11/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015 Through the looking-glass: creating a video-ready classroom – David Read and Will Nash

As I shall be working at the University of Sheffield over the summer, naturally I am curious as to what they are getting up to over there at the ELTC…

It turns out this talk is part of the Learning Technologies SIG day.

At some point last year, Will and David started thinking about how they could use video for CPD and teacher training. They came up with a project and… <Insert here a very clever use of videos of them speaking, which they spoke to! Brilliant!>

Rationale

Started with 30 teachers 10 years ago in one main site, now up to 100 across many sites. Multiple sites, multiple teachers, different contracts, how do we get them together for CPD? And what about CELTA and Delta? Peer observations? PO relies on giving up own time to observe others. Workshops? Getting teachers together is difficult. How can we create a classroom with video and audio enhancements that can be booked specifically for these things.

What systems could be used?

Looked at off the shelf bespoke systems to creating own system, buying software and hardware for this. There are many. David looked at 3 in particular, when he went to London.

Panopto

Purely software-based system. You buy all the cameras separately. Panopto provides a service where you can upload everything. Like a youtube service for your school. A content platform. Anyone in the institute could access. Good because you can access the content easily, can be integrated with a VLE, and it is searchable as well as trackable. However, no hardware. Panopto costs £12000 per year only for the software and hardware would have to be purchased on top of this.

Sony Anycast

This is a hardware based solution. You purchase a laptop like device and cameras. With this you can live edit what is happening in the classroom. You can have cameras and mics in the classroom and someone can switch between cameras and audio mikes using the laptop. Very high quality again, streaming available again, and the content was accessible. Also mobile, can pick it up and take it and record someone else. BUT relies on live-editing. This isn’t practical for ELTC purposes. Again, very expensive.

Iris Connect

A mixture of both. Commonly used in state schools, also for ITT. Combination of hardware – cameras – and a mobile element e.g. iPads. There is also a software package that goes with it. Video is uploaded to IRIS servers, where it can be viewed and commented on etc. The equipment is very high quality, there is the ability to stream, there is the ability to share and comment (useful for CELTA/Delta). Being a ready-made system was good too. The big issue was that the content is locked down. Only the teacher who uploads it can access it by password. This didn’t fit the ELTC purposes. It’s also quite expensive – in the tens of thousands of pounds.

In the research for these bigger solutions, they found some smaller solutions:

Swivl

A small, robotic device. Not too expensive (£350). It is basically a tracking device. The teacher wears a device round their neck (one comes with the Swivl when you buy it and you can also buy additional ones) and the tracker (in which you can put a mobile phone or iPad) follows this. It does not need an operator, which is useful. It can sit on a table, or a tripod. It can also be used (with an add-on) with other types of cameras. There is a microphone attached to the device that the tracker follows. Very high sound quality (where low quality is often a problem with recording in classrooms). It uses the camera and memory from the phone and the swivel system is directing where it is recording and providing the audio from the device worn by the teacher. Connect it to a computer, download the footage, upload it to youtube BUT !! unlisted. So it is not available to the public. Just as a storage system.

For peer observations, you can make it available for peers to see. The person doesn’t have to be in the classroom. David has also used it to observe a teacher for example teaching a class of muslim women who didn’t want a male in the classroom but was willing for a camera to be in there.

Google Glass

A pair of glasses. Enable showing the classroom from a teacher’s perspective. So you see what the teacher is seeing. (We saw an example of giving instructions, and of monitoring) Delta teachers have given them to the students to wear to see the class from a student’s perspective.

What about Web Tools?

After the video has been created, then what? They investigated tools that could be used for doing things with video.

– Video Ant: A tool for commenting on video. It allows you to annotate it and have markers where the annotations are. And you get “New annotation at ‘5.68” for example. Could be a comment or a question for the person to respond to. These annotations are shareable – for view only or for annotation as well, so people can respond.

– eduCanon: You can create different types of questions which are linked to a video. So you can add in questions at different points, that the viewer has to respond to as they watch. So the recording pauses and the questions appear and then the video continues again.

– Video in Google Forms: An additional feature where you can insert a video into a google form. E.g. with students who do presentations. You could insert the video and get them to self or peer assess it going through the questions on the form while watching. Or with CELTA trainees etc in a similar way.

-Youtube editor: Good for stitching bits of video together freely and quickly, if you want to make one video using bits of several.

Challenges

Balancing out the needs of the hardware systems and the software systems. E.g. IRIS you get ease of use and quality, but no ownership. Or excellent quality vs. too high price.

Swivl and Google glass cost a lot less but the quality is sufficient for the moment.

Future plans

David and Will want to continue investigating it and use it for in-house training development. They also want to look into creating production quality video for commercial sale. There may be a gap in the market there. (Think the IH Observation DVDS etc.) They want to use this system also for standardisation of internal observations – a bank of two or three lessons to carry out standardisation for tutors who are going to go in and observe other teachers. Of course also it is bookable for self-development, teachers can privately film themselves for their own development.

To discover and understand is the university motto, this is one way for them to do this within the ELTC…

Here is the link to the presentation.

Wow! Again with the technology presentations where I learn all about things I didn’t know existed! 🙂

11/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Uncovering Expertise in Coursebook Writing – Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton

Well, I wasn’t going to miss this one – interesting topic and one of the speakers (Heather) was, of course, my tutor at Leeds Met (now Beckett) Uni.

Julie and Heather want to build on the work done by the likes of MaW SIG and ELT Teacher2Writer in terms of demystifying the field of Materials Development.

They started by showing us a quote that sums up the field. Materials writing – it’s “like expecting the first violinist to compose the orchestra’s repertoire in his or her spare time” – this was Michael Swan on expecting materials development from untrained teachers.

Expertise in materials writing

We looked at the characteristics of expertise:

Then we moved on to hearing about Heather and Julie’s research project. They had used simple questionnaires, which they had distributed writers and editors. They shared the data collected with us, looking at different questions (and the responses they had collected) in turn…

What are the 3 biggest challenges that you face when writing a unit of a coursebook?

Practical constraints: space, fitting it all on to the page; being able to develop interesting texts with a limited number of terms; meeting deadlines/timing
Creativity: thinking of ideas, fresh angles on topics, a wide repertoire of tasks, creative language practice for different language points. Editors say that constraints can generate creativity i.e. within the brief.
Following the brief: being really aware of your students and teachers, background, interests etc so that you can write the right kind of lessons for them; coping with changing briefs (as projects move forward this happens)
Technical aspects: the biggest category, coming back to it later!
Managing the process: relationship with the editor

What three pieces of advice about the craft of writing would you give a new course book writer?

Working with others: useful to have a writing partner, complement each others strengths/weaknesses, bouncing ideas off each other; being able to take feedback. Editors represent teachers that aren’t like you.
Going back: looking at what you have created and being self-critical; redrafting things and being meticulous
Visualisation and imagination: you have to be able to imagine what it’s going to look like on the page when it’s finished. How will things flow from one thing to another. Trying to visualise the position of the teacher who will use the material. Understanding what works and being able to conceptualise how the material will work in class. If you don’t have this, you are an editor’s nightmare!
Managing time: managing time within a day, being self-disciplined, managing deadlines etc.
Beliefs: being aware of your own beliefs and principles regarding teaching, being aware of the principles of the project in comparison with your own and thinking twice about taking on a project if the two aren’t compatible.

Coming back to Technical aspects:

A big category so broken into 2:

Theoretical Expertise

You need a sound knowledge of methodology and linguistics.

Writers need to make the findings of research more palatable for the classroom. They also need appropriate terminology to teach items that arise out of theory e.g. corpus research. E.g. what do you call connected speech on the student book’s page?

Practical Expertise

The more support a writer puts on the page, the more tied the students and teacher are to the page. There is a balance between support and flexibility that needs to be considered.
Thinking about the final task in a unit and how you prepare students through the unit to meet it. There was a lot of talk about tapestries and weaving, ending with a seamless garment. This applies within a unit but across a whole book as well, so as to ensure continuity and good recycling of language, also consistency. Ensuring the theme is maintained but interestingly developed.
What do you do if the editor doesn’t like the topic? Knowing when to let go of a topic is important, whether it is because the editor doesn’t like it or if it just isn’t working.
How do you make your text sound natural? Will the editor cut those ums and ahs from your audio in the end?
Knowing how much material is needed for a lesson so that you don’t end up with too much.
You need to make sure communicative activities are genuine.

What advice would you give?

(In terms of use tools, this refers to things like the Oxford 3000 or the Vocab profile)

Has the way you approach writing changed since you first started writing coursebooks? If so how and why?

Internal:

Developing greater automaticity
Gaining more confidence
Gaining more knowledge of the language
Gaining more knowledge of the craft – how much can fit on one page, what works etc.
Awareness of pitfalls
Professional maturity – understanding how it works, relationship with the editor, greater awareness
Focus on students

External:

What’s valued in materials
what has changed in the world of publishing
the impact of the internet.

Conclusions:

It’s highly complex but it can be demystified. Is there any shortcut for experience? What is the best method for developing expertise? “Writing is just like a muscle: you just have to keep at it” (a writer) “I have rarely seen improved ‘creativity’ in writers, as this tends to be inherent and is difficult to train” (an editor)

Task:

Responses that came out in the post-task discussion:

A very abrupt beginning
Lots of vocabulary not practised/activated
Formatting unclear, no explanation for the words in bold.
An example would help to clarify the rubric
Is there a correct answer? If there isn’t, is that ok or not?
The discussion questions are not generative in discussion terms, could be rephrased to push students to produce more than one word answers.
Cultural inappropriacy – potentially inappropriate in some places, taboo issues e.g. divorce in some places.
My group and I also thought that the mixture of word types in the first question could be misleading. And one group of words had more words than the other groups.

And that was all we had time for! It was a very speedy half an hour on a very interesting topic.

11/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Swimming and Pronunciation – Wayne Rimmer

Floor space only for this talk! A very small room and lots of eager participants…

Wayne starts by connecting swimming and pronunciation:

Why the connection with swimming?

They rely on basic principles – once someone has them, they can swim/pronounce better.
The physical nature also brings these two disciplines together.

With swimming, you need to expend a lot of energy but you also need good technique. You can’t get anywhere without good technique in swimming. Wayne thinks it’s the same with pronunciation. Pronunciation is about what you do with your body, how you experience things.

When we give students information, does it help them to produce the language? Maybe not. It’s about what the body esp. oral cavity is doing.

They are both individual efforts. You swim by yourself, you pronounce by yourself.

Both are difficult to observe – e.g. front crawl, all you see is the arm coming out of the water, the actual work is happening under the water. All the skill is happening under the water – you have to get it behind you. You can’t learn about swimming by watching people swim – there is nothing to see. Pronunciation is similar – some more visual than others but how they are pronounced is very subtle.

Both are teachable and learnable (some may disagree!) Wayne has personally got results with both, however.

There is variation in performance.

With swimming, if you go to a pool or a lake, and watch people swimming, you will see lots of different styles, lots of variations in technique. There isn’t just one way to swim, we all have different bodies so the same way won’t suit everybody. With pronunciation, we all have different bodies and speak in different ways – if someone phones you, know who it is because their register, how they pronounce is very specific. There is also variation in accents. E.g. Manchester, northern vowel sounds. Both within anglophone countries and across countries.

Less than 5% of the population produce RP. It doesn’t represent the global reality. And it’s not possible for everyone to reach “native speaker standard” (loaded term). There is a ceiling effect. To get beyond your ceiling, you are going to have to allocate so much time to it that what happens to everything else? Teaching is all about priorities and time.

Non-imitative: even if you could mimic it in the classroom, will you be able to produce it naturally outside? (This morning’s plenary comes back to mind…) Just like with swimming, you can’t become a good swimmer by watching others swimming.

Both are, or should be, fun! Perhaps not with listen and repeat minimal pairs.

Feel the water! Image taken from Google Images search, licensed for commercial use with modification

Feel the water

Personal anecdote from Wayne: He was always quite a good runner at school, went to university, wanted to go to the next level so did as much running as possible, but realised it wasn’t possible without injury. So he needed another aerobic activity. Eventually settled on swimming. He went three times a week and got nowhere, had no technique, got dispirited. He tried copying everyone else, but it didn’t work. He got quite stressed about the whole thing, about getting nowhere. He even spoke to a few people to get advice, but it didn’t work. One day when he was getting out of the pool, an old guy asked him if he was ok, he said he was but couldn’t swim, and the old guy said “Just feel the water”. So next time, he went and decided to concentrate on what he was doing, not worry about what everybody else was doing, not worry about speed, and try out a few things by himself. Over a period, all these things fed into each other and he started to swim more efficiently and faster.

The principles are very basic, you just have to put them into operation and it clicks into place. BUT not overnight. Not in a single lesson. As a coach, it takes a lot of time to get people to that click into place point. But you need the principles. The better your technique, the easier it will feel. It also becomes automated. Like walking. But that takes a long time. To start with, you have to think about every moment, takes cognitive energy.

The principles of pronunciation are also relatively straight-forward but you need to have them before you can move with it:

Egressive airflow: air comes out of your mouth (very few are ingressive, air coming in)
Modulation of airflow: if you just blow out, nothing happens. It comes out through your lungs, through your voice box, the glottis. The folds can be open or closed, vibrating or not. That shapes the texture of what comes next. Then the oral cavity, you have a powerful muscle i.e. the tongue. (If your arms were as powerful as your tongue, you’d move through the water twice as fast!) It can change shape, direction, block airflow etc.
Automation of process: we don’t have to think about where our tongue is in order to articulate, but learners initially do. Until it becomes automatic.

Once you get a feel for what is happening there, then anything is possible. You have to experience pronunciation. With your body.

<Now we have to do things with our tongues, following instructions. Then produce sound. Then glides (diphthongs).>

So the idea is to get students to experience what they are doing with their tongue and where the sound is going.

For pronunciation, we need coaching not teaching:

Not a one style for everyone approach. We need to accommodate different styles.
We need to set realistic goals. And set different goals for different people. So that we don’t burn anybody out/disappoint them. In swimming and pronunciation, it is physical, will-power is not enough.
You have to feel it to do it. Most students aren’t interested in high linguistics, they just want to use the language.
You cannot swim/pronounce for someone. It’s up to them. A lot of what happens is irrespective of us. In teaching there is very little evidence of particular methods of teaching having particular results. E.g. which method is more effective? Hard to find such studies. We like to overestimate our role but… (again echoes of this morning’s plenary!)

Key resource for learning about pronunciation in this sense:

Catford, J (2001) A practical introduction to phonetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

It was a very interesting talk. I would have liked more on the practical activities to do with learners front, but then it was a talk rather than a workshop. I’d really quite like to attend the workshop version…!

11/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015 “EAP writing: teaching strategies for effective paraphrasing” – Tina Kuzic

My first non-plenary talk for the main IATEFL conference (plenty of PCE talks yesterday!) and it’s about EAP. Hopefully it will help me to help my students this summer…

Why paraphrasing?

Because it is such an important part of academic writing. Writing in general is the most challenging thing to teach nowadays, especially with learners who are part of the digital generation, and especially in terms of motivation. For academic integrity, paraphrasing is key.

Tina’s courses

EGAP and ESAP (for psychology) both are in-sessional and obligatory. The average level is B2 when it comes to speaking. However, for writing, the level is a bit lower; especially for formal writing. At secondary school, students only write essays so they don’t get any training in formal writing. The focus of Tina’s courses is study skills, strategies for reading, writing for academic purposes.

Plagiarism, and preventing it, is very important and one of the tasks that we as EAP teachers have to address. Students are often not aware that they have plagiarised, they lack training in this context.

Task 1

For the introductory class, Tina refers to students’ previous knowledge – what they think or know about a given thing. Start with a set of questions.

So, for paraphrasing:

what is a paraphrase?
what does paraphrasing involve?
do we paraphrase in every day life?
why is paraphrasing important for students at university?

Extension: defining terms such as quoting, citing, summarising, referencing

Students may not be familiar with all the terminology.

You could also start with a conversation, a paraphrased conversation, a written summary paragraph of it and get them to notice the differences. Or, give them a quote and a paraphrase, get them to identify the differences.

Task 2: Identifying paraphrasing strategies

An original and a paraphrased sentence is given to the students and they are given time to read each. Students asked to find examples of the rewriting and asked what happens in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Once more familiar, they could look at paragraphs, as per the task we were given.

The first sentence is a summary of the main idea of the text, used as a topic sentence.
Move from paraphrasing details to summarising main ideas.
Use different parts of speech
Use different structures e.g. active vs passive
Synonyms
changing the subject
moving parts of sentences
combining short sentences
dividing long sentences
synthesising sources

Paraphrasing uses a mixture of these.

Provide students with a list of these strategies, then go back to the sentence/paragraph and look for the strategies not previously identified.

Task 3:

Give them one original paragraph and a few sample paraphrases of the paragraph. Read them and identify whether they are acceptable or not. Why/why not? (Using sample students’ writing – from beginning to end of a semester)

Paraphrases!

Paraphrase 1

Following the same pattern as the paragraph e.g. take the first sentence and change it slightly, then the second etc. is not acceptable
The main idea has been lost.
Too many identical chunks of language copied from the paragraph. Too much is directly lifted.

Paraphrase 2

A key term is ‘psychology’ for example – you can’t paraphrase it. But if it isn’t the keyword, you have to change it somehow. Or e.g. non-verbal behaviour, in this case.
Not plagiarised but not accurate either. Original: it may be that… Paraphrase: “it is assumed that…” not the same meaning. Need to keep the original message.
This person also follows the same pattern of the paragraph.
Parts of this have been paraphrased successfully but not acceptable over all.

Paraphrase 3

Acceptable

Paraphrase 4

The sentence lengths are too short.
Coherence and cohesion are also part of paraphrasing.
The language is not hedged enough.
Informality can be a problem.

Something to consider: What about where the source is acknowledged? At the end. But where does it start? We need to introduce also reporting verbs.

Task 4

Introducing paraphrases and quotes
The importance of reporting verbs
Tentativeness
Tenses

Start with a few sentences always with “write” e.g. the author wrote etc, ask ss to read the sentences, identify the verbs and think of other verbs that could be used instead of “wrote”/”has written”. There are many verbs we can use, some stronger, some more tentative.

Give ss sentences with such verbs used and get them to identify these and the tense. I.e. present simple. -> Present simple for current relevance. -> Referring to specific research may be past simple tense.

Get ss to match reporting verbs with their meaning. E.g. argue isn’t about fighting but about putting forward reasoning for your ideas.

Give ss sentences and get them to identify which reporting verbs could be used with each one. (E.g. no. 3 – Seal presents, Seal describes etc.)

Encourage students to use more tentative verbs e.g. challenges/questions/disagrees vs accuses/attacks/dismisses

Task 5

Get students to write an acceptable paraphrase!

Encourage students to use mind-maps to organise the information visually. For identifying the key terms. From this they think about the who, what, why, make notes. They then use this when they write their paraphrase. So that they are not looking at the original and thus are not tempted to lift too much/pattern it the same way etc.

Great workshop – really useful for ideas for how to work with my ss on their paraphrasing over the summer. A most excellent start to the main conference, for me. 🙂

11/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015 – Opening Plenary – Donald Freeman

Frozen in thought? How we think about what we do in ELT

How we use ideas to explain and justify, make sense out of what we do as teachers.

Reasoning has two sides to it. We can reason about something – reason as a verb – and we can give reasons for something – reason as a noun. To reason about something focuses internally, you making sense of something, whereas giving reasons addresses other people. So reasoning has both internal and external dimensions.

Reasons can be seen as ‘myths’ – they connect us and help us justify what we do. The ‘myths’ we use are anchored in experience. They aren’t right or wrong. They have a grain of truth in them, there are elements of usefulness but also those that are misleading.

In this talk, Donald will look at a set of myths that organise our work.

The myth of direct causality
The myth of sole responsibility
The myth of proficiency as the goal

There is the one dimension of myths which is the shared-ness of the meaning, but they also create communities of people who accept them and consider them reasonable. In this way, they may also freeze our thinking.

The myth of direct causality

This is the myth that teaching causes learning. It’s like a pool shot, one ball propels the other towards the pocket. Not that straightforward. But there is a problem with this problem: we organise schools and teaching as if this myth is true. Teachers are evaluated based on how their students perform. Yearly progress is measured and teachers are evaluated accordingly. Then we aggregate this information to create league tables. The element that is true in this myth is that the opposite also is not true. Teaching and learning are connected but it is not a direct causal relationship. Teaching influences learning, a relational connection. A teacher’s move connects to a student’s move, which connects to a teacher’s move etc. So teaching does connect to learning, but the question is how we understand that connection – as influence rather than cause and effect.

The myth of sole responsibility

The myth that as a teacher I am solely responsible for making learning happen in the classroom. We do act often as if we are responsible for what is going on in our lessons, making critical decisions about what is to be taught, planning, materials preparation. So we view teaching as our responsibility. But the moves that we make open up moves that students make, and these moves re-shape the possibilities of the next moves we can make. And the game of the lesson progresses. Responsibility is distributed. It’s organised in a way that one move/decision/action shapes the possibility of what comes next. This interplay between moves we can think of as opportunities – to teach on the teacher’s side and learn on the students’ side. These opportunities when they line up seem almost seamless. When they don’t line up, things go wrong, the idea of sole responsibility resurfaces.

These two myths could be summarised in a single statement: “As a teacher, you have to manage what you can’t control.” The question is, how can we thaw our way of thinking about these myths?

The myth of proficiency as a goal

The myth that the goal of classroom teaching is student proficiency. Donald would argue that this is the myth that fundamentally has us in its grasp. What’s right about this? Clearly what we do as teachers in the classroom creates opportunities for students – to learn language. What’s frozen is not that but the relationship between what we do in the classroom and the way we think about how it travels outside. Proficiency has us in its clutches as language teachers. The idea of proficiency is grounded in an assumption of nativeness. That the world of language users divides itself between those who are native users and those who are non-native users. Proficiency is something that those who are born with and use the language a lot have, and those who meet the language through school are striving for.

The problem is that both ideas – proficiency and nativeness – are misleading. Nativeness is geopolitical not linguistic. Similarly, proficiency – an intuitive and appealing idea – is conceptually problematic. A usefully wrong idea. “Usefully wrong” – a practical heuristic from Lee Scholman. Teachers use a particular form of knowledge when they teach – usefully wrong ideas. 25-30 years ago David Nunan pointed out that proficiency is like the ghost in the machine. “assumed to exist because the concept is intuitively appealing” – Nunan, 1987. How do you actually define that stuff that people get good at in language, when language is so flexible, permeable, like water not like ice? And when getting good at is a function of place and circumstance, not something general and universal? Proficiency is a function of time, place and experience.

Proficiency freezes our thinking because we use the concept of general language proficiency which does not admit to a clear set of boundaries but instead covers a lot of territory. If students can do something in the classroom, in an exam, we assume they can do it on their own in a place of their own choosing. What happens in the classroom is not a reflection of the larger whole. It is part of it, but not a reflection. Horizonal knowledge: What you have to know in the moment and how you project it out into the future. In the language classroom, it is the suitcase problem. In order to capture language and bound it, we have to give it attributes that it doesn’t have and didn’t ask for. Grammar. Four skills. etc. They allow us to chart the relationship between what is inside and what we hope will happen outside. “The strange this funny things happen to language when it comes to school.” Language gets attributes because of the fact that we need to teach it, not because of what it actually is.

In place of this myth of general proficiency a a goal, what we need is proficiencies as a plural. All of us are multi-literate, we use different ways of accessing meaning in text. We are more literate in some ways than other ways. As plural, they are always situated in particular contexts. This would apply to proficiency. Then we need to think about how these contexts are bounded, to understand what it is we are proficient in. When we think about proficiency from this point of view, we can recognise that it is an interesting, intricate dance.

How do we create a version of English that teachers can use as they teach so that the boundaries are clear? Donald created a list of ‘teacher tasks’ – e.g. taking attendance, collecting student work, make announcements, discipline. A panel looked at the tasks and looked at how each task could be grouped into functional areas, how they are enacted in routines and what language accompanies them. So this defines classroom language proficiency from the point of view of the teacher. From task to language. If we wanted to help teachers become proficient in this context, general proficiency wouldn’t suffice. This is a very specific proficiency. By bounding it, setting parameters, identifying what it is, we can clearly identify that it isn’t about general proficiency.

Bringing it together

If these are some of our myths, how can we think about them differently? Think about skateboarding. If you watch people skateboarding, you will see there is a relentlessness about it. They practice again and again and again, on and on. So there is direct causality in what they do. They have sole responsibility (for the practice and outcome). It is clearly bounded, you become proficient in specific areas. This gives us a sense of learning but what about teaching? We need to think differently about what teaching is and might be. Learning driven by the learner. Teaching is part of it but the question is how? We know teaching is central but that doesn’t mean we have to think about it in the same way. If we reframe our myths in this way, then we can look at learning from a slightly different point of view.

Caleb Gattegno – “You can be lived by your preconceptions, which will make you a bad teacher”

Eleanor Duckworth – “It occurred to me, then, that of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer”

Think of the myths as our “right answers” – they impinge on our ability to think actively.

“What you do about what you don’t know is, in the final analysis, what determines what you will ultimately know” – Eleanor Duckworth.

Phew! A lot to digest and think about! What an interesting opening plenary. 🙂

10/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Pre-conference Event Day – MaW SIG – Part 4

By now it’s been a long day and, truth be told, I’m getting tired! I did however manage to jot down a few things for each of the remaining talks, so for what they are worth (my notes, that is, clearly the talks are worth plenty!) here they are:

Tailor-making materials from an ESP author perspective – Evan Frendo

How are tailor-made materials in a corporate context different?

Very specific. PARSNIPS aren’t an issue e.g. PIG in industry usage.
Corporate culture – e.g. a training culture
Needs – corporation needs as well as the individual.
Learning centred not learner centred.
Training rather than education.

It’s all about finding the gap – the training gap – between where they are now and where they need to be. Very specific, focused on aspects of the job that needs to be done. You can use corpora to do this (very specific texts and wordsmith tools).

However:

Vocabulary profilers don’t apply e.g. hose package is an “A1 word” if you work in the relevant trade.

Record a phonecall, discuss with participant. What does it tell me? Need to analyse…

Analysis

Company insider definition of good presentation may differ from ours but is according to their context and needs. We need to learn what those are.

Materials need to be based on evidence not intuition.

Not “English for Engineers” – Engineers speak to other people too! Priorities and issues may not be obvious to whoever wrote English for Engineers.

Check your insights with other stakeholders.

Use experts to tell you what counts as “successful” communication. It can be wrong in one context but right in another i.e. if they get the contract, get the product delivered etc.

ELF

(Mis) Adventures in Self-Publishing – Christien Lee

What should I self-publish?

An important question. Big sales, not much competition, in your comfort zone.

Why should I self-publish?

Traditional publishers give more cachet and better production values, no upfront costs, you get a commission or an advance.

But…no guarantee that a traditional ELT publisher will accept it, especially for niche market books; takes a long time before publication. (Self-publishing is quicker.) Less money and delayed payment from publishers.

Benefits of self-publishing:

Guaranteed publication
short time to publication
potential return of up to 70%.
Regular and timely income

But:

No guarantee of making money
Potential to lose time and money. Costs – e.g. paying freelance audio creators; setting up website; more work before publication (Editing, layout, formatting etc)
More work after publication – marketing, social media etc.

How should I handle editing, book layout, audio and so on?

DIY
Use crowdsourcing/freelancers
Friendsourcing

For audio there is for example Voice Bunny – post a project and people audition for it…

Where should I publish it?

Print on demand with CreateSpace (Amazon)
Book distribution service e.g. Draft2Digital or Smashwords
Wayzgoose Press – a cross between self-publishing and ELT publishers; 40% on print and 50% on e-books.
The Round – teacher development books

Ensuring quality content

For test preparation materials, match for length, genre, register, difficulty, complexity, topic/subject, testing point, distractor patterns

Tools to ensure material is at the right level:

Cambridge Vocabulary Profile (Profile a text and then use that as a template)
Academic Word List Highlighter
Lexile Analyzer – gives you a lexile score which is a number e.g. 1200 for a reading text. Put in the text and it’s 1300, then you need to simplify it to make it closer.

Developing the online content

Use a platform like WordPress with premium plugins e.g. shopping cart
Paying for a custom-designed site
DIY

Interactive service – Articulate Storyline, like powerpoint on steroids, can be used online and include quizzes etc.

Crclee+iatefl@gmail.com

My thoughts:

What a day! So much quality content, so much take away. And only my poor little brain to process it all, oh dear…! Thank you MaW SIG for a brilliant day. And to all presenters for their fantastic talks and best efforts to keep to time so that we actually stayed exactly on schedule all day – must be a first for any SIG?! 😉

10/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Pre-conference Event Day – MaW SIG – Part 3

Duly refreshed, it’s time for the afternoon sessions…

How to write ELT activities for authentic film and video – Kieran and Anna

Kieran and Anna also produced: “How to write film and video activities” – from the Teacher2writer training modules. (Yep, another module! Seems to be a trend today, for presenters to plug their Teacher2Writer module! 😀 )

In today’s talk, they intend to consider:

Role of video and film (more and more important)
Sourcing video and film
Exploiting video and film

Changing from video as an add-on (think glorified listening activities) to something more integral. Capturing and editing moving images has become much more accessible. This can be exploited in language learning. Kieran thinks there will be an increasing demands for writers of this type of activity.

You need to think about:

Syllabus fit – a strict publisher’s brief fit or just integrating it into what you are teaching?
Music/soundtrack needs not to be overwhelming, so that voices can be heard. Language level is affected by this and other things such as accents, number of speakers etc. Keep a checklist of these handy.
Length – 2-5minute clips are optimal for attention/engagement. The shorter the clip, the more repeat viewings you can have, with different activities. This helps with comprehension too.
Relevance – of topic and content vs students’ context, background etc.
Task potential – visual is important. Less effective if activities are relying too heavily on the non-visual i.e. the audio.

Established approach to writing for video

Pre-viewing tasks
While-viewing tasks
Post-viewing tasks

Publishers will break it down like this and include things like vocabulary lists for you to use too.

Pre-viewing activities:

For language-based goals – matching, summary completion (pre-teaching vocabulary), stills from the video and a summary (for more challenging material)

For communicative goals – prediction, discussion. Take a still from the film or video, accompany it with some questions. Connecting this task with the viewing is of course to check their predictions.

While viewing activities:

Don’t overload: Activities and instructions should be concise.
We can use reading/listening type questions but shouldn’t rely too heavily on these.
Need to be activities that don’t demand too much attention so that ss can still focus on the film.

For more information: www.visualmanifesto.com

My thoughts:

Maybe lunch affected my brain adversely – clearly my notes from this talk don’t do it justice! The presenters ran out of time for getting beyond ‘While viewing’ but the slides are going to be available later, so keep an eye on MaW SIG channels for further information on this!

Does a corpus have the answer? Corpus tools for ELT writers by Julie Moore

I was looking forward to this talk! I really enjoyed Julie’s talk at last year’s IATEFL and I love corpora!

Focus:

What is a corpus, what are corpus tools?
How to use them to help you write materials – with examples
What a corpus isn-t very good for
Ways of accessing corpora
A few other nifty vocab tools

Corpus, corpora – a collection of texts, used to investigate language and how it works. We use corpus tools do this, software which allows this investigation.

When you look at a corpus, you get something called a concordance. That is, examples of language taken from the stored texts, with the searched word appearing down the middle, aka a key word in context (KWIC) search. You can then click on a sentence to get a little more context.

We can ask a corpus many things…

Questions!

With a corpus we can:

search for authentic examples.

This can lead you to identify a nice context for a given language point. E.g. a film competition guideline set for “must”.

It is quite rare to find something ready for use straight away: you are more likely to adapt and abridge entries so that all language is level-appropriate.

You can also use it as a template to create your own example. It helps you to create something more natural-sounding.

do collocation searches

E.g. keep your temper, do frequency searches. Look at the example lines. Then you see it does exist but not on it’s own but rather for e.g. keep your temper under control/in check etc.

search for phrases and chunks

Sketch Engine: search “bush” to find more possibilities than “beat around the bush” So start with a wide search. Then search for the frequency of the collocate e.g. around/about. Then you can search for English type. Smaller difference between around and about for British English.

What isn’t a corpus good at?

Corpus are good at vocabulary –oriented queries. If you don’t have a specific lexical item to search for, it is more difficult and requires a lot more time. E.g. present continuous for future plans. Even if you come up with a search of present continuous examples, you would have to manually identify the future plans ones.

They are also not so good for longer examples or complete texts: this is because of copyright and permissions rules. You can’t borrow enough sentences to illustrate ‘on the other hand’ for example.

Important points to consider:

spoken vs written
genre mix
AmE vs BrE
Expert vs student

Otherwise put, it is important to know your corpus and what it contains.

For example, the British Academic Written Corpus (student writing, native and non native) so you aren’t going to search it to find out about general spoken English…

Don’t follow blindly:

You need to question the results if they are surprising e.g. with keep and temper.

You only get what you search for. Just because you find something doesn-t mean you have answered your question. Sometimes answers aren-t clear cut. Remember your audience and aims.

How to access a corpus

Major publishers have their own corpus. E.g. Oxford. Ask if you can use it.
Free corpora: COCA SkELL (great data, limited search tools), BAWE/BASE
Subscription corpora: Sketch Engine, Collins Corpus (coming soon…)

A few other nifty tools

Textcheckers – input a text and compare it to a particular wordlist e.g. AWL, English Vocab Profile, Oxford 3000

E.g. VocabKitchen

Depends how good you think the lists are as to how much you rely on the tool.

Usage trends

E.g. Cobuild online, Ngram – show a line graph of usage trends.

Dictionaries

Thesaurus facility, advanced searches – Macmillan Online is good for this.

More useful stuff!

Don’t worry – Julie is planning to write a blog post explaining a bit about these tools and what they do. Watch out for it on her blog.

My thoughts:

Another great session with lots to take away! And my note-taking brain appears to have woken up again too… 🙂 Corpora are great, as long as you are using them for what they are great at and not falling into the traps highlighted by Julie.

10/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Pre-conference Event Day – MaW SIG – Part 2

Following the first break, we were treated to two more fantastic talks:

A technological toolkit for Writers – Nick

Nick starts with a whistle-stop tour of technological history, also sharing the story of a very large internet-related phone bill with us. Apparently his parents weren’t so impressed…

The three key areas of focus are:

Useful hardware
Timesaving software
Avoiding internet-related distraction

Useful hardware

Computer – PC or Mac or… what suits you

Operating system – OSX, Windows, Linux or… what suits you

Word-processing software – Word, Open Office.. what suits you

Browser – Don’t use IE…try something else…please…

Screen-size – as big as you can; multiple monitors (less switching between applications e.g. What you’re writing and your source….avoid work and email or what you’re not writing and your distractor!) And use desktop arrangement/Fences – you can draw a box on your desktop, give it a label and put your files in it.

Keyboard and mouse – touching them all the time, make sure they are comfortable. Mechanical keyboard – clickety clackety; these days mainly used for gamers.

Timesaving software

60 seconds...starting now! Image taken from en.wikipedia.org, licensed for commercial re-use with modification

Time, precious time! Image taken from en.wikipedia.org, licensed for commercial re-use with modification

Basic criteria:

Must solve a problem: if I’m only doing it once a month, probably don’t need a fix…
Simplicity!
Integration – should talk to all devices, if relevant
Cost – should be reasonable

Nick’s ELT courses include:

Vocabulary presentations
Texts
Practice exercises

(grossly oversimplified)

So how can technology help?

1. Images – these sometimes generate a long url (that you need to paste into the document). Fix: Use browser extensions (these extend functionality of your browser): URL shortener. One touch to shrink the URL. As a rule of thumb: If you do anything with your browser that requires 2 or more clicks, someone has designed something that will enable you to do it in one…

Taking a partial screenshot (easy on a mac! yay!)

Online dictionaries: CALD space word – searches Cambridge dictionaries online. Go to search field in the dictionary, go to add as search engine, change the keyword to something quick to remember, and bingo! (I really have to set these up!)

2. Texts – Archiving for future reference. We have moved on from filing cabinets and from endless folders of unsearchable pdfs to…

Evernote!!

http://www.evernote.com – it’s brilliant. (At some point I should write a guide to using it…)

Screenshot of Evernote-s homepage: They clearly got this dude off Shutterstock or similar! 😉

3. Practice exercises (grammar or vocab)

Use macros: automate a set of actions that you can repeat ad infinitum.

Teacher’s Pet: a massive collection of macros that you install and it creates a custom tool bar, which does all the boring jobs for you. Fabulous!

Distractions – Tough love techniques

Stayfocused: A toolbar extension limits time per day on certain sites – you define which sites distract you and how much time you can spend on them today. When you look at the website, it starts counting down.

Strict Workflow: – Page blocked until a break timer starts. Back to work!

Rescue time: A weekly report on how you use your time…

Your mileage may vary… you may get more out of this than others do.

Tiny.cc/mawsig_techtools – link to a google doc for adding info to

Nick’s email: mail@nicholastims.info

My thoughts:

What an incredibly useful half an hour! It flew by, was full of humour and we got to learn lots of great techie shortcuts to doing stuff that materials writers do. What more could you want?

Session 4: Writing ELT audio and video scripts. From basic principles to creating drama

With the improvement in technology, going out into the street and recording is becoming more possible. You discover all sorts of interesting bits of language that you don’t discover if you script it all yourself cold.

Need to consider:

Is there too much target language shoe-horned in?
Is the context clear? (Stated in rubric? A picture? Sound effects?)
Is there enough turn-taking? Breaking it down makes it easier for students to handle the language load, particularly at lower levels.
Is there a suitable number of speakers? More than 3 or 4 is too many. E.g. 4 people in a meeting is quite hard for the student to know who is speaking each time. Variety of names, genders and accents can help with this. (Must be stated in the script for the actors to be aware of…)
What about the lack of authenticity? How can we introduce more feelings of authentic speech into the writing and make it less stilted?

We had a go at considering:

Our turn!

Features of authentic speech:

(Diverse) Pronunciation and accent
False starts and repetition
Error
Fillers and filled pauses
Contract and full forms
Idiom, slang, jargon, idiolect

Which of these should we be putting into our scripts? Depends on who is using the materials. Maybe not errors! The grammar of spoken English… Are they errors? Or are they just spoken English? And what will the editor remove? Ums and errs and I think are more likely to be kept? False starts often removed. It is important to start thinking about how to add some of these things in…

Adding drama

You need a central character who wants something. Then you add some kind of conflict situation that makes things more difficult for them! “Try it 3 times” – the main character tries and fails twice and then third time lucky, within the script. 5 or 6 times, becomes more like Fawlty Towers…

Video producers say that ELT writers coming from an audio background tend to state the bloody obvious. Show don-t tell. Slightly in conflict with language teaching but… we need to come up with ways to make it more visual yet control the language.

John’s website, where these slides will appear…

My thoughts:

Well, by the end of talk no. 4, it’s easy to see why people say MaW SIG’s PCE is the one to come to! So far, the diversity in the topics has made me think just how diverse Materials Writing is, there are so many different elements that meet in this discipline. It’s really rather fascinating! Also, I’m really enjoying the opportunity of doing all the little tasks that the various presenters have conjured up, working alongside people who know their stuff – a great learning experience!

Phew! After an action-packed morning, it’s time for lunch!

10/04/2015 by lizziepinard

IATEFL 2015: Pre-conference Event Day – MaW SIG – Part 1

The Materials Writer’s Essential Toolkit

Here I am at the IATEFL 2015 PCE Day, and I have to admit, MaW SIG has its work cut out for it today, as there is a portion of me that is rather sorry to be giving up my precious Easter holiday to be attending a conference! Fortunately, as the venue came in to sight, my enthusiasm and excitement finally made themselves known. Having registered and collected the usual conference bumpf, I have even read the programme now and everything! Bring on the Materials Writer’s Essential Toolkit! As it’s a long day of many talks, I am breaking it into several blog posts to make it more digestible…

Sessions 1 and 2 – 10.10 – 11.30

Writing Multiple Choice Activities – what Sue Kay has learnt…

Who knew that there could be so much to say about Multiple Choice Activities? Perhaps it-s because…“there’s an awful lot that can go wrong!”

Sue kicked off by talking about advantages and disadvantages of this question type:

Advantages

Can be marked by a computer;
Can deal with large volumes of students being tested (hence chosen format for TOEFL and TOEIC).
From a teaching point of view, can offer some support to lower level students who can recognise but not produce much

Disadvantages

Assess recognition not use of language;
Depending on no. of options, 33 or 25 % chance of guessing;
Easy to cheat…
Writing good ones is HARD!

Challenges

Are the items difficult enough? Are they plausible? The art of adding distraction to text or script (aka how to confuse the students and tempt them away from the right answer!)

At this point, we looked at the anatomy of multiple choice.

Firstly, they are not MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions) but MCIs (Multiple Choice Items) as not all are “questions”. E.g. a stem can be an unfinished sentence to complete.

Distractors – wrong answers that tempt ss away

Stem – the question or sentence beginning

Key – the correct answer

Important to remember:

Options should be plausible, not too obviously right or wrong, consistent in style and length, not repeat or contradict each other, be clear and easy to process…

Task 1

We looked at these multiple choice items:

Multiple Choice Quiz

And had to identify a) which one was a good example? b) what was wrong with all the rest of them!

C stands out as correct as much longer than A or B (should be short/roughly equally in length; avoid using linkers)
Option C is obviously a distractor, very silly (all options must be plausible or you give ‘one for free’ : suppress the urge to inject humour into MCIs!)
End the stem at a logical point e.g. after the verb AND preposition. E.g. concerned about plus the options rather multiple structures
Correct! (Options same length, consistent style, no linkers or complex structures, all plausible)
Option D stands out as the only one not starting with ‘Michael’ (consistency)
The information on the page is enough to guess the correct answer, without reference to the text. B is obviously the right one. (Too obvious right answers, too obviously wrong distractors, shouldn’t be answerable through common sense)
Options A and D have the same meaning = a double key (mustn’t cancel one another out by saying the opposite either…)
Too easy to answer without listening to the interview. (A and B easy to reject, D too obviously wrong. World knowledge shouldn’t come into play…)

The process as a whole

You need to write the text and the activity at the same time. Sue used to write the text first but this isn-t a good idea… you end up shoe-horning distractors in. The text becomes unnatural and lacking in coherence.

Plan the ideas you want to include in the text
Before you write it, draft some stems and keys
Brain storm different attitudes feelings emotions angles to include in the script so that you can test not only specific info but opinion and intention too.
Paraphrase the language in the text in your key – if you use the same language it’s too obviously the right answer
But you can use the same language in the distractors to tempt them away from the right answer. But generally speaking better to paraphrase across the board. Sometimes can be a good temptation though.
Use students’ common mistakes when adding distraction. Things that students always confuse.

Adding distraction

Time phrases can be used to set up distraction. E.g. saying what happened in the past and then testing what is happening now.

We used to….then… so now…

Distractor: (We used to) live on the edge of a city (outskirts) as something that is happening ‘now’

At first I thought… but then I saw through…

If testing what is happening now, content following at first I thought acts as a distractor.

We were thinking of….but…

He wanted to….but…

So, what did the couple do at the weekend? (Task 2)

Wanted to, hoped to, intended to, planned on, thought about, was/were going to, tried to, would to have, was/were supposed to etc. are useful to seed into the text.

Unreal past

Past tenses in conditionals or after wish.

“I’d probably stay if the boss said he’d pay me more”

Distractor: Her manager has offered her a salary increase

If you’d done what it says on the label, it wouldn’t have shrunk”

Distractor: He followed the washing instructions

I wish we’d brought the compass with us

Distractor: They were well equipped for the walk.

Negatives

It-s not as if we’re desperate for a new car park

Distractor: She thinks the town needs better parking facilities

Here are the guidelines on which the talk draws:

Remember!!

Useful resources:

How to write Reading and Listening Activities by Caroline Krantz

How to write Exam practice materials by Roy Norris

Teacher2Writer website

Reflecting on what we looked at today, Sue says “These are techniques for adding challenge…”

Comments arising from the post-talk Q and A

Making the options challenging but the language as easy to process as possible, so that the students are processing the text rather than the options.
Try your questions out on colleagues first…
With listening texts, more important to spread the items out vs. reading texts where students have control over processing time.

Digital – templates may have character limits; can be set up for exam type (i.e. can listen only twice) or to learn (can listen as many times as they want, with more challenging questions? Or if supporting lower level students then they have more time to get it right; higher levels may choose not to slow it down, listen again etc.)

End of session 1 – happy to report that enthusiasm/excitement/motivation are fully present and accounted for again! 🙂

Session 2: Maximising the image in materials design – Ben Goldstein and Ceri Jones

The role of images in ELT

How has it changed over the last 15-20 years?

When they started, it was purely decorative or a visual aid. This has changed a lot in the last 5 -10 years. Opening pages of units in CBs, there is often a big image, more central to the writing and learning process. Careful: These big images still involve rather conservative use of image. More prominent but yet still traditional exploitation. E.g. decorative.

How can we subvert?

In our roles as writers, how can we make sure that the images are working for us, inc. the decorative ones? Focus on print. Digital is slightly different.

Ben and Ceri showed us a sample search. We had to guess the search term…

Image search results

What was the search term? “Beach”

Image banks: some publishers have them (affiliations) and prefer only to use those banks. Some give you more freedom to search outside them. Some receptive, some less so. There are also budgets to be aware of. Certain images need to be cheap. You may be able to squeeze in the odd expensive one.

Types:

Stock images (clip art etc.)
Creative commons
Photo journalism
Design/boutique

Flip flops – stock image (thinkstock; used by BA in an advert. Used often for corporate materials)

Palm trees – design/boutique (lens modern) (aesthetically pleasing, airbrushed, but not full of ideas, so very decorative quality)

People on beach – photo journalism (Panos – image and text; often very generative. Can be too strong/controversial)

People on the beach – creative commons (unsplash – the social media front for a design company; like a teaser)

Sand shark – creative commons (ELT pics – by teachers for teachers, creative commons on Flickr; Blog – Take a photo and…)

Sources for different image types

These are different kinds of image banks. How do we search for images?

The bigger the bank, the more difficult it is to find what you are looking for i.e. using suitable search terms. Specificity of search is important…

Some more good sources:

The whole picture – Guardian;
The wider image – Reuters
Getty works with Flickr.

Using Alamy

Search term “beach”

Parameters – “square” [influenced by instagram, may be more creative]; (vs portrait or square-) “Creative” rather than “relevant” filter.

When writing artwork briefs, specify what parameters you don’t want as well e.g. “not Landscape”

Using Panos – the image can give an idea for a whole activity/topic. Another role of the image in the writing process – inspiration even if it doesn’t make it on to the page…

Image types revisited… this time with focus on fashion!

Are they new? trending? on the way out?

Here are some of the ones we considered:

Selfie
Selfie on stick
Mosaic
Drony (Dronie?) (Yes, really. Selfies with drones)
Infographic
Word cloud
Fish eye
Panodash (iphone trick, same person appearing in photograph multiple times);
Draw my life
Angry cat.

Keeping up to date is important – here’s how…

More useful sources and ideas:

The Map of the Urban Linguistic Landscape Facebook Group
Use your own images also!
You can use image banks to inform your artwork briefs.

Writing an artwork brief

Be very specific. Explain how the image is supposed to work not just what it looks like. Be clear about what you don’t want. (E.g. NOT a lifestyle magazine type of shot)

An artwork brief

Image roles

Scene-setting (for a topic or context)
Illustrative
Decorative
Driving force (opening spread, man and nature – positive, negative, conjures up different feelings)

Coming back to the process again, a good idea is to go to images first, see what is out there, let the images inspire. Start with a topic and brainstorm images, see what hits you. It can kick-start the creative process. It can rejuvenate you when you are on Unit 10 of level 4 of a course!

For more information see Ben’s website and Ceri’s website.

My thoughts:

Much like with MCI’s, my general thought is, “who knew there was so much to know!” With both talks, within half an hour I went from knowing very little to at least knowing how little I know! Lots of useful content. From the practical aspects such as how to find the images, sources etc. to the process, where I am particularly struck by the idea of doing an image search around a topic and letting inspiration flow that way. It’s a new way of brainstorming that hadn’t occurred to me before. Not having written an artwork brief before, it was also interesting seeing some examples and then actually doing a task in which we worked in small groups to create a brief for a given image.

Has to be said, a great start to a great day. 🙂 Worth giving up being on holiday for… 😉

24/03/2015 by lizziepinard

One step forward, two steps back! (Or, the joys of language learning…)

One step forward…

My computer has been playing up since Christmas, so finally I decided it was time to take it to the Apple store for some TLC. More specifically, the Palermo Apple store. I don’t have much, if any, computer-related vocabulary in Italian… I can also be rather lazy. This means I didn’t get round to looking up useful verbs (e.g. shutdown, reboot etc.) before going to the store. During the 25 minute walk to get to the store, I did however at least think about how to paraphrase the afore-mentioned verbs and about quite what I was going to say. I will admit, part of me thought that I might find someone with a bit of English working there (as I had been lucky enough to do at the TIM phone shop soon after arriving here the first time around with only about one ciao and one grazie to rub together!) but that wasn’t to be…

Turns out the Apple store here works differently from the ones I’ve been to in England too – there was nobody waiting to greet me, ask what I wanted and direct me to the relevant place, so I had to find someone, explain why I was there, ask what I should do, get sent to the relevant place and find crowds of people all waiting for various things. Cue explaining, again, what I wanted and getting more specific re-direction. Then I finally spoke to one of the “Geniuses”, only happily enough they don’t go by that rather cringeworthy name here! What followed was a textbook example of negotiation of meaning. I tried to explain what was wrong with my laptop and he translated it into Italian computer language. This required gestures, paraphrases and a slightly pleading expression in my eyes. What was good was when he dutifully provided a verb and I could then use that verb for the next part of the explanation! I was lucky that he was patient and didn’t seem unduly perturbed by my ignorance! 🙂 I felt quite satisfied when I left the store, armed with what I went in for – instructions for how to fix my laptop.

Two steps back…

Contrast the above rather satisfactory exchange with me on Friday afternoon, talking (or attempting to talk might be a better description) with an Italian colleague, and conjugating the verb I wanted to use in the first person instead of in the second person – i.e. the equivalent of Ok, so I’ll give it to me later instead of Ok, so you’ll give it to me later. I heard the mistake as soon as I said it, and self-corrected, but oh my lordy lordy could I make a more basic mistake?! I know how to conjugate dare in second person simple future, I know what I had wanted to say, but it just came out wrong… Was I tired? Was it just a clumsy moment? Does there have to be a reason? Who can say…

Conclusion

C’est la vie! Che ci vuoi fare. Unfortunately my self-study has dwindled to almost nothing and my Italian course that I did is receding into history. (Though I do still make an effort to monitor my use of pronouns, using what I learnt that week to use them correctly!) I’d love to be amazing at Italian, but it’s not going to happen – so I might as well just enjoy the fact that I *can* get by independently here and not worry too much about all the mistakes I make along the way. 🙂 Also, being able to paraphrase/circumlocute is a very handy strategy!