Let the Children Speak!

Courtesy of Public Speaking for Kids

Two dialogues from classrooms with very different learning environments.  Can you guess which one allows for more learner autonomy, emergent language, and student participation?

S: Ehm, how old is your father?
L: My father is forty years old. And how old is your father?
S: Fifteen years old.  How old is your mother?
L: My mother is thirty-nine years old.
S: How old are you?
L: I’m twelve.  How old are you?
S: I’m eleven.  What are your foreign languages?
L: My foreign languages are Sport, Textil.  What are your foreign languages?
S: My foreign languages are Biologie, Textil and German.
L: Ehm.
S: Oh, ah how ah how ne, what is the name or your father?
L: The name of my fater is Felix.  And what is the name of your father?
S: Ehm, the name of my father is ah Bernd, ah.
L: What’s the name of your mother?
S: Ehm, ah, my mother’s name is Maria.  And your mother’s name?
(Legenhausen, 1999:  166-167)

L: What should we talk about, Claus?
C: I don’t know, we could talk about our music group ‘Big Engine’.
L: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
C: I think it’s fun.  Now we have to play, ah , record our tape.
L: Yeah, the first time.
C: Yeah, it’s very exciting.  I have made a cover to our tape at home.
L: That one you showed me?
C: Yes.
L: The only thing it’s beautiful.
C: Beautiful?
L: Yes.
C: It’s lovely. (Laughing)
L: I think it’s good, too.
C: Yes.
(Legenhausen, 1999:  167)

In the above two dialogues, the students were put into pairs and given the very basic task of simply talking to each other in English for a few minutes.  The dialogues are from two classrooms of the same level and age but different countries with different learning environments.  Which one do you think comes from a classroom where children are given their own voice?

The first dialogue is from a German classroom where children learn from a textbook and follow a fairly prescriptive progression of learning targets.  The second dialogue is from a Danish classroom where learner autonomy is encouraged, the voice of the learners is listened to, and choice is an integral part of the learning process.  In the words of Legenhausen,the researcher who conducted the study, the learners “do not construe a contrast between authentic and didactic tasks” (Legenhausen, 1999:  181).

This was a post I’ve been yearning to write for a while and Dave Dodgson’s recent post told me the time had come.  Dave reflects on why, after years of English language instruction, learners still have poor communicative ability.  As Dave hints at, I think the key lies in the contrast we see above.  Text book type teaching and prescriptive curriculums simply don’t engage learners.  Further more, the English language becomes only something used in the classroom; it’s not seen as a part of who they are or connected to their life.  For language to be truly internalized, it has to become part of a learner’s identity, not something done to them at school.  What do you think?

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

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

Lessons from Scratch

Once again the course book issue has raised its head in the blogosphere.  It probably started with Kalinago’s Dogme Challenge meme and now with one of Jason Renshaw’s latest post.  There is an excellent discussion there and I highly recommend checking it out.  There are a number of really important issues to come out of it that I would like to take a look at.

The first one is this old argument that dogme or any materials light methodology are only for experienced teachers.  I find this idea very questionable.  I think of my own TEFL course, courses I’ve trained on, and courses I’ve seen.  How many TEFL or CELTA courses have large segments on using a course book effectively?  Very few that I’ve seen.  Most courses teach teachers to create lessons from scratch.

If they were able to create lessons with almost no experience and no course book in training, why do we assume they lose this ability when they suddenly enter a real teaching position?  I would argue that most teachers start to learn how to teach on initial certificate courses and forget once they enter the industry with its reliance on course books, disinterest in supporting and developing teachers, and lack of a career-oriented community of teachers and many schools.

I really just don’t buy this idea that new teachers on the block cannot teach without a course book (although I would consider a well-thought out curriculum as a guide to be useful for new teachers).  If initial training courses focus on lessons from scratch and educating teachers on how to find and build materials, I see no reason why this would be a problem.

Of course at first it may take more time to be able to build lessons quickly, but that’s the case with any teacher.  Even in schools where a book is used, I still often see new teachers spending 4 hours planning a 2-hour lesson.  Having the book didn’t seem to diminish planning time unless the teacher did no more than grab the book and run through the exercises in order, which, in that case, you don’t even need the teacher there!

I remember when I first got rid of a book.  I spent hours finding material and creating lessons, but I had no guidance.  Through practice and experience I learned how to do it very quickly.  It takes me very little time to create lessons these day regardless of if I use materials in the class or not.

I am also currently running a  TESOL training course which pushes an anti-course book methodology.  None of the trainees are having undo trouble creating lessons.  Sure it takes a while, but even after their first week of practice teaching they start to get better and quicker at it.

In the end, this idea that new teachers need a course book as a crutch is not supported by the way we train teachers nor by claims that it somehow takes less work to create good lessons with them.

Your thoughts?

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.

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher – Banking

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:

Dogme in the Mind of a Teacher:  Memory Techniques

Unplugged Lesson Plans

D is for Dogme

The Dogme of Dogme

Sources for Teaching Unplugged

Further Dogme Links

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 1

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

Crazy or Enlightened?

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 a 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 student 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