Reflections on Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task-Based Approach (Coursera)

I’ve just submitted my final assignment for the Coursera and University of London course entitled Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task-Based Approach. For the first time while doing a MOOC, I’ve actually managed to keep up with the timing on it, and do it in the specified six weeks. It makes such a difference when you’re doing it in your holidays instead of when working full-time 🙂 You can read about what I thought as I started the course. I wrote the reflections below as I was doing it.

Things I liked

• Interactive transcripts, so you can click on a line and go directly to that part of the video.
• Tasks to think about while you’re watching each video.
• When you’re asked to discuss something in writing, you can do it from right there in the window, without having to click through to another window to find a forum. There’s also a request for you to respond to at least two other posts, which should hopefully mean more real discussion than on FutureLearn.
• If there is a discussion question, you have to contribute before you can read other people’s answers. This means you’re not influenced by what they’ve written, and there is less of a worry that you’re repeating what other people have said. When you submit your comment, the other responses appear automatically.
• I’m rubbish at ‘pre-reflection’ unless I have somebody to discuss things with. I can never be bothered to write notes about something which I know I’m about to learn. If I’m feeling particularly good, I might think of it for a whole thirty seconds before I click on. Having the option to post in a forum with your ideas in parts of the course made me spend a bit more time on some of these tasks.
• As with FutureLearn, it’s easy to see what you have and haven’t done so far. There’s a very clear blue ‘Resume’ button to help you work out what to do next when you return to the course.
• After introducing a set of dichotomies which can be used to describe types of task, there was a poll asking you which kinds of task you use in the classroom. When you submit your results, you can see what other course participants have answered.
• Lots of examples of tasks and reading texts are described/shown throughout to help you understand the theory.
• The lecturers used work they had previously published, and critiqued it based on how their opinions/research has developed over the years.
• More robust requirements than FutureLearn in order to be granted a certificate: completing assignments and peer reviewing the work of others, not just marking a certain amount of tasks complete (though that may just have been the Italian course I did)
• The tasks we need to complete are very practical, have clear requirements and have a well-defined communicative purpose. For example, in the first week we had to create an information sheet on behalf of a Department of Educaton for L2 teachers summarising the information we’d learnt during the week (this is a short version of the rubric!) I think I’ll definitely be able to use the information sheet in future training sessions I do.
• There are clear criteria for peer review, and it doesn’t take very long. It also encourages you to look at other people’s work, instead of skimming past it. I particularly like this reminder: “Remember, English isn’t everyone’s native language. Focus primarily on how well the work meets the grading criteria.”
• ‘To maintain academic integrity, we check it’s you each time you upload an assignment.’ – never even occured to me, but great to know they’ve thought about this! They do it by matching typing patterns (didn’t know this was possible!) and using your webcam.

Things I didn’t like so much

• You have to play a video to the end for it to be marked as complete. I find having to wait for people to finish talking frustrating when I can skim the transcript much faster. I ended up skipping to the end of videos and playing the last few seconds to get round this.
• One or two of the videos don’t have transcripts 😦
• Coursera has a similar disregard for punctuation and proof reading in some of the video transcripts. Here’s an example from week 1: “Why would this activity constitute a pedagogic task. Peter general, off sited the definition of the task. Describes pedagogic tasks in terms of […]” This is also true of some key words: “You probably understand why recognizing the correspondence between a written sign, a graph theme, and sound, a phoneme, is a skill.” [grapheme!] and dates “Keith Morrow who name is strongly associated with an emergence of communicative language teaching recognized the importance of this area in 1918, as this exercise shows.” [1980!]
• You have to scroll to the top of the page again to move on once you’ve completed each task. Perhaps the ‘previous/next lesson’ bar could be sticky, so it moves as you go down the page.
• A certain level of background knowledge of methodology is assumed for some tasks, but I don’t remember this being mentioned before signing up. For example, this discussion task assumes you might know some of what it asks (though ‘participation is optional’):

TBLT has received much attention from researchers, practitioners, and policy makers recently. Discuss what theoretical and practical rationale(s) might underlie TBLT.

• It’s not possible to edit forum posts if you want to add/change anything.
• At the end of each unit, you should peer review work by three other participants. If you’re one of the first people to do the work, it says they will email you when other work is ready to be reviewed. This never happened.

Overall

I found this course fascinating and incredibly useful. It was the right amount of input versus output, and I feel like I’ve learnt a lot from it. I’m also going away from the course with a lot more questions to answer, which is exactly what I would expect from something like this: it’s motivated and inspired me. It was the MOOC equivalent of a page-turner that you can’t put down – I kept wanting to go back to do the next bit, regardless of how tired I was or how late it was! I also now have some materials ready for a potential future course I’m putting together, so it’s killed two birds with one stone. Thank you to everyone involved in creating the course for such stimulating content!

The pains of being abroad

I have been so homesick that it hurt three times in my life.

The first was in Germany when I was 18 and working in a factory for six weeks at the beginning of my gap year. I was staying with a family friend, but two weeks after I arrived, she went back to the UK for the summer, as she did every year, leaving me alone in her house. She’d introduced me to a few people in the tiny Bavarian village she lived in, but it was during the 2003 drought, absurdly hot and with only 30 minutes rain during the whole time I was there, so I didn’t really want to go outside once I got home from work. I stayed in the house as much as I could, and ended up being by myself all the time. The only way I got through the day doing the dullest job I’ve ever done was the thought that at about 6pm every evening I could watch Will and Grace, one of my favourite programmes at the time, plus occasionally being on the same job in the factory as someone my age, who unfortunately lived in a completely different place and was impossible to meet up with after work. On the last weekend I finally did a bit of exploring, visiting Regensburg by myself. I wish I’d discovered I could go off on adventures by myself earlier, but I’ve certainly never forgotten it!

The second time was a few months later, working at a jungle school in a (very) rural village for the second half of a four-month volunteering trip to Borneo. I was there with two other girls my age who had been in the jungle with me. Unfortunately I didn’t get on very well with one of them, and the second one became more and more like the first as our seven weeks in the village went on. They spent all of their time together. I only had 8 hours of teaching a day, and spent a long time planning, but once I did that I didn’t have much to do to fill my time. Instead I shut myself in my room with the fan on (when the electricity generator was working: during school hours and 7-10p.m. every night) and wrote pages and pages in my diary, consisting mostly of lists of things I would do when I got back home, and all of the things I missed. Sometimes I would use my book to try and learn some Bahasa Malay, but I spent very little time with the people in the village unless we were explicitly invited to their houses.

The third and final time (I hope) was in Paraguay. I worked there from July 2006 to June 2007 as part of my year abroad from university during my languages degree. I’d decided to go to South America and France, but also need to practise my German. I knew there were a lot of Mennonite and other Germans in Paraguay, so wanted to find a German family to live with. The first person I found fell through in November, and my (very) split shifts meant that I’d had huge trouble making friends beyond the three people I went with, who had all found their own friends by this stage. Skype was only just starting to grow, and I couldn’t really speak to my family much and the bandwidth wasn’t good enough for video. It was the year that facebook was opened out to the world, proving very important to me, but it didn’t really become popular until the end of my time in Paraguay. This was my longest ever period of homesickness, lasting about a month. I was very disillusioned by Paraguay, sad that I wouldn’t be able to go home for Christmas, and feeling incredibly lonely. So what did I do? I stayed at home, cried, and generally felt sorry for myself.

In both Borneo and Paraguay, I managed to turn it around, and ended up crying my eyes out at the end because I didn’t want to leave. In both cases, this was because I found ways to fill my time and crush my homesickness. In Borneo, this was by helping the kids and the other two English teachers at the school to create a snakes and ladders board:

In Paraguay it was by finally finding a German-speaking family, starting classes at the Goethe Institute, and helping to sort out the resources in the school library.

The most important thing, though, was that I had to stop wallowing in the feeling, tell people about it, and go out and do something about it. Since then I have never really felt homesick for more than a day at a time. It’s never possible to completely avoid the feeling, especially if things aren’t going well at home, and you can’t be there, but you can reduce the likelihood of it striking. Remember: you are not alone, you are not the only person who feels/has felt like this, and you are not impinging on other people if you tell them how you’re feeling. Good luck!

This post was inspired by Elly Setterfield’s post Teaching English Abroad: What if I hate it? which is full of great advice for new teachers. I highly recommend reading her blog. Thanks Elly!

A wonderful week in Aktobe

A week ago I was finishing my first experience as a freelance teacher trainer and my first visit to Kazakhstan, and what a week it was!

Thanks to my wonderful hosts at Darina Linguo Centre in Aktobe, I was able to spend 3.5 days working with a large group of passionate teachers. We had sessions on the basics of teaching reading and listening, various aspects of classroom management, and different websites that teachers could use with their students and to improve their own English.

With 35-40 people in each session, they were by far the biggest groups I’ve ever worked with. This tested my classroom management abilities, helping me to realise how much I’ve improved in this area since I became a CELTA trainer. They were also very understanding when I inevitably started to lose my voice, and quickly went out of their way to get me a supply of honey to help it to last.

The evenings were particularly good. Every night they had arranged things for me to do so that I could get to know the city and experience real Kazakh culture. I had a tour of the city, a trip to a spa in the countryside, a meal with the directors, and best of all, an evening at a family home. That night I took part in a traditional Kazakh welcome ceremony, learnt about many other traditions (the first steps ceremony for babies, weddings, and traditional cribs) and realised how important food and drink is for the traditional Kazakh way of life.

I have never felt so welcomed as I did in Aktobe. It was quite overwhelming at times, and the memories will remain with me for many years. Thank you to everyone at Darina, and I hope I’ll return at some point soon!