Disrupting the commonplace: embedding critical literacy within language education – Rose Aylett (IATEFL Brighton 2024)

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.

Windows, frames and mirrors: designing a CPD programme that works – Niki Joseph (IATEFL Brighton 2024)

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.

Zarina Subhan – Because you’re all worth it!

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.

Zarina’s closing statement

IATEFL Brighton 2024 day 2 – IATEFL live online

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!

The AI factor: Have we figured it out yet? – Vicky Saumell (IATEFL Brighton 2024 plenary)

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.

IATEFL Brighton 2024 day 1 – IATEFL live online

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!)

I was also pleased to find out that there will be a livestreamed event from the conference on the British Council Teaching English pages – What’s the future of English language learning in the age of AI?

IATEFL MaWSIG PCE 2024: Looking forward, looking back

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:

Here are some sample teacher’s notes with tips about emergent language, taken from materials created by Silvina Mascitti and Lewis Jaquest, helping teachers listen for meaning:

You can support teachers with frameworks like this:

Generating possible language like this:

• Functional Language: Turn taking/ expressing opinions/ asking for ideas/ agreeing disagreeing…
• Grammatical Structures: Conditionals/ comparatives…
• 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!

IATEFL is… laughter (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 summary)

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)

Great tips for academic management and teacher educators about meeting everyone’s needs by @elt_sponge #iatefl2023 pic.twitter.com/e7aD8FnpGo

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• 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).

Good food for thought by James Taylor this morning #iatefl2023 @theteacherjames @MaWSIG pic.twitter.com/L8FxyVMXKP

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• 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

— Paula Rebolledo (@prebolledoc) April 20, 2023

• 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.]

Really inspiring workshop, thanks Peter! #iatefl2023 @MaWSIG pic.twitter.com/oxyB2MAPoE

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 20, 2023

• 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

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 19, 2023

• 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.

Great guidelines for designing online learning materials presented by Carol Lethaby #iatefl2023 pic.twitter.com/WEkZ4hjVNY

— Jo Szoke (@jo_shortnsimple) April 19, 2023

Thank you

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.

Take Your Time Delta mini meet-up: Ciaran, Sandy, Pippa, Claire

Thank you to Rose Aylett for mentioning my lessons you can watch online blogpost. One day I’ll have time to update it!

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!

Race, popular culture and ESL in a post-George Floyd moment – Awad Ibrahim (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

What does race have to do with IATEFL?

Awad’s answer: Everything.

Integrating six thinking hats into planning argumentative writing in EFL – Chang Liu (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Blue = sky, sea = process, reflective thinking.

White = facts

Red = heart = feelings

Yellow = sunflowers, sunshine = values, positive things, benefits, potential advantages

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.

Building confidence in young and inexperienced trainers – Laura Khaddi (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Using the design cycle in the English language classroom – Kimberly Chopin (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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?

Other versions show it as more of a cycle:

Advantages of using the design cycle

Further resources:

Breaking the curse of knowledge: what new teachers really need – Ri Willoughby and William Morrow (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

How to write effective and engaging digital materials – Laura Broadbent and Billie Jago (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Three money myths that ELT materials could do without – Lottie Galpin (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Top-down and bottom-up needs in a language institute – Jim Fuller (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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

Accurate or biased? How do ELT materials deal with science? – James Taylor (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Sharing words and worlds: ESOl teachers as allies, advocates and activists – Lesley Painter-Farrell (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 plenary summary)

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.

International mindedness is what we need.

We celebrate we don’t negate,

We protect rather than reject,

We do not see differences as deficiencies,

We lift up and include.

We see ourselves in our students.I

t could be us.

Those backpacks are our backpacks.

‘First the grammar, second the text’: exploring student-teachers’ materials design – Luis Carabantes (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Implications for practice

Exploring reasons and emergent language in learner-generated texts – Danny Norrington-Davies (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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!)

https://dannynorringtondavies.wordpress.com/

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!

Adventures in WhatsApp: PRELIM 2 Guinea 2022 – Anna Young & Kristina Smith, Abdoulaye Konate (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

This talk is particularly interesting for me as I was doing a parallel project with Kristina creating WhatsApp materials for a similar low-resource context in Sylhet in Bangladesh at the same time as this Guinea project was happening.

Kristina was responsible for the overall design and did the liaison with all the stakeholders, wrote the questionnaires and did the research. Anna wrote most of the materials and delivered everything on the WhatsApp channel. Abdoulaye Konate is in charge of the teachers association in Guinea and coordinated it from that end. He’s not presenting but was very involved.

Some of the other influences were Prof Karin, Dr Abd Karim Alias. The video she watchied on teaching with WhatsApp and Telegram during COVID times. Colm Downs also talked about Emergency Remote Teaching using WhatsApp and Emojis. These are talks you can watch online.

PRELIM = Partnered Remote Language Improvement. Www.englishuk.com/prelim-project

Bell in the UK was paired with GETC: Guinea English Teacher’s Club. There were 766 registered English teachers in Guinea, and 562 of them were GTEC members, and were already organised in WhatsApp groups.

The aim of the course was to improve their confidence using English in the classroom. It was fluency-oriented.

Kristina recommends http;//thetruesize.com for this kind of map!

Challenges for English teachers in Guinea:

• Large classes (80-130) – teachers there wanted more chairs and desks – people sit on the floor
• Mixed age groups – different ages for starting school
• French is the lingua Franca, language of education, so they get English later
• Restricted access to books (only the teacher), visual aids, stationery items
• Internet access – patchy and expensive

Teachers had smartphones, and the project was able to provide some money to buy data.

Opportunities for the course:

• Highly motivated teachers
• Organised ETA
• GTEC already use WhatsApp groups
• Teachers had smartphones

Across the week

They started every week with a culture topic. E.g. My garden, my local market, my house.

In the middle of every week, they looked at an area of classroom language. How could you do more in English in the classroom?

On Fridays there was a pronunciation focus. These were focussed on areas which are typical problems for French speakers of English.

After every two weeks, there should be one week break for people to catch up. That extra week stops teachers from dropping out.

Tips for materials writing for this online group

Write all of your materials before you start.

They had 6 WhatsApp groups:

• 1 which was a training channel – where the materials were shared
• 4 were class groups – where the materials were responded to
• 1 was for the course assistants – 2 course assistants in each group. They read all of the materials and kept track of attendance.

WhatsApp materials

Culture Mondays:

• Your house, garden and surroundings
• Breakfast, lunch and dinner
• etc.

All of the input was through voice notes and text., so they could both see and hear.

There was a always a model, then it was handed over to them. They could answer as a voice note or text. They then had an extra task to ensure learners would read / listen to each other’s messages.

Here’s an example of what they produced:

Tuesday-Thursday: English language for teachers/

Each week there was a tick list to help them see the list of topics. There was some information (input) with both voice and text, then there was a task for the teachers to do.

By practising with a partner on WhatsApp, they can build confidence to be able to do this in the classroom.

Here’s an example of what they produced.

This also naturally fed into classroom activities. It built classroom language, showed a model of what the student and the teacher might say, both as a voice recording and a text. Taking pictures from paper was useful, as this was what the teachers would do. There was nothing flashy with technology.

Friday was ‘emoji Friday’:

They delivered this live on WhatsApp and the stories would pop up there.

Encourage questions to build rapport.

These are some of the pronunciation areas they worked on:

The materials looked like this:/

Here was a pronunciation task:

Once they’d done something as a task themselves in the WhatsApp group, they then tried the same activity with their students in class and reflected on this. These are some example of what they produced:

The final piece each week was a reflection task:

There was also a weekly Zoom class even though they knew lots of people couldn’t necessarily attend. It gave those who could the chance to experience Zoom. They would preview some of the games and activities they would show during the week. They would demonstrate it in the main room, then try them out in breakout rooms. Teachers could then take them into class.

Benefits of WhatsApp for training

Teachers had choice. Some chose to do things in notebooks and take photos. Some decided to do it as pairwork in WhatsApp. Some decided to do it as videos, showing their class doing things. This showed an immediate impact.

Rapport can be a big concern. On WhatsApp, getting to know you activities are really important. Also responding to each other’s messages. You don’t have to do as much intervention as a tutor – others do the intervention, and you respond to the ones that have no response.

Resources – find out what they have, and use that as the basis for your materials.

Give instructions by doing things step by step.

Time management – give yourself a time limit with each group so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Be you! Start the lesson in the same way as you normally would. Be human.

Monitor the channels.

You’ll see an immediate impact!

An audience member from Cameroon talked about the WhatsApp group they run. They have an awards ceremony for the most active teachers in their PD WhatsApp groups.

Lean on me: Stories of coaching, mentoring and teacher resilience – Divya Madhavan (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 plenary summary)

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.

Coaching and mentoring: metaphors for learning on those around us – this is Divya’s topic today. She tells us that ELT is different to other types of teaching. Many of us get qualified as we’re already teaching, and many of us pay our own way for professional development, unlike other types of teaching where people get qualified first then start teaching. ‘We are fuelled by a deep love of teaching and this infinite joy in discovering new dimensions to teaching and learning’ – I agree with Divya!

‘Many of the everyday choices we all make influence how the people around us grow.’

One of the things that Divya has noticed over the last few years is a levelling of the playing field when it comes to questions of diversity: different nationalities, different colours, and more. The conversation on diversity is just beginning, but it’s already got better. The journey is messy, change is messy, because human beings are messy. ‘Every human success is built on mess.’

Mess – there are many of them in ELT:

• Severely low-resourced contexts
• The problems of people having to work more than one job to make ends meet

In all this mess, we still show up for our students. Teachers showing up is what has kept education moving forward.

‘Teachers showing up deserves celebration, and showing up for each other deserves recognition’

‘English is now everyone’s language, infused with the diversity that makes it for everyone now.’

Clear communication has never been more essential to the advancement of society, and as teachers of language we help with this.

Coaching and mentoring are relevant to our context because they help us to envisage different roles teachers can take.

What is coaching?

Coaches zone in, they help people find their zone and flourish within it.

There is a specific area that needs to evolve, and the coach’s role is to guide their client / person / etc. within this area.

She’s disassociating from the professional qualifications here, as that’s a move in a different professional area. Instead, it’s about coaching as part of your other roles.

You don’t need to have subject knowledge, but rather the skills to encourage others.

This is perhaps the more natural relationship to have with our students.

What is mentoring?

Mentors zoom out and work across multiple zones, with multiple goals.

Having a mentor is like having your own special Yoda, who guides you through the ups and downs of life.

Subject knowledge is key. You need somebody who knows their stuff to guide the mentee.

This is perhaps the more natural relationship to have with other teachers.

Showing up for students

‘Going-the-extra-mile gestures are universal in the world of teaching.’

Examples: Divya says she loves her students, and therefore she often does things that go above and beyond. For example, providing cake for her debating team. Spending evenings and weekends on creating materials that are special for her students.

Who shows up for teachers?

Other teachers!

Divya will tell us about four people who changed her world as a teacher. She interviewed each of these four teachers as she prepared for this talk.

Four philosophies that are key to teacher resilience:

• Trust
• Confidence
• Courage
• Perseverance

Vicky Saumell: Story of Trust

Vicky said: Mentoring was needed to help teachers make the mindset shift for an effective implementation of project-based learning across her school. Rather than trying to push the change top-down, she went to her most experienced teacher, she asked them what they thought of the idea and how it might influence the school. Vicky says it’s about the trust you build as a leader. Once she’d got the most experienced teacher on board, it was easier to get the rest of the team on board.

We need to understand teachers’ workloads before we try to make changes. In Argentina, where Vicky works, many teachers work in 3 or 4 schools, each with their own requirements. You need to take that into account when you’re making changes.

A resilient teacher is open to change, to experimenting and trying new things.

A resilient community is one that supports their teachers in these struggles.

Divya learnt that change is implemented by getting new habits. This can only work with teachers if they are trusted to do it. Trust among teachers is cultivated, it’s demonstrated, it’s prolonged once it’s earned.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

James Clear

Barb Sakamoto: Story of Confidence

Barb is one of the forces behind iTDi, with ideas like community building.

Barb says: The most successful teachers and trainers create a community in their classroom. It’s a place where the members of the community feel safe, they can make mistakes without people making fun of them, and they feel like they belong. Sometimes it’s the only safe place.

You can’t be a teacher without learning. Any good teacher is always learning. But ultimately, the one thing that a teacher can do that other people cannot, is teach! If you bring a group of teachers together, they will teach each other – that becomes mentoring.

Community is wherever the teachers are. When iTDi had a clunky forum, teachers would still connect in other places. When they started, teachers might not have ever met anybody online who they hadn’t already met in person. They started to form their own communities.

If people believe in what you have to say, you start to have confidence. Once you have confidence, you start to talk to other people. You start to do webinars, go to conferences, etc. You can do this because you have a ‘cheering section’ – people who genuinely believe you are worth listening to.

Divya learnt: that we need to give people the space to develop and build their confidence. Where is confidence built? In the social environment of a classroom.

In many education management contexts, we need to be reminded of the lessons that critical pedagogy has for us.

Patricia Angoy, Eswatini: Story of Courage

She’s the first woman of colour to have headed the school she worked at.

Patricia says: A teacher who has been very resilient in one school may not be resilient in another because of the environment in the school. One of the roles of a leader in a school is to create an environment where teachers feel safe and can feel that they can be who they want to be. You can try things out, perhaps fail, and know that there is a whole body of people who will support you to be successful with your students.

When somebody joins Patricia’s school, she always asks them ‘Why are you here?’ She’s looking for answers to allow them to be a community, to find out what they have in common.

Coming together every day, making sure everybody was OK (even in a situation of social unrest), created a community. They knew they were there for each other. People began to step up in ways Patricia couldn’t have imagined otherwise. You begin to understand the different talents you have as an individual and as a professional. When people start to understand how much they have to give, that’s very rewarding for Patricia too. You do these things together – you’re not the expert.

Although we’re a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic world, the way in which schooling is done hasn’t really changed over the last 100 years or so, and the power is still in the hands of very few. It’s important for us to open up education to what it really is: the people who are education. Representation isn’t enough. There needs to be a huge shift in decolonising education, in a way that is accepting of others.

Divya learnt: we all need courage when we show up. Having courage shapes our decisions: the battles we choose to fight, the ones we choose to lose, the ones we come back to later, and the ones we leave behind. Courage is speaking up and speaking out when necessary.

Divya has learnt a lot from reading Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paolo Freire. It helps her to recentre.

Each of our students should leave our classrooms a small step closer to being a change agent in the world.

The English language is powerful currency, and as English language teachers we shape its exchange rate. We need courage to make these decisions.

Maggie Doyne: Story of Perseverance

Maggie used her babysitting money to help her set up a charity. And is now a CEO of a major charity, and was 2015 CNN Champion of the year.

Maggie says: They work in midwestern Nepal helping in education and orphan care. They want to create a world where every child is educated and loved. They want to create a full-service environment where school is a centre for everything: food, wellness, health, literacy, the women in the community, a connection to nature. The school is a community space and a hub, not just a centre for education.

Teachers need respect on their pay checks.

One of the biggest challenges they have is retraining and recruiting teachers and professional teachers. They want to make sure teachers can see a future in the career, can see growth and fulfilment. She wants to make sure teachers are held in esteem.

They do a lot of work with young, fresh teachers. There’s a coaching / mentoring model where they’re using co-teaching, guiding, pairing up teachers with more senior teachers. Onboarding is strong culturally, so they know that the teachers and the organisation are a good fit for each other.

Teachers need intuition and to have a strong sense of self, standing confidently in who they are and believing and trusting. Resilience is about falling and failing, and getting back up and showing up again.

Divya learnt: perseverance is about dreaming big bold dreams to keep our world magical and give us the momentum to keep our world moving forward. People like Maggie remind us how much there is to do.

Summary

Our strength is about community, and what we do together.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we’re here, and us, and futures ‘us’es are irreplaceable. Let’s keep showing up.

Developing teacher cognitions: Maximising the impact of in-service CPD programmes – Ben Beaumont (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

In-service CPD: some perspectives

Learning to teach is now seen as a life-long activity. It continues throughout our professional career.

Anderson and Taner (2022) showed that one of the features of an expert teacher is somebody who continues learning. In-service CPD is central in developing expertise.

Borg et al (2022) in a study of 8,500 language teachers looked at issues with teacher education. It tends to be top-down, administrational, and rarely focuses on teachers’ pedagogic needs or learners’ development requirements.

Carabantes and Paran (2022) showed that more embedding of materials development is required in teacher education courses.

Exploring teacher cognition and its relevance in CPD

Teacher cognitions are the ‘unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching – what teachers know, believe, and think’ (Borg, 2003:81)

What teachers do in the classroom is strongly influenced by their beliefs, developed in a wide range of different ways.

There is a constant bi-directional influence between teachers and their environments (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Our beliefs both influence the environment and are influenced by the environment.

Studies into teacher cognitions

Non-probability samples = often small groups, convenience of sample, volunteers based on the groups you have available. There’s a focus on qualitative data and understanding individual stories.

Materials development and developing teacher cognitions

Materials and their influence on teachers

Akbari has written quite a lot in ELTJ about materials and teachers.

Textbooks now take care of all the details of classroom life, and most of them come with teacher guides that include achievement tests and even all the examples teachers need in their classes.

Akbari 2008: 647

Many of us learn how to teach from the materials we use. However, the materials don’t really give us room for manoeuvre- we take the role almost of an automaton, because we’re perhaps restricted by the materials.

Teachers often use materials in ways not intended by the designers, extending their use out of context.

Humphries 2014; Sefaraj 2014

Early career teachers can develop a dependency on published materials, giving a primacy to the coursebook rather than student need or their own pedagogical knowledge.

Carabantes and Paran, 2022

Materials as CPD

Materials can actually be really useful as CPD. They can help students and teachers question the world around them. Here are three quotes about this:

Conference events are great at sharing ideas, but not necessarily very practical in terms of influencing day-to-day teaching.

The Trinity CertPT-NILE impact study

CertPT is a level 6 study, falling between pre-service CELTA/CertTESOL (Level 5) and Delta/DipTESOL (Level 7).

It has 30 hours of input, with 100 hours of total qualification time. Materials development is used as a vehicle for pedagogical change and practice.

NILE offers an opt-in for CertPT support to go with their regular courses. Teachers submit four CertPT assessment tasks:

1. Materials evaluation

2. Materials adaptation

3. Materials creation

4. Materials use and reflection

The materials are related to the particular course the teacher has done e.g. teaching young learners, trainer development, etc.

The study aims:

• Evaluate the impact of these CertPT assessment tasks on teachers’ resource use and development and teacher’s agency using resources to meet learners’ needs
• Evaluate constructive alignment between NILE’s CPD course content, CertPT assessment, and application of course and assessment for teachers.

This is the method. They’re currently between steps 6 and 7:

Early findings on the impact of the course

Interview data so far (3-4 teachers) show that these assessment tasks have a strongly positive effect on teacher cognitions and critical pedagogy.

The last assessment piece in the CertPT requires the teacher to get feedback from the learner or another stakeholder on how the materials work. One teacher got feedback from refugees in a low-resource context in Greece, and it was incredibly rewarding and powerful as an experience for both the teacher and the learners.

The impact of the criteria is also positive. The criteria helps teachers consider areas of evaluation they might not have previously considered (e.g. the wider learning context, learners’ end-point requirements). It helps teachers make the link between principles and realities of day-to-day teaching. They encourage teachers to engage with literature. It helps build an understanding of core features of higher-level academic texts (e.g. referencing and organisation).

Here are some quotes from participants:

Specialise or Diversity? That is the question! An insight into freelancing in the world of ELT – Fabiana Crispim and Shilpa Pulapaka (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Fabiana is a freelance Business English tutor. She started working in corporate companies and owned her own business. She volunteered as a teacher on the side, then moved into teaching permanently 5 years ago.

Shilpa is a business lecturer, tester and freelance ELT tutor and study coach, and a content writer. She started in accounting, but retrained as an English teacher and also taught maths and business. She started teaching 15 years ago, across various subjects in various contexts. She’s done general English, academic English, taught refugee journalists, and now she teaches accounting and management and freelances as a tutor, among many many other things.

Here are a couple of quotes about what Fabiana and Shilpa do:

If you had all the freedom in the world, which would you choose?

The audience talked about it possibly being phases in our lives, and that you might shift between the two.

Disclaimer: they’re talking about their experiences, rather than making specific recommendations.

Specialising

Fabiana’s reasons for specialising:

• Need for focus
• Develop expertise
• Stability and consistency

Benefits of specialising:

• Less time preparing lessons, more time to organise the other parts of her work (like finding students, and other aspects of freelancing)
• More time for CPD – easier to focus too because of being able to focus on specific areas and material in her development
• Focus on personalising lessons, and therefore it’s easier to sell her teaching and network

Challenges of specialising:

• Covid: required her to remodel her classes and rethink her work
• Finding work: constant need to be updated on social media platforms
• It can be boring

Diversifying

Shilpa’s reasons for diversifying:

• Multiple interests
• Variety
• Financial freedom

Benefits: of diversifying

• There’s always something to do.
• She can focus on personalising lessons across different areas, e.g. English for personal law, English for accounting.
• CPD – developing a varied skill set, because you’re forced to learn across a range of areas
• Multiple sources of income so you can pivot / fall back on other areas if you need to, and access to larger clientele groups

Challenges of diversifying:

• It takes times and patience: you need to be a little bit mad to keep going 😉 It requires commitment too.
• Learning: at times you need to learn on the job, and you need to stay constantly updated on subject matter content, sometimes just before you teach it.
• Routine: setting routines can be difficult and can be stressful if you’re not prepared.

How they cope

CPD is a lifeline. Shilpa and Fabiana met at IATEFL last year, and now they’re speaking together! 🙂

• Conferences and teacher development talks
• Reading/studying
• Certifications
• Finding a mentor – you are not alone!

Fabiana dedicates Fridays to CPD. Find a mentor and ‘stick to them like gum’ says Shilpa! Both Fabiana and Shilpa have said they’ve hugely benefitted from having mentors. Find somebody who’s doing what you want to do.

Have a USP: Unique Selling Point. Know who you are and what your selling point is. Your students will come to you because you offer you something special.

Self-care: Fabiana separates time slots between her classes to have time to go for a walk, or have a chat to somebody, watch the birds outside.

Learn to say NO!

It doesn’t matter whether you specialise or diversify, all of these things are true.

Final thoughts

There’s no replacement for CPD. It’s the best way to grow in any career.

Networking. Freelancing can get lonely. Networking keeps you connected and informed.

Mental health. Self-awareness and self-care are the more sustainable approach to freelancing. You can do better for your students if you look after yourself. They feed off your energy, so you don’t have energy, you can’t give this to your students.

Important roles: regardless of the path you choose, you are making an impact in your field and on your students.

Never charge less! Do not undersell yourself! This is part of respecting yourself.

EdTech and ‘The CELTA Course’: what trainees need to know (IATEFL Harrogate 2023)

On Tuesday 18th April 2023, I presented this talk on behalf of Cambridge University Press. This is the blurb:

Recent years have seen a growth in both online teaching and technology use in language education, with an impact on the needs of trainee teachers. This talk will address what trainee teachers need to know, drawing on content from the new edition of The CELTA Course trainee and trainer books, which I have co-authored with Peter Watkins and Scott Thornbury.

I was talking about The CELTA Course Trainee Book and The CELTA Course Trainer’s Manual second editions which were released in February this year.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

In the talk I compared 2007, when the first edition was published, to 2023, when the second edition was released. I talked about changes in technology in the world, and how CELTA courses have changed in the interim – I did my own CELTA course in 2007-2007, and am now an experienced CELTA trainer myself.

I shared materials from two units in the books, which you can see on slides 14-23 in the embedded slidedeck above.

I concluded that trainees need to know these things about EdTech (educational technology):

• How to move between online and face-to-face classrooms:
  • Adapting activities / Choosing new ones
  • Choosing appropriate teaching techniques
• How to identify the knowledge and skills they need to use tech successfully
• How to support learners with technology
• How to adapt as it changes!

…and that all of these are facilitated to some extent by units in The CELTA Course Second Edition!

If you’d like to get your own copies of the books, they’re currently available from the Cambridge website. I’ll update this post as they are released in more places.

How to create learning materials for social media platforms – Claire Bowes (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

I was very happy to meet Claire in person as she’s one of my current Delta Module 1 trainees 🙂

Social media is one of the biggest places for people to learn English. Claire is focussing on Instagram and TikTok today. YouTube has adopted some of the features of both platforms in their short formats.

Claire has a BA in Business Marketing, and during the pandemic she has nearly 1 million followers on Instagram and TikTok.

Find your focus

You’re competing with a lot of things on social media: cute dogs, and lots more. You need to find your niche.

Choose the content your community will see from you.

You need to have a particular style, so they can see who you are as a creator. When people arrive on your page, that’s when they decide whether they want to continue their learning journey with you.

Examples:

• Exam prep
• Idioms and phrases verbs
• Pronunciation advice
• General everyday English
• Grammar (but caution: you don’t have a lot of time, and you might confuse the students!)

The focus today will be general everyday English., things which they won’t necessarily find in their coursebook.

Learners might need to know this, but not know they don’t know it.

Creating educational chunks

The question you always need to start with:

What can I teach someone in less than a minute?

That’s how long these platforms are for. Even with longer videos, people probably won’t spend that much time watching a video.

There is a formula.

1. Don’t overdo it

The more you intend to teach, the less you actually teach. Learners want quick, informative, digestible content.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing! ‘Learn 1 word’ is much better than ‘Learn 10 words’.

Things you can include:

• Pronunciation
• Definition
• Metalanguage
• CEFR level
• Synonym
• Contextual examples
• Call to action/practice – giving them a chance to practice the language (this is marketing mixed with learning)

Claire showed us a 50-second video about the word ‘gobsmacked’.

2. Reduce TTT (teacher talking time)

You have time constraints, so no preamble – there’s no time. There’s a lot of online competition and people want you to get to the point. You’re not there to help the learner: they’re watching the video asynchronously. This allows people of all learners, all cultures to learn. This is an example of edutainment.

The thumbnail is the first thing they’ll see. That and the first sentence should tell them what they’ll learn.

3. You need to think like a digital native: people who have always had the internet and don’t like waiting.

How much time does somebody spend on a video before scrolling?

3 seconds! You have 3 seconds to grab somebody’s attention. How do get them to stop scrolling, but also stay true to the learning?

What works for Claire?

A. Peak their interest e.g. What’s this called in English?

B. Share your knowledge – tell them straight away, give them images and animations to keep it clear

C. Pose a question. Get the content engagement, as well as including a freer production task. This gets the learners thinking about the language you’ve just introduced.

Videos should have a similar structure. This helps learners to know what to expect, and feel like they can get to know.

What to use to get started

Hardware

All you need is a phone to get started! You phone can record video and audio, you can edit there, and you can post from there. You can upscale by getting more complicated technology.

Claire started with an iPhone 8, then shifted to an iPad 12, then she moved to a DSLR and a studio. There was no difference in engagement between the earlier videos and the later ones. There’s no difference in the quality of the information between these videos.

Software

Clare likes to use Premiere Pro, Capcut and Canva to edit her work. There are lots of other options.

Premiere Pro has a very steep learning curve, so don’t start here if you’ve never editing a video! It allows freedom to edit in any way you like. If you’re planning to produce longer-form content, it’s worth investing in.

CapCut is an app which is mostly free. It’s easy to navigate and includes most of the functions you might need. There’s not a big learning curve, and is fairly intuitive. Because it’s an app, there are limitations. It’s a good place to start.

Canva is easy to navigate. It has a paid premium service if you want it. It’s not just great for online content, it works well for creating classroom materials. There are some limitations: you might not find the image or design that you want.

They’re a great way to get started.

What to expect / How does it work really?

Cons:

Slow growth.

It’s time consuming. You have to give people information very regularly, almost every day. It can take 2 hours to edit a 1-minute video.

Be prepared for criticism.

Pros:

Connect with a wide community of learners.

A brilliant creative outlet.

Feel like you are making a difference.

Claire’s social media challenges

If you want to connect with Claire, she’s:

englii_insta on Instagram

englii_tiktok on TikTok

She’s now moved towards teaching her own students and moved away from a school.

Advancing Teacher Education Practices: Enabling Teacher Learning – Gabriel Diaz Maggioli (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

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.

Gabriel’s talk was part of the TTEdSIG Special Interest Group day, as was my talk later in the day.

Why ‘advancing’? Gabriel thinks we’ve kind of hit a plateau and reiterated the same kinds of things for a few years as teacher trainers. Gabriel thinks every teacher is a learner of teaching throughout their careers.

‘Enabling’ – in Spanish, the word for teacher trainer is a ‘former of formers’. Gabriels thinks he doesn’t shape anybody. He can open up spaces and create the necessary conditions to create the learning we are trying to promote and let it emerge.

Teacher training / education today

Here are some issues Gabriel has trouble with today.

We know that as teachers of teachers, we should promote teacher learning. We instruct our trainees in whatever way we consider best, trying to relate them to the current best practices, and yet when they go into the classroom, what emerges is the way they were taught. Lortie’s ‘Apprenticeship of observation’. His responsibility is to the students the pre-service teachers will work with in the future.

Other ones from the audience: in-service teachers who think they know everything and don’t want to learn. ‘What is this young thing going to teach us that we don’t know already?’ Another: whatever we do in class is taken as a kind of axiom, and what we say turns into a learn – this is the way we do things, and there is no other way.

Teacher education has been too much concerned with what we need to teach the student teachers. It is curriculum-centric. Of all the spheres of human endeavour in education, the only one that has failed to develop a pedagogy of its own is teacher education. [I missed who that was quoting] Gabriel wants to present a version of that pedagogy. Curriculum-centric:

• Focuses on concepts and skills
• Tends to promote a linear, additive learning sequence (we all learn teaching in the same order): classroom management, then language, then skills, then assessment at the end. Assessment goes hand-in-hand with teaching – it’s not separate.
• Allows mostly for ToT (teacher of teachers) mediation
• It promotes standardisation – we are teaching towards standards and this means the voices of many practitioners cannot be heard
• It is content-based – both the existing curriculum, and all of the things we leave out

Gabriel wants to move towards a pedagogy centric approach:

• Brings together concepts, skills, dispositions – ethics and much more
• Adopts a complex and situated learning sequence – accepting cycles of failure and success
• Allows for multiple forms of mediation
• Promotes student teacher’s self-authorship – the process of writing our own identities as teachers = a more context-sensitive type of teacher
• Needs-based

The core of teacher training

Language teaching is different from any other kind of teaching – we need to show how to do it and help achieve mastery through practice.

When we communicate, we’re creating with language, not just repeating what we’ve memorised. We’re using a living thing. It has memorised chunks, but we say things that we have never said or heard before.

The things we say have an intention.

> Therefore we need to help teachers see differently how they view themselves as language learners, as language teachers, and how the target language is used as part of the classroom.

We need to help them to understand what good teachers actually do.

Assumptions

Learning to teach is a complex endeavour.

It requires questioning of our own assumptions. (Not just having fossilised assumptions, and we need to demonstrate this )

It has to be mediated – with learners, with friends, in the staffroom, not just with the trainer.

It has to involve interaction between old-timers and newcomers.

The purposes of that interaction is not indoctrination, but enabling adaptive expertise to surface. Both the old-timer and the newcomer are developing their view of the profession. An adaptive expert is one who can do things well in a variety of contexts, not just one context.

It’s all about discovering who you are as a professional – self-authorship.

Problems

• Trainees reproduce traditional methods even when explicitly taught otherwise.
• Trainees cannot account for their instructional choices even in light of explicit instructions.
• Trainees concentrate either on the practical or the theoretical, not both.
• Trainees teach their own interpretation of our instructions, resulting in a lack of student learning.
• Trainees experience difficulty accounting for ‘what went well and went wrong’ in their teaching.
• Trainees fail to engage with professional development once they qualify.

These are all about needs which are not being met in our training.

Trainees reproduce traditional methods of teaching even when explicitly taught otherwise

The need not being met is: trainees need to explore their own experience as (language) learners.

What can we do about it?

• Stimulated recall
• Simulations e.g. of foreign language lessons
• Images from the classroom
• Videos of teaching
• Lesson transcripts – record parts of their lessons and use this to question practice
• Journaling

One example Gabriel gave us of stimulated recall is a language learning autobiography. They do it at the beginning of the year, then as they go through the curriculum, they compare it to what they’ve learnt. Moving back and forth between their experience as learners and as teachers.

Trainees cannot account for their instructional choices even in light of explicit instruction

The need not being met is: trainees need to notice gaps in their knowledge of teaching – what they know conceptually and the embodied knowledge of being a teacher.

How can we do it?

• Look at Classroom tasks and activities
• Look at coursebooks
• Look at lesson plans from others
• Watch videos
• Look at lesson transcripts
• Look at other teaching artefacts

An example: Use a Visual Thinking Strategies protocol, to get the viewer to build their own interpretations of the artefact. 1 minute to look at an image, then ask:

What is going on in this picture? (no feedback, just rephrase the answers ‘So what you mean is…?)

What do you see that makes you say that?

And weave together the opinion of the different participants, then ask:

What more (not what else!) can we learn from this image?

Trainees concentrate either on the practical or the theoretical

The need not being met is: trainees need to deconstruct and reconstruct core knowledge, accessing what we do and why.

• Videos
• Lesson pans
• Transcripts
• Observation forms
• Modelling
• Demonstration
• Professional literature sources
• Demonstrations and (loop) input

Example: reading circle (or podcast, or video). Roles:

Followed by a fishbowl – the people sit and discuss it in public, then pose their questions to the group.

Trainees teach their own interpretation…

The need not being met is: trainees need to try out their emergening understanding in a safe environment.

What to do:

• Student teacher materials
• Micro teaching
• Controlled experiments
• Scripts and protocols
• ollaborative planning
• Peer coaching

Example: collaborative rubric construction, e.g. for a lesson observation. The competences all came from the teachers.

Trainees experience difficult accounting for what ‘went well and went wrong’ in their teaching

The need not being met is: trainees need to show their mastery and justify it.

• Rubrics
• Observation protocols
• Checklists
• Lesson plans
• Learner assessment of teacher
• elf-and peer-assessment

Example: looking for learning questions, getting feedback from learners. Each student teacher decides which questions to ask, and asks in the L1 if necessary. At the beginning students might be quite compliant, but they get more detailed later.

Teachers fail to engage with PD

An example: There is a Korthagen book which Gabriel recommends for different kinds of reflection. They like six pairs of glasses to help us reflect.

In summary: enable

All of these seek to enable teacher learning, not provide or any of the other verbs we might need.

Engage

Notice

Access

BridgeL

Launch

Extend

This is a visual which Gabriel can send you. He calls this the ‘ENABLE’ model.

If you try it out, Gabriel would like to know how it works.

How to present at an international conference (IATEFL Harrogate 2023)

These are the slides from my IATEFL 2023 How to session this morning, giving you guidance on how to present at an international conference, whether that’s face-to-face or online. It’s an updated version of a presentation I’ve done at the last few IATEFL conferences. You can find all of the associated notes in this post from IATEFL Belfast 2022.

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – What can you learn from a lexicographer? – Julie Moore

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

Julie helped us to understand how a lexicographer creates dictionary entries, and showed us what materials writers can learn from that when creating materials with a lexical focus. Julie will take us through the process of how she puts together a dictionary entry, and will show us through that

A lexicographer is somebody who works on dictionaries and thesauruses.

EntryEditor is dictionary compilation software, which is what she uses to enter the information in the dictionary. The other piece of software she opens is a corpus. The corpus she uses is one that has been put together and is maintained by the publisher of the dictionary.

This is what EntryEditor looks like:

‘brief’ is the word we’ll look at today. Julie doesn’t have to deal with the pronunciation – a pronunciation specialist does that.

Part of speech

Which part of speech is “brief” in each example? Here are a couple of the sentences Julie shared:

Part of speech can be more challenging than you might expect. They can also be mislabelled in social media posts for example:

This is a noun, with a verb definition – the definition doesn’t match the part of speech.

If a definition is used on a social media post and doesn’t have examples after it, learners can’t follow it.

Insider hack 1

• Be clear.
• Be consistent. Maintain the same part of speech throughout.
• Start with the typical. Start with the most common parts of speech.

Inflections

These are important in the dictionary so the word comes up when you search it in the dictionary. Make sure you include irregular inflections when you teach new vocabulary. They might seem unimportant, but they can be really useful for learners.

Writing a definition

This should come from research, based on a corpus.

Julie tends to start with a collocation sketch to get an overview of how the word works. Here’s an example of a collocation search for ‘brief’ from Word Sketch:

Starting with the middle two columns, you can already see that there’s a lot connected to politicians. However, this corpus is an internet one and might include quite a lot of news media, which might skew the data.

The next step is to look at corpus lines and analyse them. Here are three examples of ‘brief’ as a verb which Julie has taken out of the corpus lines. Do they all have the same usage? Or are they different? If different, to what extent?

If that’s a challenge, you can start off by thinking about the context. The first one is from a work context, a project context. The second one is from politics and public life. The third one is legal. There are three different contexts.

If you brief someone, one person gives information to another. Is it different guides of information? The first one is instructions for a job. The second one is information or updates. The third one is formal instructions to act – it’s performative.

The question becomes: Is it one meaning or three meanings? We need to consider polysemy.

We can either split our definitions into all their different senses, or we can lump them together. The decision as to which one is chosen will depend on where the definition will appear and who the target reader is. Here are some examples with ‘brief’:

Longman’s is a traditional-style definition, which is quite formulaic. COBUILD introduced full-sentence definitions to learner dictionaries.

And the splitters, Oxford into 2 definitions and Cambridge into 3:

The more specific the audience you have, the more likely you are to split definitions, because they are likely to need finer grain distinctions, so the business English dictionary splits it more.

Merriam Webster isn’t a learner’s dictionary, and has no ‘defining vocabulary’ – this is the list of words which a lexicographer is allowed to use when writing definitions for a learner’s dictionary. They are also a ‘dictionary of record’, so might have more splitting:

When writing materials, you might want to include definitions as part of a glossary, or as part of matching activities.

A matching activity from an idioms book:

These aren’t really definitions – they’re more like paraphrases. This tailors them to the context – the learner doesn’t need a full dictionary definition. If you’re not writing a dictionary, you don’t have to use a dictionary definition, and in fact you probably shouldn’t use a dictionary definition. A dictionary definition has to cater for generalist situations, but if you’re writing a worksheet you know more about the target audience and know the context in which they’ve met the word, so you can tailor your definition.

You need permissions to use dictionary definitions – they’re subject to copyright, and you can’t just take them.

Insider hack #2: definitions

• Polysemy: decide whether to lump or split
• Use simple vocabulary
• Tailor it to your context

Example sentences

Shifting from ‘brief’ to ‘gossip’ now:

Julie tends to spend the majority of her working day here, picking out good examples of sentences to show off the vocabulary. That’s true in materials writing too.

We might start off with the target vocabulary in context in a student’s book input text, then you need example sentences for the vocabulary activities in the unit, then you need more example sentences for the vocabulary review, then the workbook activities need yet more example sentences, and maybe more for online activities and test activities. It’s an important skill to be able to choose example sentences.

Here’s some practice. You have a reading text from a unit about social media. The reading text has the sentence in the top box. We’ve got the definition in the box in the top right. Which of the 8 corpus-based sentences would you use as your example sentences? Which are appropriate and why?

She’ll reject number 5 – it’s being used a noun modifier, she doesn’t want to confuse them. In 6, because it’s a verb. 7 is countable so it’s a bit tricky grammatically. For B1, it’s too confusing. 8 is the wrong meaning – it’s a person.

In 4, ‘scurrilous’ is challenging – it’s tempting to put it in, but it’s a much higher level than the word ‘gossip’. It’ll distract the learners.

In 3, there’s a challenge – what’s the difference between ‘gossip’ and ‘rumours’? This could be quite confusing for students. ‘Transfer’ might be confusing too.

Julie says that 2 is a useful example, and 1 is a good example but using a celebrity name is not a good idea.

We need to build our examples. You start with the text, then have a ‘vanilla’ example – one that’s quite similar to the original from the sample text, without the vocabulary being too different. It allows the learner to focus on the target item, though there’s a grammar difference: it’s in a question (which don’t appear often!) Grammatical differences can move you away from the context a little, for example in the second vanilla example.

In the workbook, you can start to build knowledge more, for example with collocations, or by varying the context: social media, football, office…but the meaning has stayed the same. Varying the grammatical patterns help, not just using it as the object, but as the subject.

Using a corpus can help you come up with different examples like this.

This is what you end up with:

Insider hack #3: examples

• Stick to the same target usage
• Start with vanilla examples
• Add in variety after that
• Use that to build knowledge for learners

Learner dictionaries to bookmark!

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
https://www.ldoceonline.com/
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/

It’s really useful to see what dictionaries do to understand how they’ve tackled different words. You can’t take the definitions and examples directly, but they can give you ideas 🙂

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – Creating inclusive, accessible language learning materials – Sharon Hartle and Emanuela Tenca

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

Sharon and Emanuela were reflecting on research they did connected to inclusive materials.

They started off by asking about our learning design:

These were the results:

It’s important to focus on inclusion and equity. It’s the 4th goal of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, created before the pandemic, but made even more obvious during the pandemic. We focussed on tools a lot during the pandemic, and maybe learners went out of the window, but now we need to return to a learning- and learner-centred approach. Focus on content, teaching approach and learner agency.

GIAM is the name of their project in their department in Verona. The project involved two languages: a course for beginner’s in Russian, one for B1+ in English for Business English.

To help them design the course, they started with semi-structured inteviews with key stakeholders: interviewing language teachers who had experience of teaching learners with SEN, learners with SEN (dyslexia and low vision), and tutors (students who do internships at their university and assist peers with SEN). They analysed these interviews qualitatively. The areas that came out were:

• Challenges met by students and teachers
• Peer relationships
• Strategies to meet students’ needs – both the strategies themselves, and perceptions of the strategies

They considered:

• How teachers adapt existing materials
• Learner input
• Consolidating skills, particularly reading skills
• Error correction in a way that’s sensitive to learners’ needs
• Exam personalisation
• Fostering critical thinking skills
• Helping students plan their learning
• Learning aids e.g. screen readers

Universal Design for Learning

This doesn’t mean one size fits all, it’s about providing choices and overcoming barriers. People can choose what they want to do. There are three macro areas:

1. Engagement – motivating learners and making sure things are relevant to them
2. Representation – making content accessible, particularly by providing choice in input formats
3. Action and expression – putting it into practice, letting them do things in different ways, choice in output formats

From coursebook to digital content

They wanted to adapt some coursebook activities for their course. As part of it, they changed the order of the activities, they changed questions to better suit the learners, and they clarified instructions.

This is the first step of their adaptation. But is it accessible?

Accessibility

Blackboard Ally is an expensive tool which their university invested in. Read & Write is a plugin you can use. Blackboard Ally told them that the materials weren’t very accessible online. It provides a clickable button to give options for the learner, for example converting it to audio.

Using Styles, such as Heading styles, and avoiding tables can make things more accessible for screen readers. Alternatively you might need to train learners in how to access the tables themselves.

To help you, you need to:

• Build up background knowledge
• Pay attention to detail
• Be flexible
• Be creative

Use ‘alternative text’ to make visuals accessible to those with screen readers.

Summary

Inclusion and accessibility are two sides of the same coin. Adapting materials should be an interactive process between the teacher and the learners. Many of the options to make materials accessible are practical common sense solutions.

• Word documents are the most accessible format for learners with screen readers.
• It’s flexible too because it can be printed out and kept digitally.
• You can use built-in headings, styles and fonts.
• Sans serif fonts increase readability for everybody.
• Avoid italics and underlines.
• Use a high-contrast colour scheme (visuals and tables)
• Add alternative text for images
• Avoid / Adapt tables to make them accessible for screen readers

There’s a reminder that ‘every learner is disabled, because every learner has their own needs’ – we shouldn’t just be doing this for learners with SEN, but for everyone.

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – Behind the scenes: Creative materials for learner-generated digital media – Armanda Stroia

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

Armanda’s talk was based around materials her students had created, particularly videos they had made.

We need specific materials for each stage of the video-creation process to make it systematic, so you’re not going in blindfold.

Prosumers = Producers and Consumers. Alvin Toffler coined the term.

We want to help learners to become more responsible consumers, and by helping them to create their own media, this can help.

There might be one or two people in your class who are more confident with tech, but you can’t assume they understand how to use the tech. You need to keep the training stages in to make sure everyone knows what to do. You also need to teach learners about copyright and show them where to find copyright-free images.

Some areas to consider:

• conceptual domain – how to write a storyboard
• functional – what do they need to know to use the tools, e.g. to edit the video
• audiovisual – do they know principles of how to produce effective digital media, e.g. ethical principles

Stages of video projects:

1. Planning
2. Production
3. Post-production
4. Reflection and feedback
5. Distribition and sharing

Planning

• Brainstorming ideas
• Doing research
• Storyboarding
• Allocating roles in the team

Materials that might help them here:

Also suggested by the audience: analyse a genre by watching an example

Learners need to think about the purpose of their video, the target audience, and what their main message is that they want to convey. Armanda calls this a ‘Big ideas blueprint’.

Roles allocation chart: include a description of the roles. Learners can talk about why different people in the group would fit different roles.

You can create storyboard template. Here are some examples: Materials for the planning stage https://www.canva.com/design/DAFfteQEcLE/WMJQzx2naHUYrHqmwDNk0w/edit

Production

• Capturing footage
• Recording audio
• Directing actors
• Coordinating the crew

Materials that can help:

• Checklists for effective production
• Planning timeline for rehearsing scripts
• Guides on camera angles, lighting, sound recording, etc.

Post-production

• Editing
• Adding sound effects
• Adding titles
• Selecting the best takes etc.

Materials that help:

• Video-editing guidelines
• Lists with user-friendly apps with links to tutorials
• Banks with copyright-free images and music
• Peer media expert collection of tips and tricks (they record their own videos)

Students can also teach you about some of this! For example, split screens, etc.

Possible tasks:

Reflection and feedback

Materials that might help here:

• Video observation worksheet
• Rubrics for self-assessment
• Peer feedback forms

Here’s an example of a marking rubric, based on the three key areas (Conceptual, Functional, Audiovisual), and you could also add language parts to the rubric too:

Examples of a video observation worksheet:

Sharing / distribution

It’s time-consuming, but it’s important! We need to celebrate their hard work and effort.

Materials that might be useful here:

• Parent’s informed consent (depending on learners’ age)
• Short video festivals, for example inviting families to see the videos

You can found out more on Armanda’s website.

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – How to write materials for teacher training and development – John Hughes

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

John talked about creating materials for teacher training. He showed us that there are perhaps more similarities than you might expect between materials for language learning and materials for teacher training and development.

John talked to us about materials for input sessions, materials for helping teachers to reflect on their teaching (including for more experienced teachers), and materials for further reading (articles, teacher resources etc.)

Materials for input sessions

This can be based on materials you would write for students, and turning it into materials for teachers. Teachers can then benefit from understanding the process of the activities. For example a classic ‘Find someone who…’

…might look something like this for teachers:

Another activity might be ranking activities. You could ask teachers to rank ideas like spoken error correction techniques from most effective to least effective.

This is the idea of loop input, as created by Tessa Woodward. It’s about processing with content, so you’re experiencing the process, but it’s combined with the content. Here’s the start of a gapfill you could try which demonstrates how this works:

After a grammar point or vocabulary item has been 1__________, we often give students a controlled practice 2__________. One of the most common types of exercise is the 3__________ or fill-in-the-blank exercise. Typically, we give students sentences or a text and 4__________ certain key words…

You might need some kind of ‘decompression’ afterwards, where you need to unpack the stages of the activity afterwards as they might not be able to process both things at the same time.

Materials to help teachers reflect

This is about getting content from the teachers, rather than supplying it. Less is more, because you want them to provide the content. You have to get very good at writing questions. A useful framework:

• Think – what do they think about it?
• Feel – how do they feel about it?
• Do – what will they do as a result?

You need to cover all of these areas to make your materials effective.

This part of your materials is often quite short.

Visuals can often work better than text. Graphs can help, e.g. length of the lesson v. increase/decrease in some area.

You might choose teacher talking time, error correction, student engagement, or anything…this then encourages teachers to reflect on what happened in the lesson.

Heads up / heads down is another possible graph you could use, for example for reflecting on materials you write:

We know visuals work from student materials, but we don’t seem to use them as much in teacher training. The same is true of images. For example, here’s one possible reflective activity. Create two or more sentences inspired by the pictures which start ‘Writing materials is like this because…’ Here’s one picture:

John would like to see more images in teacher training materials.

Materials for further reading

This would be writing articles, blogposts, and you’re trying to train and develop trainers by getting them to read an article. After a session, you can write an article to arrange your thoughts and to act as a summary of the session. Teacher’s books are another material for further reading – a lot of teachers get their training this way.

This is a list of phrases which John found in teacher training materials:

https://mawsig.iatefl.org/writing-teacher-resource-materials/

https://mawsig.iatefl.org/mawsig-blog-guest-post-the-voice-of-the-teachers-notes/

…are the links to find those more.

It’s useful to work out your writing style for teachers. Do you prefer something which is more of a paragraph, or more bullet pointed?

For me, the bullet points are clearer and take less time to read, but they don’t have the rationale so might not be as useful as training materials. You need to think about your audience as a materials writer – what do they prefer? The context is also something to keep in mind – is it a teacher’s book? Is it in a journal? Sometimes there’s a mix of the two styles.

John says the first one is maybe more developmental and allows reflection time. The second is more about survival. Penny Hands said that when editing, it’s not always clear who the subject of the sentence is, and might switch between the teacher as subject and the students as the subject.

John has changed his office set up now. He’s switched to video rather than blocks of text, and this is his set-up as a ‘content creator’ now:

Teachers have shifted to watching videos rather than reading resource books. The statistics for the two ways of sharing are very different.

John divides video content into four categories:

• Record a lecture – more similar to classic input sessions
• Interview experts – they do all the talking, not you! Lots of people watch because they’re experts
• How to demonstrations – short video, lots of views, and way more than a blogpost!
• Thought provokers – 1-minute / 2-minute ‘think about this’ e.g. the hamburger approach to feedback, what do you think about this? Is it the correct way to do it?

This is his theory of how teacher training materials are created online 🙂 The videos are used by trainers as warmers for input sessions. Video might be the future, rather than writing articles.

6 takeaways from John

• Materials for input
  • Copy the process for student materials
  • Adjust the content
• Materials for reflection
  • Think, feel, do
  • Less is more with visuals
• Materials for further reading
  • Balance your writing style(s)
  • ‘Watching’, rather than ‘reading’ now

‘A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT’ by John Hughes

‘ETpedia Materials Writing’ by John Hughes

John Hughes and Katherine Bilsborough run courses to help teachers develop their ability to write effective ELT materials. Find out more on their website.

English for the workplace – looking for new answers – Evan Frendo (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 plenary summary)

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.

Evan’s opening plenary was inspired by Einstein. He set a test one year, and somebody pointed out to him that he had set the same test as the previous year. Einstein replied: Yes, it’s the same test, but the answers are different.

In 1914, there was an English school at the Henry Ford factories to cater for immigrant workers there. There was something called the ‘Melting pot’ – they entered it in their national costume, changed clothes in the melting pot, and left in American clothes waving and American flag.

What is English for the workplace?

Evan has been working in Maritime English for a quite a few years now, among other areas. Maritime English is a huge area – at any one time there are 50,000-60,000 ships at sea carrying cargo. There are not many people on the ships, but there’s also a huge industry behind the ships – building the ships, running them etc.

He’s been working in the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS), which is a bit like air traffic control but for ships. They built up a huge corpus of radio conversations to analyse and find miscommunications to be able to train people better in the future. Here’s an example:

When we heard the recording, it was quite challenging to understand. VTS people never know what accent will come at them. There’s a range of different levels of English. These are users of English, using it as lingua Franca to get the job done, not learners of English. It’s very context-specific and situation-specific. English in the Workplace is always context-specific – real people, real money, real stress, not like in the coursebooks!

Routine conversations with anchoring are below. Many of these are non-standard from an English teaching perspective. They work, and nobody worries about it, but it probably wouldn’t pass one of our exams! Once you get into the workplace, the criteria for success are very different: much more performance-based than we might want to / be able to test for.

Other jobs aboard a vessel: the crew might be from all over the world. Not everybody is university educated, not everybody has good English competence, but they still have to communicate and be able to do their job!

Here’s a great example of a research paper title, but based on a real quote:

Construction is an industry where mistakes with English can kill people. It’s very important.

‘Language brokering’ – for example, the children learn the language of a country, but the parents can’t speak it, so children come along to do the translation. On construction sites, you might design a team so that there is one ‘language broker’ can translate for the rest of the team.

When you work in ESP, you discover there’s a lot of specialist terminology.

‘Earnings calls’ are something you can listen to for financial English. Lots of them are available to listen to on the internet. Here’s an example from a corpus:

Sometimes you can see examples of how words take on specialist meanings in the workplace. Communities start using English in specific ways, for example ‘color’ in the image above.

Here’s an international meeting with examples of ‘non-standard’ English:

None of this stops communication, but it wouldn’t be successful in exams.

This compares to ‘native speaker’ English, people who think the meeting is in ‘their’ language. They use language at a different speed, and they also need training in how to speak international English:

Some problems people have in meetings:

– Native speakers always win. But implementation issue will be for non-native speakers.

• I cannot understand the instructions.
• I have become one crazy lady from Asia.

BELF: English as a business language Franca

‘Conformity with standard English is seen as a fairly irrelevant concept’

‘I don’t actually care whether something is correct or incorrect. As long as the meaning is not distorted’

‘BELF is perceived as an enabling resource to get the work done. Since it is highly context-bound and situation-specific, it is a moving target defying detailed linguistic description’ (p129, Kankaanranta, A., Louhiala-Salminen, L. And Karhunen, P.)

How have we traditionally approached teaching workplace English?

This is structured, top-down, and assumes the teacher is an expert. In a university class, the students expect the teacher to know what they’re going to do.

What do we mean by ‘proficiency’?

CEFR (2020) – ‘proficiency’ encompasses the ability to perform communicative language activities (‘can do…’)

But how much does this proficiency relate to actual job performance?

Here’s an example from the aviation industry:

It reminds us to ask ‘Are we actually focussing on the right things?

The ground-breaking Occupational English Test isn’t based on linguistic criteria alone. It has both linguistic criteria and clinical communication criteria, set up by people from within the industry. This sort of test is now attracting a lot of attention in the workplace.

Big standardised tests still have their place about talking about English levels, but they don’t tell us whether they have the English they need to do that specific job.

As teachers, we might be able to judge somebody’s English, but we might not be able to judge whether somebody can do their job in English.

In VTS commmunication, assessment is now carried out by a team:

• English teacher
• Experienced VTS operator – say whether they’ve done the right thing
• Legal expert- all conversations are recorded, but they can have legal implications

This is one way to assess workplace English. How do we judge if somebody can do the job?

What is the perspective from outside ELT?

Modern learning mindset – learning and development / HR:(Dillon, 2022, The modern learning ecosystem: A new L&D mindset for the ever-changing workplace)

• Make learning an essential part of the work(flow) – it’s not a separate thing
• Take advantage of the full ecosystem – what’s available to them, not just hiring a trainer
• Apply data to accelerate decision making – not based on intuition
• Provide a personal experience at scale – trying to make things unique for everyone
• Drive clear business impact – why would you invest otherwise?
• Foster persistent organisational agility – how can we react to things which are changing so fast?

Duncan is a young project manager at a company based in Denmark, and partly manages the German team:

This is quite an extreme perspective of where we are with English – in this situation, they hire anyone they can and people will learn English.

Here’s another perspective from Kasia from Electrolux:

The World Economic forum in 2020 said ‘94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job, a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018’.

In BELF research, Ehrenreich (2010) says ‘Learning…seems to happen most effectively in business ‘communities of practice’ rather than in traditional English training’. M Takino (2019) looked at how people become users of English – Evan says this is a very useful article to look at.

Informal learning is what’s really happening:

• Advertising
• Film, songs
• Social networks
• Games
• Travel
• Coaching from peers
• Micro learning
• Learning on the job
• Translation apps
• Social media

The last 10 years have completely changed how technology can be used to learn languages, and you don’t necessarily need to pay a teacher for it.

‘Microlearning’ is a key feature of HR conferences now. 10 minutes of learning languages on the train, in a queue, etc. Bite-sized chunks, and it’s happening everywhere.

Gamification is another example. By playing a game, people learn surreptitiously, but also learn in a fun way.

‘Learning cluster’ – surround the learner with ‘meaningful learning assets’. It’s not just organising courses for people, it’s doing more.

Three learning touch points, like marketing where the customer touches the product.

For example, project interviews are where you interview a customer to work on a project with them. Useful phrases people can use in the business. Curating is the aim, rather than creating new materials. The social side is mock interview partners – L&D is responsible for this.

Nadzeya says:

Teachers and trainers need to work together with other people within the company. There is a huge system here, supported by different aspects of people in the company. ‘Almost all of our trainers are full-time employees. Our strengths are our well-developed learning ecosystem and corporate learning culture’ – people who are part of the company as in-house trainers.

Content is developed based on in-house case studies.

Seunghee Miriam Choi is an expert in Maritime English. She says that language training will become more specific, for example teaching English for VTS in Busan port. General English you can get online for example.

LCD = Learning clusters. To be truly applicable, they need L&D to really surround the learners with English. It’s a new area and not everybody is able to do it yet. This is where professional language training is changing.

Informal learning is changing: ‘Dressman, M. (2020). – Evan says it’ll change your ideas of language learning and teaching:

Formal and informal learning should be retired as a distinction. People are moving away from formal learning, and moving towards learner experience.

Learnship is an online language company:

There’s a shift to outcome indicators, and away from effort indicators.

Work is changing, communication is changing, and therefore training needs to be different.

This is where we are:

L&D = learning and development

LCMS = learning content management systems, curating assets

So what?

To remain relevant we need to learn a lot more about how people in the workplace learn languages. We should be researching it more, as this is what we’re training our learners to use. A need for research.

To remain relevant, we need to think about teacher training, education and development. ‘Marinating teachers’ – put them into a context and they will become an expert within that context.

To remain relevant we need to learn to use the new technologies. This will help with pull teaching, rather than push teaching.

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – Writer/Editor: conflict or complement? – Jill Hadfield

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

Jill’s talk look at the overlap between these two roles, writer and editor.

This are very reduced notes! Jill told us a lot more 🙂

Unconscious

Jill talked about the role of unconscious thinking in creativity. This was a quote she shared:

The bath (Archimedes), the bed (Descartes) and the bus (somebody who got an idea of a mathematical formula) – these are all places where people get inspiration.

Heim and Runco both say that will (conscious thought) can actually hamper inspiration and creativity. They create self-judgement and might hamper creativity.

There’s a difference between tree thinking (roots > branches > twigs > leaves = academic thinking), and rhizomes (underground spreading, bobbig up unexpectedly, springing up at odd points = creative thinking).

There have been two main studies about creativity in materials writing. Philip Prowse (2011) in Materials Development in Language Teaching and Keith Johnson (2003) in Designing Language Teaching Tasks.

In Prowse’s chapter, writers talk about drawing on their own intuition and waiting for inspiration to strike. Tomlinson commented on the chapter saying that writers are basing their ideas on intuition and ad hoc writing, rather than on principles.

Will + unconscious

Other writers have suggested that creativity involves both will (conscious ideas) and unconscious ideas. Wallas (1926):

• Preparation / Incubation
• Illumination
• Verification – crafting your ideas

Campbell (1960) says that creativity comes from free association, and ideas strike when you least expect them.

Smith Ward and Finke (1995) talk about the Geneplore model: the generation of lots of ideas, then an editing stage of exploration.

Attridge (2004) says that creation is both an act and an event: something intentional through an act of will, and something without warning that happens to an alert consciousness.

Keith Johnson, in our profession, wrote about a study where people talked about will. The lightbulb moment comes, but it can be quite painful – it might take a long time to come, or you might realise the inspiration won’t work. Expert designers tend to spend a long time analysing tasks, coming up with several different possibilities, and they might then abandon it (easy abandonment). [Note to Sandy: relevant for your MA framework!]

Jill’s theory

Chaosmos = a term from James Joyce. The process of totally chaotic orders settling into order (chaos > cosmos), and order settling into chaos (cosmos > chaos).

• Generating ideas
• Dialoguing = talking to an imaginary reader
• Imagining scenario = imagine how it might work in practice
• Scopting materials = writing them out

This is an example of her creative process in action. The activity was about how to overcome distractions:

• Jill started with a sudden idea out of nowhere to come up with a ‘distraction jingle’.
• She then came up with a rationale for why it might work.
• The dialoguing stage was pushing her to go further and realise that she needed another stage.
• She then had another illumination: combine distractions and rewards. Choose your favourite distraction and use it as a reward.
• Finally, imagine the scenario and how it could work in the classroom. e.g. contracts and a contract buddy.

Conclusions and caveats

Editing skills are valuable for writing. Writing skills are valuable for editing.

Editing shouldn’t start too early – otherwise you might inhibit creativity.

Editors should resist the temptation to add their own creativity to the writing – it’s the writer’s book, not the editor’s book!

MaWSIG PCE 2023 – Writing lessons for immersive language learning in virtual reality – Nergiz Kern

This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.

Nergiz gave us guidelines for creating effective materials for VR lessons. This is her write-up of the session.

Social VR is when learners and teachers are in the same virtual space. It’s not like chatbots. You don’t need to have a VR headset, you can rent them for a day to try them out.

Here’s a video example of Immerse, though : https://tinyurl.com/kitchen-vr

Because you’re in a specific context related to the context of your lesson, learning is active, social and emotional if done well. Learners can have experience, collaborate on hands-on projects, and it all feels more authentic, and therefore more motivational, fun and memorable. VR lowers foreign-language anxiety, as learners can hide behind the avatar.

Considerations when planning VR lessons

Conceptual framework – Design features for educational IVR Won et al. (2023)

You have to take into consideration both ideas related to digital materials design, and ideas related to a more physical space.

The yellow part shows four different types of immersion. The ideal would be to include all 4 of these ideas when creating learning experiences in VR. Sensory / Actional are technical and depend on the platform you use – you have to know what the platform offers / what it can do. Sensory would be ideas like getting audio and visual feedback, like hearing sounds, seeing things change. Actional is about making real changes, like cutting something. With a headset, you control the movement by moving your body – embodied learning helps us to learn more effectively.

Narrative – are they engaging with the tasks, are they engaged by the context.

Social – are they interacting with each other? With other learners? With the teacher?

Narrative and Social overlap with learning – things we often want to have in a classroom setting.

Features to consider

You also need to ensure that you have a suitable pedagocical approach. There’s still a lot of lectures, and that’s not he best way to do things. It’s better to do:

• Situated learning
• Task-based learning
• Problem-based / project-based learning
• Collaborative learning
• TPR
• Active learning
• Experiential learning
• Game-based learning

Anything where learners can interact and have agency.

Narrative immersion

If you’re doing things via a desktop, you can lean more into these two types of immersion. Don’t do this:

Do this:

Tell them a story, and get them interested and involved by setting the scene and context as you might do in a lesson.

You could also try storytelling with photos. Immerse has a camera feature, including being able to take selfies. It allows learners to take something from the VR classroom outside the classroom, and use the images in other ways. For example project work, or writing a story first then go into VR and take snapshots of what they do, then create a cartoon of what they did to review the lesson in an interesting way:

Checklist

Here’s a possible incomplete checklist for the kind of things you can include:

Homework could be meeting each other outside class, and Nergiz’s students actually did this:

How to practise writing for VR

• Sign up for free VR accounts.
• Learn to use them.
• See what features

Possible platforms

When creating immersive learning lessons, materials writers become immersive learning designers in the truest sense.

Nergiz Kern

You can find more information on Nergiz’s website, including examples of complete VR lesson plans.

IATEFL Harrogate 2023 – my talks and my blog

From Tuesday 18th – Friday 21st April, I’ll be at the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 conference [this link will take you to the latest conference, which may not be Harrogate if it’s later!]. There’ll also be two bonus days: Monday 17th April will be the Materials Writing SIG (MaWSIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE), and Saturday 22nd April will be the Hands Up Project conference.

I’ll be presenting twice during the conference, once in a How To session, and once during the main conference.

How to talk

How to give a presentation at an international conference

Giving a presentation can be a stressful experience. This session will give you ways of organising yourself before your presentation and conducting yourself during your presentation to reduce that stress. The aim of the session is to make your presentation a more satisfying experience for you and your participants.

When: Tuesday 18th April, 08:15-08:45 (before the plenary session)

Where: Queen’s Suite 8

Main talk

EdTech and The CELTA Course: what trainees need to know

Recent years have seen a growth in both online teaching and technology use in language education, with an impact on the needs of trainee teachers. This talk will address what trainee teachers need to know, drawing on content from the new edition of The CELTA Course trainee and trainer books, which I have co-authored with Peter Watkins and Scott Thornbury.

When: Tuesday 18th April, 14:05-14:35

Where: Queen’s Suite 3 (part of the Teacher Training and Education SIG – TTEdSIG Showcase Day)

Follow the conference

If you’re in Harrogate, I hope to see you there! If you missed the registration deadline, you’re still able to turn up and pay on the day at the conference vnue.

If not, keep following my blog to see posts from all of the talks I attend – this is advance warning that it should be a busy place for the next 8 days with quite a lot of posts hitting your inbox if you subscribe! All of my posts can be found under the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 category.

IATEFL and Special Interest Group (SIG) social media accounts will be very busy over the next 8 days or so, so look out for lots of coverage on those channels. You can find out more about IATEFL.

Check, check, check – A checklist to develop materials based on storybooks by Ana Clara Castilho Ramos

I’ve just attended a webinar by Ana Clara Castilho Ramos run for MaWSIG. I was especially interested in it as it seems relevant to my dissertation topic, thinking about how to approach materials writing systematically.

Why stories?

Ana’s father used to tell her stories when she was little, and her mum bought her lots of picture books. When she became a teacher, she wanted to use stories with her students but couldn’t always find picture books to use with her students. She was able to go to the UK and buy some.

When she started using them with her students she noticed how engaged and excited the students were. Learners remember the language because it’s more contextualised. They want to talk about the story when they go home.

She decided to write her own storybook to create a book that was specific to her context, about animals in Brazil, because she couldn’t find an existing one. She also created materials related to the book. This was all part of her work for her NILE MA Materials Development module.

How to create your own storybook

Choose your story

What linguistic devices does it have? Is the content relevant? Does it connect to students? Do the illustrations help children to understand the meaning?

Know your learners

Make it suitable to them.

Checklist

This is the checklist Ana used to write materials based on her story book:

1. Identify the main topic of the story.
2. Identify the target language.
3. Draw links from other content areas (see the slide below). This can give you ideas for activities you can do connected to the story.
4. Design clear learning objectives.
5. Provide support to achieve the tasks and appropriate level of challenge.
6. Plan a variety of tasks and interaction patterns, including multisensory activities, providing choice, social-emotional development, quiet v. active, the 4C’s, etc.
7. Recycle language throughout the unit.
8. Plan activities that promote the use of learning strategies. For example, reflect on three different statements: I can do it with my teacher, I can do it with help, I can do it
9. Explore cultural elements.
10. Design assessment tools that match the teaching practice.

Other materials writing tips

• Include scaffolding so learners can achieve the tasks.
• Make sure you pilot the materials – they’re not always used how you expect them to be.
• Don’t just think about international or English-speaking cultures, but about whether learners can talk about their own culture in the language they’re learning. Ana had a great example of including some words of Tupi-Guarani in her materials, not just English.
• Use icons to foster independence.
• Make sure illustrations cater to diversity, for example some of the animals had glasses, one child in the illustrations had Down’s syndrome, etc.
• Have materials which are visually appealing – not cluttered and easy to navigate.

Recording

The webinar recording will show you the whole checklist in a lot more depth, with specific examples from Ana’s book – I’d definitely recommend watching the whole thing, not least to see her beautiful materials! If you’re a MaWSIG member, you can watch the recording in the IATEFL member’s area. (Join here)

MaWSIG events

You can find out about other MaWSIG events here. At the time of writing (March 2023), our first ever hybrid PCE is coming up soon, and you can still register.

Why I’m a member of IATEFL

If you’ve never heard of it before, IATEFL is the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. It was started in 1967, so at the time of writing it has existed for over 55 years. You can find out more about the history of IATEFL in the free publication by Shelagh Rixon and Richard Smith, available on IATEFL’s About page. I read it a few months ago and found it utterly fascinating!

My IATEFL story

In 2011, I became active on Twitter just before the IATEFL Brighton conference happened. The community I was part of suddenly went crazy, with tweets from the conference letting me know about the huge range of talks people were attending, and the meet-ups they were having. I learnt so much from reading those tweets, felt a huge amount of FOMO, and promised myself that in 2012 I would be there.

The next step was to work out how. As a third year teacher, I didn’t think I could afford the conference fee myself, so I investigated scholarships. I decided to apply for the IH John Haycraft classroom exploration scholarships, as part of which I had to write a conference proposal and abstract, neither of which I’d done before. Thanks to the help of Ceri Jones, for which I’m eternally grateful, I was able to submit a strong application, and was lucky enough to win that scholarship. That took me to Glasgow 2012.

Since then, I’ve been able to attend every IATEFL conference. Here’s a 2020 post sharing photos from the conferences, along with links to my summaries of talks I attended each year. These are the posts for the 2021 summary and 2022 summary. I’ve learnt so much from the conferences, and made so many friends there. It really is the highlight of my year every year!

Special Interest Groups

IATEFL’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) cover 16 different areas, and I think I’ve attended events run by most of them! I’ve been to both face-to-face and online talks, workshops, and pre-conference events, all of which have been great for my learning and for networking with others interested in that area.

Since 2021, I’ve been a member of the committee for the Materials Writing Special Interest Group, which is probably the one I’ve learnt the most from. It’s really helped me to understand how language learning materials work, how they influence teachers and students, and how they can (and should!) be improved. The people I’ve worked with on the committee and met at the events are also a super-supportive bunch. Through being on the committee, I’ve met a whole range of new people, and learnt new skills, including designing the updated MaWSIG website using Divi, something I had no idea about when I started!

Before being on the MaWSIG committee, I spent a couple of years on the Membership and Marketing Committee, which offers advice to IATEFL on how to make the Association as relevant and interesting to current and potential members as possible.

Apart from the SIGs, IATEFL does many other things. This 4-minute video will show you some of them:

IATEFL Ambassador

In 2022, I was priviliged to be asked to become an IATEFL Ambassador. Along with Evan Frendo, Sarah Mercer and George Pickering (and hopefully others in the future), I’ll be working to let people know about IATEFL and how it can help them. To that end, please do ask questions in the comments below, and share what you’ve learnt from IATEFL if you’ve been a member or been to one of the conferences.

IATEFL Belfast 2022: In defence of the 4-week course – Neil McCutcheon

Neil is a very experienced CELTA trainer. He runs www.ELTeach.com and is a co-author of Activities for Task-Based Learning [Amazon affiliate link].

New concerns in ELT

• Native-speakerism
• Varieties of English
• The inclusive turn
• New technology / teaching online
• Methodology: aligning more with SLA (second language acquisition)

Neil has boiled everything down to four specific criticisms of CELTA and other 4-week courses:

• It privileges native speakers (by dallying the status of speakers with an L1 other than English)
• It’s an inadequate entry into the profession (only 4 weeks)
• It doesn’t keep pace with the times (DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, use of L1)
• It’s too coursebook-driven (item-by-item syllabus)

Native-speakerism

CELTA is open to everybody, no matter your first language. You have to have good C1 level.

The balance of L1 and non-L1 English speakers on courses has really shifted. The current Cambridge estimates for numbers are in the slide below:

L1 and non-L1 English speakers learn a lot from each on the courses.

Trainers tell trainees about TEFL Equity. We make candidates aware of these issues.

Inadequate entry?

This is what a CELTA is.

The course is almost entirely assessed on classroom practice, which makes it a powerful course. We make trainees aware of how to select and adapt materials and bring things off the page. We teach trainees how to teach balanced lessons, with a balance of clarification and practice, how to keep students involved all the way through with good quality techniques. We teach candidates to set up and manage tasks well, to give clear instructions, to make sure tasks have a communicative goal, and to respond in a good quality way to student language. These are all important things, and are easier said than done! Candidates get a chance to analyse language.

The whole course offers a broadly immersive experience.

Even though the course isn’t very theoretical, there’s a difference between a course that’s informed by some theory and a course that’s informed by no theory at all.

If you think 4 weeks is inadequate training, how about a week? A weekend? None?

Rather than devaluing the status of professions, it’s a kind of driving licence for entering the profession. It’s a licence to teach.

Some Masters programmes have as little as 30 or 45 minutes of practicum on them – CELTA and CertTESOL have 6 hours.

Experiential learning

Examples of feedback

Thanks for Gui Henriques for collecting these. They show how trainers are responding to current theory in ELT.

Referring to using the L1:

Decoding in listening:

Analytical evaluation of materials:

It’s the trainers who count. They’re not constrained by the syllabus in any way.

The wrong approach? CELTA and SLA

These are criticisms of 4-week courses from Geoff Jordan:

Some replies:

• Raw material: the candidates who come onto the courses generally don’t have much grounding in language analysis, so they can’t do the kind of reactive teaching that experienced teachers can. They can’t offer that level of rich language language feedback.
• Immersion: plenty of input.
• Adaptation of materials: we teach candidates to adapt and select. They don’t have to follow coursebooks slavishly.
• A balance of clarification and practice. We don’t train teachers to talk about language all the time.
• We do want trainees to get students ‘doing things with language’. Courses often include TBL, and there are plenty of opportunities for fluency practice.

Examples of feedback

On the balance of clarification and practice:

On fluency tasks:

Any course offering that quality of feedback to beginner teachers is worth it’s salt!

Lesson frameworks

Neil taught his trainees how to base a whole lesson around this activity, with a structure he calls Task-Teach-Task:

Jason Anderson’s TATE framework can also be used, which has an emergent language focus:

We’re not stuck in PPP – we can use other frameworks.

The criterion from the syllabus is:

Focussing on language items in the classroom by clarifying relevant aspects of meaning and form (including phonology) to an appropriate degree of depth

2e

Explicit instruction can help learners develop their knowledge.

Explicit instruction and communicative practice together can help learners develop implicit knowledge.

[I missed the source for this quote]

Neil said he thinks there needs to be a fight back for explicit teaching.

A more radical approach?

An example of something Anthony Gaughan did on his courses:

CELTA depends on the trainer. There’s nothing in the criteria that should make it less radical.

Summary

Examples of trainee feedback:

From Emma Jones and Amanda Momeni

It was a life-changing experience.

Very common feedback from trainees (I’ve heard this many times too!)

IATEFL Belfast 2022 – Environmental sustainability and ELT in 2022: which way now? Geoffrey Maroko, Owain Llewellyn, Ceri Jones

This was the closing plenary for the IATEFL Belfast 2022 conference.

Ceri and Geoffrey beamed in via Zoom, and Owain was in the room. Sarah Mount coordinated the debate.

Ceri is in Spain, where there is a May heatwave – with 40 degree temperatures inland today (it’s May 20th). She’s one of the co-founders of the ELT Footprint community. You can join in on social media, mainly on facebook, but in other places too. Go to the website to find out more.

Geoffrey is in Kenya. He’s a university lecturer in Applied Linguistics. He’s interested in traditional environmental knowledge.

Owain is based in Wales. He’s got a website called ELT Sustainable, with language lessons focussing on environmental issues.

Indigenous environmental knowledge

Geoffrey talked about community-based organisations who share traditional environmental knowledge.

The UN has declared 2022-2032 the international decade of indigenous languages.

There are a lot of opportunities to work around this area to come up with information to sustain and protect our environment.

Contextualisation

Owain has been creating materials to be used globally, but one of the challenges is how to make it relevant across different contexts. It’s not always possible. You either have to make lessons locally, or make them adaptable for different local contexts if they’re global materials.

Sarah Mercer, Nayr Ibrahim, Kath Bilsborough and Ceri Jones recently conducted a survey which will hopefully be published in ELTJ soon. There seems to be a ‘place-based eco-pedagogy’, with lots of local action happening. Students are looking really closely at their own local ecosystems, and learning to think about the consequences of actions locally. This gives them the chance to grow eco-literacy and systems thinking.

The starting point for learners should be the world that they know.

Owain used to teach in Bulgaria, where rural to urban migration is very common. He wanted to do a lesson about this. In Bulgaria, you’re very likely to find abandoned houses as people had moved to the city, many of which had a big walnut tree. He found a poem called ‘An elegy to a walnut tree’. This lesson was used in Bulgaria and Algeria, and was relevant in those contexts, but you might need to change this tree / plant if it was in a different context. In the Kenyan village Geoffrey is from, it might be the mguwe (sp?) tree, but in other communities, it might be different. The learners might not respond in the same way.

In Kenya, many places were named after the plants which were grown there. Now the names are still there, but the plants have often gone. A conscious effort needs to be made to grow those plants there again.

Context is an important starting point for designing our materials.

An idea from the audience: the starting point is the local, and this is taken to the global.

Another question: how much should these lessons be developing over time? Over time, the situation is becoming more urgent, but there’s no sense of urgency to the lessons and materials. The focus is on the individual and what can the individual do, without a focus on collective action to pressure the big polluters. But it can depend on the age we’re teaching: we don’t want to create eco-anxiety in our learners. We can work together as professionals to learn more ourselves and to lobby within our sphere of influence in whatever way we can, and taking the action we can: walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.

Health and climate change

Many health problems which exist in the world today can be linked back to climate change. Geoffrey’s university is working with indigenous people in parts of Kenya to collect information about the plants they work with, including language information, usage of the plant, and descriptions of the plant covering as many areas as possible (sight, touch, if not poisonous (!) the taste). They are constructing a database. They thing that once this database exists they should be able to use machine learning to analyse what’s in the database, to create bilingual dictionaries (for example English can borrow from Ekegusii), to create materials based on these – making languages more relevant to the learners, by including references to these plants and how they’re used in materials, in texts, in stories.

Collective responsibility

This is a model of levels at which we can have responsibility:

• Individual: e.g. not eating meat, not buying things in plastic
• Family and friends: e.g. influencing people around you, so they start considering issues
• Professional: e.g. influencing students, staff, institution – this is probably the level at which we can have the most influence to lobby for change or to be examples of action
• Macro: e.g. when we’re voting, protesting, trying to exert pressure on governments and large businesses

Being part of a collective and a community can really support us, and also helps us to stay on track with remembering and using our professional responsibility. This is what Ceri has found connected to ELT Footprint (and I’ve found this too). She mentioned making materials for a training project (which I was lucky enough to work on) where because she knew there were other colleagues from ELT Footprint working in the team, it helped her keep on track when writing the materials and having a relevant environmental focus where she could.

‘Developing materials for the more-than-human world’ (I like this phrase!) and making environmental sustainability a social practice.

If it’s a social practice, it needs to start with the government creating the right policies, moving on to creating the right curriculum which integrates the environment. If the government aren’t doing this, environmental lobby groups should push the government to take up these issues.

Teachers can become researchers, but they also deserve support from organisations. However, teachers might feel overwhelmed by the scale of the topic and feeling a bit lost about the amount of information they might need to cover. We need to develop frameworks and support systems to help teachers, and relate them to linguistic and communicative competences – how do we integrate them? For example, Owain and Ceri have been involved in reviewing a sustainability framework which is being developed by Cambridge University Press.

We need to create practical examples of can do statements that teachers can take into their classroom.

I can understand, explain and give examples of greenwashing.

This is an example of a can do statement which combines language and environment. This develops into a practical lesson, which is practical, project based, and can be local or global.

Teachers also need training to be prepared to teach these topics, and do it in an environmentally-friendly way. This needs to come from teacher training colleges, and other courses. It also touches on the curriculum.

British Council are developing a MOOC connected to sustainability. Colm Downes reminded us that we need to keep an eye on general education too, not just our ELT bubble. The UN have replaced the term ‘Climate Change for Education’ with ‘Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), and this could be a positive term for us to take into ELT.

In the past, Owain has been told that he’s trying a form of indoctrination through doing environmentally focussed lessons. He’s an English Literature graduate, not a scientist, which has also been considered a problem. But he said we have very relevant skills: we’re used to getting people communicating. Focus on your strengths, to facilitate a discussion where learners are going to come to their own conclusions, and to facilitate a classroom community.

If you want to start teaching about the environment, start from something that you know and that feel strongly about. This will be engaging for you and the students. Take the first step, and don’t worry about it too much.

Look for practical activities, for example helping students to do what they’re read about – litter picking, creating a seed bank.

What lessons have we learnt from the past two years and how do we move forwards?

Start with our learners. Give them a sense of empowerment to deal with this pressing crisis which is already upon us. These issues shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet. We needs to empower our language learners to take part in a dialogue around sustainability and to feel that they can act.

Teachers can’t do this on their own. In training, we need to have a dialogue about what a (language) teacher’s role is in bringing sustainability into the classroom.

Publishers and materials developers should bring environmental issues in, not just focussing on individual actions, but what are the root causes of climate issues?

There is also a research agenda looking at the intersection between eco-literacy and language teaching.

Our health is dependent on the health of our environment. We need to create materials to make this clear.

Make sure that eco-literacy is given the same level of importance as areas like critical thinking and communicative skills.

Let’s not forget that the situation is really urgent. Let’s walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And let’s build hope by taking action together.

IATEFL Belfast 2022 – Teacher education and textbooks: a study of materials design – Luis Carabantes

[I missed the start of the talk, setting the context – sorry Luis!]

In Chile, where Luis did his study most university teacher training courses didn’t include specific modules on materials design, though it might have been included in other methodology modules (I think that’s what was said as I arrived!)

Many of the methodology materials talk about how to use and adapt coursebooks, rather than how to make their own materials. So how do language teachers learn to do this?

The apprenticeship of observation is now seen as one of the main obstacles to teachers implementing innovations.

Materials – what do we know?

Materials as curricular artefacts: how can they promote the learning and teaching of English?

Materials as cultural artefacts: representational repertoires in materials.

Materials in use: use of the textbook as syllabus, textbook reification – novice teachers particularly assume things work without questioning it.

Activity theory

This is a kind of sociocultural theory which Luis used to frame his study.

The activity Luis is focussing on is ‘learning to design materials’.

(Luis explained this very quickly, and I couldn’t keep up!)

Research questions

Research methods

8 pre-service teachers in their final year in year 5, doing their practicum, and working to get their BA in English language teaching.

He used stimulated recall interviews based on materials the students sent him. For example: ‘What were you thinking about when you decided to create this activity?’

Findings

Much of the design of the materials by these teachers was mediated by the idea that the materials needed to resemble course books.

He found an important tension between the pre-service teachers and their use of coursebooks. There was a need to cover the textbook as it was used as the syllabus, which somewhat removed the agency of the teachers in creating their materials.

Teachers have an average of 27 teaching hours per week, and sometimes as many as 40. This creates big challenges.

Influence of the settting

Mentor teachers from the school sometimes critiqued the teachers for creating their own materials and moving too far from the coursebook.

The teachers are taught English at the university while they are learning to teach too. They experienced these methods in their own learning, so used it in their teaching too:

ELT as teaching the textbook

Many novice teachers rely on the coursebook. The coursebook becomes the goal. If I need to cover the coursebook, everything needs to be geared towards that.

Influence from the school setting

Classrooms often have 40+ students and 25+ hours, so there is very little time to plan. Teachers learn how to teach, but can’t use this in the context, so rely on the coursebook.

Their own learning of English is textbook mediated, and therefore their practice is likely to be like this too.

Reflections

Implications

Is a school seen as only a place where students learn? Or is it seen as a place where teachers learn too?

IATEFL Belfast 2022 – Day Four

This was the final day of the conference so was a little shorter. There was an opening and a closing plenary, and I attended a couple of sessions, all of which I have summarised below. If you were one of the speakers please feel free to correct anything I may have got wrong or misinterpreted.

Plenary: Education, English and the question of future in conflict areas – Asmaa AbuMezied and Hasna AbuMezied

Asmaa’s first questions:

• Do you know of any conflicts around the world? (Everybody)
• Do you know how many conflicts are currently happening? (Almost nobody put their hand up)

There are many different reasons for this: interstate, local, criminal violence and militias, social injustice protests, territorial disputes.

Gaza is one of the areas which is involved in a territorial dispute.

Over the past few years, fewer people are dying in conflict, but more conflicts are happening. The more we are losing our natural resources, the more likely these conflicts are to happen. Where does that leave us?

Survival as a state

As we meet today, one quarter of humanity lives in conflict-affected areas. Two billion people.

Antonio Gutierrez, UN Secretary General, March 2022

Conflict isn’t just the state of active bombardment and strikes. It never leaves you, even when it ends. That’s what we’re talking about when we think about education and future generations. People find themselves in a state of survival, rather than living. Everybody is constantly looking around them to check, how can we support our families, our people to live another day.

The UN called Gaza unliveable by 2020. Asmaa and Hasna are here today. They are alive, but are they living.

Gaza

It is 365km2, with 2 million people in this tiny place. It has been occupied for decades. There has been a blockade for 15 years. It is considered an open air prison. Asmaa and Hasna had a major journey to be here at IATEFL today.

If you know somebody from a conflict area: what did it take for you to get here? What are the restrictions that have stopped your colleagues from being able to come? We (I) are privileged to be here.

What kind of future are we building for our future? We are in a state of constant fear. That’s not a future we want to give to our children.

65% of the population is living on humanitarian assistance, according to the UN.

About 50% of the population is unemployed. You put a huge amount of effort into education, but can’t do anything with it.

53% of people live in poverty.

64% of the population is food insecure, according to the World Food Programme, and most of them are eating food which is unhealthy, affecting their mental and physical health.

96% of the water is undrinkable, and this is likely to increase.

There is an air strike somewhere in the Gaza Strip almost every month.

There is no feeling of safety or security.

To help with this, education is an area that people focus on. Without education, they will not be heard. It is a way of surviving, a way of living.

What shapes the journey of a Palestinian English Language teacher in Gaza?

Teachers face many different challenges.

Educational challenges

• Limited numbers of schools per capita and overcrowded classes (45-50 students)
• Schools operate on double or triple shifts to cope with numbers. This leads to fewer hours for students too.
• Limited resources including technology. Teachers often need to buy their own chalk for example.

Teachers try to use interactive methods, but this can be very challenging due to numbers and available resources.

They have 6-12 hours of electricity per day. There is an electricity schedule, telling them when they will get electricity.

They don’t just have to coordinate with other teachers, but with the electricity schedule.

This restricts students’ learning and study time.

Political instability

• Limited opportunities to use English in real life. Limited contact with foreigners. Loss of hope and motivation.
• Disruption of education for teachers and students.

I will never be able to travel outside Gaza, so why should I learn English?

Typical student question

In the 14 years Hasna has been teaching, there has been a disruption in education every year. This puts great pressure on teachers: delivering 4 months content in 3 months. Teachers will take extra classes to meet the demands of the curriculum, and some classes may be cut (like PE or art). They know those are important classes for students, but they have to make these challenging decisions.

Trauma and mental health

In 2008, Hasna was waiting for an exam to start, when suddenly the school started shaking. She looked out of the right-hand windows and saw flames and smoke. She told them to go to the left side, and then they saw thick black smoke outside. Another teacher and her tried to keep the students in the school, but it was complete chaos. They had no idea what was happening. That was one of the saddest and bloodiest days in Gaza’s history.

For many people, schools are considered to be safe places. They are used as shelters during conflicts. 1047 students and teachers were killed during the 2014 conflict, and 46 public schools were damaged in May 2021.

There are daily triggers. Will the same thing again? Will I be able to help my students? What about my children? What if their teacher leaves them beyond? Should I go to them first? This is a constant – you are thinking about this all the time.

You might hear air strikes in the middle of a lesson, and students will get scared. They will hear drones and close their books. One student will start crying whenever she hears shooting, and the rest of the students start crying too, so now Hasna asks her to go and wash her faces. Every time Hasna has to encourage her students to continue. This is their daily life, and they have to adapt to it.

Every night, the teachers are soothing their children all night, and every day they have to go back to school and be able to support their students.

One colleague has a panic attack whenever she hears the word ‘invade’ in Arabic.

There is so much pressure for teachers to be positive all the time. They have become adept at hiding their feelings for the sake of their families, students, and colleagues. They cannot say they are tired.

We have all the reasons to collapse, but we don’t have the luxury to do it.

A teacher from Gaza

Economic challenges: poverty and marginalisation

• Underpaid salaries – they only receive 40-60% of their salaries, in the past every 50-60 days though now it is better – now they get it every 30 days.
• Poverty among teachers – teachers supplement their income with extra lessons or other jobs beyond education. Teachers walk long distances to get to school if they can’t pay for transport (which many can’t). 92% of employees in Gaza suffer from depression and deep sadness because they can’t give their children an allowance.
• Drop out of school – particularly female students in 9th and 10th grades, some of whom are already engaged in 9th grade. There is seasonal dropping out due to agricultural requirements.
• Inequality – being in a marginalised area, with buildings all built by donations from other countries, but very few people have access to smartphones or any kind of online provision so they can’t take advantage of technology for example.

Mum, you look so tired. You look like a crushed snail.

Hasna’s son, Suleiman

Future of education

The talk today leaves us with a lot of questions.

The pandemic has shifted a lot of education to the household. Educational labour in the household can leave families, and particularly women, feeling inadequate. Teaching is a feminised issue, and therefore can be undervalued and not appreciated. We need to bring this to the forefront.

Our students all experience education differently. It is our responsibility to listen to and consider what they need.

How do we make technology accessible and safe to our students?

What does it mean to be a teacher? We all have so many hats. As a psychologist, as a supporter, as a parent, as a human.

How can we ensure that we have a decolonised education system that values our indigenous knowledge? How we care for our environment? To what extent is the content of our education extractive to our cultures and to our environment?

We need to have a future to our education that encompasses us all.

Thank you to IATEFL for bringing such wonderful speakers to us today. They got a well deserved standing ovation, for an emotional and important talk.

What I think I know about materials writing (IATEFL Belfast 2022)

This is something of a companion piece to my IATEFL 2021 talk, What I’ve learnt about teacher training this year. This is the abstract for the talk:

Over the years, I’ve attended many Materials Writing talks at IATEFL. I’ve been involved in producing materials for my classroom, for publishers and for self-publishing. I’ve also recently completed the NILE MA Materials Development module, meaning I’ve been able to add more theory to my practical experience of materials writing. This session brings together what I’ve learnt in the process.

These are the slides from the presentation:

2022.05.19 What I think I know about materials writing (IATEFL Belfast 2022) Sandy Millin – slides.pptx from Sandy Millin

A video clip

The British Council asked me to talk about using a materials checklist after my talk, which gives you a 10-minute taster of some of the things I discussed:

Background

Like many teachers, I did my first materials writing in my early lessons, creating materials for my classroom. These were of somewhat mixed quality and resulted in lessons of somewhat mixed quality. With trial, error and student feedback I improved, but it definitely helped to get external input.

The first professional materials writing I did was for OUP, creating model texts for online content. Through this and other writing work, I received feedback on what I was producing and was pushed to improve the quality of my writing and/or to move it closer to the brief I had been given. I also got feedback on my writing from the editors I worked with on my self-published books, and informal feedback through materials I posted on my blog.

I’ve followed the IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) since it was first created in 2013, attended many materials writing talks at IATEFL and online, and read MaWSIG blog posts. Here are links to my summaries of IATEFL talks related to materials writing:

• IATEFL Manchester 2015: MaWSIG Pre-Conference Event
• IATEFL Manchester 2015: Materials writing
• IATEFL Birmingham 2016: MaWSIG Pre-Conference Event
• IATEFL Glasgow 2017: Materials writing
• IATEFL online 2021: MaWSIG Pre-Conference Event

In 2021, I started the NILE MA Materials Development module. This gave me more of a theoretical grounding in materials writing, both through the sessions I attended during the course and through the two assignments I wrote. Please note: this talk is not endorsed by NILE. The MA module just provided some of the input for me to reflect on.

The ideas in this talk are a distillation of some of the things I’ve learnt during this process. They’re not intended to be new or innovative, but hopefully there will be something useful in there for you.

Evaluating materials and using checklists

Looking at other people’s materials is a useful starting point for your own materials writing. By deciding what should and shouldn’t be on a checklist, then using it to analyse existing materials, it helps you to consider what makes materials work or not. You could use a similar checklist after you’ve written your materials to see what you might need to change.

As part of the MA, we learnt about different approaches to writing evaluation checklists, and through this process I thought a lot about my own materials writing. Here is the checklist I compiled for my assignment.

As part of my work as a Director of Studies, I had to guide the selection of coursebooks used at our school. I had never received any training in how to do this, so it was mostly a process of trial and error. Over time we built up a list of characteristics that we knew we needed to look for in the books we would use, but it would have been a lot easier to create a checklist to guide our selection.

Tips for writing a materials checklist

• Define your context. Who are the students? Years of learning? Level? Purpose for the lessons? Educational background? Who is the teacher? Experience level? Subject knowledge? What is the lesson format? Online / face-to-face / blended? Lesson length? Course length? Without knowing the context, the materials evaluation will be generic. The context can make a real difference to which criteria are important to include.
• Start with a list of ideas of what you think would make effective materials for this context. These ideas could (and probably will!) be guided by principles you believe (see below). Turn your ideas into questions. I found ‘To what extent…?’ to be a useful framing device.
• Ensure each point is discrete / there are no overlaps.
• Think about how many criteria it’s appropriate to use. I used 25 to analyse a full coursebook unit, which I found covered all the areas I thought were important, but remained quite quick to complete.
• Use a scoring system. I scored each criterion 0-4: 0 = not at all, 1 = just barely, 2 = to some extent, 3 = to a large extent, 4 = to the greatest extent.
• Add weighting to show which criteria are more / less important/desirable. I used 1-3: 1 = desired, 2 = preferred, 3 = essential.
• Grouping the criteria into categories can help you to check for overlaps / missing criteria. It allows you to have sub-totals for different sections if you use a scoring system, and to compare different materials.
• Include space for comments so you can make notes to back up your scores.
• Collaborate with others during the process: when deciding on what to include, when weighting criteria, when editing the checklist, when using it.

Resources for writing checklists

There are examples of checklists and advice for creating them available in various materials writing methodology books and journal articles. You may need to have a subscription to access the journal articles. These are ones I found useful:

• Cunningsworth, A. (1995) Choosing your coursebook, Macmillan. [Amazon affiliate link]
• Gearing, K. (1999) ‘Helping less-experienced teachers of English to evaluate teachers’ guides’. ELT Journal, April, 53(2), pp. 122-157.
• Hutchinson, T. (1987) ‘What’s underneath?: an interactive view of materials evaluation’ in Sheldon (ed.) ELT Textbooks and Materials – Problems in Evaluation and Development, British Council, pp. 37-44.
• McGrath, I. (2016) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching, 2^nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Amazon affiliate link]
• Mukundan, J. and Ahour, T. (2010) ‘A Review of Textbook Evaluation Checklists across Four Decades (1970-2008)’ in Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H. (eds.) Research for Materials Development in Language Learning: Evidence for best practice. London: Continuum, pp.336-352. [Amazon affiliate link]
• Sheldon, L. E. (1988) ‘Evaluating ELT textbooks and materials’. ELT Journal, October, 42(4), pp. 237-246.
• Williams, D. (1983) ‘Developing criteria for textbook evaluation’ ELT Journal, July, 37 (3), pp251-255.

You can see a summary of some of MA notes related to checklists in this post.

Principles and materials writing

Discovering your principles

I first came across the idea of considering your principles when approaching materials writing in Jill Hadfield’s talk at IATEFL Manchester 2015. She wrote a journal while writing a set of materials, then used this to put together a list of ‘framing principles’ to guide her future materials writing. Here are some of them:

#iatefl Jill Hadfield More of her principles. She calls them 'boundary fence' principles – shouldn't cross this pic.twitter.com/eeGcnqPhW5

— Sandy Millin (she/her) 🇪🇺 (@sandymillin) April 13, 2015

Mishan and Timmis (2015:1) define principled materials development as follows:

Materials development which takes into account current practice, but goes beyond it to consult first principles drawn from second language acquisition (SLA) and language teaching theory.

Materials Development for TESOL, Freda Mishan and Ivor Timmis, Edinburgh Textbooks in TESOL [Amazon affiliate link]

This could sound quite complicated or difficult to achieve if you don’t have much of a background in this theory, but it is actually easier to consider than it might seem. You could start with a list of what you believe makes effective materials, perhaps supported by prior evaluation of materials (see above). This was the list I compiled when I started my MA materials evaluation assignment:

• Materials should engage the learners’ interest through the choice of topics, and maintain it through varied activities.
• Developing positive group dynamics are a key factor in effective teaching.
• Materials should train learners to be better listeners and readers, not just test their abilities.
• Materials should provide plenty of opportunities for learners to speak and write, as well as support to help them do so.
• Materials should help learners to become more autonomous.
• Language work should not be purely grammar focussed. It should also include work on lexis, including lexical chunks, on pronunciation, and on functional language to improve the quality of learner discourse.
• New teachers need and guidance support with their teaching.
• Materials should be inclusive and accessible to all. Learners should see themselves represented in the materials they use.

Chapter 2 of the Mishan and Timmis book includes a selection of key points which might help you to incorporate SLA and theory into your principles.

You can see more detailed examples of some of the beliefs I considered during my MA module and my thinking behind them in these three posts: week one, week two, week three.

How to use your principles

Once you have a list of principles, you can refer to these regularly.

Before you start designing something, remind yourself of your principles. Is there anything key to this context which you might also need to consider? Are any of the principles not relevant in this context? If it’s for somebody else, will the project require you to ignore some or all of your principles, and if so, do you still want to commit to it?

As you design, look at your principles occasionally. Are you sticking to them? Are there any which are hard for you to follow? Is there anything you could do or anybody you could speak to in order to change your approach to the writing to be able to stick more closely to your principles?

As you proofread and edit, use the principles as a checklist. Is there anything you’ve forgotten to include / pay attention to in the writing process?

Stakeholders in materials writing

When you’re in the middle of writing materials, it can be easy to get caught up in making them exactly how you want them to be. It’s important to stop occasionally and consider the other stakeholders in the process.

The user

Ultimately, the materials have to be suitable for the user. This might be the learner, the trainee, or the teacher. Put yourself into the position of each potential user and ask yourself:

• How easy is this for me to understand?
• Do I have all of the information I need to make the most of these materials?

The editor

Please, please, please have somebody edit your work. This can make a huge difference to the quality of what you produce! It certainly did with my books.

I’ve learnt a lot from attending talks by and working with Penny Hands, editor extraordinaire. At the 2021 MaWSIG PCE, Penny talked about different roles an editor might have (see the final section of the post). When working with an editor, make sure you’re clear about which role(s) you’d like them to fulfil: whether you’d like them to focus on copy editing or proofreading. It can be easier to do these in two separate cycles. Before you send it off, read the manuscript again yourself with your ‘copy editor’ or ‘proofreader’ hat on, and try to resolve at least some of the problems. If you’re self-publishing, this saves you money too!

When you get edited work back, it can sometimes feel a bit depressing. You’ve put so much work into producing the materials, and now you find there are lots of things you need to change. Remember that the editor will only comment on things which should improve the end product. If they’re materials for your own classroom, it could make the difference between a lesson which works and one where the learners have no idea what’s going on. If you self-publish, it’s up to you whether you take the editor’s advice (in 99% of cases, I would!) If you’re working for a publisher, the editor will be helping you to meet the brief. In all of these cases, feel free to spend a few minutes being sad about the work you put in, but then let go and make the changes. The final product will be better for it!

Designers

If you’re working with a designer, learn how to write an artwork brief. Ceri Jones and Ben Goldstein included advice on this in their IATEFL 2015 MaWSIG PCE talk (the second one in the post).

If you’re self-publishing, keep the design as simple as possible. You’ll thank me when you have to reformat it for different platforms!

Layout

Some very simple tweaks can make a big difference to how easy it is to navigate your materials. These are the ones I most commonly suggest to people:

• Number exercises and questions within exercises.
• Use a different font for rubrics. Having rubrics in bold / on a different coloured background can also differentiate them.
• Add spacing before / after exercises and questions.
• Use lines and / or boxes to separate sections on the page.
• Use tables rather than text boxes to organise a word-processed document – they’re much easier to manage the layout of. You can remove the border of the table if you don’t want it to be visible.
• Use page breaks and section breaks to create new parts to your document, rather than pressing enter lots of times. The exercise will always stay on a new page, regardless of how much you add above it.
• Use ‘styles’, including Headings, to create a consistent layout across your document. Having headings also allows you to use the navigation pane to move around your document quickly and easily. [Note that some publishers prefer you not to use these as it can interfere with the design stage of materials production.]

If you’re not sure how to do any of these things, do a search for the relevant topic and there are normally accessible written and video tutorials for them e.g. ‘use a table in Microsoft Word’ or ‘page breaks in Google Docs’.

Many of these changes could make a big difference to learners with SEN and how easy it is to navigate your materials.

Inclusivity

Think about who is represented within your materials and how. Can the target users ‘see’ themselves in the materials?

• What names have you used?
• Is everybody the same colour? Gender? Body type? Age?
• What kind of things are the people doing?
• Who are they with?

Ceri Jones and Ben Goldstein included different sources for images IATEFL 2015 MaWSIG PCE talk (the second one in the post).

Other useful resources

Two very common activity types are gapfills and multiple-choice. These talks helped me to improve the quality of these activities and avoid some of the pitfalls.

• Sue Kay: How to write multiple-choice activities
• Leo Selivan: Mind the ______: rediscovering gap-fills (the last section of the post)
• John Hughes: 50 ways to avoid gap-fill fatigue (the second section of the post)

The ELT Teacher2Writer books are a goldmine of useful information, covering a wide range of different materials writing topics. If you can only afford one, I recommend How To Write Excellent ELT Materials: The Skills Series which is 6 books in one: [Amazon affiliate link]

ETpedia Materials Writing is a one-stop shop of 500 ideas to help you with your materials writing. [Amazon affiliate link] Pavilion often have a discount on it, including during the IATEFL conference.

Over to you!

Was anything here particularly new or interesting to you here?

What tips would you add to the list?

Which resources have you found particular useful in your own materials writing?

IATEFL Belfast 2022: Lessons from the living room – live online teaching – Lindsay Clandfield (and Jill Hadfield)

Lindsay and Jill have recently written a book called Live Online Teaching [Pavilion link – not affiliate].

In the past many people taught in classrooms with no technology, but during the pandemic this flipped to teaching with technology but no classroom. Both situations create constraints on how you can teach.

How do constraints create creativity?

We need constraints for creativity – absolute freedom can make creativity very challenging.

Madagascar – classrooms without technology

This was a situation Jill and Charlie Hadfield taught in. They worked in Madagascar, but there were no books. There might be a cracked blackboard, or slates for children. The solution came from the market. Smallholders there had stocks of large paper to wrap goods in. They got schools to buy lots of these pieces of paper. They put up a washing line in a classroom, with one picture at the front of the room and one at the back. Children sat in pairs back to back and described the picture they could see to their partner. Here are examples of the pictures:

The pandemic: technology without classrooms

Here are examples of the kinds of constraints when working online:

So how did teachers work around these constraints? Here are examples of using classic ELT activities.

Using video and audio

Interview an object

Jill would be off screen and have an object on screen. Students ask questions to the object, and the teacher answers as if they’re the object. Then the students do this.

> Not everybody needs to be on the screen at the same time.

Running dictation

Use email / a link to send to one student before the lesson to print out or put on the phone. Put the phone or text at the end of the room. When the teacher says go, the student has to get up and go to the text.

Participation tools

For example, chat box, emoji reactions.

Longest sentence

> This worked well even if students couldn’t get video or audio to work.

Who am I?

> You can ‘Spotlight’ / ‘Pin’ somebody so that even if they’re not talking, they’re the main screen. It’s like you’re putting them on stage.

> By giving the students the constraint that they can only use the thumbs up / thumbs down button with the video off, it forced students to ask yes / no questions.

Sharing your screen

Art thoughts

> You don’t just have to share PowerPoint slides or websites, you can share many other things too.

Same words, different place

> You can spotlight more than one person to have a dialogue.

For example, in a supermarket, in a city, in a library. Then another slide in the same place but without displaying the dialogue.

Breakout Rooms

Lindsay found that he did fewer pair/groupwork activities but for longer, compared to his classroom. They tended to be longer activities with feedback. There tended to be more open pairwork, rather than closed pairwork.

Dreamtowns

> Getting students to write things on paper and hold it up to the screen meant that others would lean forward to look at it. It seemed to engage others who were in the session as they wanted to see.

This worked well for mini projects.

Clock match

This is a kind of information gap.

> Students can produce their own materials. It might take around 10 minutes to create the materials, but it makes it possible to do interactive pairwork games in breakout rooms.

Zooming Out

> Micro breaks away from the computer.

> Teaching on Zoom drastically reduces the teacher’s mobility, which can be very tiring.

> It also feels like you’re teaching into a mirror a lot.

> Tiring for students too to always be in front of a screen!

Stand up, stretch your arms, walk to the nearest door, count the steps, type in the chat box. Then who was the closest? Who was the furthest?

Go to the fridge, find something which is yellow, come back and tell your partner.

Get up, walk around the room, mentally name 5 things in English, then come back and say what you’ve done.

> It’s a clear task, so students will come back!

Sensory poem

IATEFL Belfast 2022: Breaking stigma, building skills: representing mental illness in ELT materials – Lottie Galpin

Lottie started out as a teacher, and now focussed on DEI and materials – making materials more inclusive.

Lottie would like to trial inclusive materials with teachers, not just about mental health but about all areas of marginalisation. If you’d like to work with her, contact her via http://www.lottiegalpin.com.

When she mentioned this topic to some people, she had some who said it was important and should be included. Some said it’s too heavy and it shouldn’t be there. And some people looked at her awkwardly and didn’t know what to say. This reflects where we’re at with mental health in society – we don’t always have the language to talk about it. We can start to give our students the language to do this, and to break down some of the stigma around mental illness.

Language

There’s lots of different language we could use:

• Mental illness
• Mental health problems
• Mental health disorders (very negative!0
• Mental health conditions
• Mental health challenges?

Mind, the UK charity, talks about mental health problems, with under this umbrella many areas (but not only these!):

[If language connected to mental health is something you’re interested in, there is an episode of Word of Mouth which covers this.]

So why is it important to represent mental illness and mental health challenges in ELT published materials?

As we said, it’s a part of life! Physical health is covered, but mental health isn’t. Why do we make that division? It’s all just health.

It helps students to realise they’re not alone.

It can be more dangerous to have a world where everything is happy, happy, shiny, shiny (thanks Hugh Dellar for that phrase!) and pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Students need to have that language to be able to talk about these things.

Students are potentially ready to talk about the topic, but maybe the teachers aren’t. If it’s in the coursebook, they might be more likely to do this.

Why is representation important?

• All students can themselves in materials.
• Increases student engagement and belonging.
• Teaches students about a range of lived experiences.
• Creates global citizens – prepares them for the world.
• Gives students language to describe themselves.

If one in four people globally will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime, that’s one in four of our students who will experience it first hand, and probably all of them will have somebody they know who goes through this. We need to prepare them to deal with this.

People don’t seek treatment because of stigma.

We can’t save the world, but we can help to reduce stigma.

How can we represent mental illness?

• Representation of people with mental illness
• Content that represents everyday experiences of mental illness
• Content that builds awareness of mental illness and mental health skills
• Support teachers and students with empowering teacher’s notes

An example

Lottie created an example of materials which build knowledge about a mental health condition, but also build their own language skills.

Start with the teacher’s notes. Offer student choice, allow teachers to prepare and model good practice with triggering topics.

This is the lesson warmer. It could be a text, a video – something real-life. The question focuses on ‘health’ not ‘mental health’, and the teacher’s notes talk about how to develop digital skills:

In the text, students build up factual knowledge about the condition. The text is designed to look like something which is reliable.

The discussion questions:

In our pair, we talked about the fact that exercise 5 might depend on who you are. I thought about from the point of view of ‘I have this health problem, how can I find out how to live with it’, whereas my partner talked about ‘Somebody has told me about it, and I want to learn more’.

These are the teacher’s notes:

The follow-up task is a standard research task, with overt skills practice.

Other things we can do

Representing real people, integrated in our other materials:

All teachers could feel comfortable using this, though Lottie would add a teacher’s note explaining what OCD actually is – to avoid stereotypes.

We could also integrate it into our audio:

This is a very standard type of dialogue, but why not include references to mental health rather than ‘Sorry, I’m busy.’

Too triggering to teach?

If you know your students, and allow the teacher’s book to explore the topic, then it shouldn’t be too triggering to teach, but you need to bear these things in mind:

Final thoughts

Featuring mental illness can build awareness and break stigma.

It may be triggering, but triggers can be mitigated.

Covering mental illness should be considered according to context.

This is the start of a conversation. This is just one way to cover mental health in materials, but there could be many other ways.

IATEFL Belfast 2022: Women in coursebooks: then and now – how representation has changed. Elaine Hodgson and Vivian’s Karmeliene

What are the ELT ‘mistakes’ in this image and this text? This was from a popular coursebook, and was designed to be humourous.

This book was published in the same year as Return of the Jedi was released, when there was only one woman in the story, and she was wearing a bikini on the poster. It was also the same year as She’s so cold by the Rolling Stones. Pretty Women, Baywatch, Victoria’s Secret Angels – these were all typical of the context at the time.

They looked at two popular series from 1994/1999 and 2017, focussing on elementary level, and family, jobs and free time.

Family

Here’s an example of family:

In the original page, there is a strong focus on the man’s family. Only one question in the exercise is focussed on the woman’s family.

In the newer edition, there is an example of a solo woman with children, but with no information in the teacher’s book about how the image might be used. The family tree is Joseph’s family – still the man’s family. There’s one solo woman in the family tree, and she’s the only woman who’s unhappy in the image.

In the dialogue from an old book, the focus is on marriage. It’s expected that if you’re married, you have a husband. In the more modern edition, the focus is on siblings. In a dialogue, it’s usually the man who starts the conversation.

The man is still in the foreground

In the other series, we have Patrick’s family in the old edition. His daughter is a nurse – it’s a traditional role. In the new edition, it’s Max’s family. There’s a solo woman in the family tree too. In the texts, the focus is on the family as a whole. There is a line ‘I often help my mum or dad cook the meals’. To finish the sequence, students are invited to talk about their own families.

In the 5th edition, we have Jason’s family.

Some numbers related to family units

Jobs

In a unit about jobs, in the old edition, there were stock images, and extra information about marital status and family. In the new edition, it’s a real woman (you can find her on the internet), with real images of her working, and the information about her family is relevant to the text not randomly added in.

In the focus on vocabulary, in the old edition women are generally doing jobs traditionally associated with women. In the fifth edition, many of the roles are also similar. In the exercise, four out of five of the female jobs are caring jobs – women always have the caring roles, never men.

In the new edition below, in the grammar focus, ‘she’ is used as the pronoun. The woman starts the conversation, not the man.

Some numbers related to jobs and women

Free time

The old edition – the title is ‘Take it easy’, but the female character asks ‘What’s free time?’

The woman ‘doesn’t work on weekdays’ because she looks after her family (!)

In the current edition, the footballer works during the week and plays games at the weekend. There are no women in the spread.

In the old edition, the women generally don’t look happy or have neutral expressions:

In the new edition, there’s a much wider range of images in terms of gender, age, roles:

In the other book, in the old edition, the man is focussed on keeping fit, the woman is the couch potato. In the new edition it’s flipped. The woman is interested in keeping fit, but doesn’t show she’s happy about it.

In the old edition, there are more ‘mistakes’! In the new edition, the woman starts the conversation, but the man is assertive and says he’s good, while the woman says she’s not very good.

We’re getting there

In this book, there are real photos of families so they seem more diverse.

Two teenage girls working out – women can do their own thing without having to interact with men all the time:

There are examples of women doing different things in coursebooks too: a female judo fighter, female activists.

There is progress in the world too: Star Wars posters that are a full image of a woman.

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. [I missed the second half of the quote!]

Jane Austen

IATEFL Belfast 2022: CPD for materials writers: in search of a framework – Denise Santos

Denise’s website is www.denisesantos.com.

When Denise first started teaching, her CPD was mostly managed by the institutions she worked in. The first materials she published, she had no training in materials writing – she wrote what she thought was best. When she did her MA, she started to see things in a more complex way. When she did her PhD, things got more complex, but she was very confident and happy with the way things were. She was happy with what she learnt.

In 2020, there were too many options. Too many courses. Too many live sessions. The topics were completely new – new ways of teaching and learning that she wasn’t used to, and she had to write materials for these things. She found herself doing too many things and not knowing where these things were leading to in her CPD.

Her first CPD questions were focussed on what: what should I do? What shouldn’t I do? But that isn’t enough – we also need to know the why.

She went onto social media to see what people were talking about. People were thinking about their CPD plans for the future, for 2022. Here are some of the things people were talking about:

But still, the focus is too much on the what. There are some whys here, but it’s not systematic. For what purpose and how do I know?

The framework we tend to talk about

We plan/define what we’re going to do, we do it, then hopefully we apply it. Stopping at applying it isn’t enough, Denise says. We need to have more higher-order thinking skills.

When Denise searched for “CPD for materials writers”, she got 5 hits, and 2 were for this talk! Others led her to this book:

There wasn’t much on the continuing professional development for materials writers.

The literature

There is a lot of research about materials.

Very little about implementation of materials

Very little about writers and the writing process

Very little about writers’ (C)PD

Musing

We are materials writers, but …of what? …for what? Are you clear about this for yourself? For Denise, the teaching side of what she writes is important to her, so she looked at the models proposed for teacher development to see if they could inspire her.

Frameworks for teachers

• Subject matter knowledge
• General pedagogical knowledge
• Pedagogical content knowledge
• Knowledge of context

This is one way of breaking down what we know.

Here’s another example of a framework:

British Council teacher framework: This talks about four levels: awareness, understanding, engagement, integration. Around these four levels, there are 12 professional practices, including pedagogical, content, context issues.

The level Denise wants to draw our attention to is ‘taking responsibility for professional development’:

Evaluating is great to include, but Denise isn’t sure about how this could be done. Maybe it should be a more integrated part of the sequence of the 4 levels?

Insights from these frameworks

• Action (and application) not enough
• We need analysis and evaluation (how?) e.g. Borg, 2018

There were 374 impressions, but only 10 votes. The comments stayed at the application level of CPD.

Denise also looked at frameworks from other areas, not just ELT:

A tentative framework

It’s much more complex!

How do you know whether your professional development is effective or not?

Answers to questions

Should we work towards this individually or as groups? Working together could help us come up with a repertoire of techniques we could use for our own development and for evaluating it.

Final note from me

Here’s an article I wrote for Humanising Language Teaching with some ideas for developing as a materials writer which you might be interested in.

IATEFL Belfast 2022: A practical, goal-focused, combined approach to teaching real-life L2 listening – Sheila Thorn

Sheila’s website is www.thelisteningbusiness.com.

Sheila’s mission for the past 20+ years has been to convince the ELT profession of the need to expose learners to authentic spoken English. Scripts in coursebooks have to be scripted and read by actors, so they are effectively listening to reading aloud, not natural speech. Learners don’t get exposed to how spoken English is naturally produced.

She has worked on producing an authentic listening methodology book (Amazon affiliate link) Integrating authentic listening into the language classroom. Sheila got non-teaching friends to read the chapters and give feedback, so it should be accessible to anybody at any level of teaching.

The prevailing tendency in the teaching of listening is to provide practice and more practice without clearly defined goals.

Listening in the Language Classroom, Field, 2008:3

Sheila worked on defining these goals, and thinking about it from a learner perspective. What do they find challenging?

Issues with listening:

• Anxiety
• Cognitive load – you’re trying to decode, and more is still coming in
• Exhausting
• Don’t know some of the words, but also don’t recognise the words they know when they’re in a stream of speech (when Sheila analysed random utterances from TV and radio, over 90% of the words were at B1 level)
• Don’t speak the way we write

Sometimes we don’t realise how tough it is for students to listen to authentic spoken English.

Goals

1. To build up learners’ confidence
2. To increase learners’ automaticity (doing things accurately without conscious effort)
3. To increase learners’ lexical knowledge (aural and orthographic) – making a match between what they hear and what they know already
4. To encourage learners to work out for themselves the meaning of unfamiliar lexis
5. To train learners to focus on prominent words in a stream of speech

Three approaches to teaching L2 listening

1. Traditional listening comprehension

2. Meaning building with the teacher as facilitator. No questions or written tasks. You’re not the font of all knowledge, but you are encouraging students to build meaning from what they hear. This is what John Field talked about a lot. Learners can work in groups to do this too.

3. Decoding. Hearing a stream of speech, identifying the words, and attaching meaning to them.

How do these approaches meet the goals?

Listening comprehension

Goal one – only if the tasks are achievable

Goal 2: not really, though it might if you work with a transcript

Goal 3: minimal, though you might pre-teach some items, or answer some questions related to the comprehension questions

Goal 4: probably not

Goal 5: no, though the written task will probably naturally focus on the prominent words

Meaning building

Goal 1: yes

Goal 2: not the key focus, but you might play some extracts more times

Goal 3: this will definitely be happening

Goal 4: yes, this is the main focus of this kind of lesson

Goal 5: yes, but only if the teacher highlights those words for them

Decoding

Mining a recording already for content, but now you mine it for delivery. Taking excerpts from the main recording, working on gap fills or dictation.

Goal 1: yes, they get there in the end even if you have to play it many times

Goal 2: yes, this is the main focus

Goal 3: no, they’d already done this when focussing on content earlier

Goal 4: no, you’ve done it previously

Goal 5: yes, you can gap the prominent word, or gap the words around the main prominent word

Summary

Learners need exposure to authentic recordings. It might be a disaster the first time you do it, but it will get easier with time.

A combined approach to teaching L2 listening is the only way to attain all five listening goals.

IATEFL Belfast 2022: ‘Just be funny!’ Helping trainees develop rapport and engagement – Joanna Stansfield

Joanna is a trainer at IH London.

Joanna’s brother recently did a course which focused on:

• Planning and scripting
• Noticing language, analysing language, using language
• Focus on delivery: emphasis and prominence: pausing, volume
• Set-up, presentation, build to a point/outcome/result
• Constant monitoring of response, involvement, looking for signs from the ‘audience’
• Managing stress, performance

This was to become a stand-up comedian. This made Joanna reflect on the connections between this and teaching. Does rapport mean making people laugh? Is this how we judge the success of our lessons?

How do we – experienced teachers – create rapport?

Interaction / affective features

• Names – learning names, using them, putting names on the board so everybody can learn them
• Role adjustment: lack of hierarchy / barriers
• Natural interaction and follow up questions to show care and empathy
• Sense of humour, gentle mocking, sharing jokes, self-deprecation on the part of the teacher
• Group dynamic: encourage students to learn about each other, vary interactions, cross-class pin-pointing to find common ground

Lesson design

• Adapt coursebook to create relevance and connection
• Warm-ups and lead ins
• Language work = make reference to what SS have said, use their countries, life in London
• Making use of their own lives e.g. photos on their phones
• Mingles, information sharing

Why do trainees sometimes struggle with rapport?

• Perception of the teacher role – what does a teacher actually do? They picture the teacher as being the knower in the room imparting knowledge to the learners. This can be a challenge to break down.
• Lack of attentional resources – there are too many other things to think about. Mercer and Dornyei: ‘Getting caught up in the mechanics of teaching and forgetting about the learners in the room’
• Devotion to the plan / wedded to the coursebook
• Personality? Is it natural? Is it style over substance?
• Lack of understanding of what it is, and level-appropriateness (e.g. complicated jokes at A1 level)
• Lack of awareness of its importance – ‘my job isn’t about being funny’. ‘Rapport is important’ but we don’t necessarily say how or why.
• Misguided application
• Time – not enough time in the plan, prioritising language work over communicative tasks; time in our courses – do we have time to devote sessions to rapport and engagement? Balancing it with everything else we need to cover

Raising awareness of rapport and the importance of it

Joanna has been working on setting it up on day one, and creating that dynamic from the beginning of the course. They start with lots of activities to reduce stress levels at the beginning of the course. Then they reflect on what they’ve done: Do you feel there’s a good classroom atmosphere in the room now? They come up with the criteria – what did they do during the day to create this positive atmosphere?

• Making a connection between what’s int he room and the world around them
• Variety
• Groupwork, pairwork
• Small, achievable tasks
• Activity

What’s the difference between when you walked into the room (nervous) and now (slightly less nervous!)?

Why did this help?

• A safe space
• Inclusive
• Collaboration
• Relaxes everyone
• More open to learning
• Level of trust in the room that might not have been there initially

This then became their criteria for developing rapport with the students. They incorporated it into observation and self-reflection tasks. They had to tick what they felt they’d achieved within the lesson.

Creating time and space: collective responsibility

It’s not just one person’s responsibility on the course. Joanna encouraged them to create learner databases. At the end of each session, the trainers would leave the classroom and the trainees would add all of the information they’d learnt about the students during that lesson. This database was added to after every TP, and over time they built up a lot of information about the students. This provided information for the Focus on the Learner assignment too.

Another way of creating time and space is unassessed practice. It’s vital in allowing the trainees to make connections with the learners without feeling under pressure. Joanna has experimented with doing it daily – 15-20 minutes of student feedback at the end of each lesson, where trainees discuss lessons and activities with the learners. They could then use this information to plan the next lesson.

I felt much more comfortable teaching them as I knew a little bit about each of them.

I saw the students as people.

By making the students the focal point, we are better able to teach to the student’s strengths. For example, getting to know your students where/when possible and incorporating their personal interests or personalising the course materials.

Trainee comments

This conversation and database happened after the lesson and before tutor feedback, which meant that tutor feedback was then driven by the learners. Not ‘Did I do OK?’ But ‘Esme didn’t understand me when I said x. Why is that?’

Putting the knowledge into practice: planning

In one input session, trainees drew the faces of the learners in the group. They looked at the topic of the lesson. They had to design ways that they could get the learners involved in that discussion. Trainees changed their perspective: teaching individuals within a group, rather than a whole group. Planning became easier rather than more difficult, as they were thinking about the people in the room.

Incorporating knowledge into the lesson plan

Joanna added a motivation and engagement section to the lesson plan. Here’s one example of what a trainee wrote:

As a logical extension of this, differentiation started to appear in the lesson plan, and trainees started to comment on how they would work with this.

Advice from trainees

This is what trainees on this course commented on at the end – ideas for building rapport. It’s quite a similar list to what the experienced teachers commented on at the start.

Summary

• Address rapport explicitly – co-create criteria with trainees, so they all feel they can build it
• Establish it as criteria via paperwork
• Collective responsibility
• Focus on the learners in feedback
• Visualisation and differentiation
• Discuss humour – what is it?

This all creates care, which led to investment in what they were learning, which led to more care. This group enjoyed working with these learners so much that they’ve continued volunteering to teach this group of learners.

How to present at an international conference (IATEFL Belfast 2022)

These are the slides from my IATEFL 2022 How to session this morning, giving you guidance on how to present at an international conference, whether that’s face-to-face or online. It’s an updated version of my IATEFL 2019 How to session.

Slide 8 has icons. These are the associated notes:

• Eye contact – friends around room / Online = odd presenting to yourself sometimes. Ask somebody to stay on video so you can talk to them if possible (the moderator?) / switch off self view if you can?
• Microphone – where to hold it. Use it? / Online = headphones stop echo
• Pace: Deep breaths – ask somebody to indicate if you’re rushing
• What you say – not a script/reading from slides! Index cards? Slides + notes, presenters notes…as natural as possible
• Reactions aren’t just based on what you say – also the time of day – 8:15? After lunch? End of the day? / Nobody writing in chat online = don’t worry / invite them

Here are potential solutions to the problems on slide 11:

• Slides – USB x 2, Google Drive, email, Slideshare – check compatability. Alternatively, don’t use slides!
• Audio – have transcript, play it as a file outside presentation rather than embedded into it
• Video – summarise content
• Attention – like in class? hands up, countdown
• Empty room – ask people to come closer
• Too long – decide before what you can cut, underplan!
• Too short – more time for questions, what will you take away?
• Overall = stay calm 🙂 Ask them a question e.g. what have I told you so far? What do you still want to know?

Here’s an explanation of the images on slide 11:

• Reward yourself
• Relax
• Reflect on how it went
• If it’s IATEFL, consider writing up your talk for the Conference Selections – there’s a How To talk about that too 🙂

Here’s a recording of the 2021 version of the talk:

Catherine Walter has a summary of her tips for Giving a presentation at an international conference.

Zhenya Polosatova has a list of tips for coping with presentation preparation anxiety.

Tim Thompson has written a pep talk which you should read immediately before your presentation starts, and probably a few times before that too!

What other tips do you have?

I’d love to know which of these tips you find useful, and whether you use them to present your own talks in the future. Good luck!