Continual experimentation and evaluation...

If language teaching is to be a genuinely professional enterprise, it requires continual experimentation and evaluation on the part of practitioners whereby in seeking to be more effective in their pedagogy they provide at the same time – and as a corollary – for their own continuing education

Candlin, C.N. and Widdowson, H.
Introduction to the OUP series "Language Teaching: A scheme for teacher education"

Questions

What are you favourite questions for your students? Ones that you ask each class you have, to get them talking? Or is it just me that has "pet" questions, that fit every class, no matter what their level or general disposition?

I think the question I use most is, "What's the last thing you bought?" I pick one student and ask the question.
"Cigarettes"
"How many?"
"A packet of twenty"
"How much did they cost?"
"About one rial." [Almost two pounds, for anyone who might be interested]
"What brand?"
"Virginia Slim Lights"
"Why that brand?"
"They are not so unhealthy to the other brands"
"How many have you smoked so far?"
"Hmmm... about 7."
"Did you enjoy them?"
With a most sensuous purr of pleasure, "Mmmmm yes!"
The other students are interested now. They add questions of their own. Finally, I tell the students to repeat the conversation on their own, asking me any time they want to ask a question but don't know how; or when they come across a word they don't know. Without any need for further explanation, the students turn to one another and for five minutes the classroom is alive with activity. Language emerges, questions go up on the board, and from there into note books. We feed back. Who bought the most interesting thing? Thus a mundane topic (my favourite incarnation of this conversation was when the last thing a student bought was a carton of milk) is made fascinating, and the students begin to learn that language learning can emerge from the most unexpected of places.

But this was not the best question I ever asked my students. That honour goes to "What's more valuable - love or romance?" It was a classic because it's not anly a wonderful discussion - it's also one which helps students to see and explore the worlds which exist in between words. Into the cafeteria, the conversation went; and re-emerged next class, too.

What's the best question you've ever asked your students?

Methods & Techniques; Textbooks & Activities

We've been going through the traumatic process of swapping textbooks here at the BC, somewhere in deepest Arabia. One realisation we've come to is that our teachers are seriously Headwayed-up. Suddenly, with our more skills based books, they're finding it hard to plan lessons that don't revolve around grammar exercises, and to use texts which are more pedagogic than communicative. The resource room has never been busier, with teachers scratching around for activities to teach will and going to, or phrasal verbs, or...

What seems missing from all of this is some simple methodology. What are the methods which we base our best activities around? What are the methods at work in the mind of an author writing a textbook? What are our own favourite methods?

I'd like to suggest that Good Language Teaching is not about a good textbook, or even a good activity; it's about having good methods - perhaps embodied in a relatively small number of really good techniques.

One method that keeps coming up in my classes seems to be that of decision-making. Giving students things to do which require them to make decisions - either about, or simply by using, language. Another is that of detail - a couple of gapfills just don't cut it when testing comprehension of texts; a couple of simple questions don't get students deep down into the bellies of their experience, digging up language they'd never needed before.

So what are my top five techniques?

1. Dictogloss - whether for listening, vocabulary, or forcing learners to have a good think about how ideas are expressed in language... it's a classic
2. Ranking/selecting activities - Ranking words as more or less useful; ranking suggestions as to why they should get a pay rise; ranking recently studied grammatical forms into the easiest and most difficult - whatever you ask your students to rank, you're making sure they're thinking and making decisions
3. Paper roleplays - My students have this curious habit of developing "coping" language to help them get by painlessly in the classroom. This is fine... except that it stops them from using new language. Roleplays help to combat this. Doing them on paper doubly so: with the extra time the students have to think up interesting things to "say" by writing them down rather than speaking them, they create more interesting, unusual, and grammatically complex and accurate conversations.
4. Reading for decisions - Training learners to look for decisions writers make - about organisation of texts, graphics, grammar, vocabulary - we open up a new world for learners in which texts are written not only to help them to learn languages, but to express ideas, viewpoints, beliefs. This critical approach to reading is the first step in empowering students to make big decisions about the way they write.
Whole class conversation - Student one says something. Student two, across the classroom, is invited to respond to it. Students three, somewhere else in the class, is asked for a further opinion. All the students know they might be asked for their views. So all the students are listening, thinking, speaking, making decisions. What more do you need?

So, what are the methods you teach by? What are your top five techniques?

No photocopy day... week, even!

Oh, goody! The Beast is broke...!

The beastly photocopier is having an off day this morning. It's probably overheated as it churns out the stuff people want for the first week of term.

In another lifetime I used to have "PC Smasher" as a nick -- PC as in "photocopier" that is.

Note to self: have at least one "no photocopies" day a week this term. Nay: make that a "no photocopies" week.

Would it make any difference to the standard of my teaching...?

For kids, we have just got to use technology

My daughter Isabel is 12, has just started at secondary school and now has an interactive whiteboard in every class she sits in.

She says she likes the lessons when they use computers -- particularly those in which she gets her hands on the keyboard, rather than just watching her teacher do things: "When we use the computer, the lessons are not so boring," she says, "and people understand them better."

Understand them better...? "Yes," she explains: "There are lots of people that just can't sit in front of a piece of paper and understand it."

Maybe chosing not to use technology in our classes just isn't an option any longer...

There's no such thing as learning styles

According to consultant Clive Shepherd, learning styles don't exist. Well, er, he doesn't quite say that.

"Obviously learner differences are important, but there are more significant issues than their personality and preferences"

The more significant things are "motivation to learn the subject in question"; "prior knowledge of the subject"; and "the extent to which they've learned how to learn".

In helping design an online methodology course for Spanish teachers, I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to argue the importance of "prior knowledge of the subject", and experience, as what we should start to build on. For a methodology course I think it's vital...

But I wonder to what extent we ever really stop to consider that in the language classes we teach? Should we...?

No photocopier, can't teach... Can that be right?

One from a session I did recently on using technology in language teaching on a CELTA course...

To kick the session off, I asked which of the four things I had written on the board -- learners, teacher, materials or technology -- they thought was most important in the language classroom, with the option of proposing something else if they could think of something more important... A rhetorical question, of course.

Someone said:

The technology is the most important thing because without the photocopier you can't teach.

Can that be right...?!!!!!

Learning and cycling

Here's one that came from a discussion group I belong to...

Hannah said:

Last week, one of my students, a Latvian lady, drew an interesting analogy between learning a language and learning to ride a bike. A bit like the swimming one! She said that you learn by doing it. You just have to get on and pedal. If you fall off, you may suffer some embarrassment, but you have to learn from what you did wrong and then, keep getting back on and trying again until you can do it naturally and without thinking about it.

Tom said:

To take the cycling analogy further (cycling being my sport), as a cyclist (and a Dad) there's an important maxim that seems wrong at first: if you crash, the important thing is to get straight back on the bike and continue. The longer you stay on the ground the less likely you are to get back on. Assuming nothing is broken, it's just cuts and bruises, you just plough on regardless and it really doesn't hurt so much as it would if you lay there blubbing about it. Wash any dirt out of cuts with your water bottle, but patch up afterwards.

In the classroom, when do you correct...?

Improving student learning

Here's a US Department of Education report, Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning, that might be of interest...

I confess I haven't done any more than skim read it, and some of it probably applies more to subjects other than language learning but if you skip to pages 2 or 4, I think you'll see stuff among the seven recommendations they make that does apply...

Right...?

How Is A Good Teacher NOT Like Indiana Jones?

I just knew there'd be a use for all those spare power cables one day!

Here's a post by Larry Ferlazzo which is fun but probably makes more sense if you've seen the new Indiana Jones movie: How Is A Good Teacher NOT Like Indiana Jones?

It's tongue-in-cheek but it's a thought-provoking question. Any suggestions (perhaps before you go read the article...)?

Larry Ferlazzo has the most amazing collection of links for teachers, and an RSS feed that is well worth following.

(Er... What the blazes is an RSS feed?).

Keeping it real

I was teaching my beginners how to make offers using 'Would you like...' when suddenly I realised how hollow and artificial it all sounded. Although it is quite a frequent phrase in written correspondence, I tried to think of the last time I had actually used this phrase in actual speech and came up empty. It dawned on me that I should have been emphasising 'Do ya wanna' instead. I then proceeded to teach 'Dya wanna' and my learners could barely contain their excitement. One learner asked me to speak to them 'like I would speak at home'. I did so and they responded with glee and began practising the phrase in earnest. At that moment, I felt that we had released ourselves from the stilted, robotic language of the classroom and were actually engaging in something real. Quite often my learners, having just returned from a language stay in England, have told me that although they had understood the classroom language, they had absolutely no idea of what the locals had been saying. Good language teaching as a marriage between the structured and the real? As Ali G says, 'for real'.

A "Googley" learner "experience"?

One of the blogs I read is Assorted Stuff, in which Tim Stahmer "mostly" records "observations on the state of public education in the United States and the perpetual efforts to reform it".

Actually, I generally tend to read only Tim's headlines in my RSS feed but the idea that the "people at Google have created a list of ten design principles that will guide their work and define what makes their products 'Googley'" looked interesting.

I went to the original source, Google's Google User Experience page, which says that it "aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable" and that:

Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

I went wondering if what Google had to say could be applied to teaching... And when I went to the post on Assorted Stuff, turns out Tim was wondering the same thing.

The "Googley" principles are:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Tim says:

With a little tweaking, most of this could also be a list of principles that define teaching.

Personally, I think it would require more than "a little tweaking": (6) and (7) would require a complete rewrite, for example to make them relevant to the language classroom.

And I also wonder, do we actually create "an experience" for our learners? How do they "experience" our classrooms...? What is their experience of it like...? And shouldn't we include that in our lesson plans...?