Save Time – Make the Students Do It

Wanna here a funny story? I thought so. Well, this one is about a trainee on a TEFL course. We all know many of us make quite a few blunders during that time and nights are lost stressing and sweating over our lesson plans.

Well, this particular trainee seemed far more worn out than most. She was almost ready to quit so it was time to step in.

Trainer: “What are you so stressed out?

Trainee” (almost in tears) “I’m up until 3am every night preparing my lessons.”

Trainer: “What exactly is taking so long?”

Trainee: “The pictures.”

Trainer: “The pictures?”

Trainee: “Yes, they take forever to draw.”

You see, this particular trainee was an artist. She was hand-drawing every single picture for her lesson. Gorgeously detailed and colored owls, tigers, horses, you name it.

Here’s what she did with them for her Beginner class.

Trainee: “Class, what’s this?” (holding up a picture)

Class: “It’s an owl!”

Trainee” “Good job. What’s this?”

Class: “It’s a tiger!”

Yep, she was spending hours drawing these wonderful pictures and using them for about 5 seconds in the class.

Moral of the story – don’t spend all night preparing an activity that will last 5 seconds .

While her story is a bit extreme, many teachers do this, especially newbies. Far too much time is spent preparing an activity when it’s usefulness in the classroom doesn’t warrant the time.

And usually, someone has prepared something similar before. That’s what the Internet is for. If you can find it on Flicker in two seconds, don’t bother drawing it.

Very related to this is a point Michelle Worgan brought up not too long ago on her blog. In fact, rather than preparing anything at all yourself, have the students do it! It will save you loads of fun and actually often improves the activity.

Having the students create the material will often foster more of a need to use English in the class and the students will have a greater investment as the material being used is coming from them.

A simple example is the TEFL classic, Celebrity Heads. This is the game where students put the name of a celebrity on their back and they have to go around the room asking yes/no questions until they can guess who they are.

For such a simple activity, it can take a long time to prepare. First you have to come up with celebrity names. Seems simple, but then, as a new teacher in a foreign land, you’re unsure who the students know. And then there’s the age difference if you’re teaching younger learners. Then you probably have to go ask a local. Then you ask for some additional local celebrities to show just how culturally sensitive you are. Finally you have to type them up, call up the IT guy and wait five hours to fix the printer, and finally cut them up into little pieces. And if you’re really unlucky, it’ll turn out that the celebrities the local teacher gave you were ones no one in the class actually knows.

The thing is, this can all be avoided. Simply ask the students to do it. That’s right, make ‘em work instead of you. Bring in a bunch of cut-up slips of paper and ask them to write a famous person on it. They’ll be more interested in the activity and it’s much more likely that everyone in the class will know who it is.

I have my students come up with the material for many of my activites. I’d say a good 70% of activites in Rewards books can be improved simply by having the students come up with the language rather than being given it. Role-plays, drawings, example sentences? Again, my students usually do it.

So next time it’s 3am and you’re on your 5th cup of coffee, ask yourself, “Couldn’t I just have my students do it?”

Happy planning

The Heart of Dogme

I love dogme.  Not just because I believe it’s an effective teaching approach, but because it makes my classroom come alive, makes it breath, makes it real.  Dogme reminds me that classrooms can be real places where people interact and build relationships, not places where they come only to acquire information.

Karenne’s latest challenge asks why dogme is materials light.  Dogme is not materials light because it doesn’t favor materials (like course books), it’s materials light because it’s about the people in the class and the language they use to connect with each other.  With passion, I join Mark Andrews and say classrooms are a community, and should be approached as such!

When Scott first wrote on dogme ten years ago he asked from the heart, with this mountain of materials and resources, “Where is the story?  Where is the inner life of the student in all this?  Where is the real communication?”  EFL classrooms were and still are putting materials at the forefront of the classroom rather than the student and that’s where “we lost the plot.”

This is the true reason I am a dogmeist.  This is why dogme can be used with or without course books, with or without tech, while teaching grammar or while having a conversation.  What dogme is really advocating is that we put the relationships of the people in the class at the front and center.  Not the material.  Not the technology.  Not the subject knowledge.  Dogme’s original vows of chastity and its current guidelines are merely suggestions gently helping us remember this.  If we’re not sure how to go about this, dogme offers us what seems to me like a pretty good place to start.

Where, I ask you, is the pulse of the course book?  Can you feel the breath of the IWB?  These things are merely objects, tools to be used to mediate our interaction with each other.  But if used too much, they can become obstacles rather than aids.  By stripping away the chaf, we can find the true life’s blood of our classroom in the souls of the individuals present.

Like most teachers, I try to get feedback from students periodically on my classes.  After I finished my last Upper-Intermediate class here is the word-for-word response I got from a 16-year-old girl.

When I first started to the course, I was expecting to find a class with a serious atmosphere and a teacher who teaches grammar or uses books’ stupid texts and exercises all the time. I was so glad when it turned out to be a fun class after my first day. The way you teach is definitely excellent. I mean, you were making us speak as if we were sitting in a cafe, chatting with a few friends, and you were teaching without using books, writing someting the board and expecting nothing but taking notes from us. Most subjects were fun, too. (Thanks Yaprak ) [Emphasis mine]

This is the atmosphere I aim to create in my classroom.  It’s an atmosphere where the students view each other as friends, where they feel relaxed, and where they feel like they can talk about anything. It’s a classroom that helps us remember we’ve come together for a common purpose and we can take each other by the hand and find the way together.

Relationship & Trust Building Activities:

Circle of Trust

Trust Falls

Human Knot

Tank Game

More Posts on Dogme:

Unplugged Lesson Plans

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher:  Memory Techniques

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher:  Banking

An Emergent Curriculum

The Road to Teaching Unplugged

Pronunciation: Let’s Get Physical

For anyone not aware, Adrian Underhill has joined the blogosphere and will be blogging on his pronunciation chart and its uses.

While I’m not a fan of pron charts as I think they are simply another alphabet for students to learn when what they really need is the practice making and recognizing the sounds, I am a big fan of his notion of making pronunciation physical.  There are some nice videos on youtube of him giving a workshop on this here (1, 2, 3, 4).

One of Adrian’s biggest complaints is that pronunciation is the Cinderella of ELT as in nobody pays it much attention.  He is not alone in this (check out Henrick Oprea’s post on the same issue here).

In my work in Turkey I have not found much need to focus on the pronunciation of individual sounds as Turks have very little trouble in this area.  For Turkish pronunciation issues see here, here and here (hit cntrl+f to scroll down immediately to pronunciation).

Two areas where Turks do have a bit of a problem is with “th” sounds and “v” vs. “w.”  One of the first things I noticed with this issue, and where I really agree with Adrian, is that the physical nature of these sounds needs to be modeled and practiced.  Things like tongue placement, vibration, and air flow all become really important.

To make the “th” sound in English we put our tongue between our teeth.  My Turkish students absolutely hate this.  They find it very unnatural and sticking your tongue out is seen as a tad rude.  To really get my students doing this, I quickly realized I had to vastly over exaggerate the tongue placement.  I would stand in front of the class and stick my tongue half way out of my mouth and appear really silly overall.  I would then get my students to follow suit.  Regular practice in this way along with consistent reinforcement through correction in the class and students pick it up really quick.

Aside from that, my pronunciation work in Turkey tends to focus on linking words and weak forms as Turks have a habit of speaking in a staccato by separating every word out in a sentence.

Where I really learned the need to focus on pronunciation of individual sounds was when I moved to Vietnam.  Vietnamese pronunciation is some of the worst I’ve ever come across.  There are two main reasons for this:  1)  Vietnamese speakers don’t use their tongues when they speak.  They generally rest on the bottom of their mouths.  2)  There are no final consonants in Vietnamese so their brains actually never developed the ability to hear a consonant at the end of a word.  Since they can’t hear it, they can’t say it.  Since they can’t say it, they can’t hear it.  It’s a pronunciation teacher’s worst nightmare.

I quickly started introducing whole lessons on pronunciation.  This involved modeling a lot and getting students to stare at my mouth, which was strange for me.  I had to do a lot of the reverse as well – staring at students’ mouths and making sure mouth and tongue placement were correct.  I also learned to draw a lot of pictures detailing mouth position, illustrate sounds with air vs. no air (a piece of paper held in front of your mouth is good for this), and vibration vs. no vibration.

As Adrian points out, rather than just having students listen and copy the sounds you are making, really get them involved with the physical nature of the sounds.  I actually found that pronunciation lessons always ended in lots of laughter as people try really hard to make foreign sounds.

What kind of pronunciation work do you do in your classes?  Do you focus on the physical nature of pronunciation in any way?  Do you have any good activities for doing so?

Useful pronunciation activities:

Reverse dictation.  Students read out sentences and the teacher writes what they hear on the board.  This is often very enlightening to students as they don’t realize what they sound like.

Recording students saying a sentence in class and then comparing it to the recording of other English speakers.

Holding paper in front of your mouth to practice consonants with/without air (very useful for beginning “t” vs. final “t”, “v” vs. “f”, or “b” vs. “p”)

Tongue twisters are always fun.

The line game for minimal pairs – students stand in a line and the teacher says a word involving one of a set of minimal pairs.  For example “w” and “v”  If the students hear a “w” word they have to jump to the left, if they hear a “v” word they have to jump to the right.  Eventually, switch the teacher out for a student.

Minimal Pair Maze -  Draw a tree like below and label it with cities.  Then choose a minimal pair and writes words using the two to the left and right of the maze.  The teacher calls out a word and students follow along on their maze according to the direction on the maze (in this case, left for “t” and right for “th”)  In the end, students compare what city they ended up in.  Then get the students to do it.  (A side note:  I always choose cities that Turkish speakers are likely to goof up so they get some city vocab practice in as well).

Related Articles:

Orthographic Interference for Turkish L1 Speakers

Whose English Should We Teach (in Turkey)?

Adrian Underhill’s Pron Chart Blog

Recycling Pronuncation by Henrick Oprea

Teaching English Pronunciation to Vietnamese Learners via ELT World

Some Random Pron Worksheets

Tefltastic’s Top 15 Fun Pron Games

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher: Memory Techniques

(Note on the image:  Some people tie strings on their fingers to remind them to do something)

I’m finally posting another lesson on dogme, so this is a post lesson plan again. Rather fortuitously, it ties in with Kalinago’s current dogme blogging challenge on scaffolding.  You’ll notice the sections where I used the conversations to build on the students’ vocabulary, grammar, and learning strategies.

This lesson was done a few days ago with a group of 3 private students I have who are at an intermediate/upper-intermediate level.

As we all ordered our coffee and doughnuts (yes, teaching is tough ) one of the students started talking about a training she had received that day on how to remember things better.

Decision:  Everyone seemed interested and it’s a very useful topic for language learning as well.  Let the conversation play out and see where it goes.

The other students and I were quite curious about the training so we had a nice discussion on the subject for about 10 minutes.  During the discussion we slowly built up vocabulary related to the topic like short-term/long-term memory, mnemonic device, chunking, etc.

Decision:  The student who had done the training had been doing the lion’s share of the speaking in the activity so I wanted to open it up more to the other students and the conversation was slowing down, so it seemed like a good time.  In the previous lesson we had looked at suggestions and recommendations using the present subjunctive (e.g. I recommend that you be here ten minutes before the meeting starts).

I asked, “What about you two?  Do you have any recommendations or suggestions regarding memory tricks?” hoping to prompt some language from last week.  Sure enough the students remembered the structure without further prompts.  There were a couple slip ups but one of the students who was listening always prompted a correction.

This set the discussion off for another 15 minutes as we talked about other memory tricks & tips we used along with examples our teachers had taught us as children.

Then one student chimed in, “My grandmother is always calling me and she uses a picture of the Turkcell logo because I work there.”

Decision:  “She’s calling” is a typical Turkish mistake because present continuous is used where English speakers would often use present simple.  To drive home the point of why choosing the correct tense is important and to probably introduce something new, I decided to make a small divergence here and look at the language.

I wrote 2 sentences on the paper.

She always calls me…
She’s always calling me…

I then asked the students to look at them and ask what the difference in meaning was, if any.  They responded that the 2^nd sentence was incorrect.  I said that actually both were correct.  I asked them to give some example endings for the first one.

They came up with “She always calls me on Mondays/after work/before she goes to bed.”

I then gave three examples to end the 2^nd one:  “She’s always calling me at the worst possible time/when I’m in the shower/when I’m in a meeting.”

I then asked the students to determine the meaning of these sentences.  They responded that the sentence carried a negative meaning.

We then talked a bit about the meaning of present continuous with always for annoying habits, the importance of choosing the correct tense in this instance, and came up with a number of examples from our lives.

Decision:  Include a story from my life as it builds rapport and is good for a laugh.

I included the sentence “My wife is always setting her alarm for earlier than she gets up and hitting the snooze, so she’s waking me up two or three times instead of just once in the morning.”

This prompted a whole bunch of responses on annoying habits friends, relatives, and co-workers had.  This all lasted about 10 minutes.

Decision:  That bit of the discussion was running its course and I wanted to connect the previous discussion to language learning.

I said, “Alright, going back to the memory tricks, what was some of the new language we used regarding it” so as to review and consolidate new vocabulary we’d already covered.

Then I asked how what we had discussed concerning memory connected to language learning and study techniques.  We then had a whole discussion on chunking, the importance of context, relevance and even course books . This discussion continued for about 15 minutes and we had a really good look at different study techniques, learning strategies, and how I/we tried to incorporate these ideas into my/our lessons.

The last 5 minutes we talked about the lesson and what had been learned in terms of language.

In the end, the entire lesson lasted for 55 minutes.

Reflecting on things learned/practiced:

1)  Vocabulary relating to memory

2)  Lots of listening and speaking practice in the form of a conversation, telling stories, and explaining how to do something

3)  Review of the present subjunctive with “suggest” and “recommend”

4)  Introduction of present continuous for annoying habits

5)  Discussing effective learning, study, and memory techniques

6)  Review of the methodology behind our lessons.

Related Posts:

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher:  Banking

Unplugged Lesson Plans

Kalinago Dogme Challenge 3

D is for Dogme

The Dogme of Dogme

Sources for Teaching Unplugged

Further Dogme Links

An Emergent Curriculum

Dogme seems to be in the blogs again lately, which is always a good thing .  One of dogme’s primary focuses is emergent language from which naturally stems the idea of an emergent curriculum. What is this and how does it differ from a general curriculum model?

Well, one of the biggest differences is that an emergent curriculum is in an ongoing process of modification whereas most other curriculums are pre-planned or static with varying degrees of flexibility.

If you don’t plan it, how does it work? Well here is how I do mine.

An emergent curriculum starts and ends with the students and the classroom. Think of it like an ongoing needs analysis.

I usually separate it into interests and then 3 kinds of needs.

Interests:

The most motivating lessons will be ones students feel personally connected to. If most students have pets, create a lesson around pets. This can simply be an open discussion about people’s pets with the language built as the lesson progresses or it could be a fully planned out lesson with other aims included.

This easily combines with the needs below. Maybe most students are considering universities at this point in their lives and they are constantly having problems with the infinitive of purpose. So you can get a discussion going on the reasons for choosing one university over another or choosing one field of study over another. Or maybe they could use some computing language so you can combine it with computing by having them research university websites in English and then report back on them.

Three kinds of needs:

1) Needs that arise from the classroom

Teachers are with their students several hours a week for a period of at least a month or two on average. In public schools, teachers have students for an entire year. This allows teachers to become aware of problems simply by participating in the class. For me, this is the most common way in which I plan my lessons.

In the class it becomes very clear what the students can and can’t do. One day you walk into your elementary class and ask about a new item a student has bought. You find that the student in question along with the rest of the class is struggling to talk about and ask questions in the past. Well, now you know you should focus on this in this lesson and future ones. This goes for anything. Maybe they show a lack of vocabulary knowledge about education when you have a discussion about the state of education in the country or you find from students’ emails that they can’t use transitions well. It’s quite easy to spot student weaknesses and this is the primary material that you can use to organize your curriculum around.

In a regular syllabus you might do past tense tomorrow because it’s next on the schedule when, in fact, your students aren’t ready for it or maybe even already know it. With an emergent syllabus you’d do past tense because your students haven’t seen it and need it to get across something they are trying to talk about or because you see they are still struggling with it.   As another example, maybe your teenage class wants to talk about problems important to them and you noticed they have weak writing skills.  In an emergent syllabus, you could do the classic lesson on writing to an agony aunt.  It allows them to discuss their problems and gets some much needed writing practice in.

2) “Universal” or Generic needs:

These are the things most students will need in their lifetime. In this category I generally include things like Internet and computing skills in English, holding a conversation, color vocabulary, social justice issues, talking about oneself, being able to understand instructions, etc. While a student may not need these skills at the moment, we can assume that most of our students will need to know or be able do all these things in English at some point. Therefore these skills can be slotted in whenever a teacher isn’t quite sure where to go next.

3) Needs that arise from the students:

You may have business students that need to learn how to give presentations in English or students that need to be able to translate documents for their job or students that need English primarily for touristic purposes. Maybe it’s a class with specific needs like an exam class. All these needs are defined by the students and allow you to tailor the curriculum accordingly.

Of course we can’t appease all students’ needs at the same time. For this reason it’s a good idea to combine specific needs with general needs or student interests. For example, one student wants to learn how to give presentations, but no one else really needs this. Well, you can do lessons on giving presentations but ask students to do it as a “how to” on some aspect of using computers or the Internet. This way the one student gets their presentation practice and the others get the generally valuable language of computing practice. The same could be done with interests. Maybe all students present on a social issue important to them, or their job, or a historical event they find important.

Summing Up:

If you follow the guidelines above, creating a syllabus as the course goes along becomes quite easy. Even better, the students are happier because the course is being tailored to them. Students can make a very clear connection between what they are studying and why whereas with pre-planned curriculums no one really knows why they’re doing what they’re doing. Emergent curriculums also speed up or slow down when needed. It skips what the students already know or do well and focuses on weaknesses while building on strengths.

No more cramming through material because it’s there while some students are lost and the rest are bored.  An emergent syllabus isn’t about the number of pages or topics covered, it’s about the students.

All of this requires a lot of awareness of students and a lot of reflection on the part of the teacher. However, I think this actually becomes much easier than trying to force a pre-planned syllabus on students that they don’t necessarily need and may not be interested in.

What do you think about the value of an emergent curriculum over a pre-planned one? Do you think it’s appropriate to expect new teachers to be able to do this?  If you follow an emergent curriculum, do you create yours in a similar way? What’s the same? What’s different?

Related Links:

Authentic Teaching – Dogme Challenge 2 – Emergence

Emergent Curriculum with Children

Academic Article on Emergent Curricula

Emergent Curriculum Relieves Planning Stress

The Negative Impact of Course Books on Teaching

[A note on this post:  I'm referring to course books used as a course, not course books being used as a tool or resource]

Course books do NOT help teachers learn how to teach. In fact, they all too often do the exact opposite. Following on from the last post, I’d like to continue looking at some of the negative effects of course books.

Following from my last post, a number of commentators in the dogme debate often claim that only experienced teachers can do it.  There seems to be the idea that course books not only offer structure and guidance for teachers, but that they also teach them how to teach.  Nobody is claiming this, but it follows logically from the idea that new teachers need a course book and, after learning from it, they can move on to other approaches that don’t require such crutches.

I would argue that course books actually unteach teachers. Quite honestly, I have never observed a single teacher that analyzed their course book to see what it’s doing and why (although I’ve met some trainers who do). I’m not saying some teachers don’t do this, I’m just saying I’ve never observed one.

On training courses teachers learn how to create lessons from scratch. They learn to identify aims and reflect on their practice. Course books tend to destroy this. I’m not saying this because I believe in it as a theoretical construct, I’m saying it because it is what I’ve seen again and again and again at schools I’ve worked at. With course books, there is a very strong tendency to take the book as is, walk into the class, run through the activities, and then finish. How many teachers actually look at the aims of the lessons and see if they are handled appropriately by the book, especially for their particular students? Not too many I’ve met. Instead, you often hear teachers say that someone very experienced wrote this course book and so I shouldn’t question them. They must have done a good job. Suddenly all analysis and reflection is thrown out the window!

What is it exactly that course books supposedly teach teachers? If they are actually teaching teachers something, why is it so hard for so many teachers to leave the course book behind? If the course books were somehow teaching teachers how to create effective lessons by osmosis, we wouldn’t see this issue. Instead, many teachers are completely lost the first time the book is taken away.

Now, there is one thing teachers seem motivated to learn from course books, and that’s the grammar. Most course books are still designed around grammar mcnuggets and 90% of all conversations in the teacher’s room is how this grammar point works and how to teach it. In fact, course books don’t actually teach grammar to the teachers. Usually the teacher has to go to a grammar book, ask an experienced teacher, or research on the Internet to really get a hold of a grammar point. Interesting, isn’t it? If the teachers can’t learn the grammar from the books, why do we assume the students can?

Because all the course books focus on is grammar, that’s what most teachers identify as a good teacher – one who has a lot of grammar knowledge. In effect, the course books are teaching teachers the wrong thing.

As we’ve seen, rather than help teachers develop, course books actually take away the need to become capable identifying aims, creating lesson material, analyzing material for appropriateness, and reflecting. They also give the false impression that good teaching is dependent only upon grammar knowledge.  None of this even gets into the negative impacts it has on the way students and government administrative bodies view language learning because of them.

As I’ve stated many times and places before – there are some advantages to course books but these are severely outweighed by their disadvantages.

Some reasons for using coursebooks can be found here, so I’d prefer not to rehash that too much.  I’d like to focus comments on these 3 issues:

1)  Do you think that course books can have a negative impact on teaching & specifically teacher development?

2)  In your own experience, how many teachers critically engage with their course books?

3)  Do course books promote the idea that a good teacher is nothing more than a grammar guru?

Related Posts:

More Negative Impacts of Course Books

To Use or Not Use Course Books

Is Using Course Books Really a Bad Thing?

Bare Feet = No Course Book

Some Course Books Removing Negotiation & Choice

Scheduling in Course Book Abuse

Reflections of a Teacher’s Take on the Course Book Debate

The Importance of Pair Work

This was originally going to be a comment on Willy Cardoso’s Blog – Authentic Teaching, but it got to be so long I decided to make it a post all its own.  As a result, it also connects to Kalinago’s dogme questions of the week, which I was going to address anyway.

A maxim we often learn (and that I push) in training courses is the importance of pair work.  Willy commented that some learners prefer to work alone and that pair work is often over-relied upon with the ESL classroom.   I would disagree.

I have had many learners that prefer working alone.  In fact, I am one of those learners myself.  But language is co-constructed; it is social.  We don’t learn language to think to ourselves in a foreign tongue.  We learn it to learn how to communicate to and with others.

This is why pair/group work is so important.  The students need to learn how to communicate with other individuals.  It’s the spontaneous nature of such communication that is of value within pair and group work.  You can learn a lot on your own, but to then access that knowledge in a split second while another person is talking is another matter entirely.

I, for one, learned a large amount of grammar and vocabulary on my own when I first started learning Turkish.  Yet, my level of conversation remained agonizingly slow and stilted.  I hadn’t acquired the skill or automaticity required to actually participate in my new linguistic world.

Teaching Turkish: A Non-Native Perspective

NEST=Native English Speaking Teacher & NNEST = Non-Native

Previously working as a Director of Studies at my current school, one of the jobs I assigned myself was to teach the foreign teachers Turkish.   This was a very interesting experience for me and I think it gave me some good insights into being a non-NEST.

First, a bit on my level of Turkish:  my level of Turkish is highly conversational, especially associated with daily life.   I can understand a wide variety of accents ranging from Bulgarian Turkish to Azeri. I also can read academic texts and modern literature without too much trouble.   On the weak side are my writing skills (I write like I speak), formal speaking, and talking about generally taboo subjects here like politics or religion.

With all that in mind, I’d say I feel comfortable teaching up to an Intermediate level of Turkish.

My first day of class:   I was pretty nervous.  I had a lot of doubts. How could I transfer my method of teaching English to Turkish?  Would I catch the students’ mistakes as naturally?  Would I teach them the wrong thing?  Etc.

My first day of teaching Turkish went extremely well.  I was dealing with a mixed class of mostly near absolute beginners and one pre-intermediate.  I found that I was able to apply the same exact teaching methodology I use for English.  Get the students talking to each other and simply help them out with whatever they are weak in. Then, do some formal noticing on the board of specific features of the language.  Everything was of course done in Turkish.

Throughout my experience teaching Turkish there were definitely snags.   Sometimes I didn’t know a word like “Singaporean” or “oyster” and sometimes I wasn’t 100% sure that the way I said things was correct, but this was easily overcome.  If we didn’t know a word, we simply looked it up in an online dictionary or if we weren’t sure on a phrase we’d either google it or ask one of the Turkish staff.   These occasions were rare enough that they didn’t interrupt the class much.  It actually helped my Turkish out as well

On the other hand, it was easy for me to hear mistakes and often times I’d even be able to add different ways to say things or useful idioms into the classes, which surprised me.

Many NNESTs I’ve talked to often have this feeling of inferiority when it comes to their English language skills vs. that of a NEST. In my experience teaching Turkish, I found that the benefits of a non-native far outweigh the disadvantages.   Sure, I might not always have the answer, but I don’t always have the answer in English either.  Did I make mistakes?   Of course, but, again, I sometimes make mistakes when teaching English as well.   These were always corrected on the break or in the next class.

Maybe some of the Turkish I use isn’t 100% correct, but I know for a fact that it’s understandable as I never have people misunderstand me or look at me confusedly.   The key is effective communication and that, I am confident, I’m able to teach.   Also, most NNEST teachers I know have a far higher level of English than my level of Turkish, so if I can do it, certainly others can.

Advantages I had as a non-native:

1) I knew where students would have difficulties. I knew what had been hard for me to learn coming from English as an L1 and I was able to explain or present things in a way that quickly made sense to the students.   I knew what to spend more time on, where to focus, where to gloss over.  It was a huge advantage.

2) I knew why they were making certain translational errors and could easily point out what they were doing wrong and how/why it should be “x” instead.

3) We spoke 100% in Turkish and learned through doing.   All their previous teachers had tried to teach primarily grammar rules, all while speaking English.

4) I knew what would interest the students and I could relate to the culture.   In effect, I could easily localize the content.

5) I taught them language they would need and use.  They found the lesson immediately applicable.  Instead of focusing on “what you do in your free time” (a question no one has ever asked me in Turkey), we worked on things like going to a restaurant or introducing yourself.

6) I knew their L1 so we could often have discussions in English about the direction of the class, complicated or confusing language points, and as a way of connecting during breaks.

7) I knew the grammar better than most Turks and I could explain it in a way that made sense to English speakers. Turks level of their own grammar is about as good as most English speakers knowledge of theirs.   They very often can’t tell you why something is the way it is, provide alternative examples, provide exceptions to rules, or explain things in a way oriented to English learners.   The way Turks understand their own grammar is quite a bit different from the way English learners perceive it, so my background as an English L1 speaker helped us relate a lot.

In the end, I found that the students learned very quickly. We only met once a week and there would always be definite improvements from week to week.

So my advice to any non-native language teacher is that you should be confident in your teaching ability and realize that you have a lot of advantages over native speakers.

What do you think? Are there any NNESTs out there that feel less than confident in their teaching? How do you deal with that? Are there any other NESTs out there who have taught in their L2? What was your experience like?

Related Posts:

Lexis, Speaking, and the Non-Native Teacher by Hugh Dellar

Can You Be a Good Language Teacher if You’re Not Fluent on Teacher Talk

Creative Use of Music: Sing a Song

Many people shy away from singing songs with adults, but it’s actually great.  As long as you are willing to embarrass yourself and sing in front of everyone, the students will almost always follow suit.

I remember one of my first classes ever.  I had a group of beginners and we were working on body parts, so we did the Hokey Pokey.  There was a 40-year-old business man that absolutely refused to participate.  I said no problem.  I taught the song and actions and then we played it for real.  Halfway through, the business man stood up and joined us and he was the most animated and into out of the entire class, lol.

Singing is actually really good for Turkish students because it gets them to link words together, a major problem many students have here.  You can’t sing word-stop-word.  It just doesn’t work   Singing can help any group of learners with stress, rhythm, and linking words.

Songs are also just a great way to warm people up in the beginning, wake them up in the middle of a lesson, or fill the last five minutes if there’s nothing else to do.

I almost always use children’s songs because they are short, fun, and have lots of repetition.  I always have the students perform the actions as well Some of my favorites are:

Baby Bumble Bee

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Little Bunny Foo Foo

Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar

The Hokey Pokey

Related Links:

Pictures Painted in Sound

Music in the Background

Song Stories

Managing Uncertainty

Recently I’ve started reading a lot in Turkish again.  For that reason I’ve also been coming across a slew of new vocabulary and even some new grammatical forms.  This has made me think again about uncertainty for language learners.  Two issues arise in this regard.

1)  Often times, actually, most of the time, the meaning of words or grammar cannot be determined from the context given only one example.  Imagine the sentence

“He spends a lot of time messing around in his room.”

If you were a student, what does “to mess around” mean?  All we know from this sentence is that it can be done in a room and that it’s possible to do it a lot.  This is not enough to give us a clear meaning of the term.

I’ve found that for me personally, about 4 or 5 exposures to a word or grammatical structure in context within a few pages will give me enough information to pick up the meaning of the word.  If the new language is too far apart you lose the ability to compare or may even remember little more than that you’ve seen the language somewhere before.

I think this reiterates the need in the classroom for lots of exposure over short periods of time.  Oftentimes, books and activities expect students to “uncover” meaning with an example or two.  It’s simply not enough.

2)  The other factor that really came home to me is the desire to be certain, to firmly “know” something.  Even if I’m pretty sure I understand the language, it’s almost impossible to be certain.  This is very frustrating for a learner.  So what do I do?  I double check the meaning in a dictionary or ask a native speaker for clarification.  90% of the time my guess was correct, but that desire to eliminate uncertainty is quite strong.

This is where bilingual dictionaries or grammar explanations come in handy.  They provide students with the certainty of a translation or a rule.  Now maybe that doesn’t necessarily lead to acquisition and of course than can be problems with translations and explanations, but it gives the student the confidence to use the new language and know that they understood it.
With that said, I do still feel the process of discovering it on your own and seeing the language in multiple contexts is quite useful.  I don’t think the habit of always asking for a translation or explanation without trying to work it out is as effective for learning.   What do you think?