Think Tank

Self study -- six positions to get you thinking!

2010-01-30T11:10:36Z

Marc encourages his student to talk to themselves
Curtis asks about "the missing extensive"
Peter looks at the feasibility of complete self-study programs
Chris has is doubts about studying.
Rob reminds students not to forget their reading

Marc Helgesen

Talk to yourself - in English

There's a very simple technique. Everyone does it in their native language. It's easy. It's free. You can do it anywhere. And when students do it in English, it gives them extra practice. The technique: Talk to yourself- in English.

By "talk to yourself", I don't mean like the crazies we sometimes see mumbling and seemingly arguing with themselves and losing the argument. I'm talking about silently practicing English. It is really a kind of mental rehearsal. But, unlike rehearsal for a speech or a drama, you may or may not ever actually say these sentences out loud. It doesn't matter. Just spending time "mentally speaking" gives practice and a review of vocabulary and other part of language.

This isn't, of course, anything like a full "self-study course" which, (as Peter points out) are rarely actually used, anyway. It is a simple and easy technique that students can use to practice on their own.

The beauty of Talk to yourself in English is that students can do it at anywhere and any level.

The beauty of Talk to yourself in English is that students can do it anywhere and at any level of proficiency. Beginners might just name things they know how to say in English. Thats vocabulary review. At higher proficiency levels, they start to describe things and actions. Learners with more speaking ability can invent conversations, make up stories, etc. Many students spend a lot of time on trains and bus[s]es, and here is a great way to make use of that time - all they have to do is look out the window and narrate (to themselves, silently) what they want to say. Or the can look at the other people, describe them or imagine a conversation with them (still without vocalizing, doing it silently).

I usually introduce this in class with a video that has a lot of action. Any film with action and variety will work. I often use the opening sequence to Hitchcocks Rear Window, simply because there are lots of verbs and nouns, and they come at an easy to follow pace. And it is on youtube.com which makes it easy to bring into my classroom. I model the activity once (narrate the action while we watch), then have the student try it on their own.

Once students understand the idea, I give them a list of practice ideas and examples. The ideas follow the syllabus of their textbook so it is a way to recycle and reinforce what they are doing in class. Here are some of those ideas. If you want to copy or email this list for your students, click here for a photocopyable version.

Many students spend time on trains or busses every day. Here are some easy ways to practice English. Use these ideas. Talk to yourself silently in English.
Talk to yourself in English - practice ideas
Introductions	Look around. Notice people in the bus/train or on the street. If you were meeting them, what would you ask? What would you say about yourself? ("Hi, I'm (name). I'm a student at (schools name)./ What do you do? …").
Describing people	Look around. Notice the people in the bus/train or on the street. In your mind, describe their clothing, hair, etc. ("He's wearing a purple shirt, jeans and sunglasses. He has medium-length hair. He's cute! …").
Schedules and routines	On the bus/train on the way home, think about your schedule today. Was it typical? ("I got up at 7:00. Thats what I usually do. Today I had a new partner in English class. I hardly every talk to her. ….").
Desscribing places	Look out the window. In your mind, describe the buildings/places you see. ("That building is green. Actually, it is kind of ugly green. There's an old house with a blue roof. …").
Giving directions	Imagine the bus is a taxi. In your mind, you are giving the taxi driver directions in English ("Turn right at the next corner. See that signal? Turn left there.").
The past	On the bus/train on the way home, think about every thing you did today. How many different verbs can you use? ("I ate toast and drank coffee for breakfast. I took a shower and washed my hair….").
Jobs, abilities and interests	Look at people in the train/bus or on the street. Or look at stores and businesses. What jobs do you imagine the people do? What abilities do they need? ("She's beautiful. She could be a model. A model has to be able to look good all the time. There is a doctors office. A doctor has to have a license…").
Invitations	In your mind, think of all the ways you know to invite people. Then look around the bus/train. Imagine all the people are your friends. What would you like to invite each person to do? Think of what you would say in English. ("Hi. Would you like to play tennis this afternoon? How about going to a movie?").
The future	Think about next weekend (or your next school vacation. What do you want to do? Use as many verbs as you can. ("I'm going to meet my friends Saturday night? Maybe well go to (place)..…"). OR Think about your life in 5, 10, 20 years into the future. What is your dream? Describe it in English. What little things can you do TODAY to help make that dream come true? ("Someday, I'll travel around the world. Having good English will help me. Today I am practicing by thinking of English sentences right now!…").
Shopping	Look out the window. What kinds of stores do you see? When you see a store, how many things can you think of that they sell? ("There's a stationery store. They sell notebooks, pens, mechanical pencils, erasers,…").
Process (how to do things)	Think of things you know how to do or foods you can make. In your mind, give the directions in English. ("This is how to make cup noodle. First, boil water. Then…").
Likes and dislikes	Look out the window. What do you see that you like? What don't you like? ("That couple is holding hands. I like the feeling of love. Some guy is smoking. I dislike cigarette smoke. …")
Feelings/emotions	Look at people in the bus/train or on the street. How do you think they feel? What are their emotions? Imagine the reasons. ("That man looks really bored. I'll be he had a hard day at work. That couple looks really happy. They are holding hands. I think they are in love. …").
Giving reasons	Look around the bus/train. Notice things people have. Imagine the reasons they have them. ("She's wearing glasses. Maybe she needs them to read. He's using his mobile phone for texting (emailing). Maybe hes using it to write to his girlfriend. She's got a designer bag. Maybe…")
Instructions (imperatives)	Look at people in the bus/train or on the street. What are they doing? Imagine they are robots. You are the robot master. What did you tell them to get them to do things? ("Stand up!. Hold on to that pole. Walk down the street. Push the "open" button. … ")
Music	If you carry an iPod or other mp3 player, try listening to English songs. Really pay attention to the words. If you need extra help, you can usually find the words on the internet. Search for: (song title) lyrics. ("lyrics = songs words"). If you don't carry an iPod, think of a song in your first language. How would you explain it in English?
Happiness	On the bus/train on the way home, think about your life. How many good things can you think of? ("The weather is nice today. My family loves me. I ate chocolate today. It was delicious. ….").
© 2010 Marc Helgesen May be copied. (Download as PDF file)

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

Self Study - The Missing "Extensive"

Extensive reading is booming in Japan. Richard Day, Rob Waring (a Think Tank guest this month), Junko Yamamoto, and others have done much to promote it, and the number of schools adopting this approach have increased by the hundreds in the last seven years. Tomigaoka in Nara, the Super English High School I was advising put extensive reading at the center of their revolutionary program.

It probably all started with Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis: that we acquire language through meaningful input, lots of it, and especially by reading. Despite the endemic criticism, he has probably changed language teaching more than anyone else in the last 20 years.

But something is missing. Extensive reading is so prominent that it has almost become an academic field of its own, but borrowing a phrase from more than one pundit, "why don't we have extensive listening too?" It makes sense that if we acquire language primarily through input, that extensive listening would be just as effective as extensive reading, maybe even more so.

After all, as Barry Sanders reminds us in "A is for Ox" only 78 of the 3000 or so world languages have writing systems, and only five or six of those writing systems reach across borders. Most of our past has been oral. It is not reading and writing that propelled us into humanhood, it is listening and speaking. Reading and writing is a much later aberration. So if our brains evolved to process oral input, it stands to reason that extensive listening might be more brain-compatible than extensive reading. But then, why hasnt it caught on? Or more accurately, why don't we even have this approach as a choice? As Rob Waring wrote on his site

"One of the most surprising things about language learning is the almost complete absence of information about Extensive Listening. This is a total mystery. Why has our field completely ignored the need for graded fluency listening input that is for pleasure, aimed at building listening recognition speed and automaticity?" So, why don't we have extensive listening?"

Part of the problem is that extensive reading has two solid advantages. The first is technological. Until recently, reading materials have been much easier to make and distribute, and vastly easier for users to peruse. The rise of the Internet, however, and some of its offspring - Audible , YouTube and podcast sites - show that aural entertainment is gaining popularity, even if just with native speakers.

I wouldnt be surprised, however, if in the next ten years, a solid, well-advertised system of extensive listening for language learners rises out of the broth. Many of the pieces are already in place. First, the number of ELT podcasters is increasing almost daily. Unfortunately, the vast majority use their sites to teach English, rather than provide meaningful content in English, but there are signs this is changing. Hopefully, it won't be long until we have EL podcasts with simple stories as interesting as those provided by "my favorite story podcast: WGBH Morning Stories". Second, and more likely to dominate EL listening in the future, almost every graded reader on the market has a CD version. These could easily be repackaged and marketed as an extensive listening program. Ive discussed this with the four major publishers and none of them seem ready to take advantage of this possibility. Granted, the discourse analysis folks tell us that oral book readings not very brain-friendly, but since these products are graded, they are the closest way of solving the single largest problem of extensive listening, that of level.

Level of difficulty. This is the biggest problem with extensive listening. It is not just a matter of grading; the other big advantage that extensive reading has over extensive listening is the accordion effect: You can adjust your reading speed and the amount of rereading to fit the complexity of the text. You cannot do this with recorded listening, which has only one speed set in linear delivery. For this reason, while extensive reading people say that learners should use readers at the i-1 level (slightly below the learners stage of linguistic competence), listening proponents, like Waring, say listening materials should be i-3.

Then again, our way of teaching of listening, because it might soon represent a historical anomaly. Natural listening involves seeing too, and the visual component makes the aural component much easier to understand. The only reason we conceive of listening as being a separate skill is because we live in an age where telephones, cassette tapes, radio, and other visually limiting devices have so far dominated. The next generation might not experience listening this way at all. With Youtube, Skype, and video podcasts, listening might move back to where it should be, as one half of two-channel input.

Dont be surprised if, someday in the future, your grandchildren wonder why you, the language teacher, ever taught reading at all, since in their world, listening and watching will be seen as the only effective and natural way to acquire language.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.
Got Facebook? Then, join Curtis (and Chuck) and over 1500 dedicated teachers from around the world on the global teachers discussion page for an ongoing conversation about education.

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Peter Viney

Self Study

In secondhand bookstores and charity shops youll easily find boxed Berlitz and Linguaphone self study language courses, consisting of multiple cassettes or CDs. There's one defining characteristic of these donated sets. They're pristine. Only cassette number one has had the shrink-wrap broken.

These huge self-study audio courses for language learning are in a specialist area. Its a publishing area where the late Robert Maxwell made his fortune. Maxwell published the sets of legal books that lawyers have to buy every year, recording all the cases and rulings of the year that affect case law. Every lawyer needs to keep an updated reference set, but 99.9% of the pages within any given set will never be scanned by the human eye. The Encylopedia Brittanica (for the younger reader, this was a heavy thirty-two volume set of books in the days before Wikipedia) worked on the same basis. You bought something to read less than 0.1% of it.

Self-study audio courses are a triumph of hope over reality. The adverts work. People subscribe, but most give up before they even finish the first cassette / CD. Recently, newspapers in Britain have been giving away "free" cover CDs of various "instant" language learning methods. They get them cheaply, they help to sell newspapers. But do they work?

I have met people who have successfully learned a language with Linguaphone or Berlitz audio courses. One learned Portuguese (or rather, enough Portuguese to cross the threshold into greater acquisition) very well. He already spoke Spanish fluently and French well before he started on Portuguese. He knew what he was doing, he had to learn it for his job (high motivation) and so it worked. Diplomats have praised these courses too. The unifying theme is that theyre experienced language learners embarking on at least their third or fourth foreign language, and are highly intelligent, and highly-motivated. They're using them as an entry point to further study when they get to the foreign country, and theyre most useful for learning those languages which have less international cover.

The newspaper free CDs we see in Britain are targeting beginners; the tourism market. Thats why (in Britain) Spanish is the most popular. Upmarket newspapers will go for Italian. Another market is "Brush up your (French)" for those who studied it years ago. Ive tried many of them, using Spanish or Italian as a test bed and they fail because the learning curve is far too steep, the syllabus far too crowded at the early level, the rush of vocabulary totally indigestible, and there is over-reliance on set phrases and mechanical activity, which is necessarily dull. They never get past the basic issue. Its easy to learn Can you tell me the way to the nearest (substituted words)? parrot-fashion. However, understanding the vast range of possible answers is the difficult bit. Lets be cruel and to the point. Anyone dumb enough to believe the slogan Learn Spanish in Eight Hours is going to be too dumb to do so.

Ive been involved with self-study, both intensively and peripherally for more than thirty years now. We organized a major self-study system as a supplement to the mainstream language teaching when I was teaching at Anglo-Continental in the 1970s. Students had access to hundreds of tapes: recorded graded readers, pronunciation exercises, listening activities, oral drills, songs with exercises. They could also borrow just about every graded reader published. They all received copies of the Access to English mainstream textbook course which we never used in class, but which was selected because every word in the book was recorded and tapes were in the self-access library in multiple copies. It greatly enriched learning and most students spent an hour or two a day in the listening centre. But note, it was a supplement.

Then when I started writing Streamline English, my editor at OUP was also working on a major full-colour self study course, which never saw the light of day. Over the years, Ive spent hours in meetings on self study. Excellent self-study versions were prepared of our early videos, especially Mystery Tour, but never published. We looked at a self-study CD-ROM version of the Grapevine videos, prepared in Turkey, but it was never followed up. Then there was a plan to do a full self-study course based on Grapevine / Main Street which foundered because it required programming twenty-seven different exercise types just for level one. The programmers announced that most ELT coursebooks could be covered in between five and seven exercise program types. We took that as a compliment. The idea for this scheme involved a subscription for online tuition. This would have involved teachers monitoring work, and the teachers would have been paid. There have been several ideas involving such tuition, but they fall foul of the general pre-conception people have about the internet. They want information free, and the plans came to nothing.

Most coursebooks now have numerous free online exercises prepared by publishers, and students can be directed to the various websites. The exercise types are repetitive. Multiple choice may be enlivened by hearing a nice Ping! when you get the right answer, and seeing graphs of your improving scores, but the novelty wears thin. Exercises include matching pairs of words (Pelmanism), and gap fill. Variations on Space Invaders and Frogger and Pac Man are also standard fare. Taken for a few minutes every day, these sorts of exercises tied to a textbook are useful in reinforcing vocabulary and structure. However, none of them are designed for initial presentation and teaching.

Three years ago we were approached over a major self-study project for Oxford University Press in Spain. The idea was to write some presentational video scripts initially, but after discussions they asked me to write the syllabus over ten levels. We were all concerned to present material in a logical, well-segmented, digestible way, in strict contrast to the self-study material we had examined from other sources. Karen and I ended up writing eighty x five-minute video scripts (eight per level) as lead-in presentation material. Its only available in Spanish, because theres necessarily an onscreen guide / narrator. You can see an online introduction at http://www.myoxfordenglish.es. There are nine story strands with different sets of characters and we both think theyre some of the best and funniest videos weve written. They're taken at a slower pace than material designed for use with a teacher. The DVD cover pictures give an idea of the range, seehttp://www.viney.uk.com/MyOxfordEnglish.html The stories about England footballer Dallas and his supermodel wife Tania have had great feedback. We think it was a major jump, in that an ELT publisher with ELT teaching expertise and bilingual local expertise was forming the materials, and they were segmented carefully and logically. We didnt have any part in exploitation or exercises, but there was a thoroughly experienced team in place. There are a few video examples on YouTube as adverts as I write, though YouTube comes and goes. Search for My Oxford English, as our names arent on it.

More recently, weve discussed various other self-study programs. Ive been harrassed in shopping malls by people selling the Rosetta Stone multi DVD program with "dynamic immersion™" in Pashto, Tagalog, Irish, Welsh, and many other languages. £169 a level. With £50 off if you buy all five levels at once. And it has a six month guarantee! They're located in booths between the double-glazing salespeople and the stalls selling those transfers with temporary tattoos on them and Bob Marley posters. I had a look (at the leaflets, not the tattoos), not a thorough one, but a look. Their website shows various people clutching laptops and doing repetition. The Spanish example has Katelyn reading "na" and "da" then repeating "nada" getting a "ping" and saying "Hooray!". Right. Long way to go there, Katelyn. The photograph accompanying it is of a skydiver. So does the sky represent nothingness? Or maybe just sky? Or perhaps blue? Possibly light blue? Or is it skydiver? Or, this is early on, so maybe "man". Or falling? Or diving?

The question arises: Is it possible to learn a language entirely through self-study? People have done it, but the consensus is "not yet without a lot of tedious slog" but also, "maybe soon." Lots of people are trying. The interfaces are interesting but the intrinsic quality of the material lags. Twenty years ago, it was interesting enough that a boring gap-fill exercise was computerized on a primitive Amiga or Apple II or BBC platform and pinged and did stuff. Nowadays, that sort of activity means "nada" for students used to the complexity of video gaming. Computer learning breaks down over one problem; the unpredictability of human utterances. Every one of us, every day, creates unique sentences. Some of these sentences may never have been said before. Robert ONeill discussed this in an article thirty years ago, mentioning an utterance by a child. "My guinea pig died with its legs crossed." It may be that no other human had ever put that combination of words together in that order. It means that we need building blocks to create for ourselves rather than set phrases, however useful lexical chunks might be as building blocks in themselves. The unpredicability is one among many reasons why teachers are necessary, because we need to test what we create against a sounding board. Language is interaction, communication, so real time interaction with other learners is necessary too. Language classes are a social activity.

Correction and monitoring are also problems. Sophisticated learners may be able to monitor and compare their recorded spoken work with a recorded model. Many students cant do that. They will listen to a recording and say cheerfully "I tall and I have black hairs," listen to the correct model and fail to notice the "Im," or that "hair" is uncountable. Even if they do notice the errors, they may be discouraged, where a teacher in a free language stage of a lesson might happily accept the errors as not interfering with the message. A computer cant make that judgment. It also means that the many possible correct deviations from a model sentence in a given situation will be counted "wrong".

The message, in the end is "take lessons from real people with real people." On the other hand, we have been looking at ways around these issues recently. This months Think Tank on Self-Study isn't designed to examine the possibility of the full scale self-study course. Its designed to suggest ideas which students can utilise as an adjunct to their other studies.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Vineys website is at www.viney.uk.com?Peters forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education. It is not yet up on their website at the time of writing (September 2009), but it may be by the time you read this.

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Chris Hunt

Self Study - Forget it!

Here's a question for the teacher inside us all. Which is preferable - that children spend time enjoying themselves, or that children spend time improving their English? One reason that I loathe to give children homework is that I think we adults demand and take too much of their time already. Locking children up in schools all day isn't enough for us - we force them to bring their schoolwork home with them. Moreover, much of it, at least the bits of it I have seen, seems to be busy-work which just robs the children of their time without stimulating them in any way. It's as if the real purpose of homework is to get children to accept that life should be boring or that adults have the right to bore them.

Still, I guess I am digressing from the get go, in that homework presumably can't be classified as self study. Surely, by definition, self study must be something chosen freely by the individual? At Wise Hat English, where I work, we only ever give catch-up homework. Sometimes students want to or have to be in a particular class (for example, because of schedule constraints) and need to make extra effort at home so as to be able to join in class activities equally and fully. I think this is one of the few cases where home study can be appropriate. I guess another is where the student is studying for a specific exam. Otherwise, though, I think studying should be knocked on the head and buried in an unmarked grave. Life is too short to be burdened with studying!

My belief is that study is the antithesis of play and that what children most want and need to do is to play. It is through play that children educate themselves. Children don't need teachers or schools as Professor Sugita Mitra's "hole in the wall" experiments demonstrate. Over a period of several years he set up computers complete with Internet access and simply turned them over to children living in poverty in different parts of India. He videoed the results. Very quickly children became computer literate learning how to use Paint, surf, and send email. In one case after three months the children were actually asking him for a better mouse and a faster processor. Not only were children teaching each other how to use the computer but they also learnt English and some acquired a vocabulary of around 100 words that they used both at the computer and also in day-to-day conversations. So, the children were able to teach each other something of a foreign language. They acquired English because they needed it to do what they wanted to do with the computer.

Analysing his research the professor noticed the importance of communal learning. The children were not segregated by age. Children of different ages have different interests. So this meant that they gravitated to different facets of the computer and this meant that there was strength in depth. Quite often younger children would be teaching older children their discoveries. Because of this communal aspect the children could learn more than their own individual time at the computer would have us believe. The sum of the parts was greater than the whole. I think this is always the case with communal learning.

But what does this mean for the teacher, especially for those of us meeting each child just once a week? In a way the hole in the wall experiments indicate that the interest of most children in learning language is probably limited. When children have an overwhelming passion for something then they will focus on it. So, the notion of how to get them to self study becomes moot. They will naturally and willingly spend time to pursue things they are interested in and they automatically learn from this. One could wonder about how to maximise learning by encouraging children to focus on specific activities in particular ways. But I think this is missing the point. It is putting the cart before the horse rather than doing what we need to do which is to let the horse run free. If we want to focus on anything then it should be on providing a pasture for the horse to graze in. By this I mean having a variety of materials available so that if by chance children do ask us for something to do outside class we can respond. A case in point - this week I introduced a worksheet to some classes that focused on "double letter" sounds. In one class one child found this interesting and requested a second sheet to do at home. I'm sorry to say that I hadn't anticipated this and didn't have one. At Wise Hat English we have books, DVDs, and CDs that children can borrow on request. The limitation of this kind of material is that it is essentially passive and individual in nature. It's fine as far as it goes but it is far from enough. We need to add material that children can and will want to use with their friends. Perhaps even material that children can use with their non-English learning (and speaking) friends. Currently I'm thinking about board games and card games but I think there must be more. The challenge is how to get English to become the medium in which children play. Then they will be enjoying themselves and improving English at the same time. And everyone will be happy!

Rob Waring

Build language independence through reading

A major distinction learners need to understand is the difference between 'reading as language study' (which is sometimes known as intensive reading) and 'reading as practice' (extensive reading). These two modes differ in the same way that driving lessons and actually driving on the road differ. When learners are doing intensive reading, they are reading the text to learn the language - the grammar, vocabulary, phrases and so forth. They are focusing on the details of the language. Thus intensive reading texts tend to have quite a bit of (not too much) unknown language for them to learn. Also typically, learners follow up the reading with grammar and/or vocabulary exercises and comprehension exercises.

By contrast, the function of extensive reading is to actually practice the reading by having a main focus on the message in the text: i.e. reading for reading's sake. This is the way natives read - for enjoyment and to learn information about the text. Because they should be reading quickly the learners shouldn't need dictionaries, and nor do they need to be tested with comprehension questions.

The above distinction is hard for many learners to grasp - especially those that have been taught in teacher-centered classes. This is because they tend to believe that learning comes only from teachers and reading difficult textbooks in class, and that 'reading pain is reading gain'. They also tend to believe that the teacher (or textbook) knows best and their methods can't be questioned which can often create a feeling of passivity. Another common tendency is to believe that adding more knowledge piece by piece is all that is necessary when learning a language. But learning to read is more than that.

My own experience, and my reading of the research, suggests to me that when beginning language learning, it is generally accepted (if only because this is the standard way of doing things) that once the learners have spent some time learning the grammar and vocabulary, they can move on to reading for fluency and enjoyment. As proficiency increases, they are more able to see language as communication, rather than as a way to learn new pieces of language. They can also branch out and become more independent of classes and teachers.

All learners should grasp the chance to develop and strengthen their independence by reading or listening to things at or about their own reading level. Most teachers who understand this need, suggest their learners read graded readers which are books written at various difficulty levels from easy to difficult that suit a learner's level. The advantage of this kind of reading is that the learner can control what is read and the speed at which it is processed. This control over the input allows the learners to learn at their own pace as well as from whatever text that interests them which promotes independent learning.

This opportunity to self-select the reading material naturally leads to higher motivation. Indeed, the most impressive finding of hundreds of research papers in extensive reading show that there is most often an increase in general motivation when learners have control over what and how they read. These findings suggest that learners want to be independent and are motivated by using the language at the level they can, in order to interact with English in as a natural and communicative way as possible.

There is a veritable mountain of material learners can choose from. Nowadays there are some very easy reading materials - even for learners who only know a hundred words or so. Here is a table of some of the major graded reader series now available at every level. Some learners and teachers worry that the graded reader series may be childish and use over-simplified English. Reading simplified materials does not make the reading childish - the topic, tone, characters and the way they are written and illustrated make them childish. Several recent studies show strongly that these series reflect natural English extremely well even though they only use a limited vocabulary.

A major concern when selecting reading graded materials to read independently is that the learners select material at or about their ability level so they can read quickly and fluently as they would in their native language. For this fast fluent reading to happen, there are some minimum conditions that need to be met. The learners have to READ:
Read quickly and … Enjoyably knowing … Almost all the language so they … Dont need a dictionary.

'Reading quickly' means reading without pausing much, or at all. If one of these elements of READ is missing, then the learners might be reading slowly because the text is too hard. This in turn means they need to stop to look in a dictionary, or guess at the meaning of the unknown language and have shifted from a READing focus to a language focus. In other words they are 'study reading' not READing. If learners read materials which are too hard, it not only slows their reading, it will also not allow them to meet the words and grammar enough times so they can learn them deeply. Stopping occasionally is fine of course but if its done too often they won't be reading quickly and fluently which is one of the aims of extensive reading.

One of the great benefits of extensive reading is that it allows learners to read the language (vocabulary and grammar) they meet in course books in a natural (reading) environment which strengthens and consolidates what they know as well as allowing them to get a sense of collocations and learn new words and phrases.

One of the major ways natives learn their first language is by being exposed to massive amounts of language and given that most learners of English have limited contact with English, self-selected independent reading is a great way to fill that gap.

Chuck Sandy

Chuck Sandy's contribution will appear here later!

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level seriesConnect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Got Facebook? Then, join Chuck (and Curtis) and over 2000 dedicated teachers from around the world on the global teachers discussion page for an ongoing conversation about education.

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]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Peter Viney

Chris Hunt

Rob Waring

Chuck Sandy

Nice things that happened in my classroom in 2009

2009-12-25T14:56:06Z

Marc Helgesen

What are some nice things that have happened in your classroom/ (in your teaching) lately?

As they year winds down, I guess I like classes to “end", not just “stop." By that I mean I like them to have closure. We’ve been a community for the past year or at least the semester. There are a couple small routines I have that end the class in a positive way. One involves thanking the people at school who help them. We don’t focus on the teachers. Teachers and students all have a lot of interaction with each other. The students know we care about them and they care about us. I’m thinking more about people like the cleaning staff, the department secretaries, school guards, and bus drivers, the cafeteria workers, etc. Students brainstorm a list of the people they want to thank. I bring small packages and candy to class. The students decorate the packages and fill them. They design bilingual thank you cards. The recipients may or may not be bilingual, but I want to make sure the lesson has clear language goals and that the students are aware of those goals. Doing bilingual messages is a good way of having students notice whether they can say what they want to say in English with the same nuance they can in their first language. After class, the students – usually in pairs – deliver the presents and cards. They explain that they did an activity about gratitude in English class and they want to say “thank you" to that person. Then they give them the present.

I find this a nice way to notice all the people who help us. After doing this a while back, a department assistant showed up at my office. She was teary-eyed. In twenty years at the job, she said, no students had ever done anything like that to thank her before. Some might criticize, saying, “the students didn’t do it spontaneously. The teacher set it up." But isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Set up students to use English (and, in this case, the L1, too.) to successfully communicate what they think. Everyone wins.

I do another activity where students thank each other. Every person gets a worksheet with four medals and trophies printed on it. (You can get a copy of the worksheet here. (Click on “An award for you.pdf"). They think of an award for each person they work with regularly. It may be for helping the group. It might be for being creative. How about “a good listener" award? (In every sense of the word). At times, the awards are not even language related: Great smile or Nice fashion sense. The activity acknowledges that everyone is part of the community and contributes in some way.

I like using this as a way to encourage my students to thank each other. When I was doing it at the end of term last year, one student gestured for me to come over to her desk. She handed me one of the awards. It said “A Great Teacher". Of course that felt good but what she said next really touched me. In a fairly soft voice – talking to me but not wanting to be heard by everyone, she said, “You taught me to love English again. I used to, in junior high. But then English became all about the tests. I studied for the tests but I didn’t like English. But now I love English again."

It was one of those moments when you remember why you became a teacher. And why you stayed.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

Something nice that happened in 2009

At the beginning of this year, something happened that touched me deeply. The story involves a rather unusual student, who I will call Aki, and a normally, rather conservative professor.

Last year, Aki was a first year student at our university. She is a delightful girl and she added charm and warmth to our class. Everyone liked her. I had the good fortune of being able to teach her three times a week in the second semester. She did well in all my classes, but at the end of the last one, she said she had something to tell me. In a quiet voice, Aki told me that she would not be there the following year.

I was completely surprised. I asked her to stay after class and talk to me. If she had some problem with other students, I told her I’d help her, or if she was going to transfer to another school, I said I’d write her a letter of recommendation. But, no, she said, she wasn’t leaving for any of those reasons. In fact, she quite liked our university, but she had to quit for another reason.

You see, Aki is a different from the other students. Even though she looked and spoke Japanese, she wasn’t. She was Peruvian. Her parents, both of Japanese descent, brought her to Japan twelve years ago, when they came to seek work. They both worked hard at manual labor jobs to put her through school, and later, into our rather expensive university.

Then, last year brought a disaster for the Peruvian and Brazilian residents of Nagahama, in Shiga, where Aki’s parents work: the economy went into recession. For most Japanese, that meant they’d suffer bonus cuts or longer working hours, but for the foreign community in Nagahama, it meant losing their jobs. Both of her parents were fired along with 80% of the other Peruvians working in local factories. Poof! Just like that: The life Aki’s family had built over eleven years of hard work was shattered in an instant. Aki could not afford to continue her education, and now she was wondering if she could even stay in Japan much longer.

I was rather upset at the news, so I told a couple of her other teachers, the wonderful Professors K, K, & T, and the normally traditional, but warm-hearted dean of our department , Professor A. Almost immediately, this group of teachers looked into every possibility for a loan or scholarship, but they found out it was too late to apply for one for the next academic year.

It looked like there was nothing we could do to keep Aki.

Then Professor A, said, that as Dean of the department, he had a budget of about a million yen. He said he would give it to her as a special scholarship for 2009 so that she could stay long enough to find other means of support. We were flabbergasted at his generosity, but also a little nervous about how other teachers might see this bending of the rules. We tried not to think about these sticky issues and put his plan into action anyway. We had a meeting with Aki’s parents to confirm their financial need, and on that tearful day when we told them that we would help Aki. I felt better that day than I had for a long time, and I was proud of my colleagues.

Then, I learned later that something was not quite right. I am fairly sure now that we had been deceived about the money, not by the family, but to all our surprise, by the Dean. Now, at this point in the story, you probably think I’m going to tell you that he embezzled the money for himself, but that is not the kind of deception I mean at all. It seems there is no such thing as a “Dean’s budget." We suspected, and later confirmed that Professor A gave her the money out of his own pocket.

That tricky guy, Dean A, duped us. As a result, Aki is back at school this year, still believing she got a special scholarship from the “Dean’s budget." One of us asked the Dean if he would let Aki in on the secret when she graduates from our university. “No," said the Dean, “Let’s take it to our graves, OK?"

This professor that I thought was a bit old fashioned, that I sometimes argued with at meetings, that I never expected would break the rules, is now, my hero.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.
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]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

What Are You Thinking About / Presenting at Conferences These Days?

2009-11-09T10:28:24Z

Chuck Sandy

Connection, Collaboration, and Community

As a university student and later as a young teacher, I loved the line "only connect" from E.M. Forester's book Howard's End so much that I copied it out in my best calligraphy and taped it above my desk. In those days of typewriters and expensive travel, the best I could do to connect, though, was with classmates and colleagues on a local level in one sense, once in a great while at conferences in another sense, and through books in yet another.

Thirty years later, though, the Internet has opened the world up and increased the possibilities for connection – just at a time in my life when I found myself craving for it even more than I did in my younger days. I praise whatever powers made this possible, for as someone easing his way into his fifties while teaching in a small university department while living in a foreign country in an area best described as rural, I found myself not only craving connection, but also hungering for community and collaboration. What I've found is that there are an awful of teachers out there in the world who are hungering for the same thing.

What I wanted was a virtual teachers' room, a place where educators from anywhere -- no matter how isolated they might be in the physical sense -- could share concerns, float ideas, ask questions, reach out, and come together.

About a year ago, I started building an online teachers' discussion group on Facebook – that application which has become such a daily part of so many people's lives. What I wanted was a virtual teachers' room, a place where educators from anywhere -- no matter how isolated they might be in the physical sense -- could share concerns, float ideas, ask questions, reach out, and come together. This is exactly what's happened. At the time of writing, there are over two thousand people involved in the online discussion group I started, and while not everyone actively participates, a constantly expanding core group of a hundred educators or so have formed what can only be called a community.

Though I do not know these people in the traditional sense of knowing them, I've come to share their teaching lives in some very real way and have come to think of them as colleagues. And like with any group of colleagues who spend a great deal of time talking with one another, new ideas and projects come into being as connections form and take shape. To give you just a few examples: I'm currently working with a teacher in Iran on a paper about dissimulative motivation, cultivating a group of educators in Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, China, Japan, and the US as writers for a possible new online journal, while also developing ideas for a new textbook series with the community at large. This sort of collaboration from this diverse a community was not anything I even imagined possible thirty years ago when my aim was to only connect, and even now, I'm amazed every single day by this new world of possibilities for community and collaboration.

Meanwhile, I've also found myself thrust into the role of virtual mentor to hundreds of new teachers from around the world who join in to ask those most basic of questions: How do I motivate my students? How can I make my lessons more interesting? What sort of stance should I take in the classroom? How much homework should I give? How can I deal with difficult colleagues? How can I be a better teacher?" Though these questions get asked again and again and may seem old hat to veteran educators, they're brand new and of immediate and central concern to those asking them -- and it's essential that these questions get answered by someone, somewhere. Therefore, I now spend an hour or so every day giving whatever advice I can manage, and in the process help myself grow as a teacher, too. As I think through my responses or do a little research to find some material that might lead someone who's stuck in a new direction, I find that I'm learning as well.

Each day I wake up to find between ten and thirty new members in our group, and with each new member comes a new world of possible connections, new opportunities to collaborate and a new voice in the ever expanding community.

I can't overstate how grateful I am for these connections. Nor can I adequately explain how much I'm learning from this collaboration, or say in words how much richer my life as an educator has become because of this community. If you are a teacher hungering for the same things I've been craving, then please connect, collaborate, and become part of our community.

You'll find us online at …

http://tinyurl.com/teaching-learning

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

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Marc Helgesen

Happiness in the classroom (and out): ELT and positive psychology.

I'm presenting on several topics. One that I'm quite excited about is the Positive Psychology ELT Activities that I'm doing at JALT. Positive Psychology – TIME magazine calls it "the science of happiness" – is the branch of psychology that studies happy, mentally healthy people (as opposed to traditional psychology which focuses on people with mental health problems). As teachers, we all deal with educational psychology, and I've been working for several years to create ways we can use ideas from positive psychology when we teach English. I have a website called ELTandHappiness where I give away materials I've developed.

One of the topics I'll be stressing in the JALT presentation is gratitude. When we take the time to thank people, naturally the person thanked appreciates it. But research shows there's a perhaps unexpected bonus: the person doing the thanking gets both psychological and physiological benefits, including an increased ability to deal with stress, more energy, and fewer physical health problems. Pullout quote:

When we take the time to thank people, naturally the person thanked appreciates it. But there's an unexpected bonus: the person doing the thanking gets both psychological and physiological benefits.

One activity I do with my students is making "a gratitude list." This is a spin-off of an idea from in Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind (Amazon.co.jp). Pink suggests that, on your birthday, you make a list of things you are grateful for, listing one thing for each year of your age. Then next year, make a new list with one more item. Do it every year as a way of taking time to notice the good things in your life. How I've modified it for my classes is this: I give students a worksheet that has topic ideas and model ways to express gratitude and explain reasons. Students draw a series of ovals, one for each year of their age. Then in each oval, they write one thing they are grateful for now. It is important students understand that the list is for things they are grateful for now, not something they were grateful at age one, age two, etc. Then they exchange their lists with a partner. The partner looks over the list and asks questions about the items that interest the partner. Learners end up talking about the things they appreciate. The act of talking about those things that you appreciate makes you really notice, experience, and share feelings of gratitude.

Another "thanking" activity I'll be sharing is the "gratitude letter." This is a fairly standard exercise in positive psychology. A google search for the topic will get you nearly 7000 hits (as I am writing this). In brief, you think of someone who has made a real difference in your life who you want to thank. You write them a letter explaining what they did, how they helped you and why you want to thank them. Ideally, you present the letter to the person it is addressed to and read it to them. If that isn't possible, you mail it to them. Christopher Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and author of A Primer in Positive Psychology, says of gratitude letters, "they work 100% of the time in the sense that the recipient is moved, often to tears, and the sender is gratified as well." My ELT variation is to have students write the letter twice, once in English and once in Japanese. I tell my students that it doesn't matter which order they do it in. Some like to write their letter in Japanese first to organize their thoughts, then they translate it. Others do the English version first, then write the Japanese and see how much of the native-tongue nuance came through in the English. Usually, the writing is done as homework. The next week, when it is time to turn in the homework, I ask them to give me the English letter. I encourage them to give or mail the Japanese letter to the person they appreciate. I provide stamps and envelopes. There is a paragraph in Japanese on the sheet where they write that letter, explaining that they wrote the letter in class and the writer wanted to actually give it to the person who had helped them. The letters are often emotional, and in Japan we don't often express emotions publicly. The paragraph explaining it as a class assignment "makes it OK" to be so direct.

I've been doing something similar for years with "a thank you letter to someone in your family." This year I expanded that to let it be addressed to anyone the student wishes to thank. Parents are still the most frequent recipients but some students have chosen to write to former teachers, coaches, and homestay families. I don't require students to give the letters to the person they wrote it to but most choose to do that anyway. And I've heard wonderful stories about the results.

You can get free photocopiable copies of both of these activities and many others at my ELTandHappiness website.

While I'm on the topic of positive psychology, I'll mention two new books you should know about. Tal ben-Shahar, a former Harvard psychology professor and author of the bestselling Happier and The Pursuit of Perfect has a new book called Even Happier. It is a week-by-week guided journal with 52 positive psychology exercises. As English teachers, this is a good source of potential classroom activities. More importantly, it makes the point that positive psychology activities need to be done regularly, over an extended period, to be effective.

Another new book, Positivity by professor and researcher Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill presents very important scientific information about positive emotions. She has found a tipping point for positive emotions. In short, a "3-to-1 positivity ratio" seems to be the point at which most people find their lives become more filled with joy.

One final thought (and recommendation) concerning presentations. And this isn't even about one I'm doing. A few months ago, I read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. He suggests very useful ideas on how to improve PowerPoint/Keynote presentations to make them simpler, more effective, and more powerful. I happened to read the book on the way to the TESOL conference in Denver. It made me more aware of how bad many – even most – slideshows are. If you are presenting this fall, consider reading the book. If you are attending JALT2009, Garr Reynolds will be doing a special "Technology in Teaching" workshop on November 20, the Friday evening of the conference. Preregistration is required.

I do hope teachers reading this will be able to attend JALT, one of the EXPOs, or one of the other ELT conferences taking place during the next few months. They are a great way to connect with new ideas and with other teachers.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

What are you presenting these days?
What Brain Science Teaches us About Learning

English teaching has always been a mixture of science and art. The science is what we do in the classroom; the art is how we do it. The science is in what we decide to teach; the art is in how we decide to relate, how we help the learners grow. Science is in the syllabus, art is in your heart.

We have always needed both, but there are problems with both too. The art is pretty much uninformed. You can't learn it from a textbook. You can only learn it from years of experience. There is a problem with the science too. Traditionally, it was pretty much just drawn from the science of Linguistics, with a touch of Psychology and Education. The problem is that while we know a lot about the English language, this knowledge just forms one side of the language learning formula. The other side is learning and we need to know about this too. Theories of language acquisition have helped us understand what learning is, but they have pretty much been just theories, difficult to translate into practice. To put it simply, we have been shining the light of science on language but we have pretty much left learning in the dark.

Until now, that is. Advances in technology, have, for the first time ever, allowed us to look inside the brain and see how learning occurs. We can even see neurons reach out and connect to each other. Our understanding of how the brain works is growing by leaps and bounds and the current advance of neuroscience is often compared to the way computers advanced in the eighties. Unfortunately, while we are discovering fantastic things about learning, our teaching methods are not following suit. As Knowles pointed out, our standard educational pedagogy hasn't changed much since the 11th century when it was developed to train monastic scribes. Teachers still lecture and students still memorize. Some educators, however, are working to change our lack of progress. They believe the discoveries of neuroscience should be used to promote "brain-compatible" teaching methods. A quick look at what brain studies have told us about learning might help us start down that path as well.

Simply put, learning is memory. Memory represents the neural pathways that are forming in our brains all the time, even now as you read this. Dendrites reach out to the axons of other neurons to form synapses, thereby creating the circuitry of a new memory. In this way, a brain is like a computer – an analogy most of us grew up with, but one that most of today's neuroscientists have abandoned.

When information comes in, certain neurons are stimulated in a process of recognition. They trigger higher sequences of neurons that identify patterns, which if stimulated, again access even higher sequences. The neural sequences do not need a whole picture to identify something. Our brains are pattern recognition machines that first predict and then confirm. Our brains are highly interactive with the environment and work best when discovering, recognizing, and interpreting. So, unlike computers, that remember whatever you type into them, our brains are more oriented towards filtering and working the environment.

Having students learn language in situations similar to those they will encounter in the real world – with something at stake, with knowledge gained by discovery, and with problems to solve – causes the deepest learningMemory is fleeting.

Even the information you are reading right now is at risk. Almost all of it might be going into your short-term memory, but only a small part of it, or maybe none at all, will go into long-term memory. You are bound to forget most of this piece even before you finish it, and you'll forget more each hour afterwards. Some of it might be retained longer, and over the next two weeks, some of it might even be integrated into the rest of what you know, meaning you'll probably keep it for the rest of your life. Something happens to short-term memory that makes it long term, and if you think about it, this is the holy grail of learning. If we can find out what makes long-term memories form, then we'll have found the secret of effective teaching.

And this is what I have been presenting on. Much of the process of learning is still a mystery, but we do know a few vital factors that affect retention. Physical factors include stress, which inhibits memory formation; while happiness, exercise, and sleep promote it. See my "ideal classroom" Think Tank piece.

Of greater relevance to us are the factors we can influence by how we teach. They include deep processing (total mental engagement), brain compatibility (information in stories is retained longer than information in lectures), and maybe the most important of all, meaningfulness. Our memory system is integrated into our emotional and sensory systems, so, each memory has both an emotional component and a sensory (i.e., situational) component that influences its retention. Something that is meaningful to us is more likely to be recalled later, especially if we are in the same sensory and situational context as when it was learned.

Having students learn language in situations similar to those they will encounter in the real world – with something at stake, with knowledge gained by discovery, and with problems to solve – causes the deepest learning. It is no wonder that students who take part in a one-month study abroad program learn so much. But I'll bet it is the home stay interaction, rather than the classroom study, that has the biggest impact.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.
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Dorothy Zemach

What are you presenting about this season?

Normally, I do three kinds of conference presentations: plenary or featured-speaker type talks, that I prefer to give on a humorous topic; skills-based demonstrations on areas of interest to me, such as academic writing or business English; or publisher-sponsored promotions of materials I've written. This year, however, has been unusual. I've undertaken two trips to Libya as an English Language Specialist with the U.S. Department of State to deliver teacher training workshops in graduate schools, universities, high schools, and private language schools. I went for two weeks in April and for a month in October.

Libya attracted me as a destination because I'd never been there, and also because I knew it was unlikely I'd get there any other way; ordinary tourist visas simply aren't issued to Americans. In fact, the Embassy has only been open there since 2005. English teaching was outright banned in 1986, and was not resumed until sometime in the 1990's (I couldn't find anyone who seemed to know the exact year). Now, though, English education starts in elementary or middle schools, and private language schools teach English as well, and signs point to English becoming increasingly important in the future.

What seems "old" to us because we've done it for so many years is not necessarily old to our audience.

The mission seemed, on the surface, somewhat vague: "Just teach whatever you think is best!" The challenge, then, was to determine what would be "best" for an audience I'd never met and knew little about, and about whom almost no concrete information seemed to be available.

Fortunately, I was able to email an English Language Fellow teaching regular English courses at Al Fatah university, who explained that while Libyan graduate students, even those in applied linguistics, receive a strong and thorough education in theory, they get little to no explicit instruction in practical teaching methods. Not theory of teaching methodologies, I mean, but the nitty-gritty, the what-do-I-do-with-my-grammar-class-on-Tuesday stuff.

I decided, therefore, to give a series of workshops on extremely practical teaching techniques. I devoted one day each to the teaching of reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, and grammar. I went low-tech, too, since I couldn't predict what kind of conditions these teachers might face in schools outside of the bigger cities. I also decided to bring a lot of games and props—the "fun stuff" that I find works well with students of all ages, but which had been absent from my own graduate school training. It was, in short, like a "best of" all those Sunday JALT workshops where I learned how to teach.

I don't have space here to describe everything I did in 30 hours of workshops. But what struck me the most was how new all of my "old tricks" seemed to this audience, and how delighted they were with everything. How often these days, at conferences, do we get the feeling that we're really doing anything new? And yet here were teachers saying, "Oh, wow, I had never thought of using a song as listening practice" and "This ‘concentration' game is a wonderful way for students to memorize vocabulary!" and "Flashcards—what a good idea!"

The second biggest realization I had was just how basic instructions on how to teach need to be, if you're dealing with an audience who really hasn't had any experience with what you're talking about before. I want to emphasize that these were smart, motivated, educated teachers, some of whom had been teaching for years. However, no one had ever taught them how to write discussion questions, for example, or make a poster, or extend a page from a textbook, or adapt a game for a different level, or write multiple choice test items. If I go back to Libya—and I certainly hope I will—I will prepare more workshops on this type of issue.

To sum up my realizations, then, and apply them to a broader context: 1) What seems "old" to us because we've done it for so many years is not necessarily old to our audience. We might feel tired of dialogues about introducing one's family or ordering meals in a restaurant, but for students encountering this for the first time, it's necessary language. What we need to renew might be our enthusiasm for the material and our appreciation of its appropriateness. 2) People who are preparing to teach need explicit instruction in how to teach. This may sound almost ridiculously simplistic, yet it does not always happen. An M.A. course in linguistics or even in TESL can be rigorous, interesting, and enormously beneficial in many ways and still not necessarily prepare teachers for what they have to do in class. In the U.S., there is an ongoing debate about the place of M.A. programs—if their purpose is to graduate classroom teachers, then some (such as I) feel they should be terminal degree programs, specifically address classroom teaching, and qualify their graduates for tenure-track positions. If their purpose is to prepare their graduates for Ph.D. research, then that should be clear, and some other course of study should be made available for those who intend their careers to be in the classroom with ESL or EFL students.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing, Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press) and most recently Building Academic Reading Skills (University of Michigan Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Peter Viney

What are you presenting about this season?

First off, it's not the presentation season in Europe. The main conference / presentation activity in Europe is March to April, around Easter when it's easy to arrange conferences in the school breaks. European school systems select books in April for the school year beginning the following September, and private language schools will be making their choices for the busy summer season around the same time. We always skirt around the relationship between ELT publishing and conferences, but if it weren't for publisher support, most conferences couldn't afford to run, because speakers wouldn't be able to attend for no fee, as so often they do.

I'm only giving two presentations (so far) between now and Christmas, both in England, and both on teaching initial reading for students unable to cope with the Roman alphabet at speed. It's a cause dear to my heart, and it relates (as it so often does, and not necessarily coincidentally) to my new book, Fast Track to Reading. The biggest problem for this particular book is getting over the mystifying nature of the book when teachers do the "flick test" -- flicking through the pages to get a first impression of what is in it. Fast Track to Reading doesn't look like any other ELT book you've ever seen, and its function is to enable students to crack the code of reading the Roman alphabet (if it's new to them); or for the larger number of false-beginner users, to learn to read the Roman alphabet faster and with more confidence. To do this, many of the activities focus on "code-cracking" sound / letter relationships without teaching meaning. This sounds heretical, but it works. For students with reading problems, it exercises the brain in a Sudoku type way, which retains interest. The greatest number of users will be speakers of Arabic, followed by speakers of Farsi and Chinese. Initially I'm presenting in England, because it relates strongly to the problems of recent immigrants. For me it's a new and very different enterprise without the major characteristics of my other books. There are no dialogues; there's no humour. I have striven to make the pages visually appealing, by including many photos of authentic signs, and relating exercises to computer screen images as well as to standard text. For the last two years, I've rarely gone anywhere without a camera, and most of the signs you find in the book were photographed by me.

As ever nowadays, I'm presenting off a laptop. I use Keynote on a Mac rather than PowerPoint, because I've survived with computers since 1985 without ever using a PC. It's easier to prepare a presentation in Keynote than in PowerPoint, and in any case you can save a PowerPoint copy of the Keynote presentation. I carry a PowerPoint backup on a memory stick in case my Mac fails / gets stolen / dropped or whatever. I should take the trouble to import all the phonetics as "pictures" rather than in a font, in case I have to use someone else's PC (without the Times IPA font), but instead I lazily hope the Mac will work every time, and in five years I've only had to use the PowerPoint version of a talk once.

This year I'll avoid the computer in the middle, I'll switch it off for a bit and use flashcards. The best way of understanding the concept of the reading program is by trying it. Lesson one checks numbers because they're the guide all the way through the rest of the lessons. I take lesson two (which is the letters a / i / n / t), and present it on flashcards using shapes instead of letters, a square, a triangle, a circle, and a star. So participants learn to read a, i, n, and t, then they learn at, it, in, and an. After that we move on to tan, tin, nat, nit, tat, and nan (though not tit in print, but I'd do it in class as it's just a sound / letter combination). You can teach this thoroughly in six to ten minutes with totally unfamiliar symbols representing the sounds. Note that some of the words are incredibly low frequency, bordering on nonsense words, but we're only decoding the sounds, not teaching meaning. Phonics schemes for kids advocate the use of non-words to check the sound / letter concept. I find this flashcard section of the presentation particularly hard work, as the teachers participating are always faster than I am at picking up the symbols. The basic method takes the student through fifty-six lessons, and covers all the vowel sound spellings, plus difficult areas such as two letters representing one sound (ck, wh, th, qu), consonant clusters (nd, st, cr, str, spr, scr, and so on), silent letters (h, w, ph,). A lot of this is necessarily mechanical. But you can't say to non-readers, ‘So what do you think about the silent H, Abdullah? Discuss it with a partner.' With readers completely new to the Roman alphabet, I suggest linear patterning exercises for a minute or two before you start. This just means drawing zigzags, or loops or whatever from left to right.

It's not only phonics, as every unit has keywords, which are the highly frequent words which native speaker readers see as a kind of pictogram rather than as a linear compilation of phonemes. These are words like the, you, our, I, your, don't, and won't, that are continually recycled. As the program continues, short phrases are introduced.

All the exercises are recorded on recorded on five CDs because we know most students will benefit by doing the program a little at a time and often, in their own time. Short intensive bursts on a daily basis work best and we wish to encourage the students to use it in this way. The recording was a marathon exercise with just three of us: myself, Karen Viney, my wife and co-author, and our friend, the co-author of the Skills in English series, Terry Phillips. So all the recordings were done by teachers, not actors. It was a change to be on the other side of the recording console, and the concentration required is enormous. As ever, it's always terrifying to present a new book for the first time and have to gauge people's reactions.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney's website is at www.viney.uk.com. Peter's forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education. It is not yet up on their website at the time of writing (September 2009), but it may be by the time you read this.

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]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Chuck Sandy

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

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Dorothy Zemach

Peter Viney

What Are Some Ways to Maximize Student Talk Time?

2009-10-09T14:05:06Z

Dorothy Zemach

Modeling Student Talk

If I use the dictionary function on MS Word, I get these definitions for “maximize”: enlarge; and then also make the most of.

I don’t always want students to talk more. Sometimes, I want them to listen, or to summarize briefly, or to respond in writing. However, I do want to “make the most of” their talking time; in essence, to talk better.

These days, many textbooks are set up to give students “communicative tasks,” where they speak English to exchange information. Often, there is some sort of deed to be done—A has the information that B needs, and B has the information that A needs, and they speak to exchange their information and fill in their charts or solve the puzzle or whatever end goal there is.

Those can be enjoyable tasks, but the downside of overdoing them is that students get used to seeing every speaking task as a sort of info gap: That is, there is information that must be exchanged, and so once it is exchanged, the task is over. It’s a fine method for completing one’s “Find Someone Who” worksheet, but it fails miserably for a discussion. Discussion questions look like they’re asking for information (that is, students’ opinions on a topic, or answers to some questions), but so much more goes on in a good discussion. Participants might make or respond to jokes, show off, show understanding or sympathy, address new topics, search for new vocabulary, let off steam, learn and teach information about the topic, express frustration, and so on.

Students get used to seeing every speaking task as a sort of info gap: That is, there is information that must be exchanged, and so once it is exchanged, the task is over.

I remember one lesson in particular with a small group of trainees at Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEI) whom I’d had in class for about six months. They had a good command of vocabulary and grammar, they were lively and engaged, and of course they were happy to be in English class instead of back at their desks.

We had a unit in the textbook on receiving visitors, leading up to office and factory tours; quite relevant for these trainees, since they used English primarily for receiving overseas visitors and then showing them around. There was vocabulary to be learned and dialogues to practice and functions to employ, but first there were (as there often are in textbooks) some warm-up questions. In my mind, they’d spend about 15 minutes on these warm-up questions (though I was prepared to go longer), during which they’d bring up the necessary vocabulary that they knew, as well as signal to me what they didn’t know. Also, I’d get a feel for their past experiences and needs.

There were two questions, more or less like this:

1) Have you ever received a visitor at your company? Who?
2) Where did you meet him or her?
As it turned out that day, I had four trainees in class, so I put them in pairs. And in each pair, the “discussion” went like this:

A: Ah … B-san, “Have you ever received a visitor at your company? Who?”
B: Ah … yes. Sato-san.
A: OK. “Where did you meet him or her?”
B: At … Kansai Kuukou.
A: Airport.
B: Airport. OK, switch. A-san, “Have you ever received a visitor at your company? Who?”
A: No.
B: “Where did you…” Ah, so ka. “No.” (both laugh)

They looked at me expectantly. Time for the listening! Epic fail, as the gamers would say. I sighed. The students were perplexed. They asked if they’d done something wrong. “It wasn’t what I was expecting,” I said.

A nodded in understanding. “ ‘No, I haven’t,’ right?”

No, I said, it wasn’t the grammar, it was the information. True confusion now. “But … I only met Sato,” said B, a bit apologetically. And I laughed. Naturally, they wanted to know what was so funny. Well, we had time, so I thought, why not talk about it?

“What is the purpose of these questions?” I asked.

They had the look of students expecting some sort of trick. “To know what visitors we met?” asked A. No! Here was our problem. I explained that I actually didn’t care how many people they’d met, or who, or where. The purpose of the questions was to bring up vocabulary and functions and grammar necessary to talk about receiving visitors, and to talk about issues concerning visitors, particularly international visitors, and to practice meeting visitors in English over and over again until they could do it comfortably on their own.

Then, I modeled what I had been hoping for. I went over and sat with the students and role-played the discussion myself, taking the part of both students, like this:

A: Hi, B-san. Receiving visitors. I don’t have much experience with that topic.
B: Really? I do.
A: Oh? Have you ever received any visitors?
B: Yes, only one time. But I think I’ll meet more in the future, because it’s part of my job now.
A: Who did you meet?
B: Mr. Sato from the Head Office.
A: Did you already know him?
B: A little. I hadn’t met him before, but I speak to him on the phone almost every week.
A: How did you know who he was, then? Did you make a sign with his name?
B: No, I knew his picture from (checks with imaginary teacher for vocabulary help, and gets it) the Intranet.
A: Did he look like his picture?
B: Actually, not really. His hair was longer. But you know, he was carrying a blue SEI shopping bag. So I knew it was him.

And so on. The students looked amazed. Truly. They’d had no idea, no idea at all, that this was what I might want; just as I’d had no idea that they didn’t know. They weren’t being uncooperative; they didn’t lack vocabulary or grammar or energy; they weren’t bored. They just didn’t know what my expectations were, or even the purpose of the exercise. Once they knew what to do, they put the books down and had a good 20-minute discussion on the topic, and ended energized for the rest of the lesson.

I’m a huge modeler now, and I don’t wait for things to go wrong first.

I’m a huge modeler now, and I don’t wait for things to go wrong first. Whether I want brief, focused answers or a meandering discussion, I never want to turn students loose on a task if they don’t know what its purpose is or how to do it.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Chuck Sandy

It's Not About Technique

Although I do have a variety of techniques that help maximize talk time for everyone in my classes, those techniques really are not very important. They’re just little tricks I’ve developed over the years and are hardly worth mentioning. I’ll share one of them with you, but I want to tell you right now: it’s not about technique.

In my bag there’s always a small ball made of fabric. It’s colorful and soft and could never hurt anyone. Whenever I ask a question in class I wait a few seconds and then toss it out to whomever I see making eye contact with me. That person catches the little ball, answers the question, and then tosses the ball on to someone else. It’s then that person’s turn. Sometimes I gently clap my hands and gesture that I’d like the ball back for a moment to clarify something or make a comment or redirect the flow of the work. The key here is playfulness and a spirit of fun.

The key here is playfulness and a spirit of fun.

I do this in small classes where students sit in a circle and in very large lecture classes where students sit at desks arranged in long rows. Whatever the class size or situation, I usually find that after awhile the physical ball becomes unnecessary. Until it does, I teach little strategies such as having the thrower make eye contact with the person he or she wishes to toss the ball to and say that person’s name with a rising intonation before throwing it.

As the catcher catches the ball, he or she holds the eye contact and says uh huh. Then the thrower goes on to ask the question. In classes in which the focus is on oral communication this almost always involves some sort of personalized language practice. In lecture classes it usually involves a response to some sort of discussion question and so the strategy taught might be having the thrower say something like What do you think about that? after making eye contact and saying the person’s name. Then of course the catcher is going to need some hesitation device to use while figuring our just what it is he or she thinks about that, so I teach students how to use Hmmm, let me think about that or well.

Now, just imagine you’ve thrown me the ball:

You: Chuck?
Chuck: Uh huh?
You: Do you think it's enough to just get students talking in English?
Chuck: Well ...

... to tell you the truth, no I don’t. I’ve been to plenty of classrooms where there’s a lot of talk going on, but nothing much being said. In these classrooms the focus is on language rather than on people. Lessons are built around the dialogue, the meaningful drill, the little role-play, and the fun game. There’s a lot going on and it looks like communication -- but it really isn’t. It’s just craft and practice. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to work at maximizing this kind of thing. Too often language teachers see themselves as practitioners of a craft or facilitators of practice, armed with activities and tasks, exercises and games all designed to maximize talk time. Too often, though, these very things designed to maximize output, become a wall that blocks real communication.

In a recent study conducted by Anne Burns it was shown that output actually increased when students were off task and communicating freely with the teacher.

I’ve been to plenty of classrooms where there’s a lot of talk going on, but nothing much being said.

This is not to suggest in any way that teachers should dispense with activities, games, and tasks, but to point out that it’s often the less structured moments of a class which prove to be the most fruitful and that teachers should be aware of them and ready to follow such moments to where they lead. It’s also to say that a good language teacher is no different than a good teacher of any other subject, for as any good teacher does, a good language teacher creates a comfortable classroom with positive group dynamics where spontaneity is valued and everyone has a chance to be heard.

In addition, like all effective teachers, the effective language teacher uses relevant, intriguing materials as a springboard and not as a means to a particular end. Such materials allow for digressions and leave room for spontaneity and allow both teacher and students to ask real questions of value which go as far as possible beyond the simple comprehension questions most of us rely upon.

Therefore, the effective language teacher, like all effective teachers, thinks about the types of questions he or she asks and realizes that it’s not the teacher’s voice in the classroom that’s central, but the voices of students.

Finally, like all the best teachers, the effective language teacher is approachable outside of class as well as in. I’ve found that one of the most effective ways of increasing communication and maximizing talk time has been to arrive in my classroom early and to stay late -- then later to leave my office door open.

If you want to maximize talk time, just remember this: it’s not about technique. Now, would you please toss someone else the ball?

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Got Facebook? Then, join Chuck (and Curtis) and over 1800 dedicated teachers from around the world on the global teachers discussion page for an ongoing conversation about education.

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Curtis Kelly

From Task Analysis To Reward Analysis

This month’s question, “How do you maximize student talk time?” is an interesting one. I am going to make a few assumptions. I’ll assume a) the talking is done in pairs or groups (otherwise a choral reading is the best answer) b) the talking is interactive (otherwise speech-giving will suffice), and c) the talking is communicative, meaning that the listener does not know beforehand what the speaker will say (otherwise, the best answer is dialog reading). In short, we need to think about how to keep students talking in conversation or discussion activities.

The traditional answer for this question, and still a good one, is to do a task analysis. Task analysis means analyzing what the students are instructed to do by breaking it down into its parts and examining each. For example, how many steps or actions are needed to complete the overall task? Are the instructions clear enough for the learners to know exactly what to do? Is the task comprehensible in their culture? Are the graphics relevant? Do students have the language needed to complete the task? Is the environment conducive for doing so, such as the seating arrangement, noise level, etc.? Are there any other factors that might interfere with task completion, such as a task that embarrasses a learner, or problems with partners?

Usually, when an activity fails, the cause can be explained by one of the reasons above. The students might not know what to do because the instructions are vague, or because they never did anything like this before. They might start in English but slip into Japanese because the activity is poorly scaffolded, or because they can’t see what the teacher wrote on the board.

There are dozens of possible flaws that can bring an activity to a halt, and in my experience they are hard to predict. That is why I insist on testing each activity in class before putting it into a textbook. I remember trying an activity once where students were supposed to discuss which of their classmates they thought was the “smartest.” Most of them tried to find the “thinnest” member of the class. More recently, I asked students to talk about their favorite foods with a partner. I modeled the activity and wrote a few of my own examples on the board. I later noticed that about a third of the students were just using the phrases I had written on the board, thinking that this was the task, presumably because they almost never talked about themselves in high school English classes.

However, there are other times when the mechanics, instructions, and all the other task bits are good, but the activity still fizzles out. The students just do the minimum and quit. At times like these, it is easy to blame the students for not engaging, but the real reason for the halt is that the activity doesn’t have enough “pull.” They just comply with the “push,” and do the minimum necessary to get it over with. In this regard, task analysis is a bit weak at determining the level of engagement an activity will engender. It occurred to me recently, while studying the neuroscience of learning, that we need another means of evaluation as well, which I like to call “reward analysis.” Because of the way our brains work, the inherent reward of the activity not only “maximizes student talk time,” it also maximizes acquisition.

Consider. The brain evolved as a tool for survival. As a result, our brains are highly selective in what they pay attention to and retain.

Consider. The brain evolved as a tool for survival. As a result, our brains are highly selective in what they pay attention to and retain. In fact, we have great difficulty paying attention to or retaining anything that is not personally relevant, either directly, or metaphorically. As neuroscientist Read Montague says, and as advertisers know, the things that really catch our attention are death, sex, and food. (The first two are taboo, so that is why many textbook activities deal with eating.) Well, we can expand this list to include other areas, but the trick is to make sure that the topic is relevant to the learner, not just to the teacher or institution. How many times, for example, have you heard a teacher complain: “They don’t study. Don’t they realize how important English is for their future?” Of course not, at least not at the gut level, because they haven’t experienced that future yet, even if we have.

So, how can we use reward analysis with Japanese high school and college students to maximize talking? Assuming the level, instructions, graphics, and all the other task components are right on, what kinds of topics will keep students engaged?

Knowing that our learners like sports, shopping, movies, etc, is a good start, but these topics alone are not the end. You can just as easily put a class to sleep by having them discuss the French movie John bought for his hockey player friend. Instead, knowing why they like sports, shopping, and movies, etc. is the crux. And the reason is that they are going through what developmental psychologists call “moral development.” As I have discussed in other Think Tank articles, moral development is the greatest sociological/psychological task all teens face. It means finding themselves, establishing their identities, by determining what they think is right, who they like, finding goals, etc. It is driven by their intense biologically-based need at this age to gain autonomy. We can do better than just saying they like sports, shopping, and movies; we can say they like these activities because they have a need show their competence, to express themselves, and to figure out the rights and wrongs of the world. This is also why many of them are so attracted to English, because it represents a counter-culture of independence. (… and classes taught by native speakers, not because they are non-Japanese, but because of the types of activities they tend to use lets students interact.)

So, with reward analysis, we can identify the topics that sustain student interest: those that let them share what is personally meaningful. However, even more important than “topics” for satisfying their deeper psychological needs – the need to bond, to gain self-esteem, to discover, and others – are the activities themselves. In my 30 years of teaching Japanese learners, I have found that having students make something, solve a problem, figure something out about life, and most importantly, share something meaningful with peers, gets the most mileage. In concrete terms, that might mean having them discuss something that changed their life, explain a childhood experience, propose a class party, discuss the kind of partner they want, solve an information gap mystery, negotiate a fashion remake, and so on.

Making students feel creative, smart, cared about, or self-aware, is the basis for every activity I write.

Indeed, making students feel creative, smart, cared about, or self-aware, is the basis for every activity I write, whether for a textbook or for just my own use in class.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series. Got Facebook? Then, join Curtis (and Chuck) and over 1800 dedicated teachers from around the world on the global teachers discussion page for an ongoing conversation about education.

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Peter Viney

Maximizing Student Talking Time

Twenty-five years ago I was at a conference in Germany. I was speaking, and one of my fellow speakers was something of an ELT guru, who shall be nameless. Then any lesson observation notes in teacher training kicked off with Student Talking Time vs. Teacher talking Time. Now this particular guru was a great advocate of paired and group activities, and on minimizing the intervention of the teacher into all that communication in English which was naturally taking place in his imagination. About three hundred people attended his talk and three minutes in, we were told to get into groups of four. Seven or eight minutes later, we’d assembled our groups of four amidst much confusion. We couldn’t agree which handout we’d been told to work our way through, because we’d all forgotten it during the fuss of assembling a group and noisily shifting our metal chairs. So we argued about that for a few minutes. It was too noisy for us to be able to ask our guru. We argued in English, we were, after all teachers of English. Handout settled, we worked ten minutes before we were stopped, and the guru spoke for two minutes. Incredibly, given the size of the audience we were told to assemble in new groups. Five minutes more of shuffling chairs and negotiating ensued. We then went through a list of questions about maximizing student talking time. Five minutes before the end of the talk, we were told to assess what we had learned today … in the groups, of course.

My group of German high school teachers were furious. They had paid to come to the conference, and they had travelled a long way. They had not come to talk to each other, like they said, but to listen to native speakers and hopefully to glean ideas from the experts. They had taken the trouble to read the guru’s book in advance, and had discussed it. They all taught at the same school and had travelled together in the same mini-bus. They wanted to hear him talk. They were kind enough to say they were lucky to have been in a group with one of the very few native speakers in the room (me), but they dismissed the guru as “a really bad teacher.” I admired their confidence. So often in similar situations, I’ve watched teachers being perplexed, worried, and finally dismissive of the experts, but still feeling glad to have basked in the light of the guru’s presence. The German teachers simply saw that the Emperor was wearing no clothes.

The most appropriate medium for communication between one and three hundred is a lecture. It’s not impossible to do pair work with three hundred, though group work is really too complex to set up unless you have a “cabaret” seating arrangement where people are already seated around tables in small groups. When I was teaching in Britain in the 70s and 80s, my students had four lessons a day in classes of fifteen, plus two supplementary “lectures” a day. These lectures would be with ten classes assembled together, and they took place in a lecture room. We didn’t actually do “lectures” but we used to have short acted out dialogues with two teachers; students listening to and then singing English pop songs; or the BBC “On We Go” video series. We did repetition, drills, questions and pair work with one hundred and fifty. The proportion of pair work to teacher-centred work is the important factor. My ELT guru had it around 10 to 1. With very large numbers, I’d reverse that.

Maximizing Student Talking Time (MSTT) has become a mantra, often repeated without analyzing the content.

Maximizing Student Talking Time (MSTT) has become a mantra, often repeated without analyzing the content. It is a given that MSTT is a “good thing.” But, as usual, you should question all received wisdom. Does it mean Student Talking Time, or Student Vocalizing Time? I’ve seen very teacher controlled classes with lots of student vocalization (repetition and drilling) but I wouldn’t call that “conversation” though it is “talking.” Teacher controlled interaction questions are Student Talking Time. (Do you like tea? Ask him. Ask me. Ask her about coffee. Ask him about hot chocolate, etc). More often, it means pair work and group work.

The main question though is how to deal with “talk about what?” Students won’t hold forth in a foreign language without a model, a clear task, and motivation. This should be self-evident. At one point, I had to watch and evaluate twenty or thirty people teaching every summer. I still laugh at the memory of the most highly-qualified candidate, fresh from earning an Applied Linguistics doctorate. Confronted with a class of Arab beginners, his task was to introduce adverbs of frequency for the first time in his life, and with material of his own choice. Among the things he said in the first ten minutes were “Let’s brainstorm some adverbs of frequency! Get in pairs and make a list” and “Ali, What do you think about adverbs of frequency?” He then asked them to underline the adverbs of frequency in an authentic piece from The Guardian newspaper. He didn’t have a clue about who he was teaching, and was singularly insensitive to student looks of total incomprehension. At the end of this, one of the few lessons where I had to fight the urge to just stand up and take over, he asked, “Any questions?”

With remarkably good inflection and with a hint of bitterness one student just said “Are you a teacher?” The candidate was even more perplexed when I said I’d been introducing adverbs of frequency to beginners for years, and had only used the words “adverbs of frequency” a few times in initial lessons.

Talking won’t ‘just happen’ and it is but one factor in lessons that should involve listening, reading, moving about, doing things, writing a few words, getting involved in the content of a text, listening to grammar explanations, looking at pictures and diagrams, watching things acted out, watching things demonstrated, singing, maybe yawning a bit, and laughing sometimes too.

As a postscript, Total Physical Response (TPR) suggests that beginner students benefit from a silent period of comprehending, and responding to instructions, before being exposed to potential ridicule and embarrassment while getting your tongue around those weird foreign noises. I’ve often said that TPR is akin to becoming an expert footballer by sitting on a couch watching football on TV rather than playing it. Even so, some TPR activities will boost confidence, and learning will be taking place without vocalizing, but with a classroom we can do better.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com　Peter’s forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education.

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Marc Helgesen

How do we maximize student talk time?

There a French proverb that I like a lot:

The way to become a blacksmith is to be a blacksmith.

If you want to become a blacksmith, you don’t read about blacksmithing, you do things blacksmiths do. The same holds true for becoming an English speaker – the students need to speak English to learn English. English is not only the goal, it is also the pathway to that goal. Of course, nothing is as simple as it is sometimes made out to be. Students need comprehensible input through reading and listening, including comprehensible input from the teacher. And we know that giving a minute or two of “think time” before a speaking task increases fluency, linguistic complexity, accuracy, and vocabulary variety. And, of course, not every English class is a speaking class. But in conversation classes, the students should be doing most of the talking.

If you want to become a blacksmith, you don’t read about blacksmithing, you do things blacksmiths do. The same holds true for becoming an English speaker.

A couple years ago I was on sabbatical. One of my projects was to observe classes in a range of situations around Japan, Korea, and Thailand. My publisher organized these so, in most cases, the classes were using textbooks I had written. It was fascinating and delightful to see the ways teachers took my materials and made them their own. Well, usually fascinating and delightful. In a very few cases, I observed classes where it was clear the teacher really didn’t know how to organize a speaking class. In most of those classes, there was a constant babble from the teacher – if comprehensible input is i+1 (the learners current level plus a slight increase), this was more like i+50. The students were left clueless about what to do. They also got very little practice actually using English. It was a shame. These were teachers who I know wanted the learners to succeed and, in most cases, were students who did, too.

It made me want to do what writers to: write something. I wrote a couple skill sheets about ways to maximize student speaking time. I wrote them so the publishers rep’s would have something to give to teachers, especially those teachers who were new to teaching English or who may not have had much training. I’ve revised the skill sheets here to make them less tied to any particular textbook.

I’m leaving them in “skill sheet” form, rather than the usual prose of this blog because I thought the “bullet point” approach may be more useful for busy teachers. Have a look at them here:

Maximizing Learner Speaking Time

How to Maximize Learner Speaking Time

The first suggests the basic ideas. The second one (How to maximize…” gives more step-by-step” suggestions. I hope you find them useful. If you do, feel free to copy them to share with colleagues.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts. ]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Dorothy Zemach

Chuck Sandy

Curtis Kelly

Peter Viney

Marc Helgesen

What Are Some Ways to Motivate Students?

2009-08-31T11:00:36Z

Peter Viney

Motivation

I am only an infrequent visitor to Japan, and my last visit with Karen Viney, my wife and co-writer, was five years ago, so everything I say here must be read with that in mind. In fact I may not be the person you want to go on like I do next, but I’ll have the temerity to say what seems reasonable based on my observations.

The topic that teachers, especially Japanese teachers, discussed with us most often on that visit was fast declining motivation among their students. They said changes were significant over the last few years. Old hands among the native English speakers (NES) reported the same phenomenon. Things had changed. One high school teacher in her twenties (Japanese) said the problem was basic. English was no longer “cool”. It had been when she was a student, not that long ago. That’s probably the most important factor of all. There’s little I can say or do about that, short of hoping for a new Anglophile cultural revolution.

The first observation is that external global factors have intervened, leading to less interest in learning English in general. I’ll take that as read, whether it’s a home filled with the distractions of Nintendo and Wii, or whether it’s a feeling that in the future interaction with China will be more important than with America or Britain. In much of my teaching experience, motivation was a given. Students had paid lots of money for the course, it was intensive and important for their careers.

In much of the world, leaning English has high extrinsic motivation attached. People think English will help them climb the career ladder. In many situations in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, people want to emigrate to an English speaking country, or if not, to a country where English can be used as an initial lingua franca, that really fuels their motivation. That this desire is weaker, or altogether absent, in Japan,makes the situation unusual.

Intrinsic motivation is problematic. It’s clear that for most people success breeds motivation. It’s true in every sphere of life that if you can’t manage to do something reasonably well, interest fades. If you can do something well, but no one recognizes it and the ability gets you nowhere, interest fades.

On our last visit, we did the tourist thing and took a week off in Kyoto. We wandered around the lanes buying various bits and pieces as gifts. What really surprised us was the very low level of English in this tourist situation. Young adults serving in shops couldn’t deal adequately with numbers in English, and that’s in a near-unique situation in a place where you can look down the street and there will virtually always be other non-Japanese people in sight. Usually, when we travel, people in tourist situations say they find Karen and I remarkably easy to understand. That’s after years of teaching beginners. We both naturally control the structures we use, and enunciate clearly. If they can’t understand us saying numbers, they haven’t got much chance with the average Native English speaker.

I could list excuses for them. Years of dull grammar translation in school didn’t help much, but students suffer that in many countries. Japanese is a long way from English, much further than Italian or Greek. True, but it’s no further than Thai or Chinese, and Japan has much more access to Western culture and movies and songs than many countries.

We firmly believe motivation comes from achievement, and what we saw was remarkably low achievement in a situation where there is both opportunity and a real need to speak English.

I’m going to propose an unpopular explanation to the particular problems in Japan: I’m going to blame teaching.

I’m going to propose an unpopular explanation to the particular problems in Japan: I’m going to blame teaching. I’ve been discussing Japan a lot recently in meetings with various people in publishing, and they all remark on the extreme diversification in the teaching situation compared to other countries, especially among Native English Speakers. There’s a wide variety of methodologies ranging from the most old-fashioned to the most avant-garde. The wide diversity of teaching situations in Japan makes it a most interesting place to visit. But there’s a “but”. Individual teachers get brilliant results, but the problem is that too many people are singing off different song sheets. A teacher can achieve success with a quirky style or a novel approach to teaching, but unless that teacher alone takes the students through from zero beginner to the end of their studies, students will be meeting other teachers who are singing in a different key. Lack of a consensus on broad goals among the teachers results in confusion for the students.

In other countries, when you attend teaching conferences, there is a range of ideas and personalities and approaches, but there is a broad consensus on at least some things. They all teach grammar (whether directly, or obliquely, or through translation). They all work on skills development. They structure the input of the lessons and materials to student level.

Whether they’re working on a structural syllabus, or a functional syllabus, or trying to invent a lexical syllabus, there is a consensus on something, even if it’s just the goals of the Common European Framework. I’m not advocating the centralization of teaching lampooned in discussions of the French education system in the 1950s. It was said that the Minister for Education could look at his calendar, and know “April tenth. Every twelve year old in France will be studying adverbs of manner today.”

On the other hand, I’ve never seen teachers in Europe cheerfully boast that they’ve spent a year or two taking students (students who can hardly string a coherent sentence together in front of a native speaker) through an authentic one thousand page novel. Outside Japan I’ve never seen anyone advocate that if students get enough reading input they’ll learn as if by osmosis. Nowhere else do you find advocates of ungraded material for beginners. Elsewhere I’ve also rarely seen people allowed in a classroom simply on the basis of being a native speaker.

In most situations I have experienced, peer observation with constructive criticism is considered a major teacher-training tool, and part of ongoing in-service training. I find it hard to comprehend that experienced teacher trainers are not expected to suggest or even prescribe teaching methods to new arrivals. When I was a tutor on an RSA Cert.TEFL Course (as it then was), one of my trainees told me she intended to use the Silent Way in one of her observed lessons for the exam. I simply said, “No. Don’t do it.

You’ve worked very hard. You’re sure to pass. Don’t throw it away. Go in and teach them something in a conventional way.” I get the impression that few are allowed the authority to say that in Japan.

The best motivation for students is the feeling that you have learned something, that you are now learning something else, and that you feel you will be able to cope with the next stage of learning. Students have to be able to look back, and say ‘In January I couldn’t do that. It’s April now, and I can do it.’ At the lower levels, they should be aware of what progress they’ve made today. Every teacher has to ask, ‘Is this happening? Not just in my lessons, but in their learning experience as a whole?’

Editors and authors have said things to me recently about Japan being too diverse and confused a teaching environment to cope with. They have a point. I could give you ten pages of detailed criticism of the Common European Framework levels or of the detailed syllabus goals listed for the KET and PET Cambridge exams, but they’re still excellent starting points which have taken years of negotiation to assemble. They’re Eurocentric to a degree, because they can assume higher guess rates, but the principle is valid.

Teachers need to agree on common goals, and like it or not, those goals can only be quantified in structural and functional terms. The functional list is vague, but far easier to compose (Students should be able to buy and sell items, discussing prices and giving change). The stuctural list inevitably leads to argument. Should there be overt grammar teaching, or should grammar be embedded? What is the sequence of presentation of the items expected as a final goal? What methodologies will be utilised to impart them?

It is however possible to say that students at a given level should be able to comprehend and use the present perfect to discuss recent events. That’s a concrete ELT goal. At a given level, students should be able to apologize with different degrees of politeness. That’s a concrete ELT goal. At a given level, students should be able to read a graded ELT reader at the 1250 headword level. That’s a concrete ELT goal. Students should be able to listen to a series of announcements and note times and numbers accurately without understanding every word of the announcement. That’s a concrete ELT goal.

Human happiness is not an ELT goal, unfortunately. Nor is knowing more about the environment. Nor is being a more caring person. All these things may happen alongside the acquisition of a language skill, but they’re not the measure of the skill. The greatest motivating factor is measurable success. Are enough students achieving that success?

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com　Peter’s forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education. It is not yet up on their website at the time of writing (September 2009), but it may be by the time you read this.

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Marc Helgesen

How Can We Help Increase the Motivation of Our Part-Time Teachers?

“ The most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.” - Abraham Maslow

Obviously motivation is central to what we do as teachers. It is a deal breaker. Without motivation, nothing much is going to happen.

While learner motivation is critical, I’d like to look at another factor where motivation is too often overlooked: Part-time teachers. Universities are making more and more use of part-timers. I think that’s a mistake for many reasons including the fact that it is making life harder for students: Students, who find it hard enough trying to catch full-time teachers with time to listen to them, encounter even more difficulties getting to talk to part-timers outside of the classroom. I know better than to waste my time and energy on a topic I can’t do anything about (i.e., increasedcommittee-work load for full-timers means less time to be spend on quality teaching.) Instead, I’ll look at an area where I can make a difference. How can we help increase the motivation of our part-time teachers?

If you were intentionally designing a demotivating work situation, it would look a lot like the way universities treat their part-timers.

If you were intentionally designing a demotivating work situation, it would look a lot like the way universities treat their part-timers. At most schools, part-timers have only minimal contact with the school staff and faculty between terms – just enough to establish what classes they’re teaching, schedules, classrooms, etc. Once classes start, part-timers show up every week, hanko in, and go right to their classroom or hang-out in the part-timers room, talking only to other part-timers on the once-a-week plan.

Teaching is a helping profession. As such, the real rewards for teaching are – or at least should be – in the upper half of Maslow’s Hierarchy. For teachers, issues like belonging, esteem and achievement, self-actualization are where we want to be working. Others describe how important that is with learners. I’d suggest it is just as important with teachers – if the teacher is motivated to be creative, caring, and passionate, there’s a good chance it will rub off on the learners. But the way the system in organized, part-time teachers come, teach, go home, and then get paid. Our institutions are paying attention to only their physiological (physical) and safety needs. They can buy food and pay the rent (hopefully). How can we expect part-timers to really feel like they are part of a team (love and belonging) when the full-timers hardly ever see them?

Of course, a lot of part-time teachers do get those higher-level rewards due to their own hard work and their great relationships with students. That is wonderful, but wouldn’t it be even better if the schools were helping to achieve those things ?

In my department, we’ve been consciously trying to make our part-timers feel like the important part of the program they are. What we do isn’t particularly difficult, but the part-timers have told us how much they appreciate them and how different it is than at most other schools.

• We also have a part-time faculty room in the department. Actually, we just converted a “preparation room” (jumbi-shitsu) next to a communication classroom (see the March Think Tank ). Of course, our part-timers can use the university-wide part-time staff room, but they all prefer the one in the department. It is right across from the department’s full-time English teachers’ offices so we all get to see each other every week. That makes it easy to talk about how classes are going, about students who are having problems, the things they need for their classes, etc. Many of our part-timers have commented that they feel our doors are always open. There is better communication and“having a home” in the department makes it clear they are part of the department.

• In the part-time faculty room, each teacher has a mailbox and a basket where they can keep things so they don’t have to be dragging extra teaching supplies to and from school every week. We also have class sets of colored pencils, markers, glue sticks, scissors, and other stationary supplies which makes it easier to do creative lessons that go beyond, “Open your books to page 57.”

• At the beginning of the year, the other full-time teacher and I hold a “pizza lunch” for all the part-timers. It is more than meeting the “physiological need for food” (though everyone likes a free lunch.) It is a chance for the teachers to get to know each other – full and part-timers, to talk about our plans, to share ideas. It starts the year off in a positive way and builds the understanding that we really are a team.

• We are a small university. The school had never bothered translating things like class schedules, documents about how to upload course abstracts, etc. into English. Of course, some of the part-timers have no problem reading Japanese, but others do. So we took it upon ourselves to makes sure all that information was translated. And the good news is that now the curriculum division of the administration takes our translations and makes them available to “Japanese-challenged” teachers in all the departments. And since we have the forms, it is simple to update them every year. Just making sure the teachers can easily access the information they need seems like common sense now that we have it. It means they don’t need to find someone to explain it to them and they are much less likely to miss important events and deadlines.

• Many schools discriminate against non-NEST (non-Native English Speaking Teachers) for oral classes. We don’t. Our English communication classes meet twice a week and we try to organize the schedules so students have one NEST and one non-NEST teacher. There are things non-NESTs are better at than natives, one of which is being great role models. Also, in this age of international English, the fact that our students meet good English speakers who are Japanese, Korean, and Thai (our present complement) in addition to Americans, Canadians, Aussies and Brits, and a Jamaican is all the better. And, by not discriminating, it means we have a much wider pool of teachers to choose from. We can chose really good, highly motivated teachers. The students know the reasons behind this policy. We try to make it a case of setting high expectations for everyone.

• All these ideas, I think, come back to a basic, essential element of motivation: Respect. When we treat our part-time colleagues as the professionals they are, it is easier for them to feel they are part of the team. That’s motivation.

Thanks to colleagues Brenda Hayashi, Satsuki Kojima, Soichi Ota and Ken Schmidt for feedback on an earlier version of this piece.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

Maslow and the 3Ls

Student Motivation has always been an important concern for me. So important in fact, that I devoted most of my recent sabbatical to reading up on this very subject, especially the stuff that has come out of education and psychology. Unfortunately, what I read was a bit demotivating. There were so many mechanical models that only had a tenuous relationship to the classroom.

The labeling bothers me, but in a “good” school, motivation is nothing: it is already there. In a “bad” school it is everything: you live and breathe it. For 18 years, I worked in the latter type, schools with low rankings that accepted anyone who applied. A lot of the students who entered these schools couldn’t get in anywhere else. Attendance averaged around 50%, and it was not uncommon for me to be the only person in the room when the bell rang at the start of class. Assigning homework was a waste of time, since it just ended up punishing the one or two students who actually did it. Students sleeping through the whole class, or talking continuously, students refusing to pick up their pencils to do an exercise, or students not even bringing pencils, were common features in these schools. In many ways, these students were as smart as or smarter than students in other schools, but most seemed ill-suited to book and lecture learning. As far as I could tell, there were two reasons for this. They either didn’t have the auditory and passive learning styles needed for classroom language study, or they just couldn’t engage because their mental focus was elsewhere: personal issues, such as gaining autonomy or being valued.

Even though I studied Maslow thirty years ago in college, I never really understood his theory of the Hierarchy of Needs until I started teaching students like these. Maslow told us human needs exist in a hierarchy of five levels, as in the diagram. More importantly, a human being can only attend to one need at a time, and any lower level need eclipses the higher ones. As he explained it, a person dying of thirst will forget their thirst if all the oxygen is removed. Likewise, learners who must master the past tense for an upcoming test will not feel this need if they are hungry, nervous about their classmates, or lonely.

In short, with all the other issues these students faced, it was hard to get their attention in class. This is not a complaint on my part. Although there were some classes I dreaded going to, it was a lot worse for many of them. Despite my attempts to make classes enjoyable, many seemed miserable; not miserable because they were with me, but rather, miserable because they were with themselves. Their gaping lack of self-esteem was one of the saddest things I have ever encountered. It is the suffering of students like these that I have vowed to do something about.

It is the suffering of students like these that I have vowed to do something about.

I have a name for these students: “3Ls.” It stands for Low Ability, Low Confidence, and Low Motivation. I found them to be restless, searching, and skittish – any reading longer than 4 sentences scared them out of trying it. They also seemed to be locked in the perpetual cycle denoted by their label. Their English abilities were low, and this reduced their confidence. Their lack of confidence sapped their motivation, and without motivation, they couldn’t engage in study and raise their ability.

I have thought long about what to do about 3Ls, especially in regard of how to write materials for them. It bothers me that the majority of textbooks are designed for intermediate or advanced students, with the “Intro” levels seemingly added on later. In most cases, since the authors are unfamiliar with these kinds of students, their Intro level books seem to be just dumbed down versions of their better, higher level books, with the practice left in and the fun taken out. However, 3Ls, more than any other kind of student, need the fun element. They need a chance to manipulate language in a way that makes it their own. They need a vehicle to allow them to share. They need something to smile about. Instead, they usually just get a heavier dose of listen, repeat, and turn-your-feelings-off.

Anyway, I have concluded there is only one way to break the 3L cycle: After all, unless you have a lot of time, you can’t intervene on the ability side, and since these students have already decided that they are not good at English, you can’t do much about their linguistic confidence (although you have to be careful not to worsen it). Motivation, on the other hand, is still up for grabs, and this is where the secret to writing materials for 3L students lies. Find an English activity easy enough for them to do, but with a task so engaging that they would be motivated to do it even in their own language. In my experience, such tasks usually involve making something, finding something, sharing something, or doing something that has a real and immediate impact on their lives. For example, rather than having students plan fictitious picnics to practice food words, have them plan real class parties they will actually do. Suddenly, the English becomes incidental as they engage in a meaningful act.

In summary, instilling motivation is hard. For some teachers, it is not necessary to try, but for others, it is at the center of all they do. Having been one of the latter types that recently moved to a “good” school, I’m finding the 3L toolbox I brought with me even more valuable than before. Where once I needed these tools just to get students to participate in class, I can now use them to make students wildly excited, insightful, and prosperous. For me, working with 3Ls was how I learned to see each learner as a human seeking growth.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.
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Chuck Sandy

The Human Universe

Motivation, like fluency or beauty, is something that people cannot rightfully attribute to themselves. Just as we tend to shy away from people who say, “I’m really fluent!” or “I’m quite beautiful!” it’s rather odd to hear someone say, “I’m SO motivated,” the way one person at a book event said to me recently. I thought, “Good for you, but why tell me?” There were several possibilities that crossed my mind, all of them plausible, yet rather than explore any of those possible motivations for saying such a thing I said, “That’s great! I wish you a lot of luck” and then found a friend across the room and made my way in that direction.

The most interesting thing about motivation – like fluency and perhaps beauty -- is that it’s most often discussed when it’s lacking: especially in others. Sure, there are times when we ourselves say things like, “I just can’t seem to get myself motivated,” but what we often really mean is:

“There are a whole lot of other things I’d rather be doing.”

Of course, sometimes the deep structure of such a statement is,

“I’d rather be doing anything except this.” (in that tone)

That, in all it’s negativity, is a form of personal revolution, but in effect it’s not much different from the times when what we’re signalling is that we’d like to do less, or even less than that, as in:

“I don’t really feel like doing anything at all today.”

Yet, except for cases of clinical depression or some other form of psychological trauma, is this anything to worry about? Probably not, for if other people are like me, they don’t actually do nothing. Instead of nothing, they take a nap, reorganize things, put on some music, go out for a walk, thumb through a magazine, send an email or so, make some coffee, and all the while, let the mind wander to think about this and that.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days, and call it procrastination if you will, but don’t call it lack of motivation. I’ve been plenty motivated, yet I’ve managed to accomplish almost nothing of value to others while successfully avoiding the things I’ve supposed to have been doing – like writing this article – until now.

This, of course, is why I’ve come to understand students like me so very well, and these are the ones I’ll now turn my attention to in this article -- the way I do in class. Those other students -- the handful who just show up fully self-motivated (intrinsically or extrinsically or autonomously even) --thrive to the beat of their own agenda. Even the majority of others -- the ones who simply and quietly do what’s expected of them without too much complaint -- move forward on their own.

It’s the other ones, the people like me – the procrastinators, the dreamers, the ones easily distracted by too many other interests or issues – who need the constant gentle care of alert attention. Otherwise, they’ll possibly spin out of control, causing damage to others (the class, the group, their family) while endangering their own self-esteem in the process. It took me half a lifetime, three different colleges, and four majors to learn that.

Even so, I’ll admit that it is still sometimes frustrating when people like this skip appointments or show up without their homework or wander in late with their minds elsewhere. Yet, it’s been years since I actually took someone to task for following their own motivations rather than my own schedules, procedures, and policies. What is the point of that? Yet, as a new teacher I thought, “these people are not doing what I told them to do! They’re not listening to me! I’ll show them! I’ll make them pay!” The result: Instant collapse of even potential motivation, and perhaps even potential. Bad vibes. Bad class. Bad day for everyone.

Now, I think, maybe they had something better to do or some problem to deal with or maybe something came up, or in the case of unfinished written work, perhaps, like me, they didn’t know what it was they wanted to say – yet. So, I cut them some slack, find out what’s going on, maybe extend a deadline for them, point them in a good direction, let them know I’m paying attention, and so discover how to pull them back in. It can be done and it’s more than just worth doing.

The list of possible reasons for people to want to follow their own motivations rather than those of others is potentially endless, but as Charles Olson writes in Human Universe (1958), “There are laws: that is to say, the human universe is as discoverable as that other. And as definable.”

Olson wasn’t an academic, interested in reducing things to lists of five or even two the way those most esteemed experts on motivation have done. Olson was a poet and someone who simply understood that we can and should consider the human universe seriously, work out its laws and principles, and then even go on to define it, discuss it, and write poems and papers about it. He also understood, though, that none is this is possible without the clear understanding that each person is a universe – that vast, that deep, that complex.

Motivation and empowerment, education and learning: it’s not about technique or method or research or theory. It’s about the human universe. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

What’s interesting is that Olson’s central thesis has nothing to do with education, but everything to do with understanding the self and others. What should be clear, though, is that this is what education is all about. Still, what educators and parents and sometimes politicians most often mean when talking about the lack of motivation in others is:

“We’ve got to get these people to see things our way and do what we know is best for them.”

Often, of course, most people actually have no idea what’s best for anyone, let alone themselves, and as we all know, what’s best for everyone is not something most people truly want to be a part of, because well, they’re interested in other things. Moreover, whatever it is they’re being forced to do -- in ways they’d rather not and perhaps even can’t manage -- is keeping them from doing those things they’d rather do, in ways they can.

This is why those who seem most “unmotivated” most often rebel against “the system” in quiet and not so quiet ways: suddenly -- as in all at once deciding, “I’m not coming back tomorrow” -- or slowly -- as in over the course of a semester or adolescence realizing that, “once this is over, I’m out of here.” They spin out of control, off into some other orbit, or else crash and even burn.

What can be done to prevent this? How can we avoid having these people become the black holes of the classroom or family or nation? It’s simple: put them on a very long tether, long enough to let them explore their own universe, but not quite long enough to let them get lost in that space. Then, make them realize you believe their universe is a valid place, worth exploring.

How do you do that? You pay attention to who they are and take their lives seriously. Then you believe in their potential and demonstrate that, visibly. In a culture where taking someone’s (and even our own) internal universe seriously is increasingly rare, you just might be the only person who’s ever done such a thing for them. Result: Interest increase in motivation.

Now, if you think this sounds like just so much humanist babble, nice in theory but difficult in practice, then you’re like most people, and like most people you’ll probably be resistant to this, but I’d like to give you a challenge:

Pick your most difficult, most unmotivated student, walk into class tomorrow and, if he or she is there, find something to compliment him or her on. All you have to do is say, “Hey, nice haircut!” or “I’ve always wanted a leather jacket like that.” If you can’t quite bring yourself to genuinely make such a compliment, ask a question: “Does it hurt to get your nose pierced like that?” or “You look really tired. Were you up all night?” Then listen. That’s it. Go on about your business in class, but when it’s over say, “would you like to get a cup of coffee?” and then if appropriate to whatever you’ve learned, simply ask, “Would you like to talk about it?” Then listen, carefully. If coffee or lunch is too much, just stand in the hallway talking and listening. That’s it. Then repeat this process over the next few class meetings. I guarantee you’ll start to notice a change.

If you’re interested, there are several other easy and practical suggestions to try out. They will increase “motivation” and don’t take much effort, but they may require some rewiring on your part. If you’re already practicing such things, feel free to skip ahead or else just go and ...

• Open your office door if you have one. Keep it open. Get a coffee maker and teapot. Invest in some snacks. When you see your “troublesome” students walk by, invite them in. Stop whatever you’re doing. Talk and listen. Encourage.

• Start coming to class a few minutes early and staying a few minutes late – just to chat. Make a point of sitting down with your “worst” students. Tell them about your bad day, how hard it is for you to get up in the morning, how you’re tired because you were up late surfing the Internet or because you had an argument with your partner. Refer to that person by name, as if these students of yours were part of your life. Do this often enough and they will be.

• That worst student you complimented? The one you’re now chatting with and inviting into your office? Find out what interests this person most. Ask questions about this thing. Learn what you can. Pay attention. Then, the next time you see your student, casually give him or her something related to this – an article on the topic, a book you happen to have, a web address, or best yet, an introduction to someone else interested in the same thing. Great if it’s one of your other students. Better yet if it’s one of your friends.

• Find a way to make this interest part of your student’s academic life. In a language school, bring in an article with activities on the topic and have everybody in class learn about it. Make your “problem” student a resource, by saying, “Well, I don’t know very much about this topic, but Hiroki does.” In a high school or university context, make sure your Hiroki writes his report or thesis on some aspect of this central interest of his life. Then just say things like, “I didn’t know that. Can you find out more?” or better yet, “Here’s this article I found. Do you think it’s related?” Often the articles I find for my students make them think I’m clueless, they’re so off the mark. But then they get the pleasure of telling me why and pointing me in the right direction. Instant motivation and empowerment.

I almost guarantee that if you do these things, you’ll find that your problem student will start to shine. Do these things for your whole class, and you’ll find, like me, that this is basically all you have to do. Everything else will fall into place and you won’t even need to think about such big words as empowerment and self-actualization. In the process, like me, you’ll likely even become more motivated.

There’s one more thing, and this takes some practice and effort, but is more worthwhile than anything else you can do as a teacher: Believe that all of your students are not only capable of learning, but capable of excelling. Then, simply expect this of each one of them, in their own way. Value and show interest in everyone’s personal universe, give people a lot of latitude on that long tether, but let no one off easy. Humanism doesn’t mean just sitting in circles and feeling good about each other – though that’s not a bad thing. What humanism in education means is first helping people realize they have potential, and then leading them in the direction of reaching it. That’s a lot of work, but it’s the real work.

I’ve said elsewhere that teaching is a messy human business. That’s certainly true, but that’s what also makes it a joy. I’ve said here that this is something that’s taken me a bunch of schools and years to learn. Now, I’ll just simplify it for you:

Motivation and empowerment, education and learning: it’s not about technique or method or research or theory. It’s about the human universe. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Got Facebook? Then, join Chuck (and Curtis) and over 1500 dedicated teachers from around the world on the global teachers discussion page for an ongoing conversation about education.

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Dorothy Zemach

Can a Teacher Motivate Every Student?

Like many teachers, I have seen a lot of movies about teachers. Many of the movies, especially those “based on a true story,” have a similar theme: A smart young teacher goes to a poor, inner-city school, faces a class of recalcitrant students, each one displaying a different attitude problem, and through her (or his) unwavering dedication to the students as people and ideals of education as a whole, leads the class to success. I like these kinds of stories. They inspire me as a teacher, and when I show them to my classes, they inspire the students.

A good example is the classic 1988 “Stand and Deliver,” based on the story of Jaime Escalante, a high school teacher from inner-city Los Angeles. In one of the more moving scenes, Escalante talks to his class of poor, racial minority students about the challenges they face:

"When you go for a job, the person giving you that job will not want to hear your problems; ergo, neither do I. You’re going to work harder here than you’ve ever worked anywhere else. And the only thing I ask from you is ganas. Desire. And maybe a haircut. If you don’t have the ganas, I will give it to you because I’m an expert."

And he does give them the desire. He goads them, urges them, threatens them, praises them, rewards them, yells at them,… and he takes them from their failing status in his remedial math class to passing the notoriously difficult AP Calculus exam.

(Any student who has ever taken the TOEFL will cringe in sympathy watching these students take that test.)

It’s every teacher’s dream, isn’t it? To be able to supply motivation. And to some extent, I think we can. Every class is a sort of sales opportunity, and you sell your subject area and even the minute details, such as the importance of distinguishing count and non-count nouns. Our energy level affects the students.

You can’t motivate your students if you yourself are exhausted, burned out, in poor physical health, overworked, in a bad mood, or unsure of the value of what you’re teaching.

How responsible are we, though, for every student’s motivational level? We might see them for 90 minutes a week, or three hours a week, or in some rare intensive class, even 10 hours a week. That’s still a small slice out of a student’s life that encompasses work, family, friends, hobbies, romance, and much else that we cannot affect. Sometimes―just sometimes―what we teach in English class is NOT the most important thing going on in their lives, and we need to accept that. Motivation can also be affected by a student’s character, personality, and state of mental and physical health. That’s a lot for one English teacher to cope with.

To the extent that it’s possible, we should of course motivate students as individuals and the class as a group. I don’t think it’s possible to list techniques that “work” for motivating others because it depends too much on the personality of the individual teacher as well as on the specific class and students in question. However, I do think that the teacher’s overall level of enthusiasm for her subject and class is infectious―and that is something that every teacher can work on.

When you fly, there’s no more chilling moment for a parent than when you hear that announcement that in the event of an unexpected loss of cabin pressure, you are to secure your own oxygen mask before assisting your children. Anyone can understand the wisdom of that, but you know in your heart how tremendously difficult it would be to not help your child (or, really, anybody’s child) first. It’s a similar situation with our classes.

You can’t motivate your students if you yourself are exhausted, burned out, in poor physical health, overworked, in a bad mood, or unsure of the value of what you’re teaching.

I would argue then that one very good way to motivate your students is to ensure that you do not assign homework faster than you can grade it; that you get around eight hours of sleep a night; that you use your weekends as work-free periods; that you eat protein with your breakfast every day; that you exercise regularly. These are areas of someone’s life that you do have control over, because it’s your life. When your life is running smoothly, you’ll be more likely to have the energy and enthusiasm to lead, cajole, or prod your students into finding their desire.

Finally, I’d like to recommend a different sort of movie about teaching, “The Emperor’s Club,” based on the short story “The Palace Thief” (Ethan Canin). Truthfully, I don’t know if this was a popular movie or not―I never heard of it in theaters in the US and have never seen any reviews, but I watched it on three different airplane trips, sometimes more than once, so I came to know it well. Mr. Hundert, the teacher, works in an expensive private preparatory school, teaching a class of motivated, hard-working students. Enter a new student, a poor-little-rich-boy type of much promise and intellect, but no motivation and of course the requisite poor attitude.

Hundert tries everything he can to motivate this student, at the expense, in fact, of a more deserving but less flashy student who does not present himself as “troubled.” I’ll throw in a bit of a spoiler, because what’s important about the movie is not the plot line, but the more subtle dynamics of personality. The troubled rich kid succeeds in life―but not in the right kind of motivation, nor in appreciation for education. Hundert is left for years to question his decision of spending a disproportionate amount of energy on this one student. Could he have been reached in another way? Is it possible to reach every student? What students are pushed aside when you reach out to the most glamorous troublemaker? Those are good questions for both a teacher and a class to discuss.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Katsuko Matsubara

Classroom Group Dynamics; Significant Influence on Learner Motivation

Learning environment and motivation Motivation is a complex psychological process that is subject to both internal and external influences. The quest to sort out this complexity and eventually understand motivation is worthwhile because it can help to predict and influence people’s behavior. While motivation is psychologically determined, influence on motivation from the immediate learning environment should not be neglected. For example, the effects of interaction among learners, the teacher, and other aspects of classroom instruction such as course evaluation, materials, and peer group pressure will also have an effect on learner attitude and their motivation. Therefore, it is necessary to consider what influences learner motivation from two perspectives: social motivation (external influences) and personal motivation (internal influences).

What are internal and external influences? Social motivation is seen as human motives that are directly related to an individual’s social environment. In contrast to social motivation, personal motivation may be seen as motives developed internally without support from peers or significant others. Of course, it is difficult to distinguish these two aspects of motivation since they mutually influence each other. Examples of external influences are peer pressures and practical incentives such as getting a good grade in class. Examples of internal influences are having set personal goals and experiencing a feeling of enjoyment. If students have set concrete personal goals for themselves, their motivation tends to be high.

Motivating factors In order to investigate learner motivation in more depth, a series of interview studies were conducted among Japanese university students (Matsubara, 2006). Examples of high motivating factors are peer pressures and practical incentives such as getting a good grade in class. Students felt that if their peers work hard, they feel obligated to perform well in class. For internal influences, positive learning history and having set personal goals are high motivating factors. If they had a good rapport with the teacher or had a good experience in terms of their performance, their motivation seems to go up. The interview revealed that the most significant influence on learner motivation comes from classroom experiences.

Demotivating factors Most teachers seem to look at motivation factors and what influences learner motivation. On the other hand, demotivating factors also tell us about what is going through learners’ minds. A series of interviews with the students revealed as many demotivating factors as motivating factors. The most frequently cited demotivating factors was a negative learning history. One example occurs when a student’s personal goal and the course goal do not match or a student doesn’t like their instructor’s teaching style. For internal cause, a feeling of frustration and having no personal goal were mentioned as demotivating factors.

What teachers can do to increase motivation? Learner motivation seems to be largely influenced by the learning environment. Therefore, classroom-related factors such as the interaction among students and the teacher, teaching methods employed by the teacher, and both personal and class learning goals are important factors affecting learner motivation. Though it was found that some motivational change occurs when students encounter English speakers and other cultures outside of the classroom, major motivational changes primarily rise from particular classroom experiences.

Teachers can’t force students to like English, but they can lead students to meaningful learning experiences. Because so many students are influenced by external causes that are based in classroom practices, teachers can help by guiding their students to set concrete goals and objectives and to provide positive learning experiences that increase their motivation. In order to create a positive and motivating learning environment, we need to look at classroom dynamics where students are involved in interactions that lead to positive learning experiences.

Katsuko Matsubara is an associate professor at Chubu University. Her research interest is learner motivation, L2 writing and intercultural communication. Her recent article, "Creating Cohesiveness Among Learners Through a Focus on Classroom Group Dynamics in a Japanese Classroom" was published in TESOL's 2008 book, Classroom Management , the first volume of TESOL’s Classroom Practice Series.]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Peter Viney

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Dorothy Zemach

Katsuko Matsubara

Extra Extra!! It's The Special Summer Rerun Issue!!

2009-07-10T06:55:01Z

It’s summer. That means it is time for the beach, barbecues and, of course… summer reruns. This month, each Think Tank member chose a previously published piece to recycle. While some people don’t like summer reruns, on TV or on the Web, as Wikipedia points out, “Many viewers appreciate the opportunity to re-watch a program they enjoyed or watch one they missed the first time round.” In our case, substitute “read” for “watch,” and we’re there.
By the way, Wikipedia also points out that the invention of reruns is usually credited to Desi Arnaz, TV star, producer, and husband of Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy). You are just seven sentences into this and probably already learned something.

We’ll be back in September with a new discussion on motivation.
Enjoy!

Marc Helgesen

Language Learning and the Senses

Sight. Hearing. Touch. Smell. Taste. Five simple words. Five very powerful senses. And every bit of information we take in, we do so through those senses. Since this is how our brains get input – and make meaning of it -- this is something that all of us as teachers will want to be aware of. It just, well, makes sense.
Of the five senses, sight (Visual), hearing (Auditory), feeling (alternately called Kinesthetic [movement], tactile [touch], and haptic [touch/ movement/ emotion] are the most useful in the classroom. Smell (Olfactory) is strong. If I ask you to remember the smell of fresh baked cookies, you may well start to salivate since the memory of the smell is so strong. So is taste (gustatory). Try bringing chocolate chip cookies to class and check what the students remember. But V-A-K are the senses most often and most easily used in learning languages and other skills at school.
Everyone, barring a disability, has and uses all the senses. But we also have one that we use more than the others. It is called the “preferred modality.” The modalities are sometimes called “learning styles” or “processing channels.” Those are just different ways of talking about the senses.
Your preferred modality, by the way, doesn’t mean the one you like the most – just because you like music doesn’t mean you are an auditory person (It most likely means you are human – everyone likes music). Rather, your preferred modality is the one which, when there is nothing going on to force a change, you use as a starting point. You can often tell your preferred modality by noticing your own behavior. For example, imagine you are going to a lecture. Which of these do you usually do?

1. Take a lot of notes, which are probably fairly neat.
2. Make a recording instead of taking notes.
3. Take a lot of notes, then never look at your notebook again (it may be better that way – the notes are a mess).
4. Watch the speaker closely as you listen.
5. Close your eyes so you can focus on what you are hearing. You might mentally repeat key phrases or points.
6. Move around in your seat –adjust your position, move your arms, tap your fingers, fidget – as you listen, even though you are paying attention.

It is useful to be aware of your own style for several reasons. It is the way you usually process information so it is often the way you learn best. And, since that is the way you take in information, it may well be the way you teach.

This is just a quick introduction and isn’t meant to be a full sensory preference evaluation (more on that later), but you probably found yourself relating to a few of the ideas and not relating at all to the others. Ideas 1 and 4 are typical of visual learners, 2 and 5 are thing auditory learners do, 3 and 6 are typical kinesthethic learner behavior.
Of course, it is useful to be aware of your own style for several reasons. It is the way you usually process information so it is often the way you learn best. And, since that is the way you take in information, it may well be the way you teach. It is no surprise that many of use give out information the way we process it. After all, it makes sense (to us) that way.
But what about learners who process things differently? What about learners whose learning style/preferred modality is different than the way you teach?
What follows is an attempt to deal with that. I originally made this chart that you can download at the bottom of this article for myself. I know I am a kinesthetic learner who also rates quite high on visual. And my score on auditory scales are quite low (this is a typical pattern: high on one, fairly high on another, quite low on the third). I was worried about my auditory learners – what was I doing to make sure the class makes sense (so to speak) for them? I identified the main types of activities we do in class. Then I looked at the three main sensory areas. I tried to identify things I can do as a teacher to make sure I have the main senses covered. I also noted things they can do as learners. I try to make sure that my teaching covers the range of senses– it is useful for students to get practice with all the senses. I usually introduce a few options. Students naturally gravitate towards the activities that fit with their learning styles.
To use the chart, either take a learning inventory (see note at end) or just look over the chart and see which things you already do. It may indicate your learning/teaching style. Then make it a point to try some of the other items, especially those that are not necessarily part of your regular pattern.
Work with it. Play with it. I think your students will see the light, or it will ring some bells for them. Or maybe it will just feel right. Whatever happens, they’ll be learning.

Download Language skills across the senses: A list of tasks here
Note: To find own preferred modality, take a learning style assessment like this one. Here, I find “Learning styles test 2” to be the most useful with my students.
If you want to have your classes take the inventory as well and doing so on the Internet isn’t practical, there are photocopiable tests in Knowing Me, Knowing You by Jim Wingate available from Delta Publishers and In your hands by Jane Revell and Susan Norman, Saffire Press.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

To what extent should learners be given choices when they engage in classroom activities?

This month we were asked to rerun a piece we had written before. Since the current Think Tank archives do not have all our older pieces, I chose this one about student choices. It speaks on an educational approach little known in Asia, but needed now more than ever before. As many people have commented, this approach, although associated with Adult Education, also works with college students, high school students, and even children. Maybe this is so because it represents educational humanism, whose lovely head rears from time to time with labels like “Montessori method” (1900’s), “progressivism” (1930’s), “humanism” (1970’s), “learner centeredness” (1980’s), and so on.)

To what extent should learners be given choices when they engage in classroom activities?
Give learners choices? What a notion.
Education is after all, "filling a bucket, not lighting a fire," and letting learners decide what they need to know is like, well, letting people decide who to marry or what religion to believe in. Please! Leave it to us experts!
Giving learners "choices" is the basis of creating autonomous learners (which, by the way, is part of a recent Monbusho directive). In fact, in my field, Adult Education, there is a whole pedagogy based on learner autonomy called "andragogy." At its heart is the notion that children are by nature, dependent, teacher-directed learners, whereas adults are independent, self-directed learners. It was developed by Malcolm Knowles during the adult education boom in the West when it was found that programs for adults were experiencing horrendous dropout rates, of about 50 percent. Teachers were using the same test-driven, teacher-directive pedagogies that have been in use since 1100 A.D. (and still reign in Japan), and their adult students were dissatisfied.

An appropriate pedagogy for adults includes group discussion and problem solving rather than lecturing, and allowing learners rather than the instructor to determine and satisfy their own learning needs.

Adults tend to be autonomous, self-directed learners with specific, life-centered reasons for engaging in study. Therefore, the traditional model of knowing teachers pouring their own experience-based knowledge into the empty vessels of their students' heads does not, and cannot, apply to adults. Nor does the motivational approach of defensive learning: "Pass this test or I'll fail you." Adults, facing tasks according to their own sociological situations, are motivated to learn in order to succeed at these tasks. Therefore, an appropriate pedagogy for adults includes group discussion and problem solving rather than lecturing, and allowing learners rather than the instructor to determine and satisfy their own learning needs.
Just a minute! "Allowing learners rather than the instructor to determine and satisfy their own learning needs?" Nice in theory, but in practice, it sounds like a horror movie for teachers. But this is just because we are still caught in the teacher-centered pedagogy for children. There are methods that support learner autonomy, such as learning contracts, which I am increasingly using in my own college classes. In a learning contract, the student determines what must be learned, how, by when, and what proof will be given to show mastery. The instructor becomes more of a learning "manager" - or as we like to say, "facilitator" - than "teacher." Likewise, our pupils become "learners" rather than "students."
It works. I know. I am currently engaged in satisfying the requirements of a learning contract myself. My facilitator is an Internet expert in Wisconsin, and without even a peep from him, I am doing far more serious study than I have ever done before.
Therefore, from the perspective of Adult Education, giving students "choice" in their studies is not just something "nice" to do for them, it is mandatory. It is the basis of the only pedagogy that works for adults. In fact, the theories behind this pedagogy can explain the increasing level of malaise in today's college and high school classrooms. Whereas in the 1980's an eighteen-year-old was still a "child", adulthood comes a lot more quickly to the youth of this millennium, and with it, that all-consuming need for self-direction.
Give learners a choice? Absolutely. It is immoral not to. The notion that one person has the right to determine what another must know is absurd. On a more positive note, though, their making choices serves our ultimate mission, the building of better human beings. As Brookfield writes in The Skillful Teacher (1990, p.95):
"When people who are not used to having to having their ideas granted any public credibility find that they are being listened to carefully and seriously, this is an astoundingly powerful experience. It can precipitate major changes in their self-images...and personal lives."

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series. Visit Curtis (and Chuck) on their Facebook page

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Chris Hunt

Do you Do Tests?

(I guess I have two reasons for selecting the following piece. Firstly, it’s probably my most notorious piece of writing and has probably generated more response than any other. Secondly, and sadly, testing children is still rife. It’s more than the norm than ever. This piece, though flamboyant, remains a call for something else...)

There is some very simple advice given to people who are considering taking drugs. It goes like this:
Just say no.
Here is some very simple advice for children who are confronted by teachers offering tests.
Just say no.
If only it were that simple. If only children had that much power. If only teachers gave them that much respect. If only teachers gave them the choice.
I think that teachers who impose tests on children are the equivalent of drug pushers. I’d even go so far as to say that it should be a criminal offence. The idea of ranking and classifying children disgusts me. How dare teachers take something as sweet and precious as young life and stuff it raw and bleeding through the sausage grinder of standardised tests, or any test for that matter. What gives them the right to do so? What gives them the right?
Just what is the purpose of a test, or rather what function does it fulfil? Putting aside the issues of ranking I guess tests are supposed to reveal what students know, but they usually do this by showing what students do not know. This is unnatural.

A baby exploring the world is learning through experience. It is the experience that shapes learning. The baby does not need a test to know what it knows. It is too busy exploring and learning.

A baby exploring the world is learning through experience. It is the experience that shapes learning. The baby does not need a test to know what it knows. It is too busy exploring and learning. Moreover, the baby does not know that it is ignorant of anything. Ignorance is truly bliss. But once a child is confronted with the idea that they don’t know something they start to learn not knowing. They start to learn that there are right answers and there are wrong answers. The joy of learning becomes contaminated by doubt. It becomes contaminated by the fear of getting something wrong and the desire to be right. This is the creation of lack of knowledge. Children stop learning through exploring and instead start looking for the right answers.
In a much earlier essay Curtis Kelly suggests that testing and grading suppresses maturation. If this is the case for teenagers how much more so for children? Children are inherently more fragile and impressionable than teenagers and young adults.
What sense does testing children make? A group of children are exposed to some information and then tested to see if they have got it. This presupposes that the teaching is so effective it is possible for all the children to get the information. What’s the old adage? If the student performs well that’s due to the excellence of the teacher. If the student performs badly that’s due to the stupidity of the student.
Then there’s the concept of Multiple Intelligences. If this is valid then the concept of a single test for anything is absurd. For any given piece of information one would have to teach it in a multiple of ways and then have an equal number of tests.
But, I guess I’m missing the point. The real purpose of tests, like so much of school is to teach conformity. The purpose of a test is to teach that there are people in authority and they have the right to make people take tests. Not very useful, except for the people in authority.
So, let’s turn to something useful, and that is the idea of assessment. Targets and goals can help people to improve their skills. Knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses can help one to choose where to put effort, and also help one to assess how much more effort is required to achieve a particular objective.
With these thoughts in mind I often do one-minute challenges with elementary children learning English. I have created various worksheets, examples of which can be accessed from here. I never require children to use these sheets but rather offer them a choice to do some if they wish.
The important point for me is that each sheet has a place for a student to record a target. In other words students predict their own score before taking the challenge. Accordingly students are not measuring their performance against each other or against an external target, but rather against their own individual judgement of their ability. So even a score of 5% can be considered a success if it matches a student’s honest assessment.
It is important to point out that the challenges I make are self-referencing. By this I mean no claim for competence external to the challenge can be made. For example, I don’t think that being able to write out the alphabet in a minute will make children better readers and writers of English. But if improving one’s score is enjoyable children may end up doing more English which will probably help their English improve.
When I was at school in Britain there was an abomination known as the 11 plus. This examination determined whether children should be sent to the academic environment of the grammar school or to secondary schools where the emphasis was on learning vocational skills. I passed the exam and went to a grammar school. My brother failed. He was sent to a secondary school. Both schools were on a hill. The grammar school was at the top while the secondary school stood in its shadow. We could look out from the playground through a wire fence and see the other school below. Sometimes the boys would taunt each other and once or twice missiles were thrown. Fortunately my brother got into music. He became a drummer in a Boys Brigade band. He was able to transfer to a school that did music. His experience proved that escape was not impossible. But it was only by escaping that he had any real chance to pursue further education.
So by all means have some way of assessing whether individuals are competent to work on people’s teeth or drive cars upon the road. By all means make these assessments into tests but keep those tests well away from children. Keep that habit under control. Just say no.

Chris (Hunt) works with his wife in a trailer home. The school can be seen here.His website is available at www.wisehat.com

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Chuck Sandy

Making Things Better

(This is a piece I wrote a few years back and as anyone who knows me well knows, I can still be somewhat of an educational rabble-rouser, though on balance I've become much better at system-wobbling. Since this piece was written, I've also wisely and finally learned that if I want others to change, I have to change as well. I am -- constantly. )

Rabble-rousing vs. System-Wobbling -- Or How I Learned The Difference

My first act of revolution in an educational setting took place when I was a six-year-old kindergarten student and quite consciously decided not to follow the teacher’s instructions. We’d been given a worksheet about barnyard animals and explicit directions to color the barn red, the donkey grey, and the chicken white. I was fine with the grey donkey, but the rest of it made no sense to me. I grew up in a house with a black barn across the street and had, as a pet, a chocolate brown chicken. What choice did I have? I colored the chicken brown and the barn black, and this simple act of rebellion cost me only a recess, which seemed a fine price to pay for autonomy and realism.
By the time I got to second-grade, I’d had it with having to sit in assigned seats in the cafeteria. Given the heady political times, it seemed only right to organize a petition and get as many people as I could to sign it. “No more assigned seats!” we all chanted as I handed the petition to our teacher. The result was freedom of seating choice, which seemed a fine reward for my agitation and activism.

My aim, as Clarke writes, is to “create disturbances and force wobbles in the system,” without, as Friere warns, “losing the battle for change by causing the alienation or demoralization of anyone involved.”

However, almost getting kicked out of the 4th grade for organizing my classmates in a rousing playground rendition of Country Joe and the Fish’s infamous Woodstock “fish cheer” was, I thought, much too high a price to pay -- especially for something so silly. Slowly, I began to learn the difference between being an agitator, and a rabble-rouser. I say slowly, for in fact, it’s something I’m still trying to keep clear in my mind.
As I’ve been going through a process of personal revolution and re-invention myself these past months, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about all this– which led me to read both Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of Freedom” and Mark A. Clarke’s “A Place to Stand.”

My thoughts, this change, and these books have encouraged me this year to resolve to become more of an agitator and less of a rabble-rouser. My aim, as Clarke writes, is to “create disturbances and force wobbles in the system,” without, as Friere warns, “losing the battle for change by causing the alienation or demoralization of anyone involved.”
Wobbling the system and creating disturbances is a positive act, meant to stir things up in an effort to create conditions that encourage change in the direction we hope for. As Clarke points out, we cannot force anyone to change, but as teachers we can “manipulate variables in the learning environment and to observe the consequences of these manipulations.” These manipulations of variables are wobbles, “actions which upset the habitual functioning of the system,” and they range from simple acts -- like reordering the sequence of class events or rearranging the chairs and tables in the room -- to more complex acts -- like beginning each class with a personal anecdote simply because it’s nice to do so or having students evaluate themselves and each other instead of relying solely on teacher feedback.
It’s not possible to fully understand what the results of these wobbles will be until the wobbling has been done, but one can hypothesize. Putting the chairs and tables in a circle might help increase group solidarity. Beginning each class with a personal anecdote might encourage students to see the teacher as a person and fellow learner rather than as an authority figure. It’s likely that having students evaluate themselves and their classmates might encourage both group solidarity and learner autonomy. It’s these sorts of hypotheses which make wobbling different from rabble-rousing. The difference also lies in the knowledge than any wobble can be undone, should the effects turn out unhappily and before anyone becomes alienated or demoralized.
As a new teacher, I had a hard time admitting that I was wrong, and so was often more of a rabble-rouser than a wobbler. Loaded up with knowledge fresh from graduate school, I forced the Communicative approach, for example, on students and more or less made everyone color their chickens white and their barns red. Later, I did the same thing as a teacher-trainer, and still later as a program administrator. Do this and not that, I said. See things my way, my actions demonstrated. This is the way it’s going to be, my classroom procedures dictated. This sort of stance, of course, is rabble-rousing at its worst, and any intended good is destroyed by such a posture. It took a long time for me to realize this and to understand that admitting my hypotheses and subsequent actions or manipulations were wrong is an act that encourages trust. Now, I’m learning to stand in front of a class (or group of teachers) and say with a laugh, “well that didn’t work out like I thought it would. Let’s try this instead” and noticing that my students (or colleagues) are more likely to come along with me as I wobble than when I rabble-rouse. Can you imagine the price I paid to learn that?
Still, wobbling and creating disturbances is not enough. I’m also learning both as a teacher and as a person that it’s necessary for me to arrive at a definition of where I stand. When Freire writes, “I cannot be a teacher and be in favor of everyone and everything. I cannot be in favor merely of people, humanity, and vague phrases far from the concrete nature of educative practice,” I realize that I must make clear to students, colleagues, and friends what it is that I do believe and how I feel about issues that are important to me. I realize it’s not enough to simply be a humanist. I must choose which issues to focus on and become a person who lives and teaches as he believes.
The central belief I’ve arrived at and am choosing to focus on now is that all people are not only capable of learning but are also hungry for it. I’m not talking here about being hungry for knowledge, but rather hungry for the sort of learning that comes about when people are taken seriously and are shown that their ideas -- and by extension their lives -- have value. Therefore, my other resolution is to become someone who does much more than teach skills and transfer knowledge. My aim, as Friere writes, is “not to transfer knowledge, but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge” by spending more time working on group-solidarity and by being someone more open to listening carefully to what my students (and colleagues and friends) have to say – while also demonstrating and explaining what I believe to be true.
Still, I’m also beginning to understand that it’s not enough to simply be an understanding person who creates a non-threatening environment for learning. I now think that Freire is right when he says, “the class (should be) a challenge and not simply a nest where people gather.” I hope that by wobbling rather than rabble-rousing, by taking a stand instead of waffling, by listening carefully while also trying my best to explain my own thought-processes, and by acting as I believe both in and out of class I can create, as Friere encourages, “an environment of challenge (where) the students become tired but they do not go to sleep.”
I’d pay a very high price for that.

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Visit Chuck (and Curtis) on their Facebook page

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Dorothy Zemach

Telling Tales

(A version of this article appeared in TESOL’s former magazine Essential Teacher in Fall 2004.)
The other day I went with Kiyo, my Japanese graduate assistant, to buy a cup of coffee from a snack bar on the University of Oregon campus.
“Do you want room?” asked the student behind the counter.
(This means, in Oregon coffee-speech, “room for cream,” a little space left in the cup to add cream, milk, sugar, etc.)
“Yes, thank you,” said Kiyo. She stepped aside, and I ordered my coffee.
“Do you want room?”
“No, that’s OK,” I answered.
I noticed Kiyo taking her cup right past the condiment table. “The cream is over there,” I pointed out helpfully.
“Oh, I don’t want any cream,” she said. “I like my coffee black.”
“But … you told the girl that you did want cream,” I said.
“Well, she offered me something, and I felt it would sound rude to say no. She won’t know if I put in any cream or not, so it doesn’t matter.”
I digested this remark as I walked over to the table to get some cream for my own coffee. This time Kiyo was surprised. “But you said you didn’t want cream.”
“No,” I corrected her, “I said I didn’t want room for cream. That way I get more coffee. I take a little sip first, and then add the cream.”
* * * * *
At this point I stop telling the story and ask the students to guess what Kiyo and I might have been thinking about each other. Sometimes I have them guess in groups, or sometimes we have a whole-class discussion, but inevitably the class comes up with (in different words; and I deliberately encourage blunt wordings so that the insights don’t get lost in vague generalities) the following guesses:
Dorothy, thinking about Kiyo: “What a doormat. She’s paying for the coffee, so why can’t she say what she wants? If she can’t tell someone how she wants her coffee, how will she negotiate choices about her studies, career, and family?”
Kiyo, thinking about Dorothy: “How cheap can you get? If she wants more coffee, why doesn’t she buy a larger size? Will such a selfish person be able to have successful friendships?”
The next step is to tease out the underlying cultural assumptions. This takes more time, of course, but by the end of an intensive discussion the class can arrive at some simple yet profound generalizations, such as “In Japan, everyone looks out for others, and so everyone is taken care of. In the United States, everyone looks out for himself or herself, so everyone is taken care of.” Although we also discuss the dangers of generalizations, coming up with some helps students see that similar desires and motivations can manifest themselves in almost opposite ways.
However, what’s important for me as a teacher is not just the conclusions, which after all I could write on the board or have the students read from a textbook. The important part is the story itself, the path to the conclusion. Stories are fascinating, and students will puzzle out the motivations of characters with far more interest than they will read a two-sentence summary at the end of a chapter. Discussion with classmates sharpens critical-thinking skills while showing how many interpretations different people can have of the same events. Stories in books are good, but far more popular are stories that I tell, especially if they involve me (and especially if I don’t come out looking too good!).
Another benefit of storytelling surfaced for me last fall, when I noticed that some of the students were disappearing after the midclass break. Attendance wasn’t required as long as they learned the material in some way, so perhaps I shouldn’t have cared. But there’s something damaging to the ego about students who’ve dipped their toes in the water but don’t want to swim. So I took to telling stories. I told half of a story just before the break and the conclusion just after. I broke off at an interesting or confusing part of the story and asked the students to guess what would happen or what would have explained someone’s behavior. Then after the break, they shared their guesses, and I finished the story. It worked like a charm--everyone came back after the break, ready to talk.

Telling stories draws students in. They pay attention, think deeply, draw conclusions. And good stories are “telling”: They reveal insights, quirks, points of view, even truths.

Telling stories draws students in. They pay attention, think deeply, draw conclusions. And good stories are “telling”: They reveal insights, quirks, points of view, even truths. Stories are just as appropriate for skills classes as they are for content classes. Embed your stories with the target vocabulary and grammar, and students will happily drill themselves as they listen, ask questions, and discuss.
Not everyone has a collection of great stories, of course, or stories relevant to the class. My solution to this is simple: Make them up. Even true stories may need a little, ahem, adjustment to bring out the salient points. For example, in the opening story, just about the only truth in it is that I like coffee. I never had a graduate student named Kiyo, I don’t drink coffee with my students, and I prefer my coffee black. The story, though, never fails to generate a discussion. Sometimes I confess that it’s not real, especially if I want to guide the discussion towards stereotypes and changing cultural norms; but I don’t always. If you can’t bring yourself to, well, lie, you can always say, “I read somewhere about a man who ...” or “I heard of someone who once ....” I keep a file in my desk of good stories that I can retell or adapt: clippings from newspapers and magazines, excerpts photocopied from books, and anecdotes circulated through email.
If you have not used stories before, I encourage you to try. Begin your class with “A funny thing happened on the way to class today” or “My cousin once had a strange experience while traveling.” May you enjoy telling tales, and may all your tales be telling ones.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Peter Viney

What are ways to introduce pronunciation exercises in lessons?

Teachers find it hard to integrate pronunciation into class. Reviewers complain that many books lack a consistent pronunciation syllabus. Pronunciation is a problematic area for many teachers, and when I was teaching for the RSA exams, phonology was the least popular topic. The committed have classrooms covered with phonetic charts, other teachers treat the problems as they appear. In global coursebooks, it’s difficult to establish a consistent approach to pronunciation. While Japanese students might benefit from work on “l” and “r”, Latin Americans would wonder what the problem was. Germans have awful problems with “v” and “w”. Most nationalities don’t. For Arabs it’s “b” and “p”.
Varieties of English are another major difficulty. Too much effort is often paid to accurately repeating some supposed “norm” for pronouncing individual sounds. On vowel sounds the teacher model shifts dramatically, both depending on country of origin, and with native speakers, on region. I once saw a brilliant demo lesson on basic vowel sounds, observed by twenty or so teachers. As soon as the discussion started, the vowel sounds from Canadian, Irish, Scottish and Southern and Northern English teachers varied enormously. The intonation patterns of Welsh, Australian and Norfolk speakers failed to match the text at all. When we were working on “The Wrong Trousers” ELT adaptation, we planned a series of stress exercises. But Wallace has a Northern English accent and in a word like Birthday, he puts equal stress on “birth” and “day” (where RP British English would stress “birth”).
The textbook should expose students AND teachers to a whole variety of exercise types. Then the teacher has to decide which type to develop with their class. See which ones are beneficial, which are popular. There are times where pronunciation work naturally occurssuch as on the endings of regular verbs in the past, or plural forms. The English as a Lingua Franca movement would point out that we should be delighted that students get any ending on the past, be it /t/, /d/ or /id/. In doing recordings, I’ve found both teachers and professional actors confused as to which are /t/ and which are /d/. It’s subtle.
Start by focussing on how pronunciation affects communication. I used to spend a lot of time in the first or second lesson teaching ways of saying ‘Yes.’ It can be a question (Yes? = What can I do for you?), it can be a cheerful affirmative, it can show doubt (Yes ……… = maybe). It can even mean “no”. e.g.

A: Do you like my new hairstyle?
B: Yes …

It can mean (as it often does in Japan) “I hear you” which is confirming attentive listening, rather than affirming or agreeing. In fact research on business meetings indicate that the most common word for introducing a negative response is “yes”:
A: So I think we can double production …
B: Yes. But …
Then at least people get sensitized to the fact that intonation affects meaning. And you can go from there. How far you go is another question. For example, Japanese students can benefit by physical tongue exercises in front of a mirror. Actually physically moving the tongue daily helps with those English sounds, but it’s best taught on a one-to-one basis.
I have seen more student confusion and embarrassment caused by over-attention to pronunciation than I have by anything else.
A word of warning. I have seen more student confusion and embarrassment caused by over-attention to pronunciation than I have by anything else. There are those who believe that students must perfect the sounds before progressing and those who believe students will slowly and gradually improve. I believe that a musical ear is the greatest factor in how well students pronounce English. In my travels I have met non-native teachers with impeccable grammar, wide vocabulary and extremely strong foreign accents. I have also met people who speak only a few words of English, but have a great accent. I think “musical ear” is the key. You can’t actually teach this. You can improve sensitivity. You can try to eliminate confusion.
An anecdotal example. I lost a filling in a tooth at Barcelona airport on the way to a seminar. There was a pharmacy, and I asked for a temporary filling material. The assistant said, “Sure, no problem” with a confident voice (and slight American accent). Before applying it to my throbbing tooth, I sat down to test my Spanish guess rate on the instruction leaflet. It said that it was extremely dangerous to get it on your hands or skin, and to seek medical attention if you did. This can’t be the right stuff to put in my teeth, I thought. So I went back to check. I then discovered that the assistant spoke about fifty words of English (if that), but had a great accent. She’d sold me some kind of superglue for repairing broken dentures. First, she must have had a great musical ear for language. Second, whoever taught her to pronounce that well did no one a service! It masked her inabilities in English. If she had had a strong Catalan accent, I would have assumed the possibility of crossed wires in communication!

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com

Peter’s forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education. It is not yet up on their website at the time of writing (August 2009), but it may be by the time you read this.]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Chuck Sandy

Dorothy Zemach

Peter Viney

What are some things you do when you teach reading?

2009-05-09T01:20:44Z

Marc Helgesen

Questioning Comprehension Questions

Not so long ago, I’m sure I would have used my whole space to sing the praises of extensive reading. So many English learners had only experienced reading as tedious grammar and test preparation. They hadn’t experienced the pleasure of reading English for enjoyment. Traditional reading classes practice only work on accuracy. Students need a balance. Extensive reading provides the fluency work they need. But, compared with just a few years ago, extensive reading is exploding. There is a huge amount of interest.

The Extensive Reading (ER) pages will provide you with resources for setting up a program. You can join the ER discussion group on Yahoo.com to be part of the conversation (it’s a great source of advice for people just starting out with ER.). The Extensive Reading Foundation gives out the annual Language Learner Literature Awards, recognizing the best new graded readers. In JALT, the Extensive Reading SIG is very popular. You can download copies of the their journal. In the most recent one I write about different types of oral and written student book reports. There is a huge amount of enthusiasm about and awareness of Extensive Reading. I hope you will become part of that.

Since so many people are already doing ER, I’ll turn my attention to an issue that affects most of us as teachers but is rarely talked about. I think we need to be…

questioning comprehension questions.

In most textbooks, reading tasks are limited to answering a few questions that come after the reading. And those questions often don’t actually teach or test comprehension.

Try this. Read the sentence in the box. Then answer the questions under it.

The glorfs drebbled quarfly.

Q1. (grammar analysis)
a. Which word is the subject?
b. Which is the verb?
c. What part of speech is quarfly?
Q2. What did the glorfs do?
Q3. How did they do it?

(Scroll down to the bottom of my article to check your answers.)

Most teachers (and students) can get all the answers correct. Think about it. You answered all the questions right, a perfect score, about a sentence of nonsense words -- a sentence with no meaning. The problem, of course, is the nature of literal comprehension questions. Often, they can be answered without thinking; without even understanding the meaning.

There's a hierarchy of levels of comprehension questions. Unfortunately, literal comprehension questions, the most common type, tell us the least. If students get them right, we don't know if they really understood or just matched the words. If they get a question wrong, did they misunderstand the text or misunderstand the question? We can’t know. Since the questions come at the end, maybe they didn't know what they were supposed to find out. Or maybe they understood it but didn't think it was important so forgot by the time they got to the question.

Barrett's taxonomy of reading comprehension

5. Appreciation
(Highest) Students give an emotional/affective response.

4. Evaluation
Students make judgments in light of the material.

3. Inference
Students respond to information implied but not directly stated.

2.Reorganization
Students organize or order the information a different way than it was presented.

1. Literal
(Lowest) Students identify information directly stated.

Does this mean "literal comprehension" is unimportant? Of course not. It's basic, both as a low-level test of understanding and because this is the most common type of question in texts and tests (whether we like those tests or not, they are a key to our students' future and we have to prepare them).

But let's look at some ways to actually check comprehension, at the various levels:

Literal These are the basic questions, and for all their limitations, these questions are important. They're the kind learners meet most often. At minimum, teach the students to read the questions before they read the passage. This is important since it increases reading speed and is an important test taking skill.

One good way to focus on literal meaning is to do a scanning quiz. Make copies of the questions and answers from the Teacher's Manual. Have learners work in groups of 4-6. They open their books to the reading (or, in the case of the junior or senior high textbooks which have readings that go on for several pages, the first page of the unit). They turn the book face down on the desk. Ask the first question twice (you want to make sure everyone understands the question). When you say, "Go!", students look at the text and scan for the correct answer. The first student to find it shows everyone where it is. S/he gets one point. Once learners understand the activity, have them do it in groups. One learner, the "quizmaster", gets the question/answer sheet. S/he asks and other students try to find the answers.

Reorganization Do a "jig-saw" reading. Before class, take the reading and cut the paragraphs apart. Put them on the copy machine in the wrong order. It helps to put a box next to each paragraph for learners to write the numbers. It is also easier if you tell them which paragraph is first. Learners read and try to put the paragraphs in order. The ability to find the order shows the students and you that they've not only understood the words, they also understand the organization and relationships between ideas.

Inference Much of reading is really "reading between the lines." Learners need to understand [what] the ideas behind the information in the text. Look for inference opportunities in the text. How does a given character feel about something? How do you know? Has that character ever been here or done this? How do you know. One good way to help them infer is to have the read part of the story. Stop them at a critical point and, in pairs have them predict what will happen next. This helps students make the jump to inferencing.

Evaluation This label sounds more difficult than it is. It just means deciding fact/opinion, same/different, etc. Later, if you want, it can include higher level decisions like agree/disagree or good/bad. Students make some kind of decision. At an elementary level, it can be as simple as asking the learner, “What character is the most like you? Why?” At a somewhat more sophisticated level – this is a technique I use with my university students doing extensive reading – have them find elements in the story that do or don’t parallel their own lives. They have to explain why. Some students do this at a deeper level than others. I recall one learner who said Gulliver’s Travels was not like her life since she had never been around little people (What about kindergarten?). On the other hand, a student who read a biography of Princess Diana turned in a report that started, “Her life had tragedy. And so does mine. Last year my father died.” Heavy stuff. It was clear she was processing the meaning at a deep level.

Appreciation This is my favorite, not because it's the most sophisticated (though it is). I love it for its simplicity. After a reading, simply ask the students, "Did you like this story or not? Why?" Being able to answer is a true test of understanding. One good way to get at this is to ask each learner to draw a picture of one scene from the story. Since our students are usually skilled at drawing, they take forever getting their pictures perfect, and it is helpful to forbid erasers and limit them to five minutes. This is English, not art class. With their pictures they turn to the person next to them and explain the pictures. I let them choose which language they want to explain it in. They have read it in English. That’s the understanding I’m checking. They end with the sentence. "I Iiked/ didn't like the story because..."

One other thing about comprehension questions: As they say in the restaurant business, “Location, location, location.” Most comprehension questions are in the wrong place. The questions are generally after the reading. That is sort of like saying, “Read this story. OK, now that you are finished, let me tell you why you read it.” If the learners’ task is to answer questions, they should know the questions before they read the piece. It helps their understanding. And that’s what we are trying to accomplish.

Portions of this are from a piece previously published in Longman Teacher Link. I learned about Barrett’s reading taxonomy from Jack Richards. The taxonomy is also cited in Reading in a Foreign Language by Alderson & Urquhart (Longman)

Answers: 1a. glorfs, 1b. drebbled, 1c. adverb, 2. They drebbled. 3. Quarfly

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents. Marc also maintains the ELT and the Science of Happiness website to distribute ELT/Positive Psychology downloads and a website for various presentation handouts.

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Curtis Kelly

What are some techniques for teaching reading?
Are my Japanese colleagues doing it wrong?

Hard question. I don’t know much more about reading instruction than the next person. I’ve read the arguments for and against Krashen’s input theory, I’ve heard a number of talks on the glories of extensive reading, and I even took a TESOL Summer Institute class on that topic, taught by the wonderful Richard Day. Still, my comments are pretty much from the pew rather than the pulpit.

I suspect, though, my concerns are pretty much the same as yours. In particular, I have strong doubts about the way my Japanese colleagues teach reading, especially those who majored in Literature. I wonder what “approach” they are following by giving low-level learners classical literary works to read in the raw, i.e, read the original texts. Incomprehensible input? It doesn’t help that they tend to specialize in authors who died at least a hundred years ago.

I wonder what “approach” they are following by giving low-level learners classical literary works to read in the raw, i.e, read the original texts. Incomprehensible input?

Then, one morning, I was lying in bed half awake, when a hypnogogic reverie came to me. I’ll try to pass it on as accurately as possible: I was in a murky, candlelit room addressing an assortment of writers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. I have assembled you here today, the greatest English authors in history, so that I can tell you about the wonderful ways we have developed since your day for teaching reading. Although a few diehards still use your texts in the original form, we have come up with something better, called “graded readers.” Here, take a look at this version of Romeo and Juliet. It was rewritten with only 400 headwords. I think you’ll like it…”

(one hour later)

“So, that’s it. Pretty creative, don’t you think? And language acquisition research shows that this approach works.” (Uncomfortable silence)

“Well, I guess you agree. Any questions? William? Emily? J Scott?”

“If I may, sir?”

“Mr. Dickens.”

“Indeed, sir, to strain the words to a mere 400 sieves the stew into gruel. What fat can any urchin put on from such a weak diet?”

“Yes, but limiting the vocabulary lets them read fast, and they can enjoy it more. Um, you sir, with the frilly collar, is there something you’d like to say?”

“Methinks this helpless smoke of words doth me no right. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
“Ah, yes…?”

“I’m Tom Robbins. Allow me. What Mr. Shakespeare is trying to tell you is that you can’t take his rich phrasing and replace it with simplistic interpretations of your own. What makes reading worth it is interpreting the text in your own way. I agree. I hate the way you cut the imagery out of those graded readers. Graded, and paved. To get to the real essence of any knowing, you have to use words to describe a thing in multiple ways. The way we play with words is the Tom Turkey of writing, the bakery waft, the lie detector beep, the unexpected tax refund, your bag first on the chute, seeing Mt. Hood in December, a…”

“Okay, okay, I got it. We tend to change amorphous, complex meanings into stereotypical fixed ones by simplifying your work, but hey, we keep your great stories the same.

“May I speak?”

“Yes, Ms Woolf.”

“By what madness say you that these reduced works are still borne of our hands. They are mere skeletons of plots. Cast off insect shells. You turn treatise into cartoon. This is neither literature nor art.”

“Ah, well, we make the stories simple so that lower level readers can understand you.”

“A leather breech is no longer the bull.”

“But science says comprehensible input is what makes good reading.”

“Void of passion…”

And so on, until sometime later I woke up in a sweat. I’ve had a few days to think about that restless morning and maybe I know what it meant. We read because we love the twisty, frothy stories, the crusty lode of words, and especially, the room to interpret and discover.

Maybe I was wrong in what I said about my Japanese colleagues. Maybe there is something so special about ingesting great writing in the original that it is worth plodding through it one page per class, because even a small bite leaves a great aftertaste. Maybe our fixation raising reading speeds and language proficiency makes us miss other aspects of great writing, such as how beautiful a single sentence can be.

I am not about to give up my belief in graded language and extensive reading, but I must admit, after all, that it is just a belief. Granted, this view is supported by “research,” so to speak, but research conducted by other priests of our particular religion, whose holy scripts call for proficiency and acquisition rather than personal growth. None of these researchers has ever tried to measure the depth of internal change or passion aroused by reading a great book in the original. Then too, it helps to remember that these same Japanese colleagues that teach reading in what I think is an arcane, “wrong” way, were once themselves stumbling English students. At some point along the way, reading these great works transformed them in a big way, enough to cause them to devote their lives to causing this transformation in others. I was wrong to assume their way is wrong and ours is right. We are just pursuing different goals.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series. Visit Curtis (and Chuck) on their Facebook page

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Chris Hunt

Teaching Reading

hug a dog
hug a cat
hug a hen
an egg!
get it! get it!
get it! get it!
got it!

This is the complete text for an unfinished picture book. I’ll leave you to imagine what the illustrations should be like. I guess the finished book would be called a reader. But aren’t all books readers, unless they are incredibly dull? I always wonder about that term, perhaps it’s because I loathe abridged versions of books. Even as a child I wanted to read the real thing - once I could actually read.

I have schizophrenic feelings when it comes to the teaching of reading. Much of what I do with children on a daily basis is helping them to “crack the code” to reading English. But I think that learning to read is an individual process like learning to walk. More and more I’m beginning to think that I have wasted years in pursuing ways to make reading English more understandable for children when the emphasis should really be on making it enjoyable. As a child I wound up in a remedial reading class. I think I might only have been there for one lesson, but I do remember the feeling of being in the class meant I wasn’t normal. What a cruel thing to do to a child!

My memory of learning to read is very hazy. I don’t think phonics was used because I remember the trouble I first had dealing with it when I began using it to teach children. I definitely remember my teacher talking to someone, probably my mother, when I switched from primary school to junior school (was that at around the age of seven?). There was some kind of test that determined which class students were placed in. The teacher was deliberating. She was concerned because my spelling was too erratic. I could spell some long words but she was troubled because I couldn’t spell “the”. I don’t know how the decision was reached but I do know it was a fortunate one. I ended up in a class with Mr Right.

Every Friday afternoon Mr Wright (as his name is actually spelled) would read aloud to us. I think it was that, more than anything else, that helped me to really learn to read. He had a passion for books and reading and that is what he passed on. The titles of the books he read are all long gone, with the exception of, “The Silver Sword”, and of that, only the title remains. But Mr Wright gave me a reason to read. No, not a reason, it’s not intellectual, it’s all to do with joy and excitement. Through him I discovered the meaning of reading. He turned reading into an adventure.

Sense of adventure, of engagement, is critical when working with children

This sense of adventure, of engagement, is critical when working with children, and I’m beginning to think that it is all that is really required. Read a book like Diane McGuiness’s "Why Our Children Can't Read And What We Can Do About it” and one gains the impression that reading is an unnatural skill requiring specific kinds of instruction. It’s certainly true that the phonetic code of English is very complex and I agree with her observation that text is a representation of sound. But if it is as difficult as she maintains then children would be unable to teach themselves how to read and I know that some children do just that.

I think the whole reading wars debate, phonics or whole language, misses a critical point. In effect the argument is about what is best for the “average” child and no child should be treated as average. Each one should be cherished. I think that children can learn to read when they want to read, so as teachers we should be focusing on desire. Ideally, we would be able to construct classes that would accommodate the children individually as well as being part of a group.

The key to building desire, in my view, is playfulness. This is critical with young children. I’ve found that activities with plastic letters concentrating on sounds and shapes are generally attractive. For example, one activity that nearly all of them get a big kick out of is making a string of letters for me to read and saying, “Read!” Another, that comes later, is letter fishing, where they fish for letters and place them on large double-sided flashcards, covering the matching letters. After fishing we can find out what the combinations mean by sounding them out together and then turning over the cards to find the pictures. Recently, I’ve also garnered interest by using flashcards with a picture underneath the starting sound sitting in a circle at the top of the card. Children like taking cards and individually searching for letters in a big pile tipped on the floor. The letters are large enough to be covered exactly. And all the while we are playing with sounds, I am reading aloud to them as much as they will allow.

But it is with older children that I feel I need to work more on desire. As children get older they become a little more discriminatory and also, largely because of school and parental experiences, build up preconceptions that can interfere with learning.

I have all kinds of games and activities that are supposed to stimulate children into working the phonetic code out themselves. But recently, I have begun to sense that I have broken things down too far and have made reading more difficult and time consuming than it needs to be. How long should it take a Japanese seven year old to learn the basic sounds of English, associate them with letter symbols (one to one mapping) and be able to manipulate them to create and read their own three letter words? More than an afternoon? How about if the child is older? Which is more critical, age or interest?

To what extent has a massive industry grown up which actually requires it takes gobs of time and effort to learn to read? The longer it takes the more money can be made. I really think that if we teachers focus more on desire than on process we can open up the world of reading with much less effort and a lot more joy. But then I guess I’m questioning the whole Dick and Jane approach to education much of the world, and I still include myself, is stuck in. Got it?

Chris (Hunt) works with his wife in a trailer home. The school can be seen here.His website is available at www.wisehat.com

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Chuck Sandy

Here: Read This! I Think You'll Like It

If you want to start an argument among a room full of reading specialists simply ask, as innocently as possible, what reading is and how best to teach it. You will then see the room break up into several quite dogmatic camps. You’ll get groupings of the various sorts of phonics proponents, the whole language people, the adherents of comprehension strategies approaches, and probably even some leftover linguistic skills-based types. The interesting thing is that everyone believes they are right. The reading wars have been raging for years, and though we have some widely accepted conclusions based on long-term studies of best practices and programs, there’s still no single answer to how reading is learned and there may never be one. Though I spent some of my best graduate school years trying to figure that out myself, what really interests me is why some people are voracious readers while others read only the minimum they have to read to get through life.

As for me, I am a reader. My home and office are crowded with books and magazines and journals of all kinds. Whenever I go out of the house – even on a short outing – there’s always at least one novel, a magazine, a newspaper, a poetry book, and a little collection of essays in my bag. Yet, even with all this, I can’t resist bookstores and libraries and can never seem to leave either without acquiring even more reading material. And it’s not just print, is it? My laptop is loaded with articles I’ve discovered thanks to Facebook friends. Then there are the Internet journals, newspapers, and magazines I read regularly, not to mention those many sites I stumble upon and simply have to stop and read.

** Being a reader in the 21st century sometimes makes me feel like a member of an endangered species in an old growth forest.

Reading for me is not only wonderful, but also a large part of who I am, and even though being a reader in the 21st century sometimes makes me feel like a member of an endangered species in an old growth forest, I still have trouble understanding anyone, particularly students, who look me in the eye and say “I don’t like reading” or even, quite bluntly, “I don’t read”. What do they mean and why would they say such a thing? I keep asking myself this question and pose it to self-professed non-readers whenever I encounter one.

What I’ve found over the years is that very often people who claim to be non-readers usually have had some kind of painful reading experience in their past. Either someone (sadly often a teacher) has convinced them that reading is hard and painful, or they came to the conclusion at some point during their schooling that reading isn’t something they could ever be very good at. Others cite things like being forced to read some book they found boring in school as their reason for becoming non-readers later in life. I’ve heard a variety of answers, but what everyone who justifies their non-reading in such ways has in common is that reading has never been something enjoyable for them and they’ve given up.

What I’ve also found, though, is that it’s almost never too late to try to turn such people into readers. In almost every case, particularly with students, I’ve been able to get back to them with a suggestion of something for them to read: something that was at their level, suited their interests, and was enjoyable for them. If they claim they don’t like novels, I suggest non-fiction. If they don’t like books, I introduce them to some magazine or websites I’ve found that I think they’d find interesting. Sometimes it’s enough to give such non-readers a lead for them to follow up on by themselves. More often, though, what turns the page, so to speak, is me actually handing them something good to read – something that I’ve picked out just for them. What this does is to send a message that says “I was thinking of you when I saw this and thought you’d enjoy it.” When I follow that up with an invitation to drop by my office later to talk about what I’ve given them to read, it works even better.

As the wonderful recent novella The Uncommon Reader by Allan Bennett suggests, turning someone into a reader is often a matter of putting the right reading material into his or her hands at just the right time. In his story, Bennett's fictional Queen of England becomes a ravenous reader in her twilight years after falling in love with Nancy Mitford’s romantic novel Pursuit of Love. This book, perhaps because it was easily accessible and fun led Bennett's queen into a rest-of-her-life habit. But why did Bennett choose to give the queen this book as her way into reading? Bennett says in a New York Times interview that it's because Pursuit of Love was the first adult novel he had read for pleasure and that like the queen’s character, the book led him on and into more serious literature.

“There are all sorts of entrances that you can get into reading by reading what might at first seem trash,” Mr. Bennett writes.

It worked for Bennett and his imagined queen, but will everyone who gets turned on to and by a good read then go on to become a voracious reader? Often not, but at least they will have had one good experience with reading that they just might turn into more.

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**I encountered this lovely metaphor in an email from my old high school friend Lynn Feasley who wrote that sending her youngest to muck out the horse stalls at a farm in our old hometown of Eden, New York made her feel like "a member of an endangered species in an old growth forest." Thanks Lynn. Such a lovely metaphor deserves to be further shared

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Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Visit Chuck (and Curtis) on their Facebook page

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Dorothy Zemach

Teaching Reading Skills

I recently spent two weeks in Libya at Al Fatah University working with final year graduate students who will become English teachers; and who actually already are English teachers, working as Teaching Assistants in the English department. I decided to spend one lesson each on speaking, vocabulary, writing, reading, and grammar. We’d spend the first part of the lesson working on the skills themselves, I figured, and the second part of the lesson talking about how to teach that skill.

When we got to the reading lesson, I asked the prospective teachers if they thought there were such things as “reading strategies.” In my experiences with SE Asian students, I’ve noticed that often students think reading means nothing more than decoding words and then learning a ton of vocabulary. The Libyans knew a lot of the right answers—skimming, scanning, reading for main ideas, reading for details, making inferences; and they could trot definitions of these right out.

As practice, I gave them a chapter of a reading book I’ve just written, Building Academic Reading Skills (University of Michigan Press, 2009). The level of the readings themselves were below these students’ proficiency level, so I assumed they’d have no trouble applying the strategies.

Wrong. Each reading (two per chapter) in the book begins (after some warm-up questions for the topic) with a Predict, a Skim, and a Scan exercise. But, as soon as they started with the first Predict question, which directed them to look at the title, they started reading intensively. I stopped them, and in a few cases had to ask them to turn their papers over. The skimming and scanning were even harder. I watched one student, who had in fact provided me with the very correct definitions of skimming and scanning when I’d asked, actually pick up his pen and start moving it along under each word, underlining some, circling others. “Ahmed,” I said (not his real name), “you’re reading every word, aren’t you?” He looked stricken. “Yes, but I can’t help it! I just must read everything!”

We stopped the class and talked about what was happening. I recognize that I was extraordinarily fortunate to have students whose listening and speaking levels, as well as their reflective abilities, were high enough that they could talk about what was going on in their heads. Ahmed, as it turned out, was a literature aficionado; and normally one doesn’t skim or scan a novel or short story. However, these students were also struggling with the reading section of the TOEFL and with their own academic reading for their graduate school courses. We had a nice discussion about different types of reading approaches for different types of texts, and since every student in the class admitted to having difficulty getting through the amount of reading they had, understanding the texts, and remembering what they read, they promised to at least try the strategies I was proposing.

On to the next text. This time, they got through the Predict, Skim, and Scan exercises without reading intensively (though I admit to standing behind Ahmed and whacking him on the shoulders with a bat whenever I thought he was succumbing) (that is, a rubber toy model of the animal, not a piece of sports equipment; our readings were both on bats). Now came the moment I both anticipate and dread as a teacher—when I’ve recommended something that I’m 85% sure will work for the students, but can’t in my heart quite guarantee. But, oh, happy day! Yes, after students read intensively and did the exercises, they all said that they had found that the intensive reading went faster and that the exercises were easy to do (and yes, I knew from previous classes that if they had not found a strategy useful, they would have happily said so). Ahmed in fact stopped by my office later and asked for more short texts to practice these strategies on.

Pre-reading strategies are a bit like the first two steps of process writing (brainstorming and organizing), I find—most students see them as steps that take more time; and yet, applied correctly, they actually make the process more efficient. A good reader saves time not just by being able to move through the text more quickly but by being able to understand it and remember it better.

As teachers we need to explain the purpose of reading strategies and not just teach how to apply them. These explanations need to be repeated, re-affirmed, and re-proven.

My take-away from this experience is that as teachers we need to explain the purpose of reading strategies and not just teach how to apply them; and that further, these explanations need to be repeated, re-affirmed, and re-proven. In addition, students need opportunities to practice the strategies over and over again. It’s not enough to skim in Chapter 2, scan in Chapter 3, and find some details in Chapter 4. As I work on Book 2 in the Building Academic Reading Skills series, then, I’m making sure that I have students apply the strategies over and over and over again, and that I provide frequent short explanations of the intention and value of these strategies.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Peter Viney

Teaching Reading

That’s the title I was given, and I’m going to surprise everyone and discuss the teaching of READING: not extensive reading, not developing reading skills, not reading comprehension, not strategies to encourage reading but actually teaching people how to read. It’s the area I’ve returned to the last year or two, and it doesn’t have too much relevance to the Japanese situation, but what I’m talking about is learning the Roman alphabet and how to assemble the bits of it phonically to form words.

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a book called Basic English Reading Programme, and no one involved realized that the acronym read BERP, until too late. It was designed for teaching reading to adult speakers of languages which did not use the Roman alphabet. Most of the target audience would be literate in another phonetic script, even if that script travelled in a different direction to English’s left to right along a horizontal line. (An aside, we accept now that for learning and computer programs the British use the ‘program’ spelling, while for TV and radio broadcasts they use the ‘programme’ spelling. Twenty-five years ago the ‘programme’ spelling was used for both, hence the full title of BERP.)

BERP went out of print in the eighties, and I thought no more about it for years. Then I noticed that BERP kept cropping up on my statements for photocopying royalties from UK colleges and schools. Yes, British authors enjoy royalties on photocopying as long as it’s done in Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Australia, or Canada. This is a good thing! Whenever I went into the local ELT bookshop they asked why I didn’t republish it. Next a school asked if I had any copies left as they had photocopied theirs so often that it, and their group set, had fallen to pieces. Karen (my wife and co-writer) and I did several talks in Britain on teaching beginners after our IN English: series was launched, and we always finished with a question and answer session. Every single time teachers asked us how to deal with the students who couldn’t cope with reading in English fast enough. Even if their spoken ability matched their classmates, they stumbled through any pair work which had written cues. Every single time, we talked at length about how to teach reading effectively. At a talk in Manchester, a teacher asked why I didn’t do a new book on the topic. The students had changed over 25 years. When I wrote the original BERP, the students with English reading problems came from North Africa and the Middle East. Now they also come from China, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. My youngest son was studying martial arts in China and agreed to trade English lessons for martial arts lessons with his coaches. I sent him copies of IN English: and he telephoned to point out that his students could not read the Roman alphabet, which rendered the books less effective than they might have been. I started e-mailing him updates of the old BERP program, lesson by lesson. I thought of many ways of improving the concept, and finally I determined to start again from scratch.

The secret to reading English at speed is very simple. Adults who are literate in any linear phonetic language, don’t need to learn the concept of reading, they need to learn how to crack a code, how to interpret different symbols to form words. Adults who are not literate in a linear phonetic language (but literate in a pictographic language), or those who are altogether unable to read in any language, equally need strategies to find their way through the phonetic code.

Working with adults, you cannot use the techniques which are commonly used for teaching children

You cannot use the techniques which are commonly used for teaching children. A native-speaker child already knows the meanings of the words pen, pan, ten, tan, tat, tap, pat and associates them with pictures and words. A non-native adult does not know the meanings. In fact, phonics programs advocate the use of non-words or infrequent words (i.e. meaningless words) with kids to test concepts: nen, tet, pep, pap, nat.

Any attempt to teach initial reading, i.e. interpretation of symbols to form sounds, together with the meaning of all these words, some of which are not immediately useful or frequent, founders under sheer information overload. Initial reading instruction has to teach words initially as sound combinations without teaching meaning. This is effective for students right up to intermediate level, as the more difficult topics presented in a programmed way (pan / pane, dot / dote, bit / bite, fun / flute, or consonant clusters as in straight, scrape, or split) will enable them to read faster.

In teaching children in the UK, the letters always have the lower case name, never the capital letter name. In the USA, the capital letter name is often introduced initially. I bought my grandkids an American reading game for the Mac and it is useless because it says ‘find the “ay” or find the “oh” while the kids have been taught “a” as in pat and “o” as in not. In the new reading program we are putting together now we use the British system. When I wrote BERP, we didn’t show students capitals until they could manipulate lower case at speed. Nowadays, we can’t do that because the capital symbols, on the keyboard, are the letters they will see most frequently. We still use lower case names, or rather phonics, for both forms of the letters, but each unit marker is composed of pictures of appropriate computer keys.

Nowadays, again, there is less emphasis on writing, i.e. letter formation, because we assume someone with poor writing skills will prefer to key in texts. A further change is the introduction of a global reading element from the outset. Key words have to be read like pictograms rather than phonetically, especially as so many seem irregular. They’re not exactly “irregular” either, because the problem in English is not, as some experts have claimed, the lack of rules, but rather the large number of minor rules. I also introduce many photos of signs and other realia to make it look adult and appealing. A constant problem students have is in recognizing letters in different fonts. Think about the number of “g” shapes and “a” shapes, both lower case and capital and printed and handwritten. There are also exercises on word recognition in a variety of fonts and styles.

Working on this new reading program, Fast Track to Reading, has been a salutary experience. People desperately need to acquire a reasonable reading speed before they can learn English using any modern textbook series. This may be of little or no interest to teachers in Japan unless you’re thinking of moving and teaching in rural China, the UK, Africa, Central Asia or the Middle East. Still, even in Japan you might have some adults who struggle with romanji who could use the self-study element, but in the end, the purpose of this article is to cast just a glimmer of doubt on the overpowering concept that reading consists of only MEANING and to question whether it’s always the be all and end all.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com

Peter’s forthcoming book is Fast Track to Reading published by Garnet Education. It is not yet up on their website at the time of writing (April 2009), but it may be by the time you read this.]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Chuck Sandy

Dorothy Zemach

Peter Viney

What are some ways to start a class off right?

2009-04-04T21:54:42Z

Peter VIney

What are some ways to start a class off right?

There were two tips I gave to new teachers about the first lesson: learn the students’ names and get them moving about.

The first lesson is unpredictable, and it varies according to situation, one factor is the length of the lesson, another is how long the students are going to be studying on the course.

Most people consider a lesson unit to be 45 to 60 minutes, with 90 minutes to 120 minutes considered a double-lesson. Double lessons are common in evening classes and are becoming almost standard in many secondary schools in Europe. Teachers point out that it takes ten minutes, at least, for most students to switch into English mode, and this makes the 45 minute lesson uneconomic. I consider first lesson strategies to be for no more than for the first 45 to 60 minutes. In a double lesson, I would expect to be teaching something in the second half.

If you have just ten evening classes, or as I often did, nine day intensive courses, you don’t hang around too much over the first lesson. You break the ice and get started.

Names

Learning students’ names is essential, though lapses can be forgiven once class size passes thirty. In groups of forty or fifty, the students don’t expect you to know their names. Learning names takes work, and I’d sit down with the register and read them all carefully before the lesson, then concentrate really hard as I called the first register and said a few words to each student, making sure I used the name. Kenji? Ah, hello, Kenji. What’s your job, Kenji? How did you come here today, Kenji?

In the first lesson I would always have a circulating, smiling, shaking hands and introduction phase, even with zero beginners.

I’ve had mainly multi-lingual classes where names are a lot easier to remember, but at the same time I taught monolingual groups on specialized courses (Kuwaiti nurses, Japanese golfers, Venezuelan oil workers, Chinese translators, Algerian air traffic controllers) and most of these were single sex, which makes them doubly hard.

Many teachers have students make name cards for the first few lessons, but I prided myself on remembering. Teachers would protest that it was hard, but I was the head of department, and instead of seeing five classes a week, I saw all ten or twelve in my department and knew all of their names. That was thirty years ago, I hasten to add. I also banned teachers from writing helpful notes on the register card, which was common practice before I was head of department. However politely they are phrased, physical descriptions are going to be offensive if anyone accidentally sees them. One teacher used to write things like ‘fat, spotty, glasses’ in pencil.

I picked up one other tip watching a colleague who was fluent in seven or more languages, and native speaker level in four of them. He could pronounce every name in any class perfectly. I noticed that students were intimidated pronouncing English when confronted with a perfect accent in their own language. At the same time we had a French-Canadian group learning English, and I’d done a song in class (The Band’s ‘Acadian Driftwood’) which has a few lines of French at the end. They so loved correcting my French accent, that I determined in future to retain a definite slight Anglicization when I pronounced names, and have students correct me in lesson one. And I’d try hard to improve and say, ‘Is that OK?’ The psychological effect is that we’re going through a process together. No one’s perfect. Foreign languages are tricky to pronounce.

Movement

Cultural sensitivities intervene in a multi-lingual situation, but nevetheless, in the first lesson I would always have a circulating, smiling, shaking hands and introduction phase, even with zero beginners, though with zero beginners you teach the basic introduction language first. (And it might just be, ‘Hello. I’m Peter.’ You need to get across the idea that the classroom is not a static place. You can also get across that facial expression and friendly tone are as much a part of the introduction as the words. From elementary (British elementary, i.e. level two rather than ‘starter’) up, I’d have a form so that students could interview each other and find out basic facts.

Course books

The problem with first lessons is those spare fifteen or twenty minutes at the end. You learn the names, you have students introduce themselves to each other thoroughly, but then you have a quarter of an hour or so before the bell. As a course book writer, I try to envisage the first lesson. I assume that in many situations the book will only be opened in lesson two (or part two of the double lesson). To get around that, we have often written a classroom language pre-unit that will only take 15 or 20 minutes. We’ve also often built the introductions (including circulating and pair work form) into lesson one in the book.

Who are the students? Are they students on a secondary or tertiary education course who already know each other? Or are they new to the course? Don’t forget that people might be interviewing strangers, and some facts, even ones as basic as marital status might be information they would prefer to keep to themselves. Most people would be wary about giving a telephone number to a stranger in lesson one. I once attended a talk on Gender & ELT where the speaker was advocating the use of ‘Ms’ in most situations, but one teacher said she would always prefer to use a definite ‘Mrs’ if introducing herself to a male stranger in an evening class.

This is where the course book can help (and so can the teacher without a book) by putting students into a role-play situation right at the start. Think of a famous person. Imagine you’re that person. Write down an imaginary address, phone number, etc.

In one low intermediate book we set lesson one on a space station. There’s a conversation which starts off the lesson where a computer interviews a new arrival. The new arrival is a computer designer and there’s a comic punch line: as more information appears the interviewing computer gets more and more excited and the punch-line is when the computer finally discovers who the computer designer is and exclaims ‘Mummy!’ Then students do a role play interview with a blank form and information based on the characters. Next, they do a real interview with a partner, and the teacher says clearly that they can invent information or use real information. It’s their choice. Personalization has its place, and with students who know each other, it’s obvious that you will probably use real information. But in lesson one with adult strangers? Students may wish to preserve their privacy just a little longer. Role play allows this.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com

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Marc Helgesen

What are some ways to start a class off right?

I start the first class with something simple – that is actually a lot more complex than it sounds. I walk into class – and here’s the secret – I smile. Not some wimpy “How are you. My name is Marc.” smile. I give them a big “It is GREAT to see you” grin. It is sincere. I love what I do and I am genuinely delighted to meet my new students. But there is something else going on.

When I smile at them, most of them automatically smile back. And that is the first step of establishing rapport. Establishing rapport is a key to developing a positive, cooperative class culture. We humans reflect our expressions. I want a class where we are all important parts of one whole, not a series of cliques and separate sub-groups. I want a class where anyone can and will work happily with anyone else. When we have a positive class culture, the year is off to a great start.

The smile seems like a little thing, but think of how many teachers you’ve heard say, “I start off the year tough. I want them to know that they will need to work. I don’t want them to take advantage of me. Later on I might back off but I need to be strong from the start.” So what happens? That teacher walks in looking tough. The students match the expression. They look tough, too. And you’ve off on a “me vs. them” footing. Isn’t that almost an invitation for them to take advantage of you?

When I smile at them, most of them automatically smile back. And that is the first step of establishing rapport.

Over the first few classes, we do several icebreaking tasks where the students get to know each other. One of my favorites is “An Introduction to Remember.” I point out that many classes start with introductions that include things you like. “I’m Marc. I like music.” The problem is that everyone likes music so that makes it a highly forgettable self-introduction. I ask them to think of something true about themselves that is probably not true about anyone else. Then they stand up, find a partner, and introduce themselves with the unusual information.

I’ve done this with a few hundred students and I’ve never had students who couldn’t think of something unique about themselves. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve learned over the years:

Shiho’s sister is an opera singer.
Chiaki has 9 pierces.
David’s cousin was attacked by a shark.
Eriko plays in a metal band.
Miho’s been to Tokyo Disneyland 6 times.
Natsumi’s cute dimple is really a scar she got when she fell down on the school’s outdoor clock on the day of JHS graduation. Blood everywhere.

There are a couple things going on here. The students are sharing interesting information about themselves. Which communicates to themselves, “Gee, I’m interesting. I’m worth knowing. I’ve got something to say.” It is positive self-talk which is useful because it sets them up, and leads to healthy self-fulfilling prophesies.

Also, the students are up and moving around. So there is physical activity. People doing physical activity together build a sense of being a group. (Did you really think those rajio taiso morning exercise routines were only about exercise?). Also, movement means there is a kinesthetic element to the class. The three primary sensory learning styles are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Nearly any English class has visual input from books, handouts, the teacher, and other students. They get auditory from recording and listening to the teacher and to each other. When we’ve added kinesthetic input, it means we’ve covered all three so everyone is getting some input in their strongest learning style.

You might wonder what I’m doing while the students are doing this “memorable self-introduction mixer.” I’m listening, and working on learning names. I have to admit that it is hard to learn who everybody is, especially at the beginning of the school year when we have dozens, perhaps hundreds of new students. But I really do try. And the fact that I can combine learning the names with their interesting information gives me a head start.

I encourage them to try to learn each other’s names, too. They follow-up An Introduction to Remember by working with a partner. They look around the room and see how many people and their interesting information they can remember. “That’s Chiaki. She has nine pierces. Hmm. I can only see seven.”

Skeptical readers might say, “Pretty touchy-feely stuff. Where’s the English teaching. Where are the educational objectives? How is this going to help the students raise their TOIEC scores?” Well, think about it. They are spending most of the first class speaking English, listening and comprehending English, remembering English. Without me having to say it, they’ve experienced the fact that they – not me – are going to have to do the real work of communicating in class. But they’ve also experienced the fact that they had something worth saying and that their new classmates wanted to hear it. And they’ve started to connect to the other students and to me. We’re building rapport.

When I was training as a teacher, I don’t remember anyone talking about building rapport. Now, when I teach my own graduate school classes, we talk about building rapport and work on it from the first day. If you can get the class culture right, everyone will be pulling in the same direction. That makes the heavy lifting so much easier.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents.

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Curtis Kelly

What are some ways to start a class off right?

It’s the first day of class. I’m walking down the hall carrying the textbook I plan to use. Since the first class is always a kind of throwaway, I’m planning the lesson as I walk:

“I’ll spend the first 20 minutes telling them about the class requirements. Then I’ll spend the next 20 introducing myself, telling them where I grew up, what I studied, how I got to Japan, and so on. Then I’ll have each of them ask me one question. That’ll take another 20 minutes for sure. After I assign their seats I’ll have them introduce themselves to the class in whatever time is left over. They’ll take turns standing up, say saying their names and where they are from. Done! Piece of cake.”

Our students’ need to get to know their peers represents a strong developmental need; so strong in fact, that it is like a tidal wave.

Oh. Let me clarify the setting of this scenario. I’m at Kansai Gaidai University, this first day, on my way to my 30-student speaking class, although it could as easily be my writing class. And one more thing: it’s 1989.

Yep. This is how I did first classes twenty years ago, and pretty much the way my peers did them. I did not think these classes were all that good. In fact, I didn’t even think about the product at all. It was just an easy way to get through the first week. What a waste. If only I had known then what I know now I wouldn’t have squandered these opportunities to make really great classes. Not anymore, though. What I do now is totally different, and in end-of-year surveys, invariably, students say the first class or two were the best. So what do I do now that gets such good results? The easy answer is, that I forget myself.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a change in my orientation. Where once, I followed a tell-them-about-me-and-the-class formula, I have replaced it with a help-them-with-their-lives focus. The part about me got shorter and shorter and the part about them got longer. After all, who really wants to hear about me?

Still, having 30 students introduce themselves one-by-one can get pretty tedious, so I had to make some innovations. I tried having students interview each other and tell the class about their partners (good, but not great), I’d have them spend time in groups talking to each other (better), and eventually, I’d made up some identity games (now we are getting there). One of my favorites for writing class (and now an activity in both Writing from Within and Significant Scribbles) was to have students write a short paragraph about themselves without signing their names. I’d collect the papers, shuffle them, number them, and post them around the room. I’d then have the students read the profiles and see if they could figure out who wrote each. At the end, when I read these profiles to the class and asked the authors to show themselves. I got everyone’s full attention.

But the great first class activity came later. It has to do with surfing. Before I tell you about it though, let’s look at a little psychology.

One of the key concepts in Adult Education is that learners are life-centered. In other words, learners are geared to attend to learning that helps them solve real life problems. One way to identify the shared problems our learners face is to look at life stage studies and developmental psychology. Piaget, Kohberg, Erikson, Maslow, Belenky et al., Knowles and many others tell us that the greatest challenge youth faces is something called moral development which means figuring out the rights and wrongs of filling social roles, following rules, and forming relationships. This developmental challenge is pretty much what the rest of us call establishing one’s identity. Since individual identity is closely tied to group identity, interaction and bonding with peers is a critical part of finding it.

In short, our students’ need to get to know their peers represents a strong developmental need; so strong in fact, that it is like a tidal wave. Catch that wave, and what a ride we get. It is the perfect vehicle for delivering English instruction.

So here is how I do in first classes these days, a way that makes them great. I have students interview each other to fill in one-page forms about their partners. The forms include mail addresses (optional, of course), hobbies, dreams, hand-drawn portraits, etc. After the interviews, I collect the forms, make class albums out of them, and pass them out the following class. It is amazing how excited students get when they receive them, and it is not unusual for graduates to tell me they still have the class albums they made in the first class a decade ago. Chuck Sandy and I developed three different levels of class album forms for our Active Skills for Communication series. Here is the class album activity from Book 1. Just click below to download.

Download Class Album Activity

If our learners’ need to bond with their peers is the wave, and the album is the surfboard, then you might also do a little “hang ten” to deliver some language. For example, you might have them write out the needed interview questions beforehand, you might teach them Do you mind questions for personal information, or you could explain how wh and yes/no questions are grammatically different. As with any activity that is completely engaging, acquiring the related language is a natural and unavoidable side effect.

So, what is a good way start a class off right? Forget your own needs and attend to theirs – getting to know their peers – and use this “teachable moment” to deliver English.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.

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Chris Hunt

What are some ways to start a class off right?

"Goodbye, goodbye - speak English!
Goodbye, goodbye - speak English!
Goodbye, goodbye - speak English!
Speak English, every day!
See you, see you - speak English!
See you, see you - speak English!
See you, see you - speak English!
Speak English, every day!"

Jean-Luc Godard once said that every film has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. The same goes for classes with children. I typically begin my first class with young children by saying, “Hello!” to everyone and then wave, say “Goodbye!” and hurry out the door. I then wait for someone to call out, “Come here!” before returning and repeating the process until everyone is laughing and the children are really shouting. It helps that I team-teach, so the child can learn by example. On the occasions that I have taught alone I have used a parrot flag to pre-teach the important phrase. It takes a bit longer to get the children responding but I think it well worth the effort. They become really vocal from the outset, and it also undermines the notion of the teacher as a figure of authority. I aim to establish the feeling that we are all doing English together and to that end I think it is important to reshape the traditional student teacher relationship as quickly as possible. So the stuff of my first lesson is all about sharing and being together. We'll do activities like Which One, Wake Up, and Happy or Sad.

Learning names is secondary. In some cases I have gone a couple of classes with young children without doing names. Don't get me wrong, I think names are very important. But for young children names are often handles used by adults for control. For them, being is enough. When I was a child I could play with other children without ever learning their names. With young children we often get so busy with activities that names fall by the wayside.

I aim to establish the feeling that we are all doing English together and to that end I think it is important to reshape the traditional student teacher relationship as quickly as possible.

With children going to elementary school I do use names, combining them with the use of randomness. As much as possible, I aim to give up the power claimed by the traditional teacher. One important power is deciding who does what with whom. When it comes to deciding partners or who goes first in a game we use a dice, or with a large group, name cards drawn from a hat. This avoids possible feelings of favouritism and over time helps ensure that everyone works with everyone.

A simple name activity for small groups is to roll a dice, count around the group and ask, “Who are you?” Then, roll the dice again, count on from the previous finishing place and repeat. This means it is possible to ask a person their name more than once, and if the dice is kind, sometimes several times in a row. This procedure can be used with any question and once the pattern is established the children can take turns commanding the dice. We use a toy microphone to add to the sense of drama. It is important to keep the whole activity very short by using a timer – no more than a minute. On the occasions when someone is missed it’s then possible to repeat the game until their number comes up.

Apart from establishing the use of randomness, I’ll usually introduce the parrot flag and also symbol cards. These can be used to make sentences and introduce children to the structure of English without requiring them to read. Flags and cards can also be passed around. For example, I can take an “I” card and the “Be” card and make a sentence “I am Chris” punctuating each word by holding up the matching card. I can then pass the cards on to the person on my left and let them travel around the room. When the cards return I can replace the “I” card with a “You” card and hand the cards dramatically to my neighbour saying, “You are …” and adding their name. Or, I can switch the order of the cards and ask, “Are you …” and get the name wrong once or twice.

From this April, I’ll be taking the use of cards a stage further by having one for each class activity. In the first class I’ll lay them out on the table and use a dice to select a card before doing its activity. The ultimate aim is to structure the entire class using these Activity Cards. Once the format is established the whole group will be able to have a much bigger say in the execution and content of the class without the need to use Japanese.

From a moral point of view I think that students should be able to control their own learning. I also believe that the more control children have over their own learning the more English they can learn. The experiments I have done have yet to dissuade me from this view.

I think that as a society if we genuinely value democracy we should be extending it to everyday life and activities. That means democracy in the workplace and democracy in the schools. I guess that put this way the idea has all the popularity of lead ice-cream. If I substitute the word democracy for choice does that make the idea more palatable?

Anyway, to get any class right I feel it its important to keep the ends in mind, both big and small. We often skip an opening song but it is a rare day indeed when we don’t finish a class with our goodbye song. And that’s where I came back in.

Chris (Hunt) works with his wife in a trailer home. The school can be seen here.His website is available at www.wisehat.com

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Chuck Sandy

What are some ways to start a class off right?

It’s the first day of school and you want to make a good first impression. Get it right and you’re off to a good start. Get it wrong and you probably won’t be able to change anyone’s perception of you and your way of doing things later on. That’s because first impressions, once in place, are virtually irreversible. You won’t want to just wander into a new class unprepared for this. You’ll want to think it through.

Do you arrive early, right on time, or just a little late? Are you smiling when you walk in the room or does your expression convey seriousness of purpose? What’s the first thing you do after walking into your classroom? Do you sit or do you stand? How do you introduce yourself? Is your tone friendly and open or do you speak in the voice of someone in charge? Do you start right in with an activity or do you begin by explaining class rules and policies? And by the way, what are you wearing?

Students can work with almost any kind of teacher except an inconsistent one.

Although I’m not about to tell you what to do, say, or wear on your first day of class, how you answer those questions for yourself truly does matter.

Teachers who smile upon walking in the room are likely to be smiled back at by at least a few students who have keyed into the first impression that a smile conveys while those who enter with a more serious expression on their face will probably not be smiled at by anyone at all.

Teachers who arrive on the bell give students a different first impression than teachers who arrive early. Teachers dressed in business attire or smart chic are noted in a way that’s different from teachers dressed in jeans and a tee shirt. Teachers who arrive a bit late and shuffle their papers around are perceived differently than teachers who walk in and get things started right away.

Sit on the desk and you’ll give a different impression than you will if you stand in front of the room. Tell your students that they can call you by your first name and you’ll be a different kind of teacher in their eyes than someone who asks to be addressed by last name and title. Begin with a set of rules and you’ll have a different class than if you start off with an activity.

This is what you’ll want to think through because not only are first impressions lasting but also how you begin and what you do in the rest of the class will also lock you into doing the same sorts of things and acting in the same ways in every class that follows.

The good news is that there are no right or wrong answers because there are no right or wrong ways of being a teacher. The only right way to begin a class is by being just who you are and by starting off doing the kinds of things you want students to be doing the rest of the term. If you want to have students working in pairs and groups, then start doing that with them from the very first. If you want them sitting in rows and quietly listening to you as you profess, then start off in a way that demonstrates what you expect. Then, whatever you do, be consistent.

Students can work with almost any kind of teacher except an inconsistent one. If you’re not going to be playing games and doing fun activities in every class, then don’t raise false expectations by starting out the first class with nothing but fun activities and games. If you set a rule, follow through with it. If you start off with a relaxed and open atmosphere, don’t then suddenly shift tone and clamp down. If you insist on students arriving on time, then you’ll have to be consistently on time yourself. If you expect students to be respectful and understanding of everyone equally, then you’re going to have to be that kind of person as well – from the very start.

Although all of this may seem self-evident, it’s apparently not. Not only has it taken me years to learn this, but also I’ve found that almost every classroom management problem or student complaint I come across has at its core an inconsistency issue. When teachers begin by leaving one kind of first impression and then go on to try to run a different kind of class, students get confused. When rules set forth on the first day of class are ignored in subsequent classes, or worse yet, are only enforced for some students but not for others, every other rule becomes suspect. That’s when classes fall apart, students complain, and someone like me gets called in to try to sort it all out. It happens more than you’d imagine.

So, wear a suit or wear jeans and a t-shirt. Play games or don’t. Make rules or let things happen as they do. Expect quiet from your students or encourage a lively class atmosphere where people call out unexpected things at unexpected times. Be approachable or be more reserved. It doesn’t much matter. Just decide how you will present yourself and what kind of class you want to have before you walk in on the first day. Then, as long as you are being true to yourself and are from that moment on consistent in your own behaviors and expectations, things are going to be fine.

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Visit Chuck (and Curtis) on their Facebook page

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Dorothy Zemach

What are some ways to start a class off right?

The first day of a new class at an American university is a tricky one because you aren’t necessarily looking at your “real” class. Two students aren’t in the country yet; three will switch to another section; five more will change from someone else’s section to yours; four are placed in the wrong level and will move to a more appropriate class.

Therefore, it’s not a great day to do anything essential unless you want to repeat it at the next class or schedule individual make-up sessions. Yet many students do show up, and you have the whole class period reserved, so it seems a shame to waste it by merely handing out a syllabus and telling students to come back next time for the “real” class.

What you need, then, are activities that aren’t necessary, yet are still worthwhile.

I do first pass out a syllabus because that is expected and it contains information students need as they decide whether to stay in the class. What is the textbook? Are office hours convenient? How much homework will be assigned, and when are major assignments due? My class is just one out of their full schedules, and I know they need this information to make their choices.

The largest chunk of class time I reserve for the most important first day activity: building a positive classroom atmosphere.

Next I give students some information about myself. I’m always surprised at how controversial this is amongst some teachers. There’s a school of thought that says the teacher should be so unobtrusive as to be almost absent, and that therefore when introductions are done it should be only students introducing themselves to one another. However, I’ve found that students do want to know something about me, and I think they have a right to, as well. They should know that I have enough experience, interest, and qualifications to be teaching their class. Having some feel for my personality lets them know what the classroom atmosphere will be like. As much as we try to schedule students to balance out class sizes, there is still a good deal of section shuffling that goes on after initial schedules are passed out. I actually don’t mind if students choose class sections based on where they’d fit in best (when possible); I too want a good mesh of personalities.

The largest chunk of class time I reserve for the most important first day activity: building a positive classroom atmosphere. A class where students feel connected to one another is easier for me to work with. I want students to call on one another for support and email for missed assignments. I want them to look forward to coming to class because it’s a comfortable place to be, one charged with energy and dedicated to working intensively with the material.

I do tailor the first-day activities to the type of class I’m teaching, and I don’t have space here to describe everything in my bag of tricks, so I will choose just one favorite because it’s an easy one for anyone to construct.

I have several large conversation board games that I built with my husband. They look somewhat like a Candyland board, with a meandering path of squares. There is a “Start” square where players begin the path, but the final square says “Go back.” Each square has a broad topic such as school, a prized possession, pets, or money for students to address. I also have one version with questions and prompts such as Talk about a recent event that made you happy and What are some things you like to do on rainy days? for higher level groups.

The rules are simple. Students take turns rolling a die and advancing their marker along the board. When they land on a square, they say as much (or as little) as they wish to about any aspect of the topic. Other players may ask questions or make comments, but may NOT talk about themselves. When the player feels done, he/she hands the die to the next player. No one can win or lose, and it’s a rare class that even makes it to the “Go back” square. And while the topics sound simple, somehow the game board format brings out the best in people. I’ve used these with countless nationalities, ages from middle school to senior citizen, and all proficiency levels. (The middle school students even used to come in at lunch and play on their own.) The amount of information shared goes way beyond the typical “Where are you from?” and “What are your hobbies?” questionnaires in some textbooks.

For those who wish to make their own games, I offer these suggestions:

• Make the game boards large and sturdy. We used heavy cardboard that has stood up well over about 15 years of steady use. (If you cannot transport large heavy boards, you can also use laminated paper versions that can be rolled up.)

• Paint the boards with bright colors and make them as attractive as you can. Add a top coat of a clear sealant to protect the board and make it possible to wipe and clean it.

• Make several different versions. You can use the same topics for each board but just put them in different places. Paint the boards in different colors. About 4-5 students is a good number for a game, so if you have a class of 30, you’ll want 6 different boards.

• The game works best when students land on different topics. To spread them out quickly, a 12-sided die works better than the standard 6-sided die. A hobby shop or store that caters to gamers should have a lovely selection of multi-sided dice in attractive colors and shapes.

• Erasers make great game markers, and Japan is one of the best countries for buying erasers in interesting shapes. Use a different theme per board, such as letters of the alphabet, fruit, or cartoon characters, and have a good selection from which students can choose.

Finally, don’t forget to circulate while students are playing, and join in. Pick up a marker and play yourself (just be careful to spend the same amount of time with each group). Students will be happy to hear about your life, and it gives you a chance to bond with students in a small-group setting.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Peter Viney

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Chuck Sandy

Dorothy Zemach

What would you change about your classroom if the sky were the limit?

2009-02-25T23:17:00Z

Dorothy Zemach

This was a good time for me to think about my ideal classroom, since I am now preparing to spend three weeks teaching in Libya without any idea what my classroom might look like. I know that I'll have about 30 students, and that I'll be at a university, but that seems to be about all that I can determine. So with this Thank Tank question, I decided to list (in order of preference, more or less) what I hope I'll find when I get there.

“The value, therefore, of this kind of exercise—dreaming of the perfect classroom—is to help you think about what’s important to you and why.”

1) I'd like each student to have a square, flat desk of an adequate size. No sloping surfaces, no strange right- or left-handed configurations. The desks should not be attached to their respective chairs, and they should be easy to move around. I find myself doing a lot of activities that involve flashcards or large sheets of paper or game boards or posters, and small desks that cannot be pushed together are tough to work on. It would be nice, if I have 30 students, to have 36 of these desks and a chair for each one. That way, I can put students into groups and sit with each group in turn, if I choose.

2) The room should be neither too large, which makes the class seem unpopular, nor too small, which makes it difficult for students to move around and move furniture.

3) The room should be a comfortable temperature, perhaps even slightly on the cool side, to keep students from getting sleepy.

4) An adequate number of windows, please, because natural lighting is easier on the eyes. However, we'll need good window shades, should we want to watch a DVD.

5) I want something large to write on, though I'm torn between a traditional blackboard and a whiteboard. Chalk dust is not great for one's lungs; but then neither are the chemicals in whiteboard markers. As long as we're dreaming, then, I'lll take a non-toxic version of either one. Naturally, an adequate supply of either dustless chalk or fresh markers should be available.

6) Let's have a CD player that never skips, located in such a way that I can easily reach it, but no one will ever trip over its cord. It can sit next to the DVD player that plays DVDs from any region. When I taught at the American Language Center in Rabat, Morocco, there were speakers affixed above each door that you could hook your portable cassette player to. They were perfect for playing background music; I find that a little ambient background noise can encourage students to speak up more easily and also to speak more loudly, and thus (often) with better pronunciation. The over-the-door configuration dispersed the sound in a nicer way than having a portable machine on a desktop. So I'll throw in an order for one of those.

7) A laptop computer and projector would be next, and the projector would never say "no signal detected." It should also be safe to leave this laptop in the room at all times, rather than needing to carry it in and out every day.

8) I'd like a little cabinet somewhere in the room that has extra miscellaneous classroom supplies--those things you don't necessarily think to bring to every class but somehow wind up wishing you had, like tape, a stapler, 3 x 5 index cards, scratch paper, paper clips, extra pens and pencils, and colored markers.

9) No matter what subject I'm teaching, I'd like to have a library in one corner with extra reading materials, including things like magazines and short stories. On those occasions when a few students finish an activity very early, there would always be something for them to do. It might even encourage students to come to class early.

10) Though I've only rarely experienced this luxury, I'd like the classroom to be my own, so that I can bring in my own posters and hang student work on the walls. A nice light wall color and a generous section of cork board would help with this.

Of course, I've taught in classrooms that didn't have all of these things -- or even any of these things. In a way, this exercise reminded me of a conversation I had recently with an Iranian professor of writing who asked me at a conference what the research said was the perfect number of students to have in a second language writing class. Before I even attempted an answer, I asked him how many students he had in his classes, "One hundred," he said. Well, whatever the correct answer is, I know it's not 100. However, even if this man could have gone back to his institution with some sort of proof that, say, 12 students was the ideal number, it wouldn't have helped him. The question he should have been asking was, "How can I cope with 100 students in a writing class?" since that was his situation.

The value, therefore, of this kind of exercise -- dreaming of the perfect classroom -- is to help you think about what's important to you and why. If you identify something as very important, and you don't have it, you might be more likely to strive to find a workaround. Most of us will have to fall back on "If you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with," but it's good not to fall into complacency (or despair) and stop working with what we have.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’s Essential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Peter Viney

The sky's the Limit? I'm going to be crass and stick entirely to optimizing the physical environment. For its era, it wasn't far off when I was working at Anglo-Continental in England, and around 1972, the classrooms were already being converted to a horseshoe layout for better interaction. By 1974 stereo speakers were installed to improve sound. Every classroom had a large framed world map and UK map on the walls. We had dry wipe boards rather than blackboards (to save our clothes and lungs from chalk dust) and whatever visual aid sets or wallcharts we wanted. We had language labs, private study listening centres, and a TV room with cameras.

The best classroom I have seen integrating electronics in a physical environment was in the Netherlands. Students were seated in a horseshoe arrangement, on swivel chairs. Behind each swivel chair was a language-laboratory console which ran round three sides of the room, so students could do five or ten minutes listening or lab work and swivel back to do class work. Does anyone remember language labs? They worked with most people. Unfortunately about 10% of people were technophobes to a degree where a lab with headphones caused panic and confusion. The flat surface behind each chair - still the Netherlands classroom - also meant students could swivel to write or read something quietly, rather than relying on wobbly palettes. The downside, I have been in two swivel chairs that broke under me, so modern health and safety regulations might ban the swivels. A chiropractor friend tells me that swivel chairs are bad for the back too, instead of moving your back muscles, you swivel and your back stays in a fixed position for too long. Sit on a chair with four legs, is the advice.

“I spent years advocating that every classroom should have a TV screen so that video could be incorporated seamlessly into lessons without lugging equipment or moving students around the school.”

My best classroom in terms of design was at the Anglo-Mexican Institute in Guadalajara. It was a language school, designed for just language teaching. The classrooms were hexagonal and slotted together like a honeycomb with open areas between them for lesson breaks. The physical shape meant that students could be on five sides with the board on one, naturally forming five sixth of a circle. A circle is said to be the most democratic classroom design, but I don't like chairs arranged in a complete circle, because students next to the teacher can't see well. While a circle is great for discussion, It's poor for the teacher-centred phases of the lesson or video or whiteboard work. The hexagon with the teacher on one wall is the best I've been in.

I spent years advocating that every classroom should have a TV screen so that video could be incorporated seamlessly into lessons without lugging equipment or moving students around the school. In the early 90s I believed that the next big course we wrote would have a one or two minute video sequence with every lesson. It didn't happen, and video has stalled. It's used less than it was ten years ago, which is bad (and sad). I haven'tt used an electronic whiteboard, but I have used the lower-tech version, which is a laptop with PowerPoint (or Keynote, the Mac equivalent) and DVD capability connected to a projector. It's weird, but a DVD/hard disc is not actually as good as video tape for language teaching. We experienced this writing the scripts for the Wallace and Gromit series where we had to write new dialogue to fit existing mouth movements in the animation. On DVD, because the compression system works by sampling the differences between frames, it's far more difficult to hit a single frame than it is with video. One of the later VHS machines with a rotary slow-speed forward/rewind control allows you to move the picture a single frame at a time. Nowadays, I'd definitely want a whiteboard, but I'd like a VHS input as well as DVD if that's technically possible.

Then comes size of class. I'd have fifteen chairs (three on each of my five walls) and no more. I started teaching with one teacher to eight students, moved to one to thirty, then one to twenty-four. I've taught one to one, and I used to teach 140 in a room, daily too. The ideal size for me is twelve to fifteen, but sixteen to twenty isn't bad. With more students the degree of personal attention falls markedly. Under twelve? It can work superbly if you're lucky, but the dynamics are often spoiled by one or two personalities or isolated students who don't fit. Once you get over twelve, the group's large enough for people not to feel "outsiders" as they may in smaller, tighter groups.

Natural light is vital. The hexagonal classroom wasn't great for this (some sides joined to other rooms). But it had high landscape shape (narrow, horizontal) windows and it was in the heat of central Mexico. I hate being in windowless rooms under fluorescent tubes, it affects student mood, concentration, and vision. So sufficient natural light would have to enter the room to make me happy. The sky is our limit, and I would like to be able to see it. Perhaps like art rooms in schools, it should be north light to avoid glare and bright sunshine. So my ideal would be either a free standing hexagon or one with only two walls joined to others. Artificial light should be with expensive daylight bulbs.

Finally, I like a table for the teacher. A small plain, sturdy table, not a desk. Desks are barriers. I stand for the teacher-centred phases, and sit for the discussion /interaction phases. However, sitting on the table is an excellent halfway position (though culturally insensitive in some societies!) because you can see and be seen more clearly than when sitting in a chair, and it's less dominating than standing. I'd want enough space to be in front of the table most of the time. Oh, and one more thing -- a decent ceiling height, so often lacking in smaller language schools in Japan. It gives air and space.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Survival English / Basic Survival, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com

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Marc Helgesen

Actually a colleague and I got to do just that a few years ago, and we almost missed the chance. Our department’s language lab – which usually sat empty, full of 20-year-old equipment designed for 50-year-old methodology– was scheduled for renovation. The school planned to have the Sony labs guys come in and put in the latest version of the same old, same old. When my co-teacher and I heard about it, we told our department we wanted to transform the room into something we actually needed: a communication room. After all, we have a lot of conversation classes. Just like you wouldn’t dream of asking home economics teachers to teach cooking in a regular lecture hall, we thought we deserved a room designed to facilitate communication.

We started with the desks. Instead of desks facing the front, we arranged them in islands; two students on each side, facing two other students. The four are perpendicular to the front of the room. Students can easily see the teacher at the front of the room. But the idea is that most of the time students will be talking to each other. And there is plenty of space between desks for the teacher and for students to move around. The room just feels much less teacher-centered.

We got rid of all those old-style language lab machines that you use to play “pilot to co-pilot”. But, of course we wanted to use media. We put all the things you would expect – internet-linked computers, a decent stereo. DVD/video, video OHP and a projector with a screen at the front, and four large plasma monitors in the four corners of the room, suspended from the ceiling. Learners can watch the screens from nearly anywhere. Again, the front of the room ceases to be the focal point.

Naturally, we carpeted the room. OK, we had to fudge a bit on this part. We told the school that, since it is a communication room and lots of people would be talking at the same time, we needed carpeting to absorb sound. Which is true. But what we didn’t tell the school was that we really wanted to make it a “no shoes” room, just to make the atmosphere more relaxing. And after it was up and running, I noticed that when the weather is warm only about 25% of the students bother putting on slippers. Most of us are in stocking feet or barefoot. We chose a blue carpet (the color in these photos is not great), based on information from The Owner's Manual for the Brain which suggests blue slows the pulse and lowers blood pressure and is conducive to studying, deep thinking, and concentration. We consciously tried to build in relaxation. Relaxed learners learn more.

We wanted to transform the room into something we actually needed: a communication room.

We left about three meters of open space in both the front and back of the room. It makes physical movement activities easier, something kinesthetic learners like myself love (click here and download Let’s get physical, a pdf of ELT warm-up activities.).

The next thing was art on the walls. I’ve always found it strange how bare the walls of most university classrooms are. If you went to someone’s house and there was nothing on the walls, you’d start to think, “Hmm. Strange. Psychotic, maybe?” But our classrooms, which are supposed to be centers of inspiration and creativity, commonly lack the human touch that art brings. We started with travel posters and now have delightful Tanzanian tinga tinga paintings, Maori art, and Papua New Guinean masks adorning the walls.

The school was pretty skeptical when we wanted to put in a coffee/tea bar. We wanted nothing fancy, just a hot water pot and coffee and tea. But the students sure appreciate it and it goes a long way to make the room feel different than all their other classrooms. So do the aroma therapy burners and the zabuton mats in the corner – if you and your friends prefer to do that group work on the floor, fine. Posters we change regularly with affirmations are useful, too. Affirmations lead to positive self-fulfilling prophesies.

On a shelf in the corner of the room is what I think of as “the joy of sets”. We have class sets of colored pencils, magic markers, scissors, dice, ohajiki (like flat marbles), and sets of other things. Teachers of kids will think, “What’s so special about that?” Very true. But in a university, it is really unusual. (Actually, if we want to talk unusual I could get into the stuffed animals, the yoga mats. etc, but you get the idea.).

I do know that I am extremely lucky to have a classroom like this. But I wanted to share it with you. This is not some radical educational experiment. It is a classroom in a rather conservative Japanese university. And “the sky’s the limit” was never an issue here. The classroom was a whole lot cheaper to build that the school had planned. And it went from being rarely used to have many teachers specifically requesting it. So, if we could do that here, who knows what you can make happen at your school? And, in something I consider indicative of the success of this room actually designed for what we do, during lunchtime and those rare time slots when it isn’t being used for a class, students take it over to hang out. It’s their space.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents.

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Curtis Kelly

This month’s question is: “What things would you change about your classroom if the sky were the limit?” I guess we are being asked to do a little environmental engineering to raise the learning potential? A year ago I would have suggested putting the desks in a circle, using natural instead of artificial lighting, or replacing the PCs with Macs; but after a year of listening to Brain Science podcasts, I knew the answer instantly: I’d take all the desks out, and… are you ready? … put in beds.

That’s right, beds. Some things we’ve discovered in the last ten years make it clear that the current dearth of learning comes from physiological deficits, including the biggest, baddest, learning disability of them all: sleep deprivation.

We have long known that sleep has an impact on cognitive function – learners that stay up all night lose everything they learned the day before – but the general public still misconstrues sleep as an option. Counselors might be telling students that an hour of sleep is worth more than an hour of study, but as Dr. Ralph Pascualy points out, most people still think that not getting enough sleep is merely a matter of “toughing it out.”

Even if we get lots of sleep, eat well, get along with our parents, and do everything else leading to mental fitness, sitting long hours in the classroom pretty much cancels it.

It is not. We now pretty much know that the first night of sleep is when learning goes from short-term into long-term memory. People tend to think of sleep as down time, but if you could take a peek at your brain while you are asleep, you’d be surprised. For most of the sleep cycle, you’d see neurons cracking away far more furiously than when you were awake. During the slow-wave phase of sleep, your brain replays everything you learned during the day, over and over again, locking in new connections through an amazing process of genetic change. And there’s more: in the following nights, your brain reorganizes this new learning to integrate it into your existing knowledge. We learned from the late HM that memories roam for 11 years before finding homes, but even after one sleepful week, we move from just knowing to understanding. And even more: we also solve problems in our sleep. In one study, students were given math problems with a hidden shortcut for solving them. Three times more students figured the shortcut out after 8 hours of sleep than those in the non-sleep group.

No sleep, no learning. And drastically. An all-A student who gets a little less than seven hours sleep on weeknights and a little more than seven on weekends will drop from the top 10% of her class to the bottom 10% of those who do get sleep. With a few all-nighters, she’ll start showing the same symptoms as someone with Alzheimer’s. Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules, puts it simply: “Sleep loss means mind loss.”

Are your students getting more than seven hours of sleep? With cell phones, Web surfing, and the teen-normal hormone-regulated shift towards owlishness, probably not. When I ask my students how much sleep they get, six hours is the most common answer. Unfortunately, the data shows that only six hours of sleep for five nights straight leads to 60% loss in performance. That is SIX-AUGHT, ladies and gents! In terms of impact, no graded reader or info gap can even come close.

Nor should we underestimate naps, which contrary to popular belief, are not a side effect of insufficient sleep. NASA found that pilots who napped for 26 minutes performed 34% better afterwards, and other studies have found boosts like these last up to six hours.

So, beds it is… Um. Wait a minute. Some hands have popped up in the back. You, sir. (inaudible) I understand your point. What we really need to do is to get them to sleep more at home. . . Ma’am? (higher inaudible) Yes. You’re right. My beds-in-classrooms solution prevents the deterioration of learning potential; it does not augment it, but please, I’m not done yet. There is one more thing I am putting in my classroom: treadmills!

Even if we get lots of sleep, eat well, get along with our parents, and do everything else leading to mental fitness, sitting long hours in the classroom pretty much cancels it. It is not what we are built for. As Read Montague puts it, our brains “evolved on legs, and that makes all the difference.” For millions of years our ancestors walked 10-20 kilometers a day. These strapping athletes actively worked the environment to survive, while those who just sat passively got eaten. It makes sense then, that our brains evolved to work optimally when moving, not when sitting, and science has found just that. Most of it has to do with blood flow.

Our brains burn up blood-supplied glucose at ten times the rate of other body parts, and pump out glutamate and other deadly toxins. As long as our blood keeps pumping through, these neuron busters get carried away in the oxygen, but if not, they accumulate. Cognitive function suffers and we age prematurely.

But there is more. When we exercise, our brain also releases neurotransmitter mood shapers like dopamine, norepiniphrine, and serotonin. Even just a little exercise gives learners better focus, higher motivation, more confidence, and less impulsiveness, in other words, the Holy Grail of classroom behavior.

And more: with exercise, our brains release neurotropins, like BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor), at two or three times the normal level (and marijuana-like cabbinoids too). Harvard’s John Ratey calls BDNF “Miracle Growth” (a kind of fertilizer) for the brain. This chemical helps everything related to brain growth happen, including the increase of stem cells that become new neurons. Exercise is, by far, the single most powerful way to maintain and increase the brain’s plasticity, which means the ability to learn and change.

A recent study with 5000 children over three years found that 30 minutes of exercise, twice a day, led to higher grades across the board, especially for girls, and especially in the subject area of . . . brace yourself . . . math, which is tied in directly to executive function. Or consider the case of Mikey, a 10 year-old who took Ritalin to control his severe attention disorder, ADHD. One day, he went to the school principal – actually, his Mom– and got permission to do daily exercise instead. He swam his way to recovery, and then, on to fourteen Olympic Gold Medals. His name? Michael Phelps.

It does not take a lot of exercise to make oneself smarter. Even short walks help; even couch potatoes who fidget do better. So how are we using these new discoveries to improve education? We are not really; in fact, just the opposite. We are cutting PE classes and recess times, buying buses to haul students, and plopping our kids down in front of computers at home. This is neither human nor humane. As John Medina writes: “I am convinced that integrating exercise into those eight hours at work or school will not make us smarter. It will only make us normal.”

So that’s it, my fellow educators; beds and treadmills to make happier, healthier learners who all score in the top 10%.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.

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Chris Hunt

Hmm, if the sky were the limit – what an odd phrase. Why limit ourselves to the sky? What about other dimensions, diversions, directions? I really like the sound of what Marc and his colleagues were able to create, and I think Curtis’s idea of replacing desks with beds and treadmills is a blast, but I guess my heart’s desire would be to get rid of the classroom altogether.

The notion that learning can and should be organised into chunks of time in an enclosed space is more than antiquated, it is oppressive. As John Taylor Gatto wrote in Dumbing Us Down :

“Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

If I am to have a classroom then I would like it to be a respite from the regimes that so many children seem resigned to.

So, I guess, rather than having a classroom I would like a resource centre. There would be books and games, soft toys and software, computers and musical instruments, cooking and sports facilities, workshops with tools, gardens, wilderness, and time. Time to explore, time to create, time to relate, and time to do nothing at all.

What a fantasy! I operate out of a two-room trailer home sandwiched in a tiny car park between two houses. The nearest park is the haunt of tramps and flashers. Children’s schedules are so tight that quite often there is only a single hour on a single day of the week that they can use for learning English. The world is a madhouse we have locked ourselves into and we have lost the key.

My theme song in these columns is choice. If I am to have a classroom then I would like it to be a respite from the regimes that so many children seem resigned to. I want my space to be a place where children can exercise a little free will. I also want to help them realise that if they want to learn something that means giving it more time than the 40 to 60 minute blocks their schedules dictate. This means having materials available for them to use at home. It means having materials available that they will want to use at home. It may be impossible to do without the classroom physically, but one can do it mentally.

According to Wikipedia the American Society for Training and Development maintain that more than 40% of corporate training now takes place online and not in a classroom. I wonder if we will ever see the day when over 40% of schools are organised without grades, without grading, without fixed lessons, and without classrooms. I wonder.

Chris (Hunt) works with his wife in a trailer home. The school can be seen here.His website is available at www.wisehat.com

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Chuck Sandy

Although I have my favorite classrooms, I have learned over the years that the search for the perfect room is a pointless quest. Even in the best rooms there is always some feature that has to be worked around, and like a renter in a less than ideal home, you do what you can to cozy up the place and make it a comfortable nest for you and your students. Yet even then, the fix is nothing that should be considered permanent.

A classroom that’s been nudged into a cozy home by one group of students very often doesn’t quite suit the next group that comes along -- and so the process begins again. New students move in and recreate the space all over again. This is because a classroom, no matter how seemingly just right it may be, is just a physical space until inhabited by a group of learners and their teacher. Only then does it come alive and it does so in different ways with different groups at different times. Even the best of classrooms is just a room without students in it.

What makes a classroom ideal is not what’s in it, but who’s in it and how they feel when they’re in it

To see a bit of what I mean, go visit your favorite classroom at night after everyone’s gone. Walk into the room, sit down, and listen. What you’ll find is that there is nowhere on earth quite as quiet and empty as an empty classroom. If you sit long enough, though, memory will invoke the voices of students, the sounds of learning, and images of classes long gone. Yet, without these memories, no matter how ideal the room may be, you’ll find that without anyone in it, it’s just a room unworthy of special comment. An empty classroom, even one with the best possible features, is just dead static space -- a memorial to classes and students now elsewhere, a place that hoards silence in anticipation of classes and students to come. What makes a classroom ideal is not what’s in it, but who’s in it and how they feel when they’re in it.

Without any prompting at all, I asked a group of my students to brainstorm features of their favorite and least favorite classrooms. Only rarely were physical features mentioned. Obviously I could have steered the discussion in that direction, but what rolled out naturally was so interesting that I just let it happen. Here are the top ten responses in the order they were given:

In my favorite classroom …

I get to sit with my friends.
there’s a lot of group work.
we get to talk about interesting stuff.
it’s warm and sunny.
there’s space to spread out.
everyone laughs a lot and has fun.
the teacher is cool and never yells.
the teacher listens to me.
I feel excited and I learn a lot.
I’m happy being there.

In my least favorite classroom …

the mood is not good.
I feel nervous.
the teacher talks all the time.
the teacher is always telling us why we should listen and how we should act.
the seats are hard and it’s cold.
there’s no place for my stuff.
there’s nothing to look at.
we use computers all the time but in a boring way.
I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.
It has nothing to do with my life.
I don’t have any friends there.

Interestingly, I conducted this brainstorming activity in the best room I have, but no one mentioned any of its superb features or technological enhancements. No one mentioned the lovely small seminar rooms we have. No one mentioned the beautiful multimedia center except in a negative sense. Except for decent seating, storage space, and comfortable temperatures no one mentioned the physical aspects of classrooms at all. The student focus was on what happened in the classrooms and how they felt about that. This is an essential point. In the eyes of most students, the ideal classroom is not some well-designed wired space inside a school, but instead can be any place where they feel welcome, challenged, connected, and happy.

Still, most schools view facilities in a top-down institutional way, building new buildings and facilities without much regard for the people who will be using them. This reminds me of an anonymous quote I came across some time ago, about how designing classrooms and school buildings without thinking about what goes on inside them is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Never mind that the ship’s going to go down. Enjoy the band. Schools that misdirect their focus in this way are likely to sink in these troubled times. Yet, building continues.

Of course it’s important to have well-lit and comfortable learning facilities that are temperature controlled, safe, and clean. It’s also nice to have classrooms that are connected to the wider world via the various forms of both established and emerging technologies. Still, such rooms are just rooms unless the real focus is on supporting teachers whose focus is on making students feel connected to each other, engaged in what they are learning, and comfortable enough to take the risks that learning requires. This is the kind of teacher my grandmother was and the kind of teacher I aspire to be.

My grandmother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in the early part of the last century. I have a photo of that schoolhouse room right here and whenever I look at it am always amazed at its lack of anything comfortable. It had no heat except for a woodstove. Students wrote on slate tablets, and sat on hard wooden benches next to classmates ranging in age from six to sixteen. There were no non-essentials, hardly even enough textbooks to go around. Sill, many of the students who graduated from that little schoolhouse kept in touch with my grandmother their entire lives and looked back fondly and thankfully on the rich and caring foundational education they received there.

Once when talking to my then 98 –year-old grandmother about this she said, “it doesn’t matter where you teach, you know, or even what you teach. The secret is to make sure that all your students feel loved, especially the unlovable ones. If you can do that, they can learn anything, anywhere.”

It can happen in a one-room school, in a room in a drafty old teahouse, or in a completely wired learning environment at the most up-to-date university. It doesn’t matter where. It only matters that it does -- and this is what we should work at making possible. If the sky was the limit, and it is, I would focus less on classrooms and redirect resources earmarked for building projects on faculty development and student enrichment. Only then would providing classroom amenities and luxuries make real sense. Until then, the deckchairs get rearranged and the band plays on.

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Visit Chuck (and Curtis) on their Facebook page

.]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Dorothy Zemach

Peter Viney

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Chuck Sandy

How Did You Become The Teacher You Are?

2009-01-23T03:04:53Z

Chuck Sandy

Years ago someone gave me a motivational bumper sticker that reads Teachers Change Lives, and wanting to think that I might be or become such a person, I stuck it on my office door. I didn't think about it again or even really see it until the day it got caught on something and tore -- leaving only the words Teachers Change intact.

While teachers do certainly change lives, that original bumper sticker was mostly a cliche meant simply to give teachers a little pat on the back. When it became Teachers Change, however, it became for me a powerful reminder that one never quite becomes a teacher, but instead is always in the process of becoming a better teacher. As in other forms of personal growth, one never quite arrives but is always in the process of getting there.

What's almost hard for me to believe now is that I have been in the process of getting there for over twenty-five years. I mention this because upon reflection I find that it has been the actual going out and getting into the classroom with students day in and day out, year after year which has caused me to grow the most as a teacher and as a person. I have become the teacher I am (still becoming) by teaching -- while at the same time being open to the process of both learning and growth. The growth I refer to here is both personal and professional -- for in the lives of teachers they amount to the same thing.

Teaching, by definition, is a transformative act and in the best classrooms this transformation works on every level. The longer I teach the more I realize that becoming a teacher means being willing to share with others that self who one is at this particular moment in time. What I have discovered is that if I am willing to fully share that self while also being willing to change in the ways I am asking my students to change, my students are more willing to come along and grow with me.

When I first started teaching, people were still thinking of language learners as automatons who just happened to be equipped with language acquisition devices which teachers could simply boot-up and activate by doing certain things in certain ways rather than certain other things in certain other ways. I am referring of course to audiolingual and post-audiolingual practices that put language rather than people first, and I suppose in some way my life as a teacher to date has been a process of me raging and struggling against that machine in favor of the human.

Over the years I have struggled with these questions: How can I get students to see language not as a mysterious code, but rather as a tool for self-expression? How can I make language learning relevant for all of my students? How can I make my classes more meaningful? What are ways in which I can get students excited about learning? What materials can I develop that do what Helen Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan is referring to when she says:

"I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used
language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the
learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge."

I am still struggling to communicate that, and sometimes, of course, I fail miserably, but today I fully understand that we are teaching people, not language, and that in order to insure learning, we need to activate more than brains. We need to engage people in meaningful, relevant tasks while being willing to accept students shortcomings in the same way we are willing to accept our own. I say accept, but I mean that in a momentary sense. Once we accept our students as the people-in-progress they are, the job is to get them to recognize and overcome their shortcomings in the same way we should be willing to accept and overcome our own.

Over the years there have been days and classes so joyfully perfect that it seems strange that I get paid for doing what I do. Any teacher knows, though, that those perfect days and classes can be few and far between. Mostly teaching is a struggle, and at times the task of educating people seems an impossible one. When I feel that way, though, I look below that torn Teachers Change bumper sticker and see a quote I put there from the sculptor Henry Moore, who wrote:

"The secret of life is to have a task ... something you bring your everything to. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."

That's what teaching is: something we cannot possibly do ... perfectly, but which we can and do get better at doing the more we do it, the more we give it our all, the more we are willing to believe in and strive for the best in both our students and ourselves.

Though of course there have been very influential teachers of my own in my life, mentors along the way, gifted colleagues and coauthors, as well as friends willing to sit with me and think it all through, it really has been and continues to be the very act of teaching which has made me and continues to shape me into the teacher I am (becoming). It's the hardest work I know, but what could be better: the chance to change not only the lives of others but to change ourselves as well in the process. Teachers change and thank goodness for that.

Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, ELT author, essayist and poet who has most recently coauthored the Active Skills for Communication series with Curtis Kelly. He also recently completed work on a second edition of his popular upper-intermediate level series Passages Second Edition with Jack Richards, and is coauthor (with Jack Richards and Carlos Baribsan) of the junior / senior high school level series Connect. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and schools around the world where he most often speaks about the joys of project work and the need for materials and practices that promote critical thinking.

Visit Chuck (and Curtis) on their Facebook page

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Marc Helgesen

How did you become the teacher you are? In a sense, I am still “becoming” a teacher and hope I always will be. We are all constantly growing and evolving as teachers. Thank goodness for that. There’s always more to learn. And it’s really the only way to stay fresh – excited about what we do.

Anyway, how did I get to the place I am now? I started teaching in a maximum security prison in Illinois. (Yes, I really was just a teacher. They let me out every night.). I had been an elementary education/early childhood major in my undergraduate years and I was working as an ABE (Adult Basic Education) reading specialist. After a while, the prison started sending a lot of Hispanics to my class because they couldn’t read. They couldn’t read English because they didn’t know English. So I bought a book on teaching ESL and started an English class. And, like most teachers in a totally new and unfamiliar situation, I was lost. Then I heard about something called Illinois TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). I went to a conference. Wow. Amazing! Here were a whole lot of people who were doing what I was trying to do – and they actually knew how to do it. And they were happy to share what they knew. So that was one of the first things I learned as an English teacher – professional associations are really important. Here in Japan we have JALT and ETJ. There are local meetings and national conferences, regional EXPOs, special interests groups, and mini-conferences, websites, message boards, and discussion lists. There are a whole lot of people around us – people who are happy to help.

Anyway, while still working in prison, I went to grad. school to learn about this thing called ESL/EFL. And I continued to be active in Illinois TESOL. At one conference, I went to a workshop by Teachers College Columbia University Professor John Fanselow. The session was called “The Bridge It Done Begun At The Pasar”. At least that’s what I remember it as. Maybe that was the subtitle. Who would go to a session with a name you can’t understand? As it turns out, it was really three sessions: The Bridge, It Done Begun, and At the Pasar. And Dr. Fanselow went through them in reverse order – which matched he fact that he had stapled the handout together backwards. His point was this: figure out what it is you do, try the opposite and see what happens. And he’s right. You are certain to learn something in the process. And, when you take this attitude, it is perfectly fine to screw-up. You’re learning. And you stay fresh. That workshop was nearly 30 years ago but I still find the message important. It’s a useful way to keep growing. I think it is important for us as teachers to specifically look for change. As Harvard psychologist/researcher Dan Gilbert points out, a lot of people are neophobic. They fear change. This isn’t surprising since, for thousands of years, people grew-up and lived around members of their own tribe. It you met someone or saw something new, it just might kill you or eat you. No wonder people fear getting outside the comfort zone. But we are English teachers in Japan, so we aren’t as neophobic as some. If you are not a Japanese and in Japan, it means you’ve come to this foreign culture which is probably very unlike your native land. If you are Japanese, it means you make your living teaching people to connect with something outside the familiar. So as English teachers, we really are about change. And we can do that best by constantly changing ourselves and our teaching. Besides, it is that change that keeps us interested and engaged in what we are doing. And if we feel that way, the students will catch the energy.

After about five years in prison, I decided it was time to do something else (a sentiment I know a lot of the cons shared). I thought a couple years abroad would be interesting. So I came to Japan. A couple years? That was just over two and a half decades ago. And again, I got involved with the professional organization, JALT. This was the early ‘80’s when ELT was going through a paradigm shift. We heard a lot about the communicative revolution but there was another movement that was sort of a subset of that. It was the realization that we don’t just teach English – we teach people. People like Alan Maley and Mario Rinvolucri did workshops in Japan about what eventually became humanistic language teaching. Earlier models of language learning had treated students like language learning machines who could “listen and repeat” their way to fluency. We now assume that things like personalization and learner choice/autonomy are not simply motivation techniques and classroom management skills. They are basic to creating conditions necessary for learning. Humanistic language teaching and learning became and remains a major factor in my teaching and writing. It is also behind what I am currently doing with trying to create connections between ELT and positive psychology (The Science of Happiness)

So those are three things that I’ve learned and continue to use in my teaching – involvement in professional organizations, change and trying new things, and humanistic language teaching. I think they all fit into what we are trying to do with Think Tank. It’s good to be back.

Marc Helgesen is professor at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, Sendai and adjunct at Teachers College Columbia University MA TESOL Program - Tokyo. He is an author of over 100 articles, books, and textbooks including the English Firsthand series and has lead teacher development workshops on five continents.

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Curtis Kelly

For me, the question, “How did you become the teacher you are?” is intriguing, because I suspect the way I answer it might hint towards how all of us have become the teachers we are.

To start with, I’d like to suggest that we each have many teachers inside us, teachers that were there before we taught our first class, and even before we reached adulthood. We tend to think that our teaching style is a product of academic training, educational philosophy, or even the way we are taught, but I have come to the conclusion none of these causes us to be a certain kind of teacher, they are just boosters that move us further along an existing trajectory. These experiences just provide us the means to refine, empower, and verbalize what already is.

Indeed, I was inspired by some great teachers, including one in elementary school; I was stretched by the humanistic educational philosophy I encountered at Vanderbilt University (check yours here ); and most of what I do in the classroom came from training in graduate school, from JALT, or from my peers. Still a fascinating theory I heard in an interview made me realize the seeds of what I have become were already in play before those experiences. The theory had nothing to do with teaching; it was about politics.

The cognitive scientist George Lakoff was interviewed on his book, Moral Politics. Lakoff posits that we have two conceptual models for right and wrong imprinted from childhood: the strict father morality and the nurturant parent (I suspect he really wants to say “mother”) morality. One values equality, accountability, and self-reliance, while the other embraces compassion, care, and protection. I’ll let you figure out which represents political conservatism and which liberalism.

Lakoff has been criticized as being simplistic, but maybe unfairly. He does not say we are one or the other; rather, that each of us has a complex mixture of moral standards that we apply selectively. For developmental psychologists who study transference, his theory rings true. Something chimes for me as well, but not in relation to politics, in relation to what we do in the classroom.

Society has always portrayed educators as being alternate parents, and for a reason. Anyone who has observed Japanese high schools sees the strict father morality in action, regardless of teacher gender, and similarly, the nurturant mother (Okay, if Lakoff won’t say “mother”, I will) in primary schools. To me, the theory explains the extremes I encounter in teacher attitudes towards lateness, grades, group work, curricula, and just about anything else related to English teaching, including societal expectations. Here are some examples from college:

Father Mode

If they are absent three times then they are out. It is a rule I use to toughen them up for the real world.
If they can’t follow the lesson plan, they shouldn’t be in college.

Mother Mode

They are absent because of all the things going on in their lives, so I make special accommodations for them.
I won’t leave anyone behind, even if that means using materials below college level.

By different attitudes, I don’t just mean the attitudes and policies held by different teachers, I also mean the simultaneous, yet opposite, attitudes I carry within myself as well. Class-by-class and student-by-student, I switch from one mode of morality to the other. I am a contradiction, but I make it work.

In the long run, however, I notice myself shifting away from the strict father, and more towards the nurturant mother. Training, educational philosophy, the way I was taught might be parts of the push, but only minor ones. The real shove comes from getting to know my learners more intimately than ever before.

Although I have taught English in elementary schools, in high schools, in graduate schools, and in companies, most of my teaching has been done in Japanese universities. For the first ten years, I taught proficient, motivated students, but for the next eighteen, I taught what I refer to as 3Ls: students with low proficiency, low confidence, and low motivation. The more I understand about them, the more I see these things happening:

I reframe my role from being a language teacher to being a people maker.
I reposition 3Ls as being the primary target of my teaching, not the ones who study.
I realize that understanding and accepting are more powerful tools for enabling growth than scolding and punishing.

So how did I become the teacher I am? ... from being raised by others and then raising others myself.

Curtis Kelly (EDD) is a specialist in adult education, writing and speaking instruction, and brain-based learning. He has given over 250 presentations and written 17 books, including the Writing from Within and the Active Skills for Communication series.

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Dorothy Zemach

If I had two columns of space, I’d also write about how who taught me shaped the teacher I am. But with just one column, I’ll tackle how where I taught influenced me.

After graduating with a B.A. in French Literature, I drifted for a bit—tried out music administration and library work, and waitressed in the evenings … and then answered a 2-line ad in the local newspaper that said “Teach English in Japan! Call (number).” I knew nothing about Japan. Really nothing. When I went to the interview, the school’s owner showed me some photos that he said were “of the town and the school.” Although he’d said the school wasn’t much to look at, the first building I saw looked quite impressive for a school, quite impressive indeed, and I said so. He gave me a rather odd look, and said, “Yes, that’s because it’s a Shinto shrine.”

I kept meaning to learn something about teaching English before I went, but I took an intensive beginning Japanese language class during the day, and then was doing all that waitressing at night, and before I knew it, I was flying to Japan. Between the time I’d been hired and the time I flew over, the person who interviewed me had sold his school to someone else, who of course inherited me along with the operation. He met me at the airport in Narita, where his first words were, “I just hope you’re normal.” He took me to my apartment, where yes, he had to explain about taking shoes off and no soap in the bath (I also hadn’t found time to buy even a simple guide book—but I could read and write hiragana and katakana and carry on engaging dialogues about pens and ashtrays).

I had the next day off to see the town of Narita, which I had been warned was small and sleepy. I arrived on January 3 though, with New Year in full swing, and the streets packed solid (in those days, Narita-san drew about 2 million visitors during the January season). I put off a planned weekend trip to Tokyo because I wasn’t sure, if this was “small,” how on earth I’d ever handle “crowded.”

My second day in the country I observed three classes; the following day I taught on my own. Fortunately, Japanese students are kind to new teachers. They ask you questions, they introduce themselves, they let you know what page they’re on. Years later, when I tried my first homeroom of American middle school students, I felt like I was being torn apart by wolves; but the class with the Japanese was enjoyable, and the students seemed quite forgiving of what must have been my obvious cluelessness.

I was fortunate to have a boss (Bill Casey, now a professor at Chiba Keiei University) who was also a teacher, and who additionally made teaching supplies. He had a knack for drawing and made stacks of flashcards and posters to supplement the textbooks. He also enrolled me in JALT and drove me to each monthly meeting. JALT was like a mini certificate course in teaching. We had great presenters who demonstrated practical things. I learned a new technique every month, and then had four weeks to practice it before the next session. I directly credit the help I got from those JALT meetings with being active in professional organizations now.

My students were friendly and hard-working, but they let me know how hard English was. After all, they’d studied for years and still struggled with pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, idioms, spelling. And I believed them. They made such a convincing case for the difficulty of English, and at the same time my Japanese wasn’t progressing beyond that first semester I’d had at home—which I put down to some insurmountable gulf between the two languages rather than my spending most of my time with English-speaking friends.

After three years of teaching in Japan, I returned to the US to get an MA in TESL at the School for International Training. Following my graduation, I worked for a year at the American Language Center in Rabat, Morocco.

Moroccan students were a whole ’nother ball of wax, as they say. They had some obvious advantages over Japanese students in being bilingual in Arabic and French. Between those two languages, they had every sound that English does, and from French they had a wealth of cognates. But what stood out was their great attitude. I like to ask my students on the first day why they’re learning English. In Japan I used to get three answers: for work; for school; blank stare. In my Moroccan classes, about half the students would give answers like “I just like languages.” “I want to read English literature in the original.” “Foreign languages are fun.” Fun … and apparently easy. I asked a class of complete beginners once how long they thought it would take to learn English. Most thought it would take about a year or 18 months. And you know? Most of them were right! Because they were convinced that English was fun and easy to learn, it was indeed that way. They’d argue grammar points with downright passion. “Teacher! Isn’t possible to use the present perfect continuous here? and if we used that tense, wouldn’t it have a different meaning?”

They trusted themselves to learn the language, and they trusted me to teach it. Japanese students would let me say that I didn’t know the answer to a question but would find out and tell them the next time; Moroccans demanded that I think on the spot and would keep questioning me until they had teased the answer out. I had only one student who even carried a dictionary, and when I asked him once to look something up, he said, “But why? It’s much easier to ask you.”

When I returned to Japan, where I taught for two years at Sumitomo Electric Industries in Osaka, I took those memories back with me. I refused to buy into the whole “English is difficult” paradigm. In fact, I banned the word “difficult” from my classes. I made students use “challenging,” or sometimes “interesting” or even “enjoyable.” They’d laugh … but you know, what you say really does influence how you think, even in a foreign language. I also spent more time trying to show students the “fun” side of English—I set up international keypal exchanges, we listened to songs (yes, even in “business English” classes), we read stories, we analyzed English jokes and humorous anecdotes. Of course, by this time had my MA and more years of teaching behind me, so I was also simply a better teacher.

Japan is a great place to teach, and Japanese students might always be some of my favorites. But I encourage people who’ve taught only in Japan to try teaching elsewhere, even if it’s just a summer program. Try teaching multi-cultural classes if you’ve only experienced monocultural ones, or teach in an English-speaking country. Even if you come back and settle permanently in Japan, your experiences will positively impact the way you teach.

Dorothy E. Zemach is an ESL materials writer, editor, and teacher trainer from Oregon. She is a frequent plenary presenter at conferences, a columnist for TESOL’sEssential Teacher magazine, and has written over 15 ESL textbooks, including Sentence Writing,Paragraph Writing,Success With College Writing, and Get Ready For Business(Macmillan) and Writers at Work: The Essay (Cambridge University Press). Current interests include the teaching of writing, EAP, business English, testing, and humor in ESL materials and the profession.

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Peter Viney

I was dragged backwards screaming into TEFL. My first experience was over four years as a student, teaching teenagers during my summer holidays. That filled the mornings. The evenings were more exciting, doing the lights on summer variety shows for Tom Jones, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd. I learnt more about communication skills by watching professional comedians doing the same act twice-nightly for twelve weeks than from subsequent teacher training. I finished a research MA and got a job with what later became a well-known band. It was Christmas, we’d just got back from Germany. The band were in the doldrums. My brother-in-law was teaching TEFL at Anglo-Continental in Bournemouth and was offered a better job abroad. The school said they couldn’t possibly find an experienced teacher at short notice at Christmas, so he pointed at me … and there I was on January 4th, teaching. I intended to teach for three months only but I found a lively scene … there were weekly drama shows featuring Colin Granger and Guy Wellman. I met Karen, my wife and co-writer, doing the shows. We started writing original material together weekly for the shows. The classroom was a constant theatre. We had a props cupboard with wigs, hats, and all sorts of stuff next to the staff room. Lessons were fast-paced, funny, involving, and extremely hard work. Lord Reith, the first head of the BBC said the three purposes of the BBC were information, education, and entertainment. His 1970s successor, Billy Cotton Junior, said that entertainment should come first because without it you would not attract people to be educated or informed.

Most of us at Anglo-Continental were in our twenties and believed there was a direct correlation between teacher energy input and student language output. There’s some truth in that, but it took me ten years to find out that you could get the same results more calmly. In this “tick boxes” society, you are forced to adopt a teaching stance appropriate to your age. The twenties are the time to power through on energy and enthusiasm, the thirties to early fifties on technique and knowledge, and at my age, 61, the stance you try to get across is guru (-lite), i.e. wisdom. Like any stance, it’s partly an act for most people. Or mainly, in my case.

Why TEFL? I had disliked French at school. I enjoyed Latin because it was 30% history, and no one could criticize your pronunciation. Early on in teaching at Anglo, I was confronted with a class with, among others, a Mexican pilot, a Spanish sea captain, and a German photographer. Another teacher referred to them as the “thickies” because they were beginners. These were interesting, intelligent, and accomplished people who had failed to learn languages well at school. They’d thought language learning for its own sake was BORING and so were forced to take three months out of their interesting adult lives, and spend time on an intensive course learning English. I totally agreed with them. Language learning is dull in itself (as so many recent course books have proved beyond doubt). My mission was to make it funny and involving … not for the language specialists who could learn English from a telephone directory … but for the rest of us. That means involving and enjoyable tasks too, not just amusing presentation. I’ve co-written books with “natural linguists” and they don’t have a clue how hard or dull it is for everyone else. I try and make it interesting via content and presentation. I’ve become adept at making grammar transparent in the meantime. Most people want English as a tool to do something else, not as a study in itself. Those who do see English as a study in its own right are more than adequately catered for by existing materials. I’ve always written for the people who are not interested in English for its own sake. By an accident of birth and time they need to learn English. I’d hate to have been in the position in life of “If you want to make a living you need to learn Chinese.”

My Streamline co-author, the late Bernie Hartley, and I would discuss everything we had experienced in (bad) language classes and work out how to do it differently. Bernie had spent years analyzing the micro-skills of the teacher. Bernie could do a two hour training session on just eye contact, or pausing before a question or a cue. Bernie could give you thirty minutes on where to stand and what to do while using a cassette player. He taught me that there were a set of teachable and transferable professional skills for language teachers, and to get past the “personality” teaching I was used to.

I’m now a full-time materials writer. What is the challenge for the future? As Marshall McLuhan predicted in “The Medium is the Massage” forty years ago, the media, including television advertising, movies, video games, and MTV are changing the way that people think. When we were mainly educated by reading (or teacher explanation, or TV and film with a linear narrative thread), it promoted linear thinking, and cognitive process. Kids are now exposed to rapid multi-sensory stimulus on TV and on computer and game screens before they can even read. This alters the way people make associations and fundamentally affects the way they think and learn. Devising ways to harness rapid multi-sensory stimulus input as an educational process is beyond people like me who grew up in a linear world, but hopefully I can contribute a few pieces to the 3D jigsaw.

Peter Viney is the co-author of IN English:, Handshake, Grapevine, and Streamline. He has written thirteen video courses, and has recently finished work on a major video self-study project. He lives in Poole, UK. Peter and Karen Viney’s website is at www.viney.uk.com

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Chris Hunt

"Excessive Preoccupation with one’s self is a constant source of torment.”

Matthieu Ricard.

I don’t like teaching. It gets in the way of learning. When I think about teaching language the William Hull quote from John Holt’s “How Children Fail” invariably springs to mind, “If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn”.

The reason, I feel that overt teaching fails is that it inevitably teacher centred. Even the most child friendly and child centred lesson suffers from the flaw that it springs from the needs of the teacher rather than the wants of the child. Let’s face it, what child in their right mind would want to be in school being told what to do and when to do it? How is school anything more than a prison and how are teachers anything but well intentioned jailers? Please let me know if your experience murmurs otherwise. As I cast through the waters of my mind almost every catch confirms this dismal fact.

My first memory of school is being led through a room where children were playing with bricks. I was asked if I would like to come again and wanting a go with the bricks I said yes. I never saw those bricks again. I was four. When I was six we moved house and school was further away. My mother walked me to the school and when I realised I was going to be left there I struggled to escape. The teacher grabbed me and I kicked her in the shins. She didn’t let go. I guess she got to like me because I remember one time she gave me two puzzle books as a present. I used to take her flowers. Another time, much to my mother’s consternation, she took the whole class to visit our garden, no permission slips in those days. But I remember when I wanted to put guns on a model ship I was making out of cereal boxes she wouldn’t allow it. I did get permission from a visiting trainee teacher who showed me I could secretly use straws as retractable barrels. It was a great victory over unreasoned authority. But thinking back I must already have become conditioned to accept control as I sought permission in the first place. Now, whenever a child I am working with hamstrings their creativity with submissive requests for permission I inwardly wince.

I guess I was 16 or so when I first stood up to authority. I had been called to the Headmaster’s office with several other students. The school wanted to make us prefects. It was an honour. It was a responsibility. We would have the power to give orders, enforce school rules and put those who disobeyed on detention. When the headmaster finished explaining this to us he asked if we had any questions. In a quavery voice I told him that I didn’t want to be a prefect. I guess I was the first in his experience ever to refuse. He was momentarily rattled but decided to conclude by congratulating the others who said nothing. He made a point of shaking everyone’s hand but mine. He resorted to emotional blackmail by telling me that two teachers that I liked had put me forward to be a prefect and that they would be upset if I turned the honour down. I caved. But as a result, perhaps, I was never put on bus duty, which meant staying late until everyone travelling by bus had gone. I got to supervise a top floor corridor all to myself.

On that top floor I was a king. It was the school policy to force everyone but those in the final year out into the playground. I used to let those who wanted to stay indoors in a far room, as long as they were quiet. One time the school caretaker came by on a surprise sweep. He was about to check the room but just in time I saved myself by calling out that I had already checked the room and he didn’t bother to open the door. Another time I remember I refused a couple of third formers access to a different corridor because they were cheeky. They wanted the favour of a friend but treated me like an enemy. I guess this incident is one reason why now mutual respect is so important to me.

If we teachers were truly respectful of children then we wouldn’t teach in compulsory situations. Various situations in my life have pushed me towards teaching but it was only when I got to Japan that I began to accept it was a job I could do without self-loathing. In the private sector I found that I could put the interests of the child first before the demands of the parents. Ideally, I would only work with children who are passionate about English but in practise I do work with children who are ambivalent about it. One thing I think adults can do is to help children to find their passions. Another is to help children realise when they don’t like something and then help them not to do it. Helping a child to quit English can be as important as helping them to get better at it, probably more so.

Rereading my words above, I realise this piece is like trying to fill a bucket with a sieve. I’ve mentioned a couple of incidents, passed by many more and ignored my own experiences of language learning. I know one holiday I made a board game to practise French conversation and it blew out of the back of the car on the way home. I remember passing O Level French, it was compulsory, and after the exam our teacher was so convinced that most of us would fail that he made us keep studying. As the rest of the year whiled away the closing weeks after the exams playing cricket, football, and the like we had extra French lessons to get ready for a resit. In the event, all but three of us passed and many of us deliberately forgot to return our French books to the school by way of protest. Mine are still in a cupboard somewhere in my parents’ house.

Only one word can describe my feelings about learning French. Tedium. The Audio-Lingual method was in and it drove me out. I guess the complete lack of choice at school and the crushing boredom of so many of the lessons are why I am now so committed to providing choice and using games when I work. I’ll never force a child to do anything though I will get stroppy when one disrupts another. Refusing authority dies hard, but I’m working on it.

Chris (Hunt) works with his wife in a trailer home. The school can be seen here.His website is available at www.wisehat.com ]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Chuck Sandy

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

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Dorothy Zemach

Peter Viney

Chris Hunt

"What was the best idea you had in the last year?"

2005-12-31T15:00:00Z

Curtis Kelly

I often ruminate on is the purpose of education. In particular, what role should a Japanese college education play? To know what to teach, I must answer that question.

“Education should help people live better lives. The answer is incredibly simple, but it has important ramifications.”

The answer I have come up with is simple. The basic purpose of education is to give people better lives. It does not matter whether you see education as a way to shape society, solve personal problems, or to help you get a job, it is all the same. Education should help people live better lives. The answer is incredibly simple, but it has important ramifications. It means that I must focus more on my learners' needs and individual growth than on general English proficiency.

The concept also shows that there are huge holes in the education. There are a lot of things that would improve people’s lives that we do not teach at all. This is not surprising since our educational model has not changed much in a hundred years. We still view the three Rs as being the most important learning areas and others (sports, arts, etc.) as subsidiary. So what are some of those holes, and how can we fill them? Most of the holes have to do with values, spirituality (as in finding the meaning of life rather than religion), etc., but a huge one, and maybe the most important, is learning about how to get along with others. The Brooking Research Institute thinks so, too. In Workforce 2020, they state that human relations and communication skills are one of the two greatest training needs of today’s youth.

Human relations; a rather broad area, but within it is one particular topic that is crucial to success in life, but is almost never even mentioned in the classroom. For some reason, we teach almost nothing about love, intimacy and romance.

Finding the right partner and relating to that person is one of our biggest challenges, and it has a huge effect on the quality of our life. It is especially pertinent for college students, who go through all kinds of misadventures and romantic turmoil. It is amazing that despite the incredible need for such knowledge, and despite a huge body of scientific information on it, that most colleges do not offer a single course on love and relating. Instead, our learners have to figure out what love is all about from women’s magazines and Hollywood movies. Unfortunately, the information these sources give is often appalling. John Gottman (the “Love Doctor”) and other psychologists point out that Hollywood movies tend to teach the exact opposite of what leads to a good marriage. The typical formula: 1) Guy and Girl fall in love, 2) Guy and Girl are forced apart, 3) Guy and Girl realize they can’t live without each other and rush back into each other’s arms, and 4) Guy and Girl get married as soon as possible is precisely the wrong way to get married. Marriages done in this way have the highest correlation to divorce.

So what can I do to fill this huge hole in education? Fortunately, as English teachers we can teach any subject matter we want to, as long as it is delivered in English. So, at the beginning of this year, I changed my English for Life course topic from being “Desktop Publishing” to “The Psychology of Love.” I admit, I was nervous about the change, wondering what other professors would think or whether I could prepare the syllabus after all, my degree is in Education but it turned out to be an amazing success. It was definitely my best idea of the year.

The class turned out to be the most popular English elective at our university. More importantly, after two lectures on the psychology of love and one class in which they wrote love letters (mostly to friends or family), something happened I had never seen happen in class before. The whole mood changed. The lectures centered on love as an attitude, not a feeling, based on giving rather than getting, and this idea primed them to taking a loving attitude towards each other in class. In fact, I can pin down the exact moment the atmosphere changed. Every student in the class had elected not to let anyone else see his or her love letter, but then, one student, Yasuyuki, decided to share his. He read his touching letter written to the first girl he had fallen in love when he was a high school student and in sharing it, he created this amazing mood of trust and intimacy. After Yasuyuki, every other student but one decided to share his or her letter too.

After that day, it did not matter what I did in class. The class was theirs. In fact, it did not matter if I even showed up. They had important things to explore and discuss. Without any prompting from me, they made a blog site to continue their discussions, had dinner meetings almost every week, and spent hours in my office after class talking about more intimate problems. My role became just providing a few concepts from psychology to guide their discussions and giving them an occasional activity, such as “Finish this sentence: ‘Love is _____ .’”

Interestingly, less than half of the discussion (done both in English and Japanese) was on romantic love. Most of it was on how to deal with friends, family members, and others. They seemed to be committed to sorting out a wide variety of relationship problems, and some led to tears. I remember one student asking me if she was capable of ever loving since she had not been loved as a child. On telling her that her deciding to take part in this class was already the answer, she burst into tears. I also remember the odd feeling that everyone was a little sad when the end of class came, something that almost never happens in a regular English class.

Teaching this class was an amazing experience. Maybe I was the greatest learner. We often talk about the importance of using language topics related to student interests fashion, movies, and sports but I learned that there is something superficial in the way we handle “interest.” It is not the topic that counts. It is the underlying need to grow, of which interest in that topic is merely a symptom. If we can make these underlying areas of need love, confidence, and autonomy the targets of our teaching, instead of the side effects of those needs exploring love through movies, gaining confidence through sports, or expressing autonomy through fashions we are doing something far more worthy than just teaching language.

Love. It is a word that used to make me a bit uncomfortable (a curse laid on most English-speaking males), but not anymore. It is something to study and learn from. It is a life philosophy and the center of good pedagogy. And bringing it into the classroom was my best idea of the year, maybe the best of all my years.

Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University
Author of Writing from Within

Marc Helgesen

I was in the audience at Think Tank LIVE last October, sitting next to Rob Waring, my co-chair of JALT2005. It was Rob who asked the question, “What is the best idea you’ve had in the past year.” As soon as he said it, everyone in the room realized it was a brilliant question. It gave all the Think Tankers a chance to share the most exciting thing they are working/playing with. These could be works in progress, not fully developed ideas.

“Education should help people live better lives. The answer is incredibly simple, but it has important ramifications.”

Now, a few weeks later, we are supposed to write up our own best ideas. A minor problem with the one I want to share: we already did. The most exciting thing I’ve been doing over the past year is applying the ideas from “positive psychology” to the classroom. We wrote about that in the June Think Tank. But, as I said, I’m very excited about this. So having another chance to write about it is wonderful.

“Positive psychology” is a fairly new development in that discipline. Time magazine calls it “The science of happiness.” I prefer that term because it is easier for students to understand. For years, psychologists have studied mental illness. Makes sense. That’s where the big problems are. Recently however, researchers have started looking at mental health. They are asking what behaviors mentally healthy, happy people engage in. The main “guru” is probably Martin Seligman, whose book Authentic Happiness has done so much to inform the discussion. (Seligman’s web site is here. You can find the book at amazon.co.jp or in bookstores).

Please understand that “positive psychology” is not just happy talk or the “power of positive thinking.” It really is looking at specific behaviors that are useful.

In the June Think Tank, I shared a few ideas that I’m using in my own classes to try to make these ideas connect with ELT. I’ll share a couple more here.

In the June column, I listed eight behaviors that happy people engage in. Great, we know what they are. How do we get this information to our students? In class, we regularly do positive psychology activities. I recently wrote a pairwork (download PDF file here) which gives students some of the basic ideas. This works as it is but also gives them a way to understand how some of the other things we do fit into a larger process.

One thing we clearly know, both from positive psychology and from education theory, is that self-fulfilling prophesies are powerful. They work for good or bad. A few years ago, I learned a simple technique from Tim Murphey. He has his students form circles of 8 or 10 (or however many is convenient.). They walk in a circle, hand on the neck of the person in front of them. It is sort of a peer massage task. Last January, I went to a lecture on motivation by my editor, Mike Rost. He pointed out that our beliefs govern our motivations. He went on to identify four “self talk” patterns of motivated, successful language learners. They are:

* “English makes me feel good.”
* “I’m addicted to English.”
* “English is my language.”
* “I believe I will learn English.”

So I combined the two ideas. Now I regularly have my students massage each other’s necks, leaning forward saying positive statements into their classmates’ ears.

We often do this before quizzes. It relaxes students before the quiz (and there is clear evidence that relaxed students learn more and do better). By the way, the students do say the phrases in the first person (“I am…”, not “You are…”). They act as their partner’s innervoice while talking positively to themselves at the same time.)

I think one benefit of positive psychology is that it helps you make good use of opportunities. A couple months ago, there was a list of “feel goods” that made its way around email lists. Tim Murphey and I played with it and turned it into a classroom activity. You just give it to the students, ask them to read the list and rate how great each one is, from 1 (L) to 10 (J) I explain 10 to my students as “heaven”). Then they talk to their friends and come up with some of their own “feel goods.”

Here’s the list. If you want it as a xeroxable handout, click here. Enjoy. If it helps your students, that makes me very happy.

It feels so good! Read about things that make you feel good.

FEEL GOODS and NATURAL HIGHS
Go slowly: Think about these one at a time BEFORE going on to the next one...

IT DOES MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD (especially the last one).
Rate them: 1 to 10 (Best!)
Then compare with a partner. Talk about them.

Being in love.
Laughing. Laughing so hard your face hurts.
A sunny day during rainy season.
Taking a drive on a pretty road.
Hearing your favorite song.
Lying in bed listening to the rain outside.
A cold drink on a very hot day (or hot soup on a cold day.)
A hot face towel (oshibori) on a summer day.
Chocolate ice cream ... (or vanilla …or banana…or mango…)
A dog or cat showing that they love you.
Laughing for no good reason.
A good conversation.
Finding ¥10,000 in the pocket of an old jacket.
A rainbow.
A long, hot bath.
Having someone tell you that you're wonderful.
Hearing someone say something nice about you.
Waking up early. Then remembering you have a few more hours to sleep.
Making new friends or spending time with old ones.
Having someone play with your hair.
Sweet dreams.
Making eye contact with a cute stranger.
Holding hands with someone you care about.
Running into an old friend. You understand that some things (good or bad) never change.
Watching someone's face when you give them a really special present.
Getting out of bed in the morning. Then being thankful for another beautiful day.
A smile.
Knowing that somebody loves you.
Knowing you did the right thing (no matter what other people think.)

Marc Helgesen, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College
Co-author of English Firsthand and Active Listening

Chuck Sandy

When I hear Curtis Kelly say that the purpose of education is to improve people’s lives, I want to stand up and cheer. It’s been a long time since someone in our field has been brave enough to put such a warmly humanistic declaration into words. After years of focus on standards and benchmarks, corpus studies, best practices, and standardized testing, our professional pendulum is finally beginning to swing back towards the human.

“Over the course of year, while working on several projects together in this manner, I became not just a teacher but also a collaborator, a coworker, and a comrade.”

I’ve been learning a lot from Curtis this past year as we’ve begun working closely together on a materials development project, and in this context I’ve found that my very best ideas have sprung from something he’s said or written to me. Not long ago, Curtis sent me an email with this thought:

“There was once a time when word processors did the following: If you wanted to put something into italics, you first had to choose “italic mode” and then type the words. You could never type something and italicize it later. Unfortunately, this is not the way human beings work. We are object-oriented and not the other way around. You don’t pick up a knife to cut something and then look for an apple. You pick up an apple and then decide what you’re going to do with it. Human beings tend to focus on the object first and then think about what to do with it. We work better when we start with particulars and work outwards. It is then that we have a need, a need we can feel, and that’s when we go looking for tools to fulfill that need.”

This got me thinking, and led to my most effective idea of the year: not only providing full models for my students working in project-based classrooms, but also becoming with them a full participant in whatever work they were involved in. If I assigned my students a story-telling project, I first did it myself and demonstrated it for them. If I assigned a research paper in one of my seminars, I did one myself first and then made copies of it for everyone to see. Not only did I pass out the work or demonstrate it, I also talked openly about what was difficult for me and asked students to evaluate my efforts pointing out things they thought I could have done differently or better, making suggestions for ways to improve upon what I had done.

It was at this point in each of my classes that I then explained that the students would be doing the same work on their own and that is was their job to do it not as I had done it, but better than I had done it in their own way. As you can imagine, this was routinely met with a loud chorus of “that’s impossible” or “how are we supposed to do that?” And that’s when I began to break it down for them, showing them step-by-step what would be involved and how it would all work. Modeling the work myself was the apple Curtis wrote about, the particular we could all work outwards from. Breaking it down into steps clearly showed them what tools would be required for the job -- creating a need for when we began working at building up their language toolboxes so they would have everything necessary for the job at hand.

Then, as students began doing their projects, I sat down in their midst and did another one myself, taking into account their suggestions and trying to incorporate the ideas they had shared with me. While I was working, students would come over to see what I was doing. While they were with me, they’d not only ask questions about how to acquire some language tool they needed for their own work, but would make suggestions for how I could move forward with my own. Over the course of year, while working on several projects together in this manner, I became not just a teacher but also a collaborator, a coworker, and a comrade. They began to see me as a person rather than as some director, and I began to see them in new ways as well. Taking myself away from the center of the classroom allowed us to be together in new ways, talk about things that really mattered, and become fully with each other as we worked from the particular outwards on our various individual projects. Knowing exactly where we were all headed gave them the need they could feel that motivated them to acquire the variously required tools. Having the direction to produce a piece of work that was better than the original model I had first showed them, gave students a creative challenge they all set out to achieve.

At some point I thought I had achieved something remarkable with just this process alone and was quite happy that this idea, sparked by Curtis, had turned out so well. It was then, though, that something even more remarkable began to happen. Students became happy happy with their work, and therefore happier with themselves. As they presented their first projects to the class, I saw them begin to glow with a rightful pride in what they had accomplished. With each success, confidence grew. With this new confidence, based on earlier success, work got even better and happiness flourished. As happiness flourished, absences vanished, tardiness decreased, and work continued to get even better. I began to see an almost mathematical formula at work: a first success led to the next success; that next success increased the likelihood of further success; a further success led to not only more success, but also to an overall happiness and sense of self-worth among students that was beautiful to see.

People began to come early for class and stay late. They helped and encouraged each other. Even I did not want to miss even a moment of one of these classes because something wonderful was happening. I think it began when I got fully involved and started not only modeling, but also working along with my students. I think it got better as we began to see each other more wholly in this light. I know it got even better yet as one success led to another. I’d like to tell you that some student came up to me at the end of the year and told me that being in one of my classes had made her life better, but that didn’t happen. What did happen, though, is that in some marvelous way all of this made my life better and so I was able to pass that on through my students in each of my classes. I fell in love with teaching again, and having done so, am now better prepared to swing the pendulum even a bit further towards the human in the coming year.

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University
Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

Chris Hunt

"1.It is the right of all child citizens of a democratic state to be able to practice democracy in school on a daily basis

2. This democracy must include age-appropriate sharing of authority over the learning environment and over the control of social relationships within the learning environment

3. It is the right of all child citizens of a democratic state to be offered a minimum curriculum only.”

Leonard Turton (teacher at Summerhill)

Somewhere in King Lear there’s a discussion about the worst. For better or for worse the argument goes as follows so long as we can say this is the worst, then it is not the worst. But how does the argument stand up the other way around? Let’s try it out. As long as we can say this is the best, it is not the best! What is best can be bested. Something better this way bends. I guess whether you find this a cause for celebration or a cause for concern depends upon your point of view. Or perhaps it is both? Or perhaps it is neither?

“I think when we focus on the idea of best we run the risk of not seeing what is.”

Why is it that human beings get so wrapped up in what is best? Is it a facet of what has been termed the ‘human condition’ or just a function of social conditioning? Is it the pursuit of excellence or merely the expression of ego? Is the source a love of life or a fear of it? Does it spring from an abundance of self esteem or from a lack of it? Don’t expect much of an answer from me at the moment I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Perhaps I need a drink; but first an aside.

Where do ideas come from? When I sat down to write this piece I began with just one idea in mind, a feeble joke. It went like this. Ah yes, my best idea of the year I’m still waiting for it. But now thoughts are swirling around me and through me like so many phantoms. Which ones can I give shape and substance to? Which ones will allow me to? Suddenly I’m reminded of an old Monty Python skit where John Cleese (I think) dressed as a middle aged woman recites his theory about dinosaurs, “Dinosaurs are thin at one end, fat in the middle and thin at the other. This is my theory and mine alone.” Yet how many of us have had an idea that we can honestly lay claim to alone? Can ideas really be born in isolation? And if this is not the case, what price copyright?

Back to my drink. Okay, who’s been drinking from my glass? Just look at it! I could say that it is half empty. I could say that it is half full. I could say it’s just a glass. After all, it’s just imagination.

I think when we focus on the idea of best we run the risk of not seeing what is. This year I’ve been working at a kindergarten where the teachers are expected to teach and the children are expected to learn. Within this framework my best idea has been to create an incentive system. High on the wall of each classroom is a room-length space panorama. There is a rocket and it travels between the planets. When the rocket reaches a planet the children are rewarded with a surprise (so far this has been watching Wallace and Gromit videos). By succeeding in tasks the children earn rocket point counters. There are also flowers stuck to the whiteboard with magnets. Every day begins with six flowers (English lasts all day, once a week). A flower is removed every time a teacher uses Japanese to scold. At the end of each day the number of rocket points is multiplied by the number of flowers to determine the number of centimetres the rocket moves across the wall. The furthest travelled so far in a day is 57cm. The shortest distance 2cm. It’s a clever system.

The planets look beautiful against the black of space. The children are happy when the rocket moves a long way and when it reaches a planet. The planets are merely laminated paper cut-outs and space simply bin-liners cut at the seams and stuck together. It’s just illusion and it’s garbage. The rocket points, the flowers, even the position of the planets remain almost exclusively under the control of the teachers, that is, myself and my assistant. It is a control system. Forward little donkeys, chase those carrots, forward little donkeys, mind those sticks. Be good and you’ll grow up to be mules. I feel what this system teaches is to accept that authority exists and that it should be obeyed. Obey the teacher and succeed. The idea fits the kindergarten perfectly.

Lately I haven’t been sleeping so well. I’m wondering about whether to renew my contract. I guess what’s on my mind is whether I can come up with an idea that I will be comfortable with and that fits within the framework of the kindergarten. Parents have expectations. The children should learn. However, childhood is too precious to be thrown away in obedience. I want to work out something that is democratic and balanced. I want to create a kind of partnership between the children and the teacher where there is individual choice and mutual respect. Oi! Phantoms! How long is this process going to take? ]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Curtis Kelly

Marc Helgesen

Chuck Sandy

Chris Hunt

"Sharing Our Stories"

2005-10-31T15:00:00Z

O Best Beloved, a Parable for ELT Storytellers
Jennifer Bassett

ONCE UPON A TIME, a long, long time ago, on a small damp island off the north-west coast of Europe, there was a young woman who decided to become an English language teacher. We will call her Cinder- teller. That was not her real name, O Best Beloved, but that is what we will call her.

So Cinder-teller did a training course, and she went to live on an island in Greece, where the sun shone all day long, and the sea sparkled with silver light, and the dolphins played in the clear water. But Cinder-teller soon found that she did not see much of the sunshine or the sparkling sea, because teaching was much harder work than she had realised. She taught her lessons during the day, and during the night she studied hard at her books. And she learnt many things, O Best Beloved.

“In a classroom, Cinder-teller knew when her students were bored, because they fell asleep or sent text messages to their friends.”

She learnt that language is like a river swift and sinuous and ever-moving. She learnt that students on the river of language can go upstream, which is hard work pushing against the current, and they can also go downstream, and travel easily with the current. And it is good to travel both ways, because the view of the countryside on the riverbanks is equally beautiful, whether you go upstream or downstream.

Cinder-teller carried on teaching, and then teacher training, and on one of those training courses there was a tall, dark, handsome man called Mr Rochester Reader, I married him . . .

And so the years went by. Then Cinder-teller began to write teaching materials for students. She wrote course books and grammar books, and finally she came back to her first love stories.

But when she began storytelling for learners, she found that writing stories was much harder work than she had realised. For writing, O Best Beloved, is, as we know, just as interactive as speaking although in the words of the Wise Wizard Widdowson there is no immediate reciprocal negotiation of meaning, no joint management of the interaction as there is in a conversation. In a classroom, Cinder-teller knew when her students were bored, because they fell asleep or sent text messages to their friends. When they didn't understand something, their faces went blank or they sent text messages to their friends. When they were amused, they laughed or sent text messages to their friends.

But Cinder-teller could not see the students' faces when she wrote stories, and she wanted very much to enact a discourse by proxy, so to speak, because meaning is always negotiable. It is not inscribed in the language itself, and texts do not signal their own significance.

So Cinder-teller invented some imaginary readers to sit with her as she wrote. And they were three students, one from Patagonia, one from Kazakhstan, and one from Okinawa. There were three of them, O Best Beloved, because three is a magic number and there are always three of everything in the best stories.

And they were a great help to Cinder-teller, always looking over her shoulder, and reminding her about cultural norms and telling her to avoid unilateral idiomaticity.

The student from Patagonia would say things like . . .

"The character in this story in London is talking about August weather, but here in August we have freezing cold winds and snow in the mountains is that what you mean by August weather?"

The student from Kazakhstan would say . . .

"This story set in Europe keeps mentioning the War. Which war? Here in central Asia," she said, "we have a war to the west of us, and a war to the south of us. There are wars all around us. Which war do you mean?"

And then the student from Okinawa said . . .

But he didn't say anything that day, because he had better things to do he was down on the beach.

So Cinder-teller knew she had to try harder. She listened, and learned, and the more she learned, the more she knew how little she had learned, and how writing stories is the same as travelling on the river of language. You must stay afloat, you must watch the current, you must not turn your boat around in mid- stream or you will fall overboard and be drowned.

For in the words of the Wise Wizard Wilga Rivers, "All writers are blinded by the knowledge of their own intentions."

So Cinder-teller knew that she must never stop learning. And for every story that she wrote, she listened all the time to the shadowy voices of the readers in her mind.

And for all we know, O Best Beloved, she is still there now, writing stories in a little room, and listening to the opinions and arguments and advice from the students from Patagonia, Kazakhstan, and Okinawa.

Jennifer Bassett, series editor of the Oxford Bookworms

Kumiko Torikai

It was the first day of the new semester in 1997. I introduced myself to a first year English class in the economics department, and started to call roll. The list of names I was given from the office was all written in Kanji and in the Japanese way, with family name first. I started to call each name, without thinking, in the usual English way, first name first and family name last, reversing the Japanese order. Everybody answered in English, either “Yes” or “Present, ” until I called the name of one student. Let’s say his name was Masao Suzuki. I called out loudly, “Masao Suzuki,” expecting a “Yes”. However, there was no answer. I called again, a little louder, “Masao Suzuki.” Nobody answered. So I said, “Hummm…Masao seems to be absent…,” and started to mark him absent, when suddenly a young male voice cried out. “My name is Suzuki Masao. My name is NOT Masao Suzuki.” I looked toward the voice and saw a serious face glaring at me. He added, “My parents gave me the name. They named me Suzuki Masao, not the other way around.” To be honest, I was a little taken aback, and I pondered a second. Then I said, “I see. For some reason, I’ve always done this in English classes…but come to think of it, there is really no reason why we have to do it.” Then I asked other students what they thought of this. Deadly silence… Everybody looked terrified. It was the first class and they had no way of knowing how I might react to this. Some of them might have thought I would get angry. I could feel their tension. So I decided to throw away the lesson plan I had prepared and said, “OK. Why don’t we discuss this, because it is an important issue. Feel free to say anything. I am just curious to know what everybody thinks about how Japanese names should be addressed. Discussion time!”

“In 2000, the Council on the National Language proposed that Japanese people keep their names as they are even when they speak English.”

I divided the class into three groups, and after some time, had them report back to the class what they thought. The result was illuminating. One group thought it was all right to call Japanese names in an English way, reversing the order, in an English class, because after all we are learning English. The second group agreed that even in English classes, we don’t have to reverse the order of our names, because Chinese or Koreans keep their way, with family name first. The third group was so divided that they were not able to reach any consensus.

It is interesting to add that a few years later in 2000, the Council on the National Language (Kokugo Shingikai) proposed that Japanese people keep their names as they are even when they speak English. Following this proposal, the media reported the history of English way of calling Japanese names. Apparently, it was during the Rokumeikan Period in Meiji, when people went overboard to imitate the West, believing everything Western was modern, that people started to reverse the order of their names, including the then Foreign Minister in signing diplomatic documents.

Until 1997, I never had any student demanding to be called the Japanese way. As a matter of fact, both teachers and students took it for granted that the Japanese names be reversed to accommodate the English custom, and some students were even happy to be given English nicknames, such as Jim or Mary. However, I feel that perhaps the year 1997 was sort of a turning point, and we have started to have more Masaos. It is my belief that Suzuki Masao, who refused to be called Masao Suzuki, was, in his own peculiar way, struggling to search for his identity. And it seems to me that students in Japan, as well as in other countries, are becoming more and more aware of their identity, if not totally conscious of it themselves. As scholars such as Bonnie Norton, Jim Cummins and Claire Kramsch point out, we cannot teach a foreign language without taking into consideration the students’ identity.

Names are not just names. They represent the students’ identity, their ideology, their perception of the ‘self’, their inner thoughts, emotions and sometimes, their pride.

So, how are you going to call your students?

Kumiko Torikai, Rikkyo Graduate School of Intercultural Communication

The Day I Lost My Integrity
Curtis Kelly

“Make a few rules and then be consistent in enforcing them,” I was told, “or else the students will think you are unfair, or take advantage of you.” This is a basic rule of classroom management, and it makes sense. A rule is not something you can require of one student and not of the next. We need standardization and consistency in the classroom. It is a matter of integrity.

Well, here is how I lost my integrity.

“As she neared the door, all eyes were upon me. The others could see my discomfort.”

Her name was Maiko, and she was in my English class at a women’s college. She skipped most of the homework, but she wasn’t the only one. Her greater offense was not coming to class until the class was well underway, and that was pushing against a university requirement to attend two thirds of the classes.

Well, Maiko always came late, usually 40 minutes late, which meant she walked in when the class was exactly half over. One day, I decided to do something about it, albeit in a gentle way, and when she walked in 40 minutes late, I told her that I couldn’t decide whether to mark her absent or present. “So let’s do Jan Ken to decide. If you win, I’ll mark you present, and if I win, I’ll mark you absent.” Seemed fair.

Maybe I wanted her to win, but my “stone” beat her “scissors,” so I told her I’d have to mark her absent. As soon as she heard, she stood up and said, “Okay, then I’m leaving.” As she neared the door, all eyes were upon me. The others could see my discomfort. Then, just before she walked out, I broke and said, “Okay Maiko, stay. I’ll mark you present,” and I could see the others shaking their heads.

I was not consistent. I had reneged on my promise. I was sure I had lost all integrity with the other students, and maybe I had, but then something interesting happened. Three days later, only one student sent me a mail wishing me a happy birthday. It was from Maiko. And then she started coming to my office to complain about how easy the teachers were at our school and how they should be stricter. I asked why she came to me of all people, the “pushover,” to discuss her feelings, and that made her think. After a few more meetings, I helped her discover her real problems, and offered support for her decision to transfer to another program. She moved to another campus, but she still made an effort to visit me once in a while, usually with cakes, and tell me about her life. I had become one of her best friends, and it made me happy to hear how well she was doing.

Then, a year and a half later, when I went to my office one morning and a handmade wooden sign, with my name in red felt letters, was hanging on my door. Maiko had been there the evening before and left it as a gift. On the back of the sign was a poem. I don't know if she wrote it, or translated it, or found it somewhere, but it would have been in her style to have written it herself. Here it is, just as I found it:

Goes and Goes time goes on we are not alone.
We live on together and will find some precious things.
Sometime we smile, sometime we will cry somehow.
Don’t forget believing yourself. Tomorrows never die.

Integrity, Rules. Consistency. Now I think it is all humbug. Making things standard makes them inhuman as well. Maybe something cracked in that class that was needed to support the whole, but for Maiko, it was a crack in a wall.

Thank you Maiko for “believing yourself” and helping me believe myself.

Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University
Author of Writing from Within

Chuck Sandy

Some of the most profound moments in a teacher’s life occur so quietly they could pass by without notice if one does not pay close attention. One such moment occurred not too long ago when I walked into my classroom to find all of my students already engaged in work on the project they were doing at the time. Except for greeting me, no one paid me much mind. I was no one’s center of attention. The work was everyone’s focus. Although this might not seem like much of a story, it was years in the making as I moved from holding forth in a teacher-centered classroom to becoming a co-learner in and a facilitator of an activities-centered classroom. “Then, once classes begin, I set things up, provide possible models, and step-by-step turn the class over to the students so they can get on with the work at hand.” These days my students are mostly involved in doing project work that requires them to pull together a variety of skills in order to create something that is uniquely their own within parameters we often set together. My primary roles before classes start are planning, organizing, and gathering resources together. Then, once classes begin, I set things up, provide possible models, and step-by-step turn the class over to the students so they can get on with the work at hand. Once this happens it then becomes impossible to predict with any accuracy what questions, problems, or needs might come up. In a single class I might be helping one person work out a grammar issue, talking with a small group about alternative ways of organizing information, or discussing an issue that someone would like to share with the class. Then, I might be asked a question about pronunciation or vocabulary. Someone might need help conducting a web-search. Another might call me over to tell me about a part-time job or a new car or a broken heart. As I circulate around the room, I never know what will be asked of me or what shape a class will ultimately take until I’m in it along with everybody else. I’ve come to love this unpredictability and my away-from-the-center classroom stance. It’s this that makes each class a story of its own, a narrative that remains unknown until we all work to weave it together.

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University
Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

Marc Helgesen

This is a little story about criticism.

It happened when I was in second grade so I was, what, seven years old? I lived just a couple minutes from school, so usually I ate lunch at home. But one week my mom was gone visiting my grandmother, maybe. Anyway, I was eating lunch at school. We didn’t have school lunches in those days. We brought our own. But we could order little bottles of milk.

“I wonder, a year or two or forty years from now, will my students remember me? And for what?”

I was eating my lunch and drinking my milk when, as bad luck would have it, I knocked over the milk. It drenched me, my lunch and ran into my desk, giving my papers and books a good soak.

Embarrassed, I cleaned it up. I don’t remember what the teacher said but the next day, when they were passing out the milk, she said something like, “Marc, I hope you don’t spill your milk and make a big mess today.” And of course, she said this in front of all the other students (my peers = the most important people in the world).

I’m sure if someone had asked her after school that night what she had said to me, she wouldn’t have remembered. But here it is, more than 40 years later, and I still remember the feeling of humiliation.

And (this is an interesting part), I remember the names of all my other teachers from Kindergarten through 6th grade. Even the “extra teachers” like music, art and gym (that was Mr. Beyers Like “Beers with a Y,” he explained to us kids who thought that was very funny.) But I absolutely can’t remember the name of my 2nd grade teacher.

And I wonder, a year or two or forty years from now, will my students remember me? And for what?

Marc Helgesen, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College
Co-author of English Firsthand and Active Listening

]]> This Month's Think Tank Panel

Jennifer Bassett

Kumiko Torikai

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Marc Helgesen

ELT News Think Tank Live at JALT2005 - Preview

2005-08-31T15:00:00Z

Jennifer Bassett

As the theme of the panel discussion at Shizuoka will be sharing teaching-related stories, I think I should begin with a confession. I am no longer a teacher! So I wondered whether I should talk about my past as a teacher, or my transition from ELT teacher to ELT writer, and finally to ELT storyteller. In the end I settled for the storyteller angle, because although I am not in classrooms any more, I am still communicating with learners via the pages of a book, trying to engage and entertain them with the stories I write. And how did I learn to be a storyteller? Well, I had the best possible teachers in the world, from Austen to Asimov, Dickens to Dostoevsky, Maupassant to Murakami, J.R.R. Tolkien to J.K. Rowling. If you want to be a writer, read, and read omnivorously. And are there things that ELT storytellers in particular need to learn? Well, I have written a little short story about it ... but I am saving it for the Think Tank Live event.

David Nunan

As teachers, we lead very busy lives. There is often insufficient time to find out what our learners think and feel about language learning, to uncover what motivates them to attend our classes (or to stay away!), and to find out how they feel about the learning experiences that we create for them. We rush from class to class, often unaware of the attitudes and motivations of our learners, and the ways in which the pressures they have in their own lives have a significant impact on their ability to benefit from what we have to offer in class.

In this think tank, I would like to discuss the benefits of collecting learners' stories, that is, learners' own accounts of their language learning experiences, and the ways in which language learning fits into their lives. These stories can greatly enrich our professional lives as well as providing important insights into the processes underlying language learning. In order to collect stories that can inform our teaching, however, we need to build up our students' trust and confidence, and we need to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. This takes time and effort. In my experience, the investment in time and effort can be extremely rewarding.

Kumiko Torikai

The story I am going to tell at Think Tank Live would be decided on the spot from among the three stories I have. One is about the identity of students, a buzz word nowadays; another about motivation, a fovorite topic for all language teachers; and about the silence of Japanese students, a pet subject among teachers teaching in Japan. If you have any preference among the three, please let me know.

Curtis Kelly

"Make a few rules and then be consistent in enforcing them," I was told, "or else the students will think you are unfair, or take advantage of you." This is a basic rule of classroom management, and it makes sense. A rule is not something you can require of one student and not of the next. We need standardization and consistency in the classroom. It is a matter of integrity.

My story is about how I lost my integrity...

Chuck Sandy

Some of the most profound moments in a teacher’s life occur so quietly they could pass by without notice if one does not pay close attention. One such moment occurred not too long ago when I walked into my classroom to find all of my students already engaged in work on the project they were doing at the time. Except for greeting me, no one paid me much mind. I was no one’s center of attention. The work was everyone’s focus. Although this might not seem like much of a story, it was years in the making as I moved from holding forth in a teacher-centered classroom to becoming a co-learner in and a facilitator of an activities-centered classroom.

These days my students are mostly involved in doing project work that requires them to pull together a variety of skills in order to create something that is uniquely their own within parameters we often set together. My primary roles before classes start are planning, organizing, and gathering resources together. Then, once classes begin, I set things up, provide possible models, and step-by-step turn the class over to the students so they can get on with the work at hand. Once this happens it then becomes impossible to predict with any accuracy what questions, problems, or needs might come up. In a single class I might be helping one person work out a grammar issue, talking with a small group about alternative ways of organizing information, or discussing an issue that someone would like to share with the class. Then, I might be asked a question about pronunciation or vocabulary. Someone might need help conducting a web-search. Another might call me over to tell me about a part-time job or a new car or a broken heart. As I circulate around the room, I never know what will be asked of me or what shape a class will ultimately take until I’m in it along with everybody else. I’ve come to love this unpredictability and my away-from-the-center classroom stance. It’s this that makes each class a story of its own, a narrative that remains unknown until we all work to weave it together. ]]> O Best Beloved, a Parable for ELT Storytellers
Jennifer Bassett

--> Our thanks to all who helped make the Think Tank Live event a success at the JALT Conference. For those who couldn't make it, we hope to have everyone's stories on the site later this month. In the meantime, here's a photo and the pre-conference summaries that the panelits provided.

This month's Think Tank is actually more of a preview of the ELT News Think Tank Live event (see here for more info) at the JALT National Conference, held at Granship in Shizuoka, from October 7-10. Our five panelists have written brief summaries of what they are going to talk about at the event - without giving too much away!

The panel is made up of the three conference plenary speakers, Jennifer Bassett, David Nunan, and Kumiko Torikai, as well as regular panelists Curtis Kelly and Chuck Sandy. It will be moderated by eigoTown.com president and former ELT News editor Russell Willis. In keeping with this year's conference theme of "Sharing Our Stories," panel members will share teaching related stories, which will then lead into a panel discussion.

The Think Tank Live Panel

Jennifer Bassett

David Nunan

Kumiko Torikai

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Russell Willis

Think Tank

Self study -- six positions to get you thinking!

Talk to yourself - in English

Talk to yourself in English

- practice ideas

Self Study - The Missing "Extensive"

Self Study

Self Study - Forget it!

Build language independence through reading

Chuck Sandy's contribution will appear here later!

Nice things that happened in my classroom in 2009

What are some nice things that have happened in your classroom/ (in your teaching) lately?

Something nice that happened in 2009

What Are You Thinking About / Presenting at Conferences These Days?

Connection, Collaboration, and Community

Happiness in the classroom (and out): ELT and positive psychology.

What are you presenting these days? What Brain Science Teaches us About Learning

What are you presenting about this season?

What are you presenting about this season?

What Are Some Ways to Maximize Student Talk Time?

Modeling Student Talk

It's Not About Technique

From Task Analysis To Reward Analysis

Maximizing Student Talking Time

How do we maximize student talk time?

What Are Some Ways to Motivate Students?

Motivation

How Can We Help Increase the Motivation of Our Part-Time Teachers?

Maslow and the 3Ls

The Human Universe

Can a Teacher Motivate Every Student?

Classroom Group Dynamics; Significant Influence on Learner Motivation

Extra Extra!! It's The Special Summer Rerun Issue!!

Language Learning and the Senses

To what extent should learners be given choices when they engage in classroom activities?

Do you Do Tests?

Making Things Better

Telling Tales

What are ways to introduce pronunciation exercises in lessons?

What are some things you do when you teach reading?

Questioning Comprehension Questions

questioning comprehension questions.

What are some techniques for teaching reading? Are my Japanese colleagues doing it wrong?

Teaching Reading

Here: Read This! I Think You'll Like It

Teaching Reading Skills

Teaching Reading

What are some ways to start a class off right?

What would you change about your classroom if the sky were the limit?

How Did You Become The Teacher You Are?

"What was the best idea you had in the last year?"

"Sharing Our Stories"

ELT News Think Tank Live at JALT2005 - Preview

What are you presenting these days?
What Brain Science Teaches us About Learning

What are some techniques for teaching reading?
Are my Japanese colleagues doing it wrong?