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.