tools from this session. What could you implement in your context? Put it in the briefcase. If it’s interesting, but you can’t use it yet, put it in the freezer. It you can’t use it, put it in the bin.
Jim’s session was (obviously!) fascinating, and I wish I was in a position to use the ideas now! Find out more at http://www.spongeelt.org
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
James started to think about this talk 10-12 years ago, when he started to get interested in scientific scepticism, and learning more about the scientific approach. He found that married with his world view – it seemed to make sense to him. It affects how he sees the world around him, including his teaching.
When he was teaching and opened the coursebook and saw ‘science-y’ topics, he would think about how they deal with these topics. As he started to write those materials for himself, he tried to be conscious of these things.
This tweet appeared in James’s feed recently:
The tweeter got a lot of criticism for the line ‘It’s so important teachers critique their curriculum’ – teachers are underpaid and working hard, it’s not necessarily their job. The materials should have gone through the fact-checking process before they arrive with the teacher.
Our role as materials writers is to get the materials ready for the teachers to use.
In ELT, we have a huge variety of topics available for us to choose from: history, travel, etc.
If you look at coursebooks now, there would probably be a shift in topics and how courses are described. This description is from around 2010, and is clearly a language course:
This description is from a book now:
If you asked somebody outside ELT what this person was going to learn, they wouldn’t mention anything about language. James finds this very interesting.
Our ambitions as language teachers and materials writers has changed – we’re more and more ambitious now.
If we take ‘Curriculum development in language teaching’ by Richards in 2001, when he talks about topic-based syllabuses it’s on 2 pages out of 300+. Now coursebooks are mostly around a topic-based syllabus [hmmm, not sure about this!]
In the past it would have been language-first or language-only, but now it’s more likely to be topic-first.
The examples Richards gives of topics from a course is from 1989:
Nuclear power was one that particularly interested James, because Germany has an interesting relationship with nuclear power.
Nuclear power has these pros and cons now:
James wonders what those nuclear power materials would have looked like in Germany in 1989, and what might they look like now.
He mocked up a couple of activities. In your context, do you think these materials would be accepted / published?
As an editor, James points out that the first question is difficult to answer and the second invites learners to have an opinion on something that they wouldn’t be qualified to have an opinion on. It invites space for doubt which isn’t appropriate based on the evidence.
Another activity:
Two texts of equal size, giving them equal weight, but the scientific consensus is not equally weighted. It’s a false equivalency – they’re not the same, and by presenting the materials like this, you validate that equality.
Would this be published? Would you be surprised to see this in a coursebook? James thinks maybe.
Here’s another subject: the climate crisis.
Most people accept that the climate crisis is an issue because they accept the evidence.
James used ‘climate change’ on purpose, because he doesn’t like it. ‘Affect your life’ leaves space for people to say ‘I’m alright, so what’s the problem?’ The third question suggests that some people are catastrophising the problem.
The reading:
James thinks it’s less likely that this would be published, but that’s probably because this is a topic which is much more agreed upon.
The same thing, but about genetically modified food:
Would this get through? The scientific evidence on GMOs is about the same as the climate crisis. Maybe this would get through – James has seen lessons with materials about GMOs which aren’t really based in the science.
What about astrology? ‘Science-y’ – what’s the harm? Maybe this invites magical thinking and can be quite harmful. Or alternative medicine? James has seen those lessons:
These ones probably won’t be a problem in materials. Unless they’re in a conspiracy theories lesson, these are unlikely to appear in coursebooks:
But these ones are topics where we can be a bit woolly in our materials:
James has seen lessons which don’t really reflect the scientific evidence. What is the purpose of some of these topics from an educational point of view? It’s not that they can’t be written, but they need to be written very carefully.j
‘Conspiratorial thinking’ = why do some people believe in conspiracy theories? Don’t include ‘What conspiracy theories have you heard of?’ – that provides a space for people to share them and for them to be passed on.
There’s a crisis in psychological research, as many studies haven’t been able to be replicated.
Recommendations for an evidence-based approach to materials writing
The scientific process is the best method available for acquiring knowledge.
Expertise is respected.
The scientific consensus must be respected in our materials.
Part of this process if to check reliable sources to the best of our ability.
Personal agendas must be ignored. What is our weakness from the list of areas?
The accuracy of information in our lessons is vital. We are created materials for an educational environment. Our lessons have weight, and students believe what they read. Our focus is on language, but if we want to be more topic-based we have to be very careful with our information.
These are my notes from this plenary. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Lesley says this area of ELT is sidelined, it irritates her and she’s not sure why. ESOL trainers mentioned a lack of suitable materials, piecemeal training, being paid very poorly or being volunteers, complex situations for students, growing anti-immigrant rhetoric, and a wide range of other issues. ESOL teachers need to engage with the broader contexts in which their students live and work. THey need to understand a huge range of issues.
Challenges that ESOL teachers and students face
There is an unprecedented movement of people around the globe due to war, poverty, violence, climate change, and persecution.
The number of English language classes for this context has grown exponentially. Low English proficiency is a significant predictor of stress for newcomers to countries (Lesley is based in the US). It affects their legal status.
Immigration is:
This is really evident in all ESOL classes. The teachers need to navigate a wide range of challenges and needs.
Lesley’s experience in the field
Lesley works at a state university in New York. There are over 5000 ESOL students, primarily from South and Central America, and a growing body of people seeking asylum from Venezuela and Ukraine. It’s called the Gateway Building, and is supposed to represent welcoming open arms.
The students are:
Super-diverse
Different cultural, education, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds
Varying levels of literacy int heir first languages, different education experiences, possibly interrupted
Some have experienced trauma
Many are in the US alone
They do not only have linguistic needs. It’s not usually their biggest priority
They might never go home, see their family, have no money, have left everything behind, and they can’t speak the language in the place they’ve moved to.
And then there’s this:
The things the students are trying to do to fit in are made even harder by racism and ablist ideas that other, vilify and exclude. It’s not about belonging, but about assimilation. Immigrants are considered less and not able if they don’t speak English.
This is not new:
Being Americanised is equated as learning English. It’s seen as being a loyal and patriotic thing to do.
The analogy of being a melting pot is not multicultural. It’s that we’re melting together.
The trope that’s developed is ‘Them’ and ‘Us’
ESOL teachers are therefore in a very difficult position, in the eye of the storm. Going into a class is actually quite complicated. Teaching English has become a very politicised act.
In an ESOL classroom, it’s not just about focussing on linguistic objectives.
How we prepare teachers for the ESOL classroom
Teachers need to engage in the larger social, institutional, political contexts, which as mentioned previously involve public opinion, policies, politics and power.
We need to become allies in the classroom, and compensate for what the students see outside.
We need to advocate in the classroom.
We need to become activists and stand up for our students.
What
Connections
If we make connections with our students, it not only means empathy, but getting a deep awareness of the whole person.
Connections come before content.
Originally this plenary was going to be called ‘invisible people’, because people often don’t see the immigrants who are all around them.
A sense of community – often the classroom is their community.
See people as individuals.
‘Sharing words’ is a programme they created. MA students go into classrooms and listen to the stories of the learners.
Lesley told us a story about Juan’s life, how shocked she was by his journey. But then he was shocked by her decision to leave a good country and her family. She realised in that moment what privilege really was.
This situates us. Listening to stories and telling stories can help the teachers understand their students, and help learners to remember the good things about their countries. Our stories are our narratives, our identities.
Curriculum
A curriculum in the ESOL classroom is extremely flexible, bending and twisting with what’s in the classroom. They have to be both relevant and responsive to what the students need at any given time.
It also needs to be reflective, with a critical awareness of the materials we are using, the language that we use in class, the visuals that our students are looking at and so forth. We need to think about our own positionaliity, and realise that our positions are likely to be very different to our learners.
Positionality
Disrupting tropes and not perpetuating them: the language, the images…
There is therefore a need for trainees to have an awareness of sociopolitical issues.
Lesley is constantly trying to put herself in her students’ position so she can better understand how to help them.
Power
Power is a huge issue.
There is hierarchy within hierarchy within hierarchy.
Belonging and membership
This is Henry Ford’s melting pot again, what we don’t want:
Learning a language is additive, it’s not subtractive.
What do we mean by belong?
Who decides?
Language is seen as a problem (Hornberger, 1990)
Belonging is a fundamental need.
One dominant language…
Washing away our identity. This is a problem when we try to replace another language with English.
Cultural responsiveness
A great activity (we did this) is to say Hello in as many languages as possible, or another word. It helps learners to realise that different languages are important. We need to develop an asset mindset – multiple languages are an asset.
It was lovely to see Juan dance 🙂
Lesley asked the learners to bring something from their culture. Juan bought music and wanted to dance. He’s been in the country for 20 years, and is in the beginner class – who has been welcoming to him? Letting him dance elevates him and helps him to feel good about this.
We listened to Carlos talking about his English. He’s been in the US for 20 years without learning English, because nobody stimulated him. He’s been a food server for many years, and his family are in Peru. He had a problem with his boss and couldn’t defend himself, which was the prompt to learn English. It’s very challenging for him – it’s difficult to estimate how hard it can be to learn. He’s worked hard in the country for this length of time, but didn’t feel like he belonged until he learnt English.
Lesley is working on having more teachers like Fabiola, who translated for Carlos, rather than like her from abroad.
International mindedness
This is an installation of backpacks that have been abandoned on the border between Mexico and the US:
They all show hope, and were all abandoned.
Summary
Despite all of these problems, ESOL teachers are not failing their ESOL students.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
The quote was from one of the participants.
The Chilean context, including standardisation
ELTEd =English Language Teaching Education
1998: a reform said they would concentrate on listening and reading (80%), with 20% on speaking and writing
2012 was the most recent curriculum changes. Now they’re focussing on all communicative skills.
By the end of primary students have A2, by the end of secondary they should have B1.
The curriculum is presented in two documents. The Curricular Bases are compulsory for all schools. The other document is Study Programmes which is optional – schools can follow this or their own, but they have to meet the Curricular Bases.
Study programmes specify communicative approaches, and suggest areas like the Natural Approach, Content Based Instruction, TBLT, Cooperative Language LEarning.
They also mention that students should develop literary and non-literary texts.
Standardisation of Teacher Education
Standards involve:
Current views about teaching and learning
Standardised tests measuring the quality fo teachers upon finishing their teacher education courses
The obligatory accreditation of all teacher education courses (all 5 year, all by universities – for teaching in state schools)
The standardised tests for the teachers include both linguistic and language teaching competences. The language level is minimum C1. They need to understand communicative language teaching approaches. They need to develop the learnr’s communicative skills in an integrated fashion. They need to be able to select, adapt and design language teaching materials. There needs to be multiculturality to promote the use of English as a vehicle to exchange and represent culture as well as value and respect the self and others.
Presence of Materials Development in ELTEd
25 universities were offering ELTEd programmes in 2019, but only 3 had a specific module about materials development. The handbooks they use for the courses tend to look at how to evaluate textbooks and how to use textbooks, but not designing materials. So how do (preservice) teachers learn to design teaching materials? (My MA dissertation question too!)
Meaning and content in materials: What do teachers do?
Santos research e.g. Brazilian learners saw pictures of Brazilians in images that were stereotypical, but this wasn’t questioned or problematised in the classroom when the materials were used.
Research questions
Luis worked with 8 pre-service teachers. He conducted a focus group with 6 teachers in year 4, and more (I missed this). The course he studied involved a lot of areas, but not materials design.
Findings
Topics and themes are subjugated to discrete language points. Materials responded to the need of working with the content and grammar, and secondly the text. Another person said ‘What matters is not the topic itself, but the development of English.’
The notion of ‘content’ seemed to be in line with ‘discrete language’ rather than topics. For example, when asked what content meant, one person said ‘present perfect’, for example.
In the school placements, this notion of content was reinforced by the school mentors. For example, one mentor talked about having the last word on the topic, the verb tense.
There’s no mention of lexis, only grammar.
The pre-service teachers said they were using the national curriculum as a basis to decide what to put into their materials.
The Curricular Bases has a detailed description of the language items, but only a broad brush mention of the topics: global interests and other cultures.
The Study Programmes has broad guidance on topics, but detailed specifics regarding the language.
‘Global interests and other cultures’ is also not specific.
Findings: ELTEd Programme
The teacher education programme applies international exams to measure the increase in language levels.
There’s backwash here from the Cambridge C1 Advanced into the teacher education programme.
Thematic content took a secondary role in the pre-service teachers’ design of materials, being subordinated to discrete language.
They’re exposed to a lot of materials with a focus on grammar, so because they’re taught like that, they teach like that.
Other factors influencing the role given to thematic content:
There are mismatches between how teachers are taught and how they’re told to teach in theory.
The adoption of international exams to evaluate teachers’ linguistic competency leads to an apprenticeship of observation (they’re being exposed to a language learning experience that’s driven by linguistic concerns, pushing them towards an exam). Exams, accreditation, standards etc. are mechanisms of perform activity (Ball, 2003) and compartmentalisation of ELTEd subject matter (Donato, 2009) which undermines the pre-service teachers’ development of communicative pedagogies.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
The QR code in the image will give you all of the slides (if it’s clear enough!)
Danny loves using texts in the classroom. He’s talking about learner-generated texts in the classroom today. These are co-created texts by learners with the support of the teacher during the lesson.
How do we generate a text in class
From an image: create dialogues based on the characters, take the perspectives.
From a piece of music.
From learner stories and experiences.
From tasks.
Replication tasks – students have read a text, then recreate the same genre.
Dictogloss / grammaring / information gaps – Danny won’t include those though, as the texts don’t come from the learners’ heads.
Text 1: Food disasters
Talk about how good the learners are at cooking. Do they have a speciality?
Show them the picture. What happened?
Imagine this is you. What were you making? Why were you making it? Who’s it for? What happened?
(Good A2, B1 learners will probably do this task)
Danny will then gather the ideas from the learners to create a single text.
[Danny said at the end that this is a lovely way to teach – you’re incredibly busy in the lesson, but have very little to do before it. This lesson is just a picture, and everything else happens during the lesson.]
Lesson procedure
Here’s an example a learner produced:
The text the learners produced was very similar to the length in the coursebook.
Exploring reasons in the text
Why are we using…
…the past continuous?
…the past simple?
…the past perfect?
Danny explores that with his learners.
The rules Danny’s group came up with:
These wouldn’t come up in a grammar book, but the learners did well.
Here’s another group’s response:
Past perfect was the rewind to how the problem was caused.
If they were using the coursebook, they wouldn’t be looking as deeply into the genre.
A genre-based approach
In a way this is a form of ‘move analysis’ as the learners identify structural and linguistic regularities within a genre by analysing texts representing that particular genre. (Tardy and Swales, 2014)
A replication task follows – learners make their own texts. They chose their own image and produced their own food disaster story.
How are these forms dealt with in the coursebook?
The rules are super complicated. They are separated into different units.
The rules the learners come up with are much more in line with the genre.
What emergent language is?
Based on learner questions [I missed the rest of the slide!]
Emergent language then becomes input language for the next day. This image always causes problems between slipped, spilt, fell/feel over, tripped, knocked over, dropped, smashed etc.
Text 2: The best job in the world
B1 group of students
This is the task:
Danny got them to create a pitch and give it, rather than make a video.
You can roughly predict the language that might come up. What would you include?
Lesson procedure:
Language that comes up: can, present simple, used to/would, present perfect.
Reasons for this language in an interview or pitch: we’re using ‘can’ for skills and abilities. Present simple: this is who I am, my personality, my character. My experience: present perfect, used to and would. Extended Danny’s understanding of ‘used to’ into experience.
Brad Barker decided to write a text based on what the students told him. He wrote the text at home, then they discussed it afterwards.
Mel Lamb got learners to record themselves talking about their future plans. They then listened to the recording and mapped the language they used onto the matrix.
Anne-Sophie Cocault presented at IATEFL 2022. She gave students an existing game without the rules. They create they own rules and create a poster of those rules.
Why exploit learner-generated texts?
By co-constructing the text publicly, the errors are dealt with at a text level, not at sentence level. (Norrington-Davies, 2016)
Learners are exploiring reasons form the perspective of the writer or speaker within the genre.
Models of language are personal and relevant for students.
Focus on form/meaning/message is a collective endeavour (both students and teacher).
Language input is provided at the point of need. You’re monitoring a lot!
Learners go beyond information they’ve been given and create knowledge that is new for them – so they are repairing or adding to mental models learners have of language in their heads (see Swain, 2010).
Learners have a record of the text and language focus – the language focus lives under the text in their notebooks. Their records are records of lessons, not separate parts.
Things to consider
Prepare for the grammar, look out for the lexis. The grammar is broadly predictable, but the lexis might be less predictable.
Reconstructing the text can take time, sometimes across a couple of lessons.
Eliciting students’ ideas rather than specific words or sentences. ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Who’s she cooking for?’, rather than ‘Give me your first sentence.’D
Draw on what you have heard as you monitor.
Prepare for negotiation and questions (Danny, can I use…? Why can’t I use…?)
Embrace the mess and uncertainty.
Danny’s books
‘Working with emergent language’ with Richard Chinn
‘From Rules to Reasons’
Both of those books can help you to understand these ideas. I’d definitely recommend them!
Sandy Millin 