We had a smaller group today so stayed in the main room for the whole chat. The original questions around the topic were:
- Who stores it at the end of the lesson and how?
- How much of what comes up gets recorded?
- How does it get reviewed?
What is it really?
There was some interesting chat around what emergent language really is and how important it is for learners. On the one hand, emergent language shows that we’re really personalising the lesson to those learners; however, is the vocabulary that comes up something they really need?
Some teachers see it as part of a needs analysis and reflect on the emergent language at the end of the lesson: why did that particular word come up? Is it something to be looked at in another lesson in more detail? It gives teachers a bank of ‘future possibilities’, particularly useful for one-to-one teachers or those who aren’t following a particular syllabus.
We also discussed the fact that emergent language is sometimes incredibly personalised and may only be relevant to one person within the group, leading on to questions around how interested the rest of the group are in looking at that word in detail or recording it. Adding to this, we talked about how it’s important for learners to have an equal voice in group settings so that ‘their’ language is given the opportunity to be included in the lesson.
Another point raised was that people tend to really ‘learn’ a word when they’re ready to – sometimes the same word seems to come up again and again but then one day it will just click; other times, a learner can remember a word after seeing it just once.
An emotional connection to language
This was a theme which came up throughout the session: learners need to be emotionally invested in new vocabulary for it to really stick. We touched briefly on the idea that a word needs to be used 7 times before going from short-term into working memory – and then wondered whether this was only through explicit language teaching, whether it was also true for younger learners and what effect the emotional content of the word might have on that number.
Time
This was another key theme which we kept coming back to: sometimes there are curriculum and coursebook restraints which mean that we don’t have as much time as we would like to allow for emergent language to play a bigger role in the classroom. Allowing for tangents is often easier in a one-to-one lesson but when your students are working towards an exam or you have a coursebook to get through, there often isn’t time to review emergent language and incorporate things which have come up to be covered in more detail.
In an ideal world, plan less and allow time at the start of each lesson to review what’s come before; then allow time at the end of the lesson to fully reflect on what came up during the lesson.
And as much as possible, try to strip your coursebook back to the basics – what’s the linguistic aim of this lesson/unit? What tasks do learners need to do? Where can I personalise this unit to them?
Storing language
However this happens, it was decided that learners need to take an active role in this: partly to allow them to take responsibility for their learning and also so as not to overwhelm them with a huge list of new words each lesson which they might not want/need/use. It was also suggested that if you are able to use time at the end of the lesson to review emergent language, it gives you another chance to see how much learners engage with a particular word and can help you identify how important it is to come back to it again.
“Keep it or dump it?” was suggested as one approach for learners to decide which vocabulary as a group was important and should go into a collective vocabulary box. Students value being a part of this process of review as well.
Lexical notebooks were mentioned as a way of encouraging learners to engage more with the language – adding examples sentences, images and highlighting the pronunciation of the word as part of their homework. However, this is time-consuming.
Wherever possible, store language in chunks – showing learners how it was used in the original sentence or providing an example sentence for them.
It was also noted that it’s often easier to share emergent language in an online classroom – people mentioned having a shared Google doc with learners and part of their homework being to review what had been added during their lesson to decide which words to keep for themselves. Also, it’s then easier to find what’s come up online as you can just use the search feature, rather than trawling through pages of notes or photos of your whiteboard.
A suggestion was also for one person to be responsible for storing the day’s emergent language and then sharing it with the group in some way.
Reviewing language
A difficulty which was mentioned here was incorporating reviews into topic-based lessons (i.e. reviewing the language that came up last lesson on health when this next lesson is about food) and there was a suggestion that perhaps if language was always reviewed using a particular activity, that would then just become a routine for the lesson and not seem like a ‘different’ stage.
Some ideas which came up here:
- start with discussion questions which use a previous lesson’s emergent language
- give learners a choice in how they use the language (in a story / song / conversation)
- categorise the language in your vocab box (I know this / I think this means… / I don’t know this yet)
We also talked about allowing opportunities for learners to use the emergent language creatively. Nik Peachey was mentioned as a source of ideas for creativity in the classroom – he has a book called Hacking Creativity and there are also some interesting ideas in this British Council publication which he co-edited.
Difficulties around VYLs
One aspect we talked about was the difficulty of recording language when learners don’t write as this often means it doesn’t get added to the board so even the teacher doesn’t have a record of it at the end of the lesson.
It’s important for VYL teachers to review the language learners need so that they can use it in their own teacher talk and thereby expose learners to those words and phrases.
VYL teachers also talked about how they often use translanguaging – encouraging learners to use the words they know in L1 as part of their narrative in their first language. This involves conscientiously building the learners’ vocabulary as they talk about their personal lives and allowing them the space and time to talk about themselves in each lesson. However, this can often be tricky as learners are incredibly uninterested in each other’s personal stories at that age (and at other ages!) and so it can be difficult to maintain attention spans in order for this to be effective. A suggestion was to make use of time when learners are doing tasks, such as colouring, as a useful opportunity to talk to them one-on-one. Another idea was (post-pandemic) to set up learning stations: this allows learners more flexibility around the tasks they complete and frees up the teacher to move around ore to engage with different learners and record important language.
Emergent language with trainee teachers
We also touched on the challenges of allowing space for emergent language during initial teacher training qualifications. Some thoughts which came up here: are weaker trainees sometimes more able to make use of teachable moments? Do trainees focus too much on ‘teaching the plan’? Should we allow for much vaguer timings on lesson plans to more accurately reflect what happens in our lessons? How aware are teachers of the TTT-TTQ balance? (Rachel Tsateri has a wonderful post on the topic) How can we give our trainees the confidence to stray from the plan and make the most of emergent language?
Another aspect of the difficulties of dealing with emergent language during these courses is that learners tend to have classes with different teachers across the week, making it trickier to refer back to language that came up in a particular trainee’s lesson, given that the learners may have seen three or four other teachers since then. Similarly to the comment earlier about incorporating emergent language reviews into a topic-based syllabus, we highlighted the fact that on teacher training courses, the syllabus may be much wider, e.g. teachers might work on a different topic each day, or even each lesson.