A Board-by-Board lesson

So I’m going to post, in chronological order, with commentary, a board that evolved during my ESOL & Maths with ESOL for Employment class this morning. The lesson, nominally, was recapping shapes and reviewing positional language as they come up in functional skills maths. As a starting point we had a powerpoint showing images of rooms, and students had identified the shapes they could see in the rooms. The feedback on this led to a bit of a discussion around shape nouns and adjectives (circle/circular, rectangle/rectangular, that sort of thing.) I wanted to clarify what an adjective was, so quickly asked for examples, leading to jokes about “A beautiful teacher”. I overheard a hushed discussion in the room at this point, along the lines of “you can’t say beautiful for a man.”

Which led to the firs board: just handsome and beautiful.

A few moments, quizzical looks and questions later, and we had the following board:

which led to a whole load of discussions (like how you might describe a baby boy as beautiful, or what it might imply if you described a woman as handsome). This being a fairly low level class, the discussion around gendered language implicit here was limited to the observation that while handsome is almost purely masculine in use, beautiful is used to describe not only a woman, but also objects. There was a little bit of a quiet moment when some of the women in the group digested that observation, although we didn’t pursue it. After all we had other words to attend to, with their own set of challenging social issues attached:

Oh my. The word gorgeous came up from one student. So we had a bit of a discussion about who (or what) we would describe with these less gender specific terms: how we might, especially men, avoid gorgeous unless we were talking to / about our significant other (otherwise there are some overtones of page 3 of a tabloid newspaper). This was partly because of my own blushes when a student said “a gorgeous teacher”….

This being ESOL/Maths/Employment, I did introduce a workplace appropriacy theme: like what do you say to a (close) colleague who asks you how their new hairstyle looks. Most of the words we had already talked about had connotations of intimacy which might be inappropriate, again, particularly from a man to a woman, or vice versa. So I introduced the less emotive great. Which spiralled into:

Now, please don’t jump down my throat on the whole beauty isn’t just appearance thing – I realise that this is a bit of a missed opportunity here, but I was thinking on my feet, not to mention acutely conscious of the fact that the lesson was nominally a Maths lesson.

So we returned to our pictures, by way of a brief but unproductive jaunt to charming, and to the “official” focus of the lesson. I elicited and checked  the key positional language (prepositions and what not) then had the students using this position terms resource to make statements about objects in the images (“The plates are next to the glasses.” “The pictures are above the bed.” and so on).

The discussions in groups led to the following additions:

The appearance of the cupboard/cabinet/wardrobe distinction is fairly predictable, I think, torch arose from a student question while clarifying the difference between a lamp and a light. Oak resulted from a little offshoot (no pun intended) about TV stands: we googled “tv table” which included, yes, an expensive oak table. One student rather wonderfully recycled the word trapezium as being a good shape for a TV table.

As a final activity, the students were testing each other by arranging playing cards for each other and asking, for example “Where is the king of hearts?”. This required, of course, a bit of pre-teaching to make sure we all knew what language to use:

Around and among caused a bit of a challenge, because they’re a bit more complex, but I had a squeezy corner of board space left to pop it into.

All of this leaves out, of course, all the other interesting discussions – the differences between slug and snail and between at home and in the house, not to mention Queries about why a unused chair is usually placed under the table, but when we are sitting on the chair, we sit at the table. 

It was an enjoyable lesson for me and for the students. I had regular positive comments  (along the lines of “this is better than maths” among other things), and as is often the case, it was the incidental language that the students were talking about at the end of the lesson, not the target language. Having been teaching fairly fixed content sessions a lot of late, it was refreshing to do this again. After all, you don’t hear a lot about “emergent maths” and GCSE English is profoundly driven by the exam content. I do teach English to 16-18s, but they respond better to pace and structure, meaning that this sort of meander tends to lead to disruption. Clearly the answer to enjoying teaching maths to ESOL students is very simple: don’t bother with the maths and carry on as normal.

 

 

 

 

 

News

“I don’t like the news. It is always bad” Entry 1 ESOL learner

The news is a wonderful resource for the ESOL classroom – newspaper and magazine websites, the BBC, blogs and so on can all be joyfully and usefully exploited by teachers for a whole range of purposes. Recently, for example, the UK has introduced a new £1 coin and a £5 note, both stories which lent themselves well to an ESOL reading and listening lesson, as well as being useful generally. Then there are articles make good use of specific language items which can be exploited, using the news element to promote interest in the text and therefore the language.

But not all news is good news.

Sometimes there are articles of news which are relevant to the students, that they may benefit from knowing about – cuts to funding in the public sector, for example, changes to health or education systems, or local issues like hospital closures, all of which link to the students lives, and those of their families. Again, handled sensitively, these things can be genuinely useful from both a personal/social perspective as well as from a linguistic one.

But more often, however, the news is not something you would voluntarily bring into the classroom. Into this category I would firmly classify the bombing in Manchester on Monday evening.

With none of my classes did I plan to bring these events into the classroom, nor would I. The sense of sorrow and outrage is not something which lends itself to a classroom in any context, and as such I would never knowingly force students to comment or discuss it. Everyone has their own reactions to such news, and for some the news is too close to their own experiences in Syria, in Iraq, and elsewhere – it’s not my place to pick at wounds that are, I hope, slowly healing.

That’s not to say that the subject is banned, nor that it is limited to higher level students: indeed, with my Level 1 class, who are linguistically more likely to be aware of what has happened through the media, the word Manchester was mentioned once and that by me. Instead, it was with my Entry 1 group earlier in the day, when I sat down with a small group of 3 students to discuss something else at the end of the lesson, and instead we ended up talking about what had happened, and the students’ reactions. There was no structure, no analysis, no language outcome, just four people talking about something terrible that had happened less than 30 miles away.

What is important with this, and indeed with any selection of current affairs stories, is that it does not revolve around the teacher choosing what the students should feel outraged about, nor some kind of “sharing” of a difficult or challenging subject, with teachers as some kind of therapist. That is not who we are, nor who we should be. Neither can we always be “just English teachers” – the language we are teaching to students is also one of their keys to the wider world, however dark and unpleasant it can be, and the consequences of that wider world will inevitably filter back to the classroom. When it does come back to the classroom, then we should make space for it, be aware of it, welcome it, even. A classroom is a sanctuary, sometimes, and as such should be a safe place for students whose lives and experiences may be as terrible as those affected by what happened in Manchester. However, as in any kind of sanctuary, the purpose is not to exclude the world, or deny it, but rather to come to terms with it, and make peace.

***

There is a more practical, and very effective, description of a class doing just this in London with the amazing people at English For Action: https://efalondon.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/in-solidarity-with-manchester/ 

 

 

So, that technology thing again.

I taught a lesson today, during which I used a cassette player. I also couldn’t switch the computer on as I needed the socket for the cassette recorder. So no interactive whiteboard either. 

And do you know what, it was ok as well. The world didn’t end. The listening task was nice, the work the students did was useful, engaging, all those things. Would it have been better with a digital rather than cassette recording? Marginally, perhaps, because instead of rewinding the cassette while students checked in pairs, I would have been able to monitor the conversations a bit, but even then, it wasn’t an onerous task, and I managed it pretty speedily. In to activity, the technology neither enhanced or transformed the act of listening. And neither should it. What about the board, though, did the lack of IWB make things worse? Not realky: if anything it made it better: with an interactive whiteboard I have more or less infinite pages of board, which makes me very sloppy in my boardwork: everything goes up there, uncurated and chaotic. With the limits of the regular one, you have to think carefully about how you are laying it out, which bits you keep, which bits you get rid of. Today I ended up with this, for example: 

It was a fairly organic board (yes, I know that’s a posh way of saying “unplanned”), but it captured everything from the lesson where an IWB would have sprawled across multiple pages. The list in the middle is the answers to the listening task (listen and say what type of relationship it was). The words in the top right and bottom left are the remnants of a discussion that we had at the beginning about different types of relationships (it was tempting to drill “I am in love with you” but propriety stopped me). The stuff at the top left is language that emerged during the final speaking task (tell your partner about three different relationships).  It’s not an award-winningly clear whiteboard, and it only made sense if you were there, but it captured it in one “screen”. 

And I do think this is a valuable skill. I worry with CELTA trainees, in a curmudgeonly kind of way, that they are all learning how to use an interactive whiteboard and PowerPoint before they have really learned how to use a whiteboard. I worry about this because there is a very real chance they may rock up at a job in a year or so and find themselves with nothing more than a few old coursebooks and a whiteboard and pens, and not know what to do with it. Or cassettes: standing there with the original Headway and some old cassettes, how will they cope? Ok, so that’s maybe a little OTT, but you know, I wonder. 

Then there also the sneaky, naughty, not-Best Practice thought that although things like IWBs and digital recordings bring a load of convenience to the classroom (and believe me, I’d miss them) another part of me wonders if  there’s something to be said for the discipline of a whiteboard and a cassette player which makes you think more concisely about what language is happening in the classroom. Or perhaps it’s just me, and perhaps I can think of ways of bringing across that focus and  concision into using an interactive whiteboard, so that all the other bonuses of the interactive whiteboard (printability, quick access to google images, that sort of thing) can be utilised as well. 

I realise, of course, that this is a well worn tread for this blog, and I should probably redress the balance and say something warm and cosy about how great technology is. Because it is and it can be, and to be fair, interactive whiteboards are, in and of themselves, pretty remarkable bits of technology, even if they tend to be overloaded with unintuitive, gimmick-heavy software. And a digitally controlled audio recording is damn useful. But there are plenty of blogs and articles out there doing the hard sell, so I’ll leave that job for now. So for now, just remember, using tech is fine, in its place, and so is not using tech. Just don’t be too much in awe of it. 

Fluster

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Frank Herbert, The Litany Against Fear in Dune.

I had my formal observation this week, and my feedback. It was, as has generally been the case, a pretty accurate evaluation of the lesson, and, as any observation should, picked up on a couple of bits that I missed, or perhaps was in denial about (like “do the differentiation which you planned.” which is an improvement on “plan differentiation”)

One of the other, less formal bits of feedback was an observation that I fluster, which is interesting because that’s something I’ve seen in other people and commented on as having a negative impact on the lesson. That same fluster and nerves was really the impetus behind my last post about planning as well: frustration, being unhappy with the ideas for the lesson, never mind anything else, all of which was compounded by nerves. The nerves beget fluster, the fluster begets mistakes, the mistakes beget more nerves: the little death becomes the total obliteration.

A bit of nervous energy is not always a bad thing, mind you. If I plan in too much detail, and too far in advance, for example, I get complacent about the lesson, and forget what it is I have planned, treating it as “done”. I plan more or less day by day because I find my brain works better that way, and part of that is nerves: a sense of pressure that acts as a motivator, and I have a hundred better ideas in the house before the lesson than I do in the preceding week.

However, when it comes to formal observation of lessons, why fluster?

A part of it is simple lack of confidence. I was reading the other day about “imposter syndrome” which is where despite being good at something, you lack confidence in that ability and as a result you are convinced that you are about to be outed as a fraud.

Sometimes the fluster cycle occurs simply because something goes wrong that you weren’t expecting: it’s why we get trainee teachers on CELTA to think about things that might go wrong. Mistakes beget nerves and suddenly we find ourselves trapped once more in the nerves-fluster-mistakes cycle.

In this particular case, a small part was to do with something outside the lesson: it would be indelicate of me to comment on what the was, but I was distracted by this and had dropped a bit of professional focus. Partly, I think, it was relief at being somewhere familiar for me, and settling into overly comfortable patterns, and really not following through on it.

But whatever. These things are all well and good. They’re  not the real problem with teacher fluster during observation. In another conversation this week, there was a sense of dismay that teachers should feel nervous at observation, or feel worried about the process.

This simply demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the process in which teachers are being involved. Teacher observation for quality assurance purposes is, essentially, a high stakes summative assessment, like a GCSE exam or a degree dissertation. Whether the lesson is graded or not, if there is the potential for punitive consequences for the individual, then there will be nerves. It’s ignorant and arrogant to suggest otherwise. Never mind the official “don’t forget it’s also developmental” cant, because if it all goes south, a quality assurance observation can be the little clatter of stones that precedes the landslide.

The irony, of course, is that this awareness is more likely to lead to it happening. Almost, I think, something like the rational meditative state implied in the less well known half of Frank Herbert quote is the only answer.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

A little dramatic maybe, but it gets to the point – you have to try, somehow, to get past it and work through the nerves. You have to consciously acknowledge the consequences, but also rationalise them. It may be the clatter of small stones, but the landslide may still not happen.  ‘ve only seen the landslide a few times, so to speak. As  awfully new-agey as it sounds, perhaps the answer does lie in some form of meditative reflection before the lesson, an opportunity to rationalise and clarify, and to focus on the important thing – the learning in the lesson. Don’t deny the negativity, or try to gee yourself up, forcing yourself into some manic pixie state of rabid positivity, just let it pass over and through you.

Teach the students, make them learn. Everything else can wait.

Comparatives, Superlatives, and “by far the most charismatic teacher in college.”

This week, owing to the arbitrary governmental diktat that one ESOL qualification = 100ish hours, marks the end of our first semester. It’s a weird time, because for students who are not going up a level, it essentially means a week of diagnostics and inductions, then business as normal. It doesn’t feel like the end of a course, even though technically that’s what it is. 

So anyway, I thought it was a good time to teach a lesson which was somehow both a closing off of the course while still maintaining a sense of continuity. Also, after a week or so of exams, target reviews, course evaluations and so on, I thought it might be nice to get the students to learn something. (What’s that you say, targets are part of the learning process? Bless you and your funny ways.) In fairness, myself and the group’s main teacher have both worked hard, I think, to maintain a balance between the more reflective-administrative aspects of the course, and a need for the students to have something to take away from the lessons, but still, a “pure” language lesson, I thought, might be nice.

The lesson, then. I started from an idea around the students making farewell certificates for each other, initially thinking of students simply completing a prewritten certificate. You know the sort of thing: “this is awarded to Julio for being the Hardest Working Student”. Then I worked it through a bit more. What language were they going to need? Superlatives, of course. But this is a Level 1, that is intermediate group, and superlatives alone would be too easy, so I thought we could add in a review of comparatives, and, for good measure, some intensifiers. 

Ok, so next stop, how to get the idea started? Usually when I teach comparatives and superlatives, I like to get students to share personal (ish) information and compare that, but in this instance, I thought it would too similar to the final task, and anyway, a bit easy. So instead I chose to build a context by getting the students to classify a whiteboard full of nouns. Most of these were the traditionally bland items: cities, countries, vegetables, that sort of thing, with a couple of clever dick moments (China, Italy & Hungary to reflect countries of students in the group, plus another 3 countries, Australia, Iceland and Fiji… think about it.) I also allowed my inner imp some playtime and added recent US presidents and UK prime ministers,  including the current incumbents. 

This was quite fun, and I think I judged the complexity of the groupings and and the number of words just right: a quick bit of pair work after working it out individually, before then feeding back to check. These then formed the basis of the practice activities later on. 

Next stop – presentation: I went teacher led, posting example sentences for each structure covering the main points (comparatives and superlatives) around form and spelling, concept questioning in classic CELTA style to draw out and check meanings. After covering each, the students wrote example sentences using the words from the sorting activity. Finally, the students reviewed with me various intensifiers for comparative and superlative phrases: by far, easily, for superlatives, far, much, a great deal, a lot, a bit, a little, a little bit, and a couple more for comparatives. These were then inserted into the previous sentences. 

The final task was the certificates (after a brief tangent into imperial and metric weights and measures – don’t ask). This was simple: students wrote their name at the top, then the “certificate” was passed around the room, and each student wrote a complimentary sentence about the person at the top, with feedback, before the finished certificate being returned to the originator with 8-10 sentences on it, which they could then read. Where students finished early, and to balance things out, I had the students write similar certificates for me and the group’s other teacher, which produced things like this:

It fitted the bill nicely, and was, overall, a good lesson. Like a lot of the lessons I teach now, context was incidental, arising from the classroom and the students, rather than an imposed context. There was a lot of opportunity for language and concepts to arise that I couldn’t necessarily predict, while still having a structure, and an expectation of language production. It was a lesson of ratios: in the first task was the right ratio of nouns and complexity for sorting, and later there was just the right ratio of new to old language, and this created the right level of engagement and focus for the students, with plenty to learn as well as recap. Insofar as it is ever possible to tell, the final sentences suggested, as well, that learning, or consolidation of learning, had happened.

Ob, and one more thing: I didn’t prompt the sentences about me, I promise. 

When the students know it is bad.

In one of my earliest lessons, whilst doing my initial certificate, I really screwed up. Oh man, did I ever screw up. There are screw ups who can only dream of screwing up that badly. The lesson, a badly judged hour on adjectives for an upper intermediate group, had involved ages of painstaking work on planning and resources (cut out of fluorescent card, for reasons lost to posterity), to result in thirty scraped, desperate minutes at the end of which my trainer stood up and finished off the lesson while I sat in a corner with my day-glo cards and optimism in tatters in the floor. To my credit, I knew it was dying, I knew it was bad, just by the slow, deadly collapse of student interest and the polite, albeit frustrated, sympathy on the students’ faces. Unfortunately, being three hours into teaching, I just didn’t know how to make it stop, short of running from the room and never coming back. I have the expressions on the students faces burned into my memory, and the shame, oh the shame. 

(This wasn’t the only excruciating moment on that course; honourable mention should go to the oh so embarrassing hand out I did which I claimed was about the past tense of “have” but was, in fact, about the past perfect and my furious Wiltshire born insistence that the “r” in “car” was widely pronounced. Yes, I do know these are incredibly geeky things to be embarrassed about.) 

Since then, of course, I have been impeccable as a teacher. Mostly. Sometimes. Or at least occasionally, but always, always, the most affecting, most devastating feedback I have ever been given on a lesson is from students. This feedback, can take many forms, of course, through indirect feedback like the stony expressions as you flog the dead horse of your lesson to death. Students may simply tell you directly that said horse should have been put out of its misery a long time ago; although in my experience of such things, adult ESOL students sometimes find this hard, almost embarrassing, perhaps because they come from a culture of trust and respect for teachers. If anything, however, this makes it even worse: the very fact that for some students it is hard to give negative feedback to a teacher makes it all the more important to respond to that feedback appropriately and with respect. 

Sometimes, of course, a problem is not one of your own practice, as such, but of student belief or expectation: for example where a student thinks there are “too many games” because you use game-like information gap activities for speaking practice, or because they have unrealistic expectations about their abilities, and want to take an advanced exam by next Thursday. But whether it be the cold, stony silence of polite disengagement, or the niggling chatter of a disinterested group, or perhaps a student with an eloquent, genuine comment which is clearly rational, and based on the opinions of their classmates, you can tell if the problem is real, because, deep down, you know full well you have messed up. 

Student feedback, perhaps more than any other, triggers guilt. Guilt, as Yoda never quite said, leads to anger, and anger leads to the Dark Side. In this case, however, rather than donning a scary black mask and throttling people through the power of the force, one merely gets defensive, albeit sometimes aggressively so. It is, after all, genuinely upsetting to be told you’re not doing as good a job as you hoped. And maybe you feed on this, and you respond negatively to the students, all defensive and cagey “it was the lights/the management/the direction of the wind”. Or perhaps you internalise and dwell on it and lie there awake at 4 am wondering what you have done, and whether you are in the right job, and wouldn’t it just be better for everybody if you stopped now. 

Both of these, while human, and understandable, are also deeply unproductive. They are indeed the Dark Side of professional reflection: and as such we should all be good Jedi and move beyond them. Whether the feedback is direct, as in a student complaint, or indirect (my stony faced certificate class), then take it on board, and, crucially, change. Because that is the only thing you can do. If you don’t change then you might as well give up. Getting defensive with the students, or indeed with anyone, is pointless: listen to the complaint, notice what has gone wrong, make sure you understand it, promise to take action then, and this is the important bit, take it. 

Everyone wins. Students are happier with their course, and with you. It helps to rebuild a bit of faith and trust between you and the students, which makes teaching a whole load easier. It also helps you become a better teacher. A much better teacher because you are a better learner. You have received information (feedback), and changed your behaviour based on it. That, I reckon, is a fair definition of professional learning, and any teacher who isn’t learning is either lying or dead. Sure, students need and deserve good teaching, and you can come over all quality control assurance at me if you want, but as a teacher perfection is a rare thing, and learning is what we are all about. As teachers we learn from feedback and reflection, and students are one of the best sources of information on how well we are doing. 

So yes, make mistakes, get it wrong and listen to your class, but, as Samuel Beckett said: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. 

Upgrading Tasks

I do a lesson at Entry 1 and Entry 2 on transport vocabulary. I have the students work in groups and brainstorm vocabulary to do with different forms of transport. They then pass it to the next group who check the vocab and the spellings, then add their own ideas. This goes round until every group has had a look before some sort of plenary. I’ve refined the task into people/places/things of late, so that group A do people (driver, passenger, etc.) then B do places, and C do things. At lower levels I dish out picture dictionaries, and it becomes a research task, at Entry 2 it’s more of a revision/expansion task. 

However, in my head, this is very much a low level lesson, restricted to Entry 1/Entry 2 (elementary) students. So when I did it with my Level 1/Level 2 group I very much expected it to fly by, leaving half an hour for a discussion activity. Needless to say, of course, it did quite the opposite. Sure, the obvious stuff was dealt with quite swiftly (ticket, passenger, wheel, that sort of thing) but we did have a lot of interesting things, like what do we call the person who pushes the refreshments trolley down the train, and why the automated tannoy on the train will announce “we will shortly be arriving into…” rather than “we are shortly arriving…”. My answer to the latter was about clarity, and “action in progress at a specific point in future time. Mind you, for the former I was stumped: I couldn’t think of a generic job title, although I’m sure the train company have something like “refreshments operative”. I did tell the group about “trolley-dolly” mainly because it linked into a discussion we had been having about genderised job titles (“air hostess” vs “flight attendant”) and discrimination at work, but also because it’s silly sounding. 

Whatever: this was a good reminder that with this sort of open ended activity, students tend to choose what they will take from it, rather than being reliant on teacher-dictated input, and I’ve moved away from some of those lessons of late, relying more on teacher generated and controlled input. Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of teacher control, but opening the classroom  through activities is extremely rewarding for both me and the students. 

Mrs Khan went to the post office, the dentist, the bus stop, the sewing shop, the cafe….

I take it back, sort of. The criticisms are still there: the sometimes punitive over emphasis on “real life” for example, where observers and auditors of a particularly narrow mindset may criticise your planning for not linking to learners lives, as if this is the be all and end all; the notion that an ESOL for employment course should only link explicitly to employability skills; and the necessarily fake nature of some pedagogical dialogues. There are still issues with all these things. 

However, I did take the decision to go with a few “situational” sessions, but rather than using published materials, my first idea was to start with the crucial vocabulary. To this end, I took a walk down my local high street, taking pictures of a the various shops and services along that street. I live in a completely different area to where my students live and work, but focussed on my area for two main reasons. Firstly, I’m lucky enough to live in one of those areas where you have almost every local shop you could possibly need, and more: a couple of  cafes and restaurants, a small supermarket, an old fashioned greengrocer, a barbers with a rotating barber’s pole as the sign, a florist, a butcher, a small DIY shop, a brilliantly useful hardware/homeware shop that sells more or less everything, a couple of takeaways, a superfluity of hairdressers, nail bars and beauty salons, and, of course, a post office. As a range of potential situations and vocabulary, this was simply too rich to pass up. The second reason was far more pragmatic: I teach in a very large town, and the students are scattered across the various suburbs of the town, so the centre of the town is the only really mutual area that is familiar to all the students. I don’t know if you’ve been to a British town centre recently, but this one is stereotypically bland, with little to distinguish it either from other similar town centres (except the surpassing ugliness of one pedestrian precinct), or to distinguish the shop fronts visually from one another. Therefore, to find the same sort of easily identifiable range of shops would have taken something of a trek to find, whereas my own local area was a simple matter of walking home after taking the children to school. So yes, there was a slight stone-built cottagey tweeness to some of the pictures, but they worked as an effective stimulus for vocabulary. 

PowerPoint was king on this one. Each photo was loaded into a presentation, which was then used as a stimulus to get the students to name each shop. They worked in groups and wrote down the name on mini whiteboards, which meant I could check the ideas easily, and the students could peer check both word and spelling. After this eliciting stage, I have the students a  (black and white – austerity measures!) print out of the presentation, and asked the students to work individually to add the names of the places. This meant that a) they all had a practice in writing and spelling, and b) they all had a record of the key spellings. 

On the day, I followed this with a focus on functional language, and I wish I hadn’t. I typed up possible “things people say” for each place, and had the students work in groups to discuss which sentence went with which place. This was with a view to then writing up mini dialogues based on each sentence, and a focus on polite language. In practice, there wasn’t really time to move onto the functional language forms, and I rather wish I had simply revised present simple and adverbs of frequency with them and had the students talk about how often they went to the different places. Instead we finished the matching of utterance to place, and only really had enough time to do a bit of a spelling / vocab recap at the end. 

So as a follow up in the subsequent lessons I used a couple of different ideas. I still liked the idea of working with a dialogue, so accessed a couple of rather brilliant listening activity on the EsolNexus website. Some of the students are doing listening as part of their final exam, and really need to work on this. The first was a series of sounds from around the town, which was a nice revisit of some of the vocabulary from the day before, and students had to say where they thought it was, and then justify this using present continuous (“it is a playground. Children are playing.”) which was a nice chance to revisit that language. Then there was a listening based, of course, in a post office. I liked the listening though: it’s fast, for one, and includes a natural switch halfway through from a transactional conversation (sending a parcel) to an interactional one (“its busy in here today…”). It also had some complex bits of language that you might not expect at this level: a pointlessly applied reflexive pronoun, for example, and an unusually placed “anyway”, which provoked some discussion among the more able students in the group, although the biggest challenge, I thought, was the strong London accent, but in fact, the students coped admirably well with all this. 

So next up comes the functional language. I’ve cleared a lesson to concentrate on request forms, and hopefully will get to exploit the sentences from the first in this little trio of lessons. I probably should have done this as the second lesson, but I wanted the listening to provide a few more examples of some of the forms we might use in a transactional situation. I think I’ll go back to my sentences from lesson 1 and get the students to highlight which ones are questions, and then eliciti all the ways we can ask for something, before then getting the students to expand the sentences into role plays which they can then share and practice. 

So yes, Mrs Khan does indeed go to the post office in my lessons, just not all the time. 

Mrs Khan Goes to the Post Office

It’s generally assumed, it’s safe to say, that ESOL courses should be “relevant to students’ day to day lives”, perhaps more so than any other area of ELT. The ostensible intention of any kind of language education for immigrant population is enabling interaction with the target language society and culture, which leads to a functional/situational model of course design, built around lessons on practical, “everyday” contexts: going to the shops, interacting with the doctor, that sort of thing: what I call the “Mrs Khan goes to the post office” school of course planning. 

The challenge however, is around the definition of “relevance”, which is an entirely subjective concept: what does it mean to say that something is relevant to learners lives, exactly? My interpretation, based on what I know of my students, may be different to that of someone reviewing my scheme of work, who may have some knowledge, but not necessarily as much as me, and certainly will have a slightly different interpretation of “relevant”. An inspector, or other outside observer, may have another interpretation of what is relevant to learners lives, particularly if they are an OFSTED inspector with a focus on governmental priorities and how these are relevant to the learners: basically being a) (more) economically active and b) good little non-critical citizens, grateful for their lot.

A lot of the time, Mrs Khan going to the post office, Kasia talking to the doctor, Mr Wu complaining about his new shoes, or Alessandro talking to his daughter’s teacher are entirely relevant and useful things to cover. I’d love to find or develop some good low level resources for the last one, in fact, as it often comes up when I talk to students about what they want to cover on a course. The trouble with these things, as with any situational syllabus, is twofold. Firstly they are inaccurate representations of real interactions, and second, they are potentially limiting as course design constructs, particularly as students’ language gets more advanced.

The inaccuracy issue is obvious, when you think about it. Go into any service situation, for example, and the interactions are rarely as they appear in published materials. In Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy’s book, Exploring Spoken English they record a series of actual dialogues in real settings, and show that instead of being purely transactional, as in the mind of most teachers and materials writers, service conversations are a mix of transaction (getting things done) and interaction (exchanging pleasantries about the weather, that sort of thing. Even when operating in a second language, or even operating multilingually, this blend of interactional and transactional intention is possible: consider how quickly and naturally our own students drift from task focussed, controlled practice of target language to social focussed conversation, switching between languages as necessary. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t necessarily use these simplified, unnatural transactional dialogues, often because we need the authentic context to engage students, and set up a lesson for a specific language point: ask for the location of something in a supermarket, and you’re more likely to be given an aisle number or even shown directly where it is, than be given tidy directions or prepostitions, but you’re just setting up a lesson on prepositions of place, not making a real claim to be teaching “authentic” language in a real context. This isn’t making it relevant, or meaningful, it’s just taking away the uncertainty of the unfamiliar. 

Even if we do include these fake “real life” conversations, as we should, we can’t restrict course content to them. Anyone who has tried teaching ESOL for employment will recognise the limitations of tying everything to a limited context. The imposed restricted context of these courses leads either to particular language areas not being taught because they don’t fit, or awful shoehorning of contexts which are, if anything, less meaningful to students: adjectives to describe people for example, could be covered in a work setting (“you are looking for a new colleague. Describe her to your partner.”) but good grief is it ever strained, as compared to talking about family or people we know. This applies to any “real life” setting, good to a point, but sometimes, often perhaps, you need to go off the wall a little, and cover something outside of students’ experiences. As they get better and better, you end up needing to cover things outside the immediate reality simply because the language demands it: try limiting second conditional to “real life” and you’re pretty much onto a loser. The negative impact of these limitations is not necessarily reason to avoid these functional settings. Far from it, but we must acknowledge the inauthenticity, indeed, accept that there is nothing terribly “real” about a language teaching dialogue. 

I wonder if sometimes teachers just assume that the learners want language to be set in “real life” contexts: perhaps something of a hangover from ESOL’s association with adult literacy programmes where making it relevant may have been partly to offset reluctance or nervousness around literacy learning for adults. I think that while ESOL learners recognise the pragmatism of such an approach, I think they often lack this kind of motivational barrier: it’s probably pretty safe to say that the motivation of many, perhaps most ESOL learners is pretty high, and they quickly acquire and come to expect an explicit focus on grammar. There’s also the influence from our training, focussed on communicative language teaching, language learning should be about making meaningful communication; and which encourages us to set lessons into a context. Having “real life” as our consistent context is an easy way to satisfy both of these learned responses. Context does not have to be linked to students’ reality, mind you, and actually contexts can arise out of the language, rather than the the language out of the context: teaching discrete, decontextualised sentences to illustrate a grammar point, for example and then getting students to suggest the context after the fact can be an interesting and engaging way to work with language. 

I’ll admit, gladly, that I’m as guilty as the next person of this sort of thing. I like to use topics as an organising principle, and tend to pick these topics from “real life” whatever that actually is, usually in conjunction with the students. What happens within those topics, mind you, is anybody’s guess: I tend to select listening or reading texts based around those contexts, vocabulary arising in them, and on the opportunities for grammar teaching that the context suggests. But then I also see a scheme of work as not so much a moveable feast, but rather a rough guide to be adapted and revised as appropriate, even ignored and abandoned, and so while Mrs Khan may get involved in a discussion about good shops and bad shops, experiences with the doctor, read about money, listen to a text about someone’s life history, learn about present continuous by describing a video, or practice present simple in the context of “a day in the life of a toaster”, she is unlikely to go to the post office.

Groups, Needs & Personality: I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that

I’m currently teaching two Entry 1 classes. They both attend three days a week, are broadly similar in terms of nationality mix, gender and indeed language learning needs: both groups have members who are working above Entry 1 in some respects, working towards various different qualifications and one or two members with comparatively limited literacy. In each group there are students with similar social and economic backgrounds and situations: parents, recent arrivals, former refugees, workers, and so on. You jammy git, you may be thinking, easy scheme of work planning!

And in terms of scheme and course content, you’d be right. There’s a degree of overlap, especially as one group started a week or so after the other, and the focus of the lessons is broadly similar, and from an external perspective it’s pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, this is the trouble with the cold computational model of course planning common in FE: identify required input, deliver required input, assess required input, input successful: there is much much more to it than that.

In reality, the two groups are deeply, profoundly different, and I’ll tell you now, it’s nothing to do with the students’ individual learning needs and motivations, and it is everything to do with personality. Personality, to paraphrase Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction, goes a long way in the ESOL classroom. It influences all sorts of things. Group H, as I will call them, has many many extrovert, confident personalities, while Group D (and why not D?) has confident people, for sure, but far fewer extrovert personalities. Group H has a core of students who have been studying together for a year already, Group D is newly formed this academic year. In group H this core acts as a kind of glue, even when spread out around the room according to learning needs, they still interact well with each other. The core also gives a sense of cohesion for the other students to connect to. At the moment this is lacking with group D, but you can see it beginning to form amongst the students – the terms and conditions of group interactions, and the settings of the friendships and relationships being established. It’s interesting to observe, and the only disappointing thing is the way it will change when both courses finishes in January.

Personality, while perhaps not a fixed concept, is something which is hard to consciously change, and depends on a range of innate and learned factors. Certainly it is beyond the abilities and, arguably, the remit of the ESOL teacher to change personality, linguistic relativity notwithstanding. But the individual personality mix in a group has an impact on a number of things. Take, for example, the types of activities you choose, and their relative effectiveness: in my tentative micro-study of these two classes, group H responds well and confidently to free flowing, dogme-influenced lesson activities, group D is more tentative, and responds better to slightly tighter control over pace and activity, preferring a more “traditional” structure. That’s not say that group D can’t or won’t respond, but that they are, perhaps, developing their confidence as learners, and need at times greater guidance. And that’s absolutely fine. No single technique or activity, no strategy, no policy, works for all students all the time: I’ve spent years criticising the imposition of SMART target setting based pretty much entirely on that notion. But at least on activities, methods and resources my professional judgement is trusted enough that I have freedom to adapt things to those students. It’s not just activities, but also the nature of feedback: group D have, so far, responded really well to guided feedback: where I’ve suggested changes to writing, for example, they have a go and make the changes without prompting, experimenting as they go. Group H, despite their apparent confidence, generally prefer a lot more guidance, and like to have a longer explanation before making changes, although, and again, this is because of the god intoersonal relationships they have, there is a lot more natural peer teaching going on: stronger students will support weaker without being asked by the teacher.

I’ve blogged before, I think, about the essential falseness of the classroom setting: the language of the classroom has its own authenticity separate from the “real” English of the outside world, and any attempts to integrate this realism are undermined by this disconnected classroom microcosm. It’s impossible in a language classroom to ever fully replicate the complexity of genuine interaction, and neither should this be the aim of the language lesson. Indeed, we should perhaps be looking not at developing authentic language but rather the authentic ability to cope with the unknown, to handle the unexpected and the complex. This “separate universe” view applies to personality too. When students come to class they assume a status, a role in class that is different from their role in their “real” lives: not necessarily introvert to extrovert, but perhaps a discovery of added confidence when they realise that they are by far the strongest student in the class, or a deference borne out of a realisation that despite their verbal fluency and confidence, they need significant support for even the simplest writing task. Perhaps some students, when they arrive, see that they have the chance now to change where they were, and consciously decide, for a few hours each week at least, to have a go at being a slightly different person.

All of which makes for interesting teaching, and is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, that this job is as interesting as it is. It’s a constant challenging creative process, making that present simple lesson work for that group of students, or re-modelling the lesson on the fly because the activities are just not engaging the students (and again, that’s not just about stretch and challenge). Indeed, it’s the days when you repeat a lesson and it goes more or less exactly as it did the last time that you get almost this sense of disappointment, a feeling, almost, that you have in some way let the students down. Without this variety, teaching could so easily become as tedious a job as working on a packing line, just with added stress.