So long, farewell, Aufwiedersehn, Goodbye....?

Me again.
I find that I have been struggling to write for quite some time now: There is this strange inertia that pulls me away from the keyboard , or the page and pen: An odd reluctance to express myself.
This is not a good thing in someone whose career is based on communication.
Then again, as hinted at in  the last post, I have had some impediments going on work-wise.
Fortunately, these have, as it were, resolved themselves, mainly by dint of me and my erstwhile employer going our separate ways.
While this opens up all sorts of Adventures, Excitement and Really Wild Things for me as I gaze across the infinite possibilities of the future, I cannot help but feel that it is a shame as well.
Reading College once boasted an EFL/ESOL staff of thirty teachers and a student cohort, in its halcyon days, of about a thousand students.
As of June this year, it had five full-time equivalents and fewer than two hundred learners.
This in a town that is, by geographical and population size, the most linguistically diverse spot on the planet.
What happened? We should have been beating off learners with sticks!
Well, I'm not going to point any fingers of blame at all, except at the cuts that have absolutely harrowed all of Further Education. I cannot help but feel it is utterly misguiided, culturally divisive, and devastatiing for the prospects of anyone who finds themself out of work and without access to the necessary skills.
I have witnessed the ongoing deprofessionalisation of this industry, with oiur skills and qualifications increasingly being seen as an expensive irrelevance. In a way, it reminds me of the Bad Old Days in EFL, when anyone with a backpack and a passing grasp of English could get a job anywhere.
I have watched my colleagues and friends struggle with increasingly harder and harder workloads for less and less reward. I have watched as good teachers have just fizzled out and left - and here I am, one of them now.
I'm not blaming any one person or institution for what has happened - rather, it is a pervasive climate of, effectively, failure and incomprehension.
Anyway, as they say in interminable meetings, 'It is what it is, and moving on...'
It is what it is. I am moving on.
I feel as if a very large stone has been lifted from my back, and for the first time in a long time I can stand up and see towards the horizon.
At the moment, I think I'll be taking a break from all things ELT, but I'll be keeping this blog on simmer for the time being.
Do I miss the college? Well, I miss the students of course - especially this year's batch, who have been universally lovely. I will miss my colleagues within and without my department - Sue, Mary, Rachel, Angie, Ruth, Gillie, Chrissie, Nicky, Sylwia, Tracy, Tina, Julie, Sarah, Daniella, Martin, Richard, Nada, Lenka, John, Lorna, Katia, Josh......too many to count.
And, strange as it may seem, I will miss the view looking north from D floor - your eyes lift over the roofs, past the canal and the train line, and suddenly you seem to be in a great forest stretching towards the horizon. It was always uplifting on the tougher days.
I will not miss the paperwork, or the targets, or the meetings, or the CPD sessions that largely involved flipchart pads and/or paper table covers and marker pens. I will not miss the pointless politics that seem to be endemic in all public institutions.
On the other hand, I can't deny that this has been an enormous part of my  life, and moving away from it, good and bad, is a little difficult at times.
As for EFL - I've been doing it for most of my adult life. I love teaching, but it's time for some more challenges, I think.
I remember standing on a hill at the commencement of my career, just before going  to Turkey for the first time, and saying to myself 'There are lands out there'.
It seems I'm in the same place again.
Onward to the horizon.

Set affective filters to high!

Ahem.
Hello again.
Yes, I know it's been a while, but hey, here I am.
You may (or may not) be wondering about the hiatus in writing, and all I can say is that I just haven't felt a truly compelling urge recently. That, and an awful lot of soul searching, accompanied by many Strange And Awful Things Happening.
To put it all in TEFL terms, my affective filter has been ramped up to 11 and my intrinsic motivation has flatlined, and I can't see anything particularly worthwhile about the extrinsic motivations.
More on the reasons for my own passing state of low dudgeon in a moment.

We've all seen students do this in class, even the brightest and best: A lethargy besets them and learning slows down to a glacial pace. At best, they gradually climb out of it; At worst, they just give up on learning entirely, and their English becomes stuck in the grey hinterland of sub-B1 functionality.
What can we do to help students whose performance and attitude dip? It's not an easy task, simply because there are so many factors that have to be taken into account. It might be work or study load; it may be worries about family; It could be a case of self-consciousness and fear of being seen to fail before peers.
Or it could be even simpler. It may be that your lessons are, bluntly, tedious spoonfuls of mental pabulum.
I've mentioned on this blog before that I suspect an awful lot of teaching methodologies are there to keep the teacher entertained rather than educate the learner (Suggestopedia, anyone?), but they can be used to shake up what you do in class. If you've taught the same thing the same way more than twice, give a thought to doing it differently. Not only will you be doing your class a favour, you'll most certainly be doing one for yourself. It's important, as educators, to be on the edge of uncertainty, to ponder the how and why of teaching something new or unfamiliar, or something familiar in a novel way. After all, when we started off, we were teaching something for the very first time and working out the how and the why as we planned. I remember it took me about eight attempts to get the teaching of subject and object relative clauses off pat. I'm still pondering how best to get students to make the link between auxiliaries, verb forms and aspect.
So before you start blaming high affective filters and extrinsic factors for the fact that your intermediate class are staring blank eyed at you, start with wondering what it is you can do in class that may make a change.
As for me and my weltschmerz, well, it finally appears that I have come to the end of the road in this career. That, however, deserves an entry of its own.

Hand it in or Email it in?

We've gone all Google at my place of work. I'm still not quite sure if this necessarily a good idea.
On the one hand, it does mean that things are incredibly easy to share - colleagues can work simultaneously on worksheets, photos and resources can be sent with the click of a button, and it's child's play to create communities and websites, AND there's even the new Google Classroom app to play with.
On the other, it's incredibly easy for well-meaning people with all the spatial conceptualisation of a loaf of wet bread to create huge, arcane and functionally useless hierarchies of folders and subfolders that take one down a dizzying maze of technological befuddlement. Google Classroom is a nice idea, but it's even less feature-rich than Edmodo at present. And, perhaps more importantly, do I really want to be at the beck and call of my students at the ping of a button?
One of the problems if technology in class is that it can make it all too easy, in a way, and what can end up happening is that the technology becomes the object of the lesson rather than a resource to deliver lesson content and the learning objectives. I've had scheduled IT classes in the past where the learners may well be writing something on a blog or wiki, but the reason for writing is obscured by the act of typing and negotiating menus and buttons on a word interface.
Now, don't get me wrong - I love it when students email me their homework. I find that I can mark it and give feedback faster (and, I think, better) when I have a nice pristine electronic sheet in front of me than a sadly tattered piece of A4 torn from a notebook. The question is this: should we insist that all homework is mailed in rather than handed in?

I think that it very much depends of several factors. The first is the language level of the learner. In my Advanced groups, emailing work in is pretty much the norm, and in fact I think that it's appropriate. A lot of these learners are working full time and using English in professional correspondence electronically, so the medium of communication and practice is appropriate. But for lower level learners, it can be a more complex picture. As a rough rule of thumb, I'd say that the lower the level of English, the more handwritten work should be done. Quite apart from avoiding the temptations of spellchecking, it also helps the teacher analyse issues with the way learners engage with the language as they write - all kinds of errors and mistakes are apparent in handwritten work.

The next thing to consider is the learner's native writing system. Clearly, if someone has Arabic as their L1, writing in latin script provides its own challenges - not merely the formation of the individual letters, but also writing in the other direction, ensuring the text is left margin justified, and so on. I also wonder what the act of writing in an unfamiliar direction has on a learner's thought processes.

Two further factors are the age of the learner and their exposure (and attitude) to IT. Younger learners are far more likely to either be proficient users of tech, or adapt quickly to using it. Adult learners, on the other hand, may present challenges in the way they approach computers. for some, it's quite clear that they have a motivational issue with many kinds of technology - very similar, in fact, to the affective filter that some people have ramped up to high levels, leading them to be ineffectual language learners.

So, for example, broadly speaking, if I had a 40-year-old Georgian student in a pre-intermediate class, I'd probably want him or her to hand in a handwritten piece, while a 20-year-old German in an FCE class would be better off emailing their work.

Of course, we could compromise and ask students to write out their work, then scan it and email it.

One more point to consider though: Language is not merely an act of mind and ear and tongue: It it an act of the whole body. I feel that learners who make notes, who write things out, who copy things down off the board, are more likely to be better users of English. Put simply, the act of writing actually consolidates the language in the learner's mind - using the hand confers, as it were, a shape to the words and the grammar. Words and syntax are given tangibility and (literally) made palpable by the application of pen to paper, by the subtle movements and pressures of fingers grasping the instrument. And that is a skill that may be in danger of being lost by solely relying on technology.

'Fail again. Fail better.'

How often have you heard a student say 'I don't get it!', or 'I will never understand this language'? How often have you seen them do that puffy thing with the cheeks and shrug* their shoulders before going slumping in their seats?
There's always a point where it feels easier to give up rather than plod on, as in life as it is in English language learning. How many times have you felt as if you have reached the end of the line with something?
As you may have noticed, I'm on a bit of a Student Motivation streak in my writing at present, as it's been nagging at me as to why some learners persist and why others, well, don't. In part, it is derived from the fact that I'm trying to write consistently for a hundred days, and so I'm aware of the apices and nadirs within my own motivation from day to day - and hour to hour, in fact. And because I'm aware of it in myself, I observe it in others. Currently, I have a new student, who joined the class late and has quite a complex background. This person has had some severe difficulties in life, and has only just got back into some kind of routine, but has been out of mainstream education for a very long time (they are in their forties). Doing an exercise today, I noticed that while other students were getting on with the task, this person (let's call them 'A.X.') was sitting still. A.X. then shook their head, threw the pencil down, and said 'no understand'.
I intervened at this point, as A.X. really needed guidance. After a few minutes' work, A.X. got it, and carried on with the exercises with a considerable look of relief on their face.
A.X. is an example from the more extreme end of the 'I don't get it' spectrum, and one that will take a lot of coaching and coaxing over the months to come. If we're in a class with 30 students, however, how on earth can we give just that kind of support to each and every learner?
I think a  lot of what helps or hinders the English learner is not only their expectation of the experience of learning the language, but also how they react to problems in general. Put simply, the more 'rigidly' they view a problem, the more likely it is that they will fail to crack it. To give a simple example, some learners spend years trying to get their heads round the present perfect while others just dive in merrily, splashing examples of the tense all over the language pool, if you don't mind me extending my metaphor. Another issue is, of course, speaking: some students are so concerned with speaking without mistakes that they never open their mouths at all.

It seems to me that the learners most likely to get a block with language are those who, as it were, seek perfectibility - that is, they want the language to pop out fully-formed, rather than something that needs to be whelped into shape. At this point, we should actually look at what really confident language learners do. It is generally noticeable that these kind of students are more likely to be not afraid of making mistakes; that they do more reading; and that they are more likely to talk with people outside the classroom, to have better jobs, and to generally seem better-adjusted to living in a native speaker environment. In short, learners who are more resilient to problems and and for whom failure is just a step towards success are more likely to be better language learners and become more fluent.

It does give rise to an alternative idea, however: Should that statement be the other way around? Are better users of a language more likely to be more resilient in the face of problems?

In a way, this would make sense - the greater your fluency, the greater your capacity to verbalise an issue and find a way to deal with it. But of course, when it comes to adult language learning, it is probably a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other.

What I think is most effective, at least in the classroom, is to emphasise the fact that mistakes will be made - and in fact, that making mistakes is the  best way to experiment with and perfect the target language. As I say to my learners, 'You're here because you don't speak perfect English. If you did, you wouldn't be here, and I would be out of a job'.

Students should be aware that they are allowed to fail, and fail again, and 'fail' once more if necessary, because it isn't failing. It's learning.

*There's a whole book waiting to be written about the meaning of shoulder shrugs and to what extent different people indulge in them, from the cool Parisian mere wisp of a rise of one shoulder to the full on comical both-shoulders-hands-raised-lower-lip-pout found in Central Anatolia.

Ten things English learners find annoying, infuriating, or just plain weird about the English

Having to live abroad, for whatever reason, is a major challenge for anyone. It's all very well to talk about assimilating into the local community, but in practice it's often easier just to find people from one's own culture and skulk indoors, pining for familiar foods and TV programmes. Well, that's an ex-pat TEFLer's lot a lot of the time, anyway.
You may be familiar with the notion of Culture Shock: It's the series of emotions one goes through over a period of time as you become accustomed to living in a different culture, from surprise and charm ('Look at all these live animals in this open air market! I must Instagram this!'), to shock ('They're going to do WHAT to this dog?'), to disgust ('I am NOT eating THAT. But I'll Instagram it'), to ennui ('Oh for God's sake. Dog Stew AGAIN') and finally to acceptance ('Hmm. This dog stew could do with a little more pepper and chili. I'll Instagram it anyway.')
Wherever you go in the world, things are done differently - and it's often the seemingly innocuous things that are more likely to grate upon the soul.
What about students coming to the UK? What do they find most difficult to get their heads around? This isn't a definitive list by any means, but it's the things that pop up from my students all the time. In no particular order:

1) Saying 'Alright?' as a way of greeting, or saying 'How are you?' and not waiting for the answer

    Students are either bemused or infuriated by this, or both (befuriated, anyone?), and it simply comes down the fact that both seem to the language learner to be expressions of concern, rather than another way of saying hello. The stock responses, 'oh, not bad, not bad', and 'mustn't grumble' are also a good way of confusing students.

2) Saying 'Please' and 'Sorry' ALL THE TIME

    While most languages have cognates for both words, very few cultures use them with the same enthusiastic frequency that British people do. What is possibly the oddest UK trait is the tendency to say sorry for something that is very clearly someone else's fault, as in 'Sorry, you appear to have knocked one of my teeth out whilst you were enthusiastically waving your hand around', or 'Your pointy stiletto heel appears to have pierced my foot as you stepped back in this overheated, crowded lift. Sorry.'

3) Avoiding looking at someone you know until you're really close to them

    Students are perplexed at the habit of people who, when they sight someone they know at a distance, will then engage in a strange gavotte of movements that mean they never lock eyes on their acquaintance until the very last second, at which point they let out a slightly too eager greeting, such as 'Gosh! Hello! Fancy seeing you here!'

4) The intonation sounds false and actorly

     Ask students their opinions about the English and one thing that tends to come up sooner or later is that we are two faced. Partly this is to do with the way the average Brit hedges their bets when giving an opinion, e.g. 'it's quite good', i.e. it's bloody fantastic, or 'it was interesting', i.e. it was bloody awful. There's an awful lot of linguistic decoding necessary to work your way through this semantic minefield, and it's not helped by the fact that the range of intonation in English is remarkably wide. Our high notes, when expressing surprise, shock or just asking questions are very high, and our low notes, when bringing a sentence to an end or when Jeremy Clarkson wants to add an ironic coda to his sentences, are very low. To many non-native speakers, this can sound incredibly artificial.

5) The number of accents

 

I say! 

 This really is a problem for almost everybody who comes to the UK. Most language learners who began their English lessons ar school would generally only experience the kind of accent that you'd associate with a Chap from the 1950s in possession of a Brylcreemed head and a strangulated testicular hernia. Imagine the horror when they arrive here, ask a question such as, 'Excuse me, Can you tell me where is the station, please?' and are faced with the linguistic car crash of 'Aye hen, yasee ower thier, ye tek the lef, then hang a right asfaa as the busstop, do a rightdoon thastepsan go aboot tooorthree hundred yards thenyullseeyit'.
The UK is a truly extraordinary place in terms of the range of accents you encounter - just going along the M4 from London to Cardiff shows you how different the way we speak is.

6) Carpets in the bathroom

 

mmm, hygienic..

  The look of disgust and horror my learners' faces show at this strange quirk of ours says it all really. Seriously though, who ever thought that it was a good idea to have carpets next to a toilet?

7) Wearing shoes indoors

    Many of my learners are surprised by the tendency we Brits have to wear shoes indoors, until they try taking their own shoes off. They quickly realise that unless you have feet containing lava, you quickly freeze from the bottom up. Having said that....

8) Babies wearing virtually no clothes, even in winter

    Every single one of my students has commented on this at one stage or another. They look aghast at the fact that every baby they see on the streets seems to have as few layers on as possible. That and the fact that their mothers all seem to be 16 years old and overweight.

9) Needing a licence for a TV

Students are, at first, genuinely puzzled by this weird bit of legislation. I occasionally, for want of some amusement, tell them that they need to sit a test before they're allowed to watch TV. Some learners get genuinely annoyed, too, especially when I tell them that they still need a licence even if they're watching via their PCs or tablets.

10) GPs and Paracetamol

"Your leg's fallen off and you have TB-have some Paracetamol"

Almost every one of my students has complained about this at one time or another - 'I went to the GP, I had a cold, he said to me "take Paracetamol"!' A lot of students don't bother with registering at a surgery because of this - I have one learner who makes regular trips back to Paris to consult her own doctor. However, those who have had serious health issues have never had anything bad to say about the care they've received. I think it's just the frontline care they find a little difficult.

The calm before the storm

Blimey. I am knackered, and I haven't even started teaching yet. In the past two weeks, my three colleagues and I have seen over four hundred potential students and enrolled about 250 of those, with invaluable support from our administrator; we've thrashed out timetables, reallocated who's doing what and when, sorted out rooms, planned (sort of) what we're going teach and when, redecorated (sort of) the rooms and noticeboards, including having statutory Equality & Diversity motivational posters (namely 1x Gandhi poster, 1x Malcolm X poster, 1x Nelson Mandela poster per room: this apparently keeps OFSTED inspectors and managers on Learning Walks happy), plus posters that deal with Employability, Literacy and Numeracy. I'm sure there must be a single poster out there that beautifully summates all the above.

It struck me, as I ran around doing all this adminny stuff and not without some irony, that I'd probably be better off running my own language school, instead of working for FE. Yet here I am still.

On Monday, I will face my new classes for the first time, and that is always a moment of trepidation. Just before you enter the room, you take a breath, wonder what the year will hold, step in, and begin to change the shape of the world for the class within. That may sound bombastic, yet it is true - all teaching and learning leaves the world looking different in one way or another, and perhaps no more so  than for those who need to learn a new language in order to live in a new land.

Actually, I have to be honest here - My colleagues and I have been paid the most enormous compliment by having virtually the entire cohort of last year's students sign up (without bribery or coercion) for another year of study, something that happens not that often. However, they've also been joined by new students, so that'll be fun.

I have a clear idea of the direcion we'll be taking this year - I should after twenty years on the job - but not a clue about the routes we'll take, which alleyways and back roads we'll explore together, what stumbling blocks and hurdles we'll surpass, what surprises await us.

And that's what I love about this job - there really is always something new, even among the turgid dross of admin and official expectations. Once I've closed the door of my classroom, absolutely anything can happen. Most of the time, it's a series of little bits of magic and miracle, of watching light bulbs go 'pop' above someone's head as they realise something, or see that they understand a word, or phrase that just minutes before had been entirely alien. It's the moment where I tell a joke and they laugh, then laugh again at the realisation that they've understood the joke in the first place, and THEN they tell a joke in English, and other people laugh. It's seeing someone, who began a course crying with frustration at not being able to explain their predicament, crying with joy because they can explain and SOMEONE ELSE LISTENED AND UNDERSTOOD THEM. It's the joy of just being with people who actually want to learn, to get ahead, to make their lives better. The class is just a great place to be.

But then I have to leave this, return to the office, and deal with the dead grey hand of bureaucracy - the one that reduces humans to dessicated numbers and flicks these around like a ghoul with an abacus, lifting some here, dropping some there - and I wonder why it is that there are those who deem certain lives, and certain kinds of education, to be of so much less value than others. I know, that in many (but most certainly not all) cases, it's not any one  person who does this. It's just the way the whole system works, yet some participants of it are more enthusiastic for the workings of the machinery than others.

And yet for all the negatives, I prefer to keep in mind who it is I teach, and why I do it, and fight for their corner as best I can. I'm not here for the enhancement of some bean counter's reputation - I'm here for the students. I'm not here to let my college boast of how much they've saved in wages, or how many students they've enrolled or retained or got to pass an exam - I'm here for the students. I'm not here to make other people, or me for that matter, look like better people - I'm here for the students. I'm certainly not here for the money - if I were, I wouldn't have hung around when our wages got cut a couple of years ago.

And so, here we go again: the calm before the storm, the time to take a breath, open the door, step into the room and start weaving new shapes into the tapestry of other people's lives.

Enjoy your year, whether you're a teacher, or a learner, or both.

It's Monday! Flee for your lives!

Actually, Monday's nearly over, so never mind.....

The last post was all about capturing that Friday feeling, but a long-term reader of this blog* suggested that it might be an idea to have a companion piece that would, as it were, book-end the week.
So here it is.

I got thinking about why we get the Monday Dreads: what is it exactly that makes people look askance at the beginning of the working week? I think we'd largely agree that it is the prospect of returning to work that does it: the prospect of the next five days appears to be an interminable grey trudge, with the bright lights of Next Weekend blinking cheerily away in the distance. So, it is all associated with the return to a routine, a set programme of events that offers little in the way of stimulation or reward - or at least, instantaneous reward and stimulation.

However, without a degree of order, routine and control in our lives, we get nothing at all done, and this ultimately is even more dissatisfying. In order to enjoy the Fridays, we've got to endure the Mondays. What we need for a balanced system is both order and disruption.

Just going back a few centuries to demonstrate what a smartarse I am, I'll point out that the medieval Feast of Fools, or even the Roman Calends of January were one of the ways of doing just this: the miserable trudge of existence was leavened by having days of festival, where the traditional social order was inverted and conventions mocked. Zooming up to the early Industrial Revolution, many workers, having come straight from the farms and fields to the city, would attempt to uphold the tradition of Saint Monday, which was basically an excuse for another day off and added booze.

So why am I speaking about this subject here? Well, simply because I think we can apply this same thinking to language learning. As Jeremy Harmer, I believe, pointed out not too long ago, most language learning is just bloody hard slog. You have to learn your irregular verbs, practise your third-person -s in the present simple, get your head around phrasal verbs and so on. There is no magical panacea that will turn you into a fluent speaker of any language overnight. You've got to stick at it, and that can be a long trudge.

No wonder language learners can get a case of the Monday Dreads. And no wonder that language learning can be so demotivating, especially when you have someone who seems to get stuck at lower-intermediate level, or, to use my working week analogy, at about 12:46 on Wednesday afternoon.

I suggest that we need little 'disruptions' to break up the monotony.

It's well known that novelty is great for learning. What people tend to forget is that novelty rapidly becomes humdrum. You might remember the first time your teacher said, 'let's have the lesson outside today!', but not the second time; If you've ever seen a Prezi presentation, you'll know that the first time you see it, it's really a 'wow!' moment. By the third time you've seen one, however, it's more of a 'meh' moment, if not one of downright hostility. This effect is known as hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which is just as the name suggests: we are remarkably good at turning the special or the unique into the mundane and tedious. In language learning, this is not necessarily a bad thing: if a learner is producing the routine features of language accurately without thinking about it, then they have converted something that was once novel into something everyday. However, novelty tends to work only a few times at best, and any efficacy it has is relatively limited.

So what about these 'disruptions'? What I'd have in mind is something that either a) disrupts the routine of the class or b) disrupts the way the learner looks at what he or she is learning. In other words, it's a way to get the class looking at the situation from a different perspective, then bring them back into the routine and see what difference it makes, if any. It can also be a way of developing good language routines.

Here's an (old and easy) example: if you're teaching past continuous, get a colleague to interrupt the lesson fairly early on. After about 15 minutes, ask the students 'OK, what was xxx wearing? What was he doing?' etc.
Another one: give students a card at the beginning of the lesson. The card has an instruction on it that they must not show to anyone else - for example, 'You must use the word 'well' at the beginning of everything you say'.
It might be to get the learner to do their classwork or  homework in an unexpected way, or pushes their linguistic comfort zone.
And yes, I know that some of you out there might be tutting and saying 'but that's what I do anyway - it's called teaching!', but then again, the point of disrupting is that it highlights what we might consider the mundane and force us to reappraise it, which is what I hope I've managed to do here. One of the problems that long-term TEFLers get, just like any worker, is that we perhaps don't disrupt our own work patterns enough.
So, just for a change, do something disruptive in class next lesson and see what happens.

That Friday Feeling

Yay! Friday! What's not to like about it?
Well, everything actually, if you're a TEFLer in a private language school where the concept of a weekend has yet to reach.

Erm.....

I remember feeling apprehensive about the prospect of working weekends during my first ELT gig back in 1993. The prospect of delivering seven hours' worth of lessons on a Saturday and a Sunday didn't exactly fill me with joy. As it turned out, things weren't that bad, except for the Sunday afternoon class at 3:30. I still occasionally wake up in a cold sweat about that one. Wednesdays became my de facto weekend, which was fine, apart from the fact that 1990s Turkey was full of party-loving TEFLers, meaning that a) Tuesday evenings were ESPECIALLY wild and b) Wednesdays tended to be a bit of a blur, at best. Once My Friday Feeling Mojo had been reset to Tuesday evenings, it was all pretty easy.
And the one thing that I never, ever experienced was the Monday Morning Dread. I never had that ghastly sensation of grey horror that is experienced as you know that you have to drag yourself into the office for another deadening round of the working week. I may not have always enjoyed being in the classroom, but by and large I've never had that 'oh God....' sensation. And any job that doesn't have you wishing the week away has got to be good.

Me, when I worked in a call centre.

Anyway, segueing nonchalantly into the real subject of this post, is there a way we can engender that Friday Feeling in to our learners, especially those who walk into class looking as if a monthful of Mondays just just landed on their head? Keeping up learner motivation can be difficult, and it the degree of enthusiasm someone has for learning English can wax and wane for a variety of factors, even within the course of a single lesson. In a way, we don't need to worry about those students who act as if it's permanently the cusp of the weekend, people with so much motivation that it can be exhausting just looking at them. They will, regardless of almost anything, learn, and more importantly, learn well. We also can't do a lot with the kind of student who looks as if they carry a grudge against English into the classroom - if they've decided to be against learning (which is a bit like being opposed to food), then there is really very little a teacher can do without really deep intervention.
But what about those in between? How do we influence their moods and motivation? Many educators would say 'get them copying the behaviour of the really motivated ones.' Well, yes, but that is very easy to say, but not necessarily to do. Every single student is exactly that, an individual, and what may work for one person may not work for another. We may not know all the circumstances outside the classroom that each learner lives in, and whatever happens out in the 'real' world will influence what happens within the class.
It's one of our responsibilities as teachers to be aware of possible external influences and either encourage or mitigate their effects, depending on how they affect the learners' motivation. In this respect, I think we have to lead by example: there are many times that I have had a godawful day, or week, or whatever, yet I pride myself on leaving that baggage outside the classroom and go in there as Mr Positive Vibes.
In other words, we model an example of professional behaviour that we expect the learners to emulate. This doesn't mean being manically jolly - that would soon get wearing, to put it mildly - but rather being enthusiastic, positive and realistic about the work being done in class. I believe that a lot of a learner's motivation does stem directly from the teacher's own passion for the subject.
Of course, there are other extrinsic and intrinsic factors in motivation, but I'll leave that for a different post.
Have a happy weekend - even if you are teaching the 3:30 Sunday slot.....

How valid is your lesson?

Well, my nose is most firmly back to the grindstone once again, and I'm busy with the usual start-of-year rigmarole of assessing and enrolling, checking my SoLs, all while sporting the first head cold of the academic term.

Atchoo.

Before long, I'll be getting down to the fun and games of lesson planning. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the degree of elaboration I've put into these has waxed and waned over the years, depending on what I'm doing, how often I've done it before, and if I'm being observed. Like many teachers with a similar number of years' experience, I have a store of lesson plans safely ensconced in my head, along with a more or less encyclopaedic knowledge of the various methods of delivery that we in TEFL love to fiddle with.

Now, I'm sure you've experimented, as I have, with all the available methodologies, from mainstream CLT to the dark arcana of Suggestopedia, or even my own Blockbuster Approach (see my post from July 2013 for that), and I suspect that you may have reached the same conclusion that I have: All these techniques are fine, but I wouldn't like to do them all the time. Again, as I've mentioned before, there is not a single piece of empirical evidence to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that one technique is better than another, so why should I bother with any of them? If Grammar Translation gets results, why not stick to it? If ELT Dogme floats your students' boats, why not go with that?

All this speculation has lead me to this question: How valid are my lessons?

By validity, I am of course referring to the concept of validity when it comes to exams. It strikes me that we can also use the term when we think of our lesson, or indeed our course. And yes, I know that it may sound as if I'm reinventing the wheel - surely a syllabus must have validity in order to be meaningful? - but I suspect that the reason why we're teaching a given lesson may sometimes get hidden beneath the need to complete, let's say, a course, or because we're using a particular methodology.
If we think of a lesson in these terms, we could ask the following:

A)Does it have construct validity?
 That is, does the construction of the lesson actually end up teaching what it's meant to teach?

B)Does it have content validity?
 In other words, does the lesson's contents (in terms of the methodology) lead to the desired outcome?

C)Does it have criterion validity?
 Does the lesson, within its constraints, demonstrate that the desired learning outcome has been learned?

D)Does it have face validity?
 In other words, does the lesson look, feel, taste, smell, and/or sound like a lesson?

Two things are obvious from looking at a lesson this way.

The first is that all lesson planning should be outcome lead. This is remarkably simple, yet it is remarkably easy to forget, especially if we're teaching our backsides off and only have time to copy Unit 4, page 35, or whatever.

The second thing is that A) and B) are the two questions that teachers should ask, while C) and D) are the two questions that institutions and inspecting bodies always ask.

I suspect that in the rush to make our lessons engaging and fun (not least for the teacher), our objectives can sometimes become lost, and this in not merely a problem for the tutor - the institution itself can be culpable, leading to lessons that may well be entertaining and full of activity, but which actually deliver far less than they potentially could.

Anyway, back to the grindstone....
Atchoo.

Keep Calm and Shout Slowly

...aka the English Approach to Talking to Foreigners.
I've been delivering workshops on working with Non-Native English Speakers recently, and of course I've highlighted the above typical behaviour as something we shouldn't do. Someone asked why we shouldn't - he thought speaking loudly and slowly was the best way of getting a message across clearly. But as anyone who has ever experienced this phenomenon in English (or in my case, Turkish) knows, this isn't the case - and it's not necessarily a problem for the language learner, but for the attitude of then speaker.
Here's why - or at least, my take on it.
Let's start with the person speaking loudly and slowly. What do we generally associate a raised voice with? I'd suggest anger, frustration, warning and reproach, or getting someone to do our bidding. Who do we raise our voices at? Well, it may be someone who has angered us. I think the act of raising volume is a deeply engrained evolutionary trait, one that originally served as a way of drawing attention, warning manger, etc.
But who else do we speak loudly and slowly to? Children, the elderly and the infirm - and also foreigners. It's remarkable, actually, that there is a built in tendency to use the same tone of voice to all the aforementioned. It's as if we associate all the above with some kind of infirmity or weakness. In the case of a language learner, it's a linguistic weakness.
Now here's my suggestion: because people tend to talk loudly and slowly to foreigners, and because talking loudly has a deep association with showing strength, being angry, giving warnings etc, there is a tendency in the speaker to assume the listener is in some way inferior. Think about the number of times you've heard the phrase 'stupid bloody foreigner' or similar. I'd suggest that this attitude arises from a simple feedback loop: because the speaker has raised bis or her voice, the or she assumes on some basic mental level that they are angry or irritated , and this colours the speaker's attitude towards the listener.
So, my advice?
DON'T. SPEAK.LOUDLY.  AND.  .SLOOWWLY.
:)

Back to work - in more ways than one

Back once more!
I am making it my mission to engage in a lot more writing between now and December, in any way, shape or form, and this blog has been in hiatus for far too long, thanks to various factors.
Well, I hope all you out there had a restful Summer break. I don't know about you, but I find it difficult to get back into the rhythm of things once the holidays are over. I have this feeling of reluctance, and I really don't want to be back into the same old routines. It's also the fact that I find the first few weeks probably the most stressful: Testing and enrolment, planning, class allocation, dusting down and recycling Schemes of Work etc are hardly the most exciting things in life to do. I'd be happier just getting into class, but my workplace requires me (and my colleagues) to get our hands dirty and get down to all the onerous, tedious pre-teaching tasks - and all the paperwork, blah blah etc.
I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling less than enthralled at the prospect of doing all this.
So, the question is, is there any way possible of getting all the necessaries done without being bored to death?
Answer: probably not. The only solution is to trudge on and get it out of the way so that we can get at the fun bits, namely strutting my funky stuff in the classroom.
In other words, and you're probably way ahead of me here, I'm suffering from a raised affective filter, meaning I have low motivation, thereby leading me to be reluctant to engage in any activity whatsoever.
It shouldn't, of course, be a surprise that we teachers also have to contend with our affective filters but I suspect that we sometimes forget about it, especially when we trudge back into work at the end of August or the beginning of September. But we could, potentially, use this New Term Drag Syndrome (I just invented that phrase. Bit awful) to give us an insight, or a reminder, what learning English can be like for our learners, and, in turn, help ourselves get back into Full Metal TEFL Mode a bit faster.
When we're faced with a dreary task or set of chores so multitudinous that we would rather gnaw our arms off than begin to attempt, it's probably better to start off by looking at the end target rather than what's right in front of our eyes. So, for me, the current end target is having four or so brand shiny new classes, full of bright-eyed, eager-faced and possibly bushy-tailed students ready to learn. For our reluctant learner, on the other hand, it should be some concrete kind of attainment. I don't think it's enough to say 'today, you will learn how to use the first conditional' or whatever. Instead, using the first conditional (or whatever) is a step towards achieving something tangible. This is where it's vital for us to get to know our learners and their needs, and to develop work that will help them reach those needs. Of course, a lot of students will say they are learning English 'to get a job', or 'because English is important', or something along those lines. Unfortunately, these are too vague, and students with vague approaches to language learning are the ones most likely to have poor motivation, to do badly, and to drop out. In my experience, the more concrete a goal a student has for learning English, the more likely they are to achieve it, and to use the language far more fluently
As an example, I came across one of my old students in a restaurant the other day. When I was teaching him, he'd been pootling along with his lessons, more or less going round in circles, and he talked only in the vaguest terms of his future. After one more protracted tutorial, I discovered that he really wanted to study Art, but that he felt he'd never reach a sufficient standard of English to do it. I wrote up a Learning Plan for him, which involved him getting his portfolio of work from Sicily. I nagged him every day for about two weeks until he gave in.
He was immediately accepted onto a Foundation Art course once he produced his work. About a year later, he'd started pootling again, and so I and a colleague once more intervened, and he was taken on to a prestigious course. So, I came across him in a restaurant where he was working. My first thoought was that he'd dropped out.
'No,' he laughed. 'I've just finished the course - this is just a summer job, you know?'
'So how was it?' I asked.
'I'm expecting to get a First,' he told me, proudly. 'Thanks to you.'
It always gives me a thrill to hear good news stories from past students, but we should be aware that they don't always know where they're heading, even the older learners - and sometimes, we don't know where we're heading, either, especially as we walk back through the school gates.
Our motivation has a direct effect on the learners and how successful they'll be. Next time you're eyeing up that unenviable task, take a breath, think of the outcome, and push on through to the other side.

Teaching, not talking.

I shouldn't have gone into work this morning. I woke with my throat still hurting and knew that it was likely to only get more painful if I spent the five hours of lessons looming in speaking, instructing, correcting etc. I could stay at home: however, unless my legs have actually been gnawed off by a tiger, I always feel a bit of a fraud when it comes to illness and being off - that, or I enjoy spreading the viral joy around the staffroom.

So: how to have a lesson without using my voice too much? Simple - just don't speak. I knew I had a lesson due on going to the doctor and describing symptoms etc, so I decided to bring it forward by a day. I went into class, and literally acted dumb for the next hour and a half. This didn't mean not communicating:I wrote questions on the board, added on vocabulary items, expanded ideas on how to express the same idea in different ways, did plenty of mime - even doing work on pronunciation - and by doing so ensured the whole class was engaged in working on the tasks in hand.

What is interesting about engaging this 'Silent Mode' is noticing how the dynamic of the class changes. for starters, the whole room becomes much quieter. There's less chat going on and more focus on the tasks given. The students have to work harder at understanding instructions, but with a decent amount of miming and a whiteboard, it's remarkable how even difficult ideas can be expressed without too much hassle. And by t he class going silent, it becomes easier to monitor, to actually listen to what the learners are saying, understanding, doing with the language.

It also allows the teacher time to reflect on how much time he or she spends in giving instructions, explaining and just generally speaking. After all, we are there to facilitate language learning - if we could somehow absent ourselves entirely from the dialogue, wouldn't we actually be getting more language learning done in class?

I won't pretend that giving a silent lesson is easy. I had a colleague who decided to give it a try and ended up being given a formal warning because his students thought that  he was taking the piss. I had a decent pretext however, namely my sore throat, and in the context of the previous few lessons (use of modal verbs) it worked and worked well. You may find that it works in half-hour stints - it's good for the students as it makes them concentrate on what's happening in class in a different way, but also for the teacher, as it allows us to monitor without the interference of our own voices and also make us mindful of what we normally do and say when we instruct.

Vocabulary and affective filters

It seems that I've been making a return to previous topics recently, both here and at work, but that's OK: we all need to revisit things from time to time, to re-evaluate and appraise.
I'm returning to a subject that I covered ages ago - namely, is there a linguistic hierarchy of needs?

You've probably heard of Maslow's Hierarchy, and how it relates to things like esteem and self-actualization - here's a diagram:

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Anyway, it got me thinking about how some students just never seem to get past the intermediate level, and how some learners seem to resent their learning - that they have a high affective filter.

Now, some of this is understandable from the simple fact that English has a relatively small common core vocabulary, meaning that it's possible to reach a B1 level of use quite quickly. However, progressing beyond this, in particular with stepping beyond the confines of using our basic lemmas (e.g. changing use into useful, useless, usability, or swim to swam, swum, swimming etc) is tougher. However, there is also the fact that some learners simply find it hard to progress because, for them, there is a seeming limitation on them as people caused by the lack of language ability. In particular, I'm thinking of ESOL learners, who have to live, function and work within an English-speaking environment.

Here are three questions to ask your learners: Do you feel 'different' when you speak English? Do you sometimes feel like a child, or disabled? Why?

I think part of the issue is the kind of vocabulary we use to express ourselves. If we were to map the 100 most common English verbs on to Maslow's hierarchy, where would they go? Clearly, verbs such as 'eat', 'drink' and 'sleep' would be in the Physiological category. What about modals? Where would we put those? What about verbs of perception, feeling, and opinion? What happens when we map the entire Common Core against this hierarchy?

It strikes me that as a part of course design, we should consider the psychological effects of teaching certain lexical items and chunks. Put simply, if we can elicit words and phrases that we associate with the 'esteem' and 'self-actualisation' categories, we may well find that we have more contented, more fulfilled and more confident language learners. 

Having said that, we all know that the key to learning any language is a)using it and b) practising it. If a learner is unwilling to do this, he or she will never make much headway. But if a learner is not practising/using simply because he/she believes that they'll never get it, then focusing on the kind of language that makes them feel as if they can talk about anything surely will get them to have greater confidence in their abilities.

We should also, of course, consider what kind of topics students need to be able to discuss - for an adult ESOL learner, for example, he/she may need to handle things such as work and employment (possibly with a specialised vocabulary for their field of work), dealing with their children's schools and so on, so delivering content that allows them to deal confidently with these issues is crucial to making them feel better about language learning.

Demonstrating tenses and aspect

Blimey, it's been while since I posted. Have been kept busy with a) a British Council Inspection, followed very closely by b) an OFSTED inspection, both of which officially deemed EFL and ESOL to 'Kick Arse', of course.
I was reading a blog post yesterday, via Twitter, of one teacher's attempt at explaining tenses and the relationship of tense forms to notions of reality and unreality. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark the site, and I've forgotten who wrote it! (UPDATE: Found it! It was Sandy Millin, over here - thanks, David!)
She mentioned how much Michael Lewis, in The English Verb (1986) influenced her teaching, and I'd certainly agree - it's an informative, useful and thoroughly readable book, and one that formed part of the background reading for my 2007 conference presentation on Tense and the concept of Distance.
One part that was particularly useful was Lewis' timelines, explaining the relationship between simple, perfect and going to, but one day while using these timelines in class, I realised he'd missed a simple, but beautifully efficient trick for teaching aspect to learners.
Here it is.
Start by drawing a street corner on the whiteboard. put a stick man on the corner. Ask the learners where the man is, then ask them what tense they are using (He IS on the corner). Next, draw some traffic going past. Ask the students what the traffic is doing (it is passing the man, for e.g.), then ask them what tense that is. Draw a shop to the right: Tell them the man is going to the shop and ask what he's going to buy (e.g. he is going to buy a banana). Now draw a house to the left: Tell the learners that this is the man's home and ask them where he has come from (e.g. he has come from home) and again, elicit the name of the tense. You should end up with a board that looks like this:

Now we have the street corner, point out the directions the man has to look to 'see' the tenses. After that, take away the extraneous details and draw this:

This looks much more like Lewis' timelines, except with a crucial distinction. In The English Verb, Lewis makes the vertical line represent the simple tense: in mine, the vertical represents the point around which the continuous occurs, with the intersection of the lines (the 'street corner') actually representing the time. That is, the directions moving away from the intersection demonstrate the fact that English tenses are, in reality, aspectual (with the exception of the present and past simple tenses).

Having done this and drilled the tenses, move the action back to yesterday and ask the students where the man was. They should, fairly naturally, then come up with the other tenses. Repeat for the future, then draw this:

And there we have it. I've used this for several years now, and it helps the learners understand that there is a spatial element to the tense system in English. Of course, you will have noticed that the perfect continuous forms are not included on this: I've done that for the sake of visual simplicity, but they can be added - preferably during a different lesson :) 

Feel free to use these pictures, but I would appreciate an acknowledgement, please!

What do you think? Ideas for improvement and criticism gratefully received!

English UK Teachers' Conference 2013 - Finding the right Blend presentation

Well, that was a great conference! Packed to the rafters with delegates and good ideas. I found it really refreshing to escape the purlieus of my normal work existence and catch up with a group of fellow professionals.

Obviously, I couldn't see all the presentations, so I look forward to catching up on a few on the English UK website later on. I enjoyed Russell Stannard's talk on tech to enhance student talking, and Hugh Dellar's Counter-Blast to the sloppy use of technology in the class.

Here's my presentation from The English UK teachers' Conference 2013, along with a video about the flipped class and a sample Google form underneath. Here's a link to Socrative, the synchronous class-based quiz tool I mention in the presentation.
I'll be adding a few more links to tools I've used for blended and flipped learning that you may find useful.

and here's a short introduction to the Flipped Class...

English UK beckons again..

It looks like I'm headed for the English UK Teachers' Conference once more, although I have to say it is with somewhat mixed feelings.

Unfortunately, Dave Willis has passed away, and the organisers have asked me to step into the not inconsiderable breach with my own proposal. I'll be talking about Blended Learning and Flipped Classrooms, and in a nod to Dave and Jane, I'm hoping to include something about TBL in a blended learning environment as well.

Full Circle

 There were only a few minutes left. I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to gee myself up, but I felt a horrible twisting in my guts. They were waiting for me.

I'd spent the better part of the whole day getting ready, looking at what material I had, and trying to think out my strategies. Several draft plans had ended up scrunched in a bin, and I had gone through a packet and a half of cheap cigarettes. In the end, I thought I'd made something that would get me through. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. It did, or should do, what it said on the tin, as it were. My train of thought hadn't been helped by the fact that I'd been fighting several issues all day. The first was a hangover, caused by watching Galatasaray draw a match with Manchester United the night before, leading to celebrations the size of which I'd never experienced before. The second issue was the noise from the street. I had never really encountered such pervasive, incessant noise pollution before, from gas vans with jingles that sounded like ice cream vans to fishmongers screaming their wares, from insanely loud music in passing cars to streets full of people calling, shouting, selling, announcing. However, I felt, finally, that I was ready.
I picked up my plan and headed off.

me heading bravely off to face the action.

As I walked towards my destination, however, I felt my certainty and confidence drain away, leaving nothing but doubt. I arrived, but with half an hour before my fateful assignation, I locked myself in the bathroom, looked at myself, and said out loud,
'What the fuck am I doing here teaching English?'

Oh well, who wants to live forever! TEEAAACCCHHHHH!!!!

There was nothing for it however, but to go forth, open the door, and be introduced to fourteen polite, smiling faces. I took a deep breath, and said, loudly,
'Good Morning!'
It was seven in the evening.

And so began my career in TEFL. My first real lesson, on the 21st October, 1993. Here's the page I used:

Good Old New Cambridge English Course, Book 1, Unit 9c, 'I look like my father'
How I managed to stretch this over an hour and a half of teaching, I have no idea. Yet it has stuck vividly with me, simply because it was that very first lesson. I remember about half the class as well: Mustafa, Umut, Tolga, Cigdem, Esra, Muge, Ibrahim, and Pinar. They were all aged 18-24, so not much younger than me, really.
Since then, I've taught literally thousands of students, and covered virtually everything. My first three years of lesson were mostly at elementary and pre-intermediate level, using the above book and the original Headway series, to the extent that I can still quote large chunks of the tapescripts, complete with the actors' dodgy 'foreign' accents (e.g. 'I live in Tex-ass. That's the secon' biggest state. I got fourteen-fifteen bedrooms...'). I have taught TOEFL prep, and experience I'd rather avoid doing again, thank you very much. Later, I progressed to the dizzy heights of Intermediate level classes, and slowly progressed upwards to do, once I came back to the UK, FCE, CAE and CPE groups, as well as International Foundation Programmes and ESP courses. I've taught EFL and ESOL and the shades in between.
I've been a DOS. I've been Course Leader and Programme Leader. I've been a presenter at conferences, and delivered CPD to colleagues.
And where do I find myself now? After all the cuts to FE spending and funding, after several OFSTED inspections where Leadership and Management have been slated, but nothing has changed, after my team has been butchered to just 2.7 Full Time workers?
I'm teaching an elementary class and a pre-intermediate course. And after years of teaching just high-level students, I've remembered what kept me going in those first couple of years: A student's eyes light up because they'd said something accurately for the VERY first time, or they'd worked out a concept and could apply it straight away, that magical moment of comprehension. You can get it at higher levels, but there's a visceral shiver of excitement from seeing it happen with someone for the first time ever, and use it straight away.
So today, with my Entry 2 (CEFR: A2-B1; EFL equivalent: Elementary) ESOL group, I taught the page above.

It was RUBBISH.

I brought it to a quick end, and carried on with something brilliant instead.

Faking it.

Right, now that I'm back into the maelstrom of the new term and put a few lessons under the belt, time to kickstart the old blog again - I hope you all had a good summer, readers.

I don't know about you, but I still feel somewhat apprehensive before going into a new class, even after twenty years before the whiteboard. I still remember my first time going into a class for real, staring in panic at my reflection in the mirror of the bathroom I'd locked myself in, saying 'OhshitohshitohshitwhatthebloodyhellhaveIgotmyselfinto?' and trying to breathe. I just wanted to run away, but knew I couldn't. I would, eventually, have to unlock the door and go into that classroom to be met by twenty pairs of eyes. Minutes passed, and I kept on looking at myself, trying to chide my reflection into action. Suddenly, the school bell, an electronic little jingle that kind of went all wonky at the end, sounded:
Bing bang bing bang bing bang biiioooononinining.
This was it.
What did I do?
I went on to teach for the next twenty years, by striding into the class and saying, as loudly as I could without shouting, 'Good Evening!'
And I've been doing varieties of this with every new class ever since. It was all about faking it at the beginning - the impression of control, the sense of being the boss of the environment, until I actually became so. That may make me sound as if I need to have the class centred around me, and I think in retrospect that was what the first few years of my career was about, but until I learned to master what I do it was where I felt more comfortable. So, I faked it until I became it, which neatly segues into a mention of Amy Cuddy's TED Talk Presentation on that very subject. In it, she talks about how adopting power poses, i.e. postures that imply confidence and dominance, even for as short a time as two minutes, actually change the way a person thinks of themselves, and of how they perform in situations such as interviews. She has conducted experiments that strongly suggest that how we hold ourselves physically strongly feeds into our mental health and general wellbeing, and I'd recommend giving a view.
So, why am I mentioning this? Well, because as a seasoned TEFLer ready to jump on any passing idea as a teaching opportunity, it got me wondering whether I couldn't experiment on this with my own students. The premise: What if adopting 'power poses' would actually improve a student's capacity to learn English? Teaching ESOL students as I do, it struck me that an awful lot of our learners do actually hold themselves in class in rather diminutive, submissive positions - in the role, as it were, of supplicants before the Grail Of Language Learning. In addition, people with their Affective Filters set to Stun tend to adopt highly defensive postures. What if making the learners sit in ways that imply confidence actually changes their attitude and ability, and actually boosts their learning capacity? This would also, incidentally, link into a subject I've discussed here (and at the EUK conference) before, namely Maslovian Hierarchies and Thematically linked language learning.
Well, we'd have to design an experiment to see if it could work, and I think I may have an opportunity to give it a test- but more of that in another post.

Time for a summer blockbuster

Ah, summer...long days away from work, sweltering temperatures outside, cool drinks, time to loaf around and catch up on all that reading you've promised yourself and de-stress from the 9 to 5 (or 9 am to 9 pm in my case on thursdays).
And time to go to the movies and watch something noisy involving explosions and car chases and stuff. There are few guilty pleasures better than a trashy summer blockbuster.
The problem is, I end up with the feeling that I've seen one, I've seen them all.
And do you know, that's probably the case - almost all the big budget action movies are written to a series of simple guidelines.
I read a very interesting article on Blake Snyder and his book Save the Cat! The last book on screenwriting you'll ever need, which outlines 15 points you'll find in your typical successful blockbuster.
Here they are:

1. Opening image
2. Theme is stated
3. The set-up
4. The catalyst
5. Debate
6. Break into act II
7. B-story
8. Fun and games
9. Midpoint
10. Bad guys close in
11. All is lost
12. Dark night of the soul
13. Break into act III
14. Finale
15. Final image

Go and watch a blockbuster from the last decade or so, and you should be able to spot all of these moments.

So, why on Earth am I talking about screenwriting guidelines on my ELT Journal blog?

Because it struck me that you could, with a little bit of flexibility, apply these same principles to lesson planning. Certainly the Dark Night of the Soul bit, which usually hits me about three quarters of the way through a lesson on Present Perfect. 

I'm not sure about the Bad Guys close in, though. I suppose it could be something like Bad Grammar Appears. 

However, the idea of opening and closing images, the statement of aims, the catalyst for action, the B-story and certainly fun and games are all features that we could recognise in any given lesson.

Anyway, just to avoid poaching, I'm patenting, trademarking, copywriting and all-rights-reserving this as The Blockbuster Approach © ™ to ELT.

Because of course what the world needs is another ELT methodology.

Have a very good summer, one and all.

1

What makes a successful lesson?

I've just been reading 'The Map Is Not The Territory' over on The Secret DOS's blog, which discusses the efficacy (or not) of lesson planning. Speaking as someone with over 20 years' experience of EFL, I can say my relationship to prepping for classes has waxed and waned over time, and involves several variables, including:

• in the early years, not having any experience at all, leading to the creation of exquisitely immaculate lesson plans, taking hours of artisanal labour and minutes of actual lesson time
• the amount of paper available to write down (this was pre-pc) an LP. Several of these were literally created on fag packets.
• being observed/inspected/gang-probed by OFSTED, leading to monumental edifices of LPs
• knowing the materials and class so well that it feels like a waste of time to create an LP
• pretending to be investigating Dogme ELT and saying stuff like, 'Ha! The LP is ANATHEMA to Teaching Unplugged!'
• Hangovers.

I am, of course, writing slightly tongue-in-cheek, he said, slipping in a disclaimer for the benefit of future employers.

However, The Secret DOS's article got  me thinking - what does make a successful lesson? We've all had lessons that we've prepared to the finest edge of perfection, but which in class fly in very much the same way that a heavy brick doesn't; Then again, we've gone into a lesson without so much as a really badly-photocopied worksheet in lieu of preparation, and ended up having something incredibly productive. 

The trouble is, it's hard to empirically demonstrate exactly what it is that makes a given lesson successful, as there are so many variables.

I thought I'd give it a go, though, using the Power Of A Popplet. 

I've had to strip out some variables, such as Will To Live Sapped By The Fact It's Thursday Afternoon, but I've kept the salient ones in. Having said that, I've also probably missed a few as well, but seeing as I started this as a bit of fun, I actually think I've ended up with something useful.

So, tongue now firmly planted in cheek, does this mean we can create an equation for a successful lesson? Let's give it a try:

Ls = Ti{Texp(yt+knCl/knMat) +Lp+Ei+M/TintM} + Si{Skn(knCl/unCl+unInst+knBhvr+knT/Cl)+i(t/cl+mats)+FcX+Sint}>0

             

where Ls= Lesson Success, and Ti (teacher input) plus Si (Student input) is greater than 0.

Of course, I now expect this equation to appear as gospel truth in the Daily Telegraph.

What do you think? Have I missed anything? 

If the Popplet doesn't for some reason appear above, here is the first draft as a pic: