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#ELTChat Summary: Teaching at a Discourse Level

15 Feb

How can we focus language teaching more at discourse level rather than sentence level?

The first #eltchat of 2012 attempted to answer this question!  I wasn’t actually there and didn’t take part in the chat and I’m still not quite sure how I’ve ended up writing the summary except that Marisa_C possesses remarkable powers of persuasion and as someone who teaches higher levels this is an area of interest!  Hopefully, this captures the key points, but I’m not a “discourse specialist”, so feel free to point out any errors or omissions.  I haven’t cited individual contributors, but the transcript is available if you’d like to know who said what.

“Teacher, what mean “discourse”?”

The initial question makes the assumption that discourse works at a higher level than merely the sentence thought the Wikipedia entry relating discourse analysis to “approaches to analyzing written, spoken . signed language use or any significant semiotic event” – which I interpret broadly as meaning “if something attempts to convey meaning, it can be analysed to see how it does so”.  A more accessible overview of discourse suggests that discourse analysts are concerned with “the construction of meaning throughout a text”.  (it should be pointed out here that the word “text” is used more to mean a linguistic event than a written document).

Thus discourse can apply to patterns of interaction, “text” structures, communication events, language within a text – usually occurring within a context of authentic language use.  There are no set “rules” of discourse per se, because discourse examines everything and the rules change depending on the context.

Stuck at the Sentence?  Problems with discourse:

Receptively, learners simply may not know enough vocabulary to access texts effectively – to fully understand a text learners need to be able to recognize 95% of the vocabulary used in the text (Laufer, 1989).  Additionally, the mechanics of textual cohesion devices like referencing, linking expressions and paragraphing need to be understood.

Receptive knowledge of these devices also form part of language tests, like FCE, CAE, CPE, IELTS (etc), and within fields like EAP.  Often these tests also require learners to demonstrate productive knowledge of these devices in structured, genre specific writing tasks.  While genre is an aspect of discourse, genre familiarity is a separate issue for learners to grapple with.

Where learners are preparing for a language test, classes tend to become very test focused, very accuracy focused and very form focused – developing a test dependency that can be difficult to move away from.  This may account for the amount of language teaching conducted at the sentence level within test preparation classes, though this is not ideal.

It isn’t helped by the general trend within published ELT materials for decontextualized, fragmented, sentence based language presentations.  Grammar teaching in particular tends to be conducted at the level of the sentence and examine items in isolation and without reference to a wider context.  The natural fluidity of language would seem to predicate against this.

Problem?  Solution! – what a bunch of Hoey!

(Bonus points to those who got the discourse analysis joke there….)

The simplest responses to the issue of isolated sentence based grammar teaching would appear to be just to teach grammar in a wider context and by making learners aware of functional aspects of language and their use – aspects of Speech Act study (which is only possible in context).  This could be facilitated by more use of authentic materials or by use of digital coursebooks (this latter point wasn’t fully expanded upon – I’m intrigued and would welcome comments!).

The other key suggestion is to move learners from receptive awareness of discourse patterns, for example making them aware of such patterns as they occur in listening and reading tasks, through to productive acts that feature and practice the target discourse structures.  This would seem to favour a product approach to writing – the exposure of learners to a model text before asking them to produce something based on that model.  There is often a reluctance amongst learners to “do writing” in class, but while instruction could take place in class, the actual practice of the writing skill need not.

(An authorial aside – just from reading through the tweets as they related to discourse and testing, in particular the learners desire just to “get through the test”, I think it’s worth pointing out to learners that often with testing, there is no “quick fix”.  Discourse features occur in many language tests precisely because they are skills to be developed and rather than something that can be sidestepped.  There are task strategies than can help fine tune learner performance, but if the underlying skills aren’t there, neither will exam performance be! )

In conclusion – Do Learners need Discourse Analysis?

A good question – do learners really need discourse analysis skills or is it just the teachers who do?  There was a general consensus that the main goal is to have learners working and using “real language”, which would seem to take us back to using authentic materials as part of the input process, both to serve for language development and provision of exponents, but also to raise awareness of discourse structures and patterns as they arise in the target texts.

Teachers therefore need training in discourse analysis so that they can effectively instruct the learners, and be able to evaluate published materials more critically.  Thus they can help the learners to not only look at language performance but also to reflect on the language they encounter, to think about aspects of discourse such as audience and purpose – to be aware of the patterns rather than actually conduct a discourse analysis.

Further Reading, References and links from the chat:

(Links given where possible)

 

An apology on behalf of #eltchat – Raquel_EFL appeared to make a large contribution to the chat with people responding with phrases like “brilliant” and “Good point!!!”  but unfortunately for some reason these contributions didn’t show up in the transcript and I fear have been lost to history….

#eltchat takes place on twitter every Wednesday at 12 noon and 9.00pm London time.  Simply sign in or sign up to twitter and search for the hashtag #eltchat.  For more information, check out the website.

The Best Education Articles From “The Onion” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

7 Feb

If you don’t know The Onion – you should take a look – it’s a satirical newspaper that sometimes hits the nail on the head.  It’s also a great source of articles for use with classes – the occasionally puerile sense of humour appeals to teenagers, whilst the (not always) sophisticated parodies of mainstream news events makes adults smile.  Also some great stuff for business English classes and I think they now have short videos which could be used for listening tasks.

Anyway – this was all prompted by a post from Larry Ferlazzo - The Best Education Articles From “The Onion” - with well – these are Larry’s picks for the best education related Onion material.  My favourite is the cost cutting decision to remove the past tense from school curricula….  after all – who needs to talk about yesterday?

The First day of Geekmas: A short talk on using Poetry…

20 Dec

On the first day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  a short talk on using poetry…..

It’s the last / first day of the teflgeek Christmas countdown and it’s been a fun, somewhat introspective, quite stressful on occasion but ultimately I hope, useful, Christmas countdown.  I’m not sure I’ll be repeating the experience again next year – at least not in this form!  So a reminder of what we’ve had so far:

I thought that, in a twist and given how I’ve massacred the poetic form in creating spurious rhymes in attempting the twelve days of geekmas, I’d end with a short talk on poetry.  I’ve put this together as a you tube video – it’s the first video cast I’ve attempted, so any feedback on technique etc gratefully appreciated!

Any and all links referred to in the presentation, plus a load more besides, are given below.  Enjoy!

References and further ideas:

 poetryclass – “taking the fear out of poetry” – http://www.poetryclass.net/

A wealth of teaching resources, articles and ideas on how and why to use poetry with classes.  Designed more for students within the UK education system, but resources are graded by year group, so you’ll be able to find some suitable resources for most ages and levels.

The Poetry Express – poetry writing for 7-11year olds – http://www.thepoetryexpress.com/

Again, aimed more at the UK education system.  Poetry Express has a lot of stuff that’s aimed directly at the kids developing their abilities to write poetry as well as teaching resources that approach poetry from a cross-curricular viewpoint.

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/exercises.html

This is a just a simple list of poetry workshop ideas – more ideas to stimulate poetry creation than developing ability per se.

http://connected.waldenu.edu/language-and-literacy/english-language-learners/item/1482-how-to-teach-english-through-poetry

This is a useful and interesting, but more theoretical, article on how and why to use poetry in the classroom.

The Poetry Zone: http://poetryzone.woodshed.co.uk/index2.htm

Another kids based site – with competitions, poetry theme ideas, a place for kids to upload their poems to and usefully, a teacher zone with further links and ideas to help you use poetry in the classroom.  Look at classroom resources and “Poetry Kit” by Jan Dean for some great ideas! ( I really liked the “mismatch” idea!)

Forms of Poetry:  http://www.tooter4kids.com/forms_of_poetry.htm

This is an excellent resource for different types of poetry and poetry ideas – from limericks to haiku, language based  (e.g. used to), shape poems, parts of speech poems – the list goes on and one.  Just scroll down to see what there is to see.  Strongly recommended!

Teaching Grammar Creatively.  Gerngross, Puchta & Thornbury, 2006 Helbling Languages.

A great grammar teaching ideas source, many of the outcomes are based around the idea of poems or poetry creation.  Repetition of a grammatical form, so it seems, can lead to some great poetry!

Poem into Poem, Maley & Moulding, 1985, Cambridge University Press.

Possibly a little dated in terms of content, but the ideas included are still very definitely worth taking a look at.  “We ignore the poetic function of language at our peril.  It is the cutting edge of linguistic creativity and innovation, and the key to a feel for the soul of a language.”  Page 134.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/text-language-classrooms-talo-tavi-tasp

Lindsay Clandfield has an excellent in-depth article on using texts in the classroom, looking at TAVI / TALO / TASP in more detail.

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: ten tricks for reading

4 Dec

On the tenth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  ten tricks for reading

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

10 tricks for reading

Though strictly speaking, they’re not “tricks” – more sort of activities!

I recently ran a teacher development seminar called “The Reading Teacher”.  One of the things I realised as I was putting it together was that the general approach to reading, at least as is often evident, is as follows:

  • Pre-teach any vocabulary from the text you think they need.
  • Gist reading task – make the students read the text in a ridiculously short amount of time and then answer a question.
  • Detailed reading – let the students take the next 30 minutes to read the text one word at a time and then ask them to answer 6 comprehension questions which demonstrate (a) they read the text (b) limited understanding of six aspects of the text as given in the questions.
  • A reactive focus on any words the students had problems with or didn’t understand.
  • Move on to the inevitable grammar point that’s lurking on the next page with dodgy examples of the form lifted straight out of the text.

And it occurred to me that this might not particularly help…

Scott Thornbury’s recent “G is for Gist” gives an interesting background glimpse on how this structure has come about and his point that most learners already know how to do this in their own languages is a good one.  Though anyone teaching Young Learners may still have some work to do here!  One thing that Scott doesn’t mention (and I haven’t read all the comments, so this might have cropped up) is that a surprisingly large number of gist tasks don’t actually require gist skills.  They might require predictive skills, or scanning skills, or a combination of the two – but not always gist.

In any event – for the tenth day of geekmas – I’ve promised ten tricks for reading, these are more sort of activities that you can use to help learners develop some of the reading subskills (as indicated).

1.  Picture Sequencing  (Prediction Skills).  Give learners a set of pictures which represents aspects of the text and ask them to put them into what they think is the correct order.  Or to generate their own story based on their own sequence of the images.  When learners access the text they can check their predictions and re-sequence the pictures appropriately.  This is particularly good with young learners, whose coursebook reading texts are often accompanied by visual images / comic book style sequential pictures.

2.  Wordle  (Prediction Skills).  Given that wordle (unless you ask it not to) makes the word clouds from the key content words in the text, it’s a nice way of highlighting the key themes, especially if you’re using a text from the internet!  Though if not, you can just type a keyword set in, to mimic the main ideas or themes.  I saw this used to great effect as a prediction task by Anna Pires who used it with the lyrics to Coldplay’s “viva la vida“.

3. Abstract Matching (Skimming / Gist Skills).  Abstract / summary / headline matching.   Ask your learners to match an abstract, a summary or a headline to a text or portion of the text.  Alternatively, you could ask them to write a section heading for the different sections of the text and then ask the class to vote for the best ones.  Turning things into a competition or a race can help speed things up with young learners (older learners as well)!

4.  Personal Reactions  (Skimming / Gist Skills).  A personal reaction to the text works on a number of levels – it doesn’t require great understanding as it doesn’t rely on an intellectual or logical response to the text, but rather an emotional response.  Simple questions like “How would you feel in this situation?”  or  ”Which person do you like most?”  or “What would you do?” can help learners access the text on a level that really does take in the whole of the thing, without focusing on the detail.

5.  Find all the _____.  (Scanning).  A competition (or not) between learners to find all the _____s in a text.  This can obviously differ depending on the text concerned, but you could either go with “all the words beginning with W” or you could ask them to find all the names of the different people in the text.  This latter choice (and thanks to Dave Tucker for the suggestion) would also help learners sequence the information in the text, which can be useful for then answering comprehension questions or detail questions on the text.

6.  Bingo.  (Predictive skills  /  Scanning).  Give the learners a piece of paper divided up into nine sections (like a noughts and crosses / Tic tac toe grid) and ask them to write down nine vocabulary items they think will occur in the text (you might want to tell them what the text is about first….).  Then when you give them the text, they get one point for every correct item, ten points for line of three, and thirty points for a “full house” (all their items appear in the text).  A nice way of developing both skills!

7.  What does “X” mean?  (inferring meaning).  This idea came from a seminar I attended some years ago by Monica Koorich.  In it, she substituted key words from the text for an alternate language equivalent (I think she used Hindi) and we were asked to work out what we thought they meant from the context.  Rather than learn Hindi, (assuming you don’t already know it), you could either use Google translate, or you could make up nonsense words instead.

8.  Meaning From Context Grid  (inferring meaning).  Take nine items and write them up in a nine-square grid on the board.  You then group the learners in three teams and ask them to come up with a “definition” for the item.  Each team then writes up a definition for three items.  (I usually sequence the teams’ turn taking as follows:  ABC  /  BCA  /  CAB).  You then give learners the text and they find their items and, based on the context, then have the chance to change their definitions if necessary.  Points can then be awarded for degrees of correctness.

9.  Steve’s starters  (extensive reading).  I was fortunate enough to observe a colleague, Steve Knox, work his reading magic with one of his classes.  Steve is a great believer in the extensive reading theory of reading & language skills development and he had set almost all of his classes up to spend the first ten minutes of any lesson reading.  Learners would have chosen a book or a graded reader from the school library – once chosen the books all lived in a cardboard box under the desk in the classroom.  What struck me most at the time was the genius of the idea as a behavioural routine for young learners!  Steve had essentially created a calming, settling routine at the start of his lessons, that any latecomer would be interrupting.  And that was what happened – latecomers entered quietly, took their books from the box and settled down to read.  At the end of the time, Steve would ask them to discuss (briefly) what they’d read with the people sitting nearby.  That was the other thing I liked about the idea – it so neatly mimics what we really do with our reading in our own languages.  We see something online or in the newspaper – we tell our friends!  We’re reading a book we like (or one we don’t) – we tell our friends.  Ignominiously simple and easy.  Highly recommended.

10.  Reader Diaries / Reviews  (extensive reading).  Again, something that is relatively simple, but easy to incorporate into your classes.  I vaguely recall, from my own schooldays, having to write a page in my English notebook on whatever book I was reading / had read that week.  This is a similar idea.  Slightly different to Steve’s starters in that the learners take the books home and their feedback is more formal / in depth.  Though I suppose it doesn’t have to be.  For teachers who are already working with learner journals, this can be a nice addition.  For those that prefer the blog or wiki – these tools can be used and actually might encourage a debate around the books, where differing opinions occur.  The review idea is perhaps more gradable, as it allows for differing degrees of output & scaffolding.  A nice twist on this is to post the completed reviews around the school and incorporate a rating system, as with Amazon.com, where readers rate the review based on usefulness.

Halloween Teaching Resources

28 Oct

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners…

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September 11th Teaching Resources

11 Sep

Inspired by a recent feature on The Guardian website, which invites readers to share their memories of where they were and what they were doing (click here for more detail), I was thinking about collating teaching resources on the topic and presenting them here.

Turns out Larry Ferlazzo‘s beaten me to it…

His latest post:  ”Even more 9/11 resources” has materials from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times – as well as from the US Department of Education.

But honestly, his post “The Best Sites to Help Teach About 9/11”  has links to just about every 9/11 related teaching resource that’s out there.  If you’re planning to use this topic area with your classes – make it your starting point.

There’s also a really interesting piece on the OUP blog by Mary Dudziak on the impact September 11th has made on the classroom – read more at “How 9/11 made history“.  Thanks for @OUPAcademic for tweeting the link.

 

First Lesson or First Week Ideas

9 Sep

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix:

Recently, the 24th Edition of EFL/ESL/ELL Blog Carnival : A Journey in TEFL got posted on Eva Buyuksimkesyan’s “A Journey in TEFL” blog.  I strongly recommend taking a look here if you’re in need of inspiration – Eva’s collated over 40 (I lost count) posts from different contributors.
The Lesson Plans Page also has a wide range of back to school resources and materials, though these are aimed more at native speaker young learner classes than a language learner class – and I’ve not tried any of them, so can’t vouch for them personally!

The disabled access friendly world blog challenge: Creature Discomforts

29 Jun

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter.

The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way they see disability.

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Habitat for Humanity: Lesson Plans

13 May

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Habitat for Humanity.  I’m mentioning them here because they posted a comment under one of the blog posts and I just went and took a quick look at their site.

They have quite a wealth of lessons (detailed plans, learning outcomes, materials etc), categorised by age ranges.  The bad news is that these lesson plans are not aimed at foreign language learners.  So the stuff in the 5-8 category might be a bit beyond the non-native speakers, though there are a couple of colouring tasks which might work?

I think adaptation is going to be the name of the game here.  I think there’s quite a lot of stuff here that is likely to be of interest to learners and some things that might make some nice end of year/term projects.  It should appeal to the cross-curricular / CLIL crowd….

Habitat for Humanity operates in a large number of countries around the world, so the chances are you’ll be able to find a local office, which might make things a bit more relevant to the learners?

Habitat for Humanity lessons — Habitat for Humanity Int’l.

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

11 May

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..

There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….

Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?

But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource.  Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind.  Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!

There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).

These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!

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