What have I learned from my students? My students can be more creative than me.

This is a follow up to my last post.  I tried to get a little bit of written dialogue from one of my favourite classes after working through the verbs in a way similar to @eltbakery‘s suggestion.  It was the end of the day, end of the class and I knew this particular class was creative and always up for a challenge.

So here’s one that I thought was pretty clever.

A.  Nine years ago I almost gave up playing tennis because I didn’t get on with my coach but I carried on with it at a different club.

B.  Now that you bring up your coach, I bumped into him on the street.

A.  Oh?  How is he?

B.  Not good.  A car was driving towards him.  I shouted, “Watch out!” but he couldn’t make out what I was saying.  There was an accident and I had to look after him until the ambulance turned up.

A.  Hold on!  The coach was hit by a car?

That’s as far as the students got before the class finished unfortunately.  There are a lot of directions this story could go and I think it is certainly better, more coherent and more interesting than anything I was coming up with.  Just thought I would share.

 

What have I learned from a recent dry run? Creativity on demand is hard!

Recently I found a really interesting blog post about the 20 most commonly used phrasal verbs in English.*  Phrasal verbs are notorious among English learners and when I saw this I thought, ‘Cool!  How can I use this?’

I wanted to try something creative and that is where I have hit a, so far, insurmountable obstacle.  I’m going to go through what I have tried so far, not in class, just by myself.  I wanted to place myself in the role of my students.  Before I ask something creative of them, I wanted to see how I would cope with it:

1. Craft a discussion amongst 3 or 4 people that use all 20 of these phrasal verbs.

The idea being to get the students to act out this scene, switch roles, act it out again, etc.**  This was almost a non-starter as keeping 3 or 4 characters going in a story very quickly became too much of a challenge.  I’m not a professional wordwright.

2. Simplify it.  Craft a conversation between only 2 people that use all 20 of these phrasal verbs.

I thought, this should be relatively easy and it is certainly doable but the phrasal verbs seem to steer the conversation into a relatively negative story (at least they do whenever I am behind the creative wheel it seems).  Negative stories don’t help us to remember as well as feel-good or funny stories… so back to the drawing board.

3. Seek creative inspiration.  Storybird.

I haven’t used Storybird with any of my classes yet but I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to try it out and make a story which could educate and whet my students’ appetites for trying to use this wonderful website for themselves.   Unfortunately, being stuck to these 20 phrasal verbs, which is the task I had set myself, meant that the pictures produced more restrictions than provided creative inspiration.

4. Change the objective.  Craft a story that works with only 5 or 10 of the phrasal verbs.

This works and really, it was unrealistic to believe that an activity that immediately included all 20 phrasal verbs would be of much use to learners.  I do want to find a way to make sure that the lesson provides a decent opportunity for all students to use, practise and learn all 20 of these phrasal verbs, but this has to be built up in steps.

At the moment I’m still thinking.  I’m still wondering if I can go back to an earlier story I wrote and improve it, make it funny or heart-warming or something.  The problem there is that comedy is incredibly subjective and when trying to cross a cultural divide (and an age gap of about a decade and a half), literal comedy is one of the most difficult forms to make work.

So what have I learned from this?

• Even if I can put a decent story together, I will have spent FAR more time than I could allow my students in class.
• The failure to produce a happy, funny or simply a well-written story with these restrictions has disappointed me.  Such disappointment for my learners would probably equate to a drop in motivation and self-esteem.
• Working in a group might help me to produce a good story but what I’m really missing is sufficient structure and guidance.

So how has it gone?

With a couple of additions (I think ‘come on’ and ‘go well’ are just a couple of essential phrasal verbs to add to this list) I’ve covered this list with half of my classes so far but there still hasn’t been a spark.  I’m not happy with any of the stories I’ve made up and so I’m not using any of them and therefore I’m still presenting the list as just a list basically.

Well that’s not completely true, I’m actually presenting this as a memory/guessing game, a bit more interactive but my approach here has been less than inspiring for my students so far, I think.  I might throw this one over to Sandy Millin’s excellent brainstorm site, (Almost) Infinite ELT Ideas.

So that’s where things are at the moment.  Any ideas?

Notes

* Just in case you are wondering, the 20 most common phrasal verbs are apparently as follows: bring up, carry on, chase up, come across, come up with, fall apart, get along, get away with, get over, give up, go on, hold on, look after, look up, make out, pull over, put down, put off, turn up, watch out. (Click here for the original article with explanations)

**  This comes from Alan Tait’s recent idea about taking a movie scene and getting the students to act it out and, in doing so, providing plenty of repetition as well as taking some ownership of the text and playing with it.

 

Tongue Twisters & Lip Reading

Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry... the ultimate tongue twister perhaps?

A paper I wrote entitled “Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry: Using Tongue Twisters and Lip-Reading in my Classes” has just been published in Peerspectives, an online teaching journal from the Kanda University of International Studies in Japan.

There are a lot of interesting articles in the archive so I also recommend taking a look at the previous issues.

Hope you enjoy the read and feel free to leave comments here on this blog.

 

Collaborative writing with Google Docs… AKA, Students producing something worthwhile with their English

I feel quite proud that I’ve cracked this one.  For a while I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the fact that my students, all teenagers, seem to spend most of their free time on the computer.  I’m not putting them down for it, I’m the same way (though I can’t wait for an iPhone that will allow to get out of the house with the Internet – is that a sign of addiction?)

Google Docs has provided a fantastic resource that some of my students have embraced with gusto and the best thing about it is that it is getting them reading, thinking, writing and reflecting in English – a bunch of things that teenagers are not known for liking.

So what did I do?

As with all projects, we need a deadline to work to.

First of all, I made all this work voluntary.  I told the students that if they wanted to work on this that was their choice but that it wasn’t compulsory.

Basically I identified a couple of big translation challenges that the students could get their teeth sunk into.  This included a Wikipedia page as well as a tourism brochure for the local cathedral.  In the first case, the Spanish Wikipedia article (I’m down in Argentina) was 10 times the size of the English one.  As for the brochure, there was no English translation for non-Spanish speaking tourists.

The “carrot” in both cases is certificates that will be signed by me, the director of my school and a 3^rd person, likely a local official, acknowledging this work as helping to improve the town’s international profile for tourism (an industry they are trying to build here).

I took the files, the text from Wikipedia (both Spanish and English) and the brochure and uploaded them to Google Docs (two separate files for two separate projects).  Then I shared the file with all of my students and let them get on with it.  I set rules for them and a deadline – in this case they have until the end of August to work on this.

If the students don’t have a Google account, that’s not a problem…

So what problems/challenges have I encountered?

Hotmail.  Nearly none of the 60 or so students I’ve invited to work on these

projects have Google accounts; they all have Hotmail account and the reason for that is that they don’t even use email, it is all for MSN Instant Messenger and that’s it.  I suppose that email is irrelevant to them at this stage in their lives.  Either that or I am, in my late 20s, already a relic of a generation that still holds on to email as something useful (but that’s another thought for another post for another blog).

The students can use their existing email accounts to get a free Google account.

I had to spend time with each class going through how they could set up a Google account with their Hotmail accounts.  Not a difficult process but we did hit some bumps on the way – all part of the learning process.

So how has it gone so far?

Strangely enough, and I think there is a lot to be learned from this, the first group that I tried Google Docs with has been, without a doubt, the most enthusiastic.  I think the reason for this is that I took things slowly with them as I was unsure of what I was doing and was learning with them.  With subsequent classes I obviously skipped over steps that I, as a learner, no longer needed but they obviously did – bad Gordon, bad!  I’m not talking about a lack of technical understanding but more a lack of handholding at the beginning and baby steps towards familiarity and confidence in the process.

Bearing in mind that this project was given a week before winter vacations and classes don’t start back until next week I’m quite pleased with the results so far.  Both projects have about 60-70 students invited to work on it; one project has at least 6 contributors at the moment, the other has 16.  For teenagers on vacation doing a voluntary translation project, I count that as a win!

So why is Google Docs so brilliant?

I’m going to just list this part.  For more information, check out the video below from Commoncraft.

1. It gets rid of multiple copies of the same document.  The document exists online and everyone edits the same document online.
2. It auto-saves every 20 seconds.
3. It saves every iteration of the document so if someone deletes the whole thing by mistake (or intentionally) then nothing is lost.
4. It shows who has edited what.

So why is Google Docs so brilliant pedagogically?

I’m going to list this part as well as give you a small look at one of the examples that my students worked on last month.

1. It encourages peer-assessment.  The students have to read through what their classmates have written and consider whether it is good, needs to be corrected or can be improved.
2. It encourages peer-reading and peer-correction.  It is the students’ job to not only contribute their own material but fix or improve their peers’ contributions.  This has the added benefit of improving confidence among the students who might not feel comfortable physically crossing out peers’ work.
3. It encourages reflection.  If a student sees their work has been changed by another student, then it provokes the first student to ask themselves, “Is that a valid correction?  Should I change it back?  Is there an even better way I can write it?”
4. It encourages learner autonomy and ownership.  While a collaborative effort, this method can produce pages and pages of learner-generated content.  It blows me away, it really does.
5. It encourages repetition.  Since students should be adding and correcting a document throughout the whole week, other students must keep going back to check on their own work and to see where they can improve other peers’ work.
6. It allows the teacher to be less intrusive in observing the collaborative writing and re-drafting process, while at the same time being able to clearly see who is working in what area and what problems they might be having.
7. If a mistake is missed by a whole class after they’ve had a week to review it, it becomes glaringly obvious to the teacher that there is a combined gap in the group knowledge that should be worked on in class.

Here’s a screencap video using Jing which I hope will demonstrate a lot of what I’m talking about.  Many apologies about the feedback with the audio – hope it doesn’t put you off!

Setting up and sharing a Google Doc

So how will I improve this exercise in the future?

I’ll let you know once these projects are finished. 😉

 

Translation in Class, part 2… AKA, Translation v2.0

In my previous post, I explained the almost unmitigated disaster that was my first attempt to do a translation exercise with a monolingual teenage group of around B2/C1 ability (according to the CEFR).  This was my 2^nd attempt at the activity.

So what did I change?

Well a lot actually.  First of all, and this might be cheating, I changed the class.  I tried this with a younger group of B1 students.  I also started off by explaining all the steps of what we were going to do so that the learners would not be left bored wondering “Why am I doing this?”

We started with a free-writing exercise with a bit of variation.  I suggested the topic of ‘English’ (whether it was English-speaking music, movies, classes, teachers, etc. was up to the students) but I made it clear that if they wanted to write about a different topic they were welcome to.  The main variation of this writing was that it had to be in L1, in this case Spanish.  I put two provisos; all writing for this class should be double-spaced and it was very important that handwriting was as legible as possible.

After this I had something like 12 pieces of writing in L1.  I then put the students into groups of 2 or 3 and gave them one piece of writing – not their own – to translate into English.

While I did have an L1/L2 dictionary ready what I set up was much better – the help board!  On the whiteboard I had two columns, ‘Spanish’ and ‘English’.  If a word or phrase came up that the learners couldn’t translate, they had to put it up on the board, leave a space in their translation and wait for other members of the class to write up the translation if they could.  I would use the dictionary to check these translations if necessary or if the whole class was drawing a blank.

Why did I take this approach?

Well, after my first attempt I felt that I needed a more forgiving crowd than the apathetic, older teenage crowd that v1.0 had failed with.

The free-writing was a way of easing the students into an exercise that they might otherwise have been resistant to.  Trying to get teenagers to do writing at all is a challenge but doing writing in a foreign language is usually seen as too much like hard work (“es un viaje” as my Argentinian students are wont to say).  The L1 writing also produced texts to work on that were at least moderately interesting for the learners.

Group work for 'dry' exercises like translation is probably a must.

By putting the students into groups I made this a group learning exercise.  On this point I would like to draw your attention to a talk that Sir Ken Robinson gave about changing educational paradigms (See the whole seminar at the bottom of this post, here’s the link for the specific section of the seminar relevant to what I’m talking about).  We learn and work together in the real world so why is it so important that we work separately in the classroom or even in the tests?

The teacher-centred benefit for the students working in groups is that once a group had finished one translation I could give them another one and it would give me time during the lesson to review and correct their collaborative translation effort.  This was also aided by the ‘help board’, which meant that I was not the first person to go to as soon as the learners hit a barrier.  This wasn’t immediately successful as a lot of the students aren’t entirely sure what to do when they are given autonomy but at least by the end of the class they had thankfully stopped asking permission to get up and write something on the board.  Baby steps. 🙂

By holding back the dictionaries this also forced collaboration and got the students to recognize each other as fountains of information.  This is a bigger problem I’m trying to overcome… how many times have you been asked the same question two, three even four times because the students aren’t listening to each other, don’t listen to the question and therefore don’t register that they are listening (or not) to an answer they themselves are about to ask for.

So where will this not work?

Well obviously this approach depends on a common L1 among the learners so those of you with multi-lingual L1 classes will have to come up with something different.  For some ideas you should look at Ceri Jones’s article, a second look at translation, which focuses translation exercises in multi-lingual groups.

So what went wrong?

Very little really.  Due to the fact that this was the first time I was doing this, I made myself a little more available to the students than I would have liked but everyone needs training wheels when they start something new.  Having more free time would have allowed me to look at what they are producing in more detail but once we’ve done this a few more times we should get a little faster at it and that might allow time at the end to review various phrases, grammar, etc.

 

Translation in Class, part 1

Scaffolding, scaffolding, scaffolding.  Without that, even the best ideas can fall short of their potential or even worse fall flat on their face!

This is what I can see went wrong when I tried to introduce a translation exercise into my advanced class a few weeks ago.  You might remember I mentioned them in another post about storybuilding.

So what did I try to do and why?

Guy Cook, in his thought-provoking lecture ‘Translation in Language’, explained that the goal of most learners of English is to be an effective conduit of information between their native language and English.  My skills as a native English speaker are not what my students want or need, it is the ability to switch between their L1 and English that makes learning English worthwhile and will help them to get a good job, at least statistically.

So my idea was to have an exercise that put translation front and centre, an exercise that asked learners to take issues from a newspaper that they might be familiar with and try to re-write them in English.  My hope was that this might really help to improve this very important skill in foreign language learning.  On top of this, it would also hopefully serve to highlight a few phrases and words that might be missing in their vocabulary as well as challenging them to make their passive reading knowledge more active through translation and writing.

So how did I do this?

I took a pile of recent local newspapers and L1/L2 dictionaries into the classroom and explained what I wanted to do.  The students were given a couple of minutes to choose the article they wanted to translate and then work through it asking for the teacher’s help as and when necessary.

So where did it go wrong?

I’ve got to say this ended up being almost a complete disaster and to cut a long story short I’ll just list the errors I made:

• Motivation/Personalisation – This was an almost by-the-book translation exercise with the learners having nothing personally invested in the work.
• Groupings – For some reason I still can’t figure out, I had everyone working individually.  This turned an already difficult activity to ‘sell’ the students on into a deadly boring and uncommunicative exercise.  Bad teacher, bad!
• Level of Difficulty – I had assumed (always the first mistake) that a local paper wouldn’t present too many difficulties in its level of Spanish and would therefore be of an acceptably challenging level for a B2/C1 class to translate.  As it turns out, I had overestimated some of my learners’ L1 vocabulary.  Added to this, I had unknowingly chosen newspapers known for not using the best grammar and syntax.  Garbage in, garbage out!
• Lack of Scaffolding – Quite simply, this was a new activity for the learners and regardless of whether they are A1 or C1 on the CEFR scale, they needed to be guided and the activity needed to be built from sentences upward.  Throwing them in at the deep end of “translate a whole article” was never going to work except with the most autonomous and gung-ho of learners.

So would I try a translation exercise again?

Yes.  I still firmly believe that we have to acknowledge the important role that L1 plays in shaping our learners when they are learning English.  Just about all of an L2 is learned by making mental connections with L1 and if a teacher ignores this, they are simply not on the same page as their learners.

What would I do differently to improve this exercise?

Stay tuned for part 2. 🙂

 

L1 vs L2 Writing Skills

Question: For a group of B2/C1 teenagers that have done FCE, which language do you think they will write better in, L1 or L2?

My Answer:  L1, of course.

Their Answer:  English.  We don’t do anywhere near as much writing in L1 (Spanish in Argentina, BTW) as we do in English.  We’re much better at structured writing in English.

Could this really be the case?  My Spanish isn’t good enough to judge their writing but I might get a colleague to look at some of their Spanish compositions.

Has anyone else encountered this?

 

My 1000 Challenge – The Final Week!

I’ve just posted an update on my other blog as we go into the final week of my 1000 Words & Phrases Challenge.   For more information about the challenge itself, see this previous post.

Have a great week!

 

Pizza with my Students

“When are we all going to go out for pizza?”

This was the question from all of my advanced students almost from Day 1.  Teenagers are persistent and after three months I was eventually worn down to saying ‘yes’  a couple of weeks ago.

And what a revelation!  In the hour and a half (the length of a class) I probably got more English out of them and more of their stories than I had in the last month of classes.  Comfort really is the key (affective filters and all that) but it also helped – not hindered – that the conversations were switching from L1 to L2 depending on which part of the table I was in conversation with.  I placed myself strategically at the middle of the table so as to be accessible to all and then I simply let the conversation happen.

So now I have a conundrum – where does and should L1 fit into a conversation class for a homo-linguistic group of B2/C1 English speakers?  Everyone, including the teacher it must be said, enjoyed this forum of communication far more than the classroom.  Instead of me actively monitoring them, they were checking themselves and asking me for clarification or correction.  If I wasn’t part of one end of the table’s conversation then it would slip back to L1 (as we would naturally expect) but this meant that the conversation continued and nobody got bored and, most importantly, the periods of English conversation during that dinner probably had more value and were of more interest to the learners than a great majority of discussion we’ve had in class.

So this brings about an interesting point for dogmeists – environment and space.  Working around emergent language and a conversation-driven syllabus is great and can be rewarding and sometimes very successful, but how easy is it for our learners (and the teacher for that matter) to handle this approach, a departure from traditional methodology, while still surrounded by the four traditional walls of the classroom.  Here I am considering the hidden curriculum of space and a thought-provoking post that Willy Cardoso wrote a few months ago.

Can I move every class to the pizza parlour?  No – I don’t think my school would cover the cost of all that food!  Would it be a good idea to do this regularly?  Yes.  Would it be a good idea to do it frequently?  Probably not – I feel you get less out of special occasions when they are not special.  Can this ‘success’ be moved back into the classroom without the pizza?  I don’t know.

Thoughts, suggestions, ideas?

 

 

Reading Finnegans Wake – A Guide to Student Thinking

Obviously, if you want to get a better idea of what is going through your students’ minds when they are given something difficult to read, like a Cambridge exam, simply look at your own language learning.  This is relatively simple and I’m sure most of us have endeavoured to learn a second, third or even fourth, fifth or sixth language – indeed English may not be your first language.

However, if you are not learning a new language at the moment (1) (2) or have just about mastered the language you are currently studying then you might have already started to forget some of those feelings of frustration and despair as you spent 10 minutes reading a small article in the newspaper and you still didn’t understand what it was talking about.  If this is the case, or you just want to try something different, then may I suggest Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.  You will quickly remember the frustrations and empathise with your students a little bit more.

To say I’m having some trouble with it would be an understatement – I picked it up about 5 minutes after finishing The Girl Who Played with Fire so it had some big shoes to fill in terms of readability.  But, I wanted to share my experiences of the first two paragraphs and how it suddenly made me stop and think of my students.

My Kindle edition has a long and detailed introduction to the text and the man – I skipped it.  There is also a section entitled “The Writing of Finnegans Wake” – I skipped that too.  That is followed by “The Structure of the Wake” – skipped it – and this is finished off by a piece entitled “A Babelion Act of War”, which I also skipped but for the sake of this piece I looked through it and saw it seems to be a short composition about how Finnegans Wake is regarded by other literary giants, such as T.S. Eliot and Umberto Eco.

And then, at last, I hit the first two paragraphs and so far I haven’t got any further.  This is not for lack of trying but lack of motivation – I’m not motivated to read further because I don’t feel I’ve understood the first part and don’t see much point in continuing until I feel comfortable with what I’ve already read.  I’ve already read it five times and every time feels new because none of it is ‘going in’.  None of it is going in because little of it is being understood.

So immediately I understand my students better – I recognize and understand most of the words (not all, some are made up) but when put together I get to the end of the 2^nd paragraph and I feel like a total idiot for not understanding a single clause.  I suppose in this respect we could substitute Joyce’s odd yet critically praised composition with various student compositions I read from time to time which are complete gobbledygook.

But let’s consider my process, shall we?  I skipped all the instructions – I just wanted to get started with the reading.  This is natural yet, in the case of Finnegans Wake and many pieces of reading we give our students, important contextual, cultural knowledge is missing.  It will be some struggle but I’ll need to go through the first 6% of the book (the Kindle doesn’t work in pages) and get an idea of the background and a framework with which I can better understand the composition.

We then come to another point where I can sympathize with the students – the pre-reading, while almost always necessary, can sometimes really suck the fun out of reading.  At the moment Finnegans Wake hasn’t proved itself to me to be worth the several thousand words of pre-reading I seem to need to do before I can really sink my teeth into the story itself.  I will persist, in no small part, due to the recommendations of people in my PLN (3) however this stubbornness on my part is not something we can expect from most of our students.

In re-reading the first two paragraphs of Finnegans Wake – now for a sixth time – I’m taken back to the despair of my secondary school French and German classes: reading comprehension, 5 minutes and 10 questions.  Two or three would go unanswered and then three or four of my answers would be wrong.  How demotivating!

I may not get much further into ‘the Wake’ before I declare myself a lost cause, give up on it and move on to something easier (Stieg Larsson’s final part of his trilogy is calling to me even now).  Nonetheless, I am glad I spent the time and money on Joyce’s work because it has, quite inadvertently, reconnected me with language learning as I saw it as a student – something I’d lost being so connected and enthused as a teacher.

Footnotes

1. And if you aren’t then you should be for two reasons, the first of which is a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”  I love this quote and I see evidence of it daily when I realize something in my own language when I am studying another language and when my L2 provides me with a conversation or friendship that I would otherwise have missed.
2. The other, more practical, reason for learning another language is laid out very clearly by Scott Thornbury in an interview he did for the British Council (see below).
3. I was first got attracted to this by Mark Andrew’s excellent blog post about James Joyce’s work as an English Language Teacher in Trieste and Yssel.  Highly recommended reading.