Attached you’ll find a recent presentation given at the VHS Leinfelden in June.
Below this, in order to provide a slight interactive nature to this posting, you’ll find numerous links to posts I’ve written about in the past as well as a number of questions - do please feel free to answer these, ask further ones or to continue the discussion on in any way.
Why do students with mastery level in the English language keep taking classes?
Students recognize:
English is not like math, it’s like music.
Use it or lose it.
1. Can you think of any other reasons?
What do they usually want to learn? What do they usually need to learn?
Students want to increase vocabulary, practice difficult grammatical structures, erase fossilized errors and maintain their own identities in another language.
They’re also looking for ways to develop cultural awareness.
Principally, advanced learners need to develop their range of vocabulary especially through situational phrases, look at more complex expressions and idioms and also work on issues like their tone and register.
2. In your experience, what other areas need to be worked on?
Patty, Verena, Frances, Corina, Gayle, Stefanie, Beate, Barbara and three Susannes gathered with me on a sunny Friday two weeks ago for some teacher training on using role plays, real plays and other dramatic activities within the Business English classroom.
We started our session off with a suggestion I took from Lindsay Clandfield on using images to create scenarios and beamed a photograph on to the wall encouraging the participants to tell me
where we where we were
what we waiting for
how long we’d been waiting and
how they felt.
A series of fantastical dialogues started off very quickly – exposing just who in the room knew the most about art and modern-day artists!
Later we chatted about the relevancy of this activity in the language classroom and how giving students visual clues helps stimulate their ability to converse and covered the questions of
why drama should be used in the language classroom
when to use it
how to manage the activities
Based on those issues, we chatted about the appropriacy of using dramatic activities with adult Business learners and discussed things which can go wrong when doing these with students.
We all agreed that one of the factors to watch for is that adult business students often think the activities will be a total waste of time - or that they look at the page and aren't able to make a personal connection to the scenario described and also, often, can't see the connection to the language they just learned.
Issues related to structuring drama activities (should one, should it be left to chance?) came up quite a bit –
some participants feeling very strongly that role-plays should have a very clearly defined outline and others feeling that going with the flow helps students to find their own voices.
In the 2nd part of our workshop we looked at published role play and real play activities, covering those provided by Market Leader and Intelligent Business, as well as photocopiable materials from:
Business Roles
Business English Pair Work
InCompany Case Studies
Midway through our session we did another activity based on Ken Wilson’s Be Someone Else (from his book Drama and Improvisation in the Language Classroom).
This activity calls for students to recreate another personality all together and answer questions.
This led us, naturally, on to talking again about the differences between providing real plays (a.k.a simulations) and clearly fantasy experiences.
As mentioned above, often adult students studying Business English, prefer activities where they are still themselves.
However younger adults do often jump in to do the crazier activities with enthusiasm.
In some respects this does come down to the teacher’s attitude to drama him/herself.
Lindsay’s suggestions in his Straightforward guide on using realia to set the scene was very useful - we talked about how the simple things in an office, when a teacher is working in-company, can really help to set a scene.
In the 3rd part of our workshop we reviewed using my Conversation Control sheets as a method of providing feedback related on emergent language and entered the last part of our session with a video from Taylor Mahil (here), finishing our day with the participants creating their own scenarios: based on both realia and/or textbooks and we shared what everyone came up with.
All in all, it was a day full of fun, drama and we all learned much!!
p.s. If you have any questions about any of these slides or what we discussed during the workshop, don’t hesitate to post your questions here by clicking on the word comments below.
Last week I had a lovely time working with a group of English language teachers who came to the VHS in Ludwigsburg for a workshop entitled
Pepping Up Your Business English Course Book!
Our objectives included looking at different ways to increase student-centered learning in our EFL and ESP classrooms and on making lessons exciting even when the teacher is required to use a published material in their curriculum.
The slides from my presentation are at the bottom of this posting. If you were there, you can use these to refresh your memory of some of the points we went through during our workshop and if you weren't, as you’re an EFL teacher too, you’re welcome to have a look and learn with us.
Do feel free to ask or answer questions!
We Asked the Question: Why Do Textbooks Need Supplementing?
You suggested things like they aren’t timely, they aren’t topical, sometimes they’re years and years out-of-date.
The books are sometimes very dull. Too much reading or too little reading. The role plays aren’t authentic or interesting.
The subjects don’t have anything to do with our students actual lives, professions or responsibilities. They’re generic – one size fits all. Sometimes a bit patronizing.
Vocabulary presented often isn’t the vocabulary our students are looking for. There’s very little review of vocabulary from unit to unit.
Not enough speaking activities.
What do you think?
Do you agree with our conclusions?
Then We Did a Study Of Multiple Intelligence:
And looked at images of
JK Rowlings
Stephen Hawking
Columbus
David Beckham
Ray Charles
Prince Charles
Barack Obama
Goethe
Dalai Lama.
In what ways are they all intelligent people?
We marveled at David Beckham’s enormous ability to not only get a ball to curve but that he is able to understand his body so well to make it move where he needs it to, his intelligence understanding the size and distance of a football field: intelligences none of us in the room could say we possess!
Have a look at the names on the list, who is intrapersonally intelligent?
Which ones are interpersonally, spiritually, musically, spatially, mathematically, verbally, naturalistically intelligent?
Do you think that intelligences overlap? Is there a 10th intelligence? What might that might be?
Hint: All 9 of the above examples probably have it – Prince Charles might be the debatable one…although given his recent talks on climate change – hmm, he fits too!* answer at the bottom.
What about the learning styles?
What role might this play in our classrooms?
We discussed what we would have to do if we were the English teachers of Beethoven, Miles Davies or Louis Armstrong and had to teach them Business English!
Next We Reviewed the Practices Of Teaching Business People Business Skills In English:
What are we teaching our students? Don’t they know more about Business than we do? Shouldn’t we be focusing in on their knowledge, simply giving them the language to perform as well as they normally do?
What is it that they want to learn? How are we teaching this to them?
Are we paying enough attention to who our learners really are?
After That We Analyzed Supplementary Materials:
What is available from the Publishers, from ELT websites – which would we use, why these?
What are the intrinsic strengths in each exercise, what weaknesses lie therein; any opportunities? Are there any changes you’d make to the material, why?
Are they all feasible - with which kind of groups – what learners are they aimed at?
We Were Also In Awe Of Ronaldo Lima’s Very Impressive Class (who are blogging):
What happens when students choose to write articles and then see themselves published for the world to see?
Pop over there for a visit, http://finally5b.blogspot.com/ ask or get your students to ask his students how they do it & do let them know what you think!
Then I Showed Everyone The Products I Make Myself:
SimplyConversationsTM and SimplyQuestsTM:
What is the target group of SimplyConversations? What type of learners, what kind of intelligence?
Why are they fun to use? What sorts of skills do they activate?
How do students feel about doing 1.5hrs of strictly conversation?
What effect does choosing their own tasks in the SimplyQuests have when they’re doing their post-task activity (a.k.a homework)?
And Finally We Made An Action PlanFor Future Lessons
What will you be doing to pep up your Business English courses?
Don’t hesitate to continue the communication with me by clicking on comments (at end of posting).
Thank you for coming Sibylle, Christine, Birgit, Wilfriede, Irmgard, Sandra, Jim, Stormy, Ines, Eva, Elizabeth, Veronique, Helmut and Maulina! Thanks VHS Ludwigsburg for organizing the event and hosting us. Am looking forward to continuing learning, growing and sharing with you.
*The 10th intelligence proposed above is visionary: the person who is not only able to 'see' into the future but knows what to do with the way things are changing. Of course, this intelligence is hotly debated as to whether it is an intelligence, as is spiritual and naturalistic intelligence.
There are others too, of course. Read more about multiple intelligences here (lots of links).
As I strolled into the Haus der Wirtschaft I was immediately struck by two things: the gorgeous setting amidst statues and art pieces and the sheer quantity of English language teachers milling around.
Lindsay Clandfield: materials writer, author of the Macmillan Straightforward series, web contributor for OneStopEnglish, columnist for the Guardian Weekly, highly commended for the Duke of Edinburgh award was in the Haus, and man, us teachers were looking forward to a great training session.
Oh and I've a confession to make! Around three years ago when Macmillan asked me if I wouldn't mind being observed teaching by Lindsay and his editor, I had zero idea of who he was and said yes with barely a blink. Nowadays, knowing all he's done in his life, for teachers and the world of ELT, I'd be way too intimidated to do that again. Ha! Ignorance is bliss, eh?
It was a gorgeous German Friday afternoon in November. Lindsay, on tour with Hueber and Macmillan, was here in Stuttgart doing a workshop on how to make great grammar explanations.
Time to polish up those old rags and tune up the tools, guys!
He started off his intro' by telling us that good grammar teachers:
explain things clearly
make explanations memorable
are economic
There are different schools of thought on achieving this:
teacher-centered teaching (lecturing)
student-centered training (coaching)
You often see these reflected in textbooks along with these learning methods:
inductive - students get given the examples then work out the rules themselves
deductive -students get given the rules then apply them to examples
Which is best?
Well that depends on you: your teaching style, your philosophy, your students' learning styles and their needs. Sometimes, when it comes down to teaching grammar, inductive student-centered training is simply not economic.
Sometimes one, or the other, leads to frustrations for the learner and obviously, the teacher. Change tact when and where necessary.
Lindsay then opened up his toolbox and brought out:
The hammer
don't start with grammar
prepare
be brief
break your explanation down into stages and steps
give tangible examples: sentences clearly related to your students' lives, the context of the classroom - something, anything that your students can understand and practice using
Lindsay headed over to the flip-chart and sketched a line which he then broke up with slashes at the bottom, top and middle then called out "What's this?"
With barely a pause we yelled out "adverbs of frequency."
Did you do it too? We're such ELT geeks, aren't we!
After that we pooled our different symbols, signs and the sketchings we often use with our students. Given the setting, it wasn't really that surprising to find out there were a number of artists present.
Analyzing text
Lindsay discussed the use of written texts (authentic or not) - that's when you find a news article, a speech or a passage from literature and get students to do the work, to find examples of a specific structure and:
underline
circle
speculate why the author may have used that particular wording (e.g. modals)
or encourage them to use a text to look out for:
phrasal verbs
gerunds and infinitives
collocations
or perhaps to ask them to:
find examples, circle then underline the word which is being referred to (e.g. the, it)
find examples and change them (e.g quantifiers or a tense: make a past, present)
Life stories
One of the highlights of the afternoon came when Lindsay told us all a very personal family story entitled:
How Clanfield became Clandfield or how our family name was changed
We were engrossed as the story of his great-great-great grandfather's arrogance lost his ancestors an inheritance and how a man's pride can lead to an alternative legacy.
If Papa Clanfield hadn't tossed a ball of rags into a lake, we might never have had the opportunity to see great-great-grandson Clandfield in action - he'd be sitting in a posh manor instead.
It was highly entertaining, we had a good giggle at his expense but it was also serious grammar teaching - the story he used reviews gradeable and non-gradeable adjectives.
Do you have a story?
I just bet you do - I've got a list of them: 3rd conditional spills the beans on a man I once loved and lost to monsoon rains and oh, what could have been if I hadn't slipped; past perfect tells the day I met an orangutan in the jungles of Borneo and the events that had happened before this chance meeting; can&can't will reveal the sordid details of how I conned my way into a job on a yacht despite not being able to sail at the time; futures will invite you into my daydreams of one day becoming a famous film scriptwriter. Ah...
What are your stories and how do you use them in your classrooms?
Generative situations
After that, Lindsay moved on over to the whiteboard, took out a black marker and began sketching again.
He called out "What's this?"
We looked, a man, a face? "A man" we cried tentatively.
"Where is he?"
"In HOSPITAL"
"What's wrong?"
"He has a broken...." Lindsay drew the cast. "leg."
Then he drew another circle.
"Who's this?"
"A woman."
Lindsay laughed and filled in her hair and eyelashes.
"What's her name, what's their relationship?"
And so it continued, Lindsay eliciting, getting us to supply the setting for a story, until:
"The window's closed but the man is hot, what does he say?"
"Could you open the window please?"
"The man is thirsty, what does he say?"
"Would you mind pouring me a glass of water?"
This simple concept, the idea of eliciting requests and offers can be adapted and changed by teachers simply drawing out pictures while prompting for grammar:
a memorable holiday (practice adjectives, past simple)
a sales representative and customer (present simple, conditionals)
planning a long trip (futures, reason clauses)
Of course one thing to note is that when explaining grammar, it can take up vital communicative, speaking-in-the-classroom time, so think carefully about how often you want to use these methods and focus on the ones that encourage the most response.
At the beginning of this posting I mentioned that there are three important steps to being a great grammar teacher:
explain things clearly
make explanations memorable
be economic
We haven't really talked about the economic part yet.
Translation
Straight translation is, as Lindsay said and I agree, the most economic method of all.
I confess to not doing much of this myself - English only classroom rules and all of that - however I do allow it as part of a post-task activity (my word for homework).
Basically my thoughts are, if the students have a very low level of English it takes up an extraordinary amount of in-the-class learning time to explain something and with some aspects of grammar perhaps a quick overview in their own language might be more effective.
If a structure is totally new, it should be presented most thoroughly in the maximum of methods and styles to ensure saturation of knowledge. The entire toolbox should be used. Being amusing, being personal, making it relevant.
With higher level groups my philosophy is that it is also important to go backwards, tune the machine, fix those rusty screws and set students back on track, wrenching them away from bad habits - the more entertaining the more likely it is that it'll stick - your explanation will serve as a bridge to what was actually taught.
Of course when there's one student in a group, with one particular area of stubborn weakness, the most economic path in my opinion, is sending him a quick link to Grammar 330 with the instructions of practice-practice-practice.
What do you usually do? How do you feel about this issue?
And finally, I'll leave you with huge BREAKING NEWS:
Lindsay will be launching his own blog next year:
it'll be reflections and thoughts you and the countries he visits, the teachers, the materials, the road and...
sssh - mustn't tell you too much, yet!
Many, many thanks go to Hueber for bringing such a dynamic professional over to train us here in Stuttgart, for free: you rock!
As I promised, I've still got to update you on the other two workshops I attended at ELTAF 2008 teacher-training conference! So am back...
Both workshops dealt with the issues of globalization and their effects on language learning.
I'll start off with Comfort's commanding presentation of Best Practice, an intermediate and upper-intermediate course book, published by Heinle.
NB: Unfortunately neither the Comfort handouts or the book have arrived as yet so I'll be blogging only from memory and quick notes.
Jeremy Comfort is one of the directors of York Associates, a firm specializing in intercultural training for the corporate sector. For yonks he's been developing methods and materials which integrate an intercultural dimension into language learning.
And as we all know, this is a real buzz topic at the moment. Perhaps even more so, with the financial crisis unfolding and business partnerships moving and changing.
York Associates does intercultural training for teachers, not just corporations. One of these workshops is called "Developing People Internationally." It's pricey as all get out but you can get 20% off if you belong to a teachers' association.
The Best Practice course books are Business English textbooks, not cultural briefings, sort of a cross between your standard BE book and a guide to intercultural intelligence.
They reportedly look at culture, not only from the perspective of different countries but also down into the depths of company culture - particularly those of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India & China).
During his presentation, Comfort went through the familiar images of the iceberg - what is seen above is only a part of what is seen below:
i.e. Artefacts, words, behavious being obvious and visible, above the surface; while customs, norms, attitudes, assumptions and thought processes lie hidden below.
He also touched on themodels of Hall and Trompenaars and gave us an overview of the onion, the layers of cultural meanings and discussed the skills involved in developing transparency of communication, attitudes of tolerance and exposing intention.
Comfort explained that mostly his corporate clients are interested in developing their managers' Leadership abilities - intercultural competence skills fall in with this. He went through the various factors involved, from business knowledge to language ability, personality, motivation and business skills.
He also discussed communicative skills: how influence, establishing rapport and developing active listening skills are crucial building blocks of any successful cultural competence course.
But, to be absolutely honest, although Jeremy Comfort is a very commanding presenter, and I was very pleased to get to see him in action, his slides were a bit jumbled.
How can I describe this and still be nice?
Er, kind of a "mindmapping" circles and sticks leading out into various directions on powerpoint.
From my own cultural perspective, this was a bit disconcerting. Still, the books sound awfully interesting.
McMaster took us from the world of English to the German market.
As Editor-in-chief of Business Spotlight,(an English language learning magazine published for the German, Austrian, Swiss markets) Ian McMaster is well equipped to do this.
First off, he challenged us to an exercise involving a quadrant on the advantages non-native speakers of English have over natives in business situations(!) and vice-versa.
This then led to a mini-presentation of the Business Spotlight, great mag, and then he got on with the meat: back in Spring 2007, Business Spotlight did a survey of Germans who speak English for business purposes and what problems they have when communicating.
Their results were really quite fascinating and in many ways surprising.
Did you know that France is Germany's main trading partner (import and export)?
The US is second, the UK third.
And although 52% of the respondents they surveyed said they speak English to both Non-natives and Native speakers, 31% speak mainly or only to non natives.
And who, do they find easier to communicate with?
Yes. That's right: not us.
39% think that we're the problem.
Alright, not completely the whole problem but the difficulties Germans face when talking to native business partners range from speed (86% say this) and
60% of us use unknown expressions, 57% use far too many idioms, 56% say the words we use are too difficult, 56% that we don't speak clearly enough and 45% have declared our accents too thick.
"Mr Graddol says the majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers. Indeed he adds, many business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when there are no native English speakers present." Michael Skapinker, FT, 9 Nov 2007.
So,NATIVE-ENGLISH business leaders: would you just slowwwwwwwwww down!
Are you ready to call it a day yet? Pack up and go home?
Oh, come on, you're a language teacher! You know we don't still speak that way.
Later on that year, in Sept 2007, Business Spotlight did a follow-up poll of their respondees and asked them where the people were from, the ones who they have the most problems understanding - 192 (of the 1,330 who initially did the survey) answered.
This time the Chinese topped off the list at 34%, the Americans following close behind at 32%, French at 24%, Indians 22%, Japanese 21%, British 21%, Russians and Italians sharing 12%.
I hearthat in another presentation across the hall, in Ian Badger's room, his survey results revealed slightly different statistics:
in fact, the real culprits are the Scottish.
But that might just, could be just, a rumor.
What does this all mean for us, on the ground and in the classroom?
Our German students have a clear need to communicate interculturally and they need materials that reflect a global world.
What you do with this information is down to you.
But my personal top tip would be to read this book, recommended to me by one of my colleagues: it's excellent and really challenges you to have a look at who you are, as a language teacher, as a person living overseas.
You can also view last year's presentation by Ian McMaster at the BESIG 2007, most of the slides are the same - all statistics (very clearly presented, potentially great for a lesson on the subject with your students) are contained within. Click here.
You can get a full report of the survey on the Business Spotlight website if you're a registered subscriber.
Business Spotlight is also now published in the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Bulgaria.
As promised in my previous post, I'm going to give you the skinny on the excellent teacher-training workshops I attended at the ELTAF 2008. I'll be posting here and there, in between classes so they will unfold gradually.
BTW: Sabine (I think you're the anonymous commenter from the previous post - YES! I attended a great workshop on Intercultural competence in business English and have much to say on Comfort's workshop but am hoping to get the handouts emailed from Heinle before blogging about it...)
Anyway, let me kick off without boring you guys - you know I talk too much - the training session I learned the most from:
Duncan Laing of Oxford University Press (OUP)'s:
"Magic" formula for getting your students reading.
The blurb for the workshop read "Classroom time is limited and we need techniques to extract the maximum benefit from students' reading."
Super title.
In the initial moments of this workshop we watched as he fiddled around with the Smartboard and his powerpoint presentation & my heart sunk.
He seemed young, not so confident of his materials, kept double-tapping the screen (how fast we all learn, few of us had ever seen a SmartBoard before but after two previous sessions we were all experts "Tap once, Duncan" we said, feeling as frustrated as he must have done that he hadn't done a prior run through of the technical equipment).
Plus his first slides seemed to indicate this was actually a workshop for teachers of kids or teenies. I teach mainly adults.
Man, I love to be proved wrong!
Duncan introduced the Bookworms club, a Reading Circles system. After going through the teachers'handbook, he split us up into groups and got us to become his reading circle.
It was brilliant - AND I've tested out the materials in two classes so far, it works (not just in a workshop!;-).
My role was to be the culture collector and it was my job to read the story, looking for differences and similarities between my culture and the one in the text. I also had to think of some questions to ask the group.
Our story, from Bookworms Bronze, was called Little Hunters at the Lake.
This role led me to recognize the religious and/or philosophies within the story, to acknowledge the universal love for animals, no matter the culture, and how in my own culture they'd be really little chance of boys finding a gun in the house to go hunting with!
We had a dynamic conversation about the boys' emotionality and whether boys in Germany (or wherever else) would be capable of the same depth of feelings as the two little boys, Ali & Hikmet.
The other roles were just as exciting, the word master extracted words and we discussed them and their significance, the connector found relationships to his own experience, and the passage person found areas she thought most central to the story.
My feedback, on the down side, would be that you really need to know what you're doing.
The discussion leader's role sheet does not clearly provide guidelines to help him/her lead nor notes on the other roles in his group - although it does provide a framework for asking questions of the other participants.
My suggestion to the teachers deciding to try out this system, would be read through the teachers' handbook thoroughly before stepping into class and doing it. Because, honestly, once your students understand what's required of them, reading pretty seriously and suddenly becomes speaking. And that's our goal, isn't it!
Here's my rough summary of the system based on the teachers' handbook:
What are Reading Circles?
Small groups of students who meet in the classroom to talk about stories.
Language learners are encouraged (by having a defined purpose) to have 'real-life' discussions about the stories they've read.
In each Reading Circle, each student plays a different role in the discussion.
The six main roles (each with a specific icon) are:
1. Discussion Leader 2. Summarizer 3. Connector 4. Word master 5. Passage person 6. Culture collector
There's also the possibility of extending the roles, adding, for example an illustrator and background investigator.
At the back of the book, there's a very exciting further activity called "plotting the pyramid" and it gives students the opportunity to examine the construction of a story, breaking it down into different sections: exposition, complication, rising action, climax and resolution.
Supportive role icon badges (perhaps a little "young" -it'd be sweet if OUP could make a series and icons for adults and perhaps a business reader series) and photocopiable role sheets can be downloaded from the OUP website, free of charge.
Why use Reading Circles?
They motivate students to acquire both the habits of reading extensively and of working autonomously. They make talking about texts interesting and provide a framework for having a good discussion in English.
Links
The OUP website is truly a minefield - now why is it that British websites so often are?
Both the British Council and BBC's are also very complicated. sigh. BUT after a fifteen minute search - yes, I'm determined, I finally found the links you need to get sample pages and downloadable sheets.
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