by

IATEFL 2016 You tell me! Practical ideas for student-led tasks in ESAP (Anne Heaton)

Well, I had been planning to go to the ELTJ debate about teacher training, after lunch, but then my interview slot with IATEFL Online clashed with the start so instead I am attending Anne Heaton’s talk on student-led tasks in ESAP. Anne is Associate Director of Pre-sessional English Courses at Coventry University.

Anne starts by talking about the general to specific continuum. You could use this activity in an EGAP class to get students used to the idea. Start with some gaps in the chart for the students to fill in:

IMG_20160414_150811

Thinking more specifically about general to specific in my subject we are going to take “EAP” as our subject. We are going to look at the same activity.

IMG_20160414_150936

The best way to do it is using post-it notes which they can then freely move around. This means you can add in different layers/categories to the spectrum/chart. We tried it out:

IMG_20160414_151611

IMG_20160414_151749

These are the principles of the tasks we are looking at today:

IMG_20160414_152253

Where Ann works, there are 8 intakes a year and within that 1000 student enrolments. They have two large pre-sessionals, one pre-September and one pre-January. Students have a wide variety of destination subjects (60). As there are so many students, tutors with a wide range of experience end up working there at busy times. Until 2014, the courses were EGAP institution generic courses. There is an even split between postgrads and undergrads. The majority are from China, followed by Middle East. BA in International Business is the biggest subject and B.A. in Business-related subjects make up the majority of students. Same with the post-grads.

Ann outlined the differences between EGAP and ESAP:

IMG_20160414_152822

It is set up as a dichotomy but the two co-exist in reality. In 2014 they decided to make a move towards an ESAP approach. Not to lose the EGAP but to sit ESAP alongside it. Difficulties included establishing collaboration with subject specialists but information is needed from them as we aren’t experts; dealing with ‘odd’ subjects; deciding how to group students when there is a mix of undergrad and postgrads; managing the issue of teachers feeling underprepared to teach.

They have re-named it EIMS (English in my subject) to emphasise it is language not content. This is a typical timetable:

IMG_20160414_153138

They use a parallel structure so that the same task type or skill will be introduced across all EIMS groups but it will be tailored content-wise to the specific subject. As much as possible, they get students to generate the ideas, students positioned as experts in their subject. Students can tailor an activity to their specific interests.

Our next task was:

IMG_20160414_153417

Different reporting verbs can be used to indicate the writer’s stance in relation to what is being quoted. Agreement and disagreement are introduced and continued differently. In the ESAP classroom students would have looked at a similar activity in their EGAP lessons and might do something like this in relation to their own subject to practice it and make it more motivating. All the teacher has to do is find a contentious view within the specific subject and it can generate a lot of discussion. The teacher can also get the student to come up with the view as well. It works well set as homework so that students have time to think about it. Students within a subject will come from different backgrounds. Students can be allowed to put forward their own views or from the literature. They write it on a piece of paper, teacher collects them all and redistributes so that students respond to the view using reporting verbs.

IMG_20160414_154237

One thing that they are looking to do more now from this year is to look at different genres of academic writing. The pre-sessional course focuses almost exclusively on essays because they occur in all disciplines and are the most frequent genre overall. Most EAP lecturers tend to come from a background where they are familiar with essays. Therefore they are easier to teach and to test. But Ann wants to move to a wider genre focus. The approach is to use the students as “chief investigator in their discipline” (De Chazal).

This is what students will have to do:

IMG_20160414_154544

Students can look in the British Council writing for a purpose website to find out more and there are activities to help them. They are also encouraged to use corpus tools to help inform themselves, such as Sketch Engine, where searches can be narrowed by text type:

IMG_20160414_154728

Student feedback has been positive so far.

IMG_20160414_154843

by

IATEFL 2016 Tackling Native Speakerism (Marek Kiczkowiak, Burcu Akyol, Christopher Graham, Josh Round)

After this morning’s plenary, I couldn’t resist coming to this session to see the discussion continue. This time it’s a panel of speakers rather than Silvana holding the fort alone, and I have to say I am surprised that there aren’t more people here!

Marek introduced the session, telling us that there will be about half an hour the panel talking and then the discussion will open to the floor. He of course alluded to this morning’s plenary and what a difficult act it is to follow.

(Edit: It was tricky keeping up with everything, so please use the comments to let me know if you think I’ve made a mistake/missed something!)

The panel are:

IMG_20160414_172441

The plan is:

IMG_20160414_172957

We start by looking at a job ad from TEFL.com. As Silvana mentioned, such ads are common. Depending on where you are in the world, between 72 and 88% of ads request native speakers.

What is Native Speakerism? It was coined Adrian Holliday in 2005. Like other isms, it’s a kind of discrimination/prejudice/bias. Teachers are classified on the basis of their mother tongue. Those who fit the native speaker description get a better deal, those who don’t will often struggle. In Japan, Houghton and Rivers pointed out that Holliday’s definition was limited as it also affects Native Speakers there, in that they can only lead conversation classes so development is limited.

It influences professional opportunities, recruitment policies, teacher training, SLA research with its monolingual bias where the native speaker is the ideal model. However, it can be tackled in various ways, which is what this session is going to look at. For example, proactive research that doesn’t separate NS and NNS into two different species and rather than identifying problems offers solution. There will also be reference to examples of bottom-up action, top-down action and how to be involved and committed to this.

Burcu Akyol

She started learning English at Middle School. Her whole learning experience took place in Turkey. She wants to tell us about IATEFL 2009 in Cardiff, her first experience. Her presentation had been rejected by another organisation due to not being a native speaker. Teachers want to listen to native speakers, she was told. After that bitter experience, she expected few people in her session at IATEFL and was then shocked to have around 60 people in her room. This was a big turning point for her, in terms of of her perception of herself as a Turkish English teacher. Things are changing. Turkish presenters may not be turned down but they may have fewer audience members. As Silvana pointed out this morning, over 80% of English teachers are NNS. So we need to talk about this discrimination issue more openly.

In Turkey learning English is considered very important. Policy makers decided to employ a large number of NS teachers to teach alongside NNS teachers. There have been similar attempts in other countries: to import NS teachers to cure ‘the problem’. However, after 2011 there was no more said regarding that policy announcement. Fortunately. Policy makers need to support NNS language development and teaching skills. This will produce more permanent results than employing 40,000 NS.

It’s not about being NS or NNS, it’s about being qualified. Both have strengths and weaknesses, things found easier and more difficult. We need to free ourselves from our prejudices and stereotypes, leave aside prejudices to really talk about education.

Christopher Graham

He is lucky because when he qualified as a teacher, with a British passport as a NS there were lots of opportunities. It was great. Someone said to him, why has he got involved with this TEFL Advocacy movement because he thinks EVERYONE should have these opportunities. His interest comes from reflecting on his own personal luck. The plenary this morning was a significant moment. The issue has now gone mainstream. It has been around for a long time, some of the research is quite old, but now we are talking about it. Trouble is, talking doesn’t get things done, we need to start DOING something.

One thing that Christopher has done is write about it. He found a bunch of people like Marek, offered them some questions to answer and had some incredible viewing figures. He also had nasty hate mail such as “You are betraying your tribe”. (Wow…) However, the point is, we can all write, blog, Facebook, to get the message out there. 96% of the teachers Christopher works with are NNS teachers teaching in their own countries. He asked for a university posters to be taken down, with “Native Speaker” above his picture. Amongst certain communities there is a perception that “Native Speaker” is something special. A lot of bilingual and NNSTs can be their own worst enemies. So Christopher has started bringing this up as a topic. Some people think he is just trying to flatter/win brownie points. But then they also see the possibility of being valued. So he spends time talking about what NNS bring to the party. It is tremendously important to do this. To sow seeds.

He also thinks its important to say he does have sympathy with the small private school owner working somewhere with the 20 year long USP of the Native Speaker. It’s like telling McDonalds to go vegan. Change will be a slow process to go through… He is not pretending that bilingual speakers (and monolingual!) need language support has part of professional development. It is a question of going out there and doing something. If it makes one teacher feel more positive about looking for employment, then that’s already something!

Josh Round

Josh has been a DoS for 10 years, in London. UK-centric context. As a DoS of course he is a recruiter. It’s about having a fair and equal process. The starting point is having an Equals Ops policy and a mission statement. Inclusiveness would be a good word to have in a mission statement – applies to staffing as well as students. If there is an HR department (unusual), they can help, otherwise it comes down to the DoS. Instead of having shortlisting filters that look at L1 and country of origin, look at the competencies needed for your teaching team. Pedagogical skills, language proficiency, behaviours. These become your recruitment criteria. The process has to be quite systematic. Needs a system that minimises bias and has a balance of perspectives.

The next thing is this idea that students only want native speakers. In Josh’s experience that’s not true, as Silvana’s myth-debunking research showed. Students want and value other things i.e. having a great teacher (who could be native or non-native  – and bad and good are present in both categories!). It is important to say that English proficiency has to be talked about. This is the difficult decision area. If you are open about your approach, at some point you need to make a judgement call on level of proficiency. “Native speaker competence required” should be moved away from, instead “competent user of English” – but what does it mean? This can be a difficult area for recruiters. Managers who do recruit NNS say that students will sometimes complain and that the most common complaint is accent and pronunciation. Of course NS teachers have some special accents too.. So what do we mean? And of course English is a world language which students will need to deal with in the real world. So let’s have different varieties on the team to expose students to.

Be ready to deal with complaints. They’ll come along. Have your strategies and deal with them in the same as any other. What do they want? What do they think they need to learn the language effectively? Then educate them. Also important to be transparent, celebrate the strengths of your team and that becomes your selling point. NNEST CAN be best. Be open in your process and if the best candidate is NNEST, then go for it. They can offer a lot, as has been discussed. On a team of teachers, you need diversity to offer different, complementary skill-sets. Recruiters who have positive experiences of this kind of recruitment should share it, get it out there.  It’s about raising awareness.

Question/comment/story time

  • Teacher trainer in Egypt: only NS working with bilingual teachers, gets lots of daft questions from middle management e.g. when should be give the children sandwiches? can you take this class because you are an NS. How to deal with this kind of situation in a positive, proactive way? What to say when put in that situation? Josh: Suggest some kind of meeting or focus group with teachers and managers. Audience 1 (bilingual teacher): Josh’s idea is one, but also dealing with it in a natural way. “Sure I can do that but not because I am a native teacher but because I can handle the sandwiches or whatever.” So it’s not the fact of being born in a particular country that gives you skills, point that out gently. Audience 2: When it comes to the sandwiches, it’s a culture problem. Sandwiches is British therefore… Teacher trainer: wants to offer teachers sessions etc but it’s the middle management that are the real challenge as she has less access to them. Audience 3: If you really don’t think should be the one doing the sandwiches – “I could but I think soandso would be better doing it.”
  • (Audience) Teachers association perspective, South of Germany: a couple of years ago in first year as chair, uncomfortable with the fact that job adverts on the website were being accepted with NS speakers only. Didn’t know what to do about it, wasn’t until she came across Marek’s website that it’s illegal to do this, as goes against the charter of human rights. With this piece of ammunition, she felt she had the courage to say to potential employers that the adverts wouldn’t be accepted as it contravenes international law. The feedback was positive in terms of hadn’t thought of that before and were willing to change it to something acceptable e.g. proficient in English. Encourage your local association to do this, to disallow this kind of advert. Josh: a lot of influence may lie in management associations. Marek: native-like is a bit like a requirement for man-like strength and bravery. It is discriminatory. If you say C1/C2 level at least it is something that a bilingual teacher can attain, unlike “native-like”. A proficiency level is much fairer.
  • Audience: The idea is going against “native” as the norm. To get around it. According to the Fair List, if the two sexes are represented equally among the plenaries, then they get a tick. Would IATEFL 2016 get a tick if such a thing existed for NS-NNS? Marek: No and a half? Audience 2: feels she has been treated as a pseudo-native speaker, which is a whole other level of discrimination. Christopher Graham: It takes time. A lot of people don’t know about the EU law and that is a great stick. Audience 3: We need to move away from a yes-no tick. How can we create more a community and avoid the hate mail discussion. We need to be careful not to antagonise. Christopher: the haters were mostly Johns (re Silvana’s speech) – blokes of his age, mainly Brits living in South East Asia.
  • Teacher trainer in Oxford: Not much to be done about that kind of people but on CELTA courses where she is there are a mixture of NS and NNS, which is an opportunity to get groups to cooperate. I’m a Non-Native Speaker here me roar! Exec Room 7 11am.
  • Audience (bilingual speaker): two years ago at IATEFL giving a talk to an audience of teachers, about teaching unplugged. Live listening was mentioned, using the teacher as a source of listening to the learners. An NNS was angry because she didn’t feel that solved her problem. That mindset is problematic. That NNST do feel less than NS. It is an issue.
  • Audience (bilingual speaker): A key question is teacher development – it’s how we differentiate teachers. Most teachers in Brazil are B1/B2 tops and there is nothing being done to deal with that. When she was doing her CELTA, a key point of development for her was language proficiency, she was advised to do a language certificate. There is a myth that talking about a teacher’s language level is offensive but she doesn’t feel it is. Why don’t we actually talk about a proficiency level for teachers, what IS a good level of proficiency for English teachers in general (NS or NNS!) Marek: Agree, you can’t be a maths teacher without knowing maths and there are different levels of knowing maths. Same in English. However, important to remember that proficient speaker does not necessarily equate to proficient teacher. Of course if you are low-level, you need to improve it. But we need to avoid an obsession
  • Audience (Nepal): Nepal is multilingual, ethnically complex. In his class, the students come from 10 different language backgrounds. Students rejected a teacher because they couldn’t understand what she said. The problem was her accent was a native speaker accent. From his perspective, a level of proficiency is needed but who designs the test? How is he or she judged? If an NS develops a test, an NNS may not get the level but they may still be suited to teaching in a different country. For example, IELTS, a teacher may not get 7 but may be a good teacher in a particular context.

Wrap up (Marek )

There are lots of positives. TESOL International, TESOL France with public statements. Lots of websites are changing the way they are hiring teachers. EU Legislation helps but there is still the issue of “Native level of fluency”. There are also different levels of qualification required depending on language background. (E.g. a native speaker only required to have a Batchelor degree while a non-native speaker is required to have a Masters or a PhD!)

Ours is a strange profession, which accepts discrimination. What makes or breaks a teacher is passport and mother tongue. It is time to change that.

Visit the TEFLEquity website for more information. 

by

IATEFL 2016 Plenary Day 2 (Silvana Richardson)

The “passionate and inspiring Silvana” (as she was introduced and I agree with based on the few minutes I saw her speak for at the Cambridge networking thing last night!) will speak to us about the ‘native factor’ – the haves and the have nots. (Twitter name, in case you are interested: @laIoli)

Silvana starts by telling us a few things about herself: she is not tall, she is not male, not single, not atheist, not sport, not fantasy buff, not a native speaker. She uses this ‘ridiculous way of introducing herself’ i.e. litotes (negation of one quality to emphasise another) to pose a question: what quality is she emphasising by saying that she is a non-native English speaker? Why do we still refer to an aspect of the professional identity of over 80% of the teachers of English as a ‘non’?

How is it still a legitimate term?!

It’s not just a word.

IMG_20160414_091359

It’s time to find something better!

Next Silvana gave us –

The one minute history of Native Speakerism starring the Monolingual Bias.

She takes us  back 100 years to The Direct Method: thou shalt not use your own language in class. This and subsequent methods created a monolingual bias which gave a biased view of the native speaker. The common goal was to achieve native-like competence. Meaning 3 things: That NS is the best model, that the way that the NS acquires L1 is the best way to acquire a foreign language and that the NS makes the best teacher. This creates a deficit view of the learner’s own language – it becomes a source of interference and an obstacle, and a deficit view of the NNS as defective, a failed monolingual of English. The ideal native speaker according to Kramsch is monolingual, monocultural, speaks only a standard variety of English, and is equally competent in oracy and literacy skills. This concept has been critiqued as a figment of linguists’ imagination (Palkeday 1985). It is, however, a very resilient myth. Take for example the European Profiling Grid which is used in recruitment of teachers. The ultimate goal is “Has native speaker like competence in the target language”.

How does this notion impact on identity, as an NS or an NNS?

If you have the native factor, you can safely assume that: The native speaker is the best model, the ideal teacher. I am an NS. Therefore I am the ideal model and ideal teacher.

If you are a non-native speaker, it is the reverse. I am not the ideal model. I am not the ideal teacher.

Very problematic and toxic logic. Kamhi-Stein (2005) criticises this ‘native speaker fallacy’. It makes assumptions that NS have particular features but actually they can all be acquired through training. Silvana then shows us a linkedin profile and what it does! It devalues all of us and professionalism.

IMG_20160414_092313

The logic also creates a competence dichotomy. A very unhelpful separation into camps. An us versus them. It’s very damaging to all of us.

The Plight of the Have Nots

We will look at this from four perspectives.

1.

The Market forces’ discourse: customers prefer native speakers

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a student in need of English language lessons must be in want of a native speaker”

DO customers prefer native speakers? How true is this claim? Is it based on reliable records or on impressions? Out of 1000 students how many is it? 500? 5? The two who shout loudest? What does research say about what students prefer? This is a relatively new area of study. She is gong to look at a few studies and we have to decide what the findings support.

Cheung 2002 – attitudes to NS and NNS and the strengths/weaknesses of both. Questionnaires, interviews, observations, 420 ss at 7 universities in Hong Kong. Findings:

IMG_20160414_092806

Benke and Medgyes (2005) – SS perceptions of NS and NNS teachers, questionnaire, Hungary.

IMG_20160414_092932

Lasagagabaster and Sierra (2005) – Students perceptions of NS NNS;  Closed and open questions; Basque area of Spain

IMG_20160414_093015

Walkinshaw and Hoang Duong (2012) – how learners rate ‘native-speakerness’ compared with 7 qualities valued in EL teachers: rating survey and questionnaire, Vietnam.

IMG_20160414_093123

Silvana then presented a summary of the perceived advantages of NNESTs:

  • Declarative knowledge: knowledge about English (They had to learn it!)
  • Ability to identify areas of potential difficulty: when you know the L1, you know what will be easy or difficult, from your own experience.
  • share and use the students own language
  • able to make cross-linguistic and cross cultural comparisons
  • teach grammar more effectively
  • empathise with the learner (been there…)
  • provide appropriate strategies
  • willing to work hard

Followed by those of NS:

  • procedural knowledge (how to use English, tacit and unconscious)
  • teaching of lexis (idiom, colloquialism, slang)
  • fluency in English with ‘original English accent’
  • no apparent language difficulties
  • linguistic authenticity
  • teach speaking and listening more effectively
  • cultural understanding (of own culture)
  • more relaxed attitude to error correction

These perceptions were taken from various studies.

Silvana summarises by saying that students generally value professional and personal qualities over nativeness. Both NEST and NNEST are perceived to be competence each with unique strengths. Preference is inconclusive. Some indicate both, some one, some the other.

There is the discourse of Employers having no choice. This is discrimination. These are discriminatory practices disguised as common sense. Actually, employers always have choices. Collusion with inequality and prejudice is a choice. Discrimination is a choice. Also, “just because the market is demanding certain things, it does not mean that the market cannot be made to see things differently” (reference missed, sorry!).

Is the customer always right? Silvana did an experiment a few months ago. She had a two-hour conversation with a student who adamantly wanted a native speaker. He was shocked that it only took a month to become a teacher. He changed his mind. The real question is, are customers expectations realistic? How do we behave when they aren’t? What if their preferences are racist or discriminatory? “I didn’t come to the UK to be taught by a trainer who is a native speaker of my own language” – has been said. First they ask those who said it if there is anything in the promotional literature about this? No. This is because we are equal opportunities employers and we are proud. Proud to employ the best trainers and nativeness doesn’t come into it. They are told to give the trainer a chance and come back in a few days if still unhappy. They don’t come back.

Why are NNS rejecting themselves? (As per above example)

2. Discrimination and recruitment.

IMG_20160414_094428

No EFL qualifications required in either!

 

IMG_20160414_094516

Even narrower!

This is the reality:

This is the lay of the land.

The lay of recruitment land.

And these announcements are damaging:

IMG_20160414_094646

Clark and Paran (2007)

Looked at the recruitment of NNESTs in the UK. 72.3% of participant institutions judged nativeness to be very important.

Selvi (2010) 

A vast majority of the advertisements favoured NESTs and rejected NNESTs. He describes discrimination as a multi-faceted phenomenon. There is also the issue of variety of English, where qualifications are obtained (golden standard: Anglophone institutions) and location of citizenship.

IMG_20160414_094900

Mahboob and Golden

Focused on East Asia. Nativeness was the single most frequent criterion mentioned in the ads. 49% of the ads listed specific countries from which the applicants must come.  US being at the top. Some ads also specify colour. Nativeness is linked to inner circle countries only. Students are being taught by ‘teachers’ who are not qualified to do so.

3. The mono-training orthodoxy

If you look at SLA in the 20th century, if you look at the theories, you find yourselves in a very confined cognitive space. Very little reference and interaction with the world around you. The result of this is narrow approaches to teaching, learning and teacher education. Native speakerist, monolingual and monocultural.

If we look at the areas in which native speakerism has dominated, no stone left unturned -theory, research, publishing, teaching and learning materials etc. Cook puts it very eloquently:

IMG_20160414_095516

There is no research evidence on whether students learn better in an ‘impossible to code-switch’ classroom environment.

Ernesto Macaro’s study on code-switching: little known but important!

Monolingual approaches abound. There is a cultural appropriacy issue with this. An approach designed to work in a BANA country will not necessarily work elsewhere. Silvana gives another snapshot of realities around the world:

IMG_20160414_095811

She then plays us a clip from Pablo Toledo – EFL Howl on teaching in difficult circumstances:

IMG_20160414_095919

4. Issues of confidence and self-esteem

What has all this done to the T whose first language is something other than English?

IMG_20160414_100103

Inferiority complex: belief that own knowledge is inadequate to the linguistic standards (think back to the teacher standards we looked at earlier – ‘native speaker’)

Stockholm syndrome: secretly admiring the NS and denying self the right to be a recognised language user.

Impostor syndrome: feelings of inauthenticity and inadequateness.

Faking it: If you can’t be a native, at least try and pass for one. Hope that students won’t notice but concerned about being ‘caught out’. There is still institutional pressure – schools asking Ts to pretend to be a different nationality. What does this do to identity?

Silvana thinks NNS develop coping strategies. 

  1. Shying away: in EFL contexts, shying away from modelling language and instead ‘play the tape’ so that the script models the language; and away from using English in the classroom as the language of instruction and communication.
  2. Hiding own identity in terms of L1 status: In English as home language context never telling the students that you aren’t a native speaker; hiding it initially and then gradual or final revelation, like an embarrassing confession. “I only tell them once they trust me and like me”.

The future?

  • The wider context
  • Overcoming the dichotomy
  • What can we do?

The Wider Context: Multilingualism

A paradigm shift is unfolding out there as we sit here in this auditorium. It is now the turn of the multilingual. Multilingualism is the new norm in a Globalised world. Recent publications reflect this. It is a trend to watch and find out more about. We are moving from a deficit view of the learner’s own language to an asset view. We are moving away from an NS view of acquisition to a bilingual view. Second language acquisition is moving towards plurilingual development. The perception  of learner’s own language is moving from obstacle to resource. The goal of learning is moving from near NS competence to multilingual competence.

IMG_20160414_100950

IMG_20160414_101007

Monolinguals, take note…

Overcoming the dichotomy 

How can we overcome the dichotomy? We, as in those of us who were born and raised using a language other than English can’t do this alone and neither should we. This is a major battle about ethical and principled professionalism against prejudice. We need to stop thinking about them and us and start looking at professionalism as a continuum. On the continuum we can look at professionals as being more or less prepared, knowledgable, competent, proficient USERS of English.

What can we do?

(NB: deliberately larger font!!!) 

What can we do? We need to find out more about this issue, become more aware. Write about equality for NESTS and NNEST.

Teachers: Join an advocacy campaign and show support. There is a forum this afternoon about it! Write a statement supporting this campaign. Promote advocacy initiatives on social media. Start a discussion in your workplace to raise awareness. Do research, more is needed.

Teacher educators: review programmes in terms of the scope. What is the ultimate goal of these programmes? To develop well-rounded critical professionals or churning out skilled technicists who can produce monolingualism for export? Consider the content and methodology – is there critical exploration? Are they sufficiently inclusive? Sensitive to glocalisation? Using the students’ own language? What about bilingual identities? The elephant in the room is teacher’s own language proficiency – how can we help teachers develop this?

Workplace: Do you have an Equal Ops policy? Do you implement it? Are you proud of it? Do you challenge students’ expectations? Do you recruit based on merit?

Equal ops in work place

Teachers associations: Issue a statement against the discrimination of NNESTs. TESOl France writes to employers who write native speakerist ads to discourage them from that. Create alignment maps of professional qualifications of teachers of EFL at regional, national and international levels. Encourage members not to apply for positions where advertisement is discriminatory.

There is a lot of work to be done to make our professional equitable.

And the only way is to work together. Silvana’s dream is that teachers be judged on their merits as a teacher not on an accident of birth. Silvana’s real name is Silvana Ioli. She was born and raised and educated in Argentina. And she is really proud of it. She is a professional and plurlingual teacher of language.

And oh my goodness what a plenary! Standing ovations, some tears (not only mine!! I fought mine back, then was quite relieved to see someone who hadn’t, meaning I was not the only one to get all emotional!)

In my current context, I finally work in a place that DOES has equal ops (as far as I can tell!), where I DO have colleagues from all over, working there on the basis of their many merits rather than their skin colour or passport type. This should be the rule rather than the exception. Previously, I have worked in schools where: teachers were hired based on skin colour and passport, ‘non-native speaker’ teachers were viewed (including by themselves) as second-class citizens of the teaching world, where all teachers were British, where being male and North American was the basis the recruitment decision was made upon… I’m not going to say which indictments go with which schools. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we all do as Silvana said and recognise what has gone on, what is going on and where the future is/should lie, and do our bit to push it in that direction, regardless of our role in the teaching world. We are all professionals in the ELT world together, we all need to fight together to make it what we want to be. Jim Scrivener tweeted that this was ELT’s “I have a dream” plenary. It may be cheesy but let’s make it all of our dreams. In the hopes that at some point history will look back on this period as one where finally the paradigm shifted away from the ridiculous. 

Ok, rant over. I have only one thing left to say: this post deserves to be the most read on my blog. Silvana’s words were inspiring. So spread them. Share this post. And, if anyone wants to use my blog as a platform to share their ideas in relation to this topic, please do get in touch. You are welcome, I would be happy to host guest blog posts. 

Oh, one LAST thing: don’t forget to have a look at the TEFLEquity website too! 

 

by

IATEFL 2016 Re-placing rather than replacing the teacher (Sarah/Robyn)

As part of the mission around what has the impact, Sarah of Pearson is very keen to partner with any practitioners who are raising attainment outcomes so that she can learn from this and help more teachers make more impact.

One such project was done in partnership with Robyn and she is going to tell us about her flipped classroom.

Robyn started by asking us if we were ‘flippers’ some claimed ‘half flipper’, Robyn started that way too apparently! She plans to tell us why she flipped, some simple strategies she uses and the benefits she has noticed.

She saw an article in the Stanford Daily about this concept and how great it was, and Robyn thought it sounded good. Robyn’s job is to make sure her students can succeed at university. If professors there are using this approach, then they need to be able to use English in this kind of setting, if they are to succeed. After her learners leave her, they become just learners not second language learners, they will have to do the same amount of learning etc as everyone else.

Professors were recording lectures, students watched them at home for homework, then in class they worked on interactive activities e.g. comprehension based, working on projects, problem-solving etc. So students need to be able to actively participate, talk to native speakers, apply what’s being taught rather than just memorise stuff.

Robyn realised that she had to stop panicking, calm down, drink a lot of wine and… realise that she didn’t need to do what all the other professors were doing, she needed strategies that worked for her in the context of teaching students English to succeed in the L1 setting at university. So the flipping strategies needed to be adapted for second language learning, be easy to use but maintain the basic principles of flipping.

  • Homework becomes classwork and vice-versa
  • Flip Bloom’s Taxonomy
  • Re-place myself not replace myself i.e. change role.

One important thing about flipped learning is that you have the exact same amount of class time.

Robyn looked at traditional Bloom’s Taxonomy – in class she was teaching the lower level remembering/knowledge, understanding/comprehension and then sent them home to practice, which required the higher level skills. Now, she sends them home to do the lower level work and the higher level skills are brought into class. So homework should be easier for students rather than harder.

She had 5 issues: materials, transferability to other classes and end goals, technology, student participation/buy in and content creation.

She questioned what materials to use. Could she flip with her textbooks/current content? Could she get students to apply what she was teaching to other disciplines or settings? She wondered if she could manage the technology she needed or could she flip without technology. She wondered about Asian students, would she able to put them into this setting where they had to be very interactive.

Robyn started flipping slowly – an activity at a time. She wanted to keep her materials as the content is sound and included what was needed. The basic comprehension material is available to students all the time, in the book. Students like the book. So she kept her books: that was her first strategy. Rather than teaching students the persuasive essay in class, do basic comprehension work at home and then in class actually work on the writing. She found students get much better grades for higher caliber work. They can apply what they have learnt while Robyn circulates and helps them work on it. Much easier to grade a second or third draft.

She tried using authentic materials and materials from other classes (student selected) in reading classes to teach skills like skimming or scanning. They practice on their own with the textbook and then in class they bring anything that they are interested in (from another class etc) and work on a skill like annotating which she could help them work on it. So that they became better able to annotate the material rather than just highlight All The Words!

With regards to technology, she was worried because she knew that ELT doesn’t lecture like other disciplines. So what should go on videos? And what about settings where students don’t have access to technology? She explored other alternatives. Video isn’t necessary. She has used reading material, powerpoint (can also be printed), previously recorded materials (by others) e.g. Jennifer ESL for grammar, publisher or campus systems (e.g. Macmillan Campus). In her Grammar class, she kept the book and paired it with Jennifer ESL video. Students read a couple things in the book, do a bit of practice, watch the video and then in the class they do something more engaging that makes them use the structure/language focus in question.

In order to get students to buy in to this approach, she had to overcome her nerves with regards to an article written by a high school student who wrote about a flipped chemistry class and he and his friends decided they weren’t going to like it and weren’t going to participate. Robyn decided not to tell them it’s a flipped classroom. They expect some homework anyway so what difference does it make what it is? She gives the example of her listening class – she didn’t have to worry as much about cultural differences etc as it is a level playing field. Ss listen to the audio outside class as many times as they want – once or many – so they come to class starting from the same place. She doesn’t have to worry about time management either.

In terms of filling classroom time, she needed quality material but it turned out not to be such a problem as there is lots of extra material in the course books that she never had time to use because of time constraints when doing everything in class. So the approach to textbook use changed. Instead of the freer practice being squidged in at the end, it becomes the main thing e.g. with question formation, they learn how outside the classroom and then have a guest speaker who presents something about which they can ask questions.

She finds her class time is much better managed. So e.g. with listening instead of playing the recording multiple times in class so that the better students get bored and the weaker can catch up, they do the listening in their own time. Much better use of time as well to have more difficult activities happening in class rather than for homework. She moved from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.

rbrinks@stanford.edu

I will leave you with another kind of Flipper:

Taken from Pixabay

Taken from Pixabay

by

IATEFL 2016 Here’s one I made earlier – designing effective classroom materials (Katherine Bilsborough and Sue Lyon-Jones)

Well, the room filled up super-quickly for this one!

Sue is a co-founder of esolcourses.com which is an online platform with thousands of resources for teachers and students; Kath is a materials writer who started because she couldn’t afford to buy lots of different books to use with her students.

As English language teachers it can happen that you have to start teaching on a new course and there aren’t any particular materials for it. Depending on teaching experience, it can be a good or a bad thing. You may be thrown in at the deep end! This workshop will look at good practice for creating materials to equip us to deal with such situations.

  1. considering and discussing what akes a good learning activity
  2. looking at free materials that can be sourced from the web and adapted for use in class (Sue is a copyright expert if you have any questions!)
  3. sharing ideas for creating simple activities that are pedagogically sound
  4. look at some ways in which authentic materials can be exploited (fair and legal ways…)

What do we look for in ELT materials?

The audience came up with:

  • relevant to the course aims/class aims
  • thought-provoking
  • adaptable but with a basic core
  • does what it says on the tin
  • work in the given context

Sue and Kath added:

  • engaging and motivating: got to be interesting!
  • provide sufficient challenge: not too easy, not too difficult
  • age appropriate: we don’t want worksheets with teddybears for adults
  • have a target audience: can be very narrow – your learners – if wider, need to think about if they will work outside your classroom
  • have a clear purpose: you might have interesting video/text but need to be clear about what students are going to learn from it
  • underpinned by good pedagogy
  • foster language learning: you can find an interesting article but need to think about what opportunities there will be for learners to use what’s in it

In what three ways you might use a short reading text?

Texts can be a lot of things and you can get a lot of value out of very little:

IMG_1565

The audience came up with the following as examples:

  • dictogloss
  • running dictation

Then we moved on to a task looking at some short texts and discussing how to exploit them. Ideas were very varied due to the diversity of contexts represented in the room!

Text One

Are computers harming academic performance? (a short essay about a study on whether people learn better if they take notes by hand or on computer; came from Voice of America – most content is in the public domain so can be used freely BUT there is some syndicated content e.g. Reuters articles that you can’t use – in this case it will be tagged as such so easy to avoid)

Text Two

A Roald Dahl extract from the Learning English portion of Voice of America, already graded. NB If you want to check the level of a text, paste it into Vocab Kitchen it will tell you what level the words are through colour coding.

Text Three

A Mountain to Climb from Internationalist Easier English Wiki – contains News Articles written for English learners, also includes lesson plans. Creative commons licensed, you need to accredit the author, you shouldn’t use it make money on it and you have to be willing to share it under the same license i.e. not make money on it.

Text Four

The Tale of Benjamin Bunny is from the Project Gutenberg site which contains lots of classic texts that are over 100 years old. You can take anything from there and use it. The language may be dated and above level but you can use Vocab kitchen to catch those and grade them.

Using Images

…to Introduce Topics

There  is a site called Pixabay with public domain images both clip art and photographs. You can use a tool called Picmonkey to make collages. You can do it or you can get learners to do it. You can also find images on ELTpics (where teachers can upload their photos and you can use pictures under creative commons license)

…as writing prompts

A postcard with image prompt and space for a message relating to the picture. Customisable.

…to practise grammar

A picture of a house in the snow: e.g. question forms. Kath started with 5 answers e.g. Bob and Charlie, Winter, Meeting friends etc. = present simple. The students had to produce the questions to go with the answers. With another group, 5 different answers e.g. last summer etc. = past simple.

Devising Listening Materials

  • ELLO – You have the audio, the transcript and in some cases some exercises or quizzes and an indication of what type of English is being used
  • Librivox – free domain audiobooks
  • LearnEnglish Teens – everything on it is very regulated and non-dodgy. Nothing will be upsetting!
  1. Find something your students might be interested in (not necessarily what you are interested in!)
  2. Look at the transcript and make sure it’s appropriate
  3. Listen all the way through
  4. Analyse the language in the transcript (functional language? repetition of grammatical structure? particular vocabulary? etc.)

Learner Generated Materials

When students write things, their work can become templates for future activities with their permission. You can use hot potatoes which is a free software for making such activities.

Finally, the audience suggested Eclipse Crossword, Unsplash and Real English. There was also a handout that I got a picture of, if not the real thing:

IMG_1566

 

by

IATEFL 2016 Supporting postgraduate EAP students: teaching tips and technology tools (Angela Smith)

My intention in attending this session was to answer the question that sprang to mind when I saw the title and abstract in the programme: I wonder if  there will be anything that David hasn’t told us yet? (David Read is in charge of technology and technology focused TD at the ELTC!) Then lo and behold, who should turn up at the session but David?! 🙂

This session is focused on teaching tips and technology tools for supporting postgrad EAP students and will be delivered by Angela Smith of the University of Bradford. The room is pretty small and it’s very full too! Angela is an EAP lecturer and a technology enhanced learning coordinator.

She is going to tell us who her learners are, what postgrad EAP learners want and how to meet those needs. The students come from more than 150 different countries (those on campus attending face to face). Mainly Nigerian, Iraqi/Libyan, China, Japan and South Korea.

The extra things that are offered at Bradford Uni are:

  • drop in sessions (6hrs per week)
  • one to one support sessions (for PhD students, advance booking)
  • online support via Blackboard (materials on a shared area and a specific PhD student area in collaboration with academic skills)
  • small group tailored support sessions (faculties have been networked with and when issues arise, they will send small groups of ‘supervisees’ for help);
  • regular timetabled classes in academic skills.

The challenges that postgrad students face cover all four skills within which there are particular issues. E.g. oral/aural – discussing complex subjects with classmates, supervisors, presenting in seminars or at conferences: need appropriate language and levels of formality. With reading, there is the volume of material, the speed required, taking bits out and making valid notes. If students take poor notes, the output will be poor as well (e.g. presentations and pieces of writing). Note-taking and note-making are something that students have had little training in. Writing includes things like articles, literature reviews, annotated bibliographies and lab reports. Students know their subject but can’t communicate it effectively to the wider audience. Self-management is another area, about meeting deadlines and managing time without handholding. They also have to work with a supervisor which can cause a lot of angst. Supervisors are great but may be short on time and can come across as abrupt or not interested even if it is not the case. Students may feel scared to approach the supervisor.

There are some common difficulties that students face:

IMG_1558

Another issue is language appropriacy in emails…

IMG_1559

Students try to be very respectful and polite but wind up being completely inappropriate. This is an example of pragmatic incompetence. They don’t know the words to use with the correct level of formality. They overuse hedging language etc. and it turns out to be waffling:

IMG_1560

What do the students want?

IMG_1561

Well, a lot of it comes from written work e.g. summarising and paraphrasing, synthesising resources from different areas. Cultural misunderstanding can occur. So what do we do?

IMG_1562

Angela gets examples from faculties of what students have to produce. Using this kind of subject-specific model motivates students. She also makes sure that the syllabus matches their needs at various times, again by liaising with departments.

By adopting these kinds of activities, you can help learners become more adventurous.

IMG_1563

Shared note-taking – all students look at the same article and make notes, then share their notes on a platform and then the notes can be compared.

Angela explained that there are a lot of things that are done to help students become more autonomous:

IMG_1564

For example, she has also set up a help desk. Students can post a question in one of the three categories – Grammar, Vocabulary, Assignment title. If one person posts a question, probably a whole other group of students finds it useful, has the same question. It’s grown enough that 2 members of staff are needed. 2 day response guaranteed.

Angela emphasises the importance of the teacher in the role of guiding the students in developing autonomy.

Next, she moves on to the tools they use.

  • Foxit.reader: can be used to annotate/manipulate texts
  • Scribl.com: You can take a webpage and students can use different tools to work independently or together to deconstruct a text.
  • Mindmeister: a mind-mapping tool. Free and simple to use. You register with an email address and input students’ email addresses and they get access to what you send. Then you can see what students are doing and when in the mind-mapping process.
  • Notes.io: You can make a note then generate a web address which you can give to students and they can see it and edit it. Students can share multiple sets or work on a smaller number in groups.
  • Classtools: You can make a crossword with an associated link. Students create them in class and then work on one created by a peer-group. Good for consolidating knowledge in areas of difficulty.
  • Markin: enables text to  be marked using a code. You highlight and click on the code you want. You can also put comments in. (A little like Turnitin without the plagiarism element, so, the feedback element!) Good for highlighting problems but the student has to do something about it, as vs. proof-reading. So that students have to edit their own work.
  • Padlet: good for brainstorming. Free and easy to use. Generates a link and students can see and post notes. Good for initial planning etc.

There was a handout with all the links to the above on it but it disappeared like snow in sunshine… nevertheless, Uncle Google is your friend!

A.Smith22@bradford.ac.uk

 

 

 

by

IATEFL 2016: Teaching Academic Listening: helping learners take control

My talk at IATEFL this year forms part of a forum on Listening. This means that a number of speakers, in this case 3, take 20 minute turns to speak about their topic. An additional 20 minutes are allocated to questions for all speakers. My co-speakers were Craig Wealand whose talk was entitled The power of podcasts for adult self-study and Ellen Servinis who spoke about Listening journals for enhancing skills and strategies. My own contribution, based on my experiences at Sheffield International Summer School pre-sessional programmes in 2014 and 2015, is called Teaching Academic Listening: helping learners take control. 

In the ten-week pre-sessional programme, which I taught on for both summers, as well as teaching your tutor group writing skills and guiding them through the process of producing an extended written project, each teacher is responsible for teaching one of the other skills (reading, speaking or listening) to their own and a further two groups. For me, that skill was listening.

Being a 20 minute talk, the structure was fairly brief and straightforward:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.05

I started my talk by introducing myself and my context:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.12

 

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.20

Next I highlighted certain ‘issues’ that I met in this context specifically in relation to my listening skills classes. I use ‘…’ because they are more just contextual constraints, the way things are. Nevertheless, here they are:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.27

Assessment: Listening isn’t assessed directly at the summer school, whereas all three other skills are. Students are assessed via their projects and presentations, which directly tests reading, writing and speaking. Students who haven’t got unconditional offers do a proficiency listening test at the end of the course, alongside all three other skills proficiency tests, but they have specific classes preparing them for these tests.

Timetable: Students have one lesson of three hours per week, which is a lovely chunk of time. Of course, in between times a heck of a lot of stuff happens to them, in the form of classes for all three other skills plus a project class plus compulsory attendance at one lecture per week. Remembering what was done the previous week and carrying it forward to the current week isn’t necessarily straightforward! Yet, the skills development thread is constantly building on what has gone before, as learners are expected to use already learnt strategies and add new ones as time goes by.

General intensity of the programme: Students have a lot to do and as listening isn’t assessed directly (see above)it tends to be the one that they might let slip in terms of extra work.

Having discussed these ‘issues’, I put forward the ‘solutions’ (no plasters, just little attempts I made to make things work in my context!) I came up with:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.36

Which I then went on to expand upon.

Metacognitive Pedagogy

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.43

Vandergrift and Goh (2012:kindle loc. 1995) define metacognition as “a state of consciousness of our own thoughts as we focus on a particular cognitive or learning situation”. Their proposed pedagogy for teaching listening focuses on helping learners become more aware in three main ways: of themselves as a person, of the tasks that they are doing and of the strategies that they can use to complete these tasks. Oxford (2011) gives us the image of an orchestra conductor (the learner) using their gestures (their strategies) to control the instruments of the orchestra (the cognitive activities) in order to produce a beautiful piece of music (an effectively completed task). Being such a brief talk, I could not go into a lot of detail regarding this pedagogical approach, but I recommend both books if this is a subject that interests you.

Next I went on to demonstrate how I put the theory into practice:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.50

Here, you can see the materials I made for the second week of lessons. A week after the first lesson, I knew that students would struggle to remember what we had done previously so the first activity checks what they do remember. Both summers, students were unable to complete most of the gaps. Having guided them to the correct answers (encouraging use of last week’s notes etc.), I handed out the strategy tables for them to look at. This sequence guides them to an awareness of the utility of the strategy table, the “why” of it. Introducing the listening logs followed a similar sequence. I showed examples of each, both empty and completed:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.32.59

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.16

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.07

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.23

Reviewing strategies learnt in the previous lesson and listening done between classes acted as a means of ensuring that students brought their knowledge and experience forward to the current class:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.31

At the end of each lesson, I built in time for guided reflection via small-group discussion:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.38

As the course progressed, evaluation was also introduced:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.44

As you can see, all of the questions guide learners to think more deeply rather than just do things.

Another activity I built in was a reprocessing information activity. This was to help the learning become more deeply ingrained. The course material required students to present something using specific language, so I made the activity about their own learning on the course i.e. the strategies we had studied and how they fit together. Making these diagrams pushed learners to think about how the strategies connect rather than being a disparate list:

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.33.50

That was more than enough to get through in the time allowed, so the only thing left to do was give them my references and point them towards this summary post!

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 15.34.11

by

IATEFL 2016 Opening Plenary

After a brilliant PCE day with MaW SIG, it is time for the opening plenary of the 50th anniversary of the IATEFL annual conference in Birmingham. Marjorie Rosenberg welcomes us to this ‘momentous event’ and tells us that Birmingham has more and longer canals than Venice! Who knew… (answer: Sandy knew!) She also told us about the many things going on and reminded us to take home an IATEFL teddy bear keyring, visit the IATEFL tree in the exhibition hall and take photos at the aforementioned tree or at the IATEFL frame, for a souvenir. After a long list of thank you’s and being wished a wonderful conference, it was time for the one and only…

(Professor) David Crystal!

Screen Shot 2016-04-13 at 11.18.06

His talk will cover the changes in the English language since the year 1966 (when IATEFL was established and when the world’s first successful human heart transplant was done, Sweden changed to driving on the right, the first Boeing 747 made its maiden flight, the first issue of the Rolling Stone magazine was published and the most fashionable item of clothing in a woman’s wardrobe was a miniskirt!). He will compare the changes that have taken place in the last 50 years with those that will take place in the next 50.

Who would have thought it? 1966 – 2066.

One of the questions David is most often asked is why he finds language so interesting, why did he become a linguist? A simple answer – two words – language change. Whatever a language was like yesterday, it’s different today and will be different tomorrow. With a global reach of over 2 billion speakers, English is even more so. The language we spend a lifetime learning to teach will not stand still. The only languages that never change are dead ones. If the ‘enemy’ is language change, it will pay us to get to know it better.

Vocabulary

The loss of old words and senses, the arrival of new ones. How much lexical change takes place in English? Oxford’s choice of word of the year this year was emoji, Collins was binge-watch, for watching a box set of a series in one day. Dictionary.com went for identity, reflecting the increased attention being paid to gender and sexuality in the last year. The Australian dictionary went for mansplain – the act of a woman trying to explain something to a woman which she already knows!  What about the words that will be left out in order to make room for the new ones? When Collins got rid of fubsy (fat in a nice kind of way) there was a national save ‘fubsy’ campaign, supported by Stephen Fry no less!

Vocabulary change is always difficult to quantify as we never know what words/phrases will be permanent features and what will be transient. To give a sense of how words go out of use, let’s look at words that were coming into use when IATEFL was born. These have not been heard or used recently!

  • D-Day
  • Beautiful people
  • Flower children
  • peaceniks
  • yippies (politically active hippies)
  • dolly bird (probably wearing winkle pickers!)
  • hully gully (a dance)
  • frug (another dance)

You might be wearing a Mao (hat) and discussing Ostpolitik, Reganism, Powellism, UDI. You might read of the Black Panthers or Rachmanism. Or more mundanely you could see the latest report of the confrontation between the mods and the rockers and pick up your trimphone to tell your friends all about it!

The speed of change suggestions caution when using the internet as a source of up-to-date vocabulary. It is idiosyncratic to the point of eccentricity. Anyone can make up a word and have it included in the Urban Dictionary. The usage might be “liked” by a large number of people, but if you are going to use a source with teenagers, check it regularly or you will find yourself using last year’s word. When IATEFL was born, people were calling each other Daddy-O, calling things groovy and bidding each other farewell with ‘see you later alligator’…

For this year, in terms of neologisms, if you are wearing your kicks you are wearing your trainers. A slashkini is a one piece swimsuit with lots of cut-outs. A manel is an exclusively male panel. A wasband is a former husband. If something is very stylish, you would call it wavy, whereas if something is unattractive, unpleasant and unfashionable it is basic. Calm means good/cool, while digital amnesia is the inability to remember basic things because of over-reliance on devices. Dude food is food that is said to be favoured by men, often including meat. A Skype family relies on Skype to keep contact as a member lives overseas. The grey gapper is a person of retirement age who takes a year out to go travelling. To pocket dial is to call someone by accident when your phone is in your pocket.

Two points should be noted: over half those expressions contain more than one word so when we talk about new words entering usage we are talking about compound words and often they require understanding of the underlying words e.g. wasband. Since the arrival of the internet, it is now possible for anyone who has electronic means to encounter English in its world wide varieties. A decade ago it would have been difficult to do that without going to a place.

The millions of people who actively use the internet encounter an unprecedent range of varieties of English. Different varieties of English become neighbours on the screen, as do different levels. So accommodation becomes common.

Grammatical Change

By its nature far less noticeable at any one point in time. Only by stepping back and looking at large quantities of data over a length of time like a decade can changes become apparent. On the 5th November 1819 John Keats sends an apologetic letter – “Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter” but elsewhere in the letter, he uses “You should not have delayed”. It’s difficult to discover early usage preferences as works have been edited. Other examples can be found in Keats and Austen. I was much disappointed. I have been several ties thinking. He seemed watching her intently. You look very nicely indeed.

The frequency of some modal verbs is declining e.g. shall and must and may. In one big study using the diachronic corpus of spoken English, must reduces by 50%, shall by 40% and may by 37% in all categories studied. They have been replaced by semi-modals like have to.

  • You must be more careful
  • You have to be more careful

The former is more authoritarian.

  • The calculation must be right. (Certain)
  • The calculation has to be right (Less sure)

In each case what we see is a lessening/softening of the strength and certainty.

In the 1960s “I’m loving it” would have been “I love it”. The dynamic use of stative views is grown.

  • I’m wanting a new fridge
  • I’m intending to apply a new job
  • I’m need a new coat
  • It’s concerning me a lot
  • It’s mattering to me greatly
  • I’m knowing the answer

Know seems to have largely resisted the change so far but not worldwide, in India it is common. It seems likely that all stative verbs will develop dynamic uses over the next 50 years.

  • The book that I bought
  • The book which I bought
  • The book I bought

The last one has remained stable (typical in informal spoken English) but the use of which is dramatically decreasing. The change is the direct result of the antagonism towards the use of which in the 20th century grammar (Fowler etc.) David likes which but his copyeditor changes all his which’s to that. The association of which with more formal styles of expression has also contributed to its demise.

Any new word or grammatical construction is going to be encountered sporadically. But all words new and old have to be pronounced. So any change in pronunciation will be frequently perceived. We are sensitive to changes in accent. So how have pronunciation and accent changed?

Pronunciation/Accent

Attitudes towards pronunciation and accent have changed. Some accents have changed their phonetic character significantly. Susan Ray Scots presenter in Dundee was withdrawn when BBC had their RP drive, but today there is institutional recognition to a change in attitudes to regional pronunciation, so within the BBC all are recognised and celebrated/used. Regional radio gained an audience and National radio lost it. The new audiences liked their presenters to speak as they did. But National figures remained strong in series like the Archers and Coronation street where local accents were valued. Non-indigenous accents also began to be heard. RP continues to have a strong presence in broadcasting but its phonetic character has changed. In the 30s it was very plummy, in the 60s and 70s even it sounds dated now. Changes continue to affect RP. Even the queen’s accent has changed, today she uses more open mouthed vowels and centralised vowels.

Estuary English attracted media attention in the 90s. The Estuary is the Thames, the people with accent live on either side of it, chiefly to the North. They use question words at the end like “right?” and “innit?” Phonetically it is a set of accents intermediate between RP and Cockney. Features of Estuary have radiated out through the country. They haven’t replaced the local accents of the areas they have reached but just modified the phonetic character, pulling the vowels and consonants  in different directions. The Estuary heard in Hampshire is very different to that heard in Leicester. In Birmingham there used to be Brum. Now there is Jamaican Brum, Indian Brum, Italian Brum etc. In London this is most noticeable, with over 300 languages spoken there. It’s not that one accent replaces another but more that features combine to create a third. So in the case of RP, we now have modified RP. We have modified everything these days. Accents are a mixture of accents. There are hundreds of variant forms and inconsistencies in speech. In the latest edition of Gimson, the term RP is dropped completely. General English is used instead.

Sociolinguistic research since the 1980s has noticed two noticeable trends: increase in positive attitude to regional accents and an increase in negative views towards RP. This turnaround has happened within 20 years. Regional accents are considered warm and friendly, RP is considered cold and distant. Call centres and TV commercials provide convenient indications of change. During the 90s there was a marked increase in use of local accents. So its probably in Pronunciation that we will see the most significant change as we look forward to the next 50 years. 3/4 of the worlds languages are syllable timed. Stress timing will become less of a priority in the next 50 years, David believes. The future seems to be syllable timed. And it’s a future in which the pace of change is increasing.

Today, a new usage can be around the world in seconds in written and spoken form. The internet is the largest corpus of language there has ever been and presents more variants than have ever been seen before. Not only vocabulary has been affected but spelling too. The internet suggests that a top-down simplification of spelling is not the only way. Spelling might simplify as a result of use and being seen online. On the internet, there are no copy-editors or proofreaders and people can spell however they want. If people spell too idiosyncratically then they won’t be understood but rhubarb – rubarb for example won’t be a problem. The internet may be the force that changes the perception of what is correct.

B.B.C became BBC, Mr. to Mr, 1960’s to 1960s. But most of the orthographic nature of English has remained the same. But online radically different practices are common e.g. in chatrooms, the dropping of all capitalisation, like using i instead of I as the personal pronoun. Once upon a time in Old English there was no punctuation and now the internet is reconnecting us with those old manuscripts!

It is not only the Internet but also broadcasting media and literature that have had an influence over the language. Writers from all over the world write in English and experiment with non-standard styles of expression. Contemporary right has a multi-dialectal nature. The notion of indigenous is no longer clear cut. The lines are becoming blurred within the language and how it is used today. Literature is just the tip of the iceberg of ethic expression.

It’s crucially important to avoid confrontation in all of this. It’s all too easy for pedants to condemn non-standard English on the internet or in new literary sources and call it language deterioration. Conversely it is all to easy for people to revel in the freedom of the internet and disregard the canon that is there heritage. We need to devise an appropriate philosophy that brings about a mutually enlightening relationship between these poles. It’s no easy task given the speed and multidimensional complexity of contemporary language change. The most difficult teaching jobs in the world are language-related jobs. The need to translate and interpret, hugely difficult, the need to teach, hugely difficult.  If David were in charge of the world, all teacher’s salaries would be quadrupled!

 

by

IATEFL 2016 Materials Writing SIG PCE – Print VS. Digital; is it really a competition? (4)

The final event for the 2016 PCE day is the Panel Discussion. The panel are: Katherine Bilsborough to give the writer’s perspective; Jo Sayers who is with ELTJam and most recently in e-learning and product management roles, currently tech coordinator for MaW SIG; Macmillan’s Debra Marsh; Damian Williams. The discussion was chaired by Rachael Roberts.

(Edit: I did my best but it was all moving rather quickly! If you were there and you think I got something wrong, please correct me!! I did a mixture of direct quoting and paraphrasing/summarising…)

Question 1: Do you think writers will have more or less freedom to be creative in the future?

Kath: I think writers will have more opportunities to be creative in the future but probably by doing it ourselves i.e. self-publishing in small groups of people with different strengths and expertise.

Damian: Writing for publishers the briefs are becoming tighter and tighter which means that they are asking you as a writer to write something using this many words from this wordlist covering this grammar using these topics. It opens up new opportunities to be creative in a different way. The profession is going to demand being creative as a writer.

Debra: (Publishers view) We want the writers to be creative and get excited when something creative comes through but we have to think about what we are publishing and selling. The teachers have to facilitate learning through that creativity. Many teachers can find it difficult to work with very creative materials, they wouldn’t know what to do with that creativity and are looking to teach off the page. This could be why the most creative ideas might be rejected. If we can get teachers to understand the creativity and what it brings to the classroom, then we can use that creativity.

Jo: People seemed to get really excited about the brief of be creative for digital. It would be a shame if the potential for digital wasn’t used. It should hopefully be an essential part of writing.

Question 2: Why have we not moved on from drag and drop?

Debra: When it came in it was very exciting! It was new and yet very familiar. It came in because it was what we were doing in print. We are still stuck to a certain extent in trying to replicate what we’ve always done with print in the classroom within digital. We need now to think out of that box. Not throw everything away but think outside of that box.

Jo: Went to a talk about adaptive learning recently, the speaker drew attention to the fact that a lot of the stuff we do with learners is within the constraint of a learning interface. In the rest of their life they use technology in very different ways. So maybe we need to think about other ways of user interaction e.g. messaging rather than only drag and drop learning interface type activities; swiping to accept or reject. Edmodo is a user-friendly platform as the interface is similar to Facebook.

Damian: A student trying to write a C.V. for a job might not want to use English in a social media way.

Debra: The disconnect between technology used to learn a language and that used in everyday life is huge. But if we do a Whatsapp activity, do we use Whatsapp language? Do we use those errors and grammatical inconsistencies?

(Audience): We are using Whatsapp etc. successfully in classrooms but it doesn’t go with the publishers.

(Audience): Institutions want glorified homework self-marking teacher-time saving devices.

Question 3: Which tech skills or knowledge would you view as a priority for MaWSIG members to learn to help them with producing digital content?

Kath: A good way to learn about the digital skills is to do a course yourself on a digital platform and see what the experience is like. Every publisher will have its virtual learning environment/authoring tools and they will let you play in a “sand pit” to practice, play around creating things. To anybody who has not worked on one of these, go on something like Moodle, which is free, and see what it’s like, what you have to do to create a drag and drop etc. Don’t wait til you are in the middle of a project to learn! You learn what you need to know to progress to the next level. We need to help each other, form alliances to develop professionally.

Jo: Google docs is incredibly useful but more important than a specific tool is an attitude or approach – that of “Yeah I’ll learn how to do that/use that”.

Damian: Also kind of being able to have some kind of vision of what the end product will look like so you know what kind of things you can put in.

Question 4: How can we cater for the learner whose digital experience is so far removed from the digital language learning experience?

Debra: the learning experience is changing, so there is a growing disconnect. E.g. digital student books. Not like anything they see on their iPads! The reality is very different from what we assume reading the market research reports. The biggest concern for teachers is that coming into the classroom doesn’t attract students because it is so different from what’s going on outside.

Question 5: Kath said ‘It’s not worth arguing with your editor, you won’t win’ What does this imply about Kath’s relationship with her editor? What do other authors feel about this approach?

Kath: If you are working for royalties or a fee, at the end of the day publishers spend a fortune on market research and know why they want things a certain way or not a certain way. It does happen that there are editors that say I will not work with that writer again, and vice versa and that is very sad. We don’t want it to come to that!

Audience: can be a real collaborative job between author and editor to get it right. Sometimes if both writer and editor are freelance are working on an external brief, that gel can be easier.

Audience: did a survey asking a few questions and got some interesting responses from authors about relationship with editors.

Debra: It comes down to that level of communication. I work increasingly with teams at a distance over email, sometimes much better to pick up the phone/skype than the end-of-the-day email, have a virtual cuppa.

Audience: if there is a sound pedagogical argument to disagree, I’ll insert a comment to explain why I’ve done it, to stand up for what I believe to work. Equally, my classroom is not the same as all over the world, so will mostly just get on with it.

Question 6: With so many digital tools at our disposal, how can we hand over control to the students and when?

Damian: I’ve seen some classrooms as a teacher trainer where you’ve got these really young kids with iPads doing amazing things. The teacher saying “Ok, you show me..” and that kind of thing.

Audience: Rather than thinking about all the other stuff as things the publisher should be providing and worrying about it, maybe it should be thought about from the perspective of what teachers are doing in the classroom, at grassroots level, what they are bringing into the classroom. E.g. I’m going to use Whatsapp with my students this term. So maybe that comes more into teacher training and development to encourage that.

Debra: Teachers want ideas for using tools and information about how they fit into language teaching. Teachers need structure and hang onto that structure, to understand how to exploit it so that the students (and parents) also understand why its being used.

Jo: Is there a reluctance to commit to e.g. a double page spread on Whatsapp when everything changes so fast?

Debra: If it is digital it can be easily updated.

Damian: Also keeping it open with the writing. Bring mobiles into it. Rather specifically a lesson on Whatsapp, make it so the students can choose which app.

Audience: materials could be flexible enough so that it’s the teachers notes that need updating.

Audience: the idea of control to the student makes me think of flipped classroom learning, so perhaps good quality flipped materials…

Audience: writing extra ideas into teachers notes so that students don’t know if it has to be skipped for whatever reason

Audience: a lot of schools block some of these apps so can’t necessarily be used.

Question 7: Having worked with publishers was there anything you missed when you self-published? (Damian)

Damian: wanted to self-publish with the book but my biggest fear was thinking this all makes sense, this is great but is it going to turn out like it is in my head at the moment? Penny and Lindsay helped out a lot. E.g. assumed knowledge. The book needed people looking at it who hadn’t worked on the Delta to give it fresh eyes. Also missed deadlines and working with people.

Kath: It’s a joy to write about something you want to write about. The Heart ELT and Parsnips were very refreshing.

Damian: the Heart book is launching at 2.45 on the National Geographic stand.

And that brought us to the end of quite a day! We finished with a reminder of the SIG day on Friday and all the thank you’s. Just as well, much as it has been awesome and I want more, my fingers are knackered! 🙂

Thank you to:

Screen Shot 2016-04-12 at 22.19.21

for a great day! 🙂

 

by

IATEFL 2016 Materials Writing SIG PCE – Print VS. Digital; is it really a competition? (3)

Damian Williams took over after lunch with his talk A Road Less Travelled: From Digital to Print (and back again).

He is going to talk about the process he went through with self-publishing. The origins were back when he was working on a Distance Delta course. It involved marking 100s of assignments as a local tutor. He found he was writing the same kind of thing in feedback on drafts and so rather than getting assignments in, writing the same comments 100 times and sending them back, it would be better to put the comments on the forum as tips. This became his comments bank – a word document. He could also copy and paste (and tweak) these for the essays he got in. Then he thought why not put it out as a book and decided to self-publish. His big fear was thinking something was brilliant on paper and then getting it out there and it’s not that good. So he went with The Round, where you submit a sample and people can comment it on it with comments and published authors with The Round also have a look and comment on it. Damian launched it just before IATEFL Harrogate and it has sold pretty well. Most of the sales came through Amazon, a few through Smashwords (good for places where Amazon doesn’t sell!) and a few in other places. 300 copies is a benchmark of selling well, his first year he managed 434, second year 338.

Next Damian decided he wanted to turn it into a print book. He wants to talk about going from Digital to Print because usually it is the other way, so this is a bit different. There are a few things to consider in doing this:

Are you going to with print on demand (POD) or traditional offset? The former it only gets printed when someone buys it, the latter means printing and storing a minimum of 1000 copies that then need to be stored. Traditional offset has a lower cost per unit (bulk) and a higher quality production (but most readers can’t tell the difference), you also have books on hand to give to people when you want to. However, POD has low start-up costs if you put the hours in yourself and is instantly available – once the manuscript is set up, someone can order it and get it delivered. There is less risk – minimal costs plus your time. With traditional offset if you get 1000 copies and only sell 30…!

CreateSpace and Ingram Spark are the main Print on Demand services.

IMG_1556-1

<http://selfpublishingadvice.org&gt;

In a simplified nutshell, CreateSpace is better if you are selling through Amazon/online. Book shops don’t like buying from CreateSpace, they prefer Ingram Spark so that is better if you are selling outside Amazon, something for a wider audience.

With a print edition you need to think about the back of the book and the spine as well as the front. The spine-width depends on how many pages and what type of paper.  Trim size is another element. You also need to decide if you are going for black and white or colour. Colour can be useful for colour coding and illustration. If you use images (photos) they need to be high resolution. Ebooks need a font that plays well on different screens and formats, usually sans serif. Print books tend to be easier if they DO have serif. You could print out a single paragraph in different fonts and read through and see which feels nicest, get others’ opinions on that etc. Finally, do you want to do it all yourself or pay someone to do it for you? You can do it yourself but you need time and willpower! Damian paid someone. D.J. Rogers. djrogersdesign@gmail.com did all the formatting and putting the cover together in a few days for about $100.

Once you have your book – print book or e-book – you need to promote it. The first thing that springs to mind is social media. The thing about social media is that it is a great way to get to lots of people but you need to be a bit clever about it. You need to find the balance between using it to let people know about your book and using it to promote it all the time so that people get fed up with it. Damian set up a CELTA and Delta trainers group because he wanted to promote his book. The key is to find specific groups and market it to specific people. And to respond to people who contact you on social media. With a print book there are photo opportunities! If it is an academic book, get it on a reading list. You can also use promotional material e.g. posters, promise a free paper copy for every ten e-books bought etc, to market to schools. If you have a print book get it up on goodreads. Run competitions too. Get some ideas in and choose a winner.

damian@tmenglish.org

Final speaker for the day (can you tell I’m getting tired – intros are getting brief!) is Sue Kay with Fifty ways to not turn your editor grey! So, another different angle for today, to keep our interest intact! The relationship between editor and author is the final focus (before the panel discussion!).

We will get 20 now and the remaining tips will appear on http://www.ELTTeacher2Writer.co.uk/50-ways. Why is Sue qualified to give this kind of relationship advice? She has been an author for 20 years and has worked with a whole range of editors. Most of them seem to have survived. She has (l)earnt(!) an enormous amount from these editors and is still learning. It is these lessons she wants to learn.

Be familiar with your working environment

The more efficient you are in your work station, the quicker you will work and the more likely you are to meet your deadlines and your editor will love you!

  • Know your keyboard. E.g. taking a screenshot on mac that Kath shared earlier. Ctrl+Z=undo. Ctrl+A=select all. Ctrl+N=New page. Ctrl+G=Go to. Ctrl+K=insert hyperlink. Ctrl+Y (Ctrl + F4 on windows)=repeats the most recent action
  • Know the difference between a hyphen and an en-dash. Hyphen is to hyphenate compound adjectives. En-dash is for ranges of numbers, dates, times. If we don’t use the right one, the editor will have to correct it when they get to it!
  • Know how to create a shortcut! (In Word: “Customise keyboard”) http://www.screencast.com/MjjNSdjXPf
  • Know how to use Jing or similar for making screencasts. Quicker than explaining what the problem is in digital materials, you can screenshot it and highlight the place.
  • Use ‘split screen’ to create an answer key!! (So useful!!!)

Communication

  • Find out how your editor likes to communicate and use that method (email? phone? Skype? face-to-face?) If you are using Skype…
  • Set your webcam at a flattering angle! And be careful what is in frame. Have you brushed your hair?
  • Be honest. If you are struggling with a deadline, tell your editor – don’t make excuses!

IMG_1557

  • Agree a method of file-sharing. Dropbox is easy to use. Publishers use FTP. We Transfer is for big files. Box is like Dropbox, more functionality but you have to pay. Google drive good for collaboration.
  • Choose a good system for file naming. Keep it short, enough info but not too much. Start with a date – year month then day. Use v for version number. Use underscores rather than spaces. At a glance you can see which is the most up to date!

Etiquette

  • Keep your editor in the loop. Don’t bypass the editor and speak directly to design. Don’t send an invoice until you’ve checked with the editor that the final draft has been accepted. Two examples of keeping the editor in the loop.
  • Acknowledge receipt of emails!
  • Respond appropriately to feedback. How? Don’t be defensive – try to get the bottom of the feedback is sending. Avoid binary confrontation. Choose your battles. If the editor likes one picture and you prefer another one, let it go. It’s not that important. Much less important for instance than how many vocabulary exercises you can get into your unit. Not worth the hassle, you won’t win, so let all but the most important battles go.
  • What does the editor want? Same document with track changes or a new document? And know your schedule.
  • Trust your editor. Their job is to make you look better. Don’t question every suggestion the editor makes. They are the objective eye that your material needs.
  • Try not to pester your editor – batch your queries. They have lots of projects not just yours!

Miscellaneous

  • Use minimal formatting: tabs not multiple spaces.
  • Use Evernote to store texts from the internet – you can save as bookmark and have all the info your editor needs. ELT and Evernote=a match made in heaven: ELTJam.
  • Know your idiosyncrasies. Apparently two spaces after a full-stop is wrong – why did no one tell me?
  • Don’t write nasty things about people in emails… Be nice, show respect, spread the love.