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The limits of ELT?

October 28, 2021 by Teresa

Interesting chats as always in the coffee breaks today. In the earlier session, we ended up talking about whether finding a niche in ELT limits you. Whilst people working in after-school language classes tend to be a jack of all trades, when you set up your own business, particularly online, the suggestion seems to be to find your niche. This can certainly help in terms of marketing: you can identify the ‘pain point’ of potential clients/students and provide the answer to them with your particular skill set. Another benefit of finding your strong suit and sticking to it is that it can save you time planning in the long-run as you’re perhaps more likely to repeat similar content with different students. Plus, there’s always the option of starting with your niche and then widening the net once you become established. One downside of being your own boss though, whether you have a niche market or not, is that you need to spend time growing the business.

Another area we chatted about was the vast array of options in ELT and how limited we feel in going after different opportunities. For some, the world of ELT is completely open, with opportunities to travel to different countries, spend time volunteering, or get involved in a summer school course for a change of scene. Other times though, it’s easy to get ‘stuck’ – whether that’s because of homelife, feeling comfortable where you are or perhaps even nervous about starting in a completely new environment, no matter how many years of experience you have.

The afternoon session was far less TEFL-y (!) and we ended up chatting largely about reading – although the topic came up as we were discussing reading aloud in class. One book which came up was Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style which shows how a simple story can be told in 99 different ways and another was Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, which is written in an invented language. There were others – but I have to admit I only made a note of the two which most interested me!

Queer identity in education

March 29, 2024October 26, 2021 by Teresa

We had a fabulous chat in today’s Speakers’ Corner, with Jordan joining us to talk about making our classes and centres safer and more inclusive environments. If you’d like to hear more of what Jordan has to say on the topic of queer identity in education, check out his chat on Harry’s Teachers Talk Radio show.

Jordan put forward a number of questions during his talk and afterwards, we chatted a little about some of them more in-depth and considered why school owners and centre managers may be reticent to implement change. We suggested that a contributing factor could be the response of parents and discussed a little how attitudes can vary in different parts of a country and even between different areas of a town. There was also a feeling that language centres are essentially a business and taking a rather cynical view, each student is seen as 70€ a month more than as an individual. There were also questions of appropriateness, with a feeling that for some the focus is on learning English – potentially just to pass exams – rather than education for life.

Here are some of the questions which Jordan raised:

Does the school offer the chance for students to share their preferred names and pronouns?
To what extent are teachers encouraged to diversify the images they show?
Does the centre have gendered toilets?
How are students referred to collectively?
Are teachers encouraged to use neutral terms, e.g. parent rather than mummy and daddy, or partner rather than boyfriend/girlfriend?
How is support for queer staff and students offered? Is this support mentioned during the induction process?
Are teachers and students encouraged to question the coursebook narrative?
How do teachers deal with issues of gender and sexuality if they come up in the classroom?
Is LGBTQIA+ month celebrated?

Giving more background to the questions, Jordan provided examples of when he has found opportunities to raise his students’ awareness of certain issues. For example, he mentioned that in a homework activity with a young learner group, there was a matching task with the following:

My dad’s wearing a pink shirt. —> I’m so embarrassed.

He asked students why someone might be embarrassed by their dad wearing a pink shirt and one student said that pink isn’t seen as a very masculine colour. They googled ‘man pink shirt’ to see that it’s quite common for men to wear pink and then considered the question again, with one student saying that you’d be embarrassed if it was an ugly, pink shirt.

These teachable moments provide us with the opportunity to question beliefs and biases and promote more diversity and inclusivity in our classes.

For more resources, you might want to check out:

How to write inclusive materials by Tyson Seburn

Reflecting Reality: Diverse and Inclusive ELT Materials on Facebook

You could also watch our webinar with Ilá Coimbra and James Taylor of Raise Up!

What are your thoughts?

How can we teach writing?

March 29, 2024October 5, 2021 by Teresa

This was an interesting chat as we discussed some of the issues around writing as well as coming up with a few practical ideas to work on this skill in the classroom. To begin with, we talked about an issue here in Spain which affects not only writing skills, but other aspects of learning English too: the backward shift for students in the final year of primary when they move into secondary. One participant noticed that in the final year of primary, students are exposed to a wide variety of text types and can often have a B1 level of English, but then start secondary working at a much lower level of English, with more limited input and expected output.

Another issue we identified is that students are often not taught to write different text types in their first language, meaning that more work needs to be done identifying features of a particular genre. We talked a little about the difference between a product and process approach, and suggested that a product approach often misses out the noticing stage to raise learners’ awareness of genre features.

We suggested that students could be given better frameworks to support them in writing, identifying the features of the text type and, when the writing is to be assessed, giving explicit instructions on how the text is marked and what should be included. For example, the rubric might explicitly ask for a particular grammatical structure to be included in order for the teacher to assess the student’s use of that linguistic point.

When preparing students for writing in exams, we suggested working with bad models of text as well. These are often included in exam handbooks, along with the marker’s feedback. However, we also noted that at lower levels, this might be a less effective approach as they may struggle to identify errors in the original.

We felt improving a text might be a good collaborative activity as it gives the students a starting point rather than a blank page to work on. Other ideas for collaborative activities included story writing – and perhaps using an app such as Storybird to bring the book to life – and a focus on planning a text together, but then writing the finished product individually.

A couple of other points we touched on were about raising students’ awareness of the difference between spoken and written communication and also writing conventions – across languages and cultures and different deliveries. For example, we chatted about the fact that Spanish writing tends to involve a lot of long sentences or the fact that punctuation is very different in text messaging than in formal writing, including the idea that using a full stop at the end of a message is considered rude!

What are your favourite writing activities? Do you have any hints and tips to share?

A few wishes to get us going…

October 1, 2021September 30, 2021 by Teresa

It was, as always, delightful to share an hour of relaxed and productive chat around telfy topics. Thanks to all for coming and sharing. I hope these notes are a good record of the hour and prove useful to all.

We shared that we’re all feeling very busy with one thing and another… the start of the academic year for many of us and the build up to “conference season” too, InnovateELT is just around the corner (at the time of writing!)

We talked about the differences between online and f2f conferences. There was general opinion that after a couple of sessions we’re generally done and that it’s so hard to keep energy up as we’re essentially just watching TV (the only time we might do something similar is series binge on Netflix! And as much as we love ELT, conferences don’t quite work like that for us!). We feel a bit awkward about being at home and being at a conference, our partners and families are around us and it’s not like going away for the day or even a whole weekend, generally we preferred one-off webinars. We also agreed that we’ve all got loads of webinars and conference sessions lined up to watch later, but do we?

One fabulous idea was, in the situation where a number of colleagues are going to an online conference, use your school as a venue and project the sessions in the classrooms. Attendees can then move between the rooms, compare thoughts, have breaks together and it can become a shared experience, coffee and snacks could also be provided, along with the traditional beer at the end!

We got a sneak preview of Michelle’s session, 10 wishes for the ELT primary classroom, which she’ll be presenting in the Hub next week. We touched on a few topics and went deeper into others…these notes reflect the conversations and thoughts of the group and the ideas are the group’s thoughts.

Wish 1. We wish more people would use different approaches with primary groups towards more project based and enquiry based approaches which would be more inclusive in learning differences.

Wish 2. We wish we could connect more with our learners.

Wish 3. Assessment. We wish more people would embrace alternatives to testing. We wish there was less focus on exams, it seems to be killing the enjoyment of learning. It would be great to have more freedom in primary ELT classes where the stakes are generally less high stakes than at school. Let’s enjoy our primary classes more! It would fab if we could teach and assess around higher order thinking skills rather than the regurgitation approach! We hope there are post pandemic possibilities… We also wondered if the focus on exams has led to our students accessing higher levels more quickly, we thought that there were a number of factors involved there.

Wish 4. More money. We wish there was more money in ELT in general, it’s tough for so many of us financially and teachers should be paid more!

Wish 5. We wish there was more support available for new teachers. There are a number of great programmes in some schools but it’s never quite right!

Wish 6. We wish more people were aware of the potential to develop their own careers in ELT.

Wish 7. We wish “native-speakerism” would disappear. Things are improving but very slowly!

Just a few wishes to get us going… a wonderful source of inspiration and reflection. Thanks all!

Teaching chunks and solarpunks

March 29, 2024September 21, 2021 by Teresa

After a quick hello, we kicked off this morning’s session with Andrew sharing his thoughts about coursebooks and the restrictions around lexis. If we are tied to providing students with lexis at a particular level, certain topics will be excluded from the book. He also argued that low-level coursebooks aim for students to achieve ‘accurate fluency’ through a grammatical syllabus, which doesn’t always allow them to have the conversations they would want to have. This led on to some interesting discussion about how we can help learners to dreate their identity in the classroom with the language the coursebook provides as well as what we can bring in to enable them to have more natural conversations.

If you’re interested in finding out more about a lexical approach, check out Teaching Lexically and Lexical Lab also runs a course on teaching low-level learners.

How can we support lower-level learners and create a more authentic language learning process?

Next up, Michelle introduced us to the idea of solarpunk as she had been looking into it for some artwork in a coursebook she’s working on. Solarpunk is an art movement which imagines a utopian future in which we have created the best society we can and is heavily influenced by ideas around social justice and environmentally-friendly lifestyles.

From this, we chatted a little about whether solarpunk could be considered a PARSNIP – the ‘punk’ in the name refers to the anti-ism of the movement, which might be seen as a sensitive topic in some ELT contexts.

We chatted a little about some of the constraints put on coursebooks; Raise Up! got a mention as a project which is trying to introduce more diverse themes into ELT materials and we also chatted about the ‘happiness’ of ELT materials.