Demand High, Dogme ELT and some reflections

Demand High - Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill
Dogme ELT - Scott Thornbury

Let's put the jargons and names of ELT stars aside. Look into what these terms really mean.

Demand High and Dogme ELT

My humble view is that the joint effort of publishers and content writers have pushed the content in many English (EFL/ESL) coursebooks to such a high quality that a teacher can just 'hide' behind a curtain. Let the coursebooks teach the students by themselves. Teachers risk simply becoming teaching machines by simply managing a task set up and giving basic feedback. Arguably, software developers have been using A.I. to carry out just those classroom tasks.

If teachers simply leave the coursebooks to do the job, then, are we pretty much the same as self-checkout machines in supermarkets? (By the way, those 'please remove items in the baggage area' announcements really get on my nerves, especially when a machine gets it wrong!)

If my memory serves me correctly, Demand High was a reaction to us not doing enough to challenge/push our students. Dogme was a reaction to how we could still deliver lessons effectively even without coursebook materials and by tuning in to what our students genuinely wanted/needed to learn.

Dogme - 'it was all by accident'

A Dogme lesson by accident. How did it happen? Well, I blame hay fever. Before recalling the story here, my original lesson plan was on writing skills (IELTS Academic Task 1) through reading guided models.

So, my nose has been complaining loudly and resoundingly about the pollen. Sunny Italy doesn't help at all. Having been running a mucus factory and trying to cope with a running nose for the last 2 days, small talk always started with hay fever. It turned out the student who cannot be named thought I'd been having a temperature.

CCQ moment: Do I have a temperature? (No.) Are we talking about an allergy? (Yes.) Am I having allergic reactions to grass/tree/flower pollen? (Hell yes.) Omit the word 'hell'. There you go, hay fever.

The student then started to talk about her skin allergy, so we moved on to vocabulary extension in the topic of 'allergy'. 30 minutes later, she showed me the draft of an email, which she would need to send to her manager. We started incorporating some of the vocabulary items in her writing. All went well with the first two sentences.

Then, we touched on the third sentence which she needed to use a conditional structure in order to express her idea. The lesson then moved on to conditionals review: present and past (or the first, second and third). Since we were set a coursebook to follow, I suggested doing some IELTS listening as a check revision to our previous lesson.

Perhaps I should have just carried on with some on-the-spot practice activities of the conditionals, rather than introduced the IELTS listening tasks and taken some useful practice time away. Who knows?

Reflections of my past weeks

Lots of 'unprofessional' moments - when there are many things flying around

• 1) Don't ever ask students any question unrelated to THE task during FB, e.g. asking them the first question of a 'detail' task when they were focusing on the 'gist' task, thinking they may remember something. Not the wisest idea. Had to reassure my students indirectly!
• 2) Don't ever rubberstamp answers - it's very tempting in 1:1 or 2:1 lessons to acknowledge your students. Maybe, just nod, say 'thank you' and turn to the other student to ask what he/she thinks. And a quick 'no' reply at the heat of the moment could damage a student's confidence.
• 3) Check the listening track 5 minutes before a lesson - even when you're 100% sure you loaded the right track!
• 4) Nervous smile - probably look sarcastic depending on the teacher-student rapport.
• 5) Grading language - easy to resort to my normal speed of talking and give longer than necessary instructions (fillers, politeness, etc.). Some students did get confused because of my ambiguous wording.