teflgeek

Interesting post, and in answer to your closing question, it’s a trick one, but I generally think, no actually. Different levels have different issues, and while I think ‘proper topics’ and ‘bringing the world to the classroom’ obviously have a place at all levels, I’d suggest analysis, say, is of very very limited utility to most Elementary students.

By the way, a few years back, when Innovations Advanced first came out, we hawked a talk on this topic around for a while. Excuse the appalling self-indulgence of re-posting the whole thing, and of course feel free to trim, or just cut and keep somewhere or block or whatever, but here’s what I came up with back then. I think the main difference is there’s a stronger focus on what language needs to get covered at this level and why here:

Teaching the know-alls.
Let me be open here: this talk is about writing an advanced level book. It has to be like that because it is only through being asked to write one that I returned to teaching high level classes, having had a break from them for four or five years. It’s not that I don’t like advanced students as people, I always just found that lower level teaching was more rewarding, you could see more of an improvement, just see more the point of it all. Whereas in the past, when I taught advanced students, I would frequently think of them and occasionally rant in the staffroom:

What is wrong with them? Why do they insist on coming to class? Why don’t they just get out there and do something with their English? Get a job or a boyfriend, instead of looking at me with those jaded, been-there, done-that eyes. Just what is it that they want?

What I now realise is that rather than raging at my students and coursebooks in annoyance and desperation, I should have actually taken a step back and actually tried to answer these questions. What is wrong with them – or rather their English? Why do they come to class? What do they want?

I think for a long time my answers to these questions had been inherited more than considered. When I started teaching my impression of what students wanted was difficult grammar transformations. Loads of random idioms and ‘difficult’ words. Literature – especially the classics. Oh and teachers with beards! Or to transform that into ‘Advanced’ English:

Not only was it the transformations of cleft sentences and inversions appeared most wished for by students, but also – a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush – plentiful idioms. Moreover, it was felt they delighted in literary texts and analysis, in addition to their appetite for rarefied words and facial follicles on their teachers.

I say that this was my impression when I started teaching, because in fact for the first year or two of teaching I wasn’t allowed to go near an Advanced class, let alone proficiency. In fact, where I worked in Britain, the teachers of higher-level classes were paid more per hour than those who taught upper intermediate or below. I would see these bearded, tweedy teachers walking round with piles of photocopies from various dusty tomes, and occasionally here the class next door as they read through The Importance of Being Earnest. So you’d hear someone going “A handbag, a handbag”. I remember one time going past when the door was open and this really gruff deep, deep German voice saying “To lose one parent is unfortunate, but to lose two could be considered careless”

It reminded me of some fairly torturous school English classes reciting Shakespeare. It certainly all created the feeling that these classes should be more akin to English degrees and the teachers more like lecturers. It seemed communicative methodology was no longer appropriate – what we had was more like the old grammar translation. So when I finally got my chance to teach Advanced students, being young and arrogant, I thought right I’m going to be different- fresh, communicative. My ego was soon to be deflated.

To begin with, I did a lot of questionnaires, occasional role plays, conversations and the like – chatting essentially – and for a while everything seemed to go quite well. I – and maybe they – felt it was a release from their fusty old teachers with their fusty old grammar books. However, chatting is one thing, but I think students come to class (in answer to one of those questions) to learn something new. Taking this more task based approach – though I’m not sure I was quite aware that was what I was doing – I was trying to get them talking and then from that trying to correct and shape their language. But there lay a problem. I would sit there with paper and pen in hand – not interrupting myself (a mistake in itself) – waiting to note down their mistakes and shape their language. After five, ten, fifteen minutes of this I would frequently have almost nothing to write down. And even then when I wrote these errors on the board they were generally very quickly and sometimes rather dismissively corrected!

What I now realise is that tasks in themselves were not a problem; it was the fact that I was looking for the wrong things to correct. In fact, simply looking would better express the mistake I made. That’s because, as we shall discuss again later, Advanced students in a way don’t need much more language because they can express themselves quite effectively and accurately. What I needed to think about more was what they could’ve said but didn’t. Unfortunately, as a young – and now not so arrogant – teacher I didn’t fully grasp this. And really why should I have grasped it because neither did the received wisdom of my more experienced colleagues, my coursebook or diploma, which I fell back on. This meant more grammar, words and idioms and skills work. These are, of course, not bad things in themselves but neither my colleagues nor coursebook at that time recognised the importance of thinking about context, collocation, and chunks. I think I – and they – had more of a focus on difficult rather than new. Take this vocabulary exercise from a coursebook I used at the time.

Explain the difference between these words:

a. shack / hut / hovel / shed
b. houseboat / boat house / narrowboat / cabin cruiser
c. cabin / cottage / bungalow / villa
d. surroundings / environment / atmosphere

[this is from WORKOUT Advanced]

There are I think a number of problems with this exercise and many others which I did in the past of a similar nature:

It’s single words: How do you know the difference? How do you use them?
It’s very difficult for a teacher to do, let alone a student. It’s not that the difference between

They’re all nouns etc.

And for all that how much is actually new? And of that new language how much is actually something that will develop students communicative abilities. I think similar things often happen with the way grammar is treated. I often got students to compare pairs of similar sentences and discuss the difference in meaning. Or matching example sentences with different grammatical meanings. For example: which adverb:
a. describes how often something happens
b. intensifies an adjective
c. emphasises the verb
d. describes where the action happens
e. describes when the action happens
f. indicates how long an action continued for
g. commenting on the noun phrase

I’m really not sure how useful such an activity is for a student. But more to the point again the language often wasn’t very new. These are the words chosen for an exercise in one coursebook:
just
after thirty five years of living there
really
sometimes
when I’m abroad
totally
in Wales
all my life
actually
for seven generations
basically
until very recently

This seems the opposite of an adage I was taught on my diploma about using authentic texts. Don’t simplify the text, simplify the task. Here you don’t make the language ‘more difficult or new’, you make the task more difficult.

Of course, following coursebooks and advice, I would do the difficult grammar and idioms, but I think the problem here was the focus on the grammar rule, the transformation task, without thinking clearly enough about context. And then I would get students to produce examples for the sake of practice rather than thinking about context. As a result you would have examples such as:

Never will I forget holding him for the first time.
He is assumed to be earning lots of money.

The sentiment I understand, but it just doesn’t sound right – whether written or spoken.

Finally, I would do skills – which generally meant finding any kind of authentic text which vaguely touched my fancy, picking out a few tricky words and getting students to try and guess the meaning.

I would not say that these classes were disastrous or worthless but still they appeared dissatisfied so hence my rant … what’s wrong with them? I could say that students probably felt ‘stretched’ and ‘challenged’ and all those other things that advanced students should have done to them, but if I was honest stretching was sometimes more like torture at times, ‘challenging’ more like putting students in their place and yet at the same time wasn’t teaching enough new, relevant language.

So coming to write Innovations Advanced and teach as we were doing so – we turned to those questions again.

What’s wrong?
As we have established now, what’s wrong is not really the right question. Instead we should try and think what would make their English different and better. To get a grasp of that, the CEF is a good guide. Now I can’t use all the different sections, so, for reasons which will become apparent a little later, I’ve chosen ones on speaking and conversation. If you can, have a look through and isolate the factors which make a C1 different from a B2.

Range
Well, onene thing is that C1’s have a good command of a broad range as opposed to sufficient range. So they are more practised at general topics but also have that wider knowledge within academic, professional and leisure topics.

I realise some topic ‘genres’ we feature in the book are a bit vague but hopefully you can also see that there is a broad range and the topics are clear. And I think that IS important because students see themselves moving on a bit quicker, rather than following ten pages of a rather vague topic. Not only is there a broad range of topic there is also a range of register, so that more colloquial subjects such as humour and taboo, have more academic like texts about political correctness and swearing, while more serious ones like economy and finance are balanced by lighter magazine like articles such as the one you can see on the next page about debt. In all the units there is a double page spread based around conversation and listening while the other is based around a text. The key thing in both is – as with other levels of Innovations – thinking about the kinds of things people say in and around a topic. What you realise when you do this is that firstly, there’s a lot of language which will be new to an Advanced level student but also that these are frequently not exactly idioms and certainly not of the bird in the hand variety. Often they are new collocations with familiar words like debt. Sometimes we can focus on something like saddled with debt, but miss let it play on your mind. We want to try and get students to focus on both – and both are often glossed in the TB. What we don’t focus on though is single words. A good command comes from a broad and better knowledge of collocation.

There are a number of ways you get students to focus on these collocations and chunks – suggestions from audience – many of which are picked up in vocab focus activities. Finally, the other thing we try to do is to encourage Ss to talk about texts in relatively natural ways, which also show their comprehension.

Accuracy
Basically there’s very little difference as far as grammar is concerned – C1’s don’t make mistakes as opposed to just correcting themselves. Certainly students will need to broaden their range of grammar structures appropriate too context, they may need a little reminding from time to time, but grammar really isn’t their problem. Which is why vocabulary has a much more central role in the book. Basically every exercise is aimed to give an opportunity for the teacher to teach new language and students to learn. Where we do focus on grammar there are four types:
1. Word building – is it grammar? Kind of. But not a structure. It’s a theme.
2. lexical phrases fulfilling a grammatical function – comparing prediction etc.
3. Advanced structures – yes it’s inversion! But limited to context – and lexical!!
4. A number of activities which take a fairly global view of say auxiliaries, or modals or perfect tenses, but again short exercises, integrated with listenings or texts. The important
The aim is to encourage students to think, notice, and correct themselves.

Finally, The other way we often give students a chance to repeatedly monitor and correct their grammar is through vocabulary, by getting students to put vocab in the correct form – see how’s business.

Fluency, interaction, coherence
Partly because we are a little short of time, I’ve lumped these categories together, but I think they also share an interesting characteristic, which is the emphasis on chunking. B2’s fluency is hampered by searching for patterns and expressions. In other words, C1′ and C2’s know more of these chunks. Under interaction, C1’s can select a phrase, from a readily available range. In terms of coherence, they again talk of organisational patterns, which I take to mean the ways conversations develop, patterns such as initiate, respond, comment. Adding reasons or examples to comments etc.

What these all show are the centrality of teaching not just words plus grammar but teaching lots of fixed and semi fixed expressions to aid fluency. Some of these are those arguing / turn taking expressions such as:

It’s a nice idea in theory, but I just don’t think it works in practice.
I have to say,
I’ve got grave doubts about it myself
I’ve got a few slight reservations about it
I’m fundamentally opposed to the idea
I know what you mean in a way, but…
Fair enough, but…
I agree with you up to a point, but…
If they did that they’d be a riot.
The country would just grind to a halt.
if you ask me,
What annoys me most is the amount of…
Well what concerns me most is the fact that…
Spare me the details
Mind you,
etc.

I could go on… and indeed these and many other expressions are explicitly taught in the book. However, I also think we shouldn’t forget that in those patterns of conversation where we often exemplify or comment on our initial comment, there are also often many expressions to aid fluency.

Conversation

Finally, with the conversation section in the CEF you’ll have noticed the extra emphasis on emotion, allusive intonation and language and joking. Apart from having a unit on humour, we dealt with this is in part through having humour and banter-like comments in the tapescripts. How funny you personally find these are of course up to you, but they kept us amused when we were writing – and if you can’t laugh at your own jokes…!

Another way is teaching expressions and doing role plays where students are arguing or showing emotion. And finally, we try to help students move forward in terms of pronunciation / language exercises such as ones showing surprise and sarcasm.

Why do student’s come to class?
So we’ve seen what the CEF suggests students need to become more advanced speakers of English and I hope you think that we’re going someway to catering for those needs. But is that what students want? Is that why they come to class?

My personal belief is that students at all levels primarily come to class, to learn, practise, maintain and develop their speaking. Much as I would like them to do more outside the class, the reality – especially in monolingual settings – is that they may simply get no other opportunity to use their English in communicative ways. However, as my early teaching experience suggested, and indeed as the CEF suggests, becoming a more Advanced speaker actually takes you into areas of academic and professional life where students may on the one hand need to become more fluent writers, but also where the lines between written and spoken English become more blurred. Students who want to take their English to a higher level, are more likely to have academic and professional goals which may require the taking of exams.

There’s no particular reason for the order of units, no particular need to do all of them – which brings me to my final point and it’s an uncharacteristically humble one. The reality is that by the time you reach B2 and wish to progress beyond it, there is still a vast amount of language to learn. Enormous amounts. Making choices about what to teach is important and we feel the best way forward is to think about the kinds of conversations students want to have. However, that choice is still relatively arbitrary compared to the range of interests students may have and I have no doubt there will be occasional things you disagree with or feel you wouldn’t say or just have no interest in. Replace them, but still use the same principle – what would you say, who to, when, and why?

In the end this remains a general English coursebook – it’s not English for mechanics or fisherman or stamp collectors or lads on the pull, or psychology students or chefs, or rowers or mountaineers. In the end, and I speak as the author of a book, we have to recognise and we should tell our students that the real way forward still is to get out there, do something with their English, engage with their interests in English and not just sit in a classroom doing yet another textbook!