Job Discussion Forums

[John Hall]

The skill of speaking to students in English, using vocabulary and grammar that the students can understand, is one of the key skills that teachers of English to speakers of other languages have to develop in order to become effective teachers. As a matter of fact, the high proficiency in this skill is one of the things that makes us much different than regular school teachers.

This became most obvious to me back in 1999, when I volunteered to teach English to Kosovar refugees who had just been recently airlifted to Canada. I had just come back from Japan, and was staying with my parents in Nova Scotia, Canada, when the Serbs attacked Kosovo, and within a few weeks, a few hundred refugees suddenly found themselves at the military base in my hometown. Many of these people had barely even heard of Canada before, and had just lost everything except their lives (and in some cases nearly those as well) back in their home country.

I went down to the base to help out and very quickly found myself organizing a group of volunteer school teachers on summer holiday. It was a funny situation: I was not a certified public school teacher, and I was in charge of a group of certified public school teachers who had no TESOL experience. Several of them were convinced that their license to teach meant that they were able to teach anything, and so one of my difficulties was convincing them that they had to change the way that they were teaching, mostly because most of the time they were talkiing way over the heads of the students (many of whom had almost no English).

I am convinced that this skill we have of learning to talk to the students only with the (often very little) English that they have is one of our most highly developed skills, and yet I have very rarely encountered anything written about how to develop that skill. Can anybody tell me where I can find some good literature written about the development of this skill? Has it been studied?

Back in 1999, I had to put those school teachers on a crash course in how to speak to the students. But it became obvious that it would take time for the public school teachers to learn to be able to do it well. So, I took on most of the beginner classes myself, and left the other levels for the school teachers to manage as best they could.

My time spent teaching the refugees was surreal. The military base in my hometown was only a temporary holding place, while the refugees waited to be sent on to their sponsors elsewhere in Canada, or to return back to Kosova, if they so wished. In about four months, the base processed about 1000 refugees, all of whom ended up going elsewhere. I got to know some people who told me some pretty harrowing stories, as I in turn introduced them to the strange, new country that they had just popped up in.

[Guy Courchesne]

Grading is a core teacher skill often presented in TEFL courses. I spend a considerable amount of time working with TEFL students on understanding ourselves as native speakers (video often helps) through the eyes, or rather, the ears of the students, and learning a 'step down' approach to the vocabulary and grammar choices we make.

An easy example is phrasal verbs, or two-part verbs. Common enough in English that they slip into instructions while teaching lower level classes. The idea is look for less common, but more more easily understood alternatives.

Some examples...

to find out, to burn down, to look over

Not helpful to use if you're working on "My name is Chuck".

Stephen Krashen has a fair bit to say about comprehensible input

http://www.sdkrashen.com/

[John Hall]

Thanks, Guy. I looked at the website. But where does Kraschen specifically talk about comprehensible input? In Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning? If so, which chapter?

[Guy Courchesne]

I just posted a quick link to Second Language Acquisition...I made the reference from another text I have handy here, The Practice of English Language Teaching.

The entire work is available online at http://www.sdkrashen.com/SL_Acquisition_and_Learning/index.html

[Jizzo T. Clown]

Thanks, Guy.

Now if I could only convince my coworkers (well, a couple of them anyway) that they really do need to pay attention to their language, I'd be doing alright. Grading is REAL!

Nothing makes me more angry than a fellow "teacher" talking to a beginner like they're a native speaker, then wondering why the students "can't understand."

[tedkarma]

[coffeedrinker]

This is an interesting topic - and grading your language is definitely an acquired skill...and I have to say one that often sticks with efl teachers (at least me) often, whoever they are talking to!

I think (like writing an appropriate cover letter which is another thread) it's also connected to an ability to see things from another perspective. Part of it is just thinking and planning. Having learned another language yourself in a classroom is also helpful for this, I think.

What's interesting to me too though is that often you don't want to grade your language completely - I've heard some statistic for "if students understand this much - 60%? - of what you say, that's just right" because it means they are at least hearing new language and also they are "forced" to cope in a somewhat realistic environment - when they need to really communicate in English, they won't be dealing with a skilled efl teacher.

And it's amazing to me how much you can communicate by pressing people to use their common sense - they definitely don't need to know every word, and one of the most frustrating things is a learner who feels they can't read or understand without having every new word explained.

Anyway, it is a useful skill - I definitely notice that even outside the classroom - the same skills that help me decide how to grade my language help me communicate with other people - both native speakers and non-native English speakers when I travel (sorry if this seems off the topic - it's an interesting subject for me though)

[Otterman Ollie]

Coffee drinker ,your reference to outside the classroom caught my eye,Ithink this is an area where students can freely practise what they have learnt and they approach us for the chance to communicate in the target language in a less formal environment . It is a fact though that too many of my peers ignore the students efforts and revert to L1, again these are the ones who complain the students "don't understand" I think they are part of the problem not the soloution .

[gaijinalways]

This an interesting topic, and it is also a necessary skill when you travel abroad and are not multilingual.

[Jizzo T. Clown]

And another thing...

The ones who fail to pay attention to their language when teaching are the same ones who say we aren't doing the students any favors by speaking "easy English" because their college professors won't be speaking to them like that.

I agree to a certain extent--the more advanced the student, the less grading takes place, obviously. But it does do more harm than good when you try to make a low-level ESL classroom too much like a mainstream university classroom.

Perhaps what my colleagues need is a workshop in which they are taught a foreign language with and without grading.

[gaijinalways]

I agree, but also I have had native English speaker colleagues who taught almost all in the L1, which of course didn't prepare my students for my L2 teaching the next term .

[John Hall]

I am quite interested in the role consciousness plays in grading. In explaining this to other teachers, what I have told them is that it is as if you have two minds. One of your minds is thinking about what you want to communicate; the other is always thinking about what the students can understand. (The latter not only includes an awareness of the students' knowledge of English, but also an awareness of their "cultural consciousness.") When I am speaking in class, most of the time nothing can pass my lips unless it is approved of by both of my "minds."

It seems to me that this is an essential part of good communication: being aware of not just what you are saying, but also being aware of if and how your audience can understand it. Thus, many of you have noted how this skill is valuable outside the classroom as well as inside.

I would also point out that this is so contrary to the traditional way of lecturing in universities. I am not surprised that Jizzo is upset with some of his or her colleagues. When I was a university student, I sat through too many classes in which the professor was talking in English but yet in a subset of English almost entirely incomprehensible to me and most of my classmates. What a waste of time!