The Versatile ELT BlogA space for short articles about topics of interest to language teachers.
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The Versatile ELT BlogA space for short articles about topics of interest to language teachers.
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Michelle and me Are you sitting down? was the first thing Sarah said, ringing from her office at NILE in Norwich to mine in Brno. The plans for training 60 secondary school English teachers in Yueyang, China, had many moving parts. With visa and travel organised and permission from my uni to take a month out during semester granted, I feared she was about to tell me it had all been cancelled. Tom's passport, Sarah said, is lost in the post and we're not sure when he'll join you. Can you train the 60 till he gets there? By then, I'd trained hundreds of Chinese English teachers in regular BC training courses. And I'm Australian.
I arrived in Yueyang and Michelle, the British Council project manager, met me. The trainees arrived for a weekend course induction with Charlotte who came from the BC office in Hong Kong. I started on Monday and she stayed and observed my training for a few days. Michelle observed my training and so did the head of the school where the training took place. Tom arrived on the Thursday afternoon to start the next day. As I often hear from trainees and course organisers, they had never experienced training like this. And an experience it was, full of many experiences, as you can imagine in six hours a day for a month. Chinese teachers often comment on how energetic I am, despite my age, which perhaps says as much about them as it does about me! To welcome Tom, the headmistress took us to a music room so that we could sing him in. We had done a few songs already in those first days, as I like to show teachers how they can exemplify aspects of language in lyrics and use the backgrounds of songs in project work. One of the trainees wrote me a lovely note that day saying, that even after all this work with 60 teachers, and my voice drying up while accompanying their singing, I kept going. She said it was a great lesson for them all. I usually find that Chinese teachers are energetic and enthusiastic. In this Yueyang training, they were relentlessly so. Through participating in and reflecting on the activities, they knew that they were learning language and developing approaches to teaching. One thoughtful participant commented that as wonderful as these activities were, she couldn't imagine adding any of them to her teaching because turning the pages in the coursebook was already time-consuming enough. This triggered new thinking in me – in the ensuing years, the focus of my training morphed from skills to systems. The teachers needed more effective ways of integrating grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation into their skills work. This in turned influenced the content of my The Book of How to do things in ELT and other publications. Another thoughtful participant said that it would difficult to do these activities with their large classes of 50. I pointed out that we spent the first week doing them in a class of 60. End of! The teachers might also have been energetic and enthusiastic because Tom and I had to select the top 20 to go on to be trained as trainers. At the end of our month, Susan and Briony came and worked with the admirable 20 for another month. And then they went to Norwich for a two week summer course. I was teaching a different NILE summer course while they were there studying with Jamie. Nevertheless, the reunion was joyous! One evening, in Constable Terrace on the UEA campus where we were all living, they handmade hundreds of jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) that stretched to the horizon. Not only did the 20 then return to China, so did I. I had ten days to work with them to prepare them to start training. Michelle asked me if there was anything I needed. Twenty-four teachers whom the trainees could pilot their material on would be nice. In the mornings we prepared the training sessions, in the afternoons they delivered them to the 24 teachers, and then we did some feedback. It was fascinating to see the 24 teachers hold the 20 trainees in such high regard. The 24 completed questionnaires on the training and were positive and grateful. At the end of the first day, some representatives of the Hunan department of education that was funding all of this, drove Michelle, some other BC colleagues and me in a convoy of black vehicles to a vast lotus lake around which we boated admiring the minaret in the distance as the sun began to set. I was still jetlagged and initially irritated by this six hour trip on top of a long first day, but upon realising that this had all been done for me, my mood changed considerably. The day after my last day was Day One for the 20 new trainers. I could only stay one day, but watching them put into practice what they had learn from Charlotte, Tom and me, Susan and Briony, and Jamie, was one of the most moving experiences of my professional life. It was astounding to see them at work. As I mentioned, this project had many moving parts, all of which Michelle managed brilliantly. She organised other trainings I did in China, and this year on my first trip to Australia in eight years, I even stayed with her in Melbourne where she and her family now live. At the end of one of our collaborations, she wrote me a short letter in which she mentioned having observed many trainers and many sessions, but mine are the only ones she learns anything new from. The letter was enclosed in this recipe book.
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The hunt for DIK pics on the web is an eternal source of fascination. The yield reveals some quite interesting conceptualisations that I like to share with my students. Most of my students in the last 25 years have been either pre-service teachers doing MA TESOL courses at university, or in-service language and EMI teachers doing short intensive courses, mostly for the British Council. Lego affords arguably the most graphic representation of the data-information-knowledge paradigm. Data as a random collection of tidbits; information as patterns and relationships in the data; knowledge as something meaningful. Some of my training courses start with an activity, Three texts, Three groups, Three presentations (#58 in The Book of How to do things in ELT). The class is divided into three groups and each group receives a variety of texts about different aspects of their topic. The students read their texts, discuss the content with their group, prepare a poster that represents their understanding, then present it to the rest of the class. This is an activity with multiple affordances. The three posters are displayed on the classroom walls and referred to frequently through the rest of the training. We refer to the DIK poster when exploring inductive approaches such as discovery learning. We contrast students being given information to memorise and regurgitate with students being tasked with finding patterns and relationships in the data they collect. This leads to issues of trust and respect – we respect our students' intelligence enough to trust them to work out what to learn and how to learn. We trust that they will learn more deeply if they have to work it out for themselves, and we trust that they will benefit from learning how to learn, i.e., metacognitive training. The data-information-knowledge paradigm also demonstrates the role that collocation plays in distinguishing words which might be thought of as near synonyms. It is clear from this lexical data, drawn from a corpus of authentic samples of English, that data, information and knowledge perform different actions when they are the subjects of verbs; they are the objects of different verbs also. We ask our students to draw conclusions about these three words from their collocations. Students come to use the words with more confidence having observed their use by multiple native speakers. The students can even extend the role of collocation to other vocabulary that they are learning, if they don't already. By now, they have seen collocation at work: we show them how to obtain data, convert it into information and apply it to their own use of language. Applying it to their own use of language is an application of procedural knowledge. Any information which integrates with the information and knowledge that we already hold becomes new knowledge, ergo knowledge creation. When students conduct a survey, in a Find Someone Who activity, for example, they are collecting data. When they get together and process their data, they are arriving at information from which they can draw conclusions. They have created cognitive knowledge which may influence their view on the topic and on their classmates.
A reading or listening text serves as a source of language data. The teacher's guided discovery tasks position students to learn language from language, once again creating knowledge and developing their confidence in using the words, phrases, structures and any other target feature of the language that are observed in the current text. I’ve spent too much of the last forty years of my life learning foreign language vocabulary, as well as quite a lot of new words and concepts in my native English but this was through different means for different ends. Most of my early foreign language vocabulary study involved learning from bilingual lists or flashcards, labelling pictures, matching foreign words with pictures or English words, and filling in gaps in strings of unrelated sentences. Having no reason to believe that my teachers or course books had set out to hinder my progress or waste my time, I kept plodding along at first in Italian, then German and later Czech. And some Russian.
By the time I started studying Czech, I had also become an ELT teacher around the golden eras of the COBUILD project and the Lexical Approach. Corpora were also peeking their heads above the parapet (data driven learning). This was the early 1990s and it promised great things for a more sophisticated approach to vocabulary study, one in which we would study and teach the properties of words, their internal and external relationships with other words, their roles in creating meaning. It was a time when “learning to learn” and discovery learning were establishing themselves in ELT. Empowerment through linguistic competence was in the air. It took me some time to absorb and apply these new trends to my self-study of Czech, but I’m glad I did. It was more difficult to squeeze into my English teaching as we had to turn the pages of course books in lockstep with external syllabuses. A few weeks ago I was at IATELF Poland, where I picked up a sample course book, fresh off the press from one of the Big 4 publishers. Having been a teacher trainer for 25 years, it came as little surprise that the approach to studying and teaching vocabulary espoused in this brand new course book has no made no headway since the Headways I was teaching from 30 years ago. In my teacher training, I always offer teachers vocabulary teaching activities that engage higher order thinking skills, creativity, discovery learning, metacognitive strategies, the double processing of texts and negotiating meaning. Many of the activities derive from contemporary findings in linguistics, such as grammar patterns as properties of words, and the role of collocation in creating meaning. In the books I have published in the last ten years, I have also provided teachers with lesson plans, activities and resources that elevate the status of vocabulary to its rightful place, that prevent teachers from hindering students’ vocabulary development and that provide students with rewarding self-study procedures. Teachers want their students to be more fluent, accurate, sophisticated and idiomatic (FASI) and a solid grasp of vocabulary is an essential ingredient. Last Friday, I presented a webinar for EuroCALL's corpus SIG. And today, I have recorded the PPT and uploaded it YouTube. The best way to enter it is via the webinar's webpage.
The presentation demonstrates dozens of discovery activities that students can be tasked with doing when they are using SkELL and VersaText. In the process of making their language discoveries, they are answering their questions, processing data, drawing conclusions which they then depict in a wide range of visual representations. The language discoveries they make are about text, grammar, vocabulary and everything in between. On 1st July, the Versatile E-learning site is embarking on its maiden voyage. It has had a dry run with some teacher training courses for my teachers here in Tashkent. But in July, we enter international waters. This is no mean feat when you're in one of the only double-landlocked countries in the world. 🙂 The e-learning courses are mainly intended to add an interactive dimension to Versatile books. The first course to open revolves around Discovering English with VersaText.
Click the VersaText logo here for information about the course and the enrolment procedure. The course is free, by the way. At least it is at the moment.
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 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 The Reluctant TeacherThis 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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