TEFL In The Classroom
Read about bloopers, disasters, and everyday classroom drama here.
Teaching A Bunch Of Words In A Box
I went through my CELTA and learned about providing a context that allows students to deduce the meanings of new words. There’s also the spiel about genuine communication: don’t ask students to fill five minutes talking about a picture to demonstrate their competence, ask Student A to describe the picture only she can see to Student B; Student B listens and draws what he hears.
Then I opened two major task-based, communicative coursebooks to see vocabulary exercises like: check the meanings of the words in the box. Use your dictionary if you’re not sure.
Now again, I have a CELTA, not the more advanced DELTA or MA, but still I get the sense that looking up a list of words in a dictionary is not communicative, even though it is in a book claiming to be so. And this is a problem most practically because native speaker EFL teachers with training in the communicative approach are encouraged and expected to get their students talking and communicating. And using the book that the school has sold to the students, of course. But speaking!
Frequently those words in the box precede a text they will appear in, so finding – and heaven forbid creating – a text to serve as a context for students to infer the meanings is not a very balanced or practical way to go. Creating some sort of written matching exercise may help make it more student-centered than going through all the words “together” or giving a sentence for each yourself, but a written exercise is unlikely to get students as engaged as you’d like.
One way I’ve dealt with such exercises is with this vocabulary activity.
Date: December 17th, 2007 |
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What’s Involved In Planning A Lesson?
Start here for the background please.
Vocabulary can be considered a lesson of its own: see how to teach a box of words (coming soon!)
I’d start by deciding what I’d cover and what my aims were. When you are working with a syllabus / from a book, this is pretty straightforward.
I would read the text myself first to see what it was all about.
I’d come up with a few questions – which I would ask the class as a group or have them discuss in pairs before they started reading the text – to orient them to what it’s about generally and hopefully raise their interest in reading it.
[Think about any twins or even siblings you know – are they similar in looks? Personality? What would be nice about being a twin? What would be difficult? Have you heard any strange stories about twins communicating without talking, or knowing what the other one is doing from far away? These are questions which an average person with a willingness to try could respond to; they are at least somewhat connected by theme to the text, and hopefully make students interested in learning a little more.]
Date: December 10th, 2007 |
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From The Carnival To The TEFL Logue
Larry Ferlazzo’s ESL Carnival for November recently went up and I’m happy to report that I made the deadline, thanks to a heads up in time from Larry. Each post had something unique to offer, but my personal favorite was the video activity from Seth Dickens. I had to laugh at the video itself because somehow I feel like I have had that very conversation, with people who want to be helpful but just don’t seem to have the will to communicate in whatever language.
Watch and see if you have too:
Do-you-speak-english
Uploaded by flyingtostunt66
The gist:get your students to watch without sound and create a short dialog about what they predict the people are saying. Then of course watch with sound to check.
What’s extra neat: Seth even explains how to remove the sound electronically, with just a Photobucket account and his instructions. Don’t expect a summary here! Go read the post.
Guess the Google was another one I liked: your basic, good old guessing game with a modern twist.
It’s not from the carnival, but Larry recently linked to an article about the role of effort versus “natural ability”, or more accurately, how learners’ ideas and experiences about the role of effort and natural ability affect their academic performance. In a nutshell, those who are used to hearing “you’re so smart” are more likely to give up when the going gets tough than those who have been praised for their effort.
Date: December 6th, 2007 |
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How Much Translation Do You Use?
Most of us have heard it more than a couple of times “encourage your students not to rely on translation” or one of the other variants (”English only”). The idea is, in the long run it is better for them to try to think in English or at least be compelled to communicate in it while they are in their class with you, the native speaker. Sometimes that is part of the reason a school wants a native speaker – students will need to use English to communicate with you, and can’t fall back on their own language as they could with a local teacher when they know s/he will understand.
It’s good in the sense that if they are in a situation where they really do need to speak English – specifically because the other person does not speak their language – they will also have to rely only on English. Also the higher their level gets, the more it will happen that words may not have good direct translations. But if there is a good translation – should you just tell them so it’s quicker? In cases where they are really struggling and you know the word, it is not the worst thing in the world, but sometimes it happens in life that someone doesn’t understand completely, and you just move on. Class does not need to come to a grinding halt because no one knows the translation of a given word. I look at is as - in the long run, the skills they gain listening and figuring out a word in English are a lot more valuable than certainty about the translation of a handful of words.
If direct translation happens a lot in class, they will be more inclined to rely on translation and less able to see the value in talking around a word.
Date: November 30th, 2007 |
7 comments
Activities For Revising Or Practicing Tenses
In my experience, as long as you plan well, it’s fairly easy to present tenses but much harder to find good communicative practice. You can present present perfect without talking, you can teach past continuous without your left shoe (and don’t get me wrong, students will enjoy this!) but you don’t need a drawn-out lesson with guided discovery every single time. Students need to practice and they also need to see and hear tenses in use and have their attention drawn to verbs from time to time.
For an advanced class, I once found a “politically correct fairy tale” which they thought was just hilarious. This one was from an advanced level ESL resource book, but there are some good examples of politically correct fairy tales at Amazon.com.
The story I found was divided into 10 paragraphs which were to be cut up, and then the students had to read them and put them in the correct order. After we’d checked answers and make sure everyone “got” the most important funny parts, we started a reading race I had prepared. I wrote a worksheet directing them to find different examples of (in this case) all sorts of grammar points, such as:
Find…
Date: November 27th, 2007 |
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Notes On ESL Lesson Plans
A potential EFL teacher recently contacted me to ask: what’s involved in planning a lesson? Of course it’s hard to give a definitive answer, but it’s a good question because it’s a large part of the job, and a part that’s often neglected in EFL blogs, at least this one.
I should start with the standard “cover yourself” answers of: it depends on a plethora of factors, you’ll learn that in a course. But fairly enough, I think people want to get some sense of it – even if just an example – before they commit to a course and invest the money and so on.
And so I will oblige with an example of my own.
What the lesson will cover: I’ll take as an example a text that I personally like (twins with surprising life coincidences) - and a tense that I don’t (present perfect) - from Cutting Edge Intermediate.
The story talks about a study of twins who were separated at birth but reunited much later. All the twins mentioned turn out to have truly bizarre similarities in their lives, not just their respective appearances. One pair had both divorced a woman with the same first name, had a dog of the same name growing up, and held a series of similar jobs. Others experienced important events like marriages or serious (probably non-genetic) illnesses around the same time. The book presentation actually starts with a vocabulary activity, then comes the text, some questions on content, some questions on grammar (in fact this may come up much later, but let’s pretend), and finally some practice.
And now: what’s involved in planning a lesson?
Date: December 10th, 2007 |
4 comments
The Lesson From Hell
Even when you love your job, ugly lessons rear their respective heads every now and again. What do you do about that lesson that bombs every time, all the ways you’ve tried it?
I can’t answer for you, but here’s what I do:
I try to identify why I don’t like it and then address that specifically – does the grammar point seem useless, or do I just not really understand it myself? Does the book just present it poorly, or in a way that students don’t really get? Do students tend to find it difficult, or needlessly complicated?
Certainly there are steps I can take to address each of these – making sure I understand the point, giving students a short explanation of why it is actually useful after all, or adapting the exercises so students get the practice without the de-motivation of struggling with every answer.
I sometimes have a guilt trip because the way I interpreted my training – everything should be communicative, you should guide students to discover for themselves and not just tell them, in a communicative EFL setting the teacher should only speak a fraction of the time, etc.
I think these are good principles and I don’t in fact believe I should just give up the moment things don’t go easily, but what I see now that I didn’t before is this: sometimes textbooks do needlessly complicate exercises or grammar points; sometimes a particular point is largely irrelevant to the situations my students will find themselves in.
A concrete example: I absolutely hate teaching adverbs such as however, although, despite, nevertheless, and so on, especially when the particular lesson comes up in Cutting Edge Upper Intermediate.
Date: December 7th, 2007 |
4 comments
Christmas In TEFL
The holiday season is just around the corner…or was it that corner I passed three blocks ago? I’m terrible with directions, so I’m really not sure, but wherever or whenever it is, the holiday season comes with several important questions:
Where are you going?
Lots of EFL teachers will return “home”, meaning back to their country of origin, even if it sounds funny to call it that after some time away. As usual, Bootsnall has some international air tickets to make it a little easier on your pocketbook.
If you teach in a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas, or if your break is too short to consider going all the way home, don’t despair. You can still get away. Once again, Bootsnall is there with help, this time in the form of its logues:
Christmas in Amsterdam
Christmas in Greece
Christmas in Hawaii
Christmas in London
Christmas in Paris
Christmas in Italy
and even: Christmas in Portland
Date: December 4th, 2007 |
2 comments
Teaching Prepositions
When I google or yahoo “teaching prepositions” and “preposition games” I don’t find much that I would be able to use in a communicative-ish class of adults. Much is geared towards kids – often native English speaking kids – and much consists of written practice (which is not at all hard to find by paging through a book of practice exercises in the teachers’ room). This doesn’t mean the materials themselves are bad, but rather that you are not presented with a wealth of options by a simple google search. You can search through more pages of results or plug in different search terms, or you can bookmark particular sites to visit when you’re in need of good stuff generally, such as:
EFL Classroom 2.0 Resources
BogglesWorld (conspicuously missing a grammar section, but for flash cards and five pages of links for Adult ESL, a good resource)
Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day Blog
TEFLtastic Worksheets
Headway and Cutting Edge sites
Prepositions of place: in front of, next to, behind, opposite, etc.
These usually come up in lower levels. The meanings are literal and in my experience, students don’t have that much trouble learning them, at least compared to other prepositions (see below). I’ve had both Headway and Cutting Edge as coursebooks when prepositions of place came up, and found the activities fine. Supplement them with additional practice and revision and you’re good to go. When you look for communicative practice – the jigsaw map activity or “spot the differences” are both good – just make sure you have covered all the prepositions necessary to complete the activity.
Other prepositions…
Date: November 28th, 2007 |
5 comments
Top 10 Teaching Tenses Do’s and Dont’s
Do use timelines. [Unfortunately, I cannot find an example online of the type of timeline my CELTA trainers showed me; if anyone else can it would be very welcome. For the record, I am definitely not talking about this kind of timeline. While it is useful for a teacher or advanced learner, for most students it would violate Don’t No. 2 below.]
Don’t teach all the tenses all at once.
Don’t assume your students know the names of tenses (ask “Emir, what were you doing at 6 this morning?” not, “Sejla, give me an example of past continuous.”).
Don’t assume that just because they can put a given infinitive in different tenses, they know how to use those tenses correctly in their speech.
Do revise regularly, using practical examples rather than just rules…
…but do be prepared to reel off the rule, because even though you were hired primarily for your status as a native speaker, many students will expect you to know.
Do consider very carefully what your students know before grabbing any old English language passage and whiting out the verbs. It’s not good practice if it covers tenses or a lot of vocabulary that they’ve never met before. I hate to be a book-follower, but what is in the book generally does incorporate all this, if not perfectly, at least pretty well. For that reason…
…exploit what’s in the book first, especially if you’re a new teacher. If need be, adapt it, but take advantage of what is provided (and often what students expect to use) before going out on a limb and pulling things off the web.
Don’t make up rules on the spot (also known as committing “teflony”). Your students will find out and it will come back to haunt you.
Do think of the big picture, and remind your students to do so as well. Tenses make for nice units in text books, because there is in fact a lot to learn if you want to use them perfectly…but they are overemphasized in relation to how much they matter in your speech. Remind your students that while they do need to learn the tense system – we don’t use future perfect continuous all that often (”By the time I’m 57, I will have been writing the TEFL Logue for about 30 years…”). It’s important for them to infer some of the meaning based on knowledge they already have of other tenses, i.e. continuous tenses are for things that are not finished (and I think we all know the TEFL Logue isn’t finishing any time soon, regardless of my choice of tenses…) and so on. But one of the best lines I heard a colleague use was “You need to recognize this tense, not master it.” It’s great to be correct but there are not that many cases where people really can’t understand you because you use the wrong tense. Present perfect simple and present perfect continuous are not worth fighting over.
Date: November 27th, 2007 |
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