Dogme Blog Challenge #3 The Scaffolding

The teacher's primary function, 

apart from promoting the kind of classroom dynamic 

conducive to a dialogic and emergent pedagogy 

is to optimize language learning affordances,

by directing attention to features of the emergent language;

learning can be mediated through talk, 

especially talk that is shaped and supported 

(i.e. scaffolded) by the teacher.

Luke Meddings & Scott Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, Delta Teacher Development Series, 2009.

Who coined the term "scaffolding" to describe the co-construction of learning between learners and teachers?  What was he trying to say through this?   

In your opinion, what do you think  it means to optimize language learning affordances?

Michael Long encourages us to focus on form, (1991) to draw our students' attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in communication, to redress the weaknesses our language learners make and to help them to notice these - which requires the teacher to do more than simply provide the conditions of language to emerge: their language must be scrutinised, manipulated, personalised and practised; Nick Ellis suggests that 'by making the underlying patterns more salient' (1997) acquisition can be facilitated.

That is to say, if learners are having trouble identifying and abstracting patterns, seeing or understanding form, then their attention can be purposefully directed at them.

How?  Why is this different from teaching with grammar McNuggets?

What strategies do you generally apply in your language teaching classrooms to keep your own students focused on their own particular areas of individual concern?   What techniques work best?

Answer in the comments below or if you happen to have a blog, do write your own post explaining how this affects you and your work as an English language teacher.

And by the way, have really enjoyed travelling through the 'sphere, reading the posts and converations so far and am very much looking forward to learning from and sharing even more with you!

Karenne


The Blog Posts Challenge #3

•  Dogme in the mind of a teacher by Nick Jaworski
•  How do you scaffold by Mike Harrison
•  For those who don't know by David Warr, Language Garden
•   Affordance by Willy C. Cardoso 
•  Whether on a scaffold high by Diarmuid Fogarty 
•  Dogme with young learners by Sabrina de Vita 
•  Scaffolding by Rick Oprea 
•  Scaffolding, maps and possible routes by Cecilia Coelho 
• Dogme teaching strategies by Anna Rolinska
  

Read previous Challenge blog posts:

• Challenge #1 Co-construction + the list of responding blogs
• Challenge #2 It's emergent? + list of responding blogs

Read Next in the Challenge series

• Challenge 4 Being Light
• Challenge 5 The Learner's voice
  
• Challenge 6 NNESTs vs NESTs
  

What is all this about? 
The Dogme Blog Challenge + links to the blogs discussing Dogme
The dogma of Dogme - background info & links
Dogme ELT - other stuff I've written on Dogme
S is for Scaffolding by Scott Thornbury

How to share on Twitter:  use the #dogmeme hashtag

How to share your fellow teachers' blog posts with each other?  Add/link to the blog(s) written on the subject on your post so they form a ring and your readers can travel on from post to post!

How to respond?

Comment below with short thoughts

Go to your nearest yahoo!group and share your opinions

with like-minded teaching colleagues

Blog it:

Write a list or tell a story, 

compare lessons: dogme and non-dogme, 

relate an experience, a contrary opinion,

quote research, your own theory,

submit mere musings, rant...

share an idea, a paragraph, a dictionary's definition

come up with a clever sentence,

a beautiful photograph,

a video-log

an article or draft the bones of an essay, 

share examples from your own classroom experience...

In short, be dogmeic: personalize  your response!)

Important URLs to quote/link to in your post (if necessary):

• Teaching Unplugged: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/teaching-unplugged
• Scott Thornbury's website + articles: http://www.thornburyscott.com/
• Scott Thornbury's blog: http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/
  
• Luke Meddings' blog: http://lukemeddings.wordpress.com/
• Luke Meddings' on the Delta blog: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/author/luke-meddings
• Dogme ELT in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching

The Easiest Speaking Game in the World

That's it really.

Draw this on the board or on a big piece of paper or click on the photograph and print that out....

The first few times you play this game, put a subject in the middle circle e.g. movies, jobs, current projects, holidays - whatever is topical at the time - elicit this from your students if you like.  Divide them up into groups and then encourage your students to ask each other questions.

Once you've played a few times your students can then choose the topic within each group themselves and no group has to be discussing the same topic as the other.

You circulate and provide feedback on the lexis and structure.

I, um, think this game is straightforward enough not to include any further instructions but don't hesitate to ask questions if you have them.

Best,
Karenne

update: THIS IS NOT A BRAINSTORMING EXERCISE.   Encourage your students to simply ask each other questions and talk to each other: no writing :-)

Let's sell a car...

I get it, I do, that in a lot of cultures this particular picture would be shocking.

So I'm not going to ask the ELT publishers to be so incredibly radical as to include something like this...

But I'm not a book publisher.

I'm an edu-blogger and I live in Germany and I teach adults.

And I like to get my students speaking.

And people here, like everywhere else, are sometimes straight, sometimes gay  and sometimes not anything at all...

- 0 -

But on to the teaching point, shall we?

The other day, I wrote that one of the problems in textbooks lies in having many a pair-work activity and not enough non-even-group activities... and although some of my readers did, quite rightly, point out that you as the teacher can take on the role of one of the people in the activity, I don't actually think this is good all the time - I tend to need to walk around and listen and give feedback on their English.

Yes, of course, sometimes you can get one of the class to help you monitor and feedback on speech, structure but that very much depends on the activity, for that to work, doesn't it?  In fact, to be honest the overall let's stick to an evenness of group sizes bugs me a bit - I just don't see why...  isn't it much more fun when they're not uniformed...

And isn't it better if the language they need to use is repeated several times...


I'll give you an example:

The book I'm currently using... 

(gasp! sometimes I have to and I like this one, gasp! and I can still dogme it, wink!)  

...with my group of intensive automotive students called for one person to sell a car and the other to be buying a car.   A was told he was at an auto fair and B was provided with details of a fictional car, size of the engine, mpg fuel consumption, number of cylinders that sort of thing.  

The standard textbook speaking activity.

But there are three problems with this sort of highly prescriptive activity: one, you really need an even number of students, two it's a bit spoon fed to be giving out random numbers about cars and their costs at random car fairs and it isn't exciting or motivating and finally, three, if you have a large class then they're all going to be talking about the same thing at the same time... and that's sort of naff.

But rather than just moan, I'll tell you how I 

two'd, 

three'd 

and 

four'd it...

I selected some of my students and asked them to think of the next car they'd most like to buy (in some cases if they could afford it) and then I told them that they were all now, officially, car-salespersons.   I asked them to jot down notes about this car, the one they liked so much - what was so special about it including things like how many miles to the gallon, the type of engine, the style...

While those students were busy working on that... I chose different students to "be:"

i) a modern business woman climbing to the top of her career - what car did she want to buy?

and...

ii) a young husband and wife with no thoughts of children in the near horizon
iii) a gay couple
iv) a father and son
v) an older husband and wife with their live-at-home son, who would be sharing their car

The mini-groups of different sizes then had to work together to decide if they were in agreement regarding what would be the best type of car for their personal circumstances and to talk about preferences of engine,  size, features and general style (lexis we'd covered in the units to date).

c) Lastly the purchasers went around the rooms in circles, talking to each salesperson one by one and deciding to buy.


It was super interactive, personalized, fun, the target language was practiced and repeated and yea, we didn't pretend that the entire world revolves around the two-by-twos.  :)

Best,
Karenne
education

I love hearing from you!  Have you ever introduced the topic homosexuality into the classroom or simply ever let it slide in?   Have you found ways to get out of the mould of pair-work?

Please add your thoughts if you enjoyed this piece and you feel like there's something you would like to question, add or say about it - don't worry about perfection or agreeing with me: it's always a pleasure to hear from you and know your own opinions. Worried about spamming me? Spam = you haven't read any of the discussion either in the post or by the other comments yet you want to come to my page in order to advertise yourself... (which probably means you won't have read this either :)). Your comment will be removed. Contribution = you've read the post and the discussion which has been added from other educators (or you want to start one off) and you would like to share your own thoughts, opinions, knowledge and experience. And by the way, have you already written about this specific subject or something similar? Do please add your link as I welcome the opportunity to participate in your conversations too! :-)

Teaching English Online: Tara Benwell and MyEC

I was just going through some of the great sessions from the Virtual Round Table last week to catch up on what I'd missed and while on over there, saw a posting about one of the sessions I did attend at the time and which, if you're interested in teaching online but aren't sure where to start, would really like to point you towards. 

The session was with Tara Benwell of MyEC who works with English language learners from all over the world: almost 25,000 of them!  

She sets up monthly blog challenges for them to write, administrates their discussions and also helps them develop computer skills and develop learner autonomy.

One of the best things about MyEC - if you're a teacher as well as a learner is that you're welcome to go onto their site and set up your own group - there are many, many other groups to join in as well.    Many of their members frequently write their own blogs so you can quickly offer your services in terms of general feedback or correction (when/if they ask for this).

So basically if you've been hedging on whether or not you'd like to start teaching online, doing an Masters in Edtech/TESOL and you'd really like to have a free space, a kind of 'sandbox' to test out on strangers who are really keen to learn... or you want to work out whether teaching online is for you before diving in with  creating your own site (or even, like me the reverse, you'd like to see how tasks you set with real students work with total strangers)  then you should definitely watch this video and join their site.  

If you have any questions, Tara is super approachable, she tweets at @TEFL and her page on the MyEC page is here, the creator of their site was Josef Essberger.

Good luck!
Karenne

p.s. Let me just share with you a blog post from one of their members (displayed here with permission):

Not a Drop to Drink (Blog Action Day)

Although I have already written about water in terms of teaching English in

• Water Words (using images in Financial English)
• The price of water in airports (talking about things that make you/your students angry)

today's post is actually in support of Blog Action Day.

And I suppose in many respects, my post from last week on schooling the world would have worked better here... but I've been thinking about it, about the issues as I walk around the city, as I meander from lesson to lesson.   

How we spend such an incredible amount of talking about issues in education and referencing the 3rd world to support our adventures, waxing lyrical from warm homes, safe lives and families and friends.

We debate about the benefits that we Europeans and Americans can bring to their lives to save them  (all over again because it worked so successfully the last time when we preached - our economies did do rather well, didn't they) and we rave on and on about how we can teach them, reach them through technology but sometimes, god help us, we actually forget that the people who want an education also need, mostly need, an infrastructure in place around them.

We forget that in our very "special" position with our cheap coffee or our expensive coffee, that this  like so much of what we eat and drink comes at the cost of their ability to grow their own vegetables  - to feed themselves properly.   

We forget that the endless toys that stuff our homes or our over-filled wardrobes came on the back of their labour.

We forget that their priorities are very much things on the very bottom of the Maslow pyramid.   So yes, of course they need an education and there are wonderful good-hearted people around the globe doing this and of course, why yes, being given a free phone is wonderful (wouldn't we all love to have free phones too)

but 

please, can we not forget that they need

shelter

food

water.

So I guess I better get on to point of this post and share my contribution to the blog action day:

Did you know that almost a billion people on this planet do not have access to safe water?  That every week 

38,000

children, under the age of 5, die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions?

Did you know that the war in Dafur was probably caused due to a scarcity of water?

Did you know that in the United States alone, on just one average day, more than 500 billion liters of freshwater travel through the country’s power plants—more than twice what flows through the Nile?

Did you know that often, to get  fish on your table, many fisherman completely abuse oceanic country borders and overfish - leaving countries and islands (like the Caribbean) without enough fish for their own people?   Did you know that our deep seas are also in danger?

Did you know that every time you plug a Smartphone into the wall about half a liter of water must flow through kilometers of pipes, pumps, and the heat exchangers of a power plant.

I'm not saying feel guilty.   I'm not saying let's not teach them with technology - let's face it, I would never say that, now would I :-).... but I am saying that if we're going to talk about educating the world's children, then let's please also try to put a little more on the agenda than selling them stuff.

Anyway, I'll leave you now with these thoughts, political twice in a row... but here's the website link to sign a petition if you're in the mood or perhaps you may just feel like digging around for interesting conversation material for lessons next week...


Best,
Karenne

More blog posts

• Mashable
• The White House
• ProBlogger
• Global Voices

Dogme Blog Challenge #2 It's Emergent?

If learners are supplied with optimal conditions for language use, 

and are motivated to take advantage of these opportunities, 

their inherent learning capacities will be activated, 

and language - rather than being acquired - will emerge.

Luke Meddings & Scott Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, Delta Teacher Development Series, 2009.

What does this sentence mean to you?  Do you understand what it means for language to be emergent?   Can something come out of nothing?

Answer in the comments below or if you happen to have a blog, do write your own post explaining how this affects you and your work as an English language teacher by answering any of the questions or something entirely of your own creation...

• In your own experience, what are the optimal conditions for language use?   Does your classroom look like that?  Why/why not?

• What are some of the psychological factors which tend to motivate the general population?   Do you ever apply these needs to your language teaching practice?  Which and how?

• Critics of a dogme approach are quick to seize on its apparent lack of structure or methodological rigour.  In your own personal opinion, how can it qualify as sound practice if so much is left up to chance?

• Do you believe that we humans have an inherent capacity to learn? And to learn languages? Can you give any examples of something you or your students learned by themselves - stuff which had nothing to do with the materials you were using, your classroom (or the teachers before you)?  Why did you/they learn?  Or conversely, can you show how the materials you've been using are directly key to the language ability they now have today?

• Read these quotes:  Any attempt to control the selection and sequencing of syllabus items would be most likely to interfere with learning, since, given the state of our knowlede, it could only be appropriate by chance (Allwright, 1979).  Speech cannot be taught directly but "emerges" on its own as a result of building competence via comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985).  And, not finally,  Paulo Freire said: the class is not a class in the traditonal sense but a meeting-place where knowledge is sought and not where it is transmitted.   

How do you teach at the moment?  Do you think that it is necessary to provide your learners with all the language they need to communicate in English or can you enable them to discover any/all the words they need themselves?   How?  If you disagree, why?  If you are using a course book at the moment do you think that there is a way to create "appropriate" opportunities for language use?  How?

Looking forward to learning and sharing with you!

Karenne


The Blog Posts Challenge #2

• Sometimes a prop is really the best thing, by Mike Harrison
• Fear of the unknown, by Sabrina de Vita
• Emergence by Willy C Cardosa
• An emergent curriculum by Nick Jaworski 
• Nature emerges naturally, does learning? by Cecilia Coelho
• What does it mean to say that language emerges? by Candy Von Ost
• Dogme Schmoge by Anne Hodgson
• Unanswered questions that continue to dogme by Sue Lyon Jones
• Does language emerge? by Rick Oprea 
• Activate all inherent learning by Diarmuid Fogarty
• Unplugged moments by Michelle Worgan

Read previous Challenge blog posts:

• Challenge #1 Co-construction + the list of responding blogs

Read Next in the Challenge series

• Challenge 3 Scaffolding
• Challenge 4 Being Light
  
• Challenge 5 The Learner's voice
  
• Challenge 6 NNESTs vs NESTs
  

What is all this about? 
The Dogme Blog Challenge + links to the blogs discussing Dogme
The dogma of Dogme

How to share on Twitter:  use the #dogmeme hashtag

How to share your fellow teachers' blog posts with each other?  Add/link to the blog(s) written on the subject on your post so they form a ring and your readers can travel on from post to post!

How to respond?

Comment below with short thoughts

Go to your nearest yahoo!group and share your opinions

with like-minded teaching colleagues

Blog it:

Write a list or tell a story, 

compare lessons: dogme and non-dogme, 

relate an experience, a contrary opinion,

quote research, your own theory,

submit mere musings, rant...

share an idea, a paragraph, a dictionary's definition

come up with a clever sentence,

a beautiful photograph,

a video-log

an article or draft the bones of an essay, 

share examples from your own classroom experience...

In short, be dogmeic: personalize  your response!)

Important URLs to quote/link to in your post if necessary:

• Teaching Unplugged: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/teaching-unplugged
• Scott Thornbury's website + articles: http://www.thornburyscott.com/
• Scott Thornbury's blog: http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/
  
• Luke Meddings' blog: http://lukemeddings.wordpress.com/
• Luke Meddings' on the Delta blog: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/author/luke-meddings
• Dogme ELT in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching

Running towards TEFL

A long time ago I had a conversation with a 'normal' school teacher who said TEFL teachers are all weirdos, people who are running away from something...

It gave me pause.  When she said it like that, so bluntly, but then I forgot until it came up again last week.   The view being that if you chose to live an international life, something must have been wrong with the world you were from originally.

Yes, for some of us, that's probably undoubtedly true.

And yes, probably, some of us are freaks, criminals or people on the run.

But 

some of us simply ran from the drudgery of an office life.

Some ran towards the drudgery of an office life.

Some ran away from low-paying jobs.

Some ran towards low-paying jobs.


Some ran away from hard familiar circumstances.

Some ran towards new lovers in new countries.

Some ran towards the risk of the new.

Away from safe nests and towards challenges and growth.

Some stayed at home to live life through their students' lives.



Some explored the world in order to attain a certain level of global understanding.

Some felt guilty and wanted to give something back, to pay for the sins of their ancestors.

Some felt disappointed and ran on home.

Some hate our profession and want to run....




And

the rest

of us?

We just want a life whole-lived.

Where do you fit in?  Walking, jogging or doing a marathon?

Best,
Karenne
education

Schooling the world

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if we know what we are doing...

And whether or not, we care...

If our 'way' has to be the only way.

If what makes us happy has to be the thing which makes everyone else in the whole world happy.

I wonder if we're happy.   

Playing with our toys while wanting to have the toys of others...

Schooling The World: The White Man's Last Burden trailer HD from lost people films on Vimeo.


The world, the times they are -a-changing.

But at whose cost?

Thanks, Sir Ken Robinson
Karenne

Dogme Blog Challenge #1 Co-construction

Materials-mediated teaching is the 'scenic' route to learning, 

but the direct route 

is located in the interactivity between teachers and learners, and between the learners themselves.

Learning is a social and dialogic process, 

where knowledge is co-constructed 

rather than transmitted or imported 

from teacher/coursebook to learner.

Luke Meddings & Scott Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, Delta Teacher Development Series, 2009.

What does that mean to you?

Answer in the comments below or if you happen to have a blog, do write your own post explaining how this affects you and your work as an English language teacher.

• What is the 'scenic' route?  Why do Meddings and Thornbury suggest that materials-mediated teaching practice provides this?  Is there a subtext to what they're trying to communicate to us?
• Why do Meddings and Thornbury suggest that the direct route to learning is, in fact, located in interactivity?
• In your opinion, what do you think interactivity is - between teachers and learners?  And between learners themselves?  How do these differ?  Should they differ?
• In your opinion is there any such thing as a direct route to language learning? Why, why not?
• Do you think that learning is a social and dialogic process?  Justify your position or argue against.
• Is knowledge co-constructed? What does it mean, exactly, to co-construct knowledge?

How to respond?

(Write a list or tell a story, 

compare lessons: dogme and non-dogme, 

relate an experience, a contrary opinion,

quote research, your own theory,

submit mere musings, rant...

share an idea, a paragraph, a dictionary's definition

come up with a clever sentence,

a beautiful photograph,
a video-log

an article or draft the bones of an essay, 

share examples from your own classroom experience...

In short, be dogmeic: personalize  your response!)

Can't wait to read your posts!
Karenne
education

What is this about?  Read here
How to share your post on Twitter: Please add the hashtag #DBC_01  #dogmeme

How to share your fellow teachers' blog posts with each other?  Add/link to the blog(s) written on the subject on your post so they form a ring and your readers can travel on from post to post!

URLS which may be useful for your post

• Teaching Unplugged: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/teaching-unplugged
• Scott Thornbury's website + articles: http://www.thornburyscott.com/
• Scott Thornbury's blog: http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/
  
• Luke Meddings' blog: http://lukemeddings.wordpress.com/
• Luke Meddings' on the Delta blog: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/author/luke-meddings
• Dogme ELT in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching

You can travel through each blog post easily via Furly (see orange navigation bar at the top of page)

Blog posts
Is this dogme? by Candy Von Ost
Interactivity and co-construction by Cecilia  Coehlo
What really matters? Our students by Sabrina de Vita
Interactivity and co-construction by Willy C. Cardosa
Dogme days by Diarmuid Fogarty
The importance of pair work by Nick Jaworski
No dogma for EFL by Jeremy Harmer
A response, by Andrew Pickles
Dogme for all, by Richard Whiteside
Where I stand on dogme by Natasa Grojic (also #4+#5)

Other challenges
Challenge #2 It's emergent?
Challenge #3 The scaffolding 
Challenge #4 Being Light 
Challenge #5 The Learners Voice
Challenge #6 NNEST vs NESTs

The Dogme Challenge: Introduction

The other day, Jeremy Harmer wrote the following on Andrew Pickle's blog post:

Andrew,

Nice lesson. Good use of vocabulary and students’ imagination.
Course I don’t want to rile Luke and Scott (again!!) ,but is it Dogme, really? If people were doing this kind of thing before the Swedish film makers published their manifesto, can you still give it that name?
But it does show what can be done successfully with very little.
Jeremy

I've seen this sort of comment before, a lot.  And it's not that Jeremy is wrong, that this sort of "lesson" even with the google-fight (post-manifesto) hasn't been done before, it's that who cares?   If you're teaching dogmeically then there will always be someone, somewhere out there who wants to sagely say, that dogme existed before dogme existed.

Yup...

it did.

And before the i-phone, smartphones were a-plenty (as were tablets before the i-pad and portable mp3 music devices before the i-pod).  

Before Crocs, garden shoes existed.  Everywhere, only they were green and there weren't a clog with holes nor made of foam and plastic. 

The Kalinago populated and ruled the Caribbean before it was ever named the West of India.

Sunglasses before Ray-bans.

Vacumn cleaners before Hoover.

Anti-Art before Dadaism.

The BRAND name of a thing is not the thing.   Distracts but also adds.  I mean an i-phone is an i-phone after all.  

But this is hardly the point, whether or not (sigh) Dogme is an approach or a methodology or a style or a fad or the fool's way out.... it actually doesn't matter what the thing is called, it was named so by Thornbury  in an apparently uncharacteristic rant against the world of ELT but like all things in life, once a thing has a name it has a life.

Can you imagine students actually giving a crap about what you call the way you teach?   

I think the main point for them is whether or not they walked out of their lessons with you with a higher level of English communicative skills than when they walked in.  And that is the singular goal of conversation-driven teaching.

Andrew Pickles shared with us a great lesson plan for a lesson which no doubt didn't have a plan until he wrote it down and I understand this completely - I had the same problem, recently, when writing a case-study based on a 20 week course with five groups which I'd done in a mix of dogme and dogme 2.0 - the question of how on earth could I lesson-plan backwards in order to extract and tell what occured, what emerged in my classes..?   The mind boggles but I did do it (more on that later).

The thing is that to share the "experience" of dogme sometimes you've got to share the experience.

So, anyway, folks I have an idea...

From tomorrow and every Thursday for the next 10 weeks, I am going to lay down a challenge where we will attempt together to take a deeper look into some of the specific points Meddings and Thornbury have been trying to teach us through their book Teaching Unplugged.  

Perhaps it'll turn into yet another polemic discussion akin to why Acer is better than Apple (any day, hands down) or maybe this time instead we'll focus: unravel the knots, discover the gold, think about what separates a dogme class from a non dogme class, what really matters in the real classroom and teaching practice rather than mere theories of what it couldn't be before it had a brand and we'll attempt to challenge ourselves to teach in ways which are ever more student-centered, regardless of the name(s) we want to use.

You are a blogger:
After each challenge, write a blog post answering the question(s) I put forth.  Then you can  DM or email me (see the side bar) with the specific URL to your own blog post(s) or link back here (the trackback will show up at the bottom of the post) so that we can all travel on to your work in a so-called "dogme blog ring." 

I'll try to provide you with instructions of who to link on to (who was before and after you) but you can also keep track of this through the 'sphere and 'verse.

You are not a blogger but you are part of a forum/ ELT discussion group of any description:
Take my question into your forum and ask your fellow members what they think about each question.   Email me a link to the forum or a summary of what's been said so that we can post responses anonymously (if you/they want to).

You are not a blogger and you don't participate in groups:
Answer the question posed in each post, either in the comments of each blog challenge (if you feel like it) and then visit the blog posts on this subject within the 'sphere and agree or disagree with what the bloggers have written!

Sounds fun?

Talk to you tomorrow,
Karenne


Blog posts on teaching Dogme
The dogma of Dogme
My own musings and guest-posts from other bloggers
Dogme2.0-style teaching tips

• Candy Von Ost, Is this dogme?
• Hugh Graham-Marr, Push and Pull and ZPD and dogme
• Jason Renshaw, Why I teach unplugged but don't do Dogme
• Jason Renshaw, archive of his 'unplugged' posts
• Enda Francis Scott Byrne, A dogged approach
• Rick Oprea, Curse books
• Rick Oprea, Unplugged or Dogme
• Sara Hannam, Critical dogme or dogme with sympathy for the critical
• Eisensei, Dogme EL-what T
• Strictly Nicky, Don't you dogme me
• Eva Büyüksimkeşyan To use or not to use coursebooks 
• Nick Jaworksi Lessons from scratch 
• Richard Whiteside The Course book debate 
• Marxist TEFL group Romantic Comedy with a Sinister Twist

• Chia Suan Chong, Improvised Principled Eclecticism - a dogme research project 

 Other related
Sue Lyon-Jones on Ken Wilson, on teaching the unteachable
Emma Herrod, Failing to plan is planning to fail?
Darren Elliot, an interview with Scott Thornbury

and of course, D is for Dogme by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings, Dogme and Identity

Videos:
Scott Thornbury on the Myths of Dogme

Challenges:
Co-construction? #1 
It's emergent? #2
The scaffolding #3
Being Light #4 
The Learners' Voice #5
NNESTs vs NESTs #6

Miscellaneous
ELTchat 20 October 2010
Merchandising gimmicks for dogme teachers by Lindsay Clandfield
And...a little light relief or inspiration

How's my job different from yours?

Sean Banville's excellent blog post questions the practice of teaching adverbs of frequency with things like how often do you brush your teeth or surf the 'net and for the most part I do agree with him that it's an oddity to combine this structure with questions of how often we do do our daily personal activities 

 

(can you imagine chatting someone up at a bar 

and asking him how often he combs his hair let

alone in a business situation)... 

And it is always presented this way in the coursebooks...

(see the thing is, as I've moaned about elsewhere,

lots of textbooks are just copycats of each other with 

little critical thinking into the "why" of an activity: basically PennyUr 

or Jill Hadfield suggested this way back when and voilá all textbooks now carry it ) 

But rather than me just moaning on again, the problem, is strictly in the nature of using the question "How often:" it is unnatural and can feel like an invasion of privacy.   However our students still need to  learn how to use these accurately and naturally, so  it is a relevant and necessary lexis so I'll just tell you what I usually do with my adult learners to personalize this teaching practice.

Step 1

After reviewing the presentation in the book on adverbs of frequency (or letting it come up  in class) go through the phrases commonly used to express how often we do things and then go to the board with markers in hand (type into a wordle while online in the classroom/Powerpoint if offline) and elicit activities which most people do as part of their regular work responsibilities.

• What's the first thing you always do when you walk into your office?
• What's the second thing?
• After you've checked your emails, is there anything you usually do?
• Do you do this all the time? 
• What else do you normally do?
• What's something you maybe do once a week or so?
• What don't you do very often - let's say rarely - but it's scheduled in your calendar?

Fill the board completely (e.g. check emails, answer the phone, make a cup of coffee, write reports, participate in department meetings, go out for drinks with colleagues.)

Step 2
Ask students individually, while you're still in front of the board/screen or circulating,  which ones they don't do regularly or not at all.

Ask why not.


Step 3

Ask students to then jot down notes (bullet points) on things they do every day/ week/ month/ year, and in particular, activities which they do that they think are DIFFERENT from their colleagues/classmates.

If they work for different companies, they can also prepare a list of things that their companies do to get new business/ promote their products - things which are probably different from what (they assume) other companies do.

Step 4

Put them in small groups and ask get them to share their work/company lives with each other (write blogs if you're working online) and explain that they should give each other reasons for what they do, how often  they do it and if relevant, how they feel about these activities.  

Once they have shared their own stories they should then ask their partners if any of the things they listed are things which their colleagues do do too.

The different adverbs will emerge naturally i.e. this model: 

I usually talk to my boss on Friday mornings to plan activities for the following week but sometimes we're both too busy.   I often have to go out to meet clients in Stuttgart in the afternoons but sometimes I wish I didn't have to as it really interrupts my day. 

I hardly ever go overseas to meet clients but last year I went to Africa and China.

Do any of you ever have to meet with clients too?

Encourage them to prompt each other for more details about what's said and ask one student in each group to act as a secretary.   Warn them ahead of time that one person will have to present what's been said by the rest of their group.

Step 5

Once they've all had a chance to tell each other about their days, bring them together as a class and elect a speaker from one of the groups to share the ways that his colleagues' work lives are the same and different from his own.

e.g. Tom and Mary always get to work around 7.30 because they have children so they want to go home early but I usually get in around 9.30; Jane and Alice sometimes have meetings with their bosses on Fridays and I normally have my meeting every Monday.   Tom and Mary never meet their boss and they feel angry about this as he hardly ever listens to them.   I have to write a report at the end of every month but no one else has to.  Jane usually goes to Switzerland and Austria three times a year.

Step 6

Ask the key speakers of each group to now compare what was been said against that group's report - basically responding on his own group's findings and adding (group members can help).

i.e.  No one in our group works at 7.30.   All of us, except for Bill, always arrive at work around 8am.   Rosie has to write reports every quarter but I prepare mine twice a year.  Michael always submits his yearly budget report in December.

No one ever goes overseas to meet with clients.

Step 7
Provide feedback on the structure, accurate use of the lexis, word order issues and alternative versions of what could have been communicated.




Notes

Why is this is a good activity?  It mirrors the sort of small-talk which ocurs when international members of the same company get together and have little in common to talk about except their company.

• What to do if you're working with teenagers?  Brainstorm out-of-school social activities, weekends and home responsibilities.   

• What to do if you're working with unemployed adults?  Brainstorm housecleaning tasks, child care responsibilities and social activities that have regular and irregular scheduling.   

• What to do if you're working with refugees/people integrating into a new society?  Brainstorm their problems, current life situations vs their life as it used to be: ask them to compare each others' then and now.

If you're working online, you can do step 4  in the chat function as a whole class and then ask them to blog about what they noticed regarding other people's daily responsibilities and activities.

Caution: go through each step clearly and patiently and provide good models of what you want to hear being spoken by them  - don't stress about how often you hear the "adverbs of frequency," stress about how natural the sentences sound.

To print this activity out, hover over the box which reads bookmark below (above the retweet button), one of the options on the right is a little icon that looks like a printer, click on that.

Best,
Karenne
education

I love hearing from you! Please add your thoughts if you enjoyed this piece and you feel like there's something you would like to question, add or say about it - don't worry about perfection or agreeing with me: it's always a pleasure to hear from you and getting to know your opinions.

Do you have another fun, conversational dogmeic approach lesson tip when teaching people how to talk about the real things they do regularly but don't feel silly talking about (repetition being the key to vocabulary acquisition and all, I'd love to add more feathers to my bow)...and feel free to drop a link if you've already blogged it.

Summer's gone

The leaves on the trees  in Stuttgart have started changing colour.  It's a really beautiful time of year that comes with a fresh, dry wind offering quite a cool start to the day but it does also have a warming sun in the middle of the afternoons carrying with it a magical golden light.  

Perfect for romantic walks through crisp leaves and arriving home to curl up with herbal teas.  However this year, it keeps catching me by surprise that the summer has actually gone... mainly because we didn't really have one so I feel a wee bit cheated, like I'm still waiting for the hot days to start.  But instead the heating's been turned on and I'm wearing snuggly socks inside my bed slippers.

How was your summer?  

Mine, apart from the wet and the mostly cold, was really quite fantastically busy and I found myself running around like a headless chicken - it didn't help, of course, that I had to fight computer problem upon computer problem... but I am finally beginning to catch up on the outstanding tasks in my in-tray as hurrah! I finally got my wee baby AcerAspire his very own Granddaddy... the Z5610 (yes, I know, the whole world is heading towards the i-pad) but I tell ya, after trying to get real work done on 8.9 inches I couldn't wait to get my hands on something bigger, faster,with much more functionality and of course, something you don't need to 'jail-break' into if you want to make it actually worth the price!

Anyway... this wasn't supposed to be an essay on the weather but instead a list of the posts I wrote over the summer which you might have missed while you've been busy yourselves!

Hope you enjoy and don't hesitate to let me know if there's something you'd like written in particular and what your preferred posts are on.

Take care,

Karenne

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• The Inverted Eagle 

 
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• Thoughts on being an edublogger
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