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:

1. Role of video and film (more and more important)
2. Sourcing video and film
3. 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…

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.

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. 

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:

 

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

1. C stands out as correct as much longer than A or B (should be short/roughly equally in length; avoid using linkers)
2. 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!)
3. End the stem at a logical point e.g. after the verb AND preposition. E.g. concerned about plus the options rather multiple structures
4. Correct! (Options same length, consistent style, no linkers or complex structures, all plausible)
5. Option D stands out as the only one not starting with ‘Michael’ (consistency)
6. 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)
7. Options A and D have the same meaning = a double key (mustn’t cancel one another out by saying the opposite either…)
8. 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:

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…

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…)

 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.

 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)

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… 😉