Where am I?

Seeing my social media explode today in what I really hope and feel is a step-change in the way our society treats women and the way those women think about themselves and their relationships with others, both men and women, has prompted me to finally write a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

I’m 32.

I’m female.

I’m single.

I’ve never had a boyfriend.

I am most definitely not alone.

I’m a professional.

I’m a manager.

I’m a teacher trainer.

I regularly speak at conferences.

I organise teacher training at my school, and encourage and support women and men to be part of them.

I own my own flat.

I’m independent.

I’m confident.

I very rarely worry about what other people think of my decisions – they’re mine, not theirs.

I work hard to be the best person I can be.

I try to help other people whenever and however I can, though I often feel like I could do more.

I try to think about my impact on the environment, though I also feel I could do more here.

I travel alone without thinking about it.

I go to the cinema alone without thinking about it.

I eat at restaurants alone without thinking about it.

I swear. It is a normal part of my speech. I don’t have a problem with hearing other people swear when it is appropriate to the situation. I think about the people who I’m around when doing so.

I’m (now) happy with my body. It took work. When I catch myself now, I can stop those thoughts. They almost never come now.

I enjoy choosing clothes. This also took work, and was directly related to the point above.

I never wear make-up, after trying it a few times and deciding it wasn’t for me. I don’t feel this is a problem. Or that it should be. (Though I did once buy lipstick – when I asked for help because I’d never bought lipstick before, the woman in the shop said ‘You poor thing’.) I believe this should be a choice, and that men should be allowed to wear make-up if they want to.

I am good at using computers and other technology. I understand the basics of HTML.

I am good at maths and mental arithmetic.

I used to describe myself as being into a lot of ‘male’ things: fantasy, sci-fi, science, games, computer games, ‘nerdiness’. I no longer believe they are male and that I am unusual as a female for enjoying them. They are mine.

The fact that I’m a woman doesn’t generally make that much difference to my life, at least in terms of my decision making.

I know what I want from my life, and yes, that does include having a family at some point. But a family that is shared. I expect to be in an equal partnership, if I have a partner.

I’m a romantic. I would also like to be romanced.

I don’t believe the previous two points negate anything else I’ve written.

I’m white, I’m British, and I was born in the European Union. I know this gives me an advantage in many arenas. I can’t change any of those facts, but I can use them to try to help others. I can also remember that I’m nowhere near the most downtrodden or underrepresented population in the world. Not by a long way.

Most importantly, I’m happy.

But…

I don’t remember ever seeing or reading about ‘me’ in popular culture. (Please prove me wrong in the comments.)

Women who are there to be the love interest, check. (Note the 3 pages of male love interests v. 9 of female love interests on this wiki)

Women who are dividing their life between work and family, check.

Important women from history, check. (And it’s great that a few more of them are being noticed.)

Women who are there to demonstrate that women are as good as men, check. (Though only one at a time, of course.)

Women in the role of the villain, check, just. (And that’s important too – really important – men are most definitely not all bad and women are not all good!)

Women who are there to make up the numbers, check. (We need more diversity, so how can we fit a woman in?)

Creeping towards balance, check. (And with a minor mention of it in reviews…I hope this is the norm one day, but we still need to celebrate when this is achieved at the moment to make others sit up and take notice.)

Women who talk to each other about something other than men, check, sometimes. (The Bechdel-Wallace test helps, but it’s not perfect.)

It’s not to say I don’t enjoy that culture. I do. But I never see myself there, single, not chasing a man, would like children, 30s, professional. But I guess my story isn’t interesting for film-makers, reviewers or readers.

According to the line that culture is throwing at me, I’m over the hill and should definitely have settled down with a husband by now. I know I’m not, thanks to my friends.

I should most definitely have had more sexual experiences than I have, says the media. Why yes, that would be nice. But sex shouldn’t define me, or any woman, and nor should the lack of it.

And if I’ve done this thanks to the role models I’ve been lucky enough to have, how many more women need to see, hear and read that they can be them and there’s nothing wrong with that?

So what now?

If you think that harrassment and bullying should be a thing of the past, visit ELTtoo. (I’ve been on the receiving end of institutional bullying, instigated by one person, and causing problems for both women and men in that institution. I left. They didn’t all have that freedom, though I believe most of them have gone now a few years down the line. The institution still exists and the same people are still running it. As far as I know, none of us have really said anything about it publicly and nothing has really changed.)

If you are a woman with a facebook account, the Women in ELT group may be of interest to you.

If you are of either gender and you’re organising a conference or event, or are a woman who wants to start speaking at them, have a look at Women Speakers ELT for more information and support to run more gender-balanced ELT events.

Let’s keep talking about it, all of us, women and men.

Let’s keep up the pressure.

Let’s change the future for those who follow us.

It’s time.

My bookshelf

This post was inspired by Naomi Epstein’s response to Grant Snyder’s comic strip My Bookshelf. I’m going to write about books in general though, not just teaching ones – lots of answers popped into my head as I was reading Naomi’s post. Here goes…

The book I couldn’t put down

This is a pretty long list, and includes pretty much everything by Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and what I’ve read of Neil Gaiman so far (still a work in progress). Also Sharon Penman books when I was a teenager, the Cicero books by R0bert Harris I’m currently reading, the Harry Potter books the first time round, the Robin Hobb books, etc. etc. etc.

The book I couldn’t pick up

I’m going to put some books here which I had on my shelf but put off reading for ages because they scared me a bit, but which I ended up loving when I finally read them.

• Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky
• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
• All classics, until I read Pride and Prejudice when I was 18 🙂

The book you gave me (I haven’t read it yet – sorry!)

IATEFL sent out A History of IATEFL to members last year and gave a copy of The Non-Native Teacher by Peter Medgyes at the conference in Glasgow. They’re sitting on my shelf, but I haven’t got round to them yet. I know I’ll have read them by this time next year though!

The book I brought to the beach

I’m not really a beach person, but I definitely remember getting sunburn in the back garden from spending too long outside without putting suncream on when I was reading Love in the Time of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Alexander books by Valerio Massimo Manfredi when I was a teenager.

The book I tried so hard to like

When the BBC Big Read came out in 2003, I’d already read 25 of the top 100 books, and decided to read the rest of them. This meant that I dragged myself kicking and screaming through:

• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (boring)
• Watership Down by Richard Adams (repetitive – the rabbits eat, sleep, poo and fight)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (I just wanted to bang Cathy and Heathcliff’s heads together and tell them to get a grip)
• The last 100 pages of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (philosophical thoughts he’d already conveyed multiple times, and which interrupted what I felt was a gripping story)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (urgh)
• Ulysses by James Joyce (trying far too hard – just annoying)

I did read every page of all 100 books though, and it led me to a whole load of authors I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise. There were at least 10 books on there that are now among the best books I’ve ever read, so it was worth it! I’d love to know what an updated version of the list would look like.

The book I somehow own three copies of

Looking at my bookshelves, the thing that immediately jumped out at me was three Collins German dictionaries, and three matching French ones, though ‘somehow’ probably isn’t the right word – they chart my progress from 11 years old, to GCSEs, to university, getting considerably bigger each time!

The book that saved my life

I’m not sure I could claim that any book has ever saved my life, but the single book that probably changed the way I think in the shortest number of pages was The English Verb by Michael Lewis. I read it as part of Delta, and it completely changed the way that I think about language. I constantly tell people about it, and have it on my shelf right now, waiting for me to read again.

The book I lent you (can I have it back?)

If pushed to choose my favourite book of all time, I’m pretty sure I would go for Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I have owned various copies of this book, but now don’t appear to have any. I have definitely lent it to people in the past, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never got it back. Oh well. Spreading the love 😉

The book I fall asleep to every night

Since August 2016 I’ve been reading a few pages of Harry Potter in Polish every night before I go to bed. When I first started, it took about 10 minutes to read two pages, and I didn’t understand many of the words on the page. I only knew what was going on because of my prior knowledge of the stories. I’m now on the penultimate chapter of book three, can manage 6-8 pages in 10-15 minutes, and reckon I understand about 50-60% of what I read. It’s made me realise first hand just how useful extensive reading is for language learners.

The book I mistook for a hat

Hmm…I suspect the answer to this may also be dictionaries when I was at university – they’re certainly big enough, and we often used to have to carry them around with us!

The book I’m desperately trying to write

Well, a series actually. Book one should be out in the next couple of months, I hope, pending permission from a few publishers to use quotes from their works, and I have ideas for lots of follow-ups if it’s successful 😉 Watch this space… (and if you can’t wait, try my first e-book, Richer Speaking)

All the books that changed my life

I can’t imagine a life without books and reading, and I’m grateful to my family for instilling a love of reading in me at a young age. I don’t remember not being able to read. I do remember reading by the light of the late evening sun in the summer coming through my red curtains when I was supposed to be asleep. I’m a reading addict – when there’s nothing else to read, I’ll pick up sauce bottles on a table, cleaning products in a bathroom, anything with words on really, regardless of the language! Now I read a few blog posts every day, and have three or four books on the go at any one time. Right now it’s Harry Potter 3 in Polish, Imperium by Robert Harris, Pop-up Shakespeare by Jennie Maizels, Austin Tichenor and Reed Martin, and a few teaching magazines that have been sitting on the shelf for a while. Books really have shaped a lot of who I am. (P.S. If you want to buy any of the books in this post for yourself, and you decide to click on this Amazon Affiliates link, I’ll get a few pennies – thank you!)

My bookshelves – the first furniture I bought for my new flat!

As Naomi said at the end of her post,

Here’s to all the books I’ve read and those that are waiting to be read! Life is good!

Why should they care?

In lessons I have observed, it is often a little step that is missing that could make a real difference to the students’ engagement in a particular activity. By asking yourself ‘Why should they care?’ at every stage of the planning process, it’s easy to make little tweaks that could help students to get more involved.*

Do you recognise any of these situations?

Speaking

You ask students to discuss a question like this in pairs:

Tell your partner what you did at the weekend.

They each monologue for about 30 seconds, and the whole activity peters out after less than two minutes. Neither student really listened to their partner, and apart from saying a few words in English, they haven’t really got anything out of the activity.

Why should they care?

Here are a few little tweaks that might avoid this situation.

• Give them a listening task too. These can also be used as questions for feedback after the activity.
  ‘Find something your partner did that you didn’t.’ > Feedback = ask one or two students to say what their partner did and why they didn’t do it.
  ‘Decide whose weekend was more boring.’ > Feedback = put your hand up if you had the most boring weekend.
• Add challenge.
  Students have 15 seconds to tell their partner what they did – time it strictly. Afterwards they change partners and tell someone else what their partner did. Give them thinking time first to decide/rehearse what to say in that time.
  Students can only say two sentences before their partner speaks. Give an example, and make sure you include questions!
• Change the interaction pattern.
  Students mingle, speaking to as many others as possible. They have to find one person who did the same three things as them/did none of the things they did/did something they wish they’d done.
  Play Chinese whispers with two teams racing to correctly write down one thing each person in their team did.
• Give them some functional language you want them to use.
  ‘No, really? Why did you do that?’
  ‘That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’

If you want more ideas for how to adapt speaking activities, I’ve got a whole e-book of them!

Writing

You ask your students to write a blog post about a place they want to visit. Some of them write a paragraph, others write a whole page.

Why should they care?

• Get them interested in the topic first.
  Talk about the most popular places a tourist can visit in the students’ countries.
  Get them to decide three things which make a place worth visiting, then compare the list with a partner and narrow it down to three things from their combined lists.
• Show them what you expect from them.
  Give them a framework, e.g. Paragraph one = a description of the place, including at least three pieces of information about it. Paragraph two = why they want to visit it. Paragraph three = why they haven’t visited it yet/when they plan to visit it. > This can also be used for marking if necessary, giving you an objective way of deciding if they get full marks for content.
  Show a couple of examples from real blogs.
• Change the interaction pattern.
  Allow students to choose if they want to work alone or in pairs.
  Get students to write a paragraph, then pass it on to the next student/pair who write the next paragraph, then pass it on again for the final paragraph.
• Give students other choices.
  They could write about a place they don’t want to visit/the last interesting place they visited/the most boring place they’ve ever visited.
  Let them decide on the format: a blog post, a poster, a newspaper article, a comic strip…

Listening

There is a three-minute audio recording about straw bales in the course book your school requires you to use. 30 seconds in, the students are clearly incredibly bored, and starting to fidget.

Image from Pixabay

Why should they care?

• Use an image.
  Show them the picture above. Give them a minute to imagine this is real – they think about what they can see/hear/smell/touch/taste. Then tell a partner.
  Give them the image in the middle of a piece of paper. They should draw the bigger picture, then compare it to a partner. Do they have similar pictures?
• Set them a challenge.
  Get them to think of a minimum of five different things they could use a straw bale for, then compare to a partner.
  Somebody has dumped a straw bale in front of the school. It’s too heavy to lift easily. How will they move it?
• Make sure they have a clear task to do while they’re listening.
  The first time they listen, they could check predictions they’ve made before listening.
  Get students to come up with three questions they want the answers to. They can be as simple as ‘Why am I listening to a text about straw bales?’ 🙂
• Use the audio in other ways.
  Break it into 30-second chunks. After each chunk, students should tell a partner what they remember. They could also come up with one question they think will be answer in the next section.
  Pause the audio at a particular point and ask the students what they think the next three words are. You can decide on these points before the lesson if you want to focus on particular pieces of language. This can build students’ confidence when listening to English if you choose chunks of language students are already familiar with.

Reading

There’s an article about gender pay gaps in the news, which you think is an important issue and should be discussed with your students. Some students have previously said they would like to read ‘real’ things in class, but in the lesson the students just aren’t interested in the article, and you end up moving on to something else after a few minutes.

Why should they care?

• Deal with part of the topic first.
  Have pieces of paper around the room, each with the beginning of a statement. Students walk around and write as many sentences using these beginnings as possible in two minutes. Examples might be ‘Women are…’ ‘Men are…’ ‘Women can’t…’ ‘Men can’t…’ ‘It’s important for women to…’ ‘It’s important for men to…’
  Ask students to list five jobs where people get paid a lot of money, and five where they don’t get paid much. They compare lists with other students, then decide whether they think more men or women do those jobs.

• Use a word cloud. Wordart.com allows you put a whole text into their creator.
  Students have five minutes to write as many sentences as they can using the words in the word cloud. These become predictions – they read the text to check what was included.
  They choose one big word, one medium word, and one small word, then predict how these are connected to the story. You could also give them the headline to help.
• Reflect real life.
  Show students the headline. Ask them if this is something they would read about in their own language. Encourage them to discuss why or why not. If they say they would, ask them to read it. If they wouldn’t, ask them to choose another article from the BBC homepage (give them a time limit). In both cases, get them to tell a partner what they think they’ll still remember about the article tomorrow.
  We often read online articles by skimming them quickly as we scroll down the page. If you have a projector in your classroom, replicate that process. Scroll down relatively slowly, but fast enough that students can’t read everything. When you get to the bottom, minimise the window and ask students to tell their partner what they saw, what they understood, and what (if anything) they’d like to go back and read in more detail.
• Work with the language.
  Ask students to find phrases which describe companies or replace the name of the company, e.g. ‘major companies’, ‘organisations with 250 or more workers’, ‘the carrier’, ‘the firm’. They discuss why these phrases were selected in each case.
  Get them to list five different sentences with a percentage in them, e.g. ‘Many financial firms feature in the list, including the Co-op Bank – where mean hourly pay is 30.3% lower for women.’ or ‘It said 7% of apprentices last year were men, compared with zero in 2016, while 41% of roles involving helping at children’s tea time were filled by men – compared with 25% in 2016.’ They can analyse the structures these percentages appear in, e.g. ‘X is % lower for Y.’ or ‘% of X were blah blah blah – compared with % in year’

Grammar points

You’ve recently taught students how to use the passive in news articles. In a follow-up piece of writing, there is no evidence of passives at all.

Why should they care?

• Contextualise.
  Make sure that example sentences you use are all taken from clear contexts, not plucked at random from thin air. Context can really help students to understand new grammar.
  After doing a practice exercise, ask students to choose three sentences. For each sentence they should add a minimum of two sentences before and two after, making a longer paragraph or dialogue. They could leave a space where their chosen sentence appeared for other students to remember what it was.
• Get them to notice how it’s used outside the classroom.
  Ask students to open an article from English-language news at random. They should underline all of the passive structures they can find. Afterwards, they can compare usage of the passive in different kinds of article – for example, is it used more in articles describing a crime? A sports event? An election?
  Send students on a treasure hunt. Ask them to find one example in the news of each kind of passive you have studied, e.g. present simple passive, past simple passive, present perfect passive. They should find as many as they can and write out the full sentence, all within a specified time, for example 15 minutes.
• Compare and contrast.
  Give students pairs of sentences in the active and the passive, with each sentence in the pair conveying the same information. Ask them to choose their ‘favourite’ sentence in the pair and say why. For example: ‘The dog ate the cake.’ ‘The cake was eaten by the dog.’ ‘Somebody stole my bag.’ ‘My bag was stolen.’
  Show students a 2-3 sentence paragraph including a passive structure. Ask them to translate it into another language they know. They then use the translation to analyse differences between how the idea of a passive is expressed in their own language(s). For example, emphasis on the object might be conveyed through a change in word order but no change in the verb form.
• Add it in.
  Give students a short news article in pairs. Ask them to add three passive sentences into the article, wherever they like. They can then compare the results to another group.
  Tell students you expect to see a minimum of two passive structures in the news article you want them to write. Include this in criteria for peer checking before the article is handed in.

Vocabulary

You introduced a range of words connected to clothes in your last lesson, like ‘button’, ‘zip’, ‘sleeve’. During a revision activity at the beginning of this lesson, the students need a lot of prompting and they can’t really remember any of them accurately.

Why should they care?

• Find out what they know.
  If you’re working on vocabulary from a particular lexical set, do a board race first. In this case, divide students into two teams. They race to write as many clothes words on the board as possible in five minutes. Teams switch and work out the points for their opponents: one point for completely correct, half a point if there is a spelling mistake.
  Show them pictures of clothes – three or four items is enough. Ask them to list as many things they can see in the pictures as possible. Point to various things and ask ‘What’s this?’ to prompt students to notice features like the buttons or sleeves, not just the items of clothing themselves.
• Help them to notice the gaps in their knowledge.
  Display all of the words you’re planning to teach on the board. Ask students to draw pictures for as many of them as possible, but not to worry if they don’t know any of them – they will by the end of the lesson! To reinforce this, repeat the same activity at the end of the lesson and point out how much they’ve improved.
  Give them the first and last letters of the words, like this ‘b_____’, ‘z__p’, ‘s_____e’. Ask them to complete the words to describe parts of clothes. Again, they shouldn’t worry if they don’t know them.
• Add extra processing.
  Don’t just ask students to read words from a flashcard, show them the picture and get them to remember the word. For extra challenge, they could then spell it. It’s better to do this chorally or in pairs/groups, rather than putting individual students on the spot, as this may affect their confidence if they can’t do it or increase their fear if they think they might be next.
  Display all of the pictures on the board/floor. Students should write as many of the words as possible in their notebooks, then compare the spellings with the vocabulary list. To add challenge, you could get them to switch notebooks with somebody else for the checking stage.
• Make it real.
  Ask them to choose a word which is new for them. They should think of one time they would expect to say/write the word, and one time they would expect to read/hear it. For example, they might say ‘button’ if they’ve lost a button, or read it in a craft magazine which tells them how to make a teddy bear.
  They choose three new words they want to remember, and write them into short sentences connected to their lives, e.g. ‘I’ve lost three buttons from my coat.’. As an extension, they could then google the sentences and see if they exist on the internet anywhere.

All of the vocabulary tips can be connected to the idea of ‘hooks’. This is a metaphor I use to describe how you remember new information. The more hooks you hang something on, the more likely it is to stay where you put it. When you think about learning new vocabulary (or grammar for that matter), you need to give the students as many hooks as possible to ‘hang’ the new vocabulary from and keep it in their heads.

Pronunciation

When you ask students to repeat sentences after you as part of a drill, they sound really bored and/or refuse to do it.

Why should they care?

• Do you care?
  Record yourself doing some pronunciation work. Listen back to it. What do you think your tone of voice and body language conveys to the students? What does your intonation sound like?
  Before you drill anything, imagine somebody is going to ask ‘What was the point of that?’ Do you have a good answer for them?
• Play.
  Experiment with different tones of voice, speeds, characters (the Queen, Arnold Schwarzenegger…), positions (standing, sitting, superhero poses)…
  A really popular activity at my school is a stickman drill, where students are in teams. Each team gets a stickman, with one or two extra features of their choice, like a hat or an umbrella. Each team repeats the sentence. Whoever the teacher decides did it best can remove part of their opponents’ stickmen. The aim is to have the most complete stickman by the end of the game. [I still haven’t actually tried this, but I’ve seen it used many times!]
• Add challenge.
  Don’t just ask students to repeat the same sentence again and again. Get them to change parts of it. For example, in the first sentence of this paragraph, you could change the verb (ask), the person (students), the infinitive phrase (to repeat the same sentence) or the time adverbial (again and again). This is known as a substitution drill. Students or the teacher can decide what changes.
  Use key words or images as prompts, so students have to remember the language without having it all in front of them.
• Add extra support.
  Give students a minute to read and remember the language you’re going to drill, then close their books during the drilling process.
  Break down longer sentences into smaller chunks, then put them back into the full sentence. This is known as backchaining if you do it from the end of the sentence.

*I recognise that a lot of the tweaks I’ve suggested above may more appropriately answer the question ‘What can I do about it?’, but I find the phrasing ‘Why should they care?’ adds a bit more impact when I’m asking my teachers!

Have you tried any of these tweaks? What other little tweaks do you use to encourage students to care more about activities in class?

P.S. This blogpost has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and reading this post about lead ins by CELTA train is what made me actually write it today 🙂