Mind your language!

Do I want students to say what they want to say or what I want to them to say?

This is such a great question, it pretty much goes across all of the conversations in one way or another and is certainly the one that’s got me thinking the most!

It was fabulous to see so many people at the Coffee Break, it shows it’s something that we all value and enjoy. Is it sustainable in this way with these numbers of participants? We’ll pop a questionnaire on the Hub and we can see what everyone thinks.

There were two main topics of conversation; the Wednesday question about swearing and the other a look back at Chris Roland’s session on Young Learners.

We started off looking at the Wednesday question which had already provoked quite a response in the chat; “How do we feel about teaching swear words?” Here’s the main points people made…

  • Students are interested in it. It’s part of the language so we shouldn’t ignore it.
  • Not with younger learners, “obviously”… but they use swear words a lot, even in class. (Thank you, Fortnite et al!)
  • We don’t need to teach it, it’s there in society. But do we need to teach appropriate use? It feels horrible hearing students use the N-word in class, for example. The challenge is how to incorporate it.
  • Does swearing sound just wrong in a foreign language?
  • Are we as teachers, and perhaps living out of predominantly English speaking countries for a while, up to date? Check out History of Swear Words on Netflix
  • “You can use it out of class but I don’t want to hear it”, like a parent might to their children.
  • Swearing adds colour and flavour to language… maybe we need to teach the severity scale. See Swan, M, Practical English Usage, 1995, as he also  touches on grammaticalised swearing.
  • There’s also a book from 1996 by Sterling Johnson called English as a Second F*cking Language: How to Swear Effectively, Explained in Detail With Numerous Examples Taken from Everyday Life
  • We can also have fun with pron, for example “bitch/beach”.
  • Have some of these words lost their strength? “What the f*ck?”, “It’s so f*cked up”, etc.
  • Does a lack of alternatives for our students indicate a lack of other vocabulary?

And then the focus switched to materials…

  • Writers have to avoid certain subjects. It’s all about sales. Would Rinvolucri et al be published now?
  • Is ELT too clean? We need to reflect reality. Is “anodyne” a better word? Does ELT publishing go for an all-acceptable world view based around western values of attainment and end up in a glossy, magazine-like portrayal of the world? ELT fails to reflect so many realities, including uncomfortable realities.
  • The Raise Up series of coursebooks was mentioned as a counterpoint. https://raiseupforelt.com/
  • And of course, current materials weren’t written for a COVID world and so much seems so silly now!
  • We can ask questions of our students at all ages to help them engage in a more real world view.

We then switched topics completely to look back at Chris’s sessions about teaching younger learners and the questions that had emerged in the chat in the threads on the Hub. The main question was about Chris saying that he didn’t really do routines with his little ‘uns and why that might be.

  • Children need reference points, routines give moments of confidence, especially to weaker learners.
  • Routines shouldn’t be boring and just time-consuming, although they often are. How helpful is it for students to spell their name in every class?
  • Do we miss opportunities for natural exchanges and personalized language development if we stick to our routines? Do we want children to say what they want to say or we want them to say?
  • Routines need to change and develop, we need to change things up.
  • Routines can be really helpful in reviewing and previewing future language.
  • What is a routine? Maybe it’s a structure of a class… a connecting stage, homework check, input and closing stages.
  • The teacher might be bored but is the student? They might be really into it. We need to react to our students.
  • Try “Good day, bad day?” as a routine. Learners really express themselves, build personalized vocabulary through an appropriate use of translation and supporting learners.
  • A note on translation; try a “sandwich” where learners tell the teacher what they want to say, the teacher translates and then encourages students to repeat the words or writes new vocabulary on the board. What happens to the language then? This depends on teacher skill, we need to decide what’s worth coming back to, which of the emergent language should we recycle? The teacher become the “archiver of useful stuff”. The acknowledging of and listening to the students is a great way to build relationships too.
  • Do routines just access Lower Order Thinking Skills? Need to use routines to activate Higher Order Thinking Skills too.

Following on from the Coffee Break, Chris added a reply to the question about using routines:

“My three main objections to routines (activities that YL’s do again and again) are: 1. Some kids just hate them. There are always one or two who you can see are bored by doing the same thing every lesson. 2. The language connected to routines often stagnates, not going anywhere over the course of a term or year, sometimes to the point that it is rendered meaningless to students. You can sometimes tell this because they have no idea where the word boundaries are between the different words that accompany the actions they are performing. 3. I feel that in some situations, routines might be a bit of an easy option used to fill up class time when students could actually be being pushed further or engaged on a more personal level.

On a more technical level, I feel that routines often regulate action rather than language. To move away from an events management paradigm and towards a linguistic one, I prefer to talk about ‘scripts’ which I define as sentence length utterances connected to recurring classroom events, but not necessarily activities. I also do rely on routinised transitions, as covered in the session, using these to give me greater flexibility to lead in to the unexpected. So there is an element of routine there.

I cover scripts, classroom events and transitions in more detail in the first 5 chapters of the main book, Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom (the big one rather than the smaller volume for online teaching) but that’s about the nuts and bolts of it. Having said all that though, it’s not a stance I defend vehemently, just a preference, and I think if a teacher looks after their routines and updates or adds to the language a little bit now and then, and maybe builds on the actions systematically, then they can be a useful strategy.”

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