Exam conditions

I wrote a little bit recently about getting students to do more homework. As my students have to do examinations, they specifically requested exam practice that they could do at home. So I have slightly amended the work that I give them. I still send them articles to read, questions to research and audio to listen to (all around a certain theme), but I also send them an exam style reading/listening/writing text which we follow up on in class.

The reading exam texts that they do are very like IELTS ones. A longish text with various question types. To make this a bit more interesting in the follow up class, I take the text and I underline the sentence/paragraph that relates to each question (and then write the number for the question it relates to). I then give out a copy of this to each pair. They then have to work together to figure out if their original answer was correct. Doing it this way feels a little less teacher-centred and gives them repeated exposure to the language of the text; hopefully, it also encourages them to be a bit more reflective about their reasons for choosing certain answers.

After a few weeks of doing this I noticed a couple of trends:

1. Many students did not know really key vocabulary that either featured in the text or the article. It didn't seem to me that they had forgotten it - rather that it was completely unknown to them.

2. Many students were getting the same number of questions correct. There didn't seem to be any improvement over the course of a few weeks. The number of correct answers was approximately the same as they would get in formative tests.

3. Written essays that were completed as homework were littered with spelling errors and problems that even a very cursory check over would pick up.

4. There were some students who displayed none of these patterns: their work was improving, they had better scores than in the test and they had eliminated more basic errors from their writing (gosh, eliminated sounds quite militaristic!)

So, as you do, I had a chat with the classes and tried to dig into it a little bit. It didn't take very long for a pattern to emerge. Some students were doing their homework very carefully - they were using dictionaries, they were looking stuff up, they were reviewing notes, they were double checking, they were asking classmates for feedback on their writing. In short, they were giving it a good bit of their time. Other students were doing none of this.

Horrible cynic that I am, I immediately thought this was symptomatic of laziness, lack of focus, blah blah, blah...but as we continued to chat, it became clear that these students were not being blasé about their homework. As it was homework specifically related to their exams, they were imposing exam conditions upon themselves when they did it. They gave themselves specific times to complete each exercise and when that time was up, that was it. In the exams they would only have 40 minutes so at home they should only have 40 minutes. Hard to fault the logic, really.

If this blogpost were a TV show, the image would start to blur and wobble about now as I slip into a five year old memory of when I was teaching IELTS. Back then I used to spout an awful lot of guff:

• "You've only 20 minutes in the exam for each reading. So you need to get your speed up."
• "You won't have a dictionary in the exam so you need to start guessing from context."
• "Hmmm, you didn't do so well in that section. Tell me about your exam technique."
• "You used subtitles!?! Are you mad? You won't have subtitles in the exam!"

I had one student, CW, who steadfastly ignored all of my advice. Every day, when we checked our homework, she would get every answer correct. Embarrassingly, I remember feeling dismay when she told me that she had spent hours on it and warned her that in the exam, she would not have dictionaries or the luxury of so much time. Thankfully, she continued with her approach and in her IELTS exam, scored an 8.5 in reading (I think 7.5 overall, but am not sure - it was the reading score that really burned itself onto my consciousness). What I missed in all my focus on exam strategies was what she was doing - learning the language. 

Now, five years later, the roles are reversed. I'm pleading with my students to spend more time on their homework. Yes, they won't have a dictionary in the exam but they have one now so why not use it to learn words that might help them when the exam does come around. Yes, they will only have a certain amount of time, but why not focus on getting it right first and then speeding up rather than the other way around. And of course, in a writing exam, they may not have time to proofread their work. But if they do it now, they are perhaps less likely to make those mistakes in the exam.  

I am sure this must sound blindingly obvious but considering how blinkered I was by an "exam training" approach to teaching and also, how many of my students were adopting this "exam conditions", I think it is perhaps worthwhile asking students how they go about doing their homework. 

What goes on outside the class?

Image taken from wikipedia

I teach in an academic context. I work with students who are moving on to third level study, either undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. The amount of work that is required to get through the course and secure a place in university is considerable, far more than can be achieved in the classroom. Ergo, work needs to be done outside the classroom. This leaves me with two questions. The first is:

How involved do I get in this outside class work?

In the past, I took more of a hands off approach. I suggested websites, articles, study strategies, etc. I recommended that students form study groups and work together on certain assignments. I advised students to find time in their day, along with a suitable location to dedicate to study. And generally, the result was pretty much the same. Some people followed the advice and some people didn't. And truth be told, the people who followed the advice were more than likely the people who would have done it anyway. My conclusion was that my advice/recommendations/suggestions were pretty much worthless, not really helping the people who needed it. 

This got me thinking about why so many people were failing to do the work that needed to be done. I think any of the following could be the cause:

• distractions

I think distractions cover a lot. In my day it was telly and Goldeneye; today it is probably something I haven't even heard of yet. Chances are though that whatever this distraction is, it's probably on the internet somewhere. So casually advising students to use the internet to improve their language skills seems somewhat perilous. Yes, the internet is fantastic but it is also massive, overwhelming and a quagmire.  If they can get in, get what they need and get out, then great. But I'd say a lot get lost in there.

• other commitments

Other commitments is fair enough. Students have families, jobs. The problem is that exams and university admissions departments don't really care. So the work still has to be done. 

• lack of study habits

Lack of study habits sounds a bit vague but I am constantly staggered by how many students impose no kind of system on their studying. For many, the approach seems to be to sit down with a book and hope for the best. There is no planning of what they will study, no time limits, no setting of goals. And for others, the habit of even this kind of unstructured study has never really taken root. Study is often the thing to be done when everything else has been taken care of. 

• lethargy stemming from a sense of overwhelming dread at the amount of work that needs to be done and uncertainty about where to begin

As someone who failed spectacularly in my early days at university, I relate to being overwhelmed. For my students, the amount of work can seem a bottomless pit and this is at the same time that they are being overwhelmed by a new culture and being away from their families for the first time. In that case, it's no wonder that study gets put off a bit. 

So if all of these factors are conspiring against the students, I figured a fairly rigorous independent study schedule might be helpful. So now my approach is very much hands on. Every week I email my students a list of tasks that need to be accomplished for the following week. This covers reading, listening, writing, vocabulary, grammar and can also expand to include research methods related topics. I have attached one here. Everything is then followed up on in class. My hope is that it gives students something clear and achievable to focus on each week. For the less autonomous students, I hope it provides a model of an approach to independent study that they may be able to work with in the future when they don't have someone emailing them work to do. 

The second question I had was:

How do I refer to this independent study work?

I struggle with this. Is it flipped? I suppose but I have a bit of a problem with that term; the notion that some revolutionary new method has come along when really it's just decent, well thought out homework. Independent study work sounds okay but it is not super independent as I am the one dictating what work needs to be done. Also, it sounds a bit phoney. The reason, I think, is because the real name for this is homework. This is how I think of it and I am pretty sure many of the students think of it in the same way. But homework sounds a bit childish, too school-y for people going on to third level study. An independent study schedule sounds much more academic-y. But really, it's just homework. 

What else do I not know about...

I came across this piece by Mike Griffin today. It's a fun activity that takes a short, teacher-written piece and spins it in clever ways, playing on the teacher as outsider. For a start, I find this interesting as for most of my teaching life, I've worked in the country of my birth so it is fun to see how other teachers working abroad can exploit their "foreignness" in the classroom. One of the few times I did teach abroad, I used to do this activity where the students had to work in groups to choose suitable local TV shows for me to watch. Sounds a bit rubbish but it used to go down well. Now, it is a very different dynamic - the students are the ones that I am trying to help navigate through a strange new environment.

The other thing that caught my eye was Mike's casual reference to a Flesch Reading Ease rating. If you've not heard of it before, it is a tool to determine the level of difficulty of a particular text. I used it on my last post (shameless plug) and got a score of 66.4 - the higher the score, the easier the text. It seems like such a useful tool for:

• making sure readings aren't too easy/difficult
• grading articles - find out what the initial Flesch score is and then tweak to try to get the number up (or down) a bit 
• motivating students - seems like you can show progression with this scale: "Look, you were struggling with articles in the 70s, now look, you're flying through the 60s"

I've been a teacher for over 10 years now and I'd never heard of this. It made me wonder about all the other interesting teaching type things I know nothing about - things that other teachers use and don't make a big deal out of but which are really interesting. And rather cheesily, this made me think about CPD and how most of the good stuff comes from other teachers who find something and figure out a way to use it and are then good enough to share it. 

Teacher talking time

A few years ago, as a way to mix up the usual observation procedure, I agreed to be videotaped giving a lesson. I then had to write up a reflection on the lesson - what I thought had worked, what hadn't. If you've never tried it, I'd highly recommend the process, as I found it gave me a clear sense of my role in the classroom. What struck me most of all is that, apart from brief explanations to set up the activities, I said almost nothing. When I watched it back, I was pleased with this silence on my part. I thought it good practice. I saw my role as something like instigator/observer, and as such too much teacher talk time (TTT) wouldn't be a good thing. But I worry that I, and perhaps other teachers like me, might have gone a bit too far and developed a bit of a paranoia about TTT.

Like most teachers, one of the first things I was told starting out was to keep teacher talking time (TTT) to a minimum. It makes sense - if the students' goal is to speak English then they need the chance to do so. Also, it can be helpful in curtailing that innate tendency to waffle that us teachers suffer from (we've all been to conferences and talks!). On top of that, TTT is one of the easiest things to point out in a lesson observation. Hence, it is also one of the easiest things to make sure and avoid in a lesson observation. And if you look online, there are lots of suggestions on how to cut TTT (in fairness, other websites also offer a more benign view of TTT).

There are many instances of TTT which are a bit of a waste of time:

• long winded explanations of grammar
• random, off topic musings
• details of your upcoming birthday (to be followed by feigned surprise and mild protestations when they remember)
• explanations of very culturally specific vocabulary that may be of more interest to you than your students
• whatever the teacher version of mansplaining is.

But there are also a lot of things that fear of TTT have led me to do in class which frankly are a bit daft:

• Not answering a direct question about the meaning of a word from a student. Instead saying "What do you think it means?"
• Not offering any form of opinion in open classroom discussions about a topic when perhaps this may have been of interest to students. 

I think the first one is daft because it would annoy me if someone did this to me. And it's phoney. The student is asking me to share knowledge that I possess. They are not asking me what to think. It's a genuine act of communication. (Apologies if I'm the only person who has responded to a student in this way - I'm, perhaps falsely, assuming that every teacher, at some point, has done the same things that I have done).

The second one is a bit more interesting. My rationale previously was that I didn't want my opinions to get in the way in classroom discussions. I also didn't want to get sucked into a discussion and end up sermonising. But students repeatedly asked my opinion in these situations. They seemed to want to know what I thought. Sometimes I would deflect, but other times I would state an opinion or a perspective that hadn't been considered in the discussion. And I always felt a bit ashamed afterwards - I talked too much!

I'm a little less sure now. I've been reading Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou, in which she challenges the perception that teacher talk time should be minimised. Her point is that, in the UK, current teaching orthodoxy is suspicious of teacher led instruction and favours student discovery. She worries that this simply leads to reinforcement of what students already know without really providing them with new knowledge. In the language classroom, I wonder is there a similar thing going on. By focussing so much on student practice (with the underlying belief that they will learn simply by doing), is there a danger that something similar is happening, or could happen, in ELT/EAP. 

In what looks like a very good talk which I didn't get the chance to see (slides here), Steve Kirk* talks about this teacher talk time business in relation to EAP and looks at how group discussion exercises (often the ideal way to avoid TTT) don't often lead to much knowledge building unless the teacher gets involved somehow (to be fair, I'm interpreting a bit here from the slides so am very welcome to correction). There is some good reading here at Demand High ELT in a similar vein which I found through Steve's blog. 

If anything, I hope this post illustrates how waffly a teacher like me can be if unrestrained. So some level of TTT minimisation is appropriate. However, there is scope for a more nuanced understanding of TTT (especially among teachers like me who have come to EAP via ELT), one that doesn't view it as that which must be avoided. 

With that in mind, my question would be - in the EAP classroom, what constitutes good TTT?

*After writing this post, I contacted Steve and he was kind enough to explain his slides in more detail. I've included his comments below as I found them very helpful in understanding his talk and he also offered some interesting thoughts regarding ways in which TTT could positively contribute to the EAP classroom.

"The main drive of my talk was that TTT focuses only on form (too much / too little) and that instead we should be focusing on function - i.e., what purpose the talk serves. Teacher intervention to raise the intellectual challenge of a seminar, for instance, is a learning oriented decision - ergo, good talk. A teacher talking for ten minutes about their own struggles as a PG student can give their class deeply valuable insights into the road ahead - ergo, good talk. The model I offer later in the slides provides a less binary more granular way of thinking about teacher talk - from fully teacher fronted input, through modelling and scaffolding to fully autonomous student practice. It draws on the cognitive apprenticeship model of teaching and learning. My presentation in a star type shape rather than the CA linear sequence is to suggest that as EAP teachers working with adults we may shift within a lesson or task sequence between any of these and back, depending on who's in the room and how they actually respond to tasks etc. You set students off (traditionally 'student centred')...you roam and discover they don't really get it. ..so you pull back, model an example together with Ss, coaxing and prodding but leading them (modelling/scaffolding)...and then you say "right, now do the same with the other questions (or whatever) (back to STT - or rather to autonomous practice ). We need to reclaim the idea of ∗teaching∗. We are not just 'co-learners' or 'facilitators of learning'. We TEACH. ..and need to make more visible what that looks like. I found that the ideas from CA (interesting article on Cognitive Apprenticeship here) gave me refined ways to think about this. It's really helped me see through to what teachers actually do to make learning happen."

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.