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The Twelve Days of Geekmas: eleven tips for writing

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:00:42 GMT

On the eleventh day of Geekmas, teflgeek gave to me: 11 tips for writing

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

Although to be more accurate this should be called “11 tips to give your students to help them develop their writing (for exam classes)”, but again, that just wouldn’t scan properly…

Teachers – feel free to cut and paste and print out (some editing may be required!)

Read the question! It shouldn’t need saying and I’d be willing to bet this is a constant cri-de-coeur for many a teacher, but failure to read the question – or more importantly failure to respond to the required aspects of the question – is what costs learners the most marks. Cambridge exams are lovely and kind. They tell you what to write about – massive amounts of thought not required – just good identification technique….. (see below)
What’s important here? Every question has “content points”. If you miss one you fail. But on the plus side they’re easy to spot – they usually appear in sentences that read: ”You should write about….” / ”Include information on”. Or sometimes they have little arrows pointing to them (only in part one). Teachers – give your learners a copy of the sample writing paper from the handbook and a highlighter pen – take the time to go through it step by step. It won’t be wasted time.
Don’t get word fear! Word fear is when learners worry too much about how many words they need to write. Key symptoms include: (a) obsessively counting the number of words they’ve written to make sure they have enough. (b) Using a lengthy and inappropriate style to try and increase the number of words in a sentence. (c) adding additional random sentences and paragraphs to the end of your text upon realising they don’t have enough content. There is a simple cure: relax. No-one’s going to count the number of words. Examiners have lives too! Besides – the only true way to eradicate word fear is in proper planning.
PPPPP – PROPER PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE. Very very few learners actually plan their writing. This also explains why very very few learners get top grades for exam writing. Having insisted all my learners submit a plan along with their compositions, I was once accosted by a worried student before class: ”I’m really sorry I haven’t finished it all. I can give you the essay now, but can I give you the plan next lesson?” I don’t insist anymore. If you can’t be bothered, then fine. It doesn’t work for everybody, and I hope you’re happy with your “c” grade.
Know your genre. Again, it seems silly to state it so obviously, but learners need to know what the different texts types (a) look like, (b) feature stylistically. If learners have a clear visual representation of the text type, it makes the planning process easier. I tend to do block diagrams of the different text types as a labelling task, so that learners get a clear idea of what all the different sections involve. This then leads into a language matching task, with key phrases matched to the relevant sections.
Who’s the reader? A mistake that many writers make is in mis-imagining the reader. A letter for publication in a newspaper or magazine is written as personal correspondence between the writer and the editor – but not written for the wider audience who’ll read the published letter. Another common fault is writing for the Examiner, not for the target reader. Knowledge of who the reader is also affects register choice (as well as genre does).
Leave a blank line. This is possibly a personal bugbear of mine, but I speak as someone who’s sat down and gone slightly insane whilst attempting to mark over a 150 FCE writing scripts in a single afternoon (with some help). The blank line is a psychological trick. Learners need to leave one blank line between each section of their writing text as it is more pleasing to the eye, clearly indicates attempted paragraphing (and hence organisation, even if the organisation doesn’t actually exist) and basically puts the examiner in a much better frame of mind. Generally, you want a better disposed examiner marking your paper – they tend to give higher marks! (Apparently research bears this out, but I don’t know whose.)
Don’t draft – plan. It’s not unknown for learners to write out an entire first draft of a text and then copy it out again neatly. Fine, if you can get away with it and not run out of time, but why go to all the trouble of doing twice the work? Couldn’t you just do the work once, but twice as well? If you plan, you don’t need to draft (at least not in an exam situation). Also, planning gets rid of all those unsightly crossing outs and substitutions and insertions. If you know what you want to say before you start writing…..
A brief note on paragraphs. Earlier, I may have given the impression that a paragraph is a collection of words separated from a similar collection of words by one blank line. Psychological trickery will only get you so far – there does also need to be some substance behind the style. In an attempt to help with paragraph structure, I’ve been talking to my learners about TARS – Topic Sentence / Argument / Reason / Specific Example. As a basic paragraph structure it works quite neatly, though obviously there are variations…
It’s the way you tell ‘em. With some answers, you feel really engaged, as though the writer really cares about the topic and wants to share that with you. With others, you feel as though the writer is going through the motions. And let’s face it – why shouldn’t they? It’s an artificial situation that wouldn’t occur to them in the real world. But to get the top marks, the writing needs to make the reader feel loved.
Role play it then write it. Which is why, I like converting writing tasks into role plays. If, for example, a task asks the learners to write a report for the principal on the use of technology in the college, it can be nice to put half the class in the position of the principal and half in the position of the writer and ask them to converse on the topic. It can give both parties a new appreciation of the roles and requirements of the task!

Say that again? avoiding repetition & developing paraphrase

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:28:31 GMT

Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill that taxes most of us on a daily basis: ”I like your hair.” ”Your hair looks nice.” ”Wow! Have you had your hair done?” ”That new style really suits you!”

For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult. For learners preparing for exam classes, where displaying a wide ranging linguistic resource helps garner improved scores – it’s an essential skill. It’s useful for all those writing tasks (avoid using words or phrases from the questions) and particularly useful for CPE comprehension and summary tasks where the questions state “in your own words”. But it’s also a handy skill to have for those speaking tasks, where demonstrating ”range” is almost as important as actually having range. After all, there’s no point learning all those different words and structures if you don’t actually use them? Right?

So here’s an activity which needs no (only a very small amount) of preparation, but which helps extend and develop the paraphrase skill. I call it “Say that again?”

Materials: As much scrap A4 paper as you can find chopped down into either A6 or A7 sized slips – ideally it’d be about six bits of paper per student.

Students write a single (short) sentence on each bit of paper – ideally something they might say in everyday life. You can model this with “I like your hair.” or “Local football team played well/badly at the weekend.” Students can work together in pairs during the sentence creation phase.

Collect all the slips of paper up and ask the learners to form small groups (three or four people per group). re-distribute the slips of paper with the sentences on evenly between the groups, placed face down (i.e. sentences not visible) in a pile in the middle.

One learner takes a slip and turns it face up and reads the sentence. They then have to produce a paraphrase of the sentence, as does the next person and the next etc, until someone can’t come up with something that hasn’t already been said. So if we go back to our example: Learner A turns over the slip of paper and reads out ”I like your hair.” Learner A paraphrases thusly: ”Your hair looks nice.” Learner B comes up with “Wow! Have you had your hair done?” and Learner C with “That new style really suits you!”. Learner D however can’t think of anything new, so gets to keep the slip of paper.

The winner is the person in each group with the fewest slips of paper at the end of the activity.

Feedback can be given on any errors that were overheard during the game, but also content feedback on any sentences they found particularly difficult to paraphrase.

As an extension, for those classes preparing for an exam, the teacher could take the input from one of the writing paper questions and divide it up into sentences on separate bits of paper and ask learners to come up with alternative phrasings.

“The candidate demonstrated an impressive range.”

(Bonus points for anyone who can identify the “impressive range” featured! Post your answers below!)

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:00:02 GMT

Following on from the success of the recent Radio 4 series “A History of the World in 100 objects“, linguist and novelist David Crystal attempts to do the same for the English language. An interesting read for any and all language teachers and language historians out there!

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words – Telegraph.

If you were looking for a particularly challenging lesson for one of your advanced classes….. you could give them a selection of these words as a spelling test! And then divide the list and the class into four or five groups and set them off to discover what their words mean (and provide contextual sentences!).

Or they could just choose their favourites. Mine are numbers 43 and 49 – BODGERY and FOPDOODLE respectively.

(Thanks to Cherry M Philipose for sharing this via facebook)

#ELTchat Summary: Dogme & Formal Assessment – the odd couple?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:59:49 GMT

At first glance, the free-wheeling Dogme approach to teaching and formal assessment do not sit well together. Rather they would appear to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, representing as they do either “winging it elevated to an art form” or rigid rows of desks and standardized testing models. The #eltchat on Wednesday 9^th November 2011 tried to find out whether opposites might in this case attract, or at the very least whether this odd couple could form some kind of lasting (if uneasy) relationship.

If you’d like to look at the original transcript for this chat, you can find it on the #ELTchat wiki.

Dogme, like the term formal assessment, means different things to different people. Dogme is NOT winging it (PatrickAndrews), rather it is teaching without materials but with preparation (the teacherjames). You prepare your classes but go with the flow (esolcourses). Experience and skill can help with this (Shaunwilden), though pre-service teachers can be trained (the teacherjames). You should always remember the students’ needs and wants and not impose dogme(bethcagnol), and it works well with higher levels (rliberni).

Formal Assessment could be achievement tests or proficiency tests (ljp2010), exams (rliberni) or portfolio based (esolcourses). In general, people seemed to view “formal” assessment as tests or exams imposed on the class from outside, either by school management (e.g. end of year tests), national exam boards or student needs (e.g. IELTS / FCE / TOEFL etc).

Whether the two can co-exist is difficult to answer. As ever with these things the answer would seem to be “it depends”. The means of assessment (the testing tools) and the criteria being assessed both affect things (esolcourses), though if the test is a good one, it shouldn’t matter how the learners get there (teflgeek). Tests, unfortunately, are not always very good (PatrickAndrews) and may require specific item knowledge that therefore must be covered in class (ShaunWilden), or development of a narrow range of skills (esolcourses). Is the problem therefore the testing method, not the teaching method (teflgeek)? The fact that most schools don’t actually test properly certainly doesn’t make it any easier (Shaunwilden).

A Portfolio based approach to testing would be a better fit with a dogme approach to teaching (PatrickAndrews) and has worked for some (esolcourses), but teachers don’t often get the choice of test type (rliberni). Most testing is very “one size fits all” and there is a need for less rigidity and a more learner-centred approach to testing (esolcourses), though commercial realities make this difficult to implement (rliberni). Overall, we seem to be stuck with whatever we’re given to work with / aim towards.

Given then, that formal testing is often prescriptive and imposed, how can we reconcile the destination with the journey? Test / exam preparation often requires using past papers and extensive practice of task types (AlexandraKouk). Task familiarization is important (rliberni) but there is a difference between test familiarization and test practice and most of the research suggests test practice only goes so far (teflgeek), which is why you might want to ditch the exam material as loads of past papers are unnecessary (ShaunWilden). Though for learners who want to get through a test (e.g. IELTS et al), learner-centred teaching must by definition involve the test (rliberni).

Dogme and the Exam/Test Class: Ideas for teaching, revision and background links & references:

shaunWilden: Teaching Unplugged pages 94 & 95 – section on teaching exam classes
chrisjw133: an idea from T unplugged adaptable for formal assessment – http://anoobsguidetotefl.blogspot.com/2011/11/test-preparation-activity-create-your.html
cybraryman1’s dogme page is here: http://cybraryman.com/dogme.html
theteacherjames: suggests taking a look at dalecoulter’s blog: http://languagemoments.wordpress.com/
ljp2010 suggests asking the students to make exam tasks based on topic areas they’re interested in.
chrisjw133 does the same but with interesting texts
englishraven reckons the best approach to exam prep is an unplugged one http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2010/08/the-best-approach-to-exam-prep-is-an-unplugged-one.html
harrisonmike asks his students to do 1 minute “lightning talks” on familiar topics, rliberni recommends these for IELTS in particular!
teflgeek asks his to to a “just a minute relay race” http://teflgeek.net/2011/04/13/speaking-just-a-minute-relay-race/. Harrisonmike uses just a minute to help develop synonym knowledge, nickcherkas to develop discourse markers and fillers: http://thelinguophile.blogspot.com/2011/11/just-minute-discourse.html
rliberni suggests lateral thinking puzzles for question practice, speculation, conditionals and the like.
fionamau pins a copy of the target language to the wall and crosses it off as they go
rliberni uses podcasts, youtube and outside visits to soak up the real world
Theteacherjames asks his students to go back to their earlier written work and upgrade it as part of revision
teflgeek asks his learners what they want to revise
esolcourses gives learners links and follow on activities via the web for revision between classes
phil2wade suggests online blogs for self reflection and diagnosis. Fionamau prefers to graffiti her notebook…!

Hopefully all this is an accurate reflection of the discussion that took place – if you have anything to add – just let me know.

David Petrie (teflgeek)

Online Teaching Resource: Idioms Videos

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:30:16 GMT

I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions. The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a dictionary definition. One of the tasks they give is “Can you guess the idiom before the definition comes up?” If you had learners in teams with different coloured board pens, and they raced to write the expression on the board before it came up, it could work….

The videos are also available via the Pearson You Tube channel (I’ve tried to embed one of them below, but don’t think it’s worked – so click the link instead).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHo5DXDFGyo

Here’s the original page again: ELTCommunity.com: Space: Idioms Discussions.

Online Teaching Resource: Pearson Longman Exams Place

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:30:45 GMT

An email from my friendly local publishers’ rep dropped into my inbox this morning, which I thought I’d pass on. Not because I have eagerly signed up – I haven’t had time to fully get to grips with what’s on offer yet, but just because there is a dearth of decent exam material available for teachers and students to access online and this site looks like it could broaden that range a bit!

A quick glance shows that all of the interesting looking resources require registration and provision of an email address. But the resources do look interesting!

I’m also encouraged by the range of exams seemingly covered, as they not only cover the upper main suite (FCE, CAE, CPE), but KET, PET, IELTS, TOEFL, BEC, ILEC, and of course, the PTE series.

Definitely worth a look, but final judgement to be reserved!

Pearson Longman Exams Place: Find all the information you need about leading international English language exams plus teaching tips and downloadable resources.

First Lesson Aims: Dave Tucker Guest Post!

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:30:23 GMT

If you’ve had time to look at recent posts on this blog, you’ll have noticed a series of “first lesson” ideas and activities… after all, it’s September, we’ve all got “back-to-school-itis”!

Stepping back from the plethora of great teaching ideas to fill the class time, today our guest blogger, Dave Tucker, looks at some broader learning and teaching goals that we might want to think about before we start planning!

First Lesson Aims

I love first lessons. I tend to approach first lessons with new groups feeling uniformly nervous but excited. I come out of first lessons feeling variously elated, charged up, determined, sometimes shocked, but never despondent. A whole school year ahead to make the most of the medley of characteristics and quirks the students have, in the same nervous mindset as me, laid bare in the first moment of meeting! Lots of activities have in mind exactly this opening and sharing: “getting to know you” is the general term applied to these jolly bare-alls, but different ages, levels and group-types have different aims and needs.

Rather than focus on actual activities which are two a penny and available from anyone who has been through at least one year of this sort of thing, I instead choose to list here the possible aims for my first lessons and encourage people to sculpt accordingly. Not all the below can be achieved in the first lesson, of course, but I would suggest that most of them should make part of your aims in the first several lessons. Otherwise the rest of the school year could well be missing something that would help preserve that glorious sense of nervous excitement and stop it from so easily shading into despondency…

Possible aims for first lessons

Achievement / challenge – students should leave feeling they have learnt something and extended themselves right at the outset
Get to know each other & the teacher – fosters a sharing, supportive atmosphere in the classroom
Get to know the course/book/exam format – gives objective and direction for the course
Establish ground rules (conduct, homework, English, hands up) – removes need for later harrying, lets everyone know where they stand
Set patterns for future lessons (signals, speaking positions, greetings, etc.) – why waste the first lesson? Get into it now and make your life easier!
Establish a positive atmosphere – we want them to enjoy their learning from the outset – we want shy or reluctant students to want to come back for more!
Provide something for learners of all styles – cater for everyone at the beginning, get new students used to new styles
Analyse learning styles – get students to start making the most of their own strong learning channels
Use the discipline system – let students see that it’s not just for show, that rewards and consequences do actually work!
Give rationale for course & methods – students like to know why they’re doing what they’re doing: sometimes the reason for movement or guided discovery isn’t as obvious as we might believe
Needs analysis – help students realise that you are willing to be flexible enough to cater for their needs from the beginning

Have fun! Above all, have fun.

Dave Tucker has been in ELT for 24 years: as a teacher with a particular focus on Young Learners, as a teacher trainer on Young Learner development courses and also as Director of Studies of International House Coimbra (Portugal) for 15 years. He is the author of three Teacher’s Editions for the Primary Macmillan Series Take Shape.

Acknowledgement: Teflgeek has simply copied Dave’s author biography from his profile page on the Macmillan website. This does not represent an endorsement of Teflgeek by Macmillan or vice versa.

First Lesson or First Week Ideas

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:30:14 GMT

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix:

Recently, the 24th Edition of EFL/ESL/ELL Blog Carnival : A Journey in TEFL got posted on Eva Buyuksimkesyan’s “A Journey in TEFL” blog. I strongly recommend taking a look here if you’re in need of inspiration – Eva’s collated over 40 (I lost count) posts from different contributors.

The Lesson Plans Page also has a wide range of back to school resources and materials, though these are aimed more at native speaker young learner classes than a language learner class – and I’ve not tried any of them, so can’t vouch for them personally!

First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last summer!

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:30:07 GMT

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”.

Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class.

I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when. Anyway, the key to the activity, is that if John is writing about Amy’s holidays, John can’t talk directly to Amy. John has to ask the other learners in the class, Frank, Marta and so forth to ask Amy the questions that John wants to know the answers to.

Thus through a constant process of questions and answers John eventually gets enough information to write Amy’s composition for her. Of course, Amy will be writing Marta’s, Marta Frank’s and Frank John’s, so it all evens out eventually.

This is intended as an alternative for classes where learners do know each other – but it also works really well as the final part of a lesson with a class where nobody knows each other, as John will constantly be explaining to his classmates WHO Amy is, thus meaning everyone should have a much better idea of who everybody else in the class is by the end of it!

Having gathered together all the information during the lesson – the actual writing up of the composition can either be done in class or as a homework task. What can then be interesting is for the writer and the subject to check how close to the truth the composition is. The subject can then feedback and edit both the content and language of the composition for later revision – though this would be an optional stage depending on the abilities of the class.

First Lesson: Find Nobody Who…

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:30:58 GMT

This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation. Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you…

It should also combat those conversations with teenage classes that go: T: “Hey, how was your summer?” S: “Alright.” T: ”What did you do?” S: “Nothing.”

The basic objective is that the learners have to find stuff they did over the holidays that NOBODY else did.

So a simple procedure might be:

Ask the learners if they had a nice summer and lead into a REALLY boring description of what you did over the summer. e.g. I watched TV and I played computer games and I did some laundry and stuff. Ask the learners if they did anything similar. Establish that pretty much everybody in the class watched TV and played computer games. Then tell the learners about something slightly more interesting and less usual – for example taking a plane trip – and find out how many people did the same. Finally, describe something really interesting that you did – or alternatively make something up (e.g. rented a Ferrari and drove up the West coast of the USA). Find out whether anyone else did the same.

Thus having established the exclusivity principle, ask learners to find something that they did over the summer that nobody else did. Check that they understand they need to talk to ALL the other learners in the class.

Feedback: Find out from the learners what interesting and relatively exclusive things they did over the summer. You could also do some reformulation of any language areas that came up during their mingle activity.