"Imposter phenomena" by Teresa Bestwick

I've been doing a tiny bit of presenting recently - Teresa's mini-plenary session on imposter phenomena springs to mind. You can find her blog post here.

Personally, I'd be cautious of preaching something (methodology or tools alike) which I haven't tried out with my students. I do talk about teaching theories, but I use them in order to support my critical analysis of methodologies or classroom tools. Fortunately, nobody has said this to me yet: you haven’t actually tried this with your own students though, have you? However, I've already witnessed it happening to other people.

Unless the aim of our talk is to promote a methodology or tool, I think it's important to provide a critical view when presenting in webinars or at conference sessions. This doesn't mean we should be self-defeating, but adding something as simlpe as a qualifying statement would do the job (given that it's based on actual practice!). In the course of developing Second Language Acquisition theories, some methodologies have become fashionable only to be replaced by others. After all, no methodology is inherently good or bad, but rather it's about how effective or efficient they are for language learning, and this depends very much on one's teaching and/or learning context. There's one thing we can't deny though - language is a medium through which we communicate our ideas.

Now, I think we can easily spot an impostor 😁 by asking the 'silver bullet' question, but let's be kind and supportive to them.

Afterthought: my talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference 2020

In my recent talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference, I shared 5 materials-light language practice ideas.

In my Activity 4, I was talking about the idea of appropriacy (Hymes, 1972) in using functional language. Here were my two examples:

• buying a cuppa at a busy train station - 'A large tea, please.'
  
• visiting the post office to pick up a parcel - 'Could I collect my parcel, please?'
  

In the second example, I used an unnatural model in order to highlight the contrast of registral style with the first. On second thoughts, who would even be that formal in the UK? Unless you live in Windsor or (maybe) Sandringham, most people would just ask 'Can I pick up my parcel?' 

Thanks also to my colleagues for raising my awareness of English varieties. I'd always thought the word borough was pronounced /bʌrə/ until the week before my talk. There's a different pronunciation in the US, /bɝːoʊ/, which I didn't know before.

Lexis: connotations and culture

 A brief snapshot of yesterday's lesson with Teens FCE Preparation:

... we were grouping some adjectives of personality by connotation. The two groups are 'usually positive' or 'usually negative'.

The word emotional came up. My two students, who are first-language Italian speakers, immediately said it's 'usually positive'. Then I asked them this question - 'If someone is emotional, does that person often over-react? Is he or she stable emotionally?'

We concluded that most people use emotional in the negative sense to criticise others, not in the sense of describing the state of being filled with emotions, e.g. 'I'm getting emotional.'

Reflections:

I've questioned why I associated emotional immediately to a negative connotation. Was this one of my numerous British moments? After all, we've inherited some traits of Victorian England, one of which says you shouldn't be expressing your own emotions too outwardly. In other words, it's the famous 'British/English stiff upper-lip'.

Maybe being emotional is considered acceptable in Italian societies, whereas in the UK such behaviour is usually frowned upon and would be regarded as aggressive. Cultural differences.

Proper first day of 2020-21

The slight build-up of excitement appeared on the day before the start of year - face-to-face lessons. How would my students feel in a socially distanced classroom? Can they completely avoid touching role cards in simulation or role play practice? Would they get bored or frustrated by not being able to mingle or work with their classmates beyond their social bubbles? Would they be worried about falling innocent victim to some invisible viruses (google 'long covid'), even though they agreed to come to the lesson in person?

A million questions went with me on my first proper commute to Milan this morning. At 8°C, the autumn air is brisk - what a pleasant surprise for September in Italy.

I taught two groups of teens today - FCE preparation and PET preparation.

Some reflections on teaching socially distanced face-to-face classes

What worked really well:

To let my students give their personalised responses to the pandemic situation, I used a PET-style pyramid discussion task in the context of various modes of learning. They discussed the pros and cons of online, face-to-face, asynchronous (graded down to 'forum' or 'online exercises'), and flipped classroom (graded down to 'video tutorials'). The 'New Normal' it is.

My students also discussed their learning goals - what they wish to achieve on their course. This gave them the chance to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, which helps them set learning priorities. In one class, this led to a brief discussion of our attitudes to mistakes. Feeling I've got some shy, self-conscious (or maybe they're pushed by their parenrs) students, so we've set the slogan/motto of the class: mistakes are OK.

In my FCE class, we touched on study skills training too - the use of Cambridge Learner's Dictionary online for pronunciation.

What worked okay:

Dogme-style (more like strong-end TBL) post-task focus on language. I'm still new to the part of whipping out a practice activity - thinking on my feet. The language point was quantifier, or too + quantifier. I elicited 3 things each person had eaten; when we had a list of food and drinks on the board, the students told each other about what food or drinks they'd like to have more or less/fewer than now in general. Change of conrext was set clearly, a model given - I eat too much ___. The activity took off nicely, but the langauge clarification bit could have been more complete to include too many, too few, too little. Devising materials-free communicative practice (not just any) on the spot is the fun challenge of Dogme.

What didn't go as planned:

The lessons' digital role cards were prepared and put in one place - a Powerpoint file, which changed into Google slide once uploaded to Drive. This was intended for my students to bypass the touching and passing bit with materials in the traditional paper format. They can use their own smartphones to access role cards. While I could have shared my documents on Drive directly, the URLs were too long to type.

QR codes were trialled but some students had older smartphone models without QR scan function. They might have to install a QR code scanner app which could potentially be unsafe. We went back to taking photos of my laptop screen as a contingency plan.

Next experiment: shortened URLs like bit(dot)ly.

The 'New Normal': online, face-to-face or hybrid EFL/ESL lessons?

It's a dynamic concept. There have been lots of talking about a 'new normal' in the UK, but nobody really knows what to expect. An array of contextual lexis has cropped up: remote teaching, online learning, working from home (Italians use the term 'smart working'), socially distanced, social distancing, and so on.

For ELT or, more specifically, EFL/ESL, the past few months of online teaching and learning has definitely left its mark on teaching techniques and the wider discussion of 'post-digital ELT' (if I can describe it as such) methods/approaches.

These are some possible scenarios:

• fully online
• fully face-to-face with social distancing in place
• a hybrid mode: face-to-face and online with various degrees of flexibility
  

Every teacher has their own preference, but I believe this discussion should focus on learning contexts. Of course, a flat screen will never beat face-to-face interactions - I'm thinking about paralinguistics here. And it'd be nice for both the teacher and the learners to have the peace of mind that their next-door neighbours aren't going to inadvertently cause disruptions to the online classroom.

Putting the teacher's preferences aside, I'd say the most effective online lessons are those with one-to-one and small groups up to four students. If technological innovations allow teachers to monitor two or more groups simultaneously, then this will provide the case for having larger classes.

Then there's the flipped classroom approach. It's part of the Blended Learning method and compatible with both online and face-to-face lessons.

Synchronous and asynchronous learning theories are more relevant to the post-lockdown hybrid mode of EFL/ESL lessons. What if a student can't physically come to the lesson? What if half of the class have face-to-face lessons while the other half join the same lesson via videoconferencing? This is going to be a curious experiment for 2020-21 and I shall look forward to hearing ideas and reflections from others.