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Feedback Technique: Percentage building bar charts

16 Mar Bar chart

This is something I tried out with a class yesterday as a way of giving ongoing partial feedback on a set of module review questions, though I think it would work as a feedback technique on any larger exercise or activity, more those that have clear unambiguous answers though.

Basically, before the class I created an answer sheet on A4 paper in two columns:  the left column had the question reference (e.g. page 74, ex1, qu3) and the right column had a blank space for the learners to write their answers.  Then I created a teacher crib sheet where I wrote down the answers.  This was just to minimise the amount of time spent working out whether their answers were correct or not.

I divided the class into four teams and the board into four columns, with a percentage scale from 0% to 100% running up the side.  In this lesson, the teams were working with 23 CPE use of English style questions – obviously this can be adapted to your situation & task requirements.  I divided 100 by the number of questions (23), which works out at 4.3.  So when giving each team feedback, I’d just multiply the number of correct answers by 4.3 and increase the height of each team’s bar chart to the relevant level.  So if they’d got five correct answers, their bar chart column would be filled in on the board to 21.5%.

I then found they were checking their answers after making single changes, so I limited the number of times they could check their answers with me – in this instance they got four opportunities to check their answers with me.  If I was using this with a smaller number of questions, I’d reduce that to one or two opportunities.

The winning team is the one that either gets 100% correct, or the team with the highest percentage score at the end of the time limit.

Additional support – it did become clear that it was quite difficult to work out where they were getting things wrong, so I then told them how many correct answers they had in each exercise:  5 / 0 / 1 / 2.  If we’d had more time I would have given them an additional lifeline by simply marking which answers were correct and which were not – but we ran out of time and I ended up setting the rest of the exercises for homework.  We’ll come back to it next time!

This is another nice and competitive way of using those slightly dry “end of module review”  or the periodic “revision” sections that crop up in coursebooks from time to time, or as an alternative for exam practice tasks.  There are two key things to remember as the teacher – (1) take the crib sheet – it makes check answers a LOT quicker  (2) take a calculator in with you – 13 x 4.3 is beyond my mental arithmetic skills!

In defence of: The Test

13 Mar

There seems to be a lot of anti-testing sentiment prevalent in the teaching world at the moment.  There’s a particular degree of vitriol that seems to be reserved for standardised testing, but which has tapped a general anti-educational zeitgeist and spilled over, flooded even, into ELT.  In this piece I’m hoping to look at where some of these attitudes to testing might come from and think about what might be the best way forward.

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British Council Opportunities

12 Mar

The following email from the British Council just popped up in my inbox – there’s a couple of interesting testing related opportunities there:

(1)  three days work item testing for six hundred pounds

(2) being trained up to be a freelance online examiner

For more info – follow the link:

NEWSFLASH – Important Information and opportunities.

NB – read the specifications carefully, some are location dependent positions!

FCE online resource directory

27 Feb

For all those of you that teach FCE preparation classes – here’s a list of the best stuff I’ve found online for FCE prep.

Most of the resources can be classified as either “online practice activities” or “teaching ideas” – but if you need somewhere to send your students for self-study or if you’ve run out of interesting ways to work with a key-word transformation – there’ll be something in there for you:

FCE Online Resource Directory

Let me know if there are any problems with links etc – and if you have anything you think should be added to this page?  Definitely let me know!

 

Cambridge English Teachers’ Competition 2012

24 Feb

If you help learners prepare for one of the Cambridge exams, then you might be interested in their new competition: Cambridge English Teachers’ Competition 2012.

All they want is one practical exam preparation idea, succinctly expressed in 300 words, for one of the following exams:

BEC (Preliminary, Vantage or Higher), ILEC, ICFE, YLE (Starters, Movers or Flyers), KET, PET, FCE.

Deadline for entries is April 16th 2012.

More details (including prizes!) from their website:  Cambridge English Teachers’ Competition 2012.

#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.

Do learners know what they need?

27 Jan

There is a lot of talk about learner needs, needs analysis and learner centred lesson planning and course planning.  But do learners really know what they need?  Or do they just tell us what they want?

The difference between “wants” and “needs” is neatly illustrated by the image on the right – a want is something that is desirable but unnecessary.  A need is something you have to have no matter what!  And do we always know the difference?  I know that I often say I need to go and buy something, when the truth is, I can probably do without it!

In education the reliance on needs analysis worries me, as I fear it might be misplaced.  After all, we go to our doctors and describe our symptoms but we don’t tell the doctor what to do next – why should we as language teachers rely on the input our learners give us?  Surely as a professional I am capable of spotting the problems a learner is having, communicating those problems to the learner and working out a set of solutions.

But we don’t always notice and the doctor analogy is perhaps right – the learners come to us and say “I’m having problems” before we then think about what the causes and solutions might be.  So learner input is valid – but can it be trusted?

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The Twelve Days of Geekmas: eleven tips for writing

2 Dec

On the eleventh day of Geekmas, teflgeek gave to me:  11 tips for writing

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

Although to be more accurate this should be called “11 tips to give your students to help them develop their writing (for exam classes)”, but again, that just wouldn’t scan properly…

Teachers – feel free to cut and paste and print out (some editing may be required!)

  1. Read the question!  It shouldn’t need saying and I’d be willing to bet this is a constant cri-de-coeur for many a teacher, but failure to read the question – or more importantly failure to respond to the required aspects of the question – is what costs learners the most marks.  Cambridge exams are lovely and kind.  They tell you what to write about – massive amounts of thought not required – just good identification technique….. (see below)
  2. What’s important here?  Every question has “content points”.  If you miss one you fail.  But on the plus side they’re easy to spot – they usually appear in sentences that read:  ”You should write about….”  /  ”Include information on”.  Or sometimes they have little arrows pointing to them (only in part one).  Teachers – give your learners a copy of the sample writing paper from the handbook and a highlighter pen – take the time to go through it step by step.  It won’t be wasted time.
  3. Don’t get word fear!  Word fear is when learners worry too much about how many words they need to write.  Key symptoms include:  (a)  obsessively counting the number of words they’ve written to make sure they have enough.  (b)  Using a lengthy and inappropriate style to try and increase the number of words in a sentence.  (c) adding additional random sentences and paragraphs to the end of your text upon realising they don’t have enough content.  There is a simple cure:  relax.  No-one’s going to count the number of words.  Examiners have lives too!  Besides – the only true way to eradicate word fear is in proper planning.
  4. PPPPP – PROPER PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE.  Very very few learners actually plan their writing.  This also explains why very very few learners get top grades for exam writing.  Having insisted all my learners submit a plan along with their compositions, I was once accosted by a worried student before class:  ”I’m really sorry I haven’t finished it all.  I can give you the essay now, but can I give you the plan next lesson?”  I don’t insist anymore.  If you can’t be bothered, then fine.  It doesn’t work for everybody, and I hope you’re happy with your “c” grade.
  5. Know your genre.  Again, it seems silly to state it so obviously, but learners need to know what the different texts types (a) look like, (b) feature stylistically.  If learners have a clear visual representation of the text type, it makes the planning process easier.  I tend to do block diagrams of the different text types as a labelling task, so that learners get a clear idea of what all the different sections involve.  This then leads into a language matching task, with key phrases matched to the relevant sections.
  6. Who’s the reader?  A mistake that many writers make is in mis-imagining the reader.  A letter for publication in a newspaper or magazine is written as personal correspondence between the writer and the editor – but not written for the wider audience who’ll read the published letter.  Another common fault is writing for the Examiner, not for the target reader.  Knowledge of who the reader is also affects register choice (as well as genre does).
  7. Leave a blank line.  This is possibly a personal bugbear of mine, but I speak as someone who’s sat down and gone slightly insane whilst attempting to mark over a 150 FCE writing scripts in a single afternoon (with some help).  The blank line is a psychological trick.  Learners need to leave one blank line between each section of their writing text as it is more pleasing to the eye, clearly indicates attempted paragraphing (and hence organisation, even if the organisation doesn’t actually exist) and basically puts the examiner in a much better frame of mind.  Generally, you want a better disposed examiner marking your paper – they tend to give higher marks!  (Apparently research bears this out, but I don’t know whose.)
  8. Don’t draft – plan.  It’s not unknown for learners to write out an entire first draft of a text and then copy it out again neatly.  Fine, if you can get away with it and not run out of time, but why go to all the trouble of doing twice the work?  Couldn’t you just do the work once, but twice as well?  If you plan, you don’t need to draft (at least not in an exam situation).  Also, planning gets rid of all those unsightly crossing outs and substitutions and insertions.  If you know what you want to say before you start writing…..
  9. A brief note on paragraphs.  Earlier, I may have given the impression that a paragraph is a collection of words separated from a similar collection of words by one blank line.  Psychological trickery will only get you so far – there does also need to be some substance behind the style.  In an attempt to help with paragraph structure, I’ve been talking to my learners about TARS – Topic Sentence / Argument / Reason / Specific Example.  As a basic paragraph structure it works quite neatly, though obviously there are variations…
  10. It’s the way you tell ‘em.  With some answers, you feel really engaged, as though the writer really cares about the topic and wants to share that with you.  With others, you feel as though the writer is going through the motions.  And let’s face it – why shouldn’t they?  It’s an artificial situation that wouldn’t occur to them in the real world.   But to get the top marks, the writing needs to make the reader feel loved.
  11. Role play it then write it.  Which is why, I like converting writing tasks into role plays.  If, for example, a task asks the learners to write a report for the principal on the use of technology in the college, it can be nice to put half the class in the position of the principal and half in the position of the writer and ask them to converse on the topic.  It can give both parties a new appreciation of the roles and requirements of the task!

Say that again? avoiding repetition & developing paraphrase

25 Nov

Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill that taxes most of us on a daily basis:  ”I like your hair.”  ”Your hair looks nice.”  ”Wow!  Have you had your hair done?”  ”That new style really suits you!”

For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult.  For learners preparing for exam classes, where displaying a wide ranging linguistic resource helps garner improved scores – it’s an essential skill.  It’s useful for all those writing tasks (avoid using words or phrases from the questions) and particularly useful for CPE comprehension and summary tasks where the questions state “in your own words”.  But it’s also a handy skill to have for those speaking tasks, where demonstrating ”range” is almost as important as actually having range.  After all, there’s no point learning all those different words and structures if you don’t actually use them?  Right?

So here’s an activity which needs no (only a very small amount) of preparation, but which helps extend and develop the paraphrase skill.  I call it “Say that again?”

Materials:  As much scrap A4 paper as you can find chopped down into either A6 or A7 sized slips – ideally it’d be about six bits of paper per student.

Students write a single (short) sentence on each bit of paper – ideally something they might say in everyday life.  You can model this with “I like your hair.”  or “Local football team played well/badly at the weekend.”  Students can work together in pairs during the sentence creation phase.

Collect all the slips of paper up and ask the learners to form small groups (three or four people per group).  re-distribute the slips of paper with the sentences on evenly between the groups, placed face down (i.e. sentences not visible) in a pile in the middle.

One learner takes a slip and turns it face up and reads the sentence.  They then have to produce a paraphrase of the sentence, as does the next person and the next etc, until someone can’t come up with something that hasn’t already been said.  So if we go back to our example:  Learner A turns over the slip of paper and reads out ”I like your hair.”  Learner A paraphrases thusly:  ”Your hair looks nice.”   Learner B comes up with “Wow!  Have you had your hair done?”  and Learner C with “That new style really suits you!”.  Learner D however can’t think of anything new, so gets to keep the slip of paper.

The winner is the person in each group with the fewest slips of paper at the end of the activity.

Feedback can be given on any errors that were overheard during the game, but also content feedback on any sentences they found particularly difficult to paraphrase.

As an extension, for those classes preparing for an exam, the teacher could take the input from one of the writing paper questions and divide it up into sentences on separate bits of paper and ask learners to come up with alternative phrasings.

“The candidate demonstrated an impressive range.”

(Bonus points for anyone who can identify the “impressive range” featured!  Post your answers below!)

#ELTchat Summary: Dogme & Formal Assessment – the odd couple?

16 Nov

At first glance, the free-wheeling Dogme approach to teaching and formal assessment do not sit well together.  Rather they would appear to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, representing as they do either “winging it elevated to an art form” or rigid rows of desks and standardized testing models.  The #eltchat on Wednesday 9th November 2011 tried to find out whether opposites might in this case attract, or at the very least whether this odd couple could form some kind of lasting (if uneasy) relationship.

If you’d like to look at the original transcript for this chat, you can find it on the #ELTchat wiki.

Dogme, like the term formal assessment, means different things to different people.  Dogme is NOT winging it (PatrickAndrews), rather it is teaching without materials but with preparation (the teacherjames).  You prepare your classes but go with the flow (esolcourses).  Experience and skill can help with this (Shaunwilden), though pre-service teachers can be trained (the teacherjames).  You should always remember the students’ needs and wants and not impose dogme(bethcagnol), and it works well with higher levels (rliberni).

Formal Assessment  could be achievement tests or proficiency tests (ljp2010), exams (rliberni) or portfolio based (esolcourses).  In general, people seemed to view “formal” assessment as tests or exams imposed on the class from outside, either by school management (e.g. end of year tests), national exam boards or student needs (e.g. IELTS / FCE / TOEFL etc).

Whether the two can co-exist is difficult to answer.  As ever with these things the answer would seem to be “it depends”.  The means of assessment (the testing tools) and the criteria being assessed both affect things (esolcourses), though if the test is a good one, it shouldn’t matter how the learners get there (teflgeek).  Tests, unfortunately, are not always very good (PatrickAndrews) and may require specific item knowledge that therefore must be covered in class (ShaunWilden), or development of a narrow range of skills (esolcourses).  Is the problem therefore the testing method, not the teaching method (teflgeek)?  The fact that most schools don’t actually test properly certainly doesn’t make it any easier (Shaunwilden).

A Portfolio based approach to testing would be a better fit with a dogme approach to teaching (PatrickAndrews) and has worked for some (esolcourses), but teachers don’t often get the choice of test type (rliberni).  Most testing is very “one size fits all” and there is a need for less rigidity and a more learner-centred approach to testing (esolcourses), though commercial realities make this difficult to implement (rliberni).  Overall, we seem to be stuck with whatever we’re given to work with / aim towards.

Given then, that formal testing is often prescriptive and imposed, how can we reconcile the destination with the journey?  Test / exam preparation often requires using past papers and extensive practice of task types (AlexandraKouk).  Task familiarization is important (rliberni) but there is a difference between test familiarization and test practice and most of the research suggests test practice only goes so far (teflgeek), which is why you might want to ditch the exam material as loads of past papers are unnecessary (ShaunWilden).  Though for learners who want to get through a test (e.g. IELTS et al), learner-centred teaching must by definition involve the test (rliberni).

Dogme and the Exam/Test Class:  Ideas for teaching, revision and background links & references:

Hopefully all this is an accurate reflection of the discussion that took place – if you have anything to add – just let me know.

David Petrie (teflgeek)

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