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In his latest guest post on this blog, Dave Cosby thinks about variety being the spice of life and wonders whether taking a CLIL approach to language teaching might not be more motivating for all concerned.  After all, what’s the worst that can happen when you learn

Math in German, History in French

A dozen or so years ago my brother lived and worked Barcelona as a teacher. It was at an international school and they catered for the children of globe-trotting business people, diplomats and the like from all the corners of Europe. My brother is annoyingly polyglotal, and can rattle away in Castillian Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian, as well as his native English. He says he muddles by in German but to my untutored ear he sounds like Angela Merkel herself (well, she does have a fairly deep voice and my brother’s is high-pitched so they meet somewhere in the middle). The school had an interesting policy whereby language learning was simply a by-product of the students’ regular schooling in other subjects. So history this term would be taught in Italian, next term in French; Maths this term in English, the next in German. My brother said it used to tie his head in knots and was exhausting for him, let alone the students, and the amount of preparation time for classes drove him to distraction. That said… it worked.

A cross-curricular approach to English teaching is currently en vogue, and such an approach is something I think I approve of. Students get that they have to learn this infernal language of ours, but where’s the motivation beyond, say, intermediate level. After all with the basic tenses stashed away and a half decent vocabulary they can muddle by in most situations. I find that some often don’t see the need to go beyond this, to climb off that intermediate plateau as the learning curve again starts to steepen as phrasal verbs and idiomatic language really come into play, and the list of words the student needs to acquire stretches seemingly infinitesimally into the distance. The sheer vastness of the English language can be a demotivator all by itself. But by learning something else, by learning another topic, and using English simply as the medium picking up words as you go and when and as you need them just as native speakers do, the need and use of the extra effort is clear.

An IELTS student of mine paid me a compliment the other day, or perhaps paid a compliment to the authors of those exams in Cambridge perhaps. We were reading an exercise about the invention of the long-case pendulum carriage clock, a subject incidentally that bored me rigid. She, however, said that she enjoyed my classes not simply for their own sake but because she had the opportunity to learn about subjects she might otherwise never encounter. I paraphrase of course. Had she used similar phrasing to mine she might as well sit the exam tomorrow, get a ’9′ and sack me as her teacher, services no longer required. And it also goes to show you never can quite predict what subjects students might find interesting. The exams always seems to talk about such ‘safe’ subjects and I suppose it must be tricky to find texts which can go all around the world and not offend the sensibilities of one group or another and so must therefore be quite innocuous but still need to retain a modicum of interest. I imagine the authors of airline magazines have a similar dilemma.

To broaden my students’ vocabulary as much as possible I use as wide a variety of articles on different subjects as I can but unlike the exam boards or airlines I can add a bit of spice by picking subjects about which people are bound to disagree. I tend to avoid religion and football teams as class discussions can get just a little too heated; students in classes with just one L1 tend to switch over to it when they really get emotional, all the better to make their point clear, just as my Italian wife switches to her local dialect when I forget to take the rubbish downstairs, or leave my leave a beer glass on the floor or… oh, you get the idea. At this juncture I need to reign the class back in as the point of the exercise has been defeated, but a bit of practice is all that’s needed by the teacher to get the balance right. You often find that the class itself is in complete agreement; in such cases you need to play devil’s advocate. They will enjoy ganging up on you to knock down your arguments.

I am sure that you will have your favourite source for articles. I get mine online, all the better to cut and paste them, and use the Economist magazine a lot as I teacher higher levels. For leading language and real tabloid zing though I don’t think the Daily Mail can be beaten. There are always stories about neighbours warring over this slight or that insult or with boundary disputes or planning concerns. It’s fantastically parochial and good grist to the mill.

By mixing up the topics you discuss, read about and write essays and articles on you’ll find yourself less bored too. The exercise books we all use as teachers are really handy, and can act as a great spine to a course, but rely on them alone and both you and your students will be bored stiff in no time, you especially so, as you will have read the same text umpteen times before. A nice by-product of all this reading is a pretty good general knowledge, always handy in a pub-quiz.

Don’t forget to chase down tricky grammar when you come across it, and rather than preteach those troublesome words it might be better to see if students can divine meaning from context, though of course do concept check. Gist reading is one of those skills where there’s no such thing as too much practice. It’s also really useful to ensure that students keep a record of the useful vocab that has come up, along with a translation in L1. I know, I know, this is all stuff any half decent teacher does in their sleep, but it’s always worth bearing in mind so please forgive my reminder.

Incidentally, it’s often quite revealing to have a look at students’ translations. You’ve just given them five of six English synonyms, with different implications and grades of meaning and you lean over and read what they have translated each to, only to find that they have used the same word each time. Such are the pitfalls of translation, and its problems regarding the strength and depth of the English tongue. Now, as I have the afternoon free, I am off to learn about car maintenance… in  Portuguese.

Dave Cosby is a teacher of more years experience than he cares to remember and has worked in a variety of countries around the world, in a variety of roles from teacher to Director of Studies to language school chain troubleshooter.  Currently he’s based in Coimbra, Portugal.  You can find more posts by Dave in the Guest Posts section.

There’s an interesting post on “Visualising English Word Origins” from Ideas Illustrated, which colour codes words according to their origins and then uses this process to analyse texts.

If you scroll down through the comments section, you’ll find links to sites where you can run a similar process  to the one the author describes on your own texts.  This was originally spotted via the Johnson Blog at The Economist.

In a similar vein, the Voxy infographic below takes a quick look at where English gets some of its constituent parts – thanks to @yya2 on twitter for spotting that.

Huge apologies to everyone who came to my session at the APPI conference on 29th April – this post contains the material and links I promised you that Sunday morning.  In hindsight, I probably should have posted it up there beforehand – lesson learned!

In any event, below you should find the prezi I used in the session along with a transcript of the talk I gave.  Any problems, please let me know via the comments section below!

The APPI talk was based on a seminar originally delivered at International House Coimbra, back in September 2011, which also gave rise to a short you tube version of the presentation, which I blogged about as “A Short talk on using poetry“.  That post also contains further links to a range of additional online resources for using poetry with your classes.

A late session choice after I realising I was in the wrong room and the one I’d planned to see was full…

Claudia Ferradas – The certainty of uncertainty: meeting the challenge of change

Apparently we’re going to start with a song…  ”The times they are a’changin” – the Bob Dylan classic, to which I would link to via you tube, but apparently the content has been removed at the request of the copyright holder…  so if you don’t know the song, rush out and buy a best of Bob Dylan CD – it’ll be on there somewhere.

While the song progresses, the lyrics are being flashed up on screen: you can check them out on lyricsfreak.  And we’re being asked who Bob Dylan was asking to pay attention and it’s being pointed out that “teachers” are not being asked to change!  Why Not?

So this leads into the following Ken Robinson video – Changing Education Paradigms:

(If anyone’s interested, there’s a lesson plan on teflgeek for exploiting this).

Key Words from the video:

• unpredictability of the future
• cultural identity – globalisation
• ADHD
• standardisation
• artistic education
• divergent thinking
• creativity
• non-linearity
• collaboration

Just because we don’t feel comfortable in their world, doesn’t mean we should impose our world on them.

Challenges:

• how to contribute to the change within the system that holds onto the old model
• how to control stress and demotivation
• how to be encouraging … (lost the rest of that)

Quotes Umberto Eco on life-long learning and the anguish of upgrading – the fact that everything keeps changing:  we are not longer living calmly in the present and are constantly preparing ourselves for the future.

Liquid Modernity – Zygmunt Bauman:  (pages 10 & 11)

The only certainty (says Bauman) is change:

Learn- unlearn – relearn  /  the anguish of upgrading  /  new habits  /  new thinking skills

The unholy trinity: uncertainty, insecurity, unsafety.  Why not bring these ideas into the classroom to show learners that we consider these things as well?

Michael Rosen poem:  In our playground.http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/poems.html

(editor’s note:  the audio keeps cutting in and out and I keep missing bits – apologies)

Stability is now out of favour – variety is in.

we’re now nomadic – we travel light.

Clifford: travelling cultures:  not so much where are you from, as where are you between.  Human becomings rather than human beings.  Moving from the nation, to imagined communities (Salman Rushdie) to “postulated communities” – what aspects of your identity do you carry with you online?

We’re always wired, we’re always connected – yet we’re always alone.  Because we’re so dependent on connections we don’t know what to do without it.  We exist in a “screen state” – not our bodies.  Physical interaction is often an intrusion on virtual interaction, not the other way round.

Ubiquitous / mobile learning:

What we are used to, we too often become used by and so we must begin to see ourselves in where we are…  increasingly where we are is on the web.  (Michael Joyce 1998)

Intermediality – the blurring of media boundaries.  The use of video in a text on a web page….

“you cannot, with the web, go where no one has gone before” (Tchudi 2000)

Critical Technological Literacy:

ACCESS  /  CONTENT  /  LINKS

Globalisation:

Conflict derived from the contact with the difference

Construction of multiple fluid identities

definition of  the intercultural learner:  Corbett 2007: 41

World englishes

Conclusion – again, I think this one is going to need some thinking about, some working through and some rewriting.  stay tuned.

This blog post reports from the APPI 2012 conference in Coimbra, Portugal.  The theme of the conference is “Motivated Teachers make a difference” – I’m updating as I go, so apologies for any typos, I’ll try and clear those up later.  Owing to coffee breaks and fresh air requirements, no time to do the abstract.  I think the title’s fairly self explanatory.

Nik Peachy;  Developing materials and practices for the digital generation

This should tie in quit neatly with Nicky hockly’s talk from yesterday.

Handouts and materials from the session c/o: http://technogogy.org.uk/techteens.pdf

In this session:

• Some research
• Some tools
• Some ideas

(Everything is free)

Digital natives / digital immigrants (Marc Prensky) – levels of digital comfort vary, even amongst teenagers ….  some stats:

• 75% of teens own cell phones
• 73% use social networking
• 38% share content online
• Teens average 3,339 sent and received texts a month

Marc Prensky – “the app gap” the gap between students that have smart phones with app capability and those that don’t. What about the gap between teachers and students?

Thinking about the classroom…  what’s preferable?  NOT rows of computers, but wi-fi enabled, internet enabled devices, data projector, good broadband, with air, light, colour and comfort.  The model of the traditional computer room is outmoded already….

www.todaysmeet.com – creating a back channel with your students, another means of communication with and amongst students.  The teacher can “lurk” and see what’s going on, intervening where necessary!  Sharing links, so making classrooms more paperless.

Why use it?  Information sharing / Audience response / democratising the classroom / brainstorming / working without paper / provides a record of the interaction.

Some nice examples of literature via textspeak – including Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice and Shakespeare’s “what’s in a name”.  You can translate stuff into text speak via http://transl8it.com/.  Text speak is quite phonetic and can help work on pronunciation.

Why use it?  Increase enagement with short texts / understanding the genre /

Shared Work Space:  (www.posterous.com) works on the emailing principle – just email the blog and it’ll post.  Or text the blog.  Why:  publishing and peer editing learner work / collaboration / personal reflection / blended learning.  Also works well with audioboo, recording audio which you can then upload to the blog.

What do you use when you study?  How do you take notes?  try “scrible.com” – an online text annotator, highlighter and virtual stickynote generator, plus library or article collation system.

How has computer based information changed the nature of receptive skills?  The kinds of texts we access in our daily lives has changed and the way we access texts has changed.  So instead of referrring to a single source, learners need to access multiple sources and we can help learners by providing mixed media tasks.  An online tool to help with this: Storify – here’s Nik’s example: http://storify.com/nikpeachey/connectivism.  Can help avoid the cut and paste problem of learner research, as it means learners evaluate and assess and make an original contribution, while also including links to the original source.

Generic Tasks for digital comprehension. (see handout)

http://mailvu.com/ - good for learners to practice speaking and getting feedback.

Nik’s running out of time and I think the last part of the seminar will need some investigation via his handout, which are full of the links!

Conclusion – this is going to need a certain amount of time to process and re-organise!

This blog post reports from the APPI 2012 conference in Coimbra, Portugal.  The theme of the conference is “Motivated Teachers make a difference” – I’m updating as I go, so apologies for any typos, I’ll try and clear those up later.

Scott Thornbury – It’s getting better all the time: Motivating Teachers

Quotes from the abstract: “Teachers typically start out full of illusions, but faced with the reality of their day-to-day work, this intial enthusiasm can soon turn sour.”  Oh how we all recognise that feeling I’m sure!  I’m looking at the title of the session and wondering whether the next line of the Beatles song has some part to play in all this:  ”It can’t get much worse…”!  Abstract continues:  ”It’s possible to retrieve some of that initial motivation by taking some easy steps towards personal, professional development.”

Looks like we’re about to get underway…

Scott’s managed to find a 1935 English language textbook in a Coimbra bookshop – an interesting insight into the teacher student relationship.  Also, the way the lesson was presented, to me harks back to direct method pedagogy.  An interesting vignette!

A nice video of a pre-service teacher talking about the reasons why he wants to be a teacher.  Some cynicism in the audience….

Lots of reasons why teachers are stressed out:  quoting Mike J Harrison’s blog post on teaching conditions.

The marketisation of education – terms such as outsomces, value added, knowledge transfer

Life cycle of teachers (generally):

1. Novice – surviving, feeling out of depth and incompetent / stressed out about the additional paperwork.
2. Mid-career – stabilisation, experiementation, taking stock
3. Late career – serenity, disengagement

1. starting out
2. becoming experienced
3. new horizons: professional development
4. passing on knowledge

Beliefs and attitudes that people hold about themselves are the most important drivers.  Teachers who possessed positive attitudes about themselves

Question to the PLN: What motivates you as a teacher?  Do a quick twitter hashtag search for #motivatingteachers for the PLN responses.

Quotes:  Atul Gawande “Better” and the struggle for

Ask an unscripted question – ask a question about themselves and their learning:  needs analysis techniques that move beyond the prosaic needs and think about ‘living’ in English.

Don’t complain – complaining never solves anything just depresses you.  Be prepared with something else to discuss (fallback topics).  Keep the conversation going.  Now plugging #eltchat as a means of having that conversation woth likeminded individuals and a

Count something.  Be a scientist – If you count something you find interesting, you’ll learn something.  This is the action research cycle, and arguing for peer observation / self observation / videoing your own classes.  (things we might want to look into….?)

Write something:  writing is a reflective process and by writing for an audience (i.e. blogging?)  you can get feedback on your ideas and problems.  Also discussion boards are a good source of feedback (cites the Dogme discussion groups)

Change – look for the opportunity to change, you don’t have to follow every new trend, but recognise what doesn’t work in your current practice and seek ways to improve.

You are not alone.  nvolve the school management, involve the students, publish it, seek feedback and

“Find something new to try!”

Handouts and Powerpoints - http://thornburyscott.com/