Don't worry - be happy

[Andrew Patterson]

Stephen wrote:

Tara B does have an important point. If the students actively resist the methodology applied by the teacher, it will fail! Students here in Taiwan often believe that they need to learn more grammar. The fact that a mere six years of grammar during their state school education, perhaps a few more at university, and possibly even more at bushibans (Taiwanese Language Schools) have failed to achieve the desired results does not make the penny drop, and indeed, psychological reasearch indicates that this would be so. Psychologists have found that when a person has invested a lot of time, energy or money in something, it is very psychologically difficult to admit that it has been negative. Therefore, students with years of studying grammar and shocking productive ability (the intermediate come pre-elemntary brigade who have memorised every rule and can barely string a sentence together in less than 5 minutes) will have a psychological need to view those years of studying grammar as valuable. This belief makes it very easy for them to accept that they need to master grammar better rather than change the way they study. Thus, arguably the most important challenge for the teacher is to convert the students to a more productive method of study.

Surely this is a matter of balance. The grammar that the students have been learning hasn't been a waste of time, but if they haven't got the vocabulary to plug into that grammar, we shouldn't be surprised that they can't string sentences together. The only worry would be that they haven't even been able to learn the grammar due to not being able to plug vocabulary in. This could conceivably leave grammar to be viewed as if it was just meaningless mathematical formula. Not helpful to non-mathematically inclined students.

That's very pessimistic, though. If we assume that the grammar has been learnt, if the focus is now switched to vocabulary building progress should be fairly rapid. If they've got a thing about grammar, I'm sure that collocation exercises can be made to look as if they are more grammar, which to an extent they are anyway.

I'd look at the vocabulary builders at the back of English File, or Test your professional English series if they are doing ESP as these are very good for vocabulary building. Crosswords and wordsearches are also good for vocabulary building.

Once their vocabulary has been built up you can address things like pragmatics which may be very different to English, organisation, cohesion, etc.

[Sally Olsen]

Just to be the devil's advocate again. I meant that if teachers care about the students it doesn't matter how you teach them. If you care about the students you will find what each of them needs and encourage them to follow their own strengths in learning the language. I have never been a method teacher and use everything I can find until I hit on what inspires the individual student. Often there are groups of students who learn well the same way and that makes it easier than having each student in the class learn differently but I limit these groups to around three or four students because it is hard to operate in larger groups and really learn and contribute. I often think of myself as a facilitator or organizer who arranges the right situation or materials for the students. Of course, sometimes I must work one-on-one with certain students to get them off the ground and then it is more of a detective's role to see what can inspire them. I like to run my class like a research lab with students finding out about things that interest them and that can include "grammar". They get books from many series that cover a certain topic that frustrates them and see what ways have been used to try to teach this topic. Usually one of the ways seems to hit them and make sense or perhaps just seeing the various ways of presenting the subject helps them to form their own ideas. They are often led to sift through their own and their fellow student's writings to see how the students handle this topic and what mistakes are made and then try to figure out why - because of their first language, do all students do this at the beginning or after a certain number of years studying or ? Another thing I do is when they write. I have them fold the paper in half and only write down the left side. Then they have to write on the right side if they are uncertain about something they wrote or if they think it should be written another way. Often students get things right but don't feel confident about it. I also type out student's essays and put them in a more coherent order and try to make a more natural flow to the language - Canadian style of course - and let them read these and the corrected essays of their fellows students. All these things help some students and not others. I just do as many of them as I can.

[woodcutter]

One of the reasons that I thought the quote was very thought provoking, Sally, is that I know that you very much favour that kind of teaching, and yet the research perhaps suggests to me that that kind of methodology is no better than another.

If I run a more "teacher-centred" classroom, to use a loaded phrase which I dislike, then it is not due to the fact that I do not care about the students, or because I want to be at the centre of attention. It is because I think that they are looking for a lot of input (and perhaps correction) from a native speaker, along with a chance to converse (and they are paying good money to do so). If they can do some of the text based things you mention in their own time, and use the chance my lesson gives them for native speaker directed conversation, I think that would be the wisest course. Of course, they may well not do so, and so we are back to the swings and the roundabouts again...........

[fluffyhamster]

Doesn't sound like there is much room or time in those "native speaker directed conversations" for the learners to get things right, settle upon what they want(ed) to say.

Of course, if the teacher can supply genuine examples (not necessarily native-speaker, but certainly realistic, according to our knowledge of and expectations regadring real-life encounters) of what the learners could be aiming for, all well and good; and sometimes they have nothing to say, in which case direction does indeed need to come from the teacher (shift in emphasis/reformulation of the question(s), new topic entirely etc).

[stephen]

Surely this is a matter of balance. The grammar that the students have been learning hasn't been a waste of time, but if they haven't got the vocabulary to plug into that grammar, we shouldn't be surprised that they can't string sentences together. The only worry would be that they haven't even been able to learn the grammar due to not being able to plug vocabulary in. This could conceivably leave grammar to be viewed as if it was just meaningless mathematical formula. Not helpful to non-mathematically inclined students.

That's very pessimistic, though. If we assume that the grammar has been learnt, if the focus is now switched to vocabulary building progress should be fairly rapid. If they've got a thing about grammar, I'm sure that collocation exercises can be made to look as if they are more grammar, which to an extent they are anyway.

I'd look at the vocabulary builders at the back of English File, or Test your professional English series if they are doing ESP as these are very good for vocabulary building. Crosswords and wordsearches are also good for vocabulary building.

Once their vocabulary has been built up you can address things like pragmatics which may be very different to English, organisation, cohesion, etc.

You have some good points Andrew. However, I should like to qualify what I said. I teach in Taiwan where in high school, students have been taught English as a subject rather than a language. I taught in a Taiwanese High School for a time so I know what kind of materials the government set out for use and have had first hand oppurtunity to observe how things were done by the local High School teachers (although I should add only in one school.) English was taught primarily as grammar. Grammar was taught as a theoretical subject. It was not taught with emphasis on productive and receptive ability. (Therefore, while vocabulary building is useful, they cannot just slot in vocabulary to the grammar rules they cannot use. Although, I agree that a wider lexical approach is more useful as it presents usable chunks of language to help fluency.) While I would agree that theoretical knowledge of grammar is not completely useless, I'm sure both you and the majority of posters agree that a different approach to grammar and indeed EFL teaching as a whole would be more productive.

My main point was that students need to be brought to see an alternative (or preferably several) different methods of study as benificial. It is getting students onboard with this that represents the biggest challenge to teachers. However, in most cases, when they see the results of doing so, this challenge is at least to some extent over.

Stephen

(As an aside I should mention that since I worked in High School in Taipei, the government tests for English have changed to be less purely grammar focused. Indeed, they even include a speaking test now. Hopefully, this will eventually force a shift to a more beneficial method of teaching English in the High School system.)

[stephen]

The interesting thing about Sally and Woodcutter's is they highlight how differently an EFL class can be conducted. Sally has some great ideas although I wouldn't like to try some of them with a class of 15 or 30. After reading these, it makes me wonder why with all this research on learner styles, there is no research on teacher styles. In my time teaching, I have noticed with interest how differently myself and some of my colleagues teach (not necessarily better or worse just different.) Do different styles of teaching fit in better with different teachers If so ,why?

Stephen

[Sally Olsen]

This has been done by Devon Woods in the book called, "Teacher Cognition in Language Teaching : Beliefs, Decision-Making and Classroom Practice" (Cambridge Applied Linguistics). If you look at the comments he made at the beginning of the book on Amazon.com it follows your thinking.

I wonder if woodcutter and I had observers in the classroom if they could determine the time that students were actually speaking to us over a long period of time and see if it balanced out. I don't know how you would measure the time that the students listened because they could be sitting there and looking like they were listening to woodcutter but not be. However, in my class you could measure a bit more accurately if they were listening to their group members and be more sure from their responses in body language and in verbal answers. There will still be the one or two who don't listen to anyone but they wouldn't be listening to me either and those are the ones that I work with one on one. However, there would be some time taken from my lesson to organize the groups and move to where they were working. I think my method is not very efficient as well because I spend a lot of time meeting the students outside of class that I don't get "paid" for with money and that makes a huge difference with the ones who don't listen. I don't see the problem though of working with 15 or 30 or 90. If you break them down into groups, it is just noiser with more but they still work about the same. I flip the light switch when the class gets too noisy and they start at a lower level again. I often have more than half the groups out of the classroom in the library or the art room or the computer room or out making a movie or taking pictures so rarely have the whole class in the room for the older grades who have proved themselves responsible. Anyone not proving themselves responsible stays in the classroom with me. I have typed out the essays for a class of 40. I decided to see if it took longer than my colleagues who were marking errors in red pencil and so when my colleagues sat down to mark, I went to the computer and typed. Of course, I am a fast typist at over 70 words per minute which may be something that others can't do as easily. I was finished at least 10 to 15 minutes before my colleagues and the students read my typed corrections and they threw the red pencil marked papers in the garbage and often didn't look at more than the mark. I think if I was doing it for 90 I might just do one of their essays a term. You don't have to copy the essays for all the others, you can have them up on the wall for others to read in posterboard style. I never put the name of the author on the essay unless they tell me I can.

But in the end I think that woodcutter is right. It is just a matter of teacher's style, beliefs, knowledge and so on. I just feel so uncomfortable standing at the front of the classroom and seeing those kids in the back drifting off to sleep or whatever else they get up to. That doesn't mean that often the students in my classes come across something that they want to ask and many of them listen to my answer but I have the satisfaction of knowing that the ones who don't want to listen at that time can go on with their own groups. I found that on Fridays they were often just wanting to hear stories and tell stories and that those were the times when the classes came together more as a group but I wasn't in front of the classroom at those times but sitting in the desks arranged in a circle or on the floor on the carpet with everyone sitting or lying about or on the couch in some classrooms that were set up in a more comfortable configuration.


This forum is a great source of information on teacher's styles and I hope that Devon will include some of your musings in his next book. If you keep a detailed record of your teaching you might want to send it to him as he is trying to gather journals from various teachers around the world for this next book.

[stephen]

Thanks for the name of the book Sally, I had a look at a bit of it on Amazon and it does look very interesting, but at 72 US a bit pricy for my budget. Mind you, with luck, I maybe able to find a library here with a copy.

I can see how rewriting one model essay for a class of 40 would be quicker than marking them. However, I personally don't find my writing students just throw them straight in the bin. However, as I use correction symbols, and some students need several redrafts when first starting on a particular style of paragraph (eg. Cause & effect, contrast); this can be a really time consuming approach. Fortuanately, this improves with time, and the results are worth it in terms of linguistic progress although not in comparison to renumeration.

I must admit that I'm not a great fan of the idea of teaching by explaining grammar, but parts of my lessons do involve high levels of teacher talk time, especially, conversation classes for elementary/false beginners. Of course, this is based on developing listening skills/receptive grammar rather than explaining things to them. I prefer where possible to get students to explain grammar to me after using it,or after we've used discovery techniques.

One thing that I think would be interesting to do would be to compare how students' with different learning styles performances changed with different teaching styles. This is, of course, an extremely difficult activity to undertake because of the variables involved: the prejudices the researcher would bring in terms of preferred methodology and objectives, and how students" progress would be assessed. It is quite possible that students' assessment of their own progress and the teacher' assessment could be significantly different. Still, it would be interesting if done well.

[Sally Olsen]

I would also be interested in more qualitative studies of what teacher's actually do and what the students think of what they do. Bernard Mohan from UBC has developed or is developing a method of research based on Social Practice. You look at what is actually being done in your own classroom in various ways. You can use Critical Discourse Analysis, Register, Systemic Functional Linguistics and so on. The idea, I think, is to take one small Social Practice like doing a worksheet, or a game or a planned lesson of grammar and take it apart and see what you are doing. For this I have been using Mohan's Knowledge Framework and I examine my lessons or worksheets or projects under these titles:
Description, Sequence, Choice, Classification, Principles and Values. Vivian Cook also has a process like this to take apart your lessons. I find it very valuable and wonder what it would be like if we all did this and if we would see some patterns in our teaching even though we seem to be doing it in different ways.

If we are doing research, I wonder if the ordinary exams that the students take now aren't enough to be the final tests because those are the real life measures that all students have to take? I wonder if something like the CAEL or the TOEFL wouldn't be international enough to test English at the highest levels at least? Perhaps we should set up something for different levels for teachers to test their students on an international level although I suppose various organizations have done that.

[stephen]

Sally

Regarding your point about standardized testing, I've tested IELTS, BULATS, KET, PET and Cambridge Young Learners, the problem with standardized formats is consistancy, method of testing and assumptions set. IELTS, BULATS and what I've seen of TOEFL and TOEIC all have a number of most serious flaws. It would appear likely that a statistically analysed set of key criteria ala UCLES or TOEFL style objective testing would be seriously flawed. There is plenty of evidence to suggest this, firstly, by looking at some of the students these tests send to university, (mind you there is a big financial aspect in this too,) and secondly, by looking at two fields which have been amoungst the biggest players in providing objective testing: intelligence and personality. The arbitary nature in which personality traits are assigned to groups of questions by psychologists would be quite laughable were it not frightening. Frightening because some researchers predjudices and arbitary are used to decide people's futures, along with some clever statistics, and a Phd.

In principal it sounds a good idea; however, having had to do a research project using IQ tests when I was an undergraduate, and having tested some of the contemporary EFL tests I wouldcertainly be very sceptical about whether researchers could pull it off.

Stephen

[Sally Olsen]

Do you know the CAEL from Carleton University. It is based on hearing a lecture and reading some material in a similar vein and I think might be as close to doing what they want it to do as they can make it. One of the authors, Janna Fox, did her PhD on the various kinds of tests for university entrance and found as you said that you are testing what you are looking for. What about setting an essay for students of various levels and comparing those across the world. They always write essays in Mongolia and Greenland. In Greenland they also had an oral test which I found amazing but I don't know how you would interview classes of 90 students in this way or even 40. In the end it is always a question of what you want to do with the test results. How could you design a test that would tell you if the students are good at English and do you need to do this? Usually we just need to put them in levels for organized English classes and those usually sort themselves out over time with either the teacher asking the student to move up or down or the student moving or dropping out. So maybe we should just try to discover the ways of teaching and learning that are effective and leave the testing up to the organizations that need it. As I said that though I was thinking that I have often taught to the test and certainly you can help student do well on a test by teaching the format. I don't want to do that as an overall day to day practice though. I guess it goes back to Bernard Mohan's Social Practice. You teach what is important to the students and so you have to teach how to do these exams if it is important to them. I think that they learn some English this way and still use all my research/project/group work ideas no matter what I do. Is there any other situation in life that is judged in a "fair" manner - getting a job, picking a life partner, having children. In most of these situations we just go by instinct or our beliefs, knowledge, etc. as we do with teaching, don't we?

[wjserson]

Go Carleton University! Janna Fox rules!

http://www.carleton.ca/slals/

[woodcutter]

I'm suprised to find Sally thinks I am making reasonable points - I have to confess that I know anyone reading this stuff must guess Sally is a far better teacher than me (or perhaps anyone else!), and I didn't expect her to listen!. The depth of thought that goes even into Sally's postings here is amazing.

What really impresses me is that she has already reflected on the point I was going to make, which people seldom seem to do. The archetypal "teacher who cares" is the kind of teacher who prepares heavily and spends lots of individual time with students (unpaid?). Therefore, such a teacher may perhaps be teaching a 4-hour day as compared to the 6 hour day of the method drone. All research that I know of shows that while teaching styles are not that important, length of time in the classroom is. I submit, therefore, that "Berlitz Billy" or "Callan Camilla", the inexperienced travelling teachers with no qualifications, if they work hard at their jobs, may well have a more productive day (in terms of English taught) than the most experienced and most highly qualified of those of you writing here.

Sally's classes seem to be very large, by the way, and I have said before that the method teaching I favour needs a small class. However, even if you have a large class, if you are a native speaker working in a foreign country the chances are that people are coming to your class in the hope of getting real native input from you, not in the hope of talking frequently to their peers.

[Sally Olsen]

I am with you woodcutter in endorsing natural teachers who seem to know what to do even if they have never had a day in a teacher's course. I have met about 5 or so in my travels and they are so wonderful and the students so lucky to have them. They just seem to know when to switch ideas, go with the flow, take advantage of the moment and have numerous things up their sleave to be able to switch. They are genuine people who are intensely interested in people and teach a class as if it were 15 (and up) individuals. They form deep and lasting friendships with the students and really touch people's whole lives, not just adding to their English knowledge.
But that said, I met or saw a whole bunch of people teaching who were just taking the money and living their lives after school. They were just there to enjoy the tourist areas and any parties they could find. Some even turned up to school in conditions that were unprofessional or didn't turn up at all leaving the students without a teacher, etc. Then were often real problems.
I can't see from my experience in a quick course of one month, or one long weekend, a diploma or even from a degree that you can "train" someone to teach. Students who can write the best essay are not always the ones who can teach and are not always ethical people. They do have theory behind what they do and lots of reading and hopefully good mentoring and role models. In the end it seems that the students make or break the teachers - in private schools they just don't turn up for class and in public schools they drive out the terrible teachers, at least in all the places that I have been. It is harder in public schools to get the good teachers because you are more or least randomly assigned but university and colleges have the grape vines to spread the word about good professors.
Since it doesn't really pay all that well though it seems like we do get a lot of dedicated people who really want to teach and are excited about it no matter which style they use.
I just spent the week with my one and half year old granddaughter and what a joy it was to teach and learn from her. What a job we have!