Classroom Talk

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Speaking and storytelling

In a recent post, I outlined a collaborative writing activity for consolidating past simple and past continuous tense use. In that post, I briefly mentioned a possible follow up activity, using learner generated content and focusing on selected elements of spoken narrative. Since then, I’ve done just that with my pre-intermediate learners, and found it worked well, so I thought I’d share what I did with it here…

Time: 45 minutes (depending on class size/group size)

Materials: Cut up structural elements of spoken narrative and their linguistic realisations. (See example here ) (With higher levels, previously, I’ve cut up all the chunks individually but with my pre-ints I cut the chunks up in groups, so they had to match groups of chunks with the function rather than individual chunks, to provide more scaffolding)

Focus: Chunks of language used to structure stories when told orally (rather than written).

As I mentioned, I did this as a follow up to a lesson focusing on consolidation of past simple and continuous. For homework, I asked learners to prepare a story to tell a small group of their classmates at the start of the next lesson. Some of them hadn’t done the homework, but I grouped them so that in each pair/small group, at least one person had done the homework, meaning there was student-generated content to work from.

  • Give learners a few minutes to tell their stories to their pair/group. Give some delayed feedback on language use.
  • Tell the learners that the aim of the next part of the lesson is to look at the language often used in storytelling.
  • Hand out the cut-up chunks of language and functions; ask learners to match them.
  • Give learners each a copy of the handout as it was before you chopped it all out.
  • Do some pronunciation work, so that they can get their mouths around the chunks and experiment with intonation.
  • Get them to think about how they could integrate the language into the stories they told at the start of the lesson.

(Some of my learners had written out their story, some hadn’t; the activity worked in both instances: learners were looking closely at their writing, or discussing what they had said, and matching parts of it to the various functions, to decide which chunks to include. I monitored and guided them if they were using a chunk inappropriately.)

  • Once learners have finished, either regroup them and let them re-tell their stories to a new group/partner, using that new language and follow that up by letting a few tell their stories to the whole class, or, as in the case of the second class I tried this with, if you only have a small number of students, if they have practiced their story in their groups, you can skip straight to the whole class stage and let all of them have the opportunity to show off!

(My students automatically gave each other questions to answer before re-telling their stories, in the first class which tickled me!)

The next part of the sequence uses Headway Pre-Int 4th edition’s picture story of a flight attendant, Stephen Slater, who gets hit over the head by a passenger taking their bag out of the overhead compartment before the plane had stopped moving. Slater goes crazy and opens the emergency exit/slide, slides down and is arrested. Based on a true story! The book sequence is a series of newspaper articles related to the story and the picture story forms part of an opening activity. However, any simple picture story would do here!

  • Get learners to tell the story in the pictures, using the storytelling language that they’ve just been working with.
  • Tell the learners that same story (in my case I did it from the point of view of one of the other passengers on the flight!), of course using some of the target chunks.
  • Learners listen and tick the chunks they hear used.
  • Follow up with a discussion about how the chunks can help them in listening/understanding as well as speaking, and how speakers use those chunks in storytelling to help the listener follow what is being said: when we tell stories, we want the listener to think it’s as funny/crazy/<insert adjective we feel the story is> as we do, so we want them to follow what’s happening.

As the sequence in the book uses newspaper articles (it’s a reading sequence), I might in the next lesson draw attention to how events are ordered in newspaper articles compared with telling stories orally…

It worked well, but of course it was also a bit back to front really – the learners heard me telling the story as one of the last parts of the sequence. It was a nice way to finish (I set the book reading activities – question answering – for homework) but logically it should have happened earlier in the lesson. But on the other hand, the learners got there successfully without it, using their own stories and the language/functions met in the lesson. They did upgrade their stories really well, and using the chunks helped them in terms of fluency. I could perhaps have told a story of my own earlier in the sequence, to illustrate the chunks in use – perhaps before getting the learners to edit their own stories. Perhaps next time I will! What order should you do it in? Up to you! 🙂

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Consolidating narrative tenses: a storytelling lesson/lesson series idea

Level: Pre-intermediate but adaptable to higher levels by increasing the demands imposed in the collaborative writing stage.

Time: +/- 45mins (but time increases with class-size)

Materials: A story told in a series of pictures, all cut up. (E.g. a comic book story – blank out the dialogue, or leave it in to add reading to the skills used in this sequence; but such stories exist in ELT books too e.g. Straight Forward Teachers Resource Book Communicative Activity 2D – of which this activity sequence is an adaptation and extension. Alternatively, if you are of an artistic bent, create your own picture story!)

Focus: Narrative tenses (past simple and past continuous); question formation (the bane of a pre-intermediate learner’s life!); speaking; writing; listening.

This worked well with both my pre-intermediate classes yesterday, so I thought I’d share it here…

  • Stick cut-up pictures on the walls around the room in random order.
  • When you’re ready to start the activity, draw attention to the pictures. Tell learners the protagonist names and explain that the pictures tell a story about them.
  • Put learners in pairs (and one group of three if an uneven number, or groups of three if a larger class/you’re worried about time). Tell them to walk around, look at the pictures and decide what the story is: they can carry a notebook to make brief notes but at this point the focus is on speaking, brainstorming and logical deduction. There should be a lot of moving about to-ing and fro-ing between pictures, as they try to pick out the story.
  • When they have decided what the story is and have the key points established, they can sit down again. (They can always jump up for another look subsequently if needed!)

Now it is time for some collaborative writing:

  • In their pairs/groups, learners need to build their notes up into a story. Challenge them to use past simple/past continuous and linkers (when/while/because) – so that the story is not just a series of simple sentences and the target structures are used. For higher levels, require use of other tenses and encourage them to use as great a range of vocabulary as they can.
  • Feed in any vocabulary learners need (this gives them practice in verbal circumlocution too – e.g. “how do you say when you like someone very much in the first time of look at them?” [answer: it was love at first sight] ). This stage involves a lot of discussion, as the learners decide/agree on how to formulate their story. 

Finally, some storytelling and listening

  • When a pair/group of learners have finished writing their story, ask them to write three questions that are answered in their story. (You could stipulate that at least one question should use the past continuous.) If a pair/group hasn’t made much use of the past continuous, get them to look again and see if they can change that.
  • Now each pair/group takes a turn to tell the rest of their class the three questions they have decided on (the teacher can either have checked and corrected, where necessary, prior to this, or do the checking/correcting at this point, asking the rest of the class for help) and then tell their story. (Encourage learners to tell the story expressively,with lots of drama!) Classmates listen and answer the questions. The teacher listens and makes notes on language use and pronunciation for delayed feedback.
  • After a pair/group has finished telling their story, the rest of the class provides the answers to their questions. The teacher can then give feedback by writing up phrases to be corrected on the board (or, if available, using a good old OHP, having written language for focus directly onto a transparency! An I-pad/projector could fulfil the same function if you are a techie) and eliciting the corrections. Don’t forget to give positive feedback as well – pay attention to good use of language e.g. adverbs, dramatic language, good use of past simple/past continuous and linkers, and, of course, the content and coherence of the story.

(Of course, as the learners are reading a written story, this activity is not focused on the sub-skills of spoken storytelling, for either storyteller or listener. However, gaining better control over the past simple and past continuous will be a useful base for learners to approach an activity with such a focus e.g. the follow-up activity below…)

A homework/follow up activity sequence idea:

  • Get them to go away and prepare a story about something that happened to them (you could use the same past time point as you used for the picture story) – it can be real or invented.
  • They should come to the next lesson prepared to tell their story to a small group. Encourage them not to write it, but just to make notes. 
  • In the next lesson, get learners to tell their stories. You could these as the basis for a lesson on spoken story-telling skills, enabling learners to upgrade their stories by focusing on structure of spoken narrative and associated language/evaluative language/listener responses etc.

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(For example: A sequence for focusing on structural language: 

  1. Give learners a spoken storytelling frame, with chunks of language for introducing different parts of a story.
  2. Ask them to listen to a recording of a story, which uses some of these chunks of language and identify which chunks are used.
  3. Get them to upgrade their story using the frame, deciding which chunks of language to use at each step.
  4. Ask them to re-tell their upgraded stories to different partners, decreasing the time they have for each telling.)

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  • Then, for the next piece of homework,  ask learners to write their stories up (encourage use of a computer), using linkers to encourage the complex sentences that are typical of writing but not speaking, and bring these (i.e. a print-out/i-pad/laptop) to a subsequent lesson. (Having done the initial collaborative writing activity, this should be less daunting for them!) If learners are bored of their stories, let them choose a classmate’s story to write up instead! (It doesn’t matter if two learners have written up the same story, in fact it could yield some interesting comparisons in the peer-editing phase of this sequence…)
  • Use the pieces of writing as the basis for a peer editing activity, where they work on upgrading each others’ stories. They could then implement peer edits and upload the final version on a class blog or Edmodo. 

I hope you enjoy using these activities with your learners – do pop back and let me know how it went, if you can find the time! 🙂

1280px-Stipula_fountain_pen

Picture taken from Google advanced image search, licensed for commercial reuse with modification, source – http://commons.wikimedia.org

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Helping language learners become language researchers (part 3): concordance activity outcomes

In the first post of this series, I described the potential power of Wordandphrase.info and offered some materials I had made to introduce my students to the site. I also identified the possible issues around getting learners to use this site independently and wondered about helping them do so by bringing the site into the classroom through concordance activities based on information from it.

My second post described the first three activities that I created and did with my advanced and upper intermediate learners subsequently. 

Since then, both groups of learners have done a task for homework: the upper intermediate learners completed the task started in class while the advanced learners did a separate task. For each group the scaffolding process was different. This post discusses the process used for each group and the subsequent outcomes, as well as lessons learnt from this.

Advanced learners:

We did two concordance activities in class before they had to do any independent homework using the site. The first activity encouraged them to use concordance lines to discover the error in a sentence one of them had written, while the second looked at information taken from the website with regards to three words – concordance lines and frequency information – and required the learners to guess which word each set of information corresponded to. (NB: They had met the vocabulary prior to this!)

The homework I gave them was to use wordandphrase.info to find out about three more words from the same list of vocabulary that had been thrown at them at the end of unit 5 in Headway advanced and come to the next lesson ready to share what they had discovered. We shared out the words so there was no duplication of information.

Last night we met again and it was time to discuss the homework. I had anticipated that some of them wouldn’t have done the homework and that there may have been problems using the site (despite having the materials – those I shared in the first post of this series – to help them) but, in fact, all of the learners turned up with information they had found out and printouts from the site (some learners had printed directly, others had created a new document using information copied and pasted from the “print screen” page, to be more selective about what they printed). They each took a turn to tell their classmates and me about the three words they had explored.

Once that was finished, I asked them how they had found the activity and another interesting discussion ensued. They had found it very interesting but a couple mentioned that while the site was very interesting, it was also very time-consuming because it has so much information. Another learner very cleverly pointed out that if you had a purpose/goal in mind, and kept that as your focus, then it’s much less time-consuming (which is perhaps true of using the internet in general, as was also discussed: a digital literacy skill). She loves the site and intends to keep using it. None of them were scared or put off or scarred for life in any way – so that’s good! 😉

This made me think back to the first post I wrote about wordandphrase.info, when I mentioned my Leeds Met course-mate’s materials that had been written to help learners use the site with a specific purpose (to choose which vocabulary to learn from texts): in that post, I wondered if her materials would be more effective than my more general “how to use the website” ones. The answer arrived at from the above discussion would seem to be “yes“. However, there may be an argument for letting learners come to that conclusion themselves, as happened here. Perhaps starting from the more general, learning what the website is capable of, realising that using it without a goal equals spending a lot of/too much time and then building up a bank of purposes may help learners more in terms of independent usage, especially in terms of being able to add to that bank of purposes independently beyond the end of the course.

Outcomes: I’m very proud of my learners and feel that they are making steps towards independent use of the site. Next steps will involve getting them to use it to help them edit pieces of their writing and exploring other purposes with them, so that they start building up that bank of purposes to use it for.

Upper-intermediate learners

With these guys, it’s less of a success story (so far!) but a lot learnt (by me) as a result. We did a “find the missing word” concordance activity (again, based on previously met vocabulary) in class, but didn’t have time to complete it, so the questions regarding the patterns in the concordances became homework. What I should have done is left it when we ran out of time, and come back to it at the start of the next lesson. At the time, I thought it would be interesting to see what they could do.

The problem was, as we hadn’t done a similar activity before, they didn’t understand what was expected of them and answered the questions according to their intuition rather than by using the concordance lines. So the rubrics weren’t clear enough and my instructions weren’t either! (Though some of them had understood, so perhaps it was just last-thing-on-a-Tuesday-night syndrome for the rest! They are busy bees and last lesson finishes soon before 9, so it makes for a long day) Of course, had we done a similar activity before, fully in class, then they would have understood what was expected. Compare this with the advanced learners, with whom I did 2 activities in class before expecting any independent work.

Outcomes: 

My next step is to do some more in-class activities, to help the learners understand what is required, and develop the necessary skills, then try again with getting them to do the activities independently and using the site. I will then apply what I’ve learnt from my advanced gang and help them to build up a bank of purposes to use the site for. (I’m also going to edit that activity *again* to try and make the tasks clearer…!) My upper intermediate learners are interested but confused, as far as wordandphrase.info and related activities go. But I’ve got time to remedy it…

What I have learnt from both of these experiences?

  • Adequate scaffolding is crucial for independent success – whether with these activities or using the website. I unwittingly experimented with both approaches – both adequate and inadequate scaffolding!
  • Expecting too much too soon is counter-productive. On the other hand, when properly scaffolded, the learners can use this site really successfully.
  • Just because I understand what is required, doesn’t mean it’s going to be clear to my learners. They haven’t come across concordance-based activities or a tool like wordandphrase.info before. Rubrics, rubrics, rubrics!

Conclusion:

I’m really enjoying this project and it’s still early days – looking forward to seeing what I can do with it in the fullness of time (read: during the rest of the course). I think I’m also learning about as much as my learners are – there’s a lot to learn! 🙂  Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes too… 😉

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Helping language learners become language researchers: wordandphrase.info (part 2: 3 activities)

In the first post of this series, I described the potential power of Wordandphrase.info and offered some materials I had made to introduce my students to the site. I also identified the possible issues around getting learners to use this site independently and wondered about helping them do so by bringing the site into the classroom through concordance activities based on information from it.

This post describes the first three activities that I’ve created and done with my advanced and upper intermediate learners since then. 

1) Finding the mistake

In this activity, which I did with my advanced learners on Monday evening, the starting point was a sentence taken from a learner’s homework, which had been posted on the class blog. It was a common mistake: misuse of “despite“.

  • First, learners were asked to look at the sentence and try to identify the mistake.
  • Next, their attention was focused on some concordance lines taken from Wordandphrase.info via screen-shot (to preserve the colour-coding), which they used to identify which word types can follow despite and then to make a word profile for “despite“.
  • Finally, they were redirected back to the original sentence and asked to reformulate it correctly, using the information they had gleaned from the concordance.

The learners were engaged, there was lots of discussion and they had a clearer picture of the use of “despite” by the end of it. Initially they worked in pairs, and then we discussed it as a class. The whole activity took about 15 minutes.

Here is the activity: Concordance activity for “despite”

2) Finding the missing word

This activity, which I did with my upper intermediate learners, was based on vocabulary they had met in a previous lesson. I selected two compounds – a compound noun and a compound adjective – from that set of vocabulary and prepared a set of concordance lines (again, screenshots from wordandphrase.info, to preserve the colour-coding) for each. I blanked out the compound (using tip-ex!) in each concordance.

  • First they had to look at the concordance lines and identify what the compound was.
  • Then, for each compound, learners had to answer questions which focussed them on what words can be used with it.

They worked in pairs. We did it towards the end of the lesson, and by the end of the lesson most of them had identified the compounds (following much discussion). I asked them to answer the questions about the collocations for homework, so that in the next lesson they could discuss their answers together. As with the advanced group, this gang were also engaged by the activity. With both groups, they seemed to welcome the challenge of solving this “puzzle”.

Here is the handout I made for this activity: Compound adj & noun concordance activity.

NB: As mentioned, I did the blanking of the focus word manually, so in this document they are not blanked out.

TIP: Make sure that the learners know that each concordance is for one word only, so that they don’t try and find a different word for every space… I have now updated the materials to make this clearer!! 🙂

3) Finding the missing word and guessing the frequencies

This was my second foray into concordance activities with my advanced class.

  • This time, I used two nouns, from a page of vocabulary in their course book, again preparing concordance lines using screen-shots from wordandphrase.info.
  • As with the upper intermediate class, the activity involved using these concordance lines to identify which noun had been blanked out and then focusing on adjective-noun and verb-noun collocations. (There were no questions on this page, other than “What is the missing noun?”, but we discussed the patterns anyway. If you think your learners need more scaffolding, you could always add questions, as I did with my upper intermediate learners.)

My goal here was to try and extend the vocabulary presented horizontally, as in the book it was very much a vertical list (of nouns for emotions).

In addition to focusing on concordance lines, I did screenshots of the frequency information of each word that had been the focus of the concordances, both in terms of the top 3000 words and in terms of different registers, all of which wordandphrase.info provides very visually.

  • The learners had to guess which selected word matched which frequency information (two were >3000 and one was 501-3000, so it was a case of deciding which they thought was the most commonly used)
  • Next, we looked at the frequency information, with regards to the different registers, for each word. The learners guessed which word the first two sets of frequency information referred to.
  • Then before I revealed the final set of frequency information, they made predictions about the frequency for each register – rough predictions, focusing on the size of the bars in comparison to one another, rather than on numbers.
  • Finally, we discussed intuition with regards to frequency vs actual use, and intuition with regards to structures and collocations vs actual use.

Doing both activities took about 15 minutes or so. After each activity, 1 and 2, I asked them what they thought the purpose of the activity was, to encourage them to link this work with using the website and developing their noticing skills so that they are able to use it better. I thought being explicitly aware of this might help their confidence when it comes to using the website independently. We shall see…

Here are the materials I used: Missing nouns conc. lines and Frequency info activity

NB: As above, blanking out of nouns done manually (and in the case of part 2 of the activity, not at all because the printer failed so I used the projector and got the learners to look away while I got the relevant part of the activity on the screen and hid the word with my finger!), so no words blanked out in the .pdfs.

Common themes

What I’m trying to do with all of these activities is introduce the power of Wordandphrase.info to the learners and help them develop the mindset and noticing skills necessary for successful independent use of it.

  • The activities all encouraged learners to focus on patterns and word usage, which information can be found on wordandphrase.info, and of course the final activity brought frequency information into the mix.
  • Working in pairs, and then discussing as a class, scaffolds the process by allowing learners to collaborate and combine their powers of noticing.
  • In the case of the upper intermediates, letting the learners finish the activity for homework encourages some independent effort, which was scaffolded by the in-class pair work preceding the homework task and developed by the in-class pair work done in the subsequent class.
  • For the advanced class, following the second activity, I set them the task of each finding out about 3 of the words we had focused on in that lesson: to look for patterns of use and find out frequency information. At the beginning of next lesson, they will share their findings, perhaps encouraging prediction prior to sharing.

Time issue:

It is quite time-consuming producing the activities. However, the way I see it, these can be built up into a bank, so in future, one would have plenty of such activities to draw on, whether to use as they stand, or to adapt to different learners.

What next:

I want to continue integrating these little concordancing activities and introduce activities that require learners to go away and use the website, coming back to class to share what they have discovered. Hopefully the self-access materials I made will help them be able to do this from the technical point of view, and the activities done in class will help them be able to do this because they will have had practice in noticing patterns and interpreting the information provided by the site.

I’ll continue to share the little activities I make, both for use in class and for the using-the-website homework, periodically… 🙂 And in the next post in this mini-series, I’ll probably discuss how the learners (the upper ints and the advanced) got on with their respective homework and how the subsequent in-class discussions went.

NB: I am new to this data-driven learning malarkey, and using wordandphrase.info with learners, so it’s all very experimental. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on it!! 🙂

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Helping language learners become language researchers: wordandphrase.info (part 1)

What is wordandphrase.info?

Wordandphrase.info is a brilliant website. Essentially, it is a user-friendly interface for analysing a corpus. (For those of you who haven’t come across this term as yet, a corpus is a collection of texts stored electronically.) In this case, it is the COCA (Corpus Of Contemporary American English) corpus, a 450 million word corpus. It is the largest corpus that is freely available, was collected between 1990 and 2012 and contains texts from spoken, newspaper, fiction and academic registers.

Due to its user-friendliness (colour-coding for different parts of speech in the examples, colour-coding for frequency in text analysed etc.), wordandphrase.info seems ideal for use with students, a tool that could help them become more independent, by providing a means of discovering how language is used, that doesn’t rely on the teacher.

It provides information like:

  • frequency of word or phrase use (within the top 500 most-used words, 501-3000, 3000+)
  • frequency of word or phrase use within particular genres (spoken, newspapers, fiction, academic)
  • definitions, synonyms and collocates (for which it also provides frequency information, making it a very powerful collocational thesaurus, for phrases as well as words)

It allows you to:

  • input (type in or copy and paste) a paragraph of text and see at a glance (through colour-coding) how frequent words are.
  • search for a phrase from that inputted text, by clicking on the component words and generate examples of that chunk of language in use.
  • look at a list of colour-coded examples and identify, at a glance, what types of words are used before and after the word in focus (nouns? adjectives? adverbs? prepositions?), with a rough indication of frequency (in terms of how much highlighting of a particular colour you can see in comparison to another) too.

All in all, it enables you to gain a  better idea of the meaning and use of a word or phrase, as well as its potential alternatives.

However, when learners first meet it, it might seem daunting:

  • When you search commonly used words or phrases, large numbers of examples may be generated: this may be confusing for learners, especially as the examples are portions of sentences (x number of words around the word being analysed) rather than complete sentences, and are devoid of context.
  • Before the colour-coding for parts of speech can help you, you need to understand what it means!
  • There is a lot of information on the page – it can be difficult to know where to start.

How can we use this website with learners?

This is something I am still exploring. I think it has massive power but the limitations need managing carefully so that they don’t put students off.

I have already created some self-access materials (inspired by a course mate of mine – see below for more details) which guide learners through using the site, through a series of tasks, and help them to discover what they can do with it. My learners (of various levels) have used these materials and many were able to complete the tasks without too much difficulty. Some learners independently shared information they found via using the site, using our class blog. However, for the most part it “gathered dust”. 

While my materials address the “how” (at a basic level – there is more that the website can do, that I am still finding out!), they don’t help learners become better at identifying the patterns that are present in the examples generated. Perhaps in order for learners to use wordandphrase.info successfully and really harness its power, in-class scaffolding is needed, in the form of using concordances with learners, getting them to produce word profiles and generally developing their noticing skills. Of course, as teachers we are always trying to help learners develop better noticing skills, but we usually work with texts, complete with some kind of context, rather than with sentence fragments devoid of context. Transferring these noticing skills, then, may not be achieved automatically.

One of my aims in the next couple of months is to create some activities using concordances and other information from Wordandphrase.info and use them with my learners, to give them more scaffolding, and help them to develop their use of the site independently, as language researchers. I hope to integrate it so that learners use it to find out  more about the vocabulary we meet in class, as well as encourage them to apply it to language they meet out of class. What I create and how I get on with this project will form part 2 (and onwards?!) of this series of posts.

Here are the materials I have made:

Wordandphrase.info self access  – a guided discovery tour of the website, with an answer key at the end. If you aren’t familiar with the site, these might be as useful for you as for your learners?! 🙂

These materials were inspired by a course mate of mine at Leeds Met , Jane Templeton, who made some guided discovery materials to help learners use wordandphrase.info  to choose mid-frequency vocabulary from texts they encountered, as these mid-range words provide a useful learning focus, and to find out more about their choices. I wanted to use wordandphrase.com with my learners too, but wanted a more general purpose intro to the features of the site, rather than geared towards that particular purpose.  So it was I made my materials, with the example word “outfit” – which may seem a rather random choice! – taken from the page of compounds learners meet in Headway Advanced Unit 6. Though, one might well question whether guiding learners towards a particular purpose, as in Jane’s materials, might be more useful than my vaguer, more general approach… <answers on a postcard!>

How can this website help *you*, the teacher?

Wordandphrase.info enables you to:

  • copy and paste in a text that you want to use with your learners and see at a glance what percentage of high frequency (top 0-500), mid-frequency (500-3000) and low-frequency (outside the top 3000) words are present in your text and so an indication of what difficulties it is likely to present to your learners.
  • You could use this information to guide you in decisions regarding what words to pre-teach, what scaffolding your learners might need when they meet this text, or perhaps what words to adjust to more frequently used synonyms (something else the site can help you find, as it provides both synonyms and frequency information, as well as examples of use, if you are unsure whether you have found the right alternative) if you feel that would be more appropriate, depending on your goals in using the text and the level of your learners.

Conclusion:

Wordandphrase.info is a site with a lot of potential for language learners and teachers alike. I’m still learning how to use it and finding ways to tap that potential. Please let me know how you get on with using the materials I have uploaded here, and the website, whether yourself, or on behalf of your learners – I would be very interested to hear! I would also be interested to hear any ideas, you have and try out, for integrating use of Wordandphrase.info, in any context, and how it has benefited your learners.

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Webinar on Learner Autonomy: Information and References

Today, the 19th of February 2014, at 11 a.m. C.E.T., I had the privilege of leading a webinar on Learner Autonomy Development, courtesy of the British Council’s Teaching English website. I started with a discussion regarding the theory related to learner autonomy, inviting participants to offer their own definitions and images of learner autonomy, and using the variety of definitions offered to illustrate how learner autonomy looks different in different contexts, before providing some definitions from the literature. This was followed with a brief look at each of my current learner autonomy development projects:

  • the Reading Project (click here)
  • the Experimenting with English Project (click here)
  • the Edmodo/Blog Project (click here)

(Links to these will be added in the next few days, as they are published)

Links to these can also be found on my Learner Autonomy page (click here). They cover largely the same ground as that covered in my webinar but with additional information regarding the process I went through with each project while developing it with my learners.

I concluded my webinar with a series of quotes from learner autonomy theorists. Each of these, I feel, makes an important point that is worth keeping in mind as you embark on the process of working with your learners to develop autonomy both inside and outside the classroom.

To see the recording of this webinar, please click here.

Many thanks to the British Council for giving me this wonderful opportunity, to International House Palermo for being supportive of my penchant for trying new things in the classroom, and last, but assuredly not least, to all the tutors in the M.A. ELT department at Leeds Metropolitan University for helping me find my voice and empowering me to question things as well as look for answers. Looking for answers may mostly lead to further questions (!), but it’s an amazing journey to go on. 🙂

Here is a full list of the references used in the webinar:

Benson, P. (2003)  Learner autonomy in the classroom in in Nunan, D. [ed] Practical English language teaching. PRC: Higher education press/McGraw Hill.

Benson, P. (2011) Teaching and Researching Autonomy (2nd Edition) Pearson Education. Harlow.

Borg and Al-Busaidi (2012) Learner Autonomy: English Language Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices British Council, London.

Dornyei and Ushioda (2012) Teaching and Researching Motivation (Kindle Edition) Pearson Education. Harlow.

Holec, H. (1981) Autonomy and foreign language learning. Pergamon. Oxford (First published 1979, Strasbourg: Council of Europe.)

Holliday, A. (2005) The struggle to teach English as an International Language (Kindle Edition) Oxford University Press. Oxford.

McCarthy, T. (2013)  Redefining the learning space: Advising tools in the classroom in in Menegale, M [ed] Autonomy in Language Learning: Getting learners actively involved. (Kindle Edition) IATEFL, Canterbury.

Oxford, R. (2003) Towards a more Systematic Model of L2 Learner Autonomy in Palfreyman, D and Smith, R. [Ed] Learner Autonomy Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke.

Smith, R. and Ushioda, E. (2009) Under whose control? in  in Pemberton, Toogood and Barfield [Ed] Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Learning. Hong Kong University Press. Hong Kong.

Smith, R. (2003) Pedgagogy for Autonomy as (Becoming) Appropriate Methodology in Palfreyman, D and Smith, R. [Ed] Learner Autonomy Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke.

If you are interested in learning more about Learner Autonomy, I would recommend the following resources:

Benson, P. (2003) Autonomy in language teaching and learning in Language Teaching vol. 40 issue 1 p.21-40. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Menegale, M [ed] (2013) Autonomy in Language Learning: Getting learners actively involved. (Kindle Edition) IATEFL, Canterbury.

Palfreyman, D and Smith, R. [Ed] (2003) Learner Autonomy Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke.

The IATEFL SIG newsletter, Independence, which comes out three times a year and is free to SIG members or £6.50 to non-SIG members.

If you are interested in learning about research done into the use of CMC tools in the language classroom, I would recommend the following resources:

Pinkman, K. (2005) Using blogs in the foreign language classroom in The JALT CALL Journal vol 1

Tratjemberg and Yiakoumetti (2011) Weblogs: a tool for EFL interaction, expression, and self-evaluation in ELT Journal vol 65/4. Oxford University Press.

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5 ways of using Edmodo with language learners (part 1)

Edmodo is a collaborative platform that is specifically geared towards use in teaching and learning. It describes itself as “a free and safe way for students and teachers to connect and collaborate”.  When I use it with my students, I tell them it is a space for us, only for us, to use English at any time when not in class. In my current context, this has instant appeal: opportunities for using English outside class are limited in Palermo, particularly if your commitments are such that you cannot get to the school to participate in any of the extra-curricular activities on offer.

It is easy to get students signed up on to Edmodo: you provide them a group code, which enables them to register as student in the class attached to that group code, and they generate their own username and password. The trick when you introduce any new tool, of course, is to get learners using it comfortably and regularly. For me, another goal that I keep in mind is to enable learners to use it autonomously in a variety of ways that supplement their classroom learning. What is the difference? Well, learners could use it “comfortably and regularly” but only when told to and only in fixed, limited ways…

However, the focus of this post is on homework, so “compulsory” use of Edmodo, rather than autonomous use. Autonomous use will follow in a different post (part 2!), after my webinar. I’ve found that using Edmodo allows me to set more interesting homework tasks, that provide learners with the opportunity to communicate and me with an overview of what they can produce and, in some cases, what difficulties they may be having with what we have done in class. Here are five ways of doing this:

1) Question Time! (Pre-intermediate level)

 There is a big focus on questions in the first half of our pre-intermediate course. Students struggle with word order, form and choice of question word, sometimes adding words in when they shouldn’t, too. The course book has a grammar focus box which requires students to match question words and answers, as well as the usual focus on form gap-fills as practice. As homework, rather than a.n.other gap fill or writing questions that will never be asked, you can get students to use Edmodo to ask each other questions:

  • Give them the set of question words which they have learnt how to use
  • Ask them to post a list of questions for people in the class to answer.
  • They can then respond to each others’ questions.

Benefits: 

  • You can see at a glance who has and hasn’t got their heads around question forms. (Obviously secure in writing doesn’t preclude problems when speaking, but you can address that in class later!)
  • The students have a non-linguistic purpose for making questions: to find out more about their classmates. This should be more motivating than filling in more gaps or writing a list of questions and then forgetting about it.
  • The way they answer the questions provides insight to their understanding of the questions.
  • The students spend time between classes using the language that you have been focusing on in class in a freer way, making it more memorable for them.
  • As students communicate with each other between lessons, as well as during their twice a week classes, their rapport builds.
  • You can correct any mistakes in the questions as students post them and respond positively to correct questions, and there remains a record of this: students can look back and see where their mistakes were and what the correct version is. This could be useful when it comes to revision for tests.

A very simple activity, with plenty of benefits for both teacher and learners. This could be applied to other levels by varying the complexity of the language required. Lower levels could make more simple questions, higher levels could be encouraged to use a range of tenses and/or perhaps include reported questions too.

2) A “Getting to know you” diagnostic activity (Pre-int upwards)

The first lesson in any course usually features a heavy component of “getting to know you” -related activity. (My own current favourite is “A Map of Me”, which Sandy Millin came up with!) Of course, as a learner, when you meet a big group of people (in my context, the maximum class size is twelve and if it’s a full class this is big enough to count as “big” in terms of getting to know people!), it’s hard enough to remember all of their names, let alone everything they told you about themselves, in English, one after another. Here is a homework activity you could use in an early lesson:

  • Ask learners to write three sentences about their past, three sentences about their present, three sentences about their future. In each set of sentences, one should be true and two should be false.
  • Learners then post their sentences on Edmodo and look at the sentences written by everybody else.
  • Learners guess which sentences are the truthful ones.

Benefits:

  • You get a swift overview of learners’ basic tense control. (You already have a fair idea of what their speaking on the topic of themselves is like, from your “getting to know you” activities during the lesson, so this complements that and allows you to see if spoken mistakes are slips/procedural, and therefore not present when learners are writing and have more time to spend on accuracy, or due to absence of knowledge.)
  • Once learners have finished guessing and the truth has been revealed, you also learn more about your learners as individuals.
  • Learners write briefly about themselves for an audience, using a mixture of tenses.
  • The “game” factor hopefully makes this writing a fun activity rather than a chore.
  • Learners get to know more about their classmates.

Another simple activity, requiring no preparation, that gets learners communicating. For higher levels, encourage use of more complex language – stipulate, for example, use of a mixed conditional, a past modal etc.

3) A “taster” (all levels)

Looking ahead at what you are going to focus on in the next lesson, topic-wise or language-wise, you can use Edmodo to rouse learners’ curiosity and engage their interest before they even come to class.

  • If your next topic/sub-topic is, for example, the news, post on Edmodo asking if they have seen anything interesting in the news lately.
  • If you’re going to look at vocabulary related to “My Ideal Day”, post on Edmodo and ask learners what they like doing at the weekend. (You could then get them to repeat this activity, using “My Ideal Day” as the title, following the lesson, so that they can use the vocabulary from the lesson. They (and you!) could compare what they produced in the taster and what they produced in the follow-up. You could also get them to compare their “ideal day”‘s and find anything they have in common, to make it more interactive.)
  • If you’ve prepared a concordance activity to draw their attention to the differences between “say”, “tell” and “speak”, post a sentence using each, on Edmodo, with the key word blanked out. Get them to decide which word fits into which sentence.

Benefits:

  • You can get an idea of your students’ communicative capabilities in relation to the topic/language you are planning to look at in the next class. (This may influence your planning, too!)
  • As the lesson is not the first time for the learners to think about the topic/language/vocabulary in question, they start in a stronger position.
  • It provides an extra opportunity for rehearsal of the language, meaning learners may be able to produce more complex language during class discussions. Where necessary, you can help them reformulate this and the net result can be a higher quality of language as the take-away.
  • If learners compare “taster” and “follow up” production, on Edmodo, they will hopefully be able to see progress.

Again, very little preparation required on the teacher’s part. (How long does it take to post a topic-related question or similar?)

4) Spot the difference (higher levels)

This works well with upper intermediate and advanced learners. It requires detailed reading and some writing too. Summary writing is not an uncommon task, every learner has to do it at some point, but this activity makes it a less tedious thing to do…

  • Ask learners to find a newspaper or magazine article that interests them and to post a link to the article on Edmodo.
  • As well as posting the link, in the same post, they should post a summary of the linked article. However, this is not a straightforward summary: learners need to summarise the article but change five pieces of information, so that the summary is inaccurate.  Encourage the learners to be sneaky and make changes that are difficult to spot straight away.
  • Learners should then read classmates’ summaries and linked articles, in order to identify the differences, and reply to the post with their suggestions. (This does not preclude other learners reading and guessing – there’s nothing to say that whoever posts first is necessarily going to be correct!)
  • You can post error correction feedback on the summaries if you want to, or use it as the basis for a delayed error correction in the next class. (It’s quick and easy to copy and paste sentences that could be improved OR examples of good sentences onto a powerpoint slide to project in class). Learners can then be encouraged to go back and self-correct their summaries, using what they have learnt from the error analysis activity.

Benefits:

  • Learners are required to read (both their article and other students’ articles and summaries), write (the summaries) and communicate (their guesses) with each other.
  • The “spot the difference” element gives the learners a purpose for reading, writing and communicating.
  • Trying to trick their classmates will hopefully be fun and therefore add some motivation, where “write a summary” on its own may fail, with some learners.
  • Learners have an audience (their classmates) for their writing. This may encourage learners to take more care over their work, rather than rushing something off on a piece of paper to submit to the teacher in the next lesson.
  • It generates a writing sample for the teacher to use for error analysis, and learners can edit their own work following this, upgrading it.

5) Project work

I don’t know about other course books but the newer editions of Headway like to include little “projects” at the end of some sections. These usually go along the lines of “Use the internet to find out more about ________ [ ________ being related to the topic that learners have just finished working with]. Bring information and pictures to the next lesson to share with your classmates about it” or similar.  That’s all well and good, but what if your learners don’t have a tablet or a printer? What if your learners find interesting articles that other learners didn’t find but would like to read? What if you are pushed for time and just can’t see yourself “using up valuable lesson time on random project work, you stupid course book!” ?

Well, these projects can work very nicely using Edmodo.

  • Very simply, ask learners to share links to information, upload pictures, and comment on what they find using Edmodo. In other words, do the project, but do it on Edmodo.
  • Encourage learners to look at what other learners have found and compare it with their own findings.
  • Now that you have a shared body of information, that learners have thought about and discussed on Edmodo, you can still allocate five or ten minutes in a subsequent lesson for learners to discuss it orally. However, if you really don’t feel you can justify this, at least learners have still had the benefit of searching for, reading and discussing information related to the topic they have been studying in class.

Benefits:

  • Learners get to do the projects and communicate with each other outside class, using a range of skills and language in the process.
  • Learners get to benefit from the information their colleagues have found.
  • Tablets and printers are not required for information-sharing, making it a lot quicker and easier and not excluding learners who haven’t got access to these. (Of course more and more students have tablets, but it is still probably more common to have access to a computer. As for printers, *I* don’t have one, my sister doesn’t have one, it’s not everybody who happens to have access. Also printer ink is expensive and black and white grainy pictures are not that exciting to look at! :-p )
  • If the teacher is pushed for time, the in-class portion can be cut, if necessary, or kept very brief. (A lot briefer than would be possible with loads of paper articles to swap, compare and discuss etc! Students would be ready to launch into discussion, having already seen each others’ offerings, and rehearsed the necessary language to discuss them, on Edmodo)

Conclusion

Edmodo is a great tool, very simple to use and with huge amounts of potential. The activities I have described above are equally simple, require little to no preparation on the teacher’s part and generate a lot of genuine, purposeful language use, both receptive and productive. It enables learners in context where English isn’t much-used to use English between classes and consolidate learning done in class in interactive, hopefully motivating ways. I’ve only been using Edmodo since September, and haven’t even begun to tap all the “extra features” it has – various features and apps and so forth – but the way I use it, just on a basic level, is proof that you don’t have to be particularly tech savvy in order for you and your students to benefit from using it.

I will finish with some student quotes gained from feedback forms and reflective pieces:

“The third English course is a bit different from the previous: Edmodo has been a new tool to improve English and, even thought I don’t like very much the social network, I think it is a very useful tool to share many things, to suggest other tools, give ideas and take one’s cut from my classmates’ works. Edmodo has been a virtual place “dedicated” to our level three and I liked it.” [From a reflective piece]

“Yes definitely. I really like Edmodo and the reading project. It’s a new idea to improve our English” [The question was, “Did the course “extras” help you?”]

“Enough helpful, because it’s difficult to speak English in this city, it’s not a thing that happens every day” [Question as above]

“Yes, because I was always in contact with my classmates” [Question as above]

“Edmodo is a good opportunity of communication” [Question as above]

“I think that the ‘extra’ activities are useful, because they are moments to improve our English and you can compare your extra homeworks to your extra homework of your classmates” [Question as above]

I hope I’ve convinced you to give it a try, if you don’t already? 🙂

If you do already use Edmodo, I would love to know how you do – I’m always looking out for fresh ideas! Please comment and share ideas below… 🙂

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End-of-course reflections

Today, three of my adult classes and one of my kids classes did their final tests. Tomorrow, my two teenager classes will do their final tests. The three young learner classes, I keep, the three adult classes, I lose. So today was goodbye to three lots of students: I felt (feel!) rather bereft! It’s certainly been quite a roller-coaster of a four months: Moving to Palermo, starting the new job – and these classes! – as well as learning Italian and then embarking on the IH Young Learner Teaching certificate course, to top it all off. Phew! Meanwhile, this is my first job post-Delta and M.A. ELT, so there has been a backlog of learning to process (meanwhile trying to deal with all the learning from the YL certificate course too!), some settling down to do, as well as lots of experimentation, naturally. This mid-way point seemed like a good point to pause and reflect.

I feel I have learnt heaps in the past four months, much of which from my students. It’s been wonderful working with them and trying to help them become more autonomous, confident language users. Learning has also resulted from being observed by my DoS and my Young Learner Coordinator, both as part of regular in-service CPD and as part of the YL certificate course. A grand total of 5 observations in 4 months! In addition, there have been a fortnightly series of workshops on various topics. Sometimes I go to them thinking, “this is really the last thing I feel like doing this [Friday] morning” but then, once you’re there, it’s really refreshing being back in the learning seat and it has a clear positive impact on your teaching. The YL certificate has taught me a lot, it goes without saying, as well as driving me up the wall on a regular basis. Nothing like in-service training certificate courses to test the boundaries of one’s sanity! And of course I’ve also learnt a lot from being a language learner again: my attempts to learn Italian have certainly coloured what I do in the classroom. Finally, the various threads of my learner autonomy project have been immensely rewarding and have yielded some very positive results/feedback, but there is so much more potential for development with the project, which is a great position to be in – very exciting! 🙂  I will continue to experiment and find ways to help my learners harness all the potential bubbling away in them as individuals and as groups.

My Delta and M.A. already seem a very long time ago, and I miss that time, as it was such an immense time of learning and growth for me. However, it’s wonderful to be working in a place where I can really work with what I’ve learnt and build on it. I’m looking forward to the next wave of courses and building on what I’ve learnt during the first lot – using all the freed-up processing space that comes from not having to learn a bunch of new systems for doing things (e.g. progress reports, testing, etc etc) and from greater familiarity with the materials. Once the YL course has finished, and I have more time freed up, I would like to make some more materials – or at least finish refining the ones I made during my M.A. and started to upload onto my blog before the tidal wave of work swept over me! – read more (I’ve got a back-log of ELT reading building up!) and experiment more systematically with the many, many things I’ve learnt over the past year and a half.

The last four months have been hard work, there’s no denying it, but so rewarding. I suppose that is what teaching is all about! Here’s to the next four and all the challenges they hold… 🙂 (First things first, though: a heap of marking and reports to plough through by Friday! 😉 )

 

 

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39th ELT Blog Carnival: Blogging with Students

The theme for the 39th ELT Blog Carnival is Blogging with Students and it is a timely theme for me: With adult courses coming to an end this week, my first experiment with using a blog in the language classroom has also reached its conclusion. This was done with my Advanced class, which took place twice a week, at 1hr20 a pop, for approximately four months. It was an interesting class in terms of demographic: There were 7 students in total, 3 of whom were middle-aged and 4 of whom were teenagers (but older teenagers, coming to the end of their school years).

My goal in using the blog with these learners was:

To give them additional opportunities for using English and to harness it as a tool to help in the development of learner autonomy.

I’ve learnt a lot from the experiment and am looking forward to trying again with another group of students, using what I’ve learnt this time around.

How I did it:

I  created the blog on WordPress (I don’t know how to use any other blogging software currently!), naming it after the class, and introduced it several lessons in to the course (it got delayed by a lesson due to technical issues but I’d delayed it until that initial technical issues attempt for other reasons – see “What do I think…” below), giving learners the user name / password, demonstrating use and clarifying that they needed to put their name in brackets after their post title so that we could know whose was whose.  I mostly used the blog for homework with them initially – with the idea of modelling potential uses of it. One thing that I found very interesting is that half way through the course, I gave the learners the opportunity to discuss the use of the blog and how they’d like to use it. They came up with some great ideas (which I am going to steal and try to implement with future classes! 😉 ) but mostly they did not implement them. They also wondered if having their own log-ins would be better but then agreed that it actually wouldn’t change anything in the great scheme of things. However, in conjunction with other learner autonomy development tools, some of the learners did use the blog autonomously as well as for the activities I set as homework. Given that 4/7 were swamped with school work and tests, while 3/7 had full-time jobs and family commitments, I can understand why the ideas were there but the action wasn’t, and particularly admire those who did make time to use the blog autonomously.

What did the students really think of the blog? 

Well, I collected final feedback in two different ways: feedback questionnaires, which covered various activities/tools used with the group, and reflective pieces in which students were asked to look back on what they’d learnt from the course and evaluate it – NB the brief was very vague, I did not ask them specifically to write about the blog or the other “extra” activities used, but just to reflect on what they’ve learnt and what they found useful.  (These were published on the blog! *still awaiting a few more of these to be submitted…). Here are a couple of soundbites:

From a reflective piece, looking back on the course:

What I appreciated most was that most of these activities were often intended to foster interaction among participants by different forms of technical communication, such as publishing texts on the school blog.  By drawing upon constant web-based practice it succeeded in offering a fresh approach to language production.

From another reflective piece:

The use of the blog was also encouraging to use english outside class in many different ways.

From a feedback form in space provided beneath each question for further comment on the number circled:

It helped us to have feedback even when not in class and it was a great way to learn English in a new, less traditional way.

From another feedback form:

I liked the blog idea. […] The blog is a very useful tool and it could be exploited even more.

Due to the nature of the feedback forms, students were able to expand on what they wanted to, so some talked more about the other tools/activities used. However, the four extracts above are from four different students.

One piece of feedback which reflects my approach to using the various tools/activities, including the blog is this:

The teacher made the tools not compulsory, which was already the best way to use them.

It was in response to “How could the teacher make these tools/activities more useful for you?” More on this in my forthcoming webinar on learner autonomy.

What do I think of the blog/”blogging with students”?

I’m very pleased that it went down so well with the students, despite their time, or lack thereof, issues and I absolutely agree with the student who thinks it could be exploited even more. That is something I will be mulling over before kicking off with the next course. Now that I am more comfortable with the process (it can be ever so daunting introducing something new, that you haven’t used with students before – even if, like me, you are familiar with blogging for your own purposes! I was incredibly nervous when I introduced it, hence putting off a few lessons before I did so – I had to really push myself to do it but I’m very glad that I did!), I think it will be easier to refine it and maximise on the potential that lies in it, both in terms of opportunity for using English outside of class and in terms of learner autonomy development.

One thing that blogging with students does enable is more interesting, interactive homework. (This is also true of Edmodo, which I have used with my other classes, with very positive feedback) You can get them to do writing tasks with a real communicative purpose, which require them to read each others writing and respond to it meaningfully, and which are also good fun. (I will dedicate a future blog post to ideas for using a blog or Edmodo for interactive, communicative homework… )

Extra work?

Teachers may worry that having a class blog will create a lot of extra work for them. Maybe it does a bit: it’s important to respond to learners’ work. One problem I had with this was simply forgetting to open the blog and check for new work, because in my main browser, I’m logged into my own blog and so I used a different browser to be able to be logged into the class blog at the same time. However, it’s a lot easier to mark homework that is typed and that you can copy/paste and reformulate/refine than it is to decipher student handwriting and try to squeeze feedback into any available space. The student can then compare their work with the feedback in the comments, without being put off by all the pen marks (and possibly struggling to decipher the teacher’s handwriting! 😉 ) and the piece of work stays filed away on the blog, enabling easy comparison with future pieces of work. I also think the benefits do definitely outweigh what we, as teachers, need to put in for it to run smoothly.

Potential?

One thing I did not tap sufficiently is the blog’s potential as a reflective tool – ironic, given the name of my blog and my penchant for reflection! Also, because I’ve been trialling various things, the trialling has occurred as and when the ideas arose in response to what has been happening in my classrooms. It’s all been super-interesting but definitely not very…smooth. Now that I have a stock of ideas and a clearer idea of how to approach using the tools, including the blog, I hope I will be able to tap its potential more effectively. Of course, I will still respond to what emerges in individual classes, so more ideas will be born and existing ones adapted, but having a core of existent ideas gives the project more of a backbone and frees me up to focus on tweaking and identifying new ways to exploit the blog further, both as a communicative tool and a learner autonomy development tool. Already the ideas are bubbling away in my mind… 😉

Another avenue of potential that I’d like to explore is that of converting the accumulation of learner work on the blog into a learner language corpus. This could then feed back into work done in the classroom, in a variety of ways. This would also be possible with Edmodo. One would copy the texts over from whichever platform and store them in plain text format, before analysing them with a corpus analysis tool. I can envisage also having a corpus for each level, so that over time, the more classes I use these tools with, the bigger each corpus would become. There would perhaps be potential for comparative work, where learners analyse their own class corpus in relation to a higher level and gain a clearer picture of where they are and what they are working towards. Or compare with a lower level, to gain a clearer idea of their own progress. Or compare with an established corpus, native- or non-native speaker-based, such as the BNC or VOICE.

I think technology, especially that which enables opportunities for genuine communication, has a lot to offer language learning, if it’s used in a pedagogically sound fashion, where there are clear aims and benefits inherent in the uses made of it. In my current context, it offers students a valuable means of communicating in English between classes, which is important as, being in Palermo, there is not a lot of opportunity for using English outside of class time. They clearly recognise this and I hope that with future classes, my use of the blog and its integration into the course will be smoother and more effective so that the benefits are maximised.

Conclusion

I’m really looking forward to reading the other blogposts in this carnival, and anticipate hopefully that they will form a lovely little resource for teachers looking to use a blog with one or more of their classes. To any teachers who have been thinking about trying it but been too nervous too: Just jump in and give it a go! It’s not actually that scary (I’ve discovered!), in fact, it’s a lot of fun and very rewarding – for teacher and students alike.

blog

What shall we do with it? Anything is possible… (Taken from Google advanced images search – licensed for commercial reuse with modification)

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Minor achievements, major gains

Last Friday evening (it’s been a busy week!), I took myself out to dinner. It’s become my Friday treat here – a meal out, on the way home after work. It means the weekend has arrived! Usually it involves some degree of stuttering and feeling annoyed with myself, because I just can’t summon up the language I know I have, when I actually need it. (Ten minutes later, no problem – by then I’ve usually got it :-p)  That time, however, for the first time, I did everything smoothly and appropriately! A very minor achievement, ordering a meal in a restaurant, asking for various condiments, dealing with between-course exchanges (I had some rather lovely seasonal fruit for dessert) and post-meal bill-sorting exchanges, but a real confidence-booster. Last night, I went back (it’s my Friday night restaurant, so sue me!) and felt confident – I’ve done it before, so I can do it again! – and upped the challenge: this time I decided to try adding some small talk too and managed to do so. No philosophical discussion, but baby steps, just baby steps…

Dornyei’s (2011)  Motivational Self-System has three components, the third of which relates to the L2 Learning Experience.  This third component draws attention to the role of the learning environment within motivation and within this component, the “experience of success” (Kindle edition loc 1848) plays a role. Motivation, of course, is not static. Part of a dynamic system, as Dornyei explains motivation is now considered to be, it is in constant flux, affected by both internal and external factors (ibid: loc 5013) This theory of motivation makes me picture the classroom as a cauldron, motivation (of various types) AND demotivation (ditto!) bubbling away within. The question then arises of how we can help learners, as a group, to harness all these different positive energies and enable them, in combination, to be stronger than the negative energies, both at that time and outside class, when they are doing various activities using English.

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A cauldron of motivation and demotivation, bubbling away… (Taken from Google search licensed for commercial reuse with modification)

One of my learners came up to me at the end of class today, for me to sign her guided study form. The exchange went something along these lines: S: “I finished my book”  Me:”Yay! Did you enjoy it?” S:”Yes my first book in English! So I’m very happy!”  Me:”That’s brilliant! Are you going to read another one?” S:”Yes, definitely I want to!”. (I’m not sure who was more delighted – her or me! 😉 ) Is this a minor achievement? Some might argue it is (not me!). Either way, the gains are massive for this learner, in terms of confidence and motivation, which will hopefully last until the next “minor” achievement. Adam Simpson wrote a very interesting blog post about motivation in the classroom, and how a lot of  it is down to the students, as individuals and as a group, rather than the teacher. I fully agree with his post (and, like him, feel very lucky to have some super groups of learners to work with! 🙂 ); however, I think the teacher can have a positive influence on the evolution of motivation: perhaps as well as scaffolding language learning so that learners can experience – and be motivated by – success in their language use in the classroom, we can also scaffold their development of approaches to learning language out of class-time which enable additional success/achievement outside the classroom. As with my student from the example above. Perhaps part of learner autonomy is enabling learners to find ways of being successful in their own language learning outside of class, as part of their own motivation management, be it in choosing, reading and finishing a book, or in choosing and successfully completing other language use activities, and setting their own goals in doing these things. The teacher doesn’t create/generate or manage the learners’ motivation, but helps them do this themselves.  I believe that what happens in the classroom can play a key role in this, in various ways. Starting, of course, with the learners themselves and what they bring to the table between them, as a group.

This  can create additional work for the teacher, certainly at least initially, but it’s so worth it when you enable students, like the one mentioned above, to read their first book in English or find “a new word: English Lettereture (sic)” (from a student feedback form, different class).  However, I’m going to refrain from launching into an in-depth discussion of exactly what I’ve been doing with my learners and the feedback I’ve had (entailing plenty of food for thought for me!) – for now, anyway! After my I’ve done my British council webinar, I imagine I’ll expand on the simplicity of the reading project (as a follow-on to Extensive Reading Part 2) and other threads of learner autonomy development that I’ve been attempting to weave through my classes. (Disclaimer: There will be nothing earth-shattering!! There is no panacea…)

For now, for a warm fuzzy end to this post, I’d love to hear about your last “makes it all worth it” moment! (I want to bottle them all to get me through the final tests marking/reports/admin hell that comes next week! 😉 )

References:

Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (2011). Teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman.