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ELTC: Vocabulary review workshop

This is a very delayed write-up of a Vocabulary Review workshop that I did at the ELTC last term. It’s taken me this long because I have been reflecting on and off since, and now finally feel ready to publish it! It’s a reflective post divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ with the former focusing on my preparations and the latter focusing on what actually happened!

Before

Tomorrow I am going to be running a workshop for my colleagues at the ELTC. The focus is vocabulary review activities. This year, so far, I have already done two other workshops for them: one on helping learners become more autonomous (part of the training day at the start of term) and one whose aim was to encourage reflection on career turning points and glean ideas for further developmental possibilities. I’ve also done a practical workshop on blogging (both with learners and as a means of professional development), at Leeds Beckett University, on the Multimedia and Independent Learning module, as well as an online session also about career turning points for the recent TD SIG web carnival. Coming up, as well as tomorrow’s session on Vocabulary Review, I have another session with Leeds Beckett University, this time online, about developing learner autonomy, a British Council webinar also about learner autonomy tools/tips and my IATEFL presentation in April, which will form part of a forum on listening and focuses on helping learners become more autonomous listeners in an EAP pre-sessional context.

The reason I mention all these commitments is that (not so coincidentally!) I have recently(ish) been reflecting on my short, mid-term and longer term goals, now that I have achieved the long-term goal that I set out with after I finished my CELTA, which was to gain some experience and then in due course work at Sheffield University. Of course I also squeezed in my M.A. in ELT and my Delta in the interim, which was handy and part of the plan for getting university work. Teacher training is one of my areas of interest, so it follows logically that, if one of my goals is to become a teacher trainer, doing as many workshops as I can, in various contexts, would be a useful way of gaining experience and working on my techniques for working with teachers rather than students. Initially, I started doing workshops as a means of developing myself as a teacher, and I will admit the main personal goal early on was survival. Happily, as you can tell since I am sitting here writing this, I achieved that! Since then, goals have included sharing what I’ve learnt through my experimentation, becoming more confident in my delivering, including more interaction in my sessions and so on.

This vocabulary workshop, however, is the first one I will do since reading “A Practical Introduction to Teacher Training in ELT” written John Hughes and published by Pavillion, borrowed from the ELTC’s library.

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It is also the first workshop I have volunteered to do in response to topics requested by teachers via survey and shared with everybody by our professional development team. I did a workshop on Error Correction at IH Palermo, with the topic suggested by the DoS, as planning a workshop was one of the tasks for the Tutor in training certificate I did while at IH. It seemed logical that if I had to plan a workshop, I might as well deliver it! For that workshop, I had help from my DoS and from my ex-Delta module 1+2 tutor who shared some materials with me via email. I also had the memory of an error correction workshop I had done during Delta (hence contacting aforementioned tutor!), on which I based the workshop. Of course, this time, for the vocabulary workshop, I’ve done all the preparation unsupported, starting from scratch. I think I should do more sessions like these. I’ve already signed up to do one on pronunciation so hopefully I can use what I learn from doing this session in planning that one. I shall be team-teaching it with one of my colleagues, which also be interesting! 🙂

Hughes suggests thinking of a training session as a triangle shape, divided into three. The smallest part at the top of the triangle is “What?”, the next segment, which goes until half-way down the triangle is “Why?” and the rest of the triangle is “How?” So this is the structure I have applied to my vocabulary workshop. The “what” and “why” section will be taken care of via discussion of some quiz questions relating to the topic of vocabulary review (and by extension learning). The bulk of the session, the “how”, is going to be a game of bingo! I will ask groups to brainstorm a grid of 9 vocabulary review activities that they have used before and then I will share 9 activities of my own with them. I plan to do this by having them participate (briefly!) in each activity using Delta module 1-style terminology (particularly relating to Lexis) as the target vocabulary. If the activity corresponds with any on their grid (regardless of the name, as these activities tend to go by several names), then they get to tick it off and we’ll see if anyone gets Bingo! The remaining time will be used to allow groups to share any leftover activities on their grids. I have also prepared a handout summarising the activity procedures so that the teachers don’t need to make notes as well as participate.

I anticipate that timing is going to be tight, as I will only have an hour to play with. However, I recognise that we do not need to complete each activity, teachers just need to have a taster of it in order to make sense of how it works. As per the triangle, the “what” and “why” quiz should not take up too much time. If time does run out, then I’ll make a google doc and invite teachers to write a brief summary of the outstanding activities on their list. One of my goals is to maintain a good pace and really keep track of the timing. I suppose, in the circumstances, it is also going to be a good test of classroom management and instruction-giving! (The better these are, the better the timing will be!)

After

Well, the good news is that my colleagues responded positively to this workshop. I had 6 attendees and they all had plenty to contribute to the discussion element (!) as well as being willing to get involved in the game-playing element.

As I predicted, time WAS an issue. Or, was it less the timing that was an issue and more my confidence in managing the discussion element, which I allowed to take up too much time?They had a lot to say and I didn’t want to cut it too short! (Perhaps I should have had fewer discussion questions, though I think they were all useful…) Actually I just wish I had had a longer session to play with – in the event we started slightly late and some attendees had to leave early due to other commitments, and even that aside it wasn’t the longest time slot! That’s not an excuse though – I did know roughly how long I would have. Perhaps I should have included fewer activities to try out?

However, on the plus side, this time issue was mitigated by my carefully prepared hand-out which meant that although we couldn’t have a stab at playing all of the games, teachers did take away instructions for all of them so that content wasn’t lost. Perhaps it didn’t matter that there were left over activities. It just gave the teachers a greater take-away for future experimentation. Perhaps, then, what I needed to do was stop trying the activities at a given point when there was still enough time for a constructive closing. I think that is what really got lost, as we had to come to a halt rather abruptly as teachers had to leave to get to other things.

For me, another positive was that within the game playing, we were able to refer back to the discussion element and build on it. The games illustrated the points made through the discussion questions, making them that much clearer. I think this was important because it made the workshop more cohesive and less of a ‘discussion with a few activities tacked on’ which perhaps it was in danger of becoming, given its nature. It was intended to be a practical session, with lots of ideas for teachers to try out, rather than a theoretical session, but the discussion element allowed for the practical ideas to be rooted in theory. So even though my first thought at the end of the workshop was that I had let it go on for too long, I now feel that that wasn’t the issue, rather it was how I managed the remaining time.

I would say the main drawback was that although I identified time as a potential issue in my planning, and recognised that not every activity needed to be completed, I didn’t recognise that the teachers didn’t actually even need to do every activity, thanks to the hand-out I had prepared, and therefore wasn’t prepared in the session to stop going through my set of activities in time for a strong closing. This is something that will definitely be a consideration in future workshops.

At the end of the session, I felt disappointed that it hadn’t gone quite as I might have liked it to, but on reflection I think it had a lot of positives and, importantly, I learnt some useful things from how it did go:

  • hand-outs are really useful!
  • make a decision with regards to how long an activity should run for and be firmer in bringing it to a close, if needs be. (Alternatively, if it needs to go on longer than planned, revise plans for the timings for the rest of the session!)
  • recognise when all the material is not going to be got through and ensure that there is nevertheless time for a suitable closing element to wrap everything up
  • in planning, if there is clearly too much material, either cut it down or ensure that nothing will be lost from the session if all the material isn’t covered. (In other words plan so that no core material will be lost)

I think that’s a useful set of points for me to consider next time I plan and deliver a workshop! So, all in all, it was a successful learning and developmental experience for me in my quest to become a teacher trainer at some point! I look forward to building on it. 🙂

If you are interested, here is the powerpoint I used and here is my handout.

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IATEFL 2016: “A hundred thousand things to see!”

The title of this post is a somewhat obscure reference to a ten-minute talk I did last year at IHTOC (IH Teachers Online Conference) in which I used the lyrics of Aladdin to try and persuade my audience of the benefits of attending a conference! It also reflects the reason for this post. The truth is, even though I did manage to see over 20 talks  for every one I saw, there was at least another I also wanted to see and missed! Too many things to see… 🙂

Fortunately, the British Council IATEFL Online 2016 site means I (and many others) can play catch-up! The conference lives on a little while longer. 🙂 Thank you, British Council folk and IATEFL folk involved, for making this possible!

Here are a few of the talks I plan to have a look at:

  • Self-marketing for English Teachers – use your strengths for competitive advantage
  • Q and A session relating to David Crystal’s plenary session
  • Enhancing speaking and writing outcomes using Google Apps
  • Forum on special educational needs – creating positive inclusive learning opportunities
  • The ELTJ debate – “This house believes that teacher training is a waste of time”
  • Forum on encouraging teacher reflection
  • National Geographic Learning Signature Event – What does it mean to be a Global Citizen?
  • Chatting in the academy – exploring spoken English for academic purposes
  • Reviewing qualifications and CPD: helping meet teachers’ training needs
  • ELT Conversation
  •  Visual literacy in creating classroom materials
  • Catering for trainee diversity on CELTA courses

All of these recordings can be found on the Sessions page of the British Council IATEFL Online website. What a valuable resource!

I also want to have a look at some of the interviews that were conducted during the conference, all of which can be found on the Interviews page of the British Council IATEFL Online website. For example:

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In addition to the sessions collected on the British Council IATEFL Online website, you can also watch sessions done and recorded by Macmillan, which will be available on their page here. The two I most want to catch up with are:

  • Flourish not flounder: using teaching competences for professional development
  • The teacher of tomorrow: professional development through informal learning

Plenty to wade through, then, but that’s ok – I’ve got nearly a whole year to finish before IATEFL rolls round again and this particular list gets topped up again! Similar to my newly made language learning contract, this is a mini CPD contract – the difference is, though, that the language learning one accounts for the sum total of my language learning while this one doesn’t account for the sum total of my CPD!

How about you, which IATEFL online talks and interviews do you want to catch up with?!

 

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Pronunciation tweaks for familiar activities

I wrote this post during the summer of 2015, when I was working on the 1o week pre-sessional programme at Sheffield University. (However, it is relevant for for anyone who does regular vocabulary review and wants to integrate pronunciation into such activities.) I have finally got round to publishing it some 8 months later! Better late than never…!

I’ve been doing a lot of pronunciation work with my Social English students recently. (Social English class is a class for students on the 10 week pre-sessional programme at Sheffield University, who have unconditional offers from their departments for degree courses starting in September-October this year.) I’ve also been doing quite a bit of vocabulary work. (Spaced) review is a regular feature of our classes, so I am constantly on the look-out for different ways of doing this, in order to keep things interesting. Part of the pronunciation work done with these students was an introduction to the phonemic chart, which I reviewed in a subsequent lesson using a phonemic chart version of Connect 4. Since then, I’ve also been trying to integrate review of the sounds into vocabulary review activities. This has the benefits of linking the work done on sounds to our target vocabulary and of making vocabulary review that slight bit more interesting and challenging. Here are a few familiar activities that I have tweaked, in order of increasing level of challenge…

Board Race

In board races, learners race to write something on the board in response to a prompt from the teacher (e.g. a clue for a target word as vocabulary review.) Here are a few pronunciation based board races. For all these races, learners are put in teams and team members take turns to race to the board.

(The more complex versions may  be kept for when learners are more comfortable with the sounds and symbols in recognition and production.)

  • The phonemic chart is projected onto the whiteboard. The teacher makes sounds and one learner from each team races to touch the correct sound on the chart. First person to touch the correct sound wins the point.
  • The teacher calls a sound and one learner from each team races to write that sound on the board.
  • The teacher gives a clue for learners to guess an item of target vocabulary; learners race to write it on the board in phonemes.
  • The teacher gives a clue for learners to guess an item of target vocabulary and they race to write the word AND stress pattern on the board.

The letters game

In its traditional form, I was introduced to this game during my CELTA course at Sheffield Uni. Each group of learners has a set of letters (multiple examples of each letter) and the idea is that the teacher provides clues to elicit a target word, which the learners must race to spell out using their letters. Turns out it works equally well using sounds instead of letters! And once you have made your sets of sounds, of course they are a resource you can use over and over, with different groups etc, meaning that after one job lot of preparation, it becomes a zero prep game. To warm learners up with an easier start, make sounds for the learners to find, before calling out words for them to sound out, and then graduating to clues for words.

Two sets of sounds

Two sets of sounds, ready to go!

Hangman

Nothing new to anybody about Hangman, it can safely be assumed, in fact I think it has mostly gone out of fashion as a waste of time. However, it does work quite well if instead of using letters, you use sounds. So, instead of each __ __ __ being for individual letters of target words, they are for individual sounds (which of course won’t necessarily be the same number as the number of letters in a given word). I had my students in two teams, and the teams took it in turns to make the sound they wanted to guess. Within the teams, students took it in turns to be the one who made the sound but they collaborated first in deciding which sound they wanted. Once learners are familiar with the game, you could round it off in a later class by doing an utterance and then once it is on the board, in symbols, perhaps write the words underneath and then in a different colour pick out what happens in connected speech vs. in individually pronounced words.

Backs to the board

Instead of writing a target word on the board in letters, write it on the board in phonemic script. Teams have to decide what the word is before helping their teammates at the board to guess what it is. Once those at the board have guessed the word, you could award bonus points if they can write it on a mini-whiteboard in phonemic script.

 Target

The teacher draws a target on the board (or you could pre-prepare and project onto the whiteboard to save time) and puts sounds in all the gaps. Students are in two teams, and take it in turns to throw the ball at the board (1-4 times per go, depending how challenging you want to make it) and should then try to use the 1-4 sounds hit in a single word. You could add even more limitations, e.g. it can only be words that you have studied this week or something, to bring in an added vocabulary element. (In my case, the teacher did prepare a target but she left out a couple of sounds – no problem, the students identified the missing ones and the teacher drew those on in board marker. 🙂 ) (Can you see which sounds are missing?)

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Banana dictations

In this activity, traditionally learners, in pairs or small groups, have a mini whiteboard between them and the teacher says a sentence with a word gapped out – the ‘banana’ word – which the learners race to write on their mini-whiteboard. To bring in sounds as well as vocabulary, why not ask them to write the word in phonemic script? To do this, in their groups, they will be sounding out the word and looking at the chart for help, so it reviews sound-symbol relationships.

… This is clearly not an exhaustive list! Can you think of any more to add?

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Networking Macmillan style (Or, my very delayed summary of Kirsten Holt’s webinar!)

I had intended to watch this webinar live, but it turned out that I was away at the time (Easter holiday!) so couldn’t. Thanks to the wonders of technology, and the fact that it is only 45 minutes long, I got to catch up with it during my lunch hour at work! I decided it was worth writing up as Networking is something all us professionals have to do at some point and Kirsten had some useful suggestions for how to do it better…)

Networking

When I think of networking, what immediately comes to mind are the ELT publisher networking events at IATEFL conference and, I will confess, a slight shudder runs through me. Being in a big room full of people I don’t know (or only know by sight/name e.g. the Scott Thornburys’ of this world) with the apparent purpose of making conversation is something that thoroughly daunts me. More specifically, the going up to people and starting up the conversation. (Does anyone else feel the same?!) When I think of networking, I think of something I ought to do but would rather avoid. When I think of networking, I think “it’s just not my thing”! So, my hope was that Kirsten Holt (who has taught, trained teachers, been a director of studies and currently works at Macmillan) would give me some ideas for getting over this dread.

First she talked about why.

Why indeed… 😉 

  • It can help you develop outside normal teaching day
  • You can share ideas, knowledge, best practice
  • Because a problem shared is a problem halved: for example, you can discuss what is going on in your classroom etc. with other professionals.
  • It gives you an outward facing ELT profile, enables other people to see your capabilities
  • It can help you develop business relationships (Kirsten has often applied for jobs having met the person in advance)
  • It’s interesting! (hear about opportunities that other people don’t know about)

Where?

Start small and develop as you go through. Can be nerve-wracking but is easy to get to grips with. Lots of events from ELT organisations and publishers. (hahaha!)

Go online!

For me, this is interesting! I had never thought of all my online activity as networking until IATEFL this year when I discussed the Cambridge event and my ‘fish-out-of-water’ feelings towards it with one of my old course mates from my M.A. at Leeds Met, and she suggested that I should play to my strengths by avoiding such events and continuing to do what I’m good at doing online e.g. connecting with people via my Blog and Twitter, for example. Kirsten’s suggestions in this area seem to build on that conversation, as far as I am concerned!

Kirsten suggests:

  • FB pages e.g. IATEFL and Macmillan, if someone says something interesting in a comment, send them a message on FB alluding to the comment and asking for more info about it.
  • LinkedIn, also groups like the ELT technologies that you can join. (More information about LinkedIn below)

You can push yourself beyond the norm, beyond your social group. That’s what’s useful about these online resources.

Of course, conferences and other such events put on by Teaching Associations, or events at work where guests also attend, are all potential opportunities for networking too.

Key part of networking: Preparation

Do your research – about the online group (is it right for you, does it match what you want form it) or the event you are planning to attend; plan what you will say to the people you introduce yourself to. Think about the type of people and companies you’d like to  make contact with and do some research. If there is someone you really want to meet, search for them on LinkedIn or for profiles on company websites. It doesn’t work all the time – people might not have their picture up there for example. However, if you’ve seen their face you know who you are looking for and can say, “Hi. You’re blabla” etc. (Hence the earlier point re avoiding dog and flower type profile pictures!)

Make business cards that stand out

(There was I thinking I was doing well by actually having a business card – not to mention, remembering to take them with me to whichever event! Turns out there’s a whole other layer of things to consider!)

  • shape
  • something unsual (Top Trumps style, Bitesize with a bite taken out out…)
  • extra thick

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  • Personalised touch: e.g. editing the card based on what was being talked about at the event.
  • Don’t let the other side of the card go to waste. (E.g. Macmillan have a quote on one side and details on the other)

Vistaprint and Moo are apparently good – you can play around with the design online.

LinkedIn

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Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date. It’s basically a glorified CV online. It’s also a good idea to adapt it depending where you are headed to so that it is relevant to the areas you are planning to network about. On LinkedIn you can also access groups such as ELT Technologies.  (Hint from me: If you go to your ‘My Groups’ which you can find under ‘Interests’, and go to ‘Discover’ it will show you a ream of groups based on those your contacts are members of. You can then request to join them!) Avoid profile pictures of flowers or dogs!

This year Kirsten is talking a lot about developing teachers so her profile shows what she has done in that area.

Another thing to consider: does it showcase your talents? Use it for self-promotion. Do you have any testimonials? Look at Kirsten’s profile on LinkedIn for an example of this.

Conferences

If you are catching someone in a brief break between sessions, bear in mind they may be after a comfort break or tea, so keep it snappy (90 seconds to 2 mins tops – if people want to follow up on you later, they will – on LinkedIn etc). What you do, who you work with, what’s your teaching situation. Say what you want to do. “Hi Im Kirsten I work as a publisher in teacher development, I’m interested in teachers who will help me with reviewing material” is the example Kirsten gives. Also try and give a sense of who you are. It’s sharing your personality as much as sharing your life. If you can, have a one-liner, can make you stand out. Practice with your friends and family. Even on your own. Do a little recording of yourself and play it back. Or use a mirror. Kirsten discovered how much she used her hands and now keeps them more contained!

Be aware of how the other person is reacting. If they look bored/disinterested, stop! Don’t waste time talking to people who aren’t interested. Thank them for their time and leave it there. Move on to someone else. Not everybody will be your friend, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, it’s not meant personally!

General Tips

  • Kirsten says volunteering is good if you find networking daunting. Setting up, marshalling, helping people register – it’s a great way to meet people without taking too much on yourself. Can create more ‘natural’ ways of networking.
  • Show up early – before everyone arrives – there are fewer people to deal with. If you arrive very early and the speaker is setting up, allow them to set up, leave them be, meet other people. If you meet people early on, you might be more memorable.
  • Introduce yourself to the organiser (the person you corresponded with in order to attend the event etc.) and they can introduce you to other people if they have the time. This could help you get going.
  • Have a special number in mind, particularly for larger events like conferences. E.g for the first time maybe 10 people. And then when you achieve it, reward yourself. Or if you are at a talk, the two people next to you is even enough. It’s your special number. Your personal number of how many people you’d like to meet.
  • Be engaged. As you are meeting people, think about your handshake. It stays with you if someone doesn’t have a very good one! Firm and dry is good… And look at the person as you meet them. Show that you are interested. Don’t nod at EVERYTHING but show that you are listening. Building this rapport helps you develop the relationship further. Just as you would with your students, but this time with business contacts.
  • Don’t assume! Think about what you are saying and who you are saying it to. E.g. If you are meeting someone, don’t assume it’s their first time at the event just because it is yours. Or if a person is in work or out of work. “How’s work going?” could be a nonstarter… Wait to hear them describe their job before asking this question. Of course next time you meet them, you could refer back to what they say.
  • Don’t say “do you remember me?”. Think how many students you meet in a term. Teachers. Teacher trainers. People at conferences. People in your personal life. Hundreds of people. So it can be a difficult question to be put on the spot with. In a sea of faces it’s hard to stand out. So if you know the person, remind them how you know each other “I was at x with you, a, b and c were also there, we did y”. A clue is very helpful!
  • Be interested not interesting. Ask the other person questions, don’t just talk about yourself. At the same time, be thinking about what you can offer this person and what you want from them. Remember that they might know another 10 people, one of whom might be the person you really need to speak to.
  • Use your time wisely. If it’s not working with a person you are speaking to, don’t give your card out willy nilly, only give it to appropriate people.
  • Be very specific about who you are, what you do and what you are looking for.
  • Take notes. On the back of their business card is a good place – something to remember them for, something from the conversation. It takes seconds. E.g. “Met at x event, date, interested in y”

What happens after you network?

Log your contacts so that you can remember them. Connect with them on LinkedIn straight away. There is a 48hr window. Don’t let cards sit in the draw in your office or in your conference bag. Make a little contact. I met you at event x and it was interesting to talk about y. You mentioned z and I’d really like to hear more about that. It’s a way to open a conversation and remind them who you are after the event. If it is a large event like IATEFL, up to a week is fine. Once you’ve made contact, don’t bombard them. Don’t send hundreds of emails. A little bit of contact is a follow-up, don’t move into the area of stalking!

Kirsten finishes by saying networking is not a competition, not about numbers, quality is more important than quantity. It’s about using your contacts wisely and having enjoyable conversations with people, sharing ideas and knowledge. (See, this actually sounds more like fun! Maybe this is what I need to remember next time I find myself at an ELT publisher event or similar so that I can enjoy it instead of feeling slightly queasy…)

Thank you, Macmillan and Kirsten! If you are interested in this topic, then I would highly recommend watching the complete webinar here  on the Macmillan Website, it’s freely available and Kirsten is a good speaker, so why not?! Oh, and do feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn! 😉 )

 

 

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Have you heard of TEFLEquity Advocates?

The main purpose of this post is to share some information about a grass roots organisation that I have only recently become fully aware of: TEFLEquity Advocates. The second part of the post highlights a few other related links you might also like to look at.

TEFLEquity Advocates

Hands up if you know about it? Hands up if you knew about it before Silvana Richardson took IATEFL by storm with her fantastic day 2 plenary session? Hands up if you were like me – only vaguely aware of it before IATEFL?

TEFLEquity Advocates is 2 years old. It was set up in April 2014 with the purpose of fighting the discrimination that persists in ELT hiring practices. The about page of their website stresses that it is not only for “non-native speakers” and encourages “native speakers” to get involved as well. Silly labels that we are currently stuck with aside (for an explanation of why they are ridiculous, have a look at this post of mine!), basically what’s important is that it is for EVERYBODY who works in ELT. And if you are reading my blog, that probably means YOU too.

Even though, as I mentioned, I was vaguely aware of TEFLEquity Advocates before IATEFL, I hadn’t realised quite how extensive their website is. (It’s fantastic!) I figure that if I wasn’t aware, then there are probably others out there who now know about TEFL Equity, due to the prominence at IATEFL enjoyed by the issues that it treats, but don’t know about it and all the wonderful resources you can find on the website. Hence this post.

Resources

TEFLEquity Advocates has a whole section dedicated to useful resources:  You can find such gems as a reading list of academic papers relating to “NEST and NNEST” issues, complete with hyperlinks to help you access these; a list of blogs that also focus on these issues, again complete with hyperlinks; a list of anti-discrimination statements made by various organisations and finally a list of Facebook groups that you could join, in which these issues are discussed.

Get Involved

It also has a section dedicated to suggestions for ways for YOU to get involved, including joining a list of current supporters (on my list right now!), links to a couple of surveys that you could complete which would contribute to the website founders’ research on the issues it treats, and a badge that you can add to your blog or website. It looks like this:

badge

Put this on your blog or website and link it back to the TEFLEquity Advocates website, please!

Can you see mine, to the top right-hand side of my website?

The Blog

In the Blog section you can read a number of inspiring stories written by teachers (both “NNEST” and “NEST”) who have succeeded against the odds, blog posts written by the website curators (most recently, a post that questions what comes next after Silvana Richardson’s IATEFL 2016 plenary ) and, finally, a “Talk to the Experts” section, which contains a list of links to a wide range of interviews conducted by TEFL Equity Advocates. The list is broken down by background and contains categories such as Academic Directors/Recruiters, ELT Professionals, Teacher Trainers, Linguists/Scholars and more.

The Hall of Fame

This section contains an A-Z of schools, recruitment agencies and listing websites that DON’T discriminate. Hopefully this will be an ever-growing list, so if you think any school/recruitment agency or listing website is missing from it, there is a contact form you can use to get in touch.

Webinars

TEFLEquity Advocates regularly host webinars on a wide range of “NNEST”/”NEST”- related topics and issues. In this section of the website, you can find a list of links to past webinars together with information for how to join forthcoming webinars. (I have been invited to give a webinar later this year, which invitation I was delighted to accept, so watch this space!)

Activities and Lesson Plans

In the final section of the TEFL Equity Advocates website, you can find lesson resources, whose aim is (and I quote) “to raise awareness of ELF and World Englishes, NNEST discrimination, qualities of good English teachers in general and egalitarian hiring policies.” These are divided into plans intended for use in ESL and EFL classrooms and for use in teacher training.  If you have any lesson materials that would fit in either category, the website welcomes you to get in touch by using the contact form.

Hands up if you were aware that the TEFLEquity website contained such a lot of useful, interesting material? I wasn’t, until I got home from IATEFL and went to have a look at it! I encourage you to do the same. Read a few articles, watch a webinar, and, of course, get involved in any way that you can. The more of us who do, the better! The website already contains loads of great content, but, across the board, TEFLEquity Advocates welcome your contribution, be it by doing a webinar, writing a blog post, sharing a lesson plan or any number of other options. There is no shortage of opportunity to get involved.

Other things to have a look at

(I wouldn’t usually plug my own posts like this, but this is an important topic and these talks and discussions were so worthwhile, that I feel justified in doing so!)

Ignorance and silence are our biggest enemies, so let’s raise awareness and NOT stop talking about the issues until they become historical rather than current.

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Lizzie’s Language Learning Contract (v2.April 2016)

Capitalising on post-IATEFL momentum and motivation, I’ve decided it’s time to renew my language learning goals – and practice what I preach! I’m always telling learners, ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re busy, even ten minutes a day is better than nothing’ and encouraging them to maintain motivation. Meanwhile, what about me? Well, it could be worse, I suppose…

  • I DO write my diary in Italian (nearly) every day (I missed a couple of days while at IATEFL, for example!). My reading is slightly more sporadic – at the moment I’m listening and reading along with Per dieci minuti written and read aloud by Chiara Gamberale. It generally happens while I am having a bath in the evening but sometimes I am just too tired! (I’m also in the middle of a translation of the third book in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. But I haven’t dipped into that since I got back home from my most recent trip to Sicily, at Easter!)
  • I also have a stack of magazines that I don’t dip into as often as I should (read: erm, when was the last time I did so?!)
  • I’m reading in German a few times a week at the moment too, am quite enjoying the book I am in the middle of. It’s about horses and aimed at young teenagers (!) – good fun. 😉
  • I’m also in the middle of a book in French (Au Bonheur des Dames by Emile Zola) but it’s been a while since I dipped into that properly – though I did read about one page recently!

It’s Polish that’s the real problem. I decided I was going to learn Polish in late May last year. Suffice to say, it wound up on the back burner. However, last night, for the first time in ages, riding the wave of post-IATEFL motivation, I dug out my ‘Harry Potter 1 in Polish’ audiobook and listened a bit, just enjoying the sounds and rhythm. (I had want to listen and read along but I’ve got to work out where my e-book of it is stored, was unable to find it quickly enough…) I still want to learn Polish. However, it doesn’t end there. I’ve also got a little bee in my bonnet telling me to try another project: Project “see how much Spanish I can pick up purely through using graded readers”. Unlike Polish, Spanish graded readers are fairly easy to come by – including those with audio discs, which are the sort I would go for. I think it would be an interesting experiment!

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Using the theory I’ve used on my learners, I am going to communicate my learning goals to you lot who read this blog in the hopes that it motivates me to achieve more than I would have otherwise. Even if I don’t always manage to meet my self-inflicted contractual obligations, it will hopefully still be more than I would have achieved if I hadn’t made them in the first place.

Lizzie’s Learning Contract

I solemnly do declare that I will (attempt to) do the following this week:

  • read and/or listen to something in Italian
  • read and/or listen to something in French
  • read and/or listen to something in German
  • use my 1000 first words in Polish
  • “read”/”listen to” Harry Potter in Polish
  • use Memrise and/or Quizlet for Polish
  • use my Polish for Dummies book
  • use graded readers in Spanish

Signed: Lizzie Pinard

That’s all! It’s not a huge ask. The first three are very vague, but that’s fine – it means they encompass any kind of input I wish to use (books, audiobooks, magazines, radio, tv etc) As as sub-goal, I will aim to vary it if I can…

Let’s see how it goes. There will be updates at various possibly semi-regular intervals!

Is anybody else trying to learn a new language at the moment? How are you going about it? Is it working?! 🙂

 

 

 

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My IATEFL Summary of Posts

I thought I would collate all my IATEFL blog posts into a single post, as I usually do, but with a twist: This year, I am going to weave them into a narrative of my IATEFL 2016.

Tuesday

I arrived at the ICC  from New Street station after my “I’m going to walk” initial attitude had been wiped out by immediately getting lost and doing a big circle at the end of which I was back at the station again. “Where are the taxis?” was a much more successful approach. Thankfully, Sandy was there when I arrived (somewhat flustered!) and pointed me in all the appropriate directions, which meant I was well in time for the start of the event.

This was the day I attended the Materials Writing SIG Pre-Conference Event – Print VS Digital: Is it really a competition? I watched Ceri Jones’s talk about the similarities between print and digital, through looking at a specific learning task in various print and technological manifestations. This was followed by Genevieve White telling us about the skills needed to adapt a print course to digital. After the break was the young learners and teenagers section – Katherine Bilsborough gave us lots of great tips for primary materials design and Fiona Mauchline took us into the minds of teens. From this, we moved on to a focus of self-publishing with Damian Williams and editor etiquette with Sue Kay. I was very surprised to discover that leaving 2 spaces after a full-stop isn’t something that everybody else does. I learnt it when I learnt how to use computers and have done it ever since…or have I? Looking at my blog posts, it seems that I actually don’t leave two spaces after all. Yet I could have sworn I did… Just as well it’s no longer a thing then! The SIG day was rounded off with a panel discussion.

On Tuesday evening, along with Sandy, I discovered that Jamie’s Italian does some very good vegan options – yum! Of course, the time spent catching up with people who you haven’t seen, well, since the last IATEFL conference, is all part and parcel of the experience.

Wednesday

It started, of course, with the opening plenary delivered by the wonderful David Crystal, which did not in any way disappoint. A fascinating hour and twenty minutes. My next session was a sit-out, as I wanted a bit of head-clearing time before I did my talk in the 12.00 slot (How amazing to have such an early in the day AND early in the conference slot! (I’m used to the penultimate day graveyard slot…). It was part of a listening forum, which meant that I spoke alongside Craig Wealand and Ellen Servenis. Craig talked about using podcasts with students, in terms of encouraging them to listen outside the classroom, while Ellen talked about using listening journals with, like me, the goal of encouraging students to use metacognitive strategies to help improve their listening skills. Both talks were very interesting and I enjoyed being part of a forum, though our time allocation seemed incredibly brief!

That done, I could get down to the serious business of making the most of my IATEFL. After lunch, I attended an EAP-focused talk, by Angela Smith which was about sharing ideas for supporting postgraduate students, a materials development focused workshop, by Kath Bilsborough and Sue Lyon-Jones, which had loads of ideas for using what’s already out there in your materials and how to do that, and a talk about introducing flipped learning into a university EAP setting, done by Robyn Brinks in collaboration with Pearson, so a nice variety, all in all.

From 6.30 to 8.00 in the evening, following a rushed bite to eat at The Handmade Burger Co. near to the ICC, it was the Cambridge “invitation-only” event time. I have no idea why I was invited, but on the plus side for me, there were two-minute talks as well as the usual hobnobbing that I am so inept at! Through these I had a taste of Silvana’s fantastic presentation style, which made me look forward to the next day’s plenary.

Thursday

Well, between having seen Silvana speak briefly on Wednesday evening at the Cambridge thing and having read the abstract for her plenary – The Native Factor: the haves and have nots – I had high expectations. What I didn’t expect was to reach the end of it feeling like I wanted to cry and having to fight really hard to get all my emotions back under control. Because seriously, who cries in a plenary, how embarrassing! Turns out I wasn’t the only one. Such an important topic, so immaculately delivered, I highly recommend that you watch the British Council recording.

The plenary finished a bit late (I assume – I went directly to the next session I had earmarked and it had already started!). It was a session about using TextInspector. I didn’t write a blog post because not only did I arrive late but I couldn’t get on the wifi either, so made a few notes in Word. These are they:

Text Inspector

Late entry – worth it! (plenary)

 www.textinspector.com

  •  Profiles a text according to CUP – CEFR band scales. You can try a version for free on the Vocabulary Profile website.
  •  If you go to Text Inspector: paste text into text box, click analyse and you get the output from text inspector. Different metrics down lefthand side. If you think it has miscounted e.g. number of sentences, you can edit it and update the scores.

  • You can also jump straight to the scorecard and get an overall analysis of your text, all the statistically significant data. Number of metrics used are e.g. average syllables per sentence etc. They have a statistically significant influence in terms of Band.

Not really worth a blog post, I think you’ll agree! It looks an interesting tool though, worth a closer look. I did manage to get on the WiFi for the next talk, which was by Michelle Tamala who was looking at how to help EAP students become more autonomous and use metacognitive strategies. Finally before lunch, I also attended Alan Maley’s talk, Ten great educators and their legacy.

After lunch, I had planned to attend the ELTJ debate on teacher training but I had been offered an interview slot which clashed with the start of that session. Nevertheless, it was exciting being interviewed! (I was going to say it was my first live interview, but I guess that award goes to my ELTon award one! Pity I didn’t remember that at the time, then maybe I would have been less nervous…!)

Thursday had an EAP theme running through it – the next talk I attended was ‘You tell me! Practical ideas for student led tasks in ESAP’ by Anne Heaton of Coventry University who she talked about making general English for Academic Purposes classes more subject specific by using students’ own knowledge within tasks, and I went from that to “How to optimise tutorial time: the 20 minute fix” by David Jay of Anglia Ruskin University.

Finally, I attended the Panel on Native Speakerism – it seemed the obvious thing to do after the morning’s plenary! It was interesting to hear about the issue from a range of perspectives. I was very shocked to learn that Christopher Graham had received hate mail (of the “You are betraying your tribe” variety) for supporting the TEFLEquity movement. I suppose I always like to think that people might have got over being so ridiculous by 2016. The truth is, in our profession, the battle is yet young.

I didn’t attend any evening events on Thursday evening, was exhausted funnily enough! And my apartment had a bathtub…

Friday

Friday was another lovely day, full of the spontaneity that makes IATEFL, well, IATEFL! I started with Tyson Seburn’s talk on learner-sourced visuals for higher level texts and then took a break from the EAP theme with Dita Phillips’s talk, “I’m a non-native speaker teacher, hear me roar!”  I nearly didn’t get in – first I sat on the floor and then the ushers tried to chase me and some lovely person gave up their seat for me and exited! Thank you, whoever you are!

After that, I really wanted to go to Sarah Milligan and Patrick Curry’s talk but finally opted for the MaW SIG Open Forum, after all I am a member! It was great to hear the summing up of the year, as well as about their future plans. Their scholarship (in collaboration with OUP) winner also said a few words, which was nice. Finally, I won one of the raffle prizes. 🙂  The SIG are recruiting new committee members and I am tempted to put in for the deputy publications role, running out of time though!

After lunch, I returned to the theme of EAP with Michelle Hunter who spoke on the topic of “Demanding High in ELT – silently” and followed it with the follow-up workshop to Silvana’s plenary  – couldn’t miss it! As you would expect, the turn-out filled a good-size hall! The time went very quickly, too quickly really, but the discussion was fruitful. I think/hope lots of people have gone away from IATEFL thinking about how they can make a difference. I know I have!

Then it was break-time and I met up with my tutors from Leeds Beckett and a handful of Leeds Beckett students past and present. It was lovely. The final talk I attended on Friday was that of my M.A. tutor Heather Buchanan and her long-time friend Julie Norton, a tutor at the University of Leicester. It was “What makes an outstanding coursebook? The publisher’s perspective” – there was a lot of interesting information but not enough time. Hopefully they can say a little more about it in a future webinar…

That was all the conference sessions for the day, so off I went to Wagamama’s to grab a bite before the Pecha Kucha. Two other delegates had the same idea, one of whom I “know from online” and so we wound up having a lovely dinner together quite unexpectedly. This is one of the things I love about IATEFL! I thoroughly enjoyed both the dinner and the Pecha Kucha. It must be a real thrill to do one!

Other highlights of the day included picking up my annual Black Cat publisher bag! 😉 And also discussing ideas for future IATEFL talks with Sandy and getting an idea for a project that may well keep me going for years!

Saturday

Saturday began with snow, which was rather a shock! Fortunately by the time we made our way over to the ICC, it had stopped.

Scott Thornbury did the final morning plenary – 1966 and all that: a critical history of ELT. I missed the session straight after the plenary because I was saying goodbye to some people but then I went to “What is this thing called Academic English Language Proficiency?” which was really interesting! All about conceptual frameworks for competency and Dr Pamela Humphrey’s idea for one that combines all the ones she has read about. The last talk I went to was Damian Williams’ talk on language development for teachers, which was about integrating language development into teacher development.

Emerging from the bubble, walking in the sunlight after getting back to Sheffield and the real world (feeling somewhat bizarre after 4.5 days of intensive conferencing) followed. And that was the end.

Except…yesterday evening, I finally got round to putting the registered blogger badge on my blog! (Along with the TEFLEquity supporter one that I now proudly sport!) You can add one to your website or blog too, see this page to find out how. For other ideas of how to get involved have a look at this page.

My final IATEFL-related acts for the weekend were sorting this blog post out and writing a post that was my way of continuing the Native Speakerism issue. (It’s ok, I haven’t spent all day on the computer, I also went for a lovely little 12k run in the sunshine!) Now it’s back to the real world, but carrying all the motivation and buzz that IATEFL never fails to supply.

Thank you, IATEFL, for a fabulous few days and see you again next year, I hope!! (Meanwhile, I need to put my project into action! And hopefully also catch up with a few of the sessions that were recorded that I missed but wanted to attend…)

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The Native Factor: the discussion continues

Hands up, dear readers, those who of you who think I am a ‘native speaker’ of British English.

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Hands up if you think I am from England.

“Where are you from?”

It’s one of the earliest questions we teach learners how to ask. And yet it can be one of the most difficult and complicated to answer.

I was born in Chichester, a little town in the south of England.

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I’ve never lived there. I spent the first two years of my life in a little village near Bognor Regis (Felpham, for any Sussex dwellers!). My earliest memories of this part of England, though, come from visits to relatives subsequent to moving to the other end of the world.

From the age of 2 to the age of 17, I lived in Botswana, though I went to a boarding school in South Africa (Mafeking) for secondary school. 2000px-Flag_of_Botswana.svgsf-lgflag

My mum is English but if you follow her side of the family tree up a very little way, you will find one Mr Galindo from Spain.

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Also, once she finished university, she moved away from England permanently (apart from short periods of time when she had my sister and me). She lived in Barbados, Indonesia, Libya and Botswana and, of all those place including England, spent most of her life in Botswana.

My dad is Dominican.

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His father’s branch of his side of the family, though is originally from France (his mother was indigenous Dominican).

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He has lived in Dominica, Barbados, Grenada, UK, Belize, Indonesia, Libya and Botswana, and, again, of all those, Botswana is the place where he has spent the most time. He jokes that if he were asked to pick up arms in a world war, he wouldn’t know which way to point them.

I feel the same. Of my nearly 33 years, I have spent a grand total of about 10 or 11 (not continuously) in various parts of the UK. Two initial years, two years of A-Levels, 3 years at the University of Warwick (each year in different accommodation), a year up in Durham, 2.5 years in Sheffield, my M.A. year in Leeds. So, for 2/3 of my life, a big majority, I’ve been exposed to non-British English. In Botswana, South Africa, France, Indonesia and Italy. Add to that, of course, Dominican English via my dad!

What am I a “native speaker” of? Errrm a variety of English that doesn’t have an actual name? A cross between Botswana English, South African English, British English and Dominican English. I know the Botswana National Anthem (in Setswana) and the South African National Anthem (contains multiple languages) by heart, while the British National Anthem I know about one verse, possibly. Playground chants/skipping games were in Setswana. The mediums of instruction at school were various varieties of English (I had teachers from all over!). I studied French and Setswana at primary school, French, German and Afrikaans (but just as an afternoon activity) at secondary school, French at University and recently learnt a fair bit of Italian through living in Italy and self-study. I learnt a few words of Indonesian while I was in Indonesia too.

When I came back to the UK to do my A-levels, I had to make some adjustments to how I spoke (grammar and vocabulary) and my accent drew a lot of comment. For example, I had to learn that Botswana/South Africa and the U.K. refer to time differently. Look at these two timelines to see what I mean:

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You can imagine, when I told matron at the boarding school in UK, “Ok, I’ll do it just now”, there could be some confusion. Another example: in South African English, we say “is it?” (izzit?) in the same way as someone from the UK might say “really?” or “is that so?” (Funnily enough, my dad would always correct us when we used that particular structure.) So, I had to learn British English when I started to live (on and off!) in the UK. (That said, I have a fairly limited command of it – put me in a conversation with someone speaking broad Liverpudlian, for example, and I struggle – as I did at IATEFL 2013 when trying to get instructions on where my friend should park her car!) I also had to deal with the absence of a whole swathe of cultural references – we didn’t have British TV in Botswana (and this was long pre-internet as we know it nowadays). Come to that we didn’t have TV, other than the one local channel that operated for a few hours a day, until I was about 12 or 13. (Which was when satellite TV arrived – prior to that we could only have had South African television and my parents didn’t want it because there was apartheid going on in SA and they didn’t agree it with it!)

So, where am I from? At the moment I say Sheffield. It’s where I consider home in the UK. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon (I would say I have considered it home and where I come home to between contracts etc since 2007) . If we are talking birth, then Chichester, which otherwise means very little to me. I’m also and always will be from Botswana. And half Dominican. The strange thing is, I got a job in Indonesia on the basis of being a native speaker of British English, with my British passport. This clearly exemplifies how meaningless certain bits of paper and labels can be, not to mention job selection criteria of this nature! (My mum nearly had me prematurely in Libya so even my passport is a bit of an accident!)

Humans, however, love labels. Putting things into categories is something we are good at. We name things and group things. This is something we use to our advantage in language teaching, to help our students learn vocabulary. I actually rather dislike labels by and large. Particularly the sort that require you to tick boxes on forms – there is never a box that I actually fit all the way in! (On equal ops forms I either tick ‘other’ or, for the origins questions, ‘mixed white and black Caribbean’ – and you can bet that whoever reads that box tick wouldn’t be expecting me to show up, but there we are!) We like to tick box people by race, gender and sexuality, all of which are very fluid. It’s all well and good, the trouble comes when labels start to be abused, to be used as a basis for discrimination, hate crimes and so on.

Another thing to consider is that, issues with labels aside, the way we call things changes over time. David Crystal’s opening plenary gave many good examples of items of language coming into and going out of use. This year’s IATEFL would suggest that the labels “native speaker” and “non-native speaker” are finally ready to become obsolete, thank goodness. The world has changed since the terms were coined and it seems absolutely ludicrous that these outdated labels are still being used to discriminate against people. “Nativeness” in terms of language is really a very dated concept, due to the increased mobility of the global population. This was alluded to by David Crystal in his talk at IATEFL 2015, in which he answered a series of questions:

11. With the rise of EFL, what are your thoughts on dropping native speaker and referring simply to variants of English?

David only uses it in a biological context not a linguistic context. There has always been variety – accents, dialects. This has increased enormously, because of the enormous immigration into Britain,producing lots of diversity, and globally. Recognising this has an impact on everything we do. The fact that there is now so much “non-native” variation is simply a natural development similar to the diversity amongst people in the biological native context. People are all just speakers or writers on youtube, for example. There is a blurring of distinctions. Think of the couple who speak English as their mutual language, EFL, have a child, and speak to that child in English, then that child is a native speaker of EFL. At the end of the day, teaching knowledge is the important thing, in a teaching context. Pillow talk and nursery rhymes are the most difficult things for “non-native speakers”, according to a Swedish friend of David’s. No corpus of it – an IATEFL potential project? Watch out for microphones appearing between you in bed…😉

Yes, this year at IATEFL, the discussion has indeed continued. Indeed, with Silvana Richardson’s immaculately delivered plenary, The Native Factor: Haves and havenots, a panel discussion chaired by TEFLEquity’s Marek Kiczkowiak, and talks such as Dita Phillips’s I am a Non-Native Speaker – hear me roar! and Damian William’s talk on Language development for teachers, not only has it continued, but it has grown in volume and impact. In the panel discussion and the post-plenary workshop, the issue of labels was discussed, as the issue of what terms to use instead was considered.

I’ve been thinking about this too. In Silvana’s plenary, she pointed out that

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In this day and age, that is absolutely true. The monolingual speaker of English, unless they teach English and are aware of the need for accommodation and communication strategies in spoken encounters with multilingual users of English, is the real spanner in the works and the reason why communication fails. (When we teach our learners repair strategies, I think we ought to explain that it’s because they may find themselves faced with someone who doesn’t know how to communicate properly and may need this kind of prompting – being asked to slow down, repeat, paraphrase etc!)  This being the case, surely the “ideal model” should be a multilingual user of English? I find it very strange that we have language schools inviting students to attend classes because learning a language is a fine thing to do and will give you such great advantages on one hand, and on the other hand, the same language schools only willing to hire what they call “native speakers” or teachers with “native level” English (which only counts if that English is British/American/Canadian etc and I didn’t see a category for my mongrel variety, I have to say!) Talk about thinking that is not at all joined up and extraordinarily mixed messages!

It’s time for SLA to catch up. It’s time for employers of teachers the world over to catch up. I’m glad that this year’s IATEFL has highlighted this. Let’s keep the discussion going. And let’s back it up with action. So far, I’ve blogged write-ups of key talks from IATEFL, written this blogpost and (very proudly) put the TEFLEquity supporter badge on my blog. It looks like this:

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Click on the image to be taken to the website

I strongly encourage everybody else in our profession, who blogs or has a website relevant to the profession, to do the same. Let’s be the majority, not the minority. We shake our heads at the unpleasant (often an understatement!) things our ancestors have done in the name of labels and arbitrary categories, but let’s remember that we also need to shake our heads and stand up against what’s happening now. This is the only way to rid our profession of discrimination and ensure that we have qualified teachers teaching English rather than people who have been hired because their first language is a particular variety of English and (in some cases) because they have white skin.

Thank you IATEFL for providing a platform for all those who spoke up in talks and panel discussions and workshops to speak. Silence and inaction are perhaps our biggest enemies, so these last few days must be a score in our favour against them! And finally, again, I welcome anyone who wishes to share their views on this, but doesn’t have a blog of their own, to write a guest blog post that I will happily share on my blog.

(PS: I understand that Christopher Graham, who was on the panel in the discussion on native speakerism that took place at IATEFL, received hate mail for supporting the TEFLEquity movement, along the lines of “You are betraying your tribe”, so I am prepared for similar. The truth is, I would be more worried if such people were agreeing with my opinions [unless they had suddenly decided to become open-minded, rational beings!] So, bring it on!)

Best wishes to all,

Lizzie. Multilingual user of (some varieties of) English.

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IATEFL 2016 Plenary Day 4 1966 and all that: a critical history of ELT (Scott Thornbury)

The last day has come all too soon…

Scott starts with a warm up. He gives us some significant dates in his life: 1950, 1975, 1992, 2000. 1950, he was born. 1975, significant career landmark: started teaching! Will revisit that moment shortly. 1992, first IATEFL conference (in Lille, France). 2000, at an IATEFL conference in Dublin he coined the term grammar McNuggets – little bitesized chunks of language that we love teaching, that form the nutrition of our syllabuses, on the assumption that if we deliver enough of them, the students will magically absorb them and language learning will take place. Also likens it to feeding seals – here is the past continuous, catch that! A metaphor he saw in a talk recently.

On the theme of chronology, given it’s the 50th anniversary of IATEFL, it seems appropriate to map the lifeline our profession. The reference in the title:

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In the introduction to this book, history is not what you think, it’s what you can remember. Today will be the history that Scott can remember. He collects old course books, old grammars, old dictionaries etc.

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The titles wouldn’t resonate now – “Interesting English”? come on, it would have to be “Awesome English” and what would the follow up to “I’m learning English” be? “I’m still learning English”?!

He shows us a cover:

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It’s interesting to look at the transcript inside…

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English for interrogation purposes? In 1965, this was the height of the cold war. Looking at the credits for this book, one of the names, Weiman, is from the department of war…

However, 1966 (50 years ago):

TESOL was founded. And Chomsky said he was skeptical about the significants for the teaching of languages such insights and understandings as have been attained in linguistics and psychology.” Another voice that gave a counter-discourse in linguistics, Dell Hymes. He gave a talk about communicative competence though it wasn’t published till a few years later. But the idea is born that linguistic competence isn’t the be all and end all: communicative competence also includes sociolinguistic and strategic competence. It was an interesting, fresh look at what language competence is. Had a knock-on effect for course design and methodology.

Newmark, L. wrote How not ot interfere with language learning. Incredibly presciently, he said, if we just teach the little bits of language, there are so many of them, by the time we’ve taight them and practiced them, a child will be an adult and an adult will be dead. It’s not the case that language is additive and linear, or no one would ever learn it. “An important test of our success as language teachers…is the ability of our students to choose to say what they want.” The alternative put forward was doing tasks, that language was learning a whole act at a time rather than individual items.

Pit Corder, an applied linguist at the university of Edinburgh, said that language is not knowledge but a set of skills. The teaching of it therefore must be different from the teaching of a content subject like science. In the same year, James Asher was propagating the view of total physical response. Niche methods were trying to fill the void left by the demise of the direct method.

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Saw the foundation of IATEFL (the I being added). The first conference was in London. Scott alludes to Richard Smith’s blog tracing the history of IATEFL. The then president said that the much publicised revolution is not a leap forward but a regression into routine and dullness. There were collections of papers that are fascinating from then, there is quite a lot of controversy.

Louis Alexander’s First Things First was published, and it was based on a very structural view of the language. Error was very much frowned upon…

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H.V. George was also error phobic:

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In a paper called the significance of learner errors, Pit Corder talks about the ‘built in syllabus’, saying we need to learn more about the way the learner learns and their ‘built in syllabus’.

So on the one hand, no errors, errors are bad, on the other errors are inevitable, deal with it, and they don’t necessarily come from L1 interference.

Then we look at some children’s English books. The language used isn’t very frequent…

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1969

L.G. Kelly’s (New Zealand scholar and applied linguist)’s 25 Centuries of Language Teaching, he wasn’t looking at methods but methodologies and the ideologies that underpin them. “Methods are of little interest”. One generation’s heresy becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Out with the old, in with the new. This seemed to be about to happen in the late sixties. There was also a major cultural revolution going on in reaction to the cold war and the Vietnam war and that’s captured a progressive moevement in education generally:

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Times were changing, it was the Zeitgeist of the late 60s.

1971

At a conference in Switzerland, a group of people got together to plan an approach to the teaching of languages in Europe. The Council of Europe in Switzerland aimed to reform and standardise the teaching of languages and devise a framework for adult language learning based on the needs of the learner and things required of them to function in a target language community.

Chris Candlin presented a paper called “Sociolinguistics and communicative language teaching” at IATEFL. The very word communication hadn’t really penetrated into our field until then but suddenly started to take off.

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1972

At last the first woman in a sequence of white males produced a paper based on her own classroom research “Communicative competence: an experiment in foreign language teaching’. Widdowson’s article on the teaching of English for communication also appeared in ELTJ. There was also the first conference focusing on communicative language teaching and the first ‘morpheme studies’ and diagrams started to appear which attempted to describe the order in which morphemes and inflections are acquired in first and second language, irrespective of the first language.

1975

International House Shaftsbury Avenue is where Scott got his certificate which alludes to “surprising lapses in grammar analysis”. Scott arrived as the major change away from the audio-lingual method was happening. The Threshold syllabus appeared and Strategies. So the syllabus was organised by notions and functions rather than grammar. Language described in terms of the purpose for which it was designed, rather than a series of structures to practice.

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What’s important is what people want to DO with language. This is where this undercurrent came to the surface in pedagogic materials.

So there were two intertwining but not interconnected discourses.

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On the one hand, there is the view of learning as being primarily cognitive and the nature of language/units of acquisition as structural and atomistic, the accumulation of entities of language, of accuracy being primary and the goal being NS-like proficiency. The new discourse came from social linguistics. It saw the units of language acquisition as communicative routines, larger acts or tasks, the acquisition of which was holistic not one at a time, and fluency was primary, with communicative competence being the aim. It seemed in 1975 that these two discourses that had been unravelling over the decades had finally been resolved in favour of the communicative approach.

BUT, had they? Of course, they were never resolved. The tension goes on. There was a reaction to it…the grammar syllabus was likened to bamboo, whatever you do to it, it keeps springing back up! Then we look at the introduction in a 1968 course book and a 2016 course book. Grammar is central. In some ways, not a lot has changed:

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What happened? Well, it’s easier to test grammar McNuggets…

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With a view to finding out what people think, Scott sent out a survey to try and unravel the mystery of why we can’t shake off the grammatical syllabus.

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He thought number 5 was interesting: that SLA researchers are wrong. These are probably climate change deniers as well… The earth is flat…

Many of the respondents had been teaching for more than ten years and had taught in a variety of different contexts. A fairly representative sample. In terms of student expectation, are they ever asked? Canagarajah found that since teachers thought that students thought that grammar was important, this is what they gave them.

Scott took some of the statements from the first survey and asked people to rather in terms of whether they agree or not. There is a mismatch between what we teach and what we believe. That for many people learning a language means learning the grammar, but not that grammar is the first and most essential factor in any language.

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We need to free ourselves from being teachers of grammar and remember that we are part of the field of education and rebrand what we do as educational. SLA needs to be anchored in education.

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This is how he was going to end the talk but then when you stick your head over the parapet and look, you see that all is not well in the field of education either.

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The iconography in an advert for teaching is very business technology and ppt-heavy. This has penetrated into schools, turning them into service providers. The rhetoric/discourse of neoliberalism penetrates into the discourse of education.

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What’s associated with this is the proliferation of testing, standardised testing, which seems to have taken over (think of the number of suicidal children in Britain due to pressure of testing). There is something unhealthy about this. The atomisation of knowledge. You can deliver them and test them.

Granular is the new buzzword.

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It’s a good word for marketing a breakfast cereal but not for language. Even vocabulary is not granular, every word in the lexicon is connected to other words which are connected to other words in both the TL and other languages.

We’ve gone back to the lefthand side of this image:

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How can we find a way out of this dilemma?

There are three possible routes.

  1. The pragmatic route
  2. The dogmatic route
  3. The dialectic route

There is a view, another view that negates that ideology and then there is a synthesis of the two, which is more than the sum of its parts.

First one: it’s just a subject, it has coursebooks and a syllabus, you have to break it down and test it. Accept it, don’t get het up about it.

In 1930 the Coleman report was published, and they decided to forget fluency and focus on reading, the objective was the ability to read a foreign language. This was a pragmatic approach, not expecting fluency.

Second one: The dogmatic (dogmetic?) route – if we want to get rid of the grammar syllabus, get rid of the coursebook and go back to using the language as it was meant to be used, for whole acts, communicatively and work on emergent language etc. You can go even further and say let’s get rid of the teacher (flavour of Sugata Mitra’s plenary) as well, according to Scott.

Maria Montessori: The greatest sign of success for a teacher…is to be able to say,”The children are now working as if I did not exist.”

Third one: Is there a way we can combine the traditional on the one hand and the view that language is learnt through use, is holistic etc on the other?

  • http://languagelearninginthewild/com – a wonderful idea, for the learning of Scandinavian/nordic languages, by adults who to go the country, are enrolled in classes but are sent out into the streets and have to do things like buy a croissant. The people who work in the shops have been coached/prepared in how to deal with silly foreigners who can’t speak the language. They take photos, record on their mobile phones, they take it back to the classroom and compare notes. The perfect fusion of experience and classrooms. They can also phone up a volunteer to help them if they get stuck. Uber teachers?!
  •  http://handsupproject.org – for children who cannot get out of the classroom, children from Gaza performed some songs and chants they had learned via Skype, here at IATEFL. We are shown a reverse picture dictation, where they draw something and then try and get Nick Bilborough to draw it, through a question and answer sequence. A fusion of traditional language classroom and real language use.

Ok, where are we going? 2066…

What can we predict? Probably the intertwining discourses will still be with us. The process of learning is not straight-forward. Even when it seems so, some teachers still go against the flow. Scott salutes these teachers.

by

IATEFL 2016 What is this thing called Academic English Language Proficiency? (Dr Pamela Humphreys)

Pamela works in Australia at a University in Queensland, in the area of in-sessional support. She also has many years of pre-sessional experience.

The number of students studying in English language contexts has increased massively since 1975 (0.8m) – in 2012 it was 4.5m and rising. “All the known world has a second language for advanced education” (Brumfit). English language proficiency is a critical factor for academic performance according to Cho and Bridgeman.

Let’s start with communicative competence, term coined by Hymes in the 60s but it was the work of Canale and Swain in the 80s that gave us this framework. Conceptual frameworks in academic education draw on this framework. In Canale and Swain, grammatical competence is joined by discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Since then, the framework has undergone several iterations. Bachman takes strategic competence out, subdivides the competencies into organisational (grammatical and textual) and pragmatic competence (illocutionary and sociolinguistic).

What’s quite interesting is that despite the fact we have 30-40 years of knowledge of these competencies, we don’t know how they interact or the relative weightings, of importance. Pamela also wanted to find out how they interact with academic english proficiency.

Cummins came up with Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS)  and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP).

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He shows that the latter takes longer to develop and that there is little transference between the two. This was talking about children. Pamela wanted something similar for adults in higher education. A conceptual or theoretical model for Academic English Language Proficiency. She couldn’t find anything. Though there is a lot of information relating to academic discourse. We know a lot about it. EAP/ESP/ESAP, genre analysis, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and academic literacies.

“Academic writing is not a single undifferentiated mass but a variety of subject-specific literacies” (Hyland, 2002:352)

She found four models.

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Murray has a tripartite system. Academic literacy is not just study skills or socialisation but a plural literacies about social practice and making meaning, about identity and power. Professional literacies are what they need once the move into their working environment post-study. English language proficiency is something that can be cashed in to develop these other skills. Is there a threshold that students must surpass before they can develop these other literacies?

This vertical conception of academic literacy was criticised, of course. Harper, Prentice and Wilson include the same notions but with no threshold, they can be developed concurrently, not necessarily equally, but concurrently. They believe there is a core that can be used in all three contexts, everyday, professional and academic.

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O’Loughlin and Arkoudis (2012) take a different approach, dividing it into entry into higher education, time spent in education and the exit. The student lifecycle option. At entry they need a general academic communicative ability but as they go through their degree they need to develop more specific communicative language ability, specific to the discipline and by the time they graduate they need to have developed the language and skills necessary for their future trajectory.

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Mahboob in his Language Variation Model is talking about how language varies in different contexts with different uses.

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So he talks about the uses, the user and the mode. Uses can vary from the everyday to the specialised (including academic). Mode can vary from written to oral. Another dimension not shown is time. This gives rises to 8 different domains. Probably all of the last four apply to academic contexts.

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In terms of a summary, if we draw on all these frameworks, we know that language requires multiple competences, that there are varying contexts of use and proficiency should/can change over time. Pamela wanted to bring it all together to make one conceptual framework. (The frameworks we have looked at are conceptual not validated.)

She comes up with:

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She has three competences, three contexts of use (seen quite a lot in the academic frameworks) and they all intersect. She doesn’t think the lines are solid. The third aspect is proficiency, as we hope it will improve in the course of doing a degree.

It can show different levels of development:

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It can show change over time:

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So that is her conceptual framework. How can we use it? It can be used for key stakeholders in the industry who are not experts, people who don’t understand what language is about but need to. Could also be used with teachers and students. It could be used to help in curriculum development, to track what has been included. What you tick or want to tick will depend on your context e.g. pre-sessional may not include the professional tick. At least it would be a principled decision. With students, you could use it as means of finding out what students feel confident and less confident about.

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Of course language is very complex, so underlying this 3×3 is the complexity of what we have already see, so we can unpack this. So we as linguistics can unpack the different aspects involved in each square.

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Here are Pamela’s references:

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p.humphreys@griffith.edu.au