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

Please check out the video before reading the post.  It’s about a program started at Bernard College.

I happened to come across this video through On War and Words blog.  For me, this project is the embodiment of good teaching.  This is the type of teaching I strive for.

There is certainly a lot to like about this style of teaching, but by far the most important for me is the creation of a critical classroom.  Students were deliberately challenged to seek out new worldviews, question preconceived notions, and identify with the Other.  I truly feel that good teaching always does those things.

Seeking out new worldviews, especially ones that challenge our current beliefs is so important to be able to critically engage with the world around us, each other, and even ourselves.  These students had to delve into a very complex and difficult topic and really look at it.

More importantly, they are doing more than  just acquiring and then passing on that information.  They are living it.  They are not just reporting what someone else says.  They are being asked to truly understand that person and become them within the classroom.  This ability to get inside the head of an other is an invaluable skill and can teach so much, especially when you are asked to do it with the side you don’t agree with.

We as teachers have very powerful opportunities to bring these critical elements into our students lives and I feel that it is something many teachers either rarely consider or shy away from.

We should ask ourselves if our teaching is truly transformative or if it simply aids the accumulation of knowledge and skills.  Personally, I feel we should do both rather than one or the other.

This project also rests on some very sound pedagogical principles.  The students are given a lot of free-reign, most of the work is done by them, and the knowledge and skills are lived rather than passively received.

I don’t know 100% of how this classroom was run, but I bet I can make some pretty good guesses.  Students were given roles, but how they developed those roles, how they acquired the information, and how they presented it was probably largely left up to them.  I’m sure the teacher merely acted as a guide, someone who could point them in the right direction or make sure they were staying on track.  It’s a class where the students were mostly teaching each other.

Students were given specific goals and an excellent framework to work within, but after this, it seems that the achievement of those goals was their responsibility.  They were provided access to materials rather than spoon-fed answsers.

The most important point here is that the lesson was lived.  It was actively experienced.  I guarantee that the students will remember most of what they learned throughout this project.  How could they not?  This is the true benefit of drama in the classroom.

Your ability to implement this kind of teaching depends on a lot of things and not everyone will be able to do it to the same degree, but I think we should all try to do our best.  Simple things like access to materials for this kind of project may be hard to come by, but I imagine there is more than enough material available on the Internet, especially for an English class.

Another problem often faced in Turkey is inconsistent students.  Extended projects are quite hard to do with students that pop in and out of classes fairly frequently and can’t be counted on to come on time.  I’ve found it’s beneficial to initiate projects that can be done regardless of who shows up.  If you have to depend on key people, a big problem arises when they don’t come that day or come 2 hours late.

There is also the matter of school policies regarding controversial issues and the students’ own reactions to them.  We can simply work within our limits and I’d say we should push them as much as we can as well.  I did a number of posts a while back on different ways of introducing controversy into the classroom:  Juxtaposition, Displacement, Pushing.

What about you?  Do you consider your teaching to be critical or transformative in the lives of your students?  How do you accomplish this?  What hurdles do you have to overcome when doing so?  How feasible is it within the English classroom?

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

From time to time I’ve decided to throw up a dogme lesson plan.  Like most of what I consider to be dogme lessons, this plan was written after the lesson was completed.  It is, in fact, a post-plan.  As a teacher, I always come to class with something prepared to do, but quite often I chuck it out the window as something else comes up.

These posts will be an attempt to show how I come up with the lesson as it happens.

Banking

Level:  Intermediate
Materials Used:  None
Time:  About 3 hours

In Turkey, students tend to slowly filter in to class during the first hour as being on time is not much of a concern here.  Many of my classes, therefore, start out with general conversations or light activities that people can slip into as they arrive.

About a half hour into class a reasonable number of students had arrived and one of the students was telling a story about a problem they had at the bank the other day.  Everyone was pretty interested in the story.

Decision: Do a lesson on banking.  I decided on this because 1) a number of the students worked or studied banking & finance, 2) it was clear from the conversation that banking vocabulary was weak or unknown, and 3) the students had brought up the subject and were expressing interest.

I thought a good way to do the lesson would be a role-play as I like drama and real life situations.

First (after the student finished telling their story and questions died out), we brainstormed a number of terms that the students should be using like deposit, withdraw, interest rate, signature, etc.

One student started adding words like stock and share-holder and…

Decision: Stop it there as that would be getting off track of the direction the lesson was taking and complicate things too much, especially since many students wouldn’t know those terms and situations even in Turkish.  Also, I wasn’t at all confident with that language or those situations in English either and so I doubted my ability to help create an effective lesson in that direction.

After the brainstorm session, I left all the words and phrases on the board.  Students then became bank tellers and customers.  The bank tellers pulled their chairs to the front of the class and stood behind them as customers formed lines in front of the tellers.

The activity ran for about 8 minutes.  I noticed that the students were using a lot of the language we had come up with, but that their general language was very informal.  I wound down the activity and everyone went back to their seats.

Decision: Focus on formal language, particularly things like indirect questions, modals, and if clauses.  The students obviously had less experience with this and needed the practice.

We now did a bit of feedback on the first part of the lesson.  Students asked questions and we added some more language that they needed to the board.  We then discussed the formality of the situation and talked about the language used.  The students decided that they needed to use more formal language.  We brainstormed again and put up example phrases like “Could you tell me your customer number, please?” “Do you mind waiting a minute while I…“ “I was wondering if you could tell me…“ and “If you could just sign right here…”

Switching tellers and customers, the activity ran again.  This time students were using much more appropriate language.  Again, I helped out students when they got stuck, pointed out minor errors, or commented when students became a bit too informal.

The activity ran for almost 15 minutes this time.  Students that weren’t involved in a transaction chatted in line with their fellow customers.

After this activity, I initiated a feedback session and students discussed what they liked about the activity or didn’t, who did a good job, what was easy or difficult, questions they had, etc. While this was happening, I boarded a lot of language, both good and bad, that had come from the students.  We talked about the nature of the language, why certain language was good or bad and we discussed corrections in grammar, vocabulary, and register.

After a break, I thought we could work on complaints at the bank as that is basically what started off the lesson.  I started by giving an example of a lot of problems I’d been having with Internet banking lately.  My plan was to have some students come up with complaints, others be tellers who would decide on a particular emotion to react with, and others to be managers to be called in to help out.

After I told my story though, a number of other students started complaining about Internet banking as well.  Still others didn’t trust it and were very curious about those who used it and whether it was safe or not.

Decision: Scrap the original plan and allow an open class discussion.  The students were obviously highly interested in the topic and to stop it and move on to something else would perhaps be de-motivating.  The students were still recycling much of the language we had been practicing and they were all actively involved in the discussion.

My job was simply to support students in the language they were using if they got stuck, especially regarding vocabulary, and to get them to self-correct some areas of language that we had been working on lately or that particular students were having problems with.

The discussion ran for a good 30 minutes.  This time I dictated a number of sentences back to them where they used vocabulary that was too general or structures that were a bit too simple.  They copied the sentences down and then had to work in pairs to find ways of improving the sentences using more specific vocabulary we’d covered that day or by making the language more structurally complex.  Changes were then discussed as a class.

Including the rather open ended chat in the beginning and breaks, the entire lesson took a little over 3 hours.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

So what do you think of the lesson outcome, decisions made, etc?  Is this similar to how you run a dogme lesson or different?  What would you change or have done differently?  If you’re not familiar with dogme, does this lesson help you understand the approach better?

Related Articles:

D is for Dogme

The Dogme of Dogme

Sources for Teaching Unplugged

Further Dogme Links

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

In my last post I argued against viewing many structures as advanced, especially when they exist in the students’ L1.  While I think my main point of considering many structures as somehow advanced and difficult for students to be nonsense is well-founded, I do stand corrected on two grammar points I used as examples.

Looking deeper into the matter, there is a difference between adjectival passives (or pseudo-passives as one commenter called them) and actual passives.  A sentence like “he is married” is an example of a past participle adjective rather than a true passive as “married” serves a predicative function in the sentence.

Compare “He was married in 1990, but now he is divorced” with “He was married by a priest in 1990.”  There is a slight difference in the meaning I think.

On the “have got” end, I do still think it originally comes from one of the ways in which we use present perfect today, but it has lost that nuance.  It merely has a similarity of form rather than a similarity of meaning.  Compare “I’ve got the car for 5 days” with “I’ve had the car for 5 days.”  The first implies the length of time I will have it while the 2^nd implies the length of time I have had it.  It follows then that the meanings are not exactly analogous.

These two examples lead very well into my second reason for thinking grammar is incredibly overrated in the classroom.

Reason #2:  If it confuses us, how could it possibly help the students?

In the simple definition I use in teaching, grammar is simply the structure of the language.  For instance, in English we use subject + verb + object, the past tense is used to talk about finished actions in the past and we make it with S + V2 + O, etc.

Does this really help our students for them to know this?  Does it make sense to them?  My contention is that it doesn’t help them nearly as much as the importance we place on it seems to indicate.

Let’s face it, how many of you knew what an SVO language was before becoming an English teacher?   If you walked into a Turkish language classroom and someone told you that Turkish is an SOV language, would that have meant anything to you before becoming a teacher?  My guess is no.  So why do we teach it to the students?

Do we ever teach that “to give” is a ditransitive verb?  How about that “I wish I were…” and “If I were you…” are past subjunctive structures, or what about even the basic difference between an object and a complement?  I’m betting that almost no one has taught ditransitive verbs, done a lesson on the past subjunctive, or a lesson on objects vs. complements.  Yet our students use these structures all the time and, of course, native speakers use them as well.

Let’s do an experiment.  For those who don’t know, a ditransitive verb is a verb that takes two objects such as “to give.”  For example, “please give me the ball.”  “The ball” and “me” are the dual objects.  Now, take a minute and think of some other examples of ditransitive verbs…

Not so easy is it?  What if I asked you how to determine if a verb is ditransitive or not before seeing it in use?  The fact is, we can’t.

Now do the same with the past subjunctive.  The past subjunctive can be used for counter-factual information, hypothetical situations, wishes, suggestions, or doubt.  Besides the examples given above, please take a minute to think of some other sentences using the past subjunctive…

Again, I’m willing to bet most readers were unable to come up with any.  Why then do we ask students to do things like this?

What I’m betting you could do was come up with a whole lot of sentences using the previously given examples.  You could probably think of a hundred sentences with give, or if I were you, or I wish I were.  Using language with examples that emerge from the class is what is worth teaching – not sweeping categorical rules.  We want information like this to become chunked in our students brains and then recalled in situations similar to what we saw in class, on tv, in a book, etc.

I used the grammar points above because I’d bet that most teachers aren’t familiar with them and it gives us a good feel of what learners are going through.

Moreover, the teacher often has to figure out the rule before class or review it.  I often see experienced teachers walk into a class and bungle up passives, conditionals, or present perfect.  If we actually have trouble understanding how it works, what makes us think that passing on this knowledge to the students will help them?

How often have I seen a teacher give a rule and then ask students to make sentences with it?  It’s not easy, especially if the student is put on the spot in front of the whole class.  Just think, if we can’t quickly do it ourselves in our own language, how can we expect students to do it?

If we have taught complements vs. objects, ditransitive verbs, and subjunctive moods to our students all this time without knowing what they are, what’s to say we can’t do the same exact thing for every other grammar point?

How many of our students ever run through the long lists of grammar rules while speaking?  Well, we can easily spot the ones that do because they take ages to produce a single sentence and it comes out in little pieces.

I think this is really where ideas like teaching students to chunk language and learning through context come into play.  Students are given opportunities to use language in certain situations and then the teacher helps lead them to the most appropriate language.  Through lots of usage opportunities and comprehensible input, the language will chunk and, more importantly, it will start to sound correct to the student’s ear.

This is always a goal in my classes.  I don’t care if the students know the rules much, I want them to be able to say, “well, this just doesn’t sound right.  It should be this way” because they’ve had so many learning opportunities inside and outside my class that he language comes naturally.

What do you think?  Does teaching grammar rules have a positive impact on student learning?

Related Articles:

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 1

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 3

Steven Pinker on Language & Thought – A good video showing how grammar talk can be extremely complex and almost useless in a language teaching environment.

In Other News:

I did a guest post over on Barbara Sakamoto’s Teaching Village on different ways of using a text in class for her Stuff All Teachers Should Know Series.

I’m also doing a number of workshops at conferences this year.  Last weekend I did a workshop on storytelling over at Cevre Koleji that went incredibly well although I was rushed into giving it in 25 minutes.

I will also be presenting at TESOL Greece next week, Gelisim College in Turkey, BETA Bulgaria (2 workshops), and the 3^rd International ELT conference in Cyprus.

If anyone else will be at these conferences I would love to meet up.  Shoot me a message.

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