Spelling and Arabic learners

I read this excellent article last week on helping Arabic students who have particular difficulty with spelling. The author, Emina Tuzovic, offers some wonderful insights and lots of practical suggestions. For instance, she highlights vowels as one of the most common problems and advocates gapping exercises (e.g. _ntr_d_ct_ _n --- introduction). She also linked to this piece by Johanna Stirling which also covers a lot of interesting ground, particularly the challenge for teachers.

With that in mind, I thought I would have a bash at covering two aspects in this lesson. First of all, the lesson gives some focus to the vowels (using a variation of Scattergories that a colleague taught me - instead of using letters, you use vowel sounds). However, for my students (as Stirling noted), apart from spelling, they have a good level of English. Focussing solely on spelling, though useful, can seem like a bit of a step backward. As well, they are often in classes with students who don't have a major problem with spelling. So the second thing I tried to do with this lesson was make it challenging - to put something in there to keep everyone in the class happy (engaged?). So it covers spelling, but also reading, discussion and proposal writing. In that sense, it is probably a bit overloaded - I suppose I was trying to sneak spelling in rather than announcing it.

The topic is a bit of a chestnut - mobile phones and stress, and uses this article from the Guardian. I made the gapped exercise by using find/replace on Word. To avoid it all looking scrunched together, I found that Footlight MT Light font leaves a decent gap between words. I also doubled spaced and then double spaced between words (again using find/replace) - hopefully it is clear enough.

I should also mention that part of the lesson uses an idea I nicked from Gavin Dudeney which gets students to interact using their phones as a topic for discussion.

If you use the lesson and have any thoughts/comments/suggestions, I'd be delighted to hear them.

Click here for the Lesson PDF

ESAP - what do we have to offer?

The University of Sheffield hosted a really enjoyable free web seminar on EAP a few weeks back. They very kindly emailed on videos of all the conferences if you had signed up. I don't want to take a liberty, but I'll suggest that there'd be no harm in emailing them if you would like to see the talks, but missed out on signing up.

There were many excellent talks but one that I was particularly interested in related to ESAP and was given by Chris Smith. Of the many interesting points made, the one that chimed with me was the idea of genre analysis - taking a text from the discipline in question and analysing it from a language perspective, trying to establish what language is used in the text and for what purpose, looking at the patterns and norms of that particular subject.

What emerged from the discussions was also very interesting. I noticed many people talked about the challenge of communicating with the lecturer/professor - that they didn't get a lot of support when trying to figure out what to do with their ESAP classes.

A marketing/biology/engineering professor, I imagine, could have quite a different understanding of what an ESAP class should accomplish. Perhaps they think the ESAP class should be to build up the students' vocabulary. Or that the class should fix students' mistakes. Or that it should fill in knowledge gaps about the subject. If the latter, then they may feel frustrated - that they would now have to teach their subject to the person supposed to lighten their load.

I know it is easier said than done, but it would seem the only way to improve communication is for both sides to have a clear understanding of the purpose of the ESAP class. That could involve discussion and negotiation prior to courses beginning. However, I think that from the ESAP side of things, we need to have a very clear understanding of what we want to achieve with the ESAP class ourselves. This can be intimidating as we are non-experts (in the content subject, that is) offering our help to experts. Which is why, Chris Smith's talk was so helpful. It was a reminder of the expertise that we on the ESAP side of things are bringing to the table:

• the ability to see patterns in language
• the ability to understand students' language mistakes
• the ability to teach language and language related skills 

On top of that, we are coming to these subjects fresh, willing to work through problems with the students. Take assignments, for example. I might not be able to explain what a Buckminsterfullerene is, but I know how to research, how to plan, how to reference, how to develop an idea, how to write a coherent piece of work. This is what the ESAP teacher has to offer. And hopefully with a clearer understanding of what we are there to do, we can be more direct, confident and clear in our communication with our colleagues. 

So in saying all of that, I thought it might be interesting to share a few short lessons that myself and a colleague came up with for Chemistry ESAP. Where I work, we are lucky in that we have none of the problems mentioned above. We are small, so the Science, Business, IT and EAP departments all live in the same office. A while back, my colleague Dr L, told me that the Chemistry students would be doing lab reports soon and could we do something in ESAP to support this. I asked for a sample lab report and together we knocked these Chemistry lab report ESAP lessons together. They were broken up over three lessons to give the students time to write the various sections between classes. They are quite simple but may give some idea of a way to approach ESAP.

Any thoughts or comments on your own ESAP practice would be very much appreciated.

Click here for the lesson - Lab Reports Introductions 

Click here for the lesson - Lab Reports Procedure

Click here for the lesson - Lab Reports Discussion

Do NESTs Dream of Electric Acronyms?

Blog wandering, I've come across a lot of very interesting discussion around the issue of NESTs (Native English Speaking Teachers) and nNESTs (non-Native English Speaking Teachers). I think this article by Robert McCaul says everything (or as close to as is possible) on the subject. James Taylor also outlines the bias within TEFL which NESTs benefit from - the favouritism experienced by teachers because of accidents of birth. As someone who has benefitted greatly from an accident of birth, I thought I might share my own perspective.

I was born in Ireland, so through no particular skill on my part, I speak English as my first language. Generally speaking, we Irish don't carry too much baggage when we travel. We've never got round to conquering any other nations (at least not directly), so, if they've heard of us, generally other countries tend to be quite well disposed toward us. This makes the Irish NEST's life a good bit easier. Our accent can sometimes pose a challenge for learners (I had to live in the US for three months before I could pronounce my THs) but once you take the edge of it a bit, slow down and avoid words like rashers, nobody really has a problem understanding us. To make things even handier for us, you get nonsense like this coming up every so often. 

So all in all, I would argue, that on the spectrum, your Irish NEST has things a bit softer than most (apart from the cowboyism still a part of the industry here).

Being in this lucky position, you tend to wander along thinking to yourself what a wonderful teacher you are - how great your lessons are, how engaged your students were, how wonderfully you explained the difference between the present perfect and the past simple. And maybe this is true - maybe you are a wonderful teacher. But by reading the posts I have mentioned above, and, more fundamentally, by sharing my life with an incredibly talented and inspirational nNEST, I have come to realise that good teachers are good teachers, irrespective of what their first language is. 

There are really good arguments here as to why it makes no sense to favour a NEST over an nNEST; the Wikipedia page on the topic has some good links; and this webpage is a nice reminder that its not just NESTS teaching English out there. 

For my own contribution to the debate, I thought I might be practical, and consider what teachers can do. I believe that the people who run schools and hire teachers are acting from a practical concern - that students will favour the school with the most NESTs. I honestly don't know if students actually believe this, but if they do, then where does that leave us. Do we accept that? Does one school use this to manufacture a competitive advantage over the school who hires the best teachers, irrespective of mother tongue? I think these are questions to be considered. 

As teachers, I would (preachily) suggest that there are a few little, practical things we can do to support our colleagues. 

1. Don't distinguish between NESTs and nNESTs. We're all teachers. 

2. If you hear of a job up for grabs, recommend the person you think most suitable, regardless of where they come from. 

3. Praise other teachers in front of students. Again, regardless of where they come from, if you think a teacher is good, don't be afraid to say it in front of students (they'll still love you). 

4. Think critically about the idea "students prefer native speakers". Do they? Who says? How wedded are people to this notion?

5. Be kind to other teachers. Chances are they're having a tough day, native or not.

Nominalisation part 2 - Cause and Effect

I posted a lesson a while ago about nominalisation after coming across the zombie video via Jennifer MacDonald's blog. I've used this nominalisation lesson a couple of times now with different groups and it has gone over quite well. As I mentioned before, there has been a lot of debate about nominalisation (I've even come across some exercises teaching writers how to undo the damage caused by nominalisation) and I can see the merits of both sides. However, many of my students tend to write (perfectly fine) sentences like this:

The government needs to spend more money on education 

Giving them the option of coming up with an alternative sentence, such as below, is no bad thing.

Government spending on education needs to increase.

Quite belatedly, I've come up with a short little lesson to follow up the previous nominalisation lesson. This one focuses on using nominalisation when writing about cause and effect (there is also a very tiny bit of "noticing" of hedging language). 

As I read back over this post and the excessive use of the word nominalisation, it occurs to me that the post itself would make a very good substitution lesson :)  

Click here for the Lesson PDF. 

Does Ted count as a Podcast?

Outside of teaching, I've only really gotten into listening to podcasts in the last year or so. My colleague tipped me of to This American Life which I've started listening to on the way to work. Along with Graham Norton, Slashfilm and Second Captains, I'm pretty much sorted for sitting in traffic listening. 

So its only now, about ten years after everyone else, that I've started to think about using them. The problem with the ones I listen to myself is that they are too long to use in class. Today, I spent a good chunk of the day looking around for podcasts that were shorter. The six minute English podcasts from the BBC are really good, cover a lot of topics and include transcripts. But I can't use them too often for fear that the students get a bit bored with the structure of the talks. 

This led me to think about Ted. I posted before about using Ted.com as a homework activity that would then fit into the following class. I tended to use these talks as homework because most of the classrooms I teach into don't have a projector installed. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just take the audio from a Ted talk and use that in class? You've probably been doing this for ages but this was a revelation to me. Sure enough, on many of the talks, you can download the audio as an MP3. (I've only just noticed how the speaker in the talk was literally pointing out how blindingly obvious this was.)

Here is a lesson I did to use with this talk by Kelly McGonigal on the topic of stress. The first part is vocabulary based and encourages students to play around with the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Then there is a bit of a reading around the topic of stress with some discussion. This then leads to the Ted talk, again with another vocabulary exercise. It is a fairly vocab heavy lesson but I've been feeling lexical lately. 

I hope you find it useful and if you have any comments or suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. Also, if you happen to know of any good podcasts, please let me know. 

Click here for the Lesson PDF

5 ways to use Mentimeter

I can't for the life of me remember who recommended mentimeter to me. I think I came across it while surfing blogs or it may have been through Twitter. Either way, whoever you are, thank you so much. I used it yesterday in class and really enjoyed it.

If you haven't come across it, mentimeter lets you conduct surveys in real time. You pose a question (it only takes a few seconds). The bit where you put in the question looks like this

Your audience/class goes to a webpage, types in a six digit code and then answers your question. It is kind of like the ask the audience thing in Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

So yesterday, I was talking to a group of students for the first time. As part of their course, they have to do a needs analysis of their own learning. So I posed the question, which of the four skills do you think is your strongest. One by one, their answers start popping up on the screen, until it looked like this.

So then I can ask them to talk about why they think this is. It was a bit gimmicky but as an introduction to thinking about their strengths, it was fun. Plus, nice to have a visual representation that everyone has different strengths (or at least different perceptions of strengths - although in saying that, the first answer to pop up was listening!).

So then I posed an open ended question. I explained that they could think about it over the weekend and then I waffled on about something or other. When I turned around, they had already answered the question. 

 So that was pretty cool. 

Of course, for it to work, you really have to have a projector in  your classroom, and for the students to have internet access on their phones. 

However, if you're lucky enough to have those, I was thinking you could use it in these 5 ways:

1. If you are in an exam preparation class, you could use it to hold a vote about which part of the exam to do for that Friday's mock exam (e.g. reading, listening, writing).

2. If there is a particularly tricky question, you could use it to see how many people got it right or not (really just a fancy alternative to a show of hands).

3. It generates graphs, graphs based on their opinions. Might make IELTS writing part 1 more interesting. 

4. The students could collaborate and use it to carry out in class surveys. They could then use it for presentations or writing up reports based on the data. In that sense it is kind of like a simplified version of survey monkey

5. If you are having a classroom debate, you could pose a question at the start of the class (something like - do you agree with such and such - yes no). Then have the in class debate. Then repeat the survey and see if the opinions have changed. 

Any other thoughts on how to exploit this would be most welcome.

Questioning the coursebook

Hugh Dellar posted a while back about the generalisations regarding specific cultures that pervade a lot of ELT coursebooks. You can read his post here. I was struck by one criticism he made of a particular coursebook - that there was a piece of text that spouted some stereotypes followed by comprehension questions that essentially reinforced the message from the text. Hugh was making the point that this kind of thing is widespread and therefore, there is scope for trainee teachers to be made more aware of cultural sensitivity.

I found myself thinking - given students are likely to spend a lot of time with coursebooks - perhaps we can turn the problems of a coursebook to our advantage. Perhaps we can use the coursebook in ways that go beyond its intended purpose. That we could use the familiarity of the coursebook as the first step in a conversation about critical thinking.

Often, when encouraging students to think critically, I use resources like online articles, newspapers, blogposts. But perhaps the coursebook is the natural starting point for students to start challenging a text in English. Throw in a question or two that have nothing to do with the task being asked of them - the purpose being simply to encourage thinking beyond the coursebook.

• Who do you think wrote this? 
• Why do you think he wants you to learn this vocabulary/grammar?
• Why do you think there is so much colour on this page?
• Why do you think there is a cartoon here?
• In this reading about cultures around the world, do you think it's really true what they say about people in......? If its not true, why do you think they're saying it?

At higher levels, a lot of texts for examinations tend to be newspaper style reports on research. As well as getting students to answer multiple choice questions, match headings and fill in gaps, why not throw in a few questions that challenge the content of the text.

• How do you think they found out that 70% of people think this, or do that?
• Where do you think this research was carried out? Do you think the results would be true for every country?
• What do you think is the purpose of this text - to persuade you; to educate you; to frighten you?
• This article on car usage paints a very negative picture. Do you think there is another side to the story?
• Why do you think so many of these articles are about stress? What does this say about materials developers?

On a lot of listening CDs you often find actors pretending to be non-native speakers. I always found this a bit odd, and kind of offensive, but perhaps there is scope for introducing a tiny bit of critical thinking here.

• Do you think that person is really from ........?
• Why didn't they just find someone from that country?

Or even just trying to infer something about the people speaking on the CD. 

• Did you think he sounded a bit annoyed? 
• A lot of these professors seem to be men - why aren't there more female professors on this CD?
• Where are all the Irish people on this CD?

Or with speaking exercises - encouraging students to consider whether the question might be leading them slightly. I often see these really loaded questions in books - Do you think children today spend too much time playing video games? Wouldn't it be nice to hear a student answer no, not enough actually to this question?