The Practice of English Language Teaching

By Jeremy Harmer (CELTA course study material #1)

These are my notes for the CELTA course and one of the suggested reading, found at archive.org. Definitely a skimmable post, since it’s nearly an edit of the edition with exception to not listing all of the Figures given or some of the links for no longer being active, but still referenced.

This is also going to be a jankier edit, since I have yet to find a writing platform which will allow for simple copy paste with jpg’s and tabbed space, and ruining the alignment of the examples provided. Due to learning about this nearly at the end of my notes, I’ll be editing to skeleton quality.

Intro. This edition is focused on context sensitive teaching more than the previous editions. Different Learning Contexts listed in Ch 7. Native speaker and non native speaker teacher issues listed in Ch 6.

CH1

For some people, the rise of English speaking can cause unease or celebrating. English language’s future superiority, and growth could be halted. English’s status as one language being challenged by different Englishes used around the world.

How English became to be used so widespread cause by colonial history, economics, info exchange, travel, pop culture.

Colonial history - imposing English as the one language of admin helped maintain colonizers power. British colonial ambitions played a large role in how far reaching its become.

Econ - the survival of the establishment of the language and growth comes from economic power. US being an Econ power was a large factor in English being spread further through global commerce. One example being from Sri Lankan English which gets more popular due to the work with tech asst and call centers.

Info exchange - currently English dominated through the internet which is listed more in CH11, but how this could also change despite being dominated by English from US internet origin.

Travel - dominant in tourism, it also is preferred language in air traffic control in many countries and sea travel communication.

Pop culture - Pop music in English, or in TV and movies, despite having Bollywood be much larger of a producer, English speaking countries including UK CAN AU US promote their movies as well for attracting those in Asia as a choice for a study destination.

Speakers of World English makes one more capable of dealing with wider range of English varieties than those with native speaker attitudes and competence in regards to outsourced call centers making anyone who can’t deal with Punjabi English or the like communicatively deficient. So instead of speaker proficiency being focused on, it’s high and low proficiency users. 

English as Lingua Franca (ELF) - 2 people using English as a 2nd language. These convos have characteristics including: 

• non use of 3rd person present simple tense-s (She look very sad)

• interchangeable use of relative pronouns who and which (a book who, a person which)

• omitting definite and indefinite articles where it’s obligatory in native speaker English, and insertion where they do not occur in native English

• Use of all-purpose tag question such as, isn’t it? Or, no? Instead of, shouldn’t they (They should arrive soon, isn’t it?)

• Increase redundancy by adding prepositions (We have to study about… and, Can we discuss about…?), or by increasing explicitness (black color, versus, black, and, How long time? Versus, How long?)

• Heavy reliance on certain verbs of high semantic generality, such as, do, have, make, put, take

• Pluralization of nouns which are considered uncountable in native speaker English (informations, staffs, advices)

• Use of, that clauses instead of infinitive constructions (I want that we discuss about my dissertation)

“…the evidence suggests that non-native speakers are not conforming to a native English standard.” One other difference, is non-native speakers are more accommodating to things which shouldn’t be done, and tend to help each other in a cooperative way moreso than a native English speaker is when talking with 2nd language speakers. 

This makes non native speakers better at ELF communicating than native speakers. So from the other side, the supposed things ELF speakers shouldn’t do, these expert speakers due to being successful communicators have just as much right to say what is correct as native speakers do.

Also, due to knowing the info currently about ELF it should influence what kind of English to teach.

Learners need to learn about Englishes regarding their similarities and differences, issues including intelligibility, strong links between language and identity, etc. For pronunciation, focus on core phonology. Avoid idioms, since ELF speakers don’t use them. This is case by case basis depending on the learners wants.

When becoming more advanced, the variety of prestige may include metaphor and idiom as long as it’s not too culture-specific. More importantly is exposure to World English. As they get more advanced they should become aware of different Englishes without swamping them with diversity, but guide in an appreciation of the global English phenomenon.

CH2

Noting the differences on how we speak over letter-writing and text messaging with abbreviations, short-hand, or formality.

Form and meaning can sometimes be different. Example being, a student smoking in a non smoking area. The teacher informs the student, who may know already and only thanks the teacher due to being caught. The formation of the teacher letting his boss know the same may have come out differently due to respect for his boss’ title.

Meanwhile, the present continuous, Future: I’m arriving at 8. 

Present continuous format (aka progressive) refers to a temporary transient present reality. Look at John. He’s laughing his head off at something. 

A 3rd meaning of present continuous is: The problem with John is he’s always laughing when he should be serious, describing the habitual and not temporary action.

Context (situation) and co-text (lexis and grammar surrounding the form: 8 o clock, Look at John, etc) involves resolve in ambiguity. This helps make decisions of what forms to teach and meanings to teach them with for syllabus planning.

Multiple ways of inviting someone to cinema is one example of performative verbs.

6 variables which govern how to choose how to speak:

Setting: If in a library or a night club. Office and work environment will have different forms of speech expected.

Participants - Speaking with a superior or writing to friends, family or colleagues 

Gender - men and women use language different when addressing either members from opposite or same sex. Especially in convos, women more concessive language than men and talk less in mixed-sex chat.

Channel - differences between spoken and written language. Spoken language is affected by situation we are in. If speaking face to face or telephone, with a mic in front of a crowd or unseen in a lecture hall. The writing channel (format) also affects writing.

Topic - choice of topic affects lexical and grammatical choices. If talking about a wedding would be different than the speech in convo about particle physics. Or childbirth lexical phrases compared to football. Topic-based vocabulary is a feature of register or choice, made about what language to employ.

Tone - A features of the register in which something is said or written with a tone. Like formality or informality. Politeness or impoliteness. An example , a women’s mag talks of make-up, but teen mags call it “slap”. Or using high pitch and exaggerated pitch movement often more polite than flat monotone speech if asking to repeat something. This is the type of scenarios which influence choice of speech. When teaching this, it’s important to draw the student’s attention to these issues. Like- ask why a speaker uses particular words or expressions in a specific situation. Ask our students to prepare for a speaking activity by assembling the necessary topic words and phrases. Discuss the sort of language appropriate for an office situation when talking with a superior and whether the sex of the superior makes a difference. Important for students to be aware language is a social construct as much as a mental ability.

Discourse organisation has to be organized or conducted in a certain way to succeed. In written English this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent it needs to be in the right order - and at the least, make sense. 

An example is putting sentences from Frank McCourt text, Teacher Man out of order and the paragraph becomes incoherent. When read in proper order, the internal logic becomes clear. Regardless of a coherence to a text, though, doesn’t work unless it has internal cohesion. Each element of the text must stick to each other successfully to help navigate our way around the discourse. 

One way to do this is with lexical cohesion, and a way of ensuring it is through the repetition of words and phrases (ie, on the first day, on the second day, high school repeated, fired repeated.). Interrelated words and meanings can also be used (or lexical set chains) to bind text together (teaching, boy, high school, classrooms) from the paragraph. 

Grammatical cohesion is achieved multiple ways, one most common is the concept of anaphoric reference, which is using pronouns, to refer back to things already mentioned, like in example: his refers back to Frank McCourt, and it refers back to his book Angela’s Ashes: Frank McCourt first emerged on the literary scene with his book Angela’s Ashes, a memoir of a childhood lived in poverty. It became an instant classic.

A similar cohesive technique is using substitution, using a phrase to refer to something we have already written (The example is the last 2 sentences refer to how long he’d lasted with the job teaching which was over 30 years). Grammatical cohesion is also achieved by tense agreement, since if the writer constantly changes tense it will make the text difficult to follow. Writers also use linkers, like and, also, moreover, however, etc which is also present in spoken language. Verbal shorthand: Another round? Might as well. These two sentences referring to whether two people want a second round of drinks, and they may as well have the second round of drinks.

To be successful with conversational discourse, participants must know how to organize events in it, like when to take turns and interrupt, and show when they want to continue speaking, or happy to give the floor to someone else. In order to be successful, they need to use discourse markers effectively. These are the spoken equivalent to linkers, like “anyways, moving on, right”, which begins new thread of discussion or ends them. Ok? Right? Encourages listeners agreement, and yeah, but, and ok, said with doubtful intonation, indicates doubt or disagreement.

Lastly for convos to proceed successfully, participants need to be sure they’re playing the game according to the same rules. So if someone asks a question, the second speaker is expected to answer, which shows cooperation at the heart of cooperative principle, which makes the speakers contribution as informative as required, the contribution is true, relevant, and avoids obscurity and ambiguity, and be brief and orderly. These may not always be present, frequently excusing ourselves for disobeying maxims with phrases like, At the risk of simplifying things, or I may be wrong but I think… 

Another factor of successful spoken discourse is intonation.

One reason people successfully communicate especially in writing is understanding genre. A popular description for ESP teachers is to say genre is a type of written organisation or layout (advert, a letter, poem, mag article etc) instantly recognized for what it is by members of a discourse community, any group of people who share the same language, customs, and norms.

Advertising has many variations. Examples show sub-genres of advertisements: online job advert/theatre listing/relationships: called, ‘soulmates’ in text. Despite the differences in adverts, they show a characteristic which is written for the discourse community to recognize instantly the meaning of them and what they are. Further detail about each advert is given and the shorthand which each discourse community would be able to decipher for reading these ads more than once. So, when teaching how to write letters, send emails, or make oral presentations, we want them to be aware of the genre norms and constraints which are involved in these events, but not to imitate one type, but to be aware of possibilities and opportunities by showing students a variety of texts within a genre rather than asking for imitation of one type, more detail in CH19. Whatever text is constructed or co-constructed, like a convo where speakers together make the convo work, the sentences and utterances we use are combos of grammar, morphology, lexis, and in the case of speaking, sounds.

Grammar - a previously used sentence: I will arrive at around eight o’clock, for its success, must have the words in the write order. Example: I arrive will at eight o clock around, showing incorrect utterance, due to auxiliary verbs (will) always come before main verbs (arrive) in affirming sentences. Same with the modifying adverb, around, come after the time adverbial, since it’s its correct position is before it. 

Syntax is the system of rules which shows what can come before and which order different elements can go in.

The formation of a word is morphology - when it can be changed to indicate time. Example: Arrive(d) (ing)

Transitive (take an object) Intransitive (doesn’t take an object) or both, occurs with verbs like ‘herd’ - to herd sheep is transitive, it takes an object. The verb open, can be either transitive or intransitive. Example: a dentist says, open your mouth (transitive), or the dentist’s surgery opens at eight o clock (intransitive).

Verbs are also good examples to trigger grammatical behavior words around them, for instance, like, triggers the use of either -ing form in verbs which follow it (I like listening to music) or the use of to + infinitive (I like to listen to music), but in British English, like can’t be followed by that + a sentence (we can’t say *she likes that she sails*). The verb, tell, triggers the use of a direct object, and if there’s a following verb, the construction, to + infinitive (she told me to arrive on time), but, say triggers, that + a clause construction (she said that I should arrive on time).

Students need to consciously or unconsciously understand this and the implications. Problems stem from when rules are complex or difficult to perceive. Language awareness is a great responsibility to help students develop and spot grammatical patterns and behavior for themselves. More in CH3C

Lexis - is the vocab of a language. Word meaning, how words extend through metaphor and idiom, and combine to form collocations (frequently occurring combos) and longer lexical phrases which are a major feature of all languages.

https://www.lextutor.ca - pronunciation and how to use it in a sentence, along with most common ways of usage.

Sometimes knowing the opposite of a word, helps make clear what meaning the sentence is referring to, since some words have more than one meaning (polysemous), but a particular meaning could be more common.

Synonyms can show similar or same meaning words but still require knowledge of when to use them.

Hyponymy is sub categories of a type like, fruit have sub choices with types: lemon, banana, orange, apple, etc. A diagram follows with ‘food’ being the main category, breaking down into, meat, fish, fruit, and cereals, fruit breaks down to the types of fruit mentioned, called superordinates aka hyponyms

Words can also have different connotations, depending on context often. Smart can be a positive meaning for intelligence or it could suggest someone’s devious or self-seeking.

Or words can have meaning stretched, when green can mean naive or new, and black can mean cross

Metaphor for words can also be described by using the word tumble having to do with prices going dramatically down. When certain phrases are known by speakers, they become idioms, a common expression: He has bitten off more than he can chew.

Phrasal verb: take off, put up with - made up of 2 or more words with one meaning unit, Aka lexemes

Single words are also meaning units, but it’s important to recognize both.

Pronunciation is focused on in CH15

Pronunciation issues: pitch, intonation, individual sounds, sounds and spelling, and stress.

Intonation is used to show the grammar of what we’re saying. Tone unit is any collection of sounds/words with one nucleus - the falling tone indicates tone unit is a statement. Falling tones are sometimes called proclaiming tones and used when giving new info or adding to what’s been said. Fall-rise tones are referring tones, when referring to info  we want to share or to check info. Figuring out pitch direction is discussed in CH15

How to position mouth or tongue when saying certain letters can be important.

Spelling doesn’t automatically mean something will sound the same. Different spelling can give the same sound.

Elision can take place of the previous sound. I can’t dance. The t disappears because of the d sound after.

Stress on a word can be different to type of English, like British and American.

Sometimes adopting mannerisms can show one speaker agrees with the other, but if done consciously can seem like mockery of another’s action.

Using video material to show gesture and posture will be mentioned in CH18

Verbal speech can be much more short direct question answer as opposed to written being more formal.

Chat online is like speaking, a lecture is more like writing.

CH3

How children learn language from parents when young as opposed to learners in the classroom setting. 

Some people can pick up a second language without lessons, but mastery isn’t usual from this way, so usually learners choose the classroom, despite if a learner wanted a similar experience to how children learn, it’d be best to immerse by living in the community the language is spoken. 

Harold Palmer had interest in comparing “spontaneous” learners over “studial” one played into the other, spontaneous, going into the community was good for acquiring the start to the language, and studial was developing literacy. 

Language acquired subconsciously, anxiety free, is more easily available in spontaneous convo, but when it’s learned, it isn’t available for spontaneous use. So, learnt language is best to “monitor” spontaneous communication. 

Incentive also drives learning in a positive or negative way and through conditioning will refine the words to be more specific to their needs. 

Having students do drills of sentences with positive reinforcement or incentives is also criticized but has its benefits in behaviorism, but is simplistic in it’s theory since the link to audio lingual method of learning makes contribution to applied language settings.

Learning is from the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Students were given tasks, like request for library books or interview people, which made them speak or read, something teachers couldn’t advise or correct.

Students also participated in communication games where the objective is to complete a task with the language at their disposal. Ex. Putting objects in the same order only by direction, or drawing the same picture by description and not being allowed to look at the picture.

Allow students to say what they think and feel allows a safe environment to develop more language without feeling threatened.

Focus on form grows through use of communicative tasks. 

**TASK PERFORMANCE INCREASES LEARNER AWARENESS OF TARGET STRUCTURE AND IMPROVE ACCURACY IN USE, PROVIDES MEANING FOCUSED COMPREHENSION, AND PRODUCTION OF TARGET LANGUAGE

Students acquire language best when they know it will help them communicate in certain situations which serve their interests, which is hard to anticipate or make lessons for, so being more about general ways of multi-use environment language.

Repetition also is important if the student is applying what it means as they use it. Repeated encounters with the language helps set it in the learners mind.

The process of exploration with language will allow learners to find true understanding.

Exposing students to examples of present perfect tense and allow them under guidance to work out how to use it. Providing a word and having student look it up in a dictionary and find collocations on their own. Have students look at transcripts instead of telling them about spoken grammar and have them reach their own conclusions to how it differs from written grammar. This provokes “noticing for the learner”.

Keeping a humanist environment, where it’s supportive rather than alienating in the learning process will allow for the student to retain what’s learned.

CH4 Popular methodology

Method is the practical realization of an Approach, which include procedures and techniques of the types of activities, roles of teacher and students and the material which will be helpful.

Have students murmur a word to themselves to get their mouth formations and tongues around it.

Audiolingual drills become popular so the student constantly learns to substitute words in a controlled drill.

This will promote habit formation thru constant repetition of correct utterances and supported by positive reinforcement.

PPP - Presentation, practice, production 

Presentation - the teacher shows students a picture and asks whether the people in it are at work or on holiday.

Practice - the teacher has students repeat a sentence, then have students answer individually and corrects mistakes when heard, then returns to modeling more sentences from a picture. Each time getting everyone and single repetition when necessary. This enables a cue-response drill where the asking can be more free since the student understands the answer prompted. Sometimes the teacher will pair the students to practice the sentences before listening to a couple examples to be sure the learning is effective.

Production - “immediate creativity” -  students are asked to use the new language in sentences of their own creation. Ex. What a family member would be doing right now.

Boomerang procedure follows more task based or deep end approach. The order is EAS, and the teacher gets the students engaged before asking them to do something like a written task a communication game or a role play. Based on what happens there, the students then after the activity finishes study some aspect of language which they lacked or which they used incorrectly.

Patchwork lesson are different from the previous two procedures, for example, engaged students are encouraged to activate their knowledge before studying one and then another language element, and then returning to more activating tasks, after which the teacher re-engages them before doing some more study, etc. What the Engage/Study/Activate trilogy has tried to capture is the fact PPP is just a tool used by teachers for one of their many possible purposed.

PPP is extremely useful in focus on forms lesson esp at lower levels but is irrelevant in a skills lesson where focus on form may occur as a result of something students hear or read. It’s useful to teach grammar points such as the use of can and can’t but has little place when students are analyzing their own language use after doing a communicative task.

Issue with PPP is it’s TEACHER CENTERED RATHER THAN STUDENT but can be useful in a focus on forms lesson for lower levels but irrelevant for skills lessons. It’s useful in teaching grammar points like the use of can and can’t, but not for analyzing the students own language use after doing a communicative task.

The Silent Way - teacher doesn’t speak and through pointing indicates words which should be spoken and moving on to the next when correct pronunciation is given rather than verbal reinforcement.

This gives the student responsibility for their learning and the teacher can do the job of organizing this.

CLT Communicative Language Teaching or the Communicative approach allows for teachers to encourage people to invite, apologize, agree and disagree, along with making sure they could use the past perfect or second conditional. Typical tasks for students involve they in real or realistic communication where they achieve the communicative task they’re performing is as important as their language use. Role-play and simulation are popular, simulating a tv show or a scene at an airport. Or the students solve a puzzle and can only do so by sharing info. Sometimes students are made to write a poem or construct a story together. 

Certain practices may suit certain students better, so being flexible with teaching practices according to the students culture and interest may eventually make the teaching process easier.

For CHINESE STUDENTS repetitive listening to tapes of language was bargained to being able to do it whenever they wanted, but they would have to do ‘gist understanding’ with guided questions and slowly reduce the repetition tapes to show progress on their listening skills.

WHAT STUDENTS NEED AND SHOULD BE OFFERED? 

Affect: students learn better when engaged with what’s happening.

Input: students need constant exposure to the language, by reading or the way the teacher talks to them. Focus on form, esp at lower levels, on language forms is vital for successful learning

Output: students need a chance to activate language knowledge through meaning-focused tasks. Using the language to speak or write or reading, or listen for meaning.

Cognitive effort: students should be encouraged to think about language as they work with it which aids retention. Encourage doing some of the work themselves and sicker how language works rather than being given the info about language construction handed to them.

Grammar and lexis: lexis is as important as grammar, how words combine together and behave semantically and grammatically

How, why, and where: the way it’s done isn’t dependent on a method, but on why or where we’re teaching. What’s meant to be achieved, with who, and what context? Analyse the features and choose from procedures and techniques at our command which best fit situation we’re in. At all levels and stages of teaching we should be able to say clearly why we are doing what we are doing.

CH5

Age - Students age will determine how and what to teach. Age gives needs, competence levels, and cognitive skill differences. Children learn thru play, and adults use greater abstract thought.

Young learners have efficiency with pronunciation which is sometimes not possible in the older. 12 year olds seem to have the right capacity for intaking the most efficiently and imitation than younger learners.

9/10 y/o learn in the following ways: 

• respond to meaning even if they don’t understand the individual words

• learn indirectly more often than directly - take info from all sides, learn everything around them rather than focusing on topics they’re being taught

• understanding doesn’t only come from explanation, but also from what they see and hear, and have a chance to touch and interact with.

• Abstract concepts like grammar rules are difficult to grasp

• enthusiasm for learning and curiosity about the world around them.

• have a need for individual attention and approval from teacher

• keen to talk about themselves and respond well to learning which uses themselves and their own lives as main topics in the class

• limited attention span unless activities are engaging, otherwise they’ll get bored and lose interest after 10 minutes

10/11 y/o like games, puzzles and songs, and 12/13 y/o prefer activities built around dialogue, QA activities, and matching exercises

Adult language learners have these characteristics:

• Engage in abstract thought: don’t have to rely on activities like games and songs - but may be appropriate for some students

• Range of life experience to draw on

• Have expectations about learning process and have their own set patterns of learning

• Tend to be more disciplined than other age groups and are prepared to struggle with boredom

• Have a rich range of experience which allows wide range of activities with them

• Often have a clear understanding of why they’re learning and what they want to get from it.

Adults have a way of holding onto motivation which teens struggle with.

Adult characteristics which can make learning and teaching difficult:

• Can be critical of teaching methods due to previous learning experiences predisposing them to one methodological style and makes them uncomfortable with unfamiliar teaching patterns. They may be hostile to certain teaching and learning activities which replicate the teaching received in earlier education

• Experienced failure or criticism at school which makes them anxious and under-confident about learning a language

• Older adults worry of intellectual powers being diminished with age. How much learning had been happening during adult life before they come to a new learning experience may also be related.

May stick to certain activities longer than younger learners. Indirect learning like reading, listening, and communicative speaking and writing, and learning consciously when appropriate. Encouraged to use life experience in the learning process.

Offer activities which are achievable by paying attention to the level of challenge presented by exercise. Listen to the students concert and modify what we do to suit their tastes in learning.

Some students are better at learning language than others, due to having a particular retention for things they hear and unusual memory

GOOD LANGUAGE LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS:

Tolerance of ambiguity

Positive task orientation - prepared to approach tasks in a positive manner

Ego involvement - success is important for student’s self-image

High aspirations, goal orientation, and perseverance

Students who can find their own way without always having to be guided through learning tasks, are creative, make intelligent guesses, and make opportunities for practice, and make errors work for them not against them, as well as using contextual clues

Willing to make mistakes

Encourage reading texts for general understanding without stopping to look up all the words they don’t understand: ask students to speak communicatively even when they have difficulty due to words they don’t know or can’t pronounce, and involve creative writing

A good language learner:

• is a willing and accurate guesser

• tries to get a message across even if specific

• language knowledge is lacking  

• is willing to make mistakes

• constantly looks for patterns in the language

• practises as often as possible

• analyses his or her own speech and the speech of others

• attends to whether his or her performance meets the standards he or she has learned

• enjoys grammar exercises

• begins learning in childhood i has an above-average IQ

• has good academic skills

• has a good self-image and lots of confidence

Types of learners: Enthusiast - looks to the teacher for point of reference and concerned with the goals  of the learning group

Oracular - also focuses on teacher but is more oriented towards the satisfaction of personal goals.

Participator - tends to group goals and group solidarity

Rebel - refers to learning group for their own point of reference is mainly concerned with the satisfaction of their own goals

Other categories:

Convergers: students by nature solitary, prefer to avoid groups, independent and confident of their own abilities, analytic and can impose their own structures on learning, tend to be cool and pragmatic 

Conformists: students who prefer to emphasize learning about language over learning to use it. Tend to be dependent on those in authority and are perfectly happy to work in non-communicative classrooms doing what they’re told. This setting of students prefer well-organized teachers

Concrete Learners: though like conformists, they also enjoy the social aspects of learning and like to learn from direct experience. Interested in language use and communication rather than language as a system. Enjoy games and group work in class.

Communicative learners: language-use oriented, they’re comfortable out of class and show a degree of confidence and willingness to take risks. More interested in social interaction with other speakers of the language than they are with analysis of how the language works, and happy to work without guidance of teacher

Three position thinking - to get teachers and students to see things from other people’s points of view so they can be more effective communicators and interactions.

MI theory: Multiple Intelligences - People possess a range of intelligences rather than a single one: Musical/rhythmical, Verbal/linguistic, Visual/spatial, Bodily/kinaesthetic, Logic/mathematical, Naturalistic - recognizing and classifying patterns in nature, Emotional - ability to empathize, control impulse and self motivate, Intrapersonal and Interpersonal, each person has all of these but may have strengths in one or more being pronounced, these also influencing the same learning task may not be appropriate for all students. 

MAY WANT TO GIVE QUESTIONNAIRE: When answering comprehension questions about reading passages I prefer to work: A. On my own. B. With another student. C. With a group of students

Work with students choice of learning styles if resistant to trying different styles.

Motivation - extrinsic/intrinsic - motivation from outside/inside - outside reasons for motivation could be benefits of travel and financial reward vs. inside individual could be a enjoyment of learning and desire to feel better about themselves. If student comes to love learning process, their extrinsic motivation is more reinforced to succeed.

FIND OUT WHAT OR WHO IS AFFECTING OR INFLUENCING THE STUDENTS MOTIVATION FOR LEARNING ENGLISH SINCE THEY FORM PART OF THE ENVIRONMENT FROM WHICH STUDENT ENGAGES WITH THE LEARNING PROCESS

Teaching based off of the student merely wishing to learn English to speak conversations or learn to read English websites should influence how you teach.

Motivation is necessary for students to succeed and so must be directed into new channels to become increased after initial motivation by curiosity when it’s new or create motivation where there is none.

Extrinsic motivation - Affect: involves students feelings and as teachers has a dramatic effect. Making known as a teacher, you care about the students progress regardless of participation and knowing their names.

Achievement: success is a great motivator like failure is a demotivator. The longer a student is made to feel motivated will give them continued success and stay motivated to learn. Making tests where they’re not too difficult or easy, involves student in learning tasks they can succeed in, and guiding them toward success by showing how to get things right next time.

Attitude: Students must believe we know what we’re doing, this confidence starting as the teacher walks in for the 1st time and the students perception of our attitude to our job. The way we dress, where we stand, the way we talk to the class, and we know the subject we’re teaching. The student must feel we’re prepared to teach English and this lesson in particular. One reason a class becomes undisciplined is if the teacher doesn’t have enough for the students to do or not sure what to do next. When students have confidence in the teacher, they’re more likely to remain engaged with what’s going on. If they lose confidence, it’s more difficult for them to keep motivation they’ve started with.

Activities: Students will have better motivation for things they enjoy. Teacher’s choice of what we ask them has importance on continuing engagement with learning process. Game-like communication and interactive tasks seem to be popular, but different students have different styles and preferences. Some may want to sing songs and write poems, whilst others are motivated by concentrated language study and reading texts. Matching lessons to students is what teachers must try to do, and the way to do it is keeping a constant eye on what they respond well to and what’s less engaging for them. Then the activities chosen will have a chance of helping keep students engaged with learning process.

Agency: Instead of always correcting the student, giving them the decision on what words they found difficult to pronounce may be more comfortable for them rather than assuming they all have the same difficulties. Wherever possible, students should be given the opportunity to make decisions. Allowing students to choose homework assignments they wanted and needed motivated the students to do the tasks set. Students taking responsibility for their learning is when agency occurs. Giving empowerment through agency is likely to keep their motivation over a long period.

CH6

Humanist sentiments have a teacher not standing in the front of the class to command the room, but moving about the class and helping the students where needed. 

Foster good relationships with the groups in front of us so they work cooperatively in the spirit of friendliness and harmonious creativity. 

A group conscious teaching style involves increasing encouragement and reliance of group’s own resources and active facilitating of learning autonomously in whichever maturity level of the group. 

Students require leadership and direction which gives them clear focus and allows them to feel secure. 

As group identity develops, teachers will relax and foster more democratic class practices for students to be involved in the process of decision-making and direction-finding.

This way of teaching is culturally biased and some teachers may find this style of teaching more difficult.

Roles of a Teacher: Controller - Teachers who are in charge of the class and the activity taking place often being lead from the front. Controllers take the register, tell the students things, organize drills, read around in various ways to exemplify the qualities of a teacher-fronted class. When giving explanations, organizing QAs work, lectures, making announcements or bringing class to order. 

Prompter: In role-play activity, students lose thread of what is happening, or they’re lost for words (they have the thread but unable to continue productively due to lack of vocab). If the teacher decides to coax them on discreetly and supportively rather than allowing the student to work it out for themselves, this would be the prompting role. Make sure to prompt sensitively and encouragingly and with discretion, if too forward, it could take the student’s initiative away, but if too retiring, may not supply enough encouragement.

Participant: When teacher stands back from the activity and allows learners to get on with it and intervening after only to give feedback and/or correct mistakes. If a teacher decides to take part in activity, it’s to liven things up from the inside rather than prompting or organizing outside the group. It takes a certain skill to not be perceived as the authority and participate this way.

Resource: When students have questions about an activity is when teachers become a useful resource, as opposed to being a part of an activity or as a student is writing an essay and finding the teacher attempting to give resourceful advice may not be so welcome. If a teacher doesn’t have a ready answer for a student’s question, informing them of online resources or where the student can research further may be of use. Encouraging independent learning should always be an option to be given so the student doesn’t become over reliant on the teacher.

Tutor: Students who work on longer projects like process writing or preparing for a talk or debate can work with individuals or small groups, pointing them in directions they haven’t thought of yet of taking. In this way teachers combine the roles of prompter and resource and act as tutor, which is difficult in a large group. The most help will come from making sure to help each individual team or groups so no one feels left out and not to stay too long as to seem domineering. 

Organizing students for certain activities involves giving students info, telling them how they’re going to do the activity, putting them in pairs or groups and closing things when it’s time to stop. 

To begin we must get the students involved, engaged, and ready. Which means making sure it’s clear something new is about to happen and the activity will be interesting enjoyable and beneficial. 

This is when the teacher says something like, Now we’re going to do this because, then offering the rational reason for the activity the students will perform. 

This way, it’s not about doing it because the teacher says, they’ve prepared and hopefully will enthusiastically do the activity for the purpose they understand.

When the students are read, instructions will be shared, saying what the students will do first, then the next task, etc. 

It’s important to get the level of language right to present instructions in a logical order and not confusing. 

It’s a good idea to get students to give the instructions back in English or own language, as a check on whether they’ve understood. 

An important tool for instruction is the teacher to organize and demo what is to happen. If students are using a chart or table ask other students questions and record their answers, like, getting a student up to the front to demo the activity with you may be worth any number of complex instructions. 

Demonstration is always appropriate and will almost always ensure students have a better grasp of what they’re supposed to do that instruction can on their own.

Then it’s time for teachers to initiate the activity which is when the students will need to know how much time they have and when they should begin.

Finally, stop the activity when the students have finished or when other factors show they are to stop. Whether it’s due to boredom or some pairs or groups have finished before the others.Maybe the lesson is winding down and we want to give some summarizing comments. Now is time for organizing feedback whether it’s, Did you enjoy that? Or it’s a more detailed discussion which has taken place.

Teachers should think about content feedback - regarding roles of participant and tutor, as much as the use of language forms in form and use feedback- regarding our role as assessor.

With organizing feedback, we need to do what we say we are whether this has to do with prompt return of homework or our responses at the end of an oral activity. Students will judge us by the way we fulfill the criteria we offer them. 

Summarizing the role of organizer: Engage -> instruct (demo) -> initiate-> organize feedback

Teachers will sometimes see themselves as actors, due to how they act in front of a class as opposed to daily life. 

Since, if an activity requires energy, a teacher may act energetically because a game needs excitement and energetic behavior, encouraging, if students need a nudge to have a go, clearly, since we don’t want the game to fail through misunderstanding, and fairly, since students care about this in a competition situation.

If instead, students are involved in role-play, we should perform clearly, since the students need to know the parameters of the role-play, encourage, since students may need prompting to get them started, but also retiringly since once the activity is going on, we don’t want to overwhelm the students’ performance, with support due to students may needing help at various points.

Ex: ACTIVITY How the teacher should perform Team game Energetic, encourage, clearly fairly Role-play Clearly, encouragingly, retiringly, supportively Teacher reading aloud Commandingly, dramatically, interestingly Whole-class listening Efficiently, clearly supportively

Rapport - establishing an appropriate relationship with students creates a good learning environment in the class. 

Making sure the teacher-student rapport is positive and useful; A class with a positive, enjoyable, respectful relationship between teacher and students and between the students themselves.

Part of this successful rapport has to do with the students perceiving the teacher as a good leader and a successful professional. 

If teacher is well-organized and prepared, thinking about what they are going to do in the lesson, the students are likely to have confidence in the teacher, which is essential in the successful relationship between students and teachers. 

This also extends to the teacher’s demonstrable knowledge of the subject they’re teaching and to their familiarity with the class materials and equipment. 

This all shows the students they’re in good hands. Rapport also relies on how we interact with the students, despite being prepared and knowledgable teachers, if the interaction isn’t working, our ability to help the students were be severely compromised.

Successful interaction relies on 4 characteristics:

Recognizing students: knowing who the students are, their names, and understanding their characters. Putting names on cards or on jackets. Teacher can draw up a seating plan and have students sit in the same place for the 1st couple weeks. Noting whether a student wears glasses, are tall, etc. Due to wanting good rapport, memorizing names should be done. 

Listening to students: Students respond to teachers who listen to them. Being present even outside of a lesson will be important and to show interest in what they have to say, since this could demotivate them if a teacher is dismissive or uninterested in what they’re saying. Convincing students we are interested is a part of the job to nurture them and make every sign they have our attention. Also pay attention to their comments on how they think they are progressing, and which activities they’re responding good and badly to, since if we continue teaching the same thing day after day without knowing the students reactions could make keeping rapport more difficult and damages maintaining a successful class. Listening doesn’t mean solely with our ears, but approaching them, making eye contact and looking interested is a part of this.

Respecting students: correcting students is always delicate, if we’re too critical, we can demotivate them, if we are constantly praising them, we risk turning them into praise junkies who need approval all the time. Some students are happy to be corrected robustly, others need more support and positive reinforcement. In either case, students need to know we are treating them respectfully, and not using mockery or sarcasm to give them despair with their efforts. Respect when dealing with problem behavior is also needed, seeing the behavior and student in a positive light will show the student respect, and they’re not negative but use professionalism to solve the problem.

Being even-handed: Most teachers warm to some students more than others. Teachers react well to those who take part, are cheerful and cooperative, take responsibility for their own learning and does what is asked without complaint. Sometimes teachers are less enthusiastic with those who are less forthcoming, and find learner autonomy challenging. Teachers should ask the people who don’t put up their hands more due to cooperative, talkative ones should be more controlled by the teacher. Treating students the same way regardless of easy cooperation shows professionalism and maintains equal rapport.

Specific ways to have students hear and understand language:

Mime and gesture: back in time (gesture over the shoulder) or forward in time (gesture forward pointing), but students may not always catch this so use miming with care. For instance, if a teacher is struggling with names still, gesturing to a student with an upturned palm with inclusion, and gesturing with welcome is more appropriate rather than seeming aggressively pointing at someone.

Teachers can be a model of language since students also receive this from textbooks and reading materials, along with audio and video. Teachers do this by performing a dialogue or reading text aloud. 

Another way is to draw two faces on a board and stand in front of each one when we speak their lines. Make sure teacher is being heard and animate the performance with enthusiasm as appropriate for the convo being modeled.

Also judge appropriate speed, making sure however slow we go, we speak a natural rhythm and maintain normal intonation patterns to preserve the nature of the convo as much as possible.

Using poems or story-telling can be useful to engage students of all ages, but not to use it overly frequent.

Being aware of student talking time over teacher talking time is also important. Also knowing if they are at the lower language level, most students may not be finding moments outside the classroom to understand English in their community, so being aware they’re using the class as a comprehensible rough tuned version is what the teacher is their to provide. Since even if they don’t understand all of the words we say, they’ll get what’s being said, and more language gains are obtained by the student, which is significant. So, understanding teacher talking quality TTQ is also important with TTT.

Comparing native to non native speaker teachers and how they’re viewed still with a bias toward native speaker despite knowing either can be effective with linguistic confidence, which native speakers usually have more often.

CH7

Different learning contexts

Teaching one-to-one - esp popular with business students, but also good for students without normal school schedules and rather have individual attention instead of be in a group.

One to one teaching may be more difficult due to what the student may expect rather than the work they must put in to learn. Otherwise it is helpful to taylor a class to a single student and easier to change tasks, as well as having more talking time.

Guidelines for one to one teaching: 

Make a good impression. 

Be well prepared, give multiple options for what activities may interest the student. 

Be flexible - if student is bored or tired, offer two minute break and return to a previous task to something studied or move forward to change pace. 

Adapt to the student - allowing students interest lead tasks and activities. 

Listen and watch - keep watch on how students respond to activities, teachers should listen more than talk, ask what students need more or less of, and what they like, this will help amend plans for specific students. 

Give explanations and guidelines - when first meeting students, it’s important to explain what will happen, how the student will contribute to the program they’re involved in, and to lay down guidelines on what to expect from the teacher and what the teacher expects from them. It’s important for students to know they can influence the sessions by saying what they want or need more or less of. 

Don’t be afraid to say no - for 2 specific situations: if it’s a personality match with a student, if completely unsuccessful. Usually we can overcome this by extreme professionalism and maintaining distance between ourselves and student and allowing content of lessons to drive the matters forward successfully. When they just don’t work, the teacher must prepare to terminate the class, if they’re working for themselves, or expect the institution they work for will make alternative arrangements for themselves and the student. We need to be able to tell a student when their demands are excessive and won’t help them learn, and we can’t do everything they’re asking for. Most students understand this.

Large classes - it’s difficult for individual attention but good for interaction due to how many possible teachers could be in the class which also give no chance to be bored.

For successful large group teaching:

Be organized: the bigger the group the more organized you must be and know what we’re going to do before the lesson begins. It’s more difficult to change tack or respond to individual concerns in a group larger than 4 or 5.

Establish routines: helps daily management when we and students recognize certain processes for efficient learning like, collecting and setting homework, making sure everyone’s present, getting into pairs and groups, etc. This is helpful for time management so starting this when we first intro the class is important which can take time at the start but will save time later.

Use a different pace for different activities: small class and face to face is easier to change pace, and early on we can understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals. This is more difficult in large groups and we need to be more careful how we organize different activities with them. If we have students say something in a large class, we need to give them time to respond before charging ahead. If we are doing drills, we may be able to work at a fast pace, but if we ask students to think about something we have to slow the pace down.

Maximize individual work: the more individual work given even in a large class, the more we can manage effects of working with a large group as a whole. Having students get used to graded readers as part of individual reading programme. Having students write individually, giving responses to what they read and hear. Encourage students to make use of school library or self access centre. We direct them to language learning sites, or get them to produce their own blogs.

Use students: can have students take different responsibilities in the class like appointing class monitors to collect homework or hand out worksheets. Take the register under our supervision or organize classmates into groups. We can ask some students to teach the others, having individuals be in charge of a group who prepare arguments for debate or who are going through a worksheet. It could mean having individual students explain some language to their group, and choosing student leaders must be done with care as we monitor their performance carefully. This must be per each student being comfortable performing the leader’s tasks. As far as possible, allow all students some responsibility some of the time. Even for those who are weak in certain tasks, have them hand out worksheets, etc as positive reinforcement of being able to contribute.

Use worksheets: Going through worksheets individually with the group if not too large can be extremely beneficial for the feedback stage.

Use pairwork and groupwork: large classes, pair work and group work are important since they maximize student participation. For this type of work, instructions must be esp. clear, agree how to stop activity, which many teachers will raise their hands until students notice them and gradually quiet down, and to provide good feedback.

Use chorus reaction: since it’s difficult to use a lot of individual repetition and controlled practice in a big group, it may be appropriate to use students in chorus. Divide the class in 2 halves, and each side then speak a part in a dialogue, ask or answer a question or repeat sentences and words. ESP. USEFUL AT LOWER LEVELS.

Take account of vision and acoustics: using audio track or film clip, as long as a large group will be able to hear depending on class size.

Use the size of the group to your advantage: the main advantage of big groups are how big they are, humor is more funny, drama more dramatic and a good class feeling is warmer and more enveloping than it is in small groups. We should accept this potential lecturing, acting and joking in such situations, which allow organizing activities where students can perform this way too.

Large groups are challenging to teach so the ways above will allow some kind of success.

Managing mixed ability - mixed levels of proficiency can worry many teachers and is a major preoccupation due to planning be more difficult. In private language schools or language institutions we try to manage it with placement tests for the students so they can match other people’s level. No matter what, language level will be mixed. 

THE RESPONSE FOR THIS IS DIFFERENTIATION. A variety of learning options will have different abilities and interests offered for students like, giving students different tasks: different things to read or listen to, and we can respond to them differently, and group them according to different abilities. Sometimes we don’t want to differentiate individuals, like when presenting new language. Plus real differentiation is difficult to achieve, but it’s clearly desirable response to the needs of the individual even though they’re a part of a group.

Working with students at different levels can be navigated by providing different material to individual needs. Allow the students to make choices on the content material they’ll be working with: give a range of grammar or vocab exercises to choose from. Give them a choice on a book to read from by topic and level. 

If we can’t choose differentiation content, we have them do different things in response to content they’re looking at or listening to.

Give students different tasks: Give same reading text to all students but make different terms of the tasks we ask them to do in response to text. Ex. Having Group A interpret info in text and reproduce it in graphic form. Group B answer a series of open-ended questions. Group C may need the most support so are offered a series of multiple-choice questions and to pick the correct response from two or more alternatives because this could be easier for them than interpreting all the info themselves.

Give students different roles: within tasks students can be given different roles. Ex. Students are role-playing, the student asking the questions will be the ones in need of more guidance than the others. Ex. If students are preparing for a debate, Group A  will have a list of suggested arguments to prepare and Group B, which need less support are told to come up with their own arguments.

Reward early finishers: if all students are doing the same tasks with the same content and some finish early, we should offer students extension tasks to reward their efforts and challenge them further. These should be chosen carefully, since asking them to do regular work on top of more seems taxing.

Encourage different student responses: even giving same tasks to all students, accepting different responses should be expected and allowed. Flexible tasks make a virtue of the differences between students. In response to a reading text for instance, we can give all students a number of tasks but know not all of the students will complete all of them. When asked for students to respond creatively to a  stimulus we allow for differences in response. Ex. Asking for students to complete a sentence; the completions depend on how language proficient they are to some extent. In a poetry activity we may have them describe someone as if they are a type of weather. Students responses can vary from simply like, You are sunshine, or complex, You are sunshine after the rain, or even higher level, You are the gentle breeze of a dreamy summer afternoon. These activities are more appropriate when dealing with classes of mixed ability.

Identify student strengths (linguistic or non-linguistic): Including tasks which don’t demand linguistic brilliance and instead allows students to show off other talents they have is one way to make a virtue of students abilities. Ex. Students who have artistic talent can lead a design of a poster or wall chart. Students with scientific intelligence can be asked to explain a scientific concept before everyone is asked to read a science-based text. Students who have knowledge in contemporary music can be asked to select pieces to be played during group-work. This includes everyone rather than leaving out those who are weaker linguistically than their colleagues.

Some occasions students will be taught in a big group, or sometimes we’ll split them into smaller groups according to different abilities. Regardless of this, we will treat different students differently whether in groups or individually.

Responding to students: Taylor response to whichever kind of student you are dealing with when they ask a question. More sensitive students we will want to correct with more care than their robust colleagues. Some students need to see things in order to respond to them, whilst others respond better to having things explained verbally. When students work in pairs or group-work, we monitor their progress and intervene depending on how they’re doing. Students experiencing difficulty may need us to help them clear up some problems, we may have to correct some language use, or help them organize info logically. With internet tasks, we may have to direct what link to use for some while others may go further and ask them how they might say something more effectively, or suggesting an extension to what they’re doing. This is what’s meant by differentiation, but always paying attention to not ignore or exclude particular groups.

Being inclusive: With mixed ability classes, some students may get left behind or become disengaged to what’s happening. This happens when teachers spend more time with higher level students in a class, the students who are less linguistically able may feel they’re being ignored and become demotivated. On the other side, if we dedicate more time to the ones struggling the higher level students may feel neglected or unchallenged which has them quickly lose interest and develop an attitude which makes them difficult to work with. 

For a mixed ability teacher, one must draw all the students into the lesson, and set a task with the whole group by maybe asking initial questions to build up a situation, and the teacher will start by working at a level all the students are comfortable with. The teacher will ask questions all the students understand and relate to so that their interest is aroused and so they all understand the goal they’re aiming for. Once they’re all involved with the topic or task, the teacher can allow for differentiation in any of the ways discussed above. The teacher’s initial task is to include and engage everyone, since those who feel excluded will soon behave like they’re excluded.

Flexible groupings: grouping students may be a flexible business for many tasks. Sometimes it’s to have different groups do different tasks, like reading different texts, depending on difficult of the texts or put students at different levels in the same group because the weaker students can benefit working with students in higher linguistic level since we believe higher level students will gain insights about the language by having to explain it to their colleagues.

Realistic mixed-ability teaching - the most ideal setting is being able to work with individuals-as-individuals all the time, but this is difficult with large classes, so planning for significant differentiation is daunting than building differentiation into lessons for a group we see all day every day. Depending on class set up and how large it is will determine the different types of tasks which can be given. If the school is equipped with a self-access centre so students can work individually on a variety of materials, it makes it easier to build individual learning programs for the curriculum. 

If students have their own computers they can complete tasks upon their level of ability. Sometimes we may want to reinforce the group’s identity so we have them learn the same thing for info they all need, but will have to do the best we can with the circumstances. LEARNER TRAINING AND ENCOURAGEMENT OF LEARNER AUTONOMY IS THE ULTIMATE ACHIEVEMENT OF DIFFERENTIATION. When students take responsibility for their own learning, they are acting autonomously and differentiation is achieved. This autonomy can also raise complex issues which will be covered in CH23.

English-only environment may be the best and only potion depending on if the medium of communication is English and provides more attempts so the learning process can take care of itself esp. when students have different 1st language backgrounds which makes this the most realistic option. Banning the L1 language is “unfortunate” for a # of reasons, and in the first place, our identity is shaped somewhat by the language we learn as children. 

With bilingual children who may have a home language and a public language, which shapes their way of seeing and communicating their mother tongue. Using their L1 may help them translate what they’re doing in English in their heads, which is why it should be acknowledged as being a part of learning, both languages may be used in the class to further the learning of the 2nd.

Benefits to using L1 language in L2 class: It’s helpful for the student to use their L1 language during the process of learning so they can further absorb the L2 being learned and to compare the differences between languages. 

Translation activities can be useful, whether straight translation of short texts and translation of a summary from a longer text may be helpful in group settings so they can discuss any issues which reveal themselves more in a group rather than thinking on one’s own. 

Translation could be considered the 5th skill after reading writing speaking and listening. It’s desirable for students to use their L1 when talking about learning. 

For lower level students it’s easier to get a needs analysis when they use their L1 rather than have them struggle through with English. 

Comparison between the two languages will happen for the student naturally so it will help them understand certain types of errors by showing them the differences. 

It’s also a way of reviewing how well students have understood grammar and lexis at the end of a unit of study.

Disadvantages of using the L1 in the L2 class: A teacher doesn’t always share the L1 or the L1 of all the students, but the student will compare languages consciously or subconsciously. Teacher’s have some way of asking, Can you translate it back into English? Do you have an expression for this in your language? — most useful when speaking of idioms or metaphor use. Overuse of L1 can restrict the use of English exposure.

How and when to use and allow use of students’ L1 in class:

Acknowledge the L: Discussing learning process and L1 and L2 issues with the class.

Use appropriate L1, L2 activities: can include translation exercises or specific contrasts between the 2 languages in areas of grammar, vocab, pronunciation or discourse. Discussing code of conduct or best ways of keeping vocab notebooks or giving announcements is best in the context of a largely English-use classroom.

Differentiate between levels: Using L1 for explanations and rapport-enhancement at lower levels, becomes less appropriate as students’ English improves. After which can use L1 and L2 for comparisons and encourage the fifth skill of translation.

Agree clear guidelines: Students should know when to use mother tongue is productive or not. For ex. It wouldn’t be useful during an oral communicative activity. Finding a good compromise for students on when to use L1 and when it is counter-productive must be agreed on.

Use encouragement and persuasion: When going around to students during speaking activities, use of phrases like, Why not try stop using L1 and use English? often works, especially after discussing when to use it. If encouragement doesn’t work, you can temporarily stop activity and explain to students since activity is designed to give them practice in speaking English, it makes little sense if they do it in another language. Sometimes it will change the atmosphere so they go back to the activity with new determination.

Ch8

Feedback on students’ work has more effect on achievement than any other single factor. Making sure the feedback given is appropriate for the student concerned and the activity they’re involved in will be important. Mistakes can be divided into 3 broad categories: slips - mistakes which students correct themselves once the mistake is pointed out, errors - mistakes which they can’t correct themselves and need explanation, and attempts - when a student tries to say something but doesn’t yet know the correct way of saying it. The most concern for teachers are the errors, though students Attempts will show a lot of their current knowledge and could provide chances for opportunistic teaching.

2 sources of errors which students display:

L1 interference: Where a student’s L1 and the variety of English they’re learning come into contact, there are often confusions which provoke errors in the learner’s use of English. This can be at the level of sounds: Arabic doesn’t have a phonemic distinction between f and v, and they may say ferry when they mean very. It can also be at the level of grammar, the L1 can have a subtly different system, like French students usually have trouble with present perfect because there is a similar form in French but at the same time concept is expressed slightly differently. Or Japanese students may have problems with article usage due to Japanese not using the same system of reference, etc. Lastly, it may at be at the level of word usage, when similar sounding words have slightly different meanings, like libreria in Spanish, means bookshop or embarasada means pregnant.

Developmental errors: in child language development, there’s a phenomenon called over-generalization. An ex., a child starts by saying, they went, they came, etc. Then starts saying they goed, they comed, which is the child over-generalizing. Later on, this is sorted out when the child gets more sophisticated understanding or goes back to saying went and came and also handling regular past tense endings. This also happens with second-language learners, this a natural process of language learning. When responding to errors, teachers should be seen providing feedback and helping the reshaping process rather than telling the students they’re wrong.

Assessing student performance can come from the teacher or from the students. When teachers assess students, it can be explicit, like, that was really good, or implicit, like during a language drill we pass on to the next student without making comment or correction, which can be a danger for the student thinking the silence means something else. 

Students will receive teacher assessment in the form of praise or blame, so seeing our role as encouraging the students with praise for work well done, is vital for students motivation and progress. 

So, this could be seen as “medals” and  “missions”, the former given for doing something well, and the latter to direct them where to improve. 

Try to give every student some reinforcement with every lesson and avoid only rewarding conspicuous success. 

If we measure every student against what they’re capable of doing and not against the group as a whole, then we are in a position to give medals for small things, including participation in a task or evidence of thought or hard work, rather than reserving praise for big achievements alone. 

Praise is usually responded to well by students, but over-complimenting them on work whilst their own self-eval tells them they haven’t done well may be counter productive. Over praise can create praise junkies and blinds them to true progress they make.

Assessment must be handled with subtlety, so combining appropriate praise with helpful suggestions on how to improve will have much greater chance of contributing to student improvement. 

Focusing on incorrect verb tenses, pronunciation or spelling will be easy to advise but include what they’re saying and writing. Language production activities require the last 2. 

Asking students to give opinions and write creatively or setting up a role-play or having students put together a school newspaper or writing a report, all need feedback on what students say rather than on only how they say it.

Excluding exams, there are many ways to assess student work:

Comments - saying good or nodding in approval showing clear signs of positive assessment. When negative, we may indicate something has gone wrong or saying things like, this isn’t quite right, but also acknowledge the students’ efforts first before showing something’s wrong, and then suggest future action (a mission). 

Same applies for written work, but it will depend on what stage students’ writing is at. Our responses to finished pieces of written work will be different from the help students receive as they work with written drafts.

Marks and grades - Students getting good grades affects motivation in a positive way, provided the level of challenge for the task is appropriate. Bad grades can be disappointing, so deciding on what basis to do this and how to describe to the students will be necessary. 

Giving a grade for a homework exercise or a test depending on multiple choice, sentence fill-ins or controlled exercise types will be fairly easy for students to understand and why they achieve the marks or grades given to them. 

It’s more difficult for creative activities where students produce spoken or written language to perform a task. Awarding of grades in this case must be a bit more subjective which despite this, students may have enough confidence in you as a teacher to accept our judgement, esp where it coincides with their own assessment of their work. 

Where this isn’t the case or where they compare their mark with other students and not agree with what they find, it will be helpful for us to demo clear criteria for the grades given either offering a marking scale or written or spoken explanation of the basis for the judgement.

Grading structure varies by culture, so providing a grading scale will be necessary if you want the student to understand how it works, so many teachers prefer feedback and comments, this way clear responses are given to the students without risking a grading system confusion which demotivates them unnecessarily.

Giving marks and grades should be reserved for verbal activities, homework or end of period time, before weekend or semester.

Reports - end of term or year, teachers write reports on their students’ performance, it showing how well the student has done in the recent past and reasonable assessment of future prospects. 

This also requires a balance between positive and negative feedback. Like all feedback, students have a right to know strengths as well as weaknesses, this can lead to further improvement and progress, and it’s greatly increased if taken together with student’s own assessment of their performance.

Teachers can help students self assessment by helping them develop awareness of how effective they are at monitoring and judging their own language production, which will greatly enhance learning. 

Student self assessment is bound in with learner autonomy since if we can encourage them to reflect upon their own learning through learner training or on their own away from the class, we are equipping them with a powerful tool for future development. 

Involving students in assessment of themselves and peers occurs when we ask the class, Do you think that’s right?, After writing something we heard someone say up on the board, or asking the class the same question when one of their number gives a response.

At the end of an activity we can also ask how well they think they have got on, or tell them to add a written comment to a piece of written work they have completed, giving their own assessment of that work. We may ask them to give themselves marks or a grade and then see how this tallies with our own.

Ex. At the end of a course book unit, we can ask students to check what they can now do, like, now they know how to get their meaning across in a  convo/ use past passive/interrupt politely in a convo, etc.

This type of self eval is the heart of “can do”, students able to measure themselves by saying what they can do in various skill areas.

ALTE statement for six levels A1-C2 can be found www.alte.org/can_do/general.php

Feedback for verbal work, shouldn’t necessarily deal with oral production in the same way. Deciding how to react to performance will depend on the stage of the lesson, activity, and type of mistake made, as well as the student making the mistake.

Accuracy and fluency - when a particular activity in the class is designed for students’ complete accuracy, like study of a piece of grammar, pronunciation exercise or vocab work, or whether teachers are asking students to use the language as fluently as possible. We need to be clear on the difference between “non-communicative” and “communicative” activities, since the former ensures correctness, and latter designed to improve language fluency.

Teacher intervention, when an activity is stopped in order to correct a specific error, is sometimes preferred by the student. 

During communicative activities, it is generally understood a teacher shouldn’t interrupt students mid-flow to point out grammatical, lexical, or pronunciation errors, since to do so interrupts the communication and drags an activity back to the study of language form or precise meaning. 

Traditionally, speaking activities in class, esp activities at the extreme communicative end were though to act as a switch to help learners transfer learnt language to the acquired store or a trigger, forcing students to think carefully about how best to express the meanings they want to convey.

This remains the heart of the focus on forms view of language learning. Part of the value of these activities lies in the various attempts students must make to get their meaning across. 

Processing language for communication is the best way of processing for language acquisition. 

Teacher intervention could raise stress and stop acquisition completely in these circumstances.

Students have much to gain from coming up against communication problems, provided they have some words and phrases to help them negotiate a way out of their communicative impasses, and will learn more from doing so. 

When teachers intervene to correct, but also to supply alternative modes of expression to help students, they remove the need to negotiate meaning and denies students a learning opportunity. 

In such situations teacher intervention sometimes is necessary but unfortunate even when we’re using gentle correction. 

The best answer to the question of when to intervene in learner talk is as late as possible.

Sometimes during communicative activities teachers may want to offer correct or suggest alternatives due to students’ communication is at risk or de to this might just being the right moment to draw the students’ attention to the problem.

In communicative or fluency activities, deciding if and when to intervene at all and if we do what best way to do it since speaking with students about feedback and correction and explaining to them what we intend and when and why, then also inviting their own comments so we can bargain with them about this aspect of classroom experience would be best to find the comfort level according to each students’ needs.

Feedback during accuracy work - correction is usually made up of two distinct stages: 1. Teachers show students a mistake has been made, and 2. If necessary, they help the students to do something about it. The first techniques to be aware of is being devoted to showing incorrectness. 

These techniques are only really beneficial for what we’re assuming to be language “slips” rather than embedded or systematic errors (due to the interlanguage stage the students have reached). 

When showing incorrectness, we hope the students will be able to correct themselves once the problem has been pointed out, if they can’t however, we’ll need to move on to alternative techniques.

Showing incorrectness: 

Repeating - ask students to repeat what they said, by saying, Again?, which coupled with intonation and expressions indicates something isn’t clear.

Echoing - this can be a precise way of pin-pointing an error. We repeat the students words, emphasizing the part of the utterance which was wrong. Like, She SAID me?, this an efficient way of showing incorrectness during accuracy work.

Statement and question: Saying something like, Good try, but that’s not quite right, to indicate something hasn’t quite worked.

Expression: When we know a class well, a simple facial expression or gesture, a wobbling hand, for instance, may be enough to indicate something doesn’t quite work. This should be done with care since the wrong expression or gesture could appear mocking or cruel under certain circumstances.

Hinting: Quick way to help students activate rules they already know but which were temporarily forgotten is to give a quiet hint. We may say the word tense to make them think perhaps they should have used the past simple rather than the present perfect. We could say countable to make them think about a concord mistake, or tell to indicate they’ve chosen the wrong word. This type of hinting depends on the students and teacher sharing metalanguage (linguistic terms), which when whispered to students can help them correct themselves.

Reformulation: a technique used widely for accuracy and fluency work for the teacher to repeat back a corrected version of what the student has said, reformulating the sentence without making a big issue of it. Like, student says, She said me I was late. Teacher says, Oh, so she told you, you were late, did she? Student replies, Oh yes, I mean she told me. So I was very unhappy…

Reformulation serves as a quick reminder of how language should sound. It doesn’t put student under pressure, but clearly points the way to future correctness. The best attribute it has being its unobtrusiveness.

Getting it right - If students are unable to correct themselves or respond to reformulation, we need to focus on the correct version with more detail. 

Whether by saying the correct version, emphasizing the part where there is a problem before saying the sentence normally. Go TO the mall. Go to the mall. 

If necessary we can explain the grammar, or the lexical issue. Then have the student repeat the correct phrasing. We can also ask students to help or correct each other. 

This works well where there is genuine cooperative atmosphere. Ask students what techniques they feel most comfortable with.

Feedback during fluency work - The way teachers respond to students when they speak in a fluency activity will have much bearing on not only how well they perform during the activity but also on how they’ll continue to treat fluency activities from then on. We must respond to content not just language form, and untangle issues which the students have encountered or during the encounter, but we can decide to correct it after the event, as well. Our tolerance of error in fluency sessions will be greater than when it’s during the more controlled sessions. When we decide to intervene during fluency activities esp when depending on student preference, there are ways to respond to the students once activities are over.

• Gentle correction: If fluency breaks down completely during activity, we may have to intervene. For instance, if a student can’t think of what to say, we may prompt them forward. If it’s to point out a language feature, we may off a form of correction. Only if done with tact and discretion, there’s no reason why these interventions can’t be helpful. We must stay toward the gentle, so don’t stop the whole activity and make everyone say the item correctly before continuing with their own discussions. Gentle correction can be done in varying styles. We can reformulate what student has said in the expectatation they’ll pick up our reformulation even if it barely interrupts their speech. “I enjoy to ski.” “Yes, I enjoy skiing too.” Reformulation may help them learn something new. 

There are other techniques to show incorrectness, like echoing and expression, or merely saying, I shouldn’t say X, say Y, etc. Due to doing this gently, and not moving on to getting it right stage, our intervention is less disruptive than a more accuracy-based procedure is. 

We must be aware of over-correction during fluency stage. By interrupting the flow too often in the activity could bring it to a halt. What we must determine is whether to make a quick reformulation or a quick prompt to help conversation to move without intruding much, or on the other side, it not too necessary and could potentially get in the way of the conversation.

• Recording mistakes: Teachers are frequently observers, watching and listening so we can give feedback after. Observation allows to give good feedback about their performance and remembering to give positive and negative together. One downside to giving feedback after event is forgetting what student said, and so teachers will write down points they want to refer to, and some will use charts or other forms of categorizing to help them with this.

• After the event: If recording audio student performance, we will provide feedback to the class, which is done many ways, like assessment of an activity of how well we thought the students did, and having students tell us what they found easy and most difficult. We can choose some mistakes we recorded on the board and ask students if they recognize the problem, and then whether they can correct it. Also, we can write the correct and incorrect words, phrases or sentences on a board and have students decide which are which. Using examples on the board should be anonymous without calling out the student who made the mistake, focusing on the mistakes more than one person makes and then leading quick teaching and re-teaching sequences. Or teachers may write individual notes for students, recording mistakes heard with suggestions on where they may look for info about the language, dictionaries, grammar books, internet.

Feedback on written work depends on the writing task and the effect we want to create. In textbook exercises, they’re marked right or wrong possibly with a written correct answer for them to study. When giving feedback on creative or communicative writing, whether letters, reports, stories, or poems, we must approach the task with scope and demonstrate our interest in the content of the students’ work. 

Much will depend on if we’re intervening in the writing process when students compose various written drafts before the final version or if we’re marking a finished product. During the writing process we will respond rather than correct. 

Responding - in response, we say how the text appears to us and how successful we think it’s been (giving a rewarding response) before suggesting how it’s improved (the mission). These responses can be important at varying stages of writing process cycle. 

The comments offered to students need to look helpful and not critical. 

Depending on format, writing in the margins to note students work, or on computer where they click to read your comments, or preparing a letter in response to a students first draft composition. 

The last example is usually most helpful if the student is going to prepare a new version of their work. 

When responding to final written draft, we can say what we like, how we feel about the text and what we think the students can do next time if they’re going to write something similar.

Another constructive way to respond to written work is showing alternative ways of writing through reformulation. Instead of comments, you can rewrite the sentence by prefacing to the student you’d express the paragraph slightly differently and keep the original intention as much as possible and avoid any language or construction problems found in students original work. 

This is extremely useful for students since comparing their version to yours can help them discover a lot about the language.

It must be done sympathetically since we could steamroll our view of things and force the student to adopt a different voice from the one they want to use.

Correcting - Many teachers have correction codes to indicate students have made a mistake in their written work, and the codes are written in the body of text or in the margin. This way of correction is neater and less threatening than random marks and comments. Ex. S- spelling error, G- grammar mistake, C - concord mistake “People is angry.”. 

To use symbols, they must be trained in their use. We can also correct by putting ticks on good points and underlining problems. Or summarize comments at the end of the students work saying what’s appropriate and what needs correcting.

Training students - We must train students to understand the process of our feedback on their writing by understanding what we mean and what to do to correct it. We can do this by writing incorrect sentences on the board like, “I don’t enjoy to watch TV.” 

Students then come to the board and underline the mistake in the sentence. These types of activities get students used to the idea of error-spotting and also the use of underlining errors. 

Later we give several sentences some of which are correct and some which aren’t and they decide which are which. We can now intro students correction symbols by going through them one by one, and showing examples of each category. 

Once we think they’ve got the meaning, we can have them try using the symbols. An example is copying a student’s work and giving it to another group to correct using the newly learned symbols. 

After they use the correction code, the teacher discusses the students efforts with the class. Once the students understand the symbols, we can start using them when looking at the students’ work.

Involving students - Besides receiving teacher feedback, allowing and encouraging students to provide each other feedback can also be helpful. 

Peer review has extremely positive effects on group cohesion by letting students monitor each others work and the result helps them become better at self monitoring. 

The advantage is students see teacher comments as coming from an expert and feel obligated to do as suggested even when it’s only a suggestion. 

Students are more likely to think of what they’re writing if the feedback comes from a peer, so when responding to work during a drafting stage, peer feedback could be extremely beneficial. 

In order to make sure the comment is focused we may want to design a form where students give sentences to complete such as, My immediate reactions to your piece of writing are ______, I like the part _____, I’m not sure about ____, The specific language errors I have noticed are _____, etc.

Allowing students to decide with teacher guidance what they think is most important to look out for in a piece of writing can benefit. 

They give their opinions on whether spelling is more important than handwriting or originality of ideas should interest feedback given more than grammatical correctness. 

Students can also weight in on the best grading system, this way they can come up with their own feedback kit.

Encouraging self monitoring by getting students to write a checklist of things to look out for when they evaluate their own work during the drafting process along with the more encouragement given to be involved in giving feedback to each other or evaluate their own work successfully will have them get better at developing becoming successful writers.

Finishing the feedback process - Other than with achievement tests, written feedback is designed to not only supply assessment of students’ work, but to help and teach. 

Teacher give feedback so we affect student’s language use in the future as well as comment on the use in the past. This is formative assessment mentioned at start of chapter. 

After commenting on 1st and 2nd drafts, we hope to see the changes as the students response in final draft, this showing the feedback was part of the learning process. 

This is also why we use codes and symbols for students to identify mistakes made, and being in the position to correct them. 

The feedback process is only complete when the students have made the changes and if students are consulting grammar books and dictionaries to resolve some mistakes we signaled for them, the feedback we have given has provided a positive outcome. 

If instead the student puts away the corrected work quickly without studying it, we spent the time responding and or correcting it as being a waste.

Burning the midnight oil - Stressing over written feedback for student and teachers, since the sight of their work covered in corrections can bring anxiety and teachers spending many hours on correcting being time-consuming should mean both sides should have a break. There’s a number of ways to the varying amount of markings the teacher use, including: 

• Selective marking - not marking everything all the time, and can also demotivate, so what’s more effective is telling students for their next piece of work we’ll focus specifically on spelling or paragraph organization or verb tenses. This way students have less errors to look at and are able to focus on the area identified.

• Different error codes - Students and teacher don’t always need to use the same error codes. At different levels and for different tasks, and to make shorter lists of possible errors, we can tailor what we’re looking for depending on the class.

• Don’t mark all the papers - teachers may choose to mark only some of the scripts they’re given and sample what the class has done as a whole. Teachers then can use what they find for post-task teaching with the whole class.

• Involve the students - teachers can correct some scripts and students can look at some of the others, this being beneficial for peer correction. This doesn’t mean to not have teacher feedback as well, since both can bring creative ways on how best to provide feedback for best interest of students and teachers.

CH 9

Sometimes students fail to cooperate and can disrupt the learning taking place. Promoting student success over damage-limitation can be difficult when being a classroom manager.

Problem behavior can range from disruptive talking, inaudible responses, sleeping in class, tardiness, poor attendance, failure to do homework, cheating on tests and unwilling to speak in target language. Other types would be insolence toward teacher, insulting or bullying other students, damaging school property and refusing to accept punishment or sanctions. This also depends on teacher’s tolerance, but requires to understand why it occurs, how to prevent it, and what to do if it happens to manage success.

Why problems occur - Students personalities can be effected by their personal lives and the teacher or the other students around them and is bound up with levels of self-esteem, so the lessons going well or not can also be a cause for possible tensions. Circumstances may also influence the ability to do well as well as people around us who will affect us positively or negatively: 

Family, which can have an affect on attitude toward learning and authority and may have a student be predisposed to behaving problematically. 

Learning expectations can have the student think, since they can act a certain way around one teacher it will be accepted by another, or due to unpleasant memories, may have a bad learning experience influence their expectations and a behavior will present itself due to the result of what was previously allowed or expected. This also comes from the learning culture they’re operating in which is a norm which says being too good in lessons isn’t desirable or appropriate, or a norm about students behaving in lessons a certain way and how they should think of the teacher, etc. If the norms aren’t confronted the problem behavior will be ongoing. 

Approval - a student’s self-esteem can partly stem from how a teacher behaves. Most people who have good rapport with the teacher are happy to get teacher’s approval, but if approval is lacking the incentive to behave well is more often compromised. Peer to peer approval is also common and most noticeable in teens.

What the teacher does - Maintaining interest of the students is paramount, since if the teacher looks unorganized or unprepared, they may lose interest and become disconnected with what’s happening; problem behavior coming from this, since it will manifest before the lesson starts, to clarify, if teachers arrive at the class without knowing what they’re going to do, the odds of things going wrong increase much more. The reaction a teacher gives to bad behavior will profoundly influence the student’s reactionary behavior. If they see the teacher being decisive, effective, and fair, they’ll be less likely to disrupt in future, and their learning successfully enhances.

Success and failure - Motivation is powerful in sustaining student motivation, when achieving identifiable goals, the students are more likely to stay engaged with what’s happening. Part of the teacher’s job is to make sure students recognize their achievements, however small they are. If students don’t see evidence of their success presented constantly, in tests, classroom language use, or in teacher’s attitude to their classroom behavior, then their incentive to behave within the limits set and the group, is greatly diminished. Failure is powerful for problem behavior, so teachers should manage student success.

External factors - students behavior may be affected by being tired and can’t concentrate, if classroom is too hot or cold, they become too relaxed or nervy, and discomfort leads to disengagement. Noise from outside the class can impact badly on concentration, and in primary level, changes of weathers, like high wind make children “go wild”.

Creating successful classrooms

When students are engaged, have reasonable amount of self esteem and experience success, there’s no incentive for them to behave badly, disrupt lesson, or create barriers between themselves, the teacher, and peers. We need to try to examine how we ensure the class is a success-oriented environment.

Behavior norms - All groups, anywhere as well as education, have ways of behaving and quickly establish norms for behavior which show how things are done in the group. Eventually, norms of behavior, if the group is big enough, can become a part of cultural norms for a whole society to adhere to. 

In schools, sometimes norms will be explicitly stated, like the wearing of school uniforms, etc. Some are made by school and the teacher, like having students raise their hands when wanting to ask a question, and some rules spring from within the group itself or grew from the use in a previous group which had been used for years before, and being picked up by the new group, ie. Norm of mediocrity. 

Due to this the teacher should create their own rules in class, like turning off cell phones, no speaking when teacher is speaking or eating and drinking during the lesson. The rules will come from the teacher since the students have no agency in their creation or ownership of the norms, but expected to acquiesce to them. 

Understanding it’s better to have the students active agreement rather than feeling coerced into obedience makes a difference. 3 things should be remembered to achieve this:

Norms need to be explicitly discussed - it isn’t effective enough to say the rules, it must be discussed with the group and explain what they mean and why they’re there. We can give a handout describing the behavior or a poster or wall chart listing the rules so we can refer to them when necessary. When students know what is expected and why it’s more likely they’ll conform.

Norms can be jointly negotiated - If you want the student to go along with this, you may want to negotiate a code of conduct which the students agree to, including classroom behavior, when someone is talking, let them finish before speaking, discussing how often homework is expected and establishing norms of learner autonomy. 

When teacher and students views differ on acceptable and what isn’t, we take the student’s opinion into account and work with them. 

Ultimately we must be firm about what we prepare and accept. Low level classes may need the teacher to hold discussion in student’s first language, and when not possible, we need to show quickly and calmly by example, what is expected and what isn’t acceptable. Some teachers use a formula where teacher and student produce a chart which says “As your teacher / a learner I expect…”, “As your teacher / a learner, I will...”. 

Both of these bind the teacher and students to behaviors mutually beneficial. When a code of conduct is democratically agreed on, even on teacher direction, everyone having a say and agreeing, it has great power. 

We can remind students since they agreed to the code, they must be responsible for maintaining it.

Norms need to be reviewed and revisited: speaking about code of conduct at the start of semester must be reminded of throughout the course in case students step away from the agreed on conduct. 

This makes it easier when a copy of the code, on a poster or wall chart can be referred to. 

If students are behaving in ways inappropriate, we must discuss the situation with the group and get their agreement to come up with new norms to cover this situation, an amendment.

How teachers can ensure successful behaviour 

The way we interact and work in lessons with students makes a large contribution to group success. Rapport established with students is crucial for effective teaching and learning. 

Creating the appropriate group atmosphere and identity can be difficult and we should include other positive class atmosphere options:

Start as we mean to go on: Students will find difficulty if we insist on certain behaviour only when something goes wrong. Ex. We start our lessons in a calm atmosphere, then we need to do that from every first lesson by waiting for silence before we start activities we planned. If we decide we’re in charge of who sits where, then we should exercise this decision-making from the start rather than ask students to accept this halfway thru term.

Know what we’re going to do: students are less likely to cause issues if we give interesting things to do. They’re less likely to feel the urge to disrupt if they understand we’ve come to the lesson with a clear idea about what these things are rather than making it up as we go. Being well-organized to include study and activity thought of before the lesson has a far greater chance of success than chaotic ill-thought-out and ultimately frustrating for everyone.

Plan for engagement: students who are interested and enthusiastic generally don’t make problem behavior. In planning our classes , we must think on how to engage students in a reading or listening text before starting detailed work on it; we need to do our best to introduce topics which are relevant to our students’ experience. Interest is also generated from a teacher’s performance, students getting engaged by energy and enthusiasm of their teacher.

Prioritize success: one of the most important tasks is making students successful. Not making it easy all the time since this provokes boredom, or at least disengagement. But at the other end of the spectrum, if things to too hard, students become demoralized. We must aim for tasks, activities, and goals which challenge individual students but can have a better-than-average chance of success. Getting level of changed is a risk factor in effective classrooms. Our use of praise (medals and missions) is also a way to show students the success they’re having.

Equality rules: Dealing with members of a group, the group must see we treat everyone exactly the same way, irrespective of who they are. We shouldn’t show obvious favoritism or appear to hold grudge against certain students. We need to treat events the same way each time they occur so students know exactly what is likely to happen in certain circumstances. What this means is students who behave certain ways are treated exactly the same as students who behave similarly in the same circumstances.

Praise is better than blame: Difficult students respond extremely positively when praised for appropriate behavior. Praise allows students to more likely avoid inappropriate behavior if there is an obvious advantage (teacher and group’s approval) in appropriate conduct. Praise should be offered the right way for good reasons to be effective.

Modifying problem behavior

When students behave in inappropriate ways, our reaction to the situation determines how serious the even becomes, and also influences the attitude of the whole group in terms of their future adherence to the group norms which they have agree. Punishing problem behaviour isn’t an attractive action, but turning it into a future success is. 

The first action to discover upon a students disruptive behaviour or acting uncooperatively is to uncover the problem. We then can see if we can agree on a solution with the student and set a target for them to aim at, which ensures the success we’re striving for. We must bear in mind a few tips to achieve this goal:

Act immediately: We mustn’t leave a problem type of behaviour unchecked for long, due to it being reversed more difficult and the behavior getting steadily worse so where it could have been deflected if it had been handled immediately, is now almost impossible to deal with. Immediate action means it could be no more than stopping talking, pausing and looking at the student in question, but sometimes requires stronger action.

Keep calm: Many students see teachers who must shout to assert authority being a step at losing control, and raises noise level in the class. Not appearing flustered despite a student seeming to attack our personality and threatening everything we hold dear, we must remember, we’re merely providing a service (doing a job). 

We must act calmly and carefully, and when we try to modify a student’s behavior, we must look the disruptive student in the eye, and keep looking at them as we speak in a measured tone. 

Ask them questions to find out why they’re behaving in this way, usually this is enough to diffuse the situation, but if more serious action is required, we can adopt some methods described below. 

Focus on the behaviour not the student: We must take care not to humiliate an uncooperative student. It’s the behaviour which matters, not the character of the student. It’s more difficult to keep behaving in ways which the teacher is criticizing sensibly and fairly than negatively.

Take things forward: When a look or comment isn’t enough, we must think carefully on how to respond. It’s better to stay positive, teacher’s saying something like “Let’s do this” rather than “Don’t do that”. Moving things forward is better than stopping them. Teacher objective is to move on to the next stage of an activity or get a new response rather than focusing on the old one. In extreme cases, we can decide to change the activity in order to take the steam out of the situation and allow students to refocus. We should be careful not to base such decisions only on the inappropriate behaviour of one or two students. Other ways of going forward is changing students seats, without humiliating them and students will calm down and problem behaviour goes away.

Talk in private: It’s more appropriate to discuss student behavior in private and talk about how to improve it. 

This isn’t always possible, but disciplining students in front of his or her classmates won’t help the student’s self esteem. 

Ideally handling the student’s behavior after class or at least privately in a one to one at the teacher’s desk, if having to do it in the group, making it quiet and approaching the student is better. 

One teacher had a three step approach to conversations with teens: First stage, a chat has teacher showing he or she thinks the student is able and willing to solve the problem and the students has the teacher’s respect. 

Next stage, a word is the teacher being firmer and exerting pressure so the student can solve their problem. 

The last stage, a telling off, is the teacher clearly stating the behaviour is unacceptable and needs to change right now. 

Even when not agreeing with this approach, the first approach is always best, you must begin as light as possible before gradually becoming more serious or imposing some kind of sanction as a last resort.

One way to have students change their behaviour is writing to them, a general letter to each member of class expressing a problem and asking students to reply in confidence. 

In this way, they have a chance of making contact with us without other people listening in or facing us directly. 

This could take up a lot of time, and there’s dangers of over-intimacy, but the use of letter could help break the ice where teachers find no other ways of controlling misbehavior more successfully. 

Helping students recognize the problem behaviour and starting to find ways of changing it is a matter of upkeep care, and is more likely to occur in private ongoing communication with the student outside the class where everyone is listening.

Use clearly agreed sanctions: Apart from fairness to all students, everyone must understand the penalties for bad behaviour. If X happens, Y follows. 

A gradual scale of acton from gentle reprimand to removal from a lesson, and finally exclusion from a school, but everything to modify the student behaviour will be done so this doesn’t occur. 

When X happens the student will know what to expect and see what’s happening. This is a sense of justice and feeling confident in the system. 

It’s less effective if the teacher fails to impose a sanction they have warned the group about, and loses its power for future occasions, or imposing a sanction for far more serious than the one which the students expect, in which they could lose respect for an arbitrary behavior.

Use colleagues and the institution: there’s no shame in having disruptive students in the classroom, it happening to everyone, so when there’s an issue, we should consult our colleagues and ask for guidance. 

When the problem threatens to go beyond our control, like a pattern of disruption which continues for a series of lessons, we should be advised to talk to coordinators, directors of studies and or principals. 

All having a considerable experience of the kinds of problems being faced and in a position to offer the benefit of their experience.

Whatever sector being worked in, whether primary, secondary, tertiary, adult, state school or private sector, we all experience problem groups and problem behavior in teaching careers. More often, the problem is minor and can be dealt with easily, esp if referring to established code of conduct, and if our responses to indiscipline are based on principles and strategies we’ve outlined above, but of course it’s more attractive to try and avoid these problems occurring by managing for success. Letter writing activities could be beneficial for students between the teacher but also fellow students.

CH 10

Grouping students

Different groups - It may be necessary to make groups according to over-crowding or certain activities.

Whole class grouping is the classic idea of one teacher and speaking to all the students all at once. 

This reinforces a sense of belonging among group members, something which needs to be fostered by teachers. 

If everyone is involved in the same activity, we’re “in it together”, this giving us points of common reference to talk about and use as reasons to bond with each other. 

It is much easier for students to share an emotion such as happiness or amusement in a whole class setting. 

Language learning is a collective endeavor, so “learning takes place most effectively when language classes pull together as unified groups”. 

Whole class teaching is stable for activities where teacher acts as controller or giving explanations and instructions, presenting material, whether in pictures, texts or on audio video tape, and most cost efficient in terms of material production and organization than other groupings can be. 

It can allow teacher to gauge the mood of the class in general, rather than an individual basis, and a good way for use to get a general understanding of student progress. 

This is the preferred class style where teacher and students feel secure when the whole class is working in lockstep under direct authority of the teacher.

Disadvantage of whole-class grouping: Favors group rather than individual and everyone is forced to do the same thing at the same time at the same pace.

Individual students don’t get the chance to say anything on their own. Some students are disciplined to participate in front of the whole class since doing so risks public failure. 

It may discourage students to take responsibility for their own learning. Whole class teaching favors transmission of knowledge from teacher to student rather than having students discover things or research themselves. 

It’s not the best way to organize communicative language teaching or specifically task based sequences. Communication between individuals is more difficult in a group of 20 or 30 than it is with groups of four and five. 

Smaller groups can share material, speak quietly or less formally and make good eye contact, which all contribute to successful task resolution.

Seating whole-group classes

Plenty of ways to seat classes when working as a whole group. One common one is the rows so teacher has clear view of every student. 

Lecturing is easier this way and can maintain eye contact. Lessons like grammar point, watching a video or powerpoint, using the board or projector. It’s also useful when students are using certain kinds of language practice. 

If all students are focused on the same task at the same time, the whole class gets the same messages. It is easier to create a good whole-class dynamic when students are sitting in one group rather than many in orderly rows. 

Two more common seating arrangements is the circle or horseshoe, which are more appropriate for smaller groups, fewer than 20 - the teacher standing at the open end where the board or projector would be. 

In a circle the teachers position, where the board is situational is less dominating. There’s a greater feeling of equality in the circle more than if the teacher stays out at the front. 

Even with the horseshoe, it’s less commanding of a position due to the rows not being rigid. 

Students will potentially share feelings and info more through talking, eye contact and expressive body movement far more than being in rows one behind the other.

Groupwork is easier to arrange with separate tables with smaller groups, the teacher walking between them which makes mixed ability teaching easier. Different students can concentrate on different tasks according to different ability levels.

Whole group activities would be more difficult to teach in separate tables depending on the size of room or group. Also the students may not want to be stuck with the same students every time. Or putting opposing side seating, splitting the groups into corners to stay more dynamic and enjoyable.

Students on their own - individualized learning can be a student doing exercises on their own in class, or teachers are dedicating time working with students individually, or when a student takes charge of their learning in a  self access centre or out-of-class environment. These are all steps of learner autonomy.

To encourage this, we can allow private reading time and answer questions individually, or we can ask them to complete worksheets or writing tasks by themselves. We can provide worksheets with several different tasks and allow individuals to decide which tasks to do. Or we can hand out different worksheets to different individuals depending on tastes and abilities. We can also allow students to research on their own or choose what they read or listen to - esp with extensive reading.

• Advantages of individualized learning: allows teachers to respond to different students with varying terms of pace, learning, learning styles and preferences. Less stressful for students than performing in front of the class or pairs or groups. It develops learner autonomy and promotes skills of self-reliance and investigation over teacher dependence. Can be a way to restore peace and tranquility from noisy chaotic classroom.

• Disadvantages of individualized learning: It doesn’t help develop a sense of belonging in the class. It doesn’t encourage cooperation where students can help motivate each other. When giving students individual tasks, it’s needed to be more thought out than whole-class teaching. Working as a tutor or resource is more time consuming than interacting with the whole class as one.

Pairwork - students can practice language, study a text, research language or take part in info-gap activities together. They can also write dialogues, predict content of reading texts or compare notes on what they’ve seen or listened to.

• Pairwork advantages: Increases amount of speaking time any one student gets in the class. Allows students to work and interact independently without necessary guidance of teacher and promoting learner autonomy. Allows teacher time to work with one or two pairs as other students work. Promotes cooperation, helps class to become more relaxed and friendly. If students can make decisions as pairs, like deciding correct answers to questions, we allow them to share responsibility rather than bearing the whole weight alone. Quick and easy to organize.

• Pairwork disadvantages: pairwork is frequently noisy and teacher and students may dislike this. Teachers worry they could lose control of the class. Students in pairs often veer away from the point of the exercise and talk about something completely off topic in their L1. The chances of misbehavior is greater rather than in whole class setting. It isn’t always popular to pair off and would rather relate to the teacher as individuals rather than interact with another learner who may be as linguistically weak. The choice of paired partner can be problematic esp if students find themselves working with someone they don’t like.

Groupwork - putting students in larger groups allow them to do a range of tasks for when pairwork isn’t appropriate or sufficient. 

Students can write a group story or role-play a situation involving 5 people. They can prepare a presentation or discuss an issue and come to a group decision. 

They can watch, write or perform a video sequence; we can give individual students in a group different lines from a poem which the group has to reassemble. 

Small groups of 5 students provoke greater involvement and participation than in larger groups due to being small enough for real interpersonal interaction, yet not so small members are over-reliant upon each individual. 

Because 5 is an odd # means a majority can usually prevail. However there are occasions when larger groups are necessary. 

The activity may demand (like for the poem activity where the # of students should match the # of lines in the poem mentioned), or we may want to divide the class into teams for some game or preparation phase.

• Advantages of groupwork: Increases the # of talking opps for individual students, similar to pairwork. Unlike pairwork, due to more than two people being in the group, personal relationships are usually less problematic, there is also a greater chance of different opinions and varied contributions that in pairwork.

• It encourages broader skills of cooperation and negotiation than pairwork, and is more private than work in front of the whole class.

• Some students prefer to be prepared to eval each other’s performances, positively and negatively in a Cantonese L1 whereas is a bigger group a natural tendency for self-effacement made this less likely.

• Promotes learner autonomy by allowing students to make their own decisions in the group without being told what to do by the teacher. 

• Although we do not wish any individuals in groups to be completely passive, nevertheless some students can choose their level of participation more readily than in a whole-class or pairwork situation.

• Disadvantages of groupwork: Likely to be noisy (though not as loud as pairwork can be). Some teachers feel they lose control and the whole-class feeling which has been painstakingly built may dissipate when the class splits into smaller entities. 

• Not all students enjoy it since they’d prefer focus of the teacher’s attention rather than working with their peers. Sometimes students find themselves in uncongenial groups and wish they could be elsewhere. 

• Individuals may fall into group roles that stagnate, so some stay passive and others dominant. 

• Groups can take longer to organize than pairs, starting and ending with groupwork activities where people move around the class esp., can take time and be chaotic.

Ringing the changes - deciding when to have students in pairs or groups or to teach whole class or individuals being autonomized depends on many factors:

The task: If wanting to give students a quick change to think of an issue which we’ll focus on later, we could put them in buzz groups where they discuss or “buzz” the topic among themselves before working with it in a whole-class grouping. 

However small groups will be inappropriate for many explanations and demos where working with the class as one group will be more suitable. 

When students listen to a recording to complete a task or answer questions, we may let them compare their answers in quickly organized pairs. If we want our students to practice an oral dialogue quickly, pairwork may be the best grouping as well. 

If the task we wish our students to be involved necessitates verbal interaction, we will probably put students in groups, esp. in a large class, so they’ll have a chance to make a contribution. 

If we want students to write sentences which demos their understanding of new vocab, on the other hand, we may choose to have them do it individually. 

Although many tasks suggest obvious student groups, we can usually adapt them for use with other groupings. 

Dialogue practice can be done in pairs, but it can also be organized with two halves of a whole class. Similarly, answering questions about a listening extract can be an individual activity or we can get students to discuss the answers in pairs. 

We can also have a jigsaw listening, where different students listen to a different part of text so they can then reassemble the whole text in groups.

Variety in a sequence: much depends on how the activity fits into the lesson sequences we are following and are likely to follow next (in Ch21). 

If much of our recent teaching has involved whole-class grouping, there may be a pressing need for pairwork or groupwork. 

If much of our recent work has been boisterous and active, based on interaction between various pairs and groups, we may think to allow students time to work individually to give breathing room. 

The advantage of having different student groupings is they help provide variety, and sustain motivation.

The mood: crucial to our decision of what groups to use is the mood of our students. 

Changing the grouping of a class can be a good way to change its mood when required. 

If students are becoming restless with whole-class activity, and if they appear to have little to say or contribute in such a setting - we can put them in groups to give them chance to re-engage with the lesson. 

If on the other hand, groups appear to be losing their way or not working constructively, we can call the whole class back together and re-define the task, discuss problems different groups encountered or change the activity.

Organizing pairwork and groupwork - sometimes we must persuade reluctant students pairwork and groupwork are worth doing. They’re more likely to believe this if pair and groupwork activities are seen to be a success. Ensuring pair and group activities work well is easier if we have a clear idea about how to resolve any problem which could occur.

Making it work - Since some students are unused to working in pairs and groups, or due to having mixed feeling about working with a partner or about not having teacher’s attention at all times, it may be required to invest some time in discussion of learning routines. 

Just as we may create a joint code of conduct, we can also come to an agreement on when and how to use different student groupings. 

One way to discuss pairwork or groupwork is to do a group activity with students and then, when it’s over, as them to write or say how they felt about it (in either English or L1). 

Alternatively, we can initiate a discussion about different groups as a prelude to the use of groupwork and pairwork. 

This could be done by having students complete sentences such as: I like/don’t like working on my own because…, I like/don’t like working in pairs because…, I like/don’t like speaking in front of the whole class because… 

Then the students compare their sentences with other students to see if everyone agrees. We can also ask them to list fave activities and compare these lists with their classmates. 

When we know how our students feel about pair and groupwork, we then can decide what changes of method, if any we need to make. 

We may decide the need to spend more time explaining what we’re doing; we may concentrate on choosing better tasks, or even in extreme cases, decide to use pair and groupwork less often if our students object strongly to them. 

However, even where students show a marked initial reluctance to working in groups, we may hope, through organizing a successful demo activity and/or discussion, to strike the kind of bargain discussed in Ch 4.

Creating pairs and groups - After deciding to have students work in pairs and groups, we must consider how we’ll group and pair them, which can be based on the following principles:

Friendship: Put friends with friends rather than risk putting people others find difficult or unpleasant. By observing, we can see which students get on with others and make use of this later. 

Must consider our judgements may not be always accurate and friendships change with time. We can also leave the students to pair or group themselves, but this could be chaotic and exclude less popular students. 

An informed way of doing this is using the sociogram, but for this to work the students must know what they write is private won’t be seen by anyone but the teacher. 

This procedure has the student write their name on a paper, then write in order of preference which other students they like best in class. 

On another paper, they list the people they don’t like, and it’s important they know the teacher will look at what they’ve written. 

This will allow an informed choice on how to pair or group students, but not everyone agrees with the idea of grouping and pairing students this way. 

Sociograms are time-consuming and doesn’t answer what to do with unpopular students. Also, initial likes and dislikes between students should be replaced with acceptance of each other among the students of whoever they’re grouped or paired with. 

Sociograms can be helpful if a class isn’t cohering correctly when pair and groupwork don’t seem to go well. The info given may help us decide about grouping to improve matters.

Streaming: many discussions centre around whether students should be streamed according to ability. One suggestion is groups and pairs should have a mixture of weak and strong students. 

This helps the less fluent or knowledgeable students. The process of helping also results in the strong students being able to understand more about the language and the weaker students benefit from the help they get. 

An alternative is getting students at different levels to do different tasks, and create groups where all students are at the same level (this level different from some of the other groups). 

This gives teacher the opportunity to go to a group of weaker students to give special help which they need, but which stronger students may find irksome. 

It also allows us to give groups with stronger students more challenging tasks to perform. The value of cooperative work between the students on different levels could be lost with this type. 

Differentiation is a possible way to help individual students with different abilities in the same class CH 7. Streaming fits into this philosophy but the weaker students in weak groups could become demoralized and this could predispose them to stay in this category rather than motivate to improve out of it. 

Successful differentiation through grouping occurs with individual students together for individual tasks and activities, and composition of the groups changes depending on the task teacher’s choose. 

Streaming is less attractive when mixed ability teaching involves us teaching whole group despite different levels, which can be copied in groups, but being a danger stronger students become frustrated while the weaker ones get left behind, but the benefits of group cohesion could outweigh this.

Chance: group students by chance, for no special reasons of friendship or ability or level of participation. This is the easiest way of doing things since it’s little pre-planning. 

One way is having students seated next or near each other work in pairs or groups. The problem could occur from students sitting in the same place which could provide boredom. 

There’s the “wheels” scenario where half the class stand in a circle facing outward and the other half stand in an outer circle facing inward, and they move until told to stop, and they’ll work with whoever’s facing them. 

We can give letters to the students and whichever letters match the others will be the groups or pairs.

The task: sometimes the task determines who works with who. If we want students from different countries to compare cultural practices, we ensure the students from the same country don’t work together due to defeating the point of the exercise. 

If the task is about people who are interested in certain leisure activities (sports, music, etc), this could determine how to pair or group.

Changing groups: students who start an activity in a certain group also don’t have to stay in the groups by the end of the activity. 

For instance, students who are listing vocabulary and discuss it first in pairs, then groups of four, and then groups of 8 or 16. 

In interview activities, students can start working in two main groups then break into smaller groups for role-play. 

If groups are planning something or discussing, members from other groups can come and visit to share info and take info back to original group. 

A longer sequence may start with the teacher and whole class before moving between pairwork, individual, and groupwork until it returns back to whole class grouping.

Gender and status: some contexts may not be appropriate to have men and women working together, similarly when grouping students, we may bear in mind the status of individuals lives outside the class. 

This is esp true in business English groups where different tiers of management are represented in the group. 

We’ll need in both scenarios, to make ourselves aware of what is the norm so we can make informed decisions on how to proceed. 

We make our pairing and grouping decisions on a variety of factors, and if we’re concerned about atmosphere of the whole class, we may try to make friendship groups, bearing in mind the need to foster an acceptance for working with all students in the group eventually. 

If our activity is based on fun, we may leave our grouping to chance. If we are dealing with a non-homogenous class or if we’ve some students falling behind, we may stream groups so we can help the weaker students and keep the more advanced ones engaged in a different activity. 

We may stream pairs to do research tasks so students with differing needs can work on different aspects of language. 

We should not always have students working with the same partners or group members, this creates English for the Sole Purpose of doing Pair Work with One Fixed Partner, since mixing and moving students around as a course progresses good for class atmosphere and for individual engagement.

Procedures for pairwork and groupwork - Our role in pairwork/groupwork doesn’t end when we decide which students work together, but also during and after it.

Before: when we have students doing group/pairwork, we want to follow an engage-instruct-initiate sequence. 

Students need to feel enthusiastic about what they’re going to do, they need to know what they’re going to do, and they need to be given an idea of when they will have finished the task. 

Some instructions may involve our demo, when students are going to use a new info gap activity or we want them to use cards, for instance. 

If activity is familiar, we may simply give them instructions to practice language they are studying in pairs, or to use their dictionaries to find specific bits of info. 

The success of pair/groupwork often is helped by giving students a time when the activity finishes and then sticking to it. 

This helps give them a clear framework to work within. Alternatively in lighter hearted activities such as poem dictation, we can encourage groups who finish first as a merit. 

Despite language learning not being a contest, a slight sense of competition between groups doesn’t do harm. 

The important thing on instructions is the students should understand and agree on what the task is. 

To check they do, we may ask them to repeat the instructions or in monolingual classes, translate into their first language.

During: while students work in pair/groupwork we have a # of options. We can stand at the front or side of class, and keep an eye on what’s happening, noting who appears to be stuck, disengaged or about to finish. 

In this position we can tun in to particular group or pair from some distance away then decide whether to go over and help them. 

An alternative procedure referred to as monitoring is where we go round the class watching and listening to specific groups and pairs either to help them with tasks or to collect examples of what they’re doing for later comment and work. 

For ex., we can stay with a group for a period of time and then intervene if and when we think appropriate or necessary, bearing in mind what we’ve said about the difference between accuracy and fluency work. If students are involved in discussion, we might correct gently. 

If we are helping students with suggesting about something they’re planning or trying to move discussion forward, we can act as prompter, resource, or tutor. 

In such situations we will often respond to what students are doing rather than giving correction feedback. We’ll be able to help them forwards with the task they’re involved in. 

Where students fall back on their first language, we’ll do our best to encourage or persuade them back to English. 

When students are working in pairs/group we have an ideal app to work with individual students who we feel would benefit from our attention. 

We also have a great chance to act as observer, picking up info about student progress, and seeing if we will have to troubleshoot. 

But however we monitor, intervene or take part in the work of a pair or group, it’s vital we do so in a way which is appropriate to students involved and to the tasks they’re doing.

After: when pairs and groups stop working, we need to organize feedback. We want to let them discuss what occurred during the groupwork session and where necessary, add our own assessments and make corrections. 

Where pair/groupwork has formed part of a practice session, our feedback may take form of having a few pairs or groups work quickly to demo the language they have been using. 

We can then correct it, if and when necessary, and this procedure gives both students and the rest of the class good info for future learning and action. 

Where groups/pairs are working on a task with definite right and wrong answers, we need to ensure they completed it successfully. 

Where they have been discussing an issue or predicting content of a reading text, we’ll encourage them to talk about their conclusions with us and the rest of the class. 

By comparing different solutions, ideas and problems, everyone gets greater understanding of the topic. 

Where students produce a piece of work, we can give them a chance to demo this to other students in class and they can stick written material on noticeboards or read dialogue out they’ve written, or play audio or videos they’ve made. 

It’s vital to remember constructive feedback on the content of student work can greatly enhance student future motivation, and giving feedback on language mistakes is only one part of this process.

 Troubleshooting - When we monitor pairs and groups during groupwork activity, we are seeing how well they’re doing and decide whether or not to go over and intervene, but we’re also keeping our eyes open for problems which can be resolved on the spot or in future.

• Finishing first: a problem which frequently occurs is a group or pair finishing earlier than others, which shows they’ve had enough of the activity or want to do something else. 

• We need to be ready and have some way of dealing with the situation. We could have them relax until the others finish or we may stop the rest of the class which removes the problem of boredom but be demotivating for the other students who didn’t finish esp when almost being finished and invested some considerable effort. 

• One way to avoid the problems mentioned is having a challenging task related extension for early finishers so they can do an activity while they wait. 

• This shows students they’re not just being left to do nothing. It’s a good idea to have teachers list spare activities that first finishing groups or pairs can be involved in. 

• Even when setting a time limit on pair/groupwork, we should keep an eye open to see how students progress. 

• We can make the decision about when to stop the activity based on the observable (dis)engagement of students and how near they all are to completing the task.

• Awkward groups: We need to observe how well the students in their groups or pairs are interacting together. 

• Even where we made our best judgements by friendship or streaming, it may not be an ideal pairing, due to being unable to concentrate on the task and encourage each other to talk about something else, usually in their first language. 

• In some groups members may defer to eldest person, or to the man in an otherwise female group. People with loud voices can dominate proceeding and less extroverted people may not participate fully enough. 

• Some weak students may be lost when paired or grouped with stronger classmates. In such situations we may need to change the pairs or groups. 

• We can separate best friends for pairwork, and put all the high status figures in one group so students in other groups don’t have to defer to them. 

• Or stream groups or reorganize them in other ways so all group members gain the most from the activity. 

• One way of finding out about groups is observe and note down how often each student speaks, if two or three observations of this kind reveal a continuing pattern, we can take the kind of action suggested above.

CH11

The technology pyramid - in certain classes around the world you’ll find fixed data projectors, interactive whiteboards, built-in speakers for audio material delivered from laptops with wifi (where this edition is showing its age). When teachers want the students to find something out, they have them use a search engine, like Google. In other classes, there is a whiteboard, overhead projector and tape recorder. Other schools have white or blackboards and not in very good condition. Other schools may not have a photocopier but hopefully students have exercise books. Some class situations are down to other learning aids with a pyramid diagram of resource availability. Even with no resources, if a teacher can hang up pictures as learning aids, having a class learn exercises is possible. In this chapter we see both hi-and low-tech class resources.

The students themselves - the most useful resource is the student through thoughts and experiences and bring the outside work into the room, it’s a powerful resource we drawn on. We can have them write or talk about things they like or have experienced. We can ask them what they’d do in certain situations or get them to act out scene from their lives. In multi lingual classes we can get them to share info about their different countries. Students are also good resources of explaining and practicing meaning. In young learner classes we can get them to be living clocks by using their arms for the hand as the minute and a fist for the hour, and other students have to say the time. Students can mime and act out words or phrases as the class guesses like Pictionary. Or perform dialogues and have the class guess who they are, usually for younger learners who enjoy acting.

Objects, pictures and things:  4 ways to present and manipulate language and involve students in activities.

Realia - (TEACHING AID) A pebble can be used as a stimulus for a creative activity, but this is one use for real objects, or realia. Using realia is helpful for beginners and particularly children to teach meanings of words or stimulating student activity, sometimes teachers come to school with plastic fruit, cardboard clock faces, or two telephones to simulate phone conversation. Objects which are naturally interesting can provide a starting point for a variety of language work and communication activities. Bring “evocative objects” which have a story to tell. Like, a hair ribbon, coin, button, ring, paperclip, elastic band, old photo frame, key and a padlock. Students are placed in groups, each group picks an object from the bag without looking in first. Each student in the group writes one sentence about the objects history as if they were the object. Members of the group share their sentences to make the object’s autobiography. Then they read their autobios to the rest of the class.

Find an object with an obscure use and ask students to speculate what it’s for (it might/could/probably is) and/or design various explanations to account for it (it is used for -ing). The class can vote on the best idea and if we bring in more than one object, esp when they’re not obviously connected, students can speculate on what they have in common or they can invent stories and scenarios using the various objects. They can choose 3 from a collection of objects they will place in a time capsule or would be most useful on a desert island, etc.

Some teachers use a soft ball and make learning enjoyable by throwing the ball to a student with a question or when they give an answer to whoever is meant to respond. The student then throws the ball to another person. Not all students like this, and there’s a limit to how often a ball can be thrown at people before they become fed up.

The limitations on what we bring to class depend on the size and quantity of the objects and the students tolerance, esp adults who think they’re being treated like children. As with many things, this is what teachers must asses on the basis of student reaction.

Pictures - Teachers always use pictures and graphics, drawn, from books, newspapers/mags, or photographs, as learning aids. They can be like flashcards (smaller cards to hold up for students to see, works well online), large wall pictures (students are able to see at better detail), cue cards (best for pair and groupwork), photos or illustrations (most commonly through textbook). Some teacher use projector slides, images from overhead projector, or projected computer images through Zoom by sharing screen on desktop or web browser image. Teachers also draw pictures on the board to help with explanation and language work.

Pictures of all types can be used many ways like these examples:

• Drills - lower level students, appropriate use for pictures with flashcards for response drills. Teacher holds up flashcard (the cue) before choosing a student and getting a response. Then we hold up another flashcard, nominate another student, and onward. Flashcards are useful for drilling grammar items, cueing difference sentences and practicing vocab. Sometimes, with larger wall pictures teachers use examples like There’s some milk in the fridge or He’s just been swimming, etc. We can show large street maps to practice shop vocab or have students give and understand directions.

• (Communication) games - pictures are useful for a variety of communication activities, esp where there’s the game-like feel, such as “describe and draw” activities, where one student describes a picture (which the teacher gives them) and a partner has to draw the picture without looking at the original. We can also divide class into four groups (A,B,C,D) and give each group a different picture showing a separate stage in a story. 

• Once the members of the group have studied the picture, teacher takes it away, new groups are formed, each member being from each a former A,B,C,D group, and they share the info they saw on the pictures, they then working out what the story the pictures are telling together. Sometimes teachers use pictures for creative writing. They may tell the students to invent a story using at least 3 of the images in front of them. They can tell them to have a conversation about a specified topic, and a various stages during the convo, pick a card and bring whatever the card shows into the convo.

• Understanding - one of the most appropriate picture usage is for presenting and checking meaning. An easy way of explaining meaning of the word aeroplane,is to have a picture of one. In the same way, it’s easy to check students’ understanding of a piece of writing or listening by asking them to select the picture (out of 4, perhaps), which corresponds to the reading text or the listening passage.

• Ornamentation - pictures of various kinds of used to make work more appealing, in modern course books, for ex., a reading text has a photograph which isn’t strictly required, in the same way as newspapers or magazines articles are, but the rationale is pictures enhance text, giving readers or students an extra visual dimension to what they’re reading. Some teachers object to the use of illustrations because it’s gratuitous, but if pictures are interesting they will appeal strongly to at least some members of the class, and they have power at least for the more visually oriented to engage students.

• Prediction - pictures are useful for getting students to predict what’s coming next in a lesson. The students can look at the picture and guess what it shows. (Are the people in it brother/sis, husband wife, what are they arguing about? Or are they arguing, etc) Then they listen to an audio track or read a text to see if it matches what they predicted on the basis of the picture. This use of pictures is very powerful and has advantage of engaging students in the task to follow.

• Discussion - pictures can stimulate questions such as What is it showing? How does it make you feel? What’s the artists/photographers purpose in designing it that way? Would you like to have this picture in your house? Why? Why not? How much would you pay for the picture? Is the picture a work of art? One idea is to have students judge photographs in a competition. After they receive a category of photographs they’ll judge (men in action, reportage, abstract pictures), the students decide on four or five characteristics their winning photo should have. 

• Then apply these characteristics to the finalists we provide them, before explaining why they made their choice. Pictures can also be used for creative language use, whether they’re in a book or on cue cards, flashcards or wall pictures. We may ask students to write a description of the picture, to invent a convo between two people in the picture, or in one particular role-play activity, ask them to answer questions as if they’re the characters in a famous painting. 

• We can make pictures by having wall pictures, flashcards, cue cards, from magazines and put them on cards, we can draw them, buy reproductions, photos, posters or copy them from web sources, checking copyright law. Choice of picture use is personal taste, but we should bear in mind 3 qualities pictures should possess if they’re to engage students and be linguistically useful. 

• First, they need to be appropriate for the purpose, not too childish, students may not like them, and if they’re culturally inappropriate could offend some people. Making sure students can see the detail of the picture should be considered. If wanting to keep the cards into multiple use for future classes, can consider laminating them.

Cards -cards of all kinds can be utilized, to arrange them and use for a lesson. 3 particular uses for cards are:

Matching and ordering - cards are good for matching questions and answers to two halves of a sentence. Students can match them on the desk in front of them in pairs or groups, maybe, or they can move around the class looking for their pairs. This matching can be on the basis of topic, lexis or grammatical construction. We can also use cars to order words into sentences or to put lines of a poem in order. Using cards this way is good for kinesthetic learners. It’s good for everyone else as well, if we can get students walking around the class for a brief period.

Selecting - cards work well if we want students to speak on the spot or use particular words or phrases in a convo or in a sentence. We can write words on separate cards and then, after shuffling, place them in a pile face down. When a student picks up the next card in the pack, he or she has to use the word in a sentence. Alternatively, students can choose three or four cards then have to incorporate what is on the cards into a story. Students can also pick up a card and try describing what the word on it feel, tastes or smells like so the other students can guess.

Card games - there’s as many card game possibilities in language learning as there are in real life. We can turn the card selection  into a game by interring a competitive element, having students in pairs play against each other or against other pairs. A simple vocab game can be played in which students have cards with pics on one side and words on the other. 

If they pick the picture side, they have to produce the word. If they pick the word, then they draw it and compare it with the original pic. The old game Snap can be adapted so two players have a set of cards, with the same objects etc, but whereas one player has only pics and the other only words. The cards are shuffled then the players put down the cards one at a time. If a pic and word card match, the player who shouts Snap! First wins all the cards on the table. The object of the game is for one player to end up with all the cards.

Cuisenaire rods - The Silent Way inventor, also invented these small blocks of wood or plastic of different lengths, originally designed for maths teaching. Each length is a different color. The rods are featureless, and are only differentiated by their length and color. Simple and useful for a wide range of activities, like a particular rod is a pen or telephone, a dog or a key so by holding them up or putting them together a story can be told. All it takes is a little imagination. 

The rods can be used to demo word stress, if one is bigger than the others, in a sequence representing syllables in a word or words in a sentence, it shows where the stress should be. We can also assign a word or phrase to each of five of the rods and the students then have to put them in the right order (I usually get up at six o clock). 

By moving the usually rod around and showing where it can and cannot occur in the sentence, the students get a clear visual display of something they are attempting to fix in their minds. Rods can be used to teach prepositions. Teacher can model with the rods sentences like The red on his on top of/beside/under/over/behind (etc.) the green one. 

They can show rods in different relative positions and ask students to describe them. Students then position the rods for other students to describe them in ever more complex arrangements. Cuisenaire rods are also useful for demoing colors, comparatives, superlatives, and a whole range of other semantic and syntactic areas, particularly with people who respond well to visual kinaesthetic activities.

The coursbook - methodologists argue the usefulness of course books, questioning their role, defending their use, worrying they act as methodological straitjackets, promoting their value as agents of methodological change, or arguing against about their relative merits. The benefits and restrictions of course book use is summarised below:

• Benefits - good course books prepare a coherent syllabus, satisfactory language control, motivating texts, audio cassettes/cds and other accessories such as video/DVD material, computer programs and other resource material. They’re often presented pleasingly and provide teachers under pressure reassurance even when they’re forced to plan at the last moment, they’ll be using material which they can have confidence in. 

• They come with detailed teacher’s guides, which not only provide procedures for the lesson in the student’s book, but also offer suggestions and alternatives, extra activities and resources. The adoption of a new course book provides a powerful stimulus for methodological development. Students like course books as well, since they foster the perception of progress as units and then books are completed. Coursebooks also provide material which students can look back at for revision, and at their best, visual and topic appeal can have a powerfully engaging effect.

• Restrictions - course books, used inappropriately, impose learning styles and content on classes and teachers alike, appearing to be “fait accompli” over which they can have little control. Many of them rely on Presentation, Practice, and Production as their main methodological procedure, despite recent enthusiasm for other teaching sequences. Units and lessons often follow an unrelenting format so students and teachers eventually become demotivated by the sameness of it all. Also, in their choice of topics, course books can be bland or culturally inappropriate.

One solution to the disadvantages of coursebooks is to not use them in order to use a diy approach. It’s extremely attractive and can offer students a dynamic and varied program, if they see the relevance to their own needs it enhances their motivation and their trust in what they’re being asked to do. It allows teachers to respond on a lesson by lesson basis to what is happening in the class and the teacher has an exciting and creative involvement with texts and tasks. 

In order for the DIY approach to work, teachers need access and knowledge of a wide range of materials, from course books and videos to magazines, novels, encyclopedias, publicity brochures and internet. They’ll have to make and make use of a variety of home made materials. They’ll also need the confidence to know what and what to choose, becoming syllabus designers. 

This not only makes preparing lessons a very time consuming business, but also runs risk students will end up with incoherent collections of bits and pieces of material. However where there’s time for the proper planning and organization of DIY teaching, students may well get exceptional programmes of study, which are responsive to their needs and varied in a way which doesn’t abandon coherence. 

Such an approach also ties in with a dialogic, “Dogme” -style of teaching, suggesting going back to a materials and tech fee class where language emerges as teacher and students engage in a dialogic relationship instead of taking cues from course books and syllabuses.

Using coursebooks - most teachers reject course book free and use them to help learners and give structure and direction to their teaching. The most important aspect of course books being to engage students with the content they’re dealing with. Arousing interest in the topic, and making sure they know exactly what we want them to do before we get them to open their books and disappear heads down in the pages, while we’re still trying to talk to them. Many teachers use course books as a springboard for their lesson, rather than as a manual to be strictly followed. Much of their teaching is based on the contents of the course book, but they reserve the right to decide when and how to use its parts. There are two main ways to do this:

• Omit and replace - first is deciding whether to use a particular course book or lesson. If no, there’s two courses to take, the first is to omit the lesson altogether, and we must suppose the students won’t miss it due to not teaching anything fundamentally necessary and it’s not especially interesting. However, if we think the language or topic area in question is important, we’ll have to replace the course book lesson with our own preferred alternative. Although there’s nothing wrong with omitting and replacing course book material, it can be jarring for many students if it happens too often, esp when they’ve had to buy the book themselves. It may also deny them the chance to revise (a major advantage of coursebooks), and their course may lose overall coherence.

• To change or not to change? - when we use a course book lesson, we can do so without making any substantial changes to the way it’s presented. However, if we choose to use the lesson but change it to make it more appropriate for our students, due to material not being substantial, we might add something, like a role-play after reading text, or extra situations for language practice. We might rewrite an exercise we do not like or replace one activity or text with something else, such as a download from the internet or any other home-grown items. We could reorder the activities within a lesson or ever reorder lessons, within reason. Finally, we may want to reduce a lesson by cutting out an exercise or an activity. In all our decisions, it’s important to remember students need to be able to see a coherent pattern to what we’re doing and understand our reasons for changes. 

Using coursebooks appropriately is an art which becomes clearer with experience. If the teacher approaches lesson planning in the right frame of mind, it happens almost as a matter of course.

Ways of showing - 4 major presentation aids.

• The board - the most versatile class teaching equipment, it provides a motivating focal point during whole-class grouping, used for purposes including: Note pad,  words and phrases for students to understand or to see for the first time, topics, phrases which students have elicited when building a composition plan. Writing a word on the board can show student how it’s stressed, seeing and ‘hear’ the word at the same time. We can sketch in intonation tunes or underline features of spelling. We can group words according to meaning and grammatical function. Some teachers use different colors for different aspects of language.

• Explanation aid - boards are used for explanation, as well, like if we show the relationship between an affirmative sentence and a question by drawing connecting arrows. “He is winning. Is he winning?” - changing the order of the 1st two words. We can show where words go in a sentence by indicating the best positions diagrammatically, or write up phonemic symbols or draw diagrams of the mouth, to show how a word or sound is pronounced. The board is ideal in these ways.

• Picture frame - boards can be used to draw pictures and only limited by artistic ability. Even tho who aren’t though, can usually draw a sad face or happy face. They can produce stick men sitting or running or making a run for the bus or a car. What’s more, this can be done whenever needed due to the board being available, helping students understand concepts and words.

• Public workbook - typical procedure to write up a fill in sentence or sentence transformation items, and for instance, have individual students come up to the board and write in a fill in item, or transformed sentence. This way the whole class becomes involved in seeing what the correct version is. Sometimes teachers write mistakes they’ve observed in a creative language activity and have a student who thinks they know how to correct it, to come up and try. These activities are useful due to students focusing in one place.

• Game board - there’s many games which can be played using the board. Noughts and crosses = tic-tac-toe, teachers can draw nine box frames and write different words or categories in each box, teams have to make sentences or questions with the words and if they get them right, they can put their symbol O or X on the square to draw their winning straight line. A popular spelling game involves two teams who start with the same word, each team has half the board, and they fill up their side with as many words as possible, each new word starting with the last letter of the word before. By the end of a given period of time, the team with the largest number of correct words is the winner.

• Noticeboard - teachers and students display things on boards - pictures, posters, announcements, charts, etc. Esp useful if boards are metallic for magnets.

Handwriting should be clear and easy to decipher on the board, we should organize our material in some way so the board doesn’t get covered in random and distracting ways. Draw a column on one side of the board and reserve it for new words. Put the days lessons program in a left hand column and use the middle of the board for grammar explanations or games. It’s not a good idea to turn our back on the class while we write on the board esp if it takes time. This tends to be demotivating and may cause the class to become restless, it’s best to involve the students with the boardwork as much as possible, by getting them to tell us what to write or ask them to do the writing themselves.

Overhead projector (OHP) - They can be more useful than the internet due to only needing a bulb and electricity. Anything can be projected on it, from whole texts to grammar lessons, pictures, diagrams or students’ writing. Can be better than trying to decipher handwriting, and not having to show everything all at once, blanking out certain parts with paper until ready to add it to discussion. If going through a fill in exercise and adding the answers as the students correctly choose. OHP’s can pose problems which is caused by needing electricity or bulbs failing, some models are bulky, and aren’t powerful, esp if natural light is in the room. They can also have difficult visibility depending on shiny surfaces, as well as how big or small the projector’s square is on the wall in order for image to focus. If able to problem solves these issues, OHP can be very useful as a resource.

The flip chart - large drawing easel to make notes, record main points of group discussion, amending and changing points, and can be torn off and kept for future reference. They work best in two situations: Teacher, group leader, or group scribe stands at the flip chart and records points being made. The participants can ask for changes as they see what’s being written. The most ideal is each student having their own flip chart, this way after an activity students can walk around the room to see what different groups have done and write down notes. Flip charts can be posted at different points in the room, each one standing for a topic or point of view. Students can walk around and add what is on each flip chart, writing their opinions, disagreeing or merely getting an idea of what other students are thinking based on what’s already written there.

Computer-based presentation technology - Same idea with a projector, the ability to present an activity or pictures for a class to view by using PowerPoint template, etc. Interactive whiteboard which allows students and teacher to add notes to the same program, but this isn’t the best for groupwork.

Ways of listening - Exposure to spoken language comes from a variety of sources, but mostly from the teacher, whose voice represents the single most important source of language input. Stunts also get input from listening to each and from any visiting teachers, lecturers, or class guests. It’s still common for teachers and students to listen to recorded audio material, which is cheap and convenient.

Ways of finding out - For language learners it’s beneficial for how much resources online and off there are. Dictionaries/Thesauruses - paper dictionaries which are bilingual or mono have not only the def. But also collocation, multiple meanings, pronunciation, etc for clarity. Online dictionaries/electronic pocket dictionaries/CD dictionaries (not so common) - online dictionaries are the most common and able to find besides paper and can be used for basic or multiple definitions, like macmillan English dictionary online.

Concordancers - lextutor.ca and similar can be used to give concordances and is most useful for students and teachers doing word research. By giving a student a concordance, the exercise would be to find the right word and see if they’re correct.

Searching the Internet - Using the internet and searching for valid material is a skill in itself which teachers and students need to acquire, so when searching for certain topics, language expression being needed in order to decide whether a particular site will give the info being searched. Online newspapers or broadcasting associations like the BBC or CNN can be found along with lyrics or access to history sites. Two types of sites are worth looking into: Encyclopedias - giving a range of info like biography.com can be utilized for students needing to look up geography, political systems, etc. Groups of students in 3 can look for info on 3 sites like: encyclopedia.com, Britannica.com, and wiki, then share the info they found on the three sites and discuss if the 3 sites agree on the info they were looking up.

Webquests - Employing internet resources students use for research, this project is prepared by the teacher for an intro for students on clickable sites to visit. Students may then write a report about living conditions in tenement building for immigrants to N.Y.C. in the 1820s and 1830s. The Intro phase, students are told about the construction of the tenement houses and how people were crammed into them as tightly as possible, and the students are then told they’re a member of the Council of Hygiene and your job is to investigate the living conditions in the tenements and make recommendations to city officials concerning changes needing to be made. In the Task phase, students are told they must investigate the living conditions and write a report summarizing the situation and offering solutions. They’re told to use worksheets provided to them and follow the report template they’re given. They’re advised they can always consult the additional resources sections on the site. In the Process phase students are given investigation stages and links to click on which will take them to sites the teacher selected so they can complete the task. The Evaluations phase, students are shown how their work is assessed. Allowing students to utilize and hone their skills online can help them avoid public libraries if needed.

Practicing language on the internet and on CD  - there are free internet resources as well as subscription. CDs may be used with a textbook for materials from exercises.

Ways of composing - Word processing, word editing utilized in groups of students on word processing software allows teachers to give feedback in a different way, where there are menus in software for tracking changes in Microsoft Word and shows where mistakes are made, or can give space to leave comments and corrections in different font color from students original texts.

Mousepals, chat and blogging - before computers, teachers promoted students correspond with penpals from other countries. This is in order to give meaningful and memorable experiences using English and helping appreciate different cultures around the world. Mousepals or keypals is the same idea where students correspond by email or social media or any type of message board community. Teacher could organize real time chatting events using Googletalk etc. Students or groups can write a diary to tell others what they’re doing and to provide feedback how their learning is going, which is blogging or can be an online support group or community.

Authoring - Hot Potatoes hotpot.uvic.ca is a site which allows a variety of question types to be created, whether multiple choice exercises, short answer exercises, jumbled sentences, crosswords, etc and the software on the site provides us with the types of exercises we request.

Designing websites - promoting teaching one on one through a personal site.

Virtual learning: from emails to simulated environments - easiest way to organize teaching, swap material or provide feedback to students through tech is via email. Teachers can sent assignments, have convos and give feedback on student work. There are also internet based software programs designed to offer teaching and training environments online, like Moodle (which is free), Blackboard, First Class (both paid), EduNation is also interactive (also a paid service with 30day free trial).

Six Questions  - Regarding on whether to incorporate new technology and techniques, methodology, procedures, course book or programs offered to teachers:

What is the pedigree? Where did the new idea or equipment come from, do originators have good track record in their field? If site doesn’t have whoever’s keeping up the site, be suspicious, due to:  

Who gains? If we adopt a methodological procedure, who benefits from our purchase, hopefully teacher and students, but weighing whether at least the students benefit for the price is important. 

Why is this the best way to do this? Pronunciation work is easiest when showing stress in a word by working on the board rather than sound wave, but there are ways with computer graphics which supports learning, shown later. 

Does it pass the TEA test? T= training, must be given training opportunities. E = whole area of equipment, must be certain equipment is supported in multiple countries. A = Access, which is basically the students need to have consistent and easy access to the materials needed. 

What future possibilities does it open up? Must make sure we’re investing our time and money which has potential for expansion and future growth rather than a closed system. 

How can I make it work? Teachers must weigh the best case scenario to evaluate what we’re being offered in not only a cynical but positive light, giving a chance for true judgement to determine worth.

CH 12

Teaching language construction

Students study language in class under teacher’s direction, but also independent researching of language. Vast majority of students benefit from a teacher mediated focus on specific language forms.

Studying structure and use - language study discussed in this chapter includes structure and use of language forms specifically in these areas: morphology of forms (is and am are form of be, but *amn’t is not), 

syntax of phrases, clauses and sentences (rules of question formation or the construction of if-sentences), 

vocab, including the meanings of words, their lexical grammar (enjoy can be following by -ing form but not by an infinitive), 

and collocation rules (we say even-handed but not even-footed), 

the meanings and functions phrases and sentences can convey, pronunciation, spelling, text, 

and paragraph construction including the study of genre in spoken and written text will be covered in CH 19.

Language study in lesson sequences - The status of language study depends on why and when it happens, like form the main focus of a lesson and we may say, the chief part of the lesson will be teaching relative clauses, future continuous or ways of suggesting, and design the lesson around this central purpose. 

Language study may not be the main focus of lesson sequence and may be only one element in a grander design which a decision will have to be taken about where the study activity should be placed in the sequence. Should focus on any necessary language forms take place before, during or after the performance of a communicative task or a receptive skills activity? Or should students focus on language prior to using it in a task? 

One approach often taken by materials writers is for students to study language in a variety of ways, explore a topic then use what they’ve learned to perform a task. 

Alternatively the study of language forms may happen during a task based sequence, and we may focus on one or two past tense forms in the middle of an extended narrative writing task. 

We may have our students study or research vocal to describe weather in the middle of a sequence on holiday planning. Another option is to study forms after the students have performed the task. 

This usually happens as a form of language repair when the task has shown up language problems or when students may have found the task easier if they’d been able to produce certain language forms which they didn’t use at all. 

In Ch4 studying language after the task has been completed is a feature of a different approach to Task based learning from the one in the paragraph above. 

Rather than using straight arrows sequences we will often find that Boomerang or Patchwork lessons are more suitable. 

Even where we didn’t plan when and how to include language study in a particular lesson sequence, sometimes we find opportunities to present them, which it is impossible to ignore, and as a result we have students focus on language items which we had not anticipated including. 

This may come from a student wanting to know how some element of language is constructed or why it’s constructed the way it is during opportunistic study. 

Or it may happen due to “completely unforeseen problems presenting themselves, and we may suddenly become aware of a change to offer students some language which up till now they hadn’t been able to use but which if they are exposed to it now, will significantly raise the level which they perform the task.” 

“Opportunistic teaching - studying language which suddenly ‘comes up’ - exposes the tension between planning lessons in advance and responding to what actually happens.“

“When used appropriately, the relevance and immediacy of opportunistic language study may make it the most memorable and effective kind of language study there is.”

Many study activities esp in coursebooks tend to follow the PPP model, and often for good reasons, but other times and with more advanced students, explain and practice sequences may be inappropriate. Instead we can encourage students to discover or notice language before we ask them to use it. 

At other times, we can ask students to research language as part of an ongoing lesson sequence. We may also want to preface study exercises with activities which show us how much of the language in question is already known or we can interleave the study with other elements.

Choosing study activities - Frequently teachers decide how and when to have students study language form and use on the basis of the syllabus or course book since it offers explanation and an exercise we’re happy to use almost unchanged. 

However, some of these sequences may not suit the particular styles and progress of our learners, and may thus need adjusting or replacing in some way. We may want to try out new activities or want to avoid using the same kind of activity day after day. 

How do we make these decisions?

Following planning principles - To decide how to have students study language form, we should keep in mind the general planning principles, meaning we have to think of activities which the students do before and after this study session so we don’t simply repeat the same kind of activity. We need to offer a varied diet of exercises when studying language construction both because all our student have different learning styles, and also due to wanting to help them sustain motivation.

Assessing a language study activity for use in class - teachers must decide how effective it’ll be before taking it to class, and it justify the time spend on it before and during lesson. 

We need to believe it will demonstrate meaning and use in a clear way and allows opportunities to focus on and practice the construction of language form. We must be confident it will engage learners successfully. 

One way to assess study activities is judging their efficiency and appropriate. Must rate the ease and efficacy of the activity as well as the time spent on setting up the activity being a satisfactory ratio to the payoff the activity provides. 

If an activity takes 3 mins to explain but only yields 45 seconds of practice, it’s uneconomical. An easy activity is one which is simple for the teacher to use and organize, an efficacious activity has the students get out of it what they’re supposed to, and if the activity says it will teach students how the second conditional is used, it is efficacious if it does, but it isn’t if it fails to explain the second conditional properly. 

For appropriate, we need to see if the activity is suitable for time of day, class conditions for a particular group of students, taking into account their level, educational background and cultural sensibilities. 

We will often reuse exercises used before with other groups, and have a good idea of how effective they’ll be, but we need to remember all groups are different and what is appropriate for one class may not work well with other students.

Evaluating a study activity after use in class - once lesson is done, we must evaluate the success of the activity or activities which focused on language form, whether it’s done formally or informally; This is one reason keeping records of classes and why we should conduct our own action research is important. Did the exercise help the students learn the new language (efficacy), whether it was clear, took more or less time than anticipated (economy), whether students were engaged by it (appropriacy) and whether or not we want to use it again. This eval involves us thinking about how we may modify the activity next time it’s used.

Known or unknown language?  - Unless teaching real beginners, each individual student has a degree of linguistic knowledge and ability in English. Also, as in CH 5, individual students learn at different speeds and ways. 

These 2 facts together, explain why so many classes can rightly be described as mixed ability though the difference in level between students is more extreme in some cases than others. Mixed ability makes issue for studying of new language forms since it will frequently be impossible to know whether such forms really are new or not for individual students in a class. 

Even if most students have come across the language before, it’s not necessarily the case they’ll all be able to use it. If the teacher isn’t sure whether or not our students know the language we’re about to ask them to study, we’ll need to find this info out. 

If we don’t we risk teaching students things they already know, or assuming knowledge they do not have. One way to avoid teaching already known language is to have students perform tasks and see how well they use the language forms in question before deciding whether we need to intro those forms as if they’re new. 

A less elaborate technique is to attempt to elicit the new language forms we wish them to study. If we find students can produce them satisfactorily, we’ll not need to demo or explain them all over again, and getting students to reproduce the new language accurately through the use of repetition and drills will be a waste of time. 

If elicitation is unsuccessful, we have good grounds for treating the language forms as new and proceeding accordingly.

Explain and practice - Explain and practice approach to teaching language construction is described as deductive approach, where students are given explanations or grammar rules and then, based on these explanations or rules, they make phrases and sentences using the new language. 

Explain and practice sequences are usually PPP-like, or what we’ve called “Straight arrows”, covered earlier. In the following example for teaching the present continuous, the sequence begins when the teacher engages the students by showing them pictures of people doing various actions (painting a house, fixing the roof, cutting grass, etc), the teacher tries to elicit the sentences he or she is thinking of teaching (in case the students know the language already, and so wouldn’t need it explained again). 

So the teacher can hold up a picture of someone painting a house and ask if anyone can say what she’s doing. She’s…? Does anyone know? If the students can produce the sentence, the teacher might indicate other pictures and elicit the language for them. 

If the students also perform well on this, the teacher can go straight to an activate (or immediate creativity) stage where the students try to make their own present continuous sentences, perhaps about what members of their family or friends are doing right now. 

If students don’t produce sentences, the teacher will explain the new language. So will say, Ok, look and listen, she’s fixing the roof…listen…fixing…fixing…she’s fixing the roof…everybody, and students repeat the sentence in chorus. 

The teacher will then have students make sentences about the other activities, sometimes explaining again and correcting where necessary. The students will then be involved in some repetition and cue response drilling and may do some practice in pairs. 

All of this stage of the lesson (repetition, drilling and controlled practice) is designed to foster accurate reproduction of what the teacher is introducing.

The teacher may ask for immediate creativity, where students use the new language (in this case the present continuous) to talk about their own lives or the actions of people they know. If during this stage the students perform badly, the teacher may return either to the explanation stage or to the accurate reproduction stage to reinforce what was previously introduced. The sequence summarized below:

Students perform well—> ———————————————————   ^     | | |     / \ Lead in-> Elicitation->Explanation->Accurate reproduction->Immediate creativity

^       ^     | |       |     \ —————————————Students perform badly

Explaining things - During explanation stage we’ll need to demo both meaning and language construction, which there are many ways to accomplish this.

Explaining meaning  - One of the clearest ways to explain meaning of something is to show it. If you hold up a book and say book, the meaning will be instantly clear. For actions, we can mime, like if we’re teaching, he’s running, we can mime running. Or we can use gesture, like demoing superlative adjectives by using hand and arm movements to show big…bigger…biggest, and many teachers have standard gestures to explain such things as the past (hand pointing backwards over the shoulder), or future (hand pointing forwards). 

We can also use facial expressions to explain sad, happy, frightened, etc. We can use pictures to explain situations and concepts (a picture of someone coming away from a swimming pool dripping wet hair to show, she’s just been swimming). 

We can also use diagrams, many teachers using time lines to explain time, simple versus continuous verb forms and aspect (e.g. perfect tenses). If we want to explain the present perfect continuous tense, we can use a time line to explain, I’ve been living here since 2005. 

2005 ~~~~~~~~~>now 

If we can’t show something in one of the ways mentioned, we can describe the meaning of the word. For ex., a generous person is someone who shares their time and their money/possessions with you. Nasty is the opposite of nice. 

A radish is a kind of vegetable. If describing meaning isn’t appropriate, we can list vocab items to explain concepts. For ex., if we want students to understand the idea of the caring professions (perhaps because the phrase cam up in a text), we can list a number of jobs such as doctor, nurse, social worker, and counsellor to explain the phrase. 

We can also use check questions to make sure students have understood correctly. If they’re learning how to make third conditional sentences and one of the examples is, If she’d missed the train, she would have been late for the meeting, we can ask the students questions such as Did she miss the train? And, Was she late for the meeting? 

To make the meaning clear is to translate words and phrases, which is sometimes easy, like all languages have a word for book. Sometimes though, it’s more complex. 

Many languages don’t have an absolute equivalent for the English phrase, devil may care attitude and translating idioms such as pull the wool over someone’s eyes means having to find an L1 equivalent, even if it may be constructed completely differently. 

The trick of explaining meaning effectively is choosing the best method which fits the meaning which needs to be explained. Most teachers use a mixture of some or all of these techniques. However, check questions are important since they’ll allow to determine our explanations were effective.

Explaining language construction  - one of the most common ways to explain language construction is through modeling sentences and phrases. For ex., if we want to model, he’s fixing the roof, we may say Listen, he’s fixing the roof…listen…fixing…fixing…he’s …he is…he is…he’s… he’s fixing the roof. 

What we’ve done is to say the model normally (he’s fixing the roof) before isolating certain parts of the model (fixing..fixing…he’s) We distort one of the isolated fragments (he’s) by lengthening it (to explain its contracted form, he is…he is) before returning to the isolated element and finally saying the whole model clearly so students can repeat it. 

The procedure: T models —> Isolation —> Distortion —> T returns to isolated element —> T models

Many teachers use fingers or hands to show how he is turns into he’s, or how fast and er are joined together to make a comparative adj. We can also demo word and sentence stress by beating time with our arms. 

We can show intonation patterns by “drawing” the tune in the air. Some students find these graphic gestures enough, but others like to see written explanations, diagrams on boards or overhead projectors. For ex, if we want to show how words are stressed we can use one of these: ‘teacher, rapport.

One way to demo grammatical sequence is to write words on individual cards which can then be moved around to show the difference between affirmative sentence order and the syntax of questions, for ex. We can also manipulate a set of Cuisenaire rods, which can be used to show parts of speech, stress patterns and sentence construction.

Sometimes it’s more appropriate to explain language construction with words. Like, if we want students to understand the rule about the third person singular of the present simple, we say Listen..we say I play, you play, we play, they play, but with he, she and it we add an s. Listen, I play, she plays…you play, he plays…we play, it plays. 

However we will need to be careful, to explain the construction of the language is fairy easy to do, and we can do it in language which the students we’re teaching will find easy to understand.

Practice (accurate reproduction)

During the practice or accurate reproduction phase of an explain and practice sequence, we’ll first get students repeating the new language before then moving on to practice it.

• Repetition - either choral  or individual, and when we use it, we get all the students to say the new word or phrase at the same time. For it to be effective, it’s important to start the chorus clearly (so everyone gets going at once) and help the students with the rhythm by “conducting” the chorus, using arms and hands to show where stress occurs, etc. 

• Choral repetition can be stimulating, and it gives all the students a chance to speak together rather than being (possibly) shown up individually. Sometimes teachers may divide the class in half, when working with two person dialogue, for instance, and give each of the dialogue roles to one or other half. 

• The conversation is then spoken in semi chorus, with the two halves each taking their turn to speak. When we think students have been given sufficient repetition time in chorus (or if we don’t see the need for choral repetition) we may ask for individual repetition. 

• We do this by nominating students and asking them to give us the sentence. Like: Teacher says Ok, ‘name’? Student 1, They’re painting the house. Teacher says good, next student? Student 2 They’re painting the house. Teacher says good., etc. 

• Don’t nominate students in an obvious order by going to one end of a row to the other, since this will make the a activity predictable and as a result, won’t keep students on their toes. A form of individual practice which some teachers and students find useful is for students to say the word or phrase quietly to themselves, murmuring it a few times as they get used to saying it. It may sound strange to hear everyone speaking the phrase quietly to themselves at the same time, but it gives them all a chance for individual repetition, a chance once again to see how it feels to say the new language.

• Drills - when feeling students have finished with repetition of phrase or phrases, or if we don’t think such repetition is necessary, we may organize a quick cue response session to encourage controlled practice of the new language. 

• Suppose, we have taught a group of beginner students a series of phrases such as They’re painting the house, He’s fixing the roof, She’s mowing the grass, etc., and we have pictures of these actions on cards. 

• We can use these cards as a cue, which we hope will then elicit the appropriate response. Ex. From above, Teacher holds up a card, student answers they’re painting a house. Teacher says Good. Another card to a different student, he’s fixing the roof. 

• Teacher says Good. Cues can also be verbal, Question, film to get the response, What time does the film start? Or nonverbal, Teacher shrugs there should to elicit I don’t know. 

• Cue response drills are an efficient way of getting the students to say the new language in a way which can be stimulating and challenging. 

• If we thinks students need more controlled practice of this type, we can put them in pairs and ask them to continue saying the new words and phrases to each other. 

• Perhaps they can take turns miming one of the actions or showing/drawing pictures of painting, fixing and mowing, etc, so they are, in effect conducting cue-response drills of their own.

• Discover (and practice) - In an inductive approach, things are organized differently from the explain and practice sequences we’ve looked at above. Instead of explaining meaning and construction, students see examples of language and try to work out how it is put together. 

• Thus, for ex., after students have read a text, we can ask them to find examples of different past tenses and say how and why they’re used. This Boomerang-type lesson (like PPP upside down) is esp appropriate where language study arises out of skills work on reading and listening texts. 

• If we want students to understand how speakers in informal convo use certain phrases as delaying tactics (or to buy “thinking” time), we may after letting them listen and respond to someone speaking spontaneously, get them to listen again, but this time reading a transcript of what is being said. 

• The task we give them is to find language used for buying time, and hoping they’ll identify phrases like, you know, I mean, yeah, mmm, etc. If we want students at an intermediate or upper intermediate level to work on narrative tenses, we may show them the following text, and ask them to underline all the verbs which refer to the past: (3 ex. Paragraphs are given) 

• Students will underline simple past verbs (told, was, was knocked down, ended up, had to, etc), past continuous verbs (were holidaying, was coming), past perfect verbs (had gone out, had stayed out, hadn’t looked), and hypothetical past perfect (would have died). 

• They can then discuss why each is used before going on to a practice stage and immediate creativity of their own. Discovery activities suit some students very well, working things out for themselves. 

• Many people think the language they understand in this way is more powerfully learnt (due to having to make a cognitive effort as they uncover its patterns) than it would’ve been if they’re told the grammar rules first and don’t have to make such an effort. 

• However, not all students feel comfortable with this approach and would prefer to be “spoon-fed”. A lot will depend on their level, and it’s generally easier for more advanced students to analyze language using discovery procedures than it is for total beginners. 

• The Boomerang sequence is often more appropriate with students who already have a certain amount of language available to them of the first activation stage than it is with students who can say very little. 

• Discovery activities are esp useful when students are looking at the construction of specific language for the second or third time. When teachers ask them to look at the use of different past tenses in a story and to work out how they’re used and why, we assume they know the individual tenses. 

• The detective work they’re doing now is intended to expand their knowledge and revise things they’re already familiar with. 

• When students have discovered the language construction features they’ve been looking for, we may get them to use them either as accurate reproduction or immediate creativity. 

• If this is a second or third visit to a particular area of language, however, accurate reproduction may be unnecessary or inappropriate. 

• Instead, we’ll encourage students to try to use the language for themselves, and if they can’t do this or they’ve failed to discover what they’re looking for, we may have to explain things all over agin, and then we’ll find ourselves back in the procedure we outlined, but this is less likely to happen in discovery activities than in explain and practice sequences.

Research (and practise) - An alternative to explain and practice and discovery activities (but which is nevertheless a combo of the two) is to have students do language research on their own. 

For ex. If students are working on how we use our bodies to express meaning (waving, clenching, shrugging, wagging) we could give them a number of collocations (wave my arm, clench my teeth, shrug my shoulders, wag my finger) and tell them to use them in sentences, or perhaps ask them to talk about what the actions mean. 

However it may be far more memorable for them if we asked them to do the work themselves (Ch 5 includes the kind of agency the students utilize). 

Suggest they consult a dictionary, looking up both the verb and various parts of the body to see if they appear to collocate. We can get them to access a concordance of various words such as arm, teeth, shoulders, etc. to see what collocations turn up. 

Or we can encourage them to use a search engine, like Google, to see if collocations work. For ex., if students want to know if wave and arm go together they can type waved his arm between quotation marks, and they’ll get something like the Google results we see when consulting search pages. 

When students research language, they’re far more likely to remember what they find out than if they sit passively and are given words. 

The more we can encourage them to do this, the better, although, imposing such behavior on students, whoever they are and whatever they want or need, may be inappropriate. 

Language research is more likely to be effective at higher levels, though much will depend on the personality of the students. 

As with discovery activities, when students have researched language, we may ask them to use the language they discovered, if they find this impossible to do, we may have to return to explanations and accurate reproductions. 

As with everything we’ve discussed, the degree to which teachers use repetition and drills depends to a large extend on their judgement of when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. 

Over drilling, esp as students move to higher levels, can have a very demotivating effect, but as we’ve seen and as classroom learners now, it its place it can be very effective and enjoyable. The trick is to stop as soon as possible.

CH 13 Teaching grammar

Grammar teaching sometimes happens as a result of other work the students are doing, like when they study language in a text they’ve been reading or listening to, or when a grammar problem presents itself unexpectedly in the middle of a lesson and we feel we’ve got to deal with it on the spot. 

Grammar teaching may grow directly from the tasks students are performing or have just performed as part of a focus on form approach. 

At other times, however, we rely on the coursebooks we’re using to help us teach grammar, or we plan in advance what grammar we wish our students to be studying. 

Most teachers have a favorite grammar presentation and practice activities and will often use the when they want students to study a particular piece of grammar. 

Grammar can be intro’ed in many ways, or we can show students grammar evidence and ask them to work out for themselves how the language is constructed, found in CH3. 

We’ll also want to provide opps for students to practise different grammar points, and we may want to use games to make such practice more engaging. 

In Ch12, we discussed the need for effective activities to be both efficient and appropriate. The range of activities which we’ll look at in this ch all satisfy these two requirements in different ways. We’ll also discuss grammar books and their uses.

Introing grammar - The following activities represent a range of possibilities (some simple, some more elaborate) for introing new grammar.

Ex 1 The postman Language: present simple

Age: any

Level: beginner / elementary

In this grammar presentation which follows a PPP or Straight arrows sequence in terms of ESA, students learn how to make sentences using the present simple in the third person singular. 

They’ve already learnt how to say affirmative and negative sentences in the first and second person (e.g. I like coffee, you don’t like bananas). 

The teacher holds up a number of flashcards, and elicits the words dogs, get up, doorbell, car, uniform, a lot of money. 

The students say them chorally and individually before doing a quick cue-response drill using the different pictures as prompts. 

If the pictures aren’t on flashcards, they may be on OHTs or shown through a projector or drawn on the board. Students now see the picture of Sarah. 

The teacher asks the students what they think Sarah’s job is, but doesn’t confirm or deny the suggestions. The teacher explains she’s going tot tell them what Sarah does every day. 

She says the following sentences and the students have to choose which flashcard or picture is being talked about.

• She doesn’t like dogs.

• She gets up early.

• She doesn’t drive a car.

• She rings doorbells.

• She doesn’t earn a lot of money.

• She wears a uniform.

When the students have guessed and confirmed their guesses Sarah is a postwoman, the teacher holds up the cards individually and tries to elicit the sentences about each one. 

She models the sentences and probably gets choral and individual repetition before moving on, in the accurate reproduction stage, to conduct a cue-response drill by holding up a card, so the students have to say, She rings doorbells. 

Once students are reasonably confident with the sentences, the teacher asks them to think of a real person or invent their own and what their job is. 

They’re asked to come up with 3 affirmative and 3 negative sentences about what the person does or doesn’t do every day. 

While they’re doing this, the teacher goes around and monitors their work (offering help or correcting where necessary). 

The pairs now read out their sentences and the rest of the class have to guess what profession is being described.

Ex 2 Girls’ night out Language: past simple irregular verbs

Age: young adult plus

Level: elementary

The language in this ex. Is presented to the students in a text. The sequence starts when the teacher asks the students whether girls in their country often go out together and where, if they do, they go. 

Students can discuss this in pairs or small groups before reporting back to the class. The students now look at two texts and try to decide if they’re about a night out in Rio de Janeiro, Beijing or Moscow. 

When they’ve done this, the teacher checks they all have the same answer. 

The students then match questions, such as Did you have a good time? How did you go home? What did you do? What did you have to eat and drink? And What did you wear? With the women’s answers, marked 1-7 in the texts. 

Then they fill in a chart with ticks for Sabina or Sharon, depending on whether they wore a dress, went to a bar, talked about men, went home by taxi, etc. 

Their attention is drawn to the irregular verbs by an exercise which asks them to find th past tense forms of certain verbs. Like this: 

Grammar past simple irregular verbs: wear, go, see, have, buy, get, leave, drive, meet, can, along with phonemic forms of these past tense verb forms given as a back up for those students who are comfortable reading at least some phonemic symbols.

When student identify the past tense verb forms, the teacher gets them to say them just to check they’re pronouncing them correctly. They now look at a grammar chart before doing exercises where they fill I a short text with the correct form of the verbs, be, buy, go, wear, look, have, see, etc. Past of can = could

Other ex’s given: Fig. 5 Grammar chart

Infinitive  Past+  Past -

go     went    didn’t go

Students now listen to the third girl talking about her night out. They can ask and tell each other about their own experiences of going out with friends, using the verbs they’ve been learning.

Ex. 3 Disappointment Language: reported speech

Age:           teenage plus

Level:         intermediate

This sequence teaches students the differences between reporting speech as it happens and how this changes when we report things which were said in the past. 

We show students a picture of two young men walking down the street, one of them has a cell phone clamped to his ear and and looks really happy. The other is listening to him with a look of resignation on his face. If we can’t get a picture, we simply draw two faces on the board, and mime what follows.

We give the young man on the phone a name like Jack, and we ask the students who Jack is talking to and we elicit the fact he’s talking to a young woman he met in the school canteen. Which is why he looks happy. We ask the students what the young woman is saying to Jack and elicit sentences like, You’re really nice, I’ll see you this evening, I like your jacket, Your friend gave me your number, I’ve got two tickets to a concert, you can come with me.

Then we ask some students to suggest more of the girl’s sentences and have their classmates pretend to be Jack and report the conversation. 

Then we tell the students it’s a few hours later, and Jack is back at his house looking really glum. We explain he went to the concert to meet the girl but she didn’t come. 

His mother asks him, What did she say again? We now elicit and model sentences such as, She said I was really nice, She said she would see me this evening, She said she liked my jacket, etc. 

We ask the students why the verb say is in the past (because Jack is talking about a past convo) and what effect this has (is becomes was, will becomes would, like becomes liked, etc). We can write this up on the board to help students. 

Fig. 8 is -> was will-> would like->liked

Students can now pretend to be having a convo with other people and report what they say in the same way, and then later they can report the conversation in the past.

Ex. 4 Light in space Language: should/shouldn’t have done

Age:           any

Level:         intermediate/upper intermediate

In Ex 2 above, the language the students were going to study (past tense forms) was embedded in the texts which they read. 

The next sequence uses the story of the text as a situation to provoke a number of statements using the target structure. The sequence starts when the students are asked if they ever read science fiction, making sure they understood what genre of fiction we’re talking about. 

This might develop into a quick discussion of what they read and why. The point is to get them engaged and interested in what is coming. Students can be prompted to say what they’d expect to find in a sci-fi text. 

We then ask the student to read the text in Fig 9 (long text and isn’t included) and as they do, they must find out info such as how many people are in the space station at the beginning and end of the text, whether they’re men or women, and how long they’ve been there.

After students read the text and show they understood by answering comprehension questions, we can then ask them to say what they think happens next. What is the light? What has happened to the space station and why? The object is to get them to be creative with language and with their response to the text.

Then we ask the students to list things people did, which were “bad” or “not sensible”, and write them on the board. Ex. Rosie was rude to Cathy. Cathy didn’t look at the record book. Then we ask the students if they can make a sentence about event, using ‘should not’ to elicit the sentence, Rosie shouldn’t have been rude to Cathy. 

We may write should (not) have DONE on the board. We then encourage students to make sentences about the other “silly” actions, using the same construction. 

We may get students to come up to the board and write the sentences so the board ends up looking like a list with the given sentences ‘Rosie was rude to Cathy.’ and next to them the created sentences (She shouldn’t have been rude to Cathy).

If students are having trouble pronouncing any of the parts of the sentences, we may model those parts and possibly have students repeat them either chorally or individually. 

For ex, we may focus on showing how the phrases are stressed and contracted. 

Students are now in a position to tell stories of things in the past which they should/shouldn’t have done (I should have done my homework on time/ I shouldn’t have left the car unlocked), perhaps after you’ve told personal stories to demo what’s expected.

Discovering grammar - In the following ex. Students are encouraged to work out for themselves how language forms are constructed and used. They then go on to do exercises using the language they’ve uncovered. It’s highly possible they’ve seen the language before, but this may be the 1st time they’ve studied it properly.

Ex. 5 Comparative adj’s Language: word formation; comparative adj

Age: any

Level: elementary/ pre-intermediate

In this ex, students have listened to a dialogue in which people have been comparing things. 

Before moving on to make their own sentences, the teacher wants to draw their attention to the way we make adj’s comparative. 

She could have done this by giving rules, or perhaps by ignoring such technical info and hoping students would “notice” the various possibilities. Instead, she chooses to put them in pairs and give them the exercise here 

Fig 12. Look at this! Now work these out!

old -> older How do we make one syllable adj’s into comparative adj’s?

When they finish, she checks the answers and makes sure they understand the one syllable words which end with a vowel and a consonant double the last letter, -y becomes -I and longer words are preceded by more but otherwise stays the same. 

She now moves on to a practice exercise. For ex, she can put a group of words on the board, one students draws an arrow between any two of the words and the other students have to come up with sentences, such as, An elephant is bigger than a spider, a cat is cleverer than a dog.

There are two potential problems with the way the start of this sequence asks students to discover facts about comparative adj forms. 

Firstly, it’s not always easy to give a complete grammatical picture. The exercise above doesn’t give all the necessary info about comparative forms.

There are no irregular ones here (like good - better), nor are there ex’s of words which are made comparative ether by taking -er or being preceded by more (e.g. clever in many spoken varieties of the language). Secondly, it’s not necessarily the case all students enjoy this kind of detective work. But as a way of encouraging them to think about how language works, such exercises are extremely useful, esp when, as here the language rules they’re investigating are fairly easy to discern.

Ex.6 Rules and freedom Language: functions - expressing obligation (can’t/have to/must/ allowed) Age: adult Level: intermediate

In this ex from an intermediate course book, the students are going to look at obligation language, some of which they may have already come across separately. 

The teaching sequence starts when students discuss what rules they’d expect to find in places such as airports, bars, beaches, libraries, etc. 

They then look at a number of different signs and say where they’d expect to see them and what they mean. Fig 15. “Staff only”, “Wet Paint” “Smoking Area”. 

Now students are properly warmed up and engaged with the topic, they’re asked to look again at Fig 15, They have to say which signs sentences a-e apply to and cross out those which aren’t true. 

Finally as a result of the preparation work they’ve done, they have to put the underlined words from Exercise 3 in the correct category. 

Once the teacher has check the students have been able to complete the analysis chart she can get them to do a fill in exercise where they have to discriminate between have to, don’t have to, should, shouldn’t and are/aren’t allowed. 

They then make their own sentences about what the rules are in places from the first exercise with the airport, bars, etc. and read them out to their colleagues who have to guess where they’re talking about.

Practicing grammar - This activity is designed to get students making sentences using the present continuous. It can also be used to practice the past simple. It’ has a slight game element because the other students have to guess what the speaker is talking about. 

Ex. 7 Where am I? Language: present continuous (past simple)

Age: younger learners

Level: elementary

We tell students to think of a place they’re really like to be (beach, sports field, etc) They should keep their choice to themselves. 

Now we tell them to imagine they’re in this place and we ask them to look around them and write down three things they can see using the present continuous (at a football game: A lot of people are shouting. A man is blowing a whistle. Some is kicking a ball) while they’re doing this, we can go round the class monitoring progress and suggesting alternatives or prompting students who can’t think what to write. 

One student now comes to the front of the class, reads out his or her sentences and then says Where am I? The other students try to guess. 

One advantage of the activity in this way is students are given time to think up their present continuous sentences rather than having to produce them spontaneously. But of course, we could do it as a quick-fire game, too, if this is appropriate. 

We don’t have to use the present continuous. Students could talk about a place they went to either in reality or imaginary and make sentences in the past simple about what they saw there.

Ex 8 Simon’s adventure Language: past tenses

Age: young adults plus intermediate plus

The following activity is designed to get students to look again at various past tense forms before using them for language practice.

Student are asked to read the story about Simon in Fig 18. (A long paragraph about Simon on holiday)

When they’ve done this they have to underline all the past tenses in the story, and then separate them into three different types (the past simple - was, went down looked, took, etc, the past continuous - was rising, were breaking, were running, were just coming back, and the past perfect - had woken up, hadn’t been able, had left, had looked for, had become).

Students check they’ve underlined the same verbs and categorized them in the right way with their partners before the teacher goes through the answers with the class.

Students now close their books and tell each other the story of Simon and the surfboard. When they’ve finished, they can look at the story in the book again before once again telling Simon’s story. 

Each time they do this, their fluency with the story and how to tell it increases. Repetition of this kind is extremely helpful. 

Finally the teacher can ask the students if they know any similar stories of lucky escapes, which they can talk about in small groups then tell the rest of the class what the most interesting story in their group was.

Ex 9 Matching sentence halves Language: third conditional

Age: adult

Level: upper intermediate

One of the best ways of making students think of sentence construction and sentence meaning is to get them to match sentence halves. We can do this by giving them two lists they have to match up. 

This can be done in pairs or individually. 

Fig 19: a. If Andrew hadn’t got stuck in a traffic jam i. He would have been able to answer her call.(more ex’s given)

However the activity becomes more enjoyable and interactive if we put the sentence halves on cards, and each student gets one card and has to walk around the room until they find their pair. 

They have to do with without showing their cards to other people, so they have to read them aloud and then discuss which pairing are or aren’t possible.

Ex 10 Find someone who… and other surveys Language: elementary

Age: young adult plus

Level: any

Find someone who… is the name given to an ever popular mini survey activity, and its simplest form has students get a chart which asks them to find the names of various people by going around the class and asking questions. If they ask a classmate, Do you like chocolate? And the classmate says no, they don’t write down the name, but if the student says yes, they write their name and move on to the next question. 

The activity can be adapted to suit any structure or structures, like we could make a chart asking students to find someone who hasn’t been to India, has always liked music, has never eaten raw fish, has always had coffee for breakfast, etc. 

We can also get students to write questions themselves to make it more interesting for them or at the start of term or semester, we can find out one interesting fact about each student and put these facts into the chart (who loves swimming, find someone who plays in an orchestra, etc.) .

The activity becomes an excellent way for them to get to know each other. There are many mini surveys we can use for grammar practice in this way, like constructing or having students construct any number of lifestyle questions asking such things as What time do you normally get up? 

Or, if we want students to practice past tenses, they  can design a questionnaire in order to ask When did you last go to the cinema? What was the name of the film?, etc.

Ex 11 Perfect one liners Language: past perfect continuous

Age: any

Level: intermediate to advanced

In this activity students practice the past perfect continuous tense by making sentences in response to prompts from the teacher. 

They’re required to use their imaginations and or sense of humor and the exercise is given added enjoyment by being designed as a team game.

The teacher divides the class into small teams of two to four students and tells them she’ll read sentences for which the have to find appropriate responses using the past perfect continuous. 

She starts by giving them a sentence like When I go home last night, my flatmate was asleep in the car. 

She then asks the class what reasons they can think of to explain this, and hopes to elicit sentences like 

Well, she had been listening to a program on the radio and fallen asleep. 

Or Yes, well, this is because she had been talking to a hypnotist on her cell, etc.

Now the students understand the idea of the exercise, she reads out sentences in Fig 21 a. When I came to see you yesterday, your cat was in the fridge. (Some of the sentences in a course book, about Henry VIII may not be suitable for all students, so we can com cup with sentences of our own.)

The teams are given a short time to come up with a good explanation for each sentence and if they’re correct and or appropriate, the teacher awards a point, but no team can offer sentences which has been used before.

The game-like practice forces students to make sentences using a particular verb tense. Yet by adding the element of surreal humor, it can provide enjoyment, and it requires no material or technology, able to be slotted into lessons at many different stages.

Grammar games - Many games from TV and radium as week as games people play at home, can be adapted for class use. The following four examples show how we can design games esp for learners. We hope they and games like them will engage students and encourage them to use the target structures with enthusiasm.

Ex 12 Ask the right question Language: any

Age: older children plus

Level: elementary plus

Students sit in two teams and there’s a pile of cards between them. On each card there’s a word or phrase and the cards are face down. A member of team A picks up the first card and then has to ask the other team members questions until they give exactly the answer written on the card. 

Fig 22 a car / yesterday/ blue/ a newspaper/ No, I don’t

The game which is suitable for all levels forces students to think extremely carefully about the exact construction of the questions they’re asking.

Ex 13 Putting sentences back together again Language: comparatives and superlatives Age: young learners Level: intermediate

A common way of practicing and testing syntax is to give students sentences with the words in the wrong order, bananas/ don’t / eating/ I/ like, for, I don’t like eating bananas. Such word ordering activities can be used for more game-like ways, too. Fig 23 is the longer version of the above ex.

The teacher writes the numbers 1-12 on the board twice, once for each team, then the two piles of envelopes are put at the front of the class. 

A student from each team comes up and selects an envelope, they don’t have to choose them in order, and takes it back to the team. 

When the team rearranges the sentence and writes down on a piece of paper what they think it should be, they cross off the relevant number of the envelope on the board. 

The first team to finish gets two bonus points. The teacher then looks at the sentences they have written down and each team gets a point for each correct sentence.

Ex 14 One question behind Language: assorted questions

Age: teenagers plus

Level: beginner to intermediate

This game, adapted from a television program, involves easy mental gymnastics which make very drill-like activities palatable. It’s based on the idea students should answer not the question they’re being asked now, but the previous question. 

Students are given the question, Where do you eat?, etc, and for the 1st question, they either don’t answer at all or they just say Mmmm. And then for the second question they give the answer they would have given to the first question, Where do you sleep? (In a bed). 

We could add a competitive element to this game by timing it, or seeing who can shout out the One question behind answer first. But the fun is just trying to concentrate hard enough to remember what the previous question was. 

We can choose whatever grammar area we want to make the questions with or we can have students write their own questions to use with a partner or another team. 

One question behind is very enjoyable but remember not to let it go on for too long.

Grammar books - range from lower level, size and shape, and have digestible explanations of grammar points and provides opportunities for practice of the specific points to works designed for the more serious researcher, teacher or advanced student. 

The way grammar rules are offered will depend on the level the grammar is designed for, of course, and, as a result, compromises frequently have to be made about the amount of detail we want to give about a particular grammar point. 

If we give too much detail, we may confuse lower level students, if we give too little, we may not be telling students things they ought to know.

Michael Swan, suggests good grammar rules , for a pedagogic grammar, should exhibit simplicity, truth, because some grammar rules are more true than others, clarity because if a rule is unclear, it doesn’t help anybody, and relevance because there’re some things which neither the students nor teacher really need to know. But of course, a lot depends on what it is we’re trying to explain. 

Whereas the rules which govern the formation of the third person singular of the present simple (she speaks, he drives, it watches) may be fairly easy to state, the rules for the use some and any, for ex., are somewhat more complex. 

The question grammar focused writers have to ask themselves is how far they can simplify or complicate and still write info which will be useful and appropriate.

In their grammar practice book for elementary students, a group of students discuss the use of a/an, some, any, and no with countable and uncountable nouns. (Fig 25 given with a list of examples.) 

In Carter and McCarthy’s grammar for advanced users, including teachers and language researchers, offer a significantly more complex account of how these two words are used. (Fig 27, a long description with examples to strong and weak forms of some and any) 

Carter and McCarthy’s descriptions are clearly more truthful than those is grammar designed for lower levels, due to partly recognizing strong and weak forms represent different grammatical behaviors for some and any, but mostly because they explain everything far more detail than lower level grammars do. 

Users would need to apply the criteria of simplicity and clarity as well to see whether this exemplary modern grammar matched their own needs and level.

Using grammar books - both students and teachers may consult grammar books for reasons like, a student may be drafting or redrafting a piece of written work and may want to check they’re using some aspect of grammar correctly, or alternatively, a teacher noticed a student making a lot of mistakes in one particular area, and may tell the student to look up the language in a grammar book in order to understand it better. 

Perhaps a student gets back a piece of written homework which has correction marks on it, and when they rewrite the homework, they can consult a pedagogic grammar like Cambridge Grammar of English. 

Students can also work through the explanations and exercises in self study grammars such as Grammar Practice for Elementary Students, on their own or due to teacher suggesting exercises for homework or classwork. 

Teachers often use grammar books to check grammar concepts, esp where students ask difficult questions which they can’t answer on the spot, where an area is so complex they need to revisit from time to time to remind themselves of the full picture. Grammar books are also vital for the prep of materials.

Ex 15 Say and tell Language: verb complementations [say and tell]

Age: any

Level: intermediate and above

A student has got a corrected piece of homework, and the teacher underlined a sentence “He was tired of people saying him what to do”. 

In the margin there’s a note of a problem with the verb “say” and to look at Practical English Usage, page numbers included, and rewrite the sentence before the next class. 

When the student looks in the textbook, she reads both verbs can be used with direct and indirect speech and say refers to any kind of speech whereas tell is only used to mean instruct or inform. 

Most crucially she reads say is most often used without a personal object.

Now she can rewrite the homework sentence “He was tired of people telling him what to do” and know she has got it right. Research offered a powerful alternative to teacher explanation.

CH 14 

Teaching vocabulary - In Ch 12, some of the many ways to explain meaning when teaching vocab is gone over, and is a major part of the teacher’s art. Students need to see words in context to see how they’re used. 

The best way of intro-ing new words is for students to read texts or listen to audio tracks and see or hear those words in action. Reading texts in class is to give students new language input and whenever we ask students to read or listen we’ll want them to see how words are used. 

This is why when students read text below we’ll ask them to do exercises such as matching words from the text with their definitions. 

If they read the text about plastic surgery, we may ask them to find a word in the text meaning ‘people who doctors see and care for’ (patients), etc. 

We may ask them to say what a word means, or ask them which word in the text is opposite of a given word, etc. Sometimes we draw their attention specifically to chunks of language such as being human, Does that make sense? The whole gamut of human experience, delve deep into your own consciousness, etc. in the audio interview later on. 

Other times, we set out to teach or practice a specific area of vocab, and the examples in this CH show various ways in which this can be done. We’ll also look at activities designed to get students to research words for themselves using reference and production dictionaries.

Intro-ing vocab - When we intro new vocab, there’s always a chance it’s not new to some of the students in class which is why elicitation is important, and by the time students get to upper intermediate level or beyond, we can be sure some of them will know some of the words we’re asking them to focus on. 

Ex 4 below is clearly designed to focus the students’ attention on an aspect of vocab they certainly know quite a bit about, but they may never have studied prefixes in quite such detail before.

Ex 1 Walking, running, jumping Focus: verbs of movement

Age: adult

Level: beginner

The teacher starts by showing or drawing pics, or miming of the actions in Fig 1 below, the words carefully modeled, and the teacher can conduct a rapid-cue response drill where she points to a pic or mimes the action and then nominates a student to say walk, climb, etc. Fig 1: pictures of walk, run, jump, swim, climb

Students are now asked to put the correct verb in the sentences in Fig 2. These can be projected or written on  the board, provided the students can still see the pics. 

This can be done with the whole class or the students can work in pairs. If the students have worked on the exercise in pairs, the teacher can go through the answers, making sure the students pronounce the words correctly. 

They can then (depending on their age) do a quick round of class robot where one student is a robot and the others give instructions, such as run to the window, swim to the door, etc, and the robot has to mime these activities. 

Fig 2 pics of Complete the sentences: a You run along the road. b Then you (swim is omitted to fill in answer) across the stream, etc.

Finally, students can be asked to write new instructions using the new words, as in Fig 3 below, or they can invent their own fitness exercise or design their own activity sequence, like the one in Fig 2, and whichever they choose, they write or draw their own instructions. 

Fig 3 Write instructions for this fitness exercise and use words from the boxes: walk, up, run, stand, down, on the box, sit, off the box, the, round the room, climb, jump. 

This kind of procedure, which we might call PPP, or Straight arrows if we follow the ESA form of description, is a very effective way of teaching small numbers of individual words at beginner level. 

Ex 2 Inviting          Focus: functional language

        Age: adult

        Level: pre-intermediate

The following sequences gets students to make invitations and to accept or refuse them. Like many lessons focusing on functional language, it concentrates on lexical phrases or chunks. 

The students are shown a pic of a lake or a river where people are rowing each other around, and the foreground has a woman talking to a young man with a broken arm. 

We tell the students they should read the following dialogue and see if they can guess the word or words which are missing in each of the blanks. (Providing only part of the dialogue)

Matt: Hi, Liz.

Liz: Hi Matt.

Matt: Would you like to a _________ rowing?

Liz: Rowing?

Matt: Yeah, You know, in b __________.

When the students compare their possible answers they hear the dialogue spoken on audio track so they can see if they were right (the answers are go, a boat, Of course, etc.).

We can then get them to practice speaking the dialogue. We now have the students study two elements of inviting. 

In the first place we get them to make invitations by completing these phrase stems with go rowing? Or going rowing? 

Invitation phrase stems: Do you fancy…, Day you want to…, How about…, Would you like to…, We can then get the students to repeat the different phrases both chorally (if appropriate) or individually. 

They now look at a list of phrases and have to decide whether they mean the speaker is saying yes, is not sure or is saying no.

Copy and complete the chart with the phrases.

Saying yes Not sure Saying no

I’d love to I’d love to but… I’d rather not.

(More examples given in text.)

Once again, we’ll have th students say the phrases correctly, paying special attention to the intonation they use. We help them to think of ways of completing the phrase I’d love to but…(I’m working this evening).

We can now get them to practice simple invitation-reply exchanges by cueing them with words like dinner (How about coming to dinner? That would be great).

In pairs they can write longer dialogues, and while they do, we can go round the class monitoring their progress and helping when necessary.

The students read out (or act out) their dialogues and we give them feedback.

It’s worth noticing the level of the original dialogue is somewhat higher than the language the students are being asked to produce. 

That is because we think students can cope with more language when they read and listen than they can when they have to come out with it themselves.

When we teach functional language like this, we almost always end up getting students to use phrases (rather than individual words), precisely because certain common exchanges (like inviting) tend to use these pre-fabricated chunks (I’d love to, I’d rather not, Would you like to…) as a matter of course.

Ex 3 Explaining what you mean Focus: type, kind, something you use…

Age: young adult plus

Level: intermediate

The following sequence helps students with vocab they can use when they don’t know the words to describe things. 

The sequence starts when students talk to each other in pairs or groups and discuss situations in which they need to explain things to visitors, family and friends, etc. 

They then read some descriptions and have to say (guess) what is being described. 1. ‘It’s a type of sport which you do in the sea. You need a board and big waves. It can be dangerous, but it’s really exciting.’ (More ex.’s given)

They can check their answers with words written at the bottom of the page (surfing, curry, mud/earth, etc) before discussing with the teacher a) when the expressions in bold are used (when we don’t know a word for something or we want to explain the meaning of something), and b) whether thing and stuff are used for countable nouns or uncountable nouns. 

Now the words and phrases have been properly intro’d, the students do a practice exercise to help them get used to them. Fig 5 Put the words in order to make sentences. Then match the descriptions to the pics. 1 It’s in windows something find you front (in example, pic looks like a plant)

Next stage of the lesson sequence is for students to compile a list of things so they can use these things in subsequent exercises. In groups, they have to a) draw things which are rectangular, oval, round or square, b) name animals which are enormous/huge, tiny, etc. and c) name things which are smooth, rough, sticky, soft, or hard. 

They then compare their choices with a speaker on an audio track. Students are now in a position to describe things for each other. They do this by taking part in an info-gap activity where one student in each pair has the crossword, Fig 6 for student A and the other has the crossword for student B. 

They take turns describing the words in their crosswords by explaining what they are rather than naming them. So when student A asks student B what 1 down is, student B can reply It is stuff you make candles with and it is sticky when it is hot.

As with the two previous examples, the sequence has followed a fairly straightforward PPP/Straight arrows type progression. As a result of what they’ve done, students can now start to explain themselves when and if they have trouble remembering words. 

Ex 4 Word formation Focus: prefixes and suffixes

Age: young adult plus

Level: upper intermediate

The following sequence is from First Certificate Gold, designed for people studying the Cambridge ESOL 1st cert exam, which is taken at the end of the upper intermediate cycle of study. 

Students are reminded of a sentence from a text they’ve just read (And so began two hours and forty minutes of disbelief…), and they’re then asked to say what various prefixes mean. 

When they’ve discussed these with their teacher, they look at a number of words with suffixes, such as quickly and backwards (for adverbs), employment and happiness (for nouns) or brownish and useless (for adj’s). 

Students are now given a kind of construction kit exercise where they have to try and make as many words as they can by adding prefixes and suffixes. 

This can be done in pairs or groups, or as a team game where they have a set time limit. Finally, they’re asked to choose six of the words they’ve formed so they can write a sentence for each. 

They can then share their various sentences so other students can look at them and perhaps amend or correct them. 

The class can vote for the sentences they like the best or the students can turn their own sentences into mock test-items for their classmates to try.

Add a prefix or suffix to the word in italics so it has an appropriate meaning in the sentence. 

Sienna could not hide her appointment when she heard she had failed the test. 

Fig. 7 What do the following prefixes in bold mean? EX: re- means ‘again’. 

Fig 8 Make as many words as you can by combining different parts of the box. Dis appoint ment

Practicing vocab - In the following lesson sequences the aim of the activity is either to have students use words they more or less know, but which they need to be provoked into using or to get them to think about word meaning, esp in context. 

Ex 5 Word circle Focus: compound nouns

Age: young adult plus

Level: intermediate

In this activity students look at a wheel of words and try to say which words combine with book and TV to make compound words. 

Start by showing the students the wheel, then make sure they realize while book + case can make bookcase, TV+case doesn’t work in the same way. Students are put into pairs or groups and told to come up with the combos as quickly as possible. 

They should do this without using dictionaries first, then when we go through answers with the class we can put up some of them on the board and ask students to check dictionaries to see if they’re right. (Some won’t be.) 

Students now use these compound words in sentences, or some of them can be put in naughts and crosses squares so students have to make sentences using them to win a square. 

Alternatively, students can choose any three of the words and write a questionnaire to find out about people’s attitudes or habits concerning TV or books.

Ex 6 Word map Focus: houses, rooms, objects

Age: any

Level: any

Word maps are extremely engaging to build up vocab knowledge as well as provoke students into retrieving and using what they know. In this sequence, students are going to work on aspects of houses and other things in them. 

We start by putting the start of a map on the board: write house and circle it, a line from the house will write bedroom and kitchen on the other side. Students then come to the board and add some rooms to the diagram. 

Students should by now begun to get the idea even if they haven’t done a word map before, but be sure to elicit words for one of the rooms, such as the kitchen. 

We can then put students in groups, allocate one room per group and they’re given pens and told to add as many words as they can to the word map for the room. 

It will be entirely appropriate if they think they’re in a competition with the other groups to see who can find the most words.

The board gradually fills up with words and students help each other by offering words they know but perhaps other members have forgotten. 

They can look for words in dictionaries and while we walk around monitoring progress they can ask for one or two words they don’t know, but if there’s a game element here, we’ll have to be fair about how much help we give. 

Once the word map is complete or as full as it’s likely to be we can make sure students say the words correctly before going on to ask them to describe their favorite room at home or have a discussion about why people don’t put televisions in bathrooms (usually) or fridges in the bedroom. 

We can give students a picture or plan of an empty room and ask them to decide what to put in it.

Word maps are sometimes used by teachers to show students how words group together. Getting students to build app their own maps by working in groups has the added advantage of making them try to remember some of the many words they know, while at the same time learning new words from their peers. 

Ex 7 In the queue Focus: physical description 

Age: adult

Level: beginner

In this practice activity designed to get students using the language of description (he’s quite tall, she has blonde hair, he has a beard), an artificial info gap is created by getting the students to look at different pics.

The teacher starts by putting a pic of people in a queue on the board and gives the students a list of names, they then ask questions, What’s John like? To which the teacher replies He’s quite tall with grey hair and glasses. He has a beard. 

One student then comes up and points to the correct person in the pic. The teacher now puts the students in pairs.

In each pair one student is A and the other B. Each student A looks at the following pic which is in color in the original and is told a) to find out which of the following names apply to which of the numbered people in the cinema queue: Cathy, Alice, Mick, Jim, Karly and b) to answer B’s questions about the other people in the pic. 

Thus A will ask What’s Alice like? And B will reply, She’s quite young and she has red hair. She’s quite short, too.

Each Student B has the same pic with different captions and is told a) to find out which of the following names apply to which of the numbered people in the queue: Kit, Jane, Monica, Philip, Susan and b) to answer A’s questions about the people named in the pic. 

Thus B will ask What’s Kit like? And A will respond He’s about 50. He’s quite short and well built. He’s bald and he has glasses. 

When the activity is done, the teacher has different students describe the various characters, Mick, Alice, Susan, etc, to check they are happy using the description language.

Vocab games - There are many games which are appropriate for use with collections of vocab items. 

Sometimes games which are not designed esp for language students work equally well in our lessons. 

These include Pictionary, where players draw words which their team then have to guess, Call my bluff, and charades, where players act out the title of a book, play, or film. 

The three game examples in this section are designed to engage students, though only one of them involves the kind of guessing which many games often include.

Ex 8 Got it! Focus: word recognition/ enjoyment

Age: any

Level: elementary plus

This game is designed to engage students with a list of vocab items which will be used in the lesson sequence which follows. It doesn’t involve any guessing or complex mental processing. 

As a result of it, students see and hear a range of words and have a good time doing it. 

Students are put in groups of four or five and sit around a table with the teacher giving each group a collection of 20-30 words written on individual cards or pieces of paper (words associated with cooking, such as slice, chop, cut, frying pan, saucepan, dish). 

The students have to place the cards face up on the table in front of them so all of them can be seen.

The teacher now reads out the words one by one and the task of each individual in a group is to try to snatch the card with the word on it. 

Then they do this before the other members of the group, they have to hold the card up and shout Got it! 

Each student keeps the cards they have managed to snatch, and so at the end of the game there’s a winner in each group, and an overall winner who has collected the greatest number of cards. 

Got it! Is an entertaining way of getting the class going. 

The words can now be used in a lesson about cooking, they can form the basis of a word map, or students can be asked to look hem up in dictionaries or use them in conversations or writing.

Ex 9 Backs to the board Focus: explaining word meaning

Age: young adult plus

Level: intermediate plus

In the following game, students have to explain the meaning of a word or phrase to one of their team members so he or she can guess what the word is. 

Students are put into small teams, and each team one member sits with their back to the board. 

The teacher now writes a word or phrase on the board. All of the group who can see this for have to explain what it mean with out saying the word or phrase itself to the team member who has their back to the board. 

The first student to guess the word or phrase gets a point for their team.

The game can be made more formal in structure if the students with their backs to the board have to get their info by asking yes/no questions only, Is it more than one word? Can you find it in the house?

Hidden definitions is esp effective if the teacher puts up words and phrases which the students have recently studied.

Ex 10 Snap! Focus: word meaning

Age: any

Level: beginner

This game is particularly useful for simple word meaning recognition. It can be played in pairs or groups.

Two students have a pack of cards each. 

One pack has pics, the other has words which relate to the pics. 

The students deal their cards, putting down each card at the same time as their partner. 

When a pic card, a pic of a bird, matches the word card (bird) put down at the same time, the first person to say Snap! keeps the pair of cards. 

The object of the game is to collect as many pairs as possible. 

Many games like Snap! have been replicated online and can be played by students working on their own. 

Fig 13 shows just this kind of activity where the player can use the arrows under the pic or the word to find the different options so words can be matched with their correct pics. 

Fig 13 has pic of an Elephant the other card has the word lion, the arrows below them will allow toggling to either side to see more options. www.manythings.org

Using dictionaries - whether in book form, online or other sources is perhaps the greatest resource students can have at their disposal, but sometimes the least widely-used resource learners work with. 

This is sad due to containing a wealth of info about words, including of course what they mean, and also how they operate. 

In this section we’ll discuss the difference between reference and production dictionaries and then look at exercises designed to train students in dictionary use or which incorporate dictionary use into lesson sequences.

Reference and production dictionaries - the former the most frequently used and the latter a newer type. 

A reference dic is one where students look up a word to see what meanings it has, how it’s used and the way it’s spelt and pronounced, in Fig 14. is text of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English CD on the page for ‘research’, which has two columns for varying definitions and examples.

In today’s dictionaries there’s a good chance there’ll also be extra info telling the user about such things as: differences between British and American usage, like Monday to Friday inclusive as opposed to American Monday through Friday. 

Similar words, like the difference between gaze, stare and gape. 

Frequency in different media, like the fact certainly is more common in speech than in writing like in Fig 15 the noun research is in red, which instantly tells us it’s one of the 3k most common words in English, S2=in the top 2k most common words in speech, W1= in the top 1k most common words in written English. 

Levels of formality, like the fact indolent is a formal word. 

Connotation, like the fact the vagabond is esp literary and certain words are taboo.

Dictionaries are generally used when students have already come across a word and then look it up to check they know how to use it. 

Sometimes they’ll find a word in their bilingual dictionaries and then check with a monolingual learner’s dictionary to see if they have understood correctly.

Production dictionaries are designed for students to use the other way around, starting with a meaning they wish to express and looking for the word expressing it. 

Suppose they wish to express the idea of someone secretly listening to someone else while standing near him, perhaps on the other side of a door. 

A native speaker would choose the word eavesdrop to describe the situation. 

The foreign student might find this in a bilingual dictionary but would have more trouble with a reference MLD since not knowing the word in the first place, they wouldn’t be able to look it up.

In a production dic, students look for a general word they already know, and which is a bit like the concept they wish to be able to express in English. In the case of eavesdrop, for ex., eavesdrop might be ‘listen’. 

Opening a production dic, Longman Essential Activator is given example, the student will find the entries, in Fig 15. 

Going down the column, they come across a word which they can see, through its definition and the ex’s given, is exactly what they’re looking for and they can now use it with confidence.

Reference MLDs are packed full of info which is invaluable to students checking word use. Production dictionaries, allow students to find new words. 

Dictionary activities - designed to train students in how to use dictionaries and also to get them to use dictionaries as part of normal classroom work. 

We need to persuade students dictionaries can give them extraordinary power, and we’ll extol the virtues of dictionaries not only by talking of them, but by using them ourselves, if and when students ask us awkward questions about the meanings of words, for example. 

The second stage of trying to have students use dictionaries successfully involves training them how to read and understand the info in the various entries. And stage 3, we make sure we include dictionary use in our lessons.

Ex 11 Training activities Focus: understanding dictionary entries

Age: young adult plus

Level: pre-intermediate/intermediate

The ex in Fig 16 from a course book for pre intermediate learners is based on the assumption students will use a bilingual dictionary and points out to them some of the things they can find out from it.

How can a good dictionary help me? - A bilingual dictionary is important for efficient language learning. It tells you more than the meaning of the word, also covering grammar, pronunciation, and stress. 

It also will give example sentences, sometimes. Fig 16 Gives example to what’s been covered with pronun., stress, meaning, and Dictionary abbrev.: sth - something, sb, n., adj.,v.,prep.,adv.,pron. 

When students start using dictionaries esp MLDs for the first time, it’s good to include small training activities of this kind, lasting a few minutes each, in every lesson. 

Ex, show them the entry for swollen, and ask them questions like What parts of speech can ‘swollen’ be? How do you know? How many meanings of swollen are given? How do you know? Are any of the uses of swollen particular to any special national or regional language variety? How do you know? 

Fig. 17 shows the definitions of swollen, which goes over the questions listed above.

Ex 12 Definition game Focus: working with definitions

Age: young adult plus

Level: upper intermediate

This game teaches students how to use dictionaries and esp, gets them used to the way in which definitions are written. Modern MLDs often use a special defining vocab, which means even the most complex words are explained using word students will be able to understand. 

For ex, pernickety is described as informal worrying too much about small and unimportant things = fussy. 

The game works with these same definitions, and the special feature is the student who has to try to guess the answer is the same student who chooses, without knowing, what the question is. 

The class is divided into two teams. Each team has at least one copy of a dictionary - in this case OALD (Oxford). 

One student in team A has to choose a number between 1 and 1364, the number of pages in the dictionary. They then say left or right to indicate the column on the page they have chosen. 

They then give a number between 1 and 10, and One member of Team B then looks for let’s say, the 5th word in the right hand column of whichever page of the dic. 

They then read the definition of the word back to the Team A member who has to guess what the word is.

For the example the definition is verb: to say one does not know of, is not responsible for, or does not believe in something. If the member of Team A guesses the word disavow straight away, they get three points. 

If they have to be given the first letter but can then guess it, they get two points, and if they’re given two letters, they get one point. 

Disavow is an extremely rare and difficult word, but many words are chosen at random like this, because of how it’s instructed above, but if we want to make sure all the words are ones which the students should know, we can change the game slightly. 

The team A student still chooses the page number, but this time they might choose the fourth red word, if red list he particular dictionary use to indicate word frequency. 

If the word has three different meanings, the member of Team B will say there’re three different meanings and ask which one the Team A student wants. 

If there is no red word on the page the student has selected, the players go to the next page or the one before it.

 Ex 13   At home with do, make and take Focus: collocations

Age: teenage plus

Level: elementary

This activity is a combo of dic. training and a language awareness exercise. 

It focuses on three verbs which colocate strongly with various noun phrases but for which there’re no easy rules as to why we use one verb rather than another.

Students are given the following grid and have to say which verb collocates with the noun phrases in the right hand column. 

They can do this activity in pairs or small groups. If they are unsure or if they need to check, we suggest they should look of info in their dictionaries. We’ll tell them to think carefully about which word to look for in each case.

The grid: 1st column: do, 2nd column: make, 3rd column take 

O (make) a lot of noise

  O always __(do)____ their homework

(More examples given)

While students are doing the activity, we can walk around the class monitoring their efforts and helping them look up words either in their paper dics. or CD/online. 

This is where we can be esp useful in helping them to see what they need to find when checking an entry. 

For ex, if they want to check which verb goes with a lot of noise, they can look at the word noise on their dic and they’ll find the info shown in Fig 18: multiple examples of noise, plus the definition.

They can investigate the collocation in bold further by looking at a list of phrases in which noise occurs.  

Phrase bank: make all the right noises about sth. 

  Make a lot of noise about sth. 

  Make a noise. 

  Make noises about doing sth. 

  Noise levels. 

  Noise of. 

  Noises off. 

  Traffic/engine/background etc noise.

Once they’ve completed the grid, they can ask each other questions such as, Who makes a lot of noise in you house? Or, Do you make a lot of mistakes? The attractive feature of this activity is it genuinely helps students to learn more about make, do and tell, while at the same time ensuring they become better dic. users.

Ex 14 Monday morning Focus: previewing vocab

Age: adult

Level: advanced plus

When working with advanced students the teacher Harmer sometimes likes to start the week with a vocab worksheet, and it contains various vocab questions which relate to words and phrases which the students are going to meet during the forthcoming week’s work. 

These words and phrases either relate to the topics they’re going to study or they come from the materials Harmer is expecting to use in the next few days. 

Having prepared such a worksheet we can come to the first lesson of the week and start by getting students to work in pairs and use whatever dics are available to complete the tasks.

Fig 20 1. Why might someone be TOLD OFF?

2. What is the difference between…SYMPATHY and EMPATHY?

etc.

The advantage of this procedure is the students start the week by claiming words and phrases as their own. Of course we’ll monitor their work, but it’s they who are in charge, who have agency, and by making dic. use central to the activity, we reinforce understanding of the benefits students can get from dic. work.

Ex. 15 Films Language: film vocab

Age: teenage and above

Level: elementary

If students are doing a project on films, they need to find appropriate words and phrases for the topic. They could rely on the teacher or the textbook, both or either of these could give them everything they need, but they may be working on their own, in which case they need to consult other sources of info.

Students who consult a production dic. will be able to research words they have possibly never heard or seen before, so within the film topic, they could search for words for films and would see: movie, cinema, go to the cinema, etc., types of film, like horror, comedy, etc, people in film, actors, star, actress, etc, people who make films, like director, producer, etc, and various other categories including what happens in a film.

Provided the dic manages to predict the words which the students are likely to need, these production materials are an ideal tool for language research and the students can now use the words for the project or task they’re involved in.

Fig 21 shows what happens in a film - lists the definitions for story, plot/storyline, scene, special effect, ending, and twist. From Longman Essential Activator.

When students use dics - many teachers are frustrated by students overuse of dics, esp electronic ones. 

They find their students want to check the meanings of words at any stage of the lesson, even for ex, the teacher or some other student is in the middle of saying something and hopes for the other students full attention. 

At the same time however, this chapter makes clear we want to encourage students to use their dics in appropriate circumstances because we believe they’re such a valuable resource.

Students need to know when dic use is appropriate and acceptable and when it’s less useful as in the ex. in the prev. Paragraph. 

It’ll be useful to talk to them about how it’s a good idea to try to read a text for gist and guess the meaning of some unknown words before later perhaps using a dic to check the meaning of words they don’t know. 

They need to understand if they overuse dics when they should be listening they lose the benefit of hearing English spoken naturally and the opportunity this gives them to practice their listening skills, however we should also be sympathetic to the students desire to understand every word since most people speaking a foreign language have this need.

The best way to resolve this is to come to some kind of a bargain with the students, very much like the bargain a teacher struck with students involving students agreeing when they’ll and won’t use their dics. This together with out use of dic activities like the ones mentioned above, will ensure successful and appropriate dic use in our lessons.

CH 15 Teaching pronunciation 

Pronunciation issues - almost all English language teachers have students study grammar and vocab, practice functional dialogues, take part in productive skills activities and try to become competent in listening and reading. 

Yet some of these same teachers make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing, and possible they’re nervous of dealing with sounds and intonation, perhaps feeling they have too much to do already and pronunciation teaching will only make things worse. 

They may claim even without a formal pronunciation syllabus, and without specific pronunciation teaching, many students seem to acquire serviceable pronunciation in the course of their studies anyway. 

However, some students are able to acquire reasonable pronunciation without overt pronunciation teaching shouldn’t blind us to the benefits of a focus on pronunciation on our lessons, since it not only makes students aware of different sounds and sound features, and what these mean, but can also improve their speaking immeasurably. 

Concentrating on sounds, showing where they’re made in the mouth, making students aware of where words should be stressed, and all these things give them extra info about spoken English and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and intelligibility.

In some particular cases pronunciation helps students get over serious intelligibility problems. 

One speech pathologist was able to help a Cantonese speaker of English by working on his point of articulation, changing his focus of resonance. 

Whereas many Cantonese vowels occur towards the back of the mouth, English ones are nearer the front frequently or in the centre of the mouth.

The moment you can get Cantonese speakers to bring their vowels further forward, increased intelligibility occurs. 

With other language groups it may be an issue of nasality like with Vietnamese or the degree to which speakers do or don’t open their mouths. 

Some language groups may have particular intonation or stress patterns in phrases and sentences which sound strange when replicated in English, and there are many individual sounds which cause difficulty for speakers of various different first languages.

For all the people, being made aware of pronunciation issues will be of immense benefit not only to their own production but also to their understanding of spoken English.

Perfection vs intelligibility - we need to decide how good our students pronunciation ought to be. Should they sound exactly like speakers of a prestige variety of English so we’d assume they’re British, American, Australian, or Canadian? Or is this too much and the teacher’s pronunciation model should be aspired to, or be happy making themselves understood.

The degree students acquire perfect pronunciation depends on their attitude to how they speak and how well they hear. 

In the case of attitude, there’re a number of psychological issues which may well affect how foreign a person sounds when they speak English. 

Some students want to be exposed to a native speaker variety, and will strive to achieve pronunciation which is indistinguishable from a 1st language English speaker. 

Other students don’t esp want to sound like inner circle speakers, but wish to be speakers of English as Int’l or global language and it doesn’t try sounding exactly like someone from Britain or Canada.

It may show by sounding more like their teacher, and often students want to retain their own accent when they speak a foreign language due to its part of their identity. 

Certain phonological differences may not be critical to a speaker’s ability to make themselves understood. 

Under the pressure of personal, political and phonological considerations it’s customary for language teachers to consider intelligibility as prime goal of pronunciation teaching. 

This implies students should be able to use pronunciation which is good enough for them to be always understood. If their pronunciation isn’t up to this standard then clearly there’s danger they’ll fail to communicate effectively. 

If intelligibility is the goal, then it suggests some pronun.’s features are more important than others. Some sounds have to be right if the speaker is to get their message across, though others may not cause a lack of intelligibility if they’re used interchangeable. 

In the case of individual sounds, much depends on context of the utterance, frequently helping the listener to hear what the speaker intends. However, stressing words and phrases correctly is vital if emphasis is to be given to the important parts of messages and if words are to be understood correctly. 

Intonation is a vital carrier of meaning by varying the pitch of our voice we indicate whether we’re asking a question or making a statement, enthusiastic or bored, or whether we want to keep talking or whether on the contrary we’re inviting someone else into the convo.

The fact we may want our students to work towards intelligible pronunciation rather than achieve an L1 speaker perfection may not appeal to all. 

Despite what we’ve said about identity and global nature of English, some students do intend to sound like a native speaker. In such circumstances it’d be absurd to deny them their objective.

Problems - 2 in particular occur in much pronunciation teaching and learning. 

What students can hear - some students have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which we want them to reproduce. 

Frequently speakers of different first languages have problems with different sounds, esp where ‘b’ and ‘v’ for instance with Spanish speakers, not having the same two sounds in their language. 

If they can’t distinguish between them, they’ll find it almost impossible to produce the two different English phonemes. 

There are two ways of handling this: we can show students how sounds are made through demo, diagrams, explanation, but also draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear on a recording or in our own convo. 

In this way we gradually train the students’ ears, and when they can hear correctly, they’re on the way to be able to speak correctly.

What students can say - all babies are born with the ability to make the whole range of sounds available to human beings, but as we grow and focus in on one or two languages, we lose the habit of making some of those sounds. 

Learning a foreign language often presents us with the problem of physical unfamiliarity, it’s physically difficult to make the sound using particular parts of the mouth, uvula or nasal cavity. 

To counter the problem, we need to be able to show and explain exactly where sounds are produced. Where the tongue in relation to the teeth are, what is the shape of the lips when making a certain vowel.

The intonation problem - for many teachers the most problematic areas of pronunciation is intonation. Some of use and many students find it extremely difficult to hear ‘tunes’ or to identify the different patterns of rising and falling tones. In such situations it’d be foolish to try to teach them. 

The fact we may have difficulty recognizing specific intonation tunes doesn’t mean we should abandon intonation teaching altogether. 

Most of us can hear when someone is surprised, enthusiastic or bored, or when they’re really asking a question rather than just confirming something they know already. 

One of our tasks, is to give students opportunities to recognize such moods and intentions either on an audio track or through the way we ourselves model them. 

We can then get students to imitate the way these moods are articulated, even though we may not be able to discuss the technicalities of the different intonation patterns themselves. 

The key to successful pronunciation teaching isn’t so much getting students to produce correct sounds or intonation tunes, rather to have them listen and notice how English is spoken either audio or video or by their teachers themselves. 

The more aware they are, the greater chance their own intelligibility level rises.

Phonemic symbols: to use or not to use? - It’s possible to work on the sounds of English without ever using any phonemic symbols, and we can get students to hear the difference between sheep and cheap for instance or between ship and sheep by saying the words enough times. 

There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be effective, since we can also describe how the sounds are made by demoing, drawing pics of the mouth and lips or explaining where the sounds are made. 

However, since English is bedeviled for many students by an apparent lack of sound and spelling correspondence though in fact most spelling is highly regular and the number of exceptions fairly small, it may make sense for them to be aware of the different phonemes, and the clearest way of promoting this awareness is introduce the symbols for them.

There’re other reasons for using phonemic symbols, paper dics usually giving the pronun. of headwords in phonemic symbols. If students can read such symbols, they can know how the word is said even without having to hear it. 

Online dics have recordings of words being said, as well. When both teacher and students know the symbols, it’s easier to explain what mistake has occurred and why it’s happened, we can also use the symbols for pronun. tasks and games.

Some teachers complain learning symbols places an unnecessary burden on students. 

For certain groups this may be true, and the level of strain is greatly increased if they are asked to write in phonemic script, but if they’re only asked to recognize rather than produce the different symbols, then the strain isn’t so great, esp if they’re intro’d to the various symbols gradually rather than all at once. 

In this CH, we assume knowledge of phonemic script is of benefit to students.

When to teach pronunciation - like any aspect of language, grammar, vocab, etc, teachers have to decide when to include pronun. teaching in lesson sequences. There’re a number of alternatives to choose from.

Whole lessons - some teachers devote whole class period working on one or two sounds, it can make sense to work on connected speech, concentrating on stress and intonation, over some 45 minutes, provided we follow normal planning principles. 

We could have students do recognition work on intonation patterns, work on the stress in certain key phrases, and then move on to the rehearsing and performing of a short play extract which exemplifies some of the issues we have worked on. 

Making pronunciation the main focus of a lesson doesn’t mean every minute of the lesson has to be spent on pronunciation work. 

Sometimes students may also listen to a longer recording, working on listening skills before moving to the pronunciation part of the sequence. 

Sometimes they may look at aspects of vocab before going on to work on word stress and sounds and spelling.

Discrete slots - some teachers insert short, separate bits of pronunciation work into lesson sequences. Over a period of weeks, they work on all individual phonemes, either separately or in contrasting pairs. 

At other times they spend a few minutes on a particular aspect of intonation or on a contrast between two or more sounds. 

Such separate pronunciation slots can be extremely useful, and provide a welcome change of pace and activity during a lesson. 

Many students enjoy them, and they succeed precisely because we do not spend too long on any one issue. 

However, pronunciation isn’t a separate skill, it’s part of the way we speak, even if we want to keep our pronunciation phases separate for the reasons we’ve suggested, we’ll also need times when we integrate pronunciation work into longer lesson sequences.

Integrated phases - many teachers get students to focus on pronunciation issues as an integral part of a lesson. When students listen to a recording one of the things we can do is draw their attention to pronunciation features on the recording, if necessary having them work on sounds which are esp prominent or getting them to imitate intonation patterns for questions, as an example. 

Pronunc. teaching forms a part of many sequences where students study language form. When we model words and phrases, we draw our students’ attention to the way they are said, one of the things we want to concentrate on during an accurate reproduction stage is the students’ correct pronunciation.

Opportunistic teaching - teachers may stray from their original plan when lesson realities make this inevitable and teach vocab or grammar opportunistically because it has come up, so there’re good reason why we may want to stop what we’re doing and spend a minute or two on some pronunciation issue which has arisen in the course of an activity. 

A lot will depend on what kind of activity the students are involved in since we’ll be reluctant to interrupt fluency work inappropriately, but tackling a problem at the moment when it occurs can be a successful way of dealing with pronunc. 

Although whole pronunciation lessons may be an unaffordable luxury for classes under syllabus and timetable pressure, many teachers tackle pronunc. in a mixture of the ways suggested above.

Helping individual students - We frequently work with the whole class when we organize pronunc. teaching, and conduct drills with minimal pairs or we have all of the students working on variable stress in sentences together. 

Yet as we have seen pronunc. Is an extremely personal matter, and even in monolingual groups, different students have different problems, different needs and different attitudes to the subj. In multilingual groups, students from different language backgrounds may have very different concerns and issues to deal with. 

One way of responding to this situation, esp when we’re working with phonemes, is to get students to identify their own individual difficulties rather than telling them, as a group, what they need to work on. 

So, when revising a list of words we might ask individual students which words they find easy to pronounce and which words they find difficult. We can then help them with the difficult words. 

We can encourage students to bring difficult words to the lesson so we can help them with them. 

This kind of differentiated teaching is esp appropriate because students may be more aware of their pronunc. problems and be able to explain what they are, than they are with grammar or vocab issues.

It is vitally important when correcting students to make sure we offer help in a constructive and useful way. 

This involves us showing students which parts of the mouth they need to use, providing them with words in their phonological context, and offering them continual opportunities to hear the sounds being used correctly.

Examples of pronunciation teaching - The areas of pronunciation which we need to draw our students’ attention to include individual sounds they’re having difficulty with, word and phrase/sentence stress and intonation, but students will also need help with connected speech for fluency and with the correspondence, or lack of it, between sounds and spelling. All of these areas are touch on in examples below.

Working with sounds - we often asks students to focus on one particular sound. This allows us to demo how it’s made and show how it can be spelt, a major concern with English since there’s far less one to one correspondence between sound and spelling than there is in some other languages, esp Romance languages. 

We can have students identify which words in a list, including bird, word, worm, worth, curl, heard, first, lurch, etc, have the sound /3:/. They’re then asked to identify the one consonant (r) which’s always present in the spelling of words with this sound. 

We could also show or demo the position of the lips when this sound is made and get students to make the sound and say words which include it. 

Two more examples show specific approaches to the teaching and practicing of sounds.

Ex. 1 Ship and chip Sounds: / S / and / tf / - (what the symbols look like)

Level: intermediate

Contrasting two sounds which’re very similar and often confused is a popular way of getting students to concentrate on specific aspects of pronunc. 

The sequence starts with students listening to pairs of words and practicing the difference between /f/ and /tf/, e.g.: ship chip, sherry cherry, shoes choose, sheep cheap, washing watching, cash catch, mash match, wish which, witch - (sequence comes from Sounds English by JD O Connor and C Fletcher). 

If they have no problem with these sounds, the teacher may well move on to other sounds and/or merely do a short practice exercise as a reminder of the difference between them, but if the students have difficulty discriminating between /S/ and /tS/, the teacher asks them to listen to a recording and in a series of exercises they have to work out which word they hear, eg: 1 Small shops/chops are often expensive. 2 The dishes/ditches need cleaning. 3 I couldn’t mash/match these things up. 4 She enjoys washing/watching the children.

Then they move on to exercises which they say words or phrases with one sound or the other, eg: It’s very cheap. / a grey chair / a cheese sandwich / You cheat! / no chance / a pretty child / - before doing a communication task which has words with the target sounds build into it, eg: How much do you enjoy the things in the chart below? 1 very much 2 not much 3 not at all 

Fill in the chart for yourself and then ask three other people. 

Playing chess / watching TV / washing up / going to a football match / cooking chips / eating chips / lying in the sunshine / shopping (column titled “You” next to the list to rate whether you like these things and 2 more columns for when you ask others) 

If, during this teaching sequence students seem to be having trouble with either of the sounds, the teacher may well refer to a diagram of the mouth to help them see where the sounds are made eg. (Picture of nose and mouth with the /tS/ /S/ symbols to differentiate) 

Contrasting sounds in this way to help students concentrate on detail, esp. when they’re listening to hear the small difference between the sounds. 

It identifies sounds which are frequently confused by various nationalities. It’s manageable for the teacher rather than taking on a whole rang of sounds at the same time, and it can be good fun for the students. 

This kind of exercise can be done whether or not the teacher and students work with phonemic symbols.

Ex 2 The phonemic chart Sounds: all

Level: any

The writer, Adrian Underhill has produced a phonemic chart which he recommends integrating into English lessons as various points. 

This chart is laid out in relation to where in the mouth the 44 sounds of southern British English are produced. 

In its top right hand corner little boxes are used to describe stress patterns and arrows are used to describe the five basic intonation patterns (fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and level).

What makes this chart special are the ways Underhill suggests it should be used, due to each sound having a separate square, either the teacher or the students can point to the square to ask students to produce the sound and/or to show they recognize which sound is being produced. 

For ex, the teacher might point to three sounds one after the other (/S/, /o/ and /p/) to get the students to say shop. Among other possibilities, the teacher can say a sound or a word and a student has to point to the sound(s) on the chart. 

When learners say something and produce an incorrect sound, the teacher can point to the sound they should have made. When the teacher first models a sound, she can point to it on the chart to identify it for the students.

The phonemic chart can be carried around by the teacher or left on the class wall, if it’s permanently there and easily accessible the teacher can use it at any state when it becomes appropriate. 

Such a usable resource is a wonderful teaching aid, as a visit to classes where the chart is in evidence will demo. There’re many other techniques and activities for teaching sounds apart from the ones we have shown here. 

Some teachers play sound bingo where the squares on the bingo card have sounds, or phonemically ‘spelt’ words instead of ordinary orthographic words. 

When the teacher says the sound or the word, the student can cross off the square of their board. When all their squares are crossed off, they shout Bingo! Noughts and crosses can be played the same way, where each square has a sound and the students have to say a word with the sound it it to win the square, eg:

Teachers can get students to say tongue twisters sometimes too (She sells sea shells by the sea shore) or to find rhymes for poetry/limerick lines. 

When students are familiar with the phonemic alphabet, they can play ‘odd man out’ five vocab items where one doesn’t fit in with the others, but the words are written in phonemic script rather than ordinary orthography.

Working with stress - Stress is important in individual words, in phrases and sentences, and by shifting it around in a phrase or a sentence, we can also change emphasis or meaning. 

As we saw in Fig. 4 in CH 12, it’s assumed when students meet new words in class, and if the new words end up on the board, the teacher will mark the stress of those words using a consistent system of stress marking. 

Another common way of drawing our students’ attention to stress issues is to show where the weak vowel sounds occur in words rather than focusing on the stressed syllables themselves. 

We can draw attention to the schwa /ə/ in words like /fatografa/ photographer or /klu:las/ clueless. However, we can also focus on stress issues in longer phrases and in sentences, as the following two examples demo.

Ex 3 Fishing Sounds: phrase stress patterns

Level: pre-intermediate upwards

The following activity in which students are asked to recognize stress patterns in phrases comes from a book of pronunciation games designed to engage learners in a challenge and at the same time highlight an aspect of pronunciation. The sequence starts when the teacher chooses some short phrases which the students are familiar with and writes them on the board. She then reads the phrases aloud and as she does so she draws a large circle under each syllable which will be in the content words like bel’ieve, and ‘later, as opposed to grammatical words like to, of, and by, and small circles under the unstressed syllables. Now students are clued in to the big and small circles, the teacher gives them a copy of the following game board:

Using the ‘circles’ stress patterns, they have to join pairs of phrases with the same stress patterns, eg. Look!-Wait!; Begin! - She talked; Who cares? - Don’t stop etc. The object of the game is to discover which fish is caught, a fish is caught when it’s completely surrounded by lines. If students get the exercise right, they’ll have encircled fish B.

Students can now say the phrases and the teacher can ask them to come up with their own phrases to follow the various stress patterns - or she can make her own games along similar lines.

Ex 4 Special stress Sounds: variable stress

Level: elementary

The stress in phrases changes depending upon what we want to say. The following exercise draws students’ attention to this fact and gets them to ask why it happens. Students listen to the following convo: 

Special stress (Only partly given) 1 Walter is a waiter in a busy snack bar. Listen to some of his convo with the customers. W, So that’s two coffees, a beef sandwich, and a tomato soup… C, No, a chicken sandwich. W, Sorry, sir… W, Yes, sir? C, A small mushroom pizza, please.

The students are now asked to listen again and look at the lines in italics. They have to underline the words which are specially stressed and then say why they think this happens in this particular convo because the customer is correcting a mistake. 

Students can then practice saying the dialogues. We may also give students a straightforward sentence like, I lent my sister ten pounds for a train ticket last week, and ask them what it would mean if different words took the main stress, eg., I LENT my sister ten pounds… (= I didn’t give it to her), or I lent my sister ten pounds for a train ticket last WEEK (= Can you believe it? She still hasn’t paid me back!).

There’re many other ways of teaching and demo-ing stress. Some teachers like to choose appropriate texts and have students read them aloud after they’ve done some work on which bits of phrases and sentences take the main stress.

Some teachers like to train students in the performance of dialogues, much as a theatre director might do with actors. This will involve identifying the main stress in phrases and seeing this in relation to the intonation patterns.

Cuisenaire rods are also useful to provide graphic illustration of how words and phrases are stressed. 

These rods of different lengths and colors can be set up to demo the stress patterns of phrases and sentences as in the following ex., I’ll ring you next WEEK: (The dark rod would be placed where ‘week’ is to indicate the stress). 

Whereas if we want to say I’ll RING you next week (I won’t come and see you), we can organize the rods with the darker rod on ‘ring’. 

For stress in words, we can ask students to put words in correct columns depending upon their stress patterns, eg.

◻️◻️⬜️◻️ ◻️⬜️◻️◻️

Information discovery

Consultation recovery

Aggravation acknowledgment 

Insulation catastrophe

Agoraphobic photographer

Finally, another technique which is enjoyable is to give students a list of utterances and then let them hear the phrases said with nonsense syllables (but with the right stress and intonation). 

The students have to match the nonsense patterns with the real thing. For ex. if one of the utterances the students have is absolutely terrible, what they may hear is do-di-do-di-DOO-di-di.

Working with intonation - we need to draw students’ attention to the way we use changes in pitch to convey meaning, to reflect the thematic structure of what we’re saying and to convey mood. 

One simple way of doing this is to show how many different meanings can be squeezed out of just one word, such as yes. 

To do this we can get students to ask us any yes/no question, Are you happy? And answer yes to it in a neutral way. Now we get them to ask the question again. 

This time through changing our intonation we use yes to mean something different, I’m not sure or How wonderful of you to ask this question or How dare you ask this question? 

Students can be asked to identify what we mean each time by using words for emotions or matching our intonation to pictures of faces with different expressions. 

We can now get them to ask each other similar yes/no questions, and when they answer, use intonation to convey particular meanings which their classmates have to identify. 

In his book on teaching pronunc. Gerald Kelly uses the interjection mmm. After demo-ing the differing ways in which this can be said, students have to match different intonations with different meanings.

Match the intonation tune to the meaning.

A //↘︎mmm// i Reflects boredom or lack of interest.

B // ↑↘︎mmm// ii I agree.

C // ↑mmm// iii Strong agreement 

D // ↘︎↑ iv I agree, but…

E // →mmm// v The speaker wants the listener to say more.

The point of using exercises like this isn’t so much to identify specific intonation patterns - esp since many languages can change the meaning of individual words in the same way, but rather to raise the students’ awareness of the power of intonation and to encourage them to vary their own speech. It also trains them to listen more carefully to understand what messages are being given to them.

Ex 5 Falling and rising tones Sounds: falling and rising tones

Level: pre-intermediate

In the following exercise, students listen to identify nuclear stress (the main stress where there’s a change of pitch) in phrases and to hear falling and rising intonation.

1 Listen to these examples. Prominent words are in capital letters. Notice how the voice FALLS at the end.

It’s ↘︎MINE. She’s from ↘︎ROME. Is it ↘︎YOURS?

Now listen to these examples. Notice how the voice RISES at the end.

I ↑THINK so. ↑PROBABLY. Are they ↑ HERE yet?

When they have done this, the teacher may ask them to repeat the phrases with the right intonation before moving on to the next exercise where they have to listen to a recording and identify whether the voice falls or rises:

2 Listen to these sentence halves. Write ↘︎ in the space if the voice falls at the end and ↑ if it goes up. 

I went to London… ↘︎ on Saturday ↑

They then join the sentence halves together before working in pairs to answer questions with their new complete sentences, What does your son do now? David words in a bookshop, etc. 

Later they make their own convo after noticing how a character uses a rising tone for a subject which is already being talked about and a falling tone to give new info. 

This exercise not only gets students to listen carefully to intonation patterns, but by dividing sentences in two before joining them up again, it allows them to identify basic fall-rise patterns. 

We can also get students to listen to the way speakers react to see whether words like OK or Really indicate enthusiasm, boredom, or indifference.

There’re other ways to teach intonation, some teachers like to get their students to make dialogues without words - humming the ‘tune’ of what they want to say in such a way other students can understand them. Many teachers also use a variety of devices such as arrows on the board and arm movements which ‘draw’ patterns in the air to demo intonation. Some teachers exaggerate and get students to exaggerate intonation patterns, which can be extremely amusing and which also makes patterns clear.

Ex 6 Sound waves Sounds: intonation and stress

Level: any

The following examples show how students can use software programs to learn intonation and stress patterns. Then repeating the sentence themselves and trying to copy closely what they hear. 

Some programs allow for the student to see the sound wave made and to get it as close to the original intonation they can. 

The example given shows the graphic in Fig 2 the student speaking the sentence is using different stress and intonation from the competent speaker. 

The student now can try to change their speed, pauses, stress and intonation. With luck, they’ll then produce something more like the model. 

This type of software is esp useful with language which is more conversational, but even with sentence-like examples, the students who are more visually oriented, esp, can see what they’re saying can be useful.

This is going to be where I cut off the remaining chapter notes, due to the inability of any writing platform I’ve found so far being unable to accommodate pictures or tabbed space per the above intro.

I’m fascinated to see the results once put into practice, and seeing whether it’s possible to get positions for people with CELTA, even without a college degree not based in Asia, for now. It was definitely everything placed in one comprehensive text and I’ll look forward to the other textbook(s) to help feel more prepared.