The Big Picture: Teaching Grammar Holistically and Visually

Here you can download the explanations on how to do the activities I demonstrated during my talk titled “The Big Picture: Teaching Grammar Holistically and Visually.” The documents contain a little background info on each activity, the materials needed, step-by-step instructions, plus ways of adapting the activities to one-on-one or group lessons.

Click here to download activity procedures for “The Big Picture – Teaching Grammar Holistically and Visually” by Christina Rebuffet-Broadus

So far, I’ve given this talk at:

TESOL France Grenoble, Oct. 12, 2013

IATEFL Poland, Lodz, Sept. 28-30, 2013

If you have any suggestions about the activities or just want to tell us about how they went in your classroom, please do so! I’d love to hear from you.

Want more? Click here for 7 reasons to use Cuisenaire rods in the Language Classroom

 

“What do you get out of it?”

As we were driving back home from the Lyon airport, my husband asked me “What do you get out of it? Why do you do all this?” He was talking about conferences: spending hours researching and rehearsing a 45-minute talk, sacrificing entire days to traveling for a 3-day conference in a faraway country, and forking out hundreds of my own euros to do so. It’s a legitimate question. Why does one do such a thing? Madness, some may argue…

And I thought about it. My first reaction was “It’s just part of the job.” But no. It’s not. Think about all the teachers you know in your school, in your city, in your area. How many others do it? Teaching is part of the job. Doing a bit of admin is part of the job.  Professional development should be part of the job, but sadly it’s a bit like going to the gym. You really mean to, but somehow time always runs short. So it gets pushed into the endless string of tomorrows.

So I thought some more. “Because I like it.” I also like devouring plate-fulls of good tiramisu, but that doesn’t mean I do it regularly. Sure, there is a fun element to conferences—you get to hang out with colleague-friends (other than on Facebook), see a bit of the local landscape, and maybe even pull an all-nighter at a club somewhere. The perks of the profession, perhaps.

“What do you get out of it?” After scratching the proverbial surface, here’s how I answered that question.

I do it because conferences offer the chance to join a big international family who love what they do in life. We are all for sharing ideas. We help each other grow professionally in the classroom and on the conference stage. We come away feeling like we’re on a journey to becoming better teachers and, yes, better people.

Then there are the opportunities to grow your career, more like a tree than like a ladder. Teaching can branch out to (course)book writing, article writing, publishing work, teacher training, speaking gigs, creating your own company, and whatever you want to connect it to as long as you find a way. This in turn feeds back into your teaching practice, each activity fueling the other for fresh ideas, engagement, and interest.  I realized a few years back that I could either stay on the hamster wheel at my last company or add variety and excitement to my career. Let’s just say I never really cared for hamsters…

Also, I thought back to the people I’ve met since I started “conferencing,” just a few years ago. I know that if I need help, have a question, or just want to strike up a good debate these people are there. I have found my Personal Learning Network, my PLN. Ela Wassel, in her talk (which I unfortunately missed, but heard LOTS of people rave about) at the 2013 IATEFL Poland conference demonstrated the strength of a PLN:

Holding up a single pencil, she started to bend it. The pencil represented the teacher; the force she exerted, the pressures of teaching life. The pencil snapped and splinters flew into the air. Then, she held up a bundle of pencils. “This is you and your PLN. Just try to break this!” And tears were shed in the audience.

And if you’re looking to grow your own PLN, Ela’s blog has some great resources: http://elawassell.wordpress.com/

So what do I get out of it? All of the above and so much more.

And you. What do you get out of it? Why do you do all this?

 

2013 IATEFL conference in Liverpool: Blog post round-up

To make it easy to find all of the posts from the 2013 IATEFL conference in Liverpool, here’s the linked list of posts published on this blog :

Steven Bukin’s The Flipped Classroom – From Theory to Practice

Nicky Hockly’s Mobile Literacy & ELT 

Mike Hogan’s Becoming More Successful Workplace Communicators While on the Move

Cecilia Lemos’ Reflections from a Recovering Recaster

Colin MacKenzie’s 59 Seconds to Professional and Personal Development

Pete Sharma and Louis Roger’s Dealing with Differentiation 

Barry Tomalin’s “Make Meetings Work”

Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley’s “From Preparation to Preparedness”

Catherine Walter’s How to Give a Presentation at an International Conference

Lindsay Warwick’s Flipping the Classroom and Student Attitudes

See you next year, for the 2014 IATEFL conference in Harrogate!

 

Holistic grammar with Cuisenaire rods (or 9 tenses in one lesson!)

Last week, a learner asked to do a visual tense revision in his next lesson. He told me “I need to see it to learn it” and that he kind of knew various verb tenses in English, but needed to organize and reinforce that knowledge a bit.

Thankfully, I remembered reading an article by Rod Bolitho in the May 2011 issue of English Teaching Professional on holistic grammar. This brilliant article (which unfortunately is not freely available online, but can be accessed through the digital archives if you have a subscription to ETp) offers several ideas for teaching several tenses in one lesson, in a very visual and memorable way, and without a lot of metalanguage. Just what I needed!

The original article, however, sets activities to do with groups of students. My learner has 1-on-1 lessons. Not to fear, the Cuisenaire rods are here! They came in handy to adapt Bolitho’s ideas to my 1-on-1 context.

Profile:

• 1-on-1 lesson
• B1.1-ish, not afraid to analyze language to understand how it works
• In-company lessons, but prefers general English. We had spent several lessons talking about his project of renovating an old farmhouse, so had built up lots of vocab
• Last lesson, he requested to do some visual grammar revision

The lesson:

1. We established three points of reference in time: past (orange), present (blue), future (brown). Each rod represented a different reference point.

2. I asked basic display questions to elicit the continuous forms and the fact that these refer to temporary actions:

• What are we doing now? (We’re studying English)
• What were we doing this time last week? (We were studying English) 
• What will we be doing this time next week? (We will be studying English)

Pretty obvious, context-bare questions, but the idea was to show that all continuous forms take -ing (this would come up later with present perfect), that continuous forms exist in past, present, and future, and that it’s the auxiliary that changes while the -ing verb part of the construction stays the same.

We used the green and magenta rods to show the “be” auxiliary + verb+-ing and for the future, magenta + beige + green = will be studying.

3. Another display question: How long have we been speaking together this morning? (We’ve been speaking for an hour).

We added yellow rods to show how the present perfect continuous extends from the present back into the past. We talked about how long the learner had been working on his house, how long he had been moving boxes, etc. to show variations in how far the yellow rods extended into the past.

4. I added 5 rods lined up together to represent the five days of the current working week plus beige cubes to represent events in my schedule (we had talked about my schedule this week during pre-lesson small talk). I had the learner guess what the cubes referred to (my lessons this week).

We established that I had 3 lessons on Monday, I had no lessons on Tuesday (these past days represented by 2 orange past rods), and I have one lesson today (represented by 1 present blue rod). This got us through the past simple for finished events in finished time and the present simple for facts.

5. Then we added I’m teaching 3 lessons tomorrow and I’m teaching 2 lessons on Friday (represented by two brown future rods)–present continuous as a future tense with a time adverbial.

6. Separating the weekday rods, we got on to the present perfect simple. I asked “How many lessons have I done this week?” and it took a bit of fumbling around, but we got to “You’ve had four lessons this week” since today is Wednesday and I still have more lessons to teach on Thursday and Friday.

As we were going through all these tenses, the learner was drawing his own timeline, noting examples from his own farm renovation project, and making notes about the tenses and their use. It wasn’t just me talking the whole time!

Then we removed all the rods except those first three past – present – future rods. The learner told me about his renovation project, trying to use the appropriate tenses we had seen.

Here’s what he came up with: 

Last week we were moving and we said to ourselves “Zut! the armoire is too heavy!” and we called a friend to help. We haven’t finished yet but we hope we’ll finish next week. 

On Monday night, it was necessary to take a box from the old house. I took a box on Tuesday too. This morning, I lost the key to the workshop, and we were looking for it all morning until we found it in my wife’s car. 

Tonight, I’m planning to fix the mirror in the bathroom because I can’t shave! I don’t have a mirror! I haven’t fixed it yet because I had lost the key to the workshop.

So, in about an hour and a half, we managed to address:

• past continuous
• present continuous
• future continuous
• past simple
• present simple for facts
• future simple
• present perfect simple for events in a time period that hasn’t yet finished
• present perfect simple for an event that hasn’t happened yet but will
• present perfect continuous
• past perfect simple 
• present continuous as a future with a time adverbial

Reflections

• A very PPP (present practice produce) lesson, which maybe could have been introduced differently. What if I had started by letting the learner tell me about his renovation project and then building on that output? Would this have been more efficient? After all, we didn’t actually need the future continuous in the rest of the lesson and it isn’t really used that much in everyday speech (excepting English lessons on the continuous form…)

• Some of the uses in the final output text don’t sound 100% natural to me, but we didn’t have time to go into them. At the same time, this short little text does make use of lots of different tenses, as does natural speech in many cases. I did like the fact that in the “production” part of the lesson, the student wasn’t forced to try to use 1-2 specific tenses, as is often the case in traditional grammar-focused production exercises (Think “Now use the past simple to tell your partner what you did last weekend.”)

Rather, we looked at a panorama of tenses and the learner used the ones he needed to tell me about his project. Does this mean he’ll be able to use them all correctly spontaneously? Um, let’s not dream. But it did seem to help clear some things up and give us something to refer back to in future tense work.

• I liked the active, visual aspect of this lesson. Actually, I really liked it. It drew on the basic timeline that we all use to explain tenses, but made it more involving. Plus the fact that you can pick up parts, move them around, etc. is practical. 

• As we built on, you can see that I took photos. I sent these to the learner so he can match them to his notes. This is also a good way of keeping track of what you’ve done with the rods, in case you need to go back and re-create a specific set up but can’t remember it.

• Finally, maybe we could have done some sort of a wrap-up but I don’t know what exactly. I don’t know if having the learner summarize the tense rules we worked on would be very helpful. Plus, we all know that often learners are very good at reciting the rules, less so at applying them. 

Maybe going back through the learner’s final text and saying why he used a specific verb tense in that part of the story would be more effective. At least it would give context that the learner could relate to.

What do you think? What’s a good, effective way to round off a lesson on tense revision?

And if you’re looking for more ideas with Cuisenaire rods, you may like this post. Still need convincing? Here are 7 reasons to use Cuisenaire rods.

 

IATEFL Liverpool: Cecilia Lemos’ Reflections from a recovering recaster

Cecilia–who came all the way from Recife, Brazil to help us other recasters–enticed us to sit up front by placing little Brazilian sweets on the front-row chairs–an idea she borrowed from a conference in Turkey! What a sweet way to start! Now the nitty-gritty…

This talk was packed, as we all know we are guilty of recasting and we all know there’s a better way to correct. Ceci began by asking herself “How did I become a recaster?” and remarked that her teacher training had taught that blatantly correcting students in the communicative approach  was almost a deadly sin of ELT. It would cut communication, bring up affective filters, and frighten them into shyness. Recasting was much better!

She admitted that recasting had become an automatism—she was even doing it with friends and family! She has since become a recovering recaster and wanted to share some oral correction techniques from an experiment in correction she did with her class.

Before setting up the experiment, she began to question the effectiveness of recasting when she herself became a student. In the role of student, she realized that she didn’t always catch the recasted correction her teacher was providing. And Ceci’s a teacher herself! She figured probably less than 5 percent of her English language learners picked up on recasted corrections.

That’s when the shift set in.

She began openly correcting students in class and reassured us that she hasn’t gone to ELT hell!

However, recovering from recasting is a process. It is not automatic. Her two biggest challenges were to first stop recasting and then to revolutionize her oral correction techniques. Participants volunteered their ideas for non-recasting correction:

• Using gestures
• Asking students to correct each other
• Pointing out which rule that has been broken
• Asking for clarification
• Echoing
• Eliciting a correction

Ceci shared a common feeling that many teachers have about their practice: we feel like we need some validation of what we do, even when we see that it works. We need the research to support the practice. Cecilia went looking for this and set up an experiment.

Recovering from recasting: the experiment

Cecilia chose to experiment with 2 groups of A2-level adult learners because it can be more challenging to do new things with adults. One group got recasted corrections, the other group got other, more direct corrections.

She pointed out that she was careful to get permission from management to try this out, backing up her proposition with research and justifications.

When she asked one group if they had even noticed recasting in previous lessons, none of them had. They simply thought the teacher was acknowledging what the students were saying.  She then explained that she was going to stop recasting and try different techniques.

At the end of the experiment, the group that had received non-recast corrections actually performed better on evaluations. Food for thought…

Ceci was happy to say that she has since stopped recasting with all her groups. When teachers came to observe her classes, she reported that they felt like they had really learned a lot from seeing other styles of correction. Students also expressed their appreciation because Ceci helped them to clearly identify and correct their mistakes.

Maybe we have taken recasting to the extreme, especially in the communicative approach and in wanting to provide a more humanistic approach to language teaching. We’ve sometimes been told that students are not supposed to feel the effort of learning, they’re just supposed to learn. But are we doing them a disservice by “protecting” them?

Correction doesn’t have to hurt and it doesn’t have to be embarrassing. Ceci quoted a student who said “I feel like I’m learning because I know what I should do and what I shouldn’t do.” Open correction makes them feel like they are progressing, that they are getting better and that they can really see how they are getting better.

 Going back to the idea of feeling justified in our teaching practice, she showed a video of a colleague who observed Ceci not recasting and how she felt so much better about her own practice. You can find the video of Ceci’s entire talk on the IATEFL Liverpool online website. 

She warned us that avoiding recasting doesn’t mean constantly correcting. She used a good metaphor—you go to the doctor for him to tell you what’s wrong. You don’t want your doctor to elicit a diagnosis from you. You want their expertise. Our students want our expertise as teachers and we shouldn’t hold it from them. 

If & how:

Ceci gave us a quick test for us to see if we had recovered from recasting:

Scenario: The beginning of class with A2 learners and you ask how their weekend was. One student says “I going to the beach. It was very good.” What would you do?

Many teachers wouldn’t do anything because it’s a warmer. One teacher suggested to make a quick note of the mistake and come back to it later in class if appropriate. Another idea was to do delayed correction at the end of the lesson and also go through recurrent mistakes made throughout the lesson. And a few teachers still said they’d recast it J

This is a big source of controversy though as many teachers prefer more immediate correction for oral errors. Ceci ended by reminding us that there are many different correction techniques available to teachers and it is important to know our students what works with them so as to help them correct their errors effectively.

So what would you do? To correct or not to correct in ice breakers, that is the question!

 

Teaching past simple vs present perfect simple with Cuisenaire rods – a sample lesson and reflection

Last night, I was looking for a way to liven up a lesson the next day on that good ol’ grammar favorite “past simple vs. present perfect simple” (a topic specifically requested by a learner in the previous lesson). Out came the Cuisenaire rods.

For those of you who may not know, Cuisenaire rods are…you guessed it, rods. There are generally about 10 different colors and an equal number of different lengths. They may come in a rectangular plastic box and attractively packed so that when you open the box, students let out a little “ooh” or “aah.” How often do grammar lessons start with oohing and aahing?

You can use them for lots of things in the ELT classroom. There are posts by Scott Thornbury, Sandy Millin and Ceri Jones, and on the site busyteacher.org on where Cuisenaire rods come from and the many things you can do with them, so I’m not going to list many ideas here, just the one idea used in my class this morning.

Lesson on past simple vs. present perfect simple for unfinished time with Cuisenaire rods

Profile:

• 1-on-1 lesson
• A1.2-ish / elementary student who likes lots of revision and tries really hard to recycle vocabulary from past lessons when he speaks
• In-company lessons, but he prefers general English to get the basics
• Last lesson, he asked to look at past simple vs. present perfect, so he is expecting this lesson

Materials

• A set of Cuisenaire rods
• 2 different colored markers (but 1 marker is ok)
• A big piece of paper (from a paper board is ideal)
• A pen

1. I come in and we start talking about discussions he had with his colleagues and his boss l last week. We also talk about his English lessons, his colleague’s lessons, progress that’s been made, etc. This topic comes up naturally when I ask “How has your week been?” and we go from there. As we talk, I begin making a few notes on the things he tells me about, notably the phrases where he uses (or should be using) the past simple or present perfect simple. I don’t correct anything at this stage.

2. I pull a piece of paper off the paper board and lay it on the table. I invite him to come over to this table and I divide the paper into two halves with a marker. On the left half, I write the infinitives of the verbs used in the conversation in step 1. I also make a “past simple” column and a “past participle” column. 

3. Together, we write the past simple of each verb in the appropriate column and place a green rod above the verb. The green rods indicate “past simple.”

4. We then write the past participle of each verb in the appropriate column and place a maroon rod above the verb. Maroon indicates “past participle.”

5. I explain that we use this conjugation to create the present perfect simple write this next  to the past participle column. I then write “has/have” in parentheses in front of the past participle of the first verb as an example. We add a short red rod, which now indicates the auxiliaries “have” and “has.” We go through each verb, adding the red rod while the student says the present perfect form of each verb. By now we have a red rod + a maroon rod (representing the present perfect simple) sitting above each verb in the past participle column.

6. At the top, on the right side of the big piece of paper, I draw the classic timeline with “now” at the far right of the line. I explain that we are going to situate some sentences from the conversation at the beginning of the lesson in time and decide which tense we should use.

7. Student looks terrified, having been traumatized by time lines and the present perfect simple in school

8. I give him a sentence from the conversation, but pointing to the infinitive where the verb in the sentence would be conjugated. For example “Last week I (me pointing to ‘to discuss’) it with my colleague.” The student selects the appropriate rod(s), places it/them below the time line and writes the sentence “Last week I discussed it with my colleague.”

9. We continue this for the remainder of the verbs written on the left side of the big piece of paper.

10. I ask the student to explain what he understands of the two tenses and we clarify as needed.

11. To wrap up, we draw boxes around the past simple examples on right side of the paper to show that they are isolated in the past and we draw open-ended boxes around the present perfect examples to show that the time is not finished.

12. I ask the student what he takes away from the lesson and he replies “Past simple vs. present perfect simple is not easy!”

Thoughts and reflections

I liked the way the conversation led naturally into the study of the target structures, but I think this was just a stroke of luck. I had actually planned a few questions to start a conversation and then guide it to the need for the PS/PPS, but in the end, I didn’t have to use this “grammar ammo” which made it feel more natural. Also, since I didn’t have to force the grammar in, we came up with about an 80%-PS-20%-PPS ratio, which seems to be characteristic of this type of discourse. (Disclaimer: That is just based on my own experience in doing lessons on the same grammar point. I have no research to back it up. I do know that when we try to get a more balanced ratio, it often feels contrived and “PPS for PPS’s sake”-ish.)

That being said, this student would probably benefit from more exposure to the PPS. Does this lesson give him enough? Probably not. But perhaps now that the contrasting tenses have been introduced and correctly manipulated, it will be my responsibility to “drip feed” more PPS into the lessons, preferably as the need to use it comes up. By this, I mean drawing the student’s attention to the tense and why it will be used in a particular situation.

I liked using the Cuisenaire rods because it got us both out of our chairs. Also, they provided a very visual representation of which tense was used and how it related to the time of the action.

However, the different positions in time could have been done better. Looking at the picture, you’ll see that “two hours” and “twenty years” are represented by two orange rods and three orange rods respectively. This was a spur-of-the-moment decision on my part to represent time with long orange rods, but I’ll need to consider the length of times being represented to add clarity.

The same thing goes for the placement of the rods on the timeline. Ideally, actions closer to the present will be closer to the right end of the time line. On our model, they were a bit haphazardly placed. Maybe two pieces of board paper would have been better to give us more space. Or I could have just put the conjugation table on a separate A4 sheet and used the entire paper board page for the timeline work.

The rods did seem to help the learner get a clearer grasp on these two tricky tenses. I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that this lesson solved all his problems. Next week, he’ll surely confuse the two tenses when using them in conversation, but isn’t this the way second language acquisition works? We learn a bit more about the language, mess it up but realize why we messed up, try to repair it and do better next time and repeat as necessary until the new language is operational.

Perhaps next week I’ll start the lesson off with “So, how has your week been?” again, just to see how the conversation goes.

If you want another idea for using Cuisenaire rods, you may like the post Holistic grammar with Cuisenaire rods (or 9 tenses in one lesson!) and if you want more reasons to use Cuisenaire rods, here they are!

What do you think could have been done differently in this lesson to make it more effective? Also, how have you used Cuisenaire rods in the classroom? Please share your ideas with us!

 

IATEFL Liverpool: Barry Tomalin’s “Make Meetings Work”

If you work with executive managers who do a lot of meetings through conference calls, this was the talk to attend; not only was it lively, it was spot on in terms of how to help our business learners participate in meetings more effectively.

Barry invited us to brainstorm some problems our business learners have in conf calls. One particularly interesting cultural issue came up in the discussion—how to do small talk before a virtual meeting, how long should it last, and how to stop it. Rapport building is thus a problem for conf call meetings, as well as “native speaker insensitivity” or rather “unawareness” as Barry preferred. By this, we meant native speakers making little or no effort to make their language more understandable and also not taking cultural issues into consideration. Imagine Canadian workers trying to socialize about last weekend’s hockey match with a group of south Indian workers and you see what he meant.

Barry pointed out that of course, there are issues of confidence, hierarchy, and accent that get in the way of communication. In terms of comprehension, learners can often feel they lose 30-50% of the conversation and feel too intimidated to speak as much as they should or would like to. We as language trainers can help them with these problems.

Barry suggested building up systematic organization, showing learners how not to lose control, and how to intervene or interrupt. These problems are particularly present in the French context, but are in no way limited to French business people .

Barry’s plan for building confidence in conf calls includes:

A framework for conf calls and meetings

• Agree who will take the minutes
• Go through each item
• Summarize at the end
• Main conclusions
• AOB (this is a problem because foreign participants don’t know what acronyms mean or even what we mean by “business” in this context)
• Date of next meeting

 Stock phrases to help learners manage turns

• Introductions: Have them say their name and what they do so people can start to get used to the accent.
• Thanks: Thank you all for connecting.
• Welcome: I’d like to welcome everybody here today
• Apologies: …won’t be here because…
• Minutes of the last meeting: “Did everyone get the minutes from the last meeting?

Another important cultural issue came up in the discussion. Americans tend to dominate meetings and many non-native speakers feel they can’t get a word in! But, by using the techniques above, learners can better keep control when with dealing with Americans. Not only will this lead to more balanced exchanges, but more confidence and higher self-esteem.

Remember, a trainee may have difficulties in L2 but in L1 they are used to making decisions, wielding power, and being the leader of the pack. Having to bow to a linguistically superior other can feel humiliating. Barry’s strategies for establishing and keeping control will help our business trainees match their L1 and L2 selves.

Barry suggested trainees take 4 steps to intervening in a meeting

1. Get the agenda in advance to identify points of interest
2. Tell the convenor in advance that they want to contribute on a certain point
3. Make sure the convenor can see/identify you in the conf call
4. Make your point firmly. Keep it clear, light, tight, polite. If they can express one idea per sentence in short sentences, they’ll be much more effective. Trainees must also make sure they’re not too serious, especially in meetings with Brits and Americans. Of course, politeness is something to be aware of as well.

This led to something that we should remind learners of when working on conf call etiquette: How to be concise. This means being:

• Short: One idea per sentence, no sentences over 25 words
• Sharp: To the point, no waffling
• Sweet: Say it nicely and say it politely

As teachers, we can elicit or teach one stock phrase per stage of the meeting then practice the meeting and the phrases. This way the participants have a library of simple stock phrases for each stage. They’ll come away with a framework and phrases for each part.

Barry reported that his learners take more than just English away from these lessons. Citing feedback from his learners, he mentioned increased confidence, savings of time, and ‘we should use this structure in our own country’-type remarks. You’re then teaching them not only language but meeting management techniques. This is a powerful motivator indeed.

To put this all together into a lesson, Barry suggested having trainees select the content of a meeting, decide on a framework then run the meeting while the trainer takes notes on the language to look at after the activity.

Again learner feedback suggested that this tactic gave them more confidence and a feeling of being much more effective in meetings. Learners came away feeling more confident and more effective. Some even reported that these were “effective tips I can use in French as well.”

To finish, we came back to the difficulty of building rapport in meetings where you can’t see the other participants. One must also be aware of the role of hierarchy in certain cultures. For example, light questions would be met with silence at the beginning of a conf call to India or China. It would be a good idea to find out who is the leader, address questions to the leader, and the leader designates someone on his team to answer. This notion would seem completely foreign to Western business culture.

An interesting suggestion was to save 10 minutes for participants to ask any questions they want—about family, weather, sports, whatever once the meeting is over. This does take some time to establish as a habit. At first, the meetings may just end very quickly, but after a few sessions, this often becomes a highly anticipated part of the meetings.

Also, we should not underestimate the importance of seeing participants in meetings. This means that all kickoff meetings should be done through video conferencing. We should suggest this to our clients. If a company does not have the means to do so, suggest that the participants exchange photos of each other. Simply being able to see the person you’re talking to, even in a photo, greatly changes the amount of rapport.

To finish, Barry also suggested that we can help deal with native speaker unawareness. In a very practical activity, he has native speakers read their business card, pausing after key information. This helps them to slow down and remember that their listeners may need that extra bit of processing time. If you can’t understand a person’s name, generally you avoid talking to them. So to build rapport, it pays to pronounce your name clearly, pausing afterwards.

You can follow Barry Tomalin at www.culture-training.com where you can also download the presentation slides. His book Key Business Skills is available from Collins. 

 

IATEFL Liverpool: Colin MacKenzie’s 59 Seconds to Professional and Personal Development

I ducked into Colin’s session after another I wanted to attend was already filled to capacity. A lucky chance, because this was an inspiring talk about how to effectively develop in small ways, part of IATEFL’s Teacher Development Special Interest Group (TDSIG) Day. Plus, Colin has a really fun and refreshing presentation style—he’s one to watch for in future conferences!

First, he invited us to think of a professional problem we had. I chose irregular attendance in in-company groups.  Then we thought about professional goals. I want to diversify more in my career—blending writing, teaching, speaking at conferences, and teacher training.

Colin also asked for two volunteers before he really got into the thick of the talk: one to give him only positive feedback and one to give him only negative feedback after the talk. Why not do a bit of one’s own professional development while helping others develop? I liked this little technique and found it fitting for this talk.

Colin based his talk on a book by Prof. Richard Wiseman called  59 seconds: think a little, change a lot. Technically it’s a self-help book, but Colin said that it did help him in his teaching.

He asked us to  note three things to be grateful for in our professional life. I chose:

1. Knowing great colleagues around the world
2. Having had the courage to go freelance
3. Having access to opportunities for professional development

Working in a group with Duncan Foord and Anthony Gaughan, we all came up with similar ideas. Having the freedom to do what we want in our classrooms was also something to be really grateful for.

Colin pointed out that we develop when we’re happy. Happiness and motivation are keys for developing as teachers. We also need the necessary tools and finally, creativity to develop. We can get ideas at conferences and from other teachers, but when we make these ideas our own, that’s when we develop.

In the book 59 seconds, the author recommends spending some time (ideally 59 seconds, but Colin admitted that it often really takes longer) keeping a “Perfect Diary.” You write about something positive in your life, for example, one theme for each day of the week. Here’s a suggestion for a working week Perfect Diary:

• Monday: Thanksgiving—things you are thankful for
• Tuesday: Terrific times—things that are going well in your present life
• Wednesday: Future fantastic—something in the future that you are optimistic about
• Thursday: Dear…–a letter to someone who means a lot to you or that you respect. You don’t actually send the letter though.
• Friday: 3 things—these are things that went well over the past week

In studies done on people who actually followed this advice, there was a real difference in levels of happiness, so why not try it out and come back to tell us if it helped you?

Another way to cultivate happiness is by simply smiling. Colin challenged us to all smile for 30 seconds. It certainly got us giggling! It may sound a bit quirky, but Colin said he actually creates little reminders to smile, like smiling when he stops at a traffic light. However, he recommended not overly grinning on public transport—it tends to scare people!

Colin cautioned us about thinking too positively about the future, because studies show that imagining a too-fantastic future actually led to unhappiness. Don’t create an unrealistic future, for risk of never reaching your goals. Think of it as carefully dosed future fantasy.

Showing a photo of George Orwell, Colin brought up the notion of doublethink goals in which we define a goal, but also the benefits and barriers. These are supposed to be in one word, but it’s ok to add a few!

Here’s what I came up with:

• Goal: do more  writing in ELT
• Biggest benefit: professional development
• Barrier: Lack of time or novel ideas
• 2^nd benefit: become more known as a contributor to our field
• 2^nd barrier: finding publication outlets
• Elaboration: this was a small-group discussion of the above points

Ebenezer Scrooge from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol provided the perfect metaphor. He was most affected by the ghost of Christmas future—it sparked him to change. The future he saw and the way he would be remembered horrified him.  So Colin challenged us to do a very interesting, perhaps somewhat shocking, exercise:

Write your own eulogy.

Imagine you’ve died. What would you like a friend to say about you at your funeral? Avoid modesty, but be realistic. Include personality, achievements, personal strengths, professional success, etc.

The exercise felt a bit funny, but once you start, you begin to realize what’s important to you and where you want to go. It’s like you’re plotting the destination for the journey of your life. After that, it’s up to you to find the path to get there.

59 seconds isn’t really enough to do this exercise (it is your own eulogy, after all!) but it is an interesting one worth trying out.           

Colin also reminded us that the loudest part of our inner self is not always the most creative part—think silent, creative type.  We thought of a problem then kept our mind busy with a word search projected on the screen. Meanwhile, the silent part of our inner selves subconsciously mulled over the problem.

Exercise:

Think of a problem you’re trying to solve – do a word search or other mind-occupying idea – jot ideas to solve our problem.

In the final couple of exercises, Colin invited half of the group to think of typical behavior and characteristics of an engineer. The other half of the group had to imagine the behavior and characteristics of a punk.  Then in a standard test of creativity, we had to think of as many uses as possible for a hefty 200-page tome–the IATEFL conference program.

By imagining a creative, non-conformist type of person like an artist, a punk, etc. just before doing a creative-thinking activity, you will think more creatively. Don’t think about the perfect creative person—no Leonardo da Vinci! That’s setting the bar a bit too high, but you get the idea. 

Colin admitted that while these activities may not have allowed him to measure their effectiveness in his own life, they have helped him to feel more positive and creative.

I may just try out the Perfect Diary this week and then try out some of the creative thinking techniques while mulling over proposals to submit to future conferences.

And which ones will you experiment with? Let us know what you try and if/how they affect your creativity!

 

IATEFL Liverpool: Pete Sharma and Louis Roger’s Dealing with Differentiation

Pete related to the audience immediately by presenting a typical business English class: several learners within a company, several different needs, varying levels of attendance, motivation, and effort. Meet Ursula, Leandro, Dieter, and Daphne.

We looked at a few scenarios, or case studies, typical of the business English classroom and how they would suit (or not) our four learners. Louis reminded us that when working with case studies, it’s important to choose situations that learners can relate to, situations that become meaningful to the learners.  These could be sharing office space, work-life balance issues, planning meetings, etc. as long as they are situations that can appeal to your learners. Often though the case studies found in business English training materials may only appeal to one learner in the group. If the others can’t relate to the scenario, they’ll likely be less motivated.

The speakers then asked us to reflect on how we engage our business learners to read. In reality, we don’t always do as much extensive reading as we could in the business classroom, perhaps for time reasons, perhaps for learners’ desire to do as much speaking as possible.

They suggested business mazes for reading in business contexts. A business maze is an interactive paproach to reading and Business Mazes by Jone Farthing and Hart-Davis (1981) is one way to do this. Learners read a short passage, and then must make a decision to know what part of the book to go to next. Basically they can’t continue until they’ve read and made a decision.

Doing this in a more modern form, a digital business maze, which is available from Richmond ELT. These activities allow learners to recycle language, practice functions, and and enagage extended reading. Much research has suggested that extended reading is crucial for building one’s vocabulary.

To support this claim, Louis cited several studies that mentioned focal and perifpheral attention, deliberate and incidental vocabulary learning opportunities, the notion that explicit focus on learning vocabulary doesn’t impact learners’ retention, and the role of reading in second language aquisition. 

Virtual Learning Environment

These are web-based, password protected virtual spaces that host course materials and allow asynchronous and synchronous interactions. You can often customize them and make them look like the product that you are offering. VLEs also allow you to get into deeper conversations with your students (or encourage these among students), perhaps better so than in the classroom. Students can read the question, think about it, maybe even do some research and then respond. This stimulates more critical thinking than simply asking a question and expecting a student to respond immediately.

Teachers can deliver course elements appropriately and better handle differentiation. Students can study at their own pace, wherever they like, and personalize their study.

Going back to our hypothetical group of learners, we saw that only one person needed English for emails. The VLE gives a platform outside your email inbox where email communication can be had. In business English, this means keeping in contact with learners who may not make it to every class or who schedule one class every month.

VLEs also give students the opportunity to work on listening skills at their own pace. Rather than listening to an extract twice, it may be more effective to let listeners hear fast speech with the possibility of pausing it to have only short extracts. 

They offer interesting components in a blended approach in which we can monitor who has done what and when. VLEs and blended learning can offer the best of both worlds–face-to-face and online learning. 

However, we have to be careful of avoiding the eclectic mish-mash of multimedia mayhem. Pete pointed out that he’s rarely seen good blended courses. It’s often a bit of this, a bit of that, an app here, and app there. 

The teacher also has to be sure to have a positive attitude to the blended aspect of the course. Enthusiasm will carry over to the students. At the same time, it is important to integrate the VLE into the course so that learners (and teachers) can concretely see how the face-to-face element supports the online element and vice versa.

To conclude, Pete advised us as teachers to take a blended or online course to find out what learning online is all about. For example, a school could create an online training day where the teachers are trained how to use a platform via a platform. 

You can read the blog  of Pete Sharma Associates at http://www.psa.eu.com

 

IATEFL Liverpool: Mike Hogan’s Becoming More Successful Workplace Communicators While on the Move

This was Mike’s second presenation at this year’s IATEFL, after his early-morning “How to” session on becoming a successful freelancer.

He started by challenging us to get our learners to think about what they can do outside the lessons to become better business English communicators. Business learners tend to be very busy people, which often means that English lessons may not necessarily be their priority. To manage this conundrum, we can give them ways to optimize what little time they have.

We need to consider two questions:

• What are the key functions learners need?
• How can business learners autonomously improve their skills while on the move?

In Business English, we often get what Mike calls “the big six”–presentations, negotiations, phone calls, meetings, small talk, and e-mails. Most learners need all or some of these in their English training course, but that doesn’t tell us enough. Charles Rei blogs about communicative needs analyses (among other business English-related topics) at businessenglishideas.blogspot.de. Mike mentioned his blog in discussing why just asking learners what they want to cover in English training isn’t enough. We often get answers like “I want to improve my grammar” or “I need to give presentations.” Sound familiar?

We need to focus on key functions rather than the medium of communication–how to present data, give updates, express doubt and concern, respond to requests, network, and so on. We also need to know in what contexts, on what topics, and with whom.

Once we know why they’re taking lessons, we can find out what “communicative events” they’re likely to deal with. Then we can also start to find solutions to help them improve these skills in the little bits of time they have between their professional duties.

Mike suggested that we can flip our classes, not in the sense of recording all our lessons for them (because teachers are busy people too!), but by giving them other ways of engaging in independent learning. This way, we can optimize the time spent in the face-to-face lesson.

Where to start

WIth all that’s out there, teachers and learners may feel lost. So where do we start? We need to consider:

• relevance to learners
• return on investment
• learner motivation
• their dead time
• when and how they’re on the move

By turning language learning into a hobby, learners will make time to do it because they like to do it. “Homework” can be a challenge, but by giving them something that aligns with their needs, they’re more likely to do it. This means that our proposed “homework” needs to take into consideration the criteria above.

Building on the success of Macmillan’s Global series of coursebooks (which I highly recommend, and I’m a Dogme person!), Mike showed us how the new Global business class eWorkbook offers busy learners the possibility to continue learning on the go.

The eWorkbook comes in CD-ROM format and thus works on a computer, but the exercises can also be printed. The kicker is that it is also accessible on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

The “work globally” unit focus on functions such as expressing doubt and changing the subject. There is also vocabulary focus modules as well as business listening, reading, and writing modules. Rather than focusing on grammar, it is structured into functional chapters and activities.

For learners traveling in places where there is ot a dependable connection, the activities can be printed out and packed in the suitcase. These exercises look much like standard worksheets. There are also reading and writing files that can be printed and done on the plane or train, for example.

The “On the Move” section offers tutorial videos on how to perform typical business functions with example dialogues, opportunities to practice, and tips. These can be viewed on tablets and devices, perfect for when learners are on the move.

In sum, programs like the Global Business Class eWorkbook can help us as business trainers respond to the realities of our business learners. We need to give them content and activities that allow them to learn things through English and at the same time learn English.

Mike left us with a key message–get our trainees learning autonomously outside of class to make the time we spend in class as effective as possible.

You can connect with Mike on twitter: @irishmikeh