I finally made it to IATEFL Brighton and was able to enjoy talks on the final day 🙂 I spent most of the rest of my 24 hours at the conference chatting to people – one of the things I most enjoy about being together with friends and colleagues from around the world!
Niki’s workshop is on CPD (Continuous Professional Development). Her first activity was to complete these sentences:
A CPD programme should be…
A CPD programme should not be…
Niki has noticed that some schools have absolutely no CPD programme, some have occasional meetings with no thought in them, or some are very top down and look like a CELTA course. Her workshop is about putting teachers at the centre of the design of the CPD programme.
Frames frame our existing knowledge.
Windows give us new perspectives allow us to see things in a different way.
Mirrors help us to reflect.
Niki has been working a lot with the English Australia self-assessment tool, as well as the OUP self-assessment tool and the Cambridge English INSPIRE professional development guidance.
Frames
Niki put some of the descriptors from the English Australia framework around the room for us to look at, with post it notes to create a running dictation to get different descriptors. This was one of the ones we did as a running dictation:
Develops, models and shares with colleagues techniques to control timing and the pace of the lessons and keeps learners on task.
This is one of the ways we can help teachers to get their heads into the words of the frameworks because they’re quite dense.
We then had to decide whether our descriptors were from lesson and course planning, managing the lesson or assessment, feedback and reporting.
This is a simple way to help teachers get into a framework: Teachers are exposed to a framework in a manageable way.
Windows
You can ask teachers to film themselves teaching a class. As they watch it back, what different aspects can they watch for?
Think, Pair, Share is a way to approach this.
One person in the room mentioned a triad system: three teachers observe three lessons with three students in each group observed intensively, then decide how to do the feedback together.
Some ideas:
Who is talking?
Instruction giving
Dealing with a tricky question
Where are you? Standing up / sitting down / scrolling?
Teacher language? Do you always say the same thing?
Pace of lesson
Variety
Engagement
Transition from activity to activity
Our group also talked about body language and thinking about teacher position, as well as who is talking to who in open class (is everybody only addressing the teacher or are they talking to each other?)
The lesson observations can then feed into the CPD programme, making the teachers the centre of the CPD programme.
Before we design a CPD programme, we need to know what is relevant: needs analysis is key.
Mirrors
We are responsible for our own CPD and we can do this ourselves. This is an OUP framework which Niki refers to:
Niki gave us a dice and we played this game:
1. Activities in a school/institution
2. Activities online
3. Activities within an association/teaching organisation
4. Activities in other contexts
5. Choose any category
6. Throw again!
Examples:
Workshop
Professional book club (read a chapter or an article)
Watching videos of others teaching
Watching webinars as a group or alone
Reading blogs
Volunteer for organisations
Meet up with your friends for a chat
Learn new skills – put yourself in the position of learners
Work together to localise materials – you have to understand why you’re creating materials in that way
This activity can be used to help teachers to choose what they do in their CPD.
At the end of the activity we looked back at our post-it notes to see if there was anything we want to change.
Other thoughts from the floor: CPD programmes should not be overwhelming – if it comes from the teachers, it can feel more manageable.
I watched Zarina’s IATEFL Brighton plenary from Wednesday 17th April 2024 on YouTube. You can watch it yourself here:
Zarina is representing diversity, equality and inclusion. She chose this slogan because unfortunately it is only applied to some people, not all people. Not everybody is made to feel that they are worth it – their value is seen as different by different people. Who decides our worth?
The way someone looks at you, their tone of voice, their approach to you: they can all determine how you see your worth, and what sides of yourself you decide to portray to persuade people to see your worth in different ways.
Zarina described a lot of examples of when people misinterpreted who she was, or when she was made to feel invisible. I recommend watching her talk to see these in her own words.
Our worth can be defined by:
Our environment
The way we’re dressed
How we manage ourselves
The language we speak
The words we choose
Our tone of voice
Our body language
It also depends on what other people think about us:
The perceived notion of oneself
Our assumed role/position
Our assumed nationality
Our assumed education
Our perceived message
Our perceived confidence
Our past experiences affect how we carry ourselves, and these are all important things to support our learners with. We need to help learners to be aware of what they’re going to face in the world – not just grammar, language, but how people will treat them and whether and how they will be perceived as an English language speaker.
Online you’re up against a firing squad of abuse.
Davina Pindoria, about gender, race, and other areas – because she is an Asian women with opinions about football (and a highly successful football broadcaster!)
A single step out of line can mean that people get pushed down, overlooked, and have their worth questioned – how does that affect their motivation?
Our worth can change over time. Zarina used the example of Mo Salah, the Liverpool football player. She talked about a study of 15 million tweets made by UK football fans before and after Mo Salah’s arrival at Liverpool – anti-Muslim tweets were reduced by over 50% after his arrival. This tells us that football fans gained empathy for somebody who they had no personal contact with and felt compassion for somebody they didn’t know: they had learnt something and even wrote a pro-Muslim song (see the video – worth watching!) This tells us that representation matters: we can make people feel empathetic before they ever actually meet somebody. The images we show, the voices we showcase can influence our views.
We should stop talking about English as Foreign Language, and talk about English as an International Language: most people use English this way.
Examples of discrimination
Hair is an important issue, including teachers telling Big Zuu that his afro was distracting other learners, so he cut it off: he wishes he’d never done that. Michelle Obama didn’t let her hair be natural while Barack Obama was president: she didn’t feel the US was ready for her hair.
Names is another area: Zuu is Zuu because people couldn’t pronounce his name correctly. Zarina became Zee at university because she was frustrated that people kept pronouncing her name wrong. If people don’t hear or cannot recognise what is familiar, they will make things up about you (that’s why I get called Sunday sometimes). That’s what happens when people are not familiar with your world.
In some places in the world, if you’re wearing indigenous dress, you’re not allowed in. People can also make assumptions about people because of what they’re wearing.
Health is impacted by assumptions. Light shining through your skin to check oxygen levels in your blood: people with darker skin were shown to have higher levels of oxygen than they actually had because the light shines through in a different way.
So what has ELT got to do?
…encouraging young adolescents to explore complex perspectives and emotions can have profound effects on their brain development and overall well-being, advocating for educational approaches that promote such thinking
Centre for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE), 2024
There’s a physical change when learners are asked to think about things, rather than just to look at them. If we ask people to think about things we’re developing brain structures. The greater the brain network, the greater the sense of identity about who we are as people – especially important for teenagers. The study followed these teens and found that these teens felt more confident as adults: well-rounded human beings who can think before their biases act.
In ELT we can use any topic we like, so we can take advantage of this to push learners to think.
If we think about this as ‘a bit heavy’, that’s what we used to say about the environment. The same is true of Sustainable Development Goals: they’re starting to appear in material. We need to be developing people who do the right thing when nobody’s looking, who do things because they are the right thing.
Starting with these ethics discussions, we then start to think about the systems around us. Are they working correctly? Are they doing what they should be? Teens especially are a great age to be thinking about this and discussing this, as there’s a natural sense of rebellion at that point.
DEI can be about what seems to fit within your culture, but also thinking about how your culture is perceived by others. It’s a two-way street. It doesn’t have to be about set topics.
These discussions give deeper meaning to discussions, showcase historical contexts, and show learners civic significance: helping them to realise which communities they’re part of, and that it’s natural and normal to be part of different communities.
PISA have been assessing Global Competence since 2018, lpoking at socio-emotional skills, global competence and cognitive reasoning about global and intercultural skills. At 45:45 into the video, you’ll see a QR code taking you to a questionnaire Zarina has set up about cultural perspectives in ELT coursebooks.
In the survey results so far, most teachers think that ELT coursebooks teach intercultural competence a little too superficially. Most felt like coursebooks promote Western culture. We’re not really teaching intercultural competence. What we see in films, on TV, in social media…this doesn’t reflect interculturalism.
There are some cultures I’ve never seen in textbooks e.g. from the Balkans or African cultures.
Examples where different cultures interact thanks to English language.
More realistic situations that students can relate to e.g. Our students cannot afford to take holidays (abroad) or check in a hotel because they come from economically disadvantaged social groups.
Countries with different traditions and fests, without those countries being depicted as not modern enough.
I’d like to see more detailed examples of both native and non-native speakers of English.
Taboos in different countries or more focus on stories and articles from the Global South or using accents from Outer Circle countries in listening tasks.
What survey respondents would like to see more of in materials
We need to be careful to show respect, and not exoticise other cultures. Indigenous knowledge is not respected, and Zarina thinks this is linked to how we represent people, and the representations we are used to seeing.
The Inner Circle (based on Kachru’s model) is still in charge of materials, and yet the Expanding Circle are the ones who are using most of the materials. We need to be including them in the materials. AI data is also coming from the Inner Circle, and yet is supposedly representing everyone.
English as a LIngua Franca has two possible directions: an inferior route, leading to denigration, marginalisation and ultimately exclusion. It can also be towards privilege, the creation of stereotypes, bullying and intolerance. The part of our brain that is triggered by bullying is the same part that is triggered by physical pain.
The whole of society is responsible for what we do as societies. We are all responsible, and we can all make changes collectively.
Do your part: make change happen, make attitudes happen, change the values of the students that you work with, because you’re all worth it.
In March 2010, I did my very first conference presentation at a PARK conference in Brno, Czechia, and I’ve been back many times since, so I really didn’t want to miss this special 30th anniversary conference.
This was the abstract for my talk:
What do successful readers do?
As teachers, we’re often guilty of testing our students’ reading abilities through comprehension questions, without actually supporting them to become better readers. But where should we start? How can you move beyond a comprehension focus and help students to become the best readers of English that they can be? What might be stopping them from developing? In this webinar, I’ll aim to answer all of these questions, by looking at what good readers do and demonstrating how to support students to build those skills for themselves.
I was very happy to be invited back to ELTABB in Berlin to do a talk as part of their 2024 AGM. The last time I was there was around 2016 or 2017, when I did a workshop on lots of different options for how teachers can develop themselves professionally. This time, I ran a 90-minute workshop based on my competency framework for language learning materials writing. This was the abstract:
If you’re anything like me, you’ve produced a lot of materials for your learners, whether that’s a worksheet, a PowerPoint presentation, or a video. You’ve also had very little training in materials writing, and have learnt what you know by trial and error, with the occasional bit of feedback from learners, other teachers or maybe even an editor.
This is why I put together a competency framework specifically dedicated to materials writing for language learning. In this session, we’ll look at what the framework is and how you can use it to produce better quality materials for your learners.
The workshop was a variation on a talk I’ve done a few times this year. You can watch a recording of a previous version of the talk here.
[Hopefully this will be an embed at some point if Slideshare and WordPress ever fix their integration!]
I’ll be doing a 30-minute version of the talk at IATEFL Brighton, on Tuesday 16th March 2024 as part of the IATEFL MaWSIG Showcase Day. Maybe I’ll see you there?
On 9th February 2024, I presented a plenary at the Educast online conference. It was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was a 45-minute version of the talk I did in January at the IH AMT, sharing the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. Frameworks exist for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise Santos’ IATEFL 2022 talk, I created one for my MA dissertation. I will share what it is, how I created it, and how you can use it.
These are the slides from the presentation (as a link at the moment as the embed function isn’t working!):
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
I’ll add the recorded version of the presentation when the link is available. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
On 19th January 2024, I presented at the IATEFL Young Learner and Teenager Special Interest Group (YLTSIG) web conference. The theme this year was ‘Each child, every child and the whole child’.
I was invited to speak about Girlguiding. This was the abstract for the session:
I’ve been part of Girlguiding in the UK as both a child and an adult, and it’s contributed a lot to who I am as a person. As a girl I was a Rainbow and a Brownie, and as an adult I’m Snowy Owl, a volunteer working with Brownies. Girlguiding improved my confidence, taught me how to work with others, and added extra skills beyond what I was learning at school. It also made me part of an international family, and was probably one of the first ways I became aware of the world beyond my country. In this session, I’ll share how Girlguiding inspired me and how it continues to inspire girls and women around the world. (Note that Scouting does the same!)
This is the recording, which I believe will be available during February 2024:
On 13th January 2024, I presented a plenary session at the International House Academic Managers and Trainers (IH AMT) 2024 conference. When I was the Director of Studies at IH Sevastopol and IH Bydgoszcz, I used to attend the AMT regularly, so it was lovely to be back. Follow this link for the notes on the talks I attended.
My own talk was called Introducing a competency framework for language learning materials writing and was the first official public outing for the framework I put together as part of my NILE MA. This was the abstract:
A competency framework sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job successfully. At IATEFL 2022, I saw Denise Santos question the lack of a competency framework for materials writing. Frameworks existed for ELT teachers, trainers and managers, but not for materials writing. Inspired by Denise’s talk, I decided to create a competency framework for language learning materials writing for my MA dissertation, recognising that it’s not only materials writers who need this support, but teachers too. I will share the structure of my framework, how I created it, and how you can use it.
You can download the full framework and see the research behind it in my dissertation by following this link.
Subscribe to my blog to see a video version of the presentation over the next couple of months, as I’ll presenting it a few more times in the first half of this year. There will also be a full write-up of the presentation when I can find the time!
While I can’t give you Hermione Grainger’s Time Turner so you can travel back in time, I can give you tried and tested ways of getting those things done which demand your time and attention, or which you just never quite get round to, helping you to manage yourself and others and make the most of your time.
This is the third time I’ve presented on this topic, but as the previous two times were in 2016 and 2017, a lot has happened in between! The 2016 version is fully written out if you’d like a text version of the talk. I’ve added a few notes below where things differ. The 2017 version was recorded by British Council. Here are the slides from the 2024 version:
My life has changed quite a lot since I first put together this presentation. Now I have a partner (and we’re organising our wedding), live in the UK with him, and work for myself. That means that I work less and take more time off.
In my personal life, of the six different things I mentioned on slide 9, I actually only do physio daily now. I’ve recently started Duolingo, so languages are daily too, but cross stitch and 10,000 steps are much less common, reading blog posts is planned every week but rarely happens, and ELTpics has closed to new submissions. Instead I volunteer as a leader for Girlguiding (of which more in a couple of weeks!) and enjoy birdwatching.
I’m also mostly only managing my own time, not that of a whole team (as I was in Bydgoszcz). I run my own courses for Cambridge DELTA and do various other freelance work with different organisations. That all means that I shifted to an online calendar, as it was much easier to plan 9-12 months ahead (necessary when running long-term courses) and to share my availability with others via Calend.ly. There are screenshots of my online calendar showing how I use colour-coding for different things I do.
I track my time using Toggl to help me reflect on how I’m using it and to notice how many hours I work a week: it’s down from about 45-50 hours to a much healthier 32-36 hours. Now that I’ve moved to an online calendar ‘R’ in ‘ORGANISE’ stands for ‘Reflect on what works’, not the ‘Refresh every week’ tip I included when using a paper planner.
What tips do you have for managing your time? Are there any tips you’ve tried from my suggestions? Did they work for you?
This was a joint event which ran on Sunday 26th November, with the following programme:
Here are notes I made during the presentations. They are by no means complete!
Luis Carabantes – How do we learn to write materials?
Luis was talking about the Chilean context.
As part of his research, he analysed teaching handbooks, including Ur, Harmer, and Scrivener, the three most popular handbooks used at universities in Chile as part of ELT training courses. He realised that they framed teachers as textbook users, rather than as materials developers.
As a separate piece of research, he worked with teachers to discuss materials they had created. He discovered four things that learner teachers had in mind (unconsciously!) when they were creating materials:
Assuming learner limitations: they sometimes thought the learners could do more but sometimes less, and they created materials which reflected the lower end of their expectations.
Teaching English as teaching the textbook: they created materials which reflected what textbooks look like. There was an impression that the objective of the lessons was the cover the textbook. Practising teacher mentors also influenced these concepts, making comments which pushed learner teachers in certain directions. For example, asking where the information on the worksheet is in the coursebook, as they have to cover the contents.
Teaching English as teaching reading and listening: most of the materials Luis received from the learner teachers in his study were focussed on reading, then listening, then grammar. There was very little to work on speaking and writing. The lesson plan structure taught by the university prioritised reading and listening, so learner teachers’ materials did this too.
Subordinating topics to discrete language: there was a feeling that developing the language was far more important than the topic itself. Because of testing, grammar takes a leading role in instruction. The content of the National Curriculum does this too, as it’s a list of discrete language functions.
Luis offers a series of sample questions based on the activity system of materials design:
Subject(s) Who are the people involved in the design? What are the materials designers’ knowledge/beliefs/assumptions about teaching and learning?
Tools What educational theories are mediating the design? What are the available resources to design the materials (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, online learning environments, etc.)?
Rules How is the material expected to be used at the institution (e.g. through an online learning environment, as printed worksheets, etc.)? Is there any examination affecting how the material is designed and used?
Community Who will be using the materials? What are the materials users’ educational and cultural backgrounds? Are there any stakeholders?
Division of Labour If designing materials in teams, what will each individual do (e.g. design, give feedback)? How are the teachers expected to use the material? Are teachers expected/allowed to adapt the material?
Object What is the material going to be used for? How does the material contribute to the curriculum?
[I think this is a useful set of questions to think about when planning any materials design, and when thinking about
Heather Buchanan – Materials, theory and practice: can we close the gap?
There is often an entrenched theory/practice divide, with a lack of agreement between researchers and materials writers. Heather would like there to be a middle ground, with agreement and interaction between the two groups.
Heather asked us four discussion questions:
What is more important for you in materials writing: theory or practice?
What theories and/ research underpin your own materials (or teaching)?
Why these theories/ this research?
How can we see them in evidence in your materials?
She then showed us some research-informed materials, including the Touchstone series by Mike McCarthy et al. This series was based more on corpora than a traditional grammar and vocabulary syllabus. Here’s an example:
She also shared VocabKitchen as a lexical profiler you can use to check the level of your text.
Heather then considered whether theory brings clarity to materials development, using the example of authenticity. There are lots of different possible types of authenticity (based on Gilmore, 2007):
tasks
texts
participants
social or cultural situation
purposes of the communicative act
some combination of the above
Authentic texts are used in Speakout and Global, for example.
Sometimes the challenge can be that the text is authentic, but is so decontextualised that it doesn’t work well, or the text is authentic but the task isn’t. There’s also the problem of choosing things that are interesting for the teacher, but not necessarily for the learner. Authenticity is therefore not always the holy grail.
What are the challenges of developing research-informed materials?
Which research should we use to inform materials?
Some research is more palatable than others
Innovation v. tradition (e.g. the tradition of using lexical sets v. the research finding that this makes it harder to remember vocabulary)
Heather talked about decisions they made when putting Navigation together, particularly in terms of integrating decoding skills based on the work of John Field. They decided to include ‘Breaking the code’ boxes, like grammar boxes, introducing different sub-skills.
At the end of the talk, Heather asked us:
Where do your beliefs/ principles about language learning and teaching come from?
Do your materials reflect your beliefs/ principles? How?
What theory/ research would you like to see applied more to published materials? Why?
Those questions felt like ones we could discuss for a long time!
In conclusion, Heather said that balancing theory and practice is a dynamic model. We need to be looking at both and trying to filter them, for example through commercial considerations, professional intuition and experience. It’s important for us to disseminate findings, and consider how much time and access we have to look at research (for example through MaWSIG!) There are negative perceptions on both sides about understanding, and we need to move past these. Final questions:
Can all theory translate into practice?
Is it obvious that writers have tried to take on baord theory in their work?
Do we need a new term, like ‘practice-informed materials’, not just ‘research-informed materials’?
Bruno Albuquerque – Adding that extra oomph to your coursebooks
Bruno shared a few activities with us, and asked us to be angels (considering the benefits of it) or demons (considering the problems with it), an idea he borrowed from Jeremy Harmer.
These are some of the reading activities Bruno suggested as alternatives to choosing the correct answer, true/false, answering the questions or matching sentence halves:
Jigsaw reading
Complete the Venn diagram
Use the template to take notes – e.g. read first to note the main ideas, read again to add commentary, put them together to create a summary
Draw an alternate cover for this book/story
Plan and record and audio summary
Draw a mindmap
Draw a flowchart
Some of these might be more useful for developing reading and listening, in contrast than the usual testing of those skills. Bruno commented that because these activities are open-ended, writing an answer key might be challenging, so you could include some ideas in the teacher’s guide. It could also be a challenging activity for novice teachers who aren’t familiar with these kinds of activity.
For writing, Bruno talked about creating realistic writing tasks, such as emails in the context learners are actually in. He showed an example of a teacher coordinator writing to teachers on a course he created for language development for teachers.
For vocabulary and grammar, he suggested extending activities:
Complete the sentences with words in the box.
Listen to the sentences to check your answers.
Listen again and notice how the highlighted words are pronounced together. What happens?
Change the sentences so 3 of them are true for you and 2 are not.
Share your sentences with a peer. Ask and answer questions to find out which are false.
Bruno’s alternative thought (with A. C. Ramos) about self-assessment is that learners might not want to circle a sad face. Instead of having a happy face, a middle face and a sad face, they have ‘I can do it with my teacher’, ‘I can do it with help’, and ‘I can do it’. In every case, the learner can do the task, but they might need a bit more support.
Lilian Montalvao – Navigating the Brazilian Market: Opportunities and Responsibilities in Writing Coursebooks for Bilingual Programs
This is a growing area in Brazil. In 2017-2018, English became mandatory from Grade 6 onwards – before that, schools could chose the language they offered. At this point, English became seen as a Lingua Franca, and that changed how people saw the language. Reading and grammar were prioritised before this, and now speaking and communication have become more important. This meant that bilingual education started to appear everywhere, although there weren’t regulations for this. In 2020, standards were created in the form of the National Guidelines for Multilingual Education.
Bilingual education can be done through an integrated curriculum, an additional curriculum (via private language schools, including sending teachers and trainers into schools to support this), or an optional curriculum (after-school). Additional / optional curriculums are largely based on CLIL. Lilian focussed on the additional curriculum in the rest of her talk.
These are some of the challenges of bilingual education in Brazil:
A lack of research in the Brazilian context
A lack of legislation, as schools don’t follow the same parameters at the moment
Market pressure and competition, as the market doesn’t realise that bilingual education doesn’t happen overnight
Poor knowledge and understanding of what bilingual education entails
The need to build a bilingual education culture within the school
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to put bilingual education into place, and people need to willing to do it!
The ideal would be to transform the whole culture of a monolingual school into that of a bilingual school, rather than the bilingual programme being something that only some of the staff do, or something tacked onto the current programme. This is a challenge though if some members of the staff don’t speak the second language. Teachers are also tired and experience many challenges, and the schools might not be able to afford it. The schools also might not be able to support the teachers in creating the bilingual programme.
To overcome these challenges, Lilian would like to see:
Research on Brazilian contexts
Legislation development
Collaboration to develop a shared view of bilingual education
Professional development in how to teach within this context and use these materials
Tailoring materials to match the needs and expectations of the schools
Community engagement so people understand what bilingual education is and how to do it, and expectations can be aligned (including with parents/families)
Monitoring and engagement of the programmes
Sergio Pantoja – Intregrating decision-making tasks for effective vocabulary practice
According to Schmitt (2017), for us to listen to everyday conversational English, we need to know 6,000-7,000 word families. [That was a lot higher than my guess of 2,000!] To read a range of novels and newspapers, it’s 8,000-9,000 word families. To watch films aimed at children (e.g. Shrek), it’s 7,000 word families. This therefore means that more classroom time should be dedicated to vocabulary teaching, according to Sergio.
In Sergio’s context, students study for about 2 hours per week, meaning about 80 hours per year. Optimistically, if they study 10 words per lesson, they might get 800 words per year, which would take 7 years – a long time! Of course, they can learn vocabulary outside the lesson too, but learners need to take ownership of their learning to do this.
It’s not just teaching, reviewing is also very important. According to Uchihara (2019), the number of encounters needed to remember a word is anywhere between 6 and 20 times, though there is a lot variation. Regardless of the number, once is never enough!
Students think that learning vocabulary is about learning new words, especially at higher levels when they might think they need to learn obscure, formal, sophisticated words. We need to help them understand that it’s about taking more advantage of what they know: learning familiar words in new situations, like ‘right’ (by right…).
We also need to go beyond single words: idioms, collocations, lexical chunks… so not just the new word, but the word(s) it goes with.
Thornbury (2005) says that ‘There is a greater likelihood of a word being integrated into our mental lexicon is many decisions have been made about it.’ This really struck a chord with Sergio, and made him think about what he can do to help learners do this.
These are some examples of decision-making tasks, according to Thornbury:
identifying
sorting
matching
selecting
ranking/sequencing
We can see examples of these in coursebooks:
Sergio used these tasks to inspire him to create tasks to supplement his lessons. He considers how cognitively demanding the task is. Ranking/Sequencing is likely to be the most cognitively challenging, because they need to make many more decisions to do this. He moves from less to more cognitively challenging tasks.
He showed us an example based on a text he found:
Find the adjectives that describe behaviour and personality in the text.
Put them into groups (positive/negative).
Match them with common collocations.
Think of 3 people you know. Choose 3 adjectives from the text to describe them. Think of reasons why you chose those adjectives. Tell your partner about them.
This lesson includes four decision-making tasks, moving from less to more cognitively demanding.
Sergio recommended using the Oxford text checker to check the level of difficulty of a text.
Catarina Pontes – Five ways to bring more relevance to materials design
As a new teacher, Catarina didn’t receive any training in materials development. When she was doing the Cambridge DELTA, she started to do course design at her institution. She was able to put into practice some of the theory she learnt on DELTA. Last year, she and her team were nominated for an ELTons award for innovation in learner resources, for materials for an immersion course in English. She’s come a long way!
She has five tips for us.
1. Know your audience
For example, with children, what is their stage of development, the age range, how well can they write, how challenging are the activities, what approach can we use, how will we keep them engaged, will we use songs, storytelling, play… For adults/older learners, what can we add that is meaningful to the learners, how do we meet their needs. They also pilot materials with small groups whenever they can. To do this:
carry out desk/field research.
hold focus groups with different stakeholders.
adapt to different audiences.
test and adapt.
welcome feedback.
Do this with materials for teachers too, not just for materials for students!
2. Inclusion matters
Think about font colours and sizes, and colour combinations in general. Do some research on the types of fonts that require less from learners.
Including images of people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different abilities, different ages, makes the materials richer and helps learners to be able to identify with the materials they see.
Take into account different learning needs.
Account for a range of body, skin and hair types.
Portray different age ranges.
Make learners feel represented.
3. Think global, design local
Catarina shared an activity from Lindsay Clandfield, describing an image from different perspectives. For example, a busy city centre street described from the perspective of somebody who has just bought a flat on the top floor, a bus driver who is worried who’s going to be late back home, the people who need to cross the street and can’t find a pedestrian crossing though they’re late for an event across the road.
Another example might be showing learners an image, and asking learners to compare it to their reality, thinking about what might be the same or different where they live.
Look at world issues, but suggest local solutions
Bring the use of the target language closer to learners’ reality and needs
Invite them to think critically and go beyond
4. Allow for personalization
Give students the chance to share their voice
Invite students to contribute with their ideas and opinions
Make learning meaningful by welcoming learners’ real-life facts
5. Use and abuse of corpora
Linguee is an English-Portuguese (and other languages) dictionary which uses corpora to suggest translations.
Find out whether something is grammatically correct / frequently-used (or not!)
Textbook English v. real-life English
Refer to sources like BNC, COCA, Linguee and Youglish.
Bonus tip: Make sure you include a range of accents
This is part of the decolonisation of the English language, exposing learners to a wider range of Englishes. Catarina showed us maps of British accents and American accents. ‘You want to speak British English…choose one!’ 🙂 She reminds us that learners need to be familiar with a wide range of accents, and that accent is identity. We need to help learners feel less concerned about the variety they speak, and more concerned about how they’re going to get their message across in the global world, how to be respected in the language, and how to get things done in the language. We can use this to fight linguistic bias. Catarina’s team wants Brazilian speakers of English in their materials, not least so that learners feel less stressed about how they sound.
English varieties go way beyond British and American.
Include a range of accents in your materials.
Make good use of streaming services to broaden your repertoire.
These are random thoughts cataloguing the process of putting together my NILE MA dissertation. The dates at the beginning of each section show at what point I had these thoughts. I hope they’re interesting / useful for anybody going through the same process, or deciding whether they want to.
(23/10/2023 update: this post is incredibly long! There is no obligation to read it, but I’m happy to have it to look back on my dissertation journey. Hopefully I’ll share the dissertation itself once I have feedback on it, and I’ll definitely share the framework after my upcoming holiday. Watch this space!)
Before I started
I didn’t write a dissertation at undergraduate level, and although I write a lot, I’m not hugely confident about academic writing – this has generally been the area I’ve had the most feedback about/action points for during previous MA assignments.
I had no idea where to start, but I knew that I needed to set up systems to make the process easier right from the beginning, and to choose a topic which would be interesting enough for me to want to work on my dissertation for the next 18 months or so.
Preparing to do my dissertation
(April 2022) Ruth Clark’s NILE webinar on how to access the University of Chichester resources was very useful. Although I’d looked at them before, I hadn’t appreciated how much was available, or which were the most useful resources. I’d definitely recommend talking to a university librarian / attending a university library webinar to find out what is available to you, and how to make the most of journal sites for example.
(May 2022) I wanted to set up workflows which would make the dissertation process easier. I put a call out on facebook for advice, which gave me a set of possible tools to investigate.
I also searched for recommendations for “project management dissertation” and “referencing software dissertation”. In the end, I’ve decided on:
A Trello board for day-to-day tasks, with Evernote and Google Drive power-ups added to the relevant boards (inspired by this article and this article, from which I took a journal article reading checklist)
Zotero for managing references (I hovered between this and Mendeley, but after reading this and watching this, decided Zotero would probably be best for me)
Evernote for managing all of my notes / reading (I’ve used diigo bookmarking for years, but wanted to have something super flexible that was only for my dissertation, and it also integrates with Feedly, another tool I’ve used for years. I set it up using this article)
It took me 2-3 hours to do the research and set up all of these tools, but a) it’s worth it to save me time and stress later if they work, and b) I’ve done some of the research so you might not have to, though I recommend doing comparisons yourself to find out what’s out there!
At this point in time, that feels like everything I might need – I’ll report back on whether it worked or not later on in this post!
Choosing a topic – initial thoughts
(May 2022) Having recently worked on a couple of projects related to teacher training through the medium of WhatsApp, I thought this would be an interesting area to investigate. However, I had no idea what the focus might be – it felt very woolly.
Then at IATEFL 2022, I attended a talk by Denise Santos called IATEFL Belfast 2022: CPD for materials writers: in search of a framework, which inspired me. I feel like this could be a great way to integrate what I’ve learnt from the teacher training and materials writing modules on the MA course, and to create something which would be useful for others in the future. There are frameworks for teachers, trainers and managers, but nothing for materials writers, despite the fact that they are very influential within our profession. This feels like a very useful gap to fill.
MAPDLE Dissertation preparation module
Terminology
I initially found reading about research theory to be quite frustrating, as I couldn’t see how this might apply to what I would really like to do: create a framework. I know I would need to do research as part of it, but the theory felt incredibly abstract to me at this point. The fact that there are no specific examples connected to the terms makes them quite challenging to wrap my head around. And then I found the term pragmatism, and I’ve found the research approach for me:
Research is undertaken to answer particular questions or help solve specific problems; these questions or problems determine the choices made about the research methods used
From the NILE Dissertation Module, Activity 1b, commentary
Sample proposals / My first draft proposal
Looking at the sample research proposals made me a little depressed – it felt like so much work, and not really what I’m interested in at all! However, once I saw the sample artefact proposal things seemed to fall into place. I paused working through the module and had a go at writing my own proposal. It took about an hour to produce a first draft, using the framework of the sample proposal. I’m not sure if it the research question is tight enough, or if it’s too broad, but at least now I have an initial proposal which I can send in for feedback, and start the process of narrowing it down to something I can actually work on.
Completing the preparation module
I found the example documents to be the most useful part of the module, and have also downloaded and bookmarked various things to come back to when relevant, like the full ethics guidelines for the university. Overall it’s taken me about 4.5 hours to work through this, but I know I’ll be back multiple times as I re-write the proposal and put together my dissertation.
Submitting the proposal
The first draft I submitted seemed to be along the right lines but had too much in it. I reduced the scope of my proposal ready for the second draft, and felt more confident it was along the right lines, but I also felt like I was somewhat in limbo until I got feedback on it. I knew I had a lot to do for it, but I didn’t know where to start without the proposal being officially accepted. I tried to get ahead with other work instead so that as soon as the proposal was accepted I could dedicate as much time as possible to it.
(23rd August 2022) My proposal has been accepted 🙂 The second draft was fine, pending approval by my dissertation supervisor once they’ve been allocated. I now feel like I can start making progress! Step 1: figure out the dates of each section, and add them to my calendar. Step 2: break down each of the large tasks into smaller ones, and allocate them to the ‘dissertation days’ I already have marked in my calendar, adding more of them if necessary to make sure I have time to do everything.
Other things I did once I found out the proposal had been accepted:
Go through this Twitter thread of 15 tools to help you manage your writing to find any extra ones I hadn’t seen before.
Along the top I have the dates for every ‘dissertation day’ between now and my submission date. Down the side I have each of the main tasks I need to do, with yellow sub-headings to categorise them. The dark blue boxes show a period to complete a particular section of my needs analysis or framework creation. The light blue boxes show a particular task for a particular day.
If I complete the task, I turn the box green. Ditto if I successfully have a proper ‘dissertation day’. If something is with my tutor to check it’s orange. If I didn’t do a dissertation day, it’s red. This is really helping me to manage my time and see what’s coming up, and so far I’ve managed to pretty much keep up with the tasks, even if I haven’t managed all of the days (the two red ones so far were during a course which was more intensive to train on than I expected!) I find watching it gradually turn green to be quite motivating 🙂
So far I’ve been doing some preliminary work, analysing existing competency frameworks. These are mostly from teaching but a couple are from other fields. I’m using them to get an idea of possible designs, layout, wording, and categorisation, as well as to see what areas connected to materials writing might already be covered within existing frameworks. It’s actually been quite therapeutic – I’m not anticipating that the rest of the dissertation process will be quite this straightforward! First I decided on a set of things I wanted to look for in the frameworks, then I created a table with a row for each area. I have a blank template which I copy and paste as I start analysing each framework. It changed a little as I looked at the first two or three, but now I’ve looked at eight I feel I’ve got everything covered which I might find useful.
So far I’ve learnt that there are many possible ways to word a framework, and many ways of designing the final product. I’ve got lots of inspiration and ideas for my own framework already, and am excited about starting it. As I come up with possible needs analysis questions or framework ideas I’m dropping them into running notebooks on Evernote. I also drop any links or reading I’d like to follow up on into a single notebook – at some point I need to set aside time to go back and read them!
Yesterday I hit Amazon quite hard to get a few books, the first of which is two inches thick and arrived today (!) – there is an ebook version of it available via the University of Chichester eLibrary, but I was really struggling with navigating it and decided it would be easier with a paper copy. Now I’ve seen it, I’m wondering it that was wise! Definitely going to improve my muscle tone… I’ve also ordered books on designing competency frameworks in general, as they’re commonly used in Human Resources departments, and a book by Jack Richards which has been mentioned in many places I’ve looked at so far.
Doing some actual writing!
(11/10/22)
I’ve added in Thursdays as Dissertation Days as well from now on, as I’m currently pretty excited about my topic (very unlike what I expected would be the case!) and I think I should take full advantage of that while it lasts. That gives me some extra reading time too, which I don’t think I’d given myself enough of before.
I started this Tuesday by looking at feedback from my supervisor on potential interview questions which I’d put together as I analysed frameworks. This was really useful in helping me to refine the questions, and add a couple which I hadn’t considered.
I then moved on to trying to do set word count limits for myself, so that I know roughly how much I can ‘spend’ on each section of my dissertation before I start writing. This took about 2 hours, but I feel like it was time well spent. I copied section headings from Evernote to a new tab in my dissertation master schedule, and made a guess as to how many words I think I might need for each section, using formulas to automatically add up (to) the totals in the yellow boxes and the overall total as I readjusted the numbers.
I then went through the NILE library of dissertations to find other artefact-based dissertations, converted 4 of them to Word, and looked at their word counts:
As you can see, each of them has a quite different breakdown of categories and use of words. However, all of them have a dedicated separate literature review, which I originally thought would be included in my background and rationale. Having looked at those dissertations, I think it would be clearer as a separate section in my dissertation too, and would help me to frame my thinking more clearly. I also realised that I need to add a summary of findings at the end of my needs analysis findings. Based on what I’d seen, I renumbered my chapters and reallocated my target word counts:
By the way, so far I’ve found that using a range of notebooks in Evernote where I add everything I’m thinking about as I think about it, plus having my Dissertation Master Schedule, seems to be enough in terms of organising myself – I haven’t used Trello at all.
I’m adding references to Zotero as I go along, and have experimented with downloading the reference list a couple of times – I think that tool will probably stay. Today I experimented with the feature where you can input an ISBN and it finds the book. This made things a lot quicker, but you still need to check the info, as Penny Ur appeared twice as the author for one of her books, and only one author appeared for another book with two joint authors.
By the end of the day, I’d had a go at Chapter 1 and written almost 1000 words (1/15 of the whole total!). Looking back at the sample dissertations I’d downloaded earlier in the day was useful in helping me to work out what I could write in each part and how I could word it. Despite that, I wasn’t really sure what to include in the rationale which might be different to the background, nor the overview of stages that would be different to what was in the introduction (a summary of chapters). I decided to send what I had to my supervisor and ask for help.
That meant I’d done about 5 hours on my dissertation, which felt like a good day’s work 🙂 Seeing the word count add up was also very motivating:
On ethics and interviews
(18/10/22)
Lindsay’s feedback was very useful in helping me to restructure the first section of the dissertation. I started by doing this, but left comments for myself rather than doing the rewrites at this point, as I think it’ll be easier to rewrite once I have a better idea of other parts of the dissertation.
Today I focussed on needs analysis methodology. Lindsay suggested that I add a general section about ethics, so I started with some ideas about this. As you can see, my aim when writing is to get something on the page, adding questions and comments to come back to later, rather than trying to get it perfect straight away.
I’ll be conducting my first ‘real’ research tomorrow (or it feels like it as it actually involves another person!), doing an interview. I’ve been on the other side of dissertation interviews before, but it’s quite different being in the driving seat, and having to check that I’ve got everything in place for the interview to be as successful as possible.
As recommended by Jason Skeet, the coordinator of the dissertation module for NILE, I’ve been using Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link] to help me to understand the research side of the dissertation.
I started off by using the electronic version, available via the University of Chichester ebooks platform, but found it to be quite frustrating as I find ebooks challenging to use for reference. I decided to buy my own copy, and it’s a beast – 961 pages, nearly 2kg (yes, I just weighed it!), but I still find it easier to be able to flick back and forth in a paper book, and highlight relevant bits.
Today I read the chapter about interviews in depth, having already read a few other sections last week, including one on mixed methods and another on ethics. I used that to write a summary of why I’ve chosen a mixed methods approach, and the methodology behind my semi-structured interview, as well as to create an ‘interview schedule’ (a new term for me today!) ready for tomorrow. I already had the questions I wanted to ask, but now I know exactly how I’ll start and end the interview.
I’ve written over 1000 words, and realised that I’ve underestimated how many words I need to explain the methodology, but that’s a problem for another day…
Reviewing the literature
(25/10/2022)
Last week I interviewed one of the creators of a framework I’m analysing. We spoke for an hour, and it was incredibly useful. It validated some of my approach to researching for my framework, particularly the idea of examining existing competency frameworks, and challenged my thinking on other areas, for example what the top level of my framework should cover. I took notes during the interview, but also recorded it and uploaded it to Otter.ai for transcription. If you don’t already know about Otter, it’s an amazing bit of software which automatically transcribes audio. The results aren’t perfect, but they certainly save a lot of time compared to transcribing from scratch. My mum is going to help me tidy up the transcription (with the permission of the interviewee) and I’ll then write up my findings from the interview.
Today I planned to write as much of my literature review as possible, ready to compile my needs analysis questionnaire next week. I started by working out the headings for the section, and just writing those and a couple of introductory sentences came to 125 words!
Probably unsurprisingly, my initial ambition to ‘write as much of my literature review as possible’ hasn’t been realised! After 5 hours of work, I’ve produced 1190 words, mostly focussed on defining professionalisation (which hadn’t even appeard in my initial outline this morning!) and considering it in relation to materials writing, with lots of changes in the sub-headings I’ve come up with, which you can kind of see here:
I’ve found lots of sources I’d like to explore further, and somewhat as expected there’s a lot of rabbit holes I’ve gone down and probably will continue to go down on Thursday, when I’ll continue with the literature review.
The thorny nature of definitions
(27/10/2022)
Today I’ve spent almost four hours grappling with definitions of materials and materials writing from a number of sources. I’ve ended up with just over 1000 words justifying my final definitions, and added bits and pieces to sections on the effect of materials on learning and my background for the whole dissertation as I’ve read around today. I’ve brought the total for the literature review up to 2600 words, which is already 600 above my proposed amount and I’m nowhere near finished yet!
I ended up being super motivated and came back later in the evening (normally I stop at about 5pm!) to write another 475 words defining competencies and competency frameworks.
Compiling my questionnaire
(01/11/22)
Today I’ve spent 7 hours reading about questionnaires and surveys in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link], then compiling my bumper needs analysis questionniare. If you filled it in, I salute you. Thank you! Because I’m really not sure what I might need to include in my overall framework, I’ve tried to keep the NA questionnaire as open as possible, with the aim of getting a range of answers from a range of different people to inform the framework. I know it’ll involve a lot of data processing afterwards, but I’m not sure how else I can make the framework as representative as possible, rather than making it something I have produced by myself.
(29/11/22)
If it looks like a long time without doing anything, that’s because I’ve spent most of November on an amazing work / play trip to Australia, but now it’s time to get back to work on my dissertation. I’ve missed it!
I only had 4 hours today, so I spent the time using my tutor’s feedback to edit my questionnaire. I managed to make it a bit shorter, and have made more of the questions compulsory. However, as the aim is to get ideas for what to include in the framework, and I want to help people to think about a range of different areas of materials writing, I think there’s a limit to how short I can make it. After an hour or so of reorganising it, I sent it to a few people to pilot it this week, with the aim (hopefully!) of making it public next week.
I also put together the blog post and social media posts I want to use to publicise the questionnaire and try to get responses.
My first big hiccup
(06/12/22)
Today I’ve only been able to spend a couple of hours on my dissertation again – time seems really tight right now! Based on the 6 responses I got to piloting my questionnaire, I realised that it really didn’t do what I needed it to in terms of offering ideas for competences to include in my framework. I’ve therefore completely rewritten it to make it shorter and focus on qualititative data that could feed into possible competences. I’ve also clarified what I mean by knowledge, skills and abilities, partly with the help of a driving metaphor from this website.
(13/12/22)
I started the day by messing about on social media, which is quite common for me, but today it was actually useful! I came across a post from the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group (RESIG) which shared a tribute to Zoltán Dörnyei: a recording of him speaking about five issues in designing a questionnaire. I started my day by watching these videos, but it wasn’t so relevant to my questionnaire as it’s much more geared to quantitative research, and mine is more qualitative. Still useful to know about though!
In the morning, I created a third draft of the questionnaire and sent it to a few people for a last-minute pilot, with the aim of getting it out into the world today. I know Christmas isn’t an ideal period to send out questionnaires, but waiting until after Christmas would mean a huge delay in my dissertation as a whole. I’ve tried to work around this by adding extra time after Christmas (though it doesn’t factor in things like the Spanish Epiphany holiday on 6th January). Hopefully there will still be enough data to give me plenty of ideas to feed into the competency framework, which is the ultimate aim of this questionnaire.
Because of the problems with the questionnaire and the need for 3 drafts, I needed to reshuffle my overall schedule. It now pushes my predicted end dates to within a week of the submission date, rather than 3 weeks before. Some of the red dissertation days are planned, like a trip to Australia, Christmas, and the IATEFL conference, but there are more red days than I’d like :s Hopefully I can get some of that time back, but we’ll see! This is what the whole thing looks like now:
At the end of the day having received responses from a couple of people who I asked to pilot the questionnaire, I decided it was time to let it loose on the world. Thank you very much if you were one of the people who completed it or shared it!
Today I also shared the transcript from the interview I did in October with the interviewee for approval.
Collecting data
(20/12/2022)
I spent a couple of hours this morning sharing my questionnaire in as many places and with as many people as I could think of. I already have 44 responses, and the ideas shared have already made me think about new things to include in the framework which I hadn’t considered before.
Next I finalised the interview transcript and put it into my ongoing dissertation document, which already ran to 105 pages before adding the transcript. The document has many page breaks already in place – I haven’t written anywhere near that much, but it’s still great to see the document coming together.
I spent the rest of the day summarising findings from the interview, and the methodology for the questionnaire, as well as shaving about 100 words off the rest of my writing – every word counts!
(5/1/2023)
I’ve had 124 responses to the questionnaire, only 4 or 5 of which don’t have any data in (!), so thank you so much if you contributed. Today I started to work out how to analyse the data, beginning with reading the relevant chapters on analysing qualititative data in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link]. This afternoon I started playing around with a spreadsheet where I can analyse the results based on the one that Google Forms automatically generated (which makes life so much easier!) I’ve added a few new tabs, and spent a couple of hours analysing data from the people who volunteered to be in focus groups (thank you!) to work out how many groups there could be, and who might be in each group. I know there are currently too many groups, and that not everybody will be able to participate, but that’s a job for another day!
Organising data
(24/1/23)
Due to other commitments I haven’t been able to spend as much time on my dissertation as I wanted to, only managing 2 out of the 5 days of analysing results which I’d planned in the past three weeks. Having broken down (to some extent!) the answer to two of the qualitative questions I asked, I know I’ve already got loads of useful ideas for the framework, and plenty of things that would never have occured to me if I hadn’t done the survey. Very pleased to see it’s served its purpose 🙂
I decided to read each answer and use it to come up with headings. Every time I see a similar answer I add a ‘1’ to that column, so that I’ll be able to see which headings come up most frequently across each question. Some people have put all of their answers under the first question, or have grouped them differently to how I might have done, so I need to consider when it’s acceptable to recategorise them. I think this should be acceptable as the aim of the whole survey was to generate possible ideas for the framework, rather than to come up with definitive answers to any of the questions I asked. I’ve set up conditional formatting to change the colour of cells with answers in, and a calculation column to help me check how many separate ideas I’ve pulled out of each answer to give me a rough idea of whether I’ve covered everything. My mum is checking my classification, and yet again I’m really grateful for her help!
It looks something like this (very, very zoomed out!):
I started to colour code some of the headings to make it easier to find my way around.
(31/1/23)
It’s taken me about 2 hours to group potential focus group participants from the list of volunteers from the survey. I’ve decided to group by approximate levels of experience, and that has thankfully given me similar sized groups, and a good mix of backgrounds. I’ve updated the consent form, information sheet and debrief sheet and sent them all off to my supervisor to check. Now for more results analysis…
I’ve started to notice patterns in the results, and have therefore been reusing some of the headings I’ve based on the answers to previous questions. As I started the third question, it made sense to paste the colour-coded headings directly as these seem to be the ones which are recurring most often. I’ve also made a separate list of all the headings I’ve used so far to make it easier to find them when I want to reuse them, rather than producing original wording each time. This is what it looked like after analysing just one question:
(07/02/23)
I’ve started today by finalising the focus group ethics documentation based on feedback from my dissertation supervisor. I sent out the invites and have already had quite a few responses.
The other half of the day was about continuing to analyse data from the questionnaire. There’s so much of it! But I’m starting to see patterns, and there are so many seeds for potential descriptors in there for the framework. It’s fascinating.
I finished the third question, copied the answer headings to a descriptor overview spreadsheet, and decided to reorganise them. Sometimes I know there’s a heading connected to a particular topic, but even using CTRL + F I can’t always find it. I gave each heading a category, then regrouped them by these categories and colour-coded them again. I then transposed those headings back to the spreadsheet ready to analyse the fourth question (of six…still some way to go!)
(19/2/23)
The last couple of weeks haven’t been great for my dissertation, with a lot of other things going on, meaning I’m doing a bit of work at the weekend to at least get something done. I’m away from home and feeling motivated, so why not?
Tomorrow is the deadline for people to reply to me about participating in my focus groups, so I followed up with all of the people who haven’t replied yet. This was absolutely worthwhile, as I’ve had at least 10 replies today, including a couple of people who thought they’d replied to me but hadn’t 🙂
I also managed to do some more processing of answers from my questionnaire – it’s much faster now I have consistent categories, and I really wish I’d settled on them much earlier.
Focus groups
(7/3/23, 09:45)
Work on my dissertation for the past couple of weeks has been somewhat spotty, and has mostly consisted of following up on potential focus group participants. I ended up with all but 2 replies from the 59 invitations to participate which I originally sent out, and based on those who replied later I suspect those 2 invitations probably ended up in spam. 38 people have said yes across 6 groups, so even if some people pull out I should still be able to get quite varied input into this stage of my research.
I haven’t quite finished analysing all of the data from the questionnaire, but so far the last small section seems to be falling under the same headings as previous sections. This meant I was confident enough to turn those headings into slides for the focus groups to discuss. I sent out a preliminary email with some areas to consider: information about competence frameworks in general, what levels might work for my framework, and the headings on the slides.
I ran the first focus group yesterday, and have already realised that a lot of the loose categorisations I came up with to group the headings don’t make sense. They suggested a lot of ways to regroup the headings, which has made me think that the focus groups should be more iterative, rather than every group discussing the exact same set of data. I’ll run focus group 2 with the same set of data but looking at the slides in reverse so that the inevitable fatigue of looking at so many areas will hopefully kick in at a different point.
When thinking about how to write up this iterative idea, I’ve been sent a journal article which includes the sentence:
CPL potentially provides iterative adjustments for optimal approximations of intersubjective meaning-making, repeatedly testing and calibrating the research instruments, throughout the duration of measurement.
Murphey and Falout (2010: 818)
I’ve read this sentence multiple times, and even in the context of the whole article it’s pretty challenging to understand. It hurts my head somewhat!
(4/4/23)
March has been a whirlwind! I’ve spent the last month having some of the busiest weeks of my freelance career so far, while also fitting in 6 dissertation focus groups. Following on from my thoughts above, I decided to recreate my slides after each pair of focus groups. That meant focus groups 1 and 2 discussed the first set of slides, 3 and 4 discussed the second set, and 5 and 6 discussed the final set. At one point that involved me working until after 10pm to get the slides ready so that participants would have at least 24 hours to look at them before we met. I don’t normally work in the evenings now, so it was all pretty intense!
Having said that, it was completely worth it. I got so much useful information from the 32 participants (thank you!). The way the slides evolved through the discussions in the focus groups means I have a much clearer idea in my head now of what I think the categories should include, and while they’re still not perfect a lot of the categories make a lot more sense now than they did when I created them based on the 70% or so of the questionnaire results I’d managed to analyse before the first focus group. Some individual topics have also been clarified and/or refined for me, and I’ve also added more possible topics based on the discussions.
Today I watched the video of focus group 1 and realised just how much I missed (!) when taking live notes during the session. I’ve now sent those notes to the participants for them to sign off on what they discussed, ready for inclusion in my final dissertation.
I didn’t manage to have any dissertation time last week, and today I’ve only had 3 hours (including writing this) so I’ve fallen quite far behind my schedule. I was supposed to be compiling the first draft of the framework last week, this week and for a couple more weeks. However, I estimate that I’m at least 6 weeks away from being able to do that, not least because I need to write up more of the actual dissertation itself based on what I’ve done so far! Luckily I’ve still got 6 months until I need to hand it in, but I can’t keep losing dissertation days. Let’s see what happens!
Hiatus
(25/4/23)
The busy, busy period continues. I’ve spent 8 minutes on my dissertation today, including writing out this action plan with the next steps for my supervisor:
Write up the focus group notes and send them to participants to approve.
Summarise all of the focus group information within the dissertation, both the process of setting them up and the findings.
Go back to the questionnaire and finish fully analysing those results.
Summarise the questionnaire information within the dissertation – both set up and findings.
Go back to the frameworks I analysed, finish doing that, and summarise the results.
Send you my dissertation with all of the research part ‘completed’ for you to check.
Go back to the background reading / literature review and tidy that up, including making it shorter, while also adding the (some of the many!) things I’ve come across since my first pass at it.
Send that section to you for feedback.
Compile the framework – I’ve already got lots of ideas, but want to go over everything again before I start properly.
Write up my justification of my ideas.
Send the framework and the justification to you for feedback.
Present the framework in a webinar and ask for feedback (perhaps accompanied by a proper questionnaire to get quantitative results?)
Write up the feedback from the webinar(/questionnaire?), plus a summary of possible changes to be made in a second version.
Send that to you for feedback.
Rewrite any/all sections which need to be done to fit the word limit.
Submit the whole dissertation for marking.
Go on holiday for a week 😉
Now I just need to find time to do all that!
Getting back down to it
(23/5/23 – 10am)
I’m way more excited than I probably should be that (shock horror!) I actually get to focus on my dissertation all day today. The last few weeks have been full of conference preparation and attendance, All The Marking, and a brief bout of COVID, but now I’ve finally emerged from the other end. Now to catch up on everything I was supposed to do…
My Google calendar tells me that my original plan was to be putting together the framework itself at the moment – I should be on day 87 of 90 of doing that, but I’m not close to starting yet. Let’s see how long it takes me to get to that stage!
(23/5/23 – 6pm)
Today felt very productive in the end. I was able to summarise notes from three of my focus groups and send them to participants to comment on. I couldn’t manage any more as I stopped being able to concentrate a couple of hours ago. Since then I’ve been adding to my appendices. I’ve put in all of the documentation for my focus groups and the interview I did, including sample emails of invitiation, the information sheets and consent forms, the debrief sheets, the schedule (a kind of ‘script’ for an interview), and various other samples of communication. I’ve also added screenshots of the Google Forms from all three drafts of my questionnaire, and started to collate the ‘easy’ bits of the questionnaire results: the profiling statistics like gender and languages spoken.
The main body of my dissertation runs to 24 pages and currently doesn’t contain much actual information, just a lot of headings and page breaks. The appendices are a somewhat crazy 240 pages, and I’m nowhere near the end of creating them!
I’ve downloaded a copy of the whole dissertation so far from Google Docs – I think I’m going to start doing that regularly now to make sure I’ve always got copies of it in a couple of places, just in case!
(6/6/23)
Today I’ve finished writing up the notes for the final focus group, and finished my first pass at the questionnaire data. This is what my two screens looked like while I was analysing the questionnaire data. The top screen had the raw data, organised by question. I had a Word document open to copy longer answers and delete the relevant information as I entered it into the spreadsheet. I did this by putting a ‘1’ into a cell in the relevant column, adding / editing columns as necessary.
The bottom screen had a list of the rough descriptors I’d come up with, organised into approximate categories a couple of months ago. As I updated descriptors, I edited this list. It was also much easier to scan or search this list to find a specific descriptor I needed, as you can see below with ‘weaknesses’. I could then find the relevant column in the main spreadsheet to add the ‘1’.
The next job is to collate all of the questionnaire findings into a single spreadsheet. I originally analysed them one question at a time and the descriptors evolved as I went along, meaning that the list has got longer and more organised question by question. There’s also a risk that I’ve logged one respondent as saying the same thing multiple times depending on how they answered the questions in the survey. I need to remove that duplication to be able to see how often each answer was given, respondent by respondent. That might take a while!
(25 minutes later)
Step 1: Add a ‘Question number’ column to the spreadsheet so I can easily re-sort everything later if I want to, and a ‘New column’ column (!) so I can show where descriptors need to move to. Add another column to number the descriptors because otherwise ‘F’ will appear later than ‘AA’ when you sort them later.
Step 2: Filter for descriptors from ‘Other’ (the last question I looked at) and ‘Language systems’ (the first question.
Step 3: Put the descriptors in alphabetical order.
Step 4: For any descriptors which are clearly the same, write the column from the ‘Other’ spreadsheet into the ‘New column’ column for the ‘Language systems’ spreadsheet. Add ‘0’ to the ‘New column’ column for the corresponding ‘Other’ descriptor so you can easily hide the ones I’ve already done later. Like so, where the right hand side shows the New column, and the one before shows the column letters from the original spreadsheet:
Step 5: Work through the remaining ones and try to match as many original descriptors to final descriptors as possible.
Step 6: Try not to cry when it gets super complicated and nothing seems to match 😉
Questionnaire and more questionnaire…
(13/6/23, 3pm)
This morning I met my supervisor and she agreed that it’s enough to analyse my data and create the framework from it, without needing to present it and get feedback on the first draft as well. That’s really useful as it gives me more time to play with to compile the framework, and more words to play with when describing my findings and justifying the framework. I still want to present it and get feedback, but now I can do that after the dissertation itself is complete.
I spent the rest of the day working on collating the questionnaire results so that they are in a more usable format. I spent 3.5 hours finishing what I started last week and described above, so that now all of the answers are on a single spreadsheet. Now I’m trying to make sure that the responses aren’t skewed so that if one person said the same thing multiple times it’s only recorded once. This is where spreadsheets, formulae, and conditional formatting are my friends.
At the bottom of the full answers spreadsheet I’ve added one numbered row per respondent. The number is copied into column C so I don’t end up with a circular formula if I decide to use the whole of column A in my formula. Then I’ve used this formula in all of the cells at the bottom of the column, copied once per respondent:
=SUMIF($A$2:$A$745,$C746,E$2:E$745)
What that does is look at the cell in column C to check which respondent I’m asking about, find the relevant rows by matching that respondent number with the same one in the top part of column A, then checks whether those rows have any data in the column I’m asking about, in this case column E. For respondent 1, there is 1 data point in column E, so I get a total of 1 in cell E746 where the formula is placed.
I’ve then got conditional formatting set up, so that if the answer is ‘0’ I get a blank cell (white text in a white cell), if it’s ‘1’ I get a green box, and if it’s more than 1 I get a red box. That shows me where I need to check for possible duplication within the same person’s answers. For example:
I can then filter by respondent number to check the answers and remove any duplication. For example, respondent 6 has two answers in column F, so I need to check their specific answers to see whether they are actually duplicated. That’s my job for the rest of today.
(13/6/23, 5:30pm)
Done 🙂 That worked nicely, and now I know how many people mentioned each descriptor without having any duplication in their answers. I’ve copied those numbers to another tab in the giant spreadsheet. Next time I sit down to do my dissertation I need to see whether the possible descriptors taken from the answers of only a handful of respondents need to be separate descriptors at all, or whether they can be removed. That would be helpful as I currently have 2002 data points and 130 possible descriptors.
Back to frameworks
(27/6/23)
Today I re-read everything I’d written in my analysis of frameworks before, then analysed three extra ones. I ran out of time before, and didn’t manage to do these ones. Interesting to see how I look at them differently now I’ve thought so much more about my own framework!
(11/7/23)
I was away for work last week, and this morning I couldn’t get on the internet while I was at the hospital for my regular medication, so I only managed half a day today. I analysed two more frameworks, and started on the last one I plan to look at, which will bring me to a total of 13 frameworks from all over the world and from a range of different domains.
(18/7/23)
I started today by reading two articles from the latest issue of ELT Journal – I’m really enjoying having access to journals through my university login! They were Miso Kim on Decolonizing ELT materials: a sociomaterial orientation and Suresh Canagarajah on Decolonization as pedagogy: a praxis of ‘becoming’ in ELT. The first article gave me a couple of ideas for possible descriptors in my framework, and the second gave me some background to understand the first one, though I think I’d need to read it a few more times to fully understand it!
I analysed my final existing framework – and discovered at least one more I could analyse in the process, but I really need to draw the line somewhere.
I then went back and re-read everything I’ve written in the body of my dissertation so far. I tidied up some of the wording, and looked at three more books on competency frameworks, as I’d previously only referenced one of the four I have.
(20/7/23)
It was nice to be able to do a couple of hours on a Thursday this week, not just on a Tuesday. I worked my way through re-reading more of my literature review, and realised about 1500 words I wrote before are probably irrelevant. I’ve added a comment to ask my supervisor to comfirm this before I delete it or write anything else there.
I tidied up what I’d written about the ethics of my research and the semi-structured interview I conducted, then wrote up the section on the methodology of analysing other competency frameworks.
Making progress!
(1/8/23)
Today has been an excellent dissertation day, and I feel like I’ve achieved a lot. I’ve written about 3000 words of actual dissertation (!) I summarised the results of my analysis of competency frameworks and the implications for my framework and detailed the methods and summarised the results for my needs analysis questionnaire.
(3/8/23)
This morning I’ve been able to finish writing up my research results, summarising my method and findings for the focus groups. I’ve tidied up my dissertation document and sent it off for feedback to my supervisor – I’m feeling quite good about what I’ve achieved, but there’s definitely work to be done, especially to the literature review where I went off on a bit of a tangent! I’ve got 11420 words so far, out of 15000 in total, so it feels like an achievable target to get the whole thing finished within the word count.
Since I scrapped the idea for a webinar and a follow-up questionnaire to get feedback on the framework, by master schedule has become a bit pointless. It mostly only exists now to show me how many ‘dissertation days’ I have left until my deadline, as according to my original plans the full framework should have been completed by 9th May – I haven’t even started it yet!
It’s also useful for monitoring my current word count, though my calculations don’t quite match the total word count when I check the whole assignment.
I’m feeling good about my progress so far!
It’s framework time!
(10/8/23, 9:30am)
The day has finally arrived: I’ve now got everything I need (I hope!) to actually start compiling my framework.
(4:10pm)
I’ve got a first draft of the framework. I started off trying to do it on pieces of paper that I could move around, but very quickly decided that would be too much writing. Instead I created a spreadsheet. I copied all of the descriptors from the slides for the final focus group onto a single sheet, including the category names which the focus groups had seemed to agree on:
Visual design
Activity design
Learning design (possibly combined with Category 3)
Content
Technical writing skills
Creative writing skills (possibly combined with Category 5; potentially ambiguous – the creativity of the materials writer or the ability to do creative writing?)
Learner experience (of activities)
Understanding the learner and learning context
Sequencing materials
Understanding the classroom
Assessment
Teacher’s notes
Theoretical background
Professional skills
(Not a clear category – could be combined with Category 14)
Characteristics of a materials writer (though these may not have a place in a competency framework)
Language awareness
Next I created a series of new sheets, one per category. I used a mix of category names from before and ones which felt right to me. In the order in which they came to me, these are the 15 categories I now have:
Working with publishers
Creating teacher’s notes
Language awareness
Professional relationships
Understanding how you work
Theoretical background
Digital skills
Writing skills
Layout
Assessment
Understanding learners
Meeting learners’ needs
Sequencing materials
Activity design
Providing variety and balance
As I went along, I copied descriptors from the focus groups list and edited them for clarity and consistency. I decided to start all of the descriptors with an -ing verb, to finish the sentence ‘Writing effective materials for language learning means…’
Here’s an example of the descriptors I have for ‘Meeting learners’ needs’, currently the longest category:
As you can see, I have various notes to myself as I consider how the framework might be streamlined.
As I created the descriptors, I realised that I can’t see how to break any of the descriptors down into different levels, so the framework will serve more as a ticklist of areas to develop in than a series of levels to progress through. I’m currently not completely convinced that it’s possible to demonstrate competency in every area I’ve listed as a descriptor.
At this point, I think I need to step away and let the descriptors sit for a few days, then come back to them with fresh eyes. I’ll go back through the questionnaire and focus group results and my analyses of other frameworks to see if there’s anything which I’ve missed. After that I’ll go through the long list of reading matter I’ve collected which could potentially inform the framework, and see if there’s anything I could add.
During that process, I also need to decide what order the categories should appear in, and what order the descriptors should be in within each category. Plenty to keep me busy!
(22/8/23, 10:50am)
I’ve got feedback from my dissertation supervisor on everything I’ve written so far, apart from the framework itself which wasn’t part of what I submitted. I’ve had a quick look through, and am pleased to see that I seem to be largely on track. As expected, there are some parts which I need to remove or tidy up – there are always things that make sense when you write them, but don’t make sense to other readers (one reason why it’s important to have editors and to pilot materials you create!) I’m going to put that on hold though, and keep working on my framework today.
I’ve started by looking back through the descriptors from 2 weeks ago and tidying them up a bit. For example, ‘Meeting learners’ needs’ now looks like this, with some loose grouping:
(22/8/23, 5pm)
I’ve worked through about 400 of the 650 questionnaire responses I received. In the process, I’ve moved around and reworded a few descriptors as well as adding a few new ones. Some of these changes were prompted by the responses, others by ideas that occured to me to clarify some of the competences.
(24/8/23)
It’s just occured to me that rather than including levels in the framework itself, framework users could give themselves a rating from 0-4 for each descriptor to help them decide which areas to focus on for their development.
(1:50pm)
I’ve just finished going through all of the questionnaire responses – I hope I did them all justice, as at times my mind was wandering and I was going cross-eyed. It’s a lot of information to process! I did take regular short breaks, but still…
Responding to feedback
(29/8/23)
Today’s focus was responding to my supervisor’s feedback. I rewrote some of the literature review to get rid of the focus on the professionalisation of materials writing – watch out for a blogpost version of it at some point in the future. I did all of the minor edits, and a few of the more major ones, but with an hour of my working day left I couldn’t concentrate any more. I decided to use this time to reorganise the interview transcript to make it more user-friendly and update the timestamps for the interview I did months ago – a time-consuming task that needs to be done at some point. Unfortunately Google Docs won’t do it automatically for me, unlike Microsoft Word!
Clarifying coding
(31/8/23)
I only managed 90 minutes of dissertation this Thursday, as I’ve got marking deadlines and my next Take Your Time Delta cohort are about to start – lots of applications and admin to get through, which is a good problem to have! I started learning about types of data coding and realising that my initial ‘figure it out as you go along’ approach needs to have proper terminology applied to it if it’s going to be clear to people reading my dissertation. I also tidied up the section describing the design and distribution of the questionnaire, including adding more references to survey design theory.
Wishes and regrets
(5/9/23)
Today I’ve spent a long time reading parts of three books I probably should have looked at a long time ago:
Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers by Judith Bell and Stephen Waters (buy on Amazon)
Developing a questionnaire by Bill Gillham (buy on Amazon)
Research Methods for Education by Peter Newby (buy on Amazon)
They’re all available on the Chichester e-Library via VLE Books, a source I’ve been somewhat neglecting but need to explore further. If you want your own copies, there are Amazon affiliate links in brackets above.
Reading the books and looking again at my data made me realise that I probably should have piloted my questionnaire much more intensively to make the data analysis stage more effective. On the plus side, my survey rationale now includes references to a wider range of literature, and I’m more aware of survey design issues if I ever do something like this again in the future (hmm!)
I’ve also realised today that I probably should have held off on running the focus groups until I was much further through the data analysis of the questionnaire results and perhaps had also started to create a framework. That would have allowed me to use the focus groups to refine what was in my framework and clarify doubts, potentially getting a lot more out of them by reducing the amount of data I took into them and focussing the discussion questions a lot more.
What does the literature say?
(7/9/23)
Today I’ve been taking advantage of the University of Chichester VLE Books access to ebooks, and working my way through The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching to find out what they say makes effective materials, and by extension what materials writers need to know. I’ve read/skimmed the first half of the book, and there’s still plenty to look through. I’ve written about 600 words about it so far, and that’s without looking at any other books! I expect I’ll have to get rid of some of that at some point…
(12/9/23, 2:30pm)
I’ve spent three hours today reading relevant sections of The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldana [Amazon affiliate link] I bought a paper copy of it last week when I saw it referenced multiple times in a talk by the NILE MA coordinator, but couldn’t find it in the ebooks library. I’ll ask for it to be added, but as there are only 6 weeks to my deadline I needed it faster! I’d definitely recommend this book if you’re doing any kind of coding. It is a very readable, accessible introduction to coding qualitative data, one which I wish I’d found about 8 months ago. I’m going to rewrite the methodology sections of my results analysis based on what I learnt. For example, now I know that I used in vivo coding (quotes from the voices of the questionnaire respondents) to generate my intial codes, then I put them into categories. If I have time before I submit my dissertation, I might recode my data properly using the ideas from the book. Unfortunately I need to prioritise other things right now, like making sure the framework is in a user-friendly form and creating a justification for how I have structured it. Before I do that though, I’m going to keep working through the literature to see what it says about the skills a materials writer needs. That’s my job for the rest of today, after the results analysis rewriter.
(14/9/23)
I carried on working through the Routledge handbook today, and realised quite quickly that I was ending up with a long list of points from the book which would give me one or two thousand words of dissertation with no chance to really analyse it. I decided to change my approach. I copied my framework and added relevant references I found next to each descriptor, adding or editing descriptors slightly where necessary. This is one example for the activity design category:
(21/9/23)
On Tuesday and for most of today (Thursday) I’ve continued with this process, and I have to say I’m going a bit cross-eyed at this point! I decided to stop an hour before the end of the day, and instead take another look at my appendices to see what I can streamline. When I looked at the competency frameworks originally I included lots of excerpts in the appendices, but I’ve now realised they don’t really add anything to my framework, not least becaue there’s already a sample section from each framework. I’ve reread the excerpts in case they inspire any other editing in my descriptors, and then deleted them. This has made my document 31 pages shorter!
My framework looks pretty!
(26/9/23)
The wording of the framework isn’t 100% ready yet, but since I have 29 days until I have to submit the dissertation, I thought it was probably about time that my dissertation supervisor could see a version of the framework to give me feedback on it. I spent the afternoon creating a document version of the framework, including 6 possible use cases to demonstrate how the framework could be used by different people or groups. It’s got colour-coding for each section to hopefully make it a bit easier to navigate.
I think this is what I have left to do:
Write a full first draft of the rationale for the design of the framework so my supervisor can comment on it – I’ve started picking away at it, but there’s not much there yet
Finish updating the literature review (+ ask for feedback)
Update the focus groups method and summary of results (+ ask for feedback)
Update the section describing my analysis of existing frameworks (+ ask for feedback)
Respond to any remaining feedback
Finish adding references from the literature to the table (the literature review may change slightly as a result, but I think it’s better to do this last as it’s something of a rabbit hole!)
Add all the appendix / table / figure numbers to the dissertation
Check it all
Submit it!
Go on holiday 🙂
By my reckoning I have about 6 full working days to do this in, though some weekend days may be added if necessary!
(28/9/23)
Today I compiled a rationale for my framework design and sent it to my supervisor to check. I also spent an hour at the end of the day continuing to add to my references.
My current word count is 16,329 words with at least 837 for tables (which don’t count) out of a possible 16,500 – 15,000 words + 10%. I definitely need to tidy up some sections though so hoping I can stay within that word count without having to do too much painful cutting!
The end is in sight
(10/10/23 11:40)
Two weeks to go until my dissertation is due, and I’m starting to reach the slightly panicked stage of wondering whether it will all be done in time. Due to travel last week I didn’t manage to do any of it at all, so now I have 4 full and 2 partial days (including today) timetabled in to finish it, and I need to send the whole thing to my supervisor by the end of this week to get feedback on a full draft. I’m going to do as much as I can for the rest of today and on Thursday and send it to her after that.
(10/10/23 19:00)
I’ve managed to update all parts of the assignment which had feedback on them (I hope!), including making the section about analysing existing frameworks much clearer by adding in more images from frameworks and tables summarising key information. It’s very helpful that they’re not in the word count!
I also went through the framework and changed all of the gerunds starting the descriptors (Understanding, Aligning, etc.) to can-do statements (Can understand, Can align, etc.). I think this makes it clearer and easier to understand. Doing this prompted me to reword some of the descriptors which made them more actionable. Three people have read my framework so far, so I was also able to update some areas which they found potentially confusing. In the process I have managed to get rid of the two sections which were labelled ??? as I realised that the descirptors could be better placed in other parts of the framework. Every time I read it again, something changes!
(12/10/23)
6 hours 45 minutes of work on my dissertation today, and I’ve just sent an (almost) full final draft to my dissertation supervisor for feedback. I still need to do a bit more on the literature review and go back over focus group results to see if I’ve missed anything in the framework, but the end is definitely in sight. Today I added numbers to dissertation sections and appendices, captioned all of the figures and tables, removed a load of comments and yellow highlighting from my dissertation, added finishing touches to the framework document including finishing the glossary, and added screenshots of the framework to the document. It looks much closer to finished now than it did this morning! 🙂
(17/10/23)
I was very pleased to get feedback on my draft today and realise I only needed to spend about an hour responding to it, as things are coming together nicely and my work is generally clear. I clarified a couple of points, then started looking back through my focus group summaries to add references to what they said to my table of descriptors, literature and references to my research.
Almost there!
(Fri 20/10/23)
My deadline is Tuesday 24th October, so not long left now! Yesterday I spent nine and a half hours on my dissertation, mostly adding references from the literature and my survey results to form Appendix 6 of my final dissertation, in which I back up every descriptor based on my research. It’s quite a rabbit hole, but an interesting process because I’m still making some tweaks to the framework based on what I’m finding, including adding and removing descriptors and rewording them.
I’ve got a couple of hours today to do some more of that, and I’ll probably have to work at the weekend.
(Sat 21/10/23, 16:00)
I managed 3 hours on Friday, and I’ve now spent 8.5 hours on it today, including finding some really useful sources last minute. Kind of glad I didn’t find some of these earlier though as I think I would have tied myself in knots trying to include all of the skills other people mentioned, whereas at this point I can see how they fit into the framework I’ve created. I’ve just finished copying and pasting all the references into Appendix 6 of my dissertation. There are 4 descriptors with no references from the literature, so I’ve put out a call on social media to see if anybody can help me fill those gaps.
(16:30)
I’ve added the proper cover sheet for the dissertation, and changed the line spacing from 1.3 to 1.5 – thankfully by modifying the ‘Normal’ style I could change it in one place and it updated throughout my document.
I’ve turned all of my tables into images, as the words from them don’t count in the final word count (such a useful tip from my supervisor!) My word limit is 15,000 words, which means I can have up to 16,500 words in total (up to 10% over). How happy was I when I saw that I’ve got 15,997 words! 🙂
(17:00)
I’ve added my bibliography from Zotero, which is pretty magic. So glad I spent time finding a bibliography tool at the beginning! Tomorrow I need to check that references which are lettered, e.g. 2022a, 2022b, are consistent throughout my dissertation, and add screenshots of the updated version of my framework. That’s it for today though as we’re off to a Clive Carroll concert this evening 🙂 (and I think (9h45m of work is quite enough for a Saturday!)
(Sun 22/10/2023, 10:30)
3 hours again so far this morning… I’ve added references from the last couple of books I had on my desk. I realised that Zotero has some small flaws: in APA, it only adds date accessed/retrieved for documents, not for web links (where they’re generally more important!); it doesn’t put chapter titles, blog post titles or journal article titles in apostrophes (though as I write this I’ve just double-checked with APAstyle.org and it looks like they don’t actually need them any more – that was a waste of 20 minutes…); it doesn’t include the name of a podcast / YouTube channel in some entries; and some of the entries aren’t quite in the right date order when one author has written multiple things. I’m cursing John Hughes for producing so much useful information about materials writing in such a short period of time 🙂
(12:15)
In an attempt to find sources for the last couple of references I need for descriptors, I thought I would try an AI tool which a Delta Module 3 candidate recommended to me. I asked the question I thought would find me references to literature, but it didn’t help. While there are the roots of a potentially useful essay outline (5 ideas that seem logical), all the ideas come from two sources, neither of which mention group dynamics at all, and it’s pretty repetitive. The tool isn’t there yet… Think I’ll just have to give up on finding references for those two areas. But happily my request on LinkedIn last night netted two links to references for the other two descriptors (lots of twos there…I started with four descriptors with no references, and now I’m halfway there!)
(12:35)
Arghhh! All the last-minute things. Thankfully I noticed in time that I need to update the case studies in my frameworks to reflect the final descriptors before I submitted it!
(12:45)
Rather than taking slow screenshots of each page of my framework to add to the final dissertation, I realised that I can save it as a pdf, then convert the pdf to images. I can then drag and drop each image into the correct place in the dissertation document. So much faster than the first time I tried it!
(14:40)
I had a brief break for lunch, but apart from that I’ve been going since 7am today again. However, it was worth it. I’ve just finished my final read-through, and now it’s ready to send to the two lovely ladies who have volunteered to proofread it. I’m pretty confident that it’s all ready to go now.
Woohoo!
(Monday 23/10/2023, 10:20am)
After a final hour updating my dissertation and framework based on comments from the proofreaders (thank you Lottie and Emma!), I have just emailed the final dissertation to my supervisor. That means I’m officially done.
To celebrate, Paul and I are going to Athens for a long holiday a couple of days from now. So glad I had that to look forward to, especially after the weekend/week with all the work. This is what my time tracker told me this morning about my hours Monday-Sunday last week:
If you made it through to the end of this post, well done 🙂 It’s been a long journey, and one I’ve enjoyed far more than I expected to at the beginning. I’ll definitely be sharing and talking about the framework in the future, and hopefully sharing the dissertation itself too once I’ve had feedback on it. But for now, it’s time to get back to some normal work before the relaxation of a long holiday 🙂
It was a huge privilege to be asked to deliver a plenary at the IATEFL Hungary conference in Siófok on the shores of Lake Balaton. I was very happy that my voice came back enough to be able to deliver the plenary as it was touch and go for 10 days or so before it happened!
László Nemeth, the current IATEFL Hungary president, had asked me to present something about materials writing. I’ve been talking about it a lot recently, as well as researching it for my dissertation (watch this space: 17 days until I hand it in!) The title of this year’s conference is ‘FLOW’, so that gave me the idea for focussing on flow in materials. I originally tested out the presentation at the BRAZ-TESOL Pre-Conference Event earlier this year – you can see a fully written out version of the presentation here. Here are my slightly updated slides from the IATEFL Hungary version of the presentation:
Richer Speaking: How to get more out of speaking activities
Later that same day I gave a workshop. Long-time followers of blog will know that I’ve delivered this talk a few times before, but I never get tired of it – it’s so much fun watching teachers become more engaged the second time they try each task, and I enjoy sharing these simple ideas for upgrading existing speaking activities. Most of the ideas in the book were collected from colleagues at in-school workshops and at events similar to the IATEFL Hungary conference, so it’s great to be able to pass them on to a new group of teachers.
You can find out how to buy Richer Speaking, ELT Playbook 1, and my other book, ELT Playbook Teacher Training on the My books page of my blog. There is a 10% discount on the ebook version of ELT Playbook 1 if you buy it from Smashwords and use the code NH87X by 31st October 2023.
If you’re interested, I shared a few other posts from the talks I went to at the IATEFL Hungary conference.
Thankfully, in the last three years or so I’ve only had one flare-up of about two months and have mostly been better thanks to the magic of Vedolizumab. To get it I spend a couple of hours at the hospital having an infusion every 8 weeks. I’m lucky – it doesn’t work for everyone. I also take 6 mesalazine tablets every day. Between those two medications, I’m currently in remission, and hope to be for as long as possible.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve learnt more about my body than I perhaps needed to. I’ve spent a lot of money and time on my health, and been to medical professionals all over the world. I’ve explained my illness countless times, and will do it many more times – as many times as I can in fact, so that people understand what it means for me and the many other people who have this invisible illness. I’ve gone through phases of being on very restrictive diets and experimenting with food. I now eat a much wider range of food than at any point before the colitis started. I’ve come to appreciate my health, and particularly my digestive health, so much more, and now have a much more balanced life. And I’ve realised that the information on the Crohn’s and Colitis UK website is fantastic.
All in all, life is good and I’m very happy. Of course, I’d rather not have colitis. But I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t been diagnosed with it. Here’s to a cure in my lifetime!
P.S. I’ve just learnt about GriefSick, a new newsletter exploring the grief that comes with chronic illness, and which I’ve definitely experienced.
Recently Jane Ritter interviewed me for her show on Teachers Talk Radio, a community radio station for teachers and educators.
This is the blurb for the interview:
How do you help your learners become better readers? This morning I spoke with Sandy Millin about what successful readers do and how we can better support our learners. Sandy has wide-ranging experience as a teacher trainer, a CELTA trainer, a DipTESOL tutor, and working with teachers from around the world on many different projects and through many different platforms. She is passionate about CPD and has some strong views about how we need to provide better training for newly trained teachers, particularly when teaching skills such as Reading.
On 13th July 2023, I presented a talk as part of the BRAZ-TESOL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE) for the 2023 BRAZ-TESOL online conference.
As teachers, we can feel a difference when we’re teaching from materials which seem to ‘flow’ perfectly compared to materials which don’t. However, when we create our own materials, it can be difficult to find that same flow. In this talk, I’ll show you techniques to make your materials flow, including through the use of scaffolding for productive tasks, and the exploitation of a single exercise in a range of different ways.
As part of the research I did for my MA dissertation topic, I conducted a survey about the knowledge and skills people need to create effective materials. The second most common response was that creating materials that flow in a logical way is an important skill in materials writing, with 58/124 respondents mentioning it. The only thing that was more common was understanding the target language.
What do we mean by ‘flow’?
I started with definitions of the general meaning of ‘flow’ from two learner dictionaries, and I highlighted some of what I believe are the key concepts relating to flow.
Cambridge starts with (especially of liquids, gases, or electricity) to move in one direction, especially continuously and easily. Oxford says that when flow is related to speech or writing it is the way that words, ideas or themes are linked together in speech, writing or music and when it is related to ideas or conversation to flow is to develop or be produced in an easy and natural way.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a psychologist who wrote and spoke a lot about the psychological concept of flow. I used various internet sources to compile my own summary of the factors which he thought contribute to us feeling like we are in the middle of a state of flow:
Clear goals
Immediate clear feedback
Total focus on task
Balance between skills and challenge
Sense of control
No worry of failure
Altered perception of time
Action and awareness merged
The activity is an end in itself
Based on those ideas from beyond ELT and this article by John Hughes, this is how I understand what ‘flow’ could mean when we relate it to materials and materials writing:
Clear objectives and activity aims
Easy for learners and teachers to navigate
Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
Challenges learners
Gives learners a feeling of control
Sets learners up for success
In the rest of the presentation I looked at each of these areas in turn and offered thoughts and suggestions on how to improve your materials so that they flow better, according to my breakdown of what flow might mean. I’ve included some examples of what I mean, but if you’d like more, please do leave a comment.
1. Clear objectives and activity aims
The objective is what the materials as a whole should help learners to achieve. This should be communicated concisely to users of the materials. For example: ‘By the end of the lesson, you should be better able to get help when trying on clothes in a shop in English.’ After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve got there?
The activity aims are how each activity contributes to the objective and moves learners towards it. These should provide step-by-step support to learners to achieve the overall aim, and (if time) improve further at it. In our clothes shop example, some of the activity aims might include:
To identify what problems the customer has (when listening to a conversation between a shop assistant and a customer in a clothes shop)
To practise polite intonation when making requests
To understand typical responses a shop assistant might make to your requests
You may have come across the acronym SMART to describe what makes a good aim or objective. This is how I equate each of the words in SMART to how learners should feel about each aim or objective in the materials they are using in lessons:
Specific: I know what I have to do
Measurable: I know how to assess my progress
Achievable: I can achieve this (perhaps with help)
Realistic: This will help me in the real world
Timed: I can do this in the time available to me
+ each activity will help me to improve
If you look at materials you’ve produced and don’t feel they meet these criteria, it’s perhaps worth reassessing the objectives and aims to see how you can make them SMARTer.
2. Easy for teachers and learners to navigate
This draws heavily from John Hughes, who has been a huge influence in making my own materials more easy navigable through advice he’s offered in blogposts, workshops and webinars. Thank you John!
To make your materials easier for teachers and learners to navigate, consider the following:
Use clear, unambigious headings
Number activities and questions
Reference relevant grammar notes, vocabulary lists and other exercises
In instructions / rubrics, use consistent wording, consistent fonts (or bold, but not italics – this is harder to read), and include examples.
Use an uncluttered layout, with clear constrats between colours and easy to read fonts and text sizes.
Even if they’re only for you, include teacher’s notes and answer keys. Writing them can often help you to identify problems you might not otherwise notice.
3. Sense of direction: Clear beginning, middle and end to the materials
To some extent, this links back to objectives and aims in point 1 and navigation in point 2, but I think it’s worth highlighting this as a separate point. As John Hughes says,
You need to make sure [the exercises] fit together in a logical order. In practical terms, this means that if you have six exercises or stages on a worksheet, then any teacher should be able to pick up that worksheet, take it into class, start at exercise 1 and finish at exercise 6. Yes it’s important that the material is also flexible enough for those types of teachers who like to miss some parts out, change the order or even add their own supplementary materials, but its primary function is to offer a complete lesson.
Look at your materials from the perspective or a learner or another teacher using them. Can you easily answer these three questions:
Can I see where I should start and why?
What are the next steps I need to take?
How will I know when I’ve finished?
4. Continuity: One activity flows logically into the next
Have you ever used materials where…?
The topic keeps changing: one minute it’s about holidays, then food, then learning languages, then… (particularly in controlled practice activities!)
There are sudden jumps of focus: from reading, to grammar practice, to learning some new vocabulary, to writing…
Learners are asked to suddenly asked to start reading, listening, speaking or writing, with no warning or preparation, and then are given little to no support to complete it.
To avoid that yourself, do this:
Stick to a consistent topic throughout the set of materials and throughout each activity.
If you write materials which integrate skills and language, make sure everything you include contributes to the overall aim. No grammar / vocab ‘just because…’!
Provide support (‘scaffolding’) for skills work.
For all skills = lead into the topic first.
For writing / speaking = provide thinking time, useful language, and time to upgrade their work, either by redrafting for writing or task repeition for speaking.
5. Engaging and enjoyable for learners and teachers
To think about how to make your materials engaging, I would highly recommend one of my current favourite methodology books:
Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms by Sarah Mercer and Zoltán Dörnyei [Amazon affiliate link, BEBC, Bookshop.org affiliate link] includes a wealth of ideas for what engagement actually means, any of which you could attempt to build into your materials to help learners approach a sense of flow while they’re using them. This is a slightly different approach to flow and materials, but still an important one! Here are just a few ideas:
Use stories
Activate emotions
Start small and build up
Make progess visible
Build in learner choice
Teacher learners how to learn
Provide appropriate challenge
Include surprise, mystery and puzzles
Build rapport between learners
Built teacher-student rapport
Provide support for pair work and group work
I’d highly recommend reading the whole book if you can!
6. Challenges learners
The challenge about challenge in materials is that it looks different in every context, so to some extent you’ll need to decide yourself what challenge actually means for the learners you’re writing materials for. However, these four activites are simple ways to add a little challenge to any set of materials:
Cover the sentences / words. Can you remember them?
Test your partner: what can they remember? Can you help them remember more with pictures or acting?
Race yourself: how fast can you do it? Can you do it again faster? [for pronucniation practice, reading, speaking, writing, or completing a controlled practice exercise – note that it’s important that learners are racing themselves and not each other]
Can you write down these 3 super-fast sentences? Now can you say them yourself? [accompanied by an audio with some connected speech, or teacher’s notes for a teacher to read the sentences as fast as they can]
7. Gives learners a feeling of control
Again, this is more about helping learners to approach a sense of flow when they’re using your materials. Here are a few ideas for how you can hand over control to learners within your materials:
Offer choice:
Do you want to work alone, in pairs or in groups?
Do you want to write or speak?
Include how to learn:
Dictionary skills
Making use of online translators
How ChatGPT can help you
Include tips on approaching tasks:
Why not try…?
If it’s difficult, you could…
8. Sets learners up for success
If you’re able to incorporate a wide range of the tips above in your materials, you should be well on the way to setting up learners for success. Here’s a summary of some of the ways you can do that:
Maintain the focus
Include how to learn
Scaffold for skills work
Support learners to remember new language
All of this leads to learners going from a feeling of ‘I can do this’ to a feeling of ‘I did it!’, and to teachers enjoying teaching from the materials.
But…
…I’ve shared a lot of different ideas in this talk and post. Don’t try to change all of it at once in your materials if you feel they’re not there already!
Choose one area at a time to work on, try it out and reflect on what does and doesn’t work for your materials and your learners. When you’re ready, choose another area.
I’d be really interested to know where you choose to start and how it goes. Please do leave a comment!
8 hours from when I’m writing this, I’ll be a guest on Volkan Iner’s Instagram channel, @creativeenglish18. He’ll be interviewing me about a range of different topics, including teaching speaking and staying updated as a teacher. I’ll share a link to the video when it’s ready, but you may also wish to join us live. See you there!
Update: Here’s the link if you want to watch the recording:
This is a summary of what we discussed, taken from Volkan’s YouTube page:
Tonight we listened to Sandy Millin’s personal experiences, philosophy of teaching, turning points about her education, interesting moments that she faced during her training,encouraging sts to speak, assessment of speaking skills, creating classroom environment for speaking, overcoming fear of speaking, generating ideas and thoughts for writing, staying uptaded,technology and ELT, 21st skills, latest development and trends in ELT, suggestions for the new teachers, motto, etc.
Tonight’s motto is; “Enjoy what you are doing and Just do it!”.
…and 2 days, I submitted my Cambridge Delta Module 3 assignments.
I remember the feeling of relief when I finally pressed send, marking the end of 9 months of hard work, stress, and (somewhere in there!) learning. I still had the Module 1 exam to go, which happened 6 months later, but it felt like the worst was over.
At the time, I found my Delta course to be very challenging, and I wasn’t convinced I’d really learnt anything from it. With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, I know that I actually learnt a lot:
The usefulness of methodology books, and the readability of many (though not all!) of them – in turn, this has opened up huge amounts of information to me
The difference between testing and teaching listening – largely thanks to John Field’s Listening in the Language Classroom [Amazon affiliate link, BEBC], this has become a particular area of interest, and over time I’ve improved my ability to develop learners’ listening skills
Why assessment can go wrong (lack of validity, reliability, etc.) – this helped us to improve testing and assessment at IH Bydgoszcz
How to do needs analysis, at least a little – I still needed to do more reading, but it gave me the foundations
A better understanding of how materials in (well-designed) coursebooks fit together
…and probably much more!
What I also realised was that the high levels of stress that I experienced while doing my course, and which I know many others also experience, are really not necessary. There is no reason why working towards Delta (or another diploma-level qualificationlike DipTESOL) needs to be a traumatic experience, leading to tears, illness, and (for some) a desire to leave the profession. That’s why when I went freelance, the first thing I did was to create much more relaxed Delta courses.
My aim with Take Your Time Delta is to give Delta trainees the time and space to absorb what they’re learning, and to experiment with it during the course. I want to create a human course, where stress is minimised and there is support from the tutor and the course participants through live sessions and really getting to know the people on the course. I want a course which recognises that life happens and some weeks are going to be busier than others, so when it’s not possible to keep up with the homework for a week or two it’s not the end of the world. I want a course where you can pay on the plan that works for you: in one go, in two payments, or in monthly instalments. And ultimately I want a course which means that trainees feel confident that when they walk into the Module 1 exam or submit their Module 3 assignment, they’re definitely going to pass because they’re fully prepared and know that they’re able to meet all of the requirements.
If that sounds good to you, course days and times are now available for September 2023 to May 2024 courses for Delta Module 1, Module 3 ELT-Specialism, and Module 3 ELT-Management. I’m looking forward to helping you complete your Delta qualification!
The latest edition of the Educast interviews podcast is now out, featuring me 🙂 Mohammad Nabil interviewed me about online professional development. The episode is 11 minutes 26 seconds, so nice and quick! You can find it on Spotify, and you can look at Mohammad’s LinkedIn post about it if you’d like to add any comments. Thanks to Mohammad for inviting me to take part!
I presented this workshop at the TWIST 2016 conference in Warsaw, and I’ve just realised I never put it on my blog. Better late than never!
About my presentation
Every staffroom I’ve been into has a huge pile of scrap paper in it somewhere. We’re responsible for the death of a lot of trees! Don’t let those deaths be in vain: try these activities to energise your classes, diminish the pile and assuage your guilt.
The ‘my’ is in inverted commas, because they’re probably adapted from activities I’ve learnt from other people. If you think that person was you, please do comment!
Do you like…?
Good for: getting to know you, introducing functional language, extending conversations
Give each student a piece of scrap paper.
They write three things they like, e.g. chocolate, taking photos, learning languages.
When they have finished, they screw up the paper and throw it towards a spot you indicate.
Elicit and drill the phrases: Do you like…? What about…? And…? along with the answers: Of course, who wouldn’t? and Sorry, no.
Demonstrate the activity. Take one piece of paper from the pile, open it, and ask a student the first question, e.g. Do you like chocolate? The student should choose one of the two answers. If they say Of course, who wouldn’t? ask the next question. If they say Sorry, no move on to another student and restart the process. Stop once you’ve demonstrated with two or three people (and hope you don’t get it right first time!)
Students take one piece of paper each, exchanging it if they have their own. They mingle and find the person who’s paper they have, writing their name on the paper. Once they have both found their person and been found, they can sit down.
As a follow-up, students work in pairs, telling their partner who they found out about (preferably without looking at the paper).
Russian roulette
Good for: revising vocabulary, testing what students already know, last-minute cover lessons
Choose a category, e.g. food.
The teacher writes down (in secret) a word from this category on a piece of scrap paper, e.g. apple.
While doing this, students work in small groups to brainstorm as many words as they can in this category, writing them on scrap paper, and try to guess which word the teacher has.
Nominate one student from one group to say a word. If it’s the same as your secret word, they lose a point. If it’s different, they gain a point.
Continue with other groups. If they repeat a word or can’t think of one, they also lose a point.
Good for: revision of vocabulary sets or prepositions, introducing a topic, speaking practice, laughter!
Give each student a piece of A4 scrap paper. Make sure they have something to lean on.
Students put the paper on their head. They can’t look at it.
Dictate a scene to the students. To make it more challenging, move around the picture. For example: My living room is large and rectangular. In the bottom right corner if you look at it from above there is a door to the hall. The door to the balcony is in the top left corner. Next to the balcony door there are two windows, also on the left-hand wall. In front of the window there is an armchair. Facing the window is a fireplace. In front of the fireplace is a table with four chairs. Under the window and next to the armchair there is a small square coffee table, with another armchair on the other side of it. The bottom wall, near the door to the hall, has a sofa next to it. [Other possible topics: a monster/robot, a Christmas scene, a desert island…]
Students compare their pictures and try to remember the teacher’s description.
Error correction running dictation
Throughout the lesson, collect some of the mistakes the students have made. Write each one on a piece of scrap paper with enough context to make it easy to work out what the correct sentence should be. If you want to, include some examples of good language.
Stick the paper to the walls/board on one side of your classroom. Arrange the students on the other side, so the room looks something like this:
3. When you say go, the running student goes to one of the errors, remembers the sentence, runs back and dictates it to their partner as is. Once they have done this for half of the errors (e.g. four out of eight), they switch roles. When they have finished all of them, they work together to correct the errors.
4. When finished, allocate one error per pair. They should write the correction on the paper they dictated from. After you’ve briefly checked them, pairs walk around to confirm they were right.
When Dave told me about this project, I thought it was an interesting way for learners to find out about other cultures.Over to Dave to tell you more…
What is the Enxaneta and why does it take incredible bravery to climb? How did a group of peasants and traders kill a dragon? And what happened to the hermit and the witch?
The answers to all these questions and many more can be discovered in the stories of Barcelona, Brno and Split (in that order above!). Welcome to City Stories, where the history and culture of three iconic European cities meets digital technology, cognitive science and modern teaching methodology.
When you go to the ‘Stories’ page of the City Stories website you can scroll through stories from the three cities, or search according to level. Clicking on one that takes your fancy drops you right into the start of the story. But this is not just another reading text. Each story is a DER – a Digital Escape Room – where progress requires reading (or listening) to the text and then answering some questions. Once you have answered all questions in any one room correctly you can move onto the next room. You ‘escape’ when you clear the last room in the story.
A DER is an exciting, interesting and engaging way to collaborate and learn. Technology plays an important role in the creative engagement and motivation of students. Using the innovative concept of Digital Escape Rooms encourages students to participate in telling the story.
Engaging principles from cognitive science, our DERs utilise the ideas of scaffolding, dual coding and means students and teachers can manage the cognitive load; all leading to better learning outcomes. (For more on this topic, this is a great starting point Cognitive science approaches in the classroom: a review of the evidence)
Language teachers know that good stories are an amazing learning tool as they engage the audience and challenge them to think about and comprehend the information they are presented with. Furthermore, culture has always been an integral part of language education. Our project uses stories from different cities and countries, sending students on a unique cultural journey through our interactive digital platform.
Particularly when it comes to reading and listening texts, classes all too often move at the speed of the quickest students, leaving behind too many; or the slowest, leading to boredom and disinterest. DERs allow students to work at their own pace, get a real understanding of the text and be sure they have the correct answer before moving on.
This unique resource works on any mobile device, can be done individually, in small groups or projected for the whole class to see, giving the teacher genuine flexibility in using the stories.
Our project was a part of the Erasmus+ KA2 call for proposals themed around Creativity and Culture. DERs we produced during the project tell stories from three iconic regions of Europe, focusing on the main cities within each of these: Split represents Dalmatia and the beautiful Adriatic coast; Moravia is right in the heart of Europe with Brno as its cosmopolitan capital; Barcelona is the cultural centre of Catalunya. Discover hidden secrets about these cities and regions through 18 unique stories written by our teachers.
There is a strong demand in the language teaching industry for resources that are meaningful, motivational, modern and innovative. The City Stories project allowed us to develop resources that meet this demand.
Interested? There’s more!
We didn’t just create the City Stories, we have also designed and made a Story Builder for you. This means you and your students can write, design and create your own DERs! This could be a story from your local city, but it can be about anything, any topic, any language. There is a handbook to guide you through using the Story Builder, or you can just dive in and try it out.
We hope to see new stories from many different places, allowing language students to explore both language and culture, and improve their understanding of the world we share.
If you want to know what is the Enxaneta and why does it take incredible bravery to climb? Or how did a group of peasants and traders kill a dragon? And what happened to the hermit and the witch? Just click on the links to try the story.
Have fun learning 🙂
Dave
Dave Cleary is a DELTA qualified English language teacher and teacher trainer living and working in Brno. He came to the Czech Republic in the summer of 2000 and has worked here ever since. Dave’s first teacher training experience was to his peers, and for more than a decade he has written and delivered teacher training sessions at both international conferences and on local training courses. He is now Director of Projects and Innovation at ILC International House Brno.
Finding the Heart of the Nation: The journey of the Uluṟu Statement towards Voice, Treaty and Truth by Thomas Mayor, is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.
Here is a video of Thomas Mayor reading the Uluṟu Statement:
The Uluṟu Statement was issued on 26 May 2017 as an invitation from First Nations Peoples (Aborigine and Torres Strait Islanders) to all Australians. It was the culmination of a series of twelve Dialogues across Australia, from which over 250 delegates were selected to attend the meeting in May 2017 to finalise the Statement.
Finding the Heart of the Nation introduces and explains the Uluṟu Statement, and shares the voices of 21 different First Nations people, including Thomas, and through them the stories of many more. It shows the extent to which colonisation and subsequent government policies have impacted on the people, the land and their culture over time, not just in the distant past, but right now. This includes policies which are still in place as I write this in 2022, and ones which have been brought in as recently as since 2000. This demonstrates why a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Australian Constitution is so necessary, and is a tiny part of the truth-telling which the Statement demands: showing what has really happened.
I bought the book during my recent trip to Australia because I wanted to learn more about First Nations culture and people. Growing up, I had heard Dreamtime stories told by both indigenous and non-indegenous storytellers, and I now know that Dreamtime is not the best term, but rather Dreamings. I had done an art project at school where we had to produce a piece of art in ‘an Aborigine style’ which I understood to be made of dots. Through my trip and this book, I understand that First Nations culture is so much richer and deeper than this. Of course it is: it goes back over 60,000 years.
Dancing, storytelling, and visual arts are the way that history, law, ethics and knowledge about the landscape are passed on. Every element has a meaning, which can only be understand if culture is allowed to be shared and passed on without interference. There are trustees of particular stories and dances (Songlines) who are responsible for maintaining them and passing them onto the next generation. This rich and peaceful culture cannot be lost because of the way that First Nations people have been treated and mistreated: too much of it already has been.
If you’ve read this far, you might think that the book is depressing, but it’s not. It’s a story of hope, resilience, and human ingenuity. It tells stories of tireless campaigners, pushing back against what has been done to them, with the aiming of making life better for the generations to come. Often this has been done in isolation, with small communities fighting locally to get better conditions. There have been national movements in the past, such as towards the referendum in 1967 which changed the Constitution to count First Nations people as part of the Australian population. However, the Constitution still allows race-based discrimination (in 2022!), which is why changes still need to be made.
I chose the hardback copy of the book, which is full of beautiful photographs and illustrations, showing the diversity of people and Country affected by the Statement. If you have a choice, I would recommend this copy, as it brings everything to life.
The book changed my perceptions of what it means to be First Nations in Australia. It gave me an insight into both the struggles and the triumphs that these communities have experienced, and the importance of joining together to fight for progress. It made me reconsider how I feel about trade unions, and made me understand better how they can work and why they are important.
I would urge anybody with an interest in Australia to read this book, and anybody in Australia to support the Uluṟu Statement and the referendum that I hope will come one day. I would urge everybody to find out more about First Nations culture, and to consider what non-indigenous cultures can learn from indigenous cultures all over the world.
Find out more
AIATSIS is the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Their website contains a wealth of information to explore, including about Country, songlines, stories, art and Aboriginal astronomy. One of their publications is the AIATSIS map of indigenous Australia, showing the diversity of languages, tribal and nation groups across the continent and in the Torres Strait Islands. I recommend visiting their site to see it.
Apart from the book I wrote about above, I bought two others in Australia, both of which were fascinating and which I would recommend:
Astronomy: Sky Country by Karlie Noon and Krystal de Napoli is part of the First Knowledges series which is currently being published by the Australian National Museum. It’s a short read that will introduce you to the depth of Aborigine and Torres Strait Islanders knowledge about the sky, and the connections between the sky and the land. I’d recommend it to anybody interested in science, particularly astronomy, or anybody who wants to find out more about how people have successfully lived in Australia for so many thousands of years.
Making Australian History by Anna Clark gives an overview of various events in Australian history, but not in the typical chronological manner. Instead, each chapter is based around a theme, such as Gender, Country, or Emotion. The chapter starts with a particular ‘text’, which may or may not be a written text, and explores that theme, its connections to Australian history, and to the recording of History (capital ‘H’) itself. It made me rethink my understanding of what History is and how it influences people. It also holds questions for the future of History, including how the Western idea of History can be reconciled with the First Nations way of passing on History, or even whether it should be. I’d recommend it to anybody interested in History on any level, whether or not you’re interested in Australian History specifically.
Finally, I would strongly urge you to visit Darwin if you ever get the opportunity. If you’re in Asia, you’re most of the way there already! The four pictures above are the smallest taste of the amazing street art all over the city. The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory showcases indigenous art and tells First Nation stories (and has amazing food too!) Darwin is completely different to any other part of Australia that I visited during my trip, and I could have spent much more time there. Highly recommended!
On Sunday 27th November 2022, I presented at the first LanguagEd Day, as part of this programme of speakers:
Here are the slides from the day:
This was a slightly different version of a talk I’ve done a couple of times before. Here is a full list of all of the activities from a May 2019 post, which you can also download them as a pdf or a .docx handout. You can also find slides from a similar webinar I did for IH Bucharest, plus a few extra links, in this post from June 2020.
Having participated in one EVE mentoring program, working with teachers from Africa, I was very happy when the opportunity came up to do it again. This time there are 8 teachers from across Latin America, presenting on a range of different topics. My mentee was first to present.
[I will add a link to the recordings when they become available]
#Memes: preparing EFL learners for intercultural communication on social media – Jessica Rivas (Venezuela)
Jessica started by reminding us that memes can be offensive and not for everybody. Not every meme we see is one we can identify with.
Do we prepare our studenst to face intercultural communication on social media? To understand that social media is a bridge between different cultures? It comes with risks, challenges and threats like those of memes above.
Here are some ideas you can use to help our students to understand this:
Discuss. What are the characteristics of memes? What is the process of their creation? What is their relationship with culture? What concepts are involved in the meme?
Reflect. What is the purpose of the meme? Who is the intended audience? Who created it?
Introduce. What memes are related to the learners’ culture? What stereotypes or prejudices might they be sharing?
Compare. How does this meme relate to memes from similar or other topics? How does it relate to real life? How does it relate to other people’s lives?
This could also be a starting point for research done by students about memes they have seen.
An English teacher in a Honduran town with limited resources – Luz Milda Bohorquez Paz (Honduras)
This map shows were Luz lives in Honduras.
As English teachers, Luz says that we need to be empathic, adaptable, creative and tolerant. Love and passion should also be part of our job.
She works in an incredibly challenging context, with 620 students in public school, with only 2 x 45-minute lessons with her students each week. There are limited resources, no books, no copies, and a lack of government support. There are high levels of poverty, and many learners work in agriculture and go to school as well. There is limited connectivity. Luz has a high workload, and there isn’t enough practice time for her students. She has to find resources on her own, and be creative to design engaging lessons. She aims to empower learners so they know English is useful, and sometimes uses her phone to provide an internet connection. Luz encourages her students to create project work and work on topics.
In the future, Luz would like to create an audiovisual lab for her students. She is hoping to apply for grants and/or work with her learners to bring technology closer to her learners, engaging them more, exposing them to innovation, and providing access to opportunities with learners in other parts of the country of the world.
Prioritising Mental Health in a University Context – Patricia Gomez (Paraguay)
This is a definition of mental health. Patricia believes this is vital for university students to have, particularly to stop them from quitting their courses. At the university where Patricia works, only 10% of students graduate. Only 1% of the health budget in Paraguay is dedicated to mental health.
Patricia studied at the same university and felt very supported by her professors and classmates, but she felt the need for institutional support too. When she started her research she discovered that a Bienestar Estudiantil (student wellbeing) department exists, for wellbeing, but the office is 6km away from their faculty, and it’s hard to get around! The service has existed since around 2009, offering support with academic and administrative processes, and helping disabled students with access.
She interviewed some of her students in the English language program to find out what they knew about it. More than half of the students didn’t know it existed, and 94% of the 18 students didn’t know how to access the department. These are some things students said in her survey:
This is what the students wanted from the department:
Most of these things are actually provided by the service, apart from mental health professionals, but there is only one person responsible for a whole department.
Patricia suggests:
Create a wellbeing hub. She recognises it might not be possible to build an office or hire more staff. The University of Oxford describes this as “an online gateway that makes it easier for all to find and access wellbeing and support services.”
Build peer support networks. Train students to volunteer to be good listeners and help those who are struggling, and how to redirect students if they need professional help.
Promote wellbeing activities. For example sports, exercise and recreation, as well as socialising.
These should have a positive impact on our students.
Intentional teaching: engaging students with ADHD – Anabell Rodriguez (El Salvador)
Classroom management is often a challenge, especially for new teachers, and many teachers have little or no training for working with students with special educational needs. This can be discouraging for both students and teachers.
Before we start, Anabell reminded us that all our students have superpowers. We should see them with eyes that see what they CAN do, not what they can’t. We also need to work with other people in our organisation, and in our networks to learner more about strategies to help us work with our students. We need to work from the heart, and remind students that we love them and we want the best for them.
What happens in our classrooms and why?
Obtain adult attention. Students want adults to talk to them or look at them. Criticism and yelling are also attention, though it’s for negative reasons. We need to provide them attention for things that are positive, for example praising them for opening their books and being prepared for the lesson. They get a boost for this, and we reinforce positive behaviours. Students will then tend to perform these positive behaviours more.
Obtain peer attention. Students want other students to talk to them or look at them. Laughing, touching and fighting are also kinds of attention. Ask the students to do things which play to their strengths. For example, if a student is great at drawing, ask them to draw flashcards for you, then tell the other students who did it. In Anabell’s experience, that meant that a student was then asked to draw things for other students, and became much more engaged in the whole classroom environment.
Avoid or escape. The student doesn’t want to do the work or be in the room. They may also not want to be with certain peers. Students don’t have intrinsic motivation, so we need to work with extrinsic motivations. Encourage them based on what you know they like. For example, tell them that they can listen to some of their favourite music at the end of the lesson if they’ve worked successfully. Or let students work alone rather than making them work with peers.
Functional Behavioural Assessment and Behaviour Support Plans:
A: Antecedent e.g. when Maria is asked to do work in a group…
B: Behaviour e.g. …she gets out of her seat and walks around the classroom…
C: Consequence e.g. …As a result, she does not work with the group.
The hypothetical function of her behaviour is avoiding group work. Here are some possible solutions people came up with for this situation:
Ask her how she prefers to work, for example individually.
Assign people roles within the groups, so they are all clear what to do. Make sure she understands that she is needed in the group too.
Let her monitor the class with a specific role during the activity.
It’s important for us to identify the antecedents and consequences, not just the behaviours, to help us come up with alternative solutions.
The highlights of my teaching experience with young learners at Escuala Vera Angelita in Nicaragua – Fernanda Polanco (Nicaragua)
Fernanda’s school is in a rural area, and is a sustainable school, the first in Nicaragua. They are aiming to integrate all of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals. It’s located within a farm, producing organic food, which is used to feed the students and teachers, some of whom live at the school. There are also donors from the USA who provide things for the school. All of the students are girls who live on campus, who receive everything they need at the school, including food, clothes and healthcare.
Fernanda works to create classroom routines, including using technology like QR codes regularly. She uses a lot of collaborative work to promote interdependence between students. She makes use of the space in the classroom and the outdoor areas of the school to vary lessons.
To help students adjust to the classroom, she uses a ‘sandwich’ of English / Spanish / English. Later she reduces the amount of Spanish she uses once she knows that students feel comfortable.
Own languages are used by learners, regardless of what teachers do or say and they can also be used productively when children / teenagers work together in pairs or groups.
Ellis, 2021
There have been other challenges. Some of her students are complete beginners in English, and some don’t have Spanish either as they come from indigenous groups.
Practical ideas for pure beginners:
Story telling
Role plays
Guessing games (like mime)
Recording – students like to listen to their recordings, and this serves as self-assessment
Interviews
Board games – online and in-person
Real-life speaking
These are some of the resources Fernanda uses:
The use of social media in education – Larissa Nunez (Paraguay)
Larissa started by reminding us of some potential disadvantages of social media:
Can facilitate cyber-bullying
Can promote laziness
Can distract learners
Larissa talked about using TikTok for education. She started creating TikTok videos when working with a teenager, and this improved their relationship. There are lots of people using social media for education, including giving live online lessons.
We need to be as curious and innovate as we want our students to be.
She started to promote interesting tips to support her students, first on Instagram, and then on TikTok.
Direct app interaction activities:
Making videos – creating short videos using the target language
Duetting teacher’s videos, dialogues
Recording steps of a project
Putting math problems on video and asking to comment on the answers
Answering questions via the app
Indirect app interaction activities:
Researching a topic and writing a paragraph
Critical thinking – using videos for discussion or debate after watching videos
Telling the teacher about a TikTok that was funny, interesting, inspiring, that taught you something new, etc. (rather than ‘How was your weekend?’ as an opening question!)
‘TikTok moments’ in the classroom: students can share a TikTok video for other students to see, e.g. study techniques, words they’ve learnt, or something fun in English.
TikTok is also somewhere teachers can learn tips and ideas. Jordan Cotten was one person Larissa found it useful to follow. She also found other teachers from Paraguay, sharing tips relevant to her context.
Advantages of using social media:
Communication and collaboration
Finding tips, ideas and resources created by other students – students are more likely to listen to each other than to their teacher!
This was a very fun presentation, featuring puppets and magic tricks 🙂
Kris tries to make use of painting, singing, dancing and magic to motivate and engage her students. She was highlighted as an outstanding teching by the Ministerio de Educacion in 2021. Now she’s an instructor for Platzi, helping public school teachers.
Using magic tricks can help students to realise that it’s OK make mistakes. It fosters their imagination, boosts their self-confidence, and can help with content explanation. It encourages students to explain outcomes, going beyond surface explanations.
Professor Richard Wiseman, Jody Greig, Miss Nan, and Xuxo Ruiz are all teachers you can find online who talk about teaching with magic. Xuxo Ruiz has written a book called Educando con Magia.
[It’s best to watch the video of this one, as that will make the tricks and ideas clearer!]
Webcomics: in the EFL classroom – Analys Milano (Venezuela)
A webcomic is the younger sibling of comics. There is a sequence of frames with narrative development, with a link between images and text, in both. But webcomics are mainly made to be viewed via apps or websites and consistently published.
Why webcomics?
Vocabulary is learnt in context.
They are visually attractive, including having distinctive styles according to the authors.
They can motivate and inspire through their stories.
Students can relate to the stories and talk about their own related stories.
They promote reading comprehension.
They provide meaningful input.
Webcomics require intensive and extensive reading skills. They require critical reading, and understanding the relationship between context and experience. They also promote critical thinking.
How can you integrate webcomics into your classroom?
Focus on grammar: Find a grammar point within the comic and explain it to your classmates – why was it used there?
Complete the story: Missing frames, missing lines. Who got the closest to the original story?
Fandub: Take a part of the story and ask students to voice the characters themselves. They have to understand the feelings too, not just the words.
Translations: [I missed this one]
Focus on comprehension: You can link comics to other media, like related videos.
On Webtoon, there’s a comic called ‘Let’s play’, which Analys uses to help students understand social media influence:
We need to take our students’ interests into account – there are many different genres of webcomics. We can create webcomics to create reading habits. Comics can also help with mental health and self-awareness, for example as distraction during the pandemic.
Last week I organised an ELT picnic in Reading, my first attempt at setting up networking for Reading English Professionals. One of the attendees was Gonzalo Galian-Lopez, Director of Studies at Eurospeak in Reading, and he told us about an event he was organising to share the results of Erasmus+ projects he’s been working on. I found the idea of these projects to be really interesting, and I hope you do too. Thanks for writing this Gonzalo!
Introduction
I work for Eurospeak, an educational institution based in the UK and Ireland which is currently involved in over 40 EU-funded projects. The Erasmus+ programme makes it possible for language teaching professionals to participate in EU projects funded to develop innovative resources for teachers and learners. First, I’ll provide a brief introduction to the Erasmus+ programme and then presents an Erasmus+ project that has seen the development of resources for grammar teaching. Next, I’ll outline a few other projects that are currently working towards the creation of more tools for teachers and learners.
What is the Erasmus+ programme?
Erasmus+ is an EU programme that aims to support education, training, youth, and sport in Europe. With a budget of over €26 billion, it provides opportunities for mobilitiy and cooperation in the contexts of school and adult education, vocational education and training, and more. Some of the programme’s goals relevant to language teachers include (1) promoting language learning and linguistic diversity, (2) improving the availability of high-quality learning resources, and (3) improving the competences of educators. The programme is open to any organisation established in an EU member state, including such organisations as language schools and higher education institutions.
What does an Erasmus+ project look like?
Erasmus+ projects typically involve several EU organisations working towards the development of resources and products. They last between 12 and 36 months and include four stages:
planning;
preparation;
implementation of activities;
follow-up.
In the context of language teaching, Erasmus+ projects are often carried out by consortiums comprised of institutions with expertise in language education and result in the development of innovative resources for language teachers and learners.
An example of an Erasmus+ project for language teaching
Second-language learners generally achieve a good understanding of grammar rules, but their ability to use these rules in fluent, spontaneous communication is often very limited. The Teaching Grammar for Spontaneous Communication project is an initiative to address this issue. More specifically, this project aims to help language teachers gain new insight into how to promote the development of grammatical knowledge that learners can use fluently and spontaneously in real-time communication. The project launched in November 2020 and is now approaching its end. Led by Eurospeak, a UK-based language school, the project has seen the development of three innovative tools for language teachers and teacher trainers:
A handbook on teaching grammar for spontaneous communication [Note from Sandy – I particularly like the grid on p27 as a way of thinking about the demands of a communicative activity, with examples of how it could be used on the following pages]
A teacher-training programme on the same subject (available soon)
These resources have been informed by cutting-edge research and are packed with sample grammar practice activities. They will soon be available in seven languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Romanian, and Latvian. To access the all the project’s materials and to find out more about the project, you can visit the project’s website or Facebook page.
More Erasmus+ projects for language teaching
There is a vast array of Erasmus+ projects related to language teaching. These range in aims and target audiences, which can go from upskilling teacher trainers to supporting self-directed learners. They also range widely in project results, which can include, for example, e-courses, curricula, handbooks, apps, websites, and games, to name a few. The table below provides an overview of a selection of projects to give a sense of what Erasmus+ projects for language teaching may look like and, in turn, to encourage the reader to find out more about these projects and make use of their results:
The aim of this article was to provide an introduction to the Erasmus+ programme and to share some projects relevant to language teaching professionals. I hope that this article will arouse some interest in the Erasmus+ programme among the language teaching community and possibly create opportunities for future partnerships and collaboration with Eurospeak. I also hope that the projects presented in this article, and the Teaching Grammar for Spontaneous Communication project in particular, will be of interest and useful to language teaching professionals across the EU.
With a background in ELT and EAP, Gonzalo Galian-Lopez is research lead in several language-learning related EU-funded projects. His main research interest is in the role of practice in the development of grammatical knowledge, and he is currently pursuing a PhD in this area of SLA. His main professional aims are to continue working in projects which bridge the gap between SLA research and the needs of language teachers and learners.
I was also saddened by the Cambridge grade statistics, which show that as many as 42.9% of people taking Delta Module 1 fail (in 2019). This is a huge percentage, meaning something must be going wrong. I know a lot of people take the exam without a preparation course, and though I suspect much of this is due to the cost, I also think that some of it is knowing how stressful the course might be. I don’t think they’re failing because they’re not good teachers, or because they’re not capable of success in the exam, but because they don’t understand how the exam works and don’t necessarily have the level of methodology knowledge required to take it yet. That’s not to say you have to take a preparation course: just that it will probably increase your chances of success if it’s a good course.
I decided to put together a year-long course, in contrast to the three- or four-month courses which seemed to be the norm. I wanted course participants to have the chance to apply what they learnt to their work, and not just cram for the exam. I also wanted them to have time to absorb the structure of the Module 1 exam and feel confident when walking into the exam room, so that they could concentrate on showing what they knew, rather than trying to remember exam technique.
My first course started in October 2021, with three participants, and a fourth joining us soon after the start. I’m so grateful to my first group for working with me on this experimental course, and giving me excellent feedback throughout to help me refine it. It’s been a really enjoyable experience, and I think I’ve easily learnt as much as they have about Delta Module 1 and what candidates need to know to take the exam. I’ve also learnt a lot about how to structure my course.
I started out with a syllabus for the first 13 sessions or so, covering one part of the exam per session. I expected that we would work through these sessions, do a mock exam, then be flexible in the second half of the course, focussing on the areas which the participants most wanted/needed to work on. This is largely what we did, but I’m not sure if the specific sessions I ran the first time round were always the most effective. It took some experimentation to find session formats which worked well, combining exam practice with reflection on teaching. I also needed to work out / remember what level of methodological knowledge pre-Delta teachers are likely to have – this really made me appreciate how much I’ve learnt about teaching because of and since completing my own Delta. I sometimes pitched things too high, or expected to get through a lot more in a session, because I forgot that this was likely to be new information for these teachers.
Homework was very flexible. Generally it was designed to feed into the upcoming session in some way, but sometimes it revised what we’d done in the past or introduced new areas of language. Based on a suggestion from the group, there were also optional extension tasks, normally something to read or watch, which they could do if they had extra time or were particularly interested in the subject. If the participants didn’t do the core homework, it didn’t stop us from completing the session. I think it’s important to recognise that teachers (all adults!) are busy, and that whether they complete homework or not is their responsibility – if they do, great, if they don’t, I tend to say that’s their problem! Most of the homework was something they could check themselves, and I started to factor in time for discussing their questions a couple of sessions into the course when I realised it was sometimes taking over the session but I hadn’t planned for it.
The course ran for 30 sessions, and ended up finishing three weeks after the Module 1 exam in June 2022, since all four participants decided not to take the exam in this sitting. They may take it in December, or they may not take it at all. Part of the joy of a course like this is that it can be very flexible, and respond to the participants’ needs. They made this decision in early April, so the final 10 sessions or so have been very relaxed, and have focussed on areas of their teaching which they wanted to work on, for example how to teach listening, not just test it, or how to choose a coursebook. We’ve also had general discussions covering lots of areas of teaching which have wandered all over the place in the session. Even though they haven’t taken the exam, all four participants have commented on how much they’ve learnt from the course, which is what I really wanted people to get out of it. The 90 minutes I’ve spent with them each week have been the highlight of my freelancing so far – I’ve enjoyed it so much 🙂
We’re already 10 sessions into the March to December course, for which I have two groups, and the lessons I’ve learnt from the first cohort are being put into practice. The sessions for the second cohort have a more consistent structure, and I feel like I’ve been able to scaffold their understanding of each section of the exam more solidly based on the questions the first cohort asked me. I then fed some of these new sessions back into the course for the first cohort, as there was three months of overlap. I’ve pushed the first mock exam to the midpoint on the course for the second cohort (after session 15), to give us a little more time to go over each section of the exam first, and particularly to focus on the more problematic areas. This still leaves us 50% of the course to be flexible and respond to the needs of the participants. Of course, because they are small groups, all of the sessions can be flexible to some extent too!
I’m really pleased that the idea of the Take Your Time Delta course seems to be working. I’ve had really positive feedback so far, and the course continues to evolve. If you’d like to join me on the next course, I’ll be starting both Module One and a brand new Module Three course in September. You can find all the information and sign up on the Take Your Time page.
And if you’d like to do some form of development but my course isn’t for you, why not take a look at the Courses by ELT freelancers page to see what else is on offer?
The first time I wanted to go to the IATEFL conference, I applied for a first-time speaker scholarship. As part of it, I had to write a conference proposal, including an abstract and summary, but I had no idea what they actually were. Thankfully Ceri Jones came to my rescue, talking me through what I needed to do and giving me feedback on what I’d written.
While I can’t give you feedback (unless you decide to book a consultancy slot with me), I can hopefully offer you some tips to help you with your own applications to any conference, not just IATEFL. I also can’t guarantee that your application will be accepted, as there are often far more applications than spots for speakers, but hopefully these tips will improve your chances. I like the idea that ‘it’s selection, not rejection’, which I heard on this podcast.
Good luck!
[Note that scholarship applications for IATEFL Harrogate 2023 will close at 16.00 (UK time) on Thursday 23 June 2022. Speaker proposals are not yet open. They general open in July and close in mid-September, though please look at the IATEFL website for details.]
General tips
Here is a 30-minute talk by Madeleine du Vivier for IATEFL on How to write an effective conference proposal, which I suggest you watch in addition to reading the information below.
I think word count is the most challenging thing about writing a conference proposal: either being concise enough, or finding enough to say! I use wordcounter.net to keep track.
Make sure you save a copy of everything you send. I normally create a document for each proposal, including the title, abstract, summary, and any technology requests I’ve made. Then when it’s time to put together my talk, I can remember what I said I was going to do!
If your proposal seems interesting to the conference committee, but not quite what would fit, they may ask to revise parts of it. This is what happened to me for the 2019 conference. This won’t give you a guaranteed acceptance though: my proposal for 2017 was turned down, even after I rewrote the abstract.
What is an abstract?
The abstract is what people attending the conference see in the programme. This is how they choose which talk to attend. It is typically around 45-60 words long, or about 3-4 sentences. The exact requirements will depend on the conference you’re applying to, so it’s important to read their guidelines carefully. You will generally be automatically removed from the selection process if your abstract is too long or too short. The guidelines for IATEFL speaker proposals are available on the conference website.
The best way to get a feel for what to write in an abstract is by reading other examples of them. On the IATEFL Past and future conferences page, you can find links to programmes from previous years. When you read enough of them, you start to spot patterns of structure and typical phrases which are used again and again. Why not read 10 different abstracts from a past programme and see what you can ‘steal’ from them?
A more technical analysis
In About Language 2nd edition [Amazon affiliate link / BEBC], Scott Thornbury analyses three examples of real conference abstracts (on p190-191) from the English UK Teachers’ Conference:
Express yourself – getting students to communicate!
Students often struggle to express themselves and may lack confidence in their own opinions and insharing them. This workshop offers easy to use activities requiring few or no materials that will build students’ confidence and language skills and will get them talking and sharing their ideas. It is a practical, fun session and teachers will leave with a range of ideas that they can immediately use in the classroom.
Chrissie Florides
‘The ear of the beholder’: helping learners understand different accents
The use of English as an international lingua franca means learners will be exposed to a wide variety of accents, both native and non-native. How can teachers prepare them to cope with such diversity? This workshop features practical tasks, informed by relevant theory, which participants could try out in their own classrooms.
Laura Patsko
Getting unstuck – stretching out of our comfort zones
Our daily teaching schedule often takes up so much of our time and energy that we don’t have the chance to take advantage of opportunities to stretch ourselves of take on challenges in other areas. This talk will explore why we keep doing what we have always done – the classes we usually teach, the style, methods and technology we are comfortable with – as a basis to work together and ‘get unstuck’.
Marjorie Rosenberg
He summarises their purpose like this in the commentary:
These texts all have the basic structure of problem – solution, hence they replicate the structure of [an] advertising text […] while not overtly advertising, they do perhaps have a persuasive as well as an informative function.
Thornbury (2017: 332)
He goes on to talk about the linguistic features of abstracts like these:
As noted, the purpose is to inform/describe the content of each session, while perhaps emphasising both its relevance and usefulness. The audience is likely to be practising teachers, who will recognise the professional terminology such as ‘English as an international lingua franca’. At the same time, the writers adopt a non-academic, neutral, even infromal, register: ‘fun session’, ‘get unstuck’. The use of first-person plural pronouns in the third text (our, we), is deliberately inclusive. The net effect is to reduce the social distance and power differential between speakers and their potential audience.
The basic structure of all three texts is, as noted, a problem-solution one: the problems are presented in negative terms (struggle, lack, cope, so much of our time…) while the solutions emphasise the practicality and usefulness of the sessions: easy to use activities; a practical, fun session; ideas that they can immediately use; practical tasks…which participants could try out; a basis to work together… etc. The transition from problem to solution is marked by the noun phrase this workshop/talk, which also identified the kind of presentation it is. The assertive use of the modal will for prediction (teachers will leave… This talk will explore…) reinforces the writers’ commitment and preparedness.
Thornbury (2017: 332-333)
What is a summary?
A summary is used by the conference committee to help them select which talks would be the best fit for the conference. They will generally be the only people who see your summary – it will not be available to the conference goers. If there are similar talks proposed by other speakers, the conference committee might ask you to speak in a forum, where three speakers cover closely related topics.
For IATEFL, the summary is 200-250 words long. You can’t repeat any information from the abstract or title. You can’t include biodata. So what could you include?
A breakdown of the structure of your session: list each of the main parts and what you will do in them, ensuring that they will fit the time available.
What the audience will be able to take away from your session: specific activities, or specific new information they will be able to use.
Why the session would be helpful to your specific target audience.
The easiest way to understand what a summary does is to look at examples, so I have shared my past IATEFL proposals below.
Choosing a title
This is what grabs a potential audience member’s attention, so it needs to encapsulate your talk in some way, while also engaging their interest. At IATEFL 2022, the concise paper conference programme handed out to delegates only had session titles in it, with abstracts appearing in the pdf version of the programme which was available on the website. This put even more pressure on the titles!
All in all, quite a tall order! This is why I’ve left it until last. I think it’s a good idea to know what you’re talking about before you come up with your title, and often inspiration will strike while you’re writing your abstract or summary anyway.
As with abstracts, the best way to get a feel for possible titles is by looking at other examples of them. On the IATEFL Past and future conferences page, you can find links to programmes from previous years. You’ll probably spot certain patterns:
Colons and dashes are very popular: ‘advertising’ first, then a short description of what it means
These are the conference proposals I’ve submitted to IATEFL conferences since 2012. You’re welcome to use them as inspiration for your own proposals, but please respect my work and don’t plagiarise them.
Over the years, I’ve attended many Materials Writing talks at IATEFL. I’ve been involved in producing materials for my classroom, for publishers and for self-publishing. I’ve also recently completed the NILE MA Materials Development module, meaning I’ve been able to add more theory to my practical experience of materials writing. This session brings together what I’ve learnt in the process.
Summary:
I will begin the session with a brief explanation of how materials writing fits into my career, as well as why I decided to embark on an MA module related to materials development. I will then summarise general areas of theory which have caught my interest in my reading connected to the module. These include the evaluation of existing materials as a starting point for developing and adapting your own materials, possible frameworks for approaching materials writing, and what role different stakeholders (can) play in the materials development process. I will share top tips I’ve heard over the years for improving the quality of materials and their usefulness to students, including ideas of inclusivity and supporting learners with SEN, and some useful resources for attendees who’d like to improve their ability to develop materials. I also plan to discuss my own experience of the materials writing process, and how it has differed when working with publishers and self-publishing. Finally, attendees will consider how what I’ve learnt over the years could be applied to their own materials development. I will also briefly mention my own self-published materials. Please note: this talk is not endorsed by NILE. The MA module just provided some of the input for me to reflect on.
I have recently completed the Trainer Development module of the NILE MA, meaning I’ve read a lot of theory about teacher education. In this session, I’ll summarise what I’ve learnt and how it has influenced my work as a teacher trainer and director of studies. You’ll also be able to consider how this theory might be relevant to you.
Summary:
I will begin the session with a brief explanation of how teacher training fits into my career and why I decided to embark on an MA module on trainer development. I will then summarise general areas of theory which have come up repeatedly in my reading connected to the module. These include the importance of the apprenticeship of observation, helping teachers get at their beliefs, starting from ‘where teachers are’, balancing theory and practice, incorporating effective reflection into training, linking training to the classroom to increase its impact, and evaluating the effectiveness of teacher training. Throughout the talk I will link these ideas to my work as a teacher trainer and director of studies, showing how I have incorporated each into my practice. Examples include changing the structure of workshops in our school so that they begin with brainstorming of proper knowledge, adding explicit reflection training into our in-house PD, asking for written feedback at the end of every workshop, and including forward planning stages in training courses so trainees decide how they can implement what they have learnt. Finally, attendees will consider how these theories could be applied to their own contexts. I will also briefly mention my book of reflective tasks for teacher trainers. Please note: this talk is not endorsed by NILE. The MA module just provides the context for my reading.
[Note: I actually gave this talk at the IATEFL Online Conference in 2021.]
I was asked to revise the abstract: ‘The proposals committee has asked that you please rewrite your abstract (50-60 words) so it is clear how the session is relevant to an IATEFL audience .’ I changed my title at this point as well, as I felt it was clearer and better reflected the new abstract. The talk was then accepted.
Original title:
Intermediate learner, beginner teacher: implications for teaching and training
Original abstract:
I am an experienced teacher and intermediate-level speaker of Polish who has been teaching the language to beginners for 18 months. I will reflect on what my relatively low level of proficiency means for my teaching and my students’ learning, use of L1 and L2 in class, and how my experience might relate to that of low-level teachers of English.
Revised abstract:
What impact does a teacher’s low level of L2 proficiency have on their students’ learning? What strategies can low-level teachers use to maximise L2 use in class? When should they use L1? Is methodology or language development more essential for teachers? My experience teaching Polish informs my thoughts on these issues, relevant to anyone working with low-level English teachers.
Summary:
The talk will cover how and why we decided that it was appropriate for me, with my relatively low level of Polish and as a non-native speaker, to teach the beginner lessons at our school.
I aim for the lessons to include as much Polish as possible. I will talk about the extra preparation I have to do before lessons to achieve this and compensate for my level, as well as how I continue to work to improve my own knowledge of Polish, modelling this for my students. I will cover the interplay of English and Polish in lessons and how it has changed as my level has improved, and as I teach the same lesson for a second time having reflected on which classroom language I lacked the first time round. The talk will also detail some of the compensatory strategies I use in class to reduce the amount of language I have to use, while still providing as much exposure as possible to my students.
My Polish students are all English teachers at our school, and I will also include their reflections on the lessons from the perspective of both their teaching and their language learning.
Finally, I will reflect on how my experience might be similar and different to intermediate-level English speakers teaching the language, and what they and their trainers or managers might be able to learn from my experience. This will include training they may benefit from to counter gaps in their language knowledge. (=249 words)
New teachers are often thrown in at the deep end. If they’re lucky, they are surrounded by supportive colleagues who can help them out. If they’re not, they need ELT Playbook 1. It consists of 30 tasks new teachers can use to learn to reflect on their teaching. I’ll also describe how trainers can base development programmes on the tasks.
Summary:
ELT Playbook 1 is designed to fill a gap in the market for new teachers, regardless of whether or not they have a qualification. It’s a self-published ebook, which consists of tasks in a range of categories (such as upgrading skills, examining language and health and wellbeing), each supported by a quote from methodology books and a series of reflection questions. The tasks are rounded off with four different ideas teachers can use to round up their reflection: one each for a blog, a video/audio recording, an Instagram-style post and a private journal. It is designed to be accessible, almost like having a mentor/ trainer/ Director of Studies with you, even if you are freelance or in a school with no development. The price is affordable (£5), so it should be within the reach of as many teachers as possible around the world. There is also an associated community on social media so readers can start to develop a network of peers.
In the session, I will talk about why I decided to write the book, the way it is structured (as described above, and showing a few examples of tasks), how teachers have used it and participated in the online community since it was published in Autumn 2017, and how trainers and managers could exploit the tasks and reflection questions in their own professional development programmes. I will also invite attendees to suggest topics and tasks for possible future books in what I hope will become a series.
IATEFL Glasgow 2017: Stitching together roles in ELT
I was asked to revise the abstract. I can’t remember exactly why, but in hindsight I think the whole proposal seemed quite wishy-washy – I don’t think it was clear what I was aiming to do in it. The talk was turned down.
Original abstract
There are many roles it is possible to take on in our profession, from teacher to manager, from trainer to materials writer, and so much more besides. It can be difficult to know what non-teaching skills are required to move into each of these roles and how you can develop them. Fear not: I’m here to help!
Revised abstract
There are many roles it is possible to take on in our profession, from teacher to manager, from trainer to materials writer, as well as volunteering with teaching associations. Whether you are new to the profession or more experienced, this presentation aims to make you think about how you can develop the skills to move into each of these roles.
Summary
The talk will suggest some of the skills which may be required for those who would like to try different branches of the ELT profession. These should encompass how to move into different teaching contexts, become a teacher trainer, step up to management level, get involved in materials writing and feedback, and (time permitting) volunteer with teaching associations. It will be based on my own experience of all of these roles, as well as research into other people’s experiences of working in each area.
I will look at how ELT professionals can build up their skill set in general, as well as specifically for each role, and how the roles can feed in to each other as part of a portfolio career. I will also offer tips about starting out in each of the other areas once people have gained teaching experience. Examples of skills to be covered include communication (upwards, downwards and sideways), time management, working with other people effectively, building up your professional profile and reflecting on your practice.
The talk should be relevant to early career teachers who would like to know more about different career paths available to them, as well as more experienced ELT professionals who are looking to move into different areas.
While I can’t give you Hermione Grainger’s Time Turner so you can travel back in time, I can give you tried and tested ways of getting those things done which demand your time and attention, or which you just never quite get round to, helping you to manage yourself and others and make the most of your time.
Summary
Time management is never easy – we’re all busy people with lots of things to do, from responsibilities concerning teaching, training or management to other people demanding our attention both at work and at home. How can we ever fit in everything we want to do? Through a combination of techniques, I have been able to successfully organise a team of 20 teachers, keep up my professional development through blogs and webinars, learn new languages and maintain a healthy work-life balance. In this talk I will share examples of these techniques and offer suggestions for how you can adapt them to your own situation. They include breaking down tasks to make them more achievable and less daunting, using to do lists, tracking what I do every day and creating new habits out of the things I want to achieve. I will give examples of how I use these techniques at work and at home and why they could work for you too, as well as how to apply different strategies to different goals. This talk would be particularly useful for managers and those interested in fitting professional development in around their current schedules, but would be relevant to anybody who ever struggles with only having 24 hours in the day!
I have used journal writing with students from all over the world, and have found that they are intensely rewarding for teachers and students. In this session, I’ll share ideas for how to set up a journal writing system and show examples of journals from my students and my own language learning.
Summary
Journal writing can be used in a wide variety of ways both inside and outside the classroom in order to provide regular personalised writing practice for students. In addition, they can serve many other purposes: providing a space for students to experiment with new language, encouraging them to reflect on their language learning, and helping the teacher and student to get to know each other better.
In this session, I will describe how I have interpreted journal writing with my students. I have implemented them with students aged 12-70 in both monolingual and multilingual classrooms. I have also experienced journal writing as a student of Russian and have learnt a lot from the process. This has fed back into my teaching and enabled me to experience first-hand the benefits of keeping a journal in a foreign language.
I will share the advantages of such regular writing for the teacher and student, address some of the potential problems involved in setting up and maintaining a regular journal system, including finding suitable topics to write about. I will also describe how to encourage students to join in, and give ideas for how to use the language students produce. Finally I will give you links to find out more about journal writing in other contexts.
“I’ve studied English for years, but I can’t understand anyone!” This was a common complaint from my students on arrival in the UK. This workshop aims to introduce you to practical activities and materials you can use to help students transition from understanding scripted listening materials to feeling comfortable with real-world English.
Summary
Listening is the skill we use most in a second language. We have to understand speakers in many different contexts, of different ages, genders, levels of education, and with a range of accents, both native and non-native. However, this is rarely reflected in the classroom, where listening tends to be focussed on other students in class or on scripted coursebook recordings in ‘standard’ forms of English, mostly spoken by young to middle-aged adults (or overly excited children in the case of young learner materials!). Teachers also tend to focus on testing comprehension, rather than on teaching better listening skills. This results in students lacking confidence in their listening abilities and/or lacking knowledge of how to approach listening in the real world.
The aim of this workshop is to introduce and try out a range of activities and materials which you can use in your classroom to teach listening, rather than testing it. Some of the principles discussed will be based on John Field’s Listening in the Language Classroom (Cambridge 2008), as well as my own experience in the classroom and as a second language learner. The workshop will also look at how you can make the listening you use in the classroom reflect the real world as much as possible. Finally, participants will be given the chance to share activities and materials which have worked for them, as well as discussing how to apply the activities from the workshop to their own contexts.
What can we do to help students develop their autonomy? How can we encourage them to study outside class? How much input should teachers have in this? This talk will look at how these questions can be answered through the Personal Study Programme (PSP), created by International House Newcastle to support students in their learning.
Summary
It is well-known that teachers should teach learners HOW to learn, not just WHAT to learn. This is particularly true now that students have easy access to so much English online, and teachers are no longer always their first port of call for information about language. What teachers do have is knowledge of the language acquisition process and of the best way to use resources available to learners. Through this, they can help students become more effective learners. As well as learner training in the classroom, what else can we do? The Personal Study Programme (PSP) is an alternative to the Self-Access Centre (SAC), combining elements of more traditional teaching with autonomous study. This talk will begin by looking at how PSP is similar to and different from a SAC, and how IH Newcastle has implemented and developed it. I will discuss the teachers’ role in promoting learner autonomy and delivering PSP, how it influences the way that we teach our non-PSP lessons, and how it fits into the overall structure of the school. Most importantly, I will examine what exactly students gain from participating in PSP, based on feedback gathered from students at International House Newcastle. I will also consider what changes we can make to PSP to continue improving the programme in the future.
What factors help or hinder students’ uptake and continued use of online materials to aid their English learning outside the classroom?
What can teachers do in class to encourage students to take advantage of available materials and help them to overcome any obstacles?
This talk will detail the results of action research done in my classes.
Summary
For the last year I have been using Edmodo (a web-based interface designed for education and similar to facebook) to share materials, online activities and other links with students to extend work done in class. However, based on a survey I did at the end of the academic year only about half of the students have taken advantage of these materials.
As a result of this, I decided to research the factors which influence students’ use of online materials, as well as experimenting with activities and strategies which can be used in class to increase this usage.
In the session I will share the results of this research, in the following way:
a list of characteristics displayed by students who regularly use online materials to further their study;
a corresponding list for students who are more reluctant to use online materials;
a summary of the type of online materials which students find most useful;
practical ideas for teachers to use in class to encourage reluctant students to begin to exploit online materials.
By the end of the session, you should have the information and inspiration you need to encourage more students to exploit the wealth of materials available on the internet.
After you’re accepted…
Well done! I’d love to know which of these tips you found more or less useful when preparing your proposal.
The students and teacher who joined us live during this session, from Gaza and Argentina
One aim of the Hands Up Project is to make language learning personal and intimate. The teachers give the students freedom to write personal stories, and afterwards to create a remote theatre performance which will be done globally. They can tell their stories to the world. ‘They’ are kids in Palestine, and young people from around the world. They create a sense of community irrespective of their location.
The image above shows how it felt like everyone was in the same place at the same time, despite working remotely.
We are responsible for the future of our learners, but in the future they are going to be responsible for our future tomorrow.
Haneen
Why do we need to link students with their peers globally?
Self-identification
Self celebration
Cultural diversity
The children stand tall in front of the screen that they are able to do something so special.
Intercultural framework
Students in both countries are asked to write personal stories individually. Don’t worry about mistakes – they are the ‘golden gates towards learning’ (wonderful phrase!)
Swap the personal stories between you and the other teacher.
Both groups meet online through Zoom. They go into breakout rooms (or do this remotely) to turn the stories into scripts. This is when students start discussing ideas, assigning roles, negotiating. The teacher is there as a stage director, praising their efforts and scaffolding their learning.
The students from both ends meet in their local context (face-to-face) to edit and reformulate the script. The teacher supports them by supplying vocabulary and by editing the script, reformulating the language to a higher level, making it more accurate and authentic. Students can see before and after the editing process.
Rehearsing the story and assigning the roles. The teacher acts as a stage director and facilitator. Implicitly they’re showing intonation, pausing. Explicitly, they’re showing how to use the camera, how to work with the Zoom box as a theatre method.
Performing the stories in front of the screen.
The original authors along with other participants discussing the whole experience.
In the example Haneen shared, the children in Palestine didn’t have any awareness of Argentinian music or names. They started to learn this, and started to learn more about creating stage directions.
Victoria’s story
We were put into groups and given the story above, with 10 minutes to turn it into a play. It was so much fun! [This said by somebody who refused point blank to do drama activities until 3 or 4 years ago!]
It was great to see a performance by four members of the audience in the room (from the UK, India and one other country I don’t know), done live for the students from Argentina and Gaza who were joining us remotely in the session. One of them (Victoria) wrote the story you see above. Victoria told us how she felt about watching other people perform her story, then talked about her feelings when the police came to her house. Then the Palestinian girls told us about her feelings when performing the Argentinian story – it was a new experience for them. When they first met each other, they were very scared and didn’t know what to do, but after that it was an amazing experience.
We then watched recordings of student performances performing the same play.
Watching the videos, we saw how when producing the video, students took advantage of ‘hide non-video participants’, switching on and off cameras, changing names, using props around the screen, knocking on the camera, all to add to the theatrical experience of watching the plays. It was fantastic!
We also heard from the girls themselves talking about how they feel about being part of the project.
At the end of the session, the audience and the students who were joining us remotely sang the Hands up song together, which was a lovely communal experience, with inspirational words.
These children are the real stars, teaching us how to work together and learn from each other.
The Hands Up Project has been an amazing experience for me, and has inspired me. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to be here with you here today and to speak to you in English. I want to be a volunteer for the Hands Up Project in the future.
Dana, one of the students from Gaza
Haneen has given our students a voice. The students’ personal stories tell us about themselves, they are sharing their identities. They have created a bridge between our two schools, built from the bricks of our stories, stuck together with commitment and joy. We are honoured to be here with you today.
Maria Teresa Continental, the teacher from Argentina
There are three books of plays written by students as part of the Hands Up Project. You can buy them to use with your students or to inspire them to write their own plays. Get them at the Hands Up Project shop. I have all three of them, and can recommend them. Each play is very short – 3 or 4 pages maximum – and easy to learn and perform, but with endless opportunities for creativity from the students.
Amal is the creator of remote theatre, and one of the longest-standing volunteers on the Hands Up Project. She created a piece of remote theatre by accident as she thought it was necessary to perform entirely on Zoom, and later they made it a rule that the children couldn’t move outside the screen or edit the video.
Gaza has been under siege for nearly 15 years. It has a huge impact on everybody’s daily life, wellbeing, learning and sense of belonging in the whole world. The learners have no problem with a sense of belonging to their country and community, but what about the whole world?
Global belonging
A lovely term that Amal created
Students lack motivation. They feel that the world is deaf to them, that nobody is paying attention to them. This makes the work of the teachers very challenging. If they feel there’s no connection with the world, they don’t see the point of learning English, the language of the world. This meant the teachers wanted to find innovative ways to push the students towards learning and give them a reason to learn. Remote theatre seemed to be the way to do this.
What is remote theatre?
A short script that is created by students. They then rehearse it, and perform it live on facebook or YouTube to a global audience. It can be performed at conferences, at a literature festival, at schools or at universities.
Another way that they have run these projects is linking groups of learners from different countries to create plays together, meeting via Zoom to write and rehearse.
If you’d like to watch an example of one of these plays, take a look at the Hands Up Project YouTube channel. For example, this one from Czechia and Palestine:
How does remote theatre build a sense of global belonging?
Plays with global themes, e.g. pollution, refugees, bullying
Students and teachers conversations during the rehearsals – they work hard to communicate in English to say what they want to say, and this process really helped the students to learn, not just language, but respecting each other’s opinions, listening to each other, understanding different accents of English
Finding a global online audience to perform the play for – this creates a connection with the outside world, as the students can’t travel outside Gaza
After the play there is a lot more – discussions, what happened in the play, what experiences they had while practicing. For example: How do you feel when you’re acting?
COVID was an excellent opportunity to do lots of collaboration globally (though Hands Up have been doing this for many years).
Students don’t just learn the language because there’s going to be a test at the end of the semester. They learn because they’re motivated to communicate.
The Hands Up Project provides a safe channel to do this.
Students wanted to share their thoughts about the project, and we saw a video of them telling us in Arabic about what they got out of it: friends in other countries, people hearing their voice and caring about their talent, support from teachers and students, learning about other cultures and religions, noticing that their are points in common between their different cultures, becoming more aware of people around the world.
In 2019, Hands Up won the ELTon award for starting the play-writing competition.
A new aspect of the Hands Up Project focuses on how to empower the students, and change the teacher-learner dynamic. They want to create independent, powerful learners who are in charge of their own learning.
In most classes in Gaza, the teacher controls everything. From 1-10, how much of a control freak do you think you are in your classroom?
Raja’a started teaching 3 years ago. She is really enthusiastic about trying new ideas.
Students v. Teachers
The students come up with questions from Biology, Chemistry, Physics. They ask the teacher the questions. If the teacher can answer, they get a point. If they can’t, the students get a point.
The students are left to come up with their own questions, and the teacher doesn’t intervene until the students ask for it. Because the students have to be able to communicate the question and the answer, they are encouraged to reformulate and work with language to communicate what they want to ask.
The majority of Raja’a’s students aren’t motivated to learn English, because they feel that they won’t be able to leave Gaza, there’s nobody there who they can speak to, and there wouldn’t be a use for it in their lives. They are also studying in large classes.
With her 9-10 year old students with a very low level of English, Raja’a wanted to give them a reason to use the language from the coursebook in a communicative way. The students had to guess what the teacher is ‘going to’ do tomorrow. If the student gets the information right, they get a point. If the student gets it wrong, the teacher gets a point. The teacher can reformulate the language as needed.
The video Raja’a showed us demonstrated how excited the students were to do this activity. The atmosphere in the classroom was fantastic – if the students love the teacher, they’ll learn from you.
The reformulations Raja’a did as part of this activity are now an active part of the students’ language because they heard them in a relaxed environment.
The students got 5 points, Raja’a got 3 points. They were excited about this and felt empowered. The next day, they told the whole school that they had a competition with their teacher and that the teacher lost.
Collaboration, invisible connections, a little chaotic, powerful
Words Sara used to describe the Hands Up Project
Remote teaching
Sara normally works remotely with a teacher who is in the classroom.
In the example video we watched, the girls were telling Sara the story of Layla and the Wolf (similar to Little Red Riding Hood). They worked together to say what they wanted to.
During the story:
Heba’s decision not to speak sets the tone for the class. Why is that important?
Jana tells the story with the language available to her – what effect might that have on the class?
Sara (the student) overcomes a moment of doubt to continue the story. How does that benefit her and the other learners?
The whole process is confidence-building and empowering. They decided how to be in the class, including making a decision not to speak. As a teacher, Sara didn’t make her speak – she created a safe space for the student to make the decision to be silent. It pushes other students in the class to speak because Heba doesn’t want to.
The next step was to prepare for a retelling of the story, changing the location, the characters.
When there was a misunderstanding, the students helped each other because the teacher encouraged them to translate the word in Arabic, and teach it to her. They were allowed to correct the teacher’s pronunciation, and the students worked together to offer help. They all needed help, and they all provided help. This affected the atmosphere because it was one of equals, rather than a teacher-student power dynamic.
This is a really playful process. You can play with the different languages in your power.
Sara then retold the story with the students’ changes. She did it because she thought it would be a challenge for the students to do this spontaneously. She asked the students questions to elicit the parts of the story so that they were involved throughout the process, and using language they’d learnt connected to the story. The teacher feeds in language throughout the process to collaboratively build the story.
Throughout the whole process, the students have personal control of the language. They’re playing with it, and looking for ideas in their head. They’re learning a language properly in a way that they can actually use it.
Takeaways
Whose responsibility is it to understand?
Learning isn’t one-sided
Opportunities to take personal control of the language
Choosing when and how to speak, and the teacher allowing this
Learners’ contributions to a class aren’t purely linguistic – acknowledge all of their contributions, whatever they are
During COVID, Dalya and Elena worked on facebook live to create lessons for students. Dalya’s worked with Elena since 2018, and this is the first time they’ve met face-to-face. Elena is a digital materials creator based in Mallorca.
The Hands Up Project team teaching project won an ELTon in 2021 for the innovative ideas of the way their project works. As Elena said, there are so many exciting things which HUP is working on.
Going to (with a puppet)
This is what one Live looked like on screen, with Dalya using a puppet to help with the language:
The Live chat allowed them to get feedback from students, teachers, parents, and get feedback about what’s happening in the lesson.
Afterwards, they re-edited the videos from the live lesson and used them again after the pandemic to create short clips. They had hours and hours of valuable materials which they didn’t want to lose. We saw examples of some of these videos during the presentation – I wish you could see them too!
They kept sections of the lesson which focussed on the key language, and added titles highlighting important structures. The clips also aimed to continue to promote interactivity by adding pictures and questions directed at the students. At the end of the video, there is a link to a digital activity, for example a WordWall matching activity. Absent students can still get practice opportunities.
Although the activity isn’t very complex, and won’t necessarily promote a huge amount of learning, the fact that students can watch a video and then do something successfully as a result of it can have a huge impact on the children’s confidence.
Guessing game
Facebook Live was selected to still have interaction, as children wouldn’t necessarily have been able to access a live Zoom lesson due to connection issues.
During the Facebook live sessions, when playing a game, Dalya and Elena took answers from the Live chat and called out student names so the students following the chat felt like they were part of the lesson. Using the clip again in a classroom lesson with the titles shows students how to play the game, and helps them to review the useful language.
Finding out about other people
When you have scripted conversations in a coursebook, but perform them on Zoom with a different person it brings them to life, especially when the two people are from different countries. It helps students to understand why English could actually be useful for them.
Principles to create quality videos(especially for young learners)
Short, no longer than 6 minutes
Need to integrate visuals, games and realia
Should serve specific purposefully engaging tasks
Use friendly language and body gestures
Use scripts and texts to clarify things
Advised to send PowerPoints to learners to build on what is in the video
One of the things the Hands Up Project does is to pair brilliant teachers from Gaza with brilliant teachers from other parts of the world to work together and play.
The first lesson that they learnt from their teenagers on this international communication course was the need to emphasise communication. How to communicate when language isn’t necessarily available, through other methods like mime, drawing and others. Mediating meaning wherever they can.
When we teach communicatively, the focus is actually often on avoiding miscommunication. Culture is seen as an iceberg with superficial differences (e.g. how you show appreciation for food by (not) leaving some on the plate), and underneath this there are hidden depths.
How true is this?
They’ve actually found that these differences are much less present than the commonalities between us. Those situations where there is a complete communication breakdown due to culture are actually relatively rare. This kind of approach can lead us to promoting stereotypes.
Cultural intelligence
[I really like this term] This is what they’re really interested in, rather than thinking about superficial stereotypes as culture.
What does it mean?
Being open to learn about other cultures, institutions and languages
Having knowledge of other cultures, institutions and languages
Teens and children can approach others without prejudice. They have a curiosity when they meet others to find out more about how they learn, which adults might not have.
Course content is built around…
1. Comparing lives and environments
2. Understanding individuals’ situations motivations (like examining a tree and its roots, rather than an iceberg)
3. Opportunity for collaboration – allowing students to work together in problem-solving tasks
Online ICC course principles
Activities from the course
Words & language
What word or expression do you use most often in your language?
What’s your favourite word in English? Why?
What noise does a cat/horse/dog make in your language?
Teach me the most useful word or phrase in your language.
What’s a saying in your language that you especially like? Why?
Free word association (e.g. sport, family, cool, afraid)
Senses and abilities
This helps learners to find common ground, and it taps into their immediate environment.
What can you see and hear right now?
What’s your favourite smell, taste, view?
What ability are you proudest of? Why?
What special ability do you wish you had? What would you do with it?
Home
Describe a journey that you make each day. Help me visualise what you see, hear and smell. Perhaps describe a person you see every time, the sounds you hear every time, the smells you smell.
Name 1 good thing about your house/flat. And 1 bad thing.
What’s the first thing you think of when you think of home?
What do you like about the area you live in? What do you dislike about it?
Collaboration
Are there more wheels or doors in the world? (Thinking fast and slow) Put a quick answer in the chat box, then go to breakout rooms to have a longer, more in-depth discussion.
Your best news headline 5 years from now. (Brainstorm)
An important problem in your community and possible solutions (Brainstorming: selling others’ ideas) – put possible solutions into the chat, but another person has to sell that idea to everybody. It helps you to see things from others’ perspectives.
Not enough conferencing this week 🙂 I had a free day in Belfast and found out that The Hands Up Project were running their online conference, so decided to attend. There will be separate posts for each talk to be kind to my iPad – I’ll add links here next week.
If you’ve never heard of The Hands Up Project, take a look at their website. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Nick Bilbrough set up a project to work with teachers in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. It’s designed to amplify the voices of young people in Palestine, and around the world. They run many innovative projects, including writing plays
Why Teach Play Love?– Scott Thornbury
Scott Thornbury, a trustee of The Hands Up Project, suggested the theme ‘Teach Play Love’ for this year.
Teach: Not just about the delivery of information, but it takes place in a particular place with particular people.
While other classes in the curriculum activate mostly the brain, the language class engages the whole body, its… [I missed the end of this]
Clare Kramsch
Play: language play is good for learners, because they can experiment with language and functions.
A person who can play with a language in creative and socially-effective ways – to tell a joke or a story – could certainly also buy an airline ticket. The reverse is not necessarily true.
Guy Cook
Drama is inherently good for language because it’s participatory, co-constructed, aural and oral, expressive, creative, transformative. Plays, like ‘Toothbrush’ and the rest of The Hands Up Project book, are a great way to learn.
Love: emotion is a very important vehicle for practising and learning language.
Things that made me go [emoji!] – Chris Sowton
In support of emojis
Powerful communicative tool, especially in challenging circumstances
Bridge gaps between teachers and students – a kind of inter language
Allow students the opportunity to express themselves in a way they might not otherwise
Teaching in Challenging Circumstances [https://tinyurl.com/TeachinginCC] is an open access book from Cambridge to support teachers with practical ideas.
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
Here’s are some extracts from the book:
Countering dominant narratives about teachers
We need a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be a teacher.
Ukraine: teachers as frontline workers
This was Chris’s first experience of working with teachers in a conflict area. They were webinars run by Cambridge – to have people in the same place at the same time talking about the same issues. Questions from teachers included:
What is the purpose of learning English right now? It speaks to a possible future, a brighter tomorrow. It gives parents respite from the situation they’re in.
How do I assess my students in a conflict situation? Moving away from traditional areas, thinking about progress in different ways. Just the act of being in class was a triumph.
What do I do when I hear an air raid siren going off in class?
What he learnt:
The challenge to think quickly and adapt
The value of collegiality and being in the same place at the same time
The importance of specialist skills and knowledge (e.g. drama, well-being, conflict) as teachers are on the frontline
The impact which making materials open source can have (thank you Cambridge) – we need to get great quality stuff out there so teachers can use it, and there’s so much great stuff which is sitting there not being used
It shouldn’t take a crisis to challenge widespread, systemic educational failure
Jordan: teachers as safe spaces
There is an emotional and psychological value place on learning language.
There is a strong motivation of students in refugee situations.
There is a difference in the way boys and girls are taught. In the girls class, there was much more engagement and a positive atmosphere. In the boys class, the teaching was much more teacher-centred.
Here are three extracts from a British Council report touching on these three issues:
What Chris learnt
The classroom can be a space for imagining different futures, which can reflect positively on the present
How talking about trauma in a second language can provide therapeutic benefit
Multilingualism should be valued more – and certified where possible (not just focussing on English). How can we create a certification process which values skills in multiple languages?
Languages are crucial for increasing all forms of capital, but the system doesn’t always support this: NGOs work in silos (due to funding), certification is hard to obtain, and tech-first/tech-only solutions (apps/websites will be the only answer – but it’s much more sophisticated than this)
Palestine: teachers as enablers of latent skills and knowledge
The extraordinary desire and demand for development.
When Chris does training, he has a 20/ 60 / 20 model in his head – 20% of participants will love everything, 20% will not be interested, and 60% will be in the middle. In Palestine, he had a 5 / 55 / 40 model – 40% were very engaged.
Teachers are agents of social change.
What Chris learnt
Even in highly challenging circumstances, teachers are willing to – and benefit from – play (e.g. a snowball fight)
There is a repository of latent creativity and skills which need – demand – an outlet.
Teachers can make the present palatable and the future desirable [I love this quote!]
The virtual world provides opportunities which the physical world isn’t always able to – and language is what can facilitate that. It allows for further support after face-to-face training, along with many other opportunities.
General: teachers as deskilled, disempowered, disregarded pawns
Individual constraints: a teacher who had been given training, but when she went back to her school her headteacher stopped her from implementing the training, even though she was keen and interested and wanted to do so. If other stakeholders are dragging you back, then your training can be more frustrating – you know what you want to do, but aren’t in a position to do it.
Stakeholder constraints: teachers in Nepal regularly feedback back about parental view on student-led learning = chaos and lack of discipline. We need to adopt a whole-school approach, and train everybody, not just the teachers.
Systemic constraints: emphasis on quantity rather than quality, we measure training in number of trainings run rather than impact they have. Start with the impact: what’s the change we want to see, and work back from that. This is particularly an issue with funding, including how frequently the funding happen – what change can you realistically make on a one / two year cycle? We end up with conservative approaches because the cycle is too short for experimentation.
National constraints: language policy in South Sudan (Chris’s EdD research), there is the choice of English as the Medium of Instruction for political reasons, but there are very few people in the country who speak it. This has an impact on people across the education system.
Geopolitical constraints: Somaliland – teachers are targets, and schools can be the locus of political violence. The school is often the only recognisable part of the state in a particular area.
Lebanon: teachers as humans with histories
People’s instinct is always to teach as they were taught. Breaking those habits is extremely difficult, especially in challenging circumstances.
Teachers greatly value the opportunity to share how they are feeling – but need prompting. Storytelling is one way to do this.
An activity Chris did:
Groups of 6
A piece of paper with 6 boxes per person: each teacher write a title
Next person: carry the story on – who are the characters in the story
Next person: draw a picture which represents that story
Next: write the first paragraph of the story
This is a way to explore how you feel through the cloak of anonymity. If you just gave a piece of blank paper to a teacher and said ‘write a story’, they would be unlikely to do this.
Another activity to link emotions to learning the alphabet:
This helps young students to realise that they can have a positive impact on somebody’s life. It’s a simple, but powerful approach.
What Chris learnt
The value of puppets – linguistically, pedagogically, psychologically – children make puppets, and teach them things, and learn hugely in the process
How learning materials can have positive psychosocial messages embedded – how important this is when other services are unavailable or severely constrained
Decontextualised research which has no clear practical impact and which is driven by outside interests is valueless. We have to engage with the people we’re researching
Indonesia: teachers as trusted guides
At a university: 60-70 people, arms folded, why are you here, resistant to change
At a language school: as soon as you walk into the school, there is an atmosphere of play. Children and teachers in the photos as you entered the school – what happens as you enter this space.
What Chris learnt
Teaching hierarchies based on longevity are complete and utter nonsense
Also true based on where you teach
Nigeria: teachers as professionals who need ongoing support
Little has changed in methodology over the past 20 years. This programme is new: TARL = Teaching at the right level. Mixing up 3 years at the school so that they’re split by level, not age, especially when there are very large classes.
However, lack of support in the field for teachers.
Multi-tiered cascades present challenges in the quality of delivery.
What Chris learnt
/
Radical thinking can help unlock ‘insolvable’ problems.
Delivering large programmes needs strong admin and structures – without this, it’s irrelevant how good the materials are
Materials can be a way of delivering support and CPD to teachers – the training is embedded
This was a lesson plan Chris created, which was translated into the local language. There was a lot of guidance for the teacher, but also the opportunity to do things their own way. The footnotes give training information.
Like Sarah said, she’s never experienced a conference and a group of teachers who communicate love in quite the way this conference and this group of teachers have. It’s been an amazing day.
Sarah’s first confession: she loves watching Love Actually at Christmas (me too!) Why does she have to say it’s a confession?
If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has possibly happened once in history – it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society.
If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.
Richard Curtis
Why are we so afraid to talk about love?
Boys don’t like French because ‘it’s all about love and stuff’.
It’s ‘not cool to be kind’, compassionate or talk about ‘love and stuff’.
Cf. Berlin, 2018; Williams et al., 2002
Age of reason and overdominance of ‘logic’
Hyper-rational perspective (disconnect from emotions)
Subordination of emotions
Devaluation of supposed ‘feminine traits’
Narrow view of ‘science’ – the scientific view of what counts as research (e.g. into emotions) has only very recently opened up
But if you talk to students and teachers in the classroom, they know that emotion is a key / unavoidable / essential [my adjectives] part of learning.
Love is conceived of particularly narrowly
When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities.
bell hooks – All about love (2001, p.54)
These characteristics of love are also characteristics of a good teacher and a good classroom.
Love is to take responsibility
You enact love, it’s not just a feeling. When we love somebody or something, we don’t just feel, we act. We feel responsible towards that person or thing.
Love does appear in education but under other guises
(Barcelona and Coehlo, 2016)
Here are some of the terms which could be replaced by ‘love’ in the literature:
Pedagogical care is caring that our students don’t just learn, but that they grow too.
Teaching with love…
Love for ourselves
For the language
For our colleagues
For our students
For others near and far
For humanity
For animals and plant life
For the planet
Love expands far beyond a romantic relationship with another person. It’s commitment and action.
5 facets of love
There are many different possible facets of love, but Sarah selected 5 to focus on in this presentation:
Empathy
Compassion
Wellbeing
Kindness
Fairness
Empathy
This is the foundation of all kinds of communication. It’s being able to understand others and communicate with them.
You take yourself out of your own position and try to imagine how somebody else feels.
Walk a mile in their shoes, for example based on pictures, or stopping a film and thinking about the characters. You try to imagine other people’s lives. You don’t need to agree, but you can understand them better perhaps.
There are many ways to do this:
Use of literature and films
Role play and simulation
Questions to think about perspective: Why might they have said that? Why might they think that?
Teaching with empathy
How we teach: implicitly, we model it
Explicitly: we draw attention to it
Psychological safety: give people the space to make mistakes, help learners to support each other, take away the sense of risk, create a safe space in the classroom. The learners think about how each other feels, and learn to support each other. (Edmondson, 2019)
Enacting pedagogical caring: learners can see when we teach with love. They see it from our preparation for lessons for example. (Wentzel, 1997)
Attending to teacher and learner wellbeing (Mercer and Gregersen, 2020)
Compassion
What is compassion?
Being able to manage your emotional response to compassion is important. Compassion fatigue is a real issue.
Being motivated to provide care – for yourself and for others.
It has an action element, but also an awareness element.
Spheres of compassion
We need to think about compassion at different levels:
Self
Others close
Others far
Non-human life
Planet
Fierce compassion
Neff, 2021
Sometimes when you understand what is needed, you need to be fierce about it. You need to be assertive about it. Compassion and love are not always soft and fluffy.
Mistakes are allowed! Fail first, then learn – fostering growth mindset. This is not just a message for our students. We need to apply this to teachers as well. We need to be kind to ourselves as teachers as well.
Difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations.
Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing ceramics with gold, so the mistakes/problems are evident. We can share our best failures, and consider how to reflect on these failures.
What is your ideal colleague?
Choose three characteristics.
To what extent do you display these characteristics to others?
Sarah does this with pre-service teachers before they start team teaching. Since she started doing this with her teachers, they’ve had a lot fewer problems with the teams. Teachers reflect on what it’s like to build a relationship for teaching.
Wellbeing
It is not the same as mental health.
Teacher wellbeing is the foundation of good practice. It isn’t an optional extra. (Amen!)
It’s irresponsible if we DON’T talk about teacher wellbeing.
What factors affect your wellbeing?
There are many different areas that can contribute to it, It’s not just self-care strategies and yoga. It’s not just happy fluffy things. It’s a serious area that goes beyond the personal, and into larger systemic factors which we should consider as well: precarity, lack of trade union support in many countries, working in challenging circumstances. We can’t necessarily control everything that might affect our wellbeing.
Two strands:
Personal characteristics
Social and contextual conditions
If we’re serious about wellbeing, we should be thinking about both of these. Wellbeing is a conversation we need to have at length and seriously.
What I focus my attention on
An activity we can do to give you a sense of control. This is not an activity to do as a solution, but this can help.
What you focus your attention on, is what you can see. We’re naturally drawn to the negative: negativity bias. We can become conscious of that. Our attention is valuable: think about what we give it to. Pretty much everybody who looks at the picture above focuses on the blue dot immediately, and has to think for longer to focus on other aspects of the image.
Focus on the positives. Even in the most difficult circumstances, you can find little moments of positivity.
This is not about suppressing the negative, but learning to notice the positive too.
Savouring
We can mentally time travel, and revisit things in the past. We can become very conscious of the present and savour moments. We can travel to the future and imagine possibilities. This can help us to draw attention to the positives in life.
Gratitude journals
This is not an instant remedy, but when you do it over time you start to see positives more easily. (My mum has definitely found this) 🙂
Planet A or Planet B?
Where do you think we live?
The research says it’s Planet A, but that doesn’t make the news. There are hundreds of examples of people being kind every day.
Humans are fundamentally kind by nature.
Human Kind by Gregman
Kindness can be political
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson Mandela
Random acts of kindness
There are great resources on the website, including for the language classroom.
Kindness doesn’t have to be huge. It’s little gestures.
Teaching for kindness
Here are some teaching ideas to give kindness a larger role in the classroom:
Sometimes there are difficult conversations to be had.
Transformative Social and Emotional Learning
SEL = Social and Emotional Learning
This is relatively new. It’s not just about kindness, but also about fierce compassion, awareness, bringing in the political. You cannot talk about love without talking about these things as well.
Fairness
What is fairness?
Understanding implicit and explicit bias
Recognising issues of power and privilege
Examining who has voice and in what ways
Reflecting on social structures and equity
Representation in the materials we use
There are many different factors we can consider related to representation:
Race
Ethnicity
Religion
Gender identity
Sexual orientation
Age
Ability
Language
…
And there are questions we can ask:
What or who are present and visible?
What or who is missing or invisible?
What or who are portrayed positively or negatively?
Who is positioned in stereotypical roles?
Who has power?
Sarah asks her pre-service teachers to examine the materials they use. For example: Can you find an example of image of somebody in a wheelchair where they just happen to be in a wheelchair, for example ordering in a restaurant?
Students are in the best place to create their own materials. This is also an act of love.
Summary
We have the right to bring in all five of these facets of love into our work. It’s fair when teachers are treated with love too.
Be brave enough to teach with love and teach to love.
[I missed the start of the talk, setting the context – sorry Luis!]
In Chile, where Luis did his study most university teacher training courses didn’t include specific modules on materials design, though it might have been included in other methodology modules (I think that’s what was said as I arrived!)
Many of the methodology materials talk about how to use and adapt coursebooks, rather than how to make their own materials. So how do language teachers learn to do this?
The apprenticeship of observation is now seen as one of the main obstacles to teachers implementing innovations.
Materials – what do we know?
Materials as curricular artefacts: how can they promote the learning and teaching of English?
Materials as cultural artefacts: representational repertoires in materials.
Materials in use: use of the textbook as syllabus, textbook reification – novice teachers particularly assume things work without questioning it.
Activity theory
This is a kind of sociocultural theory which Luis used to frame his study.
The activity Luis is focussing on is ‘learning to design materials’.
(Luis explained this very quickly, and I couldn’t keep up!)
Research questions
Research methods
8 pre-service teachers in their final year in year 5, doing their practicum, and working to get their BA in English language teaching.
He used stimulated recall interviews based on materials the students sent him. For example: ‘What were you thinking about when you decided to create this activity?’
Findings
Much of the design of the materials by these teachers was mediated by the idea that the materials needed to resemble course books.
He found an important tension between the pre-service teachers and their use of coursebooks. There was a need to cover the textbook as it was used as the syllabus, which somewhat removed the agency of the teachers in creating their materials.
Teachers have an average of 27 teaching hours per week, and sometimes as many as 40. This creates big challenges.
Influence of the settting
Mentor teachers from the school sometimes critiqued the teachers for creating their own materials and moving too far from the coursebook.
The teachers are taught English at the university while they are learning to teach too. They experienced these methods in their own learning, so used it in their teaching too:
ELT as teaching the textbook
Many novice teachers rely on the coursebook. The coursebook becomes the goal. If I need to cover the coursebook, everything needs to be geared towards that.
Influence from the school setting
Classrooms often have 40+ students and 25+ hours, so there is very little time to plan. Teachers learn how to teach, but can’t use this in the context, so rely on the coursebook.
Their own learning of English is textbook mediated, and therefore their practice is likely to be like this too.
Reflections
Implications
Is a school seen as only a place where students learn? Or is it seen as a place where teachers learn too?
Paul has been talking about using L1 for many years, going right back to IATEFL Brighton 1994, about 20 ways to use the mother tongue. He’d done a Masters degree at Reading University in 1985, counting the number of activities in a 45-minute lesson – he found there were 660 tasks in a given hour (Should I do this? Should I ask him?)
[This talk report will be truncated as I need to leave a little early for my own talk in the next slot!]
These were the 20 activities he shared, and the ones which were blue were considered controversial at the time.
When planning / preparing, how do you assess the level of difficulty of a text? If you’re teaching monolingual groups, it could be what’s guessable / needs glossing / testing. We use L1 knowledge all the time, so celebrate this strategy systematically and share it with students.
Bilingual resources out of class
If it was a real-life task, or one students worked on alone, that was OK, but it was considered problematic if teachers used the L1.
But times have now changed!
Here are some connected quotes:
The third box down is a much richer definition of translations. The part at the bottom is the six types of translation they suggest we should cover in the classroom.
5 cross-lingual mediation activities
How many of these do you do already? I think I’ve only ever tried number 2.
Using L1 mentally, not orally
Name at least 4 fruits starting with the same letter or sound in L1. Quickly say / type them in English.
You’re bouncing the languages inside your head, drilling the vocabulary by yourself. It works well with particular combinations of languages.
2-phrase presentation to show / share L1 advantages
Give a list of words which you know are easy based on their L1, and work out pronunciation by showing the stressed syllable. Then have the harder words (depending on their L1), with a matching activity. They’re using L1 anyway, so help them with this.
You can encourage students to make links to L1, though they don’t have to actually say the L1:
Cognates
Match phrases and photos, and then…
Then consider ‘Which 4 are very similar to Spanish?’ Paul wouldn’t have the Spanish on the board, but he’d still work with it. The students are drilling themselves, and making connections between the two languages. We’re showing the learners the benefits of the L1, and where they need to focus their energy.
Which have similar structure to Spanish?
Which two have similar word order in Spanish?
Helps students to decide where to focus their energy when learning a list of vocabulary.
Student research
Have students research common ground – they built a wall of cognates:
Different approaches to grammar
Get students to score how similar language is to their L1. This helps them to process the structures and make beneficial connections.
You’ve heard about inductive and deductive grammar teaching. What about seductive teaching? 🙂 Don’t waste time – just tell them what to work on!
Begin class by showing anticipated mistakes, corrected. This works in a flipped classroom too.
This approach has a lot of benefits:
Fronting grammar mistakes saves time.
Use online translation
If you have a text you’re going to use with students, put it through a translator, then reverse translate it back into English, then flag up the differences. You can also get the students to do this.
Encourage language play.
Type random characters into Google translate and see what comes out. Paul’s son did this with Chinese:
Learn to use YouTube!
You can use filters for the length of videos you’ll watch, transcripts to navigate the video, change the speed. You can have control over the input you want using this.
Copy and paste parts of the transcript into Google Translate.
[If you want more like this, I recommend Youglish to help you find useful videos]
Once in Google translate, you can star sections and build your own phrase book. Export to Quizlet and create a study set – you can do this automatically useful.
Change subtitles to L1 on YouTube – see L1 on screen, English in transcript, giving you a bilingual transcript.
Caution with auto translation of YouTube subtitles though, as it may not get the correct form of the language – but you may want to use this as a tool in the classroom now.
Subtitle use – advice for students
A four-step process:
Teach students strategies for working with subtitles.
(Paul says there’s a good talk in here about subtitle use)
Nisreen works for Cambridge University Press. This is work in progress, with external content coming in the future.
Nisreen has been working on a framework to consider the impact of English.
All of our products and services are designed to improve
Why have a framework?
Understanding our impact is part of our continuous improvements.
We want our learning resources and exams to be the best they can be for our learners and teachers, and have the most positive impact on their learning and beyond.
Impact research
Cambridge has been researching impact since the 1990s.
The learner is at the centre of the education process. They want to empower participants with data and evidence.
Understanding impact should allow you to accentuate the positive and reduce negative effects.
This kind of research is also a form of transparency.
Impact by Design
This was a model introduced in 1996 by Cambridge English Assessment.
It is a concept that incorporates:
Impact considerations from the start, and seeks to anticipate potential effects and consequences with a commitment to monitoring and changing things as required
Saville, 2009
It’s a cycle which should begin at the beginning of the process, and feed constantly into what is being done.
Impact framework
Three domains:
Learning
Teaching
Assessment
Impact areas cover many different things, and will probably change with time. For example, focusing on the impact of learning resources on learner development, perceptions and future plans (e.g. study, work).
The indicators measure the areas that affect:
Individuals (e.g. learners, teachers and test takers)
Organisations (e.g. schools, test centres, higher education institutes, employers)
They now have an ‘Impact hub’ which collects all of the data from across the organisation to make them tidier to analyse.
What does an indicator tell us?
They’re like KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). If they notice there is a drop in performance in a particular area, they can set up an impact study to look at it in more depth.
The process is:
Measure
Evaluate
Report
They then communicate their impact findings in a range of ways, which will be a central website (not quite ready yet!)
This was part of the TTEdSIG (Teacher Training and Education Special Interest Group) Showcase.
Gabriel works at the Insitute of Education at the Universidad ORT Uruguay, where they focus on postgrad qualifications. He also works with tertiary-level students for teacher training. The institute has 33 campuses around the country.
He teaches a methodology course. The students have had 3 years in the college, 2 years in the public school systems with a mentor, then in their final year they have a few months with their own group. These are often the most challenging students in a school. As a teacher educator, Gabriel’s role is to help his trainees survive this stage of their training.
His students this year particularly struggled with planning. In Uruguay plans are mandated by law and have to be submitted to principals, who don’t necessarily know anything about English language teaching. This talk is based on an experiment which is still in progress.
Why teach planning?
Professorial reasons: you’re a professional if your classes are well structured and can respond to student needs.
Pedagogical reasons: in initial training, it helps you to match theories to what you’re doing.
Cognitive reasons: the more we plan, the more we free cognitive resources to pay attention to the learners in the classroom.
Sociocultural reasons: we need to follow the rules that are expected of us as teachers.
Lesson plans
Are typically:
Structured
Linear
Sequential
Useless for the unexpected
Intuitive decision-making? Perhaps they stop this – ‘To make the right change at the right time when it needs to be made’
Knowledge and thinking
Expertise is a process, not a pinnacle.
Novices have ‘chaotic knowledge’ – they might have, but don’t know how to access it, or what needs to be applied in this situation.
What does expertise mean in initial teacher education?
Not a state, but a process. One where expertise can surface. Emergent expertise (in the same way as we talk about emergent language)
Requires the development of knowledge, skills, dispositions, experience and relevant training in a specific field
Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect permanent.
Kinds of experts
We are trained to do one thing, but our initial experience may not match our training. We may need to be able to teach different levels, ages and content , so we need adaptive teachers.
Core components of a lesson
A clear learning outcome
An understanding of where my students are and where they need to go – of the students one is teaching
An understanding of the reasons for applying a particular approach to teaching – why use the same approach for a group of demotivated secondary school teenagers learning one more subject, and for motivated individuals living in another country?
An understanding of how the approach operates in practice
A means to assess the progress that t learners are making towards the outcome – my teaching needs to be reactive to what is happening with the learners in the lesson
Reflection in, on and as action to keep us going and to allow us to make the necessary changes to our teaching
A key realisation: the perfect lesson DOES NOT EXIST. And therefore we should not aim to create one – students just need to learn something.
Lessons are encounters between people who are both persuing something.
Gabriel Diaz Maggioli
Starting out
Try without a lesson planning framework first. Take out the materials you’re going to use. Then jot down the procedure, however you like.
When they did this, if you look at the aim and the sequence, you can see there’s a mis-match, and the sequence isn’t necessarily well-articulated. Each person did it on a big piece of paper, then they rotated it and peers made comments.
Then they reformulated their learning outcomes, looked back at their theoretical materials, and had to find a way to see how the theory they knew is reflected in their practice.
Every time they made a change, they were asked Why? Teachers had to justify their decisions.
Why?
When we use concept mapping, we are looking at possibilities, not narrowing in on one specific pathway. We are creating emerging expertise, especially because they are questioning each other. This enables meta cognitive learning too – becoming aware of who I am as a teacher, what I am doing, and how that reflects on my lessons.
This requires teachers to look at what theory supports their doing. This refines their questioning and conceptual understanding.
Takeaways
Gabriel played the voices of some of his teachers on his course. Teachers on the course said they felt more confident in their knowledge connected to theory and background, and could connect it to their students more.
The teachers aren’t using the structures the college prescribes, and they have developed their own shapes. Now they’re aligning activities to the students’ needs.
Answers to discussions
Did you find any resistance to reflection from the teachers? Yes, a lot. If you speak your mind, it can have consequences. It’s a traditional system where students do what the teachers say. But now they’re engaging in a collaborative action research process with these three teachers, who have found they didn’t give their students enough space to speak – they’re now trying to find out why this happens, and how to increase opportunities for speaking.
When Gabriel teaches a teacher, he teaches one teacher at a time, with the idea that one day they will be a teacher educator, in the hope they will change things in the future [a snowball effect]. He always asks: What is best for the learners you are teaching? What do you want to give those people who are going to make a country for your children?
Leo has written a book for Delta publishing called Activities for Alternative Assessment [Amazon affiliate link]. This is Leo’s blog.
Formative v. Summative assessment:
Formative is during the race, summative is when you’ve crossed the line.
…the term ‘assessment’ refers to all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by their students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet the needs.
Black and William, 1998:2
My favourite metaphor Leo used:
Here’s a task for you:
Leo has separated them in this way though he acknowledges that some could be either:
Example activity 1: 3-3-3 Speaking activity
In pairs, student A talks for 3 minutes on a topic may or may not have been prepared in advance. Student B listens. Students switch roles with Student B speaking and Student A speaking.
Switch and speak to another A / B in your group.
Go back to your original partner. Partner compare the original version you heard to the last delivery of the same monologue.
Diagram inspired by Rachel Tsateri
Finally assess your partner’s participation. We used an app called Wooclap to do this live:
Here are two other possible sets of assessment criteria for the same activity:
The idea of the original 4-3-2 activity is often attributed to Nation 1989, but Leo found it was originally in Maurice 1983 in ELTJ. It has recently been reassessed by Boers (2014) who found that the increased time pressure of reducing the time limit didn’t make a big difference – it’s fine to do it with the same amount of time for each repetition.
There has been a re-evaluation of the value of repetition:
Points to consider:
The first three topics here are more useful topics as they involve recounting something.
Practical example 2: mini debate
Possible topics:
Two students had a debate. We asked one question to each of the speakers. Then each speaker had to summarise what their opponent said using lexical chunks from the slide:
Debating is usually considered an idea for working on speaking, but why not use it to test students’ listening as well?
This talk has come out of three or four years of working on flipped CELTA and Delta courses. All of the input happens on a platform at home, but planning and input happens in the school / online.
Planning workshops are one aspect of their flipped courses.
How do we help trainees plan?
How do you usually help trainees with their lesson planning?
What is your goal in this? Do you feel you usually achieve this goal?
As Ri said, it’s often a quite unsatisfying process for both trainees and trainers. We’re helping them with that lesson in that moment with that question.
What is a planning workshop?
When they first started doing this, it felt like supervised lesson planning, but for longer. Over time, they realised that the goal of this kind of workshop was actually To develop independent strategies for planning which trainees can use in the course and beyond. It gives them a way to find their own answers.
The strategies come from their experience of typical trainee puzzles which occur during the planning process. How do I…?
Strategy 1: working with a critical friend
What’s the role of a critical friend?
Questioning the assumptions made and seeing if they know why they’re doing it
Being someone other than the trainers to bounce ideas off
Giving support and reassurance
The role of being a critical friend needs to be set up with the trainees. You need to give them permission to probe, not just rubber stamp so they don’t feel they just have to say Yes, that’s great.
When we practised being a critical friend in a lesson planning workshop during the session, at the beginning we had no idea what we were doing but after a few minutes we worked out what questions we wanted to ask. We explored the areas connected to the lesson we thought might be important. When we had a question we couldn’t answer, we could bring it back to the tutor, who might ask us ‘What are the advantages of this approach? The disadvantages? Puzzle it out together and come back to me.’ The trainer might need to monitor and prompt the critical friend for more questioning, rather than making statements – see if you can explore it with them, rather than telling them what to do.
What trainees said about being a critical friend
Reflection questions for trainees
The first half of the workshop: give them a task like the one above.
The second half of the workshop: a reflection on the process and the strategy usage for lesson planning.
Here’s an example of the reflection prompts following the critical friend task:
List 4 questions or prompts you can ask learners in feedback.
List 3 ways that doing the task yourself helped you understand what will happen in the lesson.
List 2 things you got from doing the task with a critical friend.
Note down the most important thing you need to do when you’re planning your next lesson if you have this puzzle again.
They help trainees to realise there are other experts in the room, and they make the strategy explicit. During the feedback process, more questions come out about the task itself or about the strategy, and the trainers often find they do some input at this point.
Planning workshop structure
In week one of a CELTA course, they might all be working on the same strategy. In week two, they might be working on different strategies because they’re mastering different areas e.g. What do I put on the board? I don’t know how long this will take. I don’t understand this grammar.
The QR code has a link to a Google Doc with about 10 planning strategies and typical reflection questions. The url is http://tinyurl.com/3bmt8cur
Design your own strategy
Jo Stansfield and I came up with this:
Another group’s strategy was connected to pre-teaching vocabulary.
As a trainer, thinking about the strategy and the steps is the planning for the workshop.
Summary
Planning workshops like these:
Are more concrete than traditional planning sessions
Work on both the immediate needs of the CPs but also their long-term teacher practice
Encourage teachers to participate in a community of practice
Empower trainees to resolve their own puzzles
Allow trainees more agency when planning
Answers to questions
Being a critical friend seems difficult, so how do you support trainees in this role? Reassure trainees that they’re allowed to ask questions and are expected to ask questions, and that they don’t have to have all of the answers
How are critical friends assigned? They’re normally in pairs discussing the next day’s lesson. One person teaching today, one tomorrow work together. They change who they’re working with across the course.
If there’s a mismatch, can work with groups of 3. Have the trainee step in to demonstrate what might happen, but leave them with questions to puzzle over together. ‘Why don’t you write a list of situations when correction might happen, and decide what correction might happen in each situation?’
Trainees still come to the trainer to ask questions, but generally they work with each more. Ri said she felt like she was under less pressure during the course, and it feels much more satisfying.
The willis-elt website has lots of information about TBL. Jane and Dave Willis learnt about TBL from a workshop which Prabhu did at the school they were working at. They then started to share the materials and spread the word.
This was a task-based workshop, with two short tasks and two major tasks.
Task one: From Prabhu: Listen and draw
Fold a piece of paper in half.
In the top half, draw a circle, about 8cm across. In the bottom half, draw a rectangular box – about 12cm across and 3 or 4cm deep.
In the circle, think of it as a clock. Draw a little line sticking up at 12 o’clock, and a little line sticking out at 6, 2, 4, 8, 10 o’clock.
In the rectangle, make it into three boxes, so that the middle box is bigger than the other two, but all big enough to write in.
Step two: Listen and write
In the top circle, write three words. Why TBL?
Gets learners to use language in a meaningful way.
To do that, they need to have had lots of exposure to language, to the kind of language they want to be able to produce.
Learners need to be motivated.
Examples of tasks:
Listen and do – follow instructions. Lots of exposure, but haven’t had to speak.
Listing – e.g. reasons for speaking English, characters in a story…
Ordering and sorting, sequencing
Problem solving / prediction
Sharing information or opinions
Creative tasks
They all have a communicative outcome, with exposure, use and motivation, and something to share at the end.
A lot of us are already doing tasks, but how many of us ask our learners to share the results? And what about planning to share? That’s where the learning really happens in this three-step process:
Task
Planning what to share: where the learning happens!
Share
Jane has found that TBL often isn’t covered in teacher training courses, or if it is, step 2 (the central/key part) isn’t included.
We produced our own homemade handout:
What are the challenges of TBLT for novice teachers?
In our group, we discussed:
How do teachers know learners have achieved the task?
How do we define the task?
What is the teacher role during each stage? What feedback should they give?
How do they set up the tasks?
Focussing on the language use, rather than the task itself.
Dealing with different levels.
Task Two: allocate roles
Who will be:
Chairperson: ensure everyone speaks
Secretary: writer
Oral reporter: the person who will report back
Timekeeper: check you finish on time
This is a way to get your shy students talking. [I’m reading about this in Dornyei and Murphey’s Group Dynamics at the moment.] Choosing the roles stimulates a lot of chat.
Questions Jane answered
What topics can be covered? Anything! You could take a text: list three problems from the text, give them the first half of a text and predict the second half, list three things you do before you go out to work or school. You could create two or three tasks to create a task sequence within a lesson.
How do you approach feedback? Always respond to content first – that was interesting, could you expand on it? Other groups could write them a question to find out more or say what they want to clarify.
What is a task? A task entails learners using language in a meaningful way. They’re not practising a particular language form. They’re using any language they know. It has a goal which is meaning based, and an outcome which can be reported back on.
How much time should we allocate it? Depends on the task, and they can be linked into a task sequence. Make sure there is more time for the planning. Give them limits so they know when they’ve finished. For example, if there are 12 differences between pictures, ask them to find 7, and then there will be extra ones in the feedback.
At what point does the teacher give language input, feedback, corrections? At the planning stage. Don’t interrupt during the task. Another role could be ‘linguistic advisor’ or ‘language monitor/observer’ – they can report back on how much English was spoken, and what was difficult to say so other language was needed. Don’t negate it, but make it a role if it’s something which could help your learners.
What is a framework for the planning stage? This comes from the learners. For example, hands up if you have a problem. [I think the emergent language tips from this morning could help!]
Is pre-teaching OK? Yes, you can add a pre-task stage. Dave and Jane call it priming. Introduce the topic, tell a story, ask students some topic-related questions. Do preparation, for example language preparation of a few items of language students might need e.g. what punishments might be good for this type of offence? Add them to the board for students to refer to later. Jane wouldn’t teach grammar at this stage because you don’t know what grammar they want until they start the task. Lexical words express meanings, grammar fine tunes meaning. Introduce useful phrases.
What is the role of the teacher during planning? Advisor, supporter, corrector.
What is the difference between TBL and Project-based language teaching? PBL generally has tasks in it, and is a series of lots of different mini tasks.
How do you apply TBL if you’re confined to a curriculum? The topics and functions in the lessons will all come up over the course of a year, but they don’t necessarily come up in the same order as the materials.
There is a language focus in TBL – it’s a form focus, which can happen after the ‘share’ stage.
There could be a recording of two fluent speakers which could be used as a model for learners. Learners could study the recordings or the transcribed talk. Cobuild recordings are being resurrected and will hopefully be online and available for free soon.
How can you make it relevant to exam-based lessons? Prabhu did task-based learning, then in the final term he did intensive exam prep. His learners did better in the state exams in most areas, and about the same in the grammar section.
How do you get students to feel satisfied as a result? If you’ve done the form focus, the learners go away with a ‘rule in their pocket’ (Krashen). You can let them repeat a task from a couple of lessons ago, record them and help the learners to notice the difference – if you warn them in advance and let them go back over what they’ve learnt, this helps students to revise.
How engaging are the CPD initiatives in your context?
Draw a ladder and place these initiatives on the rungs.
How do you measure engagement?
Is it the ease with which the programme can be carried out?
Did you receive good student feedback on what the students did?
Was there a tangible impact on the classroom?
Was it time well spent for the person controlling the CPD / teachers?
Was there an improvement in student performance?
Did it leave you with inspired / motivated teachers?
> Have you ever really thought about this at your school?
When Claire and Sarah started running CPD programmes, they were very enthusiastic, but the teachers weren’t engaged, despite being dedicated teachers. To find out why, they did research and spoke to the teachers to find out about their lack of engagement.
Some of the comments:
Observation is like a twice yearly ‘magic bullet’. The observers are always looking for the same thing. It isn’t really personalised to my needs. It feels like ticking a box than anything else. There’s a fear that if I don’t perform now, what will happen next year.
Dina
This is a summary of what the teachers mentioned as problems:
Though Kat also said it provided more choice for her and was more personalised.
This is a ladder of participation published by UNICEF, about engaging with children. It could also be applied to teachers. Sarah and Claire reflected on to what extent engagement with teachers went beyond tokenism and was actually empowering and emancipatory.
Three possible CPD initiatives
Non-engagement:
Two regular observations by line manager. Regular training delivered by senior members of staff.
Partial engagement:
Teachers might deliver some training sessions themselves. The school encourages peer observations and critical friends groups.
Engagement:
Teachers collect feedback from students and based on what they say/notice, teachers reflect and choose how they develop and how this should be measured. They carry out action research. Teachers seek guidance and advice from colleagues and senior members of staff.
Non-engagement – top down
Classic observations, INSETT etc.
This can be a form of manipulation – teachers don’t fully understand or aren’t’ involved. (these ideas are from the ladder above)
Decoration: teachers display their progress but no tangible reward.
Tokenism: teachers asked their opinions but are given no real choice or decision-making power.
Moving towards ‘recipe-following’ and ‘faking it’ (Walsh and Mann, 2015)
Reflection becomes blind (Dewey, 193_) – what’s the point?!
Partial engagement
Assigned but informed: teachers given specific duties/tasks and told how this will help them develop. They might be given specific roles in the organisation.
They might have a little more agency, but it’s still very much managed by the school
Big improvement on the above, but does not tap into full potential. D
Does not engage all teachers.
Is still not always relevant to immediate teacher needs, or have an impact on students.
Engagement – bottom up
If student voices are borne in mind, teacher development will be happening too.
The five principles of engagement:
Do the teachers initiate their professional development and take the lead?
Are student voices and feedback prioritised in the choices that teachers make?
Is the CPD relevant to the immediate needs of the teachers and their students?
Do the teachers fully understand why they are developing and how they need to do that?
Is there a measurable outcome?
You can use these principles to reflect on your CPD programme. They think they’ve found an initiative which actually meets these principles: exploratory action research.
James blogs at theteacherjames.Wordpress.com. He’s based in Brazil. This was part of the GISIG (Global Issues Special Interest Group) showcase.
Some headlines from the last month related to the climate crisis:
This is a grave situation, and is one we should keep in mind. But it can be hard for us to get our head around what’s happening in the world.
When it comes to the climate crisis, this is James’s position:
Greenwashing definition:
Adidas were prosecuted in the French courts for misleading advertising connected to greenwashing:
So what about ELT?
James did some informal research of his own. He was trying to choose books which he believed would be in circulation now. If they were older books, they tended to be exam preparation. He tended to look at higher-level books, as he felt like it may be possible that students at lower levels or younger learners might not have the language to discuss these issues in the same level of depth as higher levels or older learners.
These were the questions he looked at:
Does the book include related topics? These were the topics he found which could have been connected to the climate crisis in some way. He’s not arguing that they should have been connected to the climate crisis, but perhaps they could have been.
Which aspects were mentioned? These topics are more obviously related to the climate crisis – it was the main focus.
What terms were explicitly used? A larger font shows that it was used more commonly. ‘Nothing’ was the second most common thing he found – it was a lesson connected to the climate crisis in some way, but it wasn’t mentioned by name at all (though that specific term is newer – no other term was used instead).
Does the lesson suggest actions that can be taken to counteract the climate crisis? Does it focus on individual, social, scientific, corporate or governmental action? In Business English, the focus was more on the company than the individual – that had some of the better quality material. The overwhelming majority were about what you, the student, can do – what individual choices can you make.
Is a cause of the issues described mentioned? If an alien came to Earth and looked at ELT coursebooks, they wouldn’t necessarily know where climate change came from. There isn’t anyone to talk about (not blame!) The passive voice was often used – should we really be distancing ourselves from these actions? ‘No reason’ was also very common.
Accidental greenwashing
‘Carbon footprint’ was invented by BP, to promote the idea that climate change is not the fault of corporations, but individuals. It has been described as one of the most successful deceptive PR campaigns ever. Here are some reasons BP may wish to do this:
So carbon footprint lessons aren’t necessarily useful!
Recommendations
Look out for literal greenwashing.
Name some names! Not necessarily every time, but there should be some agency behind these actions.
Give learners the opportunity to properly discuss the issues.
Find ways to integrate the subject into related topics. For example, fashion, travel, consumption – even if it’s just one discussion question, it’s something.
Avoid euphemistic language and call it the climate crisis. This is the same language that’s being used elsewhere.
Less personal virtue, more big action.
We need to shift from learning about sustainability, climate change and the natural world to empowering learners to actually act.
What a student said:
Greta’s message:
Don’t forget this message if you put her in your materials!
Wendy’s company is called ELT Consultants. She has spent most of her career working in low-resource contexts.
This is about a project which was run in Venezuela, with Dr. Juana Sagaray and Dr. Maria-Teresa Fernandez.
What Telegram is not!
It is not a replacement for face-to-face training. If you need a Plan B, or if you have teachers in very remote teachers where it is very difficult to get them to come to one place, then this is an alternative to be able to give them some CPD.
Context
Global South:
Developing countries
Excessive unemployment
Low per capita income
77 countries, including China
(World Population Review 2022)
Venezuela is one of these countries.
Digital divide:
Gap between people who have access to affordable, reliable internet service (and the skills and gadgets necessary to take advantage of that access) and those who lack it.
Taylor, 2022
There might not be any internet service, particularly in rural areas. There might not be enough access to devices in the household. There might not be skills to access these devices.
This project in numbers
400 pre-service and in-service secondary teachers
Nearly 9,000 students
20 writers
11 trainers (most of whom were also writers)
10 modules
10 workshops in each module
3 months to deliver one module
Flipped learning: asynchronous one hour, synchronous one hour per week
Dr. Juana Sagaray was the British Council Project Manager for this project.
These were the statistics for technology usage in Venezuela:
There were also added problems with blackouts and lack of electricity. They needed an app which could be accessible.
Telegram had much lower data consumption than other apps (see the graph above).
It’s free.
It’s cloud-based – it won’t fill up your phone.
You can use it on any mobile platform, and on Mac, Windows and Linux.
It’s secure and fast. You can make it as secure as WhatsApp if you adjust the security settings on it.
You can do voice calls and video calls.
You can send photos, videos, messages and files of any format and size.
It synchronises across any number of installed Telegram apps on mobiles, tablets and computers.
Two APIs are free for developers to design a Bot API. Wendy first saw these bots being used to teach IELTS skills automatically. She thinks it could be used for FAQs, for example, though she hasn’t managed to develop this yet.
How are they using Telegram to train teachers
Quality assurance:
Design templates for all materials
Design PowerPoint for asynchronous content used in ‘flipped learning’ and PowerPoint for synchronous content
No animations in PowerPoints
Keep text to a minimum (CEFR A2)
Use icons and visuals
Made PDF of PowerPoint and screenshots of PowerPoint slides
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
Write scripted trainer’s notes to ensure that trainers in the future deliver the materials considering EDI
Refer to the Code of Conduct for learning online
Refer to Safeguarding for learning online
Poll teachers to ask for their opinions
Provide an option for Teachers who have missed a synchronous session to catch up
The project is designed to be loop input – whatever they do in the sessions should be something the teachers can do with their own students in the classroom.
How we use Telegram to train teachers
It’s best to use a desktop to train – it’s probably much harder doing it directly on a phone.
Keep the Telegram chat open on the screen so you can read what’s happening.
Telegram video chat ready to screen share.
Have your PowerPoint open on ‘reading view’.
This is what Wendy’s computer screen looks like:
Lessons learnt
Teachers need:
A variety of ways to access the materials in both asynchronous and synchronous sessions (PowerPoint, PDF, screenshots – all of them!)
Synchronous sessions no more than 60 minutes – unreliable connection, concentrating is harder for longer
To be taught how to reflect on their own practice – a learner journal is used
To complete tasks with allocated marks in order to complete module and get certificate
To get a certificate, they have to do 6 tasks, attend 7/10 live sessions or do the catch-up tasks, and do 2 assessment tasks. This incentivised teachers to complete the asynchronous work.
Teacher trainers need to be reminded:
To increase interactions. Using chat box, audio recording and video recordings
To summarise the asynchronous task comments submitted by teachers
To offer the catch-up option to teachers
And… (I wasn’t fast enough!)
Tutors and facilitators need:
Voices from participants
Teacher trainers said:
They have more tools to train and teach.
They noticed the enthusiasm and resilience of teachers.
The content was useful.
Negative: internet connection problems.
Negative: frequent blackouts.
The main thing they said Telegram was missing was Breakout Rooms. They said it has a real impact on teaching practice.
Participants said that 100% of them would recommend the training programme to their colleagues. They said the live sessions were a useful tool, dynamic, organised, excellent, well-planned and interesting.
The pre-workshop tasks helped them to reflect on the content. It helped them to get acquainted with what was coming up, and to practise what they would be exposed to later.
[This is an area I’m really interested in in general, so hopefully there will be more connected to it on my blog in the future!]
Rachel is a blogger you may / should (!) know from The TEFL Zone. This is her first IATEFL presentation.
She is talking about a framework she came up with for planning online lessons, and talking about how it worked with her students.
When coronavirus arrived, Rachel was teaching B2+ teenagers and adults. Their motivation plummeted and it was a challenge to get her students to care about their lessons. She had no idea how to use her coursebook online, and her classes were really teacher-centred. The only authentic communication was right at the beginning of the lesson. She decided to perhaps flip to authentic materials for a while, rather than the coursebook to boost their engagement.
The stages she used were:
Lead in
Listening
Text reconstruction (audio)
Text reconstruction (typed)
Free recall
Focus on lexis
Select and reflect
Stages 2-4 are what Rachel calls a jigsaw-gloss.
Rachel started by showing pictures – can they guess the name of the programme?
She selected this programme because she’d heard them talking about it. They then moved on to talking about their interest, emotions, motivation, knowledge and opinions about this programme. It was important to include emotions in the process because many of the students were feeling shut down.
Listening
Rachel created a summary of the plot. She divided it into four parts. She recorded it with the help of colleagues. Each student only had access to one part of the audio, via a link. She told them to listen in a dictogloss way – they were already familiar with this approach.
Dictogloss:
Listen first just to get a general idea
Listen again and note key words
Listen a third time for detail and language to help them reconstruct their text
This was a balance of autonomy and guidance. They had purpose(s) for listening – they tended to listen and start taking notes, lose track, and become overwhelmed because they couldn’t keep up.
The texts weren’t equally divided into four parts – some were shorter / longer, easier / more challenging, which allowed for differentiation.
Text reconstruction
They went into breakout rooms to put the plot together and put it in the right order orally, with one person who’d listened to each part of the recording. This was a huge focus on fluency and using the language.
Then they worked on written text reconstruction. They wrote their parts individually. If they wanted to, they could turn off cameras and microphones – they don’t have to interact all the time.
Peer feedback – they could read other’s texts, and ask each other questions. They started with giving each other feedback on content, then moved on to feedback on language.
Why did this process work?
This was a collaborative process, where students depended on each other, not the teacher, from the start.
It worked on mediation – they developed their own versions of the text. They had to explain it to classmates. They co-created a target text. These are real-life tasks.
This is a communicative replication task.
There was a balance between loud and quiet interaction, and individual time.
It was student-centred. This helped students to become more engaged overall.
Jigsaw-gloss
Listening + text reconstruction = jigsaw-gloss
These are the elements that it got from jigsaw listening, and from dictogloss.
These were 60 and 90-minute lessons.
Free recall
Stop and jot / pause and write / stop and reflect.
Write three words or three phrases from the lesson up to this point. If you want to make it interactive, they can then share these with a partner (turn and talk).
This worked as a break from the rest of the lesson. Reflection can be included in the middle of the lesson – it doesn’t have to come at the end of the lesson.
When they’re sharing, they’re collaborating. Students learn from each other. They notice words and phrases they didn’t notice but their classmate did.
Lexis focus
Rachel believes that high-level students know a lot of grammar, so what they need to develop is how lexis works together.
A central element of language learning is raising students’ awareness of and developing their ability to chunk successfully.
Lewis, 1993
Rachel chose activities like match chunks to definitions.
Adjective + noun collocations: social outcasts
Semi-fixed phrases: a gang of bullies
Then go back to your Google Doc – did you use these phrases? This allowed learners to put the language into practice – had they noticed the phrases when they listened? Or can they add them now they know they exist?
Reflection
Select and reflect: select 6-8 items (not words!) that you are going to use or that you feel you have learnt from today. How are you going to use them? Why did you choose this chunk? How will you remember it? What strategies will you use?
This allows for differentiation. Different learners can choose different items.
It allows for choice and responsibility.
She felt it was a realistic number of items.
It was a useful challenge, as they had to process what they had learnt. Adding metacognition to their learning.
Reflection – it was individual, and they also had to share their reflections. They could collaborate. Learners actually took notes of each other’s strategies.
The classroom is a community – we need to help learners to learn from each other, not just from the teacher.
Rachel Tsateri
Strengths of this approach
Productive – learners spoke a lot.
Huge focus on fluency.
Collaborative all the way through.
Reflective.
Weaknesses
Rachel ran out of time. Lessons were 60 / 90 minutes.
Long texts. Her texts were too long at the beginning, so she never made it to the lexis stage.
Focus on accuracy? Select and reflect looked like it worked, but when she asked learners to remember what they learnt in the following lesson they often couldn’t.
So, how can Rachel improve this framework? It helps her to have collaborative and reflective lessons, but how can she make sure the learners will remember the language.
If you’d like to share your thoughts, please use the hashtag #jigsawgloss on social media to say how you could help Rachel with this framework.
Richard and Danny are going to look at activities you can use to start working with emergent language in the classroom.
Unplanned language that is needed or produced by learners during meaning-focussed interactions. This language is then explored through re formulation, clarification and support from the teacher.
Chinn and Norrington-Davies, 2022 (forthcoming)
It includes errors and communicative breakdowns, but also covers alternative ways of producing the same meanings. It can also be language that teachers or learners judge to be in some way new, interesting or useful to share. And it includes questions raised by learners about an aspect of language.
These are some of the key questions Danny and Richard are asked, some of which will be covered in this presentation.
Issue 1: I find it hard to hear what my learners are saying
It can be a challenge to tune in and listen carefully. We can’t necessarily hear errors or gaps.
First, we need to focus on the meaning of what learners are saying. Focus on the content. Develop listening skills to work on learner language.
Advice:
Stop listening for errors – focus on meaning. What are the interesting things they’re saying? What is worth sharing?
Spend time tuning into individual groups (not just 10 seconds)
Note down what they are talking about
Put these points on the board to support feedback on content after discussion parts of the lesson
Tuning in task:
In class set the learners a meaning focused speaking task where there is an exchange of ideas.
While they’re speaking, unobtrusively move around the group listening to what they’re saying.
Write notes on the board.
Use these to focus your feedback.
In our discussion after a task Richard and Danny gave us, Jason Anderson and I talked about focussing on how people communicate, not just what they say. Some of the emergent language Jason and I selected might be the vocabulary they were lacking, but also the B2 learners’ ability to interact and help the other person understand your point, rather than focussing on getting your point across. This was the text we were discussing (which we heard rather than read):
Emergent language doesn’t have to just be grammar and lexis focussed. It can be about how we communicate ideas, how we express things in a way that doesn’t offend others.
Here’s an example of what they might put on the board to frame their feedback:
Here are examples of some of the prompts they might use to work on the emergent language:
Creating the conditions for facilitating meaningful feedback
Build rapport (Mercer and Dornyei, 2020)
Congruence – being genuine
Attitude towards the learner – unconditional positive regard (always being positive to learners, even if you don’t agree with them)
Empathy
Asking more referential questions (Thornbury, 1996) – genuine, real questions which the teacher can’t necessarily answer
Using these skills, one teacher reported:
Better able to notice what the learners were talking about
Able to relax
Able to notice interesting points which students were making
Conducted useful feedback on content
Didn’t pick up on any EL yet
Able to ask extra questions
Later on was able to work on EL once he’d developed these skills
Issue 2: What aspects of language/interaction should I focus on?
This depends on the context you’re teaching in and the kind of students you’re teaching.
Here are possible examples, but there are other possible answers:
Prioritising language that causes miscommunications/ obvious gaps
Choosing language or interactional skills relevant to the teaching context
Focusing on repeated issues with the same or similar forms / repeated interaction issues
Choosing a gauge that is interesting or useful
Focussing on high frequency language
Recycling previously taught content
Working with language influenced by the learner’s L1
Providing feedback on task specific language / interactional moves
An interesting process could be using a transcript and/or recording for a teacher training workshop within a school, getting teachers to discuss these areas.
What can I do next?
Gathering data
You can do it by instinct, but recording yourself doing feedback on content can be really useful for reflection. Note your moves as a teacher, student uptake etc (Walsh, 2011).
Take photos of your board.
Keep a teaching journal.
Dialogue with colleagues (Walsh and Mann, 2017)
Discussing student reactions
Discussing what is suitable for your context
Discoveries can be illuminati very (more about what you knew you do) and heuristic (more about what you didn’t know you do)
Summary
Focus on genuine, meaningful interaction and pick up on content.
Examine your underlying beliefs about the language you do decide to pick up on and monitor your practice
Explore your practice with colleagues.
Danny commented that teachers who started to work with emergent language found that over time students started to share more and be more positive about these interactions. Teachers who were reluctant to work with EL initially found that over time they and students got better about working with it.
Danny and Richard have written a book: Working with Emergent Language which will be published soon:
Announcing the addition of a Delta Module Three course to my Take Your Time offering, to accompany the Module One course I’ve been running since October 2021.
I’ve had good feedback so far from the 14 people who’ve joined me for Delta Module One, as you can see:
There will be a strict limit of 8 participants for each iteration of the Module Three course, so make sure you apply as soon as you can! There will be Module Three two intakes a year, one with a September start for the June submission date, and one with a February start for the December submission date. Find out all of the details and apply here.
There is a discount for anybody who signs up for a second Delta module with me, in either order (One then Three, or Three then One). Unfortunately, I can’t offer Delta Module Two as I’m not a Cambridge centre, but I can offer advice to help you choose the best way for you to do it.
These are notes taken on my phone during the day, so apologies for any odd typing! I presented twice, so there are two plenaries and one session here.
Quantum ELT (or The Things Wot I Learnt) – Fiona Mauchline
In the shift to online, Fiona really noticed that what the students needed wasn’t the content, it was the pastoral support and emotional connection.
Why Quantum? Physics used to be about actions and reactions. When Quantum came along, it was about interactions, the stuff between the particles, and to a large account we hypothesised what was there, rather than seeing what was there ourselves. That’s what we can look at in ELT too: what happens between us, how we interact, not just action and reaction.
Connection to self – emotional connection
Fiona’s opening activity: draw an emoji and hold it up. It’s a good way to take the temperature of emotions/feelings in the room.
Alternatively, in the chatbox, use an emoji to show how you feel. This works for kids and adults.
Emojis can also be used to change the emotional feeling in an activity. When you are working on pronunciation, hold up an emoji to show how students should say the sentence or dialogue. You can print/show the emojis, but even better, the students can draw them themselves (or reuse them from earlier).
If we make objectives and check in on them frequently, we can feel more connected with what’s happening around us. We can make our own objectives: talk to a friend, learn 3 new words… and at the end reflect on what you’ve achieved. It feels like it takes up time but it actually keeps people on track.
4 call and response options:
123 – eyes on me.
Holy moly – guacamole.
To infinity – and beyond.
Ready to rock – ready to roll.
Me grids: good for Zoom, using the annotate function, mark this, or in the classroom use it as a poster:
This grid can also be a form of vocabulary review. You could also use it as a preview. Show them the words before they meet them: which one looks funny, difficult to say, interesting, looks like it sounds nice, any you can guess what they mean. Students make an emotional connection with the words before they study them.
Connection to others – social connection
At lower levels, you can add more speaking easily through a grammar or vocab rap. They can create and say new verses (not write, just say).
This is my home.
Welcome to my home.
This is the kitchen.
We cook in the kitchen.
This is my home.
At A1, just changing a verb and a room adds a new verse.
Fiona suggests WH Auden’s poem The truth about love as an alternative framework for adding verses.
Another idea is classroom art. A school Fiona visited had murals in black and white painted by a local artist, then the colours were added by the kids. Anybody can produce art, bring it in, and add descriptions, stories, anything else. Adding any art by the students can help them to have a personal connection to the room.
Use photos before a text to ask students to create a reading activity before they read, helping them to connect to the material before they read it.
Drama can help to build self esteem, by pretending to be someone else. After working with a song, show students the lyrics and ask them to perform the song as said by a Shakespearean actor.
Connection at home
Homework buddies: encourage them to do their homework together, collaborating to help each other. It’s more sociable. Best to do in pairs, not bigger groups.
Waxing, waning, ebbing, flowing, coming, going. – Dr Claudia Molnar
Confidence gets in the way of a lot of fluency, and students’ willingness to communicate. Confidence building can be important for both teachers and students. Small tweaks can help to make activities more interesting and energising, and help students use the language more.
Asking a question about routines can have extra questions: When? Why? What are the exceptions? This can add engagement.
Preparing for a trip, in a roleplay. Allocate seasons or weather conditions to each group before the discussion. My group just listed nouns with no grammar. You can stop students partway through to create a change in the situation which might force the students to actually use the grammar you want them to practise if necessay. For example, on your trip you can now only take one bag, not three bags. That forced us to use more conditionals.
My favourite activity was an alphabet story, where each line had to contain a verb with the next letter of the alphabet.
Teaching is a form of art (more than acting) – David Fisher
David works with The Bear Educational Theatre https://www.thebeartheatre.com/ which runs in person and online theatre experiences for English learners of all ages and levels, providing interactive educational experiences. An interesting idea I like is A guest in your classroom, where students can interview an actor in their classroom either as themselves or as a famous person.
Teachers are not entertainers, but we can learn a lot from the world of entertainment. Questions to think about: what do a teacher and an entertainer have on common? How is preparing an English lesson and a show the same or different?
They both have an audience. They have to keep the audience’s attention. For David, the most important thing in a lesson is the energy in the room, not the techniques themselves.
An entertainer’s job is to entertain, though sometimes they teach us something new. A teacher’s job is to teach, though they can also use principles from the world of the entertainment to manage the classroom and the energy to make a better environment for learning.
When students act, they often change emotions too quickly. All good scenes are about a change. By the end of a good scene scene, something should change, and that is often an emotion. We practised shifting from nothing to showing the emotion over 10 seconds, not instantly.
We then added it to an advert. Start with one emotion, like sad, then get the product, then move to happiness slowly.
Presentation skills are another useful area which can be developed through drama. We can work on speaking slowly and clearly so that everyone can understand us. When somebody listens to someone they don’t really know, most of what they focus on is the body language rather than the words. As a presenter, you need to stand still and keep your hands still, holding them a little above your waist, make eye contact if you can, and speak a little bit louder and a little bit more slowly than normal. Combine all of that, and people will concentrate more on the words rather than all the other things you’re doing.
To get the volume, students can practise counting 1 to 10 normally, then repeating it again but starting from 1 very quiet, 5 at normal volume, to 10 as loud as possible. The first time they do it 10 will probably still be quite quiet, and when they do it again, it will probably be louder. Another thing we tried was counting 1-5 in the highest possible voice, then 6-10 in the lowest possible voice. We often don’t give ourselves permission to play with our voices and use them in different ways.It’s important to build the confidence to speak out loud and use our voices effectively when presenting.
Music is one way to create atmosphere and influence the mood. You can simply play a little music and ask students how it makes them feel. You can play music and ask students to imagine it’s a film soundtrack: what film are you watching with this music as the soundtrack? This is a simple creative activity. It’s almost impossible to not see a film – it’s original content students have created for themselves. This brings emotion into the classroom.
These short activities can be used as pruners. You can use an upbeat activity to energise students, or a calm activity to get them ready for a test. Those 5 or 10 minutes aren’t wasted, as it sets the tone for tasks to be more successful in the rest of the lesson.
Another question: what does a film director actually do? What makes them good at their job? What does a musical conductor do?
We said that they need to have an idea of where they are aiming at, and know how to get a group of people there. David said he had no idea! 🙂
Follow up question: what does a teacher actually do? We might not actually be clear about it, but we know because we do it every day. But what is useful is being aware of our audience, and thinking about what they need from us. Are we speaking too fast or too show? If they’re not engaged, we need to slow down because they’re not understanding.
People who are famous are not necessarily famous because they’re good. They have been given status and we get status from associating with them. Just because you’re doing the same thing in a different context, it doesn’t mean you’re any less good at it than a famous person is who might be doing that job. Just because anybody can do it, it doesn’t mean that anybody can do it will.
Teaching is more of an art than acting. As an actor you get a lot of prep time, and a lot of people to help you, then when you do your show you do it many times, and you can’t necessarily see your audience. As a teacher you get minimal prep time, you mostly work alone, you do your ‘show’ once, and you can see your audience and on top of that you have to teach them something to – despite all of the distractions, the people who give criticism apart from your audience (the parents, the management…). It really is valuable, what we’re doing. And learning entertainment principles can enhance our teaching too.
On 2nd April 2022, I had the pleasure of presenting at the PARK conference in Brno. I shared 4 activities from Richer Speaking, my ebook of 16 ways to get more out of the speaking activities you do in class with minimal extra preparation. This was a slightly updated version of the last but one presentation I did live – my previous face-to-face presentation was at the PARK conference in November 2021, and the one before that was Richer Speaking at the IH Barcelona conference in February 2020, in what feels like another lifetime way back before the pandemic!
Here are my slides:
I did the original version of this presentation in July 2019 which I’ve fully written out here.
To find the full details of the richer activities, plus another 12 ways to extend speaking activities, get your copy of Richer Speaking from Smashwords or Amazon [affiliate links]. It costs around $1/€1, so shouldn’t break the bank! As always, I don’t claim that these ideas are original, but it’s handy to have them in one place and see how they can be applied to specific activities.
If you’d like more reflection activities, you can find all the links to buy ELT Playbook 1 at eltplaybook.wordpress.com. There’s a 10% discount until 30th April 2022 if you buy it via Smashwords [affiliate link] using the code KN74F. That makes it only $6.29 or €5.63!
By the way, my blog has been a bit neglected as the previous three months have been super busy with lots of interesting projects and finishing off an MA module in Materials Development (with a distinction!). Hoping to resume normal service relatively soon…
Since November 2021, I’ve been mentoring a teacher in Niger as part of the Female Leadership programme organised by AfricaELTA and EVE, coordinated by Amira Salama and Fiona Mauchline. 10 mentees from all over Africa worked with mentors from around the world, and 8 managed to complete the programme. These ladies were already leaders in their local areas, but the aim was to help them make their voices heard on an international stage, with the project working towards them doing their first presentation for Africa ELTA. They have worked so hard over the last 3 months to put together their presentations.
It’s been a privilege to work with Hadiza on her presentation, and to see how much all of the women involved in the project (both mentors and mentees) have learnt over the last few months. I look forward to seeing what our mentees go on to do in the future as their impact grows in ELT, and hope to be involved in future iterations of the project.
Here are the videos of the two sets of presentations. Each presentation was about 15 minutes long, with a question and answer session afterwards.
Part 1 (presentations 1-4):
Part 2 (presentations 5-8):
[pending link]
These are brief summaries of the presentations, which took place on 5th and 12th February 2022.
Raising Awareness of Global Issues through Reading and Listening Comprehension – Marie-Clemence Bance, Burkina-Faso
Marie-Clemence shared examples of lessons she has taught with students which brought global issues into her classroom.
The Tragedy of Migrants was one lesson she put together to combine different skills in a lesson which was motivating and engaging for her students as they knew it was about an issue which was relevant to people they knew. The history and geography teacher mentioned that the students had were able to use ideas from their English classes in their humanities lesson.
Due to a lesson about plastic waste her students asked her if they could collect plastic from the schoolyard afterwards, and told Marie-Clemence that they would encourage their peers not to throw away plastic.
Other lesson topics included a lesson about education for girls, which is a major issue in Burkina Faso, especially in areas controlled by terrorists. For the first lesson when students returned to class after the pandemic, her students were already prepared to talk about the pandemic because they knew that’s what the lesson would be about!
Iyabo talked about how she uses poems in her classroom to develop critical thinking. She shared a thought-provoking poem called ‘Not my business’ by Niyi Osundare. She starts by telling students about the poet, the setting and why the poet wrote this work. She then reads the poem aloud, and encourages students to do the same. Then she encourages students to notice patterns in the poem, and look for literary devices like similes, metaphors and personification.
Challenges for girls attaining early literacy: the role of teachers – Claudia Duedu, Ghana
Claudia chose this topic because of watching her single mum bring up her and her sister. These are some of the statistics from Ghana:
She talked about many different causes for these issues: late enrolment, unqualified teachers, high illiteracy level, teenage pregnancy, sexual violence in school, overburdening girls with household chores, foster parenting (girls being sent from rural homes to relatives in towns, but who are then not sent to school or supported with their education) and menstruation. These causes were from Worldbank and UNESCO reports in 2021.
Due to all of these issues, there are many knock-on effects: comprehension difficulties, problems with oral expression, poor academic performance, low self-esteem, absenteeism, dropping out of school, social vices, and girls being forced to repeat years and ending up out of grade.
Claudia mentioned recommendations which teachers could follow to support children to build their literacy:
Improvise materials based on what you have – for example, writing letters on bottle tops which the children can manipulate.
Ask people to donate newspapers they have finished with, or publishing companies to donate materials they don’t need.
Get simple grade-specific internet materials and print them on small cards which students can use.
Play-based methodology – integrating play into your lesson to achieve your lesson objectives.
Use age-appropriate materials. For example, books based on their reading abilities.
Continue your own Professional Development, and join Communities of Practice. As Claudia said, “The 21st century teacher is the one who is willing to keep learning.”
Mentorship – this enthuses both adults and children. Each teacher could mentor one girl at a time – this is something Claudia has been doing for a while. If girls realise that somebody cares about their development, they benefit a lot. They also get support and sponsorship from local organisations.
Supplemental learning – giving extra teaching to girls who need it.
Community engagement – get the community involved. Talk to parents, chiefs, community leaders to talk about the development of their communities.
This was the quote Claudia finished with:
Using Technology to Teach Creative Writing: Creating a Storyboard – Lzuchukwu Light Chime, Nigeria
Light talked about making storyboards using Google Slides as a tool for creative writing. She starts by changing the format of the slide too 11 x 8″ (like a portrait piece of paper). She adds squares and arrows to indicate the possible structure of a story, which can then be used by students to think up a story. They can add text, pictures, or a combination to help them plan their story. Here’s one example:
Light recommends using Google Slides because it is easy to create and share frameworks with students, and they can edit them themselves. These are her steps:
Think of ideas
Write first draft
Get feedback
Rewrite
Proofread
Publish
She says you can also use Zoom, Canva or WhatsApp for similar storyboarding. This is an example from Zoom:
Excerpts from a WhatsApp storyboard:
If you have no technology, Light says that you can also create storyboards with post-it notes, as a template on A4 paper, as circles in the sand outdoors, and as group work.
Creative writing stimulates the imagination, brings the real world into the classroom, engages and encourages critical thinking, allows active learning, helps students to see possibilities, and lets them see progress. It involves students not just as writers, but as editors, and giving them the chance to give feedback to each other.
ICT usage in EFL teaching in Niamey secondary schools – Amou Ali Hadizatou, Niger
I’ve worked with Hadiza since November to help her to run some small-scale research using Google Forms, then summarise it in a presentation. Due to internet problems, I was sharing her slides during the presentation so wasn’t able to write about it as she was presenting, but here’s my summary.
Niamey is the capital of Niger, where Hadiza lives. When the COVID pandemic started, teachers were forced online, but many of them were very reluctant. Hadiza wanted to find out about Niamey EFL teachers’ general attitudes to ICT and some of the reasons for this reluctance. She got 26 responses to her survey. Some of her interesting findings:
65% of respondents had access to a smartphone, and 50% had access to a computer.
85% use ICT in their teaching, but only 30% do so frequently.
Many teachers were reluctant to use ICT because of a lack of availability, poor network connections, and student attitudes, as some of them try to cheat.
Teachers are also concerned about their own lack of digital literacy compared to the students.
Despite this, teachers recognise how useful ICT can be in teaching, making lessons engaging, helping with time management and giving access to tools like online dictionaries.
In the Q&A, Hadiza talked about including parents and the community in making ICT available to the students, for example by lending students their smartphones.
Hadiza uses mp3s to introduce other accents to the classroom via videos. She doesn’t have internet access in the classroom, so she downloads materials before the lesson to be able to use them.
In her school, students aren’t supposed to bring phones into lessons. Hadiza spoke to the headmaster, told him what she wanted to use phones for in the lessons and was given permission, as long as she asks students to switch their phones off before they go to other teachers’ lessons.
Creative Writing: An important spice in the classroom dish – Joan Kumako, Ghana
Why is it that so many educational systems develop such unimaginative approaches to teaching?
A paraphrase of a quote Joan shared
Creative writing is an art, producing texts with an aesthetic purpose expressing the author’s voice uniquely. It can be poetry, drama, prose (short stories, fiction, novellas), movies and songs.
Some techniques:
Brainstorming
Small groups / whole class activities
Role play
Dialogue
Drama
Story / poem-writing activities
Creative writing is important to help students develop many skills: creativity, imagination, critical thinking and problem-solving. It’s also important for cultural preservation, development and transformation. It allows learners’ self-discovery and self-expression.
As an example activity: What impression does this image suggest to you?
This is what Joan did:
Brainstorm words the picture suggests in whole class
Write words on the board
Put students into small groups (which helps to encourage those who might be more reluctant)
Students select a few of the words that interest them the most
Allow students to create a poem with their words
Let students share poems with the rest of the class
Paste the poems on the classroom wall or notice board as a form of motivation for students
Here’s an example of their poems:
There were more great poems in the presentation – to see them, you can watch the video (link at the top – about 35 minutes in).
After this, students came to hear and told her they wanted to write more poems: ‘Madam, I want to write a poem about love’ 🙂
Impromptu Meeting that Revealed Girls’ Untapped Potentials: Creating Unlikely Leaders – Oliver Kimathi, Tanzania
When observing her students, Oliver noticed the girls seemed shy, seemed to lack confidence and had no confidence to lead (both in the classroom and beyond). There was also higher truancy among girls. All of these factors led to poor performance.
As a result, Oliver conducted an impromptu meeting to bring girls together to think about how to address some of the challenges they faced: education, leadership, early pregnancy, and menstruation (a highly sensitive topic). This meeting led to the idea of creating a Girls Empowerment Club, involved both girls and boys.
She conducted a needs analysis to find out from the girls:
what challenges the girls faced
their needs
their strengths
the role of their parents and traditions in their life
what they know
what they want to know
Information is powerful.
The children read stories about female leaders. Girls and boys work as a team to think about how to uplift girls in the community. They learn new skills like cooking, making detergents, and how to conserve the environment. They learnt how to make cakes (not common in their area), and more about how to create employment opportunities.
Public speaking is also worked on – the girls feel more confident about talking in public, improve their speaking and listening skills, and improve their English skills. English is introduced at secondary schools.
Students are also able to talk about menstruation freely and have learnt about reusable sanitary pads. They are working on breaking the taboo against menstruation. Everything in their reusable sanitary pad kit is locally available, and can last for 2-3 years. Reusable sanitary pads was an idea brought to the club by a student who took part in a project outside the country and then shared it with the group.
The clubs improve the students’ team work skills, helping them to identify challenges, find solutions, be creative and improve their English language skills. It has promoted freedom of expression, increased their confidence and boldness, improved attendance, encouraged girls to participate in school leadership, shared resources, and raised girls’ academic performance.
Members of the club had a booth at a wider event at a university with attendees from six different countries, sharing the books they read, the menstrual pads, and the success of the club. This helped them with networking, and motivated girls to want to go to university. Most of the club members from the first group are now at university, and have started girls empowerment clubs of their own.
Empowering girls at schools makes sense because they fight for their education.
Tanya Lee Stone, 2017
This is an amazing project, and I recommend you watch the full video to learn more about it and see the photos. There was also a long Q&A (around 65 minutes in) covering many interesting areas, like parents’ responses to the clubs and how Oliver got boys involved.
The value of pre-reading activities in teaching reading – Patricia Keageletse Sechogela, South Africa
Why is it important for learners to read?
We can communicate through reading, we can enjoy reading, and we can extend reading beyond the classroom, encouraging learners to read at home too. This will help them to become more critical and fluent readers.
Through reading we can learn about what happens around us and around the world. Reading doesn’t stop – it continues throughout our lives.
We use reading to learn the content of other subjects.
Why use pre-reading activities?
We can pre-teach new vocabulary.
It gives learners a purpose for reading.
It can motivate and engage them, preparing them to read.
Examples of pre-reading activities
Brainstorming
Discussing the title
Discussing new words
Looking at pictures
Prediction activities
Pre-teaching vocab games (like Pictionary)
How can we motivate learners to read?
Teach reading strategies, including peer reading and silent reading.
Model positive reading habits.
Create a book club.
Let learners choose their own books.
If learners aren’t motivated, try to identify why they are reluctant. For example, they might lack phonological awareness. Give them books which are easy for their level to improve their confidence, so that they feel willing to try by themselves.
A writer only begins a book.
A reader finishes it.
Samuel Johnson
What a great quote to finish these Africa ELTA and EVE Female Leadership presentations on!
On Thursday 20th January 2022, I presented a webinar for Teaching House. This was the abstract:
Authoring tools allow you to create learning content without any specific technical expertise. In this webinar we will look at a range of different authoring tools, including Quizlet, Flippity and Learning Apps. With these tools, you can add variety to your lessons without too much extra work, whether you’re working online, face-to-face or hybrid. Even if you’re already familiar with these tools, you’ll hopefully still go away with a range of activities you can use to exploit them.
Rather than using slides, I took attendees on a live tour of each of the three selected sites, showing them examples of resources they could use and talking about activities they could do with them.
Here’s a recording of the session:
Flippity
Flippity allows you to create a wide range of different activities. They’re all based around Google spreadsheets. Don’t let that put you off though! They’re actually really easy to use, and some of them even have ‘Quick & Easy’ versions so you can skip the spreadsheet. I like the fact that there are demos of every tool, and the step by step instructions are really clear. The results are generally quite visually striking too.
Note: You need a Google account to be able to use most of the tools – that’s the easiest way to make sure you will always have access to your creations. Any tool with a ‘Quick and Easy’ option can be used without Google – you have to bookmark it if you want to be able to use it again.
Flippity – Timeline example
Every activity has a demo and instructions, linked from the grey buttons on the homepage.
Click on Demo to understand exactly how the tool works and what the end result will look like. I find it really helps to do this first to check that the tool works as you expect. Here’s the ‘Timeline’ demo:
Flippity ‘Timeline’ example – collapsed
Flippity Timeline example – expanded
Once you’ve selected the tool you want to use, click on Instructions. They’re always step by step, and troubleshoot common problems at the bottom of the page.
As you can see, the instructions start with a link to a template. When you click the link, you’ll be asked whether you want to make a copy of the template.
If you click ‘Make a copy’, it’ll appear in your Google Drive, and the spreadsheet will automatically open.
What the file will look like in your Drive
Excerpt from the template
When I’m working with the templates, I normally delete almost all of the data, but leave a few lines at the top as an example to remind me what I can put where.
Starting to adapt the template for my own content
Then I rename it and add my own information to create my version of the document.
My version, with the sample data to help me
I remove the rows with the example data.
My timeline spreadsheet
Once you have the data you want to use, go back to the instructions to find out how to make it public.
How to make a timeline public
Publish to the web step 1
Publish to the web step 2
Once you’ve confirmed you want to go ahead, the ‘Publish to the web’ dialogue box should look something like this:
Published!
Then go to the tab at the bottom which says ‘Get the Link Here’ to find the link you need to see the final document (my timeline in this case):
Flippity countries randomizer (example from the website)
The second option is to edit a spreadsheet, in a similar way to the timeline above. This gives you the option of having up to 10 columns. The template looks like this:
The Random Name Picker only has a Quick & Easy option, but honestly, that’s all you need! 🙂
Random Name Picker input
And from that simple list, you can generate an incredibly useful set of options. For example:
Random Name Picker spinner
Random Name Picker 3 Teams
Random Name Picker lineup
…and so on!
Activities with Flippity
There are currently 26 different tools available on Flippity, with the potential for creating a huge variety of different things you could with them. Here are some ways I’ve used them, or ideas I’d like to try one day.
I created a Random Name Picker for each of my classes, which I bookmarked to my browser and opened at the start of every lesson. Because they could see it was truly random, I got fewer arguments when deciding on grouping, ordering, or nominating students!
Timelines are wonderful for projects. It doesn’t take long for students to work out how to use the timelines themselves, once you’ve given them a brief tutorial. The results are beautifully presented and students are generally happy to spend a long time working on them. You can prepare before the lesson by creating the copies of the templates and publishing to the web already so that students don’t need to deal with these steps. Then share the edit link with students during the lesson.
The Randomizer works well for storytelling prompts, which could come from you, from the students, or both. I’ve also used it as a prompt for drilling with beginners, generating different combinations of daily routine phrases and times for students to practise producing correct sentences.
The Badge Tracker could be used for homework or learner autonomy challenges, allowing students or parents to see progress with a series of activities.
Spelling words would be useful for both self-study and work in class. You can have up to 50 individual spelling lists, and you can automatically get quiz results emailed to you.
Feel free to share your ideas for using Flippity in the comments. I highly recommend you just head over there and play around!
Learning Apps
I find LearningApps to be somewhat less intuitive than Flippity, but the range of tools and ready-made activities which you can try out definitely count in its favour. You can access it in a range of languages, which are currently German, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Spanish. You can also embed the apps into other pages.
While you can use it on a phone and a computer, the phone display is generally pretty small, and quite fiddly for creating apps. Although it’s possible to play the games on a phone too, the interface isn’t ideal and the text is quite small. For students with computer access, there are a lot of options though, which is why I’ve included it.
This is generally the page you will first land on:
Learning Apps – browse page
You can find out more about LearningApps and view a (helpful!) tutorial in a slightly hidden way, by clicking on the website logo in the top left to get to this page:
Learning apps homepage
Note: You need to sign up to be able to save apps you create and to bookmark other people’s apps within the site. You can use other people’s apps without signing up.
Learning Apps – how to create content
Click on ‘Create App’ at the top of the page. It will take you here:
Learning Apps – ‘create’ page
Click on a type of app to see three real examples of that app in use.
Example ‘Matching Matrix’
If that’s what you want to use, then click ‘Create new App’ – the blue button in the top right of the examples window.
It will take you to a template:
‘Matching matrix’ template
Template options vary depending on what kind of app you want to create. Follow the instructions to fill in the template:
Completing the ‘Matching matrix’ template
And define any further options at the bottom:
Setup, feedback text, and help text for the ‘Matching matrix’
Then click to Finish editing and see the results:
‘Finish’ button
You can choose to continue editing or save the app from the preview screen:
‘Matching matrix’ preview
Once it’s saved, you can see a link, an embed option, a QR code, and the option to edit it again if you want to.
As you can see, the text is somewhat cut off in my Matrix. There is a ‘full screen’ option – a tiny box with 4 red arrows in the top right, visible next to the top speech bubble in the image above. That makes more of the text visible, but you can’t see everything, so I would need to go back and edit to make sure the text fits properly. That’s one slight limitation, as the character limits aren’t made clear in the template, but it’s very easy to work around it.
Full screen ‘Matching matrix’ in progress
Learning apps – activities
Here are some ideas for using Learning Apps. I think it’s best if students create the apps themselves and then set them for classmates to do. It’s an interesting way to motivate them to produce writing or speaking (most apps have audio options), though you may need to do some mini tutorials to help them.
The Number line can be used for putting processes in order. This example shows the steps of a recipe:
Recipe ‘Number line’
It could also be used for ordering concepts, like size or temperature adjectives, or events, like the events in a story.
Matching pairs on images can be used to allow students attach words to parts of images. In this example, they are prepositions of place:
‘Matching pairs on pictures’ – prepositions of place
When students click on a red flag, they are asked to choose the appropriate sentence:
‘Matching pairs on pictures’ – prepositions of place detail
Apart from vocabulary and prepositions, it could also be used to identify parts of a text, discourse features, or examples of particular phonemes.
Cloze text allows you to create gapped texts, and asks students to choose the correct options. This is either by choosing from all of the options, or from subsets of them as defined by you. Here is an English example with all the options:
You could use this to create interactive versions of exam practice activities which students could try at home, to revise vocabulary, to focus on style differences, or to focus on grammar differences like active v. passive.
As with Flippity, there are lots of different options, and the best way to work out what’s possible is to head over to LearningApps and have a play yourself. As I mentioned at the top, it’s not brilliant on phones (though not impossible) but on tablets or computers I think it would work well. Before you start making your own though, I recommend checking whether anybody has done your work for you by browsing existing apps! Also remember that students can make content quite easily with the website too, and this could be motivating for them.
Quizlet
The final authoring tool I presented was Quizlet. As I’ve previously written a pretty comprehensive post about how to create content and use the activities, you can head over there to find out more. The main difference since I wrote the post is the addition of a new function called ‘Checkpoint’, which is a variation of Quizlet Live. Here’s the Quizlet introduction to the new function.
Over to you
I know there are many other authoring tools out there, but I wanted to pick ones I’ve used myself and which I know are generally free and very versatile. What are your favourite tools? What other activities have you tried using Flippity, LearningApps or Quizlet?
how inspections work at two different organisations
how much the culture of an organisation can influence what happens there
how a writing project works from both sides – writing and editing
a more in-depth understanding of concept checking and guided discovery
a more in-depth understanding of how pronunciation works in the mouth
more about EAP (though there’s still some way to go!)
a much more in-depth knowledge of the requirements of Delta Module 1
how to organise and track my time
how to issue invoices and manage my money
Finances
I have to say I’m glad I don’t have to worry too much about money right now – I have some savings behind me, and am now co-habiting so can share bills. Pay isn’t always great when you calculate the hourly rate for freelance work, and you might have to wait a while to see the pay for any given project, especially if it’s in publishing. You also have to chase people to pay sometimes (don’t be afraid to do this!), so it’s really important you keep track of invoices and set aside time for admin.
The lowest was £12.99/hour for a CELTA course, and that was after I’d asked for a pay rise from the original offer – if I’d accepted that it would have been £9.09/hour. I don’t imagine I’ll be doing so many of those any more – I originally thought that would be a major part of my freelancing. I’ll still aim to do one course every couple of years to maintain my permission to do them, but I can’t justify working for that little. I’m sorry for other tutors who have to put up with those rates, but I’m not really sure what we can do about since there are so many tutors out there. It seems that we’re at the mercy of the schools.
The five highest hourly rates have all been for workshops, based on preparation plus workshop delivery time. That ranges from £44/hour for a brand new workshop, to £86.21/hour for a workshop I’ve done before which required very little prep time. Sadly I don’t think I’ll be earning those amounts as a rule.
Once I take away the workshops and the CELTA course, my average hourly pay for the other six things I’ve worked on is £24.63/hour, with actual amounts ranging between £17.24/hour and £35.42/hour. In three cases these were things I was doing for the first time and will (hopefully!) do many more times in the future, so hopefully the hourly rate will improve for those things as I go back to them again and my workflow gets faster.
Tracking
I’ve been using Toggl to keep track of all of my hours, and Bokio to do my invoicing.
Toggl gives me weekly reports about the way that my hours break down – I find it useful to reflect on where my time has been going and how I might want to use it differently. It also helps me to quickly calculate total hours on a project.
Bokio allows me to send out invoices and track whether they’ve been received/opened, as well as to sync my accounts with UK bank feeds (though not Wise). It also gives me reports. I chose Bokio as it was free, but it will change to having payment plans very soon.
At the end of each project I use a spreadsheet to record the company, contact, email and project for future reference. I also note the total hours worked, prep hours and delivery hours if relevant, money earnt in the relevant currency, how much I was paid in pounds, and the invoice number. I set it up to calculate my hourly rate and 25% of the earnings in each case so I can set that aside for tax and other similar payments.
The best bit 🙂
My favourite thing I’ve been doing is my Take Your Time Delta Module One course. I’ve been working with four experienced teachers, and I know when we meet for our weekly Zoom session we will always end up laughing about something. The course is as relaxed as I’d hoped it would be, and we’re all learning a lot. We’re now nearly halfway through. Over Christmas the teachers will do their first mock exam, so I suppose that will be the first true test of whether this approach is working! Here’s what two of the participants said about the course:
If you’re interested in the course, there are three start dates in 2022:
30 weeks from March to November for the December 2022 exam
30 weeks from October to May for the June 2022 exam
9 weeks (3 sessions per week) from June to August, plus three monthly meetings for the December 2022 exam
I’ve been working far too slowly on this, especially because I discovered yesterday that I’d written down the wrong deadline for my assignments – they’re actually due on 31st January, not 22nd February. (I’m writing this post partly outside working hours to give myself maximum MA time!) I’ve done about 2/3 of one assignments, and know what I want to write about for the other one. Wish me luck!
Thank you
So many people have helped me as I start out in freelancing. I’m really grateful to those who have recommended me for particular projects, and to those who have trusted me to work with them on projects which I knew little about. I’d particularly like to thank Ceri Jones and Martyn Clarke for their support. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to Sue Swift for her support in getting my Delta course off the ground, and to Laura Patsko for her help on the admin side of things – they’ve both saved me a lot of time!
I’m really glad I made the decision to go freelance, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me over the next year.
To those of you who celebrate, have a lovely Christmas. I wish everybody a happy and healthy new year!
Sandy Millin 