Looking around at some of the videos and quizzes that teachers have made on the site, I was reminded how important it is for teachers to think carefully when they use video. I know that when I was still teaching, I often just wanted to share some of my favourite videos with my students. I knew that was not a good reason to spend class time watching, and yet I often pressed on.  Those classes sometimes fell flat; I may have liked the video, but the language may have been way over the students’ heads or there was no clear learning aim. With the principles of effective video use in mind, I created my own quiz on using video on eslvideo.com and embedded it below. Try my quiz!

The Resourceful English Teacher, by the way, can be purchased on our online store. Other books that may be of interest are Using Authentic Video in the Classroom and Film.

Posted by Nicole

Of all the questions asked by teachers, the ones about listening skills seem to indicate the most genuine puzzlement.

Indeed, listening skills are their own unique and challenging issue, but this can be compounded by ineffective tasks that:

• aren’t staged or sequenced effectively
• don’t focus on useful listening strategies
• don’t give students the chance to listen successfully and build confidence

These issues are likely to have an even greater impact if teacher hasn’t set an engaging and clear context first.

So…here’s a few golden rules to help build more effective listening lessons.

Personalize and engage students before asking them to listen

Set a clear context, preferably using visuals to help activate the appropriate schemata

Ensure there is a clear task set and that tasks are varied – (e.g. a balance of top-down and bottom-up processing)

Ensure the tasks are appropriate to the text

Ensure there is ample time for feedback where the goal is on enabling hearing and practicing effective strategies, not on just getting the answer right

Set tasks that keep students engaged and concentrating throughout the text

Above all, what may simply be required is a shift in perspective. Once we see listening activities as opportunities to improve skills and strategies, instead of tests, the puzzle of just what is supposed to happen in listening lessons becomes much clearer.

3-minute PD
These are two great articles outlining what the heck bottom-up and top-down processing is, and they both offer excellent advice for developing effective listening skills.

Teaching Listening Better

Listening Activities for Effective Top-down Processing

Excellent Resources:

How to Teach Listening

Posted by Tania

This advice is no doubt born of seeing new teachers tell bad jokes, generate embarrassed silences and then puzzle or offend students.
However, to say ‘avoid humour’ is simply too broad and can result in teachers feeling like they should be stern, stiff and ‘professional’ – which can create an equally ineffective learning atmosphere.

So, why should we bring lots of humour into the class?

Because it:

• increases motivation and self-confidence
• creates a positive learning atmosphere
• relieves tension and anxiety
• lowers affective barriers
• encourages a more open attitude to taking risks
• helps to foster the student-teacher relationship

…and also, studies show that teachers who use humour are seen as more interesting and authentic.

How do we generate it?

• Tell personal stories
• Be spontaneous
• React with lightheartedness to what is happening at the moment
• Use humourous texts, pictures, puzzles and jokes
• Encourage students to tell their own stories and share experiences

Also, it’s good to remember that humour and laughter doesn’t mean you are losing control of the class.

By laughing at ourselves and highlighting the ridiculousness of life you ultimately show your humanness – and that’s what your students will respond to most.

3-minute PD
Ten Techniques for Developing Humour in the Classroom

Posted by Tania

As huge fans of dictation exercises (including dictoglosses), we find it distressing that dictation is often overlooked as a useful classroom activity.

Many teachers see dictation as a throw-back to teacher-centred, uncommunicative activities and believe students will think dictations are boring, stressful and pointless.

If the dictation is handled with old-school techniques, we can see why people would think this.

So, we encourage you to drag this teaching gem out of the dusty closet. Just rethink the who, the what and the how.

In other words, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – just get a funky new bathtub and buy the baby a snazzy new bath toy.

Dictation activities are excellent for a variety of reasons, including:

• Focusing attention
• Changing up pacing or atmosphere in the class
• Bottom-up processing of listening skills
• Pronunciation work
• Large class friendliness
• Mixed ability class friendliness

Tips to make dictations student-centred and engaging

Put more control in the hands of the students

Create student-to-student dictations to work on pronunciation practice and recognition skills.
When students compare their errors, were they due to a lack of accurate pronunciation or inaccurate listening?

Use a CD/tape recorder and put a student (or students) in control of the pace.

Switch up what needs to be written down

• Only one part of speech?
• Only what they agree with?
• Only what they think is interesting?

Make it more communicative

Choose an interesting or puzzling text that will promote follow on discussion and pique students’ interest

Create a dynamic and energy-raising  running dictation.

And importantly, avoid the traps of…

…forgetting to provide feedback on their errors. No matter how fun or interesting a dictation is, if students don’t see the learning value, they will not feel the class has been worth their time or money.

…using a text that has many unknown vocabulary items. This leads to frustrated students and defeats the aims of the dictation in the first place.

————————————

Take a 3-minute PD opportunity and read this great article outlining even more reasons to do dictations.

If you want some truly excellent creative and engaging dictation activities, check out these two books.

Dictation, by Mario Rinvolucri and Paul Davis

Grammar Dictation, by Ruth Wajnryb

Posted by Tania

We want our students to be proactive, take risks and take responsibility for their own learning because we know that’s how they will go on to be successful in their future studies. ..but they aren’t. Why not?

There are many reasons, but most of them seem to fall within these categories:

1) cultural and educational background
2) unrealistic goals
3) lack of awareness of critical thinking skills and autonomous learning strategies

Want to see how autonomous your learners are?

Here’s a little checklist adapted from EAP Essentials.

Do your students…:

1. feel uncomfortable if they do not know some words in a text?
2. show reluctance to make guesses?
3. rarely seek out material or activity beyond the classroom?
4. regard errors as failures?
5. rarely self-correct?
6. move from task to task without analyzing the task or their approach to it?
7. get upset / show reluctance at trying new approaches to learning?

If you answered yes to these, chances are your learners are passive, risk-averse and/or unreflective – in other words, possessing low independence competencies.

But just what does it take to gain a high level of autonomy in both study skills and continued language acquisition?

There are lots of different theories and ideas on this, but the main thinking is that students need to be encouraged to become active, comfortable with risk and reflective.

As such, our role as the teacher needs to incorporate not only this recognition, but also active facilitation and effort to develop these attributes.

To check your own ‘autonomy pulse’, here’s a quick check list of practical classroom activity. See how many you incorporate into your daily teaching. You might be surprised by just how often you do encourage independence.

Ask yourself to what extent do you…

• engage in reflective dialogues when students come to you with a problem?
• share your privileged knowledge (e.g. assessment criteria) with your students?
• use their expertise in the classroom?
• actively encourage students to better understand their learning styles and strategies?
• set tasks that require learners to work independently?
• set tasks that demand your learners take risks?

However, like change, autonomy cannot come before awareness and as teachers, we must be aware that we can’t ‘demand’ autonomy, we can only encourage and facilitate it.

3-minute PD:
Read Susan Austin’s excellent article on Encouraging Learner Autonomy

Further Reading:
EAP Essentials, by Alexander et al. published by Garnet Education.

Posted by Tania

• There are no new activities
• The students will hate it
• I can’t fully predict how this will turn out

Changing our habits and taking risks to expand our teaching horizons can be an unnerving adventure for most of us. Unfortunately, it’s not just lack of exposure to new methods or materials that make it challenging to keep your teaching fresh — it could also be your unconscious thinking patterns – about your materials, your students and your planning decisions  - that can make it even more difficult for you to make a change.

Top Thinking Traps

These traps come from a great blog post on litemind.com and are based on psychological research and studies and have everything to do with being human and not much to do with being a teacher. However, as ones who like to throw the inspiration net wide, there could be some interesting lessons to learn here. After all, we are people first and teachers second, and the often unconscious way our thinking impacts decisions and choices is bound to have influence on both our personal and professional lives.

The Status Quo Trap

This could also be called the inertia trap. Why was it so easy as a new teacher to experiment and try new approaches, resources, methods? Because we had no established frame of reference – no status quo – to break from.

What can you do about it? Consider the status quo as just another alternative. Don’t get caught in the ‘current vs. others’ mindset. Analyse the appropriateness of new approaches and unfamiliar techniques, but try doing it as you would have all those years ago.

The Confirmation Trap

You hear about a new way of teaching, or a different kind of activity, but you have suspicions. You seek out someone you know who has tried it (not very successfully) and you ask her why it didn’t work. You have just walked into a confirmation trap – you looked for information that would most likely support your initial suspicions. Apparently this not only affects where we look for information, but also how we interpret it.

What can you do about it?

Don’t avoid or immediately dismiss information that runs contrary to your initial opinion. Seek out devil’s advocates and keep an open mind. Be aware of our natural inclination to prove ourselves right and first try to prove yourself wrong instead.

The Incomplete Information Trap: Check those assumptions

You’d like to try something, but you are sure your students would hate it. However, you hear about how another teacher is quite successful with this new thing. Instead of rejecting it with the belief that it just wouldn’t work with your students, analyse those assumptions more carefully.

The Superiority Trap

This trap states that in general, people have a rather inflated opinion of themselves. This is even truer for those people who have enjoyed a fair amount of success in their chosen field (read: experienced teachers).  We like to think all those accolades of, “You’re the best teacher ever!”, and “I LOVE your classes!” are reserved for us and us alone, and for our styles and approach alone. However, this just isn’t true.

We can all benefit from continued growth and change, but believing that you have nothing left to learn (or that none of the plethora of thinking traps apply to you) won’t facilitate this.

Staying humble doesn’t minimize anything you already do. It merely makes it much more possible to continue doing more great things – in ways you haven’t in the past.

We are always asking our students to take risks and get comfortable with making mistakes in service of learning. Perhaps it’s time, if we truly wish to continue our own growth as educators, it might be worth considering to what extent we take our own advice.

For more thinking traps to avoid, check out litemind’s blog: http://litemind.com/thinking-traps/

Posted by Tania

According to Barbara Gross Davis, author of  Tools for Teaching,

“Students learn best when they are actively involved in the process.
Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats. Students who work in collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their classes.”

I think this makes a lot of sense, however, ensuring everyone is equally involved, engaged and operating with the same goals and beliefs about group work is a different kettle of fish. there are potentially a lot of underlying ideas as to what participation means, what interaction means and what goal achievement actually involves – and these underlying ideas can differ widely from person to person. Even more challenging is that many beliefs are unconscious, so the believers don’t even know themselves what it is that has made them behave in a particular way during a group task.

So, here’s some ideas to help the process and uncover those ideas of just what good group work involves.

• Create agreed upon ‘rules’ for group work
• Train your students to express reasoning and degrees of certainty
• Raise awareness of underlying beliefs that drive behaviours and  patterns of listening and speaking
• Warm students up to their task: engage, lead in, brainstorm and build students’ energy and enthusiasm for the group work
• Have a clear goal and ensure all students understand the goal(s).Provide feedback specifically on group participation
• Be aware of timing and pacing
• Monitor to keep all groups on  track

These tips came from our teaching and training experiences as well as from an excellent article in Humanizing Language Teaching Magazine, by Jessica Watson – Talking Together: Working Towards Better Group Work

Free downloadable pdf discussion worksheet ‘Talking points about group talk’ discussion worksheet.

Posted by Tania

Posted by Nicole

Top 10 of 2010

Early December is not only a great time to look forward to goodies and overindulgence – it is also a great time to look back and reflect on the goodies that have already come our way this year.

We have looked at many new books this year and this is our pick of the heaving bookshelves for 2010. They can be grouped under different areas that help us all.

Some help us when teaching in specific contexts, some help improve our general teaching skills, one expands our role as a teacher and others give us great activity ideas for teaching language.

So, in no particular order, we give you our top 10 titles for 2010

Ta Da!

In the category of making us way more effective in general teaching skills, we have:

• Tips for Teaching Pronunciation
• Culture in our Classrooms
• Fast Track to Reading
• Fiction in Action: Whodunit

In the category of helping us expand our role as a teacher (and possibly being able to take new employment on board), we have:

• Teaching Online

In the category of providing great activity ideas for teaching language the winners are:

• How Idioms Work
• Collocations Extra

and finally….. in the category of sharpening our skills in teaching in specific contexts, we have:

• English for Academic Study: Speaking and Pronunciation
• English for Specific Academic Purposes – the whole series
• IELTS Target 5.0
  

We have reviewed most of these titles in our past newsletters and on our website and are confident enough to say that we did a damn fine job of extolling their virtues already.

So, to avoid unnecessary repetition, click on the title of any book you are interested in having a closer look at. You’ll get a detailed review AND the chance to look at sample units of most of them.

Happy browsing and, of course, a very happy holiday and festive new year!!

posted by Tania

According to a very interesting article in the new Achieve IELTS Grammar & Vocabulary book, where you sit on a bus suggests a lot about your personality. A recent study from Salford University found clear patterns indicating that who you are determines where you feel comfortable placing yourself in the space you are in. In this study’s case, it was which seat was chosen and in which area of a double-decker bus, that showed if you were independent- minded, rebellious or a strong communicator, for example.

I find this connection between personality and spatial orientation fascinating and this article has rekindled my passion for some related informal research I have been doing for the past 8 years.

Back in 2002, my teacher training colleagues and I began to notice a strange pattern emerging regarding the seating choices of our trainees. We noticed that time and time again, where our trainees chose to sit in our input room directly related to how well they were doing on the course. We even found that when people’s progress on the course rose or fell, they also switched seats in the class to fit the spatial pattern we now clearly recognized. Eventually, we rather dramatically labeled one chair, The Death Chair, because if anyone sat in it for more than a week, they were usually a fail candidate.

Up to this point, our research wasn’t directly linked to any specific personality trait, it was merely a weird thermometer indicating progress.

However, some odd anomalies began to show up, which made me think this ‘chair choice = progress notification’ phenomenon had more to do with personality than I had previously thought.

Every once in a while I would be shocked to find that strong candidates sat in the ‘fail zone’ chair too. Initially I thought that made sense, after all, our observations couldn’t be perfect; it would be too weird indeed if every single struggler on every single course sat in the same chair.

Then I began to notice something interesting about this particular type of strong candidate. Although these people began the course as potential ‘A’ candidates, they, in fact, did not achieve much progress during the course. In other words, they came in with strong classroom management skills, but did not take on much of the methodology, depth of language analysis or insight into materials analysis. They paid us lip service, and could lead a class well, but essentially they were resistant and unwilling to take any feedback on board.

Since reading the article about personality and bus-seat choices, I believe even more strongly that my colleagues and I are on to something.

I am not in any way condoning the pigeon-holing of people; this is not about ‘labelling’ someone, but rather better understanding what issues are blocking their progress on the course. For example, if someone is unwilling to accept feedback, hours of repetition of concepts in different formats won’t help, but acknowledging the resistance will.  In my opinion, the more insight into how people are really feeling about their course, the easier it is to adapt your approach and feedback style for that person.

And now I don’t need to spend hours wondering why strong candidates aren’t progressing on the course.

All I have to do is pay attention to where they sit.

• If you want to know which bus-seat choices reflect which characteristics,  buy the book
• If you want to know where the ‘death chair’ is, contact me.
• If you want to do your own research in your teacher training institute, please contact me!

tania@englishcentral.net

posted by Tania