Teresa

Hub digest – 11th June, 2021

by

What’s been happening in the Hub this week? Well, we had an interesting chat on Tuesday about digital literacy and assumptions/expectations during the monthly Trainer Talking Time live chat.

On Wednesday, there were lots of interesting responses in a discussion on the Facebook group about the place reading aloud has in the classroom. Interestingly, many people have become more pro-reading aloud through their careers, although it was also highlighted that it’s not something many people do in their day-to-day lives.

And as always, the chats continued in the Coffee Breaks on Thursday as we discussed our approaches to introducing more diverse and inclusive topics into the lesson as well as potential difficulties teachers may face.

Next week, it’s time for another Focused Forum on Tuesday and on Thursday we’ll be joined by Elen Evans of STEM Ginger Education who will be demystifying CLIL for us.

From educators to influencers

by

We opened up talking about pubs opening up in Ireland (only outside), haircuts being possible again in Germany, Mercury in retrograde and grandmothers sucking eggs! We compared each other’s tech setups; new mics, lighting, standing up work spaces, etc. We talked about the odd reality that is that of the travelling examiner, a tour of 7 weeks, staying in hotels and feeling a wee bit uncomfortable. We mused on cultural shifts around the increased popularity of Santa (vs the 3 Kings) at Christmas and wondered whether the tooth fairy does really exist?!

Interestingly both sessions went down similar lines… In one “Is it our duty to raise awareness and open students’ eyes with regards to social matters, or is it just not our place to do that?” and in the other “Are there “taboo” subjects or should education be open?” There are strong and often conflicting, always complex, opinions. The Hub is a great place to explore these subjects; it’s a safe, open space where all are respected. These notes are an attempt to bring together the two conversations…

English teacher or “educator”?

We asked ourselves if our role is to teach English or to “educate” people and then whether we’re qualified to do so. It’s also a linguistic question rather than just a moral one; we should include vocabulary like “life-partner”, of course.

Some felt that they really wanted to address some of these issues to “make the world a better place” and others very much thought it wasn’t our job to do that. We noted that we spend a great deal of energy making students feel comfortable in class so we need to think carefully.

What do we do when we hear “rude” or “inappropriate” comments? I want to talk about my views, should I?

We need to teach people how to not offend people, we never know who might be thinking, feeling or experiencing what in our classes.

Perhaps our job is to support students to ask and answer difficult questions, especially if it comes from the students or comes up in class, as well as create the environment where our students feel comfortable. We need to provide the vocabulary and create a culture of respect. 

Our job is not to guide students rather than impose anything, unless there is something offensive to deal with (and then it’s up to our discretion). Having said that, when we encourage critical thinking and critical reading and whenever we introduce a text or an idea, we’re sort of imposing an idea. Also, if there are only straight people portrayed, we are imposing “a straight-washed world view”. We also acknowledged the sanitised world view that coursebooks so often portray, do often aspirational, middle class, white, and can be seen in the vocabulary in books (e.g. jobs).

Representation is the first step

We don’t need to talk about the issues, images can begin the process. Representation is the first step.

Can we use LGBTQ+ pictures in our primary classes? Why not? It’s a representation of society. We wondered whether ELT is, due to issues around international acceptability, behind the curve in many ways. We talked about using different photos of families, for example, including one from “Modern Families” (containing all sorts of families!). There are increasingly representations all over the place, why not in ELT? Might parents complain? How might language schools react? Arguably, schools should support their teachers with parents and in CPD. There is much work to do. We wondered whether students sign up for language and/or culture? Inclusivity is increasingly part of international culture, it is only natural for it to be included in our classes too.

We can create space for the conversations to happen and this will, of course, differ in different contexts, for example, in Brazil these conversations feel more commonplace than in Spain. Is that because the society is more conservative as a whole or because of the dominance of religious education among our students or is it because of our students… or maybe us? In Korea there was a race awareness element of a British Council programme which included a variety of reactions to mixed race marriages and led to significant difficulties for the students. We need to be sensitive. We might well need to balance the global with the local reality. At the same time we need to remember that students lives are not limited to the local, many of our students exist within international spaces online.

If materials don’t exist, we can create our own. One participant talked about the freedom they have in teaching (a group of adults) without a coursebook and using an article about Sam Smith choosing the “they/them” pronoun. Their context is international Geneva where people are used to being asked their opinion about everything in frequent referenda. We talked about the importance of the conversations being student-driven.

We don’t need to bring the text in, our students can (they might bring in texts that contain sensitive stuff). Ideas around student voice and choice can be extremely powerful in class as they have control to really contribute. 

The teacher might need to guide (and almost certainly provide a model) and then students can drive things forward. One difficulty we might encounter is that students can worry if we ask totally open questions, instead we can give a choice of three ideas with a “or anything else you’d like to choose”. 

One idea was a reading activity where students bring in texts, put them around the walls and have two minutes to read each one before taking two more minutes to write notes on what they’ve just read before moving on to the next one. After the texts have all been read and notes taken there are a whole range of possible activities afterwards (writing comprehension check questions, creating exam style cloze activities,  writing discussion questions, etc…) 

Another practical idea was around giving presentations, again we need to provide a model and give support. We commented that this felt like a TBL (task based learning) approach where the students look at a model, complete a task and then produce the product.

We talked about the potential difficulty of presenting “controversial statements” to the class which they have to agree or disagree with.

We agreed that it’s easier to talk about other people rather than to “own” it all.

Representing everybody is normalising. Everyone should be represented. Representation is the first step.

Is our own awareness already “out-dated”? 

We thought, yes, it’s quite likely, things are changing fast and it can be hard to keep up with it all. The best we can do is be aware and realise that we might “get it wrong”.

13 Reasons Why (a text about suicide) was used as a set text by an exam board and appropriacy was again questioned. Teenagers arguably need and want to talk about these issues. Are we prepared? Instead of us providing the answers we need to find out how to guide them to access the support they need.

What is our personal mission as teachers?

We often talk about the mission of a business but what’s our own mission, why are we teaching? Teaching can be a radical tool of transformation; education can be the way up and out of a particular situation. A teacher can be a “motivator”, to communicate in a different language can be a joy and we can open doors to understanding the world.

TEFL influencers… is that a thing?

We went on to talk about FOMO (Fear of missing out) and JOMO (the Joy of missing out) for our teenage students. They read a lot of influencers rather than listening to teachers or parents. We wondered whether there are TEFL influencers… 

Online training skills

by

My apologies – I should have written these notes up immediately after the session when it was all fresh in my head! Please do add anything I’ve missed in the comments 🙂

A big theme of the chat today was around digital literacy, as well as the assumed digital literacy teachers and learners have. We identified a need for our teacher development sessions to involve introducing teachers to the tools they can use and demonstrating how to use them – similarly to how we (should) showcase a website for learners to use at home as a part of our lessons, as opposed to just sending them home with a list of links. As to often happens when we talk about tech, the question of the pedagogical value of the shiny new tool came up and the need for teachers (and trainers) to think critically about the benefit of delivering content in a particular format. Similarly, a reminder for tech not to overwhelm: introduce one tool at a time and give people the space and time to familiarise themselves with it.

Tech in training

From a tutoring viewpoint, we also asked how easy it is to assess someone’s teaching skills if the lesson is tech-heavy. I remember a few years ago, I observed a trainee who was superfluous to the lesson – everything was on the Powerpoint presentation and as long as a learner could press next (and didn’t have any questions), the teacher didn’t really need to be in the room! 

Thinking about the materials assignment on the Trinity CertTESOL too, we said how moderators are trained to ‘see through the sparkles’. And, similarly to how we often tell train to Select, Adapt and Supplement the coursebook, they need to learn to exploit digital materials in the same way.

Another point which came up was around having a specific question on the assessed lesson plan around anticipated problems with tech. In the past, we would also tell teachers to have a plan B for if tech didn’t work, but what happens when everything revolves around tech? We also noted that we had seen a lot of ‘tech-blaming’ in trainee’s reflections: either blaming the tech for them not achieving their lesson aims adequately, or (worse) blaming the learners for not using the tech effectively and so not achieving the desired outcome.

Cross-training

Online teaching was around before the pandemic and it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon! As such, we agreed that pre-service training courses should constantly encourage trainees to consider how things might be different in each environment. It’s tricky on an initial qualification course to know where someone might end up, but we can do our best to prepare them as far as possible in the time we have.

There was a suggestion for face-to-face courses to involve some online sessions, either with trainees working on their own devices in the centre or – as is much more realistic nowadays – working from home online. There was a suggestion that the Unknown Language component of the CertTESOL – which involves four hours of instruction – could have a 50-50 split with two lesson delivered face-to-face and two online. This would allow trainees to experience learning in both environments, even if all their teaching practice is delivered face-to-face.

We wondered as well whether the way people approach an online course might be different to how they participate in a face-to-face course. There was a question of whether note-taking is a generational ‘thing’ with some trainers saying they felt the younger generation seemed to be able to ‘absorb’ knowledge more easily nowadays.

However, we also felt that it was important to set up expectations for how they view and participate in the learning environment. On a face-to-face course, people come to the centre, they sit in the classroom and they behave in a particular way (hopefully!). 

Some challenges of training online

One thing we identified as being difficult as an instructor – and so something to think about as we train others – is not getting visual feedback from others. In the physical classroom, it’s far easier to read the room; in the online classroom this becomes much trickier, even if participants have their cameras on. However, working in an environment with cameras off is also something we should consider when training others. especially as it may lead to increased TTT to ‘fill the void’.

Another challenge was the distractions which participants might have around their online environment and the fact that it is far easier for people to be doing more than one thing at once, for example checking emails whilst watching an input session, popping onto Facebook during a lesson observation, etc.

Linked to this was a feeling that there is perhaps a more ‘casual’ vibe around video conferencing. We wondered whether this was perhaps as people might have used it before the pandemic to chat to family and friends, plus the fact that when suddenly we were thrown online, we spent a lot of time breaking down the affective filter, trying to make our online classes welcoming and enjoyable for learners as we all dealt with the disruption of a global pandemic.

Perhaps not a challenge, but an observation: we need to have more patience and do more learner training. At the start of a course, but also at the start of the academic year with our students, we should spend time looking at the resources they’ll be using. 

Some final thoughts…

One positive we all felt which had come out of the pandemic was a sense of community around teaching and training in ELT. There was a lot of helping each other out, with new skills being taught and learnt by all. And we highlighted the need for this community to be built for our trainees too and the need for there to be rapport-building opportunities built into the timetable for our online courses to try to mimic those moments when trainees would have a chat before or after the lesson, or ask each other how there weekend had been. Teaching can sometimes be quite a solitary profession and now more than ever we need to provide space for people to build relationships.

A Renewable Twist to your TEFL classes

by
A Renewable Twist to your TEFL Classes - with Harry Waters (webinar)
Watch now

It was wonderful to have Harry back again for another session after the success of his Zooming Around webinar back in January.

We started out by chatting about where Harry’s passion for Renewable English came from. After becoming more eco-conscientious following illness, he realised when his daughter was born that he could (and should) do more for the environment; then when he started working at a language school, he realised that he had access to lots of young minds! And not just in terms of telling them what they could do, but also raising their awareness of the power that they had to enact change. When Covid hit, he realised he had the time to devote to building the project, with the idea of reaching as many people as possible with a positive message of what we can do on a small scale. As with any sustainability journey, it starts out with what you can do but we also need to strive to make changes and part of the project involves seeing changes they can through collective action. He also felt that coursebooks introduced the topic of the environment in a boring which, which often induced eco-anxiety.

Harry started with a fun activity of ‘where are you on the scale today?’ in which there’s a series of images on a theme for people to choose which one that most identify with at that moment. A really nice idea for the classroom – you can use characters or personalities that your students are familiar with or get a student to create one each lesson as a nice way to bring their own interests into the classroom.

We then kicked off with a Menti presentation – a great tool for using interactive presentations in your lessons. The first question was about going off-topic in classes.

Tangents are a way of allowing students to express themselves, as well as working with emergent language – we’ll come back to tangents in a moment!

He then shared some of the objections which people sometimes have to introducing the environment into the classroom. Katherine Bilsborough and Ceri Jones presented a webinar back on January on Re-inventing the Green Wheel and you can find a summary of the webinar on the MaWSIG blog.

There is always a question of time and many of us might feel like we don’t have enough ‘extra’ time to allow for tangents or to dedicate time to sustainability. Harry suggested encouraging tangents to be environmentally related or planning in a five-minute slot into every lesson to allow for some chat around eco projects – some sustainable reflections or some eco-mindfulness.

We then chatted about some of our reasons not to incorporate the environment into our lessons:

We looked at the question of whether students find it boring and Harry went on to talk about his passion for vexilology (the study of flags) and how this has rubbed off on his students – and (on a tangent) there was some interesting discussion around our own views of flags in the chat. 

Going back to the Menti, eco-anxiety is real and it’s important to look at the positive things which ARE happening. It’s also great to show our students some positive (young) role models – particularly when they see how many followers some of these activists have! For example, Amy and Ella Meek of Kids Against Plastic or Sarah Goody who founded Climate Now found their passion in their early teens and are doing things because they genuinely want to help, rather than for the followers or the adulation.

Another response for eco-anxiety is: don’t get sad, get angry. Rather than punishing yourself when things go wrong – as nobody’s perfect – do something about it, but know that you can’t do everything.

Harry also chatted a little about the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals and suggests looking at your materials at the start of the year and how you can introduce one of the SDGs into a topic or lesson. They are about different social justice topics, not just the environment, so are a great way to raise students’ awareness of other issues around the world.

Producing your own materials does take time, but there are lots of resources out there. Harry has some fantastic free lessons on the Renewable English website (and you can donate here if you like to help keep it going) and you could also check out ELTSustainable.

Some practical tips

Listen to your students and take action – this shows them that they have a voice. It can start with something simple, like a student requesting a lesson on a particular topic – if you do a lesson on that, it shows them that they can be heard and they have the power to enact change.

Write a haiku on an acrostic poem about a sustainable topic related to the unit. It’s great to get students being creative and can be an easy routine for each unit.

Organise a swap shop at your centre for books, clothes, toys and more! And check out Vinted or other secondhand (pre-loved) sites if you’re looking for things yourself. And if you’re interested in living with less, check out The Minimalists.

Teach the buzzwords as they’ll be seeing them popping up all over social media and with the language of protest being English, it’s a fabulous way to teach new language. As a language learner, you might see the word frequently and get the gist of what it is, but you won’t know the word automatically. Get learners making protest signs – check out Harry’s Instagram to see examples of what his learners have been up to.

If you have exam-prep classes, get students to source their own sustainable articles or podcasts and then have them create an exam-style activity from it.

After exams at the end of the year is a great opportunity to do some projects with your students. You could do an upcycling project with your VYLs and have them create something from ‘rubbish’ related to one of the topics from their coursebook. They can then create a story around the object they create.

A litter-pick challenge is also a fun activity to bring the outside world into the classroom (remind students of the safety issues involved). Picker Pals’ Patrick Jackson likened litter-picking to a gateway drug to sustainability! There was a video shared in the chat about children in the UK doing a beach clean, though it might not be available to view outside the UK unless you have a VPN. If you can access BBC Newsround, it’s a news programme aimed at children so could be a good resource for your lessons to engage learners in current affairs.

Charts are a great way to engage students, e.g. who brought their snack in a Tupperware box rather than wrapped in clingfilm? Having a visual helps to encourage people to get involved and they can be really easy to create on Canva.

Get your older students to make eco action Insta-ry or TikTok-y and have a challenge for who can get the most views. Get them to put the hashtags that will get their videos seen by more people (remind students about online safety and check your school’s policy about encouraging them to share).

We can also a planet cooler at the end of the lesson with a quick tip for what they can do (we can also do a planet warmer to start the lesson, but real we want to cool the Earth!). It could be students sharing what they’ve done that week (both the good and the ‘bad’).

A final reminder that you can watch Harry’s lessons on the Renewable English YouTube channel – he’s coming to the end of series one later in June but already has plans for series 2 (how it works) and 3 (the path to activism). He’s doing a fundraiser in the run-up to his last lesson on Thursday 24th called Caps off for Kids Against Plastic and will be shaving his head live during the lesson! If you want to get involved, you can donate on the Just Giving page J

The lessons are really well structured, with some vocabulary to start followed by some UnFun Facts. Then there’s an interview with an expert and a Planet Promise at the end, all mixed in with some comprehension questions.

He’s currently on a campaign to get Greta to come along as an expert – so please do get involved and add some likes to Harry’s posts there!

Feel free to get in touch with Harry – we’ve shared all his social media so far except the Renewable English Facebook page!

Huge thanks to Harry for joining us to share his passion and with a slight tangent to finish, he did some awesome streaming trickery during the session using a programme called OBS.

Hub digest – 4th June, 2021

by

Oh, what a fun week it’s been in the Hub! There was some great chat in our Focused Forum on Tuesday as we discussed how we can better prepare learners to listen, rather than just testing them each time there’s an audio in class. Ideas included working with the tapescript, teaching them how to better interrupt to support them in interactive listening situations and more on bottom-up processing.

Then on Wednesday there were some interesting comments around making exam prep more relevant. We talked a little about how to engage them more in the process and for them to prepare their own exam questions to get an idea of what the exam is testing. 

And Thursday – which will now be known as THUBsday – saw the fabulous Harry Waters back with us talking about his project, Renewable English. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you definitely should as there are live lessons on a Thursday – which can also be watched afterwards – and lots of resources on the site to bring an eco-twist to your lessons.

Next week we have Trainer Talking Time on Tuesday and then our fortnightly coffee breaks on Thubsday. Hope to see you there!

How can we teach – not test – listening skills?

by

Another popular choice in the poll, with a select group there on the day to share their ideas.

Part of the inspiration for this topic came from a recent Twitter post from Rhiannon Carter, which I think has unfortunately since disappeared. As you can see, there were lots of responses to it.

During the chat, we talked about how our learners feel about listening and the fact that many feel demotivated in different ways:

  1. I have a good C1 level but I really struggle when I watch Netflix.
  2. If I see the tapescript, I know all the words…so why can’t I understand when I listen?
  3. I speak the language well, but if someone asks me something on the street I have no idea what they said.

 “We don’t realise we aren’t teaching.”

There was a definite feeling as we chatted that it was a few years into teaching before we realised that we weren’t really supporting our learners that well in the classroom with listening. Perhaps this is due to the fact that on pre-service qualifications, we often focus more on the staging of a listening lesson than on skills development?

The idea of lowering the affective filter and learners not needing to understand everything was mentioned and it’s worth reading Scott Thornbury’s Zero Uncertainty post on the topic. We also identified that there’s a need for more bottom-up processing but that it’s important not to get too stuck looking at the basics – BALANCE is the key.

 

Bottom-up processing

We talked about how encouraging learners to notice discourse features makes speech much more accessible. Filler words (such as like, kind of*, anyway) and features of connected speech are often the most frequent things we look at.

*Interestingly, one teacher mentioned when doing this bottom-up work in class, their student was able to notice that this kind of was different to another kind of…great to see learners engaging with language in this way.

Thinking about filler words, it’s interesting to bring it back to the learners’ L1 and ask what type of fillers they use when speaking. Noticing how certain words or phrases are just there as a feature of speech might make it easier to ‘ignore’ them and focus on the important content.

Sandy Millin has a great activity in ELT Playbook for dealing with listening difficulties and extends the areas which learners might have problems in when working with authentic texts: grammar, vocabulary, cultural knowledge, connected speech, intonation, accent, dialect or variety of English, and background noise. 

On the topic of background noise, we talked about how learners sometimes complain during a speaking activity in the classroom as they struggle to concentrate when there are six other pairs also having conversations around them. The fact is, this is a very natural situation for us to find ourselves in and probably some of us struggle to focus on what the person we’re talking to is saying when we can hear other people chatting around us (and not because their conversations are necessarily more interesting! #FOMO).

We also said that another feature of real natural speech is for one person to give feedback as the other is speaking, i.e. the listener interjects (right, ah-ha, yeah) over the other person. Though coursebooks are introducing more of these natural interjections in recorded material, they still tend to not be simultaneous. In films and TV shows as well the dialogue tends to involve much more turn-taking than happens naturally.

We can do a lot to pre-empt problems our learners might have but one thing to add here is that while we might think we know what difficulties learners are going to have, it’s always worth reflecting post-listening as well to see if our predictions were correct – otherwise we might spend time focussing on the wrong aspects of the listening.

And on the subject of predictions, we questioned the value of pre-listening prediction activities if students’ predictions are incorrect and not identified as such by the teacher. If we predict something is going to be said, we will probably try to listen for that. And it seems that lower-level learners stick more closely to their initial hypotheses whereas stronger learners might be more able to identify if their prediction was correct.

Although even pre-pandemic many teachers encouraged learners to listen to the audio on their own devices rather than playing it to the class, the pandemic and online teaching has made many of us much more willing to incorporate tech into the classroom. A benefit of having learners listening on their own devices is that they can identify the exact point when there’s something which they don’t understand (although this can obviously also be done in a while class situation with learners putting their hand up, though they might feel more reluctant to do so). Having learners note the exact second when they have difficulty makes it much easier for us to go to that point in the audio and work on it with them. (A guilty confession of mine is getting to the end of the listening and asking, ‘Was there anything you didn’t understand?’)

One teacher mentioned making use of voice messages with her learners between classes and taking time at the beginning of the lesson to check if there was anything they hadn’t quite got.

Approaches to deal with the issues above

1) I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of suggesting our students ‘just watch TV in original version’ in order to improve their listening skills at some point! Streaming services are a great resource as it makes it much easier to pause and rewind or add subtitles than in the past. One thing we did suggest in the chat is choosing one minute of the programme to really focus in on and do that bottom-up work, and sitting back and enjoying the rest of the show in a more relaxed way. There are more ideas in this post from Joy of Languages and there was also a post from Cambridge University Press which we shared in the Hub a while back.

Chiara Bruzzano has done lots of work on listening and in this open-access post from ET Professional, she talks about the benefits of watching TV with subtitles.

We spoke a little about listening being receptive pronunciation work and also reminding learners that how they hear something in one context is just one way it might sound. Using sites like Youglish and Playphrase.me (which might now be a subscription site) we can expose learners to the same phrase said in different accents or different contexts.

You should also check out TubeQuizard which has clips specifically focussing on pronunciation for listeners.

2) We discussed the benefits of working with the tapescript before listening every once in a while. A suggestion for using the tapescript was for them to mouth along as they’re listening to help them notice chunks of language and pauses, sounds which are ‘lost’.

Another suggestion for making use of the transcript was for learners to listen to a chunk and try to identify how many words they hear, then compare that to the tapescript. Again, this encourages them to notice chunks. This can also be done by blanking out the chunk which you want learners to focus on if they’re working with the transcript whilst listening.

 

3) Interestingly, we wondered whether this was more of an issue for learners in an ESL context, rather than people not living in an English-speaking country. However, we said that as immigrant teachers, it’s probably something we have experienced ourselves and so can use that as a way of bringing the topic into the classroom.

We talked a little about context and how it’s very rare in day-to-day life that you are involved in listening when you don’t know the context: conversations with friends, listening to a podcast or the radio – these are examples of communication where there is rarely a sudden tangent. In fact, the time when you probably don’t have any context is the typical ‘You overhear two people talking on the train’ J Similarly, when we do listening comprehension activities in class, aside from the wonderful lead-ins we do, the comprehension questions themselves will add context to the task and give the learners clues about the content.

Another aspect which we talked about was giving learners more effective ways of interrupting or asking for clarification in conversation. ‘Excuse me, could you possibly repeat that?’ is not the quickest way of getting someone’s attention, nor the most natural.

Thinking about interrupting, we also noted that some cultural awareness is important here – depending on the learners’ context, they may not feel comfortable interrupting a conversation.

 

Feel free to add any further links or comments and huge thanks to those that joined us on the day