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.