Tag Archives: DELTA

April 12, 2012 · 12:39 pm

Creating effective reading tasks

In my previous post, I looked at the whole idea of reading tasks and the arguments for and against using them. One conclusion I came to is that, ideally, tasks should bear some relation to the kinds of processes we would use when reading in real life contexts.

There are some quite simple task types which will work for a lot of texts. For example, setting up the topic (using pictures perhaps, or the title) and then asking students think of questions that they would like answered about the topic. Alternatively, ask them to write down what they expect to learn and then read to check their ideas. This kind of approach has the obvious advantage of no preparation, and is very close to what we would do in the real world.

Similarly, with different kinds of texts, particularly factual ones, we can set tasks which require students to scan and find particular bits of information. Classic examples are small ads, tv listings etc.

More typical comprehension questions,such as we see in EL exams, tend to test what the question setter sees as the main points of the text. Of course, in real life, we are able to decide for ourselves what the main points are, which means that pre-set questions are intrinsically somewhat inauthentic. The format of typical question types can also be rather inauthentic, of course. While at IATEFL this year, I saw John Field, talking about listening, and he made the very valid point that when carrying out multiple choice questions, we are asking students to do something much more complex than simply listen for information. As well as listening for the information we require, they also have to pick up on the distractors and discount them, a sophisticated process.

Some traditional question types are closer to real world reading than others. For example, multiple matching, which is becoming a very popular exam type question. This is a task type which can work very well with short texts. In a comment on my last post, ESL Notes, asked about a possible reading task for these very short tasks (death by twitter). I think multiple matching is ideal for these kinds of texts. For example, for theseparticular texts, you could ask ‘Which text is about a fuel related tragedy?’ ‘Which text tells us about a possible miracle?’ (maybe a rather depressing lesson though? 😉 )

Form completion, note completion and summary completion can also be quite realistic, depending on the students’ context. Form completion is important in an ESOL context, note and summary completion are skills needed by students studying in the English medium.

Other tasks are not necesssarily realistic, but do have a definite value in terms of the skills they teach. For example, matching headings or summaries to paragraphs, which encourages students to read in such a way as to grasp the main point of each paragraph. Incidentally, although it isn’t foolproof, it is worth pointing out to students that the main point is often in the first sentence of the paragraph (the topic sentence).

I am also quite keen on tasks where students have to put in missing sentences or even paragraphs, as these really help develop awareness of how texts are constructed. However, they are quite difficult to construct as you have to make sure that there are very clear clues which guide them to the right answer.

This is the first part (there is more text and more gaps) of an example from Real Life Advanced, an Upper Secondary book, published by Macmillan. The original article is here.

Mark Boyle, 31, gave up using money in November 2008. He lives in a caravan that he got from Freecycle, an organisation which matches people who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them, and so keeps usable items out of landfills. His caravan is parked at an organic farm near Bristol, where Boyle volunteers three days a week. He grows his own food, has a wood-burning stove and produces electricity from a solar panel (it cost £360 before the experiment started). He has a mobile phone for incoming calls only and a solar-powered laptop. Boyle, who has been vegan for six years, set up the Freeconomy in 2007, an online network that encourages people to share skills or possessions and now has 17,000 members. His book, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, is out now.

1_______________My friend and I were talking about all the problems in the world, such as sweatshops, global warming, factory farms, animal testing, wars over resources. I realised they were all, in their own way, connected to money.

2_______________I sold my houseboat in Bristol and gave up my job at an organic food company. I made a list of everything I bought and tried to figure out which I could get in another way. For toothpaste I use a mixture of cuttlefish bone and wild fennel seeds. Things like iPods you just have to knock off the list, but birds in the trees around my kitchen have become my new iPod.

Everything takes more time and effort in a moneyless world. Handwashing my clothes in a sink of cold water, using laundry liquid made by boiling up nuts on my rocket stove, can take two hours, instead of half an hour using a washing machine.

It was meant to be just for a year but I enjoy the lifestyle so much that I’m just going to keep living like this. 3________________

I had a very normal childhood. I think at first my parents wondered what on earth I was doing. But now they totally support me and they say that they may even try it themselves.

A I’ve never been happier or fitter.

B Just being a vegan cuts down the number of women I’m compatible with, never mind being moneyless.

C It all started in a pub

D My girlfriend isn’t that keen on my lifestyle though.

E Sometimes it is frustrating trying to socialise with no money

F I decided to give up cash.

The answer to the first gap is ‘C’. This is clear if you understand how narratives work- that we start by giving the background- where he was, what he was doing. The second gap is ‘F’- this relates back to his conversation- it was the result- and to the fact that he realised that the problems were all caused by money (relates to cash). It relates forward to the impact of his decision. The third gap is ‘A’ and relates back to what he says about enjoying his lifestyle. (‘D’ might also be possible here, but it is clear from the rest of the text that he doesn’t have a girlfriend).

Multiple choice and true/false are perhaps the most artificial task types. True/false also has the disadvantage of being pretty easy to guess. However, they are also the most common in exams, which many of our students will need to take, so it is perhaps worth giving them practice in these task types for that reason alone. Some tips for writing these types of questions:

True/false

Don’t use the exact language in the text- paraphrase.
Make sure there is only one idea in each statement, so that students aren’t likely to think it is partially true. For this reason, keep statements short.
Make sure there is roughly an equal numbe of T/F answers, and be careful not to create a pattern (e.g. T then F then T)

Multiple Choice

Paraphrase as above.
Make sure all the choices are plausible and can’t be guessed or answered through general knowledge (for example, a well known piece of ESOL material which asked largely Muslim students about what Ramadan is)
Don’t make the distractors (the wrong answers) too complex. You are testing what’s in the stem (the first part of the question).
Make all the choices a similar length if possible, and don’t make the correct answer the longest or shortest.
Make sure the answer isn’t always ‘C’ etc.

Whatever task type you use, in the spirit of demand high teaching, I think it’s always a good idea to devote some time to exploring why students have chosen particular answers. What in the text led them to that conclusion? This will not only prevent guessing, but will, I think, actually go some way towards developing their ability to tackle texts.

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Filed under Exploiting authentic reading materials

Tagged as comprehension questions, DELTA, efl, elt, ESL, esol, exploiting reading, multiple choice, reading activities, reading tasks

March 30, 2012 · 7:44 pm

Should we pre-teach vocabulary before reading- and, if so, how?

Photo Credit: Chris JL via Compfight cc

Pre-teaching vocabulary is something that many of us were taught to do on our CELTAs or other pre-service course. I hold my hand up to having trained other teachers to do it- and to having, as a result, sat through an excruciating 20 minutes plus while trainee teachers laboriously explained word after word until the students had lost the will to live, never mind the will to read the text.

Another argument against pre-teaching is that it doesn’t train students for real-life encounters with language; that we’re spoon feeding them rather than teaching them the skills to deal with unknown words.

I am sure this is true, and I would certainly not recommend pre-teaching as a way of explaining all the words in a text that students are unlikely to know. However, done sparingly, I think it can have some value both in terms of practicality (making sure they can actually do the task you set, and that you don’t have twenty people all asking the same question, one after another) and in terms of helping to raise interest and motivation.

The questions you need to ask yourself are, I think:

– Do the students actually need to know this word/phrase to do the task?

– Could they guess it from context?

– Can this word or phrase be used productively within this lesson?

Selecting what vocabulary to pre-teach

1. Look at what vocabulary the students will need to know to do the task you set, rather than what they probably won’t know in the text.

2. Look at vocabulary which is directly related to the topic of the text, so that it can be used to activate schema.

To illustrate what I mean, here is a scan of three pages from IELTS Foundation 2nd edition Macmillan 2012, with a set of activities around a reading text. Looking at the tasks set on the third page, there are certain words which the students will need to know to carry out these tasks. I would suggest:

current reluctant short term effects essential reduce prevent tend to encourage efficient

congestion charge higher parking charges public transport pay per mile

The first set of words could be looked at, as necessary, when the teacher is setting the tasks. Many of them are very typical of IELTS questions and so might well be already known. If not, a matching activity with synonyms might work well with these words, especially with synonyms in the text (most IELTS questions will use a synonym rather than the words in the text itself)

The second set of words however are all linked to the topic, so provide scope to act as a lead in to the text as well as a pre-teaching activity. If you look at the first page of the extract, you can see that these and other related words from the text are given to students to categorise into traffic problems and possible solutions. The students then use the words in a personalised way, to talk about problems in their city before reading the text and comparing with their ideas and opinions.

One of the major problems with pre-teaching vocabulary is dealing with a set of seemingly disconnected words, with no context. Choosing words which relate to the topic of the text is a good way round this issue, and the words can also be used productively.

Ideas for pre-teaching vocabulary

1 Categorising is often a good approach, as it should get the learners to engage with the meaning of the words. If the words aren’t related in terms of meaning you could always get them to categorise into ‘words I know’, ‘words I am not sure about ‘and ‘words I don’t know’. Done in pairs, this should lead to peer teaching and you can monitor and then help with any still causing difficulties.

2 Connecting words: ask students to choose two or more words and phrases from those you want to pre-teach and write a sentence using them. This will only really work if the words are at least half known though.

3 Predicting: Ask students to make predictions about the text using the words given. Depending on the words and the students this could range from guessing the topic, to guessing the attitude of the writer, to guessing the answers to the questions they are going to answer.

4 Using the context of the text: Pull out some sentences which contain the words you want to pre-teach and put them up on the board with gaps. Get the students to decide which words go in which gaps.

5 If appropriate, matching the vocabulary you want to pre-teach with pictures. Relatively easy these days, pictures are a great way of providing the context which would otherwise be missing.

If you do decide to pre-teach (and there are, as we have seen, arguments against it), make sure that the words and phrases are useful and contextualised and that the time spent pre-teaching is worth it for what the students will get out of the process.

Please see the previous post on selecting authentic reading materials if this is an area which interests you, or the next one on reading tasks.

If you are currently taking CELTA, can I suggest my e-book, The CELTA Teaching Compendium, available from Amazon and Smashwords, containing everything you need to know for CELTA teaching practice.

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Filed under Different ways to use a coursebook, Exploiting authentic reading materials

Tagged as context, coursebooks, DELTA, elt, ELT coursebook, ESL, esol, exploiting materials, exploiting reading, materials, pre-teaching vocabulary, teaching IELTS, vocabulary

March 26, 2012 · 1:28 pm

Tips on selecting effective authentic reading materials

Many teachers like to use authentic materials in class, and they can obviously be a wonderful source of language. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to offer some thoughts and tips on how you might go about selecting and exploiting these materials, to maximise their benefit to students.

Nunan (1988) defines authentic materials as those ‘which have been produced for purposes other than to teach language’, so that might mean emails, blogs, statistics, timetables, advertisements, instructions, labels, menus etc as well as articles from newspapers and magazines.

Relevance and interest

Have you ever done any research into the literacy practices of your students? In other words, what they actually read (and write) in their daily lives, in their first language as well as in English. Ask students to keep a note of everything they read, including cereal packets etc, for a couple of days. You may be surprised, and it will probably give you some new ideas of where to look for material.

Similarly, the more you can find out about the kinds of topics your students are interested in, the more successful your texts are likely to be. Obviously, if the students are preparing for an exam, you will also need materials and topics which reflect the exam they are taking.

Cultural appropriateness

This is a HUGE area, but I think there are three main points:

Being careful about materials which may offend political, social or religious mores. If you know the context you are teaching in, this should be fairly easy to avoid. Or, if you are confident about your class, you may be able to touch on subjects which published material would have to avoid. I once taught a fabulous class about dangerous sports, which was fabulous not because of anything I did, but because one of the students suddenly started telling us all about the time he played Russian Roulette. Everyone was, unsurprisingly, fascinated and completely involved in communicating with one another.
Being careful about materials which your students simply can’t relate to. This is a criticism aimed, not unfairly, at a lot of published ELT materials. ESOL learners in Birmingham are unlikely to want to read about skiing holidays, for example. However, just because something is outside the students’ experience, does not necessarily mean that it is uninteresting. It’s a judgement call.
Consider visual literacy as well. The way the text is laid out may cause confusion. This is particularly an issue for students with low levels of literacy in their first language, but can also cause problems if the norms aren’t transferable.

For example, look at this leaflet:

The bullet points in the top right hand corner are used to give reasons why you should join- but this is only implied through the visual convention and might well not be obvious to a student.

The speech marks on the left indicate that what is inside them is a quote- but you need to know what the speech marks mean.

The asterisk in the bottom left-hand corner indicates some ‘small print’ information (in itself another convention!)

Students need to know a lot about the conventions of this type of text to be able to make sense of it. Other examples would be speech bubbles which always go from left to right, italics to indicate direct speech and bold or capitals to indicate that something is particularly important.

Linguistic and cognitive demands of the text

To a certain extent, the question isn’t so much about how difficult the text is, but about what you expect learners to do with it (the task). However, realistically, if a text is syntactically very complex and contains a great deal of unknown vocabulary, it is unlikely to be very motivating!

As teachers, we generally have a good sense of the ‘level’ of a text. However, if you aren’t sure, you could try running it through a programme which will assess the difficulty of the vocabulary, such as the Oxford 3000 profiler. According to this tool, if 100% of the words in your text are in the Oxford 3000, it is at a low intermediate level, if 90-95%, it’s upper intermediate and 70-90%, it’s advanced. This obviously won’t help with assessing the complexity of the syntax though, or other factors such as the level of background knowledge or maturity required.

Another factor is how clearly the text is organised. This can be a real headache with newspaper texts, which often have very short paragraphs, not necessarily linked clearly to the surrounding text. I remember an activity in the first edition of Headway Intermediate where the students had to order the paragraphs of a newspaper article. It was virtually impossible, because the links weren’t clear enough- and because the students weren’t made aware that the first paragraph of a newspaper article usually sums up the whole story.

It is also worth thinking about whether you want to use the text as a model for writing and, if so, whether, for example, a newspaper article is a type of discourse that students might actually want or need to write in real life (unless they are budding journalists of course)

Practical considerations

Length (if it’s too long, you could edit it, but would need to be very careful about removing some of the features which make the text authentic or making it difficult to follow the links which make it cohesive)
Font size and style (may be too small or difficult for learners not yet familiar with different ways of reproducing the Roman alphabet)

In my next post, I’ll look at some ideas for exploiting texts once you’ve found them. If you want to get the next post automatically, just hit the ‘Follow blog via email’ button on the right.

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Filed under Exploiting authentic reading materials

Tagged as authentic materials, DELTA, elt, esol, exploiting materials, literacy practices, reading, visual literacy

March 20, 2012 · 5:16 pm

Listen up and take notice:using (semi) authentic listening resources productively

More and more authentic (or semi authentic) listening texts are appearing in published materials. In this session we will look at the reasons for this and at how these materials can be exploited fully to provide not just more realistic listening practice but also a rich resource for developing learners’ own language and speaking skills.

This post is the substance of my presentation at IATEFL Glasgow on 20/3/12, title and abstract above. It can be read without reference to the slides, but the slides can be found on the Glasgow Online website at:

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/sessions/2012-03-20/listen-and-take-notice-using-semi-authentic-listening-resources-productively

What makes a listening text authentic? The difference between a listening text which has been scripted and a piece of authentic dialogue is very obvious once it has been transcribed. In real life speech is full of :

Repetition
False starts, rephrasing and clarification
Hesitation and fillers
Simpler sentences or even ‘ ungrammatical’ language
Paralinguistic features
Backchannelling
Ellipsis

If the only practice we give our students is with material that does not have these features, how can we really be preparing them to listen in the real world?

On the other hand, fully authentic material, material which was never intended to be used for learning purposes, may be a little too authentic.

In their book, Conversation: from description to pedagogy, Scott Thornbury and Diana Slade make the following observation:

‘Conversations are notoriously hard to capture on tape and even harder to listen to. In the interests of intelligibility…speakers should be recorded talking about a topic without being told exactly what to say in advance. This way there is more likelihood of capturing naturally occurring features of conversation such as hesitations, fillers, false starts, overlaps etc.’

This is what is known as a semi authentic listening. I recently wrote the new edition of Total English Intermediate. This book, and the other levels in the series, contain at least one and often two of these semi authentic recordings per unit, using a variety of native speakers and non native speakers.

When we listened to the recordings, we discovered that, as well as providing good listening practice, the scripts were also full of examples of natural English use, which learners could learn from.

But how to get them to notice and use this language, or these features? One simple, but very useful framework comes from Thornbury and Slade. They argue that there are three key things we need to be giving our learners:

Exposure, Instruction and Practice

Exposure, or giving opportunities to hear language being used, is the one we tend to be quite good at (though I would argue that we need a lot more. Many coursebooks only have one ‘listening’ per unit.)

It is however, not really enough. Learners will either fail to notice salient points, or take a very very long time to notice them.

So we also need instruction- or occasions when their attention is drawn to these salient points of language.

And, of course, we also need practice. Instinctively, we all know that to learn any practical skills- and that’s what language is- requires practice.

So, let’s take an example of an unscripted anecdote about a childhood memory. This appears in Unit 10 of New Total English Intermediate, but you could use any recording which follows the structure of a narrative or anecdote.

The aim is to help students become aware of the discourse structure of an anecdote, following Labov’s Standard Western Narrative:


Abstract	Announces that a story is about to start (optional)
Orientation	Provides background information
Complication	Introduces a problem or a turning point into the main sequence of events
Evaluation	Show the speaker’s attitude to the events (may be spread throughout the story)
Resolution	What finally happened
Coda	Returns listeners to the present (optional)

Obviously the way this is phrased is quite complex, but it can easily be simplified for students. An awareness of this discourse structure is extremely useful because we use it all the time. In job interviews for example, when you’re giving an example of a success you had, when you’re giving an excuse and so on.

So, learners are exposed to the discourse structure by being asked to put the main events in order as well as any other comprehension tasks. Next they are instructed in the sequence of narratives and finally they tell their own similar anecdote or story, practising the structure.

Alternatively, they could retell the story from the point of view of a different protagonist. This might be useful in an ESOL context, for example, where talking about childhood memories might be inappropriate.

But exposure, instruction, practice isn’t the only way the triangle can work. Alternatively, we could have:

Instruction-Exposure-Practice

Let’s look at an example which focuses on vocabulary this time. The recording I used featured two short monologues in which people talked about problems in the cities where they lived (Madrid and Edinburgh). A lot of useful vocabulary came out of these recordings, for example;

building work, construction, drilling, exhaust fumes, heatwave, roads being blocked, horns honking rush hour, terribly cold, tower blocks.

We started by asking the students to categorise these words and phrases into Noise, Types of buildings, Weather, Pollution and Congestion. This was the instruction part of the triangle.

Next the students listened to the monologues and made notes in each category. In this way they were exposed to the language in context. Finally, they carried out a parallel task describing their own town or city.

Thirdly, the triangle could, of course, also be practice-exposure-instruction (and then maybe more practice)

This works well with a recording in which students listen to mote proficient speakers carrying out the same task as themselves, a technique from task-based learning. In my example, learners are asked to use a leaflet to plan a day trip to London.

To follow the practice- exposure-instruction triangle, learners could be asked to first carry out the task themselves. That’s the practice. Then they could listen to the recording, which is of two native speakers and one very proficient non native speaker doing the same task and find out what they decide to do. That’s the exposure.

Finally, they can look at the transcript and underline the language the speakers use to make suggestions and respond to ideas. And that’s the instruction.

While I wouldn’t suggest looking at the transcripts while listening for the first time, they can be a very useful resource. Sound disappears, the transcript captures it so that students can look again and notice the features of natural spoken English.

In this case, what they will find is a good number of useful adjacency pairs for making and responding to suggestions. E.g.

‘Are you guys Ok with paying for that?’ ‘Yes, I think so’

Incidentally, I noticed a lot of use of the phrase ‘you guys’, despite the fact that all three speakers were female. Probably not something I’d ever have thought of writing in a scripted dialogue.

Transcripts can also be a wonderful resource for developing pronunciation and fluency through automaticity.

I’m using this term as Scott Thornbury uses it, to mean memorising chunks of language that can then be pulled whole out of your store. He talks about creative automaticity. These exercises are not creative in themselves, but will lead to the learners using the language, or having it available to use (as we aren’t mandating it), in a creative way as they carry out the final task themselves.

Firstly, select just a small part of the recording, perhaps some phrases that you expect the learners may want to use themselves in the parallel task, ask the learners to listen again and mark the stressed syllables on the transcript. Ask them what happens to the unstressed syllables- they are weakened or reduced, and use the recording as a model for drilling.

Alternatively, students could read aloud at the same time as listening, trying to make their speed and intonation as close as possible to what they hear. This is a very old fashioned technique, and I wouldn’t advise overdoing it, but actually it can really help with being able to deliver chunks in a confident and fluent manner.

And finally, students can read the dialogue aloud to each other. I would suggest, however, that to make this a bit more fun, as well as more testing, you set the activity up so that they can look at the dialogue, but only when they are NOT speaking or listening. When they speak or listen, they have to look at their partner. This means that they have to memorise the chunk, in a similar way to a running dictation.

While I obviously hope that you’ll take a look at the material in New Total English, all of the ideas could be used with any authentic or semi authentic recording- and there are more and more available.

Useful reading

Conversation: from description to pedagogy- Scott Thornbury and Diana Slade- CUP

Listening Myths: applying second language research to classroom teaching- Steven Brown-Michigan ELT- 2011

How to Teach Listening- JJ Wilson- Pearson

Listening in the Language Classroom- John Field- CUP

Teaching and Researching: Listening- Michael Rost- Longman

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Filed under Different ways to use a coursebook, Exploiting authentic recordings and videos

Tagged as DELTA, elt, esol, iatefl, istening, noticing, total english

February 24, 2012 · 11:22 am

Some thoughts on teaching and learning

Taking part in this weeks’ ELTChat (www.eltchat.com) on the future of coursebooks, has got me thinking, once again, about the seeming stand off between those that like and use coursebooks and those that hate them.

At the risk of sounding like Tony Blair ;), I’m sure there must be a third way. I’d like to explore this a bit further in subsequent posts, but to kick off I just wanted to share this set of images:

Imagine, if you will, that this first picture represents a teacher’s lesson plan. The steps could, perhaps represent the ‘target language’, the boulders and plants, other elements of the lesson that he or she intends to weave in.

This second picture could represent the experience of the lesson from one student’s point of view. They get so far up the steps, but not as far as the teacher anticipated, and one of the steps is partly missing. On the other hand, there’s a nice little collection of boulders and plants in there!

For another student, the lesson might be all about the language explicitly taught. They’ve doggedly marched up those steps- and haven’t even noticed that they’re in a garden.

And this student is enjoying the garden, but hasn’t noticed the steps. And maybe he (or she) doesn’t need to if they’re getting something out of that part of the garden…..

Now, this metaphor has been couched in terms of a more traditional language lesson, where the teacher imagines (and I use that word advisedly) that they can decide in advance what the learners are going to learn. They can’t of course, because there is no way to stop the learners from wandering where they will in the garden, or even curling up in a sunny corner and going to sleep.

But, I would argue, even if a lesson is completely unplanned, organic and student led, it’s still going to be a different experience for every student in the class.

I wonder therefore if the key issue isn’t less about whether we’re using pre-prepared material or not, and more about what we are doing with it, or how we are helping the students to explore the material and take from it what they individually need?

Equally, teachers are all different and work in different ways and need varying levels of support. For some, I believe it will be very helpful for the coursebook to suggest what language could be highlighted in a text and provide clarification and practice. I know I learnt an awful lot about how to exploit texts from using coursebooks. But the coursebook certainly shouldn’t be used as a bible; at least I would hope any material I have written is not used this way. It’s a resource, pure and simple, just like any other resource, such as a newspaper or a recording. The only real difference is that someone has already thought about ways that you could choose to work with the material and, if you find it helpful, you could benefit from their experience and knowledge.

Use it, don’t use it, use part of it, use it in a different way… whatever you do the learners will undoubtedly be learning what they are ready to learn and what they choose to learn.