Paul's ELT Journal

mondaaaaaaaaaaay, part two

2012-01-23T17:15:00.000Z

Well, the second session went somewhat better. The students had been grumbling about connecting their smart phones to the College wireless network, so I demonstrated how to do it to them - a bit of faffing, but, as it turned out, extremely useful faffing. We were doing a section on holidays and, in particular, city breaks - form filling, asking for information in a tourist information office etc. I then decided to change tack from the rather worthy, but somewhat dull task about to heave into view, and wrote the following up on the board:
Imagine someone is coming to visit Reading for a couple of days. Where can they stay? What can they do?

We brainstormed a few suggestions, then I told them to whip out their smartphones and research things to do in Reading, places to stay, restaurants etc, organising them into groups of 3/4. They wrote their ideas down on flipchart paper, and, with minimal intervention from me, researched and organised their ideas. They then presented these to the other groups, and the class as a whole voted for the best places to stay, eat in, go to etc.
Good, eh?
It didn't finish there. While they were doing that, I went to Page O Rama, and set up a web page, which I then added to the college intranet for all to gawp it. It isn't finished yet, but the whole lesson finished with a satisfying zing.

mondaaaaaaaaaaay

2012-01-23T11:26:00.000Z

A very quick inter-lesson posting. My Entry 3 (pre-int/int level ESOL) class are like zombies this morning. There's absolutely no energy whatsoever in the room. It's a shame, as they're normally pretty sparky. However, I have to say that I also feel out of sorts - edgy, a bit worried, somewhat distracted. So the question is, is it me influencing them or them influencing me? Is it just my own perception that's faulty? Or is it just because it's a grey monday in January?

Blimey! A post!

2011-11-16T21:38:00.000Z

Apologies for the long lay-off. A catenation of foul circumstances has hit me, making it difficult to keep my blogs on track at the moment. Since one of these foulnesses is a legal issue, I've felt it better to keep out of sight for the time being.
I'm going to post, as soon as possible, my presentation on Global Englishes and the Language City Paradigm to the English UK Teachers' Conference in November, but it'll take a little time to do the blurb I want to add to it, so I'll leave that for later. I'll also say what I thought about this year's conference, but for now I'll just limit myself to saying that I saw Luke Meddings, looking incredibly grumpy in a duffel coat, heading towards the exit after his presentation.
For today, I just wanted to add an interesting thought about classroom interaction I've just had. Does classroom interaction follow a power law distribution? I read this fascinating article by Alok Jha in The Guardian about it, and it has got me wondering - does the 80/20 law (i.e. 20 % of the participants contribute 80% of the output) also work in 'meaningful' oral exchanges in class?
In theory, of course, it shouldn't. We should expect each and every student to make an equal amount of contribution. In an ideal world, were we to plot every student's contribution, we should expect a graph to exhibit a nearly straight horizontal line, showing equal distribution. However, in reality, I suspect this is not the case. We all know that certain students try to hog all the speaking time and attention, and it is one of the TEFLer's skills in classroom management that curtails this. But when you factor in Teacher Talk Time as well, what happens?
I would anticipate that with a newbie teacher, the Power Law Distribution holds up pretty well as a reliable way of showing the distribution of who contributes most. By the way, I'm limiting myself to oral interactions here, rather than reading and writing, as with these there's far more likely to be an equal distribution of 'meaningful' work. With an experienced teacher, one would expect the distribution of who contributes what to be a much flatter line.
There's only one way to find out however: you'd need to video a series of classes, at different levels, with different instructors, over the course of, say, 150 hours of instruction, or the amount we'd expect students to progress a level in their language comprehension - let's say A2 to B1, as that's a good level to monitor, along with a B2 to C1 control group. You would then need to transcribe and time each and every student's oral interactions as well as every time the teacher speaks, then plot it on a power distribution curve. I bet you get a classic power distribution with new teachers and a flatter line with better classroom managers. I suspect that different methodologies and approaches may also yield different results.
Who'd like to try it?

Citizens, Denizens, Commuters and Tourists

2011-07-13T00:55:00.000+01:00

What's the difference between the above-mentioned groups of people? Think about London on a busy day: Let's say somewhere just off Leicester Square or something. A native Londoner might scoot through confidently, knowing his or her own way, more or less on autopilot. A denizen might behave in a similar way, or avoid certain roads, streets, alleys, and paths; A Commuter will confidently negotiate their way to work, but put them just one street along and suddenly they're lost. A Tourist, however, wanders around, gawping, taking photos, and paying attention to the things that are pointed out to them.
Yes?
OK, let's talk about World Englishes.
It's now very late in the evening, and I may come back to edit this post or write it bigger and better later, so I'm going to keep this brief. As starters, I'll point you to this short but decent overview of World Englishes on Wikipedia. The one particular model of the different types of world English I'll point out is Kachru's Model of Circles of English. Basically, he says you have an 'Inner circle' of English - that is, the 'original model', followed by the second and third circles. Can you see the problem with this? Yes, totally elitist, isn't it? It raises the uncomfortable assumption that the 'Inner Circle' is the 'purest', 'best' form of English.
Unfortunately, other models of World Englishes that have been proposed don't particularly help matters - they still tend to imply that British or American English are somehow the best, most proper types of the language. Certainly, language learners can feel extremely anxious about their language knowledge when interacting with someone they consider to have a 'better' kind of English than they do, even if they have passed exam after exam in the language.
So, here's my model of World Englishes, or indeed, any language: The Language City Model
The key point of a Language City is that there are four basic ways that people interact with it. They are:

Language Citizens
Language Denizens
Language Commuters
Language Tourists

Let me explain in brief (possibly to be expanded in a later edit), using English in this context:
Citizens are people for whom English is either their L1 or one they use commonly and, importantly, comfortably. An Indian who uses Indian English is a Citizen, because they use this form of English with ease and communicate effectively. However, the Citizens of English do not always necessarily understand each other - just as a person who lives in one part of a city may be entirely comfortable in his or her local area, but somewhat uncomfortable in a street on theother side of town. They're still citizens of the same place, but they don't always recognise all the features of the place they live in.
Let me skip over Denizens for a moment.
Commuters are people who use English for professional purposes - they 'enter' the city, and work within it, but withdraw from it once the task they are employed in has been completed. A typical Commuter could be a student working towards a Cambridge exam, or someone who needs to use academic English, What is comsidered to be a typical EFL student could be seen as a commuter.
Tourists are those people who have only a passing interest in or need of English. A schoolchild might be a tourist, especially if they're learning Englsih in a large class with poor resources. It could be someone who decides to study English for a term or two at a language school, but doesn't pursue it further. It could be the seller of tourist souvenirs who needs only a few phrases.
Denizens are the most interesting group. These are the people who, for one reason or another, have to use English because they are required to function within it. This could be immigrants living in the UK, for example, or a student who has to study in English ( notice that a commuter can become a denizen - there is some degree of flexibility in these descriptions). Whatever, these language users have some kind of compunction - they are not citizens of the Language City, even though they might have been using it for a long, long, time: They are still an outsider in many ways.
I'm going to write more about this later, but I hope I've got my main idea across. It's far too late to write down everything yet.

mini lightbulb moment

2011-07-07T15:27:00.000+01:00

...and a mini entry. I'll write something more substantial soon, honest! I was just talking with a colleague about how you end up not noticing half the things you do in your job once you've been doing the same thing for ages. You know what it's like - you automatically fill in forms, give enrolments, write up stuff, and virtually forget that you've done it at all.
It suddenly struck me that this is precisely what happens in acculturation and fossilization in adults in an L2 environment. It is not merely that they are 'stuck' in their language learning: rather, they have acculturized and fossilized to their entire lifestyle. This would explain why adult learners tend not to progress with language learning - they've simply got used to doing the same old things in the same old way, just because the same old things in the same old way work well enough for them in the way of life they've got used to!
So, what approach could we take to rouse them from their slumbersome routines? Something like a Buddhist bell might work - a sudden 'chime' to bring somoeone back to mindfulness.
Personally, I favour cattle prods.
More on this later.

By Popular Demand...

2011-06-08T21:29:00.002+01:00

My English Tense Poem!

TENSION

I’m really feeling rather tense.

These English verbs - they make no sense!

I know there are these grammar rules,

But the speaker always seems to choose

How he or she sees the action,

I’m afraid it’s giving me a nasty reaction.

Look at the future, please do!

Can you explain it to me, you?

These strange tenses, all snaky and sinuous,

Don’t get me started on the future continuous!

I understand ‘will have been’,

But what’s this ‘will have been being’

I’m seeing?

You think the present’s easy?

I tell you, it makes me queasy!

I think ‘I get up at 6 every day’

Is alright, it’s OK,

But ‘I arrive at 6 tomorrow’?

No, no, no –no way!

The present perfect leaves me confused.

Have you ever seen all the rules?

I know I saw him yesterday.

So why can I say

‘I’ve seen him’, eh?

Now, modal verbs – you must be joking!

Must, may and might leave me choking.

I can write, ‘He could be home’,

But ‘He can be home’

Only makes my teacher groan.

‘But ‘could’ is past, isn’t that right?’

‘We can use ‘could’ to be polite!’

As for conditionals-well, I’d like to explain

But honestly, they’re a right pain:

So ask me, please don’t:

I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.

So now I’m going to do what I should have done first –

Learn French – I’m sure it can be no worse….

Provider or Manager?

2011-06-06T23:23:00.001+01:00

This post was originally going to be about using authentic texts with Intermediate/Upper Intermediate students, but after some reflection, I'm going to extend it somewhat, although it'll still be anchored in reading skills.

I've been doing some research and refreshment over the past few weeks on reading skills, and how to make text-based lessons more interesting to our learners. A lot of students don't really enjoy doing reading in class, as they think it's something that doesn't actually teach them any English per se. In fact, I suspect quite a few teachers think the same - it's quite a tempting thought when students have their heads down in a text, reading silently (or possibly dozing and dribbling onto the page) - there doesn't appear to be anything going on, and both the instructor and learner end up having the same uneasy sensation, that possibly there should be something apparently happening. The chances are that our students don't actually do as much text-based work as they should, and this is a shame - research shows pretty conclusively that language learners who read more are better and faster at language learning.
However, this also suggests two things - first, that the students who read more are more likely to be avid readers and, importantly, readers of a wide range of things, in their L1, and that they are motivated to do language-based activities outside the classroom. What we don't, or possibly can't, know is whether the reading drives the motivation or vice-versa, or there's some weird feedback loop thingy going on. Anyway, it seems clear that we should motivate students to practise their English outside the classroom, doesn't it? After all, if we motivate them, they will seek down each and every opportunity to use their ninja-like English skills in new and exciting ways, yes?
Or, possibly, there's something else going on, and it very much depends on the context in which we teach, and how we teach it - hence the title of this post.
I've taught in both a monolingual environment - in this case, a private language school in Turkey - and in a native English speaker context, i.e. my current job in an FE college in Deepest Berkshire. Let's imagine that we have the same student going to both places, learning broadly the same syllabus, and moderately motivated. We'll also imagine, for the sake of things, that he's had some kind of ghastly accident involving a copy of Jeremy Harmer's finest, causing him to lose his memory of his previous English learning, and he wakes up in an ESOL class in Reading at the same level he started off in in Turkey. Well, it could be worse: he could have woken up in Slough. Anyway. Our Turkish student in Turkey, if he is sincere about learning English outside the classroom, must actively seek down opportunities to speak, read, write and listen to the language. Now, of course it is relatively easy these days to do that, but our learner, being an average chap, has a thousand and one things to do outside class as well, and to be honest, English studies are really going to drop down the list unless he is a) motivated and, crucially, b) his teacher is motivated enough to be on his case, and does things such as actively suggest where to find information, things to study, where, how and when to practise etc.
Now our hapless student has his bizarre mishap with Mr Harmer, and suddenly he's in the UK, and doing the same kind of studies. And the difference? He doesn't have to actively seek English: He's totally inundated by it. I use 'inundated' correctly, I believe: it's an uncontrollable, unstoppable, tumbling, reaving, crushing, horrid tsunami of words, phrases, attitudes, assumptions of prior knowledge, in-jokes, requests, demands, persuasions, dissuasions and god knows what else. So what is the teacher's duty in all this? After all, we don't need to persuade the learner to hunt out opportunities when they are all around.
In fact, we should first consider it from the learner's point of view. It is natural, in this context, to not engage with the language: it's so overwhelming, that you just want to run away somehow - culture shock, anyone? Look at ELT practitioners the world over - how many of them form expat groups? there you go, it's the running away from the language and culture. Of course, culture shock covers more than language, but from an ELT view it's something we should be clearly aware of, even when the student has been living in the UK/USA or wherever for years and years. A lot of their language engagement may actually be embedded in avoidance strategies - and if you're an ESOL/ESL practitioner,I bet you've seen that more than once, haven't you?
The point I'm trying to make in my roundabout way is this. Depending on our teaching context, we have to deploy different language motivation strategies. If you work in a monolingual/NNES environment, you have to be a language provider - that is, you need to give the materials in class, and provide ways, methods, links, techniques through which the learner can step outside the classroom and actively use English. In a Native English speaking context, however, the teacher is not so much the provider as the manager. In other words, we need to contextualise, parse and manage the flow of information that the learner has to deal with, and render it in such a way as to make it manageable for the student, who after all has to deal with it anyway, regardless of how many lessons he or she has. Only by showing the student that the information is actually manageable can we hope to motivate them, otherwise they will reach a point where they simply switch off, and just don't want to engage with the world around them.
So, are you a provider or a manager, or both? And what do you do to motivate your learners beyond the classroom's Fourth Wall?
I'll deal with methods and practice behind this in another post, as it's getting on the late side now, and I still have to motivate myself through a torrent of student essays.

Suspicious of Unplugged?

2011-05-30T22:03:00.001+01:00

once again, I find myself not writing as much as I'd like to, simply because of work, work, work. I've already mentioned a few details previously aof what is going on in my workplace, and right now I don't feel at liberty to divulge more, as my position is rather precarious at present. So allow me to go on about something completely different.
I think I've already spoken before about my scepticism regarding Dogme, or ELT Unplugged, as I suppose we should now call it. Certainly, I've mentioned it during the weekly twitter debates on #eltchat, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who hasn't participated as yet, and also over on David's ELT World, which is far better than Dave Sperling's increasingly tatty and authoritarian ESL Cafe. Yet I, as an ELT practitioner of 18 years, should embrace this particular approach, especially seeing as I do it half the time anyway, and seeing as I currently teach ESOL students, for whom this democratic, empowering approach could, and should, have been designed.
So why do I still regard it with suspicion?
I think, first of all, is the fact that I can't honestly see any difference between Dogme and 'Strong' CLT, in terms of the actual practice of each within the classroom. Krashen and Terrell say pretty much what Thornbury and Meddings say in many respects. This leads me to suspect that Dogme is just a 'sexed up' version of CLT, and I am naturally suspicious of any and all advertising - after all, as Thornbury somewhat ruefully admits, he spends a significant amount of time flogging the Unplugged Approach, and Luke Meddings I suspect will only have Dogme wrenched from his cold, dead hands.
However, this approach to this, er, Approach, has been spectacularly successful - just look at the number of CELTA, DELTA and MA essays on Dogme, to the point where teacher trainers and lecturers have an almost Pavlovian urge to beat something to death whenever they see the word Dogme. Of course it's appealing - communitarian, embracing, materials-light, student-centred - who wouldn't love it? The trouble is, of course, that a lot of people will misunderstand it, in particular newbie TEFLers, hence my second doubt - the teacher's approach to the Approach.
Any fool can walk into a classroom. Any fool can stand in front of a whiteboard and say, 'I'm the teacher'. Any fool can write things on a board, and play a CD, and get students to follow from a book; Hell, a good fool can even get their students to write some stuff down. Only a Teacher actually makes a difference, and becoming a teacher is something that, in all honesty, takes far longer than a CELTA or DELTA (for our profession, anyway) actually gives.Dogme is a dangerously attractive approach, simply because it suggests that anyone can simply walk into a room, say something, and call it teaching. I would like to know how many people have claimed to be teaching Dogme-style, when in fact they are doing something that has (somewhat unfairly) been levelled at Dogme, namely 'winging it with a label'. Certainly, I have watched a video of someone proudly claiming to be doing an Unplugged lesson that in reality consisted of the teacher simply feeding vocabulary to students, completing their utterances, writing down his thoughts on the board, speaking a bit more, and never attempting to check what the learners can actually produce (I'm deliberately not going to post a link to it here, as I don't want to embarrass the teacher) - in other words, it looked like a totally winged lesson. The teacher might want to engage this approach, but unless teacher and learner work together, how can it work? Which leads to suspicion three - motivation.
I suggest you read Chiasuanchong's excellent blog, especially the post about making student-centred teaching student-friendly, before reading this bit. The impression one gets from teachers who employ the Unplugged Approach is that it unfailingly works. Reading various journals, blogs and tweets about it suggests that students are enthusiastic about it. It also suggests that students are highly motivated - look at the blog post I mentioned above for examples, such as transferring notes from one book to another. It seems to me that a lot of the work in Unplugged is actually about motivating students to learn, rather than teach language itself. As study after study has shown, motivated students learn faster and better than ones who do not feel any particular impetus - in fact, Krashen called it the 'affective filter', which is, of course, a pretty discredited idea these days, yet seems to be a key factor in Dogme. So, does Dogme make the motivation, or does the motivation drive Dogme? And if you took the same degree of motvation but with a different approach, would the students learn equally as well? And, in order to motivate students, the teacher must also be not merely motivated by their desire to teach English, they must be immersed in it - fully cognizant of the range of learning needs that may appear in their classroom, but also of the full range of skills the learner needs (or wants) to acquire. This leads to the question - how can a teacher doing 24-30 contact hours per week, plus all the tutorial and pastoral work that surrounds it, stay motivated enough to guide a student-centred syllabus?
Which leads to a serious point that is somewhat overlooked. Meddings and Thornbury, through ELT Unplugged, make it very clear (albeit somewhat unwittingly) that ELT is perhaps the grossest example of commercialization in education. Ever since the rise of the concept of teachable standards, and of standardization of teaching systems, and of standardization of quality in language schools, we have actually been witness to the effective industrialisation of ELT. Now, schools must be of a certain, measurable, standard; Now, students must have a certain, quantifiable, testable standard of English; Now, teachers of English must have certain, quantfiable, testable qualifications; And to assure all this, you have institutions like Cambridge ESOL, and exams like CAE, IELTS and TOEFL, and to feed all this, publishers like OUP and Pearson, all of whom profit from what is in reality a semi-created addiction to learning English.
For this reason, ELT Unplugged should be thanked - it's a reminder that we TEFLers aren't (or at least, don't want to be seen as) corporate, buttoned-up shills. It appeals to the rebellious spirit of the person within us who was once captivated by a newspaper advert to 'Teach Your Way Around The World!!' Which all goes to show: never trust an advert that uses exclamation marks....

Is my day more interesting than that of a three-legged cat?

2011-05-05T22:57:00.001+01:00

I was so inspired :) by this story of a photoshooting three-legged cat that I thought I'd take some photos of my own day. I'd say it's a toss-up as to who had the better day.

First lesson of the day.

my 2nd work station - moderately tidy

Students waiting for the fun to kick off...

students! moving about! engaged in activity!!

bit of board work: students working on 'used to'.

nerve cerntre at work. messy, post-lesson.

the nerve centre at home. lunchtime.

time to make dinner before going back to work - chilli con carne (-ish)

arrrgh! evening traffic! why I hate using cars to commute

back to lovely,lovely work.

evening class time!

student work-features of a narrative

student work - features of articles

All chatted out!

2011-05-04T22:07:00.000+01:00

I'm feeling rather frazzled. Not only by the ongoing stress of work, or the pace and work requirements of the DELTA, but also by participating in the #eltchat regular thread on Twitter. It's exhilarating and rather exhausting at the same time.
I have to say, however, that it has been an excellent reminder of why I'm still in this job and enjoying it, and it's brilliant to see quite how much enthusiasm, ideas, work and research is going on out there. Being able to bounce ideas off other people to see what happens has been really interesting. This lunchtime, for example, the chat topic was one I proposed - why do so many adult learners never get past intermediate level? Apart from feeling chuffed with myself for having my topic chosen, it was also heartening to see what other people thought on the subject, and helped me formulate an idea which relates back to something I've posted on here before about difficulties students face when moving forward. It's this:
Intermediate students can handle a language. Students at higher levels can manipulate it.
Therein lies the difference. At lower levels, students are taught how to function in English - in other words, they can handle it, even if they handle it clumsily. We could say that they cope with the language. Higher level students, however, manipulate it - in other words, they can alter and change their language to suit their needs, rather than have to handle formulaic systems and phrases. It is this gap between handling and manipulation that many students either cannot, or do not want to, bridge.
I'm going to write about this in more detail later, I think, as it ties in very well with what I've said before about 'fuzzy' understanding as well.But for now, I've got me some reading to do - largely thanks to #eltchat!

bilingualism link

2011-04-21T23:42:00.000+01:00

Not me writing, but an interesting article that relates to what I've suggested about language learning...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110314132531.htm

One egg, one lesson.

2011-04-06T22:57:00.000+01:00

so, how do you turn this:

into a lesson?
Easy.
The group: an ESOL Entry 3 class, pre-intermediate/intermediate level. 9 students out of 18. They did an exam on tuesday, and this was their last lesson before the holidays.
Procedure:
write 'holidays!' and 'Easter' on the board. give students some time to think of vocab associated with the words.
feedback from class, write words on board. explain any vocab. find humorous picture of chocolate rabbits.
next, put one small Cadbury's Creme Egg on the table in front of the board.
Ask questions: what does this mean? what do you think about these?
Give students a couple of minutes' thinking time, but not discussion time with others.
Place students in groups to discuss what they thought.
Run a quick feedback on ideas, adding any new vocab to board.
Next, in groups: what question would you like all the class to answer? students in their groups brainstorm some questions, then decide on one question they would like to ask.
students come up and write their question on the board. Here's a chance to do any necessary correction, eg use of auxiliaries.
groups explain why they chose their question.
whole class then votes on which question they would like an answer to.
after vote, they give their ideas in a turn-taking discussion. One student can act as scribe for vocabulary/ interesting ideas.
conduct final feedback on session - conclusions, ideas, feelings.
return to vocabulary and/or any grammar issues.
I ended up with my IWB looking like this:

the question my students wanted to answer was 'why is the egg a symbol for Easter?' which led to a fascinating discussion about Lent and Ramadan, different Easter traditions, how spring is celebrated in different parts of the world and in different religions, what fasting means, the advantages and disadvantages of fasting, and why Spring is important in some parts of the world and not in others. With the vocab, I asked my students if and how they would use the new words, and how they usually record vocab. Finally, we looked at the structure of a passive question.
See? Cadbury's Creme Eggs. A whole lesson in a yummy mouthful.

quick thinking point...

2011-04-04T22:46:00.000+01:00

...just based on a bit of reflection. Like most British people, I endured the hell that is French at school: 30 students in a class, lined in rows, sharing textbooks and listening to a tinny little tape recorder* saying 'ecoutez et repetez. Ou est ma singe? Ma singe est dans l'arbre'. It's no wonder so many Brits don't learn another language.
Amazingly, however, some of my French actually stuck, and I can still read a French text and get at least the gist meaning. What I can't do is produce it, apart from a few lexical chunks.
A bit like my E3s, in fact. I was doing a reading exercise with them the other day, and it was very clear from how they interacted with it that they understood it. What they couldn't do was express the answers to the comp questions absolutely accurately. In other words, it was as if they were looking at the language 'fuzzily'. Or, possibly, they couldn't activate the language.
Here's the thinking point: We all know about active and passive vocabulary - the words we recognise and use, and the words we recognise but don't use. What about an active and passive grammar? Going back to me and French, I can't just read the text, I can generally also identify features such as tenses fairly accurately. But, again, I'd be lousy at producing it. So, is this an example of passive grammar knowledge? And how could this concept be tested in a group? Chew, digest, consider...

*for the kids out there - tape recorder: an analogue linear recording device, recording to a bilateral magnetic medium. Like your iPod, but you can stick a pencil through one end and spin it round.

Hiatus, again.

2011-04-01T21:38:00.001+01:00

Perhaps I should rename this blog 'Paul's very occasional ELT Journal', as that would be more accurate. Actually, I haven't been too active over on main my blog either. Reason? I could say work and study, which would be true, but I have to admit it's also a healthy dose of torpor as well.
Anyway, work. situation: not good. As part of the government's ongoing campaign to support toffs by squeezing every shred of money out of the poor - sorry, the sensible and vital austerity measures - The college looks like it's going to lose at least half of its ESOL cohort, simply because they won't be able to pay for it. Not only that, but our college, thanks to some spectacularly fucked-up decisions by previous administrations, is now about £3m in the red, and one of the ways of tackling this is to have everyone re-apply for their jobs for about 11% less pay. Joy. I'm not even sure that I'll have a job after summer.
Next, study. In a pleasingly ironic gesture, the same college that may be telling me I don't have a job has actually funded me to do, finally, my DELTA course. Now, I know what you may be thinking - 'what? you haven't done your DELTA yet???' The truth is, I haven't had the combination of time, circumstance or money to be able to do it - finally it's here, and I may end up never using it in the end! Nice one, Fate!
Well, let's live in the moment for the time being, if you'll forgive the pun. I'm atually finding the course hugely enjoyable, depsite not being able to devote as much time to the studying as I'd like at the mo. Just completed an essay, and in doing the research on it, something struck me: why is language regarded as essentially a linear object? Why don't we consider it as something with dimension?
Think about it. Language is the output of a series of inputs - visual, aural, kinaesthetic, the whole VAKOG thing, basically. Language, in other words, is a medium, or device, used in order to make sense and relate these inputs. since these inputs constitute dimensions, shouldn't langauge also be seen as something three-dimensional?
I'm maybe not explaining myself too clearly here, but it struck me that we can regard a lexical item in terms of, for example, its register, style, deployment in a given situation, grammatical use, and intonation. In other words, we apprehend it almost as a physical object, with facets of meaning. And in fact, when we look at the tense system in English, doesn't the fact that we rely on aspect so much tend to suggest dimension rather than a simple linear transaction? What I' suggesting is that rather than look at lexis or grammar as something that is 'flat', we need to regard them as somethng with 'shape'. Well, it's something to work on, and I haven't a clue how you would begin to desribe it in simple terms. Yet.

Linguistic hierarchies: presentation from the English UK Teachers' Conference

2010-12-22T23:43:00.000Z

Well, better late than never.
Here's the presentation I gave at the English UK Teachers' Conference back in November. I think that it's pretty self-explanatory, but I'll be writing up more on this idea later. Enjoy.

This is what I do and why I do it.

2010-12-16T22:20:00.000Z

I had tutorials this week. These are occasions to meet up with students individually and discuss any issues they have and review or set academic and pastoral targets, or do risk assessments, or get their latest news. With our ESOL students, these can sometimes be pretty tough: we've had a wave of young Afghan lads having their asylum applications turned down recently, and often they're going back to situations where they are likely to be either killed or used as footsoldiers for the various clans, druglords, Taliban groups, Mujahideen groups with grudges to settle, or often a combination of all these. One lad was forced to watch his father being shot, and then his uncle was bombed. He spent a year and a half trying to reach the UK - now the government is keen to wash its hands of him.
We also get people with mental health problems, domestic violence victims, students with doctorates and great work histories who can only get jobs as cleaners, motivated people who get spat at because they wear hijab, or they're the wrong colour, or they speak in a funny way, or because they walk the wrong way - and I'm really not making that one up. I'm actually quite fortunate - I generally don't have to deal with the real horror stories, but we all have to accommodate these students, these real people, these non-statistics. We act as confidantes, unpaid social workers, and we have to be concerned but dispassionate, and above all hold in check our anger at the utter shittiness that some people get dealt.
Then again, there are bright spots. This is what a student said to me this week, and while in one way it seems dark and disturbing, in another way it is a little bright ray of light.
A. is a devout Muslim from Pakistan. He holds a British passport, works in the local mosque, drives a minibus for disabled people and works nights as a security guard. He sends money back to his family in Pakistan and regularly goes back there, determined to fight Islamist Extremism. He would like to take a chaplaincy course so that he can work on university campuses and prisons. He is a gentle, soft-spoken and deeply kind man with a sense of humour that often catches people by surprise. And, being a devout Pakistani Muslim, he wears what is generally seen as traditional muslim clothes, a beanie cap and a beard. A few weeks ago, he flew to Chicago to celebrate Eid with some relatives. I'll paraphrase his words slightly, while trying to keep a flavour of the original, but this is what he told me about going through US Passport Control.
"We came to passport control, and this man from the FBI took me to one side, and also some African men, a Chinese man and a muslim man, I think from Saudi. He told us we will have an interview before we can go through. I said to him, I don't speak good English, can my wife come with me and be interpreter? He said no, and took me to a room. I was very very nervous, because I thought I can't understand his questions. Usually when we travel, my wife translates. I waited in the room five minutes, then the man came back. He looked my passport, my British passpor, and he said, 'how much did you pay for this?' I told him I'm a British citizen, and he said 'you're a liar'. I told him I was born in Pakistan, but I got my citizenship three years ago, but he didn't want to believe. He asked me 'how close do you live to Afghanistan?' I told him where my family live is quite near, he asked me 'Did you visit Pakistan for military training?', I told him my job, he said 'I can send you straight back home', I said 'it is your choice, it is your country'. He asked me questions for 45 minutes, same questions, different questions. I was very worried, but I answered him.
And do you know? At the end, he said 'why did you lie? You speak very good English' and he smiled, and he let me in. Then I knew that my English has got better, and it is because of my teachers. I was nervous, but I could answer him by myself, and I couldn't do that last year.
So, I said a prayer of thanks for what you and the other teachers have done."

It says a lot about passport control security and a lot about him. He realised that he had the ability and the confidence to deal with the situation, and he'd got that from learning with us.

This is what we teachers do. We make a difference.

So to hell with all you bean counters who reduce all human life to a number. I do something that you can never do - something good.

Ahem.

2010-12-06T23:03:00.000Z

Sorry, bit of a hiatus.
To put it mildly.
And why? the frenetic pace of work, lots going on, plus, with regard to this blog, a total sense of inertia.
So, what's going on/has gone on in my ELT world?
1) my place of employment has changed owners;
2) because of this, everyone's worried that they're going to lose their jobs;
3) the new owners have done nothing to assuage this worry by doing a legal, but entirely unethical, 'consultation' to reorganise the various curriculum areas in the college that means that they can get rid of a lower echelon of management within 30 days;
4) the impression they give that they regard the place as a business rather than an educational institution;
5) on a brighter note, I gave a presentation at the English UK teacher's conference;
6) I developed a STONKING enrichment activity involving a tent.
right, three subjects I will put on here:
a) a write up of my presentation subject - a linguistic hierarchy of needs, as I began to outline here in earlier posts;
b) a language ability graphic profiling system I developed;
c) a extraordinary suggestion I have that may give an insight into why we use language in the way we do when we're learning, or for why bilinguals seem to prefer one language over the other.
And here's the video of me preparing for my enrichment activity:

Mind the Gap.

2010-04-02T23:39:00.000+01:00

Here's a question for you - what do the following all have in common?

A cryptic crossword puzzle
A cloze (aka gap-fill) exercise
A sudoku puzzle
A grammar exercise where you have to write the correct form of the verb
An algebra exercise
one of those team-building things where you have to work out how to cross a river using a piece of string and two dead dogs or something
a reading task asking you to identify words and phrases in context that mean the same as a given set of synonyms

That's right, they're all problem solving tasks.
So why am I bringing it up?
The point is this: do the ones about language actually test a knowledge of language, or do they in fact only test an ability to solve a problem? In other words, it strikes me that many of the tasks in student workbooks are not real tests of language knowledge whatsoever, but exercises in learning skills.
Let me give an example task to you.
Here are three rules.
If a sequence of numbers is 3 digits and ends in 9, follow it with 12.
If a sequence of numbers is 3 digits and ends in 7, change the 7 to 9 and add 12.
If a sequence of numbers is 4 or more digits, it must be preceded by 21.
and here are some sequences:

329
5437
777
919
A427
3424245539

Easy, isn't it?
Now change the rules to those describing how to make comparative adjectives in English.
The simple fact is that many of the exercises we do with our students do not in fact test their understanding of language, but their cognitive and problem-solving capacities. Someone who can understand a logic problem, as long as the problem and a model solution is clearly presented, should be able to solve any given issue. Now, while it may be useful for someone to comprehend a given set of rules, it does not necessarily follow that that person is in fact capable of using the language in a way that is comprehensible, simply because languages have a nasty habit of not following their own laws. This is why, whenever we do level testing, we should always look at a suite of abilities rather than rely on the good old grammar test prior to deciding a language level. It also explains, by the way, why EFL students tend to score higher on formalised language tests which are generally problem-solving based tasks, than ESOL students.

Is there such a thing.....

2010-03-16T23:18:00.000Z

...as a linguistic hierarchy of needs?
This is following on from the last two posts, and I'm just trying to formulate ideas behind motivation, or perhaps more accurately, demotivation in language learners. This also, I think, segues rather neatly into a piece of research I did last year, namely a brutal piece of statistical number crunching I did with ESOL students' results that showed how people moving from intermediate to upper intermediate experience a far greater drop-out rate than should be expected. It also churned up the shocking stat that nearly two-thirds of ESOL students fail the Adult Literacy exam at Level One in their first attempt, a real indictment of its efficacy and usefulness. If you want to read it, it's over here on Scrib'd.
OK, my thinking goes like this. Just as Maslow has the different needs, so do language learners. So far, so no brainer. Well, what about 'peak experience'? What do students consider to be their aim? If you look at the questions I asked my two groups last week, you'll see that this was something I was trying to tease out of them, albeit not to any great extent. What is also signifcant is the fact that the learners felt inhibited about talking in a 'deep'/'satisfying' way about subjects that they felt deeply about, and about which they could communicate highly effectively in their own languages. In other words, they perceived a disparity between what they wanted to express and what they felt they could communicate. OK, well, duh, obviously.
But is this perceived disparity a genuine, objectively measurable one, or is it in fact a highly subjective thing? When we talk about things that genuinely interest us, what we should notice is that the language is arguably highly descriptive, but not necessarily grammatically difficult.
Let's go back to Maslow. Now, here is what I propose to do: I'm going to match the type of functional language and grammar forms we might expect to teach our students onto the hierarchy of needs, then compare it to what we actually teach people at elementary level etc. What I suspect this to show is that, for a student who lives in an English-speaking country, they actually need to be far more proficient in certain grammar forms in order to express their most basic needs, than they would do to express 'peak experience' ideas. In other words, in order just to fulfill their simplest physiological and psychological needs, an adult requires language skills far above what they actually would need to express themselves fully in a 'deep' conversation.
This disjuncture, I would argue, leads to a profound sense of demotivation. Indeed, I would say that it is a leading reason for a typical ESOL/ESL student becoming essentially 'diminished' in a way that an EFL student (who is studying the language as a subject, rather than as a medium through which things are learned) does not experience.
This may suggest that they way in which English is taught may need a rethink, certainly for ESOL students. While the Skills for Life materials do, in some respects, attempt to do this, they are rather feeble.
This also suggests that we may be able to talk about a 'hierarchy of language needs' - that is, optimal levels at which a student requires particular things and ways to express him/herself. This, though, would look very different from the mapping of language skills mapped over the Maslow hierarchy, as to some extents it would be informed by the student's own perception of need. What I would would then like to do is map it against statistics for achievement and levels of achievement against exam results and learner progression, in order to see if the hypothesis matches real-world results.
Could be interesting.

More on depression and speaking

2010-03-09T16:15:00.000Z

Yesterday's post, and the ideas behind it, has prompted quite a bit of interest among my colleagues and over on one of the discussion boards I frequent, and got me thinking further too. This morning, I did a bit of thoroughly unscientific research with my L1 (that's an intermediate-upper-intermediate level) and E3 (pre-int - int level) classes. I asked them, first 'does speaking in English ever make you feel depressed?'
The answer was almost unanimously 'yes', except for one student who just giggled. Mind you, she does tend to giggle at pictures of kittens, handbags, passing clouds and occasionally while staring blankly into space, so...
I then asked 'why?'
You can probably guess the types of answer - embarrassment, fear of mistakes, frustration, etc.
I then asked, 'are there any situations which make you feel particularly embarrassed?'
Here the answers were varied. For a significant portion, it was talking on the phone: others mentioned more formal social situations such as going to the bank or talking with their children's teachers. A few of the more confident students said that they couldn't answer colleagues back in more formal meetings.
I then asked 'What situations/things would you like to talk about, but feel you can't?'
Here the answers were varied, ranging from talking to the council about housing benfits, to discussing schoolwork with a teacher, up to talking about politics, environmental issues, dance and music.
Lastly, I asked 'do you sometimes feel as though you are disabled?'
A unanimous 'yes'.
and 1 giggle.
The finding that most interested me was the one about which things people would like to be able to talk about. It shows, I think, that the level at which students would consider a conversation 'deep' and 'satisfying' vary enormously. It's no wonder that language learners do get so demotivated.
It's also set me off on what may turn out to be a rather exciting tangent of thought, but I'm going to have to put in a bit of research first. More later.

Speaking foreign makes you depressed, innit?

2010-03-08T22:21:00.000Z

I know, I know, far too long, far too busy, but it's time to kick this old corpse out of its coffin and bring it lumbering back to life...

Is it possible that speaking in a foreign language can actually make you depressed?
It might seem a somewhat bizarre notion: After all, learning languages is supposed to be an incredibly liberating thing, allowing you to communicate with new people and new cultures, to open your eyes to another way of seeing the world.

That's what language teachers say, anyway - after all, they have only their jobs to lose.

But consider this report on a piece of research. The basic findings are that people who spend more time engaged in chat and gossip are significantly more likely to be depressed than people who engage in 'meaningful' discussions.

Now consider what we do with our students in class and what kind of topics are used - do these count as 'meaningful'? It strikes me that it is possible that the type of topics, along with the limitations of a student's level of language and their ability to express their ideas, may collude to be massively demotivating. We already know that students get frustrated at not being able to say certain things, but if we are also making them depressed by getting them to talk about, let's say, collections and hobbies to express the notion of habitual behaviour, then we are ladling on the problems. When we also consider that many students tend to drop out of English study round about Intemediate level - when their level of language is just emerging into an increasingly more sophisticated level of complexity, but the topic matters used are frequently banal - then we may have one of the (many)reasons why the dropout rate is so high.

Of course, it's all about keeping the students interested, curious and open-minded, but let's face it, unit 5, exercise 3 (listen to Brian talk about his dead pet hamster) probably isn't going to cut it. This is where getting to know our students as individuals, their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes, is so important. It's also important to consider the fact that one person's notion of 'meaningful discussion' may not be the same level as another's. Matey in the corner might only satisfied with a weighty talk on Wittgenstein, while someone else will be thoroughly satisfied discussing puppies and shopping. It's all about the differentiation in class.
However, I suspect it may be difficult to find a text about Wittgenstein shopping for puppies.

The English UK Teachers' Conference 2008

2008-11-26T21:43:00.000Z

Another year, and another chance to shine before my peers at the English UK Teachers' Conference, held once again at Prospero House in Southwark. This time, I was acting as co-presenter and official hand-holder for my colleague, Chloe, whose presentation it was really. I was there to describe the technical bits. Our presentation was on Online Records of Work, a subject that may sound so tedious as to make you wonder why I bothered according it capital letters: However, these are a devastatingly simple and effective solution for dealing with groups that have more than one teacher or for instructors (like me) who can't be bothered to fill in the paper version after the end of a long evening slaving over the Present Perfect. If you're interested in the idea, go over to http://eflstuff.wikispaces.com and have a look.

Anyway, we arrived at the venue with no incident, apart from me letting loose an urban legend, while trudging and lurching through a tube station with several hundred other people, about how George A. Romero had based his Zombies' shuffling gait on the movements of London commuters on the underground. I said it loudly enough for several pairs of ears to hear me. I wonder how long it'll take before it gets published somewhere or other.

Prospero House has seen a few changes: The ground floor has been refurbished and made to appear wider by the judicious removal of the pokey little rooms facing Borough Road. In their place, a coffee lounge has been opened, complete with baristas in green aprons, attentive to everyone's needs. The pokey rooms have been shunted upstairs and given inspriational names like 'Express', 'Smile', 'Inspire', 'Poke with a Stick'. I've made one of those up. Why on earth give rooms names? Does it make the average conference delegate think 'gosh, I'm in a room called smile, I'd better look amused or something'? I suppose the designers thought it made themselves look more creative than appellating them room 1A or something.

We'd already missed half the opening session, so rather than furtively wander into the back of the room, we decided to have coffee and investigate which room we'd be using. It was one of the pokey rooms – Smile 1. It contained twelve chairs, an old projector on an old stand at a dodgy angle, no projector screen, one flipchart pad and a view of dilapidated buildings on Borough Road. And, somewhat crucially we thought, considering we were going to be given a presentation on computer-based admin environments, a laptop-sized hole. Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to bring my own along, and Chloe had four memory sticks, a CD and a printed version of the whole presentation, just to be on the safe side. And she'd emailed it to me and herself.

Anyway, we had plenty of time: we weren't due to deliver our presentation until the afternoon. We looked through the programme and decided which of the other presentations would be worth going to. This year, it seemed that there were an awful lot of company reps flogging their wares – sorry, giving meaningful and useful shows while utilising certain branded products. We decided to try and give these a miss and watch what other instructors were doing. Our first stop was motivated solely by self-interest, rather than any attempt at gathering information from as many different sources as possible to later disseminate – or, in the truly dreadful jargon our institution employs, cascade down – what we'd found out to the rest of the teaching team. No, we wanted to find out how to get published, and become full-time EFL publishers and live on yachts, drinking champagne like Liz and John Soars. So, we went to the excitingly-named 'Get your name in lights! How to get published', presented by the excitingly-named Celia Wigley. She was in Smile 1. We tried to smile too, as fifteen people attempted to squeeze in, mostly middle-aged older TEFLers who had all been seduced by the exclamation mark in the middle of the title. Celia was waiting with a brittle, nervous smile at the front, occasionally being kicked accidentally by people stretching out their legs, and looking anxiously at the laptop that someone had dug out, or possibly up. She had every right to look anxious, as the thing wouldn't work. Mark Rendell, the English UK organiser, appeared, and sent someone else off to find a techie guy called John. In the hiatus now offered us, Celia hemmed and hawed and introduced herself, and explained a little of her background. More from what was left unsaid, it was obvious that she'd followed the classic late 80's/early 90's route into TEFL: leave university; do some crap job for a while, while waiting for someone to give you a dream job and/or the world to sit up and realize what a wonderful genius you are; realise that actually you haven't got a clue what you are actually good at or for; see an ad in the newspaper saying 'teach your way round the world!!!' (see, those tempting exclamation marks again!!); go off on some dodgy teaching course or other while instructing a conversation class of 50 exhausted Indonesian businessmen; suddenly wake up and realize you've been in the job 10 years. However, she had, to her credit, managed to land a publishing job with EF. After a few more minutes of waiting, one techie arrived, followed by another, and they gesticulated at the computer for a bit, before disappearing. At this, Celia completely clammed up, claiming that she needed her presentation; So why hadn't she made any prints of the slides?

This afforded us all several more minutes of quiet contemplation, during which I marvelled at the clothing choices of my fellow TEFLers. Celia herself was dressed in a fairly standard long black woolen dress affair, complete with sparse pieces of chunky jewelery. The other women (apart from Chloe, I must say) seemed to have mostly got dressed in the dark with the aid of a guide dog with no aesthetic sense, and had their hair done in a variety of exciting, not to mention haphazard, ways, involving attempts to make grey hair more interesting. The men were far duller; corduroy, twill and tweed predominated, along with slobby jumpers. For the record, I was dressed in black trousers with a fine grey pinstripe, a grey and black striped shirt and black shoes. What the men lacked in spectacular sartorial wear, they more than made up for with the variety of stains of different hue on their clothes, and the various methods employed to try and disguise baldness.

Eventually, John the Head Techie arrived with another laptop, plugged it in and got the whole show going, some twenty minutes late. Actually, it was a shame, because there was quite a lot of potentially useful information about the publishing process itself. What there wasn't was any particularly useful or concrete advice about getting oneself published, just info about the arduous path the neophyte TEFL writer must wander. Fooled by those damned exclamation marks once again! It wasn't helped by Celia being not exactly well-prepared or practiced, either. It never ceases to amaze me how people whose profession involves standing in front of a load of strangers and communicating ideas to them in an alien language suddenly all go to pieces and forget good practice in front of their peers.

Anyway, after the end of her presentation, Chloe and I went our separate ways, her to a presentation on EAP methodology, me to one entitled 'Explore the subtleties of language', fortunately exclamation-mark free, which promised to explore the subtleties of literature, poetry, music and text within an upper-intermediate/advanced context. It was hosted by Karen, the DOS of a language school somewhere in London. She had bags of enthusiasm. She had big glasses. She had hair that had obviously been large and roughly the same shape as Carol Decker's from T'Pau in around 1986, and which had gradually worn down over the intervening years. She had a bright red cardigan and green dress. She had a brittle smile that kept on saying 'please like me'. Sadly, what she didn't have was a) enough photocopies to hand round, b) even a basic powerpoint presentation or c) a clue. The following fifty minutes was an object example in someone's enthusiasm overtaking their ability to express themselves clearly, or to actually analyse what it is they're delivering in class.

What was was, her reading and listening material seem to have expired at some point in the late eighties. We were treated to an extract from an early Jaqueline Wilson book, lyrics from heavy metal group Queensryche and Bon Jovi, and a newpaper article which, as she put it 'is written like he is dancing'.

Karen proceeded to hand out her materials, saying all the while that she loved them and they were excellent. What she did not do was explain methodology, approach, and practice. Instead, she encouraged us to analyse the text, looking for similes, metaphors, and tenses. Why? What for? The most appalling was the Bon Jovi lyrics, for Dry County, which are absolutley chock full of Christian imagery and allusion, and particularly imagery that resonates to an native English speaker. How on earth was it possible to make it relevant or interesting to non-native non-christian students? All in all, a total waste of everybody's time, in my opinion.

Deeply disappointed, I met up with Chloe again and we ate our buffet meals, most of which seemed to have been deep fried even if iy didn't want to be. We discussed final strategies and what we'd seen so far. Around us, other teachers sat in small groups, chatting of this and that. I watched one guy struggle with a daub of ketchup on his plate and something resembling a goujon, finally adding to the stain collection on his shirt. We finished off quickly, the went upstairs and set up our show. In fact, it was a good job we did, because it took us twenty minutes to set up the bloody computer. However, we managed it, and managed to start our presentation on time to a select audience of, er, ten. Well, strictly speaking, nine, as one had clearly overdosed on deep-fried substances and fell asleep at the back. We delivered the whole thing successfully and, amazingly considering our lack of practice, seamlessly, even though I was occasionally distracted by the sight, through the window, of a naked woman casually wandering around the flat above a shop on the other side of the road. What feedback we got was very positive indeed, and I think we provided something useful and tangible for those present.

Finally, there was the closing session, with Hugh Dellar, who was delivering a talk called 'the curse of creativity'. He works for the University of Westminster and has produced several textbooks. The talk was clearly one he had delivered before, but no worse for that. It was an entertaining performance and a good way to end the conference. Hi s basic premise was that teachers spend far too much time trying to be creative at the expense of the students actually learning anything. I think he has a point: why try to recreate the wheel in every lesson? However, I think he missed out a really crucial point – namely, encouraging creativity in students, even though he touched on a point about the Japanese concept of 'shu-ha-ri'.

And it is difficult to take seriously anyone wearing white shoes – SHOES, not trainers – with a cowboy shirt. At least the shirt was stainless.

Ten Thousand Hours

2008-11-16T22:59:00.002Z

...the length of time, according to research reported by this guy, it takes to achieve mastery over any given field. Read this; It's important. I also believe it has signficant implications for learners of language and language teachers. Basically, this article is an extract from a book, looking at how really successful people are successful because of a combination of talent, luck, timing and application. What is of interest, however, is the figure in the title. If you think about L1 acquisition, that roughly equates to two and a half years of waking existence, the kind of age where children start to have a clear emerging language, rather than babble and lumps of vocabulary. Of course, they don't have mastery, yet the brain has acquired the bare bones of the language by then, the simple version of the operating system it will use over its lifetime, if you like.
In terms of language learning, would ten thousand hours of practice equate to mastery? Research suggests it would. After all, the requirements for Proficiency level state that someone who has studied for far less than this figure will achieve this level. And when a student has the opportunity to be entirely immersed in an English-speaking environment, we should point out how swiftly that can, in theory, become masterful. Let's take an example of someone with mastery of the English language: Joseph Conrad, someone who knew nothing of the language before the age of 19. Now, he came from a family that were hard-working and determined, and he had hour after hour to learn English while aboard boats, criss-crossing the oceans. In the end, he began writing, and look at his work! But I bet you that the aforementioned figure , all that time in practice and learning and practice again, had to be crossed before he even set pen to paper.
And as for being a teacher, what of that? After reading this article, I reflected on how many hours I've put in, both in the classroom and in preps, practice etc. I must have done, on average, about 20 hours per week of direct class contact over the last 15 years. So, 20 x 44 (don't forget holiday times, when I do my paperwork) x 15 = 13,200 hours of class time, plus planning & admin. Have I achieved mastery of my subject? Well, no, because I can always find something to learn, and there is always something to learn. But also, yes, because I know that I can walk into a classroom or even a circle drawn on the floor, with or without materials, and still deliver a good lesson.

English UK conference, again

2008-11-08T00:59:00.002Z

Yes, another year, another invitation to speak before my peers. This year, I'll be doing a bit of practical stuff - online records of work, with my tag-team buddy Chloe Courtenay. We had a practice run-through of what we'll be doing next saturday (15th) at the conference. Something we've all been experimenting with is using a VLE tro support the paperwork side of things , and especially the record of work where a class is shared between several people. Having a document that is readiliy available anywhere just makes it easy to do.
As you might remember, last year I was up against Adrian Underhill; This year we're going head to head with Jim Scrivener. No probs.
Anyone interested in online records of work could do worse than visit this site, where I'm playing with them, alongside other stuff.

Acquisition and Learning

2008-10-21T22:22:00.002+01:00

Well, the original purpose of this journal was to help with my studies and my work. Here's an essay I've just completed: see what you think.

Compare the concepts of language acquisition and language learning with reference to your reading and experience. Explain their relevance to three different learning situations in which you have had a direct teaching role.

Introduction
Since the nineteenth century and the rise of various theories of how languages are learned, one consistent area of research has been how children learn their mother languages, and how best that can be replicated in the language classroom in order to facilitate the simplest and easiest way of learning a target language. Since the 1970s, further research has been undertaken into understanding the differences between the seemingly unconscious way in which young children learn and the way in which adult learners learn languages, what processes are involved and how these might affect how we learn, and teach, languages. Arguably the currently most dominant theories are those of Stephen Krashen regarding language acquisition and language learning, as laid out in Second language acquisition and second language learning (1981), and how they relate to his and Tracy Terrell's Natural Approach theory (1983). While the Natural Approach, according to Krashen himself, falls under the umbrella of the Communicative Approach, nevertheless his own theories on Acquisition, learning and the differences therein has had a significant impact on language teaching, methodology, materials and texts since the 1980s. In this essay, I will compare the concepts of acquisition and learning, first exploring in brief some of the historical background behind the rise of Krashen's theory of second language acquisition. Next, I will compare the concepts in relation to classroom practice, based upon current materials and my own classroom practice, and explain three teaching situations which illustrate the concepts, and finally I will explain my own attitude towards acquisition and learning based upon my own experience.

The historical background behind acquisition and learning theories
It may be said that, broadly speaking, earlier approaches to language teaching and learning focused either on grammatical accuracy or on seeking to create conditions in which language is learned in a way closest to how a child acquires language, the two prime examples being the Grammar Translation Method and the the Natural, or Direct, Method, of ca.1900. The latter involved in its initial stages the instructor reading a text and then asking questions in the target language, often involving 'a great deal of pantomime' until the learner could comprehend phrases and sentences in the language being studied. It would only be after this initial phase that he or she would be expected to produce, and only later that grammar would be studied. While the Natural Method should not be confused with the much later Natural Approach, it did have something in common with the later idea. It is only later that there was consistent research into and analysis of what learners actually do. It was long held, for example, that (adult) learners of language would learn grammatical structures with greater or lesser speed depending on how close or distant their L1 was from the target language. This 'Contrastive Hypothesis' maintained that the learner's L1 could exert a positive or a negative interference depending on whether the language being studied contained the same grammatical feature as L1. However, when language learners were actually subjected to research during the late 1960s and 1970s, this hypothesis was found to actually have very little bearing on how L2 is learned. These 'Morpheme Order' studies sought to discover whether there is a natural sequence in which the structures of any given language are learned. While the initial studies have now come in for criticism, an outcome was that there does indeed seem to be a universal order of acquisition, and that we have an innate capability to acquire a language system from birth. Moreover, adult language learners appear to acquire language in much the same order as a child acquires his or her L1. However, there are still differences in these two processes: acquisition and learning.
What is Acquisition?
Acquisition, according to Krashen (1981), is the process best described as the 'natural' way in which first language development occurs in children. It is an unconscious process, involving the development of language proficiency by understanding a language and using it to communicate effectively and meaningfully. Krashen and Terrell (1983) state that the primary use of language is to communicate, and as such, language is naturally acquired in morphological 'chunks' – either word by word, utterance by utterance, or phrase by phrase, and that grammar has little to do with the natural way in which languages are acquired. Research does bear this out: Children acquire words according to their needs, and only later develop the 'framework' to create longer, more complex structures, the better to convey more complex meanings and information. Moreover, this framework takes time to become fully realised, and in the intervening time, children use an interlanguage – a form of the child's L1 in which he or she can experiment with language and where the rules and conventions are seemingly arbitrary and flexible. I can attest to this from my own experience of bringing up two children in a bilingual household. In the case of my first child, he initially acquired one language in preference to the other (in this case Turkish over English). However, due to a change of country just prior to his second birthday, he was plunged into a new language environment, and began to learn solely English, and his linguistic development subsequently proceeded in that language. By contrast, his younger brother (currently two years old) is exposed to both languages simultaneously at home, and also to Arabic via his childminder. When he speaks, he freely produces words in all three languages, but is at the point of clearly showing preference of lexical item depending on who he is communicating with. Nevertheless, his emergent interlanguage is still a mixture of vocabulary items from the languages he is acquiring. What is very clear is that there is very little discernible 'grammar' as such.

What is learning?
Language learning is a very different process from acquisition. It involves a process where the learner develops conscious rules about a language. It could be said that he or she learns about the language before learning the language itself. The outcome of this process is that the learner has clear, understood, knowledge of a language and can then verbalize this. In many respects, this means that a learned language is information learned much like any other subject, rather than the means or vehicle by which information is learned and disseminated, as is the case with L1. In contrast to acquisition, learning occurs in a formal taught environment. The development of the rules governing the target language may be helped by formal teaching techniques, such as error correction and testing. According to Krashen's theory, Learning cannot lead to acquisition, mainly because of how learning occurs, but also because of two other factors: the learner's internal 'monitor' and his or her 'affective filter'.

Acquisition, learning, the monitor hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis
I have described above how acquisition is the process by which children acquire L1, and also how there seems to be a universal order of acquisition by which certain structures begin to appear in the learner's production. Research indicates that this order of acquisition also occurs in the way in which adult learners, whether in an informal or formal learning environment, acquire a target language. For example, the manner in which the negative is formed in English is typically initially expressed by putting 'no' before a verb ('I no go'), then by using an auxiliary correctly in one way, but incorrectly in another ('I don't go', but 'he don't go' or 'he don't can go'), before finally mastering the structure. This research into adult learners puts into question the entire notion of a grammatical syllabus. Surely we should teach English in a manner which most closely resembles the way in which we naturally learn our mother tongues?
This is in fact what Krashen and Terrel propose in the Natural Approach (1983). Some of the key features of this, according to Richards and Rodgers (2001) are that, firstly, the approach is designed to help students develop from beginners to intermediates in the target language; That specific objectives depend on learner needs; And that content selection should be interesting and foster a friendly, relaxed class atmosphere. The feature most relevant to our discussion is the role that the learner is expected to take. In the initial phases of a Natural Approach-based course, the student is not expected to contribute or produce until he or she feels ready to do so – in other words, once he or she feels a need to do so, imitating the need to communicate that is believed to drive language acquisition in children.
However, Krashen goes on in his SLA theory to describe other factors that distinguish Learning from Acquisition. First of these is the 'Monitor Hypothesis'. In short, this states that conscious learning functions only as a monitor,or editor, of what is uttered (as initiated by an acquired linguistic system), and provides a way of correcting language when we communicate. The efficiency of the monitor is affected by three conditions: Time, where there must be enough time for a learned rule to be chosen and applied; Focus on form, where the speaker is focused on accuracy or the form of what is produced; and knowledge of the rules, where the speaker, or performer, has to know the rules. As we have pointed out earlier, in second language learning, the rules of a language are generally learned along with the language.
Another factor that has been described is the Affective Filter Hypothesis. This states that the adult learner will be more or less successful in learning a language depending on the strength of their affective filter, that is, the emotional state, attitudes, motivation, self-confidence and anxiety he or she brings into the language learning environment. Krashen states that the lower the affective filter, the more successful the student will be in learning.
In other words, an acquired linguistic system is one learnt free of anxiety, or prior assumption. On the other hand, adult language learners have a set of assumptions and attitudes towards the target language and its culture that may or may not impede the process of learning.
One more important point to raise before we move on is this: Learning does not occur within acquisition, yet acquisition may, and does, occur within the learning process.

Examples from teaching situations
All my own teaching experience has been with young adult and adult learners, so I see students who are very much in the process of learning rather than acquiring English, albeit with some individual exceptions. One example was a student who had acquired highly fluent spoken English. Prior to entering the classroom, he had never formally studied the language: Instead, he had acquired what he knew of the language from his job as a waiter and bartender in a holiday resort, even to the extent that he spoke with a distinct London accent, despite never having been to the UK. Given his level of spoken English, it was anticipated before his initial assessment that his reading and writing would also be of the same standard. Instead, he tested out at ALTE level C2. He was disappointed by this, and once on the course with people with far lower levels of spoken fluency than him, he rapidly became frustrated and disillusioned, to the point that he stopped trying to learn any further.
The difficulty lay in that he needed to learn rather than acquire, even though he had acquired listening and spoken skills necessary for him to function, and function at a high level. Looking at his case through Krashen and Terrell's Natural Approach Theory, he had succeeded in acquiring a language in the most naturalistic way possible. However, in order to further his own career, he also required reading and writing skills, and this required a much more formal learning environment. In order to facilitate this, I had to first encourage him to continue learning. This I did by making him think about what it was he wanted and needed to learn, why this was, and how he could do it. This developed first through conversations, then through writing down his targets, then by breaking these targets down and showing him what he needed to learn. By involving him in the actual process of learning, and making him learn about language learning he managed to progress swiftly and far more happily.
I encounter similar issues with ESOL groups. Quite often, there is a disparity between spoken language, where long-term residents in the UK have acquired functional spoken capability, albeit one that is often limited to a specific set of social and work-based contexts, yet have highly limited reading and writing skills. Also, ESOL groups are frequently unfamiliar with the metalanguage and terminology frequently used when teaching a language, further evidence that they have not experienced a formal learning environment. Only through individual appraisals is it possible to devise an effective way of approaching how they need to learn further and what techniques are most likley to be effective.
By contrast, I have also dealt with groups (in the case I am thinking of, monolingual groups of Chinese students) who in had a technically high degree of knowledge of English, yet were incapable of functioning in the language environment simply because they could neither understand nor react to spoken English, nor were sufficiently capable of producing it to the degree that their grammatical knowledge suggested they should. In their case, they had achieved a great deal of learning but had experienced next to no acquisition. In their case, their frustrations with the language, while ostensibly similar to the first two examples, were in fact caused by the incapability to express the knowledge they believed they possessed, and this was compounded by the fact that they had to express themselves since they were studying in the UK. Many of them had aimed to go on to study at a British university after a year of studying English: with the realisation that they could not understand spoken interaction even at a relatively basic level, they became further discouraged. In the case of these students, exposing them to spoken interaction in class, encouraging them to listen to as much English as possible in their free time, and ensuring they reassessed their expectations all helped.
Conclusions
There is little doubt in my mind that Krashen's theories about acquisition and learning are, by and large, true. However, it may seem that some of his ideas are too simplistic, too much of the obvious being stated: one critic (Gregg, 1984) even goes so far as to suggest that he has no theory of language at all. I would take issue with the affective filter theory, and with some of the other features that he describes as distinguishing learning from acquisition, as I believe there is may be another way of explaining the difference. However, that falls outside the remit of this essay.
What we cannot do is invoke acquisition in our students in the classroom environment. Nor can we teach in a way that perfectly mimics acquisition. All we can do, within the class, is try to create a synthesis between how languages are picked up and an analysis of how the language works. What we can also do is encourage students to explore the language outside the classroom: we can direct them to discover for themselves as much as possible, to expose themselves to the target language as much as possible, to immerse themselves within it. And most importantly perhaps, we should encourage them not to be afraid, to play with language, to be flexible and arbitrary, to seek to be creative, to turn off their critical, affective filters and experiment with what is possible – in other words, let each student be comfortable in their own interlanguage as they learn.

sinking!

2008-10-15T22:57:00.004+01:00

you find me buried neck deep in work and studies, hence my not writing on here as much as I would like to be doing. This time of year is always a hectic pace, and for me it is not helped by the fact that a) I'm trying my damndest to get my Dip done, and b) I'm now also doing, at the same time, my Diploma in Teaching for the Lifelong Learning Sector, or DTLLS for short.It would be fai to say that I have rather a lot on my plate right now. You might be asking, why the hell are you doing two courses? Well, it is soon to be a requirement in the British FE sector that all instructors have a qualification to teach specifically in the further education area - all part of a drive to push up standards etc. So, every wednesday this year, my services will be required in a classroom to discuss this, that and the other - currently, curriculum design. It promises to be rather a long slog, and, if the word of some of my colleagues who have already done the course is to be trusted, there's a bit too much of the old jumping through hoops while dotting 'i's and crossing 't's about the whole thing. I'm just trying to see where I can make the work cross over the two courses, as it were.

Neologisms Corner

2008-09-09T00:43:00.002+01:00

An occasional series of entries devoted to the wonderful world of Neologism spotting in English. An awful lot of new words, meanings and phrases enter the language each year - on average, one every two hours - and an awful lot of them are total rubbish. Take this prize example, heard on the BBC news earlier on today. A police officer was describing the scene of a crash between a car, a bus and a tram in Croydon, which had left one person dead and several others seriously injured. He was explaining that they were waiting for the place to be forensically examined: '.....we are treating the scene as a crime scene, and are waiting for it to be forensicated..'
Totally bloody ugly word.

Wake me up when September ends.

2008-09-03T15:07:00.003+01:00

Oh well, back to the whiteboard. I returned to work on monday: Now for another term full of testing, enrolment, stress and acquired colds. I'm still getting back into my stride and going through one of those 'bugger this for a game of soldiers' moments. However, there are fairly good reasons for this - we are chronically understaffed, we have a new Curriculum Manager, we have an administrator who still needs a bit of breaking in, I'm busy testing out new systems, I don't know yet how many students I'm going to have coming through the door, and the University Reprographics department has run out of its budget and doesn't have any paper. That's right, we can't print anything up. Oh, and there's been a nasty snafu about the enrolment sessions involving a buggered up booking programme, two classrooms and too many potential ESOL students. On top of that, I'm having a mare finding time to study - and there's another thing: I will have to do my Cert Ed this year on top of completing my Dip. Joy.
On the plus front however, I found this electronic version of the European Language Portfolio, which will hopefully make using portfolios with my students much, much easier.

Portfolios and VLEs

2008-07-28T23:03:00.002+01:00

Slowish day today, but at least I've pretty much resolved all that needs doing until September, and the rest can wait till then. I even managed a bit of precious research time.
One thing that will wait till the start of the new academic year is the portfolios, or rather the virtual part of the project. I mentioned in the earlier post that a designated list of tasks would be given, from which the students would select the best work for their portfolios at the end of the year. Well, what will also happen is that these will form the core of 'key tasks' on the university's VLE, Blackboard. Not only will the task be outlined alongside the companion tasks that a student will need to be able to understand and do in order to complete the task, each component will be a learning module. The idea is that where students can't come to class for whatever reason, they will be able to complete the designated self-study tasks and still have their attendance counted. That's what we're moving towards, anyway. In addition, links pages will direct students to additional reading, exercises and study linked to each key topic, the idea being that we can create differentiation within the cohort - faster students will be able to do more challenging work involving less guided, more real-world learning material, while lesser able students still complete the tasks they need to. It will also be a boon for the IT sessions we ru for our FT students, as these are currently a bit on the flabby side.

Lazy(Tembel, Barid)) Sunday (Pazar, Al-Ahad) Afternoon (Ogleden sonra,بعد الظّهر)

2008-07-27T15:08:00.005+01:00

It's too hot to do any serious work today, and besides it's Sunday. I'm just sat in the garden, listening to langourous mid-afternoon birdsong, drinking a beer and contemplating sparking up the barbie. And, while son #2 is having his nap, reflecting on how he's acquiring language. Currently he's not two years old yet (he's 21 months), yet you would expect he would be producing certain phrases by now. He is, but what's interesting is the variety. Nur and I are both making the best effort we can to speak English and Turkish with him, but he's also getting input from his childminder, who's Syrian. So, we have 3 very different language systems that he's being exposed to, from the uninflected Turkish through to the highly inflected Arabic. Although Turkish and Arabic share quite a few lexical items (though not as many as you might expect: The Turkish language reform of 1928 effectively created an linguistic tabula rasa) they are significantly different. You would think it would be hard for any child to make sense of anything through the prism of these different tongues. So how does Sean cope?
Surpisingly well, is the answer. While it's difficult to understand what he's saying at times, apart from some lexical items and bits of syntax, what is also apparent is that he understands himself - in other words, he has his own interlanguage with its own rules and conventions and which to him is perfectly comprehensible. What I find a little surprising, considering the L1 environment is English, is that he seems to prefer Turkish and Arabic vocabulary. He tends to call me, for example, 'Baba' or 'Aba'. However, his intonation and rhythm are distinctly English - for example, he uses very distinct rising and falling intonation when asking a 'wh-' type question (even if I don't understand what he's asking!), and a rising intonation when asking a 'yes-no' type question. What will be interesting to watch is how this interlanguage develops, and how, or if, he will begin to change preferences as to which lexical items he uses, and thence how it changes morphologically.
(btw, please forgive any dodgy Arabic in the heading)

busy?

2008-07-25T11:44:00.002+01:00

rather a slow week, or at least it's felt that way - maybe it's the weather. And again, frustratingly, not much going on on the Dip. front. I want to complete my current workbook in the next few days (the distance Dip. Tesol is split up into workbooks), then try and do as much as possible over the summer before I'm inundated by the shitwave of work that inevitably breaks over me come september. So far this week, I've been working on publicity for the PT & FT EFL courses, marketing strategies (too little, too late, in my opinion: The university's sole overseas agancy is about to be closed, meaning that we probably won't be getting much in the way of FT students for the new academic year), and, of course, portfolios. It finally looks like they've crystallised. Basically, the FT programme will use the portfolio in very much the way they were originally designed to be used, vis. a showcase of each student's best work. However, the Programme Leader will set out prior to the start of the programme what work needs to be covered, and from that the minimum number of items that need to be included. On top of that, and to encourage students to work, having a complete portfolio will be in some way a requirement of course completion, and prizes will be given for the best portfolios.
For the PT programme, because of time constraints and its more specialised nature, the portfolio will be used more in the way I originally envisaged it, i.e. a way of delivering specific tasks that conform to ECF freamework descriptors and show students the type of tasks they may face in PET, FCE, CAE and CPE. It means we can spread the exam skills workload over the whole of the course, rather than trying to cram it from halfway through the course (don't ask why this is: suffice to say it's a long story involving fundaing regulations for FE).
Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with what I've hammered out - now all I have to do is sit back and see if it bloody works.

2008-07-21T16:37:00.002+01:00

Another rather slow and plodding monday. Currently working on the whole portfolios idea - it's evolved a bit. just a bit. Currently, the idea is to use the European Language Portfolio as the core for students to reflect on their own language skills and what they want to do with language, followed by a reflective diary-type thing, possibly on the net, then sections covering functional and notional skills. The headache lies in the latter. I don't want to be too proscriptive as to what can and cannot be done, yet it would be desirable to have concictency across several levels in the same learning cohort - it means we can match students to the ALTE framework and give us a really accurate snapshot of a whole academic year, covering accuracy of initial placement tests to end of year results. It'll also give us standardised pieces that would make Internal Validation, and external for that matter, much easier. However, saying 'this and this must be in the portfolio, but not this' isn't desirable, as it ignores the students' needs. In addition, each class may have subtly different needs that require addressing. It's all rather thorny.

step forward, step backward.

2008-07-18T12:56:00.002+01:00

Well, it's been a frustrating week. I don't feel as if I've done that much - something I put down to sitting in front of a monitor until my eyeballs bleed, rather than being up and on my feet in a class. Most frustratingly, I've done hardly anything on the Dip, something which really bugs me. I'd like to have done more, but work stuff and a house full of ill people has put paid to that. Made some progress on the portfolio design, only to find it seems to be getting more and more complex and involved than I first thought.

Red Face....always remember..

2008-07-15T13:22:00.003+01:00

...to do your research before you write! How many times do I tell my students that? Further to the previous post about SATs, I find in fact that the majority of the marking is actually done in the UK, and not, as implied on the BBC this morning, abroad. The problems allegedly come from the lack of training and support ETS Europe provide, alongside an apparently appalling system for transporting and delivering papers. This doesn't surprise me. ETS are probably better known for running the TOEFL, quite possibly the worst Academic English exam in existence. And why is an American company dealing with British exams in the first place? Just an example of shoddy government - go for the cheapest contractor, and to hell with the futures of the children being tested.

SATs, contractors and doing it on the cheap

2008-07-15T09:22:00.002+01:00

Off the topic of ELT, but still educationally related - The SATs(Standard Attainment Tests), sat by 11 and 14-year-olds in the UK. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle, to put it mildly, at the delay in releasing the results this year. There's been more disgruntlement at schools, where teachers have been resending marked papers because of inaccuracies in the scoring. So, what's going on?

the papers have been sent off to be marked to a company contracted to do it, presumably the cheapest one available.

Its name?
ETS Europe.

The marking of the SATs has been subcontracted to a company not based in the UK. In other words, British students' work is being checked and marked for accuracy in somewhere other than the UK.

I can't begin to describe how shocking I find this. It's wrong on so many levels. Now, if it was just a case of a multiple choice paper being fed into a computer, I could accept that. If it was just checking the result of a maths paper, where you can only have a correct or wrong answer, I could just about accept that too. But it seems (and honestly, I couldn't be more glad if I were wrong on this point) that the entire lot is being sent off. OK, you can make a point abour objectivity in marking: The examiner will have a set number of descriptors against which he/she will check the submitted work, and based on that assign a mark. However, I can see so many ways that marking will be inaccurate.
Just a few examples:
Orthography. The way that UK kids are taught to write is significantly different from the way it is done in other EU countries. This is a fairly neat example:
, and it's written by an adult! Imagine an 11-year-old's being deciphered by an examiner.

Cultural and Social mileau. Taken out of context, how can anything relating to a culture or society be accurately interpreted, let alone assigned a score in an exam?

Examiner's L1/L2 competency. No matter how good the examiner's English may be, nevertheless they will be marking and interpreting at one remove - that is, they will have to decode the information, recode into L1, interpret according to two sets of cultural and possibly sociolinguistic filters, then assign a mark and re-encode into English. There is no way it can be done entirely fairly, as any examiner in this situation will use affective filters in the process.

All I can say is that it's WRONG. Totally bloody WRONG.

Acquisition within learning

2008-07-11T14:58:00.003+01:00

Insight: In acquisition, learning does not occur. In learning, acquisition may occur. By this, I mean that when we acquire information, in this case languages, we do not consciously analyse, criticise or judge what has been acquired: It just is. However, when we learn, we apply a critical process - we may ask ourselves what we are learning for - in other words, there is some form of conscious motivation involved. Even though this happens, some information is (uncritically, non-judgementally) acquired. We see evidence of this where students, even in the midset of ropey writing, produce a perfectly executed phrase or sentence or turn of speech. It indicates that that phrase has been acquired syntactically. If we were to ask the student why they used that, they would probably not be able to give a good reason.
Just thought I'd share that with you.

Portfolios

2008-07-10T20:13:00.002+01:00

This is a work-related post, and a warning. Never volunteer ideas too loudly - you might get saddled with redesigning an entire syllabus, as I have done. And I've only got a few weeks to do it in!
Actually, it fits in fairly neatly with the curriculum and syllabus design section of my Dip studies, and it bodes to be a hell of a lot more interesting than doing plod work on the Summer School. It also chimes in with a few ideas I've had about running the part time programme and how we keep students from drifting away, as often happens when their work/life/study balance changes.
Basically, it centres on using student portfolios. It's not a new idea, and in fact there is, somewhere out on the Interweb, a British Council document about using a learning portfolio, which for the life of me I can't find. The idea and structure is simple. Each student creates a portfolio of work which is proof of work done over a course, and contains marked and internally validated work covering the main skills. It will also contain a 'biography' section, a 'personal vocabulary' section (for vocab students come across in everyday life rather than in the classroom), a reflective diary and individual learning plan for them to identify what their targets are. So far, so good.
The difference comes in two places: How it is delivered and how it is differentiated. I'm weighing up how much of the portfolio needs to actually be on paper and whether it can't be done using our online learning platform, Blackboard. Anyone who's used this bit of software will know how clunky it is - it's very old as a piece of software and relies on plug-in modules to keep it up-to-date - and how it tends to render users rather passive (and here I mean teachers and students). However, with some nifty wrangling I think I may be able to do something usable. Actually, it does have its own version of a portfolio as a plug in, but it's really not much more than a glammed up CV. There is also the issue of technophobe students, and even more technophobe teachers. Currently, I think that the portfolio can be in parts delivered online, but with backup documentary evidence to place in a file. For example, the reflective diary can be in the form of blogs, which would give them much greater flexibility - students can use alternative ways of recording what they're doing, including pictures and sound recordings. The various marked tasks might be done both electronically and on paper.
Which last point leads very nicely onto differentiation. By this, I mean not only differentiation across levels, but also across the courses. For example, we have an evening Effective Writing course: It would be rather ridiculous having the students complete a portfolio that has elements not related to their study needs. In addition, one feature of this course is that students bring in real life writing situations into the class, and so a portfolio should cover this - perhaps by some kind of case study, analysis and solutions - some kind of report, perhaps. For the classes that cover Exams - for example, FCE, CAE etc. - the portfolio requires tasks that directly relate to the type of tasks they will need to do in exam conditions, but without being tainted by Backwash.

The most important differentiation task will be across the levels. Here, I intend to use the Common European Framework to identify what students are expected to be able to do and how they express it. For example, in the 'biography' section, I envisage the lowest level students just completing a simple form asking for basic details, while a higher level student might be expected to write a CV and sample cover letter, or write a more complex biography.
Well, that's the idea, anyway. Wish me luck.

drawing articulators

2008-07-08T20:12:00.002+01:00

I never was much good at drawing these things..

Honestly, look at them - looks like coils of bacon. The first one is meant to show the position of the articulators during nasal plosion and the second during lateral plosion.

ambiguous language spotting

2008-07-08T11:11:00.003+01:00

..from 'Mary, Queen of Shops' last night, while describing discerning shoppers in York:
'...she needs to understand what the thirty-something fashionable women of York want...'
Is she talking about women in their thirties, or is she implying that there are only thirty or so fashionable women in York?

2008-07-07T15:01:00.002+01:00

bloody plosions. Especially nasal and lateral ones. It's not that it's difficult, it's just tedious.

Roles of speaker and listener

2008-07-04T09:27:00.000+01:00

Just a short post, based on a conversation last night. Do different language groups place different responsibilities on the speaker and listener in a conversation to ensure that any given communication has been understood? In English, if I want to make sure that the other person is following me, I might say 'Understand?', '..if you get me..', '...did you get that?', and so forth. In Turkish, however, you say, 'Anlatabildim mi?', which means 'Have I made myself clear?'
Another feature of Turkish is the tendency to repeat information, especially important information, three times, often in subtly different ways. So what's going on? It seems to me that in English, the responsibility on understanding the message is on the listener, hence the reason why I say the things above. In other words, it's down to the decoder to ensure the successful transmission of a message. In Turkish, however, the responsibility for the successful transmission of the message lies with the speaker, or encoder. This means that, in English, listening is a far more active role: There is an expectation that the message will be understood. In contrast, in Turkish the listener is far more passive. Speaking from experience, I would say that this explains why Turkish language students tend not to hear instructions in class, as well as explaining why they can get so frustrated in conversation - it's because the role they are expected to play is at variance with what they do in L1. When they speak, this tendency to repeat and emphasise comes out, which to the English listener is frustrating: When it happens to me, I want to say ,'Yes, yes, I understand!', which is rather rude in Turkish culture. When the Turkish student listens, the expectation is that all the work of making the message clear lies with the speaker.
This phenomenon possibly also has something to do with the turn-taking periods in the two languages. In English, generally the first person will speak, then the next person will speak afterwards. In Turkish, there is a tendency to overlap, hence possibly the reason why it is necessary to convey information several times.
Now, there may be some research out there into this, but I don't have the time at the moment to look; However, I think I'm on to something. Ideas, anyone?

2008-07-02T16:55:00.000+01:00

My eyes are feeling a bit fried up from reading for the past three hours, and I'm about to call it a day - well, at least for the time being: I'll probably do some more work this evening at some stage. A question about methodologies: why are they all aimed at beginners? OK, so lots of research has been done about acquisition and learning, but what about the fine-tuning, improving and expanding phase, once students get past intermediate level? I don't know if much research has been done, but my impressions based on my teaching experiences are that there's a big drop-off in the numbers of students who want to learn English once they get to an intermediate level, or thereabouts - in other words, once they reach a basic level of linguistic competency. Now, the fact that tens of thousands of people take the FCE and CAE, and that the number of students taking IELTS has exploded over the past year, may belie that fact, but there it is. What turns basic competency into fluency and eventually mastery? What are the motivators?

Suggestopedia

2008-07-01T21:25:00.000+01:00

In my ongoing travails, I have to read about the various theories and methodologies that pervade the world of language teaching, and have spent most of today making notes and reading about the damn things. One of the more looney ones has to be Suggestopedia, which quite frankly appears to be madder than a betting shop full of scousers who've just found that a) their giro's been stopped and b) they've had their last 50p nicked.
I can't begin to describe how ridiculous this theory is, nor the demented self-aggrandisement and egotism of its proponent. Suffice it to say that part of it involves letting the students sit in recliners, listening to baroque music while listen to the teacher, who projects an aura of believing in what he's doing while being simulataneously enthusiastic and grave of deportment, intone a relevant text, before the whole lot get up and bugger off without discussing a thing. Utter nuts.

Dipping away.

2008-07-01T15:08:00.001+01:00

working away on the dip. Currently, I'm having a deeply exciting time looking at theories and methodologies - right at the moment, Krashen's Natural Approach, TPR and the Silent Way. Why do none of these seem to have much to say about higher level English Learners? They're all focused at getting beginners competent to a certain degree. Since I generally teach the other end of the spectrum, I'd be interested in the work done regarding theories and methodologies for those who already have higher levels of L2.

Not a wholesome day.

2008-05-27T17:55:00.000+01:00

It is one of those days where I cannot be arsed with this job. In other words, it's Course Review Day. This delightful little thing is where the Programme Leaders have to write a report based upon OFSTED criteria, analyse data, prove retention and achievement statistics and explain why we're all doing such a wonderful job, thank you very much. This produces ream after ream of report, stacked to the hilts with unreliable numbers and unprovable facts, all done in order to keep some bloodless little number-cruncher in meaningful employment. And, just to add to the fun, the government's new Every Child Counts Strategy has been introduced, adding another ream of paper to each report.
As you may have guessed, it is not my favourite activity, and I've spent the best part of the day trying to drum up enthusiasm and inspiration while staring at my computer screen. While I don't mind targets and aims - I am, after all, a teacher and the Exams Officer - it's the extremely anal nature of what we have to write that I object to. It's the insistence that everything is a measurable, gradable, quantifiable thing that I hate. It's the theft of the teaching mojo: that magical, inexplicable part of the job, the moment when it all goes right and the student goes 'yes!', and these humourless beancounters think it can be all measured up and tucked in a box, in this case a coffin.
Oh, yes, I am also getting stress ulcers because of the bloody exams. Two more sets this week, then a whole week's worth in a fortnight, then two more sessions at the end of June.

sodding dilemma.

2008-05-14T23:53:00.000+01:00

well, the last post seems to work: I wish I could say the same of me. I am at a crossroads, professionally speaking, and feeling deeply frustrated. Partly, it's because of the time of year. It's exam season at the moment, and I find myself kicking my heels in the classroom because of the revision and practice stuff, but also because I'm spending the vast majority of my time right now organising the bloody things for my faculty. I'm responsible for the smooth passage, organisation, implementation and execution of students,er, exams, and I find it a colossally tedious process. Indeed, I find all the paperwork associated with my current job tedious (I'm also responsible for the Part time EFL programme and the smooth flow of data in the department - the latter is rather like being Hercules trying to wash through the Augean Stables with a slightly flabby hose). All of my work commitments effectively mean that I'm hamstrung when it comes to doing the study and research I really need to do in order to further my career, a situation I have begun to suspect my manager has actually engineered. And now she is off to pastures new, and everyone is expecting me to apply for her post. It's a job I could do, no problem: The difficulty lies in the fact that I don't have the qualifications I need, precisely because I've been too damn busy doing what I do. There is also the nagging fact that it's not really the pathway I want to go down. On the other hand, it is something I should strive for, simply because I need the extra cash; But do I need the extra grief?

High time I reactivated this thing..

2008-05-14T23:40:00.000+01:00

..so let's kick it off with the presentation I gave at the EnglishUK teachers' conference last year. It's via Google docs, so I don't think the animation stuff works, meaning it'll look a bit messy.

busy.

2008-03-11T09:13:00.000Z

Deary me, I'm not keeping this as much up to date as I'd like, mainly because of work: I'm up to my eyeballs in exam arrangements (part of my job is to organise the Skills for Death exams and the Cambridge Main Suite one), and running round making sure certain other people do their jobs vis a vis looking after their own areas and getting data to me. Also, I'm embedded - no bogged down in - reading about the history of ELT and the various methodologies, approaches and theories, written by the kind of writer for whom a night watching paint dry would count as excitement beyond belief. However, write this I must, as I promised myself I would. Well, what's on the menu for me today? I'm startingh with an upper intermediate class, and we're visiting the wonderful world of homonyms and homophones; After a quick dash into town for an urgent bit of business, it's on to the Academic English class, and Language Comparison; then in the evening, an Advanced class, where I'll be looking at some reading skills and probably a bit of CAE related stuff. Excitement. And once I've got home, round about 9.30, it's aquick meal and some more dip work.

half term.

2008-02-19T23:13:00.000Z

Half term holidays. Invented for the ease and convenience of the teacher, so that he or she may catch up with the mountain of marking from the previous six weeks and bin/set fire to all the stuff that was marked urgent a few weeks previously. In no other profession is it easier to understand how the tomorrow we worry about today will itself become today: In other words, if it really is urgent, it will make itself utterly bloody obvious, and the rest is just bollocks.
I have been in work today, and amazingly found myself with very little of the bin/burn variety. instead, I have been developing Blended Learning material using the Blackboard Platform - that is, gap fills via the interweb thingy - and pushing onwards with my studies. Actually, I am very much in favour of using IT in class, as it's engaging and fun, and means you can recycle tons of stuff ad nauseam once you've put the initial legwork in. I don't particularly like Blackboard, which is a very dated piece of software, but until my educational establishment stops paying for the licence, it's what we've got.

I wouldn't say bad hair day...more flat hair day.

2008-02-07T23:31:00.000Z

I had only the one lesson today, and while it was OK, I didn't really enjoy it. It hung off its foundations like a 20-year-old's clothes off a 70-year-old's body. It was my upper intermediate class, and we were looking at the perennial fun favourites of relative clauses and present and past participles. Whoo. I didn't do any pyrotechnics this time round - I just didn't feel up to any, for some reason.
The evening saw me handing out information and smiles to potential students, most of whom wanted either ESOL or something more intangible - something to remove their ennui, perhaps.

lesson idea: your life in the news

2008-01-31T17:15:00.001Z

quick idea: your life in headlines
The aim of this exercise is focusing on key words within texts. The idea is to model one or more parts of your day on the board as headlines, e.g. Teacher in early morning no tea terror. Try to get students to guess what the story is. Students then write a headline for themselves and other students have to guess what the story behind the headline is. An exercise that can be done in conjunction with a reading exercise centred around looking at newspapers. It should be pointed out to students how headlines tend to use present simple in order to be dramatic and omit articles and auxiliary verbs. By getting students to deliberately omit these, it helps them focus on the reasons why they are used in the first place.

finding directions.

2008-01-22T00:18:00.000Z

I'm still trying to find my feet with this journal, and identifying precisely what it is for. In part, this reflects my own doubts about my career: Is this what I really want to do till I retire? Or is it just the vague thrill I get from standing up in front of a load of people and making them believe in me? If that's the case, why not go on stage, do stand up, or get in a pulpit or on a soapbox? After all, it's all the same skill: making someone else believe in what you are saying, or confirming their beliefs.
Besides, I might get paid better.
It's a strange fact, and a sad one, but TEFLers are some of the most creative teachers, and the ones most willing to embrace new ideas, theories and technologies, although you'd be hard pressed to believe the latter if you saw my place of work. One teacher's idea of trying to understand the intricacies of logging on and reading his emails is to write everything down on grey pieces of cardboard cannibalized from cereal packets, and store it in a filing system in the bottom of a rather smelly, damp holdall. For all the TEFLer's enthusiasm however, we are amongst the poorest paid of teachers. An absolute top wage, for someone with a doctorate, is likely to be in the region of £40,000; In FE, you'd be lucky, after several years, to break the £30 k barrier; And the entry wages are shocking. In the private sector, things are even worse - I've heard of people earning as little as £7 per hour in London, even those with a diploma or higher. There's also the public persona of a typical TEFL teacher - lecherous, drunk student backpackers, or alcoholic runaways from the law, and the attitude of colleagues who teach other disciplines - namely, we are not seen as 'proper teachers'.
Is any of this fair? well, from the perspective of a long-term teacher with 15 years' experience, clearly not, but when you look at the TEFL certificate mills, there is justification. A four-week programme of study simply cannot prepare someone to teach. A lot of would-be teachers do the course as a way of paying for a year or two abroad, or to escape home for various reasons, then they go abroad, dragging their metaphysical baggage with them, and live up to the stereotypes. The rate of attrition in language schools is high - less, maybe, than it used to be, but still high. But still the TEFL mills continue to churn out neophytes clutching their TEFL Certs. The last time I bothered looking at the statistics, there were some million and a half TEFL Cert-ified teachers knocking about. Most of those do not last longer than a school year or two. It's no wonder, with such a glut of native speaker instructors knocking about, that schools feel they can get away with offering peanuts.

'will' for predicting a current situation

2008-01-15T09:26:00.000Z

I'm doing modals this morning, so here's a quick idea for showing the use of'will' to predict things currently happening:
on the board, draw two stick men. give them names - Dave and Gavin, or something. tell the students that one has just seen the other. What does he say? 'It's Gavin'. write it on the board. Now, draw a door between them. Can Dave see Gavin ('No'). wipe off 'It's Gavin'. Tell them that dave was expecting Gavin, and now he's knocking on the door. what does he say? 'That'll be Gavin'.
That's the idea, anyway.

Guess who...

2007-12-02T23:22:00.000Z

...just bagged an 'Outstanding' from an OFSTED inspector?

Except he wasn't working for OFSTED, but in a private capacity, hired by TVU as part of a team to check that all us lecturers are standing on our best tippytoes while balancing the tutorial equivalent of a ball on our noses.
However, it was a bloody good lesson, and one forged out of rather unpromising materials. One thing that worked especially well, and which I pass on free: Speed Dating Information exchange.
the students in this class were split into two groups, reading two different texts, but answering the same questions. After they had finished the texts and answered the questions in their groups, I had them sit down in two rows facing each other. They then began to ask their partners questions in order to elicit information from each other. After a minute, I got one group to move chairs so that they talked to a new partner, and change again after another minute and so on, until each person in the first group had talked to evfery member of the second group. It worked wonderfully well, especially as students had to generate new questions in order to fill in their gaps in the knowledge they had obtained from a previous partner.

The English UK Teachers' Conference

2007-11-25T22:48:00.000Z

The day didn't start too auspiciously. Actually, the whole week hadn't started auspiciously. My prsentation was still in a parlous raw state, and the dry run I'd given clearly hadn't worked. However, thanks to the advice, criticism and suggestions of my colleagues and the support and encouragment of others, I could clearly see where and why it was going wrong, so got down to the task, or at least trying to. Come thursday, however, it was still only distinctly three-quarters baked. I tried to work on it during the day, and late into the night, hoping that I'd have a few colleagues willing to give it a dry run through with me again the next day.
Fat bloody chance. Our regular team meeting went on, and on, and on, and - guess what? - on, and on a bit more, until half past ten had come and gone, and everyone said, sorry, we've got other things to do - with the exception of a couple of teachers, who graciously gave up their time to watch. It still wasn't ready, but I took on the advice proffered. Later on, after lessons, another colleague patiently sat through it and offered her ideas. To add to the stress and tension, an email came through from EnglishUK detailing which rooms we'd be in, and it appeared that I had swapped sessions with Adrian Underhill, so he'd be giving my presentation! I emailed them back to tell them of the mistake.
Anyway, picture me slaving away late on friday night, when I suddenly nailed the words and ideas that I exactly needed and rapidly made up a couple of class activities to go along with them just for good measure.
The trip up to London was uneventful, and I found Prospero House, where the conference was taking place, easily. It's billed as a state-of-the art conference venue, but it's not that wonderful, being a long, linear structure with the main hall to the back of the building, smaller - no, tiny - meeting rooms facing onto the main road, and a large hall for dining. I checked in and introduced myself to Mark Rendell, the organiser from EnglishUK, He gave me a copy of the programme, now billing me with the right programme. It was to take place in one of the largest of the rooms, with a bloody huge projection screen: The room itself was created by the nifty use of heavy wooden dividers in the main hall.
Anyway, after a quick scoot around the publishers' stands, it was time for the opening plenary. This was delivered by Paul Seligson, on the theme of spontaneity in the classroom. It was a neat, entertaining session, but it wasn't, for me anyway, anything new, apart from a good summation of techniques to allow spontaneity to occur in lessons. I was a bit surprised he didn't mention Dogme. However, for a neophyte TEFLer, and there were quite a few in attendance (there were 170+ delegates), I think it would have provided an interesting and encouraging summation of ideas.
Following that, I went along to a session on using dictionaries more effectively. If only. It was a pleasant presentation by a pleant presenter, but I learnt nothing new. More importantly, it was overrunning, and I had to make my excuses in order to get myself set up. I quickly went to the loo, and saw the huge queue for Adrian Underhill. By now, it would be fair to say I was bricking it. I took a deep breath, and went into my room. There were about fifteen people already sat down. I went up to the podium, found the computer, plugged in my portable hard drive, briefly panicked when I thought the computer couldn't find it, relaxed when it did, waited a minute and made a bit of manic patter, and watched as all of a sudden another thirty delegates walked in, most of them young teachers. And I began.

One hour later, as I walked among the crowd chowing down on the rather magnificent lunch buffet, I realised that a) people were telling colleagues about my presentation and b) I so, so, so NAILED it! My point about how the full infinitive in English has a specific function in certain contexts - namely, it suggests incipience - had experienced teachers giving out an audible gasp of understanding. Damn, I felt good.

This lasted until fifteen minutes into a spectacularly bad presentation I decided to join, and which was nothing more than an extended plea by the author to buy his book, when I had a sudden colossal headache and I just had to get out of the place.

All in all though, I felt I'd done a good job.

Ouch!

2007-11-09T14:28:00.000Z

that was a bit painful - giving a dry run of my English UK presentation, I mean. However, it was a useful exercise, as it has helped me to see where the whole thing is flabby and needs trimming, toning and excising. It's also helped me realise, thanks to colleagues' comments, that it also needs to be more focused on what happens in the classroom and not so didactic.

2007-11-06T11:15:00.000Z

I'm currently halfway through a pig-slow upper intermediate lesson: plodding boggily through past tenses, with the prospect of an hour and a half of reading to come.
Yesterday, I had a moment of inspiration regarding time/place lines, and in particular one of Michael Lewis' ideas, something that I think will make the final version of my presentation. I now have only three days to get the raw version complete.

Ready, Steady, Teach!

2007-11-05T09:19:00.000Z

What's the fastest you've ever put a lesson together from scratch? And no, I don't mean just turning to pages 42-48 in Headway Intermediate. How long do you think it takes?
Watching the execrable wasteland that is daytime TV in the UK, one of teh brighter moments was 'Ready, Steady, Cook' on BBC2. For those who don't know it, the idea is that two cooks have to make several dishes from a bag of ingredients given to them by members of the studio audience. Of course, they also have a fridge and larder stuffed with the basics, but it requires imagination.
So why not do it ourselves when it comes to lesson prep? I think it is possible to create a one and a half hour lesson, from scratch, in about 20 minutes. Here are the rules:
1) there are clear aims and objectives to the lesson.
2) you are allowed to use any 'off-the-shelf' ingredients, but you cannot use more than one page from a standard textbook and nothing directly from a workbook
3) there must be at least two skills practised, one as a main focus, one as subsidiary - so, for example, listening and speaking/pronunciation
4) there must be at least one original piece of work - this can be an adaptation of 'off-the shelf' materials or techniques, or an entirely new piece.
5) you get extra points for the relevant use of realia or current new items.

Sure, this is what we're meant to be doing, but in reality, I think we either overplan (if we're beginners, or doing a Dip.) or we just reach for the safety and convenience of a textbook. The latter is all very well and fine - after all, they're the product of people with years of classroom experience - but they are designed with an idealised, generic class in mind. Without wanting to be rude, they are McLessons - the pedagogical equivalent of fast food. When we know our students and their needs, it is clearly not enough to give them this fare all the time.

getting nervous.

2007-11-02T22:09:00.000Z

Despite years of standing up in front of various strangers who understand me to varying degrees and making a total tool of myself, I am now starting to feel extremely apprehensive about standing up in front of my peers, who will understand me only too well, and possibly making a complete arse of myself. I will be giving the presentation, which currently is residing in bits and notes all over the place, a dry run next friday, then the real thing on the 17th. Even as I write it and ponder over the idea, new thoughts have crowded forward, sometimes making what I want to say clearer, sometimes more complex, and sometimes I feel that all I'm trying to do is reinvent the wheel. However, I'm absolutely certain I'm on to something: by seeing verb forms and tenses in terms of being 'here' or 'there', it makes certain structures, in particular future forms and conditionals, much more accessible. What is going to be controversial, however, is what I'm going to suggest about 'going to'. I'm not about to say any more right now: I want it to be a surprise.

on the work front, I had a rather tedious afternoon session with The Group That Think They're Better At English Than They Actually Are. How can one make reading sessions more interesting?

thinking between lessons ruins your appetite.

2007-11-01T11:29:00.000Z

A very quick post, as I'm in a break between classes. Yesterday turned, once more, into one of those where a whole lot of paperwork gets done and not much else. So, once again, I didn't get much of mty presentation completed. I'm still tussling with a couple of the key ideas relating to the whole distance thing, but I'm about to try a notion in class and see what the students make of it. Probably a shed load of confusion, but what the hey. They've already been shown the way that we can concieve of past forms as being notionally 'there'; what we're going to do now is compare narrative tenses and see what happens. How is the third form of the verb more apart from the second form? are the past simple and the past continous in the same 'there'? does the past perfect occupy a space that is best described as 'beyond there' and how does this relate to the notion that the present perfect occupies a space inbetween the present and the past?
let's see how they deal with these.

bits and pieces.

2007-10-30T17:26:00.001Z

This has been one of those frustrating days when I don't seem to have achieved much, apart from wade through paperwork and little bits and pieces. The writing retake exams seemed to have gone without a hitch, and the entries for the speaking and listening exams in december appear to be all on course, so I'm happy on that count. As for preparations for the conference - hmm, slower than I want. It's all started to appear far more real now and I can feel the slow dread hand of panic starting to creep over me.

deixis midnight runners?

2007-10-24T16:22:00.000+01:00

Have you ever heard of deixis? no, neither had I until yesterday.
A quick question for Irish or Scottish readers out there:is the phrase 'will you have/be having a cup of tea?' more polite than 'do you want a cup of tea?' Is it preferred to 'Would you like a cup of tea?', and does it have the same connotation of politeness?

lost time

2007-10-23T22:47:00.000+01:00

I hadn't realised how much time had elapsed since my last posting on this site. This is partly due to being so damn busy at the beginning of term, and partly to lassitude in filling it in. In all honesty however, I haven't been doing much since then in terms of study or research. It's getting the opportunity to do some that has been the problem.
anyway, here's some information about what I'll be doing next month at the EnglishUK Teachers' conference. I'm up against Adrian Underhill, so I suspect I'll be playing to the TEFL equivalent of one man and a dog called Colin. I will be dealing with Tenses in English and the Notion of Distance. My key idea is that we can understand the English Tense system by visualising it in terms of relative proximity to the speaker's point of view; That is, we can deal with tenses by seeing them as being 'here', 'there', or 'in between', and that by using this process we can give answers to the reasons why we choose particular forms to express concepts relating to futurity; explain why certain conditionals and polite forms choose to use'past' forms of the verb; and why we need to use 'to' in order to create the full infinitive in English, and how the full infinitive has a consistent, single and remarkably simple function when used in verb patterns (but not with certain adjectives); And also to suggest that one particular piece of grammar has been presented inaccurately since God Knows When.
That's the idea, anyway.

2007-09-26T21:40:00.001+01:00

Today has felt like a series of lost opportunities, thanks to several external factors. However, I did some further work on the material I'll be presenting at the English UK conference and produced an initial PPT that I'm going to do with my students. The aim is to see how they react to a different way of seeing tenses and verb structures in English. I discussed it with Liz, one of my colleagues, and it helped me crystallize a few concepts. Interestingly, it has almost confirmed a suspicion I had that my hypothesis is very difficult for people to understand regarding their own language, yet becomes crystal clear when they think about a language acquired later in life.
I'm sorry I'm being a bit cagey: It's just that I want to get the explanation of this idea right before I discuss it. Suffice to say, it builds on some of Michael Lewis' stuff, and is apparently mirrored by Stephen Pinker in his new book, which I have yet to read.

Induction day

2007-09-26T00:04:00.000+01:00

Two new classes today - an upper intermediate group in the morning, an advanced group in th evening, the lesson virtually identical in every aspect, as we have to give an induction to each and every class we give on their first day. This, I suspect, leaves students feeling 'Jeez, is it going to be like this for the next year?', and possibly leaving forthwith. I made a generic PPT for all the part time cohort to use this year, which seemed to do the trick - it certainly soaked up the teaching time.
In the morning, walking Angus to school, I reflected on how there is a direct cognate between going to/will and have to/must; the first in each pair operate as 'false modals', and imply a certain external point of view, or rather one that is not as immediate and personal as the second in each pair.
No time for any reading today, as rather hectic.

2007-09-24T22:36:00.000+01:00

Right, a new blog, but this one is to be about my work, study and research in EFL/ELT.