TEFL In The Classroom
Read about bloopers, disasters, and everyday classroom drama here.
Five Ways To Avoid Being Overworked, From Yahoo’s Penelope Trunk
I’m becoming a fan of the career advice of Yahoo’s Penelope Trunk. Her advice seems to draw a great deal of angry criticism as comments, which may just be par for the course when lots of people read it and have the opportunity to post comments. Or it may be because her advice often challenges commonly held beliefs.
So how can you avoid being overworked? According to Penelope:
1. Force your boss to prioritize by explaining that you can’t do all that. Unique TEFL challenge: guess who has the advantage in getting inexperienced people to sign contracts committing themselves to a certain number of hours a week. Partial solution: get informed by learning about norms and getting a TEFL certificate before signing a contract. When you’re more aware of what goes into planning a lesson, 30 contact hours a week may not seem like such great deal after all.
2. If your boss won’t prioritize, do it yourself. Basically - cut corners because you are in a no-win situation anyway. Somewhat unique TEFL challenge: whereas in a typical work situation, you may not deal directly with those affected by your work, in TEFL, your students are the ones most impacted by this. And you deal with those students regularly, and probably feel an obligation to them, so cutting corners is easier said than done. Partial solution: read number 3.
Date: August 28th, 2007 |
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“Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?” Teaching Interview Skills
Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Why did you choose this company?
For two extra points, which is not a good ending for this sentence?
My weakness is that:
a) I work too hard
b) I am impatient for results
c) I don’t mind selling my soul to a company for cheap.
In many countries these are standard fare for a job interview, so much so that many of us probably almost have stock answers which we’d be ready to give, if not excellently, fairly convincingly, at short notice.
I was a bit surprised to hear some past banker students say they though a lot of people in their country would be startled to hear some of these questions at a job interview, even in their own language. It’s not that surprising that business happens in different ways in different countries, but it is interesting to me that something we take for granted would not be common at all in some places.
I went to look for some Business English resources – specifically at the BBC’s Learning English site to see if this has any implications for teaching. Even though the BBC is of course based in the UK, the questions they include are pretty much the exact same ones I would expect to hear in the US, in general at least. But what my bankers said raised an interesting question about teaching something like interview skills.
Date: August 24th, 2007 |
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Rant On Missing Articles
I got shot before I went to India. Oh, no, actually, I got a shot, one against hepatitis, before I went to India.
Just one of funnier instances of missing article resulting in different meaning. Usually, missing articles don’t affect meaning as much as in this case.
But if you’ve taught English to students whose own language doesn’t have articles, you probably have some idea of how hard it is to learn to use them correctly or even to remember to use them at all. It’s definitely not hard for native speakers to use them, or to do gap-fills designed to practice them…but I gained some insight when I proofread excellent translation of book about speeches on economics: it was excellent in almost every way save for its near total lack of articles. It is extremely hard to “put them into” someone’s already-expressed thoughts.
Date: August 24th, 2007 |
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A Case Study: One Speaking Test Format
I recently mentioned that I thought a “speaking test” would not be a bad supplement to a book test which is overly focused on grammar, especially when the class is more focused on communication. Here is an example of a speaking test, designed to have three parts, which I have seen used for good (as opposed to evil):
In the first stage, the teacher choses from a list of questions and simply asks each student a couple individually. Next, student A gets a picture, looks for a minute or two, and then explains what he sees to student B, including information about what he thinks is going on and how the people are related (you need good pictures for this). Then – to maintain some sense of being communicative – B looks at that picture and says if A missed anything or if she disagrees. B does the same thing with another picture. I suppose to really make sure the second one is listening, you could ask the speaker to give one false piece of information, and see if B catches it…this seems a little mean though, doesn’t it?
Date: August 15th, 2007 |
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Are Your Students Too Embarrassed To Speak?
I ask because apparently embarrassment at speaking a foreign language is a major reason given by some Brits for choosing not to travel abroad. I suspect many Americans are in the same or a similar boat…and further I suspect that this embarrassment is not about making a grammar mistake, but about speaking the foreign language at all.
So what about English language learners: are they embarrassed to speak? The answer probably depends on a whole range of factors, like the culture and each student’s own personality and so on….but if …
Date: August 14th, 2007 |
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Funny False Friends
Even if you don’t speak any Slavic language, you’d probably recognize kompjuter, interesantan and kalendar…but sometimes words that sound similar actually have meanings different than what you would expect, hence the term “false friends”.
There’s the great one that a direct translation “I am full” in French – “Je suis pleine” – means I am pregnant, and I believe embarazada in Spanish means not “embarrassed” but also…pregnant. So much for euphemisms.
There are a couple of funny false friends between various Slavic languages – most often, similar words do in fact mean the same thing, but “hour” in some means “year” in others; this had the result of me wishing a bunch of individual Slovaks a Happy New Hour on January 1. Words for chicken and matches in some mean obscene things in others. I get a childish kick out of learning the “bad” words, but then I get worried about confusing them with similar-sounding normal words.
Date: August 26th, 2007 |
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Pangrams And Spoonerisms: Adapting English Language Trivia For Class
There were some fun English language trivia in The Daily Mail. I would preface this by saying: In a class with a syllabus to cover and limited time, I would probably use these only as fillers, or as some fun but still English-related cooler after students have just finished working intensively.
The first page – with phrases Shakespeare coined which evolved into fairly well-known idioms - you could design a short matching activity using some of the phrases (either match the phrase to the meaning or the first half of the phrase to the second), and set homework to write good sentences which illustrate the meaning of 6 or 8. In class, they could then read the sentences without the idiom, and the other team guesses which idiom is missing. I wouldn’t tell them this because it will make it more likely that they try to come up with good sentences, and not those specifically designed to trick each other. A fun variant would be to play Pictionary to revise them…though make sure you select those which lend themselves to being illustrated!
The pangrams might work out best for kids, or maybe for those new to the Latin alphabet. I’d invent a few decoys – other long sentences which use a lot – but not all - of the letters of the alphabet. And students have to identify which ones really do include all the letters. Or, if you want to save yourself the creativity or re-typing up, have them tell you which letters are extra (each sentence includes all the letters of the alphabet but also has more). Communicative? Practical skills they will use in the real world? Not exactly, but still a part of learning, and good to serve the purpose of a somewhat mindless but tangentially relevant task.
Date: August 24th, 2007 |
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The TEFL Logue And The Bee: Akeelah In Class?
Akeelah and the Bee is a fine movie with a heart-warming ending that made me ask a question I probably should have asked a long time ago: spelling bees - why?
No, the Simplified Spelling Society did not slip me some cash to write this. I don’t think English spelling should change and I fully agree that well-spelled finished product is important. English-speaking kids need to learn how to spell words in their own language. But a whole competition, based on the idea that it’s commendable to spell words which you need to ask a definition of and will never in your life use?
The EFL teacher in me (which does not take a rest even when I watch a movie) cheered when Lawrence Fishburne spoke out against rote memorization - and for spelling, no less! He taught Akeelah that it is important to know the origin of the word and the meaning of the prefix and so on – then you are more likely to remember the word and how to spell it. Meaning before form, just like my CELTA trainers said!
Date: August 15th, 2007 |
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Fun With Dictation
It doesn’t sound like a very nice activity, first of all because, you know, Stalin and his ilk bring an unpleasant connotation to dictating and such, but even its normal teaching meaning, “dictation” smacks of the past. A traditional schoolmarm reading out a long speech for students to copy down word for word, to be marked on their ability to write quickly and spell. Not something we value today as useful for language learning.
But I have come across a few good uses for dictation which can transform a sterile, impersonal book task into a) something personalized, ideally interesting and possibly competitive, and b) a task which requires more student engagement than reading.
One is running dictation. Don’t do it just for the sake of running; do it to revise or refresh students’ knowledge of vocab or a structure or two – without putting pressure on individuals to produce the language on the spot. With running dictation, they’re using the language as well as their speaking, listening and writing skills. It also doesn’t hurt if they need a little exercise to liven up.
If you’re planning on some grammar guided discovery or clarification, concoct some examples using the target language about yourself (I never pick up hitchhikers, etc.). Read each sentence out once or twice (set the number of times and stick to it), have students take it down in pairs, and then they have a set time to decide a) what the correct sentence looks like (what your exact words were) and b) whether or not that sentence is true about you.
Date: August 14th, 2007 |
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Teaching English When It’s A Second Language
Ole at Costa Rica Classroom recently posted on the theme of teaching English when it is his second language…and he touched on the point of “authority”. I’m not going to summarize his points here (I’d recommend reading the post), but rather share my take on them…
I remember a conversation with a first year teacher who was not a native speaker. She was teaching that horrible lesson from Cutting Edge Intermediate contrasting “I have been living” and “I have lived”. The “beauty” of these tenses in English is that there is no simple rule for these. But students see it, they see that it is hard, and that’s what they demand to some extent, even if it is not the teacher’s active decision to dwell on it.
She was almost near tears. She was young and she felt like her students wouldn’t believe her because she wasn’t a native speaker…I don’t think this was a totally wrong impression, but the thing is: I had also been near tears once or twice due to a “mean” group that really wouldn’t let me off the hook when I couldn’t give them the grammar explanation they wanted. And this was because I had learned the language without reference to explicit rules. Part of this was being a new teacher, but part of it was just that there is always something you are not an expert on.
Date: August 14th, 2007 |
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