Hybrid lessons: a laptop and a speaker

It all started with an email this morning - one of the students ('Student G') had to remain in self-isolation due to pandemic regulations, and she would join the afternoon lesson online from home.

Despite my modest knowledge of the hybrid classroom/lesson, I'd never taught one up to this point. So I spent the whole morning trying to visualise the logistics in the classroom and think through a number of key questions in my head. How would my students be working together? What would Student G need so that she could follow our lesson successfully? How could I make sure the sound was all right for all students? How would I deal with unexpected issues with technology? Where should I place my laptop?

In the end, I decided to do it like this:

 

(Note that I'm using Student G as a kind of 'hyponym' of those who join an in-person lesson synchronously from their home.)

• I put the lesson's digital material (handouts and information-gap task cards) in a shared folder on OneDrive, so that I could share the link with Student G prior to the lesson.
  (N.B. The material is numbered 1 to 4 for easy reference.)
  
  
• I place my laptop in such a way that the webcam could capture all students working in the classroom. I also projected the online meeting on the classroom's television, so that all students could see Student G.
  
  
• I connected my laptop to a stereo speaker and set the audio at a level which was audible but wasn't intrusive, so that all students could hear Student G talking and vice versa.

 

What worked well: some reflections

• Instructions - clear, succinct instructions with the usual checking questions work just as well as in any online or in-person lesson. In a hybrid lesson, however, it would be a good idea to 'chest' the material for Student G in front of the webcam (hold it for a few seconds) before moving back to the physical classroom. It also helps when eye contact is made with both Student G and other students when giving instructions.
  
  
  
• Arrangement (pairwork and groupwork) - once the laptop is set up at a stationary place, it would be easy for any student to move to the 'workstation' space for pairwork. Groupwork might be tricky depending on pandemic regulations and how many people one can fit in front of a webcam. As usual, it would work better by moving the students to a new type of arrangement before giving instructions. (In our case, it was convenient because we had worked on Can you + verb (base form)? a couple of weeks before. Student A, can you move here? Thank you.) I also asked my students to speak up when they were working with Student G, even though the laptop's microphone was able to pick up my voice from afar. (N.B. The online meeting's noise cancellation setting was put on its lowest.)
  
   
• Attention spread - I got this useful tip from one of the webinars I've attended. (A big thank you to those teachers who shared their experience of teaching hybrid lessons!) Generally speaking, there is a tendency for the teacher to focus on either Student G or other students for the extended period of time. When I was teaching this hybrid lesson, I tried eliciting answers directly from Student G (Yes, Student G?) as well as the rest of the class (with a follow-up question: Student G, do you agree?). Similarly, this technique was applied to post-task feedback giving.
  
  
  
• Listening - to avoid issues with echo, I muted the laptop's microphone while I was sharing sound with Student G in the online meeting. This worked smoothly since other students were able to listen to the audio through the stereo speaker at the same time.
  

What could have been better

• Monitoring - It felt as though I wasn't monitoring Student G sufficiently, but it was the noticeable difference between the in-person and the online modes which created this false impression. In a hybrid lesson, post-task pair check will take on greater importance since it represents the crucial moment for monitoring Student G's answers. Another useful monitoring tool is the chat in the online meeting, which I'm going to address in the post-task feedback.

• Post-task feedback - I had to rely on whoever was working with Student G to make sure she had the correct answers. I've also thought about other means of giving Student G feedback: chat, virtual board, screen sharing the answer key, showing the whiteboard through the webcam or Teacher Talk. Given its bad reputation, Teacher Talk may sound less desirable, but it is actually less time-consuming than other means of giving feedback on a shorter lesson task - and it is purposeful Teacher Talk. Screen sharing the answer key would be useful if the lesson task is longer or the answers more complex. The reason why I decided not to use the chat was that it would have effectively meant I needed to give the same feedback twice (physical whiteboard and chat), but I'm open to different opinions.
  
  
• Technology - my students and I did with bare essentials - a laptop and a stereo speaker. What would have been better was a second camera/webcam facing the physical whiteboard directly, but it wasn't too time-consuming to rotate my laptop.
  

Teaching grammar: reverse order (interrogative and then affirmative/negative)

It was an interesting lesson yesterday in a positive way. The students were learning the present perfect simple in the context of single past actions/events (unspecific time). Since all of them are L1- and L2-speakers of Italian, there is no doubt that translation has played a certain role in their acquisition of this grammatical structure in English.

We started off with the topic of continents and countries. The students made a list of A-Z countries, A for Argentina, B for Brazil, C for Canada, and so on. This was an engaging activity for them.

The students were then shown a short dialogue:

Person A: I went to France two years ago.

Person B: Have you been to France?
Person A: Yes, I have.

The language clarification work then centred itself on the difference between a specific past time (past simple) and 'time not known' (present perfect simple).

After that, the students used their list of countries and practised the closed interrogative form along with the short answers.

In the next lesson stage, the students practised doing KEY Reading Part 2 to focus on the affirmative and the negative forms.

It was at this stage that the focus on -ve (pronunciation) and the form took place. This has made me wonder if some coursebook writers suggest a similar approach:

meaning - practice activity (focus on meaning, e.g. alternate responses) - pronunciation work - inferring the form - practice activity (gap-fill)

...

Fast forward to the language practice stages:

15 minutes left - at this point, the students had just finished doing a guess true or false sentence construction activity with a deck of paper cards (verbs). They were all making excellent progress. (Student A's current language level was very strong.)

Student A: Let's play a game.
Me: All right then. What would you like to play?
(various ideas from the class)
Student B: A-Z list of cities this time?
Student C: Simon Says?
Me: Right, let's have a vote. Who would like to play ...?

Then we played Simon Says for 5 minutes. (I joined in the game too.)

...

7 minutes left - the students wrote three questions with 'Have you + verb (past participle) ...?' which they would like to ask each other. We finished the lesson with another practice.

Note: This is a Teens KEY preparation class at Pre-Intermediate (A2) level.

Reflections on Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning

Teaching and learning have undergone a period of sweeping changes which was almost unthinkable in the last decade. As we are standing at the crossroads where learning can take place both synchronously and asynchronously, how can teachers best use lesson time to maximise language learning? In search of answers, I shall reflect on my personal observations and explore some implications for lesson planning and choice of activities.

This is a talk which I delivered at the 2021 annual conference of International House (IH) Milan and San Donato.

Exploiting reading texts for communication

I started off feeling slightly dissatisfied with some traditional reading tasks in the EFL classroom. (Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy with most coursebook tasks!) But what I've started noticing is that not only do my students' reading speeds vary considerably, but most classroom reading tasks also represent mere exercise for their own sake or they are there on the page to present contextualised language. If used at their face value, most tasks would barely reflect our purposes of reading in real life. So, instead of coming up with an extra task for the fast finishers, I've started exploring other ways of using reading texts:

Scanning for information: jigsaw reading for collaborative exchange of information

I was teaching a demo lesson in July 2021 for my school's professional development course - IH Certificate in Teaching Young Learners and Teenagers (CYLT). On this occasion, there were 4 students who were young teens at Pre-Intermediate level.

The course tutor, Kate, gave me two Wikipedia dossiers of Harry Kane and Giorgio Chiellini. (Let's not mention that England lost to Italy on penalty!) The reading task required my students to scan for specific information about the footballers, such as their age and place of birth. While I was preparing this lesson, I thought it would be a good idea to make this task a bit more communicative. We often look up factual information on the Internet in order to relay it to others, don't we? So, I adapted the given dossiers for a jigsaw task, in which my students had to work in pairs and relay information about Harry or Giorgio to each other.

Role play: another route to achieving detailed comprehension(?)

I'm teaching a class of KEY Preparation (A2) this year. We had a lesson on Reading skills two weeks ago, and the coursebook task was based on a short text about a teenage sports coach recounting his experience. Instead of running it as a traditional 'detailed comprehension' task, I asked my students to read the text and think of three questions to ask the teenage coach. After that, one of them in each pair/group would assume the role of the teenage coach. My students interviewed each other and answered questions from their peers using the information from the text. I was glad to see this role play injected a bit of life into the classroom.

Gist: collaborative matching texts to their headings/titles

I tried this one with a pair of Upper-Intermediate (B2) adult learners last week. For this 'gist' reading task, I divided the text into two equal halves. The students had to summarise the texts to each other and work together to match their texts to the respective headings/titles. This collaborative task mirrors our acts of sharing what we've read with others while our conversation partners often capture the 'gist' of it.

An afterthought: are these adapted Reading skills tasks pointing to Widdecombe's idea of 'authenticising' an 'inauthentic' text? (Thinking ...)

New school year, new action points

Note to self:

• for a class of young teens preparing the KEY exam - keep policing my graded teacher talk (in terms of both language and speed of delivery)
  
  
• for the above class - experiment with modelling practice activities instead of giving 'longer' instructions
  
  
• for a class of older teens preparing the FCE exam - still the same coursebook as last year, but introduce even greater opportunities of communicative practice
  
  
• for the above class - adapt practice activities for groups of threes more frequently
   
• for company courses - encourage learners to bring material to the lesson more frequently
  
  
• for IELTS/CPE preparation (and other courses in general) - be selective of my feedback to avoid overwhelming learners with too much information

 

Experimenting with drama in EFL

The Friday Show has been a usual fixture at the summer camp. For this week, my group of students (9- to 11-year-olds) came up with a short sketch.

Since it was my first time using drama in the 'classroom', I decided to let things develop without a fixed plan.

 

Day 1, Monday

The students worked in two smaller groups. One group came up with the plot while the other group chose a song and transcribed its lyrics.

As most of them were at level A1/A2, they talked in L1 but produced written language in English.

Day 2, Tuesday

Having taken note of what the students came up on Day 1, I prepared a worksheet for the group by typing their original plot on Word.

For the day's main task, I had identified six 'scenes', for which short dialogues would need creating, in the plot. The students were therefore split into six pairs. Each pair had to write short dialogues for their designated scene.

Again, they discussed the finer ideas in L1 but produced written language in English. The weaker students needed support since they didn't have enough language for writing; word spelling was a key problem for them too.

Day 3, Wednesday

The students worked on the other items for the show.

(In the meantime, the script was more or less ready behind the scene - several mistakes in the student-generated dialogues were ironed out. I also added a small number of simple structures at level A1/A2 to it.)

Day 4, Thursday

The students rehearsed the sketch and improved on a few places in the script. Support on pronunciation was given to one or two weaker students.

Day 5, Friday

The students had a final rehearsal on their own.

About half of the group were already able to memorise their parts, which was an excellent sign in terms of learning and using the language. This was, however, not compulsory as they were told they could always rely on the script. Having said that, only one student read directly from her piece of paper due to pronunciation-related challenges.

The final result was satisfactory given we had a few hours to create a sketch. In terms of language learning, it would have been better if error correction had been elicited from the students.

With hindsight, I shouldn't have overlooked stage choreography in the rehearsals. Apology for being the perfectionist here. For maximum performance effects, the students should be encouraged to adopt clear diction and appropriate tones, speak with audible voice levels, and pay attention to their body gestures (i.e. avoid facing the audience with their side or back).

Teaching YLs: a more refined take on student-centredness

I was teaching animals (vocabulary) with can/can't (grammar) to a group of 9- to 11-year-olds.

It started off with the idea of engaging my students at the planning stage. (Yes, it's always been my nightmare to have a group of bored faces who would zone out during the lesson!) As I was delivering the in-person lesson, I noticed a  special vibe which I had never experienced in all other previous YL classes. It was akin to the concept of 'flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Finding Flow (New York: Perseus, 1998) - wonderful to take a back seat and see the whole class of YLs working so calmly in pairs.

Looking back on the lesson, I've identified what particularly worked well:

Warm-up routine

I've been a language learner and there were occasions on which I wished I'd had the chance to get to know certain classmates. Hence I decided to use 'rings of circle' as both a GTKY activity in the first lesson and a warm-up routine.

The student-to-student rapport was overall excellent. We continued building on the familiar routine of standing in two rings of circle, so that everybody has the chance of talking to each other through rotation and turning towards each other.

Presentation of vocabulary

I realised that whenever I mimed along with flashcards, it was always me, the teacher, who imposed the actions on my students.

What I did this morning was that I elicited the mime of each animal from individual students. Then other students followed their classmates, which worked wonderfully.

(Thanks to my colleague, teacher S, for guiding me on drawing flashcards with a marker pen. Teacher development for next year: learn how to draw?) 

 

Practice of vocabulary and grammar: guess which animal

Team games worked well. For vocabulary, an individual student had to mime the animal while the teams compete against each other in writing the answer most quickly. (N.B. One benefit of not having gone for 'saying the answer aloud' is that it might be harder for the teacher to judge who have raised their hands most quickly.)

For grammar, a representative of each team was given the same animal. They went back to their teammates, who had to ask them 'Can you + verb?' (questions). The representative could only answer 'Yes, I can' or 'No, I can't', and their teammates needed to guess the animal as quickly as they could.

I ended up showing the answer once by accident - didn't hide it well in front of my students. They were honest enough to tell me, so each team earned a point!

 

Positive points system

The implication of catching YLs being good is that I've started giving points to the well-behaved opposite team when a student started misbehaving. (The key word is 'opposite'.)

I've also started using the points system more consistently when grabbing students' attention for giving instructions, asking students to tidy up/put things away, etc. 2 points are sometimes given to the 'good' team, whereas the 'bad' team still get 1 point if they are just a bit slower.

Teaching YLs in-person - after a hiatus

Forgive my silly thoughts, but I do sometimes wonder if I would forget how to teach YLs after a year of not having done it. This was exactly how I was feeling before my first summer camp lesson today - a group of 9- to 11-year-olds. By the way, the youngest student I've taught this year (2020-21) was 13.

Some observations:

• GTKY with two rings of students worked well. I had a group of 12, so there were two rings of 6. At any time, only the inner or outer ring would rotate.
  
  
  
  I introduced myself to the students, which also acted as a model. "My name is Daniel. What's your name?"
  
  
  
  At the very end, I asked the students to turn towards their partners in the same ring, so that everybody has a chance to talk with (absolutely) each other.
  
  
  
• Chain story to revise vocabulary doesn't work so well in a plenary setting in terms of student engagement, unless the size of the group is small. The compensation was to ask the students to help each other in an attempt to engage those who have already had their turn. This isn't a new observation, but the only time I had success with an adult class of 4 when I used the plenary setting as a model for pairwork practice.
  
  
  
• Lesson planning / Classroom management - one way of alternating between 'stirrers' and 'calmers' is to think about whether the students have been actively moving and whether they would be doing the same or opposite in a subsequent activity.
  

(At the risk of slight exaggeration, the number of hours I've spent under the sun today more or less exceeded that I did for the whole year in the UK. Anything above 15°C is warm - 20°C is hot - this is my idea of summer temperatures. It was 32°C today in Milan - lovely blue sky though.)

Teaching grammar: self-checking questions

Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) are undoubtedly a term familiar to any teacher who has completed a TEFL training course. We ask CCQs to make sure our students have fully understood a lesson's target language, so that they won't fossilise erroneous assumptions which may later contribute to all sorts of errors (e.g. interpretative, strategic, stylistic, etc.) in their language production.

I believe, however, CCQs aren't limited to the domain of EFL teachers. Our students can make good use of them too.

I was tapping into my personal experience of learning German noun, adjective and article endings. Like many German learners who use English as the referential anchor, I always joked we had it much simpler than the 'infinite' number of German cases and endings. Nevertheless, it is my German teacher, Beate, who I have to thank for helping me attain mastery of this system. (I'm still making loads of mistakes because of noun gender, but that's another story.) She explained how it works by giving me four self-checking questions.

For those of you interested in the self-checking questions, here they are:

1. What gender is the singular/plural noun?
2. Is there an article in the sentence? (Do we need one?)
3. If there is an article, does it already carry the gender ending?
4. What case is the object noun in the sentence?

Gestern habe ich ein blaues Fahrrad gekauft. [I bought a blue bicycle yesterday.]

1. Fahrrad is a neutral noun. It is singular in this sentence.
2. We need an article because Fahrrad is singular countable.
3. The indefinite article ein is not inflected; it can signal either the masculine or neutral gender.
4. Fahrrad is in the akkusativ, not dativ, case because of the verb gekauft. The indefinite article ein is sufficient (eines is in the genetive case), but we have the adjective blaues, which carries the -es netural gender ending.

After using these self-checking questions for a gazillion times, I have internalised the entire system to the point of reducing my formulation ('thinking') time down to less than a mere second! In other words, it has become an automatised process for me in speaking and writing.

If we transfer the above learning experience to the English language, teachers may be able to go a step further by giving their students self-checking questions where appropriate. In turn, the students can ask such questions outside the classroom, which would enable them to move closer towards internalising the use of a target language. To this end, collaborative 'guided discovery' tasks with checking questions (CCQs) are a great teaching tool.

Ideas for teaching Writing skills

Here are some ideas for teaching Writing which I've tried this month - by deconstructing the process of writing, rather than consulting empirical research.

 

FCE Writing (Part 1)

The issues which my students were facing included 1) the lack of a central idea and 2) the lack of development in each paragraph.

First, we established a template structure (as below):

Introdcution

Paragraph #1 (idea: ___)

• statement:
• supporting reason/example:
• consequence/result:
• summary (paraphrasing/mirroring the statement):

Paragraph #2 (idea: ___)

Paragraph #3 (idea: ___)

Conclusion

 

Then, the students brainstorm ideas collaboratively. (Each bullet point represents a single sentence.)

Once they have finished brainstorming, what the students need to do is turn each bullet point into a full sentence.

Formal and informal emails

As an extension, I asked my Business English students to come up with 'less formal' and 'more formal' equivalents of what they had written.

• Feel free to get in touch for more information.
• Please let me know if you need any further information. (semi-formal)
• Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further information. (formal)

This allowed my students to practise choosing vocabulary appropriate to the tenor (relationship between the sender and the recipient). They could also build up a bank of expressions in both styles.

 

Learner Agency - how learning happens online

It sometimes feels as if the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed a sizeable part of TEFL back to pre-Chomsky days, but not all is lost!

This isn't so much about researches on how languages are learnt but rather how learning happens online, which brings me to the topic of Teacher/Learner Agency.

Oxford University Press has invited several speakers to deliver webinars on this topic: Andy Gao, Terrie Cradd, Kathy Kampa, and many more at their ELT Online Conference 2021.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyxvfJQNH4 (Andy Gao)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHVZyD_Ce0s (Terrie Cradd)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCpuZbYg2nI (Kathy Kampa)

How to teach online, but how to learn online

I was a schoolboy when the SARS pandemic broke out in 2003. Back in those days, there was unlimited broadband (yes, you read it correctly!) at home already thanks to the digitisation push in 1997. School moved online to the internal email network for two months. Video meeting was still in its embryonic form on the laggy MSN Messenger, so online lessons were out of the question.

Fast forward 17 years, we had to move online all of a sudden, but the methodologies which most EFL teachers are using in their online lessons still consist of assumptions based on the in-person mode of instruction. I, myself, am one of such teachers.

This has got me into thinking about how learning actually happens online. With little time to delve into research results, webinars are a much quicker way of getting as much information as I possibly can. The webinars above are a good place to start.

My current belief is that there need not be massive changes to language acquisition theories, but I'm going to have to think hard about the potential affordances which some digital materials can offer. Learner Agency comes into play because students need to know how to take notes (screenshots? Word documents?) and organise the information they've received in online lessons. No matter how effectively we teach, students need to be taught online study skills before they can reach their full learning potential.

Success stories

I wrote a post about being Powerpoint-drunk, but I still use Powerpoint as a (prepared) digital whiteboard in my online lessons. It's worked better with older teens and adults than younger kids. I've also verified successful learning with some of my most motivated students by using language proficiency tests and appropriately designed end-of-course tests. Maybe 'motivated' isn't the best word, but I've noticed those students tend to possess good note-taking and organisational skills which help them refer back to their past learning.

Patchy 4G in the age of 5G

This is a tech-related post - it's been a tricky second half of the week due to Internet issues.

As I've decided not to tie myself to 24-month fixed-line rental (and broadband Internet plans) in Italy, I'm using mobile Internet at home. The Internet is vital to online teaching and so I have SIM cards with two different major network operators. In case one fails, I thought, the other one would still save my day. But after this week, I might have to reconsider my options.

By Sod's law, the back-up SIM card failed me this time round. On Wednesday evening, my main SIM card started connecting to the barely functional 4G+. Normally it would stay on 4G even though my router is '4G+ capable'. This meant the 'stop' mechanism wasn't working. The constant shift between 4G and 4G+ caused the Internet to cut off for a few seconds every time it happened. 

So I temporarily switched back to using my old '4G only' router and tried it with both SIM cards. The speed on 4G was dead slow. By this point I had figured out that upgrading work was being done to my nearest mobile radio tower. I remember a similar two-week ordeal in 2019 - the trigger was a mild rainstorm at that time.

You can imagine my annoyance since a stable Internet connection is required for online lessons.

The solution? I'm going to use a '4G only' router to avoid my SIM card switching inadvertantly to 4G+. It seems my three-day ordeal is over (slight improvement!) and I truly hope I didn't speak too soon. Then I'll also have to look into a third mobile network provider whether it's on mobile or fixed-line Internet.

(For those techies out there, I'd prefer using my '4G+' router on 5 GHz since the family living next door generously uses up two out of three chunks of 2.4 GHz channels.)

Teaching prefixes: mental associations

What's your 30-second story about a word?

It was an improvised idea which worked well with a C1 (Advanced) group of General English adult learners.

We were using a coursebook graded article about a hotel as the langauge input. Halfway through teaching the lesson, the word 'preposterous' suddenly came to my mind. I started pondering how this word had became stuck in my mind. Then I figured out it was the sound of which I've formed strong mental associations - the way how Sir John Gielgud said this word in the screen adaptation of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance. My brain immediately evokes the image of Sir John, who played the role of Aaron Jastrow, saying this word in a disapproving tone. (The other words are 'mischance' and 'misjudgement' which come from Jastrow's final diary entry.)

Tapping into my personal experience of forming associations with words, I decided to ask my students to choose a word with prefix and tell the class about their mental associations with it. (When did they first come to know the word? What was the occasion?)

It worked well - two students picked the same word by chance! This was an excellent example which illustrates how each of us forms highly personal mental associations even with the same word.

Teacher Training - a humbling experience

It was a while ago when I read Teresa Woodward's article on being a teacher trainer.

I wouldn't call myself one, but I feel fortunate to be involved in a couple of teacher training initiatives by the school.

The way I approach this is of a bottom-up style - I see myself as someone who helps other teachers and has something to offer them, so that it makes their lives easier.

It's been a humbling experience because it makes me realise how much more I still need to learn. There's also the obvious - being able to demonstrate what I'm preaching!

(By Sod's law, I read an article on the BBC about how mispronouncing names is increasingly seen as an intentional offence. And one thing I need to learn is to pay greater attention to the spelling of names!)