Tag Archives: elt

June 7, 2012 · 2:37 pm

Is 1-2-1 teaching intrinsically better for students than being in a group?

Background to the question

This is a summary of the lively ELTChat on this subject, on 6th June 2012, moderated as well as ever by @Marisa_C and @ShaunWilden. See http://www.eltchat.com if you’re not familiar with this great institution!

I volunteered to write the summary, as I had proposed the question (so it was my fault!;) ). What sparked the question for me was an interesting post by @ukteachers on his blog http://www.ukteachersonline.co.uk/blog_files/lack_person_centred_ELT.html. An example quote:

“The fact that teachers work with groups is part of the problem. The individual needs of each person simply cannot be met in a classroom environment. So teachers have to pitch things at the lowest common denominator in the classroom who is the student who more or less understands what’s going on. A great deal of what happens in classrooms is an exercise in training yourself to put your own needs last and the needs of the group and its consensus first. You don’t understand something? Tough – the teacher doesn’t have time for that.”

The chat began by discussing 1-2-1 teaching in general.

Advantages of 1-2-1

Lessons can be tailor-made

@theteacherjames suggested that ‘An obvious benefit of 1-2-1 is that the lessons should be focused on exactly what the st needs to learn’ and, similarly, @Shaunwilden added the benefits of ‘personally selected material, run at sts pace, easier to monitor class.’ @Kevchanwow also pointed out that, ‘1 on 1 allows for all (2) participants to focus in on a clear set of goals.’

And @andivwhite made the point that ‘More than 1 student immediately means multilevel in terms of personality, interest, language, etc.  ‘

Some students will prefer this way of learning

@hartle and @RichmondELT mentioned the need to meet individual learning styles as well as goals and @Elawassell said, ‘Learning with a group may be frustrating 4 some Ss. The ones that get things quickly or for those who are slow…’

Several participants (such as @TutorMe_Online) also mentioned that students would need to participate more in a 1-2-1 setting, which might be good for shyer or less confident students.

Benefits in terms of accelerated learning

@TheteacherJames, ‘The st gets a lot of time to speak & listen to a high level language user. More demanding in that respect.’ And @rliberni felt that ‘It is tiring but very rewarding as you can see the student develop & improve before your eyes.’ @Elawassel referred to a student who was very clear that they found 1-2-1 much more effective.

@TutorMe_Online: Think 1-2-1 has the edge in terms of productivity & how much improvement a single student can make in 1 lesson

Disadvantages of 1-2-1

Difficult for the teacher?

Not everyone agreed that 1-2-1 was any more difficult for the teacher, but this was certainly the majority opinion. For example, @Marisa_C talked about being ‘on’ all the time, and AlexandraKouk said she found preparing and teaching ‘intensive’. @JoHart mentioned the difficulty with a shy or uninterested learner. @rliberni added ‘it can be tiring, also need to address issues as they arise which means you have to be on your toes always!’

On the other hand @theteacherjames felt that with experience, it was not necessary to do a lot of preparation, and @shaunwilden felt that there were ‘ways of taking a back seat’.

Not always best for the learner?

@esolcourses suggested that 1-2-1 could be isolating for the student and @teflerinha added that it could also not be the best preparation for the outside world. @worldteacher added that ‘many students gain confidence from a group setting’.

@kevchanwow made an interesting point, that ‘the power of peer modeling can’t be overestimated. The closer the peer is socially, the greater the impact.’ @worldteacher also mentioned the benefits of a group: less pressure, peer teaching, moral support, sharing, etc and @RichmondELT said ‘In groups independent learning is encouraged, students can help each other rather than always depending on the teacher.’

@teflerinha mentioned the fact that if we learn by negotiating meaning, that having to do so with a variety of people, some of whom might struggle to understand more than a ‘helpful’ teacher, could only be a good thing. Similarly, e_clements suggested a problem with 1-2-1 was that there was only 1 teacher voice and that ‘In a group Ss can interact with other NN/lower level speakers – probably more realistic for what they’ll need to do in real life.’ And @kevchanwow said, ‘Groups allow exposure to wider array of truly learnable structures, not structures teachers think should be learned.’

That said, @theteacherjames said he encouraged learners to listen to different voices outside the class, and a couple of people said that 1-2-1 classes in their context involved different teachers on different days.

Points about teaching 1-2-1 in general

 The conversation turned to how people actually teach 1-2-1. A lot of people pointed out the danger of 1-2-1 simply turning into a ‘chat’. This provoked a lot of discussion, as several people pointed out that a chat was a great basis for learning- provided that students were enabled to ‘notice’ language and learn and develop. For example, @theteacherjames said, ‘I always start conversation led, then introduce relevant activities based on the conversation. Chat is priceless!’ or @andivwhite,’If the chat is structured with feedback and error correction, it’s perfect.’ Dogme was mentioned at this stage, but not really picked up on. (Incidentally I think 1-2-1 is perfect for a dogme approach, even IS a dogme approach..certainly that’s what I was doing 20 years ago teaching 1-2-1)

@ukteachers pointed out that ‘If u approach 121 as if you’re in a classroom and barricade yourself behind materials then sure – it’s dull as dishwater.’

@esolcourses reminded us of the danger of the teacher dominating, which point was taken up by several others. For example, @kevchanwow, ‘In 1:1 it’s hard to remember that silence is often necessary for production and consolidation.’

@Ukteachers said’I think of 121 as a specialised form of pairwork rather than being a TEACHER vs STUDENT situation.’

Horses for courses

At this point the talk moved on to whether groups were better. Many of the points had already been made when talking about 1-2-1, and the general consensus was that they were different things (not better or worse).

Essentially, most people seemed to agree that 1-2-1 was best for learners with very specific needs, but that groups had advantages too. Many of these are outlined above, but added were:

@hartle in 121 you can’t use grp activities that allow students time to repeat and consolidate new language etc. @teflerinha seconded the importance of task repetition.

@RichmondELT In groups independent learning is encouraged, students can help each other rather than always depending on the teacher

@MrChrisJWilson: #eltchat a teacher only has a set number of experiences, stories, input. Having other students increase the knowledge/stories in the room. Also allowing development of group skills as well as knowledge of grammar vocab and lexis

@ukteachers asked the question as to what we, personally would prefer. Obviously the answer varied according to the individual. Some preferred the intensive nature of 1-2-1, others the group experience- bringing up the intriguing notion that this might, like learning styles, be something that teachers had preferences for- and were thus in danger of assuming that everyone felt the same way as themselves.

Cost

 Next there was some discussion about cost, and whether students expected more ‘spoonfeeding’ for paying more (@MrChrisJWilson), or whether the extra benefit was worth the extra cost (@Michaelegriffin. The question was asked about usual rate in UK- and this seemed to be between £9 and £50 an hour.

Conclusion

@esolcourses brought up the fact that many classes she taught had a combination of 1-2-1 and group work (This is/was common in the ESOL context, but disappearing with funding cuts). Many people agreed that a combination of 1-2-1 and group would perhaps be the perfect scenario.

Perhaps the last word should go to @hartle ‘Lots of good points here about both contexts, but a good teacher should be able to manage both and the challenge is to adapt your skills.’

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May 31, 2012 · 2:21 pm

The power of groups

I recently read an interesting post, entitled The lack of person-centredness in ELT on Jonathan’s English Blog, at ukteachersonline.  It caught my attention because, as an ELT teacher and trainer, I like to think that I work in a person-centred way.

In Freedom to Learn, Rogers lists five hypotheses (paraphrased):

1 No-one can teach anyone anything; they can only facilitate learning. Everyone will process what they learn in their own way and in their own time.

2 A person only learns what is personally meaningful to them.

3 People naturally resist change, but being open to consider new and different concepts is vital to learning.

4 If people feel threatened, they become less receptive and more rigid.

5 The educational situation in which people learn best is where threat is reduced to a minimum and the ability to look at things in different ways is maximised.

It seemed to me that there were two main points in the post I mention. Firstly, that teacher training does not give nearly enough attention to the psychological aspects of learning. Secondly, that ELT teaching fails because it is usually carried out in groups.

In relation to the first point, Jonathan says, that in most teacher training courses, there is ‘nothing whatsoever from educational psychology or adult pedagogy and not a whiff of a mention of inter-personal skills, group dynamics and so on. How can this be? These are human beings in the classroom and yet nobody seems to think it’s worth training teachers to think for a second about how people interact together in classrooms and how this might relate to learning.’

I couldn’t agree more. Jonathan also says that ‘A different pedagogy could be developed in the classroom which recognises the social nature of language and constructivist learning principles but which is also based on a person-centred concept of language teaching.’ Obviously on a four week CELTA, for example, there is a limited amount of time to go into depth on these areas. However, it should be something which runs through every element of the course, like a stick of rock.

However, when it comes to the second point, I can’t agree. Jonathan says, ‘The fact that teachers work with groups is part of the problem. The individual needs of each person simply cannot be met in a classroom environment. So teachers have to pitch things at the lowest common denominator in the classroom who is the student who more or less understands what’s going on. A great deal of what happens in classrooms is an exercise in training yourself to put your own needs last and the needs of the group and its consensus first. You don’t understand something? Tough – the teacher doesn’t have time for that.’

This may be true of some (even many) classrooms, but I don’t think that it is an essential drawback of teaching in a group. In fact, I think that working in groups can be much more powerful a learning process than working 1-2-1.

Whether we want to admit it or not, there are strong parallels between the processes of therapy and classroom or educational processes (which is why, I guess, Carl Rogers was so interested in learning). Both are about growth. Look at this quote I found through a quick google about group therapy:

Group therapy is a powerful venue for growth and change. Not only do students receive tremendous understanding, support, and encouragement from others facing similar issues, but they also gain different perspectives, ideas, and viewpoints on those issues. Most students, though somewhat apprehensive at first, report that the group experience was helpful far beyond their expectations.

I would argue that pretty much the same thing is true of the group experience in teaching and learning English. Rogers talks about minimising threat and maximising opportunities to see different perspectives: what better way to do that than in a supportive group? And,  it is a group experience, not about the teacher on one side and the learners on the other. The teacher doesn’t need to spread themselves thinly between 20 (or more) students, because they are not the only person in that room who can facilitate learning. What about the other students? What about the student him or herself?

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May 25, 2012 · 1:07 pm

Discovery listening and other ways to read your students’ minds

What do we know about what is actually happening inside a learner’s head while they are listening? It’s a complicated process. Speech comes at the learner in a continuous stream of sounds. They need to be able to identify and discriminate between these sounds, and recognise their stressed and unstressed versions. They also need to be able to recognise where one word stops and another word starts (particularly hard to do in English, with linking, elision and assimilation). They need to understand the meaning conveyed by stress and intonation.

And that’s before we start on understanding the actual meaning of the words being used, and the syntax!

No wonder that students at lower levels, without a wide vocabulary or much familiarity with the features of connected speech are so overwhelmed by all these demands that they simply can’t hold onto the meaning of what they are listening to long enough to piece it all together.

In my last post, hosted on the OUPELTGlobal blog, I wrote about ways to develop these bottom up or decoding skills in listening. In response I had a tweet from Kyle Smith (@ElkySmith ), drawing my attention to a fascinating article by Magnus Wilson, on what Wilson terms Discovery Listening. This got me thinking about ways in which we, as teachers, could find out more about our learners’ listening processes- and of course raise the learners’ awareness at the same time.

Discovery Listening

In Discovery Listening, Wilson builds on an idea by John Field (2000), of using dictogloss to develop students’ awareness of how they are processing language. Field’s technique is to carry out a dictogloss, where students note down all the words they can catch while listening, and then discuss their understanding of the overall meaning with classmates afterwards. The idea was to raise awareness of how they can use guesswork to build meaning. Wilson takes this idea further by getting students to try to reconstruct the text more fully after listening, and then compare their versions carefully with the original. It’s a discovery, or ‘noticing’ activity, because students look specifically at what they failed to hear correctly and classify their problems. For example:

I couldn’t hear what sound it was.

I couldn’t separate the sounds into words.

I heard the words but couldn’t remember their meaning quickly enough.

This word was new to me….

As well as raising awareness, Wilson makes the point that ‘noticing’ these issues is likely to make language, or aspects of connected speech ‘stick’ for the learners. While I wouldn’t  suggest carrying out this kind of micro focus all the time, as an occasional activity, I think it could be very effective.

Protocols

A protocol is a technique used by researchers to try and find out exactly what is going on in someone’s head during a process. Basically, the subject is asked to either talk aloud while they are doing something, explaining their thought processes, or, in stimulated recall protocols, they are reminded of what they were doing, and asked to recall what their thought processes were at the time.

There are lots of examples of protocols being used to discover more about listening in second language acquisition, for example Wu (1998), but I can’t see why this couldn’t be something that teachers could use themselves in the classroom. Obviously we wouldn’t want everyone talking aloud while they listened (!), but after listening to a recording, we could ask students to discuss with a partner which parts they found difficult and why. Or they could listen again with the transcript in front of them, and underline parts that they found difficult to follow, and then discuss why.

Listening log

Another interesting article is Jenny Kemp’s The Listening Log. In it she describes a project carried out at the University of Leicester, on a summer programme, where learners were required to keep a log of at least 5-6 listening experiences they had outside the classroom each week. They were asked to comment on how easy or difficult it was to understand, and what had helped or hindered them (e.g. context, accent). Looking at the examples given, it is evident that this could be a powerful tool for raising awareness and increasing motivation- as well as giving the teacher useful information about each learner’s individual difficulties.

The teacher is a tape-recorder

And finally, a very old (hence the title- should it be the teacher is an Mp3 player?) activity, which is a bit silly and light-hearted, but actually really useful for identifying problem areas.

Simply choose a text- this could be the transcript of something already recorded, or a story, but it needs to be written down, so that it can be reproduced exactly each time. Start to read aloud, as naturally as possible. Learners could be answering questions, or, probably better still for our purposes, trying to write down the text. Whenever the learners want they can shout ‘pause’ ‘rewind’ ‘fast forward’ etc. Of course, you could equally well do this with an actual machine, but believe me, it’s much more entertaining with a teacher doing it. I think students (of all ages), just love being able to bark commands at the teacher!

The serious side of this activity is that you can use it to identify chunks of connected speech that the learners are having difficulty with and then look at the linking, weak forms, assimilation etc with them afterwards.

Please do add any other ideas you have for either raising awareness of, or developing these decoding skills.

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May 17, 2012 · 12:11 pm

Decoding skills: a neglected part of listening comprehension?

As with reading, a lack of decoding skills can make it very difficult for learners at lower levels to hold enough meaning in their short term memory to effectively use their meaning building skills. This week I’ve written a post on this, with a range of practical ideas, for the OUP ELT Global Blog. Link here.

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May 9, 2012 · 5:17 pm

Repeated reading: some activities to build reading fluency

repeated reading[Thanks to @mkofab at ELTpics for the photo.]

In my last post, I looked at reading while listening, and how it might help learners both to read more fluently, and to acquire more language. Reading while listening is a form of something known as ‘repeated reading’, a strategy whereby a student reads a passage several times, either silently or aloud. The idea, as discussed in the previous entry, is to develop greater fluency or automaticity, and there is evidence to suggest that it works, and, moreover, that it has a positive effect on the student’s language development as a whole.

But isn’t it terribly boring to just read the same passage again and again? Not according to Gorsuch and Arnold , who claim that students were ‘delighted to see such powerful and immediate increases in reading speed and comprehension.’ I’m sure that’s it’s true that students can be motivated simply by seeing progress. The typical way that this kind of motivation is built on in schools is by overtly measuring this progress. For example, Tomkins (2003)* suggests the following procedure:

1 Conduct a pre-test. The student reads a passage aloud while the teacher records the reading time and any mistakes. The teacher then clarifies any problems.

2 The student practises reading the passage again on their own, out loud or silently, several times.

3 The teacher records the student again and makes a note of reading time and any mistakes.

4 Teacher and student discuss the improved time (pretty much inevitable) and whether there were fewer mistakes.

I can see this working very well in some contexts, and being disastrous in others. Your call, I think.

If you don’t want to take such an overt approach, you could try thinking about real reasons why a student might need to read aloud in English, and build activities around these. For example, the class might enjoy reading a one-act play, repeatedly reading it in order to prepare for a recording. Or, many ESOL classes are made up of parents of young children, just learning to read in English at school. These parents could definitely benefit from practising reading aloud their children’s favourite books.

Or try some activities where there is a goal or outcome, other than simply improving your reading fluency. For example, a dictogloss in pairs. Student A reads the text out loud, at a natural speed, while B tries to write down as much as possible. This is repeated until B feels confident that they have the whole text. B can then read the text back to A, for checking. This works best if the more fluent reader in the pair is A, the one who initially reads the text, as this way A is able to give a good model. The activity could be extended by changing the pairs, so that B then takes away the text to dictate to a new (A) partner. This way, B also gets the repeated reading practice, but only after they have heard the next a number of times from the original A.

Choral reading, as a class, has also been shown to be very effective, but in its unadulterated form seems rather dull and childish. You could try putting a text on the board or smartboard, getting students to read it aloud as a class, and then rubbing out random words, so that they have to remember what was there. Of course, this is as much about memory as reading, but it does provide a powerful motivation. It is also a good opportunity to work on weak forms and linking- demonstrating how these occur in the text which is being read.

And, of course, repeated reading does not have to mean reading aloud. A nice activity which can be done with absolutely no preparation is to ask all the students to read the same passage silently. After one minute exactly, stop them, whether they have finished or not, and ask them note how far they got. Tell them to start the passage again, from the beginning. Stop them again after one minute and ask them if they read any further this time (they almost certainly will have done). The beauty of this activity is that it is completely differentiated, as each student is working at his or her own level, and under no obligation to expose their reading level to anyone else.

Tompkins, G. (2003). Literacy for the 21st Century: Teaching reading and writing in pre-kindergarten through grade 4. New Jersey: Merrill Prentice Hall.

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April 25, 2012 · 2:00 pm

The wonder of wait time!

  How would you like it if your students:
  – Gave longer answers?
  – Answered more often?
  – Gave more confident answers?
  – Weren’t afraid to challenge or add to   other students’ answers?  – Were willing to discuss and offer alternative answers?
For all these benefits, why not try new and improved ‘Wait Time’TM?

Actually, I doubt any teacher would need a heavy sales technique to be persuaded to ‘buy’ this idea. These are the benefits which Rowe (1974) found to increasing the amount of time teachers wait after asking the class a question. Typically, she found, teachers wait no more than 1.5 seconds after asking a question before they jump in and rephrase it, or even answer it themselves. By waiting at least 3 seconds, she concluded, all the above benefits ensued.
Her research wasn’t in a language classroom, but Nunan (1991) came to similar conclusions, as did Scott Thornbury in 1996.

Of course, the questions asked need to be those which warrant giving the extra time to think. In other words, more open and higher level questions, rather than very closed or display questions. This is important, because when teachers lengthened wait time when asking lower level questions (Riley 1986), student achievement and motivation actually went down. No doubt they just thought the teacher was half asleep!

But, there is also evidence (Swift & Gooding, 1983; Tobin 1986) that when teachers started consciously giving more wait time, their own skills improved. They tend to ask fewer questions, but make them higher quality- asking for more thought and higher level thinking skills.

As well as wait time after asking a question, there have also been found to be benefits in pausing briefly after a student offers an answer. This gives them time to add any further thoughts, or even for another student to add something or contradict.

And why stop there? As Stahl (1990) points out, there are plenty of other moment in the classroom when silence can be golden. He refers to ‘think time’ rather than ‘wait time’, as he feels this better describes the purpose of such times (for both teacher and students) Stahl lists eight categories of periods of silence:

1 Post teacher question wait time (this is discussed above)
2 Within students’ response pause time (not jumping in when a student hesitates- and/or not allowing other students to do so)
3 Post students’ response wait time (allowing a few seconds when a student has finished giving an answer will enable them to add something if they want to, and allow other students the chance to consider what has been said and respond to it.)
4 and 5 Student and teacher pause time (that there should generally be a culture where it is acceptable to stop for a moment and consider what you are going to say)
6 Within teacher presentation pause time (That while a teacher is presenting some information, they stop for a short time, just to let the information sink in and give time for students to absorb it).
7 Student task completion wait time (This seems obvious, but I have a tendency to ask students to work in pairs almost automatically. Here the suggestion is to set a specific amount of time for students to work in silence, individually)
8 Impact pause time (Using a short pause to grab attention; making students wait in anticipation for the next piece of information)

Of course, especially at first, it can feel really uncomfortable to leave any silence in the classroom. In my experience, however, it is worth a bit of initial discomfort to experiment with this idea.
Alternatively (or additionally), rather than simply waiting, you could of course, give students something concrete to do with the wait time:

• Try getting students to write down an answer first. If it’s a closed question, they could write the answer on a miniwhiteboard (or piece of paper) and hold it up when they time has finished. You could then nominate a learner to explain the reasons for their answer.

• Let the students discuss the answer in pairs before nominating a student (or pair) to give their answer to the class.

• Before carrying out a feedback slot on, say, a reading comprehension task, allocate different questions to different students and ask them to spend a little time thinking about why they chose the answer that they did, so that they are ready to explain their reasoning to the class.

At different times in my teaching life, I have been recorded teaching. While it has never failed to be a gruesome experience watching (or even listening to) myself, it has to be said that there is no better way of really examining what is actually happening in your classroom. Why not try it, and see what kind of wait time you are giving and the impact of it when you do give more?

References
Nunan, D (1991) Language Teaching Methodology. Prentice Hall

Rowe, M.B. (1974). Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on language, logic and fate control: Parts I and II. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 11, 81-84 and 291-308.

Stahl, R. J. (1994). Using ‘Think-time’ and ‘Wait-time’ Skilfully in the Classroom. ERIC Abstracts, report number EDO-SO-94-3

Swift, J. N., & Gooding, C. T. (1983). Interaction of wait time feedback and questioning
instruction on middle school science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching,
20(8), 721-730.

Thornbury, S (1996) Teachers research teacher talk. ELT J, 50 (4): 279-289.

Tobin, K. (1987) The Role of Wait Time in Higher Cognitive Level Learning. Review of Educational Research, 57 (1), 69-95.

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April 18, 2012 · 3:03 pm

Getting students to notice language in reading texts

To start with, why not try this little awareness test:

How successful were you in noticing? Whatever we are doing, we don’t tend to notice everything- and we can miss some quite important elements!

We tend to notice things which are either frequent or salient. So, when I first went to live in Portual, I quickly noticed the word ‘puxe’, which was written on a lot of doors. It was something I saw frequently. It was also salient, or meaningful for me because the pronunciation is ‘push’..but it means ‘pull’!

Schmidt, who first coined the term ‘noticing’(I think), carried out a study of his own language learning in Brazil (where they use ’empurre’ rather than ‘puxe’ btw). He concluded that he was more likely to actually use language himself when his attention had been drawn to it in some way.

Or as Scott Thornbury puts it:

‘1. Learners must attend to linguistic features of the input that they are exposed to, without which input cannot become ‘intake’.

2. Learners must ‘notice the gap’, i.e. make comparisons between the current state of their developing linguistic system, as realised in their output, and the target language system, available as input.’

(Thornbury 1996)

A reading text is full of language that we can draw students’ attention to in this way, and thus, hopefully, help them in the process of acquiring this language into their ‘store’.

Before we can start to focus on language though, it is important to focus on the actual text as a whole (see previous blog posts), and then we have to consider which aspects of language to focus on or we risk not seeing the wood for the trees (or the monkey for the basketball players).

Activities which help students to ‘notice’ vocabulary

Many texts will have a clear topic, so this is a good place to start (especially if the topic is one which is relevant to students’ needs and interests- and if it isn’t why are you using it? 😉 ). You can simply ask the students to find words and phrases in the text connected with the topic of X, or ask them to categorise the words and phrases they find into subsections of the topic (example here from IELTS Foundation 2nd ed-click to enlarge).

You can help to expand students’ vocabulary by asking them to find synonyms of words you give them, in the text. This is particularly useful for those taking exams, where questions are usually paraphrased.

You can help students to see how texts are put together by asking them to find lexical links and chains in the text (example here from IELTS Foundation 2nd ed-click to enlarge)

Students can also develop their awareness of chunks and collocation by asking them to find chunks of words that go together, or asking them to search the text to find what collocates with a list of words from the text which you have given them.

Activities which help students to notice grammar or discourse

The most obvious task is to ask students to look at the examples of the language focus in the text and use them to complete rules about its use. Or they could try writing their own rules and then comparing them with a grammar reference.

An alternative is to remove those examples (or parts of them) and get students to complete the text, comparing their versions with the original. This is something which works very well for articles and for discourse markers.

Or you could give students another version of the text with deliberate errors, and ask them to find a ccertain numbers of mistakes and correct them- before, again, checking against the original.

Try a dictogloss (read a short section aloud, which contains the language you are focusing on) and ask students to write down as much as they can before reconstructing the text together. This works well for structures which are very frequent, such as reference links or articles.

Having thus drawn the students’ attention to language, I believe that it is important to give them some opportunity to use the language. Opinion varies as to whether practising the language per se helps students to acquire it, but at the very least it is another opportunity to notice it, which does seem to help with acquisition.

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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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April 6, 2012 · 3:52 pm

What kind of reading tasks might be worthwhile?

In my first reading related post, I looked at things you might consider when selecting authentic reading texts. There’s quite a lot to consider, I think, and I can sometimes spend several hours searching for the right text. As Ray Williams said, back in 1986 (ELTJ 40(1)), ‘in the absence of interesting texts, very little is possible.’

Having spent all that time, the last thing you want is to only end up with a 20 minute activity in class, so I think it’s really worth considering how you can maximise what students get out of the text . Clearly, a major reason for using texts in class is in order to provide students with the opportunity to ‘notice’ language in context. However, can texts also be used to develop students’ actual ability to read effectively and efficiently?

Some of the reading skills which teachers and materials commonly aim to develop include:

  • Skimming
  • Scanning
  • Reading for gist
  • Predicting content
  • Identifying point of view and tone
  • Identifying main points
  • Guessing meaning from context
  • Recognising the organisation of a text

In recent years there has been some debate about the whole idea of developing  students’ reading skills. Walter and Swan point out  that there is perhaps an assumption that the learner does not already have these skills and that, if they do have them, that they are unable to transfer them into their first language. Thornbury  gives the example of how he was able to apply his L1 reading skills to reading in Spanish, and how, as his Spanish improved, so did his reading. I think these are both very valid points. However, I do slightly wonder if Thornbury should consider himself typical of a language learner, as he was clearly very aware of his own language learning process. In my experience, many learners do not always have good reading skills in their first language and many do not seem able to automatically transfer them.

I certainly agree that it can be patronising to make students jump through hoops of skimming and scanning and I also agree with Swan and Walter that guessing meaning from context activities are too often impossible. That said, that if we reduce reading texts to no more than vehicles for useful language, we are selling our students short. What about the information and/or pleasure that can be gained from a text? We don’t read in our daily lives in order to notice language.

Of course, we don’t usually set ourselves a task either!

But we do need to give our students a reason to read, and a well designed task can provide that, as well as the opportunity to develop reading skills if they need to be developed. In order to be able to use a text as a source for language, the text needs to have been understood first and a task can also help to ensure this.

The question, perhaps, is not so much whether we should be setting reading tasks, but what kind of tasks we should be setting. Ideally, I think that the task should bear some resemblance to the way we might naturally read that genre of text. So, if you want students to read a set of food labels, there is not much point in setting a gist task! If it’s a carefully argued article, on the other hand, you might want to set a task which helps learners to identify these arguments and how they link together

Research has found (Carrell 1984, 1985), that understanding how different types of texts are organised is a key factor in understanding a text. This is something which is often focused on in EAP, but, I think, much less so in General English. Obviously this is partly because academic writing tends to have more clearly defined text types (cause and effect, problem-solution etc). However, I think all students can benefit from being able to recognise the organisation and development of a text. Here are a few prediction type activities which might help with this:

1 Get students to look at the visual clues- how the text is laid out, any pictures, any headings or sub-headings. Where do they think the text came from?

2 For a newspaper article, try getting students to read the title and the first paragraph. This is often a summary of the rest of the article, so students could predict what will be found in the rest of the article.

3 Ask students to read just the first sentence of each paragraph. This is often the topic sentence (sentence with the main idea), so this can give a good overview of the content of the text, and its organisation.

4 If the text already has comprehension questions (i.e. an exam practice text), give out the questions before the text and ask them to use the questions to predict the content of the text. Exam questions should go in the same order as the text, so it should be possible to make some predictions about the organisation of the text as well.

In my next post, I’d like to look more carefully at some different types of tasks and questions, the aim behind them, and some tips for creating them. If you want to receive this through your email, the button is on the right.

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April 3, 2012 · 11:05 am

‘Pushing’ student output: one way to Demand High Teaching?

Having taken part in the ELTChat discussion last week on Demand High Teaching (see Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill’s slides from their IATEFL talk here), I was reminded of a session I taught for in-service teachers on the Output Hypothesis. Back in 1985, Merrill Swain studied children learning French in an immersion context in Canada and discovered that while their comprehension was good, their productive skills were not very strong. They had been given lots of what Krashen calls ‘comprehensible input’, but, she concluded, they had not been given enough opportunity to use the language themselves. Output is important because:

  1. While attempting to produce the target language, learners may notice their linguistic short-comings, ‘notice the gap’
  2. Output is a way of trying out language and testing hypotheses that are forming.
  3. Speech (and writing) can offer a way of reflecting on language itself in interaction with other students, helping to clarify ideas and iron out problems.

 Swain also came up with the idea of ‘push’ (see here for Thornbury’s excellent blog post on the idea of ‘push’), saying:

‘Comprehensible output refers to the need for a learner to be pushed toward the delivery of a message that is not only conveyed but that is conveyed precisely, coherently and appropriately.’

Just how helpful this ‘push’ can be is illustrated in the following example from a piece of research by Alison Mackey (2002). She recorded ESL learners interacting with other learners, teachers and native speakers and then asked them to watch the videos and reflect on what had been happening for them at the time.

This is a transcript of one of these interactions:

NNS: And hand- in hand have a bigger glass to see.

NS: It’s errr. You mean something in his hand?

NNS: Like spectacle. For older person.

NS: Mmm. Sorry, I don’t follow. It’s what?

NNS: In hand have- he have- has- a glass for looking through for make the print bigger to see, to see the print, for magnify.

NS: He has some glasses?

NNS: Magnify glasses. He has magnifying glass.

NS: Oh, aha, I see, a magnifying glass. Right, that’s a good one. Ok.

And this is what the student said about the interaction:

In this example I see I have to manage my err err expression because he does not understand me and I cannot think of exact word right then. I am thinking, thinking, it is nearly in my mind, thinking bigger and magnificate and eventually magnify. I know I see this word before but he is forcing me to think harder, think harder for the correct word to give him so he can understand and so I was trying. I carry on talking until finally I get it and when I say it then he understand it, me.

So, we can see that being ‘unhelpful’ to a learner can actually lead to much more learning than jumping in and giving them the word they’re looking for straightaway.

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