What’s the point?

What’s the point of teaching, testing, teacher training and conferences?

At the risk of sounding as though I’m copying Barry O’Sullivan, I may say that, at the beginning of this post, you are reading but you don’t know where this is taking you, and I’m not sure I do too, but I hope that it will all come together along the way.

The image I chose for this post is one of cycling along on a fixed course whilst everything blurs around you, and I sometimes wonder if this is what I’m doing. During every big conference, like Iatefl, there are moments of confusion, where the input from so many presentations becomes just a bit too much and these are then followed by moments where questions arise. At some stage, later on, usually after the event there come moments of clarity as well, where everything seems to crystalize (no pun intended!) into various themes or topics or ideas, and that is the answer, I think to my first question: what is the point of conferences? Conferences, of course, as we all know, are much more than presentations, they are, as a friend of mine put it, a time when you ‘hang out with your tribe’, something we all need to do. Then, however, we go back home and everything is swirling around in the background as you try to catch up on sleep and the hundreds of emails waiting for you, that you couldn’t answer due to the slow Internet in the hotel etc. Then, slowly, ideas and thoughts emerge from the surrounding blurriness and occasionally there are moments of insight. My insight is connected to the cyclist in the image above.

Cycling along without being aware of the bigger picture around you

I suppose most of us do this, to some extent, we go into our classrooms or our offices, and we do the work that is infront of us, to the best of our ability but how often do we ask ‘Where is all this leading?’ I am not referring to the paycheck or making ends meet. Most educators, I still believe, are not ‘in it for the money’ but do have some type of, if not vocation, belief in what we are doing. Barry O’Sullivan, in his incredibly thought-provoking plenary, managed to convince me that at best we are muddling along and that our assessment system is actually pretty much a case of trial and error, no matter, how scientifically we dress it up. Reliability is a term that is used a lot in testing, and actually, as he said, it actually only means ‘consistent’ not whether the test is consistently good or consistently ‘crap’ as he put it. We buy into the scientific principle that bigger is better so that if test results are reliable over large numbers than that must be a good thing, mustn’t it? Well, actually, possibly not. We don’t actually know. We only know that the numbers or the results are reliable, or consistent, not that the test is good or even valid, in that it tests what our particular learners need, and here I come to the second point from Barry’s presentation that I’d like to stop and think about. The ideas that testing, teaching, teacher training all need to be ‘local’ and not that they need to be developed locally, necessarily, but that they need to reflect local needs. Local, in this case meaning relevant to individuals, to you and to me and to each of our learners. This takes learner centredness to a whole new level, as Barry called for everyone to work together: trainers, teachers, testers etc. informed by standards with a capital ‘S’. If you’d like to see the plenary, where he says so much more and which, as my friend Sian said, was ‘a cracking plenary’, follow this link to the British Council online coverage.

Barry, in fact, encourages us to ‘create the future’. This really means stopping your bicycle, getting off, looking around to see the bigger picture and to start smelling the roses.

What’s the point of my teaching?

So, I went for a walk in the countryside near Verona where I live. OK, so I wasn’t really smelling the roses, but I was admiring the arrival of Spring, and a doubt that had been at the back of my mind for a while, surfaced once again. To put it bluntly, I was wondering what the point of some of my courses is. For instance, in my specific university course for third year undergraduates, I am spending  36 academic hours teaching language students to go someway towards being able to analyse discourse, something that has taken me years, in fact, to even approach being able to do, on a good day, and then, just for good measure, we are also doing an introduction to corpus linguistics and to translation theory and practice. This is all fascinating stuff, that I am personally quite passionate about but I am really feeling the time constraints, and I also feel that it is unfair to expect the students to be able to gain much expertise in these fields, so that is why I was questioning the point of it all, but, and there is a ‘but’, as Barry O’Sullivan said, we can ‘create the future’ so the point is actually, in my mind, to whet my learners’ appetite for these things, to teach them the value of critical thinking and not taking what they read, hear, watch or translate at face value. Hopefully, I can communicate my own enthusiasm to my learners and some of them will then choose to go more deeply into these things. So, my moment of lucidity is this: creating the future means whetting our learners’ appetites, catering for their and our own needs and putting what we do into a bigger context. As I walked with the dogs around the fields, admiring the blossoms and the wild flowers in the grass I actually felt a moment of peace. So, that you Iatefl and thank you Barry, for helping me once again to come back from the conference and clarify a whole range of ideas.

Getting back to normal

So, I hope that this little post has actually taken us somewhere, and tomorrow, when I go into clas, I think I will share the idea of ‘whetting appetites with my learners as I allay their fears about my expectations of them in their final exams. After all I want to be able to assess what they can do, and what will help them in their English, their lives and for their futures once they leave the university.

 

Brighton Day Two: taking things into your own hands, blending learning, pavement poetry and singing barbers

Speaking out and blending learning

This morning dawned bright and sunny and spring was in the air as well as in my step as I set of for the plenary. Walking along the King’s Road with the sea sparkling blue on my righthand side was a few moments of pure joy, which set me off in the right frame of mind for the conference. The plenary set the mood for the day and it was a mood of courage. Dorothy Zemach, in an extremely polished but down to earth presentation, stood in front of the audeince and described the situation in the world of publishing, and she told it like it is, with no embellishments, cost cutting which leads inevitably to cutting the money available for authors, which, in turn, leads to experienced authors leaving the profession as they find that they cannot survive on the fees being offered. As a result quality suffers. She said a lot more, and despite the harsh nature of her message remained positive, as she argued for quality writing and urged the audience to go to publishers and tell them what they want and need.

As a direct result of this I went to the Pearson stand and asked, once again, (I’ve done this several times before over the last few years) why they have removed the concordance line option from the digital component of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. It is a dictionary that I like a lot and recommend to my learners because of several features such as the collocations section or the activator, an extremely innovative idea in its day. I, and my learners used to like the concordance lines option that you could choose on the CD Rom, when we still had such things, because it reveals language patterning so clearly and can be used to study or explore collocations, verb patterns, meaning over chunks etc. This time, however, I decided to appeal to the marketing department of Pearson, so I said: I’ve just given a talk where there was quite a large audience of educators all interested in corpora, so perhaps it’s time to bring the concordance lines back. It would actually enhance the product without raising the price as you would get two products for the price of one: a dictionary and a corpus interface so an exclusive focus on lexical usage that would be a unique selling point for the product. You get the idea? If you want to get a result you have to try to speak the language that will get you that result. They seemed to be interested and said they would pass the message on and get back to me. Fingers crossed. At least, I felt that I had been proactive, so thanks, Dorothy, for that.

Practice and more practice

Jim Scrivener was next on my list of appointments. He was speaking about the value of practice, and getting back to basics. Among many other things he said that “the essential learning experience is doing it yourself”, which is not new but is worth pausing to consider in more depth. Some of what he said was deliberately provocative such as “Teaching hardly matters, learning does.” This was provocative but led to quite a lot of thinking on my part, anyway. I thought about the fact that in a university context where undergraduates have what are actually quite short courses to cover a vast amount of content the ‘lecturing’ is often the starting point, and it is then true that students need to take matters into their own hands and read, think, digest information and put new skills into practice. Some of this is done in class, but not all of it. To say that the teaching hardly matters though is, I think, wrong. The teaching can, and does motivate and help learners scaffold learning and foster it, when it works, on the other hand it can also have the opposite effect, if it is not done well, leading to completely disengaged learners who are simply sitting in a lecture hall, physically, but their minds and souls are elsewhere.

Scrivener stressed the need for practice when learning a new language and speaking to a musician later on this evening, we were comparing language learning to learning how to play a musical instrument, saying just how important practice is if you want to be able to play that instrument. In the same way giving learners exposure and the chance to use language in a variety of meaningful ways is, I believe, fundamental, although I believe that mindless repetition is not effective as engaged learners experimenting with language in a meaningful way, such as putting language into a context which is meaningful for them.

Having said that, however, many of us are under time constraints to ‘cover’ a syllabus which is not of our own choosing and time becomes a luxury in class. The answer, I think, lies in motivating learners as far as possible or whetting their appetites for more. If you don’t have time in class, encourage your learners to take things into their own hands. The classroom can be a springboard to a whole range of language activities that can be done privately, at home, or on the train whilst commuting, thanks to the wide range of apps that are available these days, or with friends or the online community in games. Apps such as Kahoot, which is being widely used at the moment enable teachers to set games for their learners to play offline, or even simply providing spaces such as Padlets for discussion and feedback etc, can be invaluable.

What sort of blend do you like?

No, I’m not talking about coffee! Connected to the idea of motivating learners to extend their learning beyond the classroom, which is by no means new,  are notions such as blended learning and the flipped classroom. I, personally, have blended my university classrooms for quite some time, partly because of the timetable constraints I just talked about but partly because I have large classes and many learners who live in different cities and sometimes miss classes for one reason or another. Blending the learning so that what we do in class can continue digitally online , which can then be integrated back into the traditional face to face classroom is very useful for many of my learners. Pete Sharma and Barney Barrett practically coined the term blended learning, at least as far as ELT is concerned, so I felt privileged to be able to go to their talk on best practices in blended learning to see what the state of the art is.

They actually said that there is no such thing as the perfect blend but that every situation can have its own special flavour. Traditionally more than 30% of the teaching being done online is considered to be blended learning but what is more important, they argued, is how those components fit together. The online components must complement the face to face ones and vice versa. I couldn’t agree more with this and those courses that provide extra online practice are doing just that: providing extra practice, which may be very valuable in itself but does not mean that learning is blended. Blending learning in a course means thinking carefully about which components it makes sense, in your specific context and for your specific learners or learning aims, to do face to face. Pete Sharma gave the example of a presentation course and said that fixed phrases that you might use in a presentation such as ‘This presentation is structured in three parts’ can be studied online perhaps, whereas it makes sense to do a dry run of the presentation face to face and then provide feedback, that might actually focus on helping learners with the phrases they had studied online and then put into practice in the classroom. This, to me, seems to be a very good example of a series of elements being blended together in a meaningful learning process.

Spring in the air

This was all extremely thought-provoking but today was a beautiful day and I have travelled quite a long way to come to Brighton. You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you? Yes, I took some time off from the presentations and went out for lunch with a friend and colleague, We sat outside at a pavement restaurant and enjoyed the sun and the sea whilst we discussed the sessions we had been to among other things. This is also what a conference is about, meeting colleagues, discussing ideas and extending the conversation whilst enjoying the place you are in. Brighton has always attracted innovation and has a quirky nature ranging from the Pavillion itself to the iconic West Pier and today I discovered one or two more examples of this in a pavement poet and a singeing barber as well. Take time out from the conference even though there is so much going on. Otherwise you will find that you can’t process everything and sometimes you just need to walk along the beach and read the pavement poetry :-).

Iatefl Day One: a lexical thread for me

IATEFL 2018 Day One: anyone for research?

The conference kicked off this morning enthusiastically as everyone gathered for the first plenary. Lourdes Ortega talked about the divide between research and teaching asking what research is good for. This provocative question is actually one that is well worth asking. So many teachers seem to fear research as being something which is inaccessible to them, or not related to what they are doing. Researchers are often seen as being unfriendly or negative towards teachers. Researchers, on the other hand, are also afraid, at times, of making recommendations for the classroom or at other times they go to the other extreme, claiming to have all the answers. If the researcher is a young PhD student this can be particularly galling for an older, experienced teacher, with a lifetime of pedagogical intuition developed by working with learners. The fact remains, however, that good research can both inform and underpin teaching, and a bridge should be built between these two worlds. Conferences go some way towards doing this, although it is true that they tend to have a bias towards either the theoretical or the practical. Iatefl, actually, has both. Publications such as ELT Journal also try to bridge this gap, as Alessia Cogo explained this morning in her ‘How to publish in academic journals’ session, stressing the fact that those who want to publish in the ELT Journal need to write about something that is both theoretical and practical, and relevant to the readership as a whole.

A Rose by any other name…

My own thoughts on this are that actually it is the name ‘research’ that puts people off. Teachers, in fact, are not so afraid of research if it is packaged as ‘classroom inquiry’ or ‘study’. It makes sense to observe what happens in your classroom and learn from it, so that means that it makes sense to do research. The fact that there are those, mainly in universities, who do this on a larger scale perhaps, and have more of a theoretical interest, should not mean that what they discover is any less interesting, or more frightening. The name ‘research’, however, for many teachers is off putting, they do not read academic journals, often because they do not have access to them, which is a great shame. Ultimately as Lourdes Ortega said, research finding s should be treated like other pieces of ‘knowledge’ and if they convince you they are useful but if they don’t, then, perhaps it is as well to treat them with mistrust.

Lexis, corpora and treasure chests

I like to choose various themes when I go to a conference and today’s theme was mainly lexis. I gave my own presentation this morning on two digital corpus interfaces, which are both user friendly and useful: Just the Word and Word and Phrase. If you missed this talk and are interested, or if you were one of those who didn’t manage to get the handout, here is a link to a Padlet I’ve set up, where you can download the materials and add your own feedback and thoughts or share your own experience with corpora in the classroom. I’d be very interested to see what others have to say. I use these interfaces as well as The American Corpus and SkeLL both as a resource myself when teaching and as a reference tool for learners who need to know more about lexical usage. I am convinced that corpora are a veritable treasure chest of ‘lexical gold’, in the words of James Thomas, and training our learners to be treasure hunters can help them to learn how to use collocations, colligations (gramatical combinations) and understand the meaning and tone or semantic prosody that words take on when they are combined together. Just to give you an example of what I mean, I looked at the word ‘regular’ and asked people what it means. The idea of ‘habitual’ came up or connections with time, and a glance at the results in a combinations search in Just the Word which draws on the British National Corpus (BNC) confirms this but also has examples such as ‘regular features’ where regular takes on a completely different meaning or ‘regular army’. Just the Word did not have another very common example, which is ‘regular coffee’ which refers to size. Learning to discover such meanings and combinations can be invaluable for learners.

Do some words matter more or the frequency fallacy

After my own presentation I went to see Leo Selivan’s talk which was also on lexis and actually touched on many of the things I did as well. He began by describing the topic of frequency and why frequency is often used as a measure of what lexis should be taught, the most frequent, but went on to say that things are not as simple as the fact that ‘80% of English text is made up of high frequency items. The fact is that those items do not exist in isolation and there are many aspects such as polysemy, for instance, that cloud the issue. Leo’s talk was, in fact videoed, so if you’d like to see more, here is the link.

Champagne and Ice cream

Meanwhile, in the exhibition hall it was just one long party, as far as I could tell. Every time I went past the Nile stand there was Champagne, others were handing out ice cream and later on another stand, I think it was Macmillan, were handing out wonderful slices of cake. To top it all off the sun came out and there was even a touch of spring in the air, so all in all, a very successful first day for Iatefl 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you use that image?

photo credit: Sharon Hartle

Well, I’m back from Iatefl, and am gradually settling back into my normal Italian life. One of the highlights of the week, last Wednesday was a lesson I did on ‘Intellectual Property’ with my advanced C2 class, who have to do presentations as part of their final exam. Many people use resources such as prezi or emaze to do this, which are public, open platforms, freely accessible by the world and his wife. As we live in a world where remix is the norm and images, video, music and other media are shared at the speed of lightening, often without much thought for ownership, it is important, I think, every now and then, to stop, take a deep breath, and question all this.

I have added a photo credit to my own image above, which I would probably not normally do,  (This is my photo, by the way, ) in a rather ironic way to make the point, but for many taking time to think about who owns ideas and content really did seem to be a wake up call, that meant looking at their practice, if not their lives, with new eyes.

What did we do?

Part One: Discussion and Reflection

The lesson began with reflection and the discussion of these two questions:

1. “We live in times of theft, intellectual theft. When you can download just about everything and make it your own what incentive is there for artists to create any more?”
2. “A remix is actually an original reworking of someone else’s idea, so as long as credit is given where it is due, it belongs to the remixer.”

This gave rise to various points such as the distinction between piracy and theft, which was not immediately clear to everyone. There is also a fine line between plagiarism and intellectual theft which we also explored, and it seems, at times, for some to be difficult to distinguish between expressing their own ideas and expressing someone else’s. This may seem obvious but when does an idea become so commonly accepted or shared that it is no longer necesary to cite its author? We, obviously, cannot cite everything so in our comunity, for instance, we  refer to ‘scaffolding’ because everyone knows what it means, without having to cite Vygotsky every time we do this.

Part Two: So, in practice?

So far, this was all rather theorectical, however, so the next stage reinforces what this actually means in the way we use technology. I had created a Facebook exercise for the Student Group (which is a closed group on Facebook), with an image I had created by adding special effects to my own photo of an art installation, inspired in fact by J.J. Wilson’s plenary at Glasgow Iatefl.

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During this motivating plenary one of the things he asked the audience to do was to look at differnt classrooms and create ‘I wonder……’ ideas with each other. I asked my learners to do the same, (and there are  prizes for the most ‘liked’ ideas). This time, though, I asked the class to look at this video and to say whther or not they thought it was intellectual theft. (I had added a link to an article about the original installation as well, both for those who were interested in reading about it and to give credit to the author.

Reactions

The class decided that this was not intellectual theft because the installation was in a public space and I was using my own photo, not claiming that the installation was mine. The power. however, of this exercise, I felt, was that it really made people think about how they use Social Media and the content they post. Some went away from that lesson looking rather worried and talking about closing accounts, a reaction that they would probably not have had from simply taking part in the discussion.

So, why is all this important?

Reflection

Well, reflecting on what you do before you do it is a skill that often needs to be relearned in our world where everything can be shared at the speed of light, by the click of a mouse. I personally believe that respecting other people’s work, ideas and insights is etremely important and I hope that they will respect mine too. When you have experienced your own work being plagiarised or stolen in some way you will know how hurtful it can be. Why do we need to steal other people’s work when we can give them credit for it, ask them for permission to use it or…actually, even better, use our own work? Oh, and by the way, the reflection image above is my own photo taken in Glasgow, just in case you were wondering :-).

 

 

Ten Pearls of Wisdom from Glasgow Iatefl 2017

The conference finished yesterday and I was, like everyone else I met, “all conferenced out” so I went for a walk around the Kelvingrove area of Glasgow and the West End, partly to vlear my head and partly to be outside for a while. The area around the university was a lovely place to wander, look at the spring flowers and take in the greenness by the water, which was lovely. During this time I decided to write a blog about ten interesting points from my conference experience. There are thoughts that I wrote down during the sessions and which have made me think. So here are my ten pearls, (even though these are sctually only some of the pearls.)

Pearls of Wisdom 2017

1. Gabriel Diaz Maggioli: “we are experts at routinising our tasks”: he went on to point out that what starts out as innovative quickly becomes normal or even boring, so that teachers meet a new technology or idea and integrate it into their classroom but both teachers and learners soon see it as predictable. My thoughts on this one are actually mxed. In fact, I think, the more innovative ideas you meet and integrate into your teaching repertoire, the richer the whole process becomes, and whilst some things are repetitive, repetition can be reassuring and learners recognise little rituals that occur in the lessons that are actually a welcome structuring of their nlearning process, which is often not at all structured. It is true, however, that the continual search for new resources, new ways of doing things, new apps, new activities can become a destructive spiral if the “wow” effect is the only thing determining it. Most teachers, however, I think, and especially those who are searching for innovation, do reflect about their practice and integrate the new with the tried and tested into a meaningful code of practice which may be eclective but is still meaningful and varied enough to appeal to a whole range of differeing learners with their differing needs.
2. Sophia Mavridi: “What do people associate with you when they see you online?” A simple question but one that we don’t always stop to ask ourselves. I recently asked a colleague what he associated with my Facebook use, thinking he’d say that I posted too much that was realted to teaching, but what he actually said, was that I posted beautiful photographs. 🙂 So, I suppose, the message is to see yourself through other people’s eyes and to reflect on what they tell you. I recently looked at someone else’s Facebook Page, and it was what might be termed as “showing off”: a whole seies of this person with VIPs in photos, so the message I got from this was “Look at me and how important I am.” It was not a very positive impression, at least from my point of view, because I like to think that online use is an exchange or sharing of impressions and ideas, and I cannot learn very much from self aggrandizement. Each person, of course, projects only certain aspects of themselves online, but it is worth thinking about which aspects e re going to post, which ideas e are going to share and which moments, emotions and insights we are going to invite othrs into.
3. Peter Medgyes: “the proper use English affords privileges” This was said, I think, although I’m not quite sure of this, with reference to the Berlitz coastguard ad. which I blogged about earlier in the week. It underlined an idea that I think is prevalent in those who choose to study English. The language is often a means to acceptance indifferent communities, a passport to a better life and better job opportunities. “Proper” English,  in my view, is not the use of a whole range of idiomatic phrases but an awareness of how to use language to express yourself in the best way you can. Language, no matter which one, empowers its user, because if you can express yourself articulately you can share your understanding of life with others. We are living in a world where knowledge and information are at a premium and I would actaully say that using any language “properly’ affords privileges.
4. Several speakers: “the wow effect is not enough.” This is a theme that comes up often in conferences and there had been a marked move away from those presentations of technology aimed at simply showing people how to use new techniques and tools, simply because they are ‘cool’. Cool tools are still great but there was a lot more emphasis on thinking skills and routines being developed by means of these cool tools. This is also a sign of the times, where technology has become such a normalised part of our lives it makes sense to ask yourself: is this the best way of accessing content or thought? This is not only true of technology but also of common classroom techniques. One of these is, for instance, cutting up pieces of paper with parts of a text on them that then have to be reassembled. Now, I would be very surprised if you have never done this (That is, if you are an ELT teacher). I have and still do, but I am very much aware of two things:
   1. Make sure that the different parts match very clearly, so perhaps divide your text in the middle of sentences rather than at a fullstop, so that it is very clear which parts go together. If you don’t you will see learners trying to match up the way you have cut the paper rather than looking at the language. I know because I have resorted to this myself! After all, the aim is to put the pieces together correctly, however you do it…. isn’t it?
   2. Be aware that if learners are doing this they are actually analysing the language and NOT reading the text. It is quite possible to put a whole text together and not read it at all. I have seen trainees on teacher training courses do this, with a txt about reading skills, and at the end nobody had actually understood the content of the text. So make sure that you have a very good reason for doing this. (I often do it to highlight lexical grammar items on Quizlet, such as “The reason……..” “…..why I sat this is”. If you do ask learners to put a jumbled text together, for whatever reason, then give them the chance to read it through for meaning as well, with enough time to do so.
5. Marcos Benvenides “Extensive reading simulates what good readers do (read all the time and for fun.)” This is an important one, I think. Marcos made the point that “smart people read” and for whatever reasons this tends to be true, but often learners (and their teachers) feel that they should be focusing on great literature or what the teacher suggests. (I am guilty of this myself, as I have set books for my university classes). Encouraging learners to read whatever they want to and to stress the fact that it is the habit of reading itself, and aiming for a regular reading habit, that brings benefits. Of course, there has been a lot of research on the subject and this seems to suggest that you should be reading something which you find very easy to understand, and it should be something that you want to read, whatever it is, which means it should probably be your own choice rather than your teacher’s.
6. J.J. Wilson: “compliant students answer the teacher’s questions but engaged students ask their own?” This is another interesting one, because it made me think of those students who I sometimes get mildly irritated with because I want to make one point in class and they ae going off in a whole new direction, on their own tangents. It is however, those tangents that may lead them off to the stars. So, I try to take a deep breath, not be irritated and to spend ten minutes or so with these learners, who generally are asking something because it has occured to them, and which means they are engaged. Some of these people, incidentally, are the ones who are still following my Facebook Student Group years after they have graduated.
7. “I wonder…” This also came from J.J.Wilson’s plenary. He showed us images of different classroms aaround the world and asked us to complete the thought “I wonder….” for each one. We did this in pairs or small groups and what I noticed ws that the more we did it the further we went into both the observation of the images and the ideas, which began by being quite simple but quickly ranged from the facetious to the philosophical and it reminded me of work done in art education by museums, which explore the way we look at images and all the different aspects, thoughts and knowledge cultural or otherwise that we bring to this activity.
8. John Field: “we draw on our knowledge of the world AS we listen not beforehand.” John Field dismantled the “traditional” procedure when approaching listening of doing pre-listening work whether discussion of pre teaching of vocabulary. He said, quite rightly that neither of these are sub-skills of listening and that we should perhaps spend more time on helping learners with precisely those parts of the texts that are causing them trouble, if we want to lead them “out of the fog” of listening in a second language. I agree in part, though, though because I see listening as part of an integrated skills approach, which are hard to separate one from the other. I may watch  a TED talk about something I know little about, but I still have expectations and discussion in advance is meaningful in itself, although I agree that too much scaffolding is not actually helping learners deal with potential listening difficulties.
9. Gad Lim: “we are social creatures who like to interact with each other.” This was related to understanding new language, and the fact that frequency of exposure is key. The more you are exposed to a phrase, the more memorable it will be to you. He went on to say, however, that it is also the quality of that exposure that counts so that babies whose mothers talk directly to them are being exposed to language in a more memorable way than if they were simply hearing the language on TV and he cited studies to back this up. This made me reflect that we are social creatures and the quality of our exchanges does determine how memorable they are. I’m not sure what this means for classroom exchanges but if anyone has any insights I’d be really interested to hear them.
10. Sharon Hartle: finally here is one from me: “keep putting  yourself in the shoes of your learners.” In a conference like this we are often asked to do things in the same way that we may ask our learners to and it can be a very salutary experience. If you ask your learners to answer a question or to discuss something, give them enough time to do so. If you cut things up and ask them to reassemble things do it for a reason which is very clear to all concerned.

Anyway, that’s it from me today. I have to get to the airport now and then… back home again. So, goodbye Iatefl2017 and Glasgow 🙂

 

What are you ‘sinking’ about? The ELF Debate continues…

The Elf Debate

The elf debate is still at the back of my mind, as it often is and the other day, here at Glasgow Iatefl, Peter Medgyes, in a very well presented speech which supported the importance of learning English as a language in its own right, rather than learning a not very well defined ‘elf version’, quoted this video as an example of one reason why in real life situations we need to be able to speak ‘proper’ English.

There is so much wrong with the stereotyping of this ad, which is actually a Berlitz advert, that I’m not sure where to start, both as far as language learning is concerned and as far as stereotying the Germans… However, my point here is not the stereotyping in itself but how relevant this is to the question of ELF. The point being made here seems to be very much in favour of traditional English models although who, in their right mind, in a context such as this, would react in this way??

I, personally, keep thinking that there is a distinction to be made between ELF as the traditional researchers such as Jennifer Jenkins or Barbara Seidelhofer, and others, see it and Global English as described by david Crystal as the usage of English as a lingua franca on a global scale. There is no denying that English is a global language, and this means that it is in rather a different position from other languages perhaps that are studied with the express purpose of contributing to or integrating into L1 communities. This means, in my view, and as I have said before, that when it comes to assessment we need to take into consideration the notion that our learners need to aim for clear expression rather than to adhere to unreachable native speaker norms, which has to be taken into account in assessment. When it comes to teaching, however, there still needs to be a clear model to present in the classroom, and this is the closest native speaker variety to those learners, so that in Europe this will probably still be British English to a great extent. After all, I may, in a test situation, decide that using ‘informations’ as a countable form rather than the traditional, uncountable ‘information’ does not impede the message particularly (although it will affect the grammar and text references that go with it when writing, which may well hamper reader comprehension). So, when testing this may be acceptable but when teaching we are sulely doing our learners a disservice if we do not point out that even though many now use this word in a countable way it is, actually, uncountable. The model that is presented, in fact, is often just that: a model, and then each individual will, as they do in their own language, develop their own voice and means of expression. As Peter Medgyes also said in his presentation, this is actually not ELF but simply the way we use language.

What do you think?

Iatefl 2017- Exploring digital footprints and Elfies

I can’t believe we are already half way through the conference. So far, in fact, it has lived up to its reputation of being a whirlwind of events, learning, meeting old friends, working and networking. Yesterday was the first day and there were various sessions that I attended, In fact they were all inspiring. I went to an extensive reading presentation by Marcos Benvenvenides, which I liked because I have long been a fan of reading and need to remind myself from time to time of how useful just ‘reading for fun’ at a non demanding level, can be for everyone, and particularly for learners.

I also went to a lovely session on ambiguity by Jonathan Marks, talking about punctuation in the tradition of ‘Eats, shoots and leaves’ but many other aspects of language that go to create ambiguity. In the end he concluded, however, that the context of use determines the meaning and that most of us deal with ambiguity n practice with no trouble at all, no matter how funny we may find such things in jokes.

Both of these talks were  informative and fun, but I would like to write about two different sessions in more detail here.  The first of these was a session by Sophia Mavridi who was speaking about ‘Portraying Yourself Online’. This was of particular interest to me, not as a teacher who portrays herself online, although that is true as well, but rather for my undergraduate and post-graduate students who are tying to enter the world of work. Her session provided me with several interesting points that I can pass on to my students to consider:

Your Digital Footprint

Sophia talked about the digital footprint each of us leaves behind us in our daily trek through social media, what we post, how permanent it may be and how unwary posts can come back to bite in the future, Examples of this were things like:

• posting yourself drinking alcohol
• posting yourself in a swimming costume
• posting unguarded thoughts and opinions

The point was also made, however, that at times others may post images of you in a swimming costume, for instance, and the nature of socila media means that this is largely beyond your immediate control.

On the other hand she also talked about the things you can do to make sure you leave a postivie digital footprint:

• blogging
• posting comments to other people’s posts that go beyond the ‘great post’ level and actually say something more like ‘great post! I enjoyed it because….’ so that those who read can learn something from you as well.
• Drawing a fine line between showing off and showcasing your skills
• Creating an eportfolio on sites like ‘linkedin’ etc.

In any case, and Sophia did not prescribe her views of what was or was not apropriate but left it for us to decide, the talk  provided food for reflection for both me and my university students.

The World of Elf

The second event that made me think, and is still making me think aday later, was the ELTJournal Debate about the motion:

“ELF is interesting for researchers but it is not important for teachers and learners.”

You can see the video of the event below:

//www.viddler.com/embed/c73a4cd5/?f=1&player=arpeggio&secret=102511449&make_responsive=0

WordPess embed

Peter Medgyes spoke for this motion saying that ELF is something that has been created by what he called ‘elfies’ who have invented their own ‘elfiology, which bears little resemblance to the English that learners aim to learn in order to express themselves in the ‘real world’. Alessia Cogo, on the other hand said that “Applying ELF in the classroom is a challenge but it is a challenge worth taking up”. The members of the audience had several comments to make on the subject including my own. I said that I feel the subject to be a complex one and three issues that come to mind are:

1. the language you teach depends on the audience you are teaching. If, for instance, you are teaching Academic English writing to PhD students who would like their work, perhaps, to be published, you would be doing them a disservice not to teach them a model of English that is accepted in that world. I could add, that whether or not it is fais, those preparing for external certification also need to conform largely to native speaker standards in the ‘Use of English’ sections of the exams they take. Jennifer Jenkins may claim that countable or uncountable nouns ar eon the way out, but if you use ‘informations’ instead of ‘insformation’ in an exam, you will prbably still be penalised. Of course, there are other factors to take into account. (I said it was complex) and most speakers, in actual practice. will willingly accommodate to each other if they want to communicate, this is not necessarily true of assessment criteria.
2. I said, in fact, that I think a distinction needs to be made between teaching and assessment. Whereas, I truly believe that assessment in the C21 needs to take Elf into consideration and could easily, partularly in speaking tests, take elements such as negotiation r accommodation, into account, it is more difficult when it comes to teaching. There is a danger of an ‘anything goes’ approcah being adopted at one end of the spectrum, where accuracy is not taken into consideration at all. This is also a disservice to learners, because whereas it is true that I can understand you if you do not use the third person ‘s’ in the present simple, it may be helpful for you to know that it exists, and that you may well have to understand it when it is used by others.
3. I also mentioned the issue of non native speakers, which I know is another subject, but which I thought was worth bringing in. Here I think that many excellent non native speaker teachers are pensalised around the world for their status, which I personally consider to be both unfair and unwarranted. Many of these teachers are in a unique position to help their learners precisely because they have gone through the process of learning the language themselves, so that they know where the pitfalls may be. These teachers, however, have also started from a native speaker model and this is the model that they teach to their learners.

Ultimately, I think it is unrealistice to expect our learners to aspire to native speaker standards when they use the language, but what we teach them has to at least start from a native speaker model. I may be wrong, and, in fact, at the end of the debate the voting was even on both sides. I voted against the motion, however, this was not because I believe that ELF should be taught but because I believe that English is being spoken as a global language and this does affect the way people use it so our assessment of use must evolve to reflect this, but not perhaps the initial models that we teach.

Well, the jury is still out so what do you think?

 

To Join or not to Join SIG Groups?

 

Whether you are still on your way, arrived yesterday or are planning to come later this week, I’m sure lots of you are thinking of Iatefl and Glasgow. I was told the weather would be cold and raining, and although there was some rain today it really was not very cold. Yesterday was a beautiful day with sunshine and blue skies. So, I think the key is probably to dress in layers. The weather reporter is actually promising better whether for the second half of the week.  In any case, for those of us who were at the Pre Conference day today, it didn’t really matter what was happening outside as we spent the day in our SiG groups.

Joint PCE TEASIG and ESPSIG

This year our TEASIG group joined up with ESPSIG to host a joint event. The day was characterised by various series of shorter (15 min) talks followed by the chance to ask questions to everyone in each group, like mini panels. This worked quite well although there were comments that it did not really give people to go into the issues in much detail, which they would have preferred. There were also those who said that having a joint session meant ‘having to be interested’ in something they actually weren’t. One person who was of this opinion said that she belongs to TEASIG and was not interested in ESP, so she was rather disappointed. However, the fact that the two groups were going to co host the event was well publicised in advance, and it is important to try out new formats for events, rather than always following the same one. In fact the group was split, quite a few people saying that they liked to have the two groups together and the others saying ‘No’.

Read Before You Choose

I, personally, am interested in both assessment and EAP/EMI so I found the content to be relevant. I think the only advice I could give would be to look very carefully at what your SIG is planning and if you are not interested in that, go to something else. One example of this for me is the LTSIG, which I have been a member of for quite a few years. One year the focus was on young learners that I don’t teach, so obviously I chose to go to something else.

Anyway, I was wondering what other people thought about this? So here is a quick poll. Let me know what you think: it expires in one week.

 

Celebrating Shakespeare and our Language

400 Years since Shakespeare’s Death

 

 

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on 23rd April 1616, a day which, as Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent rightly says marked a day when ‘a man died but a legend was born.’ His legend, in fact, is still very evident in the very language we speak. He is a character who is very dear to our hearts here in Verona, so I decided to dedicate a blog post to him today.

Shakespeare and Iatefl Birmingham 2016

One of the things it was hard to miss at the recent Iatefl Conference in Birmingham was the centre stage in the middle of the exhibition area, where mini performances had been scheduled for the whole conference, an excellent idea.

One day when I was wandering around the book stalls and being handed cupcakes and sparkling wine (just thought I’d add that detail) I heard the amazing sound of Shakespeare as ‘hip-hop’. So I found out who was doing this amazing performance and it turned out that this was a group of people who, among other things, perform  educational events. They come under the name of THSC or The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company. Check them out to hear Shakespeare as you’ve never heard him before. Here is a video to see what I mean: a comparison of hip-hop with Shakespeare followed by the hip-hop version of Sonnet 18:

Shakespeare and Our Language

Whether you like the hip-hop version or not is probably a matter of taste, but one thing is clear: much of the language we speak today (and this is true not only of English but others too) has been influenced by Shakespeare, partley because so many have read his works or seen them performed, but the pervasive nature of expressions that he coined is a tribute to the poetry of the language he uses itself, I think.

Yesterday, Sian Morgan, a friend of mine on Facebook shared an image of ‘Things we say today which we owe to Shakespeare” which is a picture of a notebook page written by 20-year-old Becky in London and published in September 2011 on Tumblr (See the link above).  It was simply an image of the notes she had taken of simple expressions from everyday language that come from Shakespeare’s work, but it very quickly went viral. Sian’s post reminded me of this image, so I have decided to celebrate the Bard by giving you all a mini lesson plan. It could be used as the starter to a lesson or as a follow up activity and may be related to:

Literature

Language

Linguistics

Personalty

Interculture

Poetry

Music

… and many more.

Here is the updated image and the original, which Becky generously gives her permission to everyone to use. (I actually prefer the original, spelling mistake and all!)

 

Mini Lesson Plan

1. Project the image of the language without the heading and ask learners what the connection between these ‘chunks’ is or where they think they originate from;
2. Ask learners to choose the chunk or saying they like best (this is best done quickly, instinctively);
3. Ask them to write their saying on a slip of paper;
4. Collect the slips of paper and redistribute them randomly to everyone in the class;
5. Ask learners to ‘mill’ around the classroom and their aim is to find the ‘owner’ of the ‘saying they have been given. They can do this by asking questions or guessing but they cannot simply ask; did you write X? They could, for instance, for a saying like ‘vanish into thin air’ ask:
   1. Did you choose something about escaping/ superhuman powers?
   2. Did you choose an image related to ‘air’?
6. Finally group learners in small groups (with their original slips of paper) and ask them to discuss why they chose their expressions with questions such as:
   1. Did you like the sound?
   2. Did you like the image?
   3. Did you like the idea?
   4. Did you like the language?
7. Optional stages:
   1. ask them discuss what they think their choice says about the way they are feeling at the moment;
   2. ask them discuss the influence of Shakespeare on their language: do they recognise any of these expressions?
   3. ask them discuss the influence of similar literary figures from their own culture: in Italy an obvius candidate would be Dante, for instance.

I coould go on but I think that is enough for today. Any comments or more ideas would be very welcome 🙂