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The mouse that roared

29/9/2019

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Once upon a time when I was working on a teacher training course in Norwich (UK) a group of trainers was spending a jolly summer evening in our shared kitchen-dining room in the university accommodation provided. Somehow the conversation wound around to the topic of graded readers and "Minnie" scoffed declaring them an abomination and would no sooner use them with her students than erotica. "Leo" was no less imperious in his view, his ego fuelled by the evening’s bonhomie and bruised by Minnie’s unequivocal stance. His mane shook as he roared at all gathered in his little kingdom, that as the author of several graded readers himself, she was a very foolish mouse. I don’t believe these were his exact words, but neither are these their exact names. Nevertheless, his mane was ruffled. The mouse roared back explaining that she didn’t realise she was in a conflict zone, let alone trying to win a battle. Minnie snatched her bottle of Pinot and retired to her mousehole.
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The brouhaha that had unfolded in her kitchen, his kingdom, revolved around a misunderstanding. Had Leo and Minnie taken the time to clarify what they meant by Graded Readers, this tense standoff between two BNIFs (Big Name in Field) could have been avoided and I could have had another glass of Pinot. For Minnie, a graded reader is a simplified, condensed version of Defoe, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, et al. Her preference is to work with extracts of the original than with a bowdlerized whole. Leo was referring to his own oeuvre and that of all the others who have recently been commissioned by ELT publishers to write original novellas for learners of English. ​

Understanding another involves empathy, which requires the kind of similarity that we just do not have with lions, and that many people do not have with other human beings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Out of Your Seats workshop at IATEFL Liverpool

9/4/2019

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Shoulda been there! 
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Co-author Anette in full flight!
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April 2019
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Out of Your Seats – reader feedback

8/4/2019

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Out of Your Seats is now in use all over the place. So if you are using the book and would like to share any comments about your experiences with it, please click the title of this post and make a comment. We'd love to hear from you.

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Do I hear silence?

5/2/2019

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New article by James Thomas just published here on the website. If you would like to comment on the article, do see here on the blog page. Looking forward to your comments.

​James
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The Reluctant Teacher

29/1/2019

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The Reluctant Teacher

This extract from the Introduction to Out of Your Seats addresses some of the issues that cause language teachers' reluctance to engage in drama activities.
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This type of teaching does not assume that teachers are drama experts, which teachers often cite as a reason for not getting their students out of their seats and engaging them in the types of things that this book has to offer. Teachers also fear looking foolish, which is the risk we are asking teachers to ask their students to take. Taking these risks develops the mutual trust between students and teachers and between students themselves that communicative language teaching depends on. Furthermore, no one needs to feel that they are performing unless they want to: we are not in the process of staging a play replete with costumes, lighting, ticket sales and stardom. Rather, teachers and students alike need to recognize their contributions as, well, contributions – contributions to something greater than the sum of its parts. Many of the Activities and Lessons see students working in pairs, in small groups and in whole-class activities.

Another underlying reason for not engaging in drama activities is the teacher's lack of faith in their learning outcomes. This is an admirable concern, for teachers should not engage in any teaching practices that they do not believe in. It is less admirable if teachers do believe but are constrained by the timetable, their boss and other stakeholders. Such teachers need to be able to justify the outcomes of their chosen teaching procedures through exploring the affordances that they offer. The aims provided at the top of the Lessons are a good start.

In several lessons exploring idioms, for example, the learners put the key words in order using mime. They then work with the idioms' literal meanings and then with their figurative meanings through matching and looking at them in multiple short contexts. They go on to use these short sentences to study sentence stress, visually and aurally, all the while acting out key words and building up short improvs. They conclude by performing dialogues that revolve around them. Thus, the students are having multiple learning experiences that consolidate and extend several competences.

Once the multiple affordances of an activity are listed and compared with those of the desk-bound, book-bound and transmission alternative, case closed.
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A bad reason for engaging students in activities is because it is easier to get the students up doing something than it is to teach them. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that engaging students in any way with language counts as language teaching (see Swan 2009).

Accounting for the affordances that an activity manifests should also slam the door in the face of the most common excuse, time. When we have so much to teach, recycle, revise and test, we need to find ways of doing more than one thing at a time. Comparing the affordances of these activities with those of the traditional alternative may convince even the most ardent Doubting Thomas to reconsider. If evidence fails to convince someone, their incontrovertible belief system must be preventing them from opening their minds.
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In tightly controlled and inflexible timetables, teachers find it difficult to add the activities offered in teacher resource books to their lessons. Interpolating activities mustn't short change other parts of a lesson nor short change the students. It is important therefore that teachers adapt their teaching plans to absorb the activities and lessons that they would like their students to experience. Thus, when preparing to introduce, revise or extend a grammar structure, the words and phrases of a topic or a feature of pronunciation, for example, the teacher can compare what is in their course books with what is in this book: it may then be a matter of using the format of the activity in this book with the topic in the course book, or it may suffice to simply replace the segment in the course book.

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Out of Your Seats was written by Anette Igel and James Thomas.
It was published by Versatile in 2018.
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January 09th, 2019

9/1/2019

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Flying high with Out of Your Seats

8/1/2019

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Susan Hillyard and Eugenia Dell'Osa have chosen such great travel reading that they want to share it with the world. Can't blame them really. :-) 

They were flying Buenos Aires to Bolivia, I believe.

Thanks for your support, Susan and Eugenia.
See what they're reading!
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January 06th, 2019

6/1/2019

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Syllabus Stress Table
​Task-based pronunciation teaching​


​Given that English word stress is a problem without a systematic solution, the Syllable Stress Table is an activity that focusses students' ears on the number of syllables in words, and then which of them is stressed. I have found that once students know this about a word and know that this is worth focussing on, they have more confidence in their pronunciation and they have a system for developing this aspect of English pronunciation. 
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Discovering English with Sketch Engine: reviewed at last.

10/8/2018

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From a 2000 word review published last year in the Journal of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, come these snippets: 
This book demystifies the corpus approach to language teaching and shows that corpus software is no magic wand, but a useful tool to obtain language information that was hitherto almost inaccessible. ​
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Generally, DESKE is a witty, highly-readable narrative written by an enthusiast with vast experience in ELT, whose line of argumentation is very compelling and engaging. It is rich in metaphors, imagery, real-world and literary references which deliver ideas in a more immediate, easy-going and memorable way than traditional academic prose. It elegantly combines theory and practice, which one always hopes for in a textbook. 
Written by Maria Kunilovskaya and Marina Koviazina in the Department of Philology and Journalism University of Tyumen, Russia.

To read the whole review, click on the 
Journal of Linguistics, and search for 'sketch'.
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Versatile News

9/9/2016

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It's the 9th Sept 2016. This is the end of my second week of my post-university life. The intention to finish some books to add to the Versatile catalogue is not going quite as planned. Unfortunately, I've become very involved in my Prepositions Project, which is starting from scratch. I should be finishing things that are much closer to completion. 

In this time, I've also remade the Versatile site and launched it on 7th inst. This is Versatile's first ever blog posting.

And I wrote a page in my old site about comparing synonyms using corpus data: 
http://bit.ly/sketch_diff_respond_answer

And there has been a huge swap-over of books. I had borrowed many books from the university libraries and my office was full of my own books. I'd say we're about even now!

And to celebrate the new life, I bought myself a proper iMac, which is far more adorable than I'd expected. How on earth did I write several whole books on my MacBook Air, which btw is sitting diminished to the left of the iMac. But it has been a very faithful companion for four years.

​
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