Issue 16: Spring 2004

Transcripción

16
Spring 2004
ih j o u r n a l
of education and development
It’s My Job to Ask the Questions by Jeremy Harmer
Understanding Chinese Students by Melissa Lamb and Alison Ashburner
Beginnings in IH by Colin McMillan
Real Pro’s by Jayne Silva
CELTA and the Experienced Teacher by Keith Hawkins
Doing the Distance Delta by Richard Hargreaves
Motivation Among EFL Teachers by Simon Cox
Methodology for Beginners by David Tompkins
Something on Language Awareness by Alex Tilbury
Tests and Exams in IHWO by Mike Cattlin
journal of education and development
Issue 16 • Spring 2004
Contents
Editorial
2
50 Years of IH
Beginnings by Colin McMillan
4
Classroom Matters
It’s My Job to Ask the Questions? Reflections on an Ordinary Teaching Experience
by Jeremy Harmer
Lost in Translation: Understanding Chinese Students by Melissa Lamb and Alison Ashburner
6
8
Career Development Matters
Real Pro’s: Developing Trainees’ Awareness of Professionalism on CELTA Courses
by Jayne Silva
CELTA and the Experienced Teacher by Keith Hawkins
Going the Distance by Richard Hargreaves.
Why Do We Do It? Motivation Among EFL Teachers by Simon Cox
11
12
14
16
Language and Terminology
Methodology for Beginners: Sticking Labels on What You Already Know by David Tompkins
Something on Language Awareness by Alex Tilbury.
18
20
Tests and Exams
The IHWO Placement Test and The EURO Exam for IH Schools by Mike Cattlin
26
In your Own Words
The Game by Benita Cruickshank
Words by Andy Cox
28
30
IHWO News
What’s going on in the IHWO
31
Book Reviews
Cutting Edge Advanced reviewed by Will Hutton
New Headway Intermediate reviewed by David Riddell
Inside Out Elementary reviewed by Melissa Lamb
Natural Grammar reviewed by David Riddell
Focus on IELTS reviewed by Nancy Wallace
Assessing Young Learners reviewed by Nancy Wallace
Task Based Learning and Teaching reviewed by Amanda Lloyd
Homework reviewed by Leslie Anne Hendra
Eats, Shoots and Leaves & The Guide to Better English reviewed by Elena Rose
Just Right reviewed by Alastair Douglas
English Pronunciation In Use reviewed by Andy Cox
34
34
35
35
36
36
37
37
38
39
40
International House Journal of Education and Development • International House, 106 Piccadilly, London W1J 7NL, U.K. Tel: +44 (0)
20 7518 6955 • e-mail: [email protected] • Editors: Rachel Clark & Susanna Dammann • Subscriptions Manager: Ruth
Marriott • Editorial Board: Nigel Beanland, Steve Brent, Pippa Bumstead, Michael Carrier, Roger Hunt, Jeremy Page, Scott Thornbury
Subscriptions: Contact Ruth Marriott, Subscriptions Manager, IH Journal of Education and Development, International House, 106 Piccadilly,
London W1J 7NL, U.K. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7518 6955 • e-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 1368-3292
Editorial
IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004
E D I TO R I A L
Susanna Dammann
Co-editor
Rachel Clark
Co-editor
Nigel Beanland
Advertising
editor
Ruth Marriot
Subscriptions
editor
IELTS and up EAP and University Foundation Programmes is
clearly answering market demands. Mike Cattlin’s article on
p. 26 says more about an exciting innovation on the examination front which is unique to IH.
Jeremy Harmer, as we noted in the last issue has joined the
IH Board of Trustees, and we are grateful to him for allowing
us to print, from the talk he gave at the 2003 DOS
Conference, his thoughts on classroom practice. It’s good to
read what the more exalted figures in the world of ELT actually get up to when back in the classroom, and good too, to
be reminded that ‘real’ writing can be a stimulating and effective tool in the classroom. As people who, by definition
almost, care about words and how they achieve their effects,
perhaps we language teachers sometimes need to remember to look again at the work of those who have used words
outstandingly in the past and to introduce it more often to our
students. We also experiment with words ourselves and two
results of these experiments may be found in the new section
in this issue – ‘In Your Own Words’ - writing connected in
some way to teaching or language. We hope you will enjoy
reading Benita Cruikshank and Andy Cox’s contributions and
if you feel inspired by them, please send us your own pieces
of writing.
We have, as a result of very hard work from Nigel Beanland
(thanks Nigel), a huge review section this time, so the ‘Book
Special’ section in which authors, teachers and trainers write
about a chosen coursebook begun last issue, will continue in
the next one with articles about Cutting Edge. However, we are
aware that most of our reviewers are based in London and
we’d like more of you to be involved: if you would like to do a
review (and get a free book for yourself or your school) please
get in touch with him at [email protected] .
He’ll send you the book and you do the review. Simple!
There are (again!) too many contributors to mention them all,
but we are immensely grateful to all those who have given us
their time and energy, to make this your Journal; keep the
articles coming – and thank you!
elcome to this new issue of the IH Journal, which is,
for at least one among you: a ‘most important
source of practical and theoretical input as it
contains the most recent, and therefore relevant, development
and thought in EFL’. Thank you Carrick Cameron of IH Huelva
for those encouraging words. We hope all of you will find
something in the contents of this number which is relevant and
that many of you will be stimulated to react to what you read,
by developing your classroom activities as a result, or by
writing to let us know what you think, or both.
We are sad to say goodbye to Ruth Marriott, who added to
her duties in IH London as an excellent administrator, by running the subscriptions for the Journal and helping to develop a
database which we hope will ensure that you all get your
copies on time. (Please let us know if you don’t.) We wish her
all the best in her new life up North. It’s also goodbye to the
2003 purple cover and hello to the new blue for 2004 (we
thought it would look rather good on your shelves next to the
purple – we hope you agree!).
We have once again had to squeeze, to get everything into
this issue, and once again have had to postpone publication of
one or two items for lack of space. One space-taker, and
worth every column centimetre, we feel sure you will agree, is
Alex Tilbury’s thought-provoking article on ‘Language
Awareness’, provoked itself by his reaction to Rodney
Blakeston’s piece in Journal 14.
Now that the 50th year celebrations are over (see the IHWO
news for Colin McMillan’s description of the amazing variety of
activities that IH schools in Portugal undertook to mark this
occasion) it is time for us once again to be looking ahead to the
future. Despite continuing gloomy predictions based on the
world situation, expansion into Asia is booming (see Alison
Ashburner and Melissa Lamb’s article on p. 8 for first hand
knowledge of and insight into teaching Chinese students). In
addition, a shift in focus in Study Abroad schools across the
world, away from ‘traditional’ General English and towards
increased provision of examination preparation courses such as
W
—2—
Fifty Years of IH
FIFTY YEARS OF IH
Beginnings
Colin McMillan
t was in 1959 that I heard the name Haycraft for the first
time. At the time, I was taking a year out from university and
living in Seville, giving English classes to keep body and soul
together. One day, in the middle of a private class, probably to
ease the boredom of the course book, my student, Francisco,
asked me if I’d heard about the goings on in Córdoba of the
Haycrafts.
The ‘goings on’, as far as I could discover,
amounted simply to parties with dancing, which, in the repressive atmosphere of southern Spain in the 50s, and in
Francisco’s mind, had achieved the status of orgy. I tried to
explain this to Francisco and thought no more of the Haycrafts
and their parties in Córdoba for the next few months.
In October of the following year I returned to London to take
up my Spanish course again, which meant joining the previous
year’s first year students.
Among them was Josefa from
Cordoba, some of whose family had attended John and Brita´s
school and had featured prominently in John’s book on life in
Córdoba, Babel in Spain. Unfortunately, the particular references had not gone down at all well with Josefa and her family, who felt that John was certainly persona non grata. This,
together with similar reactions by others in Cordoba, may well
have influenced the press and the local authorities and led to
the ban to enter Spain put on John, which he only became
aware of, when he was prevented from entering Spain at the
Algeciras frontier in 1965. Whether Josefa had ever actually
met John, I am uncertain, but she was, nevertheless, extremely voluble in her criticism and dislike of him.
I
I managed to fix something
up which looked vaguely
bar-like with the help of a
few second-hand chairs,
a saw and hammer and nails
from my father’s tool-kit.
Another member of the eleven-strong second year Spanish
course I had joined was a Gibraltarian called Sam Benady who,
unlike the rest of us, was a smart dresser and seemed fairly
affluent. We soon discovered that a small part of his affluence
was the result of working as a part-time English teacher for the
Academia Británica (in the future to be renamed International
Language Centre – International House), John and Brita’s new
venture in Endell Street. Unlike Josefa, Sam had immense
admiration for John and regaled us with accounts of the school,
new teaching ideas, John and Brita’s life in Cordoba and their
plans for the future in London. It was unfortunate for us, in this
small group of students, that Josefa was quite incapable of
accepting any differences of opinion, attitude, feeling or affection from those she herself held, and carried on a vendetta with
Sam until the end of the course. On the one hand, this meant
that the rest of us were always on our guard to ensure that the
two of them were kept as far apart as possible, particularly on
social occasions, and on the other, we were always conscious
of the person behind their differences. John was a kind of
backdrop to our course for the next two years.
t some point in the year, Sam asked me to stand in for him
one evening at Endell Street. I was, he said, quite an
experienced English teacher: I had progressed in my teaching
in Seville from a Grammar Translation methodology that my
French teacher at school would have been proud of, to a
Direct Method approach, thanks to the Académia IFAR (Inglés,
Francés Alemán Ruso) where I worked for a few months under
the tutelage of a Jorge Chimewelski. I had also flicked through
Essential English by Eckersley, the last word in English language teaching at the time and, therefore, felt thoroughly prepared to substitute Sam. Despite that, I climbed the four (or
was it five?) flights of stairs at Endell Street with a certain trepidation, and had the distinct impression from the puzzled look
on the face of the blonde receptionist on the desk when I introduced myself (I’ve always assumed it was Brita but never had
the courage to ask her) that Sam hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the substitution!
Towards the end of that academic year, an excited Sam gave
us the news of the impending move of the school from Endell
Street to Shaftesbury Avenue and, knowing that I needed a job
over the summer months, told me that, as there was going to
be a bar in the new school, they were looking for someone to
run it. I’d done quite a few holiday jobs and this didn’t strike me
as too difficult. All I had to do, Sam told me, was give John
Haycraft a ring and set the thing up. This I did quite promptly,
only to be greeted by a bemused John Haycraft who told me
that, in the first place he hadn’t even thought about a bar; secondly, there was no bar in the new premises, but at the same
time it did seem quite a good idea and could I come over and
talk to him about it. This was to be my first meeting with someone of whom I had formed three conflicting mental pictures as
a result of the rather bizarre coincidences of the last year.
Would he be Josefa’s devil in disguise, Francisco’s
Bacchanalian figure or Sam’s angel in action?
As it was, on this, as on all other occasions, I felt completely
at ease with John: he was friendly, open, enthusiastic and
extremely humorous. He was also incredibly persuasive and by
the time we’d finished talking I had agreed, in true
entrepreneurial spirit, to take over a space
between two corridors (two small rooms in
fact), actually set a bar up from scratch, and
A
Colin McMillan started an English language school in Lisbon in 1963. This school, originally
called Central School of English, was one of the founder members of the IH world
organisation.
—4—
Fifty Years of IH
something which was really quite fresh, vibrant and new. The
bar/restaurant managed to survive despite the rather basic
fare we were able to provide (cold meats, boiled veg, instant
coffee) or perhaps because people from abroad had few
expectations of anything special in a culinary sense when they
went to England at that time.
The increase in student numbers meant that more teachers
were needed so that I, too, quite soon spent the mornings
serving instant coffee and peeling potatoes, and then, in the
afternoons, took off the apron and became an English teacher.
The summer also provided me with a most unexpected and
precious gift; it allowed me to get to know John quite well and
build the foundation of a friendship which continued unbroken
until his death in’96.
I returned to University in October of ’61, allowing the bar to
drift into other willing entrepreneurial hands (nobody paid me
anything for it!), and kept in touch sporadically with developments at 40 Shaftesbury Avenue until I’d finished my degree,
at which point, in a conversation I was having with John,
which had moved on to my own plans for the future, he said
‘Why don’t you start a school in Lisbon?’ And that’s another
story.
also provide lunches for groups of teenagers who would be
coming over from Italy at the beginning of the summer!
I managed to fix something up which looked vaguely bar-like
with the help of a few second-hand chairs, a saw and hammer
and nails from my father’s tool-kit. The kitchen area was a bit
more problematic as it didn’t have running water and there
were no cooking facilities. The solution to this was a borrowed
Primus stove and water from the toilets down the corridor.
And we (a girl friend from University and I) were ready to go on
day one of the new school in Shaftesbury Avenue.
But before that, the move had to be made from Endell
Street, a mile or so from Covent Garden, to Piccadilly Circus.
All hands - teachers, reception staff, friends and barman converged on the old school one Saturday morning and created a constant removal chain, carrying tables, chairs, desks,
blackboards, wallcharts, books etc. down Shaftesbury
Avenue to their new home at number 40, a feat that the volume of traffic, and probably the law, would make impossible
today.
That summer was an exhilarating experience. The new
school grew and teachers, receptionists and other staff felt the
excitement of growth and development, and being part of
Keltic
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—5—
Classroom Matters
CLASSROOM MATTERS
It’s my job to ask the questions? Reflections
on an ordinary teaching experience.
Jeremy Harmer
few weeks ago I took some material into my
Intermediate class that I had used many years ago, but
which I had almost forgotten about. However, it
seemed like a good idea to resurrect it, and anyway, to be honest, at that time I didn’t have too many other ideas in my head.
The material in question was a taped extract from Peter
Schaffer’s play Equus.
In Equus, a psychiatrist (Dysart) is trying to work out why a
teenager (Alan) has blinded a number of horses in a stable. The
play centres round the whole concept of worship, sexual insecurity, identity, and above all the value of imagination and
beauty. Peter Schaffer beautifully constructs a scenario in
which the psychiatrist’s cure of the boy happens at a cost to
both the boy and, just as importantly to the doctor’s own
hopes and fears. Some of this I explained (in different words,
of course,) to my students. I then told them that they were
going to hear the first real conversation between the boy and
the doctor on a morning after the psychiatrists had heard the
boy crying ‘Ek,’ ‘Ek’ in his sleep. They then listened to a tape
of which the following is a 50% extract:
Alan:
A
Dysart: Hello. How are you this morning?
Pause.
Come on. Sit down.
Sorry if I gave you a start last night. I was collecting
some papers from my office, and I thought I’d look
in on you. Do you dream often?
Alan:
Do YOU?
Dysart: It’s my job to ask the questions. Yours to answer
them.
Alan:
Says who?
Dysart: Says me. Do you dream often?
Alan:
Do you?
Dysart: Look – Alan.
Alan:
I’ll answer if you answer.
Pause
No. Do you?
Dysart: Yes. What was your dream about last night?
Alan:
Can’t remember. What’s yours about?
Dysart: I said the truth.
Alan:
That is the truth. What’s your about? The special
one.
Dysart: Carving up children. My turn.
Alan:
What?
The students appeared to be (mostly) intrigued by the tape,
which is spoken by two experienced actors. The nature of the
conversation, the backwards-and-forwards questioning etc is,
after all, quite interesting. Some understood more than others.
Nobody got the ‘carving up children’ reference of course
(carve and carve up don’t feature high on frequency lists), and
there were other features of language later in the extract which
passed them by especially since, because Equus was written
in the late 70s, there are anachronisms such as ‘bloody swiz’.
We talked about what we had heard and discussed some of
the language use. The students listened to the tape again with
apparent enthusiasm. When it was over we started working
through the script, in particular looking at which words were
stressed in certain phrases. Did they hear THAT is the truth,
That IS the truth or That is the TRUTH, for example (it was the
second option). I had them practise saying things like ‘Do you?’
with the kind of challenging knockback that the actor playing
Alan had used. We spent a good deal of time doing this.
Finally (and to cut a rather long story short) I placed two
chairs at the front and had pairs of students come up and act
out the scene. I had written their names on pieces of paper
and students had to take out the pieces so that the pairing
happened pretty much at random. I was especially worried
that a particular student would be chosen because she would
have had difficult doing such a thing, and her accent was still,
at intermediate level, pretty impenetrable. Luckily we ran out of
time before her name came out of the bag.
Dysart: Very well. Only we have to speak the truth.
went back to the staffroom at Anglia Polytechnic University
where this lesson took place feeling pretty pleased with
myself. But not for long. Because once you start thinking
about an experience you end up having to
ask questions about what was achieved,
I
Alan (mocking): Very well.
Dysart: Do you dream often?
Alan:
Yes. Do you?
Dysart: Yes. Do you have a special dream?
Jeremy Harmer is a writer of methodology and coursebooks, including the brand new
Just Right series from Marshall Cavendish. He is general editor of the Longman How To
Series and hosts a TD website at www.eltforum.com. He is proud to be a trustee of
International House.
—6—
Classroom Matters
why you did it, and who gained and lost the most. But let’s be
frank: these aren’t life and death questions like invading a
country illegally or ruining a weapons inspector’s life. They’re
just the common currency of uncertainty that keeps us teachers on our toes, slightly edgy and at best, alive. At worst? Well,
we won’t go there right now.
We could call this ‘Common Currency Reflection’, I
suppose, so here are some of my own reflections on my
lesson:
All of us who are experienced
and have a care about what
we do, are informed in our
attempt to make sense of
all this by theory, but the
theory is often contradictory.
1. One of the reasons I felt happy about the lesson (at first)
is because it was an old favourite and it was nice to meet
up again. I think the extract is beautifully written, the
atmosphere is satisfyingly tense, and I like messing
around with playscripts anyway. But whether that means
that they liked it too, well that’s a bit of a different issue.
How important is it, in other words, for teachers to do
things they like? Or, turning it round, does a teacher’s
enthusiasm guarantee good learning? It seems to me
that there’s some fine dividing line between a teacher’s
natural enthusiasm for what they themselves like and the
learner’s need for what they enjoy. It is undeniable that
happy teachers are more attractive than miserable ones,
but if their preferences are too self-regarding it could
have a negative impact on the class and on learning.
the two or three students who didn’t seem able to say
things in the way I was encouraging them to? Their fault?
Mine? Should they have had to try and imitate actorly
Englishmen anyway? And yet… I think it was useful and
amusing for at least some of them, and had I followed it
up properly with exposure and practice of similar kinds
of speaking, well, that might have really had an effect.
4. Acting out is something I like doing, to be honest. After
all, once an ego’s been cultivated it sort of takes on a life
of its own. But my students, with a couple of exceptions,
wouldn’t have passed any audition as they read their
scripts studiously and tried to remember what they had
been practising – or didn’t in the case of at least one pair
who weren’t that bothered.
Is acting out a ‘good thing’? I think it is, but the next
time I do something like that we’ll need more rehearsal
time, and we’ll need time to get them, perhaps, to learn
the extract so that they have a chance to ‘act’ it rather
than read it.
But even then, not all students take particular pleasure
– or are especially good at – acting out. It’s a great
activity for some, in other words, but not for everybody.
2. How much did it matter that the material was (a) not very
contemporary, and (b) highly stylised? I should have
explained, perhaps, that the extract ended with the boy
singing a Double Diamond song from a TV commercial
(note to younger IH teachers: Double Diamond was a
bottled beer back then!) It was quite fun watching them
try to sing something from the 70s, but hardly cutting
edge (note the lower case) language or methodology.
And yes, the extract is stylised. But of course, that’s
what gives it power as a possible teaching extract. The
repeated questions, the short phrasing, the opportunity
for interesting intonation and pitch variation all occur precisely because of the kind of writing it is. Plays are not
real life, of course, but the better ones are pretty much
like the real thing, and sometimes sharper and more
effective. Like this extract. You wouldn’t want to use this
kind of material exclusively, would you? But it may have
a useful focusing function used judiciously.
hose are the kind of questions that any ‘normal’ teaching
experience throws up and which expose what we see as
dichotomies between concepts such as teacher-led and student-centred, between learning and doing, between acquisition and learning, between authentic and stylised input. And
the questions don’t go away.
All of us who are experienced and have a care about what
we do, are informed in our attempt to make sense of all this by
theory, but the theory is often contradictory. We are frequently
moved too by fashionable trends and swayed by what, often,
turns out to be a statement of the personal stylistic
preferences of an educator or methodologist. What I suppose
we have to do, then, is to give serious attention to the advice
we are given (both theoretical and methodological) so that
when we reflect on lessons we have taught we can bring not
just our own prejudices to bear, but also the views and
experiences of countless others who inform and enrich our
professional lives.
T
3. It seemed to me that drawing students’ attention to intonation and stress – and then having them try to say the
lines effectively – was a good way of not only raising their
consciousness in terms of these topics, but also an
involving way to have them say things ‘correctly’? But
what is the effect of that in the long run? Does this kind
of activity help students to learn anything or do they forget it instantly? Is there a connection between this kind
of attention to detail and the students’ overall improvement in speaking, especially in areas of pronunciation
such as this? Those are the big questions, of course, the
ones that get people arguing about Focus on Form vs
Focus on FormS, and about the relative merit of transmission teaching vs experiential learning. And what of
—7—
Classroom Matters
Lost in Translation: Understanding
Chinese Students
Alison Ashburner and Melissa Lamb
merely asks himself not what his family can do for him but what
he can do for his family.
Of course, all of us have outside pressures, but ask yourself
when was the last time you flew to a country you knew very little about, knew even less of the language of, to study a subject you had no particular interest in, because it was the right
thing to do?
Confucius said, ‘It is indeed harmful to set one’s mind upon
utterly new and strange doctrines.’ Jo has been in London for
about a month now, daunted by the openness of society, lonely. It’s neither wise nor easy to make friends with foreigners.
Besides, he isn’t here to socialise. He is here to study hard and
get high grades and in order to do that he must have perfect
English. He likes the school, he has nothing against his classmates, but he can’t quite get his head round his teacher or for
that matter the teaching. Why is it that he spends most of class
playing children’s games or having discussions with Spanish
people about Posh and Becks? Why does his teacher keep
asking him what he thinks he wants to learn? He doesn’t have
time for this, he knows how to cram and regurgitate what he’s
learned, so why on earth is he still in pre-intermediate when he
ought to be on the IELTS course by now?
Chinese students have serious hopes, fears and questions
and at the same time we might say they have unrealistic goals
and an unbending doctrine. I have been guilty of not attempting to understand these concerns and not dealing with the
implications of culture clash. In turn, I have set them and
myself unrealistic goals, been unbending in my doctrine and
spent a good deal of the time asking ‘Why’ questions in the
staffroom. Here are a few:
onfucius said, ‘Am I a learned man? No! A lowly
peasant once asked me a question of which I was
ignorant. I thrashed the matter out by studying the
two sides of it and then told him all I knew about it.’ We came
to the UK last September having taught in China for five years.
Five years and we thought we’d learned something about
Chinese culture, but we were stumped by the first question put
to us: ‘Why are Chinese students so difficult to teach?’ What
follows is my attempt to thrash out the matter and hopefully
come up with some observations that may be of use to you.
First of all a few disclaimers (or perhaps statements of the
obvious):
C
•
We are all individuals
•
China is vast.
•
Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean or Malaysian
Chinese are a whole other article, though some notes
from this article might strike a familiar chord if you teach
them.
•
Chinese people are Asian, but incredibly different to their
Japanese and Korean neighbours.
Let’s say that Jo is a student from the mainland who sets off
to London to study. If so he’s likely to be relatively well off,
young, single and under a tremendous pressure to succeed.
Success is a degree and a trouble free stay in Britain. On
return to the motherland, he will be crowned a hero and
hopefully contribute to the ongoing success of the family
business or get a top job in a joint venture company.
Expectations are high all round. Life has been one long
competition to be top of the class. Thousands of like-minded
pioneers are part of this grand scheme to fulfil China’s manifest
destiny. And, most importantly, the whole family, including
5000 years worth of ancestors, are with him from not just that
one small step onto the hallowed tarmac of Heathrow, but
every step of the way. He does not question the plan. He
Confucius said, “It is indeed
harmful to set one’s mind
upon utterly new and
strange doctrines.”
•
Why is it that my Chinese students always look bored in
my class?
•
Why do Chinese students ask for more practice but
complain when we do practical activities?
•
Why do they never take notes in class or prepare for
speaking activities?
•
Why didn’t he say anything in his tutorial?
•
Why does he give me extra written work to mark
everyday?
•
Why do Chinese students finish pairwork before my
Italian students have started it?
•
Why does he always look at me for an answer?
•
Why can’t I read him?
Answering questions like these involves taking a good look at
the cultural, social and educational baggage Chinese students
carry with them. This isn’t easy to do even to yourself. So if
even Jo doesn’t know, where do we start? One idea is to start
Ali and Melissa taught college students in Hunan Province China for
2 blissful years. Ali (pictured right) went on to teach in Qinghai, the Amdo-Tibetan
region of China, and Melissa (pictured left) spent a year with IH in Shanghai,
followed by a year with the British Council in Beijing. Ali is now teaching German
and Italian in a secondary school in Dorking and Melissa is a teacher at IH London.
—8—
Classroom Matters
with language, since it echoes its surroundings and acts as a
(two-way) mirror of a society’s enlightenment, culture and
mentality. Chinese characters, being originally pictographs
and ideograms, are especially revealing.
(Before you read on, it might be interesting to try to draw a
picture which represents the following words: education,
teacher, teach, student, study.)
Down went the cane
onto the desk with a
tremendous thud.
Education
An old man lays his hand on a child,
his other hand he carries a stick.
Teacher / to teach
his is literally still true in the more rural parts of China.
When we took our students on teaching practice the cane
was the first piece of equipment they were given. After this we
observed a local English teacher to get an idea of how classes were run. She drilled ‘What’s your name?’ ‘My name’s Jim’
for 45 minutes whilst brandishing the cane wildly and beating
it against the desk. We were all petrified. At the end of the
class she asked two students to step up on the raised platform
and demonstrate the dialogue.
T
The teacher is an old man who stands
on ramparts to show his authority.
The verb to teach has the
education character
followed by the character
for book which is a blank
pen over an empty page.
Student A: ‘What’s your name?’
here are a number of important notions to take on board
from this. Once again it reinforces the age and authority of
the teacher and with authority and age come responsibility, wisdom, and the status of expert and consequently respect.
When was the last time you saw an old man, dressed in combat trousers miming the word ‘dog’? Jo will expect his teacher
to be relatively smart and fairly serious, a joke is ok but he
wouldn’t want you to make a fool of yourself. He will also be
expecting you to have good subject knowledge and be able to
give clear answers to his questions i.e. fill up his blank page. He
will want the teacher to make demands of him by nominating
him to speak in class and giving lots of written homework.
Classrooms in China are generally serious places. Chinese people don’t use gestures or facial expressions as much as other
nationalities - showing your emotions in public is not the done
thing. You may think Jo looks bored, but it’s just as likely that
he is concentrating hard or giving you face by taking you seriously. Quite refreshing really!
T
Student B:‘My name’s Li Song.’
Down went the cane onto the desk with a tremendous thud
and the class corrected her: ‘My name’s Jim!’ This is an
extreme example, but there are several valid points to consider.
Chinese education is not about choice, opinion or developing
the analytical part of the brain. It is about being spoonfed right
answers, memorising them and regurgitating them.
So Jo will find the approaches taken in our classrooms
rather alien. He will need a lot of coaching if he is to become
a more autonomous learner and he will need to understand
why it is important to take responsibility in this way. This is
reflected in even the simplest of tasks like recording vocabulary. He will expect a list from the teacher, clearly presented on
the board that he can copy down at your signal. Additionally,
everything requires a right or wrong answer, and the teacher is
expected to adjudicate on this. Once he has his answer or rule
he finds exceptions or other points of view extremely difficult to
deal with. Most likely he will take the rule and use it doggedly
without reflection.
Education in China is also extremely competitive. Those that
get to college are those that respond well to the pressure of
exams and know how to jump through the hoops. Jo may not
realise that over here the hoops have been moved. Grades are
the only feedback a child gets on his performance, so if Jo
doesn’t get this form of feedback he is less likely to see the
value of the course or the activity. In addition, by focussing on
the score or result, the process by which he gets there is devalued, hence the 30 second pairwork, the lack of planning and
preparing for activities and plagiarism. These are complex
problems but can work to your advantage by setting clear aims
for a task and the process by which that task is to be achieved,
evaluating preparation work, setting minimum talking times and
giving tasks whilst students do pairwork. Making sure that ss
see the point of any classroom activity, coupled with lots of
learner training can help avoid potential pitfalls.
To study / student
Here we can see the old man/master
again, laying his hands crosswise upon
the darkness that covers the mind of his
disciple.
By adding a further
character we have the word
student; the earth producing a plant which lays
the groundwork for growth.
mplicit in these pictograms is the notion that study is not solitary, and thus the student cannot achieve enlightenment
without the teacher, no matter how fertile his mind is. Chinese
people I met found it remarkably difficult to believe I could
communicate in their language having only ever had two
I
—9—
Classroom Matters
can help, but in the early stages this will need a lot of teacher
overseeing and guidance. Left to himself, Jo will still be trying
to achieve perfect English by reading the dictionary and memorising articles. Keeping a section of his vocabulary notebook
for things he finds difficult in English is a good start. Encourage
him to note down problems he has in class (a grammar point/a
sound) and outside of class (keeping a conversation
going/sounding polite). At first, check this regularly and discuss
with him any action he can take. This is a relatively painless
way of coming up with goals and action points that are measurable, attainable, realistic and time-restricted. Later, review
the usefulness of doing this and then ask him to consider the
extent to which you need to be involved in the process.
By saying nothing or
expressing his appreciation
of your teaching skills,
the student is trying to
give you face and
to develop a better
relationship with you.
Practice
weeks of formal language training. My Chinese students just
weren’t used to working things out by themselves.
Confucius said ‘He who is not in charge of it does not interfere in its business.’ Rarely, during my time in China, did students proffer comments or give feedback unelicited. Jo Li will
not expect to have to tell the expert how to run his class, or
what content to include. Should you confound his expectations by consulting the class, handing out needs analysis, or
conducting tutorials, then you are unlikely to get a favourable
or thoughtful response. The consulting process, be it one to
one or as a class makes him feel at best uncomfortable or at
worst like he has done something wrong. Confucious said ‘If a
man demands much of himself and little from others he will
certainly keep away resentments.’ It is not that Jo doesn’t
have an opinion, rather that he does not want to appear to criticize you (especially in front of other students) because he is
only a student. By saying nothing or expressing his appreciation of your teaching skills he is trying to give you face and to
develop a better relationship with you.
There is a well-known Chinese joke that illustrates this (it is
necessary to know that, in Chinese idiom, placing a top hat on
someone’s head means to flatter them):
A young bird (wings) learns
to fly by itself.
nlightenment requires a teacher, but practice is something
you do by yourself. Chinese language practice is usually
written, repetitive exercises. Chinese children spend the
majority of their primary school education sitting on their own,
tracing characters, copying passages or reciting them. The
emphasis is on control and accuracy.
Pairwork/groupwork
and freer practice is difficult to adjust to because of this and
the belief that you can’t learn from a fellow student who is
equally unenlightened. This belief is very deep rooted.
Explaining your reasoning behind pairwork may help but you
need to be explicit about exactly what you want the students
to practise during the task.
The tendency to recite or make speeches as opposed to
conversing is also very ingrained. It is considered impolite to
interrupt someone when they speak and improper to ask too
many questions, particularly about feelings, family or opinions.
Consequently, Jo may feel that his classmates are rude and
intrusive and they may think that Jo is shy and introverted but
in actual fact they are just reading from different scripts.
Discussing cultural differences is something Chinese students
really enjoy and so taking this forward into a learning point
about how these differences affect interaction can be helpful.
Likewise, analysing dialogues and identifying turn-taking and
language used to give feedback, interrupt etc. is useful and
new to Chinese students.
E
Two students, on their first day of college, went to see their
tutor. The latter told them, ‘In this world, following the proper
path will do you no good. It is better if you place top hats
on other people’s heads.’
One of the students said: ‘You are right. Most people in this
world like wearing top hats. You, however, are an
exception.’
The tutor was very pleased at this comment.
Upon leaving, the student said to his classmate: ‘I’ve just
given away my first top hat.’
e were hoping that by the end of this article you would
be able to answer some of the questions posed at the
beginning. While writing, however, it has become clear that it
is difficult to find a simplistic answer to these questions or an
easy solution to the problems Chinese students have when
studying abroad. Cliché and generalisation are difficult to
avoid and what is left is only the subjective opinion of someone who really feels that she can only make sense of 2% of the
culture that she was immersed in for five years. However, the
experience of living and teaching in China was both fascinating and enjoyable, and we particularly enjoyed the lessons we
learned from our Chinese students.
W
So while Jo may have exceptionally high expectations for your
classes he is not necessarily going to tell you what they are.
One way around this is to approach the subject in as informal,
indirect and depersonalised a way as possible.
In general, Chinese students are happier talking about their
own performance than about yours. In tutorials, he is likely to
focus on his weaknesses; this self-criticism or false modesty is
both a cultural norm in China and a face saving device.
Analysing progress and strengths, however, is likely to be a new
concept for Jo and he will expect you to tell him what is wrong
and what to do about it. A certain amount of learner training
— 10 —
CAREER DEVELOPMENT MATTERS
Real Pro’s: Developing Trainees’ Awareness
of Professionalism on CELTA Courses
Jayne Silva
hat is professionalism? Most CELTA trainees think
that it simply relates to punctuality and dressing
appropriately. The wider and more important issues
of liaising with colleagues, planning lessons thoroughly and
independently and keeping coherent records (in the CELTA 5
document) never occur to most trainees unless trainers point
them out.
I am sure that most CELTA trainers will agree that a lack of
professionalism can have a very negative effect on a trainees’
performance and ultimately grade. Being defensive in TP feedback and being over reliant on help from tutors are issues
which can seriously hinder a trainee’s professional development. The CELTA course is vocational and as such should
emphasize the value of professional behaviour for the outset.
I have found that simply telling trainees to ‘be professional’
and giving verbal guidelines is completely ineffective. So last
year I decided to assert myself by creating a set of WRITTEN
GUIDELINES for trainees to follow. My colleague, Claire Walsh,
and I put our heads together and came up with the following
guidelines:
W
Professional Awareness
A professional trainee teacher…….
•
arrives punctually for input and TP sessions and attends
100% of the course.
•
calls in to inform tutors of lateness or illness.
•
is independent and doesn’t rely too heavily on help from
tutors.
•
is prepared to experiment in the classroom and learn from
his/ her mistakes.
•
understands that the tutors’ role is to guide and support
trainees but not to spoonfeed them or plan lessons for
them.
•
is able to take on board tutors’ and colleagues’
suggestions and put them into practice.
•
is able to assess his/ her strengths and weaknesses
objectively.
•
liaises carefully and regularly with his/ her TP group
members.
•
takes notes and remains quiet when observing colleagues
and experienced teachers.
•
does not use TP time for writing out future lesson plans.
It is our duty to prepare
trainees for the
realities of the workplace.
•
offers constructive criticism to colleagues during TP
feedback sessions and supports all TP group members
throughout the course – trainees who work well in a team
cope better with the course than those who do not find
time to liaise properly with colleagues.
•
understands that TP feedback is for assessing that day’s
TP and not for discussing future lessons.
•
PLANS AHEAD as much as possible. Tutors will be
available to answer your questions between 11.30 and
11.55 each day. Please bring questions about which you
have already tried to come up with the answer. It would
be preferable to discuss your queries about the following
day’s lessons and not about lessons the same day. This is
because you will probably not have enough time to act on
my suggestions on the same day.
This document has proved very successful in actually helping
course participants to understand the concept of professionalism in an ELT/ ESL context. There is no longer a specific grade
in the CELTA criteria for ‘professionalism’ but this document
helps trainees to realise that it is an essential and integral part
of their conduct on the course and their subsequent development as a teacher.
I normally spend at least one hour on the first day of a CELTA
going through each point so that the trainees are left in no
doubt about what is expected of them. If trainees fail to follow
the guidelines during the course I find it useful to refer them
back to the document during TP feedback or tutorials.
The main advantage of these guidelines is that they encourage autonomy and help me to define my role as facilitator (and
not spoonfeeder!) more clearly than I was able to in the past.
If we CELTA trainers want our trainees to be
more independent, we need to let them
Jayne has worked in France, Austria, Hong Kong, Latvia, Hungary and the UK. She has been
teaching for 15 years and training for 12. She particularly enjoys training new teachers and
has done extensive research into the Lexical Approach.
— 11 —
know this at the beginning of the course. It is, I feel, unfair to
withhold a B grade from a trainee who is deemed too reliant on
tutor help if this trainee has never been made aware that such
dependence is inappropriate.
Since issuing these guidelines, I am happy to report that the
majority of my trainees have not talked to each other while
observing colleagues and experienced teachers. Nor have
they been as reliant on me as they used to be. They have
shown respect for each other and for their tutors. Their record
keeping and punctuality have also improved.
I never used to understand why some trainees couldn’t see
the value in liaising with their colleagues. Now I realise that the
importance of groupwork had not been emphasised enough at
the beginning of the course. Trainees have so much to worry
about (assignments, lesson planning etc) that professional
issues can be sidelined unless tutors give professionalism the
importance it deserves in teacher development.
Trainees with an awareness of professionalism on the CELTA
course will go on to be professional in their future jobs. I
believe it is our duty to prepare trainees for the realities of the
workplace. They need to understand that a defensive, disorganised teacher who is reluctant to work independently will not
fare well in a busy staffroom.
Giving our trainees an understanding of professionalism in
an ELT/ ESL context during the CELTA course will provide
them with a good basis on which to develop their teaching
careers in the real world.
CELTA and the Experienced Teacher
Keith Hawkins
s an experienced teacher in the independent sector in
the UK, who is always looking for opportunities for selfdevelopment and with half an eye on how in the future
I might achieve my long-lasting aim of living and working
abroad, I found myself in the first half of 2003, actively looking
for a CELTA course. This, of course, raised a number of eyebrows among my colleagues, but I was used to that; there are
few Science teachers who will admit to being linguists, artists
and musicians as well! School timetables being what they are,
the most convenient CELTA course for me turned out to be the
one run intensively during the summer holidays by International
House Lisbon, and so I persuaded my family that that was
where we should spend our summer – they on the beach, I on
the course.
A
Coming to CELTA as an already
experienced teacher
It is inevitably hard, as an experienced teacher, to lay yourself
open to criticism by inexperienced teachers, and that was my
main worry – and, to judge by the questions asked during my
interview for a place on the course, the worry also of Paula de
Nagy, the course tutor. Many of those who do the CELTA
course are having their first taste of teaching in any form, so a
typically a significant proportion of time is spent on developing
the basic skills of teaching in the context of English as a foreign language. I was hopeful, however, that my own experience would have been gained over long enough and over a
broad enough range of circumstances to make it easy for me
to assimilate the lessons of the course; and yet I was a little
concerned that I might be regarded as a dinosaur whose
teaching was hopelessly out of date. As things turned out, I
found myself able to help the other trainees in some ways (lesson planning, stress management, presentation skills – the
basic aspects of teaching that probably never change) at the
same time as I was learning for myself those new skills I needed specifically for the teaching of EFL. No-one, tutor or
trainee, ever criticised my existing teaching skills.
Coming to CELTA as a teacher of another subject
One of my worries before I arrived in Lisbon was that my tutors
on the CELTA course might try to break down the skills and
techniques I had already developed in my career as a Science
teacher. I knew I was successful in that role and that my skills
were soundly based. I could, though, if I were to need a
defence, always claim that Science teaching is very different
from EFL teaching! In fact I was able to approach the course
very positively, looking for new teaching techniques to apply in
what was going to be a new teaching area for me, and I quickly lost any apprehension I had about the change of subject.
More than that, I took away with me a list of things to try out in
my Science teaching on return to school.
Learning and transferring the lessons from CELTA
As the course progressed, it became clear that the skills and
techniques I was learning for the teaching of English could be
useful in my other areas of interest, too. The course tutors
were very demanding as far as the trainees’ keeping of notes,
the course journal and the CELTA diary were concerned; but I
also kept a section of my personal CELTA file for writing down
thoughts about how I might make use, outside EFL teaching,
of these new skills and techniques when I returned to school
in September (‘week 5’ of the 4-week course, as it was always
referred to). In effect I was using the CELTA course not only as
my gateway into EFL teaching, but also as a piece of general
professional development that would improve my teaching
whatever subject area I was working in. Some of the techniques and skills I learned in Lisbon have turned out to be very
influential in this way.
Keith Hawkins is a second-career teacher, formerly having worked as a Chartered Engineer
in industry and as an officer in the Royal Navy. He is currently Head of Physics and also Head
of the Upper School at Oswestry School, Shropshire, UK. He speaks Portuguese and French
with a smattering of Afrikaans and Norwegian, and his interests outside work are in music
(playing folk guitar and singing), painting (pastel and watercolour) and watersports (kayaking
and sailing). He is married with two daughters aged 10 and 12.
— 12 —
Teaching outside EFL
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the influence that the
CELTA course has had on my work has been the way it has
changed my teaching outside EFL. I was highly impressed in
Lisbon by the use of the first 30 – 45 minutes of every day of
the CELTA course for a general ‘question time’, when trainees
were expected to ask the lead tutor questions about anything
to do with the lessons of the course, with the teaching of
English or with the English language itself. Long silences
sometimes occurred while trainees (who had, of course,
sometimes been working into the early hours the night before
to keep up to date with written assignments, diary entries and
lesson planning) struggled to think of things to ask. Yet always
something emerged as a topic for discussion.
I introduced this practice as soon as the new term started in
school. Every group of students I teach in Physics now has
the first half of one double lesson per week designated as
‘question time’, when we sit in a horseshoe and students are
allowed to ask anything they wish – though preferably about
Physics. These sessions have turned out to be a wonderful
way of getting students involved in their own learning, and also
of improving the general communication between student and
teacher. I knew I had done something worthwhile when, one
morning, I arrived at the Physics lab to find that the class had
already set out the stools in the horseshoe ready for my arrival!
The subjects about which they have asked questions have
been interesting, too. There has been a strong tendency
towards questions about the Universe, space and astronomy,
in every age group… but almost nothing about the mundane
aspects of the subject that we have to teach in order to get
through the exam syllabuses. There’s a lesson here, maybe,
for the design of Physics courses. There has also, among 1516 year old students only, been a flurry of questions about
Biology, to answer which I have had to delve back into my
memories of teaching general Science. We have learned that
silences are acceptable – I often just sit and wait for questions
to arise; and wait, and wait… As an EFL teacher, it has also
been an opportunity to observe how much or how little overseas students take part in lessons, and my next priority will
have to be to find a way of getting EFL students more involved
in these ‘question times’.
The idea of ‘concept questioning’ took some getting used
to, during the CELTA course. Our tutors went to great lengths
to teach us how to devise and ask questions to check students’ understanding of points in English. How useful (I
I knew I had done something
worthwhile when I arrived
to find that the class had
already set out the stools
in the horseshoe ready
for my arrival!
Implementing the lessons from CELTA in my school
Oswestry School is a mid-sized day and boarding school in
rural Shropshire. Boarders account for approximately one
third of the student numbers, and of these a high proportion
are from overseas. Altogether the overseas students represent about a dozen nationalities, although there is a large contingent of Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking Chinese among
them. One of the problems associated with such a school as
this is that some of the overseas students are not able, for reasons of language, to pursue as broad a curriculum as their
English counterparts. There is, for example, little point in sending Chinese students to study French, German or Latin when
they are still struggling with English. The result is that some
students find that they have gaps in their timetable and I, as a
senior manager, had in past years identified the need for more
focused use to be made of what could otherwise be wasted
time during the school day. My personal involvement in the
school’s EFL teaching has therefore, immediately following my
return from Lisbon, been to take responsibility for the work of
overseas students in the times when they are otherwise unengaged.
The particular group of students with which I am working
consists of 6 Chinese, 2 Russian and 1 Japanese in year 9
(aged 14 or so) – ideal for splitting into groups of three with one
non-Chinese in each group to enforce the use of English as a
common language! My work with them has been focused on
using one teaching period a week to set up an activity that they
would then take with them to occupy a further three periods
before I would see them again. Naturally I have tried to base
this activity on whatever the students have been doing with
their full-time EFL teacher, but I have had the luxury of being
able to be creative since I was not constrained by having a
course book to complete.
We have noted a significant improvement in the students’
use of time as a result of this approach. A major problem was
that at first they regarded the work I was setting as ‘extra
homework’ rather than work to be done during non-contact
school time, and therefore treated it with the usual contempt
reserved for homework. Once that misunderstanding was
overcome, however, we reckon that we have increased these
students’ direct involvement in English study by up to 40%,
and hopefully this will be reflected in their long-term progress.
It is somewhat paradoxical
that overseas students
are taught more about
English grammar than
their English peers!
— 13 —
rately. One 16 year-old student is currently working through
parts of the HEADWAY Pre-Intermediate course in private
study (but tutored and monitored by me) with the aim of
improving her written English and her reading comprehension.
In the longer term I am also thinking about the use of EFL
material as a routine measure with, perhaps, 11 year-old native
English speakers as a way of improving the general level of
English in the school, with possible spin-off benefits in many
subject areas. This idea has arisen following many comments
about English students’ lack of knowledge about the structure
of their language and about the correct use of grammar as
they get older and start to prepare for GCSE. It is somewhat
paradoxical that overseas students are taught more about
English grammar than their English peers!
thought at the time) this might be as a technique for checking
whether my Physics students have understood what I have
been teaching. So I tried it, and although the opportunities for
detailed checking of this kind during a Physics lesson are limited, it works, and not just with EFL students!
I have also used in my Physics teaching the ‘receptive skills
procedure’ taught to us during the CELTA course. Whereas
before I would have simply set a piece of work based on a text
from the students’ books, I now lead in to the text with some
sort of discussion or thinking exercise. Sometimes I deliberately turn the ‘question time’ discussions around towards what
I know I am going to be setting as text-based work later in the
lesson, as part of this lead-in. It is difficult, of course, to measure the effect of changing this approach, but I feel that the
opportunity – particularly for EFL students – to think about
issues and ask questions about the subject matter before
doing the work is helpful for them.
I have tried using CELTA techniques in teaching Portuguese to
English students, as an after-school voluntary activity. Since language learning – any language! - is such a fundamental ability of the
human brain, the techniques have worked well. I look forward now
to the time when I may have an opportunity to look more closely at
the curricular teaching of languages at school, to see whether
CELTA techniques could be applied productively there.
It is one of my roles as a senior manager in the school to
monitor the progress of individual students, and this has led
me to consider (and, lately, to put into practice as an experiment) the use of EFL resources for native English speakers
whose command of the language is weak or who are having
specific difficulty with one aspect of English – e.g. writing accu-
Conclusion
Doing the CELTA course as an already-experienced teacher
brought its own challenges, but the experience was a good
one. The course not only gave me an invaluable grounding as
a teacher of EFL but also provided a set of ideas and techniques that have been influential in my teaching outside EFL.
As a piece of professional development it was of great value.
Teaching is a fascinating profession, and one of its beauties is
the range of techniques that are there to be tried, whatever
subject area you teach in! Through having a broad interest
across the work of my school – science, languages, curriculum
and pastoral management – I have found many applications
for the lessons learned from the CELTA course. I would recommend it to anyone; but beware! It is intensive and it could
be career-changing.
Going the Distance
Richard Hargreaves
Why the Distance DELTA?
the end, I was able to do the OC in New Zealand, because our
trainer, Benita Cruickshank, was already here and available to
pilot the course in New Zealand.
This part of the course was a real eye-opener. We learned so
much in those two weeks! The OC helps you to get a feel for
the genre of the assignments that you have to research and
fter gaining several years of teaching experience, I felt that
I was ready to study for the Diploma. I did my Cert. in
TESOL with Trinity, and I had envisaged that I would continue
my professional training with a Trinity qualification. However,
some of my colleagues suggested that a Cambridge qualification might carry more professional kudos, and I decided to
‘jump ship’ on their recommendation.
The next decision, whether to do a part-time or full-time
course, was largely made for me by the need to continue earning at that time, which ruled out a full-time course, and left one
final choice; whether to study the course locally two evenings
per week or to do the Distance DELTA. In the end the Distance
DELTA won the toss, because of the flexible nature of the
course – apart from the 2 week Orientation Course (OC), the
Distance DELTA offers you the freedom to study when it suits
you (although by the end of the course it felt as if I was at it
pretty much 24 hours a day anyway!). The final clincher for me
was finding an excellent local tutor.
A
The Distance DELTA offers
you the freedom to study
when it suits you.
write on the DELTA course, which is especially useful for teachers like me who have been away from the academic world for
a long time. We didn’t follow up very much of the preOrientation work we had done (in the form of reading and
tasks) as I had expected, but Benita and her assistants were
absolutely marvellous at steering us through the vast miasma
of new and confusing information, leaving us with a very clear
Orientation
The two-week OC took place before the distance element of
the course. Participants on the DELTA undertake the OC in different centres around the world, and originally it looked as if I
would have to travel to Thailand for a two-week ‘holiday’. In
— 14 —
idea of how to proceed. Consequently, when the OC finished
and we were cut loose into ‘free orbit’, we really felt that we
were up to running speed. During the OC we also received
induction to the website, which was to become our link with
the ‘support community’. I remember returning from the OC
with eyes wide-open and raring to go!
I remember returning from
the OC with eyes
wide-open and raring to go!
The loneliness of the long-distance learner
It would certainly be difficult for a distance-learning course to
match the levels of interaction that occur on face-to-face
courses, and despite the convenience and flexibility of studying times that the Distance DELTA offers you, this has certainly got to be the biggest drawback. I had always had reservations about this element of the course. The creators of the
Distance DELTA have, however, gone a long way to generate
a feeling of community.
Firstly, participants are ‘grouped’ on the website, and some
of the tasks in the course units require you to liaise with your
group co-members. In addition there is the website forum,
where queries, suggestions, ideas and general ‘cries for help’
can be posted. Once we got the hang of this, it proved to be
very useful and some good relationships were formed.
However, whilst the course tutors were generally very
responsive, I was surprised to see that some people on the
course did not participate at all in forum discussions. One reason for this may be due to something that came to light during
the course; participants tended to feel nervous about ‘baring
all’ in public, and possible ‘buddy schemes’ were discussed
for future courses. Another reason may simply have been due
to pressures of time. Personally, I felt that given that the website is the ‘lifeline’ of the course; it could have been promoted
more overtly during the OC as a means of formal, and informal,
support.
Secondly, the process of uploading drafts and receiving
feedback from your course tutors (who change every 8 weeks
or so) provides you with the opportunity to converse with
someone and to refine your ideas, although I do have to say
that sometimes questions and answers became somewhat
‘lost in translation’. Generally, the advice given was pertinent
and easy to follow, although as above, I sometimes felt a bit
shy about asking questions. The moral is; ‘Use the website
and the tutors, that’s what they’re there for.’ I found that my
local tutor, Anne Stubbings, also played a vital role in keeping
me on track, which is especially admirable when you consider
that it is a voluntary role.
The website also contains an ever-growing mine of information; course materials (also available on the CD ROM supplied
on the OC), practice exams, model answers, reading lists (books
and journals, some of which are available in PDF format), web
links database, participant and tutor profiles, and more.
The course material
The Distance DELTA consists of 8 units, one a month. There is
input on each of the four main skill areas as well as grammar,
lexis, and pronunciation. The course also covers methodology,
learning styles and motivation, testing, course planning and
about a million other things that the ‘modern professional
teacher’ needs to know. So you’ve certainly got your work cut
out to get through the sheer volume of course material in the
given time. Add to that the monthly assignments, the ongoing
‘Extended Assignment’ and preparation for the dreaded exam,
and it’s amazing that anyone actually gets through the course.
However, the course felt very well planned and was well
staged, and the exam preparation elements were particularly
good. The DELTA is relentless; you finish one assignment and
have to start thinking about the next one before you have
drawn breath, but the Distance DELTA course certainly helps
you to get through it in one piece. God knows how they manage to fit it all in on the intensive courses!
One of the hardest parts of the course for me was the
‘deconstructing’ of myself as a teacher, and the subsequent
rebuilding. Going through this process is very stressful, and
brings me to what must be one of the biggest advantages that
the Distance DELTA has to offer.
At the beginning of the course I felt that I was quite a good
teacher, but that I was getting a bit stale and that I needed
some new input, but once I started to realise what teaching is
really all about, I started to feel that I was actually not a very
good teacher at all. When you raise the benchmark, you realise
that you are falling way short of the mark, and it takes time
before you realise that you are actually learning a lot and that
you are improving as a teacher. The Distance DELTA gives you
the time for this process to evolve. This process is still continuing now, several months after the course has finished, but I
don’t think that I would have benefited in the same way if I had
done an 8 week intensive course.
Furthermore, you need time to think. There’s a lot of information to take in, which you have to absorb, reflect on and
then find some thin ‘slice’ that you are going to investigate and
work on. Once again, the Distance DELTA provides you with
the necessary time for all this to happen.
Final reflections
There’s no doubt that the DELTA is a tough course, but now
that it is over I feel really glad that I undertook it. It was a great
learning experience, and I feel sure that it will benefit me in
many ways in the future. I think that the course was very well
planned and managed, and in response to Karen Adams, who
said in 2001 (in the IH Journal) that ‘The key is in the creation
of a real learning community’, I think that the course has largely succeeded in this respect. I should also mention at this point
my single biggest secret weapon in getting through the
Distance DELTA; my partner, Karen Wolff, who undertook the
course with me, and who was the driving force in keeping me
going! Thank you, Karen, and thank you to everyone involved
in the course.
Richard Hargreaves recently completed the IH/British Council Distance DELTA course, the
distance training programme leading to the Cambridge DELTA qualification, whilst living in
Auckland, New Zealand. He has just found out that he passed all components –
congratulations.
— 15 —
Why Do We Do It: Motivation among
EFL Teachers
Simon Cox
t’s good to see that Bill Murray has been nominated for an
Oscar for his portrayal of someone suffering from culture
shock in the film Lost in Translation. Of course, as any
TESOL-er knows, Bill had it easy – he didn’t have to get up at
seven a.m. on a Sunday morning to teach a class of grumpy
teenagers the joys of the present perfect continuous as he
deals with life in Tokyo.
As I entered my 10th year in ELT and searched around for the
things I felt needed researching for an MA (and although I knew
that second language acquisition had a million unanswered
questions I should really be thinking about) I couldn’t help
returning to the issues which have concerned me throughout
those 10 years. Over them, I’ve been humiliated, extorted and
frequently shaken up (sometimes literally) by my experiences
working in foreign countries. That’s not to say that there
haven’t been many, many more good than bad times, but all
the same I kept coming back to the same thing … ‘Why do we
do it?’ By ‘we’ I mean those teachers who travel away from
their own countries to teach abroad. What did ‘we’ have in
common and what were the implications of these thoughts
and feelings for the future of ELT? This became the focus of my
research.
It is worth pointing out the demographic of my research. Of
120 respondents about 40% told me they had a Diploma or a
Master’s Degree and more than 70% had been teaching
between 5 and 10 years. I would suggest that this is probably
not a particularly representative sample of the ELT world as a
whole and that, if nothing else, I learned from my research that
only certain kinds of people (perhaps we could call them the
major ‘stakeholders’ in ELT as a profession) answer stupid
questionnaires! In the future I’d like to know more about the
people who didn’t answer.
To start with I needed to look at the idea of ‘motivation’. The
leading expert in the field of motivation in applied linguistics
describes it like this:
I
In a general sense, motivation can be defined as the dynamically
changing cumulative arousal in a person that initiates, directs,
coordinates, amplifies, terminates, and evaluates the cognitive
and motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires are
selected, prioritized, operationalize and (successfully or unsuccessfully) acted out.1
Overall, this seemed to
suggest, teachers generally
are interested in the
‘intrinsic’ rewards of
their work.
Although it’s thought provoking and comprehensive, it doesn’t
really help clarify the variables necessary for research. I needed to narrow it down, so I eventually ended up by thinking of it
as a cyclical process that allows ‘motivation’, ‘satisfaction’
and ‘morale’ to be seen as perspectives on the same ongoing,
complex cycle – where ‘morale’ is concerned with an individual’s expectations for the future, ‘motivation’ is an initial causal
factor for action and ‘satisfaction’ is:
A state of mind encompassing all those feelings determined by the
extent to which the individual perceives her/his job-related needs
to being met.2
The last of the three – satisfaction – seems to be the best
option for investigation, as you don’t have to worry about asking people about the past or the future, but ‘What do you think
at the moment?’ As a point of comparison I searched around
for similar studies, but found very few relating to ELT. There are
some about ESL teachers, but most of them are working in
their own countries.
By far the largest body of previous research relates to
schoolteachers. Dinham and Scott’s investigation into schoolteachers’ sense of satisfaction in Australia, New Zealand and
the UK in 2000 is one of the largest and most recent surveys.3
Their ‘top 10’ of satisfiers shows that most teachers put issues
such as ‘students’ achievements’, ‘relationships with students’
and ‘personal growth’ at the top of the list. Factors such as
‘status as a teacher’, ‘career opportunities’ and ‘salary’ come
at the bottom. Similar results are reported by research into ESL
teachers4 and my own survey of 120 EFL teachers provided a
very similar kind of spread. Overall, this seemed to suggest,
teachers generally are interested in the ‘intrinsic’ rewards of
their work rather than the ‘extrinsic’.
Williams and Burden describe the difference:
Very simply, when the only reason for performing an act is to gain
something outside the activity itself … the motivation is likely to be
extrinsic. When the experience of doing something generates
interest and enjoyment the motivation is likely to be intrinsic. A
general guideline would be to ask: Would I do this even if no
reward or punishment followed?5
So far, so good for the ELT industry’s sense of professional
integrity! But it didn’t match my own everyday experience of
teachers moaning about their salaries – whatever they said in
the replies to my questionnaires. Perhaps I needed to examine
the definitions again. I’d assumed that the opposite of ‘satisfaction’ was ‘dissatisfaction’, but as Herzberg explained,
The opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction but,
rather, no job satisfaction; and similarly, the opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job dissatisfaction.6
This seemed to bear a closer relationship to what I saw in the
staff room. Sometimes pay and conditions
can be excellent, but we can feel a lack of
efficacy in what we do in the classroom;
Simon is the DoS of Apollo Education and Training in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is adapted from
a talk he gave at the IH DoS Conference in London in January 2004.
— 16 —
conversely we sometimes get paid peanuts, but still love our
jobs because of the delight in seeing that our students are
making progress and that we’re doing a good job.
So far I’d got some ideas about the way ELT teachers felt
about their work, but I also wanted some insight into ‘Why did
they start doing it in the first place?’ Over the years I’ve heard
a thousand different stories from people about how they started teaching. Often they describe a desire for travel and new
experiences, sometimes it’s a matter of adapting to specific
situations, or falling in love, or boredom, and sometimes it’s a
lack of any idea at all. I’ve even heard it described as an easier option than the French Foreign Legion! This is a marked difference from the feedback from Dinham and Scott’s research.
They report that ‘I always wanted to be a teacher’ is the number 1 reason for the choice of career of schoolteachers and the
same is the case in many other research projects. Most
describe this motivating factor as ‘vocation’ - whatever that
means (The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives us
the choice of ‘a type of work or way of life that you believe is
especially suitable for you’ or ‘a belief that you have been chosen by God…’. In my research, only one out of 120 respondents said that they’d always wanted to be an ESOL teacher.
This seemed to be a very important discovery. As I’ve already
mentioned, ESOL teachers seem to have similar feelings of
satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) as other kinds of teachers, but
it seems that they didn’t start out by looking for them. Instead,
they seem to have developed these thoughts and feeling over
time.
Which brings me to consider whether this central point then,
that most ESOL teachers are in the job more or less by accident, has implications for the question: ‘How do we get others
to do it?’
I’ve even heard ELT described
as an easier option than the
French Foreign Legion!
sionality’ could and should be explored further by the TESOL
community. As IH schools, we all hold and take part in workshops, seminars and TT and TD sessions on a regular basis.
Most of them relate to professionality in the ‘restricted’ sense.
In my experience, the ‘extended’ issues are left for after-work
discussions over a beer in the bar. Perhaps we could do more
to bring these debates into our schools. It’s possible that the
issues raised will help to define the notion of what it is to be a
TESOL professional. Here’s a list of some ideas that could be
discussed, but there are many more. I’d be delighted to hear
from anyone who’d like to add to the list, or who has already
brought a social context into his or her working life.
s a DOS, I feel that a central aspect of my job is to keep
teachers happy. They need to be paid, respected, challenged … plus a million other factors that go into ‘motivation,
satisfaction and morale’. A common approach to satisfying not
only teachers but also the growth of the whole school is ‘professional development’. In one of the most useful books that
discusses this issue we find
A
•
What are the aims & objectives of the TESOL
industry/profession globally? What are the economic &
political consequences of TESOL?
•
What is the status of TESOL teachers worldwide? How
are they likely to be viewed by their students & the general population of the country they live in, as well as
among the worldwide TESOL population itself?
•
As most of our students are adults, we should take into
account what could be called the ‘sexual dynamic’. How
does attraction between teachers and students affect
their behaviour?
•
Travelling around the world can create feelings of ‘culture
shock’ – a response to change that can cause frequent
and severe changes in mood and behaviour in some
people. It may be a necessary process in adapting to a
new place, but can/should a school help someone deal
with it? After all, in other types of work ‘conditions’ that
affect productivity are major sources of concern.
any occupation aspiring to the title of ‘profession’ will claim at least
some of these qualities: a basis of scientific knowledge; a period
of rigorous study which is formally assessed; a sense of public service; high standards of professional conduct; and the ability to perform some specified demanding and socially useful task in a
demonstrably competent manner.7
References
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide how many of those qualities
ELT possesses as an occupation, as I move on to examining
the idea of ‘profession’ further.
The notion of ‘profession’ in practice has been divided into
two parts: professionalism and professionality. If
professionalism, simply stated, is a matter of behaviour then
professionality is concerned with ways of thinking and can be
seen as ‘restricted’ or ‘extended’. We have probably all met
those madly enthusiastic teachers who are always trying out
new approaches and methodologies that turn up in teaching
journals; this ‘restricted professionality’ is an example of trying
to develop the central experience of work (i.e. classroom
practice), but there is also ‘extended professionality’ which
relates to seeing ‘teaching’ outside the classroom and within
the context of the world at large.
I would like to suggest that this idea of ‘extended profes-
1
Dornyei, Z. (2001), Teaching and Researching Motivation. Pearson
Education (Applied Linguistics in Action Series).
2
Evans, L. (ed.) (1998). Teacher Morale, Job Satisfaction and
Motivation. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
Dinham, S. and C. Scott (1998). ‘An International Comparative
Study of Teacher satisfaction, motivation and health: Australia,
England and New Zealand.’ Paper presented to the American
Educational Research Association. San Diego, April 1998
3
Pennington, M.C. (1991). ‘Work Satisfaction and the ESL profession’, Language Culture and Curriculum 4(1): 59-86.
4
5
Williams, M. and R.L. Burden (1997). Psychology for Language
Teachers: A social constructivist approach. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
6
Herzberg, F. (1968). Work and the Nature of Man. Chicago:
Staples Press.
Wallace, M.J. (1991). Training Foreign Language Teachers - A
Reflective Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7
— 17 —
LANGUAGE AND TERMINOLOGY
Methodology for Beginners: Sticking labels
on what you already know
David Tompkins
epending on your level of experience, you will probably
know a fair amount of TEFL jargon (e.g. TTT, PPP,
Jigsaw Listening, Mindmap etc.) that would bewilder
the outsider. Most of this jargon is fairly simple when explained
and nowhere near as complicated as it first seems. The same
is true of the major areas of thought in TEFL methodology.
Some of the ‘labels’ given to these areas (like
Desuggestopedia) can make them seem specialised and light
years away from our own day-to-day classroom practice. The
good news is that you have probably already done mild forms
of each methodological area without realising it. The purpose
of this article is to ‘demystify’ some common terms used in
methodology and advise teachers who are intimidated by
grand-sounding names.
D
Ever used pictures, objects or mime (rather than
translation) to get your message across?
Of course you have. Especially if you’ve taught multilingual
classes or gone abroad with a limited knowledge of the local
language. You could say that you are doing the Direct
Method of teaching, which forbids translation. The aim of this
method is to get learners to think in English over blindly transferring words from one language to another. The Direct
Method is nothing new, but still widely used. Another more
recent method that tries to simulate the way we learn our
mother tongue is Asher’s Total Physical Response, in which
the teacher and class perform actions or instructions together.
The learners hear the language, react to it by physical action
(e.g. fetching something, making an imaginary sandwich), but
don’t speak until they are ready to do so.
Ever drilled words or phrases?
You did this because you believe that pronunciation and intonation are important to a student wanting to get their message
across. If you drilled a phrase a number of times or substitut-
Most of the jargon is fairly
simple when explained
and nowhere near
as complicated as
it first seems.
ed words in the drill (e.g. I’ll be working/ studying/eating dinner
at 20.00), then you sound like an adherent of AudioLingualism. Used extensively by the U.S. government to train
overseas operatives after the Second World War, it subordinated grammar for practical spoken phrases. The central idea
is to form new habits in sentence and sound patterns over
those of your native language.
Ever played background music in the class?
If you have, you probably thought that this would help your
students to relax or create a more pleasant classroom atmosphere. According to Krashen, all learners possess an ‘affective filter’ that determines how quickly they will acquire the
language being taught. If a student has negative feelings then
their affective filter is raised, preventing successful learning.
This massively influential theory is the basis of a lot of humanistic approaches, which try to make use of students’ lives and
personal feelings. So the next time you ask your class to talk
about their experiences – you are actually being humanistic.
To lower the affective filter, we can try to make our classrooms
as comfortable as possible and to tolerate mistakes. The importance of physical surroundings and the use of music in particular are vital parts of Lozanov’s Desuggestopedia method.
Some of the ideas in this method, like reading in time with music,
may seem a bit odd at first, but they are surprisingly effective!
Ever stuck posters on your classroom wall?
For the same reasons as above. Perhaps you wanted to
brighten up the classroom or have verb tables on display at all
times. This is another part of the Desuggestopedia
approach, which emphasises the importance of peripheral
learning. In other words, the learner is surrounded by the target language in their immediate environment.
Ever done an ‘Information-gap’ activity?
Probably one of the first things you learnt to do on your CELTA
was to give instructions for a pair-work activity and have students ask each other questions to find out information they
don’t have. You’ve probably heard of the Communicative
Approach and you use it because it’s fun and you want your
students to enjoy themselves. This approach centres heavily
on language functions, namely asking, complaining, giving
advice etc. Seeing your students interacting in role-plays is fun
for the whole class (and also for you!). You do a great deal
more communicative activities than you
perhaps realise – every textbook is awash
with them.
David Tompkins has been an EFL Teacher at a language school in North London for a
number of years and has worked abroad in Czech Republic, Slovakia, France and Spain. He
did the full-time Diploma in the first half of 2003 and passé.
— 18 —
Ever used phonemic charts to correct
pronunciation?
Some teachers avoid them like the plague and see them as an
unnecessary add-on to the teaching process. It’s understandable if phonemic charts intimidate, but seize the bull by the
horns and learn it if you haven’t already. You won’t regret it in
the long run and you might avoid the feeling of embarrassment
when a student knows the chart better than you! One method
that sees the phonemic chart as absolutely vital is Caleb
Gattegno’s Silent Way. Rather than correct a student’s pronunciation by saying the right sound, the teacher will simply
point to the sound on the chart that they want the student to
say. The central idea of the Silent Way is that the teacher says
as little as possible. They can also use coloured ‘Cuisenaire’
rods to highlight intonation in sentences.
It isn’t good to have a teacher
jabbering on so much that
the learners can’t get a word
in edgeways, but you shouldn’t
underestimate the importance
of yourself as a resource
for the class.
Ever worried that you’re doing too much
Teacher Talking?
they want builds confidence and all-important learner autonomy. All the same, I wonder how this method would work with
a class of unruly teenagers!
The Grammar-Translation Approach is the old ‘chalk and
talk’ method that involves students studying the language,
more or less without speaking it. Imagine French lessons in
British schools in the 1970s and you’re pretty close to the
grammar-translation method. It is hard to find any modern
TEFL school that believes in this approach, but a great many
countries still teach languages in the ‘traditional’ way.
Silent Way adherents worry about TTT incessantly, because
they believe that students should be speaking more than the
teacher (After all, they are the ones who need to use the language, not the teacher!). Maybe you’ve been told in an observation that you talk too much. Of course, it isn’t good to have
a teacher jabbering on so much that the learners can’t get a
word in edgeways, but you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of yourself as a resource for the class – especially if
you’re teaching in a foreign country. You may be the only point
of contact for a number of people learning English with a native
speaker. Forgive yourself the occasional monologue, as it
might be one of the most authentic listening activities your
learners get.
Ever given your students a task to do with the
grammar point you want to teach hidden sneakily
inside?
If you’ve used a coursebook printed after the mid-nineties you
have. This is because Task-Based Learning has grown massively in popularity over the last decade. Even one of those
‘Find someone who…’ exercises could be regarded as Taskbased, because students are performing a task subconsciously using the target language (namely question forms).
What constitutes a ‘Task’ is debatable, but Task-Based
Learning turns ‘Presentation Practice Production’ neatly on its
head.
And finally, how important are all these terms
and phrases?
I survived for a number of years with barely any formal knowledge of methodology. I knew what I was doing, I knew it
would work or amuse the class, but I only had a rough idea
why I was doing it. Swotting up on methodology helped me
to realise the purpose of various activities and, in turn, I felt I
was able to justify or explain the reason for doing something
‘new’ to my classes. My confidence increased and my students had more tolerance for activities outside of their educational culture. To finish on a final ‘posh’ word, have no doubt
that you are a truly eclectic teacher. Namely you use different
methods at different times. Don’t we all these days? Answers
on a postcard (or an email) to the IH Journal…
Ever taught whole phrases to a class rather
than single words?
Another positive answer? There seems to be a growing fashion to do this more in TEFL as the Lexical Approach grows in
popularity. Michael Lewis has perfected the idea that language
is not just learnt by grammatical rules but by students acquiring ‘chunks’ of language (e.g. That should come in handy!).
Although not strictly a method but a view of language, the idea
that we produce language in chunks rather than sticking
words together is certainly true when I think of my own production of foreign languages!
Ever put your students in a circle to speak while
you’re on the outside?
References
Bowen, T. & Marks, J. (1994). Inside Teaching. Macmillan
Heinemann.
You seem like a Learner-centred type of teacher, or you may
like to call yourself a ‘facilitator’. Almost anything that takes
the attention off the teacher could be called learner-centred
because it nurtures learner autonomy. If you’ve put the learners in a circle and thrown a tape recorder in the middle then
you’re doubtless aware of Community Language Learning
(another humanistic approach), in which the learners decide
what they want to say and when they want to record it. The
main idea behind this approach is that minimal teacher interference and the fact that the learners can say and do what
Dellar, S. (1990). Lessons from the Learner. Longman.
Harmer, J. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching.
Pearson.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000). Techniques and Principles in
Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.
Richards, J. & Schmidt, R. (2002). Longman Dictionary of
Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics 2002. Longman.
— 19 —
Something on Language Awareness:
Should teachers learn or acquire it?
Alex Tilbury
ome time ago Michael Carrier visited the school where
I work, and he asked me if I could think of any bit of
material which the World Organisation might usefully
develop to help educational managers with the in-service training of newly-qualified teachers. My unhesitating reply was
‘Something on language awareness’. Those of you who have
met Michael will readily understand how I found, within the
space of a few minutes, that I had agreed to author the material myself. A couple of years later, ‘something on language
awareness’ is the International House Language Awareness
Course, or LAC for short. It comprises fourteen units, and can
be delivered in any International House school where there is a
member of the senior staff with some experience of in-service
training and an interest in how language is described for teaching purposes. A fuller description of the course is in IHWO
News below, on page 33.
What I’d like to do in this article is explore some issues relating to the role of language awareness among language teaching professionals and, in the course of the discussion, counter
some assertions made about ‘pedagogical grammar’ in an
article which appeared in a recent edition of this journal
(Rodney Blakeston, ‘How British education failed to teach us
about our own language’, IHJ 14 / Spring 2003). While writing the LAC, I was inevitably faced with the question, ‘What do
teachers need to know about language?’ – and obliged, for
better or worse, to answer it. As the writing progressed, I
encountered a second and rather more disconcerting question, namely, ‘Do teachers need to know about the language
at all?’ Some discussion of these questions seems to me to
be worthwhile for its own sake, but I hope too that a statement
of the tentative conclusions which I have reached will help
shed some light on the guiding principles behind the LAC, and
so be of use to those trainers around the world who deliver the
course. Let us take the second of my two questions first.
S
Those of you who know
Michael will readily
understand how I found,
within the space of a
few minutes, that I had agreed
to author the material myself.
Do teachers need language awareness?
s the introduction to this article makes clear, my gut reaction to this question, like most people’s, is ‘Yes, of course
they do’. Students expect their teachers to ‘know grammar’,
teachers feel inadequate if they don’t, and how can teachers
work effectively with the coursebooks which most of them are
required to use, if they can’t get a handle on the traditional
descriptions of language which those coursebooks, almost
without exception, continue to propagate? These are compelling practical arguments, but they gloss over what is surely
the fundamental issue which we, as teaching professionals,
ought to address, and which we can frame as another, rather
more exacting question: ‘Is language awareness an essential
attribute for a teacher who wishes to be an effective facilitator
of language acquisition?’ Put this way, the question begins to
look a little less one-sided.
There seems to be a pretty wide consensus nowadays that
there are three essential conditions for language acquisition:
exposure to plenty of language which is, with effort, comprehensible to the student; motivation on the part of the student;
and use of language in meaningful interaction. The EMU
model owes its widespread acceptance, I think, to its appeal
to common sense, its simplicity, and its refreshing freedom
from association with any ‘magic method’. Its usefulness as a
yardstick against which we can measure the content of our
lessons – ‘if you do nothing else,’ the model suggests, ‘provide
exposure, encourage motivation, and ensure use’ – has made
it, for many practitioners, powerfully reassuring. But on closer
examination, there is something decidedly un-reassuring about
the EMU model in what it omits, for it seems that instruction,
conscious attention to the forms of the language itself, is
deemed somehow non-essential. Can this really be the case?
Well, there is some evidence that, beyond a certain level of
proficiency, conscious attention to form is necessary if learners
are to avoid fossilisation of errors in their language; but in any
case I think the question unanswerable either way, as I know
of no way to prevent learners from attending consciously to the
language ‘code’ for themselves, regardless of what their
teachers might say or do.
A more fruitful line of enquiry might be this: accepting, for the
sake of argument, that focus on form is not essential, might it
not still be the case that it is useful, that it helps? To return to
our earlier question and to modify it yet again: ‘Is language
awareness a desirable attribute for a teacher who wishes to be
a more effective facilitator of language acquisition?’
A well-established means of approaching this question is to
place it in the framework of the Krashen dichotomy between
learning and acquisition. At the risk of stating the obvious, I
think it worth spending a few lines setting out my understanding of these terms, for reasons which I hope will become obvious as this article progresses. In his recent
article for this journal, Rodney Blakeston,
though he does not define either term
A
Alex Tilbury is a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies at International House Katowice in
Poland. He made an unsuccessful attempt to learn French as a teenager, and is now in the
process of acquiring Polish.
— 20 —
explicitly, uses them such that they have the following senses.
Acquisition is what happens when one is immersed in language ‘left, right and centre’, it is unconscious and effortless,
it is the attainment of language proficiency ‘in fantastically propitious circumstances’. Learning, by contrast, means getting
to grips with a language in an environment where that language is foreign, it takes place ‘after a gruelling day at work’,
it involves effort, neon lights and Beefeater posters. I don’t
believe I misrepresent Rodney, for an earlier article of his evidences a very similar set of assumptions (‘Language Teachers
Should Learn Languages’, IHJ 12 / March 2002).
Now, this is certainly not the sense in which I understand the
terms Iearning and acquisition, nor is it the sense in which I
believe most teachers understand them. Learning and acquisition, as originally conceived, do not merely denote different
paths, one ‘easier’ than the other, to language mastery, or proficiency, or competence, or whatever one chooses to call it;
rather, to use a language effectively to any really significant
degree, only acquisition suffices. To acquire language is to
internalise it to such a degree that it may be put to use in
encoding and decoding discourse spontaneously and without
effort; it is to be able to use language ‘without thinking’. The
process of acquisition, moreover, does not require – is not even
directly furthered by – ‘study’ or conscious attention to form.
Everyone who speaks a first language – that is, nearly everyone
in the world – acquires a language in childhood; English language teachers working in non-Anglophone environments, as
Rodney points out, acquire (‘pick up’) language; and English
language students commonly surprise their teachers and themselves in uttering language that they have not been ‘taught’ or
ever given any conscious thought to, but which their brains
have seen fit to acquire nevertheless. Acquisition, rather like
‘shit’, simply happens. Most teachers experience both phenomena in the classroom on a fairly regular basis.
Learning is at once a less common and a less remarkable
phenomenon, involving the study of language and the conscious application of rules and recall of lexis in the production
and comprehension of language, like having to remember how
to move one’s feet every time one walks. The language –
some would call it merely ‘language-like behaviour’ – of an
individual who has learned much but acquired little is typically
hesitant and gives the impression of being constructed piece
by piece as we listen. Most teachers will have experienced the
agonised and agonising output of students who, they protest,
‘think too much’.
As should be clear from the above, acquisition and learning
are not simply alternative routes to the same goal, but differ
fundamentally in their nature and importance. It is surely necessary for all those who wish or need to be proficient in a language to acquire it – not merely to learn it, but to acquire it.
Learning is something which students do in the hope of
advancing themselves further on the path to that goal. It is
not, as Rodney implies, an end in itself, but a means to an end.
The key question for language teachers then, is this: does,
or can, language learning promote language acquisition? Can,
for instance, the conscious learning of rules by students somehow contribute to the subconscious process of acquiring
those rules? Krashen, at least in his earlier work, insisted not.
Language teachers tend to react negatively to this proposition,
as it implies that much of what they do in the classroom is a
waste of time. More recently, a consensus seems to have
arisen that there is in fact an ‘interface’ of some kind between
learning and acquisition. Research into the question suggests
Acquisition,
rather like ‘shit’,
simply happens.
that the interface is a highly complex one, involving the interaction of a variety of factors, such as the particular ‘language
point’ in question, the state of the student’s interlanguage,
which ‘language points’ have already been acquired and, not
least, the aptitudes of the individual student. For the language
teacher who is interested in such questions, the picture
emerging from this research is one of breathtaking intricacy
and endless fascination; but it is also, for those in search of
empirically-based prescriptions for classroom practice, utterly
frustrating in the tentativeness and sometimes seemingly contradictory nature of its results. Pending the discovery of anything reasonably concrete about the learning / acquisition
interface, most teachers, myself included, bolstered by anecdotal evidence of learning ‘becoming’ acquisition, take it on
trust that there is such an interface, and proceed according to
the maxim that if you throw enough mud (—learning), some of
it must stick (—acquisition).
So, to return, at last, to the question of whether teachers
need to know about language, the answer would seem to be
yes: because what teachers know, they can teach; what students are taught, they might learn; and what students learn,
they might acquire.
What do teachers need to know about language?
et us now turn to the other of our two questions. Having
established, albeit provisionally, that language awareness is
essential to language teachers, we can re-examine the question of what, exactly, do these teachers need to know about
language?
Again, Rodney Blakeston’s article provides a useful starting
point. In the second half of his article, he argues that, as our
students are language learners, doggedly struggling to memorise words and rules and apply them in their speaking and writing, ‘we have to make what would appear [to be] gross generalisations’ in our treatment of grammar in the classroom.
Those of us who are ‘loftily disdainful of modest pedagogical
grammars’, he suggests, ‘have forgotten what it is like to be a
language learner’, and if we teachers had to learn languages
ourselves, ‘we would be much more respectful about prescriptive, simplified and canonical grammar…we would be crying out for simple rules’. He also implies, in a manoeuvre
which is presumably intended to foreclose debate, that those
of us who are not studying a language ‘in a classroom, with a
teacher’ – this rules out most of us, as Rodney will be aware –
have no right to be so ‘loftily disdainful’ as we allegedly are.
What Rodney means by ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ is,
again, never explicitly stated, but it is clear that what he is
defending is traditional coursebook grammar of the sort which
has constituted the central strand of English language syllabuses for decades: ‘the tenses…the ‘three’ conditionals…
articles… modals etc.’ He pays lip-service to the notion that
L
— 21 —
/ or elaborated at higher levels. But if one believes, as I do,
that the road to mastery involves unconscious acquisition of
language, then the effects of ‘modest pedagogical grammars’
are potentially rather pernicious.
But let us leave aside this admittedly speculative talk about
how languages are mastered. Another argument commonly
advanced in favour of ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ is that
they comprise ‘simple rules’; alternative descriptions of language are, by implication, deemed ‘too complicated’. Again, I
believe this notion to be false. Rodney suggests, for example,
that it is a simplification (which a linguistics professor would
‘snigger at’) to regard all verb forms in English as ‘tenses’, and
better not to confuse teachers or their students by separating
out tense from aspect or voice. But what this means, in practice, is that we have to teach students something like thirty two
distinct verb forms (or ‘tenses’, as Rodney would have them)
and, in each case, pair it with a meaning or a range of meanings. If, on the other hand, one separates out present and
past tense, perfect and progressive aspect, and active and
passive voice, it is possible to show students how each of
these elements has its own formal and semantic properties,
and that they combine with each other to make the numerous
verb forms of English in predictable ways. In other words, students are faced with the task of working with a handful of form
/ meaning rules (in some cases rather abstract, to be sure),
rather than a couple of dozen ‘tenses’ and their associated
meanings. Different approaches may be appropriate with different learners on different occasions, but the notion that the
canonical approach is somehow ‘simplified’ is nonsense: it is
more concrete, perhaps, but most assuredly not a simplification in terms of the sheer number of ‘bits and pieces’ which it
requires students to learn.
Another ‘simplification’ which Rodney alludes to is ‘the three
conditionals’. But this is an argument which, in his own terms,
Rodney cannot lose, for the ‘three conditionals’ model is a perfect example of how a ‘simplification’ is only necessitated by –
and can only be defended alongside – other misguided ‘simplifications’ at earlier stages of the syllabus. Let us take, for
example, a sentence of the type which is usually described as
a ‘first conditional’:
‘we should know as much as possible about a variety of
descriptions of language and these should inform us educationally’, but gives no indication as to how this process ought
to operate. True, we might, given his fury at ‘the neglect of
state education’ in failing to equip native-speaker CELTA
trainees with ‘the basic taxonomy of the language’, take him to
mean that ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ are indispensable
to ‘rookie’ teachers until they are able to progress to something more advanced; but given his claims about the needs of
learners, it is clearly implied that even the most experienced of
teachers would do better to leave ‘sexy’ or ‘exotic’ language
models well alone.
These arguments are, I believe, entirely mistaken. First, note
how the whole of Rodney’s argument rests on his idiosyncratic use of the terms learning and acquisition as alternative, but
equally valid, routes to language mastery: students, as people
who must ‘learn’ languages and have not the luxury of being
able merely to ‘acquire’ them, need ‘simplified’ rules. But if we
restore the orthodox relation between learning and acquisition
as, no matter how complex their intertwining, essentially
Acquisition and learning are
not simply alternative routes
to the same goal, but differ
fundamentally in their
nature and importance.
sequential rather than parallel, the argument collapses, for if
what students are after is acquisition, and if learning is but a
means to acquisition, it surely matters how we present language to our students. If we believe learning promotes acquisition, then there is surely a significant danger that those ‘simple rules’ which we ought to teach will be internalised. I cannot, of course, prove that this danger exists, but I do know that
the following rules – both, of course, wrong – are well established in ‘canonical grammar’...
3. If we lose the vote tonight, the government will fall.
Defenders of canonical grammar would argue that, because
the protasis here lacks ‘will’ even though it refers to the future,
it is self-evident that conditional clauses will prove difficult for
students to produce accurately, and that we ought to help
them by drilling them in a small number of fixed conditional
structures. Students cannot be expected to produce such
idiosyncratic structures for themselves, the argument runs,
and neither can we be expected to teach our students all possible conditional structures, so better to stick to three or four.
As regards the fact that some conditionals do actually have
‘will’ in the protasis…
1. use the past progressive to talk about the longer of two
actions
2. use ‘will’ for the future tense
… and that it is difficult to find students in Poland, even at
advanced levels, who don’t…
1. over-use the progressive, using it to refer to any situation
which ‘takes a long time’, like this: What did you do on
holiday? *We were lying on the beach.
4. If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you the bathroom.
… we may inform students about this, as an exception, at a
much later stage in their learning.
As a response to the ‘problem’ of conditional sentences this
seems plausible enough, but note that the problem is one of
the ‘canonical brigade’s’ (to paraphrase Rodney) own making,
for they will insist on telling students that ‘will’ is ‘the future’.
2. avoid / get confused by the use of ‘will’ to denote present
habit or assumptive certainty.
Of course, if one believes, as Rodney seems to, that language
mastery can be attained through purely conscious means,
then it might be that ‘simple rules’ can easily be unpicked and
— 22 —
Descriptive linguistics, however, suggests that present forms in
English may always have either present or future (i.e. non-past)
time reference, and that ‘will’ is better analysed not as ‘the
future’, but as just another modal verb with extrinsic and
intrinsic meanings: it denotes either certainty, in an assumptive
rather than a deductive sense…
5. That paper’ll be in the second drawer down.
…or intention / willingness…
6. I’ll open the window.
If we adopt this description of the semantics of ‘will’, the ‘problem’ of the first conditional vanishes: extrinsic ‘will’ is simply
redundant, and therefore omitted, in the protasis of sentence
(3.) precisely because it begins with ‘if’; while in sentence (4.),
‘will’ occurs in the protasis because it has intrinsic meaning
and is, therefore, not redundant. In short, teaching the ‘three
conditionals’ is only a necessary simplification if you find
you’ve already ‘simplified’ the teaching of ‘will’ – that is, taught
the meaning of the most frequently-used modal verb in the
English language wrongly. Yes, we should be informed by the
findings of descriptive linguistics – so why aren’t the canonical
brigade?
here is, as far as I am aware, no conditional structure in
English whose meaning cannot be derived consistently
from the elements which comprise it. In order to produce such
sentences (not just three of four types of them) accurately, students need to draw on their existing knowledge of the semantics of verb forms (especially tense) and a proper understanding of what modal verbs (including ‘will’) mean. As always they
will need prompting, correction, encouragement, to be sure –
but it must make better sense to encourage students to put
their existing knowledge to wider use, rather than spend time
teaching them a handful of superficially baffling new ‘things’.
The issue is not how many conditionals should be taught, but
whether we can justify teaching conditional sentences as separate constructs at all. If they had their own truly idiosyncratic
properties, we could; as they don’t, we can’t.
I am not, myself, as Rodney suggests some trainers are,
‘disdainful of modest pedagogical grammars’; on the contrary,
I am passionately concerned with what pedagogical grammar
– related to, but distinct from, descriptive grammar – should
be. Not only do I find the question intrinsically interesting, I
also believe that interest in it is a matter of professional duty.
We surely ought to question, for example, the teaching of ‘will’
as ‘the future’ when this is simply not the case and, despite its
being intended as a simplification, has deleterious and ever
more acute effects on students’ English as they progress
beyond elementary levels. Now, the ‘intrinsic / extrinsic modal
verb’ treatment of ‘will’ is, to be sure, more abstract than the
‘future tense’ treatment. During the writing of the LAC it
appeared, again and again, that there is a directly proportional relationship between the ‘accuracy’ of a rule and the level of
its ‘abstractness’.
accuracy of the rules we teach, and how abstract they are?
The tendency to date has been to opt for the more concrete /
inaccurate end of the spectrum; as is probably already clear, I
believe we could – and should – position ourselves further to
the right. This may seem, at first sight, a daunting prospect,
but would it really be so difficult to teach ‘will’ alongside ‘may’,
‘might’ and ‘can’t’ as a modal verb denoting a level of certainty and referring, as they all do, either to the present or to the
future? In and of itself, the answer to this question is surely
‘no’. Insights of this kind from descriptive linguistics are not
too abstract to be of use to students: certainly they are no
more difficult to grasp than many of the precepts of canonical
grammar, and there is in any case no reason to suppose that
abstract concepts cannot be grasped by students, or that they
cannot be conveyed effectively with some careful planning by
a competent teacher.
How, then, are we to explain the reluctance of many teachers and teacher trainers to deviate from the conventions of
canonical grammar? – even the downright hostility which the
idea sometimes provokes? First, it must be acknowledged
T
concrete
innacurate
RULES
abstract
accurate
The central question for authors of pedagogical grammar may
be framed thus: what should the balance be between the
The road to mastery
involves unconscious
acquisition of language.
that for teachers who have spent years working within the
framework of canonical grammar, the demands of the ‘revisionist’ camp can often seem threatening to professional selfesteem, or at the very least to require a change of mind-set
which would be highly inconvenient from a practical point of
view: cherished lesson plans would have to be jettisoned,
familiar coursebook materials radically adapted. Secondly,
and contrary to what the dire warnings in Rodney’s article
might lead us to think, canonical grammar is so deeply
entrenched in our profession, the inertia in language teaching
is so massive – bolstered in coursebook syllabuses, CELTA
courses, grammar references, internal and external exams –
that to attempt to teach a different sort of grammar, or even the
same sort of grammar with a different slant, would simply
require a great deal of work. Let us suppose, for example, that
we choose to teach ‘will’ as ‘just another modal verb’, with all
the adaptation / rejection / supplementing of our coursebook
materials that that would entail. Having started down this
road, we would be required, similarly, to adapt any other parts
of the coursebook which dealt with ‘will’, for example those
parts focusing on conditional sentences. Add to all this the
likelihood that our students will have had previous teachers
who followed canonical grammar – meaning that our students
will be resistant, consciously or unconsciously, to our ‘new’
descriptions – and will have such teachers again in the future
— 23 —
– meaning that any benefits we give our students may be no
more than ephemeral – and we might be forgiven for not making the attempt at all. A thoroughgoing adoption of some new
grammatical descriptions is a daunting prospect; canonical
grammar, on the other hand, promises a quiet life and peace
of mind for teachers and students, not to mention publishers.
But none of this, of course, alters the fact that much of the latter is empirically and pedagogically indefensible.
In other words, the course
aims not just to teach,
but to teach about
‘coursebook grammar’.
t the beginning of this article I expressed my hope that my
discussion of language awareness in language teaching
would help illuminate the principles which guided the writing of
the LAC. The general outlines, if not the particulars, of my
own views on what currently passes for pedagogical grammar
should by now be clear, but I should state at once that the LAC
does not aim to foment a revolution among impressionable
new teachers against canonical grammar. As I began work on
the course I was convinced (and became more so as the work
progressed) that there are serious shortcomings in canonical
grammar of which teachers need at least to be aware, if the
English teaching profession is to be worthy of that name; but I
was also convinced that teachers need a thorough understanding of canonical grammar if they are to cope with the
day-to-day reality of having to use published materials effectively and, should they so choose, adapt them. The LAC
therefore sets out to do two things:
A
•
to familiarise course participants with descriptions of language commonly found in coursebooks and other published materials (‘canonical grammar’);
•
to enable course participants to critique such descriptions,
both in terms of their descriptive accuracy, and their usefulness to learners.
conditional sentences could be got using the ‘lexical
approach’ of the more atomistic kind associated with Dave
Willis; Unit 13 aims to acquaint trainees with the grammar –
and, to a lesser extent, the vocabulary – of the much-neglected noun phrase; and the final unit deals with the notion of lexical ‘chunking’ which lies at the core of the better-known ‘lexical approach’ inspired by Michael Lewis. This last unit may be
taken as characteristic of the course as a whole, in that it
explores the benefits and shortcomings of both the traditional
‘grammar plus vocabulary’ approach to language description
and of the lexical phrase hypothesis, but does not engage in
the – to my mind – rather barren debate about whether structure or lexis is ‘primary’.
So the approach of the LAC is, I hope, best summed up as
one of intellectual honesty: acknowledgement of the exigencies
of teaching in schools where resources may be lacking and
teachers have little time to reflect on descriptions of language
and their application in the classroom, but also an openness to
fresh perspectives and a determination to give rational consideration to the merits and demerits of any attempt, canonical or
otherwise, to describe the language we teach.
The first of these aims inevitably means that much of the
course is preoccupied with the grammar of the verb phrase,
reflecting the traditional bias of most coursebook syllabuses.
The second aim of the course encourages trainees to critique,
rather than blindly swallow, the descriptions of language presented. In other words, the course aims not just to teach, but
to teach about ‘coursebook grammar’. This dual aim is built in
to every unit, and is also manifest in the structure of the course
as a whole. At the unit level, trainees are familiarised with more
conventional ways of looking at language, and then invited to
critique them in relation to alternative descriptions; and I have
tried to maintain a balanced view of the advantages and shortcomings of both modes of description throughout. The unit on
tense, for example, introduces the idea (proposed by Lewis
and others) that the core semantic value of the past tense is
‘remoteness’, and then invites trainees to discuss how plausible they find this idea as a description of how verb forms work,
and how practicable – or not – it would be to import it into the
classroom. At the level of the course as a whole, the opening
unit aims to engender a healthy scepticism among trainees
regarding where descriptive language ‘rules’ come from, and
how definitive we are justified in assuming them to be. The
next ten units, mirroring the preoccupation of the current
grammatical canon, focus on various dimensions of the verb
form in English; the list of topics here is fairly conventional,
though much of the content of each unit is not. The final three
units of the course are dedicated to less traditional areas and
analyses of the language, with the intention of pointing up the
inadequacies and blindspots of conventional verb phrase
grammar. Thus Unit 12 suggests that a superior analysis of
o return to Rodney Blakeston’s article once more, it is, to
put it mildly, disappointing, in an educational journal of all
places, to hear the view expressed that it would be a good
thing if ‘rookie’ teachers were insulated from ‘exotic tales of
much sexier language descriptions’ (Lewis? Willis? sexy?)
which will ‘lure them astray’. Let us savour the folly of this for
a moment. There would actually be meetings, at which some
sinister clique from the upper hierarchy of International House
Teacher Training would be heard to insist: ‘Hey, here’s a good
idea. Let’s stop encouraging our rookie teachers to think’.
Not only is the idea grotesque in principal, but it lacks any
justification on practical grounds. If we leave aside the inaccurate suggestion that novice teachers ‘welcome’ alternative
language descriptions because they obviate the need to learn
‘tenses’ and make them ‘readier to say to the students: “Er,
there aren’t really rules here… you just have to sort of feel
whether it sounds right’’’ (a wilfully silly parody of the lexical
approach), the only possible reason for confining more
‘advanced’ linguistic knowledge to teachers with a good few
years’ experience (not, of course, that they would actually do
anything with this knowledge) is that novice teachers will
somehow get confused by it.
Again, not true. Most of us get exasperated from time to
time by the more fantastic claims of the disciples of corpus linguistics or the acolytes of Michael Lewis, but to deprecate
them on the grounds that they damage teacher development
T
— 24 —
suffered by increasing numbers of children in Britain. This
issue aside, the ‘knowledge gap’ which Rodney mentions can
be a real headache on CELTA courses, and one effective
means of tackling it is to address both canonical and alternative modes of language description during seminars. A session on the concept of the past tense having ‘remote’ meaning, for example, benefits native speakers by acquainting them
with the morphology of past tense forms and the hypothetical
meaning of the past tense in certain contexts, while the notion
of a ‘unified theory’ of past tense meaning engages the attention of non-natives and provides them with a new and elegant
perspective on how the English verb form works. Similarly, a
session on lexical descriptions of language is far more likely to
be of interest and value to all trainees than one on, say, ‘the
present perfect’. As with the case of teaching conditional sentences mentioned above, an otherwise manageable difficulty is
exacerbated by the canonical brigade’s refusal to countenance
the validity of any description of language other than that
enshrined in canonical grammar.
In the course of this article I have made no secret of my
misgivings about canonical grammar.
It must be
acknowledged that many generations of students have
become proficient in English over the years, either with the
help of, or in spite of, canonical grammar. With the help of, or
in spite of. I think it matters which. Alternative ideas about
language description ought not to be dismissed out of hand or
locked away in a secret room, but welcomed, rigorously
debated by all members of our profession and, if they seem
superior to those in the current canon, the canon changed,
and the idea applied. The LAC, however modestly, attempts
to embody these principles.
is quite misguided. It must be borne in mind that language
awareness, unlike many teaching skills, is essentially a matter
of declarative knowledge. Thus a novice teacher may struggle
to carry off, say, a decent task-based lesson, but there is no
reason to suppose that they should find a concept in language
description any more difficult to grasp than a teacher of several years’ experience; they may even, if they have a particular
aptitude for such things, find that they grasp the concept and
are able to pursue its pedagogical implications more easily.
And indeed, this is what we found when we ran the pilot version of the LAC materials in Poland. Although the course was
originally conceived as an aid for newly-qualified teachers, the
trainees actually ranged in experience from post-CELTA to
post-DELTA, and there was little correlation between a
teacher’s level of experience and their ability to understand and
compare the competing descriptions of language presented.
More experienced teachers were, as one might expect, quicker to spot the potential practical benefits of and problems with
novel descriptive ideas, while greener teachers, their minds not
yet cluttered with the baggage of canonical grammar, stimulated much debate with an ability to ask some direct and
searching questions. Their grasp of canonical descriptions – if
not their adherence to them – was, if anything, tightened rather
than loosened by their awareness of alternative ones, precisely because the latter tend to define themselves in opposition to
the former. In terms of the impact of the course on the
trainees’ teaching, this will, it is to be hoped, become more evident in the longer term; in the short term trainees tend to stick,
for reasons of practicality and security, to more orthodox treatments of language, but the course does equip them better to
prioritise exercises, anticipate potential problems with their
materials, and deal convincingly with student queries which
would otherwise be highly disconcerting: ‘Oh yes, I see. Well,
since you ask, in this particular sentence there are two “wills”
because…’
Finally, and to return to Rodney’s article for one last time, a
word about language awareness among native versus nonnative speaker teachers. The first half of Rodney’s article proclaims ‘the neglect of state education’ in failing to teach
English grammar to British children, leading to a situation
where groups of CELTA trainees are typically a mix of ignorant
native-speakers alongside non-natives who are well-versed in
canonical grammar. Why the state should expend resources
on teaching children the grammar of a language they already
speak, other than for the convenience of our profession, is
never really made clear, for it is difficult to see how teaching
children about the ‘second conditional’ would alleviate the very
real problems with literacy – not language description –
WOULD YOU LIKE
TO ADVERTISE
your
• School
• Course
• Book
• Exam
• Idea
in the
Ideas about language
description ought not to be
dismissed out of hand or
locked away in a secret room,
but welcomed and debated.
IH JOURNAL?
If so, get in touch with
Nigel Beanland
[email protected]
?
SPECIAL RATES FOR IHWO MEMBERS!
— 25 —
Tests and Exams
TESTS AND EXAMS
The IHWO Placement Test and Level Tests
and The Euro Exam for IH Schools
Mike Cattlin
n this article I would like to outline the large Euro Exam project at IH Budapest, update the proposal concerning
Placement Testing in IHWO and make a proposal for an
IHWO examination suite. Anna Sikó, Director of IH Budapest,
spoke about these ideas at the Directors’ Conference in
Cordoba last year; the Directors they were enthusiastic about
adopting these proposals, but the support of the Educational
side of the organisation is equally vital. At the 2004 DoS
Conference I presented a session aimed at convincing participants how these proposals could benefit DoSes and their
schools, and go some way towards providing a Unique Selling
Point for IHWO.
I
The Euro Exam project at IH Budapest
This project was the subject of an article by Adam Schreck in
the IHJ Issue 14. It is a suite of examinations which has been
made more accessible to students than others on the market,
particularly with regard to its cost. They are currently available
at B1, B2 and C1/2 levels and were accredited by the
Hungarian Ministry of Education Accreditation Board in
November 2001, since when their popularity has soared; in
December 2003, a total of 1908 candidates sat one or other
of the Euro Exam suite, an increase of almost 100% on the
same month in the previous year.
The advantages of the Euro Exams are several:
•
They are standardised to Council of Europe levels. There
is the Common European Framework of Reference for
Languages, there is the European Language Portfolio with
its language passport; internationally, people want standardised results of the ability to communicate based on
the ‘can do’ statements.
•
They are ‘Where-are-you-now?’ tests which can show
students where they are in relation to an internationally
recognised (Council of Europe) scale, Proficiency Exams,
‘designed to measure people’s ability in a language
regardless of any training they may have had in that language ….. not based on the content or objectives of language courses’ (Arthur Hughes in Testing for Language
Teachers, CUP 1989).
•
The exams use real English in real-life tasks, what many
see as the future of testing and reflecting the philosophy
of International House and Communicative Language
Teaching.
•
They are aimed at achieving beneficial backwash – the
tests can positively influence teaching.
•
There are both General English and Professional/Business
English options available.
A proposal concerning Placement Testing in IHWO
A logical next step for IHWO is to use the expertise at IH
Budapest to create the long-awaited IH Placement Test. The
crucial point here is that Placement Testing should not only
place students effectively but also sell the school effectively in
terms of its professionalism and corporate image. Many IH
schools have effective, good-looking tests, but not all, and this
proposal aims to address this and provide a uniform system
which will tie in with the IH level system, and make sure that an
Intermediate student in country X is as similar in level as possible to an Intermediate in country Y.
We propose the test procedure should include:
•
pre-test;
•
a focus test at 3 levels;
•
an oral component;
•
results which place students in the 8 IH levels.
These tests are being put together at the time of writing and we
hope to have them available to all schools by September – free
of charge within IHWO. Initially, their use will not be compulsory, but greatly encouraged. If they work well, they will be made
compulsory for all new IHWO schools in tandem with the IH
level system; full implementation world-wide could then follow.
Younger Learner Placement Tests will follow on demand and
subject to the successful adoption of the above. Other IH
schools are already looking into this as well.
A proposal for an IHWO examination suite
There are two options available here:
• To create 8 end-of-level tests (to match the 8 IHWO
levels), each test being about an hour in length plus an oral
component. This idea was very enthusiastically received
by the DoSes at the January Conference.
Mike Cattlin is currently a Teacher Trainer with IH Budapest, having previously worked as a
Director of Studies in Poland and Indonesia, and as a Trainer in Poland, England, Spain,
South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Italy. He also works on the IH Distance
Diploma in Educational Management (ELT).
— 26 —
Tests and Exams
•
Because IH-type teaching is communicative by nature, it
prepares students for such an examination.
•
Also see the advantages listed in part one of this article.
The exams use
DoSes in those countries where the increasingly popular
English Language Portfolio is widely accepted were particularly interested in the adoption of the Euro Exams.
It is possible for both of the above options to be provided
and offered in tandem, the first throughout all IHWO schools,
the second for those schools / students for whom the advantages detailed above are relevant.
real English in
real-life tasks.
or the piloting of the Euro Exams as an internal exam, a trial
set will be available for use in May / June 2004; we would
need to know entry numbers three weeks before the exam
date. In the future, they could be issued at set periods, for
example, late-May and late-November, and the marking of
everything except the Orals could be done centrally in
Budapest, at least during the trial period. At the moment, IH
Budapest offers the Euro Exams as an external exam four
times a year; other countries are already considering it as an
externally accredited examination. In the long-term, they could
rival Cambridge with IH schools administering them.
Feedback from the educational side of the organisation as a
whole is important in deciding whether to proceed and, if so,
how to go about the logistics including the necessary training
(IH Budapest does have courses available for familiarising
teachers and students with task types).
This is a consultative process; as with all changes, it needs
managing and evaluating as a result of experimentation. Any
comments or questions you have can be addressed to me at
[email protected] or [email protected] or you can contact
the Euro Office directly at [email protected] .
F
•
The adoption of the IH Budapest Euro Exam suite (B1, B2
and C1/2 levels). There would be costs involved, but
many advantages as well, as we will see below, not the
least of which is the possible expansion of the suite to the
status of external examinations which all IH schools could
sell and administer in their own countries.
The advantages of the first option are, perhaps, self-evident,
so I will focus here on the rationale for the second. Perhaps
the outstanding advantage lies in the results the students
would receive; a candidate taking the B2 paper, for example,
would receive feedback in the form of 5 or 6 marks (one each
for Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing, Grammar and
Vocabulary, plus Mediation (translation) if offered); this would
give a clear indication of a student’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to the internationally recognised B2 standards (for
example, a pass mark of between 60 and 65%). This has the
following, clear advantages:
•
It provides the school with a solid rationale for the subsequent placement of students – for example, it would be
easier to explain to a student why s/he had to repeat a
level or take extra classes in a specific skill; likewise, it
would be easier for a student to justify why they should
jump two levels.
•
It provides valuable feedback to the DoS / school on
which skills are (not) being taught well across the institution, or even from teacher to teacher.
•
Progress would be more clearly and statistically visible to
both school and students.
•
It helps to ensure uniform placement and levels throughout the IHWO, so that, for example, students going to
study abroad have a clear level and a clear indication of
their needs for themselves and the host school to
address.
Other advantages include:
•
There would be no need for the DoS or over-worked
teachers to have to sit down and write tests.
•
The test itself (orals excluded) does not need teaching
staff to invigilate.
•
The exam could be optional for the students upon enrolment or by a specified date, but in either case, could be a
powerful marketing tool. The exam gives an ‘added value’
and offers the potential for ‘satisfaction plus’, if successfully marketed.
— 27 —
In your own words
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
The Game: Early Days in TEFL
Benita Cruickshank
’ll never forget my first day as a TEFL teacher. First of all, my
job wasn’t taking place where it was supposed to be.
Fortunately I turned up hours early.
The Nothing School of English was in Notting Hill Gate but
they were bussing parties of kids (I could see them imprisoned
on huge coaches above me, staring down at me like silent
gorillas, with monkeys screaming in between) to somewhere
unknown. And ‘they’, my employers, seemed to have disappeared anyway.
A blond, fey sort of girl of about 18 airily told me, ‘We’re all
over in the Park – like last year.’
‘We are?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Clearly I didn’t.
‘Oh, great!’ I muttered darkly. Somewhere along the line I’d
been misled. I hoped I hadn’t been misled about getting paid
at the end of the month.
I
’d just done one of those TEFL courses of which I’d understood absolutely nothing – except I liked the students - they
were sweet; but the network surrounding the whole activity of
‘communicating’ with them left a blur in the mind. I had a book
and was determined to teach from it. Someone somewhere
was going to get taught. I kept wondering where the people
who’d employed me for this task had gone. The Bahamas?
Somehow we all got to a vast building which had been hired
for us. It was nice: gardens all around on a sunny August day.
There were children from pram-size to Frankenstein hulk.
Some were being tenderly delivered by gibbering nannies and
maids who looked terrified at leaving their charges in such a
zoo. One was an Arab princeling surrounded by an entourage,
hair wet and flicked back, pallid face constantly patted,
squeezed and kissed by agitated female attendants for whom
he clearly had no respect. Some skulked about in corners but,
fortunately, didn’t seem hostile.
The bossy girl and I argued about what should happen next.
A nondescript creature arrived with a rucksack on its back
and stood waiting for us to stop arguing.
The bossy girl turned on him, ‘Yes?’
‘Ergh. Sorry I’m late. This is supposed to be my day off.
They rang me this morning’. This was a teacher? One of us?
I
There were children from
pram-size to
Frankenstein hulk
‘Oh’, the bossy girl was trying to disguise relief, I was sure.
‘You weren’t here last year’, she added, pulling rank.
‘Ergh. No. I joined last Easter’, he said, unloading his rucksack and opening the top of it. Out came some white, lined
cards. He gave them to her.
‘Ergh. These are the registers. Had to go and get them first.
Sort the kids out, will you? I have to change in the toilets’. I
realised what he was wearing was his cycling gear.
The bossy girl clutched the registers in possessive hands
and murmured, ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’
I hadn’t noticed a spark of sexual energy myself but I agreed
dutifully. I’d had enough of arguing. She definitely knew more
than I did.
‘New Zealand or Australia?’ I realised she was still speculating about the addition to our team. I shrugged.
Children howled around the room. The high ceilings created an echo effect with the bare boards as she debated the
point.
‘We’d better organise them’, said the bossy girl.
‘In what language?’ I asked. I’d heard a lot of Arabic and
Brazilian Portuguese, which sounded much the same to me. I
didn’t speak either.
The bossy girl gave me a mistrustful look. I’d clearly lost
face with that one.
‘Latin? I did Latin at school.’ I suggested, trying to keep my
end up. She turned away, ignoring me.
She shouted to get the kids’ attention. After several shouts
– I loyally joined in – we got some sort of silence. Sixty pairs
of eyes stared at us manically. I shivered.
‘Good morning’, she said cheerfully. Was it still morning? I
looked covertly at my watch. Twenty past nine. We didn’t finish till four. God!
‘I can’t hear you’. She exploited the situation. We’d had a
lot of that on my recent course. She put her hand to her ear.
‘Good morning’, she shouted again.
I was amazed. A sort of murmur came in response. She did
it again until she’d got them all screaming back. What power!
Then she said to me, ‘Do you know a game?’
‘A game?’ I asked, startled. ‘What do you mean?’
She blinked rapidly. ‘You know. Like “I Spy”?’
‘Huh?’ We had one hundred and twenty assorted eyes fixed
on us and she wanted to play ‘I Spy’?
The New Zealand cyclist returned looking quite respectable
in grey trousers and a saggy sweater. He addressed himself
to the mob:
‘Right, you lot, get into your classes.’
What classes?
He and the bossy girl walked around the
room sorting bodies into clumps. They
Benita has been a CELTA and DELTA trainer in IH London for 19 years and has worked in 22
different countries around the world. She is also the co-author of ‘An A – Z of English
Grammar and Usage’ (Longman) with Professor Leech.
— 28 —
In your own words
ended up with an assorted job lot and came back to me.
‘Take this lot to E’, I was told. The saggy sweater and the
bossy girl seemed to have exchanged personalities.
‘Where’s that?’ I asked, dumb as ever.
‘Through that door – by the toilets – through the library, at
the far end. Just keep going. You can’t miss it!’
The job lot followed me, muttering to itself.
We found the room. Quite a nice room, with glass doors
opening onto a shrubbery, kids’ books on the shelves, hastily
arranged, little chairs and desks.
The job lot sat down on the chairs and fiddled with fingernails, hair and noses. It knew the drill, even if I didn’t.
I went outside the classroom door and stared around.
Mysteriously there seemed to be groups in rooms and adults
in charge of them. I caught sight of Saggy Sweater picking up
a box of bricks in a room full of very young children, including
the Arab prince who was now screaming for attention and, for
the first time in his life, being ignored.
Saggy Sweater earned my respect by telling him to shut up.
The little boy obeyed.
‘What’s your name?’ I whispered through the doorway.
‘Tony’. He looked tired and poor, but not humourless.
‘What am I supposed to do?’
He grinned as if I’d made a joke. ‘Keep them quiet till 3.45
and then send them home’.
‘Oh? That’s it?’ What did I do in the classroom? I was worried now, too afraid to ask. I was supposed to know! I had a
sudden inspiration. ‘Do they have lunch?’
‘Oh, yes. And a break. Stop at 10.45 for half-an-hour and
then stop at 12.30 for an hour and a half. You’ll hear the
noise’. I was relieved. That didn’t sound too bad.
‘OK’.
Needless to say I got through the material I’d thought of earlier in about ten minutes. It turned out that they had ‘the book’,
or rather enough of them had the book, to share. This was
one of those ‘Learn English in Five Minutes a Day’ books
which started off with ‘This is a book’ and by lesson 10 was on
‘These are green and red books’. The kids mopped that up in
a few minutes. It seemed useless. You didn’t go round saying things like that in real life.
‘Can you count?’ I asked.
‘Win…too…free…five…eleven’, they all intoned.
‘No, no, no’, I sorted that out bossily. I could make bingo at
home and play that with them, I thought, wondering if the
evening would ever come.
‘Can you spell your names?’ It hadn’t until then occurred to
me that I didn’t know their names! That took a good half-anhour of alphabet practice and by the end of it the job lot was
sorting itself out into individuals. They seemed to vary from 6
to 13 years old and were mainly from countries I knew nothing
about. But then I’d only been to Spain on package holidays.
There was uproar outside and I looked at my watch and it
was the break. Thank God. I might get some advice on what
to do next.
Not a bit of it. They (there suddenly seemed to be at least
half a dozen teachers milling around) were all engrossed in
their own concerns, priority being given to toilets, phone calls,
coffee and cigarettes.
Eventually the hullabaloo settled down and we were barricaded in our corner again. I opened the glass doors to freedom – the park outside.
One of the boys got out a wad of money. Ah, I thought.
Counting. Yes. They liked this and we spent an hour count-
There was uproar outside and
I looked at my watch and
it was the break. Thank God.
I might get some advice
on what to do next.
ing each other’s money, buying imaginary things from each
other and working out the change. They all appeared to get
more pocket money at the age of 8 than I got paid in a month.
I was rapidly revising my parents’ view that everyone in the
world was poor except the Americans. This lot were all rolling.
Lunchtime arrived. It wasn’t as much fun as I’d thought.
Instead of doing something, the joy lay in not doing anything.
I found the bossy girl under a tree.
‘You can take them all out’, she told me. ‘In the park. To
museums and shops and supermarkets.’
‘Oh. I didn’t know that. So I could teach them food and
then take them to the supermarket, for example’. She nodded,
boredom spreading rapidly across her English rose features.
Clearly I hadn’t thought of anything original.
I gradually put together a list of things I could do with them
and life settled into a routine. The problem was Friday afternoons. I managed to get them through a couple of illustrated
readers they quite enjoyed (Jack and Jill and the Burglars type
of thing) but once they knew what to expect they got fed up.
‘You can take the books outside.’ I told them brightly. There
was a mass exodus. Two or three of them ended up groping
about in the bushes and found a ball. Then there was a quarrel between brothers and sisters about who should have it, and
thus was born ‘The Game’.
I, who had never played a game in my life apart from netball
(and I starkly refused to play that, at an early age) and therefore knew no correct ‘rules’ for any game, was about to invent
a game.
They were divided into two teams of roughly equal size and
age. The object was to get the ball between two books/
coats/ cardigans/ lunch boxes/ anything that came to hand.
That much was obvious.
‘You can throw it, kick it, whatever you like’, I said. ‘You can
get it away from each other however you like, but no kicking,
scratching or biting – or you lose the ball – and no complaining when you get home if you get hurt’.
Eyes lit up all around me. A lot of chatter went on among
the different ethnic groups who then broke into English as the
shared means of communication while they sorted out the
‘rules’. A pushing, snorting, somersaulting pack tumbled and
fell and screamed and yelled their way up and down our
stretch of grass. The best score was something like 13 – 11.
Everyone ended up covered in bruises and panting from
exhaustion. The only real fights were between siblings and
they were separated by their peers who wanted to get on with
the game. We did this every Friday afternoon.
Thus was my first experience of teaching English as a foreign language. I’ll never forget those kids. They never ‘told
on’ me and that terrible game. I did get paid – by the woman
who’d employed me in the first place. Where had she been
the whole month? I didn’t care. I had a REAL job to go to
somewhere else!
— 29 —
In your own words
Words…
Andy Cox
HEY, collude they, elude hiding themselves in
secluded parts of the brain, elusive, corrosive,
destructive, explosive. They conjure magical
images. Inspiring, spiralling, spinning and wheeling. They rush, have the power to hush small children, humble
the old and educate the scholarly. They gnaw at the bone
change their meaning with tone, they hone in and stone the
moaner with expletives and adjectives that describe the fleetingness of our futile attempts to understand. But then words…
re not weapons but communicative syntax, lexical shapes, they’re abstract. Ticks, dots, ink
blots and blotches, smears and hotch potches of
hieroglyphic symbols. Punctuated with strategic
spaces, leaving us traces of thoughts and feelings historical,
dogma and speeches rhetorical, rhythmical, lyrical, stories true
and false. They can be blue, but of course! But they’re not to
blame, never spoken twice the same. Words… they’re just
straight lines and curves. Left hanging in the air or scratched
out on paper, scribbled on notes to be decoded later. But then
words…
an be splashed with a tear, drenched in fear, warbled and yodelled, sung in the shower monotonal. Snivelled sobs, grovelling yobs, screeched
and demeaning, lauded by snobs. They can be
used to belittle, trailed by spittle, an aerial display of lace, lands
pitter-patter in your face. Used and abused, use them badly
you lose. They come dripping and wrapped, saturated and
spat out. Charged with emotion, they’re causing a commotion
somewhere. Words, just like these can be used in desperate
pleas. But then words…
re being shortened and stretched, bellowed and
fetched from dictionaries fat, and, yes, fancy that;
the word ‘oligopoly’ does exist, it’s like a cartel,
get the gist? Meanings unsure, kids inventing
more, swapping texts and sending vexed messages through
cyberspace, now there’s a new discovered phonetic grace,
like; c u @ ur place + . ‘X’ means kiss but then we all know
this. Hurling at word speed, dot, dot, dash, www, forward
slash. But then words…
re dynamic, hilarious, tragic. They can cut you
down, leave you with a scar, a bruise, a smile or
a frown. They can fill you with pleasure, hypnotise you and knock you over with a feather plume
that swoons. There are antonyms, synonyms, complimentary
adjectives in predicative positions, words that weave together
in blurring elisions. An idiomatic phrase, can truly amaze, and
sentence stress? Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll give it a rest. ‘Coz words are
not really a grammatical system but culturally learnt through
linguistic acquisition. But I’ll stop now, ‘coz it’s all too scary,
when everyone starts getting vocabu-lary.
Andy started teaching English at the Callan School of English and decided he wanted to take
it further. He passed the CELTA course in November 2002 at IH London and has been
working for us ever since teaching General English. He recently spent 3 months working in
Catania, Sicily.
— 30 —
IHWO News
IHWO NEWS
Michael Carrier
Executive Director, IHWO
produce a localised version for a particular company.
To assist in the promotion of our Study Abroad schools, we
have produced a colourful and attractive CDROM catalogue of
the schools, which students (or agents) can search to find the
language and the location that they want, along with details
and photos of the schools and cities where IH is located. You
can order a copy from head office or view it online at
www.ihworld.com/studyabroad.
One the main developments for 2004 is the introduction of a
Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for IH schools to use in
online teaching and training. We are currently piloting systems
and devising sample course materials, and there will be
demonstrations of this exciting new technology available for all
IH staff to access by the summer - more in the next issue!
he IH community continues to grow and expand worldwide. In the last six months we have affiliated new
schools in Bratislava, Bangkok, Dubai, Toronto, Jeddah
and Al-Jouf. We are expanding into new countries with new
applications - or rather, returning to countries once part of the
IH network such as Lebanon and Algeria.
On the educational front we have produced new resources
for busy teachers in the form of a 25-hour course in English for
Marketing. The most requested speciality for many schools,
English for Marketing is a popular product for many corporate
clients. In order to assist schools in preparing a specialised,
tailor-made course for their clients, we have commissioned an
experienced trainer and DOS, Jeremy Day, to produce a
course that can be run 'off-the-shelf', or can be customised to
T
IH Prize Winners!
Jenny Davey
n 2001 Cambridge ESOL introduced an annual prize of £500
for candidates taking the Diploma in English Language
Teaching to Adults (DELTA), who have shown the best overall
performance across the three components: the Coursework,
the Extended Assignment and the Written Examination. Two of
the prizewinners since the prize was launched have been IH
trainees: Neil Anderson who took the DELTA course at IH
Budapest in 2001 and last year Jenny Davey, who did the
course at IH Lisbon where she had also done her Cert TEFLA
and the Young Learners Course. Here’s what they had to say:
‘Doing the DELTA more than lived up to
my expectations. The trainers at IH
Lisbon were committed and inspiring and
I enjoyed the impetus to read widely, to
experiment and to be ambitious in the
classroom. The practical element of the
Jenny Davey,
course meant that I could feel very directly
2003 Cambridge
ESOL
the benefits I was gaining from it when
DELTA Prize Winner
working with my learners, who seemed to
appreciate their central role in my own
learning. My colleagues both at my school and on the
course were also an important part of the learning process.’
I
Neil Anderson
‘ What I learnt from my excellent DELTA course at IH
Budapest is obvious, simple and yet easy to overlook in so
many ways: to value the student above the lesson plan.’
Congratulations to both – and here’s looking forward to the
next lot of results and the announcement, perhaps of another
IH winner!
— 31 —
IHWO News
Celebrating 50/40 Years of IH In Portugal
t an IH Portugal directors’ meeting at
the beginning of 2003, we decided
that our way of celebrating the 50/40
(the very seeds of IH sown in Cordoba in 1953
and the opening of the first IH school in
Portugal in 1963) would be to select a really
worthwhile cause and organise a series of fund
raising events to enable us to present a large
cheque to the organisation of our choice at a
party, which would more or less coincide with
the anniversary of the opening of the first
school in Portugal, and, by extension the start
of John and Brita’s school in Cordoba.
A
We agreed that FENACERCI (the Portuguese
Federation of Cooperatives for the Education
of Mentally Disabled Children) should be the
The Directors of IH Portugal schools with the Director of FENACERCI
and a fat cheque.
object of our fund-raising. Over about 25
years, with minimal Government funding it has
developed a chain of over 50 Cooperatives (many in towns
where there are IH schools) providing opportunities for
e learned a lot: a most important lesson was not to
education and work experience for a huge number of disabled
‘over-intend’: better to put on a couple of events with
children.
time to plan properly, than to cancel or postpone at the last
minute. Even more important – even the most generous
Our initial plan was extremely ambitious and included
donors can suffer from donation fatigue after the second or
third appeal for contributions to the same cause.
Feb-March: An Art Competition on the theme ‘Children’
Sponsorship (patrocnio in Portuguese) was generally really
April:
A Sponsored Spell
only understood in the Nike/Beckham sense; as a result we
May:
A Sponsored Walk
needed more time than we anticipated to get our idea across.
June:
A Summer Fete
W
Between the schools we raised 20,000 euros which we were
very proud of; FENACERCI were absolutely delighted and sent
out a press release which referred to IH in glowing terms.
Unfortunately only one national newspaper found it sufficiently
newsworthy to carry an article.
The event that generated the most enthusiasm was the
Sponsored Spell. It was probably also the least headache to
organise and contributed the largest proportion of the 20,000
euros.
Socially, and possibly from a marketing angle, the Sponsored
Walk was the most successful. All the participants wore IH 50th
T-shirts and large numbers of people walking together on a
Sunday morning in May caused a bit of a stir. Everybody
involved was determined to make it an annual event so we are
preparing for the 2004 walk with at least double the number of
participants.
Colin Macmillan, Director IH Lisbon
For details of how your school could organise one of these
events, to raise its market profile locally AND help a good
cause, contact Colin at IH Lisbon.
Check Point on the IH Portugal Sponsored Walk
IH Educators’ Conference
It was a triumph for the organiser George Pickering and he
is already planning the next one. The Journal will be printing
versions of many of the talks in issue 17 so if you missed it
don’t despair – you will be able to catch up with much of the
content if not the atmosphere. In the meantime, if you are in
London or near, why not join the Professional Development
Centre (details on www.ihlondon.com).
he first weekend in March IH London hosted the annual IH
Educators’ Conference; there was a record turn-out, (and
some disappointments – next year book early!) with a video
link organised to the adjoining room to 106 Piccadilly’s famous
C2 for the plenary sessions; and a star line-up including Scott
Thornbury, Tessa Woodward and many other famous names.
T
— 32 —
IHWO News
IH Malta, Gozo
ozo is a tiny mythical island with a history stretching
back to well before Stonehenge, whose hills are
scattered with the limestone churches which give it
the distinctive character for which it is known. With a climate
whose average temperature in winter is around 14 degrees
and whose summers are tempered by the sea breezes,
Gozo is a holiday dream – so it’s startling to find it is also
home to a language school. A rather unusual language
school and a visitor there finds herself asking a few questions:
G
Is it the only IH school which is most conveniently
reached by helicopter?
Is it the only IH school whose facilities include a pool
and sun deck, a bar, a games room, a fitness room and
a sauna? (If you look very carefully at the photo, you can
see the IH logo sign by the gate into the school, behind the
bougainvillea.)
the IH Gozo pool
Is it the only IH school whose social programme includes
walking, cycling, boating, sailing and fishing expeditions
as well as poetry evenings and an opera season?
Is it the only IH school situated on a cliff commanding
magnificent views of the Mediterranean and the
countryside?
IH schools are so varied that the answer is probably not – but
if you want ALL of these things then IH Malta Gozo is the place
for you!
An Overview of the IH Language Awareness Course (LAC).
By Alex Tilbury DOS IH Katowice
LAC Units:
chosen from a homework menu. Suggestions for reading are
also provided.
Describing Language (an introductory unit).
Tense.
Auxiliaries & Operators.
Modal Verbs I (extrinsic meanings).
Modal Verbs II (intrinsic meanings).
Will & Would.
Future Forms.
Course Delivery
Because the homework tasks have a vital role in helping
trainees consolidate and expand upon their understanding of
the sometimes quite involved or abstract concepts presented
in sessions, it is intended that the course will be delivered on a
part-time – say, weekly – basis. It should also be noted that
the sessions ‘build’ on one another – that is, each assumes at
least a basic familiarity with concepts presented in those preceding it. For this reason, trainees will need to attend all sessions if they are to reap the full benefit from the course.
Forms with Have (perfect aspect).
Forms with Be I (progressive aspect).
Forms with Be II (passive voice).
The Verb Form.
Conditional Sentences.
The Noun Phrase.
Language as Lexis.
Materials & Accreditation
All course materials are on a CD-rom (Resource Bank 5) which
was sent to IH schools over the summer of 2003. For each
session there are detailed explanatory and procedural notes
for the trainer, with occasional suggestions for alternative or
additional activities, and typically a dozen or so photocopiable
worksheets. Individual trainers are of course free to adapt,
supplement and edit the materials as they see fit. At present
the course is not centrally accredited, so it is up to individual
schools to define requirements for successful completion of
the course and issue certificates.
Unit Content
At the core of each unit is a ninety-minute input session. The
course is primarily concerned with deepening trainees’ knowledge of the language itself, but each session has as its final
stage an extended, guided discussion on the possible implications of what trainees have learned for syllabus design and for
ways in which language is presented in the classroom.
Homework Tasks.
For further information, contact IHWO.
Between sessions, trainees are encouraged to carry out tasks
— 33 —
Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEWS
erage of non-western viewpoints and the poor representation
of non-Europeans. On this note, a more prominent role for the
voice of the non-Native speaker would benefit the book.
Second, the flatness of many of the modules seems to stem
from a combination of lacklustre illustrations and layout combined with the frequent failure of the units to take learners on
a critical journey, in that they are often doing the same descriptive and therefore cognitively undemanding activities with the
same theme throughout the module. The rutted and worn cliffs
on the cover, full of cracks and crevices, promise a refreshing
bumpiness that the book does not entirely deliver.
Will Hutton
Cutting Edge – Advanced
Sarah Cunningham and Peter Moor
Longman, 2003.
he cover of the latest edition to
the best-selling Cutting Edge
series is illustrated with the picture of
a cliff at either sunset or sunrise. Is it
an allusion to the daunting nature of
learning English at an advanced level,
with unknown word heaped upon
subtle distinction, seemingly endlessly? Alternatively, does a sunset point
to completion, task accomplished?
No matter, how well does this book
strike a balance between providing advanced learners with an
opportunity to put into practice what they know and moving
them on with fresh challenges?
Firstly, what strikes me about the course is the sheer abundance of material. In this respect, it mirrors the labyrinthine
nature of a website as you click from enticing link to enticing
link. Divided into ten substantial modules, the core material is
supported by an ample ‘Language Summary’ and ‘Grammar
Practice’ section, along with a booklet inserted into the back
cover (The Phrase Builder), packed with yet more exercises.
This is not to mention the enormous amount of photocopiable
material in the ‘Resources Bank’ in the Teacher’s Book.
Embedded within each module are frequent links leading students to explanation and practice. There is undoubtedly no
lack of material in this book and the frequent cross-referencing
does encourage a more interactive experience and serves to
break down the demarcation between class time and homework, leading to both a more integrated experience and
greater learner autonomy. In particular, the ‘Patterns to Notice’
feature raises student awareness of crucial highly generative,
yet neglected language areas, such as the use of noun phrases (page 73). Similarly, the ‘Grammar Extension’ element clearly has the extremely valid intention of moving the learners on
from what they know into more challenging waters.
In terms of providing a thorough advanced language syllabus, Cutting Edge Advanced is admirable. However, I would
suggest that this very thoroughness as far as language is concerned can detract from the course. The very meatiness of the
modules can make getting through them heavy going, especially as ways to break them down into more manageable
chunks are not always obvious. More importantly, this takes its
toll on the task as students often suffer from topic fatigue by
the time they reach the tasks. This is a pity as the tasks themselves are frequently engaging. However, before the learners
have a chance to engage with the task they are compelled by
the nature of the book to wade through far too many exercises that focus on individual forms and which favour analytical
learners
Overall, while Cutting Edge Advanced is without doubt an
effective course, more could have been done to give its modules more texture. Specifically, I would cite first the lack of cov-
T
New Headway Intermediate – New Edition
Liz and John Soars
Oxford University Press, 2003.
ome things in life are re-assuring to have around you. And if
you’re a teacher, it’s re-assuring to
have Headway somewhere nearby. It’s something we can rely on
and trust as a source of quality
material. Now, we have the new
New Headway Intermediate, and
as with New Headway and old
Headway the latest edition provides the busy teacher with a rich
source of quality lesson material.
The format is re-assuringly familiar, and for both teacher and
student the book is easy to use. Topic titles are often original
– ‘Get Happy’, ‘I Just Love It’, and ‘Just Imagine’; all make you
want to turn to the relevant pages and find out more. And
when you do, you find interesting texts – I mean, how could
anyone not want to read an article called ‘The Clown Doctor’,
or ‘How Not to Behave Badly Abroad’?
As well as varied and interesting topics and texts, the language sections are clear and interesting (and I really like the
Contents page which highlights in a different colour the language focus of each unit, whether it’s
‘Grammar’,
‘Vocabulary’or ‘Everyday English’).
There is an excellent bank of Writing activities at the back of
the book, each with a clear language focus. This could certainly be appropriate for student self-study as well as for classroom use.
As well as the Workbook, we also have a Teacher’s
Resource Book, with many excellent communicative practice
activities relating to the corresponding units in the Student
Book.
This new edition of Headway is, indeed, re-assuring. It has
been up-dated and refreshed and is very easy-to-use. But as
well as being teacher-friendly (easy for both experienced and
less experienced teachers to use), it is learner-friendly, and is a
very welcome addition to the series.
David Riddell
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— 34 —
Book Reviews
surrender value for Elementary students. On closer inspection
it was there, shopping scenarios, cafes, hotel bookings etc.
However, I felt this really could be more explicit. I also thought
that there could be more writing in the Student’s Book. The
Workbook does include an integrated writing syllabus but I feel
that writing shouldn’t be tucked away like this. Naturally, the
extent to which you focus on writing is dependent on your students’ needs, but I feel it’s important that writing is seen as an
integral part of learning a language and including a variety of
writing tasks in a course-book helps convey this message.
Despite these reservations I have to say that Inside Out
Elementary is an impressive coursebook. It is interesting and
accessible if you are a student, solid and reliable if you are a
newly qualified teacher and refreshing and exploitable if you
are more experienced. It stands out amongst from other elementary books because it is both intellectually challenging and
emotionally involving.
Melissa Lamb
Inside Out Elementary
Sue Kay & Vaughan Jones
Macmillan, 2003.
hen I first got my hands on a copy of Inside Out
Elementary Student’s Book, I couldn’t believe my luck.
One week into a course with strong elementary students, we
needed something more challenging and inspiring. Being
familiar with the other course-books in the Inside Out series I
thought that this could be just what they needed.
I wasn’t disappointed. Inside Out Elementary has the glossy
cover, real photos, up-to-date topics that appeal to students
and teachers alike. Layout is clear, easy to follow and the
organisation of material logical. Whilst you could follow the
order of the book as it’s set out, each unit, indeed each section of a unit, can stand alone. I found this flexibility and the
exploitability of the texts and activities very appealing.
It was also good to know that however we approached a
unit the students went home with a very concrete record of
work done, in terms of grammar, lexis and pronunciation.
These are integrated skilfully into each unit by means of realistic texts, which encourage noticing of target language. Closeup grammar sections encourage the learner to organise and
incorporate language in bite-size portions. By including the
language reference in the unit these sections seem less like
test and help highlight form and use. Lexis is presented as
part of a system, with activities to consider and practice collocation, connotation and register.
The learner can further benefit from the high degree of exposure to target language which the syllabus provides as it progresses. Not only this, but there are repeated opportunities to
practise language in a meaningful way. This is particularly evident in the well thought out review sections, which, unlike
other course-books, are not merely tests of students’ learning.
They contain texts, tasks and activities that give the learner the
chance to manipulate structures and re-activate and extend
language from previous units.
A distinctive feature of this series (and Inside Out Elementary
is no exception) is the highly personalised speaking tasks. Not
only did my students enjoy talking about themselves and finding out about others, but they found it incredibly rewarding that
at this level they could talk for two to three minutes on a given
topic. More adventurous students can take risks with language and those less confident or not quite sure what to say
can use the prompts and/or sentence headers to structure
their ideas. As a student it’s a great way to exchange not only
information about each other, ideas or opinions, but also
phrases and vocabulary that you’ve picked up outside of
class. As a teacher it is a golden opportunity to listen to just
how much language elementary students can produce, to
diagnose problem areas and work on this output in feedback
or later classes.
My group of strong elementary learners found the materials
challenging and consequently motivating. Had they been
weaker they might have run into difficulties. There is a lot on a
page, even though the presentation is clear, and this may be
daunting to some students. The texts may seem long from a
student’s perspective: this is not insurmountable but requires
careful planning in pre-reading stages of a class.
Another concern I had was that at first glance there didn’t
seem to be much situational language, which has a very high
W
Natural Grammar
Scott Thornbury
he words ‘grammar’ and
‘natural’ do not necessarily go together as obviously as
‘fish’ and ‘chips’, but Scott
Thornbury shows in this new
book that grammar can - and
should - be seen as natural
language. As Scott says, the
book is ‘about grammar, but it
is organised around words’.
This immediately makes the subject of ‘grammar’ more relevant, more interesting, and perhaps more ‘natural’.
The book deals in alphabetical order with one hundred ‘key
words of English and how they work’, ranging from ‘a / an’ to
‘you’, with ‘good’, ‘my’, ‘up’ and many more in between.
Each double page spread follows a similar pattern - a blue box
with basic grammatical information; grammar patterns (the
book focuses strongly on patterns); collocations; set phrases;
and several exercises (‘with a view to helping fix these in the
memory’ and to ‘apply the grammar patterns to build naturalsounding language’). The presentation is clear and consistent,
and the book itself is attractive both in terms of size and
colour; and in the way the word ‘Natural’ is written in much
larger font than the word ‘grammar’! Priorities are thus clearly
established!
If we use ‘place’ as an example, the blue box tells us that it
can be a countable noun or a verb; grammar patterns include
‘a/an (+ adjective) + place + to-infinitive’; collocations include
‘take your place’; set phrases include ‘to be all over the place’;
and four different exercises follow for practice. The exercises
include matching example sentences to definitions; adding the
word ‘place’ in the appropriate position in given sentences;
completing collocations; and choosing the right verb for sentences already including ‘place’. This provides the learner with
lots of consolidation of what they have read about, and the
opportunity, indeed, to ‘fix it in the memory’ and ‘build natural
sounding language’.
The book also has a grammar index, a glossary, and a key,
T
— 35 —
Book Reviews
IELTS courses to devote to grammar per se, it is practical to
have remedial grammar exercises, which can lend themselves
to fun activities like a grammar auction or to self-study. The
task approach tips brief students as to how to tackle questions
and generally give useful advice on strategies, thus saving the
teacher from coming up with these and allowing students to
take more responsibility for their learning.
To sum up, Focus on IELTS is a flexible resource. It lends
itself effectively to both group and individual study, an important asset for an exam coursebook as students can be
encouraged to learn outside the classroom. On the IELTS nineband score, I‘ll give it an 8 – of its kind, I haven’t seen better.
Nancy Wallace
making the book ideal for self-study for students (and
teachers!). It could also be exploited for classroom use,
though if it is, teachers may want to provide more variety and
context for the practice tasks. In either case, the book is aimed
at students from intermediate to advanced, and it is ideal for
these levels.
The idea of writing a ‘grammar’ book dealing with key words
rather than verb forms is one that will be warmly welcomed by
teachers and one from which students will benefit. There is
definitely a need for such a book and I for one will be using it
at the earliest opportunity.
David Riddell
Focus on IELTS
Sue O’Connell
Longman, 2002.
Assessing Young Learners
Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlos Pavlou
ocus on IELTS is an integrated
new coursebook for students
preparing to take the International
English Language Testing System
exam for university entrance or
professional purposes. Any addition to IELTS teaching resources is
welcome (especially with the
revised format of the exam) but
Focus on IELTS is a particular
bonus to the bookshelves for various reasons, perhaps reflecting the author’s experience as a
teacher and examiner.
For me, there are several features which distinguish this from
other IELTS coursebooks. Firstly, the format is much more
teacher-friendly; the 20 units are topic-based rather than skillsbased. This makes it much easier to plan a cohesive lesson
which hangs on a theme or framework rather than randomly
practising skills which reflect the format of the exam. Similarly,
each unit begins with a box, which outlines the aims and the
skills practised and how these relate to the exam, making it
explicit to teacher and student alike. The teacher’s book is
adequate, not so comprehensive, but easy to follow with simple answers boxed for quick reference. Some sections are
tricky to find too but the layout is logical, it just takes a bit of
navigating.
Another advantage is the content: it’s not just the unusual
topics, but the range of them - from communication systems
to natural hazards to time management; also good are the
activities with language facts, and the lead-ins which lend
themselves conveniently to quizzes, discussion and lighter
activities to ease into the lesson.
Other key features include a practice test, error hit list and
task approach tips. The practice test is useful for reference and
also because the Cambridge PracticeTests For IELTS series is
not photocopiable or may be already known to students who
are working independently as well as taking classes. Thus the
practice test could function as a mock exam at the end of the
course. The ‘error hit list’ and ‘spot the error’ exercises are a
‘hit’ because they focus on common errors (based on the
Longman Learner’s corpus) and help students to identify their
typical mistakes. Also, because there is often not time on
F
esting, testing, one, two
three... but this book does a
whole lot more than test or
check your students know their
numbers or colours. Assessing
Young Learners is intended for
teachers of students aged 6 –
12, who are anxious to integrate
child-friendly assessment into
the curriculum.
T
As one of the Alan Maley series it was bound to be a useful
resource for teachers, but by dealing with the thorny area of
assessing young learners it is particularly welcome, for most
teachers, regardless of how they feel about testing, are
involved in some way in assessing their childrens’ work.
Perhaps this is why this was easily the most popular book for
Young Learner teachers on my training courses last year to
tuck under their arm to take back to their various countries.
So what does this book offer? Firstly, it provides suggestions
for activities to test the four skills at low levels. For example,
non-intimidating and motivating type activities, such as class
surveys and pairwork information exchanges, test speaking.
These are categorised according to age, level and time they
take. The teachers’ notes are practical and allow for less than
ideal conditions, so there are suggested follow-up activities
and forms to encourage students to assess their own performances so they feel part of the assessment process.
Similarly, there is one section dedicated to ‘self-assessment’. This helps students to reflect on their progress, for
example by putting an animal on a cline to measure their success or building up a ‘picture of achievement.’ Additionally, it
encourages them to express their feelings and attitudes to
English classes or tasks by assigning smiley (or miserable!)
faces, from which teachers can learn a lot.
‘Learning how to learn’ is another section, with such strategies as using a dictionary, guessing meaning from context and
predicting content. These are invaluable skills in the language
learning process and yet sadly lacking in the classroom, so
drawing attention to them as activity ideas may promote good
study habits and help children become independent learners.
— 36 —
Book Reviews
Ellis admits that he writes very much from a cognitive perspective, assuming that the individual mind processes and
stores input, which can then be transformed into output.
Chapter 6, ‘Sociocultural SLA and tasks’, acknowledges the
Vygotskian perspective that learning is essentially social, created through interaction, but the book as a whole fails to incorporate a wider sense of society. In the final chapter, ‘Evaluating
task-based pedagogy’, Ellis summarises the criticisms levelled
at task-based learning (TBL), including the important argument
that TBL may be seen as an Anglo-American methodology,
inappropriate in other cultural contexts. The book would have
been stronger if it had begun with such criticisms, and showed
specific ways in which TBL can address them. For instance,
Ellis does argue that TBL focuses on ‘discoursive practices
that encourage the learner to actively engage in shaping and
controlling the discourse’ and ‘social practices that are centred
on allowing and resolving social trouble’ (p. 252). By including
examples of tasks that focus on broader political issues of language and power, e.g. a task which asks learners to discuss
whether a native speaker or a non-native speaker makes a
better teacher of English, Ellis could have placed TBL within a
broader socio-political framework and made it more accessible to teachers outside the ivory towers.
Amanda Lloyd
The language portfolio activities are also useful since language portfolios (a collection of samples of a child’s work collected over a period of time) are now used in state schools in
many countries around the world. The guidelines and ideas on
using portfolios will help teachers keep up to date with current
practices and their assessment, while including the young
learners in the process.
However, best of all are the photocopiable worksheets.
These will undoubtedly appeal to children as eye-catching, but
equally to teachers as time-saving but professionally- presented materials, which also help them organise their record-keeping and reporting.
So, overall... my feelings about this book:
Nancy Wallace
Task-based Language Learning and Teaching
Rod Ellis
Oxford University Press, 2003
he preface to Task-based
Language Learning and Teaching
clearly states that this is ‘a book about
task-based research and teaching’
(italics in original) rather than a book
which outlines ways of implementing a
task-based approach. However, as a
book which advertises itself on the
back cover as showing ‘how research
and task-based teaching can mutually inform each other’, it fails to give
due emphasis to the classroom, and, perhaps more importantly, fails to include a wider sense of the social conditions in
which English is learned.
Task-based Language Learning and Teaching certainly does
provide a comprehensive overview of research in the field so
far, and underlines the (vast) amount of further research still
needed. Perhaps the most interesting studies for teachers are
described in Chapter 4, ‘Tasks, production, and language
acquisition’, where we learn that different types of task produce different effects on complexity, fluency and accuracy. To
encourage complexity of language, teachers should set up
tasks in which learners share information and in which the outcome is open. To promote fluency, tasks which have familiar
topics and have a clear structure and outcome should be
used. For accuracy, task implementation is more important
than choice of a particular task, as the key factor is that learners have time while doing the task to consider their language
choices. Chapter 8, ‘The methodology of task-based teaching’, is also classroom-friendly, providing a helpful framework
in terms of lesson design (pre-task, during task and post-task
phases). Usefully, Ellis goes beyond the traditional idea of the
small group task to a broader sense of ‘participatory structure’
which includes individual student activity or teacher-class
activity as alternatives to group work. However, the book
would be strengthened by the inclusion of teacher and student
perspectives. An example of a task-based lesson, evaluated
by both teacher and class participants, would have grounded
the theory, and provided further issues for researchers to
investigate.
T
Homework
Lesley Painter
omework, a recent addition to
OUP’s excellent Resource Books
for Teachers series, addresses an
area that one might not, on first
thought, consider central to teaching
— yet outside the classroom students
review, consolidate and extend what
they have learned, experiment with
their new language and gain experience and confidence. For these reasons, homework is beneficial to both
teachers and students. However, students often feel negative
about homework, deeming it boring and time-consuming, and
this may be because teachers sometimes assign homework
without much forethought or consideration of student interests. Painter addresses this at the outset, devoting the first two
of eight sections to teacher attitude and approach as well as
student motivation and involvement, all of which are linked.
Ideally, homework should be fun, novel (e.g. assignments
delivered by e-mail), personalised, relevant and useful. It does
not have to be purely teacher-generated and corrected, but
can involve student input, collaboration, peer-teaching and
peer-correction. The author supplies three questionnaires that
cover student needs, preferences and learner styles in regard
to homework. From the information thus gathered, teachers
will find it easier to choose and develop homework suitable for
any given class.
The book is well and clearly organised. Sections 3 to 8 focus
on Lexis, Writing, Language, Communication, Pronunciation
and Receptive Skills. Each activity is prefaced by ‘Level,’
H
— 37 —
Book Reviews
‘Time’ (required in class as preparation, and as homework),
and ‘Aims.’ Following this are the stages — Preparation,
Procedure, Variations, Follow-up and, sometimes, Comments
(tips). Here is a sampler of tasks:
The Guide To Better English
by Philip Gooden
Peter Collin Publishing.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
by Lynne Truss
Profile Books.
Lexis:
• finding collocations on a theme (from TV, Internet,
magazines).
• finding examples outside class of lexical items such as
idioms, multiword verbs or compound nouns.
hese two pocket-sized books form part of that bundle of
useful volumes to stuff into your rucksack, as you head off,
armed with your CELTA, to conquer the world and become the
best ELT teacher your students have ever had. Unlike the
invaluable Teaching Grammar by Jim Scrivener reviewed in the
last issue of the Journal, which also falls into that category,
these are not specifically designed to help you become a better teacher of English: they are designed to help you become
a better USER of English. But a better user is also likely, surely, to become a better teacher. If you cannot put together a
structurally sound and semantically coherent sentence which
conforms to the basic rules of English grammar, punctuation
and syntax, at the very best you will feel less than confident
when writing reports likely to be read by your DOS; at the very
least, your credibility is likely to suffer – certainly with your more
advanced students, whose knowledge of the finer reaches of
English grammar is likely to be much more intimate than yours,
given the recent parlous - as some see it - state of the English
education system. And advanced students are the future: as
the market changes, more and more of us are going to be
required to teach English for Academic Purposes where clarity of thought and of expression is primary; or English for
Special Purposes to people who require your expertise to help
them express themselves effectively in specialist areas such as
oil-drilling or compliance law where the same thing applies.
So either or both of these books should find a place on your
bookshelf or in your backpack. The first is, as its title indicates,
a guide; it does not dictate, neither does it rant. It suggests,
sometimes over-tentatively perhaps, that such and such a
usage is thought to be ‘incorrect’ or ‘unusual’: ‘…it’s not
uncommon to find them [“a” and “lot”] written as one, probably because pronunciation runs them together’. (Sorry, it may
be not uncommon, but surely it is also just plain WRONG?)
Sometimes its opinion is arguable: ‘Moral is pronounced with
the stress on the first syllable; morale rhymes with “pal” ’.
Morale rhymes with snarl – doesn’t it? Or maybe I’m forgetting
my Yorkshire. Most of the time however, it provides reliable,
clearly explained guidance to knotty points such as frequently
confused words like lay and lie, special and especial, censor
and censure and so on. It tells you clearly when its is its and
not it’s. (I know Murphy does this too but do we want to
encourage Murphy?) It includes a nice (in both senses given
here: ‘pleasant’ and ‘precise’) paragraph on the difference
between, and meanings of, irony and sarcasm and two on
defining and descriptive clauses (disguised as items on the difference between ‘who’/’who’ and ‘which’/’which’). Sometimes
trenchant, often helpful, advice is what it has to offer. Read it,
inwardly digest it, and your prose may not sparkle, but at least
it will be clear.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves deals exclusively with the contentious
matter of punctuation. Punctuation, as Lynne Truss points out,
quoting from ‘the style book of a national newspaper’ is: ‘a
T
Writing:
• taking notes on the weirdest story of the day (news) and presenting next day.
• writing an almanac entry on what happened on a particular
day (research on Internet, at library).
Language:
• creating your own gapfill using target language, to be
corrected by teacher and handed to different students for
completion at home.
• colour-coding a text (present tenses in red, simple past in
blue).
• interviewing someone outside the class on given points.
Communication:
• creating a role for yourself (form supplied) to be acted out
in a party context next day.
• make a taped journal at home.
Pronunciation:
• writing your own minimal pairs list.
• collecting examples of schwa.
Receptive Skills:
• solving a puzzle dictated by the teacher.
• collecting examples of English in your town or
neighbourhood (signs, ads).
Such a list does not do justice to the book, as it gives no idea
of how the task is set up, carried out or followed up and no
idea of variety. In fact, there are almost 90 homework activities,
not including the ones that deal with needs, interests and
learner styles in the first two sections of the book, entitled
‘Getting Started’ and ‘Focus on Homework’.
Homework will be an asset to any teacher who wishes to
consider new approaches to homework, provide a variety of
motivating homework assignments and encourage
independent learning.
Leslie Anne Hendra
— 38 —
Book Reviews
that work well and become standard practice but often they
are ill thought out, unworkable in the classroom and eventually the new idea disappears. I opened Just Right with a twinge
of anticipation and started to look for the angle.
What I found is a very conventional, almost traditional book
that does not rely on gimmicks to sell itself. It is divided into 14
themed units, the units being further divided so that each has
a sections on the four skills as well as a section dealing with
grammar, functions, vocabulary and pronunciation, the activities linked to the themes. I addition there is a separate booklet
with the tape scripts and a grammar reference. The themes will
be familiar to experienced teachers and include such tried and
tested favourites such as travel, music sport and home.
I found the layout of the pages to be somewhat text heavy
and I did feel that there was a lack of photographs to enliven
the book, line drawings being mainly used to illustrate the
texts. However, this will help to prevent the book from ageing
prematurely, unlike so many others that are firmly fixed in time
by the styles and fashions of their photographs.
The skills activities are generally good, providing interesting
material and I was pleased to see that writing gets a full role
and is not just the afterthought it appears to be in so many
other coursebooks. I particularly liked the activities on cohesion and coherence as well as paragraph writing. This makes
a change from writing being simply about different genres.
I also felt that for once pronunciation is given proper prominence in the course and again it is broadened to include sentence stress, word stress, intonation, consonant pairs, pitch
and links to spelling. But why no weak forms? This is a rather
strange omission in an otherwise comprehensive look at this
important area.
Although I am not a trendy modernist in my approach to
teaching, I have, however, embraced a more lexical approach
and consequently I feel that the book’s view of vocabulary is a
little too traditional for my liking. It does look at ‘language in
chunks’ as well as words in isolation and once the thorough
look at functional language is taken into account, the book can
be considered to be more lexical than it at first appears and
after all, what’s in a name?
So far so good. It is at this point however, that I have to
declare that not all the book is to my taste. I was not entirely
convinced of the approach to grammar, which is also a little
too traditional for my liking. Test teach test is the preferred
method for many of the grammar presentations, with the students looking at the grammar reference for the ‘teach’ part. I
have not had the opportunity to see the teacher’s book so I
cannot comment on the thought processes behind this, but I
tend to favour a more guided discovery method with closer
links to the activities that have gone before. This approach
does have the benefit of encouraging student autonomy,
which is to be applauded, especially at this level. This encouragement of learner independence is also extended through the
many, excellent mini-sections on dictionary work.
Just a couple of further quibbles. The grammar reference is
very thorough, but I was surprised not to find a table of irregular verbs, or a phonemic chart, especially in view of the pronunciation and dictionary work.
Overall this is a solid book with much to recommend it. It will
not cause a revolution in language teaching, but if you favour
a more conventional approach, this could be the book for you.
Alastair Douglas
courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling’. The problem is that opinions differ on exactly
how that courtesy should be extended. It is a well-known fact
that the editors of the IH Journal always agree about everything; but they have been known to conduct slightly tense discussions on precisely where a comma should be placed. This
dissension has ancient and well-documented antecedents:
‘grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices’ of such august publications as the New Yorker. The
comma is particularly contentious because, above all other
marks, as Truss explains, it
…draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation
and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:
1. To illuminate the grammar of a sentence
2. To point up … such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch,
tone and flow.’
In other words, as she elegantly puts it: ‘On the page punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the
reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum
the tune.’ And to those of us constantly telling students to ‘listen to the music of the language’, the ability to pick out and
hum the tune is essential. That said, it is true, as Melanie
Philips points out in a recent edition of the EL Gazette if you
can’t do the grammar, you won’t be able to do the punctuation and Truss assumes a knowledge of structures perhaps
only to be found among the over-forties these days; you do
need to know what a sentence is before you know where to
put a full stop.
Nonetheless, this book is full of wise suggestions and useful
advice (especially a wonderful passage on exactly why one
shouldn’t attempt to join two sentences with a comma, as in ‘I
hate bad punctuation, it really annoys me’, unless one is
Samuel Beckett) and it has a rare distinction: it reduced this
reviewer, eating alone with it in nice, refined, well-behaved
Indian restaurant (see Gooden if you want to know why there
is no comma between well-behaved and Indian) to completely helpless giggles. The waiters were a little concerned. So if
you have to choose between these two thoroughly useful and
practical books, go for the one that will also double up as a
light reading: it might even replace Bill Bryson in your rucksack
– and his marvellous Mother Tongue: the English Language is
one of the books Truss acknowledges as a source and inspiration. You could add that one, I suppose, and then you really
would be equipped to go off and become the best English
teacher your students will ever have.
Elena Rose
JUST RIGHT
Jeremy Harmer
Marshall Cavendish, 2004.
hen I was asked to write a review of a new intermediate
course book, my immediate reaction was ‘I wonder
what the angle is going to be?’ In an overcrowded market
many new course books are written with a twist to help them
stand out from the crowd. This could be a new approach to
teaching, to learning or to language. In doing so these new
books often have good intentions and some have innovations
W
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Book Reviews
I found the students responded well to the exercises, especially once they had been ‘diagnosed’ via the test and their
particular problems whittled down to individual sounds. It does
seem a waste though that the test should do no more for a
student working alone that simply find his strong or weak ‘sections’. I felt that directions to specific exercises following the
incorrect answer of each question in the test could easily have
been incorporated, like in the final exercises of each unit.
However, if this is a tiny chink in the formidable armour of
Mark Hancock’s work it is adequately made up for with the
afore mentioned ‘Guide for speakers of specific languages.’
One of the most useful features of this book is that it uses
research from Learner English (Michael Swan and Bernard
Smith, 2001) to provide an invaluable timesaver for students
studying the book alone and a useful guide for teachers using
the book in the classroom. It basically offers recommendations
of which units could be left out in section A and which ‘sound
pairs’ to focus on in section D, given a student’s L1.
The book comes with a set of four cassettes or CDs, (which
doesn’t alter the price of £19.95) one for each section of the
book. Overall, the voices were authentic and for isolated language it was as natural as can be expected. I was a little dubious of the sections that provide American pronunciation. I
doubted the necessity, but also the accents, which seemed to
vary from an New York Italian-American to a Texan drawl.
Similarly, having stated that the accent used for the British
model would be a southern English one it suggests ‘Alaska’
sounds the same as ‘I’ll ask her’ – which sounds very Northern
to me.
These are tiny criticisms however of a book which I know I’m
probably going to use in just about every lesson I teach for a
good long while.
Andy Cox
English Pronunciation in Use
Mark Hancock
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
’ve found myself increasingly teaching Asian students whose grammar,
reading and writing far outstrip their
listening and speaking abilities. It was
becoming obvious that drilling and
knowing the schwa simply wasn’t
enough. I knew I’d have to work a little more of that dreaded pronunciation
into the lessons.
This clearly and logically laid out
book appeared as the answer to my
needs. The language is functional, useful and up to date and
using the test takes all the diagnostics out of your hands. Just
follow the instructions on pages 5-8 and you’re away. Although
targeted at intermediate students, the many and varied exercises are easily adapted for use in the classroom at all levels.
This is equally true of the user-friendly explanations, pictures
and examples in every unit. The sixty units are split into three
sections, A to C, they cover the saying and spelling of
phonemes (A), syllables, word stress and sentence stress (B)
and pronunciation in conversation (C). A further section (D)
contains, amongst other things, an introduction to the phonemic chart; complete with exercises to help you learn it, a diagnostic test, a guide for speakers of specific languages, and
sound pairs students find difficult. Students are advised that
having equipment to record themselves would be useful. I
must say I think it’s essential if they are using the book alone.
I
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106 Piccadilly London W1J 7NL
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Issue 16: Spring 2004

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