The Problem of Empathy

I've been very quiet of late on the old Twittering and Blogging front because I have taken myself off to the UK for a little while to teach on a Pre-sessional. I thought that this would be a really good chance to find out how things are done EAP-wise in the UK as compared to Ireland, as well as stretching myself as a teacher. So far, it's been an absolutely fantastic experience. My colleagues are all wonderful (as tends to be the case in ELT), the course is really well organised and the facilities are excellent. As I had expected, I've been learning tons from looking at how the course has been put together and then discussing how to approach it with my fellow teachers.

On top of all that, though, I've learned perhaps even more from the students themselves and getting a little taste of what life must be like for them. Back in Dublin, I have an apartment, a car, friends, family and a routine. Over here, I've none of that. As with my students, I'm living in shared dorms, struggling with how to set up a bank account and away from what I know. Yes, the culture clash of being Irish in the UK is not nearly the same as being say, Japanese in the UK, but it has helped me get a better appreciation of how overwhelming it all must be for students. And that's before you get to the academic side of things.

To get a sense of what that must be like, I decided that I would complete the same assignments that they have to do. A lot of this was pre-reading for class discussions which I was able to manage handily enough. But the big thing is the 2,000 word essay. I chose developments in EAP as my topic, thinking it would be fairly easy and quite interesting. I was right on the second count, way off on the first. Writing a referenced, 2,000 word essay is tough. If, like me, it's been a while since you were in university, I'd recommend giving it a go. I've found it easier to explain things to students, I've learned a lot about my field and I've picked up some handy tools for referencing.

I've also given up saying stuff like "students don't know how to critically evaluate". I don't really see this as some independent skill that you can learn and apply across the board. To do this, you have to know a lot about the subject. For most of my reading on this essay, I'm nodding in agreement. Only after reading a ton of articles can I start to form my own line of thought. And I'm reading in my first language. We still talk about criticality in the classroom, not so much as an abstract concept or skill, but rather how to critically engage with the particular subject they're working on.

On a more general, abstract note, I've found myself thinking about empathy quite a bit whilst working over here. The title of this post refers to a book by the philosopher and Catholic saint, Edith Stein. I studied this book as part of my masters in philosophy nearly 15 years ago. It came back to me whilst writing this post (a chap called Kris McDaniel has a very good overview of the book here). Essentially (I hope), Stein's idea is that we recognise another person, not simply as a physical thing, but as an individual person, an I just as we are an I. Stein's objective in exploring the concept of empathy was phenomenological, mine in mentioning it, simply a way of stitching an overarching theme to this post.

If I look for connections between successful teachers, empathy seems to be a commonality (as a side note, this would be part of the argument as to why multi-lingual language teachers are especially helpful to their students). I haven't been able to find a lot on the value of teacher empathy (although there does seem to be a lot on how to teach empathy), but I believe that it is a valuable asset for EAP teachers. The problem is that our empathy can wane a bit as the gap between the present and our former student life widens. That's why a good kick up the backside, as I've been getting this last couple of weeks, is no bad thing. And it can be a self-administered kick - all that needs to be done is to loudly proclaim (it has to be loud so you can't back out) that you will stand shoulder to shoulder with your students during the assignment (unless it's a bloody learner journal! They're on their own for that one).

*I should also point out how amazing the Twitter community is - I did a shout out for sources for my EAP essay and got lots of really helpful responses.

The Importance of Being Native

I think here in Ireland, we have a strange relationship with the English language. In one sense, there is a sense of regret that English has replaced Gaeilge as our first language. We lament the teaching of Gaeilge in schools and marvel at how other countries manage to get their kids speaking different languages by the time they leave school. We sprinkle the "cupla focal" in our speech but I believe there is a real sadness for many of us that we can't converse in the language of our (very recent) ancestors.

And it is perhaps this regret that makes us particularly proud of our brand of English - Hiberno English. We delight in the fact that we have different words for things; words like press for cupboards or rashers for bacon.

And our grammar is different too. Instead of the present perfect form (e.g. I have eaten), many of us use the "be+after+ING form" (e.g. I'm after eating). I don't know if it is nationwide but in Dublin, you'll often hear someone say I do be tired on Fridays when someone from the UK might be more inclined to say I'm usually tired on Fridays (Stan Carey has a nice piece on this grammatical form here). These constructions are leftovers, grammar structures that were translated from the Gaeilge and hung on as the language went into decline.

And we are proud of our writers - Wilde, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney. We tell visitors that the English may have invented the language but we took it and made it better. I grew up hearing this stuff and it is impressive that such a small country has 4 Nobel Prize winners for Literature. But still, you'd wonder. Would we swap one of those Nobel prizes for bilingualism?

So, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that we have mixed emotions when it comes to speaking English. This gets even more complicated in the world of English Language Teaching. Because of our history, because we lost our native language, we get to sit at the head of the table as native speakers (although Thailand gave us a bit of a scare a few years ago, before letting us back into the club).

You would think that considering this tangled history with the English language, our institutional failure to teach our native language and the massive levels of emigration from this country, we would be well placed to challenge notions of what it is to be a native or non native speaker of English. That we would be sensitive to those who have left their homes and are speaking English out of economic necessity. But I worry that this is not the case. I worry that we may be even more protective of the importance of "nativeness" by virtue of the fact our own doesn't sit so comfortably.

Many jobs here still look for native only teachers. I'm not going to name and shame but with a dodgy Internet connection whilst sitting on a train I found 4 in 5 minutes. As many other people have pointed out (here, here, here, here and here), this is discrimination - excluding someone possibly qualified for the job on the basis of something over which they have no control. If we take the Braj Kachru "Inner Circle" view of what constitutes a native speaker, then these ads are effectively saying Americans, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Irish only. Obviously there are many more countries that can be considered native speakers, but I think putting it like this helps to highlight the discrimination involved in native only advertisements.

So, in a way, the word native helps to cover up some discriminatory hiring policies. It is a lot easier to say "I just want native English speakers" than to say "I just want Irish people". I can imagine the people who post these ads might object to the accusation of discrimination and say that they are simply responding to market demand. Spanish kids don't want to come to Dublin to learn English from a Spanish teacher. That would seem a reasonable position and suggest that the schools in question make these decisions based on their view of quality standards or concerns for the needs of their students. And yet one school advertising for natives only stipulates that no experience is required. Do Spanish kids want to come to Dublin to learn English from someone who has never taught before? Does "nativeness" trump all other considerations?

It seems strange to me that a large chunk of the ELT world holds on to the notion that students want native teachers (rather than the notion that students want teachers who will help them learn as quickly as possible). Why is it that in this one area, we let a perception of what students want dictate our approach when in everything else, we claim to know best ("No, no, no, put away your dictionaries - it's better if you guess the word from the context")?

The troubling thing about this glorification of the native is that it creates a horrible dichotomy. The majesty of the native requires the humbling of the non-native. Silvana Richardson argues that we need to move away from the term "non-native". The addition of a negative prefix to people who have successfully learned a language to a very high level (and, as is the case in Ireland, are brave enough to leave their homes to work in a foreign country) seems perverse. Would anyone be comfortable with their job description including a negative? It suggests a lack where really there should not be one. Would native mono-lingual English teachers be happy if they were referred to as "English teachers who have never done what they are trying to get you to do"? But even that wouldn't be a fair comparison, because at least they could do something about it. The non-native title is a permanent exclusion.

This is not exclusively a problem in Ireland. I have heard stories from around the world of teachers being excluded from jobs because of their nationality. But the world is changing. Most English conversations today are between people for whom English is their second (or third, or fourth) language (the world of Tennis is a great illustration of this - look at how Wimbledon, this bastion of "Englishness" is populated by international tennis players all communicating together through the one language). Jeremy Harmer argues that "the old ‘learn-to-speak-English-like-a-native’ trope of the middle of the twentieth century is long long gone". 

Instead of focusing on an insensitive and anachronistic view of English language speakers, Ireland has a small enough ELT industry (on the cusp of significant change if school closures and Government promises of reform are to be believed) that it can focus on a far more equitable dichotomy - good teachers and non-good teachers. The first step would be to get rid of these native only ads and see where to go from there.

Halfbaked idea - Day 1

I've never been one to shy away from enthusiastically embracing a barely digested idea that I overheard someone talking about...once...a while ago. Considering that I heard both Jeremy Harmer and someone else whose name I can't remember but who looked very knowledgeable about these things talking about the book Breaking Rules by John Fanselow (as well as skimming a synopsis of it here), I can safely consider myself an expert on the subject now!

Image via http://itdi.pro/itdihome/index.php

As I understood it, the idea is that you try to teach in different ways to how you would normally. So if you normally stand during the class, try sitting and see what happens. If you normally do vocabulary first, do it second.

Considering that we are coming to the end of a very long term, I thought I would give it a try. Before a class, I will think of one typical thing that I do frequently in class and try to do the opposite. (As I write this, I'm struck by how reality TVesque/wacky/awful this sounds - like I'm pitching a story to a dead-eyed Jim Carrey. Apologies if this is the most banal post you read this week, but I'll plough on...)

So the thing that I do in class is make jokes, self deprecating remarks or funny comments. I'm not quite sure what the opposite of that is, but for my lesson last week I decided that I would very consciously not make any jokes in class.

If I think back to when making jokes or funny comments was a conscious decision, my rationale might have been that it would help students relax, that it might make the lesson more enjoyable, and, quite needily, that it might make students like me and my lesson more. Of course, like those learner errors we hear about in CELTA courses, the habit becomes fossilised. Now, I do this simply because that is what I do.

So, in this class, I did none of that. These are my observations (I didn't think to ask students if they had noticed any difference).

• By being conscious about this one aspect of my teaching, I was also far more conscious of other aspects. I think this made me more attentive to my students and what was happening in the lesson. This might not have been the case if I were trying to change something more challenging. Not making jokes simply required the resisting of a temptation every so often. Perhaps something that required far more attention might have resulted in me being a bit less attentive in class. 
• I think there is a competitive edge to making jokes. I went to an all boys school, have only brothers and play a lot of football - I'm not sure if it is international, but Irish men compete to be the funniest. I wouldn't like to think that I am taking that into the classroom and also nice to give students the space to be funny or make quirky comments.

That's pretty much it to be honest. I don't think it made a huge difference to the lesson as really this is only a very small element to my teaching. Still, it was very interesting to challenge this one aspect.

Would be very curious to hear if other teachers have similar fossilised habits/rules that might be worth breaking.

Jeremy Harmer in Dublin

I have just come back from a fantastic talk by Jeremy Harmer. Essentially the talk was about the main changes in the ELT world since the publication of the first edition of The Practice of English Language Teaching in the early 1980s to today (when the book is in its fifth edition).

Some of the key changes he explored were the developments in technology (he interestingly, and to some dismay from sections of the audience, suggested the interactive whiteboard may go the way of the fax machine - for shameless link to my own post on whiteboards, please see here), the growing number of non-native teachers (he very passionately argued that the distinction is not a valid one - that a really good language teacher is a multi-lingual teacher, irrespective of nationality - lovely to see someone so esteemed arguing the case for equal footing for non-native English teachers; echoes a lot of Marek's work in this area) along with a discussion of the various approaches, ideologies and trends that have come along in the last thirty years.

The talk was held in the teacher's club in Dublin, a venue that has seen a lot of great talks over the years (doesn't seem to get as much use of late, unfortunately). After an epic day of correcting and spreadsheet wrangling, I found the talk uplifting and I have been trying to put my finger on why exactly that was. Yes, Jeremy Harmer is an excellent speaker and he covers a really wide range of very interesting topics. But I think there was more to it than that. I am not sure if it was an overt message, but it seemed to me that the purpose of the talk was to assert the value of the teacher - that despite the changes he outlined, the need for enthusiastic and passionate teachers remains.

For instance, he spent a huge chunk of the talk describing his observations of teachers from around the world, teachers who were motivating students and delivering well thought out, engaging lessons. And as a methodologist, he argued that it was his job to observe teachers like these and report back on the good practice he observes. So in essence, what I took from it was, that as teachers, we have so much to learn from observing (and talking to) each other. And it was this message that I found very, very uplifting.

Extensive Reading - playing the numbers game

On an average week, I would probably read about a dozen 250 word essays. That's about 564 a year. So over the last 7 years, I've read....3,948 essays. And not just read; I've corrected the life out of them. The potentially dispiriting thing is that it seems like they never really get any better. If it were the same person writing all those essays, then of course you'd be worried. But those 3,948 essays are the work of hundreds of students - students who improve and move on, replaced by students who need to improve to move on. So in the halfway house that is the classroom, I've been trying to think of ways to "do" writing better.

What I'm thinking now is that I have to get those numbers up. 

At the same time, the problem I often find with students' writing is either a lack of vocabulary or a lack of ideas on a relevant topic. So, naturally, I want to get the quality up too.

If you follow Stephen Krashen on Twitter, you'll know that he posts a lot of his articles for free on his website, Krashen writes a lot on the topic of extensive reading. The idea is that tons and tons of self selected reading helps language acquisition. A bit of a wander around google (scholar) throws up some interesting free articles like this and this. Scott Thornbury has some interesting points here about extensive reading and how on its own, it isn't enough. To learn new vocabulary just from extensive reading, you need to come into contact with the word multiple times - some form of reinforcement is needed. Thornbury advocates dictionary usage as a way to top up extensive reading (from a vocabulary acquisition point of view). (NB: In this post, Thornbury mentions the 96% figure I've come across once before - apparently, this is the amount of words in a text you need to know to be able to guess the meaning of the ones you don't).

I'd guess, like many teachers, I am quite attracted to the idea of extensive reading (especially when you get to do stuff like this great idea from BALEAP conf - everyone brings a book to class, including teacher; 10 minutes of reading time, then chat about it.....sorry, would love to credit, but I can't track down the source of this great idea. Please let me know if you do. Addendum - found it! - Greg Strong talking about Fluent Reading posted by BALEAP) My concern is the self selected bit - my students have to write on a load of topics, topics that they might never be particularly motivated to read about of their own volition. The other thing is that many do not read a lot in their native language.

So in terms of getting them to write more (with hopefully more vocabulary and more developed/relevant ideas), I've been trying a bit of guided extensive reading (with a bit of listening/watching thrown in as well). Strictly speaking, this isn't exactly extensive reading - it is probably better defined as "doing a good bit more reading than you would usually do (about topics that you may not normally read about)"(c) :)

I've been trying this approach for the last month and so far it has been interesting. It is nothing revolutionary, but... 

Basically, a week before the class, I email students with the following instructions:

1. The topic for next week's writing class is ......(insert topic here)
• Read this article and highlight any relevant vocabulary (insert link here)
• Read this (different) article and highlight any relevant ideas (insert link here)
2. (Listening) Here is a Ted.com talk on this topic (insert link here)
• What are the speaker's 5 main points?
• Look at the transcript - any relevant vocabulary?
• If you were in the audience, what one question would you ask?
3. (Reading) Here is an article on this topic (insert link here)
• What is the overall point the writer is trying to make?
• What are the main ideas? What examples does the writer use?
• Does the writer talk about effects (e.g. as a result....consequently....)
• Do you notice any vocabulary that you found in the listening or other articles?
4. (Writing) Now, after doing all that reading and listening, write 250 words on the question (insert a question related to the topic here).

This is an example that we did a while ago. Here in Dublin, we had some bus strikes so the students missed class. As the concept of trade unionism was not a familiar one to them (and having seen this topic come up in an EAP exam in the past), I thought it might be of interest.

Trade Unionism example

(photo taken from journal.ie)

Reading (approx. 30 minutes)
Use google to find the answers to these 4 questions. Write a few lines to answer each question. We will discuss in  class. 
1.       What is a trade union?
2.       What are the advantages of a trade union?
3.       What is a picket?
4.       Why did Dublin Bus go on strike? 

This video might be a good place to start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNb0VYyfarc 

Listening/Speaking (approx. 30 minutes) 
Watch this Ted talk. The talk is about peaceful protests and is very interesting. http://www.ted.com/talks/will_potter_the_shocking_move_to_criminalize_non_violent_protest 
1.       Write 3 sentences to summarise the talk
2.       Write one question that you would have asked if you were at the talk
3.       Note 5 new words/phrases

Writing (approx. 1 hour)
Write a 250 essay based on this question. 

Workers in essential services (e.g. police, doctors, bus drivers) should not be allowed to go on strike. It causes too much inconvenience to the majority of people. Do you agree or disagree? 

Read these two webpages as support
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-more-people-should-go-on-strike-strikes-are-a-measure-of-our-freedom-1587089.html
http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-it-ok-for-teachers-to-go-on-strike-or-should-they-employ-other-means

The end result as I see it is that students are writing more than they did, they are reading a good bit more than they did. Are their essays any better.....
  

BALEAP - Sunday

Here are my notes/thoughts/acts of gluttony from day 3 of the BALEAP conference.

BALEAP breakfast, part 2

The key to taking full advantage of the buffet breakfast is to sit alone. Time spent talking and worrying if you have food on your face is time not spent eating. Granted, I may have appeared anti-social but I got to eat the following:

• 1 bowl of sugar puffs (they still exist!)
• 1 bowl of muesli
• 2 vegetarian sausages
• 2 vegan sausages
• 2 fried eggs
• 3 hash browns
• Tomatoes
• 4 slices of toast (2 brown, 2 white)
• orange juice
• coffee
• 3 pastries
• yoghurt
• banana
• apple

Emphasising the A and not the E in EAP - Magdalen Ward Goodbody

This talk was an overview of the development of the Academic Skills Centre at the University of Bath. As such it was a nice companion talk to the one by Mark Ingarfield. Essentially, the Academic Skills Centre has moved from being a peripheral part of the university to an embedded centre for all students (not just international ones) who need help improving their ability to use Academic English. Again, fascinating from an Irish perspective to see how these centres have successfully integrated into universities.

Talk also included this slide going through what the nice people at Bath mean when they say academic skills. 

Writing your own: How to create effective EAP materials - Julie Moore

This was an excellent workshop by Julie Moore who is a lexicographer and materials writer. Despite suffering from a severe case of BALEAP belly, I found this to be one of the more inspiring talks of the weekend (incidentally, this was also the opinion of other delegates who later breached bathroom etiquette to praise the talk).

Julie started by asking how many people create their own materials. The majority responded in the affirmative, allowing Julie to make the point that despite the wealth of materials, teachers still feel compelled to create their own stuff for class. Whether it is the lack of specific, relevant materials or an urge to be creative, the fact is that for many of us, creating original material is part of our job. The workshop was about how to do that better.

I tweeted several photos of slides from the workshop here, here and here.

In no particular order, here are some of the ideas from the workshop:

• Establish a very clear aim.
• Be critical - do your materials achieve that aim.
• Abstracts are a great source for intensive reading.
• Don't overload the material. You might see a dozen things you could do with a text but you have to be ruthless and narrow that down.
• Start with the aim and then find materials rather than the other way around.
• Think about what students will take away from the class. 
• Get someone to have a look at them.
• Always acknowledge the source.
• Think about staging your activities. For instance, adding a direction like "give reasons for your choice" adds a bit more complexity for Ss so consider at what stage to have simple and more complex tasks.

Innovating instruction: specificity and English in the disciplines - Ken Nyland

Looked at research into conventions in different disciplines. The idea that different disciplines use different structures/language/techniques and that Ss should be exposed to this, encouraged to notice the specific norms of their discipline. EAP is about equipping students with a new kind of literacy - not about topping up deficiencies in their language. This echoed the theme in many talks that EAP needs to be more specific to the discipline of the Ss. 

A very interesting talk that zipped by without me taking decent notes. Sorry. 

BALEAP packed lunch

Unbelieveable! Sent on my way with a cheese salad sandwich, crisps, fruit, water and flapjack which were enjoyed as I bounced my way back across the Irish Sea aboard this little beauty.

BALEAP - Saturday

Here are my notes/observations/impressions from day 2 of BALEAP. Again, please let me know if I get anything wrong or if I miss the point. I only slept 5 hours the Friday night so the quality of my notes deteriorated as the day went on. 

BALEAP breakfast

• All you can eat buffet including both vegetarian and vegan sausages! As I was sitting with the Sheffield crew, I wanted to make a good impression so showed some restraint
• muesli
• 2 vegan sausages
• scrambled eggs
• 1 hash brown (afraid to ask for 2)
• 2 pieces of toast
• orange juice
• croissant
• coffee
• yoghurt
• Don't feel I made the most of that buffet

Listening and Reading in L2 academic contexts - Dr Catherine Walter

• 4/3/2 idea. Read as much as you can in 4 minutes. Then try again in 3. Then try again in 2. 
• This will help to build more fluent reading.
• Translation and back translation - translate from English to your language and then back again. (remember doing something like this in class with the Vincent Price part of Thriller)
• Dispelled myths about "good readers"
• good readers guess meaning from context
• no, good readers know lots of vocab
• implication - teach vocab and vocabulary systems, not how to guess from context
• Talked about pronunciation. Often, if we mispronounce, we have a chance to correct. But if we don't hear/understand, we might not get a second chance (esp in lecture). So makes more sense to teach received pronunciation (i.e. to teach pronunciation in terms of listening to it, rather than devoting all the time to making sure Ss get the pronunciation spot on)
• Implication - do more dictation work in class. 
• Ss much less likely to abandon initial hypothesis when listening. So for example, if they hear "way" first, they are more likely to stick to that, even if later evidence suggests it was actually "weigh". 
• Ss much more likely to replace unknown words with known words.
• Paul Nation got mentioned a lot

Capitalizing on technology to promote learner autonomy in a writing course - Prof. Esther Boucher-Yip

• Blended learning model. 
• Used Blackboard to take grammar out of the classroom
• Students had access to grammar exercise/practice online.
• Used free stuff for these grammar resources
• Advocates looking at your class and thinking, what can you get out of the class and have them doing at home
• Online work supports classroom work

Delivering the discipline-specific pre-sessional that you are responsible for - Karen Nicholls and John Wrigglesworth

• Make the course as ESAP as possible. 
• Graduateness - boil down topics - filter out stuff that at least one student in the class wouldn't need as a graduate. So you are left with stuff that will be applicable to all in the class (e.g. stuff about research)
• They all have a book that they bring to their class - a book that is relevant to the genre that they wish to write in. This is their resource in the class relevant to their area. This is the meat for the skills that they work on, individual to each.
• Record your own lectures. The speaker talked about how he creates lectures himself so that they can be more tailored to Ss needs.

Teacher anxiety and content involved EAP - Dr Justin Alam

• 3 types of ESAP teacher
• 1 - avoids the content. Literary type. Instead of content, teaches skills (e.g. note taking, writing). Avoids anxiety by not dealing with content, bouncing questions back to students when they come up.
• 2 - regrets they can't always expand on answers. Would like to know more content.
• 3 - the model student. Tries to know as much as possible about the topic. Behaves like the model student, helping the students in this way. Sits in on content classes. Sometimes explains things that are not covered by lecturer. 

Exploiting corpora to address the vocabulary needs of Business Students - Andrew Preshous

• Students know "customer" but not the many collocations that go with it (e.g. "customer base")
• Mentioned BAWE and Sketch Engine
• Good for targeting subject specific vocabulary to teach Ss
• Outlined many guided discovery tasks (here, here and here) that can be used with words from BAWE

BALEAP Lunch

• All you can eat platters. Sat with very nice and knowledgeable people from University of Liverpool and Essex. Contributed very little to the conversation due to the following:
• cheese salad sandwich (2 quarters)
• egg salad sandwich (1 quarter)
• tuna salad sandwich (1 quarter)
• 2 mini vegetarian quiches
• 2 vegetarian samosas
• 2 vegetarian bahjis 
• 2 cream cakes
• water (important)
• coffee

Improving tutor feedback on online academic writing courses for postgraduates - Jill Northcott and Pauline Gillies

• Feedback is a social act
• Therefore, feedback to students on their writing should be social. Not a clinical identification of their errors - instead try to engage with what they have written.
• Engagement can be motivating for both teacher and student
• Talked about grounded theory - I know very little about that so if anyone could suggest further reading or expert grounded theory bloggers/tweeters to follow, that would be great.
• Scaffold writing assignments by giving 3 sources for an initial writing assignment

An integrated approach to EAP administrative support - Mark Ingarfield

• Behind the scenes at University of Liverpool
• Talked about points of pressure in the year - important that these are highlighted and prepared for so that staff on both sides (academic and administrative) are aware of each other's burdens and are kind to one another.
• Talked about integrating the EAP centre into the systems of the university. 
• The EAP centre and pre-sessional students are income generating. 
• Lot for Irish universities to take from this talk. A vision of how things are done in the UK and perhaps, how things could be done in Ireland.

Gala Dinner (preceded by power nap)

• Slap up meal in a suitably glamorous location
• (additional mash potatoes requested and received)
• Table quiz (did not win)
• Table quiz quibble - the question "What speed does the DeLorean need to reach to travel through time?" should not be multiple choice. 
• Dance floor annihilated - did not see that coming

BALEAP - Friday

I went to the BALEAP conference in Leicester over the weekend and it was really inspiring. I've transcribed my notes for Friday below if anyone would like to read them. I know that in most cases, you had to be there, but there might be something of interest in my scribbles.

Suffice to say, that they were all amazing speakers and it was an incredible experience.

(BALEAP - Saturday)
(BALEAP - Sunday)

I'm terribly sorry, if I've misspelt any names or misinterpreted anybody's talks. Please let me know if you would like me to amend anything or add anything. I didn't take notes during the Pecha Kucha which is a shame as it was the highlight of Friday for me.

Navigation in a complex world - Prof. Rebecca Hughes

• Academic writing is an increasingly collaborative process
• English is increasingly the language of academic publication
• EMI (English as a medium of instruction) is on the increase. Therefore, we are likely to have students coming with higher levels of English in the future.
• Consequently, they will have different, perhaps more complex needs
• Predicts India, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, China and Malaysia as the countries where students are likely to be coming from in the future
• "The deficit model is dead" - the student is not the problem. (to be honest, I'd love if someone could explain this to me or refer me somewhere - it seemed to be a theme throughout the conference)
• Delegate from Scandinavia made the point that this could lead to higher levels of English but possibly lower levels of knowledge of the content/subjects (e.g. history, physics etc)

Scaffolding reading comprehension in an L2 academic context - Vasiliki Antoniou

• The use of Moodle to scaffold academic reading tasks
• Students were guided through a series of tasks (and given prompts and reminders) in relation to specific readings (encouraging them to do different things - e.g. think critically about texts)
• Findings from research showed that the scaffolding methods students were most positive about were model answers and notifications about task updates
• Do students perhaps prefer more passive forms of scaffold (i.e. ones that require less autonomy). This was a point made and discussed in Q and A.
• Activites like mind maps were mentioned. Another activity was mentioned - MAZES. I forgot t ask what that was.

The complexities of preparing international students for group and seminar discussions - Ann Smith

• Chained tasks - don't just get them to do one task but a series of tasks that feed into one another
• The task she described was to ultimately give a presentation with the aim of persuading the audience (in this case it was a bid for a project)
• So to complete the presentation there were a series of tasks that they had to complete, all building up to the presentation (e.g. researching, planning etc)
• Oh I forgot to mention - they were working in groups - larger groups of between 5 and 7
• She considered the pros and cons of self selected groups and careful team formation/assigned groups. 
• Felt that self selection was better than random selection (e.g. you're sitting beside each other so you're altogether)
• Assigned selection is better if the project is being marked
• There was peer allocation of marks! If they all gave them the same marks, it was given back and they had to do it again. 
• The students had to log everything they did - i.e. whilst working on the project minutes had to be taken.

Becoming Metacognitive Teachers - Maggie Heeney

• What makes an exemplary teacher?
• Discussed the idea of letting students inside your head - seeing the process
• This involves thinking aloud, modelling for the students, interacting with the students and scaffolding)
• Studied a teacher - charted them over many weeks - taking notes throughout their lesson. Looking at instances where the teacher thought aloud, modelled what they were asking the students to do.
• Made a good point that teachers need to be able to do what they are telling there students to do. I found this quite salient - some tasks our students are required to do, I would struggle with. Point seemed to me to be that you have to do it yourself in order to better understand how to help someone else do it (and by thinking and reflecting upon how you do it)

The EAP of spelling learning together - Bee Bond

• talked about exploratory research - that it is very cooperative; that you don't go looking to prove something but instead to find out the answer to a question; that it is about developing understanding rather than proving.
• Different to action research
• Talked about the EAP treadmill - feeling jaded, doing the same things over and over. Without the time to develop, to tweak.
• Talked about not seeing the students as individuals, as capable of taking their education seriously (perhaps because you only see them not doing what you want them to do)
• Really good point - students are independent - they are choosing not to listen!
• So listen to students - show them that the onus is more on them.
• Bee made students co-researchers, not objects of research.
• Looked with them at why their spelling is bad. Threw the question back to the students. Tried to figure it out together.
• Discovered that beautiful joined up writing helps with spelling.
• Distinguished between scholarship (i.e. you critically evaluate what you do as a teacher) and research 

Technology tools for teaching English for Academic Purposes - Dr David Lefevre

• Says that online pre-sessional courses are going to be big stuff
• For many students, online is the only option. Face to face not an option.
• Pros - you can target who needs the help through feedback on their online submissions.
• Wondered which of the skills could be taught more effectively online and which not so much (speaking, writing, listening, reading, vocabulary)?
• Videoing lessons from experts - putting that online. Makes knowledge accessible to a far wider audience

Pecha Kucha

Once upon a time in a pre-sessional classroom in Sheffield - Elaine Lopez

• Noticed that students don't have great grammar. But we don't teach grammar in EAP
• Did a research project
• Turns out they learn the grammar anyway, even without explicit instruction

Ten Tips to Survive your first year as an EAP tutor - Emma Hillman and Zella Phillips

• Full of great observations - e.g. the new serious EAP clothes when we shift from ELT; the worries about our ability to teach academic stuff

Why you should use a randomiser in class - Hannah Gurr

• write students names on lollipop sticks - pick them out randomly so you make sure to ask different people. You don't just rely on the stronger students.
• Use an app to do the same function but more technologically.
• Great line - if my student says I don't know (as a way to avoid contributing/cop out), Hannah responds with "Ok, well what might you say if you did know).

EAP materials for prospective MSc science/engineering candidates - Jon Wordie

• Hilarious. Impossible to do justice to it here. Sorry, if you weren't there, you missed out. 

Pre-sessional migration: managing the masses - Linda Hurley

• Dealing with the large numbers of teachers coming in for pre-sessionals
• Ideas linked to beautiful paintings (again, very visual so can't do justice)
• As someone coming for Ireland where pre-sessionals don't have the same scale, I missed lots while gaping in awe at the volume of students, and teachers employed in UK universities

Accessible feedback for international students: a colourful approach - Rebecca Thomas

• The use of colour code as a way to engage students more with feedback
• Students more likely to engage with higher level feedback if colour code used (because they don't have to uncode complex language to understand the problem in the first place)

The social media diaries - Susie Cowley-Haselden (aka The EAP Archivist)

• Whitesnake
• How blogging and tweeting has helped her tremendously
• Encouraged everyone to blog - to tweet - to get involved in the wonderful online community that is out there for EAP teachers.

I like correcting

It seems like I have spent the last month either correcting, worrying about correcting or avoiding correcting. Around this time of year, the amount of corrections that need to be done starts to look ominous and a collective dread works its way around the staffroom. Whenever the topic of corrections comes up, a sigh tends to be the most common response. Weekends marred by a stack of papers lurking somewhere in the house.

But the thing is, it is the quantity rather than the process itself that I don't like. If I have a bit of time, if a bit of love (or at the very least, some care) has been put into the writing, then correcting written work is really rewarding.

You can figure out new things to cover in class, you can get to know your students a bit better, you can spend a bit more time thinking about how language works than in the heat of the spoken moment. And if you get the time to sit with the writer, you can have a really wonderful exchange.

The only problem is time. There is so little of it. And trying to get through tons of corrections in what little there is, I fear, robs you of the possible joy of correcting and denies the student the value to be gained from those meaningful responses that our better selves would like to offer.

Does anyone have any thoughts on correcting and how to make it less of a drag and more meaningful?

Nominees

Last week I went to a comedy gig in a small pub. At one point, the comedian, in the middle of a bit about how great drinking is, asked if there was anyone who didn't like alcohol. I could see he needed someone to say they weren't into drinking for the joke to work. And I happen to be a teetotaller. All I had to do was put up my hand and we'd all find out what point he was trying to make. Until then, audience participation had been ticking along nicely. I'd even had the comedian direct a few bits at me earlier. It should have been relatively easy.

Instead, I kept my mouth shut.

Not a terribly significant or interesting story, but it seemed to chime both with a discussion we had on introverts in the classroom over at #eltchinwag and some points made by Hugh Dellar on these classroom management videos.

I would not necessarily label myself an introvert. Like many teachers, I'm fairly mouthy at conferences. But I think there are many solid reasons why I chose not to speak up at that gig. The audience was 80% male and a bit peculiar. I had a bit of a sore throat that night. Overall though, I said nothing because I didn't want to risk embarrassment.

Does the student in the classroom risk embarrassment to the same degree as someone being picked on by a comedian in a bar full of drunk lads? Probably not. But fear of embarrassment, big or small, can cause people to clam up.

So what is embarrassing in the classroom? Not knowing an answer? Getting an answer wrong? Having something patiently explained directly to you by the teacher? Your teacher making a joke about the mistake you made ("You cut your hair! Wow, that's amazing. How did you get the back so straight?....Oh you mean, you had your hair cut!")? Having to talk about something a bit personal (Why don't you drink?) Your teacher making you repeat a word you mispronounced?

It's hard to say. If you don't want to embarrass someone by asking them if they have the answer, what do you do? Ask nobody? Let the same one or two people repeatedly answer while the others avoid eye contact?

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I think in teaching EAP, I've often found myself saying a variation of - Look, when you get to college, you're going to have to speak up in tutorials and give presentations. You should speak up more in class so you get used to it - as a way to encourage the less vocal. Yet, I'm not convinced that this is the best way to motivate someone to speak up - I notice you're very quiet in class so I'm going to make you talk more to help you. 

So what to do?

If I think only about nominating students in some Teacher Student interaction (e.g. checking answers, finding opinions, pair-work feedback) then I've started to question my traditional approach, which can be summed up as - nominate students to answer questions = good.

But why nominate?

If I am checking answers and I just want to make sure all the class knows, who cares if not everyone chips in with an answer?

If I am checking to see if they understood, why wait until everyone else is watching? Why not wander over for a look during the exercise when there is time to do something about it?

If I think they're shy and want them to get involved, why single them out in front of a dozen other people? And how involved is someone if every so often, I make them say True or B. (And do you have to be talking to be involved?)

If I think they have something interesting to say, is there a way that I can give them a bit of a heads up first?

If I am nominating because my experience tells me nobody will answer if I don't name names, then maybe I need to leave a few sticky silences around the place for students to deal with.

Would be very interesting to get students' perspectives on what does or does not embarrass them.

Scaffolding reading (kind of)

Recently, while discussing approaches to ESAP and the challenges students face, I was struck by something a colleague said. My colleague is the business lecturer for students trying to progress to undergraduate studies. The point he was making is that students are required to do a ferocious amount of reading. For instance, the coursebook they work with, Business Studies, is 816 pages. For a native speaker, this is daunting. For someone with a 5.5 in IELTS, it is Everest. If that student is also not a big reader in their own language, then it becomes an abyss.

One way of helping the student, I believe, is to offer tasks to guide them through the reading they have to do. As my colleague rightly pointed out, there is a good chunk of reading that they have to do outside of the classroom, probably on their own. However, I think there are a number of things we can do to support them in this, which don't take a great deal of time to prepare.

For want of a better term, I'll call them guided reading worksheets. If you've ever taken your students on a tour of a museum, handed them a worksheet and let them loose, the principle is basically the same.

You (or the content teacher) tell them which chapter(s) they are to read. You then create a worksheet that adds a bit of structure to their reading. The type of things such a worksheet could include would be:

• Your Questions (you skim the text they've to read and generate 5 to 10 questions for them to answer)
• Summaries (ask students to write specific length summaries of specific chapters)
• Vocabulary searches (find and look up key words (say 10) that you identify for them)
• Examples (if the topic is a concept (e.g. stakeholders), ask students to find examples from the local area)
• Their Questions (tell students that they have to email you (or the content lecturer) with one question each based on the assigned reading)
• Divide up (you ask certain students to read certain chapters - they've to summarise for each other)
• Other reading (give them an article from the business section of a newspaper - they have to read and then identify as many chapters from their course book that have some relevance to the topic of the article)
• Assign the chapter - they have to find one image to represent the main point (sorry, scraping the bottom a bit here)

This doesn't have to be done in the form of worksheets handed out in class. Students could be emailed the chapter to be read, given the relevant task and given a deadline to complete. 

I know it is not very original or very autonomous. However, I think that in many cases the physical act of sitting down and reading itself needs to be scaffolded. Whether or not you follow up on the task, at least there is a clear starting point there for students struggling with the volume of reading they need to get through. 

This is perhaps overkill, but here is a sample handout I did up for Unit 6 of the Business Studies book.

I'm a social learner (except when I'm alone)

I've come back to this fabulous talk by Russell Mayne a number of times now. It is a joy to watch someone taking shots at sacred cows with such abandon (though as someone who gobbled up the learning styles approach, I find myself cringing quite a bit (gobbled up......does that make me a gustatory learner?)). Without wishing to simplify, Russell's point is that ELT seems to offer a warm welcome to dubious theories and unsupported practices (e.g. Brain Gym and NLP). This leads to classroom activities like watching the direction of your students' eyes to determine when to start and stop activities.

Apart from silly lessons (nothing terribly wrong with a bit of silly), one of the main problems Russell highlights is the damage to the professional credibility of ELT. Russell's targets are not teachers on the ground, but those a little higher up the chain - teacher trainers, ELT writers, course book publishers. Those who influence the kinds of ideas and methodologies that make their way into the classroom. 

What I find interesting to consider (as Russell does in his talk) is why it is that there is such acceptance of theories that seem "intuitively true" but which lack any evidence to support them (and evidence that suggests they are in fact bogus). Why is it that in EAP we teach critical thinking, but don't really practise what we teach?

I don't wish to be an apologist for teachers but I think the straight answer is mostly practical. Time. Most teachers I know are paid by the hour and have little or no access to ELT journals. If they want to get any sort of professional development, they have to give up a Saturday, unpaid. Their outside class time is spent preparing classes, correcting work and fretting that they are not effectively helping students maximise their learning potential. If they go to a talk by a charismatic so and so who espouses the wonders of NLP, then chances are, come Monday, their students will be closing their eyes and visualising childhood memories.  

As Russell says, if we want professional credibility, we need to be more professional. I have taken this as a bit of a mantra lately. I figure if we want to be considered on a similar level to university professors, then we have to act like university professors (i.e. publish, give talks, look startled when approached by students in the corridor). However, I am fortunate to work for an institution that gives access to journals and support to do research. I am conscious that not everyone is so fortunate. Thankfully, with ELT Ireland we have a great resource in helping to make things here a bit more professional. 

Essentially, this brings me round to continuing professional development (CPD). Challenging accepted wisdom, engaging in the debate, should be a part of our CPD. But for many of us, it is not. According to the Medical Council, doctors are expected on average to do 50 hours per year on CPD. But there is a framework, a support system there that helps doctors to fulfil their obligations. As far as I know (and I may be wrong), there is no such system for ELT teachers. It mostly seems ad hoc. Wouldn't it be great if there was such a system and support for teachers to carry out their CPD? Perhaps then we may be better positioned to critically evaluate current pedagogical trends (fads?).  

ELT Ireland Conference

Saturday and Sunday (Feb 21st and 22nd) marked the first ELT Ireland Annual Conference. It was a fantastic event and wonderful that this organisation exists here in Ireland. Our industry is going through some tough times, so it is great to have the chance to go to events like this, meet colleagues and share ideas. There were tons of highlights (I will do a post on these later this week) but one that really resonated with me was Peter Lahiff's talk about getting involved. His message, "Push, the door is open", really struck a chord, especially as Peter himself has given me, along with many others, a lot of support in trying new things and getting involved in the ELT world.

The hashtag for the conference was #eltirl2015 if you would like to check out some of the discussion.

I've attached the slides from my talk here if anyone would like to take a look. Basically the talk was about exam preparation classes and how to share the pain with students.

I'll try to explain one or two points that might not be so clear from the slides.

½ with answers + ½ with questions = less TTT

With reading texts, I might give half the students the questions and let them get cracking. With the other half, I give the answers. Their job is to find evidence in the text to prove the answer. After the time is up, get them together. They discuss a bit more as opposed to listening to me telling them the answers.

Text + student questions = speaking practice

I often give a reading text on a particular topic. The homework is to think up discussion questions related to the topic. The next day, we use those topic questions for discussion in class. They are hopefully more invested because they are discussing their own questions and they can use ideas/language they picked up from their reading.

Backwards essay writing = plans and questions 

I always bang on about making plans before writing. One thing that breaks up the monotony of me harping on is to give a complete essay and ask students to make a plan from it and figure out what the question was. If it is a good essay, it should be easy to make the plan. If it is a bit incoherent, trying to recreate the plan might show that up; likewise if the essay hasn't answered the question.

I should also credit Hugh Dellar, who very kindly allowed me to rip off the structure he used in this talk and offered his encouragement.  

What I've learned from learning Polish

This month marks the one year anniversary since I started learning Polish. Considering that I've never consciously had to learn English, I think the next best thing for us natives is to try and learn another language and let that inform our teaching practice. This is what I've learned.

1. Learning a language is difficult

I hope I always knew this. But the thing is, I started out learning Italian when I first got into teaching. And I found it really easy. I may have sounded like a bit of an eejit, but I was having garbled conversations in no time. Did this make me less sympathetic to students struggling with English? I hope not. At least now, after a year of Polish, I have much, much, much more sympathy for people who don't get it as quick.

2. Vocabulary is important

When I read something I don't understand, it's not because my skimming/scanning/predicting skills aren't up to scratch, it's because I don't know the words. When I am unable to say something, it's because I don't know the words. I need words. Give me words.

3. Grammar is boring

This is a bit harsh but there is so much of it in Polish. I started off thinking I would learn it properly but after I almost had a stroke trying to correctly say "My brother is a sporty man", I decided that accuracy was getting in the way. Now I don't ask my teacher is it correct, I ask is it correct enough. Keeping my motivation for the language is more important than speaking only when I'm sure it's correct.

4. I like being corrected (but only in a certain way)

If I make a mistake, I don't mind if someone points it out to me. What I can't stand is when someone explains to me why it is a mistake. If I didn't use the masculine form then chances are my priorities were somewhere else. And if you try to explain it to me, I'm afraid plenty of other people have tried and failed. Just tell me the correct version and hopefully it might stick.

5. I get embarrassed easily

I constantly tell my students - come on, speak, who cares if you make a mistake. When I speak in Polish, I can get embarrassed at the drop of a hat. If someone does that scrunched up, what was that face, after I say something then I get anxious. If someone says something I don't understand, I panic. Funnily enough, this doesn't happen when I speak English.

6. I'm not listening to you as much as you might think I am

I'm sure we've all had that student who never seems to listen. You tell him/her a hundred times and they keep making the same mistake. Each time you explain something, they nod sagely, say ah and then carry on regardless. I am that student. When you're talking to me in Polish, chances are I'm preparing the next thing I want to say. Or maybe I'm stressed because you used a word that I know I know but I can't remember it and now I'm thinking how stupid I am, how I'll never learn, how I'm too old, how.........oh sorry, did you say something?

7. I love boring stuff

I recently chatted with teachers and we were complaining about how creative, fun homework is often met with a lukewarm response from students whereas they lap up gap fills and match ups. As a Polish student, I gobble this stuff up like its ice-cream. Give me ten sentences to translate into Polish and I'm in heaven. Give me a paragraph with words taken out and I'll put them back in with a tear of joy in my eye. I love them because they are quantifiable. I know when I'm done and I know when to pat myself on the back.

I suppose the two main things that I have learned is that, number one, I am a shockingly bad student. Instead of just studying, I spend ages trying to come up with new systems that will help me study more efficiently or writing blogposts that try to add heft and significance to my Polish classes. The second is that Polish really is a stunningly beautiful language (less so when it's me doing the speaking), worthy of the fabulous people that speak it .

Still, I think there is something to be said for getting into your students' shoes as much as possible. Would love to hear other teachers' language learning experiences.

Curb your routine

I read a couple of interesting articles yesterday. The first was an opinion piece by John Worne about the drop in the number of British students taking second languages at university. The second was another John, Fanselow this time, reflecting on his idea of teachers breaking rules. The latter piece advocates a lot of self-observation (by videoing lessons) and challenging the routines (or self imposed rules) we adhere to in the class. The former espouses the benefits of learning a second language.

With those two articles in mind, I tried to do a lesson using the John Worne piece as a source and the Fanselow piece as inspiration.

Normally when I prepare a reading activity, I start off with some discussion questions. Trying to break this rule, I started with vocabulary I extracted from the text. Normally, I do vocabulary as matching - this time I tried to do it as guided discovery. Not sure if this is better or worse, but shook me out of my routine a little bit. Plus, I got to use a picture of Larry David.

I tried to also add a research element to the reading - encouraging the students to investigate the author and a source referenced in the piece. I normally do this as a complete lesson - this time I just threw it in quite casually, a minor part of the lesson.

The writing element I also made quite unstructured, using the Twitter idea I described in an earlier post. There is something fun about writing with a limited number of letters/words. For instance, today, in class, we were looking at essay exam questions and we had a competition to see who could boil the question down to the fewest number of words. Surprising how engaged they were with this.

I finished it with a bit of grammar (wish for regrets), again lifted from the text. The idea of the lesson is that there are quite a lot of elements to it.

Click here for the Lesson PDF

Born to reflect?

I took part in a very interesting discussion on #eltchinwag, the first time I'd ever taken part in one of these hashtag chat thingys. I don't think I really get it - it might be a digital immigrant thing - there is something non-linear about hashtags and twitter (and the internet in general) that confuses me. Still, apart from worrying that I was missing something or posting comments in the wrong place, there was a lot of very interesting thoughts* around the topic of developing students' metacognitive skills. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to boil this complex topic down to one soundbite - helping our students to reflect on their learning.

(*ELT teachers spending their evenings talking about ways to help students - ELT employers, if you happen to be reading this, any chance of a few more quid?)

In my first years as a teacher, I heard very little about reflection. Since moving toward the EAP side of our world, I can't escape it. A few random google searches throw up tons of articles promoting reflection, both for students and teachers. Many of us teach on programmes where reflection is in some way part of the syllabus - more often than not in the form of a learner journal.

I have mixed feelings about reflection, or at least our approach to it. I will try to explain.

First off, I absolutely believe that the best way to learn is to reflect on how you learn, what works for you, what doesn't. I do not dispute the efficacy of reflection. My concern is that our enthusiasm for reflection can be a little off-putting for students.

I'll try to illustrate by example. I used to be really big into running. After a couple of years, I came across a book called Born to Run which is about this tribe of native Indians who run incredibly long distances. The book eulogises running barefoot. Bursting with enthusiasm, I told as many people as I could and took off my shoes to try it out (in fairness to the book, it strongly advises against this gung ho approach for newbies). Within a few months, I'd done both Achilles. I don't run as much anymore.

If I stretch the comparison a little - is there a danger that with our similar enthusiasm for the benefits of reflection (talking zealously about it; working it into curricula; asking students to do learner journals; assessing how good they are at reflection), might we end up killing it a bit for the students?

My own take on it would be this. Everyone reflects in some aspect of their life, to varying degrees. If you think about what you are going to say to someone before (or after) you meet them, then you're reflecting. If you think about what someone would like when buying them a present, you are reflecting. On a most basic level, if you avoid certain foods because you don't like the taste, then you are reflecting (or at the very least, capable of it). So basically, reflecting is part of us, we do it constantly. Some people will naturally turn this skill toward their learning, others won't. Those who do will learn faster, those who don't probably won't learn as fast.

So as teachers, we want to help those who don't reflect on their learning, knowing that it will ultimately help them. If they go for it, perfect. If they resist, frustration for everyone involved. I agree 100% with the intention. It is the approach that I want to consider.

First of all, we tend to stream according to language ability. But the ability to reflect is in no way linked to language level. So in a B1 class, you could have massive disparity in terms of students' ability to reflect. Then there is the cultural side of things. Certain cultures are resistant to the idea of reflection. They may believe that it is the teacher's job to do all that stuff for them. And if reflection forms part of their assessment, there can be a sense of injustice, that they are being penalised for something that doesn't come naturally to them.

So what to do?

I would say, don't make a big deal out of it. Yes, certain students would improve if they were able to reflect better. But don't make it a yes or no thing. Shy people would learn better if they were more outgoing, but we don't make them keep confidence journals. We deal with what is in front of us. If they are willing to reflect, go for it. If not, don't force it. Try to get around the problem. For instance, many people might not like analysing themselves but are more than happy to ask other people questions. Perhaps activities where students ask each other about what they do, how they study, might be a good first step toward self-reflection.

Second, don't assess it. It is good, but it is a tool to learning. I don't think we should assess the tool that someone uses to complete a task.

That's it really.

Seeing as I gave rather a bad impression of the book Born to Run (it's actually a brilliant read), I knocked this lesson together on the topic. It is quite IELTSy but there is a nice few questions around the front cover of the book that students found interesting. And some nice vocab too. I used this review of the book for the reading text. Unfortunately, I didn't include answers for the True/False/Not Given questions. I tend to write ambiguous questions and then let the students argue with me and try to convince me my original answer was wrong. What I'm trying to say is that some of the answers might be ambiguous and I'm kind of okay with that.

Click here for the lesson PDF

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.