As we figure out new ways of working in light of the COVID pandemic, many teachers are being asked to teach hybrid/blended/concurrent classes. The definitions of these terms vary, but for the purposes of this post I’m talking about teaching simultaneously to some students online and some students in the face-to-face classroom. It demands a whole new set of teaching skills that very few of us are likely to have had before March 2020. This post is designed to share links and experiences that might help you. Feel free to add other links in the comments, and please let me know if any links are broken.
Thank you to colleagues on Twitter and Facebook who supplied these links.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Hybrid Teaching by Larry Ferlazzo: part one features the experiences of Amber Chandler, Tara C. Dale, and Holly Spinelli and part two is from Deborah Gatrell, Amy Roediger, and Carina Whiteside. These two posts are from Education Week, which requires a subscription after a limited number of posts.
Subscribe to my blog for a guest post from Silvana Richardson, talking about how they implemented hybrid classes at Bell.
How to set it up
You might not have many options here, depending on the tech available where you work, but here are some ideas.
I found lessons were more successful if planned as an online lesson &then tweaked for the physical classroom, rather than the other way around. Wherever possible work on fostering that classroom community so it still feels like one class rather than 2separate entities. Good luck!
I've tried activities where online and physical Ss are grouped separately as well as together. If the plan is to get them all do things together then better insist on all the Ss logged on to the online platform at the same time.
On 13th November 2021, I attended a truly hybrid conference. 150 trainers attended from around the world, with some of us in the building at IH London, and the rest attending online. All of the sessions were presented via Zoom so that we were all watching the same thing and could participate equally, either via the chat or by speaking to the person next to us. Those of us in the building also had catering 🙂
Here is the YouTube playlist with recordings of all of the talks.
The sessions I attended were:
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Danny Norrington-Davies and Khassoum Diop
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
Raining on prom night – James Egerton and Giovanni Licata
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
Final comments by Adrian Underhill
IH London this morning 🙂
I really enjoyed this conference format. I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person, which meant that I got to see all of the sessions and to discuss them with people face-to-face too. Because the sessions ran online we heard the voices of people from all over the world, including questions by chat and on video from a range of different countries, not just the people who could make it to IH London. I saw talks presented by teachers in York, Sydney, Senegal, Barcelona, Cairo, Moscow, Rome and Budapest. The conference felt really international, and it really did feel like it was talking about the Future of Training and what is possible for us in the future – I can’t remember the last time a conference theme was actually fulfilled as well as this! I’m looking forward to watching the recordings of parallel sessions which I couldn’t attend.
International skills for better communication – Chia Suan Chong
A large proportion of our job relies on us talking and interacting with our students, and helping them to interact with each other as they communicate in English. It should naturally follow that we should be experts at interpersonal skills and communication skills. But we know that that’s not always true. A typical teacher training course might address areas like how to grade our language, how to give instructions or how to respond to students’ errors but seldom do we discuss how we can build trust and rapport with our students, how we can deal with conflict or how we can adapt our communication style to the different students we encounter. In this interactive session, we’ll be reflecting on our range of interpersonal skills and considering how we can develop them.
I attended Chia’s version of this talk at IATEFL 2021 this year. You can find the summary at the end of this post. There were a few extra points in this teacher training version (I recommended you read both posts to get the full picture!):
Transactional Communication v. Interpersonal Communication
T = Focus on information exchange v. I = Focus on building relationships
T = Getting things done v. I = Getting to know people
T = For the short term (results) v. I = For the long term (relationship)
T = Shorter turns v. I = Longer turns
T = Predictable script v. I = Less predictable
T = Often measurable result (Did you get what you needed?) v. I = Not instantly measurable
Interpersonal skills are the skills you need to interact and communicate with people….Interpersonal skills are sometimes referred to as social skills, people skills, soft skills or life skills.
Skillsyouneed.com
As teacher trainers we tend to give feedback/tips on transactional communication, rather than interpersonal communication. This is often easier or more straightforward for us to do this, not least because of the predictability of transactional scripts. Interpersonal skills like rapport, classroom dynamics, building a positive atmosphere are all much more difficult to give advice on.
Chia presents a series of training called Fierce Conversations, created by Susan Scott, who also wrote a book with the same name [Amazon affiliate link]. The idea is that the conversation is not about the relationship, it is the relationship. When we have conversations with others, we’re building relationships – we can’t separate these two areas.
What tips can we give to build rapport?
We came up with these ideas:
Remember names.
Share information about yourself.
Ask genuine questions.
Be sincere and honest.
Remember what they say.
Respect them.
Space in the lesson for relationship building.
Take account of their experiences beyond the classroom/lessons.
When you do an online search for how to build rapport, there are some useful ideas, but we might need to be culturally sensitive with some of them, for example about using humour or laughing often.
Incorporate personal stories and personal experiences: some students might find this unprofessional. They might have a different expectation of what is and isn’t appropriate in the classroom.
Allow students to make decisions on classroom activities: some students might not be happy with what they might see as an abdication of the teacher role. Menus of options might be more useful than open questions – you could also use the contents page of a coursebook to do this.
[My note: It’s also important to maintain our boundaries and our mental health, so be cautious with advising ideas like ‘volunteering your time outside class to support students’ or ‘have breakfast/lunch in the school cafe surrounded by your students’.]
Ultimately, one size doesn’t fit all with how we build rapport.
Why should I trust you?
Good question!
Because we’re teachers.
Because we’ve built up a certain level of knowledge.
Because we trust them.
If you want to read more about trust, Chia recommends The Trusted Advisorby David H. Maister, Robert Galford and Charles Green. It includes the Trust Equation (described in this post). To improve trust, you ultimately need to reduce self-orientation.
Do you ever have people who ask you for advice, but really they want you to listen to them complaining about what other people think of them? That’s one example of self-orientation. Self-orientation is when you put yourself in the centre, rather than having regard for the people you’re talking to.
We should bring trust into the conversation in teacher training courses. What efforts are teachers/trainers making to build relationships in the classroom? How do we build trust? Which strategies do we use?
Ways that we build trust:
Establish competence – I’m competent in this area, you can trust me
Finding common ground (commonality)
Empathy
Openness (information) – what you see is what you get, I don’t have a hidden agenda
Reliability – you can trust me because I’m reliable
Openness (emotion) – showing vulnerability, you have to be genuine about it!
Willingness to trust first – we trust people who trust us
In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, very precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.
Stephen Covey
Here are some critical incidents you could discuss with trainees. How would you react?
Your student arrives late for class. They don’t apologize and they don’t give any reasons for being late. We’re conditioned to believe that justifying behaviour in this way is the correct, so we’re taken aback when our social script for this situation has been disrupted. The student might not have the same social script. Who says that we should give reasons for being late? He might not feel like he’s late – it might be a different perception of time. If you haven’t specified classroom rules from the beginning of the course, then it might be different.
You tell students to address you by your first name and they keep calling you ‘professor’.
You’re telling the class a story and one student keep interrupting to comment on parts of your story and to ask questions.
You could think about your communication style, as well as the communication style of somebody you don’t get along with. What are the similarities and differences? Are your problems with communication a result of the similarities or the differences? It can help people to realise they have different communication styles. Chia has included a series of clines to help you do this in her book Successful International Communication [Amazon affiliate link/BEBC non-affiliate link]
Nothing can be said in a way in which it cannot be misunderstood.
Karl Popper
The illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean, and so we expect others to know it too. There is a tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people understand us.
The ADAPT model (developed by Chia)
Awareness: What’s happened here? Describe the situation in other ways.
Don’t judge: avoid words like ‘picking at’, ‘being negative’
Analyse: can you think of at least 3 interpretations of why this is happening in this way/why the people behaved in this way?
Persuade yourself: align the communication values of the other person with yourself
Try: Me and my style v. Them and their style. If you try and adapt 20% of your behaviour, you might get 80% of the results you want (Pareto principle)
Challenging CCQs – Yulianto Lukito and Yanina Leigh
This presentation deals with CCQs (concept checking questions) as a language clarification technique. Trainees on pre-service courses and new teachers sometimes claim this technique is rigidly based on “the CELTA method” and does not work well in the real classroom where learners desire clear explanations. This session will question the validity of such a claim and propose practical strategies to deal with issues arising in this area.
Yuli and Yanina are asking does “questioning” work? The points below say they don’t:
Observation of trainees in pre-service courses
Lack of use – don’t use them at all
Overuse – asking them when they’re not necessary
Inappropriate use – not asking the right questions
Misuse – ‘If my room is upstairs, is it downstairs?’ (no purpose at all!)
Observation of experienced teachers
CCQs ‘don’t work’ with lower levels
‘Explanation’ is simpler and more time-efficient
Students don’t answer questions, so we’ll have to explain anyway
Learner feedback (anecdotal)
Learners want teachers to ‘explain’ well
Learners expect teachers to ‘explain’
Learners may perceive a lack of explanation as a lack of knowledge
So what can we do as trainers and teachers to help trainees/teachers see the benefit of questioning approaches?
Less CCQs – More CCTs
Concept clarification techniques, rather than questions.
On many courses, CCQs tend to become the technique to be used – in lessons, in assignments. The misperception of CCQs as part of ‘The CELTA method’ could be partly our fault as trainers. Should they be an obligatory part of Language Related Tasks? Is this giving trainees the impression that CCQs are more important than other techniques?
We should assess their ability to select appropriate concept clarification techniques instead. Here’s a selection of what trainees could use as a CCT:
Antonyms/synonums
TPR/mime
Cline and timelines
CCQs
Ask for examples and extension
Visuals/Realia/Audio-visual
Scenario/presentation
Guided discovery
Explanation
Translation
Develop ‘questioning’ skills appropriate to the level
Help trainees become successful in eliciting information. Could becoming skillful at using questioning tehcniques effectively enable trainees (and teachers) to move away from lecturing learners? Explanations can be a comfort zone for many teachers, but this could be because they lack the skill of questioning well.
Focus on purpose first: to get information, opinions, check understanding
Question design and variety e.g. Funnel questions: typical CCQs. We ask quite a few questions to check the core meaning. Probing questions: allows you to gather more subjective data based on learner response. e.g. What are some examples of things which are revolting? Soup. Tell me why soup is revolting. Leading questions: If you ate soup, would you vomit straight away? Recall and process: open-ended questions. Use this promote critical thinking and discussion. Do you remember last week when we talked about….? What do you remember?
Scripting and practising
Rephrasing and adjusting: don’t give up too quickly. If students don’t answer, try to reword the question, provide more clues, though don’t turn it into a guessing game.
Consider waiting time – yes!
Being able to vary question design can help trainees avoid being in the habit of patterns like 2 questions answered ‘no’ followed by one answered ‘yes’.
This set of skills could be more useful fuel for a session than one dedicated to how to write CCQs.
Flipped approach
Trainees plan CCQs for TL allocated. Peer-teaching to get feedback on appropriacy. This can improve teaching quality as trainees have a chance to experiment with techniques.
Video trainees (with permission!) during the lessons – gather a library of weak and strong clarification stages for other trainees to watch and discuss. Trainees aren’t really watching their peers on the days when they’re teaching – this could create a wider library for them to access.
Play games with CCTs. For example, charades. This could give trainees a chance to practise these techniques.
Give trainees the chance to go back and re-teach language to peers and see what they can improve, in a non-assessed, safe environment.
Responding to learners’ expectations – Is there a place for ‘explanations’ in the language classroom?
Yes, there is, as long as we explain well.
The students might have a different understanding of what explanation means to us – we might contrast explanation with questioning, whereas students might equate explanation with clarification.
There are some situations when explanation might be better:
L1 negative transfer – it might be faster sometimes to explain in the language
Universal concepts – just tell them what it is (e.g. banana)
Lack of knowledge – if they don’t know, you can’t elicit it – just tell them!
When students ask a random language question in the middle of the lesson – it can be frustrating if students are questioned in response
Error correction technique – it can be more efficient
Thematic words/phrases – key words for the lesson, tell them what it is and move on. You could use rhetorical questions to generate interest and move on.
[Odd CCQ moment I came across recently, clarifying the meaning of some global problems. “Child mortality. Are you OK with that?” Nobody batted an eyelid at this strange question!]
In conclusion, it’s not about abandonining CCQs, but keeping a balance. Helping trainees to realise when to ask and when to tell. CCQs can be ineffective for trainees, because they haven’t developed and practised questioning skills during the course.
In our discussion at the end of the session, Richard mentioned the idea of using techniques/questions to bring meaning into focus, stopping it from being so fuzzy. I like that idea that the meaning is blurred at first, and you’re using techniques to tighten it up. You could extend this metaphor – how focussed does the image need to be? Does it need to be completely sharp, or is a little fuzzy good enough? What’s the most efficient way to make it sufficiently sharp to move on with the lesson?
Teaching online: construct and methods to give teachers what they need – Alison Castle (mostly about the Trinity Certificate in Online Teaching)
This talk reports on Trinity’s development of a new online course and qualification that supports teachers working in an online environment. We will first review how we arrived at the underlying pedagogical underpinnings and then talk about how these were implemented in the course design. Finally, we will consider data from impact studies to identify lessons learnt for future support.
Some initial conversation questions:
If you have experienced a move from in-person to online teaching, what skills or knowledge did you feel you needed in order to be as effective online as you are in an ‘in-person’ class?
What skills or knowledge do you think teahcers need in general when transitioning from ‘in-person’ to online teaching?
What types of resources are needed to help teachers develop their online teaching skills?
They started off with a webinar series called Transformative Teachers, which has been running for a number of years. At the beginning of the pandemic, they started creating free online learning resources and enable blended and online Trinity courses. This moved on to writing a full courses, piloting and trialling it, and then launching it in the autumn.
It is self-study, convenient, bite-sized, and includes lots of examples of showing how to teach English online. They’re not just perfect classes, but real-life ones with a critique of what did and didn’t work. The support is informed by research and experience. There is a communicative focus, with the learner kept at the centre of the process.
The course is designed to develop the following areas:
Developing teachres’ ability to use online tools effectively
Helping teachers identify online tools that meet learning needs
Using interaction that encourages communicative learning in an online environment
Using online assessment techniques that meet learning needs
Helping teachers create a motivating environment for online learning
Increasing teachers’ confidence in facilitating online learning
There are 10 units of study, divided into 3 modules:
Preparing for the online classroom (intro, planning, classroom management)
Developing language skills
Resources for learning and teaching (tasks and activities, resource adaptation, design and creation)
You can access separate units or whole modules, so it’s flexible. There’s a sample unit on the website. It’s also possible to get a regulated qualification, an Ofqual Level 4 Certificate (CertOT), from Trinity if you complete the whole course.
Some lessons they learnt from developing an online course:
Test, pilot and trial as much as possible. Review content from different perspectives, including welfare experts, not just teachers, schools, academics.
Ensure there is time to react to trials and reviews.
Choose a platform that works globally or for your target area.
Check copyright restrictions for content and learn about Creative Commons.
Be aware of safeguarding.
Lessons learnt about teachers’ needs:
Teachers need to be shown focussed, practical techniques to help their ‘just-in-time learning’.
Videos of real classes are just as valuable as mini best-practice videos.
Teachers need to be directed to consolidate learning, just like ‘non-teacher’ learners
Online learning must have a variety of media to help maintain interest and support local adaptation.
Teaching is a messy business: acknowledge and embrace this.
Teachers want certification for learning just as much as learners do!
Online teacher training in low resource contexts – Nicky Hockly
School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have led to learning loss at all levels of education, including for teachers. This talk reports on fully online teacher training projects that TCE have carried out over the last 18 months in data-poor contexts in Africa. Lessons learned about designing fully online teacher training courses for low resource contexts will be shared.
The Consultants-E are members of Aqueduto and take part in research into online teacher training – there’s lots of interesting information on their website.
Through TCE, Nicky has experience of running projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, including English by WhatsApp, English Connects and a project called CoELT.
Some of the challenges to moving teacher training online during the pandemic (AQUEDUTO, 2022 – research to be published soon):
Lack of digital skills amongst trainers
Lack of access to tech
Lack of support for well-being, of teachers and learners
Resistance to working online
Positives found in the same research:
Digital upskilling
Rethinking teacher assessment
Enhanced collaboration and support
Online teacher training is now ‘on the map’ – accepted and recognised as valid
Nicky is telling us about a specific online project in South Africa.
Challenges:
Widespread school closures
Teachers unable to reach learners remotely
Rural / urban digital divide
High data costs (highest on the continent); loadshedding (rolling electricity cuts)
Lack of devices (e.g. one feature phone per family – i.e. with a keyboard, not a smartphone)
Online teaching/training via a VLE and/or videoconferencing not realistic in many SA contexts
Massive learning loss, especially in rural and deprived areas
COELT: Certificate in Online English Language Teaching: done in cooperation with the British Council and the Department for Basic Education (DBE). TCE developed the course, then trained a group of Master Trainers who took the course as participants at first then cascaded the training to teachers. The course was:
40 hours fully online
6 modules over 6 weeks
Aligned to EFAL (English as a First Additional Language) materials for Grades 1-12
Aligned to CiPELT and CiSELT training (teaching methodology certificates)
Course tools:
Self-study materials on a Google site
WhatsApp for teacher reflection and group work
Weekly Zoom sessions (for debrief and reflection)
Mentoring and evlauation:
Group mentoring via WhatsApp
Individual coaching via Zoom – several times during the cascade
Evaluation of online competencies via an evidence-based evaluation framework with indicators
As it was for a low-tech context, they kept the following in mind:
Easy to access materials: Google site, not behind a password protected VLE
Mobile-friendly: designed for mobile first
Low data demands: icons rather than photos, audio rather than video, H5P to create simple interactive elements in self-study materials (e.g. drag and drop, click on ABCD and get feedback)
South African teaching materials and local accents in audio
Downloadable PDFs for each module (many people will find wifi, download materials and take them away to read them)
WhatsApp as the main communication channel for teacher training
WhatsApp for demo live language lessons
WhatsApp Live Lessons – synchronous interaction
Some related research from MIT done in South Africa to train community leaders in rural areas: Mohlabane and Zomer, 2020.
TCE took DBE materials and thought about how it could be delivered via WhatsApp in an engaging, realtime lesson.
The live lesson starts off with rules and routines. 10 minutes/5 minutes before the lesson, they check ‘Are you ready?’ The start of the lesson is reviewing the group rules which were established in the first lesson. There’s a clear signal for when they start: *OK, everybody. Ready, steady, go.* The lessons are very intense and very fast, although it’s important to remember that typing can take longer on a feature phone. The pace of the lesson is slower on a feature phone than on a smartphone.
They demo a live lesson on WhatsApp, with the trainees experiencing the lesson as students. Then there is clear signal that they’re now teachers, and share their immediate reactions to the lesson. There can be a mix of voice notes and text.
They also used WhatsApp for reflective course tasks during the course.
Findings
The digital skills of the teachers was so much lower than they expected. Key digital skills were lacking, for example being able to copy and paste. They added a 6-hour key digital skills to the beginning of the course with these absolute basics.
Tech with low demands in terms of data, but also in terms of the digital skills required.
Videoconferencing might not be appropriate – they used it because the DBE requested it, but not everybody could use it.
They used WhatsApp in RT (real time) and NQRT (not quite real time) – a combination of these interactions was very effective.
The interaction in WhatsApp was with text, pictures and voice notes, but no videos.
They integrated ways of how to use WhatsApp in other ways for education, for example liaising with parents.
Nicky expects that WhatsApp will continue to be used in this way even after the pandemic.
Using WhatsApp for teacher development – Khassoum Diop and Danny Norrington-Davies
In this session we will share our experience of using WhatsApp to offer development opportunities to large groups of teachers or teachers working in different locations. We will offer tips and advice on how to set up groups and set boundaries, encourage sharing and participation, and how to help teacher developers manage their time and commitments. We will finish by offering suggestions on how WhatsApp might be used on teacher development courses.
Danny is a trainer from IH London, and Khassoum is a trainer in Senegal. They ran the session as a Q&A. Danny asked questions and Khassoum gave the answers.
Some initial questions:
Have you ever used WhatsApp for teachign training?
How might WhatsApp be used for training in your context?
Why do you use WhatsApp for training and development?
Lots of teachers in different and sometimes remote locations
Poor internet coverage does not allow for high tech tools
Does not require lots of training/digital skills
Can use text, pictures and voice notes
Less expensive than other tools
How many teachers do you tend to work with?
As many teachers as possible! Locally and internationally.
What do you mainly use WhatsApp groups for?
Social interactions – building rapport and community with other teachers
Sharing materials
Sharing techniques and ideas
What advice do you have for setting up and running discussions?
Set up a clear, focussed question.
Set clear time limits, e.g. the end of the week.
Situate discussions in the classroom so they are more real.
Respond to contributions and ask follow up questions so teacher do more than give lists of ideas.
Summarise and share the discussion at the end – these summaries can become training materials or articles for publication. The summaries are also shared on WhatsApp. Summaries can be written by the co-ordinating trainer, or by a member of the group.
What kinds of topics have you had discussions about?
They tend to focus discussions on a specific topic, for example, the different stages of listening comprehension, or strategies for teaching listening. The discussions can also motivate teachers to explore topics in more depth.
Discussions to develop content knowledge – for example, based on problems a student has, asking for advice, What would you say?
Discussions to develop pedagogic knowledge – for example, pair or groupwork.
Discussions framed as problems/case studies can be helpful to encourage teachers to answer.
How important is it to have rules and regulations on your teacher WhatsApp groups and how do you set this up?
A sample set of rules:
Remember that [this group] abides by these rules:
English posts ONLY
No religious or political posts
Give and take ONLY in [this group]
Do not keep silent, participate as much as possible.
No personal discussions in [this group]
Thank you for your understanding.
Tips:
Set clear rules and boundaries at the start. These could relate to content, tone and times when you can post.
Have a system to deal with transgressions e.g. give a warning before taking action/suspending a participant
Give new participants time to settle before they become active
Talk to the ‘ghosts’ (the people who watch but don’t participate) – make sure people are giving as well as taking, because everybody’s ideas are valid. They find that a lot of people contribute the following session after this.
What advice do you have for encouraging teachers to share materials? What do you have to consider when you share materials?
There is a rule that they’re not there to assess or evaluate materials, but that everybody’s materials and ideas are valid. They don’t want people to feel ashamed about sharing materials. Be clear that the thread is about sharing rather than assessment.
Set a clear task e.g. ‘What speaking activity have you used recently that your students enjoyed? Please share it here saying what the task is and why you think the students enjoyed it’
How do you limit your own time commitments with the number of groups you have?
Khassoum makes sure he has time to rest. He chooses which sessions to attend, rather than attending all of them.
Tips:
Set time limits for discussions.
Share the forum with other trainers if possible.
Have cut off times in the day when the group is closed.
Turn off your phone or mute notifications for set periods.
Make sure you have boundaries.
How do you ensure that the group is democratic rather than autocratic?
They tried to have different people running the sessions, including volunteers from the group. Some people said that they wanted to run a session because they wanted to learn something – you don’t have to be the knowledgeable one.
Tips:
Invite teachers to set discussions or ask questions.
Inform the teachers you will be absent from the discussion for a set period. (Give them space!)
Set reflective questions e.g. ‘What was the biggest challenge you have faced with your class recently and how did you overcome it?’
Question from Khassoum: How do you think these ideas would work on a teacher training course?
Set ‘office hours’ and clear boundaries around topics e.g. no planning questions, no changing the topic mid-discussion.
Create and delete groups through the course e.g. Q&A for each assignment.
Set reflection tasks before feedback and sit out the discussion.
Flip training by setting questions or readings for input sessions. You can also encourage trainees to ask you questions: Tomorrow we’re going to talk about reading skills. What would you like to know?
Set observation tasks and run discussions during TP.
Q&A/Comments
Trainers really appreciated the chance to share responsibility and to learn from each other in the WhatsApp groups.
There is no obligation for people to join groups. Discussions can be weekly, monthly, or at random. In their platform, they have Friday discussions from 4-6pm, though sometimes people share questions at other times. (A little like the #eltchat hashtag on Twitter!)
Reflective elements could be done in L1 if the English level is too low to be able to reflect in English (e.g. A1/A2), even if the trainer doesn’t understand the language.
They can see that the WhatsApp groups are working, because they see people sharing the ideas in other contexts, such as in other groups they are members of, and crediting the ideas back to the WhatsApp groups.
Group work is possible in WhatsApp too – you can have a bigger group with everyone, and smaller groups for teachers/students which you’re part of. [Teaching via WhatsApp is a whole new world to me, and sounds very exciting!]
They share WhatsApp groups organically by creating flyers which can be shared by/with other teachers. There’s a lot of word of mouth.
Meeting local needs in contexts new to the internet – Joe Wilsdon
The internet gains 700,000 users every day. The African Union plans for every individual on the continent to have internet access by 2030. With the assumption that English will remain the global language, how can language teacher training meet local needs in countries and cultures newly connected to the internet?
The internet is gradually becoming available to more and more people. Some initial discussion questions:
How has the internet changed your work as a teacher in your country?
Imagine you were training an online CELTA with candidate teachers from Nigeria, Pakistan and Canada. What, if any, information about their specific, local contexts would you want to know?
When the internet is available to the entire world, will a one-size-fits all course like CELTA be appropriate?
In some countries, internet use is on the phone, not on computers. It’s still possible to show images and short texts on phones around a large group – it’s not perfect, but it works.
The rural/urban dichotomy can often be a bigger difference than that between different countries.
The UN committed itself to as one of its infrastructure and development goals to ‘strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020’ (goal 9C). This date has passed. Access to the internet is now possible from 97% of the world’s surface. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has access. Just 54% of the global population use the internet. In the least developed countries only 19% have online access. 2018 was the 50/50 point – when 50% of the global population had access to the internet.
What does it mean to have internet access? Within global development, it means to be able to access a device at some point that has the internet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody has it. If one person in the village has a device which they give other people access to, that can mean multiple people count as having internet access.
According to ourworldindata 27,000 people gain access to the internet per hour. One project to help increase internet acccess was Google’s Loon, though it was discontinued in January 2021. Facebook Aquila was another project. One key question is whether we want mega-corporations to be in control of internet access.
What does increased internet access mean? Increased opportunities for girls and women is just one impact.
How does the spread of the internet to more people influence the ELT industry?
In Northern and Western Africa, 141 million people are native French speakers. If only five percent of those people seek and pay for online English classes, that’s seven million new clients for the ELT industry.
More students means more teachers. More teachers means more trainers.
On the other hand, more people online means more choice for the consumer, which means lower prices, which probably means lower wages.
Joe’s advice is to specialise as much as possible. General English may well be coming to an end. By having to become an expert in a particular field, we probably have to become more professional.
What about linguistic imperialism? Philipson (1992 – Amazon affiliate link) argued that the spread of English is already:
Perpetuating native speakerism
Contributing to the death of languages around the world
Perpetuating a model of culture that is Euro-centric
Joe doesn’t say this is wrong, but doesn’t a globalised world need a globalised language? In recent decades, enormous gains have been made in lifting people out of poverty (slowly, uncertainly, hesitantly, but still). Would it be possible to have a globalised economy without a globalised language?
Some thoughts on the next 15-20 years:
The number of EFL teachers will grow rapidly.
The majority will be teaching both online and offline.
A proportion of them will come from countries where English is taught through traditional, teacher-centred methods and not communicative approaches. (Note: it’s not self-evident that communicative approaches have to be the best way to learn)
Exposure to a greater variety of international speakers through internet access will change people’s perceptions of which accents/dialects are considered acceptable.
What might need to change?
Qualifications must adapt.
EFL training could become adaptable according to the region from which the participants hail.
An increasing number of countries are teaching all subjects in English to VYL.
CELTA could pivot to prepare trainees to teach history, science and maths in English? A more CLIL approach.
CELTA could also be more specialised towards teaching adults in their professions.
In the discussion afterwards, there was a discussion of the risk of being colonial in marking speaking/writing exams. It’s a challenge that exam boards need to address. Intelligibility between candidates might be fine, but examiners might not find candidates intelligible and therefore mark them down.
Translanguaging, with the combination of English with other languages, will become increasingly common, so that people will still be able to participate in communication.
It’s raining on prom night – Giovanni Licata and James Egerton
The last 18 months have been momentous for teacher training. The online transition has not only meant reinventing the wheel in some cases, but also facing ever-present teacher training fears that had been more hidden in the 100% physical classroom CELTA. Our session will spin the audience through technical, cultural-educational and organizational moments where it felt like the rain was ruining prom night, but for which moves in the new dance must be mastered.
The idea of this presentation started a long time before COVID. It was about thinking about the problems that teachers have and how to deal with them. What do you do when you’ve been building up to somethign for a long time, then things don’t happen the way you expect them to?
Face to face or Mask to mask? There are challenges to teaching in person with COVID restrictions too, not just to teaching online. There can be restrictions on not moving from your chair, not being able to monitor – all adding extra challenges to initial teaching experiences. [You might find some useful ideas on socially distanced teaching here.]
Giovanni would like to see a lot more experimentation with using different physical environments within the same school, to give you the privacy that breakout rooms give you.
We should try to stop ourselves from thinking that everything was rosy before the pandemic. The pandemic has been an accelerator to the integration of technology in education, not a circuit break. The idea of going ‘back to normal’ isn’t a thing. We need to reconceptualise what is happening in our spaces.
Flexbiliity: We have the choice with the spaces we work in to be able to provide the best possible services for teachers and trainers. How can we combine and integrate these two worlds?
Collaboration: Working with centres around the world. Can we continue to share ideas and innovations in the way we have during the pandemic?
Integration of new ideas
Key concepts moving forward:
Assessment – being flexible
Cognitive flexibility – awareness, confidence and flexibility
Hybrid: Attention can’t be split – all students online or all students face-to-face. Mixed-mode could be better – some lessons of each.
Learning by doing: Replanning a methodology course to prepare for online teaching – Joanna Szoke
During COVID, I had to completely redesign a simple methodology course to give enough practical support to my in-service trainees in online teaching and learning. The aim was to equip them with skills they could use right away. The talk will look at the design principles of this “learning by doing” course and its main takeaways.
Jo teaches pre-service and in-service trainees at a university in Budapest. The course she’s talking about was called ‘Using ICT tools in the ELT classroom’ – it was designed for face-to-face classrooms. [I sympathise – I wrote a whole MA assignment on a two-week ICT course I was really proud of, but which didn’t mention online teaching at all. Doh!] In-service trainees were transitioning into online teaching. Pre-service trainees had their first ever experience of teaching online.
She had to redesign the course completely to meet their needs, expectations and requests. She wanted to provide efficient support to struggling trainees with minimal online teaching experience. Jo believes in learning by doing and the power of passing knowledge on. She thought that the in-service teachers would be able to pass the knowledge onto their colleagues too.
The course design process:
Identify their needs.
Find out what they have to do and how they have to do it. Environments, software, tools they have access to. Done through interviews.
Remove everything from the old course schedule to create a new course!
She wanted/needed to include:
Zoom and MS Teams
Interactive tools like Learning Apps and WordWall
Colloboration online
The course consisted of Zoom and VLE training (Google classroom), with autonomous and flipped components, and formative assessment. They got 5-minute long videos with tasks on Nearpod. They had open-ended questions at the end to serve as revision questions at the beginning of synchronous sessions. Formative assessment:
Flipped videos + required task+ optional tasks
Tasks in sync with the materials e.g. do a flipped lesson on Nearpod, then create a Nearpod lesson yourself; play a game on Wordwall, make one yourself
Option to resubmit improved assignments
Peer feedback
Nearpod allows you to track what people have completed. [There’s a guest post on it here.]
A journey through time – Abeer Ali Okaz
University total closure took everyone by surprise. Most of the training that PUA academics have previously received did not seem to fully help. This presentation focuses on the challenges that necessitated the change in the current training programme. It will take attendees through a journey to adjustment and survival, and provide tips gained from PUA’s experiment with online learning.
The University of Pharos has around 3500 students registered for English each year. Challenges they faced when the pandemic started:
No phone numbers or emails for students, so no way to contact them.
Burnt-out teachers.
Teachers without digital skills.
Connectivity issues.
Lack of access to devices.
Poor wellbeing.
They created 114 Google Classrooms for their students, but not everybody could join them. Teachers were anxious and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to prepare, they couldn’t write on screen, there was a huge amount of information about possible resources, teachers couldn’t monitor all the students carefully…they had all been through the university’s training programme before the pandemic, including some observed training and peer and formal observation.
The university realised they had to stop and reassess the training programme. They knew blended learning wasn’t going to go away – they had to redesign for the situation and for the future.
They changed their approach to training:
Bottom-up – teachers can create training content and manage its delivery. They could suggest sessions, research and share with each other. The attitude to younger teachers training older ones changed amongst the teachers.
Smaller groups
Asking teachers via WhatsApp and Google Classroom what they needed.
Using Google Classroom and Padlet for content creation and ideas and tools. One team was responsible for each of these tools and collecting information to share on these platforms. The Padlet was open to all teachers to post ideas, comment on each other’s ideas and access them later too.
Helping the teachers to be responsible for their own learning and training other teachers handed over control, in the way that we want learners to be responsible. They surveyed teachers regularly to check that this met their needs.
They scheduled training based on priority and availability. The management was only facilitating – there was more reward for teachers from this approach.
Abeer believes that this approach will continue in the future – there were common goals, there has been a lot more interaction between teachers, morale has improved – teachers are very proud of the sessions they’ve done, and there is enhanced communication between teachers.
Final comments from Adrian Underhill
[This was an excellent way to end the conference – very positive! I may have missed some points, but here are many of them!]
The discontinuity of COVID has led to a huge amount of creativity. It’s amazing how we’ve managed to deal with this situation, and it’s released a huge amount of energy which this conference has showcased. The picture of training has become much more nuanced.
Core values are important – we’re not trying to be values free. We seem to be moving from ‘It works’ or ‘It doesn’t work’ to ‘I/We work’ – a much greater sense of agency and involvement, with a commitment to values and the expression of values.
We’re not just going into detail, but zooming out and looking at the big picture and questioning systems as a whole.
Interpersonal skills, as described by Chia, are the ground out of which everything else grows. We need to build trust and reduce distance. How do we talk about empathy? When Adrian started the TD group in 1986, he meant personal development for teachers. We need to think about How can we be more facilitative in our teaching?
How can we share power? Mentoring…Reflective practice… It’s great to see that in teacher training.
There’s a need for honesty and to be who we are. Sharing real experience, sharing insecurity, learning to forgive yourself and be less judgemental of ourselves so we can be less judgemental of others.
WhatsApp allows accessibility and communication, getting lots of people talking.
Flipped learning/teaching seems to have become more relevant than ever to maximise the use of synchronous time to have discussions and create meaning together, not just to go through facts.
Each can learn from the other: online from face-to-face and vice versa. We may see new potential in being online. It might not replace reading the room when you’re all together, but it might bring other things which we don’t recognise yet.
Leadership in ELT is a key concept too and was discussed today. Adrian gave a plenary on it at IATEFL 2012, but it’s taken a while to enter other parts of ELT. It’s about empowering others.
We can make a difference through training. We can be guided by meaning, values and people. With our ingenuity and energy, we can find ways of making a difference. We are connecting with the whole world. There’s hope for the future.
Today was my first face-to-face conference since before the pandemic started. According the Czech event law, this was required:
Covid-19 Measures Circumstances force us to check everyone at the entrance. Please have the following ready in paper form or in an app on your mobile phone:
A Covid-19 Certificate
Proof of having had Covid-19 recently
A negative Antigen test (not older than 24 hours) or a negative PCR test (not older than 72 hours).
We kindly request that everyone:
wear a respirator (not a normal mask) for the duration of the conference
disinfect their hands
wash their hands regularly
maintain distances.
This made me feel much better about going to the conference, though it did involve trying to find respirator masks in the UK. This proved impossible (even normal masks were challenging to find!) and I ended up ordering them online from a Czech company and collecting them from a parcel box once I’d arrived in Brno…the miracles of the internet!
Mark Andrews, Nikki Fortova, me, and Phil Warwick during the panel discussion to round off the conference
I presented a talk called One activity, multiple tasks, and took part in a panel discussion at the end of the day. These are my notes from the sessions I attended – the opening plenary and two other talks.
The next PARK Conference will be 2nd April 2022.
Going with the flow: Making our learners fluent, well, actually confluent! – Mark Andrews
Mark started by playing a little of Smetana’s Vltava. Write the name of a river you like, 3 words to describe it, and think about what it might be like to talk to the river. Mine: Kennet, changeable, mixed, shallow.
Confluences have been a big part of Mark’s life. He grew up in Appledore, and lived in Belgrade.
Listenership is a concept he’s interested in.
A conversation is not a monologue, it is two- sided, we not only express our thoughts but we listen to the expression of other people’s thoughts.
Harold Palmer, 1921, The Oral Method of Teaching Languages
Mark believes we need to create more activities which build confidence in our learners, but also prompt more spontaneous reactions. How do we put the con(fluence) back into conversation? There are still lots of students who do English at school for 10 years but aren’t able to speak English.
Try this structure:
The thing is…
The other thing is…
The (worrying/strange/etc.) thing is..
Have you ever taught this?
You see…
I see… (to mean I understand, is often taught quite late)
Well,…
OK,…
Right…
We separate productive and receptive skills, but what about interaction. [I believe the CEFR does highlight interaction now…]
We can use a corpus to find common phrases from interaction.
The exercise above is a kind of drill. It doesn’t separate accuracy and fluency…maybe we should be combining them more.
Teacher talking time has been a taboo for a long time, but maybe we can say short things and get students to react.
Did you?
Really?
What happened?
How could we react? What could we say?
The COBUILD project and John Sinclair had a revolutionary effect on language study. Developing the largest English language corpus led to many changes in research.
IRF:
Initiate
Response
Feedback
…is a common classroom pattern. Feedback is often ‘good’ – we don’t take the opportunity to push the conversation further. Wong and Waring (2009) showed that teacher falling intonation signals the end of conversation and closes the door for student interaction.
Discourse analysis started in 1975, finding out how real communication really happens.
Push learners beyond IRF: Tell your partner about your last week. Make sure you both speak at least 4 times.
How collocations with ‘vaccine’ have changed over the last few months
A lot of repetition is good for learning languages. Mark gave lots of examples of what linguistics calls ‘vague language’, but they’re the lubricants that make fluent communication possible. We can do this in the classroom, like this:
These writers make listeners feel like we’re fluent.
Etymology is interesting to learn too. [The slide above shows one of my favourite Czech words, and I never knew where it came from!]
Hello? Goodbye? Or…
Hi
Hiya
Alright?
See ya
See you later
You can introduce this kind of diversity of phatic communication even at very low levels. Get the students interested in language right from the start.
Teach them how to build relationships, not just engage in transaction.
Do you want a drink?
No. (I’m OK for now. Thanks, but not now…)
‘Must’ in spoken English is used almost exclusively for speculation, but we associate it with obligation.
Good listenership involves responding.
We can drill this kind of thing fairly easily – getting students to respond in simple phrases.
Going back to the start of the talk: I talk like a river is the Best Children’s Book of the Year 2020 according to Publishers Weekly. It was written by somebody who stutters, about overcoming it. It could be a way to think about how to encourage children/ students to talk. Some people have a bad experience in the first year of English classes, and are quite ever after.
Here’s Ed Sheeran reading the story:
Definitely worth watching!
The Sounds and Shapes of Words: Teaching reading effectively – Steve Lever
Steve was presenting a hybrid session from Greece, something I think will be increasingly common in future conferences. There was a facilitator in the room and Steve was on the screen.
He discussed teaching early literacy for young learners, including how frequency can influence your choice of what to teach.
We watched a scene from I Love Lucy where Lucy’s Cuban husband is reading in English, demonstrating the vagaries of English spelling and pronunciation.
How many characters are there in the English alphabet? Not 26 as you might think, but 52, as capitals and lower case look different.
How many sounds are there? 44, depending on the variety.
How many spellings represent the English sounds? 250
How many consonant clusters are there in English? 30 initial and 100 final
Why have capital letters increased in importance? Because keyboards use them.
A letter may have more than one phoneme. A phoneme may be represented by more than one letter or combination of letters.
These are all issues those learning to read in English have to contend with.
We associate meaning with sound. Reading is not an innate, natural skill. Learners go from the letter to the sound to the concept. Readers become prudish when we see the image of the word and automatically get to the concept of the word.
Early literacy teaching has moved towards a frequency focus: what are readers most likely to encounter?
A possible sequence:
Introduce most common sound pictures in CVC words. Single letter consonant pictures: b p t d l m. Single letter vowel pictures: a e i o u.
Introduce consonant blends (2 letters, 2 sounds): st, br, bl, gr etc.
Introduce digraphs: sh, ch, etc. (2 letters, one sound)
Introduce split vowel digraphs – explore magic ‘e’: Tim/ time
Introduce proper vowel digraphs: ai in rain, ou in house etc.
Make learners aware of initial, mid, final position sound pictures.
Present alternatives: snow/now, dog/egg.
Frequency: /k/ in duck (3), kitten (2), queen (5), school (4), cat (1). Which is most common? I think ‘cat’ – I was right! The numbers in brackets show you the order from most to last frequent.
/i:/ is tree (3), key (4), me (1), pony (5), beach (2)
3 key skills:
Blending (running sounds together)
Segmenting
Phoneme manipulation (how a word sound changes if you change one of the letters within it)
We’re not looking at saying the names of the letters, we’re looking at the sounds of the letters.
Sight words (e.g. the, and, to, he, she, that, in, it, is, are, be, but, one, said, was, at, I, you, he, she, his, her…):
Build learners’ confidence
Help children focus on more challenging words
Provide clues to understanding the meaning of a sentence/ text.
Many sight words defy decoding strategies.
Builds learning behaviours that will help learners read new and more complex words.
Practical tips:
Balance ‘sound’ approaches with letter pattern and ‘sight word’ activities. Encourage recognition of patterns, getting learners to actively focus on words in a text. Work with words systematically and in context.
Get learners into the habit of ‘looking with intent’ – paying attention to the eyes.
Point out that print is all around them (this really helped me with Cyrillic). You could have labels or word cards around your classroom.
Take an interest in words as you read. Ask them to predict the spelling of one or two words before you read for example.
Encourage students to take mental pictures of words in their mind.
Get students to write down words and to see if it feels right.
Be multi-sensory.
Word shapes – what words are above, below, on the line? You can draw lines around the word for the shape, or have hand up for above, down for below, flat for on.
Show words on the screen. Close your eyes. Which word is missing?
Bingo works for writing and reading.
Overwriting/Tracing works for letter formation. Green dot where we start to write it, and a red one where we stop, without fully writing it.
Visualise words within words. An animal in education: cat. A part of the body in learn: ear.
Angels or Demons? ADHD and other white elephants – Claudia Molnár
What does SEN look like? All of these people have/had one or more of dyslexia, ADD or ADHD.
Fragile X syndrome was new to me – it’s a mutation in the X gene which brings many other things with it: dyslexia, dyscalculia, limited short term memory, limited executive control, emotional behavioural diaorder, autistic spectrum disorder etc. It’s rarely tested for.
Many people with SEN go undiagnosed for a while.
Teachers of English do not usually get adequate preparation for teaching children with SEN, or we might not be told about a diagnosis, or we might suspect but not be able to communicate that with parents.
Meeting the needs of children with SEN requires a lot of commitment, energy, professional knowledge and skills. Not only do English language teachers need specific knowledge and skills to accomplish this important task, but the crucial pre-requisitve for success in the EL classroom is their cooperation with class teachers, specialists in school or local community, and parents.
Claudia Molnar
How do children learn a foreign language? Exposure, repetition, etc. These are hard enough anyway, but can be much harder with the additional barriers to learning caused by SEN. Building confidence is important.
Inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity: 3 features common to ADD/ADHD, though they might be differently balanced for different people.
Symptoms of inattention:
Failure to give close attention to detail or making mistakes
Often forgetful in daily activiites
Easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
Often losts things necessary for tasks of activities
Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
Difficult sustaining attention during activities
Difficulty in following instructions for activities
Avoidance of activities that require sustained mental effort
Often has difficulty organising tasks and activities
Hyperactivity can easily exhaust people. Symptoms of hyperactivity:
Often fidgets with hands or squirms in seat
Often runs about or climbs excessively in situations in which it is not appropriate
Often leaves seat in situations in which remaining seated is expected
Often talks excessively
Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly
Is often ‘on the go’ or acts as if ‘driven by a motor’
Symptoms of impulsivity:
Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed
Often interrupts or intrudes on others
Makes important decisions without considering long-term consequences
Reckless behaviour and accident-prone
Often has difficulty awaiting turn
Potential knock-on effects, which can also influence each other:
Segregation
Anxiety
Motor skills problems
Depression
Fear
Phobias
Insomnia/sleep disorders
Emotional disorders
PTSD
What does that mean for language learners? Bilingual learners with ADHD have more difficulty with code-switching, not necessarily being able to keep up with which lanugage they are supposed to be in. The lesson they had immediately before might influence their ability too, for example if they had a German lesson before their English lesson. Translation activities could be quite challenging. Claudia is running studies on this now.
Dyslexia manifests itself in different ways with different people. Again, it can have huge knock-on effects on other areas of people’s lives, not just the stereotype of problems with reading. [Note: Dyslexia Bytes has excellent resources to help you.]
People with dyslexia might use their peripheral vision more than those without it.
Ways we can adapt our lessons in a range of ways for successful inclusive practice:
Applying appropriate teaching methodology
Using appropriate teaching material
Having extra time for individual work with the child
Acquiring specific knowledge, skills and experience in dealing with diversity in class.
Adapting the curriculum
Considerations when planning:
Pre-teach vocabulary
Give learners a title/ context when writing
Allow learners to draw rather than write everything, they speak it loud
Give them the opportunity to discuss the difficulties they have and share possible solutions through peer discussions.
Go back to basics. Think about how to make things easy access.
Reading:
Don’t insist that all learners read aloud
Use prediction techniques for each upcoming section
Read short sections
Stop and ask Wh- questions for comprehension and clarification, and to check predictions
Use visuals – images, comic strips (see the CIELL project), etc.
Repeat these steps for each section.
Writing:
Build in planning time (as a group)
Brainstorm text organisation
Create sub tasks for the writing process
Give enough time, release the pressure of in-class writing (though might be a problem for exam prep)
Set a linguistic focus (e.g. use of mixed past tenses) (Komos, 2020)
All SEN students can learn! But we may need to find ways to change our teaching to help them to learn.
On Monday 8th November 2021, I gave a webinar for IH Cairo with the following abstract:
Are you a language teacher looking for practical tips on adapting materials? Would you like to know more about the principles behind adapting materials? Do you teach online and need to know how to adapt materials for your online classroom? How can you get your students to interact with your materials? Looking for ways to get your students more in control of their own learning?
In this session, Sandy will look at some of the principles behind adapting materials, and consider how they can be applied in the online classroom. Among other things, she’ll consider ways of presenting materials that go beyond PowerPoint, ways that students can interact with them, and how to hand over control to the students as much as possible.
My webinar was part of a series, all of which will be/are (depending on when you read this!) available on social media:
The webinar itself wasn’t just about adapting materials for online lessons, but more about principles for adapting materials for any kind of lesson, with mentions of how some of these tweaks could be made online. I generally believe that a lot of ways of adapting materials are equally valid in the online and face-to-face classroom.
Here are the slides:
I’ll add a recording when it’s available.
We started by looking at where the attendees fall on these continuums:
I use materials exactly as they are. < ——————— > I adapt everything – nothing is used as is.
My lessons are similar – I use a small range of activities. < ——————— > Every lesson is different – always use new activities.
I emphasised that there is no right place to be on the continuum – different points have different advantages and disadvantages, and it’s important to consider our students’ and our own needs when we think about adapting materials. For example, if we adapt everything, it can create a lot of work and reduce our free time, whereas using (good) materials as they are can be useful if we’re not confident about how to stage a lesson. If we use a small range of activities, students become familiar with these and they can be set up quickly and efficiently, whereas if we always use new activities, students might feel uncomfortable about the lack of routine.
When reading the rest of the post, think about an upcoming lesson you’re going to teach. How might these ideas influence your lesson planning?
Before you plan
Consider your course objectives – how does this lesson fit in to them?
Find out your learners’ needs and wants, perhaps through conversations, questionnaires, getting to know you activities, diagnostic testing…
Based on these two sets of knowledge, decide your lesson objectives: what would it most benefit your learners to focus on next? If you have to use a coursebook, aim to pick and choose, rather than simply doing the next page. If you have to work through a coursebook page by page, make sure that your objectives are focussed on what the learners ‘can do’ (will be able to do) at the end of the lesson that they couldn’t do (as well) at the start, rather than having objectives which focus purely on completing the exercises on the page.
Consider ‘backwards planning‘ – start with what you want learners to achieve, and identify all the stages needed to reach this point. It’s probably best to identify these stages before you spend too long looking at the materials if you can, as otherwise you’re likely to get distracted by the materials themselves – it’s easy to lose site of the objectives of the lesson as a whole.
Why adapt materials?
Cunningsworth (1995:136) says:
Every learning/teaching situation is unique and depends on factors such as these:
– classroom dynamics
– personalities involved
– syllabus constraints
– availability of resources
– learner expectations
– learner motivation
Material can nearly always be improved by being adapted to suit the particular situation where it is being used.
Think about how these factors might influence the lesson you’ve got in mind e.g.
syllabus = double-page per lesson to get through in a year
personalities = quiet, prefer individual work, dominate the group
dynamics = only just met – don’t really know each other yet, don’t take risks, don’t want to switch cameras on – voices only
resources = do students have access to copies of the book? notebooks? cameras they can hold things up to?
expectations = do they expect you to cover every exercise in the book? did they ask for lots of speaking activities and no writing?
motivation = Friday after lunch?
Four evaluative processes
McGrath (2016: 64-65) lists these four processes as a starting point for deciding what you might need to adapt in your materials:
Selection Material that will be used unchanged.
Deletion Complete – omitting a whole activity, or even lesson Partial – cutting one or more stages within an activity
Addition Adaptation = Extension or exploitation of existing material Supplementation = Introducing new materials
Change Modifications to procedure Replacement = Changes to context/content
Be careful not to make extra work for yourself or make activities too challenging for your students, for example by deleting a key preparation stage before a speaking activity.
Areas to think about
When going through the four evaluative processes above, there are a large number of areas you could consider. This list might seem overwhelming at first glance – you’ll probably find you think about at least some of these areas already when lesson-planning, but maybe there are some you haven’t considered before. It’s not exhaustive – the six areas could include many other ideas, not just those listed here.
Methods movement heads-up/heads-down interaction patterns feedback techniques
Language content amount meaning/use form pronunciation
Subject matter interest authenticity relevance
Balance of skills reception v. production written v. spoken training v. testing
Progression and grading order of items scaffolding memorization time/prep time
Design images layout readability cultural content
The list includes ideas from Cunningsworth (1995: 136).
An example
This double-page spread has been taken from p56-57 of English File Pre-Intermediate 3rd edition by Christina Latham-Koenig, Clive Oxenden, and Paul Seligson.
Here are notes of some ways in which you might choose to adapt the materials to use them differently within your lesson. They are not intended to map out a single lesson, but rather to inspire you to look at your materials from a range of different perspectives and decide what is best for your learners and for you as a teacher. The headings refer to the ‘areas to think about’ above. There is often cross-over between the ideas under each category. They cover both the online and the face-to-face classroom. Feel free to ask for clarification of any of the ideas in the comments, as they’re written as quick notes below 🙂
Methods
Movement
Face-to-face: mingle for 3a, work with different partner 1d/5b,
Online: running dictation – 1d – teacher dictates 1a sentence, students run from other side of room to put letter in chat
Both: copy words onto paper in 4a and organize; 3d – stand up = T, sit down = f or right hand/left hand
Heads-up/heads-down
Display questions on screen rather than in books, speak to partners = heads up, writing = heads down
Interaction patterns
Pairwork, groupwork (e.g. 3a, 5b – can prompt more discussion)
Hand over control – let students choose speed they progress through (parts of) the page, and you’re there to help?
Offer choices to students – do they want to do the reading or the listening? write about the school (1d) or their own ideas, use 5b questions or their own ideas / choose 2-3 of the questions from 5b, add 1 own idea to 4b
Feedback
Cascade in the chat for 1a (write but don’t send, then all press enter at the same time)
Annotate for 4a, 4b = why are they comparing – how similar are you?
Have a specific task for 5b = talk to a partner + choose one language learning tip from your experiences to share with the group
Make a student the teacher (e.g. give one student all the answers + switch your camera off/stand at the back of the room)
Put them in pairs whenever you can
Language content
Amount
Focus only on modals / modifiers? Could be too much especially in online classes when things take longer!
Meaning/Use
Might need to give the rules rather than elicit, might focus on this after they’ve tried an activity e.g. 1d / 4b before they do the rules
Form
Highlighting of the form on the screen/board
Remember the words and write the spellings (esp. mustn’t, quite…)
Pronunciation
Point to signs and get them to remember the sentences/cline and remember words
Show first letters for sentences for students to remember
Practise saying minimal pairs sentences in 2b
Subject matter
Interest
This spread is probably pretty motivating, but you could start at a different point on the page to get them into the topic – 3a to get them involved (post question in chat, not from book), or tell them the situation (3b) and the title for them to predict content before they read, or start with 5b
Authenticity
Seems fairly authentic. I wouldn’t change anything
Relevance
Very! I wouldn’t change anything
Balance of skills
Reception v. Production
Pretty good balance, unless you decide to take something out – keep an eye on it
Written v. Spoken
No writing really (Ex 6 is probably a separate lesson), apart from a little in 1d – maybe replace 5 with creating an article/blogpost with your own tips if learners need practice
Think about how much you use the chat v. get students to say things in open class (and how many SS *really* participate in open class speaking)
Training v. Testing
All testing, so you probably need to add training
Focus on sentences from the listening, reflect on techniques used (metacognition)
Underline answers in the reading
Spend more time on either reading/listening and skip the other one (just summarise the important info if needed for the rest of the lesson)
Progression and grading
Order of items
PPP structure now, maybe make it more TBL – put 1d/5b first
Choose what to focus in on – maybe the skills are more important than the language or vice versa – may need to just think about the grammar for example, if that’s what your learners need (make sure they really do need that and that the grammar work is clearly contextualised if you make that decision though!)
Scaffolding
3b/3d = do first one together?
2b = help them with number of words, do one at a time, working in pairs
5a/5b – add prep time before speaking
Memorization time/Prep time
Memorization of modifiers – look, cover, write, check
Memorization of form/structures – look at signs and write sentences
Memorization of interesting language from reading/listening text
Remember some of the have you ever…questions in 5b for a future speaking
Prep time = 5a/5b – thinking time before speaking/writing (depending on how you set this up
Give time to choose 3 questions to ask in 5b, rather than covering them all
Design
Images
Highlight them in some way – pull them off the page (on a slide? blown up copy? – only spend time doing this if you’re going to spend more than that amount of time exploiting them in the lesson though!)
Exploit them more = what’s the conversation between the two men? How might it change between two women?
Use images for prediction (along with the headline?)
Assign a symbol to each modifier for students to use as a prompt for memorisation or creating their own activities
Layout
Very busy pages – lots going on – focus in on particular parts
Mask other parts with paper if in book
Make them bigger on screen
Use circles/arrows to draw attention
Readability
Text could challenge students with reading issues as very closely spaced – masking (as above)
Retype and space more (if necessary – don’t spend precious time on this if it won’t make a noticable difference for a learner!) Note: English File texts are available as downloadable/editable Word documents from the Oxford Teacher’s Club (requires login)
Colours probably fine – yellow background with black text for reading. Worth asking learners what they find easiest/most challenging to read though
Cultural content = going to a bar? Might be problematic in some contexts. Better in a café? > Change the picture
A planning checklist
Once you’ve planned/As you plan your lessons, it can be useful to have a short checklist of different dynamics you find it important to include in your lessons. For example, you could ask what balance of the following areas you have in your lesson:
Moving around / Sitting down
Teaching / Testing
Head up / Heads down
Teacher in control / Students in control
Individual work / Pair work / Group work / Whole class work
etc.
As with the clines at the start of the post, there is no single correct way to run a lesson – it depends on many different factors. But it can be useful to ask yourself these questions, and to consider whether the balance you’ve created is beneficial/suitable for your learners/your teaching style.
What tips would you give teachers to think about when choosing how to adapt materials, especially for online lessons?
Links
If you’d like more ideas for exploiting activities, try these:
Richer Speaking – my ebook of 12 different ways of adapting speaking activities, available for less than $1. Find out how to get your copy here.
References
Cunningsworth, Alan (1995) Choosing your Coursebook, Heinemann [Amazon affiliate link]
McGrath, Ian (2016) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching, 2nd edition, Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics: Edinburgh University Press [Amazon affiliate link]
On Saturday 6th November 2021, I went to my first face-to-face conference since before the pandemic started. It was a strange experience, but a wonderful one too – I wrote about it here, including information about the sessions I attended. (Link will be added within a few days of the conference!)
The fantastic view of Brno from my hotel window – looking over the Cabbage Market, with the towers representing (left-right) Petrov (Cathedral), Spilberk Castle, Domincan church and the Old Town Hall
The aim of the session is to take a single activity from published material and come up with as many different ways of varying the set-up or exploiting it as possible. It helps teachers to exercise their creativity and (hopefully) to reduce their planning time. It should also introduce them to a few extra activities to add to their toolkit.
The material we used was page 146 of English File 3rd edition Teacher’s Book Intermediate Plus. It is designed to revise future forms, like this:
A Mum! I’ve dropped my ice cream! B It’s OK, don’t worry – I’ll get / I’m getting you a new one!
A I’m freezing! BShall I turn on / Will I turn on the heating?
…and so on. There are 12 mini dialogues like this, each with two options to choose from – students can also tick if both are possible. At the bottom of the page is an ‘activation’ activity, where students write two mini-dialogues, one with will and one with going to.
This is my slightly updated list of ways to exploit this page, with suggestions for how to tweak some activities to make them online-friendly:
Remove the options.
Mini whiteboards.
I say A to the group, they predict B. Then in pairs.
Gallery walk (one copy of each question stuck up around the room)/Online = send one question to each student/have them in white on a doc, they highlight only their question
Evil memorisation (one of my favourite activities, learnt from Olga Stolbova) – the third activity in this blogpost
Say all the sentences as quickly as possible (AQAP on my lesson plans!)
Banana sentences (replace the key words with ‘banana’ for partner to guess)
Extend the conversations (what was said before/after)
Decide who/where/when/why it was said (by)
Take the ‘wrong’ answer and create a context where it would be right
Back translation/Translation mingle (students translate one conversation into L1, noting the English original elsewhere. They show other students the L1 to be translated.)
One group does 1-6/odd sentences. The other does 7-12/even sentences. Give them the answers for the other half. They check with each other.
Say them with different intonation/voices to create different meanings/situations.
Remember as many conversations as you can with your partner. Lots of variations for this: freestyle (no prompts), with A/B as a prompt, with (own/sketched/teacher-generated) pictures as prompts…
Hot seat/Backs to the board with a picture prompt for student looking at the board to say sentence A, person with back to the board says sentence B in response (Online = Pic prompts only)
Board race. Again, lots of variations: list as many sentences/conversations as possible on the whiteboard/in the chat; teacher/a student says A, teams write B; combine with ideas above like banana sentences…
Teacher says first half of the sentence, pausing at a convenient point. Students say second half. Then in pairs. e.g. “Shall I…” “…turn on the heating?”
Students have A sentences. They write their own Bs on separate pieces of scrap paper, then mix them up. Online = mix in a doc. Another pair tries to match the As and Bs together.
Change A to the opposite/a slightly different phrase. What’s an appropriate B? e.g. “I’m boiling!”
These were the ideas from the audience, collected via Mentimeter:
By the way, to celebrate being able to go to a face-to-face conference, there’s 10% off the Smashwords (affiliate link) ebook price for ELT Playbook 1 on November 6th and 7th 2021 – the code you need is VX68T.
Thanks to all of the people I’ve stolen those ideas from over the years 🙂
Let me know if you try out the brainstorming activity, the session, or any of the other tasks from ELT Playbook 1. I’d love to know how they work for you!
Sandy Millin 