Turning CELTees into Successful NQTs

 With the second IH Teachers Online Conference approaching rapidly (Friday May 25th), as well as trying to arrange all the sessions and get the speakers up to speed,  I’ve been mulling over what to talk about myself on the day.  Since we’re celebrating 50 years of teacher training around the IH World (the first four-week course was held in June 1962) and as I’m an almost full-time CELTA trainer, I think what I’d like to discuss is how CELTA trainees can transition from the intensity of the course to a full-time teaching position, maintaining all the good habits they’ve formed on the course, while continuing to develop into more rounded teachers.

Which is where you come in!  Thinking back to your early days as an NQT (Newyl-Qualified Teacher), what helped you most to get to grips with a full timetable, a wider variety of coursebooks, completely different types of students, the need to inspire and motivate your learners, not to mention the paperwork this all entails?  And what would you change looking back over your first years of teaching.  What did you need that you didn’t have?  What would you like to take back and do over again?

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences and also what advice you’d give to today’s NQTs coming off CELTA courses and starting off in the wide world of ELT.  And as a little incentive, all contributors will receive an invite to the session on May 25th, so get commenting!

A Short Guide to Guided Discovery

The other week I was reading Adam Beale’s fab blog ‘Five against one‘ rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing and yet again I found myself chastising myself for not going to #eltchat anymore (it’s actually the fault of doing CELTA at the times that the chat is held rather than of my own choosing), since Adam had blogged a summary of the latest chat, that just happened to be on one of my pet topics and favourite ways of teaching – guided discovery.

And so I was rather surprised with Adam’s concluding paragraph and this post is my own humble attempt at helping Adam address the balance.  Here’s what he had to say:

ELTchat may not have answered my question or provided me with the plethora of examples I was hoping for, but it certainly highlighted the need for some further hands on research and investigation. Now, I may be looking in the wrong places or typing the wrong words into my search engine. So please tell me if you know of any great resources. I know that there must be research papers out there, but for teachers what we really need is examples and people writing or talking about their experiences with it. So if you do use Guided Discovery and have some ideas get them out there, blog them or put it out on twitter. 

And so my response is to share my latest foray into Guided Discovery world on Wednesday morning.  I was teaching the CELTA TP students and being watched by my CELTA candidates – having to put my money where my mouth was since we’d had a session on conditionals the afternoon before where I had espoused Guided Discovery worksheets – time to show them the power of student-centred text-based step-by-step language clarification (i.e. Guided Discovery).

K had taken the students above-standardly through the text (Global Intermediate Page 95), so I simply started with the worksheet, which you can download here:

Unreal Past Conditions Guided Discovery Worksheet

The students anwered the questions about meaning alone, checked them with a partner and then we fed back on them.  The main sticking point was the question ‘Is this staement real or unreal’, since they mostly saw it as real.  I think I need to rephrase this question to something like ‘Is the speaker describing a situation in the real world or imagining an unreal situation in their head?’, although that seems too wordy to me.

A little bit of elicitation and refining the context by asking this question helped me convince them the statement was unreal.  And this elicitation of the fact that we’re talking about the past and we¡re talking about an unreal situation made eliciting the name of the structure to the top of the handout easy peasy – Unreal Past Conditions.

Then we drilled the statement aplenty.  First lots of choral drilling of each clause, backchaining the phrases ‘If he hadn’t noticed’ and ‘this wouldn’t have been’, and they had quite a bit of trouble at first reproducing /w@d@n@bIn/ (the @ are supposed to be schwas but I can’t get them to come out) but they got there after lots of laughs and backchains:

/bIn/

/n@bIn/

/d@n@bIn/

/w@d@n@bIn/

Then they completed the pronunciation section by themselves, in pairs and we fed back to the whiteboard.

Unreal past conditions pronunciation

Unreal Past Result Pronunciation

I did a bit more drilling to consolidate it with the written phonemes, which seemed to help them a bit and then they headed on to completing the form section by themselves which they found pretty straightforward.

Unreal Past Condition Form

Unreal Past Result Form

What really pleased me is they were able to come up with different possible modals for the result clause, they weren’t limited by the ‘third conditional’ misnomer to would, they quickly proferred could and might and may and must and should as well, although lots of credit must also go to K here who had brought out this point when guided discovering Unreal Present conditions on Monday.

So they had been guided and they had discovered.  Time to practice.  Turn over the worksheet and consider the other inventions mentioned in the global text and discovered by accident.  What would have happened if their accidents hadn’t happened.  Off the students went to try and complete their own conditional sentences.  It was a very challenging exercise since they had to go back to the text to remind themselves of the accidents that had led to the discoveries.  But they were able to have a good go at it, although there were plenty of forms errors in their work.  Have was being missed out regularly, one or two weren’t using past participles and one was using the past simple and so talking about the present.  But with a few points back at my boardwork and the odd return to my CCQs – are we in the past? – they were able to self correct or at least peer correct when they got together to confirm answers.  By the time they got to the group feedback they had the correct structures between them and I elicited them to the board (after some more focused drilling) to consolidate the structure for these very visual learners.

Unreal Past Conditions Controlled Practice

Unreal Past Results Controlled Practice

Unfortunately the 40minute lesson was drawing to a close, so there was just time for a quick discussion of the inventions in Practice 2 and how things would have changed if they hadn’t been invented.  Not surprisingly, some of them had unreal present results rather than past ones, but this was a good thing as they were able to form them correctly on the back of K’s Monday lesson and they were all happy to accept these as correct answers.  No time for discussing the difference or for personalisation, but the practice activities will live to fight another day.

If I’d had more time, I’d've done more personalisation. 

We’d've discussed real and unreal results of unreal past conditions, if the lesson had been longer.  

They’d've practised more freely and probably have made even more mistakes if we’d gone any further. 

But they wouldn’t have felt such a sense of achievement if they hadn’t discovered the rules for themselves. 

There was no accident about their discoveries.

Hope that helps Adam and any other Guided Discovery newbies out there.  Let us know how you get on if you try using the worksheet yourself or adapting it to another piece of language.  Go discover!

50 Top Tips for Teachers – IH Teachers Online Conference

On May 25th International House World will hold its second online teachers conference as part of the ongoing celebrations for 50 years of IH Teacher Training.

As part of the celebrations we intend to make aspects of the conference open to all, so watch out for details of that. We’d also like to have a running theme throughout the day based on the number 50.

Following this theme, we will be sharing 50 Tips with teachers and teacher trainers and this is where we need your help.

It doesn’t matter if you work for an IH school or not, teach in a state school or a private language school, whether you love dogme or a coursebook  – what we need are your ideas!

To make it easier we have come up with five categories for suggestions

Tips for new teachers

Best tips for classroom management

Tips for CPD

Things that make a special teacher

Materials-free, student-centred tasks

Between now and the week of the conference we are hoping to have hundreds of your suggestions pouring in by the sack-load! We’ll then look over the suggestions and choose 10 for each category. These tips will then be presented to you at the online conference.

After the conference we’ll share them all on a blog and in the IH Journal. We may even have a vote to decide the best tip of all.

So do you have a few minutes to spare? Please go to this link and enter a suggestion. You don’t have to give a suggestion for every category and you are more than welcome to go back again and again to add more suggestions – the more the merrier!

Thanks for giving us your time. Tune in to the social media channels and conference on May 25th to find out what was suggested.

Take me to the suggestion form

 

Article retrieved from http://ihteachers.com/?p=283 on 24/4/12

B2 Lesson Plan – Writing an album review (Oasis – (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?)

B2 Lesson – Oasis Album Review

This is a lesson I taught on an FCE prep course last week, which supplements (replaces) the review writing in Unit One of Premium.

First the students do an FCE speaking task comparing and contrasting the album covers of Abbey Road and What’s The Story?

Then they read the text and summarise each paragraph, followed by a focus on the vocab used to describe the band, the album and the music / individual songs.

It leads nicely into the learners bringing in their own reviews to share with each other and then using all of this input, writing their own reviews of one of their fave CDs.

Enjoy!

Comment on @ThornburyScott’s blog post ‘I is for Imitation’

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/i-is-for-imitation-3/#comment-7236

A very timely post for me and my IH CAM (Advanced Methodology) course participants who have been discussing the difference between active and passive noticing this week, Scott.
We decided active noticers find useful language in the texts they read and listen to and try it out in other contexts in order to communicate for themselves, thus (eventually) making the language their own. Passive noticers on the other hand just copy and paste without thinking or adapting or creating something new out of the old.
Surely the imitation being discussed here is the same, and the more actively we imitate (i.e. think about the meaning and contextual use of the utterance we’re imitating as well as copying its form) the more successful language learners we become?
The teachers roles are many in this process. Giving helpful and immediate feedback, as Kathy suggests above, is crucial. But training / encouraging our learners to take as active a role as possible in their imitation / noticing, as both Bruno and Luiz have done, is also crucial learner training. Activities such as When would you say this? Who could you say this to? can help immensely in this regard.

A Sporting Chance – The sticky wicket of sports-inspired idioms

A Sporting Chance is a workshop I’m presenting on Sunday 25th March 2012 at the ABS conference ‘Challenge Your English’ – a conference for non-native teachers of English to boost the level of their own English.

Handout A Sporting Chance

ABS Challenge Your English

Slides A Sporting Chance

The workshop focuses on English idioms from the world of sports, starting with sailing, then baseball, cricket, cards and finally a free-for-all called guess the sport.

As they are introduced to the idioms, the teachers play sports themselves which can be used in the classroom.

Abstract:

Do you find yourself behind the eight ball when idioms come out of left field?  Are you out of your depth when idiom-loving friends call the shots? Give yourself a sporting chance to cover all the bases as we dive headfirst into the world of sport-inspired idioms, exploring their meaning and background to give ourselves the inside track in the idiom race, allowing us to paddle our own idiom canoes and put a new vocabulary arrow in our language quivers.

The Total Process – ‘verb+ing or infinitive?’ – once and for all.

I was asked this week by @easyteach, when they should use propose + infinitive and when they should use propose + verb+ing.   Well, let’s look first at the general meaning of infinitives and verb+ing  and then see if it holds up for proposing. 

The whole debate between verb+ing and infinitive use is one that has raged for years, with most course book stating there is no rule and we need to learn each possibility as a collocation.  In the same way, many argue that I like playing and I like to play mean the same thing – well, if they did, why do we have two ways of saying it?  They mean similar things, but there is a difference and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone explain it satisfactorily (see G is for Gerund for many valiant but unsatisfactory attempts).  So @easyteach has given me the excuse to give it a go myself.   This is the way I teach the difference and my students have no trouble understanding it and have never found an exception to the rules – can you?

For me the infinitive is the unmarked form – like the simple aspect – and is used when there is no specific need to use another form.  The infinitive / simple aspect describes a state or action in its totality and can be seen as atomic (in so much as it cannot be divided up into smaller states or actions), which is the main reason why I prefer to denote the simple as a circle on timelines rather than a cross, as seems to be commonly accepted, since a circle seems to depict better the totality or non-divisibility of the event.  So we use the infinitive when we are talking about the simple fact of an action in its totality.

The continuous form, on the other hand, and the continuous aspect generally, focus on the progress of the action and the speaker is emphasizing the fact that the event or the state (although much less often) can be broken down into the constituent parts that make up that progress.

And so we tend to choose to say I like watching football, because we want to emphasise that we enjoy most of the aspects that watching football entails – the trip to the stadium, the dodgy pre-match burger, the anticipation of the event, the singing along, the celebration of the goals etc. all of the match day rituals need to be and are emphasized in the simple choice of -ing form over infinitive. 

Watching football?

When we are focused on another aspect of the statement however, we want to take away the importance of the nuts and bolts of the event and just treat it as a uniform totality, and so we use the infinitive (or the simple aspect when we need to conjugate).  And so we would say I like to watch football, perhaps, in answer to the question ‘What do you watch most on television?’ since the speaker is not focused on the beauties and intricacies of the ritual that is watching football, but is thinking much more about the watching of television and the events he watches when he has it switched on.

The ‘rule’ holds up when we consider the verbs which change their meaning depending on the following verb being an infinitive or -ing form.  We remember posting the letter because we can remember the whole process – we went to the post office, we stood in the queue, we bought the stamps, we gave them a good licking, we popped the envelopes in the box….but when we say we need to remember to post the letter, we don’t care about the process of posting a letter, we just care about the totality of the event – we want the letter to be posted, whether or not the process involves a good licking. 

To post or not posting?

So what about proposing?  I wasn’t given any examples, so let’s stringnet the phrases and see what comes up:

1	So where do you propose to send her?’Here the important information is the ‘Where?’, we’re not interested in the process of sending her, just the destination, so therefore we use the unmarked form.
2	She said,‘ Well, when do you propose to go and see her?’Again, the ‘When?’ is important, not the process of the going.
3	‘Oh,’ Harrison’s voice was tinged with sarcasm,‘and how do you propose to do that?’This is more interesting, since it’s possible to ask, if we ask ‘How?’ aren’t we interested in the process?  Well, according to the speaker’s choice of to do, no, we’re not (yet) interested in the process, we’re not expecting the answerer to launch into a detailed explanation of the process of doing it, just an overall summary – perhaps, outlining the main action to be done.   This is also true for example 4 below, and 5 is like 2, so let’s jump to example 6, our first example of propose + verb+ing
4	‘ If Kinsella steals from the IRB fund, how do you propose to blazon the news abroad?’
5	‘ When do you propose to arrest him, sir?’
6	How do you propose correcting errors identified in 7.1.2:Here we are interested in the process of correcting the errors, particularly since we seem to be emphasising that it’s going to be a difficult process or that we expect different techniques to be used for different errors and we’re interested in knowing which ones for which errors.  We are expecting a detailed account of the process of correcting and so we use correcting in oreder to signal this.  The next example of a verb+ing is example 16, so let’s jump there:
16	‘ When do you propose calling on Eddie Brady?’Again, an interesting example, since we’ve previously said when we ask ‘When?’, we aren;t interested in the process of what happens but the timeframe and so we expect the infinitive. But here the speaker chooses to use the verb+ing – why?  They must be interested in the process of calling on Eddie Brady.  Perhaps it’s more difficult to call on Eddie than it is the other people that have to be called on (and so the difficulty of this process is emphasised) or the speaker is suggesting the listener simply doesn’t have the time to call on Eddie and so is emphasising just what process is involved, reminding the listener of how long this will take, to challenge the listener to explain how they will complete this process within the timeframe known to both conversants.

Saying yes or to say yes, he's popped the question!

You might find propose + verb+ing sounds strange, but that’s simply because it’s less common.  We don’t tend to choose to emphasise the process of something when we talk about proposing it.  The details of the process come later.  But there are times, such as in examples 6 & 16 above, when we do want to do so and the choice is there for us to do so when we need it. 

Why not give your students that choice by teaching them about the fundamental meanings of the infinitive form and the verb+ing form, rather than give them rules that don’t work in practice, or suggest they learn infinite lists of verb + verb ‘collocations’?

And while you’re at it, have a go at applying other uses of the -ing form or infinitive to my theory and see if you can come up with examples that except my rule – I’d love to hear about them….

P.S. Here is a game I’ve used in class for verb pattern development / revision, which can easily be used to explore the above rule with your students.  The examples I chose for the sentence race bring up some interesting uses which prove the rule, for example:

Neil would love to run a marathon is the intended answer (we’re not interested in the marathon running process, we’re interested in Neil’s yearning to run one) but one might say Neil would love running a marathon, it’s right up his street, if we were thinking of all the things involved in the process of running a marathon and that Neil would enjoy them.  This use might be more common (or colligate) with comparatives – Neil would love running a marathon more than he’d love cycling 100km. 

Level 2 Elementary Verb Patterns Sentence Race

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Realising Reading

Realising Reading - Macmillan Montevideo 2012

Realising Reading – Handout from Macmillan Montevideo 2012

Here are the slides from my talk ‘Realising Reading’ which I gave for the first time at the Macmillan Conference in Montevideo on February 29th 2012.  The talk is about how we can keep reading real for our students at the same time as getting them to realise what they’re reading, thinking about it critically and noticing the language in the texts.

Look forward to hearing what you think about it.  Enjoy!

No Man’s Land – Finding the Middle Ground in the Dogme Debate

No Man’s Land - Slides from Montevideo 29/2/12

Macmillan Montevideo

On Wednesday 29/2/12 I had another go at No Man’s Land at the Macmillan Montevideo Conference 2011 held at the Anglo.  It was interesting to see how the talk changed as a result of  having a different dialogue with a different audience – Montevideo was much less impressed with Dogme than Buenos Aires was and quite a few members of the audience were brave enough to call themselves Textbook Traditionalists at the beginning of the talk, although we all ended up as Dog-maurauders at the end.  The talk was also shorter, so I focused more on the ten key principles and had also summarised 10 key Dogme-rauder principles which the audience were happy to accept and take away to consider.  Let us know how you get on!

Many thanks to Nicolas from Macmillan for organising the day, my impressive fellow speakers Aldo Rodriguez, Phil Hanham and Gustavo Gonzalez and, of course, the anglo for hosting the event – although it was the great audience that made the day such a success.

Pro-T Buenos Aires

Here are the slides from the talk at Pro-T 2012 on Thursday 16th February 2012.

No Man’s Land

Many thanks to everyone who came to the talk on Thursday and to @lcamio and the Pro-T team for inviting me and organising everything so smoothly.  I really enjoyed the talk and discovering much more about the principles of Dogme ELT through the process of researching, planning and writing the talk and sharing it with you on Thursday.  It was exciting (and empowering) to put the decision about whether or not to ‘convert’ myself into a Dogme-gician in your hands, and participating in that Dialogic Co-construction of knowledge to see what emerged was an enlightening process.  I hope the talk has helped some of you to look at your classrooms from a slightly different angle and gives you some ideas about how to ensure our students are at the centre of everything we do.

If you feel you are a Dogme-gician, it would be great to hear how you have managed to incorporate your Dogme teaching style into the confines of the educational context where you work.

Dogme-gician's believe in all the magic of Dogme.

If you’re a Dogme-rauder, it would be great to hear which principles of Dogme you have particularly pillaged and which ‘emergent’ tasks and activities you have used successfully or are going to try out.

Dogme-rauders have a soft spot for the 10 key Dogme principles, but prefer to loot and pillage the best of all methods

And if you’re a Textbook Traditionalist, then it would be great to hear the reasons why.

Textbook traditionalists start their planning from the next page of the course book and feed their students grammar mcnuggets

The ones that came up during the talk were pressure from above (Principals getting in the way of principles?) and the necessity to prepare students for exams.

The first problem is going to take time and persistence in order to convince principals, parents and even ministries of education, that the syllabus can be covered and students can learn English and prepare themselves for exams without having to faithfully follow a course book step by step.

And exam classes can easily prepare through a less materials dominated approach.  Students choose the texts they want to work with (be they authentic, course book, test book or whatever).  Students can construct test activities for each other from these texts, empowering them to discover much more about the tests and the strategies needed to complete them successfully.   Students can decide which tasks to work on when, depending on mood, trending current affairs topics, previous classes, perceived weaknesses.   Students can design the course syllabus, selecting the test materials to use, the balance of test types to focus on, writing proposals at the beginning of the course, progress summaries during the course, reviews of the course as it progresses and reports on their progress towards the end of the course.  Obviously, the students will choose to use Practice Test materials during the course (I imagine), but this is all part of being a good Dogme-rauder – letting students choose, allowing the syllabus (as well as the langauge) emerge through a dialogue involving the whole class.

Al, Vicky and Susan enjoying the talk – laughing in the face of Dogme?

I seem to have burst into song – lyrics a-merging!

Looking forward to hearing where you stand and I was relieved to find out I can continue to be a Dogme-rauder at the end of the talk!

Game on! Football Feedback

Having been asked to share the football game that I refer to in my Feedback Fiesta talk and that I wrote for the IHWO Games Bank, here it is:

IHWO Games Bank Football

It can be used for feedback on any controlled practice activity or for livening up feedback on progress tests or revision tasks.  I didn’t invent the game, but have no idea where I first saw it (apart from the fact I’m pretty sure it was at International House in Prague) or who thought it up originally – it’s just one of those EFL classics, I guess.

If you do download and use the game, please do leave a comment letting us know how you used it, so we can share and spread the word about this ‘beautiful game’.