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.
Monday 15th April 2024, IATEFL Brighton, the day before the main IATEFL conference, was the 10th pre-conference event run by MaWSIG, the Materials Writing Special Interest Group. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but I was still able to join in the hybrid event, helping to run the online side of things.
There were six talks and workshops. This was the programme:
Following Elly Setterfield’s advice, I’ve summarised a few interesting points from each of the talks which I’d like to remember for the future.
Carol Read – Paradigm shifts in writing materials for children
I was surprised that magic and anthropomorphic characters aren’t allowed in stories in YL books in some cultures.
Carol described the amount of market research which goes into new YL projects, including the amount of ways information can be gathered, but also acknowledging both the fact that this can maintain the status quo (the same people say the same things) and that there is research that says course books aren’t always the best way to teach.
Research-based approach to creative speaking – this is a really interesting model by Becker and Roos (2016), starting with Level 1, reproducing language you hear, then Level 2, starting to use controlled situations to create your own language, then Level 3, where you’re completely creative with the language:
Carol said the Levels 1 and 2 are compatible with a coursebook-based model, but Level 3 isn’t what teachers and institutions want as it feels quite risky. This is one example of the gap between research and practice in YL materials. Teachers don’t have easy access to research, and therefore they’re not necessarily pressuring publishers for this research to be reflected in materials.
Paul Talbot – Using AI to create a framework for developing ESP materials
I haven’t really used AI / ChatGPT at all yet, apart from a couple of times playing with it. Paul gave me ideas for prompts I could use to exploit it in a range of ways.
Suggesting areas to cover in a syllabus
Text creation for 3 different audiences with comparable length, style and complexity Prompt (on the 3rd attempt): Write a 180-200 word technical product description on (PRODUCT). Include information on the product’s features and functions, physical characteristics and component parts. Write the text in 2 or 3 cohesive and well-connected paragraphs. Do not use subheadings. Use a range of cohesive devices. The 3 audiences were: a technical audience, a non-expert audience, a business audience. Here’s an example:
As Paul said, sometimes it sounds a bit cliche, but this type of language is also quite common and can be studied and compared.
Question design based on texts you’ve created
Lexical extraction – pulling out words from texts and creating definitions for them
Discourse analysis – ask it to identify particular features, then create templates from them which students can work with. Here’s an example of phrase templates and examples:
Problems that ChatGPT had:
Overestimated student knowledge – what students would know at that level and age
Accuracy of the texts (a tendency to ‘hallucinate’)
Repetitive comprehension questions, sometimes leading to the same answer
Lexicographically weak, sometimes selecting very low-level non-technical words, and with some definitions containing the target word
This meant Paul realised you need to know your criteria really well and play around with the prompts until these criteria are met.
Paul was open with the learners so they knew the source: co-created by Paul Talbot and OpenAI. This was also a way of teaching learners that they need to be aware of these areas.
Elaine Hodgson – Authentic materials for beginners: challenges, opportunities and success stories
I was amazed that the Brazilian national coursebook programme uses authentic materials throughout. The writers are allowed to use up to 1 minute of audio at normal speed, without any slowing down at all. The activities were all achievable for beginner level students. For example, this task:
…is used with audio from this video, which feels very fast to me even as somebody with English as my first language! But I can also see how the task is perfectly managable, obeying the mantra: grade the task, not the text.
It was also great to see tasks dealing with characteristics of texts and reading strategies too. For example, this one is connected to genre analysis:
They also mix the use of English and Portuguese within the books to make sure all learners are able to access the information. For example, some of the reading strategies are written in Portuguese to make sure all learners can use them.
Jo Sayers – Materials writing for sustainable futures
It’s possible to use our materials writing to influence how we would like the future of our world to look. It’s difficult to add anything else from Jo’s talk here as it was very self reflective!
Richard Chinn – Developing materials to support learners’ emergent language needs
Richard Chinn and Danny Norrington-Davies (2023) define Emergent Language (EL) as:
Unplanned language that is needed or produced by learners during meaning-focused interactions. This language is then explored, through reformulation, clarification, and support from the teacher.
Rather than comprehension questions, we can ask learners to answer personal response questions or evaluative questions about texts. These generate more emergent language than comprehension questions would, which you can then work with and reformulate. Here are some examples:
Materials can also support teachers to develop emergent language needs, particularly through teachers’ books and teacher’s notes. We can remind teachers that it’s OK to ask learners what they mean, as in the yellow highlighted section above. We can also point out different options to teachers for working with language – there are lots of choices. There are vertical extensions, focussing on lexical choices. There are syntax patterns, with horizontal extension:
Other tips for the teachers’ book could include what you might write on the board, or how to take notes about emergent language to make sure it doesn’t just disappear into the ether. You could also include tips on what you might be listening for. Here’s an example:
Sentence Frames: Have you considered/It might be beneficial to/It would be twice more efficient to/When it comes to… xyz/ It all stems from /boils down to
Words and collocation: Allocate money/Pour money into/Take advantage of/socially responsible
We could include a guide like that in notes for teachers to support them when working with emergent language.
Kath Bilsborough – Materials writing: mistakes and lessons learned
I’ve learnt so much from making mistakes that I’m thinking of making more.
Attributed to Cheryl Cole, Goldie, etc.
I really like this quote 🙂
Things Kath reminded us of a few areas where she or other colleagues have made mistakes:
Always ask what abbreviatgions and acronyms mean if you’re not sure – don’t make assumptions!
Don’t write work based on an artwork brief if you don’t know for sure that that artwork will be purchased.
Hourly rates are not always appropriate.
Any text in images should be really carefully checked.
Spot the difference images: make sure there actually are differences!
Copying people into chains of emails which they’re not supposed to see. (This has happened to me, though thankfully the comments about me were nice!)
Always ask for clarification, always, even if you think you know the answer. There’s no such thing as a silly question!
The rest of IATEFL Brighton 2024
I’m not sure if there will be any more IATEFL posts from me this year. I’m not attending the conference because my immune system is currently not very happy, but I plan to attend whatever I can online. If you attended, I’d love to know which talks you went to and what you learnt!
The last week has been so full of laughter, and I’ve enjoyed it so much.
The video below will give you a taster of that laughter.
I’ve been at the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 conference, and everywhere I looked I saw laughter, the laughter of people getting to know each other, the laughter of realising what we have in common, and the laughter of old friends reunited.
Sandy and Marjorie
I’ve always found the IATEFL conference to be the best week of my year, but this year it felt like something truly special. After 2 years of cancelled face-to-face conferences in 2020 and 2021, then the IATEFL Belfast conference where it seemed we were still trying to work out how to be in the same spaces again and what the impacts were of the previous two years, this year felt like a huge sigh of relief at a return to being able to really enjoy being with our community again. And enjoy it I did!
Chia, Sandy and Peter
Learning from sessions
Of course, I also learnt a lot. I’ve been blogging the talks I’ve been to all week, and I’d like to summarise some of the ideas I’ll be taking away with me. These are my interpretations – the speakers may have intended something different!
The language in our coursebooks, our classrooms, and our exams doesn’t match the language that many users of English produce and need to understand when they go into the workplace. (Evan Frendo)
Teachers are amazing in the ways that they support each other and their students. (Divya Madhavan and Lesley Painter-Farrell) [Of course, I knew this already, but it’s always good to be reminded!]
ELT teaching is like no other field of teaching, because most of us start teaching and then get qualified, rather than the other way around. Even those who study it at university have probably already done some tutoring at some point before they start studying. (Divya Madhavan)
ESOL teachers need a lot more support from our industry, support in terms of consistent training, understanding of the challenges they face, and managing the mental load of the traumas in their classrooms. They need this support so they can continue with what they’re already doing, an amazing job supporting their learners. (Lesley Painter-Farrell)
We’re not born part of a particular race, we learn to be part of that race by learning the ‘language’ of what it means to be a member of that race. There are no black people in Africa – they only become black once they go to a country where Black becomes an over-arching label, where all of the other individual identities are subsumed in one, removing all of the individuality and variety. (Awad Ibrahim)
Learners coming up with their own rules for why language is used in a given context can give us insights into how language is used that we might not realise if we remain bound by the rules we repeat from what we’ve learnt. (Danny Norrington-Davies)
Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats are a useful tool for learners when planning extended writing, though it will take time to help them understand how to use them. They can provide independence and broaden learners’ understanding of topics. [though the white / black colour choices are problematic] (Chang Liu)
The future of English learning is in completely different spheres to ones I know about. Making materials for Instagram and TikTok audiences requires a whole set of skills and knowledge which I had no idea of before. (Claire Bowes) [I feel like Claire embodies the next generation of teachers coming after me, and it really excites me to see where this will lead] It’s all part of ‘microlearning’ (Evan Frendo) [something I already did, but had no term for]
When creating teacher training materials, one approach is to take activities we use with learners and change the content so it has a teacher training focus. (John Hughes)
What we’re currently doing in the majority of teacher training isn’t actually having a huge impact on what happens once teachers go into the classroom. The apprenticeship of observation is still very strong, and we need to change our approach if we really want to change teacher cognitions (beliefs and ideas about teaching) and therefore teacher actions in and beyond the classroom, and give teachers the tools they need to keep developing on a deeper level. (Gabriel Diaz Maggioli, Ben Beaumont)
We’re assessing teachers on the language learning materials they develop, but we’re not actually teaching them how to develop materials effectively. (Luis Carabantes)
The ‘curse of knowledge’ can stop us from understanding what it’s like to not know something when we are in a position of knowledge already. This has a particular impact as teacher trainers, and we need to get back in touch with our novice selves (among other things) to understand what it is that we should focus on in our training. (Ri Willoughby and William Morrow)
There are many ways we can build the confidence of pre-service teachers, particularly young ones, to help them realise that they can take on a teacher role. If we don’t do this, we’ll lose them and we’ll lose TP students. (Laura Khaddi) [Another one I knew, but good to be reminded.]
The design cycle is a potentially useful tool for teacher training. You could ask teachers to bring problems they (might) have in the classroom, hand over those problems to others to come up with potential solutions, and then bring the solutions back to the original teacher. (Kim Chopin)
Delivering training via WhatsApp is a hugely underexploited area, and could reach so many teachers who aren’t being served by our current teacher training models. (Kristina Smith and Anna Young) [Having worked on WhatsApp projects last year, I know this, but I wanted to state it explicitly here!]
There are a myriad of different ways of finding out what your teachers actually need in terms of professional development [and I wasn’t really using any of them as a DoS!] (Jim Fuller)
Digital materials have many affordances which paper materials don’t, but we’re still creating most digital materials as if they were purely interactive coursebooks. There’s so much more we could and should do to increase engagement. (Laura Broadbent and Billie Jago, Nergiz Kern)
There’s a lot that materials writers can learn from lexicographers in terms of approaching the writing of definitions and example sentences in our materials. (Julie Moore)
We need to think really carefully about the implicit messages we include and assumptions we make when creating materials, including but not only materials related to science (James Taylor) and money (Lottie Galpin).
When helping learners to create videos, there’s a huge range of potential materials we can make to support them in the process. (Armanda Stroia)
Having a mentor can have a huge impact on your professional development. (Shilpa Pulapaka and Fabiana Crispim) [I need to find myself a regular mentor who I can meet up with]
Learning beyond sessions
For me, one of the best parts of a conference like IATEFL is the learning that happens beyond the sessions. It’s in the conversations you have in the corridor, in the exhibition hall, over dinner. Often these are about other sessions, but they’re also about people’s backgrounds, how they came to ELT, and the interesting things they’re working on now.
Mark, Sandy and David, and the book we worked on together 🙂
Here are some of the things I’d like to remind myself of later, with the sources if I remember them! Some of these might be somewhat corrupted in my memory, so feel free to correct me.
‘Personal information management’ is a term you can use to summarise how you deal with all of the information that comes in. Academic managers have two strands of PIM to manage: the practical side, for example who needs to be where and when, and the inspiration side, for example ideas about how to develop the CPD programme. The techniques you need for each strand of PIM in this case are different. (Mike Riley, via Pippa Wentzel)
It’s not often we given learners the opportunity to produce something genuinely funny that can be easily shared beyond the classroom. Memes can provide this opportunity very easily. (Ciaran Lynch)
When creating social media content, if you want it to be effective you need to really analyse how it’s being used and viewed. You need to consider ideas like what’s in the picture, what direction people are looking in in images, whether there is a clear ‘call to action’, what time it’s posted, and many more factors. (Marcus Morgan and Karen Waterston, via Ciaran Lynch and Paula Rebolledo)
An interesting and informative session by Karen Waterston & Marcus Morgan at #iatefl2023. Considerations when creating engaging and meaningful content in social media. pic.twitter.com/SecQenGaI4
Many of the books of photocopiable materials which were created for discussions 10-20 years ago are very out-of-date and wouldn’t / shouldn’t be published today. They really need to be updated. (Peter Fullagar, via everyone who saw his talk and thought it was brilliant, including Jo Szoke – sorry I missed it!, Richard from the University of Chester) [I knew this, but again, worth the reminder. Check out Peter’s blog and Raise Up! if you’re looking for replacement ideas.]
The position of women in ELT has improved, but there’s still work to be done. (Julie Norton and Heather Buchanan, via Jo Szoke)
Women in ELT: Where are we now? by Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton #iatefl2023
There was an interesting question from the audience: is it just men who tend to make negative comments or are a woman’s worst enemy another woman? pic.twitter.com/pFMXtjS9ZK
There’s a growth in awareness that online learning materials need their own guidance, different to paper learning materials. These are now being shared. I went to Billie Jago and Laura Broadbent’s talk, and Jo Szoke supplemented what I learnt with her notes from Carol Lethaby’s talk.
Thank you to Chang Liu for her enthusiastic endorsement of my How to present at an international conference talk. She came last year in Belfast and again this year in Harrogate, and said that it was the reason why she was presenting this year, and that my post about writing an abstract helped her apply to present. Another attendee this year said she was presenting later that same day and it had relieved her nerves. If you appreciate what a presenter has done, please don’t be shy to tell them – it really does leave a warm glow!
Thank you too to Ciaran Lynch and Claire Bowes, as well as Vicky Margari, for telling me that my blog and hearing about IATEFL from me encouraged them to apply for a scholarship (Vicky) and apply to talk (Ciaran and Claire). Look at the IATEFL website and conference pages to find out more about upcoming conferences.
Thank you to the many people who’ve mentioned my Delta content.
Thank you to everybody who’s mentioned my IATEFL 2023 blog posts. I first experienced IATEFL through the tweets and blog posts shared from the IATEFL Brighton 2011 conference. I got so much out of them, and it’s wonderful to be able to pay it forward now.
It’s always lovely to hear about the impact of things that I’ve done – it really does make the time and effort worth it.
Thanks to the MaWSIG committee for being such a lovely group of people to work with, and especially to Clare and Jen, who are leaving the committee. We’ll miss you!
Thanks to Thom Jones for giving me a very entertaining start to Wednesday morning.
Thanks to James and Jo for being wonderful flatmates and making me laugh so much. Thanks to Jo for share beautiful sketch notes and showing me the Bamboo app.
Thank you to all of the IATEFL staff and volunteers who have put so much effort into keeping IATEFL alive throughout the pandemic and the huge financial challenges of recent years, and who have worked so hard at putting this year’s conference together.
Thanks to all the people I had lunch and dinner time conversations with, and to everyone I had corridor chats with.
I can’t wait to do it all again in Brighton next year!
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Awad looked back at his abstract and realised that it wasn’t quite right. He changed his title: What exactly has race got to do with a very nice organisation like IATEFL? Intersecting race, identify and the pleasure of (second) language learning
Hip hop people don’t clap their hands, they snap their fingers.
Awad says that he has really enjoyed the conference and wondered why he’s never been here before.
There is a lot of focus on teaching techniques this week, and Awad wants to flip the script – go upside-down. He wants us to focus this presentation on us, the teachers. The best gift we can give our students is ourselves.
Race works like a language
1. Blackness works like a language = race is language = mythology = language of the monster
Awad started by showing us a clip from a video of hiphop. Powerful line: ‘I do not look to society to affirm my worth.’
Stuart Hall argues that race works like a language. Signifiers gain a meaning based on the relationships between things. Their meanings can never be permanently fixed. There is always something about race which is left unsaid.
Awad is interested in the idea of race as language. How we speak it. What we say through our bodies. What our bodies say to others. We don’t have control over what these bodies say. They can be read in different ways.
What does this mean?
1. Blackness is an empty signifier. It has no inherent meaning. Objects do not mean. People put meaning onto them. Blackness is a symbolic capital whose meaning and value can only be determined within a particular market: ‘symbolic markets of linguistic exchanges’. Blackness in the UK, US, Canada, blackness is the marked signifier and whiteness is the unmarker signifier.
2. Blackness is not a possession. It is only relational. It only has meaning in relation to other categories: whiteness, browness, to other signifiers: gender, etc.
3. Blackness is a discursive catergory, so a social script, a role we play, a plot, a representational language that is beyond our individual control. It’s a performative category, a language we speak every day in how we dress, speak, walk, in our hair, makeup etc. It transcends the individual, and is a norm, and through repetition and many other acts, one eventually becomes black.
4. No one is born Black, one becomes Black. Language also forms as much as it performs identities. We speak blackness from birth, and this also forms our identities. Language has the double task of both representing and forming identities. This also means no one is born White. Whiteness is also a language that white people speak from birth. White people need to ask themselves what is the language we speak? How do we speak it? What is the history of that language?
5. Blackness is not just a free-floating signifier. This is because power intervenes in closing its meaning. Blackness becomes a closed canvas – an already signified signifier. When power intervenes and closes the meaning of blackness: blackness finds itself sealed into objecthood and it’s multilingual, multicultural nature is negated and it becomes one; blackness is defined and hence treated as a lack, a negative capital, an Other, that which is not White (the transcendent) – after George Floyd, white people discovered their ignorance in thinking and white people need to take this ignorance seriously; when the meaning of blackness is closed, it becomes a representation of the history too [I think I missed this].
6. We need to expand the meaning of language, take it away from Saussure and bring it closer to semiotics/semiology. In semiotics, language doesn’t work in a mimetic way – there’s no 1-to-1 relationship between language in the real world, like a mirror image. Meaning doesn’t lie in the object or the event. ‘Things don’t mean, we construct meaning using representational systems’ (Hall, 1997) – language lies at the borderline between [missed this!]
7. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we should take blackness from a meaningless perspective – i.e. that it has no meaning. That’s not what happens: Blackness is now a narrative, a mythology, a monster in need of control. Compare what happened after George Floyd’s murder with the January 6th insurrection in the Capitol. A black person becomes part of a mythologised narrative. The idea here is: if the black body is not controlled, there is no knowing what it can do. The black body also points to the African presence, the history of the Middle Passage, the history that people prefer not to see and brush under the rug.
8. This grammar is performed every day, and is fixed through an external exercise of power. Awad’s emphasise in his research isn’t about race per se, but is on racialisation – the act of becoming, and on racism. Blackness is a complex morphological and syntactical system that is forever dual.
Awad’s own work: rhizome of Blackness
When people came from Africa to America, they fell under an umbrella of blackness. However, they had no idea of what it meant to be black in America when they first arrive. They find themselves becoming black. They end up creating a third space that does not fully belong to America, nor to Africa, but the two combined.
The rhizome are the roots of the tree which we can’t see.
The eye might show you somebody who looks black, but under the surface there is something more complicated: multi-dimensional, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-national. The rhizome disrupts the single notion of blackness.
Research findings
There are no Black people in Africa. Once in America, all of these descriptors are subsumed under black.
Black immigrants have no solid comprehension of the grammar of Blackness. As they do this, they complicate the notion of blackness by adding their ideas to it.
They learn BESL: black English as a second language. [missed the extra points here]
BESL is an expression of identify formation, becoming Black. When they are locked out of other spaces where they can’t see themselves, they then invest themselves in other areas – hip hop, BESL. ESL students are no longer ESL in the classrooms, but through media: films, music, etc. So what are we doing in the ESL classroom?
BESL and hip-hop become sites of a null curriculum. These are sites of learning.
Immigrants are refugees. We tend to mix the two, particularly in the US.
We watched this video. You should stop now and watch it. It’s important.
‘Home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun.’ The woman performing was in tears – you could hear them in her voice. Audio by Warsan Shire.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Many factors lead to a lack of confidence for these teachers. This leads to a lack of teacher presence. This can impact on success in TP, and this can become a spiral – one TP is less successful, they feel less confident going into the next TP, etc. It can also impact on other trainees in the group – they’re not providing such a useful model for each other. It can also impact on numbers of TP students.
These are things that York St. John University have donee.
Pre-course: before applying
The trainers go into the TESOL course and do occasional sessions so the future trainees can get to know them.
They run general English classes at the university, and everybody on the TESOL courses can apply to be teaching assistants. This gives them the chance to try somethings out.
They’re encouraged to join groups at the university like the Korean society to build greater cultural awareness.
The trainers give a presentation to potential applicants to manage their expectations.
Pre-course: after applying
They cap the number of internal places on the courses, so there’s a range of types of trainee. It’s not just another university module.
They monitor the pre-interview tasks and give feedback.
There is a rigorous selection procedure. There’s no automatic place on the course just because they’ve done the TESOL course. Sometimes they suggest different course types or going away to build knowledge in a certain area before they join the course.
They do language workshops for internal trainees before they join the CELTA. These are ‘language for English language teaching’ – some areas they would need to know.
During the course
(In addition to the normal CELTA courses)
At York St. John, they have a maximum of 10 trainees, capped 50/50 internal and external. There are 2.5 tutors per course. When they have online courses, they leave meetings open during and in between input and TP so that students can continue informal discussions if they want to. They also try to involve professional links, for example somebody coming in to do a Q&A about future careers.
New features they’ve tried to add:
More unassessed TP, with some quite simple tasks given to them by the trainers to develop the confidence and try new things (without all the heavy lesson planning)
‘Copycat’ teaching – using lessons the trainers have delivered in input, which they’ve analysed in input, taking those and delivering those in one of the free TP slots
Increased observations – live observations of the trainers working with the students the trainees know
Input on preparing to teach: ‘What if…’ – case studies, what their actual fears are
Considering what actually makes a good teacher – things they need to know beyond the CELTA
Post-course
University of Sanctuary – they have an ESOL drop-in group, a conversation group. It’s not run by the trainers, but there a lot of links. A lot of CELTA graduates volunteer there.
They also run ongoing TP sessions, which CELTA graduates can volunteer to keep teaching. This is especially useful if they haven’t got a job to go straight into. The people who’ve taken up that opportunity have tended to be from the external half of the group.
They’re looking at setting up a ‘buddy system’ with CELTA graduates and current undergraduate and post-graduate students. Laura has seen that working well in nursing and state education, but they haven’t managed to try it yet.
What did trainees say about building their own confidence?
These helped trainees already:
This is the same slide with their wish list added:
What boosted trainee confidence? The more yellow there is, the more helpful it was for them.
Slightly worrying: reflecting on own progress and student reactions in TP aren’t very helpful. Question from the audience: were you able to go back and investigate those areas further? Is it perhaps because they’re not very good at doing those things?
Ideas from IATEFL 2023
Analysing the criteria and getting trainees to understand what they actually mean in real life (rather than developing their own).
Ring-fenced TP rehearsal time without the tutor, but rehearsing with each other.
Sharing trainee lesson plans with each other. Cathy’s trainees used those to fuel online chat after the lesson.
These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Fabiana is a freelance Business English tutor. She started working in corporate companies and owned her own business. She volunteered as a teacher on the side, then moved into teaching permanently 5 years ago.
Shilpa is a business lecturer, tester and freelance ELT tutor and study coach, and a content writer. She started in accounting, but retrained as an English teacher and also taught maths and business. She started teaching 15 years ago, across various subjects in various contexts. She’s done general English, academic English, taught refugee journalists, and now she teaches accounting and management and freelances as a tutor, among many many other things.
Here are a couple of quotes about what Fabiana and Shilpa do:
If you had all the freedom in the world, which would you choose?
The audience talked about it possibly being phases in our lives, and that you might shift between the two.
Disclaimer: they’re talking about their experiences, rather than making specific recommendations.
Specialising
Fabiana’s reasons for specialising:
Need for focus
Develop expertise
Stability and consistency
Benefits of specialising:
Less time preparing lessons, more time to organise the other parts of her work (like finding students, and other aspects of freelancing)
More time for CPD – easier to focus too because of being able to focus on specific areas and material in her development
Focus on personalising lessons, and therefore it’s easier to sell her teaching and network
Challenges of specialising:
Covid: required her to remodel her classes and rethink her work
Finding work: constant need to be updated on social media platforms
It can be boring
Diversifying
Shilpa’s reasons for diversifying:
Multiple interests
Variety
Financial freedom
Benefits: of diversifying
There’s always something to do.
She can focus on personalising lessons across different areas, e.g. English for personal law, English for accounting.
CPD – developing a varied skill set, because you’re forced to learn across a range of areas
Multiple sources of income so you can pivot / fall back on other areas if you need to, and access to larger clientele groups
Challenges of diversifying:
It takes times and patience: you need to be a little bit mad to keep going 😉 It requires commitment too.
Learning: at times you need to learn on the job, and you need to stay constantly updated on subject matter content, sometimes just before you teach it.
Routine: setting routines can be difficult and can be stressful if you’re not prepared.
How they cope
CPD is a lifeline. Shilpa and Fabiana met at IATEFL last year, and now they’re speaking together! 🙂
Conferences and teacher development talks
Reading/studying
Certifications
Finding a mentor – you are not alone!
Fabiana dedicates Fridays to CPD. Find a mentor and ‘stick to them like gum’ says Shilpa! Both Fabiana and Shilpa have said they’ve hugely benefitted from having mentors. Find somebody who’s doing what you want to do.
Have a USP: Unique Selling Point. Know who you are and what your selling point is. Your students will come to you because you offer you something special.
Self-care: Fabiana separates time slots between her classes to have time to go for a walk, or have a chat to somebody, watch the birds outside.
Learn to say NO!
It doesn’t matter whether you specialise or diversify, all of these things are true.
Final thoughts
There’s no replacement for CPD. It’s the best way to grow in any career.
Networking. Freelancing can get lonely. Networking keeps you connected and informed.
Mental health. Self-awareness and self-care are the more sustainable approach to freelancing. You can do better for your students if you look after yourself. They feed off your energy, so you don’t have energy, you can’t give this to your students.
Important roles: regardless of the path you choose, you are making an impact in your field and on your students.
Never charge less! Do not undersell yourself! This is part of respecting yourself.
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
Sharon and Emanuela were reflecting on research they did connected to inclusive materials.
They started off by asking about our learning design:
These were the results:
It’s important to focus on inclusion and equity. It’s the 4th goal of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, created before the pandemic, but made even more obvious during the pandemic. We focussed on tools a lot during the pandemic, and maybe learners went out of the window, but now we need to return to a learning- and learner-centred approach. Focus on content, teaching approach and learner agency.
GIAM is the name of their project in their department in Verona. The project involved two languages: a course for beginner’s in Russian, one for B1+ in English for Business English.
To help them design the course, they started with semi-structured inteviews with key stakeholders: interviewing language teachers who had experience of teaching learners with SEN, learners with SEN (dyslexia and low vision), and tutors (students who do internships at their university and assist peers with SEN). They analysed these interviews qualitatively. The areas that came out were:
Challenges met by students and teachers
Peer relationships
Strategies to meet students’ needs – both the strategies themselves, and perceptions of the strategies
They considered:
How teachers adapt existing materials
Learner input
Consolidating skills, particularly reading skills
Error correction in a way that’s sensitive to learners’ needs
Exam personalisation
Fostering critical thinking skills
Helping students plan their learning
Learning aids e.g. screen readers
Universal Design for Learning
This doesn’t mean one size fits all, it’s about providing choices and overcoming barriers. People can choose what they want to do. There are three macro areas:
Engagement – motivating learners and making sure things are relevant to them
Representation – making content accessible, particularly by providing choice in input formats
Action and expression – putting it into practice, letting them do things in different ways, choice in output formats
From coursebook to digital content
They wanted to adapt some coursebook activities for their course. As part of it, they changed the order of the activities, they changed questions to better suit the learners, and they clarified instructions.
This is the first step of their adaptation. But is it accessible?
Accessibility
Blackboard Ally is an expensive tool which their university invested in. Read & Write is a plugin you can use. Blackboard Ally told them that the materials weren’t very accessible online. It provides a clickable button to give options for the learner, for example converting it to audio.
Using Styles, such as Heading styles, and avoiding tables can make things more accessible for screen readers. Alternatively you might need to train learners in how to access the tables themselves.
To help you, you need to:
Build up background knowledge
Pay attention to detail
Be flexible
Be creative
Use ‘alternative text’ to make visuals accessible to those with screen readers.
Summary
Inclusion and accessibility are two sides of the same coin. Adapting materials should be an interactive process between the teacher and the learners. Many of the options to make materials accessible are practical common sense solutions.
Word documents are the most accessible format for learners with screen readers.
It’s flexible too because it can be printed out and kept digitally.
You can use built-in headings, styles and fonts.
Sans serif fonts increase readability for everybody.
Avoid italics and underlines.
Use a high-contrast colour scheme (visuals and tables)
Add alternative text for images
Avoid / Adapt tables to make them accessible for screen readers
There’s a reminder that ‘every learner is disabled, because every learner has their own needs’ – we shouldn’t just be doing this for learners with SEN, but for everyone.
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
Armanda’s talk was based around materials her students had created, particularly videos they had made.
We need specific materials for each stage of the video-creation process to make it systematic, so you’re not going in blindfold.
Prosumers = Producers and Consumers. Alvin Toffler coined the term.
We want to help learners to become more responsible consumers, and by helping them to create their own media, this can help.
There might be one or two people in your class who are more confident with tech, but you can’t assume they understand how to use the tech. You need to keep the training stages in to make sure everyone knows what to do. You also need to teach learners about copyright and show them where to find copyright-free images.
Some areas to consider:
conceptual domain – how to write a storyboard
functional – what do they need to know to use the tools, e.g. to edit the video
audiovisual – do they know principles of how to produce effective digital media, e.g. ethical principles
Stages of video projects:
Planning
Production
Post-production
Reflection and feedback
Distribition and sharing
Planning
Brainstorming ideas
Doing research
Storyboarding
Allocating roles in the team
Materials that might help them here:
Also suggested by the audience: analyse a genre by watching an example
Learners need to think about the purpose of their video, the target audience, and what their main message is that they want to convey. Armanda calls this a ‘Big ideas blueprint’.
Roles allocation chart: include a description of the roles. Learners can talk about why different people in the group would fit different roles.
Guides on camera angles, lighting, sound recording, etc.
Post-production
Editing
Adding sound effects
Adding titles
Selecting the best takes etc.
Materials that help:
Video-editing guidelines
Lists with user-friendly apps with links to tutorials
Banks with copyright-free images and music
Peer media expert collection of tips and tricks (they record their own videos)
Students can also teach you about some of this! For example, split screens, etc.
Possible tasks:
Reflection and feedback
Materials that might help here:
Video observation worksheet
Rubrics for self-assessment
Peer feedback forms
Here’s an example of a marking rubric, based on the three key areas (Conceptual, Functional, Audiovisual), and you could also add language parts to the rubric too:
Examples of a video observation worksheet:
Sharing / distribution
It’s time-consuming, but it’s important! We need to celebrate their hard work and effort.
Materials that might be useful here:
Parent’s informed consent (depending on learners’ age)
Short video festivals, for example inviting families to see the videos
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
John talked about creating materials for teacher training. He showed us that there are perhaps more similarities than you might expect between materials for language learning and materials for teacher training and development.
John talked to us about materials for input sessions, materials for helping teachers to reflect on their teaching (including for more experienced teachers), and materials for further reading (articles, teacher resources etc.)
Materials for input sessions
This can be based on materials you would write for students, and turning it into materials for teachers. Teachers can then benefit from understanding the process of the activities. For example a classic ‘Find someone who…’
…might look something like this for teachers:
Another activity might be ranking activities. You could ask teachers to rank ideas like spoken error correction techniques from most effective to least effective.
This is the idea of loop input, as created by Tessa Woodward. It’s about processing with content, so you’re experiencing the process, but it’s combined with the content. Here’s the start of a gapfill you could try which demonstrates how this works:
After a grammar point or vocabulary item has been 1__________, we often give students a controlled practice 2__________. One of the most common types of exercise is the 3__________ or fill-in-the-blank exercise. Typically, we give students sentences or a text and 4__________ certain key words…
You might need some kind of ‘decompression’ afterwards, where you need to unpack the stages of the activity afterwards as they might not be able to process both things at the same time.
Materials to help teachers reflect
This is about getting content from the teachers, rather than supplying it. Less is more, because you want them to provide the content. You have to get very good at writing questions. A useful framework:
Think – what do they think about it?
Feel – how do they feel about it?
Do – what will they do as a result?
You need to cover all of these areas to make your materials effective.
This part of your materials is often quite short.
Visuals can often work better than text. Graphs can help, e.g. length of the lesson v. increase/decrease in some area.
You might choose teacher talking time, error correction, student engagement, or anything…this then encourages teachers to reflect on what happened in the lesson.
Heads up / heads down is another possible graph you could use, for example for reflecting on materials you write:
We know visuals work from student materials, but we don’t seem to use them as much in teacher training. The same is true of images. For example, here’s one possible reflective activity. Create two or more sentences inspired by the pictures which start ‘Writing materials is like this because…’ Here’s one picture:
John would like to see more images in teacher training materials.
Materials for further reading
This would be writing articles, blogposts, and you’re trying to train and develop trainers by getting them to read an article. After a session, you can write an article to arrange your thoughts and to act as a summary of the session. Teacher’s books are another material for further reading – a lot of teachers get their training this way.
This is a list of phrases which John found in teacher training materials:
It’s useful to work out your writing style for teachers. Do you prefer something which is more of a paragraph, or more bullet pointed?
For me, the bullet points are clearer and take less time to read, but they don’t have the rationale so might not be as useful as training materials. You need to think about your audience as a materials writer – what do they prefer? The context is also something to keep in mind – is it a teacher’s book? Is it in a journal? Sometimes there’s a mix of the two styles.
John says the first one is maybe more developmental and allows reflection time. The second is more about survival. Penny Hands said that when editing, it’s not always clear who the subject of the sentence is, and might switch between the teacher as subject and the students as the subject.
John has changed his office set up now. He’s switched to video rather than blocks of text, and this is his set-up as a ‘content creator’ now:
Teachers have shifted to watching videos rather than reading resource books. The statistics for the two ways of sharing are very different.
John divides video content into four categories:
Record a lecture – more similar to classic input sessions
Interview experts – they do all the talking, not you! Lots of people watch because they’re experts
How to demonstrations – short video, lots of views, and way more than a blogpost!
Thought provokers – 1-minute / 2-minute ‘think about this’ e.g. the hamburger approach to feedback, what do you think about this? Is it the correct way to do it?
This is his theory of how teacher training materials are created online 🙂 The videos are used by trainers as warmers for input sessions. Video might be the future, rather than writing articles.
6 takeaways from John
Materials for input
Copy the process for student materials
Adjust the content
Materials for reflection
Think, feel, do
Less is more with visuals
Materials for further reading
Balance your writing style(s)
‘Watching’, rather than ‘reading’ now
‘A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT’ by John Hughes
‘ETpedia Materials Writing’ by John Hughes
John Hughes and Katherine Bilsborough run courses to help teachers develop their ability to write effective ELT materials. Find out more on their website.
These are my notes from this plenary. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.
Evan’s opening plenary was inspired by Einstein. He set a test one year, and somebody pointed out to him that he had set the same test as the previous year. Einstein replied: Yes, it’s the same test, but the answers are different.
In 1914, there was an English school at the Henry Ford factories to cater for immigrant workers there. There was something called the ‘Melting pot’ – they entered it in their national costume, changed clothes in the melting pot, and left in American clothes waving and American flag.
What is English for the workplace?
Evan has been working in Maritime English for a quite a few years now, among other areas. Maritime English is a huge area – at any one time there are 50,000-60,000 ships at sea carrying cargo. There are not many people on the ships, but there’s also a huge industry behind the ships – building the ships, running them etc.
He’s been working in the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS), which is a bit like air traffic control but for ships. They built up a huge corpus of radio conversations to analyse and find miscommunications to be able to train people better in the future. Here’s an example:
When we heard the recording, it was quite challenging to understand. VTS people never know what accent will come at them. There’s a range of different levels of English. These are users of English, using it as lingua Franca to get the job done, not learners of English. It’s very context-specific and situation-specific. English in the Workplace is always context-specific – real people, real money, real stress, not like in the coursebooks!
Routine conversations with anchoring are below. Many of these are non-standard from an English teaching perspective. They work, and nobody worries about it, but it probably wouldn’t pass one of our exams! Once you get into the workplace, the criteria for success are very different: much more performance-based than we might want to / be able to test for.
Other jobs aboard a vessel: the crew might be from all over the world. Not everybody is university educated, not everybody has good English competence, but they still have to communicate and be able to do their job!
Here’s a great example of a research paper title, but based on a real quote:
Construction is an industry where mistakes with English can kill people. It’s very important.
‘Language brokering’ – for example, the children learn the language of a country, but the parents can’t speak it, so children come along to do the translation. On construction sites, you might design a team so that there is one ‘language broker’ can translate for the rest of the team.
When you work in ESP, you discover there’s a lot of specialist terminology.
‘Earnings calls’ are something you can listen to for financial English. Lots of them are available to listen to on the internet. Here’s an example from a corpus:
Sometimes you can see examples of how words take on specialist meanings in the workplace. Communities start using English in specific ways, for example ‘color’ in the image above.
Here’s an international meeting with examples of ‘non-standard’ English:
None of this stops communication, but it wouldn’t be successful in exams.
This compares to ‘native speaker’ English, people who think the meeting is in ‘their’ language. They use language at a different speed, and they also need training in how to speak international English:
Some problems people have in meetings:
– Native speakers always win. But implementation issue will be for non-native speakers.
I cannot understand the instructions.
I have become one crazy lady from Asia.
BELF: English as a business language Franca
‘Conformity with standard English is seen as a fairly irrelevant concept’
‘I don’t actually care whether something is correct or incorrect. As long as the meaning is not distorted’
‘BELF is perceived as an enabling resource to get the work done. Since it is highly context-bound and situation-specific, it is a moving target defying detailed linguistic description’ (p129, Kankaanranta, A., Louhiala-Salminen, L. And Karhunen, P.)
How have we traditionally approached teaching workplace English?
This is structured, top-down, and assumes the teacher is an expert. In a university class, the students expect the teacher to know what they’re going to do.
What do we mean by ‘proficiency’?
CEFR (2020) – ‘proficiency’ encompasses the ability to perform communicative language activities (‘can do…’)
But how much does this proficiency relate to actual job performance?
Here’s an example from the aviation industry:
It reminds us to ask ‘Are we actually focussing on the right things?
The ground-breaking Occupational English Test isn’t based on linguistic criteria alone. It has both linguistic criteria and clinical communication criteria, set up by people from within the industry. This sort of test is now attracting a lot of attention in the workplace.
Big standardised tests still have their place about talking about English levels, but they don’t tell us whether they have the English they need to do that specific job.
As teachers, we might be able to judge somebody’s English, but we might not be able to judge whether somebody can do their job in English.
In VTS commmunication, assessment is now carried out by a team:
English teacher
Experienced VTS operator – say whether they’ve done the right thing
Legal expert- all conversations are recorded, but they can have legal implications
This is one way to assess workplace English. How do we judge if somebody can do the job?
What is the perspective from outside ELT?
Modern learning mindset – learning and development / HR:(Dillon, 2022, The modern learning ecosystem: A new L&D mindset for the ever-changing workplace)
Make learning an essential part of the work(flow) – it’s not a separate thing
Take advantage of the full ecosystem – what’s available to them, not just hiring a trainer
Apply data to accelerate decision making – not based on intuition
Provide a personal experience at scale – trying to make things unique for everyone
Drive clear business impact – why would you invest otherwise?
Foster persistent organisational agility – how can we react to things which are changing so fast?
Duncan is a young project manager at a company based in Denmark, and partly manages the German team:
This is quite an extreme perspective of where we are with English – in this situation, they hire anyone they can and people will learn English.
Here’s another perspective from Kasia from Electrolux:
The World Economic forum in 2020 said ‘94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job, a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018’.
In BELF research, Ehrenreich (2010) says ‘Learning…seems to happen most effectively in business ‘communities of practice’ rather than in traditional English training’. M Takino (2019) looked at how people become users of English – Evan says this is a very useful article to look at.
Informal learning is what’s really happening:
Advertising
Film, songs
Social networks
Games
Travel
Coaching from peers
Micro learning
Learning on the job
Translation apps
Social media
The last 10 years have completely changed how technology can be used to learn languages, and you don’t necessarily need to pay a teacher for it.
‘Microlearning’ is a key feature of HR conferences now. 10 minutes of learning languages on the train, in a queue, etc. Bite-sized chunks, and it’s happening everywhere.
Gamification is another example. By playing a game, people learn surreptitiously, but also learn in a fun way.
‘Learning cluster’ – surround the learner with ‘meaningful learning assets’. It’s not just organising courses for people, it’s doing more.
Three learning touch points, like marketing where the customer touches the product.
For example, project interviews are where you interview a customer to work on a project with them. Useful phrases people can use in the business. Curating is the aim, rather than creating new materials. The social side is mock interview partners – L&D is responsible for this.
Nadzeya says:
Teachers and trainers need to work together with other people within the company. There is a huge system here, supported by different aspects of people in the company. ‘Almost all of our trainers are full-time employees. Our strengths are our well-developed learning ecosystem and corporate learning culture’ – people who are part of the company as in-house trainers.
Content is developed based on in-house case studies.
Seunghee Miriam Choi is an expert in Maritime English. She says that language training will become more specific, for example teaching English for VTS in Busan port. General English you can get online for example.
LCD = Learning clusters. To be truly applicable, they need L&D to really surround the learners with English. It’s a new area and not everybody is able to do it yet. This is where professional language training is changing.
Informal learning is changing: ‘Dressman, M. (2020). – Evan says it’ll change your ideas of language learning and teaching:
Formal and informal learning should be retired as a distinction. People are moving away from formal learning, and moving towards learner experience.
Learnship is an online language company:
There’s a shift to outcome indicators, and away from effort indicators.
Work is changing, communication is changing, and therefore training needs to be different.
To remain relevant we need to learn a lot more about how people in the workplace learn languages. We should be researching it more, as this is what we’re training our learners to use. A need for research.
To remain relevant, we need to think about teacher training, education and development. ‘Marinating teachers’ – put them into a context and they will become an expert within that context.
To remain relevant we need to learn to use the new technologies. This will help with pull teaching, rather than push teaching.
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
Jill’s talk look at the overlap between these two roles, writer and editor.
This are very reduced notes! Jill told us a lot more 🙂
Unconscious
Jill talked about the role of unconscious thinking in creativity. This was a quote she shared:
The bath (Archimedes), the bed (Descartes) and the bus (somebody who got an idea of a mathematical formula) – these are all places where people get inspiration.
Heim and Runco both say that will (conscious thought) can actually hamper inspiration and creativity. They create self-judgement and might hamper creativity.
There’s a difference between tree thinking (roots > branches > twigs > leaves = academic thinking), and rhizomes (underground spreading, bobbig up unexpectedly, springing up at odd points = creative thinking).
There have been two main studies about creativity in materials writing. Philip Prowse (2011) in Materials Development in Language Teaching and Keith Johnson (2003) in Designing Language Teaching Tasks.
In Prowse’s chapter, writers talk about drawing on their own intuition and waiting for inspiration to strike. Tomlinson commented on the chapter saying that writers are basing their ideas on intuition and ad hoc writing, rather than on principles.
Will + unconscious
Other writers have suggested that creativity involves both will (conscious ideas) and unconscious ideas. Wallas (1926):
Preparation / Incubation
Illumination
Verification – crafting your ideas
Campbell (1960) says that creativity comes from free association, and ideas strike when you least expect them.
Smith Ward and Finke (1995) talk about the Geneplore model: the generation of lots of ideas, then an editing stage of exploration.
Attridge (2004) says that creation is both an act and an event: something intentional through an act of will, and something without warning that happens to an alert consciousness.
Keith Johnson, in our profession, wrote about a study where people talked about will. The lightbulb moment comes, but it can be quite painful – it might take a long time to come, or you might realise the inspiration won’t work. Expert designers tend to spend a long time analysing tasks, coming up with several different possibilities, and they might then abandon it (easy abandonment). [Note to Sandy: relevant for your MA framework!]
Jill’s theory
Chaosmos = a term from James Joyce. The process of totally chaotic orders settling into order (chaos > cosmos), and order settling into chaos (cosmos > chaos).
Generating ideas
Dialoguing = talking to an imaginary reader
Imagining scenario = imagine how it might work in practice
Scopting materials = writing them out
This is an example of her creative process in action. The activity was about how to overcome distractions:
Jill started with a sudden idea out of nowhere to come up with a ‘distraction jingle’.
She then came up with a rationale for why it might work.
The dialoguing stage was pushing her to go further and realise that she needed another stage.
She then had another illumination: combine distractions and rewards. Choose your favourite distraction and use it as a reward.
Finally, imagine the scenario and how it could work in the classroom. e.g. contracts and a contract buddy.
Conclusions and caveats
Editing skills are valuable for writing. Writing skills are valuable for editing.
Editing shouldn’t start too early – otherwise you might inhibit creativity.
Editors should resist the temptation to add their own creativity to the writing – it’s the writer’s book, not the editor’s book!
This talk was part of the 2023 Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) IATEFL Pre-Conference Event (PCE). The theme this year was ‘Materials creation: more than just the student’s book’.
Nergiz gave us guidelines for creating effective materials for VR lessons. This is her write-up of the session.
Social VR is when learners and teachers are in the same virtual space. It’s not like chatbots. You don’t need to have a VR headset, you can rent them for a day to try them out.
Because you’re in a specific context related to the context of your lesson, learning is active, social and emotional if done well. Learners can have experience, collaborate on hands-on projects, and it all feels more authentic, and therefore more motivational, fun and memorable. VR lowers foreign-language anxiety, as learners can hide behind the avatar.
Considerations when planning VR lessons
Conceptual framework – Design features for educational IVR Won et al. (2023)
You have to take into consideration both ideas related to digital materials design, and ideas related to a more physical space.
The yellow part shows four different types of immersion. The ideal would be to include all 4 of these ideas when creating learning experiences in VR. Sensory / Actional are technical and depend on the platform you use – you have to know what the platform offers / what it can do. Sensory would be ideas like getting audio and visual feedback, like hearing sounds, seeing things change. Actional is about making real changes, like cutting something. With a headset, you control the movement by moving your body – embodied learning helps us to learn more effectively.
Narrative – are they engaging with the tasks, are they engaged by the context.
Social – are they interacting with each other? With other learners? With the teacher?
Narrative and Social overlap with learning – things we often want to have in a classroom setting.
Features to consider
You also need to ensure that you have a suitable pedagocical approach. There’s still a lot of lectures, and that’s not he best way to do things. It’s better to do:
Situated learning
Task-based learning
Problem-based / project-based learning
Collaborative learning
TPR
Active learning
Experiential learning
Game-based learning
Anything where learners can interact and have agency.
Narrative immersion
If you’re doing things via a desktop, you can lean more into these two types of immersion. Don’t do this:
Do this:
Tell them a story, and get them interested and involved by setting the scene and context as you might do in a lesson.
You could also try storytelling with photos. Immerse has a camera feature, including being able to take selfies. It allows learners to take something from the VR classroom outside the classroom, and use the images in other ways. For example project work, or writing a story first then go into VR and take snapshots of what they do, then create a cartoon of what they did to review the lesson in an interesting way:
Checklist
Here’s a possible incomplete checklist for the kind of things you can include:
Homework could be meeting each other outside class, and Nergiz’s students actually did this:
How to practise writing for VR
Sign up for free VR accounts.
Learn to use them.
See what features
Possible platforms
When creating immersive learning lessons, materials writers become immersive learning designers in the truest sense.
Nergiz Kern
You can find more information on Nergiz’s website, including examples of complete VR lesson plans.
From Tuesday 18th – Friday 21st April, I’ll be at the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 conference [this link will take you to the latest conference, which may not be Harrogate if it’s later!]. There’ll also be two bonus days: Monday 17th April will be the Materials Writing SIG (MaWSIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE), and Saturday 22nd April will be the Hands Up Project conference.
I’ll be presenting twice during the conference, once in a How To session, and once during the main conference.
How to talk
How to give a presentation at an international conference
Giving a presentation can be a stressful experience. This session will give you ways of organising yourself before your presentation and conducting yourself during your presentation to reduce that stress. The aim of the session is to make your presentation a more satisfying experience for you and your participants.
When: Tuesday 18th April, 08:15-08:45 (before the plenary session)
Where: Queen’s Suite 8
Main talk
EdTech and The CELTA Course: what trainees need to know
Recent years have seen a growth in both online teaching and technology use in language education, with an impact on the needs of trainee teachers. This talk will address what trainee teachers need to know, drawing on content from the new edition of The CELTA Course trainee and trainer books, which I have co-authored with Peter Watkins and Scott Thornbury.
When: Tuesday 18th April, 14:05-14:35
Where: Queen’s Suite 3 (part of the Teacher Training and Education SIG – TTEdSIG Showcase Day)
Follow the conference
If you’re in Harrogate, I hope to see you there! If you missed the registration deadline, you’re still able to turn up and pay on the day at the conference vnue.
If not, keep following my blog to see posts from all of the talks I attend – this is advance warning that it should be a busy place for the next 8 days with quite a lot of posts hitting your inbox if you subscribe! All of my posts can be found under the IATEFL Harrogate 2023 category.
IATEFL and Special Interest Group (SIG) social media accounts will be very busy over the next 8 days or so, so look out for lots of coverage on those channels. You can find out more about IATEFL.
If you’ve never heard of it before, IATEFL is the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. It was started in 1967, so at the time of writing it has existed for over 55 years. You can find out more about the history of IATEFL in the free publication by Shelagh Rixon and Richard Smith, available on IATEFL’s About page. I read it a few months ago and found it utterly fascinating!
My IATEFL story
In 2011, I became active on Twitter just before the IATEFL Brighton conference happened. The community I was part of suddenly went crazy, with tweets from the conference letting me know about the huge range of talks people were attending, and the meet-ups they were having. I learnt so much from reading those tweets, felt a huge amount of FOMO, and promised myself that in 2012 I would be there.
The next step was to work out how. As a third year teacher, I didn’t think I could afford the conference fee myself, so I investigated scholarships. I decided to apply for the IH John Haycraft classroom exploration scholarships, as part of which I had to write a conference proposal and abstract, neither of which I’d done before. Thanks to the help of Ceri Jones, for which I’m eternally grateful, I was able to submit a strong application, and was lucky enough to win that scholarship. That took me to Glasgow 2012.
Since then, I’ve been able to attend every IATEFL conference. Here’s a 2020 post sharing photos from the conferences, along with links to my summaries of talks I attended each year. These are the posts for the 2021 summary and 2022 summary. I’ve learnt so much from the conferences, and made so many friends there. It really is the highlight of my year every year!
Special Interest Groups
IATEFL’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) cover 16 different areas, and I think I’ve attended events run by most of them! I’ve been to both face-to-face and online talks, workshops, and pre-conference events, all of which have been great for my learning and for networking with others interested in that area.
Since 2021, I’ve been a member of the committee for the Materials Writing Special Interest Group, which is probably the one I’ve learnt the most from. It’s really helped me to understand how language learning materials work, how they influence teachers and students, and how they can (and should!) be improved. The people I’ve worked with on the committee and met at the events are also a super-supportive bunch. Through being on the committee, I’ve met a whole range of new people, and learnt new skills, including designing the updated MaWSIG website using Divi, something I had no idea about when I started!
Before being on the MaWSIG committee, I spent a couple of years on the Membership and Marketing Committee, which offers advice to IATEFL on how to make the Association as relevant and interesting to current and potential members as possible.
Apart from the SIGs, IATEFL does many other things. This 4-minute video will show you some of them:
IATEFL Ambassador
In 2022, I was priviliged to be asked to become an IATEFL Ambassador. Along with Evan Frendo, Sarah Mercer and George Pickering (and hopefully others in the future), I’ll be working to let people know about IATEFL and how it can help them. To that end, please do ask questions in the comments below, and share what you’ve learnt from IATEFL if you’ve been a member or been to one of the conferences.
To help my iPad to cope, I will write each talk up as a separate post. I apologise in advance to your inbox if you subscribe! I’ll come back to this post at a later date and add an index of all of the day one talks.
If you were one of the speakers please feel free to correct anything I may have got wrong or misinterpreted.
Plenary: (Re)imagining and (re)inventing early English language learning and teaching – Nayr Ibrahim
(Re)viewing the past
When Nayr started teaching in 1994, she had a degree in literature and a CELTA. She was trained to teach adults, but found herself in a classroom with children. She was mis-qualified, and the children ran rings around her. This reflects the experience of many teachers. Teaching children was seen as the appendix of the ‘real job’ of teaching adults.
Eric Lenneberg (1967) put forward the Critical Period Hypothesis, launching the age debate – is younger better? Research that was shared was based on children learning a second language in immersion contexts. Nayr emphasises that Foreign Languages (FL) are learnt in a different way. There was a struggle for a different lens for early language learning, different to adult learning, different to immersion contexts.
In 2002, when Nayr was looking for a Masters degree, there was no qualification focussed on teaching young learners. She twisted her MA modules so that she could focus on YL in all of them. At this point she discovered the literature of YL teacher.
This literature helped her to feel proud of being a YL teacher. This literature covered areas like the way that children are learning how to learn, the importance of the socio-affective domain, teaching the whole child, how to scaffold to both support and motivate children, and how children experience the world of fantasy.
Courses to focus on teaching young learners like the CELTYL were unsuccessful as there was little demand, partly because schools didn’t ask for them. But the growth of children learning languages was huge. This was one quote about it:
A truly global phenomenon and as possibly the world’s biggest policy development in education.
Johnson, 2009, p23
CEFR levels were launched in 2001, but they were developed for adult learning and slapped onto children / teens and their materials. Now there are descriptors for children and adolescents, but they don’t cover all of the aspects of early language learning, as it covers far more than just languages.
By 2011, all EU countries had introduced foreign language learning at primary level. 84 countries in the world had lowered the age at which a foreign language had introduced. Nearly all 42 Asian countries had made foreign language learning at primary obligatory. But studies were showing that younger is not better if conditions were not correct.
Conditions for younger to be better include small classes, more time, qualified practitioners, the out-of-school experience / exposure, and understanding all of the many factors which impact on children’s foreign language progress. (There were many more Nayr mentioned)
2014 was a watershed moment for Nayr. The debate at that year’s IATEFL conference was ‘Teaching English to young learners does more harm than good’ (I think I’ve got that title slightly wrong!) ELTJ published a special issue in teaching English to young learners. It included an article ‘Young learners: defining our terms’. There were acknowledgements in general about dividing young learners into early years, young learners, teenagers – highlighting that there are differences between how these learners learn. There is more professionalisation of young learner teaching now, more research, and it’s acknowledged as a field.
ELLRA – Early Language Learning Research Association is about to become a reality.
I am a teacher, with a complex identity. Own your identity. Display it to the learners. They will benefit from it.
Nayr Ibrahim
Although we have to some extent accepted the use of the L1 in language teaching, we need more research into translanguaging. We need to move from the mother tongue or the L1 to integrating more linguistic diversity.
In 2018, Nayr was thrown into consultancy work on the Norwegian curriculum. Some of the words in the curriculum are shown in the image above. There was a move from ‘learn’ or ‘know about’ to ‘discuss’ or ‘reflect’. The question with all of these things is ‘Do we know how to do this?’
As Kalaja and Pitkanen-Huchta say, the problem is that these are all buzzwords. We still know very little about how these areas work in primary and pre-primary English. There is a lot of fuel for research here, if you’re looking for something to work on.
There is now much more literature available related to teaching young learners.
ECML is one website which looks at plurilingual and CLIL approaches.
The most recent ELTon winner for innovation was a book focussed on pre-primary by Gail Ellis and Sandie Mourao [Amazon affiliate link]. This is a huge shift from when Nayr started her career.
Where are we now?
There has been a steep rise in pre-primary education in general around the world. 63 countries have adopted free pre-primary education. 51 have adopted compulsory pre-primary education. 46 countries have free and compulsory education. Even one year of pre-primary schooling can have a huge impact on later education, laying the foundation for literacy and numeracy, and general preparation for school. However, in COVID responses, early / pre-primary education as often neglected in favour of older children.
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong opportunities for all.
Goal 4 of (I’m not sure!)
In top-level educational guidelines, early foreign language learning is one of the least mentioned areas, but it is exploding unofficially. We need to be aware of our impact on children at this stage – at no point is the whole child so important.
Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) – there is a shift from teaching to care, being mindful of these young children in our care.
According to Mourao, there is a slow increase in talks connected to research in early language learning. This area of ELT is being taken seriously now. There are now more books too, with a steady increase in publications, as you can see in the photo below.
Nayr says we need to continue to investigate pre-primary contexts, and fund more research in these areas, with a focus on areas like broad cognitive development, child-centred pedagogies, holistic training, and greater specificity in training.
How can we reinvent early language learning?
Go back to basics!
Start with the child. A learning individual. Beings in the present. Social actors in their own right being changed by and changing their environments. Languages should not be fostered as separate subjects, but as something communicative which is used through other subjects. We teach the whole child through English, rather than teaching English to the child.
Start with children as linguistic geniuses, with the right to all of their languages. Language learning is hard work, even for little ones. Nayr asked a little boy ‘What is English? What is French?’
English is green and French is vert.
Learning languages allows for an affirmation of identify. Translanguaging gives children voices and foregrounds their personal language experience as valid, important and relevant. Children can learn more than one language simultaneously. Our languages are always active in our heads, they are not blocked.
Colourblindness vs colour-consciousness.
Husband, 2019
Diversity is around us, not somewhere else. Be aware of it. Deal with issues of race and diversity explicitly. Don’t ignore the differences around us.
Use quality language materials. Use picture books. Allow children to explore not just the word, but the world, as Freire said.
Learning is messy. It’s erratic and recursive and simultaneous and complex. Occasionally it plateaus, then it peaks. Children need colour, art, music, nature. Let them play! Stop testing them. Use observation and reflection. Stop sitting them at desks. Let them move around. Stop adultifying early language learning. Use the philosophy of approaches like Montessori, Steiner. Stop CLILifying. English should be integrated in the routines of everyday life.
Let them play!
Nayr Ibrahim
Let’s making learning Trans!
Transcultural
Translingual
Transformative
Transgressive
As we move from primary to pre-primary, we can’t assume that we can use primary approaches to teacher 3, 4 and 5 year olds.
This is my first PCE as a member of the MaWSIG committee. We ran a day of sessions called ‘Exploring dichotomies: bridging gaps and joining the dots’. This was the programme:
These are my notes from each session. If you were one of the speakers, please feel free to correct anything you feel I may have got wrong! There may be some slightly odd sections when my iPad w
Writing effective materials about traumatic subjects – Tania Pattison
Tania lives in Canada, so this talk is centred on a Canadian context, but can be applied anywhere in the world.
She did a materials writing project based on a tragic episode in Canadian history. She’s going to share 10 tips for writing materials based on topics which aren’t typically in course books.
She wrote about this for IATEFL Voices, issue 283, published in November 2021, if you’d like to read more.
The episode Tania wrote about was the way that indigenous people were treated in Canada over a number of years, and the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). One of the TRC recommendations was that newcomers to Canada and people in the education system need to be taught about what happened. Tania worked on EAP materials for a college in Canada, which had to include materials related to TRC. She’s not indigenous, or even Canadian so she asked herself how she could write about this in a sensitive, accurate way, while fulfilling her goal of writing EAP material.
These are her tips.
1. Know why you’re doing it
Are you trying to fill a gap in student knowledge?
Raise awareness of world issues?
Work on critical thinking?
2. Keep your own values in check
Any attempt to impose your own values on students becomes ‘an exercise in self-indulgence rather than effective’.
Guy Cook, IATEFL debate 2021
3. Consider your timing
Make sure students already know each other and feel comfortable with each other before you approach this kind of material. Give them background information first – for example, Tania had information about Canada’s government and some basics about the country first, as the materials were for newly-arrived students.
Allow time for students to process the materials – you may want to have less material in these units. Make sure it’s a point in the course where you can determine whether the students are ready for this type of material.
4. Scaffold your materials.
Find out what students already know, and what stereotypes people may already have. You may need to dispel these before you start working on anything else.
5. Be mindful of the balance between teaching language, skills and content
You can’t suddenly switch from harrowing content to a grammar lesson. Think about how to make transitions between parts of the lesson.
If you can, incorporate skills into your teaching, for example website analysis, critical thinking.
6. Let the voices of those affected take centre stage
Never speak about us without us.
Roberta Bear, Indigenous Canadian teacher, 2017
Can you use first-hand accounts from those involved? Artwork? Guest speakers if you can? Those could be the basis of the materials.
7. Don’t sugar-coat it
Recognise that something terrible happened, or is still happening. Show the reality.
Use trigger warnings – be prepared for students to excuse themselves from activities.
8. Allow flexibility in the way the material is to be delivered
Take cues from how student are reacting.
If you’re writing for other teachers, include ideas for different approaches in the teacher’s notes.
9. Build in opportunities for individual reflection and response
The issues might not be unique to the situation you are writing about – it may allow students to talk about other issues from other places and times that aren’t foreseen in the materials.
Phrases like ‘Use your own judgement’ or ‘There is no correct answer’ are useful in instructions and teacher’s notes.
Many learners have been waiting their whole lives to engage in these kinds of conversations and find Canada, or the right teacher, is giving them the space to do so.
Amy Abe, Indigenous Canadian teacher, 2017
10. Try to end on a positive note where possible
This may not be possible, but if you can, aim to leave students with a sense of optimism.
Can you find a way to celebrate an oppressed culture, show improvements that have taken place, etc.? Examples Tania used were encouraging students to attend an art gallery with indigenous art, or to find out about college statistics regarding indigenous students and the support they have available for them.
Chanie Wenjack was the child whose story Tania wrote about – he died when he was a child and ran away from the boarding school he was forced to attend. Now, it’s the name of a lecture theatre at the university Tania attended, and the name of a school: The Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies, Trent University, Canada.
When properly approached, these discussions can be some of the best, with students coming away with invaluable lessons learned.
Tim Johnson, University Affairs, 2015
Responses to questions
If you’re writing materials for teachers and students you don’t know, your teacher’s notes become very important. Make it as clear as possible regarding different ways you can approach this material, and different ways students may need to process this information.
Working with young learners, they know about what’s going on in the world even from a very young age, so we need to address these topics, but we need to feel how ready they are – what background knowledge do they have? What are they ready to process? Some children may be more scared by not talking about these challenging issues than if we cover them.
We also need to know about the potential backgrounds of the students (and teachers) we’re writing for. Some of these issues may trigger areas which our students have personal experience of and don’t want to or aren’t ready to talk about yet. We need to leave space within the materials to allow processing of these issues, and not force anybody to discuss anything they don’t want to – there needs to be an escape clause too.
Practical strategies for writing inclusive ELT materials – Amina Douidi
Amina is an intercultural and diversity consultant.
Intercultural language education is about integrating the teaching of language and culture / cultures. It needs to go ‘beyond presenting isolated snippets of information about the target language culture’ (Liddicoat, 2014) and the integration of the learners’ languages and cultures (Liddicoat, 2008).
Intercultural communication competence is about the refinement and development of intercultural skills, knowledge and attitudes of interacting with the world of cultural difference that complement language competence (Byram, 1997). We don’t assume that our learners come to the classroom as blank pages, hence the inclusion of refinement here.
It’s a particular challenge for writing materials for English teaching, as opposed to other languages, because of the way that English has been appropriated globally.
Interculturally oriented materials:
Promote Global Englishes and/or English as a Lingua Franca, in order to continually challenge native-speakerism.
Recognise Global North / Global South power imbalance, inequalities and status quo. Recognise our own identities and how they might impact on the materials writing process.
Promote a decolonial discourse and challenge methodologies (Kumaravadivelu, 2006; 2016) and concepts rooted in an imperialist worldview. Create space for learners within the lessons.
Promote intercultural skills: mediating, interpreting, and relating, curiosity, interaction and curiosity.
Global majority is a new term which is intended to replace the idea of racial minorities.
Amina asked us to reflect on our own writing:
These are the principles Amina would like to promote these ideas.
Principle 1: Variety of representation
Amina has selected variety rather than diversity.
The 4 Ps (Yuen, 2011):
People: Global North and Global South
Places: The historically privileged and the historically marginalised
Perspectives: dominant and silenced narratives
Practices: judgement-free, contextualised, and well-informed account of cultural behaviours, customs and traditions, focused on the individual – rather than stereotypes / overarching narratives, focus on a single narrative – rather than cultural facts
Principle 2: Complexity of representation
Addressing topics of social and cultural relevance to learners (e.g. gender roles)
Challenge fixity of cultural constructs: normalise the possibility of change / changing opinions / changing your mind – just because you don’t like modern art now, doesn’t mean this will always be true
Contextualise systemic inequality beyond personal responsibility – what is the history of this practice? E.g. Why don’t people vote?
Show intersectionality as the norm: we’re not just one identity, we’re many. Amina is educated, a PhD holder, a woman, a wife, a multilingual speaker, not just one…all of these.
Sustaining inclusivity: there is no ‘correct’ amount of diversity to include.
Principle 3: Intentionality in instruction
Include these ideas within rubrics and learning outcomes. For example:
Mediation
Curiosity: finding out about other people’s practices e.g. what do you eat for breakfast?
[2 others which I missed]
The ‘Five savoirs’ shown in the slide above are possible ways we can think about intercultural skills. They shouldn’t necessarily be turned into learning outcomes, but they can be things you can consider in your writing.
Discussion
As an editor, you need to acknowledge the fact that materials writers have spent a lot of time on their materials already. You don’t necessarily want to come in and scrap the materials completely because they’re lacking intercultural elements. You may need to tweak the materials by adding a task, changing a task, adding a question or two.
Queer materials writing: sharing research perspectives and (some) experience – Thorsten Merse
Torsten is a professor of ELT education at the University of Duisburg-Essen, who is particularly interested in LGBTIQ+ and queer theory at the intersection with critical coursebook analysis. He is a researcher, but has some experience of writing materials himself.
He acknowledges that it’s easier to critique materials than to write them in the first place. He also recognises that he speaks from a position of privilege, that we are able to talk about this in our context, but this might not be possible everywhere int he world.
Thorsten says: Coursebooks can cause transformation. If something appears in the course book, teachers might think about including it. If it’s never there, they may never consider it, even if they would be willing to do so.
In Queer EFL Teaching and Learning, there has been a systematic invisibility of these identities. There is a lot of sexual identity in coursebooks, but it’s so normal we don’t even think about it: for example, the typical family. It’s about challenging norms which are there. We often circulate single stories in our profession: ‘the single story of heterosexuality’, and although there are some shifts (for example, not everyone is now white), there is still not much in the way of queer identities in materials. There are some research links in the photo below:
Queer EFL teaching and learning has started to become a more researched topic, and is now being researched more. There have been conferences about Queering ESOL, podcast episodes (Angelos Bollas got a mention) and it’s becoming more visible.
In Germany, there is now a requirement to include the diversity of sexual identities in some curriculums.
English as a school subject ‘engages learners in themes such as social, economic, ecological, political, cultural and intercultural phenomena, problems of sustainable development as well as the diversity of sexual identiities’
Curriculum English from Lower Saxony, NsK, 2015 (Thorsten’s translation)
Merse and his colleagues looked at three ELT coursebooks for year 9 at comprehensive schools, looking at representation of diversity in general: sexual, gender, and other skills. They looked at images and the text surrounding them, exploring visibility, voice and agency of diverse identities. They started from the assumption that heteronormativity and cisgender would be the default.
They grouped these into prevailing features – not what we should do, but what actually happened in the course books they analysed.
Representational strategy I: heteronormativity
This is often the default.
100% clarity: male, female, cis
No trans or inter
In cases of ambiguity, the texts clarify, for example through pronouns
No representation of any facet of LGBTIQ+ diversity at allOf
Often written out on purpose
Representational strategy III: ???
Problematising queer identities, with no opportunity to challenge being gay as being a problem identity, for example in the text below.
Representational strategy IV: The stand-alone and stick-out representation
More positive representations
But only one in the whole book
And not necessarily
Exotic, an add-on, but well meant
Representational strategy V: a full unit
The acronym was spelt out. The whole unit dealt with the question of gender identity.
New strategies
Background diversity of LGBTIQ+ coursebook characters just happen to be LGBTIQ+ without requiring explanation.
Ambiguity and openness: create tasks and activities where learners can bring their own experience into ‘gaps’.
Explicit focalisation of LGBTIQ+ create cultural and linguistic learning opportunities through engaging learners in LGBTIQ+ content
An example from Thorsten’s materials
Challenges
How much LGBTIQ+ is enough? (OR: How much normativity are you willing to have taken away from you?) – not necessarily a valid question, but one that you have a lot
Fear of ‘wrong’ or ‘too extreme’ representation of LGBTIQ+ lives, issues and people
‘The danger of a single story’ – balanced representations
Making thematic matches that makes sense rather than appearing odd (for example, a discussion about a koala keeper – sexuality not relevant, but a discussion of toilets in a school – definitely relevant)
Selecting and curating authentic sources, or creating pedagogic texts, for materials production
Bridging a 30-year gap in materials writing – Sue Kay
Sue is talking about how she took the Reward resource packs and is trying to update them 30 years after they were originally written. The first pack was released in 1994.
The writers wanted to think about how to make them more relevant and useful for today’s classroom, including ideas like diversity, inclusion, and making them deliverable both face-to-face and online.
Simon Greenall wrote the Reward coursebooks which the resource packs were written to accompany. Simon observed lessons Sue was teaching, and Sue showed him some materials she’d written to add communicative elements to to the classroom. Simon asked her to write the resource packs.
In ELT in the nineties, the cassette started to lose ground to the CD. Typical books were Headway, Streamline, Thinking First Certificate. Jill Hadfield’s Communication Games and and Play Games with English by Colin Granger were popular resource books. Michael Lewis wrote The Lexical Approach in 1993. The CEFR first draft was written in 1995, but wasn’t published until 2001. Corpus-based dictionaries became popular in the 1990s.
What wasn’t happening in ELT in 1994?
No broadband internet for finding authentic materials quickly.
No way to quickly check word frequency in a corpus-informed online dictionary.
No checking CEFR level. There was no talk of ‘Diversity and inclusion’ – Tyson Seburn did his talk ‘This talk will make you gay’ at IATEFL 2019.
English as a Lingua Franca only came to fore around twenty laters.
There was no green agenda – ELT Footprint was founded in May 2019.
21st century skills were not a thing.
No considerations of neurodiversity, such as dyslexia.
No digital delivery.
These are the filters through which they’re re-writing the materials. They’re trying to maintain the humour and fun of the original activities, while considering these factors now.
Obvious changes
Activities which were based on student input didn’t really need to be changed, apart from considering digital delivery.Fonts in some activities
Fonts in some activities need to be replaced to make them more accessible for students who might struggle to read them
With references to holidays, they’re aiming to have a green filter, reducing the amount of international air travel for example.
This activity has been updated to reduce the ageism in it, along with other phrases which might be removed or updated.
Updating a pair work activity
In this activity, students put the phrases in order based on what is typical in their country. They then read a story and reorganise the phrases based on that story. They then tell their story to a partner by looking at the phrases, not the story.
They created two updated versions of the activity. This one is for face-to-face delivery:
They changed the title, and for the phrases, they separated meeting online / face-to-face, widowed (relationships aren’t only about first relationships), meeting families (not parents), ‘became exclusive’ added as an up-to date phrases. These are the new stories:
These are the new stories:
They’re universal stories, which could apply to any culture, situation or sexuality.
In terms of the methodology for the face-to-face activity, the steps were largely the same, but some tweaks are there. For example, rather than thinking about what is typical in your country, students are now asked to think about a relationship they’re familiar with.
For online delivery, there is a spreadsheet. There are new teacher’s notes to show how it can be delivered in the online classroom.
When they started to consider how to adapt materials for online teaching, They did a survey related to pair work and group work online. These were the results:
Mingles
Does anything jump out at you as being inappropriate? How would you adapt it this to the online classroom?
These are the changes they made.
They removed some wording, changed some wording, and added in some green wording.
For online delivery, they created a spreadsheet with different tabs – one for each question. They gave very clear instructions in the teacher’s notes to show how this mingle could be run in an online classroom – this is a very clear format which makes mingles possible online.
Picture research: what can we do for each other? – Sharon McTeir
Sharon runs her own company, called Creative Publishing Services which focused originally on design and typesetting. Now her specialism is picture research, mostly for ELT contexts, dictionaries and education.
What does a picture researcher do?
Research In different contexts, libraries, commissioning photographers
Clear permissions and rights
Changes in picture research
There are fewer image libraries, as they have been amalgamated into big companies.
It’s harder to find natural images. Many of them are staged.
Fewer picture researchers are being hired. Instead writers are asked to do it, editors assistants and interns might be asked to do it, or staff in the big UK image libraries, or outsourced to companies in India and China.
Why use a picture researcher?
Relationships – building up a relationship with them
Years of training in copyright law
Awareness of how different photo libraries can be used
Providing a carefully considered image for that situation
Diversity and inclusion
Race, gender, animal rights, sensitive historical images, and tokenism are all areas which are now considered.
Writing a picture brief
You need to include all of the following information about the business:
Project title / ISBN
Print / digital
Print Run / Licence period
Territory
And about the end user:
Business / academic / etc.
Age: adults / young adult / children.
Any special needs / considerations.
Sometimes it can be useful to say what you don’t want, rather than what you want.
Answers to questions
Photo shoots don’t have to be expensive. Sometimes it can be cheaper to have a day of working with a photographer than trying to find the perfect images and ensure the permissions are all signed off on.
Many publishers have exclusive agreements with specific picture libraries.
Avoiding tokenism: working together to find a better way – Aleksandra Popovski
Alex is the outgoing MaWSIG coordinator and she’ll be the next Vice President of IATEFL. She’s also in the classroom with her students every day, and regularly produces materials to use with her students.
Tokenism is inclusion for the sake of inclusion, to help make you or your organisation look good. Coursebooks are cultural constructs and carry a lot of cultural messages.
Equality, ELT materials should not look like political manifestos – that’s not what not what they are. It’s not propaganda material. Materials should provide a springboard for discussion, a springboard for critical thinking, and we should remember that they’re there to improve English skills.
There is no framework for avoiding tokenism in ELT, so we need to take these from other fields. These are some suggestions.
Alex says that we need to tell more stories, covering a wider range of stories. It’s impossible to cover them all. When we write about a different culture, we should not write about the usual aspects of that culture we already know. That can create stereotypes, which becomes the story. We should talk about different people’s stories, within that culture.
Here are examples of some of the alternative stories you could tell about some of these cultures:
Do your research before you start writing
Look for more than one story.
Write about things you know, you are familiar with, lived experiences.
Make an informed decision about what to include in your materials.
What do you already know about the culture? What are your opinions on this topic? How might this influence your writing?
What cultures aren’t represented in the materials you use? How could you find out about that culture? Where would you do the research?
A framework you could use is a KWLH chart:
What I know
What I want to know
What I learnt
How I write about it
No showcasing
Do not put anyone or anything on display just because it seems special or different to you.
Create a character with personality, not just inserting an image.
Create a character with a real purpose and meaning in materials. Don’t just put them there, but use them again throughout the unit and the materials.
Create connections
Materials writers aren’t just producers of exercises, of grammar rules. We are writers of stories, who should be real and relatable for our students. Avoid one-off characters and events whenever you can. Weave stories, and create connections throughout materials.
Have a ‘sidekick’
Ask somebody to work with you to read / trial your materials. They could be a ‘fixer’, making sure you’re not tokenistic. This is something editors can do if you’re working with them, but classroom writers should consider this too.
Overall
There were lots of threads of inclusion, diversity, and considering carefully how we approach our materials writing so that we are thinking about them from the beginning, rather than retro-fitting. A fascinating PCE!
This was originally going to be the topic for my IATEFL Manchester 2020 talk, so the ‘this year’ referred to in the title is 2019-2020. Although the IATEFL conference moved online and to 2021, it’s still relevant and still true, and serves as a good reminder to me about what I was thinking a year ago when I first presented it at the IH Academic Managers and Trainers conference in January 2020. If you’ve read that post, you’ll find that this is the same thing again but with a few minor tweaks for online training 🙂 I gave this version of the talk on Saturday 19th June 2021.
Here is a video of the session which I recorded before the big day in case of technical problems:
Background
Although I’ve been doing teacher training since August 2014, 2019 gave me a much better theoretical background due to my MA Trainer Development module and the associated reading I did for it. I discovered there are a lot more resources out there about training than I realised. It’s helped me make my training more principled, in the way that Delta did for my teaching. Here’s a summary of what I learnt and how it’s influenced the training I do.
Working with humans
Pay attention to group dynamics before you do anything else, because without that nothing else will work: use icebreakers, share experience and manage expectations. In the live version of this session, I started by asking participants to write a definition of teacher training before the session started, then introduce themselves and compare their definitions. Online, you could use the chatbox for a similar activity, or put people into breakout rooms. Another idea (thanks Simon Smith) is to use post-it notes at the start of a course for participants to write one thing they are excited about during the training and one thing they’re worried about. They can compare these and generally find that there are similarities with their colleagues.
Training is about changing how somebody thinks about something. This can mean needing to get at their beliefs and that means in a small way changing who they are. Without making people feel comfortable, they won’t feel ready to share and take risks during training. I could have talked a lot more about beliefs but didn’t have much time – it’s (still!) something I’m planning to return to on my blog as I experiment with them further.
Group dynamics are also important at the end of a training session or course for a sense of completion – I’d always done some form of icebreaker at the start but never really at the end before, and had only focussed on getting to know you, not expectations or worries. I used the post-it idea on a course in summer 2019. We left the post-it notes on the wall all week (I’d done one too), then returned to them at the end of the week to see whether these hopes and fears had manifested themselves during the course. This served as an interesting way to reflect on the week.
Start where they are
This is mentioned in a lot of the literature, but particular in Wright and Bolitho. Start with trainees writing down questions they want the training to answer, or get them to brainstorm ideas connected to the topic. We can learn a lot from each other and this puts everybody on an equal footing, rather than the trainer being the only ‘knower’.
Brainstorms that you use at the beginning of a session can also be added to at the end and displayed. For example we have them in our kitchen at school so teachers can refer back to them. This helps teachers realise what they’ve learnt and shows you what you don’t need to spend as much time on in the session. Online, you can use tools like Google Jamboard, Mentimeter or AnswerGarden for a similar activity.
Experience-based rather than information-based
We know teaching works better when you experience it but for some reason training often ends up being more lecture-based.
I used to give people a lot of information and not really any time to think about it because I thought they’d do that later. That tends to be how I work because I’m lucky to have a good memory and I like collecting information 🙂 but I realised that that’s actually quite unusual.
I’m learning more about experiential learning and I’m in the process of getting more of it into my training room so this is still a work in progress, but I’m moving towards less content and more depth. My past workshops might have included seven or eight activities in 60 minutes and now it’s just three or four with more processing time.
As we shifted online, I moved to completely the other extreme content-wise. I ended up having almost no content as I thought that teachers had far more first-hand experience of the online classroom than I did and would therefore appreciate being able to share their ideas with each other. After a couple of workshops which fell flat, I realised I still needed to include content which came from me, and I’ve hopefully moved towards a better balance now.
Increase impact
I’m trying to maximise transfer from the training room to the classroom with more action planning time and reflection time.
In most of my workshops I now have a section where teachers use a coursebook or a lesson plan and talk about how they can adapt it in light of the workshop. If it’s a list of techniques like error correction, teachers choose two or three to try in the next week and (ideally) their mentors ask them about it to see how it’s gone. I aim to dedicate at least 15 minutes of a 60-minute workshop to this.
I’m still thinking about how best to do this on CELTA courses, but if anyone has any ideas I’d really like to hear them. I always try to make explicit connections in input sessions to particular lessons I know trainees are going to teach, as well as referring back to input sessions and handouts when doing assisted lesson planning, but I’m not sure how successful this is.
Learning through dialogue
Reflection and discussion time is maximized. This enables teachers to learn from each other, formulating their own thoughts and getting at their own beliefs through the questions of others.
Mann and Walsh recommend reflection through dialogue as the best way to develop and I’ve realised the importance of this in my own development since I read their book. It also helps group dynamics and helps everybody to feel valued if they’re learning from each other and reflecting together.
As part of this process, I emphasise that there’s no one right way to teach but that teachers should experiment with different things to find out what works for them and their students. This also comes from finding out about how other teachers talk about teaching and learning, so teachers can see what they have in common and where they differ and realise that it’s OK to have different teaching styles.
Model
Practise what you preach throughout. If you tell trainees to do something, make sure you’re doing it yourself! For example, if you tell them they must include a variety of activities, make sure you’re doing it too. This was something else I had trouble with when we moved to online workshops, as I fell into a trap of always having experience sharing sessions with ideas pooled in a Google Doc – this got old very quickly! I feel like I’ve been able to move past that now with a lot more online workshops under my belt. Walking the walk means that teachers/trainees are more likely to respect your advice, not least because they are experiencing what it feels like to benefit from techniques you’re recommending.
Having said that, trainers need to make connections explicit between what happens in the training room and what could happen in the classroom – they can be hard to notice, especially for new teachers, when trainees are in ‘student’ mode.
Evaluate
Get feedback. We introduced a post workshop feedback form with 5 questions:
What do you need more help with?
What will you take from this session into your lessons?
What should we keep the same?
What should we change?
Anything else you want to tell us?
This has helped us to refine our workshops and make them more suitable for our teachers. It also models how to get and respond to feedback. I realise I haven’t carried this through to online workshops, but we’re done with them for this year!
I’m still quite form-based in the way that I get feedback on training I’ve done, so would welcome ideas from others.
Does your training follow similar principles? Will you reconsider anything in your training based on anything here?
If you’re interested in developing as a teacher trainer, you might find ELT Playbook Teacher Training a useful starting point for reflection (and there’s 10% off on Smashwords ebooks using the discount code ZX79U until 17th July 2021).
There are 30 tasks with reflective prompts, and if you complete 5 of them in any one section you can get a badge to display wherever you like:
Last weekend IATEFL offered a weekend of free professional development for the ELT community in place of thre IATEFL Manchester face-to-face conference. I was privileged to be part of the final panel discussion which was called Moving Teaching Online. IATEFL have kindly decided to share the recording of the discussion for free on their YouTube channel.
Recordings of all of the other sessions are available for IATEFL members in the members’ area of the site. Highlights were Laura Edwards’ tips for online teaching, Alex Warren talking about using TED talks, and Tammy Gregersen discussing teacher wellbeing. Here’s how to become a member if you’re not already: https://www.iatefl.org/get-involved/membership
Thank you to Shaun Wilden and Ros Wright for organising it, and to everyone whis given us such great feedback on the discussion.
Today was supposed to be the first day of IATEFL Manchester 2020, but what with one thing and another during The Great Pause, plans have changed, and instead it’s the first day of the IATEFL Global Get-Together. Inspired by Katherine Martinkevich and a huge bout of nostalgia, here is a self-indulgent post of some of my favourite photos from the IATEFL conferences I’ve been lucky enough to attend, along with links to my talks from each year. Putting it together led me down a lot of rabbit holes of talks and links I’d forgotten about!
Glasgow 2012
My first conference, which I attended when I was lucky enough to win one of the two IH John Haycraft classroom exploration scholarships, alongside Ana Ines Salvi, who has now become a friend.
Go online: getting your students to use internet resources was my first IATEFL presentation, and I’m very pleased to see that the tools I spoke about then are almost all still available. Quizlet and Edmodo are particularly useful right now. These two photos were taken at the end of my talk, and summarise the key part of the IATEFL conference and organisation for me: the people.
The PLN after my talk
The Twitterati after my session 🙂 (photo by Cecilia Lemos)
Liverpool 2013
One of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had, with these wonderful people:
It was my first IATEFL birthday, with Ela Wassell getting lots of people to sign a card for me.
The day ended with a birthday meal at Wagamamas, with a waiter holding a lighter over a plate of plain rice and chicken for me to blow out while my friends sang happy birthday. This was the second week of my crazy diet – without my IATEFL friends, I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to go to restaurants and push them to cater for me.
I was also very excited to take part in the Pecha Kucha night with these fantastic people, talking about 19 things I’ve learnt about as an EFL teacher. < You can still watch the PKs in that post.
Manchester 2015
A great quiz night team:
Ela’s surprise baby shower:
This was the first year I attended a Materials Writing Special Interest Group pre-conference event, probably the single most useful day I’ve ever spent at IATEFL. It was called The Material Writer’s Toolkit.
I shared lots of other conference photos in this summary.
Birmingham 2016
This was the first year that I attended as part of the IATEFL Membership Committee (now the Membership and Marketing Committee), and the first year I mentored another presenter. This was the year the IATEFL blog was born, which I curated until September 2018, and through which I met a lot of wonderful people and enjoyed hearing their stories. (The blog now lives here and is called Views.) It was great to feel like I could give something back to this community that has given me so much.
I was excited to see my name in print for the first time:
I took part in the Pecha Kucha debate on whether teachers should be paid more than bankers. There’s a recording in my summary blogpost. I didn’t present as my talk wasn’t accepted (completely justified – my idea was very wishy-washy!)
Apparently this was the year of no photos – I was clearly too busy having fun, including another IATEFL birthday, this time on the day of the MAWSIG PCE 🙂
Brighton 2018
By this stage, IATEFL is about meeting up with old friends.
James (who appears in both of those photos) showed a group of us around the stunning Brighton Pavilion, seen in the background below beyond other friends.
I haven’t got round to writing up my tweets into posts from Liverpool yet – it’s a good job I’ve got another year to do it 😉 though hopefully it won’t take that long!
2020 online get-together
This year life is all a bit different. Instead of another MAWSIG PCE yesterday, and day one of the conference today, it’s day one of a two-day online get together. It’s open to anyone, and videos will be available to members afterwards. So far I’ve attended two fascinating sessions by David Crystal on language change and Tammy Gregersen on teacher wellbeing. The full programme is here. I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on online learning at the end of day 2. See you there!
This blog post collects together a few ideas that look at how English as a Foreign Language has changed as a profession over the years, for better and worse.
Barry O’Sullivan’s closing plenary looked at the history of the testing industry. I found the overview fascinating, not having realised quite how recently testing became such big business, or the incremental changes that have gone into shaping it. You can watch the full plenary here.
I felt independent publishers were much more prominent at this IATEFL conference than in previous years, with their stand right in the centre of the exhibition. The stand featured EFL Talks, Alphabet Publishing, Wayzgoose Press (run by Dorothy Zemach – see below), PronPack,The No Project,Transform ELT, and I was able to advertise ELT Playbook 1 there too. (Apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone!)
My main presentation was introducing ELT Playbook 1, which I self-published. I was pleased to be able to talk to so many people about it and get feedback on my idea throughout the conference. If you have missed my advertising it all over this blog 🙂 and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s an ebook designed for new teachers, supporting them with questions to aid reflection, along with suggestions of ways to record their reflections, and option to join in with an online community and get support from others. It’s also suitable for trainers or managers who would like help with supporting their teachers. I’m aiming for it to be the first in a series, so watch this space for later entries. You can find out more information, including how to buy it, on the ELT Playbook blog. Mike Harrison and Shay Coyne both attended and sketchnoted the talk – thank you!
The visibility and importance of independent publishers was helped by Dorothy Zemach’s plenary, ‘Sausage and the law: how textbooks are made’. It was one of the highlights of the conference for me. You can see responses by Helen Legge in this tweet:
More notes from #IATEFL2018 (or, more accurately, my kitchen table!)
Dorothy Zemach ‘Sausage and the law. How textbooks are made’ pic.twitter.com/oJQ1IBpuEN
and by Steve Brown in this blogpost. Emma-Louise Pratt, the conference artist, responded to the talk visually during the conference, which I thought was an interesting addition to the event this year.
You can watch the full plenary yourself here, as well as watching Dorothy talking after the plenary here:
Here’s my summary (though you should watch the talk yourself!):
Students’ books used to be the component of coursebooks which made all the money, with teachers’ books given away for free. They were basically just an answer key. Now publishers still try to make money on the students’ books, but there are a huge range of other possible components. There is also more copying and piracy of components, as well as old editions being used for longer and teacher-made materials replacing the books.
The combination of these factors mean that profits fall, so the price of books has risen, making them harder to afford, meaning there is even more copying, and so on. This, in turn, means that there is less money to pay the writers, especially as publishers have moved from a royalty system to a fee system, so authors find it harder to make a living. They also are less likely to care as much about the project, become reluctant to market the book, and quit, or they just don’t propose the innovative ideas they might have in the past.
The knock-on effect of all that is that experienced writers leave the profession, and less experienced writers fill the gap as they cost publishers less money. There are also more non-educators in other parts of the publishing process, meaning that the quality of projects drops. The whole process involves more work for everyone, as these writers need more support. Writers are also far more likely to be doing this work in addition to another job. Dorothy included a quote from Michael Swan summarizing the problem with writing on the side, rather than full-time:
To expect the average working teacher, however gifted, to write a viable general language course is like expecting the first violinist to compose the whole of the orchestra’s repertoire in his or her evenings off.
Dorothy also talked about the amount of money an author might (not) make from a book put together by a publisher versus a self-published book. She mentioned that digital was blamed for the drop in revenue from books, but as she said, if digital is losing you money, you’re doing it wrong! Technology should be making things easier and cheaper, not harder and more inaccessible.
In a nutshell, Dorothy’s plenary explained exactly why I decided to self-publish ELT Playbook 1: my ideas, my control, my timescales, my responsibility, my money.
So what can we do? Evaluate materials critically, compare and contrast them, keeping your learners’ needs in mind. Give feedback to publishers, push them when they don’t want to include particular things, up to and including the name(s) of the author(s) on the cover. If you love a book, tell publisher what they’re doing right. Pay attention to the content, trust authors to defend the pedagogy of their work, and remember that nobody wants to put together a bad product, because it just won’t make money. Most importantly
PAY FOR YOUR STUFF.
If you can’t afford something, don’t copy it or download it illegally, choose something else. The more often you refuse to pay, the more expensive things are likely to become. Piracy is not a victimless crime. If we don’t pay, people can’t earn a living, and we all suffer.
As Dorothy said, good writing is hard. It shouldn’t be us and them. It should be us, all together in education.
A fascinating post, and I completely agree with Svetlana. Your blog is truly inspiring! Here’s to the next few hundred posts 🙂
Thank you Sandy. Let’s see if I can make it to two hundred first! Will you join #ELTbehindthescenes and share with us what goes into making your blog?
How could I refuse? Thanks for the invitation T!
Last week I put together a series of posts about the IATEFL Glasgow 2017 conference. It’s something I’ve started to do every year, and every year I forget just how long it takes 😉
While I’m at the conference I tweet throughout any and all of the talks that I go to, providing I can connect to the wifi. This is for two reasons:
As notes to download later ready to put together my posts
To help other people feel like part of the conference: I started out on the receiving end of the tweet stream, and I know how lucky I am to be there.
Here are some fascinating graphs from TweetStats that show you when I’m at conferences 🙂
Tweets per day in the last year
Guess when the conference was
If the wifi’s not working, then I use the iPad Notes app, but still write as if I’m tweeting.
I’ve been tweeting throughout conferences for six years now, and it feels fairly automatic. I’m also pretty quick now 🙂 I can take most of it in, but obviously I don’t always notice everything, so that’s where it’s handy when other people are tweeting from the same talk. I also look at the conference hashtag regularly to retweet things from other talks that I’m interested in.
After the conference, I look back at the list of talks I went to using my paper daily planners, and categorise them, so for example this year I had Listening and Pronunciation, Teacher Training, Materials Writing… It’s the first time I spot what the main themes of my conference were. I set up a draft post for each theme, plus ones for Miscellaneous, Things I Missed, and a summary to bring all the posts together.
I use Tweetdownload to get a .txt and a .html file of my tweets. I start with the .txt file open from the beginning of the conference/the bottom of the stream, deleting tweets as I put them into the relevant blogposts. If I want to embed a tweet or follow a link, I use CMD+F to find it on the .html file. Clicking the tweet in the Tweetdownload file automatically opens the original on Twitter. This is when the learning happens, as I have to organise my thoughts into something coherent and logical. It’s also when I go down a lot of rabbit holes, following up on things that I didn’t have time to investigate during the conference itself.
Normally I only have a handful of tabs open in my browser, but when I’m writing up the IATEFL posts, it’s a bit different:
The top right window has all of my posts. Bottom right is the Tweetdownload .html file, and a tweet I’m getting ready to embed. Bottom left is the .txt file to delete things as I write them. Top right has everything else, like the British Council IATEFL links for me to find videos, Amazon if I want to put in affiliate links (the only way I make any money from this), and various other things that I can’t remember now.
Because there were so many tabs open, I didn’t switch my computer off overnight, something I normally do religiously. It would have been too much faff to open them all again! This time round, it took me about five hours on Monday, and thirteen or fourteen on Tuesday to write everything up. It must always take me that long, but I’ve never really noticed it before!
I think in the past I’ve done one theme at a time and looked for the tweets for the relevant talk, so I’ve published the posts as I go along. This year I published them all simultaneously, apart from the last one, so that I could put the live links onto the summary straight away.
So there you have it: that’s how I turn just under 1000 tweets into 8 blog posts. 🙂
If you blog, I’d be fascinated to hear something about how you go about it. Let’s find out more about #ELTbehindthescenes
As a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies at a school which mostly hires newly-qualified teachers, it’s now inevitable that at least some of the IATEFL Glasgow 2017 sessions I attended were connected to teacher training.
Here are my session summaries, along with some tweets at the bottom from sessions I didn’t attend.
Applying differentiation in teacher training (Alastair Douglas)
Alastair says that training teachers is just another form of teaching, and I agree! So we need to differentiate training too. I’m not sure why this hadn’t really occurred to me before, or at least, it had in passing, but I’d never really though about how to put it into practice. When training teachers, we’re giving them a model of how to teach.
Just as your language students look to you to provide ‘correct’ models of English, so too will your trainee teachers be looking for good models of teaching in the way you carry out training. A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training[affiliate link] by John Hughes
For example, on a CELTA course in Vietnam, they differentiated language awareness sessions for natives/non-natives. With native speakers, they focussed on grammar, and with non-natives, they focussed on lexis (e.g. collocations, ‘natural’ language). Alastair Douglas and his colleague wrote this up in Modern English Teacher 24/3. Non-natives could also help native speakers with their language awareness.
On another course, they were working with both primary and secondary school teachers on different ways of presenting language. Here’s an example of a session plan by Jacqueline Douglas:
Example of plan. Trainer needed to be available to group for feedback at teach stages – requires careful time management #iatefl2017pic.twitter.com/9Mxio0vMA1
A final way of differentiating training which Alastair is still experimenting with is the option of using more detailed lesson plans for final lessons on initial teacher training courses, with a more in-depth focus on learner profiles, stage aims and the rationale for them. This allows stronger candidates to really show off what they know about their students and what they can do in the lesson, and balances the extra attention that weaker candidates tend to get at the end of such courses. This idea was inspired by Chris Ozóg.
Other ideas were:
workstations
tasks with different levels of scaffolding
varying the number of questions to answer
different activities in different rooms
different guided discovery tasks
jigsaw tasks
get trainees to decide which materials to use (hard/normal)
give trainees the option to prepare more before sessions, e.g. through preparatory questions
There are some problems with differentiation:
for trainees:
overreach, where trainees try to do something harder than they can manage
loss of face (hence grading tasks as hard/normal, not hard/easy)
for trainers:
more time needed for material preparation
difficulties with managing feedback (can be through worksheets, sharing in an information gap)
for courses:
if there’s a set syllabus (but can work within it)
assessment – making sure it applies to everyone
Alastair also found that differentiation wasn’t always necessary if techniques were equally new to all trainees. On a course with more and less experienced teachers where they were analysing lexis, he gave more experienced teachers a longer list of items to analyse. Because the techniques were new, it actually took both groups a similar amount of time to analyse the items. A similar thing happened in a CELTA session on using authentic materials, where he divided teachers into natives and non-natives, expecting non-natives to find it easier to identify language areas to focus on. Again, since the techniques were new to all trainees, differentiation wasn’t necessary.
To differentiate effectively, know your trainees, and you can tailor the courses to what is necessary. The more you can find out about the background of trainees, the better. Be explicit about what you’re doing so they can learn more about how to differentiate in their own teaching too.
This tweet was from a talk about mixed-ability teaching, but is relevant here too:
Analysing and reframing written feedback (Kateryna Protsenko)
The word ‘feedback’ only came into existence with the invention of microphones, and originally meant ‘awful noise’. Touching a hot kettle is an example of negative feedback, because you stop doing it. In positive feedback, action A gets bigger, e.g. in a herd as panic spreads, or when a fire alarm sounds, but it can turn negative if people end up doing something too much.
Trainees say written feedback is what they benefit from the most, but how much do we really think about what we write on it?
The biggest problem she found was that ‘good’ was the word she used most. This doesn’t help trainees to develop at all, and nor does it promote a growth mindset, something Kate had originally learnt about at IATEFL 2016 and on her MA at NILE.
Until they used the word clouds, they didn’t realise what dominated their feedback. As a result of these discoveries, Kate and her colleagues put together a word cloud of suggested words to use in their feedback:
Here’s a word cloud of suggested words you can use more instead, which provide more useful feedback #iatefl2017 Protsenko pic.twitter.com/js7Ogs1vCr
Without putting my feedback through WordItOut (yet!) I’m pretty sure that my feedback will reflect similar patterns to Kate’s. I’m going to save her suggested words and have it open next time I’m writing feedback – hopefully what I write will be a lot more useful to the teacher, regardless of how strong or weak the lesson was!
Dare to share! Should trainees share their TP feedback? (Rebecca Brown)
Asking trainees the kind/format of feedback they want seems like a great idea! Why don’t I do this?!
One trainee said ‘The more feedback, the more you can improve’. Trainees said they often reread feedback more than twice. Oral and written feedback were considered equally important, but trainer feedback was considered more important than peer feedback.
Sharing feedback is something I’ve suggested with TP groups who have gelled well, and some groups do it without prompting. I often ask candidates if they mind me sharing aspects of their plan, materials, or feedback with other trainees during oral feedback, telling them exactly what and why I want to share it – nobody has yet said no, and some trainees have told me how much it has helped to see exactly what it is they should be aiming for. I’ve never done a survey of this kind though, probably because I’ve always been a ‘guest’ tutor – maybe one day if/when I regularly work for the same centre, I’ll experiment more in this way!
Getting teachers to act on teaching practice feedback (Tracy Yu)
Tracy did a survey with her trainees and found that over 70% of her trainees spent less than one hour reading their written feedback throughout the whole course. She wondered how to get them to apply the feedback more to future TPs. She also asked them what they would like to do if they could have an extra 30 minutes with their tutors: the main answer was to get 30 minutes of feedback and advice on their lesson plan before they taught, including reminders before the next lesson of what was discussed after the previous lesson.
Since then she has started to do the following:
Use Review – Reproduce – Retain to counter the effects of the Curve of Forgetting. Trainees review what they have learnt from feedback, and reproduce it in a different form (I think), helping them to remember their feedback better.
They use a TP feedback tracker. And schedule 10-15 minutes to share what they’ve tried and get feedback frm each other #iatefl2017 Yu pic.twitter.com/r00RRa2qfu
She also reminded us to ABD: Always Be Demonstrating! Don’t just preach to the trainees, show them how you want them to teach and how to respond to feedback.
Tracy says that we should be doing less feeding back and more feeding forwards, leading to the next TP, rather than looking back. A lot of training centres don’t give feedback on the plan before the TP, even though tutors think it would help. Time is an issue though.
One of the most frustrating things for me as a tutor is trainees who seem to have the same issues over a number of TPs, and who don’t seem to be reading their feedback at all, since it normally contains suggestions for how they can counter these problems! I like the idea of feeding forward, but I’m still not quite sure how to go about it.
The three talks above were all part of a forum on TP feedback. Here are some of the points from the Q&A afterwards:
One trainer suggests them starting written self-reflection immediately after lesson, pausing for oral feedback, then going back to finish it later.
A recent Delta trainee questions how easy it is for trainees to reflect effectively immediately after a TP, when you’re still in the heat of the moment.
Easing the pain of language analysis in initial training (Bill Harris)
‘LA’ can mean language knowledge, language analysis, linguistic competence or language awareness. Different qualifications use different descriptors for the ‘language’ component:
CELTA groups language analysis and awareness, including strategies for assessment
Trinity defines it as just language awareness (I believe – I wasn’t keeping up well at this point!)
Bill did a survey with 72 trainers and 51 ex-trainees, asking 6 questions related to LA on courses. These included ideas about confidence with language before/after TP, books that are recommended on courses, whether is LA compulsory, and a few more I didn’t get!
Swan is the book most courses recommend, followed by Scrivener, and Parrott [affiliate links]. More trainers recommend Parrott, but trainees don’t buy it. A Twitter discussion after the conference showed that this is partly because it is very expensive to buy in Asia – I’m not sure how many of Bill’s respondents were based in that part of the world. My personal favourite from this list is Scrivener for trainees, especially because a lot of schools have a reference copy of Swan, which I believe is best used as a final resort if you can’t find the answer you need elsewhere! I think Parrott is useful, but Scrivener more closely reflects classroom practice.
Bill Harris uses lots of different things to ease the pain of language analysis #IATEFL2017 Apologies for poor quality camera! pic.twitter.com/1dQycexT5N
(Sorry, but I can’t read it any better now on a larger computer – you’ll have to ask Bill for it!) He has tried workshops where they do poster presentations on different areas of LA.
Bill believes the Language Related Tasks assignment should reflect Language Analysis as closely as possible. When putting together the LRT, some tutors put language in context (which helps trainees to understand it), others decontextualise it (so trainees practise creating contexts for language).
Bill Harris’s final word on Easing the pain of LA: hit them with as many support mechanisms as you can!
Desert island descriptors: where do our values lie? (Simon Marshall)
Simon has been teaching CELTA for 35 years’ and has trained in 22 countries, and is very positive towards the course, but he still has questions about the way it has developed over time. There are 42 descriptors in the CELTA 5 booklet, and a candidate is supposed to achieve all of them in 4 weeks.
He wanted to know which CELTA criteria trainers tended to consider more important than others, as many of us (me included) feel that the criteria are not all created equal. His survey asked us to choose the ‘most important’ descriptors from each section, and many trainers said it was hard to choose, as it depends on the stage of the course. Despite that, he came up with clear findings:
Part of Simon Marshall’s aim was to see how important language teaching really was on a language teaching course – both related descriptors appear here, which reassured him (and me!)
If the 5 descriptors on the graph were like the Premier League, it would have an influence on how courses are run, and which sessions were included. Rapport was one of the key descriptors identified, but it rarely appears on courses as a session: we seem to know what it is, but it’s hard to pinpoint: we know it when we see it. Being more independent is part of what we’re grading trainees on (see page 14), but there’s no specific descriptor for it now, although there used to be.
Out of 85 respondents, nobody chose the ‘writing’ descriptor, or any of the following, as the most important:
These descriptors wen’t chosen at all in survey #iatefl2017 Simon Marshall. How can you get S+ for 1b? fail 1c? All presented as equal pic.twitter.com/bbADukd0po
Simon Marshall emphasises that this seems bizarre in terms of value and confusing in terms of achievement. He reiterates that he’s not anti-descriptor in general. For me, some of the wording is confusing/unclear, and I really think they need to be updated, especially to reflect the fact that trainers know that some criteria are more important than others, but they’re all displayed equally to trainees.
To supplement his research, Simon asked a school he used to send trainees on to about how they were doing. The manager said they were good in lots of ways, but knew nothing about language. When reflecting on observations he had done, Simon noticed that:
CELTA graduates:
used a lead in/warmer, checked instructions, included lots of activity types, and plenty of social engagement…
but when he observed them teaching language, they could do it a bit, but they didn’t look as if they felt comfortable…
and when they did activities, there wasn’t much afterwards in terms of error correction, feedback, or building on language.
Non-native non-CELTA graduates:
used no warmer and lots of instructions
were ‘language-obsessed’ – L1 translations were possible, they could answer students’ questions, less communication
Watching a German CELTA graduate:
she hit the ball out of the park!
a range of activities…
but she also knew the language well, and could answer the students’ questions.
The same graduate wasn’t allowed to teach above B2 in one school because she was a non-native – she was ecstatic for the opportunity when she moved schools. As Simon said, this is very wrong.
When Simon did his course in the 1970s, 7 of his 9 TPs were language-focussed, and he got a lot better at language over the course (echoing what Bill Harris said above about trainers noticing trainees improving their LA). Now, CELTA assessment criteria state that weak lessons at the beginning of the course won’t be held against you. You can get through the course with only two language lessons, one of which is often early in the course. So if you only have one language focussed lessons that actually counts, how can you actually improve?
As Simon highlights, skills lessons are largely laid out for you in books, so perhaps we should shift our focus, and therefore also prioritise the descriptors more clearly. Echoing Bill, Simons says LA could also be described as language affinity, language aptitude, language affection? Do they like language? Do they show any impression of being comfortable with it? Language awareness also includes being ‘on the prowl’ for language that comes up in the lesson. We’ve got to make them technicians.
In conclusion, maybe our CELTA mission should be: to train language teachers who can teach language! (Though the course can’t all be about grammar!) I think this would be a much more useful mission for a lot of our trainees, although we’d have to think carefully about how to differentiate to cater for both native and non-native trainees. I certainly agree that the criteria drastically need to be updated or at least ranked in some way – come on Cambridge!
Tweets from other sessions
#iatefl2017 Marisa C: Balloon debate for teaching approaches to promote critical thinking (‘Which guru gets chucked out?’) + Memorable.
Trainee reactions to using critical question prompts in TP feedback. Developing a reflective skills for post-course. #iatefl2017pic.twitter.com/fypLS6CxBc
As an adaptation of the Desert Island Discs format:
@sandymillin@Marisa_C Eg Trainees are left to design an effective reading lesson for YLs and you give them 20 ingredients from which they choose 5 #iatefl2017
Tweets from ‘Addressing the apprenticeship of observation: ideas for pre-service training’ by Joanna Stansfield (International House London) & Karla Leal Castaneda (Freelance):
At this year’s IATEFL Materials Writing SIG pre-conference event, Katherine Bilsborough offered us tips on writing materials for primary-age young learners. These were really useful, so I asked her to put together a blog post summarising them for you.
Writing ELT materials for primary can be great fun but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s somehow easier than writing materials for an older age group. It isn’t. It has just as many challenges but some might be less obvious at first. Following on from the talk I did at this year’s MaWSIG pre-conference event at IATEFL, here are five things to take into consideration for anyone thinking of writing for primary.
1 What does primary actually mean?
The term primary usually covers six years – a long period in the life of a child. Materials that are suitable for a year 1 or 2 pupil aren’t suitable for a year 5 or 6 pupil – for a number of reasons. It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the age group for which you are writing. The best way, of course, is to teach this age group yourself, but this isn’t always possible. The next best thing would be to observe some classes being taught – but fortunately there are a few easier things you can do too.
When you know the age group for which you are writing, check out the kind of things they are doing at school by using the UK’s Key Stage classification. Once you know the key stage, you can go to sites such as BBC Bitesize* and look at what children are doing in terms of subject matter and activity types. Remember this is a site for British school children whose first language is usually English so the language used might be more complex that the language you need to use in an ELT context. A good place to go to get an idea of the kind of vocabulary and grammar your target users need for their age group is the Cambridge English Exams website**. The word lists are very similar to word lists in the syllabus of most course books, especially since more and more course books now include exam preparation materials.
2 Primary appropriateness
The most important starting point for anybody writing materials for primary children is appropriateness. There are lots of ways to interpret this but we all know what it means. Primary materials have all the usual no-no’s and then a few more. Publishers usually provide a list of things they wish to avoid. Many of them are common sense but others might surprise you. It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with all of the potential restrictions to your creativity. It’s frustrating having to completely rewrite a story, for example, because you’ve included something that needs to be cut … and the story won’t work without it. This is why it’s also a good idea to run your ideas past your editor before embarking on a writing marathon. I haven’t given any specific examples here … that’s a whole blog post in itself!
3 Illustration
Illustration is important in primary materials and once again the importance of age appropriateness needs to be considered. Look at some storybooks for five-year-olds and then at some others for nine-year-olds. You’ll notice all kinds of differences. Not only obvious things like word count or language used but also themes, genres and art styles. I have heard that more and more photos of real-life people and objects are appearing in materials for ever-younger learners. This might reflect changes in their real worlds where they are watching an increasing number of youtube videos and have much more access to photos.
It’s worth investing in a scanner if you start writing primary materials. Editors, designers and illustrators appreciate getting a scanned sketch of your perception of a page. They also like to see more detailed drawings of story frames or pages where the illustration is key to the understanding of the text. It’s worth pointing out that one of the best things about seeing the final product is seeing the brilliant work of the artists in transforming your roughly sketched ideas into work of true beauty.
4 Instructions/rubrics
When it comes to writing materials for primary I think a good rule of thumb for an instruction is ‘the simpler, the better’. That’s probably the case for all kinds of materials, for all ages and levels, but with primary it’s especially important because in the case of the youngest learners, some might not be able to read yet. Have a look at the instructions in materials for this age group. Note how they change according to the age and how simple icons are used for year 1 pupils to support the learning.
5 Useful websites for a primary materials writer
All professionals have their favourite websites and primary materials writers are no different. Here are 6 of mine. If you have any others, let us know. It’s always great to discover a new one.
http://vocabkitchen.com
Paste a text and get an instant colour-coded version, showing at a glance where each word lies within the CEFR guidelines or the AWL (academic word list) guidelines. Perfect for adapting the level of reading and audio texts.
http://www.puzzle-maker.com
Free online puzzle maker where you can create crossword grids and word searches quickly and easily. Other online puzzle makers make anagrams, jumble sentences and create other kinds of puzzles.
Whether you are writing primary materials for your own classes or to share with others, for a blog, a website or a publisher, don’t forget the most important thing – have fun!
About Katherine
Katherine has worked in ELT since 1986 as a teacher, teacher trainer and author. She has published coursebooks and materials for all ages and contexts. Her primary materials include Dream Box, Ace! Oxford Rooftops, a new course book for OUP and a new online course for BBC English. She develops print and digital materials for the British Council and the BBC and regularly contributes to the LearnEnglish and TeachingEnglish websites. When she isn’t writing, she is gardening. Not having a blog of her own, Katherine enjoys gatecrashing other people’s blogs and was recently named ‘the interloping blogger’ – a title she approves of.
If you want to find out more about materials writing, why not get a copy of Katherine’s new e-book How to write primary materials, written for the ELT Teacher2Writer site. (If you decide to buy it through Smashwords with this link, I’ll get a few pennies!)
So I want you to tell me what you think went well, what you think didn’t go so well and what you would do differently next time…
Sound familiar? If you’re a teacher trainer, academic manager or even just a teacher who has been through a training course, then the above is probably burned into your brain and has become a mantra. In initial teacher training, at least in my experience, these three points form the start of the post-lesson discussion. And the reason? Reflection.
Most teachers, I hope, would agree that reflection is a useful, maybe even vital, tool for professional development as it helps us dig into what we truly believe in order to then subject it to scrutiny, with the final goal being improved practice. The question I ask myself, though, is would someone on an initial training course (CELTA/CertTESOL) see things the same way? Do they see it as a route to professional competence or merely another hoop to jump through to satisfy the tutor on the other side of the table? Are the reflections that follow the prompts a genuine attempt to understand what just happened to them in the previous 45 minutes? Or strategic responses to tell the tutor what they want to hear? Or even in some cases an attempt to rescue a failing grade by showing real awareness of their class? Only one person in the room truly knows the answer to that question, but, again, from my experience I’ve had reason to believe that required reflection in such stressful circumstances doesn’t always lead to genuine reflection and may in fact be counter-productive.
I struggled with this dilemma for a long time. I came to the conclusion that forced reflection will always be unreliable, so can you engage the trainees in genuine reflection during teaching practice?
The answer…? you can’t. At least, not all of them. Genuine reflection has to come from a place of genuine desire for development and if we’re honest, we have to admit to ourselves that that’s not where the majority of our future teachers are coming from.
In the end, the solution was a simple one: to teach the trainees the benefits of reflection for future development and more importantly how to go about it. This way if they are truly invested in their future development, the tutor can allow the time and space for reflection in feedback. However, for those not interested in future development and more concerned with the certificate they need to secure their visa to work abroad, there’s no need to make them squirm or to elicit the same strategic responses that waste the tutor’s time, their time and the time of their co-trainees.
In response, I’ve created a series of activities designed to lead the trainees through the reflective process and to provide a framework to guide reflection for those interested. This was incorporated into an input session during week 1 of a four-week course.
Stage 1 – Identifying reflection as a rigorous mental process
The session starts with a look at the stages of a reflective process and trainees organise them into what they feel is a logical order. The aim is to lead trainees away from the notion that reflection is simply looking back and highlight the importance of seeking to name the issue and, more importantly, to devise hypotheses for future action. As a kinaesthetic problem-solving activity it tends to generate a lot of discussion too.
I use this process taken from Rodgers (2002:851) which is a summary of John Dewey. However, the exact process isn’t so important. What’s more important is that there is a framework to guide the trainees.
An experience is required to trigger some sort of reflective thought.
The teacher seeks to interpret the experience.
The teacher seeks to name the problem.
The teacher seeks explanations for the problem and general questions are created.
A concrete hypothesis is developed.
The hypothesis is tested.
Stage 2 – Reframing classroom events
In this stage trainees consider typical classroom “problems” and seek to find potential reasons, encouraging them to think deeper than their initial knee-jerk reactions in the classroom. Once they’ve made a list of reasons they spend some time in groups discussing possible ways of addressing each of them in the classroom, which helps to encourage the hypothesis forming described in the stage 1.
Stage 3 – Categorising reflection
In this stage I get trainees to look at real reflections taken from recorded feedback meetings (these could also be written by the trainer) to highlight the different angles we can reflect from. They spend some time reading them and then categorise them according to what the teacher is talking about. For this I use four categories inspired by Zeichner and Liston (1985).
Reflection which simply recounts the events of the lesson with no real analysis of them.
Reflection which focuses on what worked and didn’t work and how they could address it.
Reflection which focuses on why the teachers chose to do certain things in the lesson and what they hoped to achieve.
Reflection which moves beyond the lesson and questions larger curricular issues.
There is typically a lot of grey areas here, which is good to generate discussion, and leads to the creation of questions to ask themselves to elicit each type of reflection. This has been identified by the trainees as a very important stage.
Stage 4 – Analysing beliefs about teaching
Using the reflections from the previous stage, trainees discuss what the teacher’s beliefs about teaching may be and then compare them to their own beliefs and discuss how aligned they are with how they think languages are learned. This stage should bring the reflective process to a logical conclusion and encourage more critical reflection.
Results
Since introducing this session on the course, feedback has changed. It no longer starts with the holy trinity of feedback questions from earlier, but instead begins with something much simpler: “How do you feel about the lesson today?” Those invested in their own development reflect; not always in useful ways, but as with any skill it takes practice. Those interested in their grade often respond with “How do you feel about it?” or more commonly “Did I pass?” and that’s ok.
References
Rodgers, C. (2002) ‘Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking’ The Teachers College Record Vol. 104, no. 4, pp. 842-866.
Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1985) ‘Varieties of discourse in supervisory conferences’ Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 155-174
About the author
Dan Baines has been teaching English since 2004 and been involved in some form of teacher development since finishing his DELTA in 2008. He currently works for the British Council in Prague and as a freelance Trinity CertTESOL and DipTESOL tutor.
During IATEFL I was tweeting. I tweet quite a lot during conferences 🙂 The guys from the ever-interesting TEFLology podcast happened to notice, and asked me if I’d like to chat to them about the conference. Obviously, I said yes! You can listen to the resulting interview by clicking on the episode page from the site or via iTunes.
If you prefer reading over listening, you might like this post from EFL Magazine, in which I chose my presentation highlights from the conference. Thanks to Marjorie Rosenberg for putting me in touch with Philip Pound, and thanks to Philip for publishing it.
I’d definitely recommended exploring the back catalogues of both the TEFLology podcast and EFL Magazine, as there is a lot of interesting content on both.
This post should bring it all together, and share a few of my other highlights of the conference.
My name in print 🙂
Probably the most exciting part of the whole conference for me was seeing my name in print on a real book for the first time 🙂 I was part of the team of writers who have put together the B2, C1 and C2 level workbooks for new series called Keynote from National Geographic. It’s all based around TED talks, and immensely proud to be part of it as I think it’s a fabulous series (and I’m not just saying that!) In case you’re interested, my contributions are Unit 10 of the B2 workbook, and all of the writing spreads for the three levels. The series actually starts with B1, but I didn’t work on that. I also met some of the other authors while I was there, and was generally very excitable about the whole thing 🙂
Joining a committee
I’m now officially part of the IATEFL Membership Committee (though my name’s not on this list…yet!) We had our first face-to-face meeting at the conference, and I look forward to seeing how this role develops. Watch this space for news, and if you have any tips or ideas on how to get more members/give more to our members, please let me know!
Another first(s)
For the first time, IATEFL allocated me as a mentor to another presenter. Marianne was doing a poster presentation, something which I had zero experience of, never even having looked at the posters at a conference before (oops!) Thankfully, facebook came to the rescue and a few people managed to help out.
Marianne was talking about a new way of learning pronunciation called Pronunciation Club. Her boards were covered in clear information, and every time I walked past she was there handing out flyers – true dedication!
Sandy and Marianne (photo by Victoria Boobyer)
Evenings
ELTjam telling us about learning experience design (LXD), with the help of Ceri Jones, Lindsay Clandfield and Brendan Wightman.
A meal out with CELTA and other teacher trainers at Asha’s for tasty Indian food.
National Geographic shared drinks and nibbles at All Bar One.
Seven ‘victims’ sharing their brilliant pecha kucha presentations with us (which don’t seem to have been recorded this year 😦 )
I spent a lot of time chatting in very noisy rooms. And I lost my voice and am now on my second day off work post-conference, with another to come tomorrow. Though on the plus side, it’s given me time to blog…
The best bit
I say this every year, and I never get tired of it. The best bit of the IATEFL conference is meeting up again with old friends, and making new ones. Here are a few photos of various people:
Sandy and Natalie
Chia, Tyson and Sandy
Sergio and Sandy
Out for lunch with Tyson, Marie, Ken, Sue and more!
I’ll leave you with the video which was shown to us at the end of the conference, and which had a lot of us in tears. It shows just how much people get out of the conference. Thank you to everyone who had a hand in organising it!
See you in Glasgow! 4th-7th April 2017, with pre-conference events on 3rd April, so I get another IATEFL birthday 🙂
I was very sorry to miss these presentations, but at a conference like this there will inevitably be some sessions that you can’t get to. Luckily, the online conference has filled in a couple of the gaps for me.
English for the Zombie Apocalypse might sound like a crazy topic, but the idea behind Lindsay Clandfield and Robert Campbell’s book from the round is to show how functional language can be interested in an entertaining way, tapping into the current fashion for zombies. I really wish I could have been to the session, as by all accounts it was a lot of fun! Lindsay speaks about the book in the interview below, and you can also read a review of it by David Dodgson.
These too…
Also high up on my wishlist were:
Using images to engage and motivate the ‘multiple-stimuli generation’ (Fiona Mauchline)
Fiona is one of my fellow eltpics curators and I’m pretty sure there would have been some familiar images in there, plus Fiona always has great ideas about how to work with teenagers (like the ones from the MaWSIG pre-conference event)
Using smartphones to let our learners tell us what they think (Tilly Harrison)
After her session, we discussed Kahoot (which I love) and Socrative (which I’ve heard of but never used), and she also recommended NearPod (which was new to me). I’d like to have seen how she suggested using these in the classroom.
Practical writing tips for Arabic learners (Emina Tuzovic)
I don’t teach Arabic learners any more, but I think Emina’s tips are also useful for anyone teaching students with low levels of literacy. She wrote a very good guest post a couple of years ago, and will hopefully be following that up soon 🙂
How to speak British (Martyn Ford)
Because I love these postcards 🙂 [affiliate link] and I wanted to hear more from one of the men who created them. I’d often wondered if one of them was an English teacher!
General tweets from other people
Throughout the conference, I always retweet anything I think is interesting from other tweeters. In no particular order, here is a selection of those tweets which don’t fit into the topics of any other my other posts.
Sample pages of our new methodology book Teaching Lexically now up online: https://t.co/f8SPQWB4gJ
As Lizzie Pinard does every year, she has put together a summary of all of her IATEFL 2016 posts, this time in enjoyable narrative form. It includes a few talks I wanted to go to but couldn’t, most of which I’ve linked to in my post ‘We’re all teachers’. The only other one I didn’t make it to was What makes an outstanding ELT coursebook? The publisher’s perspective (Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton), but if you’re interested in English for Academic Purposes you’ll find a lot more there.
As a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies, I’m particularly interested in sessions connected to training new teachers. Here is a summary of some of the talks connected to teacher training, CELTA and continuous professional development from this year’s IATEFL Birmingham conference.
Images for teaching: a tool for reflective teacher learning (Matilda Wong)
Matilda teaches on an undergraduate pre-service course for secondary school teachers at the University of Macao. Students do a four-year B.Ed. programme. In their fourth year, they do two one-month practicums in a local secondary school, the same school each time. Matilda works with 8-10 students from each cohort, and tries to teach them how to better at reflecting on their teaching.
When she first started doing this, Matilda used written journals for reflection, but she felt they weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Instead, they were putting added pressure onto her trainees, and some of them were just completing it because they had to instead of really thinking about their teaching. It can lead to burnout.
While Matilda was doing her PhD, she was given paper and coloured pencils, and had to draw a picture of her ideal classroom. The teacher she drew had no mouth, and it wasn’t until analysing the picture afterwards that she realised the teacher had no mouth. The underlying thought here was that she had no voice, and she hoped that one day she would be able to draw a mouth onto her face. That was in 1999, and she still had tears in her eyes talking to us about it last week. It was a very powerful experience for her.
This led her to experiment with drawing pictures rather than writing, as it can be less tiring, and can be combined with written reflection later. It can also highlight beliefs which are difficult to articulate. Matilda asked nine students to work with her on this experiment, none of whom knew anything about reflection before working on her module.
Who am I as a teacher?
What do I want to achieve?
What does it mean to my job?
Before their first practicum, Matilda asked her trainees to write a language learning biography, describe their worries before going into the classroom, and draw a picture of their ideal classroom, then answer some simple questions.
What level are you teaching?
How many students are in your class?
What is the lesson about?
Write as much detail as you can to describe what you are doing (e.g. What re you saying? What materials are you using? With whom are you talking? What are you thinking?)
After they finished the second practicum, she asked them to evaluate their original image of an ideal class and compare it to their experience. They reflected on what was the same and what was inconsistent, and also on what they felt they had learnt from this type of reflection.
Matilda showed us lots of examples, but only one was drawn in colour. What do you notice about this student teacher’s image, bearing in mind that they come from Macao, a Cantonese-Portuguese city?
We spotted that it was odd that the teacher was blonde, since in real life, she was Cantonese. Matilda hadn’t noticed until we pointed it out in the session. It was another way of reinforcing the lack of confidence that some bilinguals have in their teaching ability. This is just one of the subconscious beliefs that was expressed through drawing, but probably wouldn’t have been through writing. Three of the teachers had smiley faces in their images, showing that they think it’s important for a teacher to be friendly. One forgot to put a teacher in the image at all, and didn’t realise until it was pointed out! For me, it was also interesting to see that most teachers were at the front of the room, and only one was in among the students.
These are Matilda’s conclusions after the study, and she would like to experiment more with it. I think it would be interesting to get them to draw another picture between and after their practicums and get them to analyse all three of them. I also think it would be interesting for them to analyse each other’s images, or those of previous participants to draw conclusions about stereotypes about teaching (like that the teacher should be front and central).
This session was one of the surprises of the conference for me, and it was a real shame there were only 10 people in the audience. I’ve asked Matilda to write a guest post on it for me, and hopefully she’ll say yes!
Training or grading? TP and the art of written feedback (Bill Harris)
I met Bill at last year’s conference and enjoyed chatting to him about his experience of working on CELTA courses around the world. I also responded to one of the surveys which formed the basis of this talk, so I was looking forward to seeing the results. 109 trainers and 90 course graduates responded to his surveys.
Because Bill has worked in so many centres, he has worked with a wide range of formats for written feedback. He often adds ‘cold’ feedback to post-lesson reflection, so trainees write ‘hot’ feedback immediately after the lesson, get their spoken feedback, then write another reflection summarising the two.
Why do written feedback?
Detailed written feedback helps the trainer process their feedback (often more for the trainer than for the trainee!)
In his survey, Bill was mainly contrasting handwritten and typed feedback.
Tutors said that 45% of them handwrote, 43% typed, and the rest said it depends on the situation. 28% of trainees said they got typed feedback, 40% said it depended on the tutor, and the rest was handwritten. [I normally type on CELTA because I have my laptop with me, but handwrite in school observations because I don’t!]
Bill separated the advantages and disadvantages into those for tutors and those for trainees but I can’t remember which were which so have combined them!
Advantages of handwriting
Used to doing it (for some!)
More personal/authentic
Seems more detailed
Penmanship can seem important
Seems to show more care and effort from the tutor
Able to add cartoons/diagrams etc
Break from looking at a screen
Can easily use different colours
Can use lots of different signposts easily to help trainees process the feedback: ticks, smileys, ?, TIP:
Disadvantages of handwriting
Can be harder to read!
Advantages of typing
Neater
Looks more professional
Easier to read
Can watch the lesson more (if you’re quick!)
Faster (if you touch type)
Easier to edit
Can copy and paste previous actions points easily
Easier to share with other tutors
Can email to trainees
You have a backup if it gets lost
Most trainees said they’d prefer typed feedback (mostly due to legibility!)
Disadvantages of typing
Can be noisy/distracting [I was once told that when I got excited I typed more quickly/loudly and they wondered what they’d done!]
Can take time/be difficult to print out
May seem formulaic/impersonal
Tutors may write too much
Can get distracted by other things on the computer [though in the face of a 40-minute grammar lecture, this may not always be a bad thing ;)]
What should be in written feedback?
Trainees said that they appreciated practical suggestions for how to improve, with clear action points. They also wanted recognition of what they were good at, and a positive spin on things when possible. One non-native speaker wanted more feedback on language [and some natives do too, especially if they are not confident with grammar].
Written v. oral feedback
Trainers said that written feedback could be digested more slowly away from the pressures of the group, and focussed much more on the individual. This was contrasted with oral feedback, which was for the group as a whole. Written feedback acted as a useful prompt when giving oral feedback.
Trainees said that both written and oral feedback was useful. Written feedback was more permanent, and they could refer back to it with time and less stress. They appreciated the interactive discussion aspect of oral feedback, but found it hard to remember all of the details. One problem was that sometimes there were differences between what was said in oral feedback and what was written. Some felt that their peers were over-positive or too harsh in oral feedback, and were not qualified to give feedback. One audience member suggested recording oral feedback too, partly for accountability and transparency.
Conversion
Up until recently, Bill had always written his feedback by hand, but he is a recent convert to typing. Then he worked at a centre where he took over part-way through a course and had to shadow the other trainer’s feedback style. Luckily they had a colour printer, and this was the result:
Tutor-trainee team-teaching: a hands-on tool for teacher training (Emma Meade-Flynn)
Emma reported on some research she has been doing into how to make use of unassessed slots during CELTA, Delta and other short courses. In a survey of tutors, she found that 60% sometimes used it for a demo lesson, 70% used it for practice with no tutor present, some for getting to know you activities with students, and some for practice with a tutor present. About 35% of her respondents were already doing some form of team-teaching in these slots.
Team-teaching: planning, delivering and reflecting on a lesson together.
Emma found that her students were very receptive to team teaching, and when asked, they always requested it. In demo lessons, they couldn’t see the students’ faces and often felt left out. Because they weren’t part of the planning process, they didn’t always understand what was happening.
Emma decided to incorporate the trainees into the unassessed lessons by giving them roles, such as collecting and correcting errors, setting up activities and monitoring. They were also used as the source material, for example in live listening activities, meaning the students go to know them better. Trainees decided what they wanted to focus on, and it was almost always collecting and correcting errors, so she does a lot more of that now. She negotiates with them about where they want her help: with planning? With choosing materials? With presenting?
Benefits
Trainees were much better able to reflect on the learners’ abilities if they had been involved in the lesson in some way.
It taught trainees how to adapt lessons to finish them on time, partly through doing some improvisation in lessons: they would only plan the first half, and base the second on what came up.
They could deal with more difficult language areas which would be challenging for the trainees to work on without support.
Trainees saw lots of techniques in action, which they were then able to incorporate in their own lessons.
They were much more aware of student language, and used the pro-formas Emma corrected to help them focus on particular areas.
This lead them to teaching and helping each other more within the group, without always relying on the tutor.
Emma could explain the rationale of activities more clearly before the lesson, and evaluate them more easily afterwards.
It can be tailored to the trainees’ emergent developmental needs.
You can help trainees to notice things on-line during the lesson.
Learners can offer feedback, and they generally don’t worry about having lots of different teachers when they can see they are working together.
A word of caution
Emma said it’s important to decide the boundaries of the team-teaching with trainees before you start. Will you intervene? How will you handle transitions? Be aware that it won’t suit some trainees. Careless (2006) says there must be pedagogical reasons to team teach, it must be logistically possible and it must be interpersonal, with everyone cooperating equally. Make sure you identify a clear developmental objective, and don’t just do it for the sake of it.
You can find Emma’s slides here, including videos of two Delta trainees talking about their experiences of being part of team-teaching. Her blog is Teacher Development Lab.
Three speakers spoke about teacher reflection on pre-service and in-service training courses:
Daniel Baines on why feedback on 120-hour initial training courses may need rethinking, and how to integrate reflection training in the first week of the course. Hopefully Daniel will be writing a guest post on the blog about this: watch this space!
Mike Chick on dialogic interaction and the mediation of pre-service teaching learning.
Teti Dragas (one of my CELTA tutors 🙂 ) on how in-house video training materials may help ‘reflective’ teacher development and help trainees to learn how to reflect more effectively, and on how to encourage them to watch more of the videos of their collaborative lessons with more focus.
Should reflection be assessed? That’s the one key question which comes out of this interview, but I have to say a lot of the rest of the interview feels a bit wishy-washy to me. I agree that experiential learning is better than focussing on theory, and I think that what Jim is suggesting might work on a day-to-day basis for your own classroom through action research, but I’m not sure how it will work on a pre-service or further development course (like CELTA or Delta). Here are a couple of Twitter quotes from his talk:
CELTA despite issues ‘at least gets people teaching before being overwhelmed by information about teaching and learning’ @jimscriv#iatefl
Interview with Tessa Woodward about the 30-year history of the Teacher Trainer Journal, talking about how it has developed and grown over this period.
Tweets from other teacher training/CPD-related talks
These were talks I attended vicariously through other tweeters. I found these snippets of information interesting. Maybe you will too 🙂
Unfortunately nobody seemed to be tweeting from Pam Kaur Gibbon’s talk on the impact of technology on CELTA courses. I spoke to her as part of the her research and would have been interested to see the results, as I’ve written about it previously.
Katherine Solomon from @Bell_English observed 4 lessons and counted 428 teacher qs, only 48 student qs! #iatefl2016
A couple of days after the conference, Hugh Dellar wrote a post called CELTA, the native-speaker bias and possible paths forwardquestioning the future of the CELTA. It generated a lot of discussion in the comments and Anthony Gaughan responded on his blog: A critique of Hugh Dellar on CELTA. You might like to join in with the discussion on one of their blogs. It certainly makes for thought-provoking reading 🙂
Silvana Richardson spoke articulately and memorably about a huge issue in our field: discrimination against non-native speakers and the primacy of the native speaker. It was easily the best plenary I have seen at IATEFL, and I urge you to watch it yourself. Go on, I’ll wait.
OK, now that you’ve seen it (you have, haven’t you?), here are my thoughts. And if you haven’t seen it, read Lizzie Pinard’s summary of the plenary as it was happening. Then go and watch it to get the full effect. Have I told you you should watch this?
As Silvana said, why are we referring to over 80% of the teachers in our profession as a ‘non’? This implies that they are in some way inadequate or lacking, and leads to the continuation of the native speaker myth.
The words we say construct reality.
If we don’t think about what we are saying, and the impact of the words we are using, we are propagating the myth that ‘native speaker’ is better. This logic is faulty:
And in what way could this ever be considered correct?
The native speaker is the best model.
I am not a native speaker.
Therefore I am not the best model.
The native speaker is the ideal teacher.
I am not a native speaker.
Therefore I am not an ideal teacher.
What students really need is good teachers, and there are good and bad teachers from every language background, whether monolingual or multilingual. The language you are born speaking does not determine your ability to teach. They are two entirely different skill sets. As somebody said on Twitter:
We should not forget the ‘teaching’ part of ‘English teaching’. Linguistic competence should not be the only factor.
I agree completely that implying that native speakers are in someone superior, regardless of the teaching qualifications they possess, devalues our entire profession, and the hard work those of us who care about our jobs put into it. It is also damaging to the identities of those who suffer because of prejudices towards non-native speakers. The Johns of this world should not be allowed to teach without having to go out and get qualified:
And yes, I am fully aware that I may seem something of a hypocrite, as I started as a backpacking volunteer (though I knew I wanted to do the CELTA – which many might argue is not enough). I have friends who have used the luck of their native speaker identity to get jobs, although I am not aware of them having advertised themselves as such and I don’t know if they knew that this would have been a hell of a lot harder for somebody who was not born in one of the ‘inner circle’ three/four/six English-speaking countries.
Silvana included a lot of research findings in her plenary, the upshot of which is that there is inconclusive evidence as to whether students prefer ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ teachers. In fact, some students prefer non-natives, and some want a mixture of both. Very few seem to want natives only. (See Lizzie’s post or slides 31-42 of Silvana’s presentation (downloadable at the bottom of the page) for the full information about the findings) Slides 43 and 44 show the research referring to the perceived advantages and disadvantages of each type of teacher, although I would say that these are only at first, and many of these skills can be learnt through training. Having said that, I can never know what it is like to learn English as a second language, despite being an experienced language learner.
Ultimately, the ‘native speaker myth’ is just that, a myth. There is no research anywhere which conclusively proves that an L2 only classroom is better, or that students all prefer to be taught by ‘native speakers’, whatever they are.
“We need to find out more about this issue, become more aware. Write about equality for NESTS and NNEST.
Teachers: Join an advocacy campaign and show support. Write a statement supporting this campaign. Promote advocacy initiatives on social media. Start a discussion in your workplace to raise awareness. Do research, more is needed.
Teacher educators: review programmes in terms of the scope. What is the ultimate goal of these programmes? To develop well-rounded critical professionals or churning out skilled technicists who can produce monolingualism for export? Consider the content and methodology – is there critical exploration? Are they sufficiently inclusive? Sensitive to glocalisation? Using the students’ own language? What about bilingual identities? The elephant in the room is teacher’s own language proficiency – how can we help teachers develop this? [See the information about Damian William’s workshop below]
Workplace: Do you have an Equal Ops policy? Do you implement it? Are you proud of it? Do you challenge students’ expectations? Do you recruit based on merit?
Teachers associations: Issue a statement against the discrimination of NNESTs. TESOL France writes to employers who write native speakerist ads to discourage them from that. Create alignment maps of professional qualifications of teachers of EFL at regional, national and international levels. Encourage members not to apply for positions where advertisement is discriminatory.”
The plenary has already generated a lot of follow-up in the week since it happened. Here are a few examples:
Anna Searle being interview by Nik Peachey on the British Council’s attempts to extend their reach beyond the major cities and their attitudes to recruiting native and non-native speakers
Here’s Silvana talking before the plenary about the main issues covered:
Thank you so much to Silvana Richardson for bringing this issue out into the spotlight. There were many of us with tears in our eyes at the end of this plenary, including me, and it got a well-deserved standing ovation. I hope that this is the beginning of the end, and that we will soon all be able to say ‘I’m an English teacher.’ without anyone asking us where we were born.
(Addendum: Later posts which have arisen directly from Silvana’s plenary are:
NEST privilege by Jennie Wright)
Other sessions directly related to this dichotomy
Unfortunately I missed some other sessions which added to the debate, but thankfully Lizzie Pinard has reported on them. I recommend checking out her summaries:
Tackling Native Speakerism (panel discussion with Marek Kiczkowiak, Burcu Akyol, Christopher Graham, Josh Round)
Quote from Burcu Aykol: “It’s not about being NS or NNS, it’s about being qualified. Both have strengths and weaknesses, things found easier and more difficult. We need to free ourselves from our prejudices and stereotypes, leave aside prejudices to really talk about education.”
The Q&A follow up to Silvana’s plenary A quote from the audience: “It’s not dispensing with the idea of NS-NNS, it’s actually being equal and that equality to be placed on the basis of qualification and competence which includes language competence. But language competence doesn’t mean native modelling.”
Marek Kiczkowiak is one of the founders of TEFL Equity Advocates. I’ve shared one of their posts before, but for some reason had never put their badge onto my blog. This has now been remedied.
Click on the badge to go to the site
In this interview Marek and Burcu talk about some of the issues surrounding non-native teachers in ELT, and about the founding of TEFL Equity Advocates:
And finally, a couple of relevant tweet from Jack Richards’ talk:
Richards: Many language teachers aren’t native speakers-but how much English do you need/what kind? General/specialised proficiency? #IATEFL
One of the areas mentioned by Silvana and others as still holding some teachers back is their own language proficiency. Damian presented tips for help teachers to develop their English proficiency, and pointed out that there are very few books out there for this area, and it seems to be valued much lesson than developing other skills which are more directly related to teaching, like use of technology. For many teachers who have learnt English, their main use of it now is in the classroom, and they get little exposure to it with anyone other than their students.
He gave activities to incorporate raising linguistic awareness into methodology courses through guided discovery, and ways to highlight methodology within language courses aimed at teachers. Lizzie Pinard has a list of all of the activities in her summary of the session.
This is something I would like to develop at IH Bydgoszcz. It was an idea in the back of my head before, but now I would like to make it a priority and try to work out if we can offer something like this at the school next year.
The world’s language: using authentic non-native input in the classroom (Lewis Lansford)
Lewis is one of the authors of the new National Geographic Keynote series (of which I have contributed to the workbooks!) One of the things I particularly like about this series is that right the way from B1 up to C2 level, no distinction is made between L1 and L2 English speakers. The focus is on what they have to say, not which language they grew up speaking.
In his presentation, Lewis showed us clips from three TED talks:
The videos he shared include different stress patterns, ‘mistakes’ with grammar, and people who have ‘missed’ the target of native-like speech, but as he said, that is not the target they were aiming for. They are all successful communicators. Their accents are features, not hindrances, and they do not need to aim to lose them.
He spoke a little about English as Lingua Franca, and some of the features of this type of English. If you’d like to find out more, including ways of working with ELF in the classroom and other examples on L2 user models of English, I’d highly recommend the ELFpron blog.
Lewis highlighted the need to use international models of English to prepare our learners for the real world by training them in listening to authentic English from many different speakers. Unless they move to an English-speaking country, they are much much more likely to mostly speak to other L2 users than to L1 English users. They therefore need to hear other accents in the classroom to increase their awareness of cultural and linguistic differences in the way people use English, depending on their language background.
Can you hear me? Teacher perceptions of listening skills (Patricia Reynolds)
The fact that we need more exposure to different accents was echoed in a presentation by Dr. Patricia Reynolds. She showed us surprising findings from a research project she did which showed that many L2 users of English working as ESL teachers in the United States found it very difficult to assess the speaking proficiency of anyone from a different language background to their own. When she contacted the providers of a particular US English proficiency test, they said that anybody who had done the training could administer the test to the same standard, but this is not what she found in her research.
Non-natives score other non-natives’ spoken output more harshly than natives do.
This highlighted the fact that they (and, in fact, all of us!) need more exposure to a wide range of different accents in English before we can be expected to assess proficiency. This begs the question of how valid exam results are, and whether, for example, somebody who is unfamiliar with Arabic accents in English might grade more harshly than somebody who is used to them. It is also a question of increasing the confidence of her trainees so that they feel able to assess students from any language background fairly.
How many of you had coursework in your teacher training where you were required to listen to speakers with other accents?
This takes me back to my classroom at IH Newcastle, where I often had to ‘translate’ Arabic English to Spanish English to Chinese English etc, as students could not understand those from other L1 backgrounds, especially at lower levels.
It is an area which requires further investigation and awareness raising, particularly among the providers of standardised tests.
Last word
I really hope it won’t be long before the native/non-native issue is not an issue any more, but I know it will require work from everyone. If anybody would like to share their stories or write a blog post about their thoughts on this issue, I would be very happy to host them. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with me through the comments.
This post brings together talks on a variety of topics which I have loosely grouped under the heading ‘supporting students’. It covers SEN (Special Educational Needs), dyslexia, students who find English scary, and other areas of inclusivity.
If this is an area that you’re interested in, you should consider joining IATEFL’s proposed new Special Interest Group (SIG) on Inclusive Practice and SEN. They need fifty people to sign up to be able to found the SIG.
Forum on special educational needs
Phil Dexter, Sharon Noseley and Sophie Farag presented in the forum on SEN. Phil gave a general overview of what SEN are, Sharon focussed on SEN in British universities (EAP – English for Academic Purposes) and Sophie suggested ways for teachers to adapt their lessons, not just to help students with SEN, but to help all students. You can watch the whole session here:
Impairments are not identities, but they can affect access.
– Phil Dexter
This makes me think of two recent podcasts I’ve listened to: Sign Language on Martha’s Vineyard from Stuff You Missed in History Class and Why I’m not just blind from BBC World Service’s The Why Factor – both podcasts I would highly recommend. The sign language episode talks about how it was normalised on Martha’s Vineyard, and everybody could use it regardless of whether they were deaf or not. The Why Factor talks about how blindness can come to define the identity of many people with little or no sight, and about society’s reactions to them.
Phil also showed us a clip from Rosie’s story My autism and me, where a girl with autism takes us into her world, and explains what makes her unique. 1 in every 100 children has some form of autism, but medical labelling can sometimes cause more problems than it solves since so many conditions co-occur or are on a spectrum.
Sharon has severely dyslexic family members, and has seen how dyslexia can affect their lives. She works with university students in the UK, and says that some of the problems her students have may be down to SEN, rather than cultural differences or a lack of English. For example, her son has trouble with telling the time and sequencing events, so how easily could he write an academic essay with correct cohesive devices?
Dyslexia can affect short-term memory and fine motor skills, and can therefore make note-taking in lectures very challenging. It can affect 1 in 5 learners. Some international students studying in the UK are not entitled to support as it comes out of the budget for home students.
English is a dyslexic language…[which]…actually causes more dyslexia than other languages.
– Schwartz (1999)
Sharon gave examples of three students she has worked with:
A student from Kuwait, diagnosed with dyslexia at 39 after comments from her English teacher. She was given a report in Kuwait, came to the UK, but it was noticed too late and she had to go home as she couldn’t cope with the pressure.
A Chinese student who was always late, handed in work late, and seemed to have no interest in the course. After Sharon spoke to her, it turned out she had trouble telling the time, was depressed because of the lack of support, and had no idea about SpLDs (Specific Learning Difficulties). She was diagnosed at Sharon’s university: “This report is my medicine and you are my nurse.”
A Cypriot student found out at 22 she is dyslexic, dyspraxic, and has ADD, after struggling to take the IELTS exam. She was supported through her MA and ended up passing with a merit, having created an app to help dyslexic children tell the time.
Sophie suggested using open-ended tasks in the classroom where possible, as there is no single, right answer, and students can work at their own speed. This benefits all students, not just those with SEN. It gives them the freedom to express themselves in the way that suits them best. Some examples of tasks might be journals, diaries, reflection or response tasks or making posters.
By using a dark font on a pale, non-white background, you can help your students to read slides more easily.
Activities can be differentiated in a variety of ways:
by outcome: let students choose whether to make a video, do a presentation or draw a comic strip in response to a prompt.
by resource: e.g. longer, more complex texts for higher-level students, for example through Newsela.
by task: having different activities for different students, or having a worksheet with tasks which get harder as students progress through it. Have extensions for students who finish first. If students want to work alone, let them, unless there is a key reason why they should work together.
Listening/reading differentiation example: A writes notes/summary on blank paper; B has gapped summary; C has multiple-choice.
Writing differentiation example: A has no support, B has guiding questions; C has outline/incomplete text to complete.
Some tools which might be useful:
Voicethread: learners can choose whether to respond by writing, recording an audio comment, or recording a video comment. They can also doodle while recording.
Quizlet: students can play the games which suit them. It is multi-sensory, you can print a list or cards with the vocabulary, and you can hear the words. [See my student guide to Quizlet]
Newsela: up-to-date news articles presented at five different reading levels. You can annotate articles, and many of them have a little quiz.
My Study Bar: a toolbar which can be downloaded onto a USB stick and used on any computer. Designed to help dyslexic students read and write more easily on computers.
Other tips that came out of the talks were to recycle more and revise more to help students build on their short-term memory, to use as many different ways of encountering the language as possible (see it, hear it, have a picture etc), and to consider what other ways tests can be administered in, as giving extra time often isn’t sufficient. One audience member suggested using stop-start-continue as a way of getting feedback from students on if/how they want you to change the lessons to suit them better.
Teaching English to students with SEN: Challenges and opportunities (Marie Delaney)
I bought Marie’s book Special Educational Needs – Into the Classroom [affiliate link] just before the talk (and reviewed it later), so I couldn’t miss seeing her in action 🙂 At first glance, it looks like a very practical book, broken into sections with tips for teachers about various different Special Educational Needs, including dyslexia and ADD.
Marie started off by telling us that many boys in the UK would prefer to be thought of as naughty than ‘labelled’ as having SEN. Behavioural difficulties isn’t just about being ‘naughty’ though – these students need more support. Every school should have a register of children with medical conditions of any kind, including epilepsy or allergies, not just SEN.
One of the main problems is that the definition of SEN is quite woolly:
Students have special educational needs if they have significantly greater difficulty [how much?] in learning than the majority of students of the same age and special educational provision [what?] has to be made for them.
Marie’s general message is that it is possible for anyone to support their students, and that we shouldn’t expect to just magically know how to do this. As with any skill, it is a question of exposure, experience, and asking for help when you need it. Remember to ask students and parents, as they probably have a lot more experience of dealing with the day-to-day realities of SEN than you do. They should be able to tell you something about what works for them. Here are some typical teacher concerns:
I am not qualified to teach these learners.
Other children’s learning will suffer if we include children with SEN.
Other parents/carers will complain.
It takes a lot of extra planning and different types of activities.
These children cannot become independent learners.
Most of the tips are about ‘good solid teaching strategies’ and will therefore benefit all of our learners.
You might be able to get away with poor instructions with many students, but a student with problems with their short-term memory will need you to give instructions in the order you want them performed, and one at a time so that they don’t forget them.
Focus on what they are good at too, not just what they can’t do.
To counter parents’ concerns (while still acknowledging them), remind them that there are benefits to inclusion: their children will learn empathy and will get a broader, more diverse view of the world. Research shows that children benefit from this.
When talking to parents, focus on the fact that you want to help all of the students to learn as much as possible, rather than focussing on the SEN.
Think about how you react if a child says ‘He’s your favourite.’ Children do understand who needs help: ‘I don’t know why you’re upset. I know you’re a kind person and you know that everybody needs more help sometimes.’
If you’re planning for hours for something you’ll only use for a few minutes, think again about your planning! [Also generally true of many first-year teachers!]
Measure progress, not attainment. Be encouraging and supportive, and don’t focus on marks. Don’t focus too much on behaviour either, as some children may then become disengaged from learning. (Marie told a story of a boy who was proud because he’d sat still throughout a lesson, but when questioned had no idea what subject it was!)
Don’t speak to the teaching assistant or talk down to the child. Speak to them in the same way you would any other member of the group.
Get students with anxiety to tell you about the feelings they are having. It’s OK to be anxious.
Use Find Someone Who… or finish the story type tasks to develop empathy between all of the students.
Ask students to show fingers based on how fit they are for learning: 10 is excellent, 1 is I’m not listening [Or ‘give me the prosecco’ in this case! We got an average of five, in the last session of day 3 of the conference!]
Edit the language you use. Rather than ‘You’re not listening. Listen.’ which can lead to a defensive response, try ‘I need you to listen.’
Separate your description of the behaviour from what you think it means.
Get students to share the thought processes behind how they do activities. ‘You’re good at pelmanism/pairs. How do you remember which card it is?’
Acknowledge behaviour: ‘I understand you think it is unfair, but I still need you to do it.’
Give ‘naughty’ children a job straight away. They are more likely to fight to keep a job than to try to behave in the way you request in order to be rewarded with it.
Some children with ADD are hyper-alert and always on the lookout for danger. Ask them where they NEED to sit, e.g. by the door for easy escape, or at the back so they can see everything.
Marie left us with the point that a lot of our approaches imply that the child should change, but what about school systems? If somebody’s wearing glasses, you wouldn’t assume that you know how to help them, so why do we do it if somebody with autism is in our class? Labels mean we might assume that all of our learners are the same. This is not true at all.
We cannot solve the problems of today with the same level of thinking which created them.
– Einstein
Marie’s blog has a lot more information and links to her other books.
Dyslexia
I didn’t attend Jon Hird‘s talk on helping students with dyslexia at IATEFL, as I went to it at the DoS conference. I found it incredibly useful, and would recommend looking at his tips for adapting and creating materials.
How to help students who find English scary (Ken Wilson)
Ken started by saying that the problem with good and bad teaching is that we often know what not to do, but it’s not always easy to say what we should do instead. He also pointed out that none of us in the room were scary, because scary teachers don’t go to conferences 🙂
Question 1: Are they scared, or are they just bored?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell! Students get bored when they sit for too long, when the teacher talks too much, when it’s all talk and no action, when things are too complicated or too easy for them, when they can’t relate to the material, when they’re tired, when the lesson is boring… They might also be suffering from tech withdrawal, so try to include at least one activity where they can use their technology! (Sandy: Kahoot is great for this)
Ken asked his facebook friends what they used to dread about going to class. Here are some of the themes from the answers:
The teacher shaming the students
The teacher telling them off
Reading aloud in front of the class
So, things not to do:
DON’T single out a student for criticism.
DON’T reprimand students who are already having problems.
DON’T grimace!
DON’T ask students to do something that you haven’t trained them to do.
DON’T ask students to read aloud.
But that’s a lot of ‘don’ts’, so what should we do? Ken has five tips:
Don’t teach grammar!
Or at least, don’t introduce it as such. ‘Today we’re going to do the present perfect.’
Instead, teach the language in chunks wherever you can. Have a conversation, tell a story, draw a cartoon, use a diagram, do a role play. Introduce it in context first, and make it fun whenever you can. And most importantly: don’t look like you’ve had an electric shock when you have to correct grammar 🙂
Image from Pixabay.com (free use)
Devolve responsibility In a class of 25-30, how long is it before you know which students respond best to your teaching method? Pick the ten ‘best’ students in class, ask them to see you after the lesson, then get them to help you support the ‘weaker’ students. ‘When I say get into groups, I want you all to work in different groups, not together. I need you to help me to help everyone.’
Work with group dynamics and build confidence to help them get to know each other. What makes us different? Get all students to stand up, share statements about yourself (the teacher) and ask them to sit down if the statement is not true. By the end you should find out who is most similar to you 🙂 They can repeat this in groups.
Find out what they already know
Use this to help you personalise the experience of using coursebooks. At the beginning of the year/book, give students a list of some of the topics in the book, e.g. moon landings, sharks, fashion. Get them to write one fact each on post-it notes, then give them to another student. Don’t read them yourself! Student’s read each others notes, then stick them into their coursebook on the relevant page. When you get to that unit, ask them to tell you what they know about X as a warmer.
Flip the lesson.
Do the homework before the lesson rather than afterwards to increase their confidence. Anticipate the following lesson. For example, give them the name of a person you will read about. Showing them a picture and ask them to make predictions. Tell them to find another picture of that person at home and send it to the teacher. This will raise their interest.
Mystery tip! Unfortunately Ken ran out of time! Hopefully he’ll share it in the comments for this post 😉
Tweets from other talks
Throughout the conference, I retweet anything which I think is interesting from other tweeters. These tweets are all related to supporting students in some way.
Inclusivity was also visible in a few other areas at this conference, from a higher prominence of LGBT issues, to talks on adapting lessons for visually impaired learners and adapting exams for deaf/blind students. [See also my posts about teaching a visually impaired student and my links on integrating every student.]
Here is a selection of some of the videos from the IATEFL online coverage which you might like to watch. (All videos will be embedded when I work out which code to use!)
Plenaries
I attended both of these plenaries, but they didn’t really fit into any of my other posts, so I’ll put them here.
I learnt about Nick Bilbrough’s Hands Up project during Scott Thornbury’s closing plenary.
The hands up project teaches English through online storytelling and other remote learning activities. We work with children in circumstances that may be challenging because of social, political or economic reasons.
Our current projects include groups of children from UNRWA schools in Gaza and the West Bank, Syrian children in refugee camps in Jordan, and an NGO in Pakistan.
From the ‘About me’ page on his website
Nick is working full-time on a completely voluntary basis (and looking for a funding provider, if you can help!) He has a blog full of video clips from his lessons and also shares resources with teachers. Listen to him talk about the project here:
I was also recorded for various other things during the conference.
Christina Rebuffet-Broadus recorded Bruno Leys and I talking about British food and what we think of France and the French. (pending)
Hanna Zieba interviewed me about the IATEFL conference and about CELTA courses, on behalf of Lang LTC in Warsaw, where I’m currently tutoring on a part-time CELTA.
Neil from Teaching English asked me to offer short tips for students and teachers on the a subject. I chose speaking, and got in a cheeky plug for my ebook too 🙂 (pending)
This year’s MaWSIG (Materials Writing Special Interest Group) pre-conference event was based around comparing print and digital publishing.
Lizzie Pinard documented the whole thing in four parts on her blog, so I’m going to cheat and give you links to them instead of writing my own summaries. I can’t really add anything she hasn’t already said! 🙂
Links on ‘parts’ will take you to Lizzie’s blog, links on names will take you to blogs or profiles of the speakers.
Part 1 Ceri Jones – Same but different
Talking about how you have to approach the same learning outcomes in different ways depending on whether you are writing for print or digital, and raising the question of how to include freely productive tasks in self-study courses. (See also Christina Rebuffet-Broadus’ sketchnotes of the talk) Genevieve White – Adapting ELT materials: how to digitise a print course
Talking about her experience of having to adapt print courses to work online. We suggested ideas for our versions of a print spread at the end of the day, and I was the lucky recipient of some puffin poo, which was much tastier than it sounds! (See also Christina Rebuffet-Broadus’ sketchnotes of the talk)
Part 2 Katherine Bilsborough – Writing for Primary Covering the content, illustration, appropriateness, rubrics and key ingredients of primary materials, as well as some tools Katherine uses to help her write age-relevant materials. Fiona Mauchline – Writing materials for the Playstation generation Focussing on materials for students aged 11-19. Including some very interesting research she did with her class on topics teenagers do and don’t want to talk about in class. (See also Christina Rebuffet-Broadus’ sketchnotes of the talk)
If you’re interested in the interface of print and digital, you might also like to watch the recording of this presentation by Laura Patsko and Rolf Tynan, based on research done at Cambridge University Press into the use of face2face ebooks at the Embassy English school in Cambridge.
Thanks to MaWSIG for organising another fascinating pre-conference event. Looking forward to next year already!
Addendum: a few things from the rest of the conference
corpus (pl. corpora) a collection of written or spoken material stored on a computer and used to find out how language is used From the Cambridge English Dictionary online
I’ve been interested in corpora for a while now, but never seem to have time to go beyond my very basic understanding of how the Brigham Young University corpus interface works. I’ve always used it for the BNC (British National Corpus), which covers 1980-1993, but discovered a few seconds ago (!) that COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) is constantly updated, so I think I’ll be switching to that from now on!
All I knew before was how to do a basic search for a term and how to look for collocates, possible with a verb or noun near the key word if I was feeling very adventurous. Thanks to three talks I attended on different versions of corpora during the conference, I now feel like I know much more! 🙂
COCA
Jennie Wright did a very practical session introducing us to the basic functions of COCA, with three activities you can take straight into the classroom. Mura Nava, the master of corpora, helpfully collected my tweets from the session (and added notes to make it clearer – thanks!) which show all three activities, and Jennie has shared the list of corpora resources on her blog. She particularly recommended COCA Bites, a series of very short YouTube videos designed to introduce you to the corpus.
One thing I particularly like about COCA is the fact that parts of speech are highlighted in different colours. Here’s an example of a KWIC search for ‘conference’, giving concordance lines with the key word in a single column (a function Jennie taught me!)
SKELL
James Thomas taught us how to answer language questions from corpora, focussing on the SKELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) concordancer (thanks for correcting that James!). I didn’t realise that SKELL was created by the people at Masaryk University, in (one of) my second home(s) Brno 🙂 Again, Mura collected the tweets, this time by me, Leo Selivan (another corpus master) and Dan Ruelle.
What makes SKELL different to many corpora is that it uses algorithms to select 40 sentences from however many the search finds, getting rid of as many as possible with obscure words or which are overly long to make it easier for learners to use. This works well for common words, but not always for slightly more obscure words, like ‘mansplain‘ (possibly the word of the conference, thanks to David Crystal’s opening plenary!) You can also use the ‘word sketch’ function on the corpus to show you lots of collocates, a function I think I will now use instead of a collocations dictionary! Michael Houston Brown has a very clear introduction to SKELL on Mura’s eflnotes blog.
One slight problem, as with all corpora, is that it cannot distinguish between different senses of the same word, which may confuse learners. In this example, conference is listed both in the sense of the IATEFL conference, and as a sporting league. This could also be seen in the COCA image above, but I think it is easier to spot here.
Chad Langford and Joshua Albair are clearly die-hard corpus fans. They trawled through over one million words from over 8,000 TripAdvisor restaurant reviews to create their own corpus of review language. The findings were very interesting and showed up some clear features of the genre, but I’m not sure how practical it would be for most teachers to do this kind of project as anything other than a hobby. They’re based at Lille University, but they didn’t say how much of their time was dedicated to this project versus teaching, or how many groups they used it with, so it was difficult to work out the return on their investment of time. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to see how you go about building a corpus. Again, thanks to Mura for collating my tweets with more information in them.
There are interviews with some of the presenters of corpus talks at this year’s IATEFL, including James, Chad and Josh, on Mura’s blog. This list of talks shows everything connected to corpora from this year’s conference.
You’ll probably notice that some things aren’t on that list. I don’t have a partner or a family, which obviously frees up a lot of time for other things. I often joke that the reason I can manage to do so many things is that I have no life, but that’s not strictly true. While a lot of my life does revolve around this career which I love, I also recognise the importance of a work-life balance and endeavour to maintain this. I’ve therefore adopted many strategies to organise my time, which I shared in my presentation at IATEFL. Here is a recording of it which was made by Hanna Zieba for me (thanks Hanna!):
This handout summarises all of the strategies and you can download it via Slideshare.
Alternatively, read on for a fuller account of the strategies and why I use them.
The device in the picture is a Time Turner, used by Hermione Grainger in the Harry Potter films to give herself five extra hours a day. It may feel like we need something similar!
Tip number one: Outsource your memory. What I mean by this is that you should write down everything you need to remember as soon as possible. I do this in a variety of places. At work we have an annual year-to-view wall planner with post-it notes which can be moved around if things change. Just before the school year starts we copy over the main events from the previous year. It’s on the wall in my office for teachers to see at any time. Also at work I have a weekly planner, which I will describe in more detail later.
The most organised I have ever been at home was last year. I was given two diaries for Christmas, and decided to use one as a normal dates/appointments diary, for example with flight times, and the other as a to-do list diary. Whenever I thought of something I needed to do I would put it in my diary on or just before the appropriate date, meaning I could then forget about things until I needed to do them. I used to use scraps of paper and discovered this system was much more efficient, so much so that I bought a to-do list diary for work too!
Tip number two: Refresh every week. I have a weekly planner at work which I write out every Friday before I leave, or on a Monday as soon as I get in. I find it much more motivating than having a single ever-expanding list.
Another benefit is that you can see the shape of your whole week in one place at a glance. If you use a diary or annual planner too, don’t forget to copy things over each week, as well as transferring anything you didn’t finish the previous week. If you copy something more than three times, you either need to stop procrastinating and prioritise it, or drop it from your list because it’s probably not that important. If you drop it, you could put it in your diary for a quieter period of the year, if that’s ever likely to happen for you!
I have just finished this notebook and now have an A4 sheet I print off which already has recurring events and tasks typed onto it.
Tip number three: Leave Gaps. If you have any kind of daily to-do list, whether it be in a weekly planner like the one above or a diary, make sure you leave gaps to add extra things as they come up. They always will.
Another tip is to use small boxes on your planner as it is then harder to overfill them. It helps you to be more realistic about what you can achieve in a given time. I divide my planner into morning and afternoon, highlighting appointments and classes in blue, and highlighting anything which needs to be done urgently in yellow. This makes it faster for me to see when I’m available when people ask “Can you…?”
It took me a while to work out what I can realistically achieve in a morning or afternoon. This has improved with practice, but I still get it very wrong sometimes!
One of the teachers at IH Bydgoszcz started to use this system a few weeks ago and said:
It’s proven invaluable in helping me organise my hours a bit more effectively, and reduces the stress of ‘I have too much to do!’
Despite us both being quite techy people, we prefer to do all of this the old-fashioned way. There’s nothing quite like crossing things off a big piece of paper!
Tip number four: Notice your Achievements. By noticing what you’ve achieved each week, you will hopefully feel less like you’re drowning under the weight of things you ‘need’ to do. I always take a second to admire my weekly planner at the end of the week, and to notice how little needs to be transferred to next week’s plan, even though I know that in seven days my ‘new’ one will look pretty similar!
At home, I make a note of what I’ve done each day on my calendar. I hate seeing crosses on there, and since the beginning of February I’ve put a tick if I’ve managed to do everything – more on exactly what those things are later. I’ve noticed that I’ve completed all six things I want to do much more often since using ticks. This makes me feel a real sense of achievement. 🙂
Tip number five: Not a huge thing. If a task is huge, you’re much more likely to find reasons to procrastinate and avoid starting it. By breaking them down, you can work out how to fit it into your busy timetable, and you will probably find it more manageable. Here are examples of two huge tasks with possible ways that they could be broken down or the workload could be spread. Consider delegating if you’re a manager, but make sure you don’t overload your staff too much. By breaking large tasks into smaller chunks, it’s also easier to find ways to fit them into the gaps mentioned before.
Tip number six: I am important too. Don’t forget to take time for yourself. If you can choose your working hours, aim to keep them as regular as possible (for me it’s 09:30 to about 18:30) and make sure that there are times when you are not available, with your phone switched off if possible. For example, Thursday evenings are my flamenco classes, so I try to avoid scheduling things for that time and staff know that. Make these times sacred so you have time to recharge your batteries.
I have a programme called TimeOut (Mac – I don’t know the Windows equivalent) to remind me to take little breaks to stand up and stretch from the computer. I try to go outside as much as possible, for example, by taking my laptop outside if I really need to complete a project and it’s warm enough, walking to work and paying conscious attention to the parks and people I see. Having the ’50 ways to take a break’ poster on my desktop helps me to think of different things to do, or I can just do a bit of housework, like the washing up. I can also work towards the personal goals I have each day, as described below.
I also try to factor in time for spending time with family and friends, having times in my diary with nothing specific scheduled so I can do what I feel like that day (though these are rare!) and having a holiday to look forward to whenever I can.
Tip number seven: Start small. Don’t try and add every new habit you want to do at the same time, especially in your personal life. Add one new thing, make it a habit, then add the next thing if you can manage it. Too many things at once will probably overwhelm you, and you’ll end up not doing anything.
I started by using a pedometer to aim for 10,000 steps a day because I realised I wasn’t doing enough exercise – at one point during Delta I was doing as little as 1,500 steps a day. When this worked, I realised I was more likely to do my physio exercises if I wrote it down every day. When I was frustrated with my language learning, I started to add Russian practice, and saw a massive increase in my progress. I follow a lot of blogs and started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of blogposts in my reader, so I broke it down and aimed to read three to five posts each day. Now I rarely feel overwhelmed, and blitz it whenever I can. Despite being an ELTpics curator, I wasn’t uploading many ELTpics, so I added that. The final thing I put on there was cross stitch when I had projects to complete. Uploading just one ELTpic or doing just one strand a day of cross stitch is enough to get me my tick, and more is a bonus. I’d really like to learn to play the recorder that’s been sitting on my shelf for about two years now, but I think that’s one habit too many so I haven’t added that. I’m aiming for a sense of achievement, not depression!
Tip number eight: Experiment. These are my techniques, but they might not work for you. Keep trying different things until you find something which does. As Nick Tims said at the IATEFL MaWSIG pre-conference event last year, you may have to kiss a few frogs. These techniques have taken me at least five years of development. I started with scraps of paper with to-do lists on them, and these tips are the evolution of that.
In summary, if you ORGANISE your time using some or all of the eight techniques listed above, you will hopefully be much less likely to need a time turner! I hope you find these techniques useful, and if you have any others, why not share them in the comments below?
Finally, thank you to LAM SIG (Leadership and Management Special Interest Group), who chose to feature my presentation as part of their day.
This has been my most enjoyable IATEFL conference so far.
Starting with the MaWSIG PCE (Materials Writing Special Interest Group Pre-Conference Event) and ending with Carol Ann Duffy’s plenary, I was privileged to see a range of quality talks covering all kinds of areas which I summarised in the posts below:
I gave a talk on using journals with students which went well, despite a couple of initial technical hitches – thanks for your help, David! I missed a few talks I wanted to see, but have managed to catch up with at least some of them through the power of the internet.
I was very happy to win two prizes, one of which was a book which was on my wishlist, and I also bought myself a couple of other books I wanted.
The conference centre, Manchester Central, was excellent: easy to get to, easy to navigate, clean, modern, and with excellent wifi – I never had to fight it once! I managed to tweet throughout: according to the downloader I’ve used to help me compile my posts, I sent about 1500 tweets during the conference! I appreciated the responses I got which justified me doing so. Those tweets have also enabled me to put together my blogposts after the conference.
Anyone wanting perhaps the most comprehensive series of tweets from a whole host of talks at #Iatefl should be following @sandymillin
However, as always, the highlight of the conference was the people. I met a few members of my PLN (professional learning network) who I’ve been wanting to meet for a very long time.
Lots of the lovely followers of my blog came and said hello and thank you – it makes it all worth it! There were also lots of comments about how much tweeting I did and Jo Budden challenged Joe Dale and I to a tweet-off. Next year?
Our team came joint second in the quiz night:
There was a baby shower, with lots of PLN love.
I caught up with good friends, and missed a few who were absent (See you next year, Katy?).
I had dinner with CELTA and Delta trainers, and very much enjoyed listening to their stories, as well as lunch with my fellow curators from ELTpics (We missed you Julie!) I also had lunch with my CELTA tutors, being able to properly catch up for the first time since I finished my course in February 2008.
And that’s not to mention all the random encounters in passing throughout the conference:
Thank you IATEFL, and see you in Birmingham next year!
For various reasons, not least the sheer size of the conference, there were various talks I missed during IATEFL. Thanks to the power of the internet, I’ve managed to catch up with some of them through tweets, videos and/or blogposts. Here’s a selection of them:
The ear of the beholder: helping learners understand different accents – Laura Patsko
Laura’s talk was on at the same time as mine so I wasn’t able to watch it. I know it started with her ‘having a cold’ to demonstrate how we can make meaning evefn when the sounds we hear don’t correspond with our expectations, and I’m intrigued to hear more about her suggestions. She’s shared her presentation, and hopefully there will be a video of at least some of it soon!
Here’s one of her tweets from another point in the conference:
Language changes thru usage. If sth ‘non-standard’ is dominantly used (through #ELF for example), it’ll become acceptable. @davcr at #iatefl
Fostering autonomy: harnassing the outside world from within the classroom – Lizzie Pinard
Lizzie‘s talk was also in the same slot as mine and Laura’s – so many possible times and they put us all on in the same one! Lizzie has written a lot about autonomy on her blog, and demonstrated it with her own Italian learning. The aspect of learner training is key when trying to encourage autonomy, and is one I’m sure Lizzie’s presentation would have helped me with. Thankfully, she’s blogged about it as has Olga Sergeeva, but it’s not quite the same as hearing it first-hand. I’m hoping the gods of IATEFL shine on all three of us next year and put us on at separate times!
Where are the women in ELT? – Russell Mayne and Nicola Prentis
As with last year, the talk which Russ was involved in is one of the ones which seems to have taken on a life of its own after the conference. Nicola and Russ picked a subject which is another very important discussion point, after Russ tackled the myths of EFL in 2014. [Original text (see comments for why I’ve kept this) As with last year, Russ’s talk is the one of the ones which seems to have taken on a life of its own after the conference. He has a way of picking subjects which are very good discussion points, and this year he was ably assisted by Nicola Prentis.] Their talk immediately followed my own and was in a tiny room, so I knew it was wishful thinking to believe I might get in, but I tried anyway. A whole group of us were waiting outside, disappointed. Last year Russ’s talk was officially recorded (content is currently being updated on the IATEFL 2014 site), and Russ and Nicola have recorded their own version this year – thank you! This area is one of particular interest to me, being a woman and in ELT as I am. 🙂 Through the Fair List, I’d become aware of the fact that plenary speakers at conferences are often men speaking to a room full of women, which seems odd. As I understand it, Russ and Nicola were questioning the fact that men feature dispropotionately at the ‘top’ of the ELT profession, despite it being a female-dominated one in general.
They did an interview about it which you can watch as a taster:
Here are two of the blog posts which were triggered by their talk, both of which have fascinating discussions in the comments which are well worth reading:
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy! Steve Brown highlights the amount of time that the ‘big’ names highlighted in Russ and Nicola’s talk have been at the top (something which they mentioned in their interview too)
P is for Power: Scott Thornbury questions the balance of power in the ELT profession, not just in terms of gender, but also covering native/non-native speakers and the socio-economic circumstances that teaching takes place in.
Russ and Nicola have also set up their own website to examine gender equality in ELT, with a lot more information about their research. At other points in the conference there were tweets about increasing the number of non-native speakers visible at conferences and in the global community.
Walk before you run: reading strategies for Arabic learners – Emina Tuzovic
I saw Emina speaking about helping Arabic students with spelling at IATEFL last year, and she subsequently very kindly wrote a guest post summarising her talk for this blog. I’m hoping to encourage her to do the same again this year, as her ideas are very practical and deal with areas which there isn’t much coverage of in the literature I’ve read.
People, pronunciation and play – Luke Meddings
Luke shared a couple of his ideas in an interview:
I really like Luke’s focus on playing with language, which is something I’ve become more and more interested in.
Olga Sergeeva went to Luke’s talk and wrote a summary of the whole thing, although she admitted it was difficult because they were laughing too much!
Tools, tips and tasks for developing materials writing skills – John Hughes
John has shared his slides, which gives me a taster of the tips he has for developing these skills. I think the most important idea is to ‘develop a materials radar’, which echoes what Ben Goldstein and Ceri Jones talked about in their presentation on using images at the MAWSIG PCE.
Technology
Mike Harrison talked about using Vine to make short videos, and Shaun Wilden and Nikki Fortova looked at apps on the iPad to do the same.
Here’s an idea from Nicky Hockley to use a mobile phone to practise past continuous:
Mobile for past continuous – set alarm for 4, 6, 8pm;SS take selfies at that time, then share online with descrip. @TheConsultantsE#IATEFL
These are things which I retweeted because they made me think. I’m sharing them here to make sure I don’t forget those thoughts and to see what you think. They’re loosely grouped into topics where possible.
Student abilities
#IATEFL Pete Rutherford: you can be a B1 student but able to communicate more competently than those at say C1.
Helping beginner teachers understand who they are is hugely neglected in teacher training says @AnthonyGaughan#IATEFL — Diana Tremayne (@dianatremayne) April 11, 2015
#IATEFL “teaching is the profession that eats its young” – we have to be concerned about early drop out rates and understand what drive that — Sarah Caton (@sarahcaton66) April 11, 2015
Know thyself! Fundamental for learning in TT and know who you are in the classroom. @AnthonyGaughan#IATEFL — Ana Garcia Stone (@AMGS1958) April 11, 2015
Momber: Successful teachers continue to focus on their development after they have finished their training #IATEFL
#IATEFL rate of teacher sickness is a great measure of health of an institution — Sarah Caton (@sarahcaton66) April 11, 2015
(Hoping the rate of sickness at IH Bydgoszcz doesn’t go up when I take over as DoS!) 😉
As a leader you need to exhibit behaviours you want to see from your colleagues says @johntomsett Also need to avoid fear #IATEFL — Diana Tremayne (@dianatremayne) April 11, 2015
‘I don’t put Ss 1st, I put Ts & Ss =1st. Motivated Ts turning up 4 class everyday is best 4 Ss.’ John Tomsett @IATEFL_LAMSIG#iatefl — Jane Cohen (@JaneCohenEFL) April 11, 2015
Teachers need to develop skills of self reflection – in short courses focus is often on what they are doing not if/why it worked #IATEFL — Diana Tremayne (@dianatremayne) April 11, 2015
#Iatefl the things you learn: of the 10,000 most frequent words, 45% are French derived, 32% Old English and 17% Latinate. — hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 12, 2015
#Iatefl Jonathan Marks: what we often perceive as unusual new random coinings may well be old usages that have lain dormant for years.
In the Middle Ages, you’d call your beloved names of fish, like “prawn”. Ha! @davcr teaches us to be historically romantic at #iatefl — Laura Patsko (@lauraahaha) April 14, 2015
Pronunciation
Best sesh I’ve seen so far: Using Synthetic Phonics for Listening. Inspiring & thought provoking research from @teachAdam. #IATEFL
Lots of people were blogging throughout the conference. You can find a full list of all of the IATEFL Manchester registered bloggers on the ManchesterOnline site.
As always, Lizzie Pinard was very prolific, and has helpfully indexed all of her posts. Apart from the plenaries, I only went to one of the same talks, so there’s a lot to catch up on! Olya Sergeeva also has an index of the posts she wrote about the sessions she went to, including some which I’ve linked to above. Tyson Seburn wrote about his bite-sized takeaways from the conference. Jen McDonald summarised the talks she saw in short paragraphs. The British Council had a number of roving reporters at the conference, one of whom was David Dodgson.
IATEFL online
Apart from the many sources I’ve mentioned above, there is, of course, the wonderful resources that is IATEFL online, full of interviews and recorded sessions, at least some of which I hope to find the time to watch at some point in the future. Are there any you would particularly recommend?
I’ve moved away from the classroom over the past year, so for the first time at IATEFL I didn’t go to many talks which fitted this category. I got some interesting ideas from all three talks, and can’t wait to try to put them into practice when I finally do get back into the classroom in September!
A new way to teach reading – Ken Lackman
Ken‘s title seemed like a pretty dramatic claim, but that’s exactly what he showed us, and I really want to try it out!
He started by telling us some of the problems with the traditional approach to reading, mostly the fact that many of the skills used in the classroom are not easily transferable to real life. Students don’t have tasks like a pre-set gist question or vocabulary that somebody else has pre-selected from the text for them when they read texts outside the classroom.
He decided that there must be a better way to prepare students for reading in real life, and this is what he came up with, working through a demo lesson based on a short story as an example for us. You can get the story Ken used with us (A Secret Lost in the Water) as well as more information about the whole process by going to his website, clicking on Activity books > A New Way To Teach Reading > IATEFL.
What are the key characteristics of a short story? List them.
e.g. Only two or three characters. One or two settings.
Turn these characteristics into questions. e.g. Where is it set? What is the relationship between the characters?
Show students the title. They add to the list of questions.
(Optional: Collect questions on the board.)
Choose one of the questions as a good gist question.
Read for gist, answering the question selected. As a side note, one of my favourite moments of the whole conference was how Ken got us to read fast: everybody stood up, and had to sit down once they had the answer. Still standing after everyone else has sat down? Too slow!
Choose other questions from the list as comprehension questions.
Read again more slowly to answer them.
Underline any words which you’re not sure of the meaning of.
Choose one of the words and analyse it to try to decide the meaning: What part of speech is it? Are there any clues in the parts of the word (e.g. prefixes/suffixes)? Do the adjacent words help? Come up with a synonym or phrase which you could replace it with and try it in the space. Does it make sense? Repeat as necessary.
Choose 10 collocations that you think are really useful for you.
Compare your list with a partner.
Divide the class into groups, each with a different coloured board marker.
Groups come up with discussion questions related to the text. They can’t be yes/no questions and you shouldn’t be able to find the answer in the text. Write them on the board.
Students choose some of the questions from the board and discuss them.
This strategy was very engaging as all of the questions were written and selected by us, and we managed to create the questions before we’d seen the text, in a way that is eminently transferable to any text type and can easily be used outside the classroom too. Repeated practice using the same lesson structure will make students more confident with their reading, and similar staging can also be applied to listening too. It encourages greater awareness of the conventions of different genres which should have a knock-on effect with writing too. If students are unfamiliar with a particular genre, you can analyse it with them the first time they see it. Vocabulary is chosen by the students rather than the materials writer, and they decide what is and isn’t useful for them. There is a lot of processing, which aids memorisation, and students are able to check it in a dictionary too if they want to. Coming up with their own discussion questions promotes critical thinking and a deeper reading of the text.
Academic reading circles: improving learner engagement and text comprehension – Tyson Seburn
Tyson’s EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students often have trouble understanding texts to a deep enough level to be able to discuss them intellectually or engage with them in their written work. When reading, they tended to treat texts very superficially and only deal with problems with lexis, with looking at the concepts at all. Academic Reading Circles were developed out of the idea of literature circles as a way to address this by dividing students into small groups and assigning them different roles to break down a text. Each group works on a single text and has time to prepare before the lesson. They then come together and share their knowledge to build up a deeper understanding of the text.
Leader: gauges group comprehension and situates the text for the other students, dealing with the purpose for reading, source, target audience, etc. They create one or two questions about the text to gauge understanding.
Contextualiser: picks out contextual references like times, dates, places and people and finds out more about them.
Visualiser: finds anything from the text which can be visually represented, e.g. maps, photos, videos, etc.
Connector: makes connections to outside sources, for example other events, other sources or their own experience.
Highlighter: focuses on linguistic problems, e.g. unknown vocabulary, topic specific language, anything which shows the feeling/attitude of the author.
The students deal with up to five texts per term, and no more than one per week, rotating the roles through the term. Academic reading circles lead to deeper comprehension and their writing also improves as a result, including a greater use of topic-specific language.
Lizzie Pinard wrote a summary of the session. You can read more about Academic Reading Circles on Tyson’s blog, and he is working with The Round to produce a book about them. I’m sure there must be away to apply this approach to other kinds of reading group too.
Classic exercises and why they work in the 21st century – Hanna Kryszewska
Hanna is the editor of Humanising Language Teachingmagazine (always looking for articles!), which has a section called ‘Old Exercises’. These act as useful reminders of things you might have forgotten. She is also a believer in ‘thinking routines’, the idea that we need to make thinking processes visible to students. This can be draining but is very useful, so should be done little and often. Here are examples of classic activities combined with thinking routines:
Questions: Show students an artwork/poem. Give them post-it notes. Every time they have a question, they write it on the post-it and stick it to the board. The questions can be as deep or as trivial as they like. Students then go away and find the answers to their questions.
Tug-of-war: Show an image/quote etc conncted to an issue which could be debated. Hanna’s example was images of the Aral Sea showing how it has dried up over the last few decades. Students put their opinions on post-it notes, then rearrange them according to where they would fit in a debate. It’s a good way of dealing with potentially controversial issues.
Numbers: Students chose numbers which are important to them, then share why with other students. They aren’t forced to give information which they don’t want to, as would be the case if the teacher supplied questions for them to answer.
Mingle: Find two things in common with each person in the class. You can’t repeat them. Once they’ve finished, each student draws around their hand. Other students write what they learnt about their classmates in the relevant hand.
Thank you: Stick a piece of paper on each person’s back. Students write what they’d like to thank each person for – again, it can be as trivial or as deep as the students want.
All correct: In an multiple choice exercise which should have only one correct answer, get the students to justify why any of the answers could be right. This works particularly well with answers where changing the tone of voice could make a big difference.
Senses: Dictate the five senses. Then dictate random words, with students deciding which sense to allocate it to. They then share answers.
Map: In a similar way, give students a blank map. Dictate words and students write them where they ‘should’ be, entirely based on their own opinions, before sharing answers.
Playing cards 1: Hanna has a set of playing cards with pictures of artworks on them. She selects three at random and arranges them on a piece of paper. Students have to justify why they are arranged like that.
Playing cards 2: Each group gets 6 cards. They choose 3 and arrrange them. Other groups then have to say why they were arranged like that. They can then compare their justifications.
Exploiting the coursebook: After using a text, students are challenged to write questions to which there are no answers in the book/text. Another group then gets the questions and has to rewrite the text to include the answers.
Vocabulary: Draw a picture of a bicycle, but you can only include the parts that you know the names for in English. Choose which six items you need to learn to be able to compelte your picture. This is particularly good for mixed-level groups.
Shapes: Each group gets five slips of paper. On each they write one part of the body and arrange them into the approximate shape of a body. The teacher can offer/add more words. Students then group the words according to different categories, e.g. touching the bed/not touching the bed, important for work/not important for work.
Points of view 1: Have three chairs. Each represents one role, e.g. mother, daughter, dead guinea pig. Students ask questions and decide who should answer them, e.g. Was she a good owner?
Points of view 2: Set up a roleplay situation, e.g. breakfast time. Students start the rolleplay, but anyone watching can step in and take over at any point.
By encouraging visible thinking we encourage different points of view, build community and encourage critical thinking. You also move away from the ‘tyranny of the correct answer’. Start with simpler activities (like numbers/mingle) to introduce these ideas slowly and to build an atmosphere of sharing in the classroom.
You can find out more about thinking routines in the book Making Thinking Visible [affiliate link].
When I was at IATEFL I decided to use some of my birthday money to buy a couple of books in the sales on the final day. Because of my current role as a CELTA tutor and my move into management as a Director of Studies, I’ve been thinking a lot about professional development recently. I thought it would be a good investment to read some of the literature about it and get a few more ideas about how to help the teachers I work with to continue their development. Here are brief reviews of the two books I bought. Clicking on their titles will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get a few pennies if you decide to buy them via these links.
Books in the Delta Teacher Development Series (DTDS) are always easy to read and full of great ideas, and this one was no exception. I saw Duncan speak at IATEFL 2012 and as well as being a good communicator, I got the impression he must be a very good person to work for because he seemed to really care about the people he managed. That care comes across in this book.
Each DTDS book is divided into:
Section A: a look at the current theory underlying the area being discussed;
Section B: practical ideas to try out;
Section C: further areas to explore.
In this case, section B was further divided into five areas of investigation or ‘circles’, moving out from the teacher and gradually involving more and more participants:
You
You and your students
You and your colleagues
You and your school
You and your profession
(I don’t have my copy in front of me, so I hope I’ve remembered those correctly!) Each circle starts with a checklist of possible tasks, where the reader is encouraged to identify what they have already done and what they would like to try. This is then followed by a variety of different activities, broken down into the aim, the reason for doing them, and the steps needed to achieve them.
Section C focused on longer term projects, such as how to set up action research. The projects could draw on some of the activities from section B, or be completely independent of them.
Overall, I felt the book would be particularly good for less experienced teachers or for those looking for inspiration to put together a professional development programme, and less so for more experienced teachers. Through the schools I’d worked at and the online development I’ve done, I’d tried most of the ideas already. There are still some I’d like to experiment with, though I can’t recall any specific ones now a few days after I finished it. It will be a useful book to refer back to when I want to try something a bit more unusual for my development.
This is the first book I’ve read from the Cambridge Language Education series, which Jack C. Richards is also the series editor for. It was easier to read than I expected – even though this has been the case with most of the methodology books I’ve read, I’m still pleasantly surprised when they are written in such an accessible way.
It is divided into 12 chapters (again, no copy here so do correct me if I’m wrong!), plus a brief introduction explaining how to use the book. Each chapter focuses on one particular approach to professional development, including:
Observations
Teacher journals
Critical incidents
Case studies
Action research
In each case, a definition is given and the benefits and potential drawbacks of engaging in this kind of development are examined. This is followed by a step-by-step guide to how to approach it. Throughout every chapter there are vignettes to show real-world examples of how they were used by teachers around the world.
I had only heard about the concept of peer coaching from Ela Wassell in the last year, but this book had a different definition of it, seeming to express it as something closer to a form of delegation of training. Critical incidents was a term I’d heard, but didn’t really understand before reading this, and case studies were completely new to me. The information about action research and teacher journals complements Foord’s book, and taking the two together would be a good starting point for anyone wanting to try either of these for their development.
One frustrating thing for me was the lack of a contents page or index, so you have to flick through the book if you want to find a particular section again. The depth of the book was useful to me as an experienced teacher, as was the way that the chapters and ideas fed into each other. For example, critical incidents were suggested as possible fuel for a teacher journal. However, I feel this depth and difficulty of navigation might be off-putting to newer teachers, and they may feel overwhelmed. For them, the suggestions in the book may need to be mediated or introduced chapter by chapter rather than being read in one go as I did.
Having said that, it has given me a lot of ideas for possible professional development sessions over the next couple of years – I just hope I can remember some of them!
From August I’ll be the Director of Studies at IH Bydgoszcz in Poland, and in preparation for this I’ve been reading and listening to blogs, books and podcasts about management. Observation will also be a key part of my role, as well as being relevant to my work as a CELTA tutor. I’ve therefore grouped the talks I saw at IATEFL on these topics into a single post.
Forum on peer observation
This was my first experience of an IATEFL forum, and I decided to go on the spur of the moment. I’m glad I did, as it gave me ideas for how to encourage teachers to take part in a peer observation programme, and showed me some of the potential problems with setting one up.
EFL Teachers and Peer Observation: beliefs, challenges and implications – Gihan Ismail
Gihan works at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. She decided to research how experienced EFL teachers (5-20 years) perceive peer observation, in contrast to most research which focuses on relatively inexperienced teachers.
Experienced teachers had multiple identities as teachers which came into conflict when considering peer observation, contrasting their personal identity and the value of the observation to them as individuals with their professional identity and observations as CPD (continuing professional development). Her findings showed that there was a relatively negative attitude towards peer observation, despite experienced teachers knowing that it can be beneficial. This encompassed the following factors:
School culture.
How the outcome of observations may influence their career.
Psychological/emotional tensions, including a potential distrust in the peer doing the observation.
Feeling threatened because there’s a risk that they might lose some of their reputation if the peer doesn’t understand what they are doing.
A rejection of changes in their habits: comfort zones are difficult to leave.
Doubt in the outcome of any changes they might make as a result of observations.
The potential stress involved in participating in peer observations, and the fact that this can be avoided by doing other forms of CPD, like going to conferences.
Their beliefs were also shaped by past experience and ‘professional coursework’ (e.g. formalised training, books read).
Most studies focus on external factors influencing whether teachers are willing to participate in peer observation schemes, but Ismail found that actually internal factors were dominant. For example, issues like fear and/or a potential loss of face in front of a less experienced colleague were more likely to make teachers want to avoid peer observation than factors imposed by their employer. It wasn’t helped by the fact that in most cases there was no pre-observation meeting to set up what the observed teacher and the peer wanted to get out of the observation. Her research suggests that teacher needs should be examined more carefully in workplaces, where student needs tend to dominate and teachers’ needs are secondary.
Peer observation: introducing a system that actually works for everyone – Shirley Norton
Shirley described a successful peer observation scheme which was set up at the London School of English, where teachers have between five and thirty-five years of experience.
Before the scheme was set up, peer observation was:
officially encouraged, but rarely happened unless there was an inspection.
management-led, with teachers being told who they should see.
contrasted with the atmosphere of collaboration in the staffroom: you can’t come into my classroom!
mostly focussed on quality control, rather than developmental aims.
To be able to implement a peer observation scheme which would work, they started with a questionnaire to collect opinions about peer observation, and discovered many points which echoed Gihan’s findings in the previous presentation. Everyone agreed peer observation was a good thing, but nobody actually wanted to do it!
All the research Shirley did said that teachers need to be involved from the beginning when setting up schemes like this, so that’s what she did. They had a focus group discussing the possible benefits of peer observations and potential obstacles. All ideas were accepted, and they came up with over 100 obstacles! Previously, this is where they had stopped when thinking of such schemes, but this time they went through each obstacle and came up with potential solutions. This led to the creation of clear guidelines for the scheme, including the role of the observer and the teacher, how to give feedback, and how to focus on development rather than judgement. Throughout her talk Shirley emphasised the importance of these guidelines, and the fact that a peer observation scheme is unlikely to be effective without them. Guidelines on feedback are particularly important, as this is where observation systems often fall down. Here are some examples:
Problem: Increased workload for teachers. Solution: No formal paperwork required for management. Peer observation is supposed to be development, and there doesn’t need to be proof of this. It’s between the teachers involved.
Problem: Lack of management buy-in. Solution: Make it a sacred part of the timetable and find a way to ensure it is never dropped.
Problem: There’s no chair for the observer. Solution: The teacher doing the observation provides the chair.
Spending time on these ‘what ifs’ makes teachers more relaxed and more likely to want to participate. No matter how minor they may seem, these are genuine fears which may scupper your programme, so you need to take them seriously.
The scheme has gone through various incarnations, with Shirley trying to match teachers up with their observation wishlists (logistical nightmare), then telling them who to observe (teachers were unhappy), before finally settling on teachers deciding for themselves (success!)
Now each teacher has an allocated week in the school year which is their opportunity to peer observe. Within that week they are allowed to choose anybody to observe and they will be covered if necessary to enable them to do so. This happens regardless of anything else going on in the school (illness, inspections etc) as otherwise the programme would fall apart. Up to two teachers may have the same week allocated – more than that makes it difficult to cover everyone. Even generally disengaged teachers did peer observations willingly with this system. As for those being observed, you can only say no to somebody coming into your classroom if you’ve been observed within the previous four weeks. Observations are included on the school’s weekly planner and email reminder is sent out to those being observed. Management doesn’t tell them who or what to observe: that is entirely up to the teachers involved. The only requirements from management are that each observation has three steps: pre-observation meeting, observation, post-observation meeting (these can be as long or as short as the participants like). Everything above is codified in the guidelines for the scheme.
Overall, the aim of the scheme is to share best practice, with everyone learning from each other.
Peer observation: making it work for lasting CPD – Carole Robinson and Marie Heron
Maria and Carole work at NILE, where there is a relatively high turnover of teachers. These are the benefits of peer observation as they see them:
New ideas.
Learning ways of dealing with critical incidents in the classroom.
Building peer-peer trust.
Observing learners from a different perspective (when observing a class you also teach).
Extended professional development.
Enjoyment!
They have tried a variety of different peer observation systems. An open-door policy was seen as being too radical, so they decided to have a sign-up sheet instead. Teachers have been issued with red cards which they can put outside their door if they feel it would be a bad time for an observer to come into their lesson. Although they have never been used, it makes them feel safer and more willing to accept observers.
Because of the problem of cover, many observations are only 10-minutes. These are particularly useful at the beginning of a class as teachers are more likely to be willing to relinquish their students to another teacher at this point while they go and observe. Once every two weeks, they also run workshop sessions for the students which require fewer teachers than traditional classes do, leaving teachers free to observe other classes.
Other possible observation systems are:
Blind observations: The lesson is discussed before and after it happens, but there is no observer in the room during the class.
Video observations: The lesson is discussed before, videoed on a mobile phone, then specific sections of the lesson are watched with the observer. This removed the fear of having another person in the room.
The pre-observation chat is very important, regardless of the manner of observation. This is when the focus of the observation is decided on as well as how feedback will be conducted.
To reduce paperwork, teachers only complete an observation log showing the time, date and focus of observations. No other paperwork is required by management. To maximise their potential, observations take place throughout the year, rather than only once or twice, and they vary in length to help teachers fit them in. Teachers are encouraged to keep a reflective journal of what they have learnt from the observations, both as observed and observer. They don’t have to show it to anyone, but can if they want to: What have I learnt? What questions does it pose?
Peer observations are also the subject of workshops the school holds, including discussion about how to develop the scheme further. These workshops take the form of debates and happen every 2-3 months, covering a whole variety of topics (not just peer observations). They sound like an interesting idea, and one I’d like to experiment with.
Better together: peer coaching for continuing professional development – Dita Phillips and Ela Wassell
Ela has been telling me about the peer coaching project she has been running with Dita over the past year since it started, so I had to go to this talk to find out how it all panned out in the end 🙂
Dita and Ela met at IATEFL Harrogate last year, and quickly realised that they had quite similar teaching profiles in terms of their experience and length of time in the classroom. They were also both based in Oxford.
Ela returned to the classroom at around the same time, having taught 121 for a long time. She asked Dita to observe her to check some of her classroom management techniques. Dita asked Ela to observe in return because she didn’t want to get stuck in a rut. They found the experience so useful that they decided they wanted to turn it into something more formal, and their peer coaching project was born.
Peer coaching is:
A confidential process through which two or more professional colleagues work together to reflect on current practices; expand, refine and build new skills; share ideas; teach one another; conduct classroom research; or solve problems in the workplace.
Robbins, P(1991) How to plan and implement a peer coaching programme Alexandria, VA; Association for Supervision Curriculum Development (may be a slight mistake in the reference – tweet not clear)
Or, as they said:
Reflecting together, learning from each other.
Their project involved:
Listing their individual and professional goals before the project started.
Meeting regularly to discuss their lessons, things they had read/watched and teaching in general, working together to solve problems and build their knowledge. Because they were working with an experienced peer, the discussions could go into a lot of depth. They supported each other as critical friends.
Observing each other’s lessons for specific details. They originally taught at different schools, but Ela later moved to Dita’s school. They told their managers what they were doing, and received support with timetabling (among other things) to make their project possible.
Audio and video recording lessons.
Giving feedback to each other on lessons and suggesting small tweaks they could make to change them.
Keeping a teaching diary, which formed the basis for future meetings and ideas for observations. Ela colour-coded hers: change, improve, important.
Teaching each other’s classes: they could focus on their learners while the other teacher led the class. When students asked why this was happening, it evolved into a discussion about the nature of teaching and learning, and students were interested in how they were developing their teaching. As a result, Dita became more comfortable with asking her students for feedback on lessons.
For Dita, the project encouraged her to leave her comfort zone, and she decided to work on a CELTA at a different centre, giving her more material for development and reflection.
These are the benefits of peer coaching according to Dita and Ela:
Easy to incorporate into your work schedule (especially with the support of managers).
Inexpensive.
Two heads are better than one!
You build a closer relationship with a colleague.
Hands on.
In depth.
Mutual motivation because you don’t want to let your peer down.
Can see continuity and progress throughout the year.
Fun!
Here are their tips if you’d like to set up a similar project:
Choose the right person.
Set up ground rules, including confidentiality and how you will give feedback.
Decide what forms of coaching you will include (see ideas above for inspiration).
Set goals before you start and review them regularly.
Create a schedule and stick to it.
Decide what you hope to achieve with the project as a whole.
Inform management and gain school support if possible.
Be open and honest about what you are doing.
Evaluate the project when you have finished.
Share the results.
Because there was no requirement to grade or assess the lessons, they both found it very liberating and learnt a lot.
I’m here to improve and to learn.
Their students also benefitted. They both gained confidence in their own practice and abilities as teachers, as well as the courage to experiment more with their teaching.
Dita and Ela also spoke to IATEFL Online about their project. You can watch the interview here:
Lesson jamming: planning lessons in groups – Tom Heaven
I was interested in this session because IH Bydgoszcz has a system of lesson planning in groups, and I wanted to see how someone else uses the same technique.
Lesson jams were designed as a fun way to get together for a few hours with other teachers and be inspired by each other and a random prompt (you might find some inspiration on my other blog!) to come up with a lesson plan. There is a step-by-step process for this, culminating in each group sharing their plan with everyone there. The aim of the jam is to be creative and to learn from each other. They also share the final plans on their website, and they’re currently looking for more ideas on how to work with the finished products after the lesson jam. So far, they’ve had two very successful jams and will continue to hold them in the future.
If you’d like to set up your own lesson jam, there is a downloadable guide including all of the stages on the Berlin LW GAS site.
Aspiring to inspire: how to become a great LTO* manager – Fiona Thomas
(*Language Teaching Organisation)
What is the difference between an inspiring manager and a mediocre one? How does an inspiring manager make you feel?
Why is it so hard to be inspiring? It requires time to connect with people at an emotional level, and if there’s one thing managers are short of, it’s time. Our stress levels build up because we’re constantly ‘on’ and this leads to us ignoring the warning signs of stress until it’s too late, much like boiling a frog. This leads to us becoming uninspirational micro managers.
To combat this we need to stake a step back and analyse what we are doing with our time. Fiona suggested creating a pie chart and using this to decide whether you are spending appropriate amounts of time on each area. These are the categories she suggested:
Operations management;
Strategic management;
Being an academic expert/mentor;
Emotional intelligence.
Fiona decided she was spending too much time on operations management and looked for ways to delegate some of the more administrative parts of her job. Technology could also help you to make some of these areas more efficient. This frees time to focus on developing ‘distinguishing competencies’, thus making managers more inspirational. These differ from ‘threshold competencies’, which are the minimum skills required to do your job. For a DoS, this would be areas like timetabling and conducting observations. ‘Distinguishing competencies’ include:
Social intelligence: understanding relationships.
Emotional intelligence: being aware of your own emotions.
Cognitive intelligence: interpreting what is happening in the world around you.
Research shows that outstanding managers create resonant relationships with the people they manage. This reminds me of the idea of one on ones from the Manager Tools podcast I have been listening to, which seems like a very effective way of building up these relationships. So what is a resonant relationship? It’s one which:
Communicates hope: the belief that the future will be good and things are possible;
Reminds people of the purpose of the organisation and encourages a shared vision (If you have a mission statement, refer to it!);
Demonstrates compassion (showing that you care and that people feel you care) – following the recipient’s agenda: what motivates them?
Shows mindfulness (you are ‘with’ the people you manage, not thinking about other things) and attention. Be fully aware of where you are and what you’re doing. If you know it’s not a good time and you can’t give your full attention, act accordingly: postpone the meeting, ask to speak to them at a specified later time, etc.
Has participants who appear to be authentic, genuine and transparent and act with integrity;
Includes quality time spent with the people you manage, in which you learn about their aspirations and motivation – it’s easy to make assumptions about people if you don’t get to know them properly;
Spreads positive emotions: the more powerful your position is, the more likely your emotions are to affect other people.
These talks have given me many ideas for how to implement observations when I become a DoS, the most important of which is to make sure that any peer observation scheme comes primarily from the teachers themselves. I am also more and more sure that I want to include one on ones in my timetable for next year to get to know the people that I am working with as quickly as possible. Lots to think about 🙂
Following on from the excellent MaWSIG pre-conference event, I ended up going to quite a few more talks related to materials writing during the conference. Here are summaries of said talks.
Designing materials: from theory to practice? – Sonia Munro and Susan Sheehan
Sonia and Susan work on the MA TESOL at the University of Huddersfield. The course originally had only a traditional dissertation at the end of it, but they have now added the option of a more practical materials design project rather than a dissertation. Students have to create 15 hours worth of classroom materials for a specific context and do a 30-minute viva. The only course participants who now do a dissertation are those who are required to do so by external forces, such as those who are being funded by a Ministry of Education. All others opt for materials design.
Why did they choose to offer this alternative? Feedback on the dissertation module was not as positive as for other modules on the MA, with participants complaining that they couldn’t collect the necessary data from their students over the summer. Materials design doesn’t just help those who are creating materials; it also helps teachers to be more critical when choosing materials for their students.
The viva allows participants to show the theoretical underpinnings of their materials, but Sonia and Susan noticed that there was a huge range in the ability of course participants to do this. Tomlinson (2003) mentions that many established writers start with intuition based on their own experience in the classroom, but MA students don’t have that luxury and must demonstrate that they have clear reasons for their materials design. In the viva, they have to present their materials and demonstrate the theory behind them, then participate in a discussion building on this. Some participants could do this easily, but others were unable to demonstrate any awareness of theory at all. To be successful, they need to:
Draw on a wide range of sources, not just readings suggested by tutors;
Demonstrate critical engagement with theories and sources;
Show a clear relationship between theory and practice, demonstrating they understand this;
Analyse materials that are typically used in their context and use these as a springboard for their own materials;
Notice the good points and limitations of the materials they use as a reference;
Show an awareness of their context: What are the constraints? Are these materials appropriate?
These are the main problems their MA students had in the viva:
Only citing a narrow range of authors.
Not referring to SLA (second language acquisition) theorists.
Sticking to authors writing about materials design only.
Not referring to authors specific to their context (e.g. EAP).
Not mentioning issues like Global English or English as a Lingua Franca.
Conflating literature and theory and not going deeply enough into the theory.
Not demonstrating enough criticality: for example by comparing authors or mentioning the weaknesses of the research. Being quite superficial.
To increase the students’ engagement with theory, Susan and Sonia would like to:
Make the use of theory more explicit and show students how to find theory more usefully.
Emphasise that theory is the core of the module.
Stop students from getting lost in the aesthetics of the materials – they tend to spend too long on this and not enough time on the theory.
Train students to do better literature searches.
I haven’t done an MA yet, but would like to at some point in the future, so I think this will come in very useful when I get to that stage.
Frameworks for creativity in materials design – Jill Hadfield
I’ve been connected to Jill on facebook for a while, and she’s been able to help me out a couple of times, so I went to this talk to be able to meet her in person for the first time. It gave me lots of ideas for potential workshops in the future, and furthered my understanding of some of the principles behind materials design, following on from the talk above. It’s also encouraged me to consider in more depth the principles I believe in/follow/use (What’s the right verb?!) when designing materials, teaching, and training.
When Jill was writing her latest book, Motivating Learning [affiliate link], with Zoltan Dörnyei, she started keeping a reflective journal to help her uncover the principles behind her own writing. She then analysed her journal and categorised her comments to try to find underlying patterns. She was motivated to do this by theorists who posited that materials writers tend to rely on intuition rather than theory, but as she said “We do have principles, but we’re too busy writing materials!”
Jill divided up the principles from her journal into two areas: framing principles and core energies. Framing principles ask questions like ‘What makes good materials?’ Here are some of Jill’s examples:
#iatefl Jill Hadfield More of her principles. She calls them ‘boundary fence’ principles – shouldn’t cross this pic.twitter.com/eeGcnqPhW5
They are a kind of limit, and you shouldn’t include anything which does not adhere to one or more of these principles. In contrast, core energies suffuse your work.They are the underlying themes of your materials, which resurface again and again, but may not be obvious in every activity. In Jill’s journal, these were Affect, Creativity and Play. The example Jill gave to show the difference between the two types of principle was that she believes all activities should be communicative (framing principle), but that there are times when activities should be cognitive, logical or serious depending on the aim (which could be seen as contradicting some of her core energies).
In analysing her journal, Jill realised that she wrote most when she was dealing with problems, and very little when the writing was going smoothly. She seemed to have a lot of tacit principles underlying her writing. Here are some of them:
Does this activity fulfil the aim in the best possible way?
Is the staging in the best logical sequence?
Does staging scaffold the students by providing achievable steps?
Are the groupings appropriate to the task and do they provide variety and balance of interaction?
She also noticed a system of checks and balances that stopped her forward progress at times. These included trying out the materials by putting herself in the position of the teacher (imagining), the student (trying out), or the writer explaining the materials to the teacher (dialoguing). Through this process, she sometimes discovered that her activities didn’t do what she wanted them to, which meant she had to rethink them.
Once she has finished writing, Jill uses checklists based on questions formulated from her principles. These help her to ensure quality, coverage (a range of activity types/interaction patterns etc) and analyse covert syllabuses (a hidden agenda). Covert syllabuses can be positive, for example by promoting rapport within the group through activities focussing on dynamics and groupwork, or negative, such as those implied by the kind of images that might be chosen to illustrate a course book (see Ben Goldstein and Ceri Jones’ talk at the MaWSIG PCE).
Jill shared lots of possible tasks which you could do to examine your own priniciples, or which could be used as the basis for workshops. Here are just a few examples:
Pyramid discussion, where participants first detail their own principles relating to materials design, then compare them with others.
Look at the principles you have related to classroom practice and consider them in more depth. Which of them are supported by research? Which of them do not seem to have theoretical support? Why do you think this is?
Give participants a range of different activities from published materials, chosen to demonstrate a range of writing styles. Analyse how much they like doing the activity, how often they create similar activities and how much they like creating that kind of activity.
Analyse the principles you have come up with in more depth. What are the potential advantages and drawbacks of having these as principles? Can these principles be justified by theory and classroom practice? What questions should you ask yourself about being driven by personal preference in your writing?
Dialoguing: participants work in pairs, with one as the classroom teacher and the other as the materials writer. The writer must justify their design decisions to the teacher. Record the conversation, play it back, and see if there are any decisions the writer wants to rethink.
Imagining: go through the activity step-by-step, as if you’re using it in class. Record yourself talking through the process, then listen back and analyse it critically. Is there anything you would change?
Trying out: put yourself in the students’ shoes. Record your interactions. Listen back and ask yourself questions. For example: Did the activity produce the language required? Did it produce enough of it? Was it engaging? Did everyone have equal turns?
Spoken protocols: participants design an activity and verbalise their decisions as they make them. Record this and listen back, with participants trying to verbalise what unspoken design principles are influencing these decisions.
Take an activity you have designed and try altering one element, for example, changing it from a pair to a group task. What effect does this have?
Develop your own checklists based on the principles you have uncovered. Use them!
Uncovering culture – Ben Goldstein and Ceri Jones
When Ben and Ceri started teaching, cultural content in coursebooks looked very different. It tended to reflect and/or reinforce cultural stereotypes, drawing on students’ prior knowledge of the world. There was a lot of pop anthropology or negative etiquette, ‘othering’ the cultures discussed by distancing students from it: ‘They do it like this, not like you do.’ It also reinforced the idea that everyone in a country acts in the same way: ‘Americans eat fast food’. Subliminal cultural content was also common, for example in the choice of images used.
Ceri and Ben wanted to move from this global, stereotypical image of culture, making it more relevant to the students’ lives, combining the global and the local to make it ‘glocal’. For example, rather than an article describing food of the world, including McDonalds as the food of the USA, you could:
Compare menus served by McDonalds in different countries.
Question what junk and healthy food really is.
Look at the designs of McDonalds restaurants, and how they differ around the world, for example the McCafé.
Find local news articles featuring McDonalds.
Continuing the food theme, try exploiting these food flags, designed for the Sydney Food Festival. Each image showcases food typical of that country. Students can identify the food, then decide whether they think it really does represent the country. Finally, they create a flag for their own country and other students discuss whether it’s truly representative.
Image from peacechild.org
‘Breaking’ stereotypes in this way can be a very productive exercise in the classroom. Something similar can be done with postcards too: do they reflect true experiences of what it is like to be in the country?
Ben and Ceri have written various course books together. The most recent are the Eyes Open series, written for secondary school students and published by Cambridge University Press. They have used ideas to exploit culture throughout, and showed examples like this one during their presentation.
There is a move away from stereotypes, showing a more multicultural view of Britain. Texts also have links to the outside world, so that the restaurant mentioned is a real place which students can visit the website of if they want to.
You need to build a bridge between the materials on the page and the lives of the students. One way to do this is to have the voices of ‘insiders’, rather than ‘outsiders’, talking about their own cultures. The example Ben and Ceri gave was a video about dabbawallas in India, leading on to a discussion of whether this system would work in the students’ own countries: What kind of food would they include in the boxes? Who would cook it?
Another avenue for uncovering culture is to emphasise the trans-cultural flow of ideas, rather than separating out cultures artificially. One way to do this is through YouTube videos and the associated comments, like those by Bethany Mota, who often shares videos about food. The ‘unboxing‘ meme is a productive one, and this video of an American opening a pizza in Korea gives lots of language students could draw on to make their own video, making the connection to their own lives and culture.
Can a picture tell a thousand words? – Hugh Dellar
You might think that this metaphor is as old as the hills, but according to Hugh’s research, it was actually coined about a century ago by an advertiser in the USA trying to sell advertising space on the side of trams! Hugh decided to continue this theme by advertising too, in this case the new edition of Outcomes, which he co-wrote with Andrew Walkley. 🙂
Hugh’s attitude to the use of images in materials has developed over his writing career. Originally he thought they were just a way of breaking up the page, and that the focus should be on language, because this is what students learn from. When his publisher changed and he was asked to incorporate more National Geographic content into his materials he was initially reluctant, associating them with doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and pain! He also highlighted the fact that although many of their images are beautiful, they aren’t necessarily great for generating language. They say 1000 words, so you don’t have to. Instead, he finds images which have the potential to ‘bring 1000 words into being’ much more useful.
So what are the functions of the image in the ELT classroom?
To illustrate the meaning of lexis. Learners can label things, but it’s not great for longer phrases.
To test whether students have remembered lexis. This is great for nouns, but not so good for things which are more abstract.
Decoration.
Prompts for grammar drills. Hugh mentioned ‘English for voyeurs’, which is true whenever you use images to practise the present continuous!
To check receptive understanding (e.g. choose the picture which shows…)
To set the scene.
To generate language and ideas.
To generate discussion, stories, opinions, etc.
The last three are the ones which are the most fruitful, but they require a certain type of image, preferably with some kind of ambiguity or something unstated.
In Outcomes, the picture above is used to introduce a unit on business. One of the discussion points is why there are no women shown. It then leads on to a unit about business, including making phone calls.
The same principles which apply to images could also be used for videos. Again, just because it’s on YouTube, doesn’t make it interesting. There is no guarantee that the language in the video is intelligible, appropriate for the level of your students, or will ever be used by them again. Once you’ve found a suitable video, you still have to write the materials to go with it too! This is where video content accompanying coursebooks comes in. In Outcomes, video is exploited in a variety of ways, not just for traditional comprehension tasks. It’s also a way of improving students listening skills by analysing small chunks of language, and then attempting to reproduce them to experiment with their pronunciation.
The Materials Writing SIG has gone from strength to strength since it started a couple of years ago. At the open forum, they updated us on what has been happening over the last year and their plans for the next year, including MaWSIG May, a series of webinars which happened very successfully last year and which they would like to repeat. They also held a raffle, and this happened 🙂
All of these talks have given me a strong incentive to examine the principles behind materials design in more depth, which is something I hope to do if and when I ever get round to doing an MA! I really like the idea of the Anglia Ruskin course, which focuses heavily on materials design, but unfortunately it’s only available face-to-face and I can’t afford it at the moment. One day…
This was my first IATEFL since I became a CELTA tutor, so I had a whole new set of talks to discover. Here are the three I went to, all of which made me think about how I approach CELTA tutoring and what an ‘ideal’ course would look like.
Strictly Come CELTA: An analogy and some thoughts on feedback – Jo Gakonga
I’ve found Jo’s CELTA training videos very useful and enjoyed a meal with her and a few other CELTA and Delta trainers at the beginning of the conference, so was looking forward to hearing her speak, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Jo compared the role of CELTA tutors to that of judges on the BBC programme Strictly Come Dancing. Each of them has a distinctive personality and gives feedback in different ways, which reflects our roles as CELTA tutors. She asked us to consider which of the judges we are similar to, and how this may change throughout the course or with different trainees.
She also talked about differentiated grading scales (compared to ‘To Standard’ and ‘Not To Standard’ from Cambridge), and how this can create standardisation issues. On SCD, there is a 10-point scale, but only one of the four judges really grades like this. One of them only really uses a five-point scale, because she never gives lower than 5. In 12 series, one judge has given 113 ’10s’, another 146 and another 35, but they’re all supposed to be grading on the same scale. She used this to encourage us to think about whether differentiated grading is useful or not.
The development of cognitions and beliefs on CELTA courses – Karla Leal Castañeda
I first learnt about the concept of teacher cognitions (what teachers know, believe and think) at the IH DoS conference in January this year. I believe it has a big effect on participants in CELTA courses and how receptive they are to the training they receive. I chose to go to this talk in the hope of finding out more.
In a nutshell, Karla’s research was to investigate what the trainees believed coming on to the course, whether this changed through the course, and how it influenced their performance. She did a combination of interviews and observations with 8 trainees from 3 different courses.
Most of them had unrealistically high expectations of what they might be able to learn on a four-week course, including ‘grammar’, a formula for how to be a good teacher, or a completely new way of approaching teaching. By the end of the course, they recognised that it was impossible to cover all of this within the time constraints, but still found the learning experience to be ‘rich and far from disappointing’. As they said, CELTA can only give them an insight of what teaching is and experience will give them the rest.
They highlighted the importance of planning in their post-lesson reflections, as they realised that problems in the lesson often stemmed from a lack of preparation. Based on negative experiences they had had in lessons, trainees had aspects of teaching they would prefer to avoid after the course, for example, CCQs (concept-checking questions). Despite this, they recognised that they needed to give techniques a fair trial before discarding them categorically, and that a four-week course was not enough time to say that a particular technique would or wouldn’t work.
Coming on to the course, most of the trainees talked about their own previous negative experiences learning languages and expressed that language learning needed to be fun to be effective, with a good rapport between teacher and students. This led to them prioritising fun in their own evaluations of their lessons, often disregarding what the trainer had to say about the lesson in terms of how successful it was if they (the trainees) thought that it wasn’t fun. There was a belief that language teachers need to be different to teachers of other subjects, since language teaching cannot be as teacher-centred as other subjects: interaction is crucial. By the end of the course, classroom management was added to the list of desirable teacher characteristics, in addition to subject knowledge and good rapport with students.
During the courses, there was shift towards a more student-centred approach to teaching. However, trainees stated that when teaching more student-centred lessons they felt less professional, and less ‘teachery’, which echoes my own informal observations of the need for trainees to adopt ‘teacher position‘ to feel like they are being effective and useful to the students. There is a continuous struggle against deeply rooted previously ‘learned’ behaviour, either from their own experience in the classroom or from the ‘apprenticeship of observation‘: what they have learnt from being a student and observing their own teachers.
In the Q&A session at the end, a trainer in the audience highlighted that sometimes we are not very good at managing expectations during the CELTA course, and that perhaps we need to revisit them more often. Another trainer suggested including regular slots in input sessions where you encourage trainees to compare what they have learnt about teaching with their own beliefs about how to teach. This is definitely an area which warrants further research, and one in which I will watch developments with interest.
The natural CELTA – a farewell to language? – Joanna Stansfield and Emma Meade-Flynn
This was the final talk I went to at IATEFL this year, and was a great note to finish on as it inspired me to consider a completely different approach to putting together a CELTA course by rethinking it from the ground up, rather than basing it on more traditional structures.
Joanna and Emma wanted to remove as much of the stress from the CELTA course as they could and make sure that their trainees were as prepared for real-world teaching as possible. To do this, they decided to get rid of language instruction from the timetable, since this is the most stressful area for most trainees.
They also tried to integrate the course as much as possible, so everything fed into the teaching trainees would do and nothing felt like extra work, since many trainees find it difficult to prioritise when juggling assignments and TP (lessons). They still had to meet the criteria set by Cambridge though, and demonstrate that their trainees could be effective language teachers. To do this, they changed the course in the following ways:
Replacing language analysis sheets with task analysis, focussing on the specific activities that trainees were planning to use. Different sheets were used for receptive and productive tasks. This had many effects on the trainees, for example realising that lexis is important for listening tasks. Trainees also created more meaningful productive tasks as a result.
Basing the language skills assignment around task analysis sheets which had been used in previous TPs, with trainees reflecting on what problems the students had with the language and re-planning the lesson in light of this. This is instead of the over-analysis and the added stress of a more traditional assignment, which can create an atomised view of language. It can also mean trainees over-explain to students because they try to give them all of the knowledge they have instead of just what is relevant.
Teaching a model lesson at the beginning of the course in the same way and using the same materials that they expected their trainees to use, then incorporating more explicit reflection on the model lesson throughout the first week of input, unpacking the techniques used in it. Trainees were noticeably better at lesson cohesion after this.
Adding a 20-minute slot at the end of TP where trainees could speak to students about what happened in the lesson without trainers in the room. This was recorded, and fed in to the Focus on the Learner assignment. Trainees were more aware of their students as people and of their needs, and better able to understand their accents. There was also higher student retention because of this, and this reflects the real world, since student retention is something we all need to be aware of.
Encouraging trainees to note questions they wanted to ask the students and their co-teachers while observing.
Learning more about students meant TP points weren’t needed after week one, as lessons were based around student needs, although a course book was still used.
Changing the layout of the lesson plan, including a column for self-evaluation. Before seeing trainer comments, trainees had to fill in a stage-by-stage reflection, rather than only reflecting on the lesson in general.
Integrating assignment 3 with trainees designing materials they would then go on to use (I think – my tweets aren’t very clear at this point!)
They got very positive feedback from their trainees on this course. They developed their language awareness naturally, in a similar way to how teachers do in the real world, and language became much less scary as a result. They also realised how important lexis was and were much better at teaching it because they had built up a good rapport with the students through the 20-minute conversations. Students weren’t afraid to ask how new lexis should be used. Trainees were also much more self-critical and reflective as a result.
This is definitely a course structure I would like to find out more about, and I think it will influence my own course design when I finally put together a CELTA course myself as a Main Course Tutor (I’m an Assistant Course Tutor at the moment).
This was the first IATEFL where I saw talks which mentioned Africa at all. I know there must have been related talks at the previous conferences I was at, but they didn’t cross my radar. This year I had no choice but to notice them, as the Monday and Tuesday plenaries were both about the continent, and what a perfect choice that was.
The justice and imperative of girls’ secondary school education – a model of action – Ann Cotton
Ann Cotton’s plenary was truly inspiring and got a well-deserved standing ovation at the end. She described the evolution of the organisation which was to become Camfed, the Campaign for Female Education.
Back in the early 1990s, Ann was doing university research which involved her visiting a Tonga village in Zimbabwe to find out why girls’ educational attainment was so low. What she saw there surprised her. Contrary to the standard belief that girls weren’t sent to school for cultural reasons, she actually discovered that poverty is the main barrier to girls’ education. The people in the village she visited had been moved there by the government when a dam was built, away from the river they depended on for their livelihood and to land which was not suitable for resettlement. To force people into the cash economy, the government also imposed many different taxes, like a hut tax, a dog tax, and a requirement for a fishing license if they wanted to use the nearby lake for food. There was food aid for the first two years, but after that the people were on their own. In order to meet the economic needs of their families, boys needed to be educated as a priority because they were likely to be able to earn more money later. When Ann arrived, there were seven boys for every one girl at the school. Although Zimbabwe had made huge strides in its education system after desegregation, there was still a long way to go to achieve true equality. It wasn’t that the Tonga people did not want to educate girls, but that they were forced to prioritise boys’ education because of the local economic situation.
They were making the only decisions they could on the basis of economics and survival.
When girls are poorly educated, it has many knock-on effects, including high infant mortality and the exclusion of women from the economy and decision-making. If a girl leaves school young, she will probably marry very soon afterwards because her family will struggle to sustain her financially. Both her and their security depends on her finding a husband. This means she’s likely to become pregnant while still a teenager, and in the villages Ann visited, she would be far away from medical services. If she had trouble during labour, she would be taken to a hospital two hours away for free medical treatment. However, if she died, the family would have to pay for the return of her body, leading to some incredibly difficult decisions. Some families chose not to let their daughters go to the hospital because they wouldn’t be able to get the body back afterwards if anything happened. The people at the clinic thought this meant families didn’t care about their daughters, but again poverty was the true underlying cause.
You have to make the decision that makes the best economic sense.
In all of the research she had done, she had never met the idea that poverty was a potential reason for girls not being sent to school. In fact, there was a huge desire for education, and this inspired Ann to try to do something about it. She felt completely out of her depth, but she knew it needed wider consideration. She abandoned her studies, and started to go to organisations to explain what she’d found, but she met repeated resistance and minds closed to the idea that there might be another explanation for educational and health issues.
When Ann returned to the Tonga village, the chief was very surprised to see her. They called a meeting about how to get more girls in school, and Ann was amazed when hundreds of people turned up. The chief sent out the word to local villages, and when the people came it proved that they really wanted their daughters to be educated. The chief provides the bridge between the traditional world and the modern world, and is trusted by the tribe. They built a committee to decide how to progress, including the chief, educators, people from the health system and the mothers’ support group, ensuring that women were represented in the decision-making too. The Camfed model endeavours to understand the girls’ lives both inside and outside school to make the system fit the child.
The child is at the centre of everything.
They draw on the social capital of the people in the tribe and of the girls who have been educated thanks to Camfed to strengthen their model. For example, there have recently been severe floods in Malawi which is likely to lead to severe problems with food as the year goes on. Camfed has been providing food which local mothers distribute. They are all illiterate or semi-literate, but can decide who needs extra food based on observing the way the children eat, without needing any tests or scientific basis for their decisions. Ann also mentioned learning a lot from James Rebanks in the book The Shepherd’s Life [affiliate link], where he talked about how much he has learnt from talking to semi-literate people. These are examples of ‘knowledge capital’ and show us that a lack of literacy does not mean a lack of intelligence, and that in fact some knowledge can be lost as the world becomes more literate.
There is an intense arrogance in seeing poor people as potential data points.
It’s important for us to gather information about the situation related to girls’ education. However, we need to be sensitive in how we do this and ensure that the data is returned to the community so that it can be used fully: often it goes up the system and the community never have access to it. Ann gave examples of the power of data to acknowledge and change behaviour. By demonstrating to families how the changes they had made in their approach to girls’ education had impacted on their lives, the communities felt hugely positive and were more likely to continue with these changes.
From a small start, they have grown and grown. In 1991, they supported 32 girls to get an education. In 2014, it was 1.2 million. There is now also a sister organisation called ‘CAMA’ made up of the alumni of Camfed, who are supporting more girls in their turn: 63,274 so far. The organisation spread to Ghana, and now works in five different countries, including Muslim communities where people said the system wouldn’t work. On the contrary: everyone wants their children to be educated!
Camfed has also worked to provide role models. Because nobody from the local tribes had got through the education system, none of the teachers spoke the tribal language. At secondary school, English was the language of education, and the children had had no exposure to it outside the classroom. One of the first things Camfed did was work to reduce the entry requirements for Tonga people to go to teacher training college. As well as the language barrier, there’s also a barrier in the metaphors and examples the children are expected to understand. In collaboration with women from CAMA and Pearson, they are working on materials to reflect the children’s experience more closely, to reduce the feeling of detachment and remoteness of the educational environment the children were entering. ‘Learner Guides’ are the bridge between these two areas. They are young secondary school graduates who work with teachers, bridging the gap between the ‘imported’ teacher and the local children. Because the learner guides are from the local community, they can help with the language, dealing with large class sizes, moderating materials, and providing a friendly face for the children when they come to the school. Parents can see their daughters progressing and earning respect in the local community, with teacher training college being considered the next step.
Ann gave some inspiring examples of some of the girls who have come through the Camfed system, entrepreneurs, doctors, and even a member of a UN advisory committee. Because of their backgrounds, they understand poverty in a way nobody else can, and they are more able to make changes because there is a bridge to their communities. Their communities celebrate them and are proud of them: they are not trying to hold them back at all.
They emerge as extraordinary global leaders who are fighting for change for others like them. What a loss to the world if they had not been educated!
Ann finished with these words:
When everyone thinks the way you do, it’s time to think differently.
Mark Twain
Ann’s slides and handout are available along with the session details on the IATEFL online site here. I would strongly recommend watching her plenary, because my summary does not do justice to it at all:
ELT in difficult circumstances: Challenges, possibilities and future directions – Harry Kuchah
Apart from a brief stint volunteering at my old primary school when I was 18, and two months at a primary school in Borneo, all of my teaching has been at private language schools, where the largest classes had 16 students. More than half of the classes I’ve taught have had fewer than six students. The majority of the reading I do about ELT deals with similar situations, with the occasional diversion into primary or secondary contexts with up to forty students. I always knew that this was not the reality for many teachers and thought it must be very difficult to teach huge classes, with little chance of seeing progress in your students. Until Harry Kuchah’s plenary on the final day of IATEFL, I never really understood how teachers managed in this situation. He had an inspiring and positive message, and one which I hope to see more of at future conferences.
Harry was the recipient of a Hornby scholarship to study an MA in the UK in 2006. He learnt a lot, but it wasn’t always easy to apply to his context. Even the ‘difficult circumstances’ described in the literature he read were a far cry from his context. He’s from Cameroon, a country with 258 languages and tribes, where French and English are the mediums of instruction. As well as being a teacher, he works for the Ministry of Education as an inspector. The average teacher to pupil ratio is 1:72. It used to be 1:125! This doesn’t take into account the fact that subject teachers teach consecutively, not concurrently, so the maths teacher and the English teacher count as two teachers in the ratio, even though they will actually teach classes that are twice the size (125 each, not 63) one after the other. Many teachers also prefer to stay in urban areas, so rural classes are larger too. Seven or eight students share a single textbook, and three or four sit at a desk designed for two. The ‘Education for All’ movement has led to an increase in the number of pupils at schools, but no corresponding increase in the infrastructure available to educate them. Other initiatives from the ministry, mainly due to the offer of finance from interested third parties, have meant that teachers are constantly required to change their methodology: there have been 12 required changes in pedagogy since 2000, almost entirely influenced by Western pedagogy. It’s impossible to keep up with this rate of change. Teachers are constantly told that they need new training, but there is little or no acknowledgement of the effort they put in. There is severe danger of burnout.
In Harry’s classroom he had 235 teens in a classroom designed for 60. Temperatures regularly reached 46 degrees. Through a process of negotiation with his students, they decided to move outside, and started to have lessons under the trees. They decided that the best thing would be if all of them became teachers, and they worked collaboratively to help each other. His children didn’t have books, so they found texts and produced their own materials. As the teacher, Harry’s role was to check that the texts students brought to him were relevant to the syllabus. You can find examples of the materials he used and his students created on the IATEFL site, for example, a poem they wrote based on Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. I’d highly recommend looking at them: in most cases, the first text is the sample, and the second is what the students produced in response to it, often with much longer and more complex language as they enriched their texts. Another idea was to take pictures students drew in response to a text in one class into another class, with the second class writing original texts based on the pictures. During the plenary, Harry showed us a video of one of his students telling a story based on these pictures: as well as the complexity of the language the child produced, what particularly struck me was the noise of the class. I find it hard to imagine being able to concentrate, having come from the luxury of quiet environments. The materials the students created served as a diagnostic tool for ‘accuracy therapy’ (I love this metaphor!) Harry published his story with Richard Smith in 2011.
English is the life-giving language for many people in the world.
Learners are partners. We can share the burden of low resources with the students, no matter how young they are.
Based on his own experience and the lack of correlation with what he had studied on the MA, Harry decided to do more research. The changes in pedagogy which teachers had imposed on them were confusing and often irrelevant to their context.
Context-appropriate pedagogy needs to be developed across the world.
Harry defines this as:
The aspects of practice which are considered good by teachers (and students, I think – didn’t have that in my tweet!)
Doable within that context
Worth doing within that context
In order to facilitate the development of a pedagogy which is appropriate to the situation in Cameroon, Harry asked teachers and students for their opinions about good/appropriate practice within their context. He conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed classes, and videoed lessons which teachers felt were successful. As a follow-up, he watched the videos in workshop groups with 30 teachers, and fed in information from his interviews with students too. It was the first time this kind of discussion of learning had taken place for any of these teachers or students, and it had a very positive effect, since it emerged that teachers and students didn’t always agree about what was ‘good’. This was an eye-opener for some of the teachers, and led to changes in their approach. For example, one teacher believed that group-work would be too chaotic in his class of 87, then saw a video of it happening in a class of 120, with the children saying how much they got out of it, and was inspired to try it out. Another teacher said they used to underestimate their pupils, but realised they could do more than they thought because of the workshops.
Many of these practices also contrasted with what was recommended by the Ministry of Education, and Harry saw a huge difference between the lesson plans he was given before the class and what unfolded in front of him. Teachers told him that they write the plans to satisfy requirements by following the model they are told to use, but this is rarely what they do in class. The challenges they faced and the huge rate of change meant that many of them employ ‘survival teaching strategies’, which often do not respect the recommendations of the ministry.
Harry believes that teachers are more likely to accept pedagogic innovation when it is seen to come from their colleagues and/or their context, rather than being imposed from above. As a result of this, he is now working with the teachers of the Cameroon teaching association, CAMELTA, to do ‘teaching association research’. After a plenary, 170 teachers wrote three possible research questions each. Working with the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group (RESIG), a questionnaire was created on the basis of these questions and sent out to teachers in CAMELTA, asking for one problem the teachers face in their classroom, solutions they have tried, and whether they work. The idea is to build a bank of knowledge specific to the context which other teachers can draw on. This is still in progress, but they already have 504 responses, with more coming in all the time. The teachers involved feel a sense of ownership, and are participating in research and building knowledge in a way that they wouldn’t have time to do as individuals.
In conclusion, we need to:
Create an enabling environment, rather than just telling teachers what to do and how to do it;
Incorporate the perspectives of both teachers and students;
Negotiate the divergence between these perspectives through critical reflection;
…and last, but not least: Focus on the positives and appreciate teachers’ efforts.
Harry’s slides and handout are available along with the session details on the IATEFL online site here. Again, I would highly recommend watching his plenary yourself:
Talk English: from CELTA to volunteer ESOL in South Africa – Julie Douglas
The third talk I went to connected to Africa was about a volunteer teaching project helping .
Julie and one of her colleagues did the CELTA at IH Durban in 2005. At the end of the course, they discovered that many of the students who were coming to the free teaching practice classes wouldn’t be able to continue studying English because they couldn’t afford it. With the support of IH Durban, they started offering free classes to anyone who wants them, particularly refugees who need English to start their new lives in Durban. This has developed into a project called Talk English, which has gone from strength to strength, but still needs the support of as many volunteers and financial backers as possible. You can find out more and donate through their website.
Taken together
These three talks have changed my vision of how English teaching is done in Africa. I wish all three of the speakers continued luck with their projects. I fully intend for my future Kiva loans to go to Camfed projects. I would like teaching association research to take off as context-specific methodology is sorely needed in so many places. Finally, I hope that Talk English finds the permanent location it is searching for and the money to fund it.
Before IATEFL 2015 I said I’d try to publish at the end of each day of the conference. I should have learnt by now that there’s no way that will ever happen because I don’t have time to think, much less blog during the conference! Instead I decided to group my posts by themes I found in the talks I chose to see. The first two plenaries didn’t really fit any of these, hence this post. The other posts will hopefully appear over the next few days…
Frozen in thought? How we think and what we do in ELT – Donald Freeman
In the opening plenary of the conference, Freeman examined three myths of teaching and ELT:
‘direct’ causality: teaching causes learning
‘sole’ responsibility: as teachers, we’re the ones responsible for what happens in our classroom
‘proficiency’ as the goal of our teaching
I liked the metaphor of a suitcase sculpture called Partir from Florence for how we think about how the language teaching we do in the classroom corresponds to how the students use the language outside the classroom:
Funny things happen to language when it goes to school.
In order to teach language, we have to give it attributes it doesn’t have, like grammar, levels and a division between the four skills. These create the ‘suitcase’ of the metaphor, and lead to ‘The Suitcase Problem’, divorcing language from the kind of settings it will be used in.
Rather than aiming for general proficiency, we need to ‘bound’ the language we are teaching to help the students know what they’re aiming for, and link to the settings it will be used in as much as possible [adding clear contexts]. Based on a research project with teachers learning English for classroom use in Vietnam, for example, Freeman observed that having a clear target setting motivated lower level teachers to improve at a faster rate than their higher-level counterparts when they could choose what to study and when.
Engagement principles and practice in classroom learning, language and technology – Joy Egbert
For the second plenary of the conference, Joy Egbert discussed the principles of student engagement and how this applies to the use of technology in the classroom. Her message was that unless students are engaged with the topics we choose and the materials and tools we use to present them, little learning will happen.
She described her own experiences of second language learning with the use of technology, and showed that many students fail to learn languages because of demotivation, boredom and frustration, as well as ineffective teaching and learning. This is something I’ve heard from many people who’ve failed to learn languages, particularly due to negative experiences at (mostly secondary) school.
When students are doing an engaging task, they pay more attention and have a greater chance of success, both linguistically and in the task itself. These are the ‘engagement principles’ she shared for creating such tasks:
Include authentic tasks (ones which are perceived as important by the learners, not necessarily reflecting things they would have to do in real life);
Integrate connections to the students’ lives;
Provide social interaction or deep individual focus. In group activities, allocate roles and gives students a clear reason to listen to each other;
Offer practice and feedback;
Have a good balance between the level of challenge and the skills the students have (not too easy/hard).
Joy advocated using technology to fulfil some of these criteria, but emphasised that you should only use it if it adds to the task, not for the sake of it. She gave various examples of how this might be possible and emphasised the importance of getting to know your students to ensure that the tools and materials are as relevant to them as possible.
I’m not sure how much of this talk was actually new or thought-provoking to the audience – a lot of it seems like common sense – but it did remind me of the importance of getting to know your students.
The Materials Writing Special Interest Group is the newest IATEFL SIG, and very active. They have a blog, a facebook page, and a Twitter account.
Each SIG has a pre-conference event (PCE) with a specific theme. The MaWSIG theme this year was The Materials Writer’s Essential Toolkit and featured a whole range of speakers with huge amounts of experience between them. I’ve done a little materials writing myself, and thought this would be a very useful way to find out more about how to develop in this area, even if none of my materials end up being published. I’m very happy I chose to go to this PCE as it turned out to be incredibly useful, with lots of tips that I can start using straight away, and hopefully build on if and when I get more writing work.
How to write multiple-choice activities – Sue Kay
This was a very practical way to start the day. Sue offered us these tips:
Keep options of a similar length and style, preferably short and avoiding linkers – students should be spending time processing the text, not the question;
Keep distractors plausible – avoid humorous or silly options because they’re obviously wrong;
Don’t have any obviously incorrect answers;
Avoid any overlap between options;
Make sure questions can’t be answered using world knowledge or common sense;
If using an unfinished sentence as the stem, divide it in a logical place (e.g. not in the middle of a fixed expression).
Sue also advises writing the text and the multiple-choice items at the same time whenever possible, unless you have a text which you’re required to base your items on. It’s much more natural than writing the text first, then trying to shoehorn distractors in.
When writing distractors, here are a few techniques you can use:
Change the period of time using phrases like I used to…but now I… or Normally…but this time…
Compare the desire/hope/intention of the speaker to what actually happened: We planned to…, We thought about…
Use unreal past in conditionals or after ‘wish’: If the boss had given me a raise, I’d have stayed.
Use negatives or near negatives, especially less common ones: It’s not as if we’re desperate for a car park. or It’s hardly my idea of fun.
The role of the image in materials design – Ben Goldstein and Ceri Jones
Ben and Ceri shared lots of image banks and showed how the same search of ‘beach’ can yield very different results depending on where you search and the filters you use. Panos seemed particularly interesting. It’s a collection of photojournalism, often accompanied by short texts. Even if you don’t end up using the images themselves, they can provide inspiration for your writing as they are a lot more generative than stock photos. Other image banks are:
Unsplash is a Creative Commons image bank where you can use the images for any purpose, including commercial. They share 10 free images a week. Another option is Death to the Stock Photo. For non-commercial use, there is of course ELTpics, and there are lots of ideas for how to use those images on the Take A Photo And… blog.
On Alamy you can set filters to look for certain kinds of image. For example, if you choose ‘square’ you’ll end up with Instagam influenced shots. As a materials writer, you may have to write an artwork brief to tell publishers what to put with your materials. By experimenting with filters, and telling publishers what you DON’T want, the image is much more likely to be what you’re looking for. Don’t get your heart set an image though, and remember that there is a budget.
Other tips for writing an artwork brief:
Consider including sample images you’ve sourced – this can be clearer than describing the image;
Explain how the image will be work/be used in the materials, not just what it looks like;
If you know what you want, but can’t find an example, describe it in as much detail as you can to make it more likely that the final result is what you envisaged.
We may also need to move away from the traditional image and consider modern types of image such as the selfie, infographics, dronies (new to me!), panodash, Dear Photograph, Draw My Life, memes and kinetic typography. With these, they may be hard to sell to publishers, and they may go out of fashion. To stay up-to-date with images, try these ideas:
look out for images being used in adverts, etc;
subscribe to adweek for the top 5 commercials every week;
subscribe to Unsplash for weekly emails with taster images;
[my addition: download the Guardian app for images from Eyewitness]
Images have four roles in materials:
scene-setting
illustrative
decorative
driving force
When choosing your image, consider which role it will play and choose accordingly. For example, CAE images tend to be mid-shot (rather than close up) so you can see the surroundings too.
A technological toolkit for Materials Writers – Nick Tims
I learnt a lot of useful tips here!
Use multiple monitors so you don’t have to flick between screens too much. (I’m doing this for the first time as a I finish this blogpost!)
Get browser extensions to save you time and reduce clicks.
Link shorteners (like bit.ly) make huge links to Google Images (for those artwork briefs!) much more manageable.
Use ‘Grab’ for Mac or ‘Snipping tool’ on Windows to take partial screen shots instead of copying and pasting things into Paint or other cropping tools.
Create custom search engines in Chrome. Go to any site with a search box, right click the search box, add as search engine, create a keyword and you can use that search that site directly from the address bar. It took me about 10 seconds when I just tried it – amazing!
Use Evernote to archive texts you find for future materials writing. It appears in Google searches you do later too. (I use diigo which does something similar, although Evernote is more elegant and has a much better app)
Macros are ways of using one click to do a series of actions. You can download a whole set of macros from Teacher’s Pet to do things like automatically create matching activites, making activity and worksheet creation much faster. This got a round of applause and a collective gasp from the audience! (Unfortunately there are only versions for Microsoft for Windows and Open Office, but no Mac version – it’s a work in progress according the developer.)
StayFocusd is a browser extension you can use to limit the time you spend on particular sites in a single day. Don’t be over-enthusiatic though, because you really can’t get round it!
The Pomodoro technique can make you manage distractions. It involves 25 minutes of work, followed by 5 minutes of ‘reward’. That’s also good for getting you to move around. You can download browser extensions to help you with the timing.
RescueTime sends you a report at the end of each week telling you how much time you spent on useful/distracting websites. Can be a bit depressing, and Nick says he never gets more than 70% productivity 😉
Nick says that you need to experiment with these tools, and you may need to ‘kiss a few frogs’ in the process of finding what works for you. Here is his handout.
Writing ELT audio and video scripts – John Hughes
John showed us ways of improving our scripts to make them more interesting and add a little drama to them.
To add authenticity, you can record people in real situations. Interesting bits of language come up in this way that you might never consider if you are trying to write things yourself. However, this can be time consuming: from half a day of recording, John only got five minutes of usable audio.
You can also add features such as fillers, false starts, contracted forms, slang and more. This may depend on the publisher and the purpose of the materials (developing language or developing listening skills?), as some markets are resistant to this and prefer the more ‘polished’ nature of traditonal coursebook audio. One audience member mentioned the difference between spoken and written grammar, and there was some discussion of the fact that spoken grammar has only recently started to appear in published materials.
Target language needs to be balanced with incidental language.
Increase the amount of turn-taking to make audio more manageable for students, particularly at lower levels.
Stick to a limited number of speakers, and differentiate them through accent, gender and use of names to help SS follow the turn-taking.
Video helps you to show context, whereas you need to set up the situation more clearly if you’re writing an audio script. With video, don’t state the obvious. Show, don’t tell.
To add drama to your scripts, we can learn from Kurt Vonnegut. He said that in a good story you need to have a clear central character who wants something. You can then add drama by applying the ‘try it three times’ rule. The first two times the character fails to get what they want, but on the third attempt they succeed. This can give you more opportunities to showcase the target language, and in a more natural way than a short two or three line dialogue might. It also gives you the opportunity to add characterisation.
The final idea was to video the same scene twice, once running smoothly, and the second with the ‘try it three times’ rule. Students can watch both and compare the difference.
Writing ELT activites for authentic video and film – Kieran Donaghy and Anna Whitcher
Kieran is the man behind the very successful Film English website on which the majority of the videos have little or no dialogue. He’s particularly interested in exploiting images used in film. Anna is an ELT film-maker, and her opening quote was that there is an increased demand for authors who can write for video, film-makers and script-writers, so this is definitely an area to develop your skills in if you want to get into materials writing. Together they’ve written a book for ELT Teacher2Writer including many more ideas than those below.
Videos need to be consciously integrated into course material, rather than used as an add-on or as glorified listening comprehension. It particularly needs to match the topic, with a language fit as secondary. To aid comprehension, follow these guidelines:
Use dialogue which is clearly enunciated and not too fast.
Include a high degree of visual support.
Ensure the soundtrack is not too loud or distracting.
Have only one person or character speaking at a time.
Include supporting, titles, subtitles or graphics.
Reduce the number of dialects and/or strong regional accents.
Use a slow, clear voiceover or narration.
Keep videos to 2-5 minutes to hold the attention, and make repeat viewings easier to fit in. Try to use different activities for each viewing. When choosing a video, consider the relevance and interest of the topic, the cultural backgrounds of your students, and their experience of the world. You can also ask your students about the kinds of videos they enjoy watching. Vimeo Staff Picks, Future Shorts, BBC Earth and National Geographic are good places to look for videos.
Once you’ve chosen one, follow a three-step approach to exploit it. Editors often recommend the structure and/or the kind of activities they would like you to use, and you should ask if they don’t.
Pre-viewing e.g. Look at the stills and have a discussion/complete the sentences with the missing words. (could be used to pre-teach vocabulary)
Match collocations.
Complete a summary/review.
While viewing Don’t overload the students at this stage – stick to short answer tasks like true/false or ‘Number the sentences in the order you hear them’. The answers should be from the video, not from their knowledge of the world. Ask questions in the same order as they are in the video, and spread them evenly throughout.
Post viewing Draw out the key concepts of the video in some way, for example through a discussion or a longer project. Students could also make their own version of the video or a follow-up to it.
Does a corpus have the answer? Corpus tools for ELT writers – Julie Moore
Julie started by telling us that she can’t imagine writing materials without a corpus, and once she told us the range of things she uses it for, I’m not surprised!
Ask questions like ‘How do we use…?’ ‘Do we say…?’ ‘Which is the most common…?’ ‘What’s the difference between…?’
Find natural examples.
Get inspiration for the context you introduce language in.
Search for collocations. Once you’ve found that a collocate exists, click through to read examples.
Expand the range of words which you collocate with a key word.
Check your intuitions.
Find phrases and chunks of language.
Do a ‘context search’ to find words around the key word, accounting for variable collocations or ones which might have other words in the middle of them.
Examine British/American/global English variations.
Corpora can’t do everything though. They’re not good for:
Searching for language features that don’t involve specific language chunks, e.g. present continuous to talk about the future.
Getting longer stretches of complete texts – these are still subject to copyright. This also makes it difficult to use corpus examples for things like discourse markers which require longer texts.
SketchEngine is a good tool for searching within corpora. Know your corpus! Think about British v. American English, the kind of texts used to build the corpus (e.g. newspapers, stories, academic journals…), spoken v. written language, expert v. student writers… Choose a corpus based on the text types your students will have to produce. Here are some ways you can access a corpus:
Other useful tools you can use to analyse language are Vocab Kitchen (breaks down the language in a text by level), Google NGram Viewer (showing changes in language use over time) and the Macmillan Online Dictionary. Dictionaries with CD-ROMs in them are particularly useful because of the advanced search tools which are often available on them. Julie has put more information about using these tools on her blog.
Finally, don’t accept everything the corpus tells you blindly. If it looks like a strange result, question it. Go deeper by clicking on the results to see the longer text, and look carefully at where the examples are taken from.
Tailor-making materials from an ESP perspective – Evan Frendo
Evan works mainly in the corporate sector, and has spent many years developing materials specific to his clients.
Corporate culture can influence the materials you make as you need to fit them into the training culture of the organisation. The needs of the business take priority over the needs of the individual students, and the focus is more on training than education. Materials tend to have a short shelf-life and may need to be frequently updated depending on the market. When creating tailor-made materials, you don’t need to worry so much about PARSNIPs (the topics which are often avoided in more commercial materials) providing the people you are creating the materials for are happy for them to be included. However, sometimes even in ESP they can cause problems. Evan was asked to use the longer term not the shorter term in some materials for oil workers (see photo below), even though ‘pig’ is a very generative term and is in common usage across the industry, including in the Middle East: Have you pigged the pipeline? Is the pipeline piggable?
When designing your own materials in these situations, you need to find the gap between ‘where they are now’ and ‘where they need to be’, then create materials to move the students from the first point to(wards) the second. This involves in-depth needs analysis which can be done through:
Analysing real texts that the students will need to be able to read/write. Tools like WordSmith can be useful here.
Finding out about the specific terminology students need, and what they are aware of already. Many of these may be well above their ‘level’ if they were in a traditional EFL environment.
Interviews with various stakeholders, not just the students and their managers.
Recordings (e.g. of meetings, telephone conversations).
Field notes (e.g. a day in the life of…, collected by shadowing somebody using the target language/doing the target job).
The materials you put together need to reflect the target discourse, which is why such in-depth research is vital. It shouldn’t be about what we as outsiders perceive to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather what is required within the organisation/industry you are creating the materials for. Genre is a key focus, including how to handle different/international understandings of those genres. For example, presentations may be done differently in different cultures, and there may be varying requirements for the amount of information included on slides depending on what they will be used for after the presentation. Use experts to tell you what counts as “successful communication”.
Communication style can be as important, if not more so, as lexis and grammar. Many learners don’t care about accuracy in the traditional sense, they care about meaning. They are often not aiming or a native speaker model, with English as a Lingua Franca becoming instead.
Ultimately, the materials you create must be evidence-led, not intuition-led.
Adventures in self-publishing – Christien Lee
What should you self-publish?
Something which fills a gap in the market, has good sales potential and where there is limited competition. Do your research! Christien decided to publish a print self-study guide for an English test in Canada, with an online component.
Print or e-book?
What are your audience likely to respond better to? Print can be considered more trustworthy, and for some people they prefer it because they’re more familiar with it. It can reduce the ease of pirate copies being distributed. Cost is also a factor here, as you need to spend more money up-front if you choose print.
Why self-publish?
Traditional publishers offer more cachet, better production values, no up-front costs, and you should get either commission or royalties. However, there is no guarantee of publication, it takes a long time to get products to market, you get less money and there is a delay in payment. Sales might also be quite low depending on how much the publishers choose to promote it.
Self-publishing means guaranteed publication, a short publication process and returns of up to 70% of sales. The disadvantages of it are that there is no guarantee of a return on your investment, and you may lose money due to upfront costs. There is also more work pre- and post-publication if you choose to self-publish.
How do you go about it?
You can use crowdsourcing, freelancers, friendsourcing (my favourite new word of the day!) or go it completely alone. The latter option is difficult as you need to deal with editing, layout, audio (maybe) and many other options, so it’s a good idea to look for specialists to avoid too much work for you. VoiceBunny is a tool you can use for audio: post a project on the site, and people can audition to be allowed to record for it.
Where should you publish it?
Amazon has a system called CreateSpace which is a print-on-demand service. You could also use book distribution systems like Draft2Digital, Lulu or Smashwords. Wayzgoose Press is a publisher which is somewhere between a traditional publisher and self-publishing. The Round is specifically aimed at ELT authors looking to publish something a little different from what traditional publishers offer.
Ensuring quality
Christien was putting together a test preparation book. When putting together something like this, it’s particularly important to provide a quality product. Questions need to match the original test for length, genre, register, topic, difficulty, distractor patterns and more. Here are some tools you can use to check that your material is at the right level:
If you decide to create online content to accompany your book, WordPress with premium options is a good choice as you can get features like a login-only area and a shopping cart. Articulate is a versatile tool for creating professional-looking online courses. Christien described it as ‘like PowerPoint on steroids’!
Problems with self-publishing
It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time, money and work involved in self-publishing. Be prepared for everything to take longer than you expect!
Other summaries of the day
Lizzie Pinard wrote four blogposts covering two talks in each:
Finally, if you want to follow the day as it unfolded, Sophie O’Rourke, part of the MaWSIG team, put together a Storify with tweets from the whole event.
In this presentation I spoke about writing journals with students in a variety of different contexts, including both monolingual and multilingual classrooms. I also talked about my own experience of using a journlal for my Russian learning.
I find journal writing to be a very rewarding process for the students, and I learnt a lot from going through the process myself, including improving my spelling, increasing my vocabulary, and learning more about my teacher. As a teacher, reading my students’ journals was a great way to learn more about them, including their needs as language learners. I’d highly recommend trying it out.
Here are the slides, including information about what exactly I mean by journal writing and tips on how to set it up. All of the links in the slides are clickable.
There is no commentary on the slides as there is a recorded version of the same talk available from the TOBELTA online conference from August 2014, which you watch via this link or below:
I’m about to leave for the IATEFL 2015 conference in Manchester, where I’ll be going to the Materials Writing Special Interest Group pre-conference event today, The Materials Writer’s Essential Toolkit. If I can connect to the wifi, I should be tweeting throughout on the #IATEFL hashtag on Twitter. You can also follow the online coverage, including some live-streamed and recorded sessions (not mine), and interviews throughout the conference:
I’m hoping to publish a summary at the end of each day, but that will depend on how motivated I’m feeling and how tired I am 😉 There will inevitably be a plethora of blog posts from lots of people throughout the conference. After it’s finished, I’ll tidy up my posts and add links so you can find them. I hope to see some of you there, and if you’re not, to be able to share as much of this experience with you as possible!
At IATEFL Harrogate I watched a presentation which went a long way towards answering a question I posed on this blog a while back: How can we help Arabic learners with their huge problems with spelling in English? It was given by Emina Tuzovic, and she kindly agreed to write a guest post sharing her tips for my blog. What with one thing and another, it’s been a while in coming (she finished it for me 6 months ago!) but I hope it was worth the wait!
Emina
A couple of tips on how to improve spelling in Arabic learners
Any TEFL teacher who has experience teaching Arabic learners is acquainted with the difficulties they face when it comes to spelling. I would like to share some spelling tips which helped my Arabic students improve this skill.
First of all, I would pre-teach what vowels, consonants and syllables are as well as highlight the difference between sounds and letters. This is important for Arabic learners as when they learn English, they need to deal with the following:
a new script;
numerous spelling patterns;
a complex and very often unpredictable system of mapping sounds onto letters (Arabic has a regular 1-1 sound-letter conversion);
a different reading direction (Arabic is written from right to left).
Therefore using the appropriate ‘labels’ will make your explanations much clearer. Also don’t forget that a phonemic chart looks like another script for this group of learners. Therefore I tend to avoid it if I can, especially transcriptions of whole words. Instead of writing a phonemic on the board, I prefer writing another, high-frequency word with the same pronunciation of a sound in question, e.g. moon; rude (/u:/).
Vowels
As you have probably noticed it is the spelling of vowels that creates most difficulties for Arabic students. One of the most effective tasks for this group is simply gapping the vowels: e.g. _xc_pt (except) vs _cc_pt (accept).
‘Problematic vowels’ are down to L1 interference. Firstly, in Arabic short vowels are in most cases not written down but only indicated by diacritics. For that reason, they are frequently glossed over by the students when they read in English (which consequently results in the poor spelling of vowels). Secondly, Arabic only has three long and three short vowels in comparison to English (5 vowel letters and 20 sounds!).
Therefore when I board new vocabulary (especially multi-syllable words), I mark vowels with a colour pen and break the words down into syllables which I subsequently drill in isolation. This is very important as many Arabic students will otherwise either guess the vowel or simply omit it when trying to read a new word.
Breaking down words into CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) patterns is also important as it helps students visually memorise lexical items. I try to encourage my students to practise words by writing them down, not typing them up on the computer. This will help them consolidate the visual form of the words which is absolutely vital if you want to be a good speller! (e.g. they need to see how differently words such as play and blue look like). I also try to get the students not to only copy the word but use the Look, remember, cover, write, check method. I get them to look at a word for about 20 seconds and try to memorise it before covering and then trying to recall it. In this way you know the students have used their processing skills to retain the item instead of just copying it.
Noticing patterns
As teachers, when we teach spelling, we tend to focus too much on spelling and pronunciation irregularities (e.g. plough, cough, etc.) rather than teaching spelling patterns. If you need to check these and the rules associated with them, I suggest using the guide on the Oxford Dictionaries website. In relation to this, I try to get my students to notice the most common letter strings (e.g. sh, ch, spr, ure, etc.) and encourage ‘active reading’ where they look for letter strings and spelling patterns. When they record vocabulary, encourage the use of spelling logs as a separate section of students’ vocabulary books (based on a spelling pattern, e.g. ie vs ei, rather than just randomly recorded vocabulary).
When revising new lexis, I sometimes use magnetic letter strings (rather than only letters) which I simply ordered off Amazon! Here is the link if you’d like to buy your own magnetic letters [affiliate link, so Sandy gets a few pennies if you order here!]
To get a closer insight into spelling games based on spelling patters, I would recommend Shemesh & Waller’s Teaching English Spelling [affiliate link].
I have noticed that my Arabic learners are well aware of their poor spelling. In order to build up their confidence, they need to be shown that they have made progress.
I usually set up a routine: for the first or last 5 minutes of the class we revise vocabulary from the previous day (e.g. spelling bee) or I might give them a spelling test either every day or every other day. In this way they will soon get the sense of achievement.
I also try to praise my students for using a correct pattern (e.g. *reech, *shef, etc.) even though the word might not be spelled correctly.
Morphology
When it comes to spelling, morphology plays a very important role, too. Highlight the root, suffixes and prefixes of a word and encourage students to create word families. Based on their L1, Arabic learners will be familiar/will be able to relate to this concept/aspect of learning the new vocabulary.
Avoid the following…
One of the common spelling activities you find in various coursebook is unjumbling letters (e.g. *fnsniuoco-confusion). However I would not advise these exercises for Arabic learners. Individual letters shuffled around might only confuse them as these exercises do not contribute to consolidating the visual form of a word.
Another exercise which particularly lower-level Arabic learners might not find useful is crosswords for the same reason as listed above (words are often presented vertically and in divided block form).
Spelling games on the computer
Students can check the following useful websites if they want to practise spelling in their own time:
If students enjoy playing spelling bees, spellbee.org is an option. However, you need to register.
In terms of spelling software (which has to be downloaded on your computer), there is a lot to choose from. However, the vast majority is designed for native English speaking children and is therefore not the best tool for ESL learners. After having done some research into those, I’d recommend ‘Speak n Spell’. Although there are some issues with the audio, it’s still worth having a look.
THRASS chart (phonics chart): Although this chart is not free (from £2), it’s a very useful tool to memorise phonics and consequently spelling patterns.
To my knowledge not much has been published to solely cater to Arabic learners’ difficulties in spelling. In the classroom I frequently use Harrison, R. (1990; 1992) Keep Writing 1 and Keep Writing 2, published by Longman [affiliate links]. These books are specifically aimed at helping Arabic learners with their writing. At the end of each chapter you can find spelling exercises.
By incorporating the things mentioned above in my lessons, my Arabic students managed to considerably improve their spelling in a fairly short period of time. I hope you find these tips useful too! You can write to me on emina.tuzovic@londonschool.com.
References
Harrison, R. (1990; 1992). Keep Writing 1 and 2. Longman.
Shemesh & Waller (2000). Teaching English Spelling. CUP.
Despite having read a bit about it for Delta, I never really got how The Silent Way worked. Roslyn Young’s IATEFL Harrogate 2014 session changed all that, and while I don’t believe it will change my teaching completely, it’s something I’d be interested in trying out with lower-level groups, particularly if I ever get to teach beginners again.
[Note: this post was written during Roslyn’s session, hence the narrative style.]
Roslyn has been using The Silent Way since 1971, so has many years of experience.
She introduces us to how Cuisenaire rods are used in The Silent Way.
She shows us a rectangle chart and teaches us some Japanese, by giving us a single sound and pointing to the rods on the image and getting us to repeat the sounds. She mouths sounds, pointing to more rectangles. By pointing rapidly, we make words. She uses a lot of gestures and mime, but no sound. There’s a lot of laughter in the room. By pointing at rods at the bottom and top of the chart, she shows us pitchs.
Roslyn teaching us Japanese using a Cuisenaire chart
After about two minutes, we already know that Japanese has a pitch system. The rectangle also shows us the five vowels of the system.
Her job as a language teacher is to make us aware of all the problems we might have to deal with as learners of Japanese.
The chart also shows us the consonants. It’s a map of the whole sound system of Japanese.
She teaches all ages using this method.
She also has a rectangle chart for the sounds of English, including stress and reduction. The colours go from language to language, so the same sound is connected to the same colours in different languages.
The learning process according to Gattegno
There are many theories about how we learn. This is how Caleb Gattegno, creator of The Silent Way, sees it.
There is something to learn. (e.g. in the Japanese chart there are two lots of vowels marked, so the learner sees there’s something to learn)
We learn through awarenesses/movements of the mind. They might be things that you notice visually, audibly. They can be internal or external awarenesses. You have to be ‘present’ to what you’re doing to learn. It’s the stage of ‘exploration’.
This is where things become automatic. At the start of this stage, they’re not automatic, but at the end they are.
Transfer. Anything I’ve learnt in my life is available at any time that I want to use it.
Saying more
There are charts for beginners using the same colours as the rods. You can point to different words to build up sentences.
Roslyn using the word chart
What should we be teaching?
Beginners’ books normally start with the same structures: Hello. I come from…, adding vocabulary…
The Silent Way is completely different. It asks what you can give the learners in the time you have them. It requires you to give them everything they might have trouble learning without you, like pronunciation and structures.
What Roslyn wants them to learn is the mindset of how to relate to people in the English language. You can do this by placing yourself in time and space. They can learn vocabulary without her. She wants to give them those things that they won’t get outside her lessons, focussing principally on pronunciation to start with. This will give them a grounding for self-study later.
The next step
She pulls out a couple of students, and they follow instructions, using the language in a ‘real’ context. This is after about five hours of language.
e.g. Take a rod. Give it to him.
A student might suggest ‘Take two rods and give it to her.’ At this point, Roslyn will hold up her hands and point out ‘Take two rods and give them to her’ on the chart. This helps students to learn the meaning of ‘it’ and ‘them’. This is how the Silent Way advances, by students taking leaps and the teacher helping them. Every time, communication has already taken place, and the Silent Way shows them how to express it correctly. The students are talking to each other the whole time. The only time Roslyn speaks is for classroom management. Silent Way is about expression.
“The person I talk to most is myself.” Language is about understanding my world in terms of what I think, what I say – you say things in different ways in your head until you work out what you want to say.
Connected speech
The chart shows different pronunciations of the same spellings, like ‘there’ and ‘there’, showing the different functions. The chart also has dots showing words which might have different pronunciations, like weak and strong ‘a’. Students learn this from the very beginning.
The initial English rectangle chart includes schwa, schwii (short /i/, like at the end of ‘happy’), and schwu (short /u/, like at the end of ‘shadow‘).
Spelling
There is a similar chart to the rectangle chart, showing all of the spellings for each sound. Those written in a smaller font appear less often, and students notice this and realise they don’t have to focus on those sound patterns as much.
Silent Way spellings chart
The colour-coding mean that there is an immediate way into reading off new words that students have never seen before.
This still works for colour-blind students, as people work via the geography of the chart as well as the colours.
Why use The Silent Way?
You subordinate your teaching to the student’s learning. It helps the students undertake their learning in a very orderly way.
By repeatedly doing something you create experience, like an apprentice learns from a master craftsman. You then order that experience to create knowledge, like a craftsman writing a book. Somebody picks up that book, but that doesn’t give them the knowledge. They still have to build up the experiences. You can’t transmit knowledge, but you can give students experience. Silent Way gives them that experience by getting students to speak as much as possible, with the teacher acting purely as a facilitator.
[I wrote the first half of this post back in May last year, and now that it’s February 2015, I thought it was probably time to finish it! The first sentence is still true though, so I won’t change it] 🙂
IATEFL Harrogate was over a month ago now, and I’m still digesting what I learnt there. In this post I’ll attempt to summarise my conference experience and the talks I attended based on tweets and blogposts from the week.
Wednesday 2nd April
English and economic development – David Graddol’s plenary
Education systems geared up to produce B1/B2 learners, but that’s the level employers are least interested in #iatefl@graddol — Sandy Millin (@sandymillin) April 2, 2014
English is becoming a way of competing between individuals in getting jobs/promotions, but might not be needed for job #iatefl@graddol
— Sandy Millin (@sandymillin) April 2, 2014
David gave a lot of evidence about the relationship between English learning and economic development. The quotes above were the most interesting, because it questions the standards we set for school leavers, and the reasons why we require potential employees to be able to speak English. What is the point of training learners to a standard that isn’t good enough to get them a job? And/or what is the point of forcing students to learn more of the language than they’ll ever need to be employed? And is English just another piece of paper to show you’re qualified, or is it actually a necessary skill? You can watch a recording of the plenary.
Due to the dodgy wifi, I blogged the rest of the talks I went to on Wednesday:
I also liked these tweets from Hugh Dellar, because the first one summarises how I felt there too. I don’t drink though, so I’ve only experienced the second one via other people’s delicate heads! 😉
If you’ve never attended #iatefl, imagine being propelled round a human pinball machine containing everyone you’ve ever met in ELT
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 2, 2014
It was my birthday so I decided to have a slow start! 🙂 Ela Wassell started my day off beautifully with a card which she’d got signed by lots of people there. Thanks Ela! I Speak Meme – Nina Jerončič How to use memes in the classroom, in the talk with the best title of the conference. She might be writing a guest post for me summarising the talk, although since I asked her a long time ago and forgot to remind her, I’m hoping that she’s still willing to do it!
Adam Simpson and I were interviewed by Ann Foreman and Paul Braddock from British Council Teaching English. We spoke about blogging and offered advice to those of you who(‘d like to) blog.
While I’m on pronunciation, Richard Cauldwell’s name was mentioned a few times during the day, and his book ‘Phonology for Listening‘ [affiliate link] was one of my birthday presents (thanks again Ela!). When I’ve read it, I’ll share my impressions, but until then, here’s what Hugh Dellar has to say:
#iatefl Check out Richard Cauldwell’s site – http://t.co/w0usbBDcxs. Full of inspiring ideas that are both practical yet deeply principled.
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 3, 2014
Mike McCarthy ‘Collocation and the learner: wading into the depths’ was on at the same time as Laura and Katy. Luckily, Cambridge ELT were tweeting some of the highlights:
McCarthy will be talking about Cambridge international corpus, at 1.9 billion words, CANCODE Corpus, and Cambridge Learner Corpus #iatefl — Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014
McCarthy: delexical verbs aren’t easy to avoid – they’re used by everyone, not just fancy native speakers. #iatefl
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014
McCarthy: both B1 and B2 learners make mistakes with “make” and “do”, but this improves at C1. #iatefl
— Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014
I found it particularly interesting that these mistakes could be divided by level:
McCarthy shares a curious phenomenon of near synonyms being used as collocations “a horrible stench smell”. #iateflpic.twitter.com/HhoQRcgUbZ — Cambridge ELT (@CambridgeUPELT) April 3, 2014
# of panic attacks witnessed @ #IATEFL thus far bc a presentation’s fancy audio/video weren’t working: too many. Keep it simple, people.
— Jennifer MacDonald (@JenMac_ESL) April 3, 2014
You don’t just learn by accumulating information – you learn by sharing it. @Marisa_C talking at #IATEFL — David Petrie (@teflgeek) April 3, 2014
Friday 4th April
I had another slow start on Friday and missed a lot of sessions. The first one I went to was Emina Tuzovic’s ‘Spilling or Spelling? Why do Arabic EFL learners stand out?‘ Emina shared some very practical tips and activities for helping Arabic learners with their spelling, which was something I’d been looking for since I realised they had a particular problem not shared by any other L1 background. Emina was kind enough to write a guest post on my blog sharing ideas from her talk.
Lots of wonderful people at my IATEFL 2014 conference presentation
Cecilia Lemos taught us about ‘Making lesson observation a teacher’s best friend, not the enemy’, with a very interesting idea about a menu of observation tasks, which I’m looking forward to reading more about when she finds time to put it on her blog 🙂 In the meantime, you can read Lizzie Pinard’s summary of the session.
I used to work with Amy Brown at IH Newcastle, so it was a no-brainer that I would attend her talk ‘Reading for pleasure: a path to learner autonomy?’, especially because it is about extending the Personal Study Programme into a new area – PSP was my IATEFL topic in 2013. Amy discussed a project she implemented in partnership with The Reader Organisation, where trained readers came to the school to run guided reading groups. Again, Lizzie blogged about Amy’s talk.
My last ‘proper’ talk of the day was Pete Sharma introducing the‘Vocabulary Organizer: a new way to organize lexis’ [affiliate link to Amazon – I’ll make a few pennies if you buy via this link]. This was my only publisher talk of the conference, and I got a free copy of the organizer. 🙂 I really like the fact that there are two separate sections in it for ‘vocabulary to recognise’ and ‘vocabulary to use’. It’s specifically designed for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students, but I think it might be useful for other students too. You can see Pete’s slides on slideshare.
That night, I was lucky enough to be one of the speakers for the Pecha Kucha evening, which was a fabulous experience. You can find out what Pecha Kucha is and watch the recording here – it’s a very entertaining hour, even if I do say so myself 🙂
Saturday 5th April
Sugata Mitra’s plenary generated a huge amount of debate, which I’m not going to get into here (as I haven’t got round to reading a lot of it yet!) Instead, I’ll give you a link to said plenary, and let you Google ‘Sugata Mitra IATEFL 2014‘ to find out what happened next…
The next talk was a reunion of sorts, since it was given by Teti Dragas, one of my CELTA tutors, who I hadn’t seen since I asked for advice a few weeks after the course finished. Her talk ‘Exploring culture in teacher education: reflections on a corpus-based study’ was based on a module done the MA TESOL at Durham University. In it, she compared Chinese attitudes to teaching and training to those in the UK, and the implications of this on the MA TESOL programme. She recommended moving away from assessed teaching practice towards a more general culture of reflective practice.
My final talk of the conference was another reunion, this time with Alex Cann, who did his Delta at IH Newcastle while I was teaching there. He was presenting on a similar topic to me, ‘Helping high-level learners understand native speaker conversations’. He shared some interesting activities to help students deal with pronunciation issues and activate their knowledge before starting to listen. He also shared my favourite video of the conference, demonstrating the importance of pronunciation and listening:
Jackie Kay, a poet, finished off the conference with a lovely selection of readings from her work and stories from her life. It was livestreamed but not recorded. Here’s an example of her reading Old Tongue, about losing her accent, so you can hear her lovely accent 🙂
Other people’s blogging
IATEFL runs a scheme where anyone can register as a blogger, regardless of whether they are at the conference or not. This creates a great picture of the conference as a whole, and promotes a lot of discussion. Here is the full list of Harrogate Online registered bloggers. It’s definitely worth taking a look – there are a lot of posts about the conference, and it’s a good place to start looking for other blogs you might want to read in general.
As I write this [back in May!] I’m over a month behind on blog reading, and still have at least three talks I missed during the conference which I’d like to watch the videos of, with more probably being added to this list as I catch up with my reading. I still have one or two posts in my drafts which I’ll add to this summary as I publish them. I’ve also asked a few speakers to write guest posts based on their talks, which I’ll add too, so there’ll definitely be more to come from this year’s conference. Watch this space!
[February 2015 update: I think I’ve shared all of the planned posts, and I’ve caught up on my blog reading, but I still haven’t managed to watch the videos I want to, starting with Russ Mayne’s ‘Guide to pseudo-science in English language teaching‘ which I’m still hearing about regularly despite it being nearly a year since the conference. Russ, the buzz hasn’t died down at all!]
book [affiliate link]. He spoke about 
🙂 [affiliate link] and I wanted to hear more from one of the men who created them. I’d often wondered if one of them was an English teacher!
[affiliate link] just before the talk (and 
of it [affiliate links]. This is how he went about it. (See also 
[affiliate link].
– Duncan Foord
– Jack C. Richards and Thomas S. C. Farrell
[affiliate link], with Zoltan Dörnyei, she started keeping a reflective journal to help her uncover the principles behind her own writing. She then analysed her journal and categorised her comments to try to find underlying patterns. She was motivated to do this by theorists who posited that materials writers tend to rely on intuition rather than theory, but as she said “We do have principles, but we’re too busy writing materials!”
[affiliate link], where he talked about how much he has learnt from talking to semi-literate people. These are examples of ‘knowledge capital’ and show us that a lack of literacy does not mean a lack of intelligence, and that in fact some knowledge can be lost as the world becomes more literate.
[affiliate link, so Sandy gets a few pennies if you order here!]
[affiliate link].
by Johanna Stirling]
and 
, published by Longman [affiliate links]. These books are specifically aimed at helping Arabic learners with their writing. At the end of each chapter you can find spelling exercises.
‘ [affiliate link] was one of my birthday presents (thanks again Ela!). When I’ve read it, I’ll share my impressions, but until then, here’s what Hugh Dellar has to say:
: a new way to organize lexis’ [affiliate link to Amazon – I’ll make a few pennies if you buy via this link]. This was my only publisher talk of the conference, and I got a free copy of the organizer. 🙂 I really like the fact that there are two separate sections in it for ‘vocabulary to recognise’ and ‘vocabulary to use’. It’s specifically designed for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students, but I think it might be useful for other students too. You can see 
Sandy Millin 