Turklish TEFL

Simple but sweet.  Music in the background has a lot of uses.  Here are a few:

-  In general, music in the background is just a good signal once students become accustomed to it.  When you turn off the music, the students know that it’s time to transition, look up at you, etc.

-  Especially with kids, but also with adults the mood and tempo of the music can change the mood of the class. You can play fast songs for games and slow songs for thoughtful preparation or writing.

-  Playing music in the background makes your students talk louder.  This is a good trick for those classes that like to whisper when doing pair or group work.  I highly recommend it.

-  Music can also be used to block out the voices of other students.  This is especially useful if students are preparing for a debate or some kind of game where they don’t want anyone else to overhear what they are saying.  It’s also nice because students can ask you questions and not be so worried about embarrassing themselves by asking “a stupid question” in front of their peers.

-  Setting the mood for role-plays.  Dance music at a party, muzak during shopping, even speeches at a historical event can all be good for setting the scene and making things a bit more realistic.

Generally when picking songs it’s useful to play instrumentals as I’ve found that students sometimes stop doing whatever they should be doing in order to try and understand the song lyrics.

Volume is also important.  It should be just loud enough to have an effect.

Do you have any other ways you use music in the background for a class?

Related Posts:

Song Stories

Pictures Painted in Sound

I read a really good article tweeted by the English Blog the other day discussing not the usefulness, but the need for translation within the language classroom.

I would agree that this is indeed the case, especially when looking at some of the strange sentences my students produce and the issues those signify.

One of my favorite lessons from Jamie Keddie’s TEFL Clips is Lesson 9 – Teaching Get. It’s from a great series of videos made by Lev Yilmaz (which sounds like a Turkish last name). The one Jamie uses is Procrastination (my personal favorite is the one on mothers).

In this lesson the students are asked to translate some sentences into their L1 and then back into English. This activity is extremely useful because:

1) It helps students notice gaps between the languages and gaps in their understanding.

2) It brings an attention to focus on chunks of meaning.

3) It helps establish connections between the languages.

4) It gives students the often welcome chance to use their L1.

5) It challenges the teacher.

Here are three of the sentences Jamie asks students to translate.

1) When I got home, I didn’t feel like cereal anymore.

2) When I got back, it was getting late.

3) I just need to make sure to get to bed early.

Here is how a large percentage of upper level and TOEFL students from my classes consistently (mis)translate them into Turkish:

1)  Eve geldigimde kendimi daha fazla misir gevregi gibi hissetmedim.

2)  Geri dondugum zaman gec oluyordu.

3)  Ben sadece erken yataga girmekten emin olmak zorundayim.

The problem with the first example is that, among other things, students have translated “feel like” literally and produced nonsense in Turkish.

In the second example they literally translated a grammar structure that no one would ever use.

In the third one they are attempting to translate the sentence word for word. In the end, the sentence can be said to be grammatically correct in Turkish, but no one would ever say such a strange thing.

Here’s a much better translation for all 3:

1)  Eve geldigimde artik misir gevregi yemek icimden gelmedi.

2)  Geri dondugum zaman gec olmustu.

3)  Erkenden yatmaliyim.

Notice the differences?

In each case high level students have made the false assumption that languages are translated literally word by word. As my students tell me, a major reason for this is that this is what they were taught to do in school. This has major repercussions on how students are understanding English in the classes and points to a lack of awareness of a need to focus on meaning.  It also reflects on how a purely L2 classroom can lead to possible misunderstandings.

It’s also quite fascinating to me that students would translate something into nonsense in their own L1 and shows the depth to which misperceptions can go.

I use to run into this problem all the time when I’d ask people to help me learn Turkish. They would constantly give me the English translations for things as word and grammar crossovers rather than what people actually said or what the phrase actually meant.

This is just one of many examples I have of translation issues that crop up in my classes. I have found it incredibly fruitful to do such activities and get students to start being aware of differences, similarities, and the complexities of translation.

After all, most students will have to do large amounts of translation at some point. Many job interviews in Turkey ask candidates to translate documents rather than speak English at the interview because the manager probably can’t. Additionally, many companies often use their English speaking employees as cheap translation services.

While there are many good reasons to limit the use of L1 in the classroom, translation remains a very necessary part of the English classroom both as an aid to understanding and as a skill most students will need.

What are your thoughts on translation? Have you used similar types of activities? How valuable are they? How much doubt does this cast on the usefulness of monolingual English teachers in monolingual classrooms?

Related Posts:

Against Translation

Using Turkish in the Classroom

Turkish-English Dictionaries

There’s really only one core, key principle when it comes to becoming a successful edu-blogger, and it is this:

“Do unto your fellow bloggers

what you would have them

do unto you.”

Follow this dogma on their blogs, within the blogosphere and right across the twitterverse and eventually – you must be patient – the Great Google God will bless your life with love and you shall be gloriously showered with many, many visitations.

Once you have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are most selfless and diligent then you shall also be rewarded with the keywords to Google’s first page and forever more, be known as blogian.

image credit:

Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, Queen Mariana of Austria, blogging

(c) KarenneJoySylvester, 2010

This article is part of a new series: Thoughts on Edu-blogging. Karenne is an ELT edu-blogger, a ESP:IT teacher, EdTech teacher-trainer and materials writer, originally from Grenada in the Caribbean. She currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany and writes Kalinago English and BusinessEnglish~5mins.

The other day Scott Thornbury brought up the notoriously difficult grammar point of gerunds.  It became clear from Scott’s post that there isn’t even a consensus on what they are or if they actually exist.   This brought me back to my posts about how I feel grammar is extremely overrated in the ELT classroom.

In the course of the discussion that ensued, Scott asked if grammar was perhaps at the very least an expedient means to an end for learners with little actual time in the class.   A very good question and one I decided to answer here rather than in the comments, as I’d like to give a lengthy response.

While I think simple grammar has its place in the classroom, I would answer “no” to Scott’s question if we’re talking about complicated distinctions like gerunds vs. infinitives.

Here’s my argument:

I think far and away the biggest mistake we adult learners and teachers of adults make is that analytical understanding of grammar aids acquisition.  This is probably the biggest complication when looking at adult vs. young learners. Adults constantly want to understand why something is the way it is instead of just accepting it and using it.  This need to understand actually acts as an obstacle to acquisition.   As language learners, we need to accept language as it is and use it.

I can’t remember exactly who, but someone once made a comment that helping students to analytically understand grammar makes them comfortable in the classroom and therefore raises the affective filter, aiding learning.  I would agree.  That, I think, is the main positive effect it has.

If analytical understanding truly aided language acquisition, then lecturing and grammar translation would be wild successes.   It’s quite clear they are not.  So why do we persist in trying to teach language this way?

Now, I do think that knowledge of grammar rules can help, but only if the rule is simple to apply and mirrors the students’ L1.  For instance, adding –ed to make the past tense in English or not using the verb “be” with he/she/it in Turkish.  These are very simple rules that can be clearly understood by students with nearly no explanation.

Actually, there should be a distinction made between application of simple rules and analytical understanding.   The former is useful while the latter is not.

An example of a simple rule is adding “s” to present simple verbs when he/she/it is the subject.   We don’t have to understand why that is and it wouldn’t be helpful to do so, we merely apply the rule.   To go back to Scott’s discussion, telling students that the infinitive is more common after verbs than gerunds is useful.   Telling them that one is more nouny and one more verby is not.

Trying to explain something complicated like gerunds vs. infinitives, articles, or the myriad rules surrounding relative clauses is not useful in my opinion.   In fact, most students pick up these “rules” and use the language correctly without explicit instruction the majority of the time.   I never teach explicit rules for articles yet even my beginner and elementary students start to use them correctly as the course progresses if encouraged to do so.   In the same way, I have as yet to have a student that could tell me the difference between an subject & object relative clause, but most of them, if given a choice between sentences on the board, can tell me in which ones we can omit the relative pronoun.

How is this possible?  Well, they are simply taking the language they know and repeating it to themselves.   They go with whatever sounds right.

Think about it.   How many times have you taught a finer grammar point to a class until every one in the room was very confident with it.  They could even give example sentences and do basic substitution drills.   Yet, the students fail to use the new grammar afterwards no matter what context you provide.   In fact, they don’t use it again until you actually direct them to do so. If analytical understanding aided production, wouldn’t the opposite be the case?

When is explicit rule teaching helpful?   There are a couple cases:

1) There is a similar structure in the L1 and they transfer over the grammatical chunk.

2) Simple rules that don’t require in-depth understanding of grammatical concepts.

3) To aid error correction, especially in writing when dealing with really complicated language.  Students can be more confident of their work if there is a rule supporting their language choices although, again, I’d consider ear and sight correction a more important goal.

4) To aid in guessing about how to create unfamiliar sentences based on the rules they know (although really the same can be done by making logical guesses based off of the language they are familiar with rather than some sort of rule and I would say it’s preferable).

Grammar concepts are ultimately quite murky and, let’s face it, in real-time conversation there is absolutely no time think about conceptually complex rules before formulating a sentence.   The same applies for most test situations where writing and speaking are required.   I can think he with verb+s pretty quickly, but I can’t determine whether what I’m about to say is something connected to both past and present vs. something definitely finished in the past vs. my L1 that would use a present construction.

I remember my first month of teaching; I was ecstatic when I realized the difference between the use of “be” & “do” in present simple was one of verbs vs. other parts of speech.   With a grin, I walked into my elementary classes and happily explained this distinction.   Yet, my students still consistently failed to grasp this difference.

Then I thought about it.   As a native speaker of the language it took me over a month of looking at it and trying to teach it and the difference only clicked with me because my grammatical knowledge had been growing and growing.   I analytically understood a grammatical point, but this didn’t really aid my students in terms of meaning and use or really help them at all as they still couldn’t figure out an adjective from a verb unless they really stopped to think about it.  We were back to square one.

The same went for me in Turkish.   There is a clear grammatical distinction between subject and object relative clauses in Turkish and looking at them really helped me figure out the English equivalents.   Yet, despite this knowledge, I still could not use them.   I simply couldn’t figure out how to make sentences with them or when to use which form.

Then I started going to the café with co-workers and students after class and the majority of the conversations were in Turkish.  One day I joined the conversations and was using relative clauses.   Sure, it was a bit haltingly, but it quickly improved.  Something had just clicked.   I looked at myself and realized my understanding was no different, but intuitively I had started to figure out when to use what.   The same went for all the Turkish structures and concepts that differed from ones in English.  There was so much stuff that simply never made any sense to me and then I would just find myself using it one day.

If we really look at our learners and our own language learning experiences, this is almost always what happens.   There is a point where it just clicks.   When we first start to learn language, things go quite slow and we’re always formulating sentences in our heads.   With use and exposure, these phrases and transformations become internalized and automatic.   Quite quickly we move from checking our utterances against grammar rules to checking our utterances against what sounds or looks right.

This is really the goal.   I think much explicit grammar teaching of complex concepts literally slows down the process of actual acquisition as students break language into pieces, obsess about rules before producing, and spend more time translating.

Think about moving to a new country.  You always pick up some useful phrases and apply them immediately.   You make no grammar mistakes because you have the necessary language as a chunk.  Why then do so many beginning students say things like “Where you live?” or “I 18.”?   Instead of taking what they’ve heard or seen, they are either translating in their heads or trying to construct sentences based on barely remembered rules.   Other students, especially ones that picked up English at younger ages I’ve noticed, never make these kinds of mistakes.   They’ve learned things in whole pieces, not bite-sized chunks.

What does all this mean?

1) Students need lots of exposure to the language.

2) Students need to use that language so often that it becomes automatic and comfortable.

3) Getting students to understand the finer points of grammar may make them feel comfortable, but ultimately doesn’t aid their inter-language and production abilities.

4) Spending lots of time on conceptually complex grammar rules is time not well spent.

In the end, my strategy is to give an explanation and then just move on.   Turkish students can never figure out why we say “Have you read any of the Harry Potter books?” rather than “Did you read any of them?”   Often the murky answer to this question is that it’s the past connected to the future or life experience or something else that the students simply never conceptualize.  I provide the appropriate rule, which makes them feel like they know it and therefore comfortable, we move on, and then I encourage use of the structure in that vein through error correction in the class and getting them to notice examples of it in material we use.   Sometimes rather quickly, the students just start using it right although I guarantee they aren’t thinking about the rules we worked out previously when they make these sentences.

Over to you.  Is the distinction between simple application rules and conceptual distinctions valid?   What’s the importance of this adult need to analytically understand things rather than just accepting it as “In English, we use this language in this situation”, especially as it regards motivation?  What are your experiences as language learners?

Related Posts:

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 1

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 2

G is for Gerund

Write the word “Trust” on the board.  Ask your students to take a minute and reflect on what trust means to them, where it’s important, and if it’s important in the classroom.  You can have them write down some ideas on paper if you wish.

Tell them to share their ideas with a partner.

Now ask the class if they trust you.  Hopefully, they say yes .  Tell them that you trust all of them and that you are going to prove it to them.  Ask them to volunteer a couple ways in which you might do this.

Ask a volunteer to come to the front.  Tell them that you are going to fall and that they have to catch you.

Do a practice run so they get a feel for your weight and so they can get the positioning down right.  The volunteer should place their hands firmly on your shoulder blades with the fingertips points up (this is very important because the wrists are weak and if they do it the opposite way they could drop you), bend their knees in a tripod fashion, and get themselves squarely under you.  See the above picture (although this example has two people supporting which is a good idea for heavier individuals).

Lean backward into them and have them take you farther and farther down each time.

Now tell them you will do it for real.  You need to keep your eyes closed, your legs straight, and cross your arms in front of you like the guy in the picture.  Then just tip backwards.  It’s a bit scary, but the volunteer will catch you.

Now switch positions and do the same with them.

Each student now grabs a partner and they start of with some practice runs and then do the real thing.  Warning:  Make sure partners are of about equal weight.  If there is a really big person in the class, you can do it with two people supporting, one at each shoulder blade.  Have them change partners a few times.

You can now do a reflective writing or a round table discussion on how they felt during the exercise.  What did they learn about themselves and each other?  Is it easy to trust others?  Why or why not?  In what ways do we need to trust each other in the classroom?

This activity is great for building up relationships in the class and fostering trust.  I highly recommend it for any class.

Related Posts:

Building Relationships 1: Tank Game

Building Relationships 2:  Human Knot

Building Relationships 4: Circle of Trust

This activity works best with between 8-15 people.  If there are too few it goes really quick.  If there are too many it simply takes too long or just doesn’t work.  You can split your class into groups and make it a race if you have a larger class.

Participants need to form a circle.  Then everyone needs to reach across the circle and lock hands with someone else, grabbing the hands of two different people.

Now tell students that they have to untangle themselves without breaking their grips.

This is a great trust-building exercise.  Most people don’t believe it’s possible at first but the vast majority of groups untangle themselves successfully.  In the end, all participants should be facing outwards, forming the original circle.

If participants get really stuck you can allow one unclasp and reclasp.

The sense of accomplishment when the knot is untangled is fantastic.

Obviously this activity brings out a lot of language related to body parts, prepositions of movement and place, directions, and imperatives.

Here’s a video of the activity being done (apologies for the religious theme):

Related Posts:

Building Relationships 1: Tank Game

Building Relationships 3:  Trust Falls

Building Relationships 4:  Circle of Trust

A discussion ensued on my  last blog post about some changes we were implementing at my school.  One of the issues that came up was how to approach grammar teaching.  I’ve been meaning to start a series on this, so here is the first installment.

Assumption:  Grammar-focused lessons, syllabi, and course books are the antithesis of communicative language teaching.

We need to stop deluding ourselves that teaching grammar and then asking the students to partake in an activity that uses the structure is actually communicative.  It is not.  It’s simply grammar instruction with a speaking component.  This series will examine the many incorrect assumptions made about grammar and will take a look at actually applying the CLT approach and teaching communication.

Part 1:  The Argument Against Advanced Grammar

One point that came up in the discussion is teaching “advanced” structures to lower levels.  I think Karenne’s reply aptly sums up my feelings on the subject, mainly that language is “NOT math.”  The picture above is a great example of how grammar can be made overly complex in a classroom.  Will diagraming grammar like above help the students use the language?  Certainly not.  Well the same follows for all the time wasted explaining grammar to students with simpler but still overly complex language.

Understanding and using grammar are two different things.  We want to teach our students to use the language, not to be grammarians.  A very common mistake is to focus on grammar as form rather than grammar as meaning.

Well, here’s the question:  should we teach structures like passives or present perfect or mixed conditionals to lower level learners?  My answer is, in most cases, absolutely, if they are ready for it or it‘s appropriate.

The first critical point that Karenne brings up is that a step by step approach to grammar is nonsense and even insulting to some people’s intelligence.  In an article by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings on Dogme and the coursebook, they state that, “there is no research evidence to suggest that such [grammar] lists match the manner nor the order in which language is learned. It is more probably the case that such language items “emerge” naturally in real language use, through repeated cycles of exposure, attention, output and feedback.”

I would strongly agree.  My main language learning experiences are with Turkish and a bit of Vietnamese.  While Turkish is worlds apart from English, I picked up the structures incredibly fast.  As I lived in Ankara, a city somewhat notorious for cold people, when I first came to Turkey and because I was teaching all the time, I had few opportunities to practice my Turkish.  Yet I downloaded grammar explanations online for most major grammar points and started amassing translations of important words.  Not an ideal way to learn, but it’s all I had.

After a month in the country I had the opportunity to take a vacation to a different city.  On that vacation I made friends with a couple of university students who were studying art.  Neither of them spoke a word of English.  However, I had no problem talking to them.  I had the most difficult time understanding anything they said to me, because I had so little listening practice, but I got my message across with the scarce vocabulary I had available at the time.  The thing I did not have trouble with was expressing passives, future plans, unreal situations, etc.  This is all part of my language that I use every day.   It’s not difficult to understand.  Not only that, my language ability sky-rocketed with two days of practice compared to the small gains I had made in the previous month I had been studying on my own.

This has been my experience throughout learning languages.  I progress slowly or I can’t get something, and then suddenly I get immersed in intensive speaking situations and my fluency shoots up in a very short time.

A very similar story goes for my experience in Vietnam although that was much easier as grammar was much simpler and closer to English.  I would meet people who were shocked that I could make sentences in the past, present, future, and continuous in Vietnamese and they still couldn’t after months of Vietnamese classes.  That’s because I took 10 minutes to look them up online rather than wait until the course thought it was appropriate.  I not only knew these tenses, I used them in my interactions every day at the market.

The idea that our students can’t understand some grammar because it is too “advanced” is ridiculous.  What is difficult is actually learning to take the grammar apart and explain it, but I’ll deal with that in a subsequent post.

Let’s take a look at some “advanced” grammar.  How about passives?  Should we really be able to teach this to beginners? Hmm.  Let’s see… 

I’m married.
Is he tired?
He gets dressed at 6am every day.

Well look at that, 3 passive structures that we teach almost immediately to beginner level students (Ok, you can argue the first two can be viewed as adjectives, but it’s a moot point because functionally the structure and the meaning are the same).

This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions in TEFL.  Obviously if the students can get the above structures, we can teach any other grammatical point in the same way, passives or not.  It’s all about meaning and using the correct language in the correct situation.

How about present perfect?  Well, have you got some more time?  A present perfect sentence most course books teach within the first few weeks.  Why then do we wait until later to introduce this tense?  Well, we could say there is no present perfect in many languages so it’s more difficult.  Well, Turkish also doesn’t have a commonly used verb for “have” anyway either.  Of course this use of present perfect is a bit simpler to comprehend, but you get my point.

Then we move on to mixed conditionals.  What thel is a mixed conditional anyway?  The only reason it’s “mixed” is that because somewhere down the line someone came up with the less than brilliant idea that there were only 4 types of standard conditionals in English.  What egghead sitting in an office decided this I don’t know.  Mixed conditionals are only difficult because our students have been told for years that there are only 4 types.  Now you are mixing them?  How about just not putting constraints on them in the first place?

I tell my students, if they ever ask, there are two main categories of conditionals, ones that deal with real situations and ones that deal with unreal.  That’s the only point to even worry about.  As for conditional types, anything goes.

Once the student is ready, they’ll attempt a sentence like, “If rain, I (hand motion for grab) umbrella.”  Why would I not give the student the correct language he wants to use?  What can possibly be more important than what the student is trying to say? I don’t need to create a context, the student already has it.  He just needs the correct forms, “If it rains, I’ll take an umbrella.”

Now say the same level student comes out with the sentence, “If I rich, I buy very nice house.”  Again, the student has the context, give them the language they need to say it.  They’ve got it in their own language already.  Do you want to clarify it for the rest of the class?  Ok.

Teacher:  So Mehmet, are you rich?

Mehmet:  No teacher.

Teacher: Do you have a nice house?

Mehmet:  No

Teacher:  So this is real or not?

Mehmet:  No real.

Teacher:  Ok then, say, “If I was rich, I’d buy a very nice house.”

There, you just taught 2^nd conditional to a low level class.

Will they remember it right away?  Probably not.  Should you spend lots of time on it and drill it?  Again, I’d say probably not, it depends on the nature of the conversation or activity taking place.  But now the students have been introduced and, when they are ready or when they see it again, they’ll be much more prepared.

Were a few of your students a bit lost?  Ask for a quick translation and move on.  You’re not going to waste time trying to explain something unless you really think your students are ready to use it or it’s appropriate for the activity.  Once you really want to or need to dig into this kind of language, then really bring the points home, but if it’s just something that came up in class (which is the best way to introduce language anyway), quickly get students on the same page with a few well chosen concept check questions or a translation and move on.

We know that grammar knowledge does not equal acquisition.  No matter how much you teach the students about the grammar, it will not translate over to proficiency and fluency, so why do it?  Most students have had years of grammar instruction and it has not worked for the vast majority of students as we can see quite clearly by looking at our students.  Why then do we continue to give grammar instructionwhen it so obviously hasn’t been working?

Present a topic very briefly, I usually say under 5 minutes like in the example above and then just give the students tons of practice opportunities in the form of conversations and tasks.  Will everyone get it immediately?  No.  Is that ok?  Most definitely.  They will see it again and again, and – this is very important – when they are ready, they will pick it up.

This isn’t just theory.  This is something I have seen work in my classes time and time and time again.  For all the trouble Turkish students have with present perfect I can honestly say that my elementary students start to use it naturally without even realizing they’re using it after a while.  Why?  Because we don’t focus on the grammar.  We just do lots of activities with excellent context that provide them language use opportunities.

I would argue that the only thing that should limit explicit grammar teaching, if it is explicitly taught at all, is size and whether it’s in the mother tongue or not.  Obviously for a student that can barely get out “I live in Istanbul,” we’re not going to introduce “If I get a new job, I’ll move.”  However, the student is hardly going to attempt saying something like that if he’s not ready for it.  It should never be a problem.

Obviously beginners have less ability to keep long sentences in their head or to manipulate a lot of variables.  It makes sense to teach present simple and future before introducing the 1^st conditional because the conditional builds on the previous two.  In the same way, students need to have a critical mass of vocabulary before dictionary use can be really effective.  However, grammar that depends on other grammar is in the minority in the language, so this is rarely a problem.

The other constraint is the L1. It’s always much easier to learn something that is already present in your L1.  I’ve been told Chinese does not have language for imaginary situations in the past, so 3^rd conditional will be a struggle.  Turkish students don’t have anything like the present perfect, so it’s more difficult for them to pick up.  It doesn’t mean we can’t introduce it early on, it just means the students will need to spend more time working on it to acquire it.

To connect back to my last post.  Stop worrying about what the book and the syllabus say and start worrying about what language your students need and are ready for.

What are your thoughts?  Are structures like passives, perfect tenses, and wishes really any different from present tenses or possession?  Is it really that difficult for an adult who may have a master’s degree and run a company to make a sentence with two pieces instead of one (i.e. I go vs. I am going).  Do some classes focus too much on grammar?  Are complex analytical explanations useful to students?  I’ll be interested to hear what others have to say.

Related Reading:

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 2

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 3

Dogme and the Coursebook

I have a number of posts in the works, but have something more pressing that I would really love all your feedback on.  I’m trying to convince my fellow manager to follow suit on a few issues and would also like to know if anyone thinks I’m on the right track or not as well.

I’ve been managing my current school, Oxford House College, for about 3 months now.  It is an absolutely fantastic school, one of the best in Turkey as far as I’m concerned and I’ve very proud to work there.  Everyone from the owner to the managers to the teachers are dedicated to teaching and we are constantly improving.

Before I ask for your input I should let you all know that we use an ongoing enrollment system.  While there are some drawbacks such as shifting classes and difficulty in planning or building on previous material, I love the system.

For anyone that doesn’t know, ongoing enrollment means that students do not buy courses, they buy hours.  They can enter a class at any time.  They don’t go through a course in the traditional sense that there is an official start and finish date.

They can also advance at any time.  The system is tailored to the students’ needs.  If they work hard, practice a lot, or are just good at learning languages, they can move up quickly.  If they are slower, very busy, or just taking more time, they move at a slower rate.  The teachers constantly keep the students progress in mind and when they feel the student is ready, they move them to the next level or tell them to stay longer, whatever the case may be.

We are trying to work with a set of can-do statements similar to the Common European Framework’s. However, these statements have been annotated or changed to apply specifically to Turkish learners.

If a students can talk about their present routines, their family, and fill out a form, but can’t write an email to a friend well, then the teacher specifically focuses on that can-do task until they are reasonably proficient and then the student(s) can move up.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve slowly been making and been trying to make a number of perhaps radical changes since I accepted the position.  I would love to know what your thoughts are on the issues.

#1 Exams

I have eliminated all exams.  Of course, if the teacher feels they really need to, they can give one, but exams are not required and the students know that the teacher’s opinion is all that matters.  I have done this because I trust my teachers.  I have an excellent team right now.  My teachers are with the students every class.  They know their students.  How can an exam tell them anything they don’t already know?

What’s more, students are becoming intrinsically motivated and focusing on progressing in their communicative ability.  They know there is no exam at the end, so they don’t skip class and show up at exam time and they don’t save all their studying for a week before the end of a course (technically we don’t have courses, but you get the idea).

My teachers don’t feel the need to teach to an exam, they can focus on what the learners actually want and need to learn.  It makes classes more flexible and allows students and teachers much more control over the direction of the course.

#2 Course books

We no longer have a primary course book.   Course books have a whole slew of problems associated with them.  They aren’t made for our learners, they are often boring, they take a step-by-step approach to language learning that often isn’t realistic, and they are too grammar focused.

We have a number of course book series available and lots of supplementary material in our small library as well as tons of high quality digital lessons on the computer all organized by level, skill, grammar point, and content.  Teachers identify the needs of the class and find or create appropriate material.

Too often students and teachers get bogged down in slogging from one page to the next and focusing on grammar mcnuggets (thanks Darren and Scott ) Why are we teaching past simple or letter writing if our students already do it well?  Skip it and move on to lessons they actually need.  A course should be dynamic and fluid, not linear.

#3 The Internal Syllabus

I’d like to do an entire post on this concept sometime, but for now, just a brief summary.  The syllabus comes from the students.  I’m terribly partial to Harmer’s EASA approach (which was brought up nicely on English Raven not too long ago) or Test-Teach-Test styles in general.

Come in with an engaging activity and then see what the students do well with and what they struggle with.  Make notes on the points they struggle on and then, in that lesson or another, teach, review, or revise the material.

This way you don’t cover stuff the students are already good at.  That’s boring and a waste of time for everyone.  You really focus on students’ needs.

It’s also much more skills and content focused.  You are constantly practicing skills rather than isolated grammar or lexical sets.

In true Dogme style, if students are searching for language to communicate, teach it to them.  Don’t worry about the course book or the lesson plan.  What could possibly be more important than what the students are trying to say?  This also ensures the perfect context.  The students know what they are trying to say, they just don’t know it in English.  Supply it and I guarantee it will stick better and make more sense to them.

An internal syllabus isn’t just about language points, it’s about content as well.  What are the students interested in?  What do they want to learn?  Get to know them.  Get the feedback from them.  Ask what they want.  Then bring in material based on that information.

An internal syllabus is created in the dialogue between teachers and students.

#4 Cut Down on the Worksheets

Gap-fill worksheets are banned and so are book activities that do the same.

I’m trying to get my teachers to cut down on worksheet use in class in general.

Yes, yes, I know.  I’m a Dogmeist now.  I need help .  Most of the material for a lesson can come from the students themselves.  You can get at least a two-hour lesson out of picture with tons of wonderful, student-produced language.

Let’s not bombard our students with worksheets and busy work.  Give one sheet to every 2 students so they are always working together and helping each other out.

Worksheets should be short and help to scaffold a primary activity.  I hate coming into classes and seeing students spend 20 minutes figuring out a crossword puzzle or filling in some blanks.  Then another 5-10 minutes is wasted going over the answers.

If you want your students to practice prepositions of place have them hide objects around the room, describe pictures of their bedroom for a partner to draw, show them a scene from Wallace & Grommit and the Wrong Trousers and have them describe what’s happening, play Simon Says, anything but an unproductive worksheet where very little language is produced or engaged with.

#5 Skills and Content Focused Learning

We have 3 and 4-hour lessons at our school.   I encourage my teachers to see this as an extended learning opportunity rather than discrete hours with separate lessons.

Pick a topic like Art.  The first lesson can be a listening on abstract art, the second a reading on surrealism, and the third can be a heated debate or discussion on the connection between politics and art.

Throughout the 3 hours, students are building and revising related vocabulary and structures, but they are also coming across lots of new information and getting a chance to focus on particular skills throughout.

Were your students sick and they come in talking about it?  Have a conversation about it.  Brainstorm illnesses and discuss remedies.  Do a doctor-patient role-play.  Write about your last visit to the doctor then exchange with a partner and do some peer correction.

Our students should be learning to communicate and learning different skill sets, not obsessing over grammar  and vocabulary.  Of course, grammar and vocabulary have their place, but skills and content are so much more interesting, contextualized, and, IMO, effective.

What Do You Think?

Well, that’s the end of the main pushes I’ve been trying to make that directly concern teaching in the classroom.  What do you all think.  Good ideas?  Bad ideas?  Should I modify them.  I’m really looking for your feedback on this one and I’d appreciate any and all comments.

Related Reading:

No Good Reason to Grade

I am honored to have Darren Elliott guest posting this week.  Darren often has insightful posts on the conflicts and issues that emerge between students and foreign teachers on his blog.  In this vein, check out Which English:  Why Your Opinion is Irrelevant, I Want You to Express Your Opinions Freely (as long as they’re the same as mine), and Responsible Racism:  A Guide for Teachers.  Darren was kind enough to give us a series of anecdotes about his experiences with Turkey and his understanding of what those anecdotes tell him.

I once worked with a man from Turkey. As we sat in the canteen one icy morning, he looked out the window at the thin light peeking above the horizon and told me that the winter sun always made him feel sad. Mind you, working night shifts at a cake factory in a provincial English town will do that to you.

According to Thompson (2001) there is no ‘be’ verb in Turkish. However, there are three different /r/ sounds, none of them like the English. So, what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. I’m guessing that Turkish language performances of ‘Hamlet’ lose something, as do discussions of Cartesian philosophy.

Amongst the list of First World War peace treaties I had to learn as a schoolboy, I was especially impressed with the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923, as it was a re-negotiation of the 1920 Treaty of Sevre. That was the kind of schoolboy I was; one who sat up the front in history and memorized pacts, alliances and peace treaties.

I once taught a Turkish student, a labourer, at a private conversation school here in Japan. He was the exact inverse of his two Japanese classmates. While they would go through agonies before allowing tiny, perfectly-formed droplets of language to fall from their lips, he spewed forth streams of consciousness in which the flotsam and jetsam of English grammar bounced and tumbled.

So, to answer the question, “What does this tell me about Turkey?” – none of this teaches me anything about Turkey or the Turkish people. Gert Hofstede claims that Turkish people are keen to avoid uncertainty, maintain a fairly large power distance, and are members of a collectivist rather than an individualistic society. An awful lot of data analysis has gone into reaching such conclusions, but I wonder about reducing national cultures to numerical scores on a five-point scale? Why not buy the cultural GPS app for your I-phone (it’s a real product!) next time you travel? We can all too often pick out those little factoids we half-know about countries we have never visited, and pass them on as truths, extrapolated to express an entire society. It’s a danger that teachers, in particular, should never lose sight of.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the stereotypes about Japanese students. Japanese students are quiet, they lack creativity, they can’t think critically, they are stifled by fear of losing face. I could find you a number of examples from my own teaching career which would bear these stereotypes out – in fact, there is one listed above. Without visiting Japan, or ever having taught Japanese students, you may have a similar image. But I could also find you a number of examples of Japanese students who are talkative, who think around corners, who have no shame!

The stories you hear first, the ones you choose to remember… is there a danger that the teacher will put their students into a box before they even walk into the classroom?

So that’s what I “know” about Turkey. I’d love to hear your notes on countries you have never visited, as long as you recognise that they tell you absolutely nothing.

I have just read Vocabulary by John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri, a part of the Resource Books for Teachers Series by Oxford House Press.  This post has nothing to do with the merits of the book although I would say that I didn’t find it very useful.

My problem is with one of their assumptions that relates back to one of my earlier posts.  Right in the introduction there is a mention of why translating is a natural learning strategy and should be allowed or at least built upon in the language classroom.  As it so happens, the example they give has to do with the Turkish word ev.

Rather than making a case for them, it actually makes an excellent case for not using the students’ L1.  John and Mario claim that a student will naturally associate any new word in English with its translation in the L1.  They are right, this is inevitable, at least at low levels.  However, it is not something that should be encouraged.

Just looking at the word ev in Turkish.  The closest English equivalent would be “home”.  However, “home” is often an adverb in English, so we can’t say things like “We’re going to my home” or “We went to home.”  In Turkish, it always functions as a noun and so there are immediate grounds for error.  This word can also be translated as “house” or “apartment.”  In Turkish, the word can be used for your house or your apartment, whereas, at least in American English, we would distinguish between going to our house or going to our apartment. This is a common source of confusion in the classroom as you ask students if they live in a house and they say they do (houses are very expensive and hard to find in Istanbul).

This is why I really discourage this kind of approach.  Even with the simplest words, there are vast differences in grammar and usage.  Encouraging translation encourages these kinds of mistakes.  We want to build students’ learning strategies that don’t rely on this crutch.  It slows down their processing of the language, leads to untold numbers of errors, and kills their fluency.

I’ve had so many students that struggle to say even the simplest sentences because they are still translating.  It becomes a conceptual problem as well.  Students get so frustrated when there aren’t grammatical or lexical equivalents to new language.

My best students and the people I know that learn languages well always think in the target language as much as possible.  They don’t get tripped up by “I feel like a coke.” because they don’t translate “feel” and “like” literally.  Rather, they take it in context and immediately understand what it means.  If we translated the Turkish kola icmek icimden geldi it would literally translate as “cola drinking came from my inside” which makes no sense in English.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students be unable to process new words unless translated because it’s become such a habit or because they haven’t developed better learning strategies yet.  I’ve had a picture of an owl and pointed to it and said, “owl” and still had a student ask “what it meant.”  I’ve had students come up with the weirdest translations for present and future perfect tenses (there are no equivalents in Turkish).  They mangle their own language just to try and make it work.  I’ve had students using causatives correctly yet still want to know “what they mean” because they can’t translate them.

One activity in Vocabulary was to play Othello with words in L1 on one side of a card and words in L2 on the other.  This kind of decontexualized activity only makes the situation worse.  What’s the point of having students make sentences in decontexualized fashion and at the same time reinforcing bad translation habits?

Condition the students to think in English as soon as possible and the rewards they will reap in the future will be enormous.

Related Posts:

Turkish-English Dictionaries in the Classroom

Using Turkish in the Classroom