How to demand high – Jim Scrivener (IATEFL 2013)

Part of a planned series of summaries of the talks I’m attending at IATEFL Liverpool 2013. Please feel free to add or correct me if I’ve misinterpreted anything!
These are the main points from Jim Scrivener’s talk, taken from my tweets.

Here’s the Demand High blog in case you don’t know it http://demandhighelt.wordpress.com/

What do your students complain about in your lessons?
For example: it’s easy/slow/boring/difficult, we waste time talking, the teacher never corrects me/always says ‘good’

What is Demand High?
Am I engaging the full human learning potential of the students in my class? Have we lost our edge in favour of fun?
Aremy learners capable of more? Am I underchallenging them? Would my students learn more if I demanded more of them?
How can we move away from just ‘covering’? @jimscriv says it’s OK to teach! Explicit teaching is not bad.
We need to focus on where the learning is. What will move learners forward? Classroom management techniques beyond pair and groupwork are necessary.
Demand high wants to help us teach at everyone’s pace, not just the fastest high.

How can we put it into practice?
Looking at how we can implement Demand High in the feedback/checking stage.
This is the sample task from @jimscriv’s Visual Grammar:

How can you extend simple feedback to that one exercise to an hour? Our suggestions: remember the answers/questions, put into longer context, mini roleplay
Jim Scrivener’s suggestions:

Pronunciation:

Practice, memory, mistakes and being playful:

How about: What sort of face would you make when you say that? By doing that, students change their voices too. Replay the sentence in your head. See the person saying it in your ‘mind’s ear’. Change it to someone else you know. Adds processing time. Once you’ve processed it mentally, move it down to your mouth and say the intonation but not the words. Teacher imitates intonation pattern, students say whether that’s correct or not. Then add words gradually. By having part words/part mumble, it helps students become more aware of unstressed words.
The things @jimscriv has demonstrated are variations on drilling. Practise is what makes students remember, not presentation. Practise through repetition and processing are what make students remember and internalise language.

Update:
Here is Dave Dodgson’s response to the same talk.
Here is the summary by Chia Suan Chong.
Neil McMahon includes some comments on Jim’s talk in his post about day 1 of the conference.
Barry Jameson’s take on the talk.

Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment

For the International House Certificate in Advanced Methodology which I’m studying at the moment I need to plan and teach a series of lessons using a different lesson planning descriptor to ones which I’ve applied before.

I’ve been trying to find out about the “Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment” descriptor used by Michael Lewis in The Lexical Approach (1993) as an alternative to PPP (Present-Practice-Produce) and seem to have come up against a brick wall. Most of what I’ve read consists of the same quote from page vii of the book with no extra information:

The Present-Practise-Produce paradigm is rejected, in favour of a paradigm based on the Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment cycle.

This is what our notes have to say about OHE:

First of all they [learners] observe language in use, for example through listening to or reading a text. Then they make hypotheses about the way that language works and experiment with creating it themselves in their own contexts.

Observation isn’t just a case of receiving language input but also submitting it to critical examination.  Otherwise,  it  will  be  impossible  to  make  hypotheses  about  language behaviour. The  hypothesising and experimenting stages involve activities such as identifying, sorting and matching and their aim is to encourage curiosity about language and among learners. We as teachers need to take a longer term view of learning and cannot expect to limit language to a single structure and presume this has been learnt by the end of the class (as PPP advocates) because language learning simply doesn’t work like that.

I’ve found a couple of other explanations:

From ‘Alan DELTA‘

The “OHE” or ”III” model (Lewis & McCarthy)

1. Lewis and McCarthy’s view on PPP;

2. Observe, Hypothesize, Experiment;

3. Ss get an “Illustration” followed by “Interaction” with the lgg, which will hopefully lead to an “Induction”

From this presentation on Methods and Approaches:

Michael Lewis claims that students should be allowed to Observe (read or listen to language) which will then provoke them to Hypothesise about how the language works before going on to the Experiment on the basis of that hypothesis.

This quote sums up my problem:

In his own teaching design, Lewis proposes a model that comprises the steps, Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment, as opposed to the traditional Present-Practice-Produce paradigm. Unfortunately, Lewis does not lay out any instructional sequences exemplifying how he thinks this procedure might operate in actual language classrooms.

I seem to understand all of the words, but can’t make the leap from that to an actual lesson plan where I can clearly apply the descriptors. So these are my questions:

• What would an ‘Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment’ lesson actually look like? i.e. Does anyone have an example they could share with me?
• How much does ‘observation’ involve? What should be done to fulfil this stage?
• Can it only be used for lexical chunks since it came out of the Lexical Approach? Or could it be used for grammar / skills work too? This is a lesson I planned to practise writing an article which I think fits the OHE descriptor but I’m not sure – what do you think?

• I have to plan a series of four lessons applying the same descriptor. Does that mean each lesson should contain the full set of OHE with stages being repeated if necessary (I think this is the case) or should it be more of an over-arcing thing?

Apologies if this is not very coherent, but I’m really confused at the moment!

Thank you for your help!