Teaching YLs: ideas for spoken and written practice

A huge thanks to Teachers E and S - I've been able to add a couple of practice activities by teaching their lesson plans! 

As the Summer Camp weeks go along, I should be able to add more to the following lists.

Spoken practice (YLs)

• capture the flag - with flashcards in two rows (each YL should stand next to a flashcard)
  
• Who am I - holding flashcards on one's forehead (without being able to see them)
  

Written practice, or practice with form (YLs)

• treasure hunt - given visuals (write the word) 

Other 'less extended' practice activities I've used:

Spoken practice (YLs)

• back to the board - Italian speakers call this game 'taboo'
• pictionary
• musical chairs
• run and tag
• whispers
• pass the flashcards round - and say the word aloud
• find the missing flashcards 
• run and tag
  
• Simon says
• chain story
  

Written practice, or spoken practice with form (YLs)

• pelmanism - I call it 'memory tiles' (if there are tiles containing the target vocabulary)
• word bingo
• board race
• battleship
• chain story
  

Pronunciation - Form or Form - Pronunciation? / Written - Spoken or Spoken - Written?

Reflections: MPF or MFP?

Why do CELTA tutors tell trainee teachers that they should follow MPF (meaning - pronunciation - form) in that order when clarifying language?

In terms of learning, does it matter whether the EFL teacher chooses an MPF procedure over MFP as in Guided Discovery tasks?

After teaching vocabulary to a group of YLs aged 8 and 9 this morning, I noticed some evident differences between the two clarification procedures.

I was teaching the word Poseidon, which is pronounced /pəsaɪdən/ in RP English. Despite drilling it several times and breaking it down into individual syllables, once my students saw the written form (i.e. spelling / orthography) of the word, some of them  came up with all sorts of pronunciations. I heard pole-say-dawn, pole-see-dawn or pole-side-dawn in the subsequent practice activities. No matter how many times I corrected certain students, there was still a tendency for some of them to creep back to their L1 habits.

What does this say about decoding and encoding a word? The MPF procedure ensures that language learners keep to the spoken form of a word until its pronunciation is more or less firmly lodged in their short-term memory. In an ideal world, it is at this point that they can move on to the written form of the word.

(There are exceptions to the MPF procedure for clarifying language, but this renders another blog post.)

Reflections: Written - Spoken or Spoken - Written?

What does this say about the order of language practice activities then?

In the context of teaching VYLs and YLs, the order is thus spoken practice before written practice. Note that this is different to what trainee teachers are taught on the CELTA, which is written (controlled) practice followed by spoken (controlled - freer) practice.

If we apply the Spoken - Written concept to staging practice activities, there should be plenty of spoken practice before the learners start writing a word or grammatical structures. More importantly, VYLs and YLs don't learn a language by reading and writing it; listening and speaking always happen first in real life.

(In a related blog post, I'm going to mention some extended practice activities in the context of teaching YLs.)

Teaching YLs: flexibility and effectiveness

When something doesn't go 'as planned' in a lesson, it becomes a creative learning moment for the teacher. This couldn't be closer to the truth when I said hello again to teaching YLs (under 11s) after a whole school year.

 Back-up activity format/arrangement

The original GTKY idea was having my students stand in two circles. Either the outer or inner circle was going to rotate left or right, so that the students could say hello to each other and repeat several sentences about basic personal information.

While it'd worked magically well with a CEFR A1/A2 group last year, there was confusion among this particular group of students at level A1. After another attempt, I had to come up with a different arrangement - asking my students to stand in two rows and move like a conveyor belt. It worked very well this time round.

What have I learnt from this?

The effectiveness of a YL lesson isn't necessarily measured against how closely an activity follows the plan, but how flexible a teacher can be when making decisions. I think there lies a delicate balance between when to insist on trying and when to use a back-up arrangement. In any case, the aim of my GTKY activity was achieved regardless. (So I knew what to do next time if things didn't work!)

Listen to the teacher

Some YLs (at levels A1/A2) can be talkative and although they're using a lot of L1 to socialise, I think it would be unrealistic to demand such students to use English for that purpose. There's often little point in either forcing the use of English or discouraging YLs from socialising with each other. It only becomes an issue when YL students keep talking during critical moments of a lesson, such as task setting or instructions.

Based on my observations, I'd like to outline three probable causes as to why this happens in a YL classroom:

1. YL students don't understand when exactly it's appropriate for them to stop talking and listen. This might not be a behavioural issue.
2. There's no reward system connected to student behaviour, which makes it harder for YLs to know when it's appropriate to stop talking.
3. There's a lack of clear attention-grabbing signal on the teacher's part, but even the classic 3-2-1 countdown cannot save a teacher's day if there's no reward system.

As you can see, points 1 to 3 are interconnected with each other.