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How Languages Are (And Aren't) Learned (With Patsy Lightbown)

Second language acquisition researcher, Patsy Lightbown, joins us to discuss how languages are learned, and also, how they aren’t. We hear about problems of training teachers, how learners overcome challenges and aspects of language teaching which still lag years behind research.

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End of Year Special: What's The Best Way To Become A Better Teacher (With Thomas Guskey)

If you regularly listen to this podcast, the chances are you listen because you want to be a better teacher. But what is the best way to become a better teacher? Is it attending training? Is it being observed by your boss? Is it watching your peers teach? In a special end of year double length episode, Professor Thomas Guskey, author of Evaluating Professional Development talks to us about the best way to help teachers learn and the evidence for workshops, peer observations and what the best teachers do that the rest of us don’t.

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The Downsides to Speaking (with Professor Stephen Krashen)

Students need to speak to learn a language and the more students talk, the more they learn. Not according to Professor Stephen Krashen. For 40 years he has championed the concept that what students should be doing in class is reading (and listening), not speaking. In this episode, Stephen tells Ross some of the arguments against forcing students to speak, something which might not just be inefficient, but in some cases counterproductive.

The Downsides to Speaking (with Professor Stephen Krashen) - Transcription

Ross Thorburn:  Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we have a man that I think does not require an introduction. That's Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus from the University of California. I'm pretty confident all of you know who he is.

In this episode I spoke to Professor Krashen about something which I think is so common in language classes that we often don't discuss it on the podcast. That is getting students to talk and the disadvantages of doing that. Enjoy the interview.

 Ross Thorburn:  Professor Krashen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's fantastic to have you on. You had a great article called "Down With Forced Speech." In the beginning of it, you had a really nice anecdote about your neighbor and anxiety from speaking in language class.

Professor Stephen Krashen:  Well, that was the incident with my daughter, which really changed things. She was four years old, and I went over to pick her up. She was at the neighbor's house. She's playing with the neighbor's daughter. I was going to take both girls back to our house. I went there.

Our neighbor, a good friend of ours, said, "Sorry that you have to do this. We would have liked for her to stay longer, but I have to go off to class. Thanks for taking both of them." "So you're taking classes?" "Yeah, at Santa Monica Community College. I'm taking Spanish."

She says, "Wait just a moment." She goes in the kitchen, gets a glass of water, takes a pill, and swallows the pill. I said, "What was that?" She said, "It's Valium," like Prozac today. "It's Valium."

Ever the researcher, I had to find out what was going on. I said, "If you don't mind my asking, why are you taking Valium before Spanish class?" She said, "It freaks me out. I get really nervous." I said, "What is it about class?" She got it right away. "Talking, having to talk, being called on in class."

That got me going. I looked at the research. The number‑one activity that causes the most anxiety in foreign‑language class in general? Talking, when you're called on, etc., when you have to say things that you've learned but haven't acquired. The least anxiety, of course, is reading. All the research again supports it.

Forcing yourself to talk or forcing a student to talk is not going to push language acquisition any faster. It just makes them uncomfortable. The ability to speak easily and fluently is the result of language acquisition. It's not the cause. We have overwhelming data, I think, that leads to the conclusion that it doesn't help.

We've a lot of people who've acquired language very well with little or no output. We have societies that basically insist on it as a condition. They allow people to talk, relax, etc. I've looked at case histories where people speak languages very well. Wouldn't say anything for the longest time.

They simply relaxed and got comprehensible input that they understood and that they found interesting. See, as a scientist, I'd say it's a great hypothesis with no counter examples. As a regular person, I would say it's true.

Ross Thorburn:  Presumably, ultimately then, the issue here is that nervousness and anxiety stops students from learning. It raises their effective filter. As soon as that happens, language becomes more difficult to learn. Is that right?

Stephen Krashen:  Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ross Thorburn:  Then I guess there must be some cases where that's maybe less true. I find in teaching, for example, primary‑school‑age children, that they seem to be much more willing than adults, in general, to speak in front of the whole class.

Stephen Krashen:  Well, they're less concerned about making mistakes. That's for sure. There's less pressure on them, so the anxiety is going to be lower. I still think that it helps language acquisition when they talk. The only way it helps is indirectly. If you talk and you're lucky, someone will answer back. That's conversation.

When it invites input, it helps. The real cause is comprehensible input, of course.

Ross Thorburn:  Now, speaking activities are very common in obviously English classes. Is a main benefit then from a comprehensible‑input point of view that if students are speaking to each other in class and the people that they're speaking to, the other students, are getting input from their peers? Is that right?

Stephen Krashen:  Yes, and probably they're best off by listening to the teacher. I don't know how much they're getting from the other students.

Ross Thorburn:  I've also read, I think in some of your research, that students at lower levels might make errors as often as every second word. Is there a danger then that by doing those kind of speaking activities in classes, that students are going to pick up on the errors of their peers and learn or acquire those errors?

Stephen Krashen:  Well, I'm sure it happens, of course. I'm one of the few people in the profession who's not too worried about fossilization, that these errors are there forever and they'll never go away. The people who claim this fossilization, I've looked at their data. If you look at people over a long term, they do gradually get better.

We have not looked at the impact of really rich, a massive amount of comprehensible input. Here's what usually happens.

If you look at someone who has emigrated to another country, came as an adult, speaks the language as a second language like so many people in the United States, and if the person has had a chance to make friends, have a life, and is a reader, they usually acquire the language very, very well. A good case is former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everyone says, "Oh, he doesn't speak English that well." When you listen carefully, Arnold speaks English very well. He's extremely articulate. He makes no grammatical errors. His sentences are complicated. His vocabulary is immense. He was governor. Man, he was good. He didn't have trouble except for his position in education, but that's another story.

I should say, by the way, that back in the days when I was working out on Venice Beach in my competitive weightlifting days, Arnold was there all the time. He was very friendly. Oh, my God. You'd be over doing bench presses. Here's Arnold. Mr. Universe would come over and say, "Yo. Do you need a spot? Can I help you?" "No." See? Very nice guy. I have to say that because he gets a lot of bad press.

Anyway, his English is extremely good. He has a slight accent. When you listen to his accent and you listen to the accent of other people who, say, speak English as a second language, it's never very heavy if you listen hard. They don't speak English using the phonological system of the first language. Most people have acquired most of the phonology, say 95 percent of it.

Our problem is that our standards are ridiculously high. If you don't speak with a perfect native accent, it's considered unacceptable. That's just plain crazy.

Ross Thorburn:  I think people don't necessarily want to sound like native speakers, do they? Your accent says so much about your identity that that might not really be necessarily what people want.

Stephen Krashen:  Good for you. I think that one of the reasons that we're not perfect is...Oh, let me back up. Accent to me is a marker of what group you are a member of. They say that anyone who opens their mouth you can tell where they're from, who their friends are, etc. To a great extent, that's true. You can tell a lot about people. It's very uncomfortable to try to be what you're not.

If someone could, for example, give me a magic pill and I could swallow it and sound completely French when I speak French, I don't know. That's not really me. It's like being slightly overdressed or slightly underdressed. There are good reasons we have our accents.

Ross Thorburn:  I remember meeting a professor from Cambridge years ago who was Greek. She lived in the UK for years. She said, "Hey, you know what? When I speak English, I don't want to sound English because I'm not English. I'm Greek. I don't ever want anyone to assume that I'm someone who I'm not."

Stephen Krashen:  People worry about it needlessly, I think.

 Ross Thorburn:  I wanted to ask you to tell us briefly about something which I think does the opposite of creating anxiety, which is also related to speaking, which is acculturation. Can you tell us a bit more about how that might be a motivating force for students and helps them?

Stephen Krashen:  Who do you connect with? Who do you acculturate to? You acculturate to your friends, not to a nationality. A language is where I have the best accent. My German accent's pretty good. I don't know if people think I'm native maybe for a few minutes. French is OK. Mostly it's Canadian. My accent in Spanish is Mexican, not in any other. It's not Cuban. It's not Spain.

Not because I have a special affinity for Austria where I did German, or Canada, or all these things. It's because I had friends. They were the ones I acculturated to. I was a member of their peer group. I talk the way my friends do. I don't think, "Gee, it's great to be Mexican." Mexico's fine, but I don't have patriotic feelings and [indecipherable 9:42] that stuff.

Ross Thorburn:  I suppose all this relates back to anxiety and speaking, doesn't it? I've certainly found that among my friends my Chinese is going to be a lot more fluent than if I'm in a situation where I don't know the people or I'm talking about an unfamiliar topic.

Stephen Krashen:  I'll give you my example. Again, I have no hard evidence. It's just my experience versus others, but I thought it was a pretty good example. My French comes hundred percent from Canada and largely from several months I spent there in 1981 when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Ottawa. We did some research on children ‑‑ subject matter, teaching.

Then I would go back occasionally, and we'd meet. We were working on one article we did in English and one in French. The one in French, I met with the French group. The people in the French group were people I knew very well. One had been my French teacher. One was my buddy, [indecipherable 10:37] . Everything with these people was always in French 100 percent.

We were having the meeting. I was in charge of it. I was outlining the paper, what we might do. The door opened, and a stranger walked in. I thought, "Oh, my God. I'm probably making a complete fool of myself. I'm sure I'm not getting things right." My French collapsed on the spot. I was less fluent. I probably started making mistakes, and it was involuntary.

I call this the output filter. It affects our performance, success phobia. We don't want to feel too perfect, etc., whatever, but it's very real. For my case it was. Depends on who you're talking to. The other time with French, I was in Paris with my daughter whose French is pretty good. She went to a French school for a while. She's quite good and comfortable with it.

This is a little bit after the episode I just told you. I met with a local sociology of language professor from the Sorbonne, and we met in a coffee shop. My daughter was with us. She would go off ‑‑ she was a young kid at the time ‑‑ and play video games, come back. This person spoke about 90 languages, but none of them was English, so we had our conversation in French.

We certainly got lost in the idea. It was a great conversation. My daughter came over and said, "Dad, I was amazed at how well you were speaking French. I didn't know you could do it. My gosh. It was great." I wasn't even aware. That's when the filter is down. It's up when you feel you're being judged. My accent in French is variable.

Sometimes I sound reasonably good. Sometimes I'm told I speak French without a trace of a French accent.

Ross Thorburn:  Why do you think that speaking activities continue to be so popular in language classes in spite of maybe students' own feelings? You mentioned earlier that these activities can cause anxiety and research that shows that the key to language acquisition is comprehensible input as opposed to output or skill‑building.

Stephen Krashen:  What happens is that people invent all these other activities because they feel like language teaching. You can fill the classroom hour. The public will accept them as language. Each student is given a sentence, and you have to get together to put the sentences into a coherent story‑‑ that kind of stuff. Is there any evidence it works? No.

Does it feel like language teaching? Yeah, teachers do it all the time, or "Let's do a closed test. Let's do a vocabulary activity, etc." These feel like language teaching, but we don't have evidence they do.

Ross Thorburn:  What then do you think about speaking activities that teachers do in class that are maybe based around comprehensible input? For example, maybe you read the students a story that they're engaged in. Then afterwards you discuss the characters, or personalize it for the learners, or focus on the language.

Stephen Krashen:  Is it better to think of an activity to do post‑story, or is it better to tell another story? My hunch is that it's better to tell another story because if you interrupt with activities, what we found so far is that the story in terms of acquisition is more efficient in terms of amount gained per unit time.

The only activity that is sure‑fire is compelling. That means so interesting you forget it's in another language. Compelling, comprehensible input with lots of language going on. I don't know any activities that do better than that.

 Ross Thorburn:  One more time everyone, that was Professor Stephen Krashen. If you're interested in finding out more about his work, visit his website. It's www.sdkrashen.com.

Hope you enjoyed the show today, and we'll see you again next episode. Bye‑bye.

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Do Coursebooks Stop Teachers Developing? (With Dave Weller)

Do coursebooks de-skill teachers? What happens if the important decisions about planning get left to coursebook writers rather than teachers? How much of the coursebook should schools tell teachers to use? And what can you do if your school doesn’t let you deviate from the prescribed materials? Dave Weller, author of “Lesson Planning for Language Teachers” and friend of the podcast discuss. 

Do Coursebooks Stop Teachers Developing? (With Dave Weller) Transcript

 Ross Thorburn:  Welcome back, Dave.

Dave Weller:  Hurrah! Nice to be back.

Ross:  Thanks. Dave and I were having a conversation a couple of nights ago, and we got talking about teachers uses of materials, right?

Dave:  Yes, perhaps in the over‑reliance of materials in the classroom.

Ross:  It reminded me of this quote from Ian McGrath, who says, "It's been argued that if teaching decisions are largely based on the textbook and the teacher's book, this has the effect of deskilling the teacher. If the person doing the teaching cedes to the textbook rights have responsibility for planning, he or she gradually loses the capacity to exercise the planning functions."

He says, "The teacher's role is trivialized and marginalized to that of a mere technician." [laughs]

Dave:  It seems over my many year's teaching and training, one observation is that when I see teachers who have been encouraged to use, only use and teach from the materials they have. They seem to develop habitual actions in the classroom that they do without thinking without reflection. There is definitely a parallel there between the quotation from the graph that you read.

The teachers executing their plan without really understanding or taking into account some of the learners. [laughs]

Ross:  At the same, it's quite obvious from a management point of view, why is a school you'd want to provide as much support as possible for your teachers? Both in terms of maybe getting teachers to teach as many hours as possible. You could minimize the planning. You want to ensure some minimal level of quality.

Dave:  Exactly. It comes from a good place to provide more materials, and more support is a wonderful thing for the schools to want to do. Especially from the terms of the quality of the class that the students have. At least if you know the teachers are using materials and following a strict pattern, then at least the students will reach some minimum level.

It seems to be that there's a limit to downsides of perhaps hiring newer or less skilled teachers. It also can limit the upside, I believe, of letting those teachers then develop over time, because they're not allowed to.

Ross:  Absolutely. Over the next few minutes, how about we talk about how to find that balance between giving enough support, and then just limiting teachers to technicians?

Dave:  Sounds good.

Ross:  Great. From what you were describing earlier, obviously every teacher starts off as a new teacher, and every teacher, therefore, needs a lot of...

Dave:  I was born ready, Ross.

[laughter]

Dave:  Not everyone's Dave Weller, though, are they?

Ross:  Obviously, there's an advantage to new teachers getting a lot of support, isn't there?

Dave:  Absolutely, yes. We often forget how intense an experience it is for teachers who travel halfway across the world. They're dealing with culture shock, new environments, new colleagues, and they're thrown into the classroom, the day after they arrive, when they still [laughs] have jet lag.

In those situations, there's a lot to be said for the school providing a lot of support for those teachers until they can find their feet.

Ross:  I guess typically, what might that look like to describe so we're all on the same page here, something that's becoming more and more common in my experiences is giving the teachers not even like a recipe book, but like a PowerPoint or something to follow that your job as a teacher is to flick through this.

You don't even necessarily even have to read the instructions because they're already on the PowerPoint for you. You might have suggested timings for just about everything, really almost like idiot‑proofing, teaching.

At the extreme end, I've had managers asking me, "Can you write a script for the teachers?" The teachers, all they have to do in the class is read out the script. It's impossible for anyone to teach a bad class.

Dave:  That's interesting. Remember, that's with technology. Back in the day, I remember, when I first started, you were given the course book, and that was it. You had to pick things from there. You were given a certain guideline. Maybe each unit takes three lessons. There were six pages, so you do the math.

[laughter]

Dave:  You went from there. You had a lot of autonomy over what to choose, how to sequence a lesson, you can move things around. You did have to rely a lot on your more experienced colleagues, which perhaps taught that course. Before, to give you ideas, it encouraged a definite interaction and collaboration, the staff from the people sharing ideas.

Then I remembered a few years later, when maybe an update happened, course books are suddenly accompanied by teachers notes. First, people, the experienced teachers didn't use them at all. I just flicked through and pfft.

[laughter]

Dave:  You turned your nose up at the book. We found that newer teachers would arrive and be very, very interested in pulling it out and teaching those lessons, as is until they became used to it. Then they found that they began with collaboration with input from their more experienced colleagues.

They had more interesting ideas to try newer ideas, and they saw the benefit and the effectiveness of those in class. It naturally moved away from the teacher's notes. It's like training wheels on a bike, I guess.

Ross:  Obviously, the issue here is if the training wheels remain forever, then...

Dave:  Or mandated.

Ross:  ...or mandated. That's another thing getting to mention briefly, isn't it? It's not just about what materials and what support you give to the teachers, it's about the management of what you tell the teachers that they have to do. Then also maybe what you tell parents and students they have to do.

Something that I've definitely heard about before is teachers getting complaints for deviating from the materials. Obviously, that's something that you can't say it's always the best idea to deviate from the materials. If someone never deviates...

[crosstalk]

Dave:  [laughs]

Ross:  Well, right, it does, isn't it? If it's a good course book, or if it's a bad course, but shit, maybe it's all good and bad, is it? It's also how appropriate that is for the group of students that you're teaching. There's a basic thing there is, isn't there, about what a customer or student expectations are? How you balance that?

Dave:  Again, that one is easily change. It's often you get complaints from parents or students about the structure or the style of the class. They're used to the most grammar translation methods from their school day. That's what they expect and want. This all falls under the same umbrella of your customer's education.

It should definitely be a part of any school's program to not just educate students but educate parents. If they're young learners, or educate the students themselves in the methodology, and explain to them why the methodology they'll be learning under is the most effective way to learn a language. I would have put the materials that not meeting certain criteria under that as well.

Then your other point, which is to go back about if the training was always left on. Scaffolding around the teachers when they first come. They're not allowed to take that scaffolding away. Then you're doing so many things with that. You're creating habitual patterns of thought and teaching for the teacher. They never really improve.

Then I'll have to experiment and try new things, which can lead to boredom, frustration, both for them and the students. Obviously, it has all kinds of effects on the business itself, whether that be student retention, teacher retention, referrals or whichever metric you care to use.

If you don't let teachers develop to their full capacity, that will be a longer‑term implication for you and for your school.

Ross:  Almost imagine this is looking on a graph where if you have maybe no materials or minimal materials, you're going to end up with a huge variety of amazing lessons from some teachers and with some classes to absolutely awful lessons. The more support you give and the more you mandate, people use those. Maybe the more you limit the things that are going to hit the very bottom of the quality scale.

Equally, you also end up pushing down people from the top of the scale and squashing them all into this middle of mediocrity. Where probably what's going to happen in the short‑term is, you might not get any complaints, and you might not get as many refunds.

You probably not going to get very many people sticking with your language courses in the long term, because after a year, they [laughs] find that they didn't learn anything.

Dave:  It's a really good point, and for me, this is where a good manager comes in. That's exactly what a good manager should be looking out for and assessing. If they hire an experienced teacher, they perhaps know they don't need as much support in terms of content, lesson planning ideas, and so on.

They should observe them and encourage them to develop, maybe fill in the gaps of their knowledge and encourage them to developing ways that they would find interesting and useful and effective.

Whereas when they hire a new teacher, of course, it's providing a lot more support. Perhaps encouraging to use the teacher's notes and materials to get that minimum standard as quickly as possible, both for their [laughs] benefit and the students. Maybe we could talk about ways or what to do if you find yourself stuck in an environment like that.

If that is the case, then all it takes is one enthusiastic, motivated person to start to change the culture bit by bit. What I've seen is if you go in there, and you get a...Maybe you do a lot of reading online, you listen to podcasts, like this one, Ross.

Ross:  [laughs]

Dave:  You get some ideas, then go in and try them. Don't keep it to yourself, try, and go "Ah, right." You share those in the staff afterwards, good or bad. "I tried this thing. It didn't work very well. Have you ever done that before?" Whether it works exceptionally well, you have an amazing lesson.

Share that with your colleagues and tell them what you did and how you did it and where they can find similar resources. Encourage them to start stepping away a little bit by little bit and see what happens.

Ross:  Activity books can be great for that as well. A lot of teachers' rooms have those where you can flick through or look at the back for whatever grammar point of vocabulary you're teaching. Try and find something that's useful and fits, and is just different from what's in the course, but can give it a try.

Dave:  Exactly. Say, if you're not being set challenges or by managers or you're wondering what to do, then you pick a good book by a well‑known author. Set yourself a challenge to say, all you have to try one new thing every lesson for the next two weeks and see what happens. Whatever the result of that, you're going to learn something new, be enthusiastic about it, be prepared.

Things might not be as good because you're new and unfamiliar. Don't let that put you off and keep trying new things.

Ross:  I think for managers as well, that can be good. CPD now and again is to bring in some activity books. In groups, your goal is to go through and find at least three activities that you think you could use in the class this week.

Present it and say, why you think they're useful, and they would be effective, and a great way of getting people out of whatever mindset that they're currently in and exposed to some new ideas and thinking about using.

Dave:  A question for you, Ross, do you think this is a trend in the industry that you've seen? You probably have a wider experience and spoken to more people than I have. Have you seen this as a growing trend? Do you think it's decreasing? What do you think?

Dave:  I would say I have seen this trend coming in more and more. There are probably two or three reasons for that. One is getting value for money from teachers. If you're paying a teacher to teach for 40 hours a week, then you can either have them planning for maybe 20 hours and teaching for 20 hours.

If I do all the planning for you, I can get you to teach for 40 hours, and I can make double the amount of money.

Then the second one is customer expectations. If you're going to sell something to someone, if every single teacher in every single class, you get a quite different experience, that's much more difficult to sell. You end up getting more refunds as a result when the student's expectations are different from what the reality is. That's much easier to standardized teaching.

I'm not saying that's a good idea, but that phrase I hear a lot is we should standardize teaching.

Then the third one is...Especially with AI, and cameras and things come in, it's a lot easier to surveil teachers, and check on what's happening in the classroom. You can measure, for example, if it's online, how many pages of the course book do the teachers teach. If it's offline, even now, there is seemed to be AI where you can check students' facial expressions.

Parents now in a lot of schools are able to go on and watch live streaming of what's going on in the classes. All those things together combined to make for more of this teach by numbers.

Dave:  I hope there are no managers listening.

Ross:  [laughs]

Dave:  They might be persuaded by your argument, Ross. We might have the opposite effect.

Ross:  I wonder what these some of the arguments are against it? Obviously, it's ultimately bad for the profession. There's a lot of arguments for that in the short term. If you own your own school, and you're trying to make as much money as possible in the short term, I think there's a lot of benefits to that.

Dave:  Again, I see as a first part of an argument, because yet in a short term, it can be useful. It gets a new teacher up to speed in the quickest possible way. You've limited the potential earning power of your school because you done short‑term convenience. Getting them up to speed as quickly as possible, but you're missing on long‑term benefits of quality.

Without letting your teachers develop and reach a maximum capacity, you're losing out on teacher retention. They probably won't stay as long if they're not receiving professional development.

Also, the students won't hang around as long either because they'll be shopping around based on price. Probably end up staying where they do feel they're part of a community, where they can see the teacher trying new things and building rapport with them.

The first, sure, I would agree there are business benefits for the short term, but you're missing out on the long tail and the long‑term benefits of teacher development.

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Replacing Texts With Pictures (with Mark Hancock)

Texts are a starting point for manly lessons. But what about using a text with no words? Mark Hancock (author of Pronunciation Games, English Pronunciation in Use, Pron Pack and Pen Pictures) tells us about basing lessons around pictures and using these to generate stories, descriptions, language needs and much more.

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Are MA TESOL Courses Failing Teachers? (with Thomas Farrell)

Professor Thomas Farrell joins me to discuss MA TESOL courses: what are their shortcomings and how could these be improved? We discuss what is covered in MA courses, how they are taught, whether MA TESOLs ought to include a practicum, and much more.

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L1: Friend or Foe (with Penny Ur)

All language students speak a first language, but what do we do with it? Some teachers ban it. Some teachers use it to teach English in. Some schools make students sign a pledge never to use it. Penny Ur tells us about what we can do take advantage of students first language, when to avoid it and when even to encourage it.

L1 Friend Or Foe? (with Penny Ur) - Transcription

 Ross Thorburn:  Hi, Penny. To start off, a lot of teachers ‑‑ I certainly count myself as one of these ‑‑ mix up, as Vivian Cook puts it, "Minimizing L1 in the classroom with maximizing L2 in the classroom."

Obviously, those two concepts aren't mutually exclusive. Less first language doesn't necessarily mean more English, does it? Are there any reasons that you think teachers might legitimately want to ban students' first language from their classrooms?

Penny Ur: “Ban”, certainly not. One of my slogans [laughs] is “never say never”. In education in general, language teaching in particular, there's nothing I can think of which include no recommendation, which would include the word never or always. There is a place for the L1 in the classroom. The question is what that place is, how to limit it, and what to limit it to.

The golden rule perhaps is, as Vivian Cook says, "The aim is to maximize the use of L2." If you're speaking the target language, and you're speaking it all the time and your students aren't understanding it, then they're not learning very much.

It makes sense to use the L1 here and there to facilitate understanding so that when you do use the L2, they understand. L2 should only be used comprehensively. If L1 use occasionally can help that comprehension, by all means, use it.

A classic example is introducing a new word in a monolingual class. If you know the students' mother tongue, it's so much quicker and easier to explain the meaning of that word by just giving a quick translation than it is by lengthy explanations in the target language at the end of which the students may not understand.

The end of which [laughs] very often one of the members of the class shouts out the L1 equivalent anyway. Why did you bother to go round the world trying to avoid it? I'd say there is a place. The main point is to make sure that L2 is used most of the time and that it is used comprehensively.

Ross:  That's so true, isn't it? Most teachers, and certainly when I come across a word that I don't understand in my second language, what do I do? I translate it. I'm sure that's what most people do.

Penny Ur:  Most people use bilingual dictionaries. They don't use monolingual dictionaries. If they want to find the meaning of a word in another language, they look up a dictionary that tells them what it is in their language. It's the most sensible and quickest way to do it.

Ross:  Why then do you think so many teachers ban L1 from their classes or even schools? For example, where I've worked before have signs up saying, "No Chinese." Why do you think there's such an aversion to students' first language being used anywhere in language classrooms?

Penny Ur:  Partly because it's a slippery slope. For a lot of teachers, once they start using L1, it's so easy to do that they slip into using it much too much. I've observed lessons where the teacher is using the L1 70, 80 percent of the time. There's not much time left for the target language.

What we need to get teachers to implement in the classroom is that the target language is the language we want to use most of the time. One of the reasons why teacher‑trainers discourage the use of L1 is because they're afraid teachers are going to overuse it. It is a well‑grounded fear because, as I said, I've seen it happen. It does happen in a lot of situations. That's one reason.

Another reason is that in modeling classes where you could use the L1, expatriate teachers coming from the UK or coming the States and teaching, say, in Europe, they simply don't know the students' mother tongue, so they can't use it. They make a virtue of necessity. I can't use your language so I shouldn't be using your language. It's better to use only English.

There's another rather insidious message coming across here that English is not only the target language, in the case of teaching English here, which is what we're mostly talking about. English is in some way the superior language, and we should be using it in some way. The students' language is inferior and should be taken out.

This is a very dangerous and not legitimate message coming across, particularly in these days when we're teaching students English in order to enable them to become multilingual users of English. In other words, or bilingual at least, where we're not teaching a Spanish speaker to become an English speaker.

We're teaching a Spanish speaker to remain a Spanish speaker who also has a good command of English and can use it, where necessary. We're training bilinguals, not imitation native speakers. Bilinguals' repertoire of languages, the first time it functions side by side with the new language, English, and therefore has a place also in the learning of their language.

Ross:  A student studying English as a second language can never ever become an English‑speaking monolingual, can they? Why try to imitate that?

Penny Ur:  No. It's a case of knowing where and when it's appropriate to insert a little bit of L1 or to use translation as one of the techniques for testing, or for explaining new vocabularies, as I said before. It's a fairly complex issue but you don't really gain anything by giving blanket instructions, like never use the L1.

Ross:  For teachers who can speak the same L1 as their students, which I think is probably the majority of English language teachers out there, when might it be useful for them to use that?

Penny Ur:  Legitimate uses for L1, apart from vocabulary, explaining a grammar point. Very often, you need to do this in L1. Again, I'm talking about monolingual classes whose language you understand and speak yourself. Explaining grammar. Often the grammar that you're explaining, the words you need to know to explain it are far more difficult than the grammar itself.

Explaining the difference in present simple and present progressive, for example. It's very, very common tenses and aspects that the language you need to explain the difference is much more difficult. Therefore, it makes sense to do it if you can in the students' L1. That's one place.

Another very useful use [laughs] of the L1 is contrastive analysis in order to avoid mistakes. A lot of mistakes that students make come from interference from their mother tongue. If you bring this up to the surface and explain to them, "Look, your mother tongue says it this way, English says it that way, and that's why you're making this mistake," you can help your students avoid mistakes.

For example, in Hebrew, which is my other language and the language of my students, after "afraid," they will always say "afraid from" because that's what it says in Hebrew. You have to teach them, "Look, Hebrew says 'afraid from,' English says 'afraid of.'" You've got to make sure you know the difference.

Another example, most languages where English uses the present perfect progressive, as in "We've been talking for several minutes," most languages would use the present tense in that context. Most of the languages I know about, anyway.

Most languages say, "We are speaking for several minutes." That's what students will tend to do unless they are made aware of the difference. That's another very useful aid using the L1. There are one or two more, but those are the main ones.

Ross:  What about then for teachers who can't speak the same first language as their students? What can those teachers do? Is there any way that those teachers can somehow make use of their students' L1 in the classroom?

Penny Ur:  Obviously, the teachers themselves can't because they simply don't know the language. To allow students to write down new words with the L1 equivalent themselves in their vocabulary notebooks or wherever they're noting the new words, to explain to each other if necessary using the L1.

Make it clear that the L1 is not an illegal, illegitimate thing to bring into the classroom. If it helps you, use it.

Ross:  Those are mainly examples of what the teacher can do to use their students' first language or mother tongue to teach. What ways can teachers encourage students, maybe, to use their first language in the class to help with language learning, maybe in activities, or tasks, or elsewhere?

Penny Ur:  One thing which I found students really enjoy ‑‑ again, we're talking about monolingual classes here where the teacher speaks the students' language ‑‑ is translating. Not translating entire passages because that gets a bit tedious, but for example, translating a sentence.

Or looking at the translation of a particular word or phrase within the context of how would you say this word or phrase in your mother tongue? Or the other way around. Here's a sentence in mother tongue, how would you say this in English? Helping them to get to the right answer in English. That's one which students really enjoy, even in a very elementary level.

I've done reading comprehension, for example. I've given them a short text to read with a picture. Something fairly short story or something. A little anecdote, a little joke. Then ask them the comprehension questions in their mother tongue and ask them for an answer in their mother tongue.

That way, I ensure that firstly, they spend most of their time just doing the reading and not doing the comprehension work, because the comprehension work, they do pretty quickly. Second, it gives me a very, very quick insight into whether they've understood or not. Reading the questions is also reading comprehension.

The trouble is that it's also a bit tedious. [laughs] It's boring. Whereas the texts themselves, the little stories are quite interesting to read. What I'm doing is by giving it in mother tongue, I'm letting the students spend most time on the reading, which is interesting and fun, and as little time as possible on the task which show me that they've understood or not.

A lot of teachers would not accept this, but that's my justification for doing the questions in mother tongue. That's another activity.

The third one, which I would look at again on the level of contrastive analysis is let's look at a couple of translations. Take a word. How would you translate this into your mother tongue? Let's explore the differences.

Perhaps, the mother tongue is more informal. The mother tongue one is matched to gender and the English one isn't. All sorts of things which can simply raise student's awareness of meanings of words in the target language.

Ross:  Finally then, we need to end with some sort of a caveat that we obviously want most of our classes most of the time to be done in English. How can we avoid opening the L1 floodgates and students using too much of their first language in class?

Penny Ur:  Opening the floodgates is a good metaphor for this. Firstly, the teacher needs to be very disciplined him or herself. If there's, say, an instruction which you want to give, and there's a word in the sentence which they don't understand. Say, "Put the words into columns," and they don't know the word "columns."

A tip to the teacher is: don't translate the entire sentence. If the only problematic word there is the word "columns," then say the whole sentence in English and just put in an oral gloss on the word "columns." Keeping to English as much as you can and only translating where it's necessary for comprehension. That's one.

Another one, doing oral daunting activities. The place where the floodgates do open, students lapse into L1, is when you ask them to discuss things in groups, and you're not there hovering over them. If they all speak the same L1, if they're doing the discussion task in groups, they're likely to lapse into L1. Teachers find this all over the place.

What can you do to stop this? Two main strategies here. One is make the task one which you know they can do using the language at their disposal. It has to be an easy task. Slightly i‑1, as it were in Krashen's terminology. A bit below the normal level that you're doing your reading comprehension in. Easy task you know only demands language which they can use.

The second strategy is within the group itself, appointing one language monitor whose job it is to jot down every time anybody says something not in the target language, not in English, or uses the mother tongue.

This has an amazing effect on students because if they know that their names are going to be written down every time they use the mother tongue, this is likely to deter them from doing so. It acts as a deterrent.

[tefltraininginstitute]

The Power of Fluency (with Paul Nation)

Paul Nation tells us about the importance of fluency and how to develop it with students at all levels. Paul Nation is one of the world’s leading researchers on and writers on vocabulary, reading and fluency, has written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970. Paul is Emeritus Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan.

Transcription - The Power of Fluency (with Paul Nation)

Tracy:  Hey everybody. Welcome to our podcast.

Ross Thorburn:  Hey everyone. On our podcasts, I think we spent a lot of time talking about speaking, but we haven't ever really directly tackled the idea of fluency.

Tracy:  That's true.

Ross:  Today we've got, once again, Paul Nation, emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand, to talk to us about fluency and vocabulary and how those two things link together.

Tracy:  Paul is one of the world's leading researchers and writers on vocabulary and fluency. We are incredibly lucky to be able to have him on our podcast.

Ross:  As usual, we've got three areas that we'll cover in the podcast. Firstly, we will ask Paul why fluency is important. Then secondly...

Tracy:  ...how can teachers help students develop fluency, and the third one...

Ross:  ...what are some common mistakes that teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluent?

 Why is fluency important?

Tracy:  Hello Paul.

Paul Nation:  Hello.

Tracy:  How are you doing?

Paul:  Good.

Tracy:  Before we go onto fluency, let's start off by talking about vocabulary.

Paul:  No problem.

Tracy:  Why have you dedicated so much of your career to vocabulary and vocabulary research?

Paul:  There's a couple of reasons why I focus on it. I guess being important is one of the reasons. The vocabulary knowledge underlies every language use skill, and without vocabulary, you can't do much in the way of listening, speaking, reading or writing.

The other reason I'd probably focus on is that it's been a very poorly researched area in the past. In fact, some of the worst researched areas that I know of in applied linguistics are actually in vocabularies.

Ross:  Can you tell us a bit about fluency then? To start off, why is fluency so important?

Paul:  One of my favorite stories about that is when I was in Japan. We went on a train. We weren't quite sure whether we were going to the right place or not. I looked around the carriage, and there was a very studious looking young woman there wearing glasses, looking like a student.

I asked her, "Is this the train to Osaka?" She looked at me, and a look of dismay came over her face. She buried her hands in the face. "Oh my goodness, what have I done?" If I caused her to lose face, what's going to happen as a result?

Anyway, someone further down the carriage, a man said, "Yes, Osaka." As the train went along, this woman pulled out a book and started reading it. Being nosy, I dropped my pen on the floor and had a quick look at what the book was.

She was reading a book called "The Macro Economics of Agriculture" in English. I couldn't read a book called The Macro Economics of Agriculture in English, even being a native speaker. When we got off the train, she came up to us and said, "Where are you going?" I bet that she'd been practicing that sentence for the last 20 or 30 minutes before we got to the station.

I said the name. She said, "Follow me." We had a conversation. Here was someone with enormous knowledge of the language and yet not fluent in some of the basic things that she could have quite easily become fluent. It meant that these avenues of use of it were closed off to her.

I think it's important that about a quarter of the time on a course to spend getting fluent in reading, getting fluent in writing, using just the little bit that you know even, but making sure that you can use it.

Ross:  Paul, with fluency, I think there's this concept that, for students, they only really become fluent or develop fluency at maybe intermediate or advanced levels. You wouldn't think of a beginner as being fluent. When do you think it's useful for students to start to develop fluency?

Paul:  I can't talk about anything nowadays it seems without having to get onto what I call the four strands. The four strands are simply learning through input, learning through output, deliberate learning, and developing fluency.

Each one of those that I call a strand, which in the basic principle is that in a well‑balanced language course there should be roughly equal amount of time spent on each of these four strands at every single level of proficiency.

If you're learning a language for survival, David Crab and I did some research to set up a survival vocabulary for foreign travel, which is about 120 words and phrases, that if you know those, you can do quite a lot in the language.

You can travel around. You can get food. You can find accommodation. You can be polite to people and so on like that. The thing is, you could learn those, but the other thing is you've got to learn them fluently.

That means that you can say them in a way that people will understand. When people reply, you need to be able to interpret what they say at a speed which will make it useful for you. Even then learning, a survival vocabulary, you've got to get fluent and that kind of fluency is quite easy to develop.

You keep getting people to repeat it over and over again to you and get faster and faster and faster. You keep practicing and practicing and doing that. It's very important because a lot of students have quite a lot of knowledge of English, but they don't have the fluency to put it into practice.

 How can teachers help students develop fluency?

Tracy:  Paul, can you please share some practical activities which teachers can use in the classroom to help their students and develop those skills to be more fluent?

Paul:  I've written lots of books, but the one that I liked the most, one that gave me the greatest satisfaction having written it is called, "What Should Every EFL Teacher Know," because of near I sort of wanted after training teachers and teaching English and that for well over 50 years.

I thought if I can sit down, reading all the research, and say in a simple, clear and direct way what do I think EFL teachers should be doing, then there's something wrong with...I haven't spent my life well.

I wrote that book and then as, part of doing it, I sat, and I thought, "Well, what if I had to choose 20 teaching techniques and activities, what would they be? The top ones that people should know."

I came up with a list of those which are in the book. The ones for speaking fluency, one is a very interesting technique called Four, Three, Two, where the students choose an easy topic, and then they sit down with a partner and teacher says, "Go."

For four minutes, they have to talk about that familiar, easy topic. After exactly four minutes, the teacher says, "Stop. Change partners." Then everybody moves onto a new partner.

Then for three minutes, the same people, half of the class have to talk again to their partner saying exactly what they said before to the new partner, but doing it in three minutes. After three minutes, they move onto another partner. Then they have to do it in two minutes. That's a very simple, easy but very effective technique for developing spoken fluency.

Another one would be repeated delivery of a talk, which is a bit like Four, Three, Two because repetition is one of the ways of developing fluency. It's what I call the will beat a path to fluency, that is you keep doing the same thing over and over again until you get good at it.

Another way of developing fluency is a rich and varied map where you do similar things but not exactly the same thing. You change it in some way so that you keep coming at the same stuff, but you're doing it in different ways.

A very useful technique for that is called Linked Schools where people might read about something. Then they might write about the same topic, and they would have to get up and speak about that topic.

Having now read about it, written about it, when they come to speak about it, they can do this speaking with a lot of knowledge and use that speaking as an opportunity to develop fluency in speaking, drawing on that knowledge.

 Common mistakes teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluent

Ross:  I remember, Paul, a few years ago, in fact, I think we did a podcast about this, I remember reading a paper that you wrote that was warning teachers of the danger of teaching vocabulary in lexical or semantic sets.

Can you tell us about some other examples maybe of where you think there's a gap between what research says works with teaching vocabulary and what teachers tend to do for teaching vocabulary?

Paul:  The lexical sets was interesting because once again, the research is starting to show that there are sort of niceties to that lexical set idea comparing immediate learning compared with a long‑term retention from it.

There's interesting research which shows that the interference is greater with say, if you learn fruit together. It becomes harder with fruit, which in some ways resemble each other like apples or more like oranges. Then they are like bananas.

You're more likely to get interference between apples and oranges than you are between apples and bananas in terms of the word form and its meaning. That's funny.

I would say that the greatest mistake is one I've mentioned already, which was the idea of vocabulary needs to be taught. I would say another belief that's encouraged by people who haven't read the research is that vocabulary needs to be learned in context.

They often express this negatively in the sense that it's not good to learn vocabulary out of context and the research is quite the opposite. Learning vocabulary out of context is highly effective and highly efficient.

The idea, for example, of using bilingual word cards or bilingual flashcard programs is a very good idea. You'd have this often criticized because it says all the vocab isn't learned in context.

If it's part of a well‑balanced program where there's opportunities for learning from input‑output in fluency development, which are all in context. Then some deliberate learning, using the first language translation, learning the word without any illustrative context around it is very effective and efficient.

Tracy:  That one is interesting. I think that's very different to what most teachers believe and what gets taught on most of the teacher training courses.

Paul:  Steve Crashing criticized this saying that this learning will not be learning which will be of use when you come to use the language normally. I tackled him on this at a conference one time, and I said, "Does this apply to vocabulary? The idea that deliberate learning doesn't result in the kind of knowledge you need for a normal language used."

He said, "Yes, it applies to vocabulary." I said, "Good." We went away, and we got one of our PhD students working on it. She showed the deliberate decontextualized learning of vocabulary resulted in both implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Implicit knowledge is a kind of knowledge that you need for normal language use, this kind of flash card learning. You can learn enormous amounts in a very short time, but they out very important principles to follow when you do this learning.

These are principles, which have been well‑established by psychological research or research in psychology over the last almost 100 years, or so, involving repetition, spacing of the repetitions, retrieval that means not looking at the word and the meaning together all the time, but having to try and retrieve or recall the meaning that went with the word.

If you can't recall it, you have a look. The idea of spaced retrieval is very important. The idea of varying the order of the words being learned, so you're not learning them in the same serial order or anything like it.

There are simple guidelines for that learning, but they're very important guidelines. If learners are trained in how to do that, training is not a big deal for that, they could learn large amounts in a very short time.

This allows them to make good progress through extensive reading and extensive listening and things like that, because they bring all this background knowledge of decontextualized learning, which now becomes contextualized through their reading and listening.

 More from Paul Nation

Ross:  Paul, I'll put a link to your University of Victoria web page. Is that a place for people to go if they want to find out more about your work?

Paul:  Yeah. The latest thing on the website is the updated vocabulary levels test, which is the most useful test for teachers of English as a foreign language to do, to measure the learners' vocabulary size. Then I wrote a book for learners called "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?" That's free for download.

Ross:  Thanks so much again for taking the time to come and talk to us.

Paul:  No problem. Good luck with your work.

Ross:  Thanks, Paul.

Paul:  Bye everyone.

Tracy:  Bye.

[tefltraininginstitute]

Knowledge and Challenges for Young Learner Teachers (With Wendy Arnold)

Wendy Arnold passes on a wealth of experience of teaching and writing about young learners. Wendy tells us about how young learners' home lives affect their development, how the expectations of teachers and materials writers can effect student achievement and the problems associated with one size fits all curricula and coursebooks.

Image by Pixabay

[tefltraininginstitute]

Teaching Phonics (with Lesley White)

Letterland teacher trainer Lesley White tells Ross about phonics. We touch on the history, the advantages of phonics over other approaches, different options to teachers within the phonics system and some of the differences between learning to read in your first language and in your second language.

Teaching Phonics (With Lesley White)                     

Ross Thorburn:  Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week, I'm speaking to Lesley White. Lesley is a trainer at Letterland. She's got many, many years of experience working there as a young learner, teacher‑trainer. She's been running phonic sessions in the UK and overseas since 1992, which is indeed a lot of experience.

In this episode, I got to ask Lesley all about phonics, a bit of background about where it comes from, how long it's been around for. Then we also get into a lot of practical advice for teachers. If you've ever taught any students to learn to read, then I'm sure you'll find a lot of valuable information from Lesley.

 Where should teachers start in teaching reading?

Ross:  Hi, Lesley.

Lesley White:  Hi.

Ross:  Very simple question to get us started. Where should teachers start in teaching reading?

Lesley:  Well, within our system, we start by teaching the very young children all the prereading and prewriting skills before they even get as far as learning to read. We want them to have those very early stages because we're working with children around about the three‑age range.

Before they start even thinking about reading, they need to have the tools to be able to read. For that, we introduce them to using the knowledge they have about the sounds. We want them to then blend them together to be able to read.

If they only know a couple of sounds, they don't have very much in the way of background or the very many tools to help them to read much. Start small and then keep growing.

Ross:  You mentioned there are prereading skills. What exactly are prereading skills?

Lesley:  Babies learn by imitation. That's how they develop their native language skills. That should be the same way for other languages as well. The nearer we can replicate what they do naturally, the easier it is to give them the baseline, the starting.

We try to give them the prereading and writing skills, the ability to spot odd ones out, learn about logic and how things go together, think about the sequences. All those what I call prereading and prewriting activities, then provide them with a basis. Without that, the actual skill of reading becomes far more difficult because English is not a purely phonic language.

We need to introduce the children to a systematic and explicit way of learning so that they have the tools to then be able to decode the message that's carried within those shapes.

Ross:  When I was a teacher, phonics was just starting to become popular, at least, in China. Could you give us a bit of a sense of what the history is of phonics and, maybe, how it's been used in comparison to other approaches?

Lesley:  I remember when I was at school, which is long before you were a teacher, and long before you were at school. I remember I was taught to use those sounds and talk about the C‑A‑T, the cat, sat, S‑A‑T on the M‑A‑T. The phonics has always been around and about for very many, many years.

It goes in cycles as to whether it's popular within the educational elite, but phonics came back into vogue towards the end of the last century. The beginning of this led, in part, by the UK government's desire for all children to be introduced to phonics early in their careers, so the letters and sound document.

As far as phonics for a second language, that's slightly more difficult because if the children don't have a vocabulary, then they don't know the words they're trying to create.

That's why I say those early stages, those prereading, prewriting stages, includes helping the children to begin to develop a vocabulary and have some understanding of the language. It's not just picking up a book and barking at print.

It is actually being able to blend the sounds together, read the words, but read them with understanding because so often parents will say to me, "My child can read these words, but they don't know what they're reading." That's as useless as not being able to read, if you like.

Ross:  It sounds then ike children really need that foundation in listening, maybe speaking, and definitely having vocabulary knowledge before they start to learn to read then.

Lesley:  Without those skills, then the next stage can't be reached. When we get children walking, for instance, they don't just stand up and start to run, they start with falling down and bringing themselves up again.

We have to look at reading in exactly the same way that they have to take those steps slowly, little by little, adding to their knowledge and their understanding. The more that they enjoy and are entertained by it, the better their knowledge acquisition becomes, and the more they enjoy the experience.

There are different types of phonics. There's synthetic phonics. It's the buzzword in many educational circles. That's about blending the sounds together in order to read words. We also have linguistic and analytic phonics, as well.

Now, how relevant is that for very young children? It's about enjoying books. It's whatever way that they can look at print and get meaning from it. It is about getting meaning from it, not just what I call, barking at print.

 Stages in Learning to Read

Ross:  What are some of the different stages that students go through in learning to read? Presumably then, the first stage there is for students to start to link letters to sounds. What happens from there?

Lesley:  I'd say the first stage is speaking and listening. As far as the silence, I think it's vitally important that the children begin to have a feel about the rhythm of the language, about the knowledge that sounds. So getting to that stage before they get as far as putting those sounds together and being able to do anything more than that.

The first stage, as far as I'm concerned, is speaking and listening. We then go on, as you very rightly say, to identifying the sounds. There are 44 sounds in our English language. It's not just learning about the 26 letters and the shapes of those letters, but it's then about the combinations.

If we think about it, consonants, B, C, D, are never ever confused in reading, but the vowels confuse and complicate because they make a variety of different sounds. Somewhere without making it too unfactual for young children, we have to engage them and help them to make those connections and understandings.

Ross:  Is there an order that is best for teachers to teach the different sounds and letters and in others, SATPIN, which is a common one? There's also A, B, C, D, which is very common. What are some such things and considerations teachers might think about before choosing the order they're going to teach the letters in?

Lesley:  My answer to that is it depends on your objective. If you're wanting the children to learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, that's fine. That's the order that you'll find in a dictionary, or an index, or anything else. Getting the children to sing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., is part of learning a rote about the names of the letters.

That's not going to help the children blend the sounds together to make words. The SATPIN teaching order, which is a sequence that has been suggested as recommended in various publications means that you can start making words after you've covered the first four letters.

Simple words, but you've got S,A,T making S‑A‑T, sat, P‑A‑T, pat. Then we can turn that round and have T‑A‑P, tap. Already, even after four letters, we're able to blend those sounds together.

That teaching order also makes sure the letters that are similar‑looking to young children like the B and the D...Some children are very confused by those two shapes, because they're very similar just turned round the other way, if you will.

Teaching out of sequence means the children can become used to one of them as if you're teaching A, B, C order, the B and the D are very close together. The only word you can make out of those first four letters, you can make bad. You could make cad, but not very many young children are going to need that word.

Now, other schools of thought would say that you want to be concentrating more on handwriting as opposed to the voice‑sight systems that will concentrate on getting the children to make a circle, an O. There are a variety of different strategies about which teaching order is most useful. I think you pay with your money and take your choice.

At the end of the day, the children have got to know all 26 letter shapes, and the sounds associated with them. Once you've decided that your objective is to help your children to read, as well as to write and to spell, then you choose the order that works for you.

My one piece of advice to all teachers though is follow a system because I've come across teachers who decide that they'll just do their own thing. They dart from one letter to the other because the weather was nice and we'll use this letter for some particular topic or something.

I understand why, but in all honesty, letters like Q, X, Z, they get forgotten about. I would always suggest that teachers should use a systematic approach that captures children's imagination. Whatever that system happens to be, I can justify a variety of different systems.

Ross:  What about some of the more difficult sounds and letters then like "th" and "ck," etc.? When would you decide to teach those?

Lesley:  The order that has been put together by the letters and sounds document, which is the UK government's suggested order, make sure that the children are covering the S‑A‑T‑P‑I‑N to begin with. Then we keep going, we add all 26 letters.

Then, sh, ch, th, are the digraphs, which will be introduced earlier, whereas some of the more complex spelling patterns, the E‑A‑R, all those sorts of things. Whatever program, whatever system one decides to adopt to cover all the sounds, eventually. There are 44 sounds in our English language. There are over 150 different spelling patterns.

If you told me that on the first day I went to school, I'm sure I'd have said, "I don't know what on earth you're talking about." It is about trying to engage the children and add to their knowledge in time.

Ross:  Then what do teachers do about more difficult words? They are sometimes called sight words like, the, one, you, words that don't follow this typical phonetic rules in English.

Lesley:  Absolutely. You've got "the," even something that looks as if it would be very simple, a word like "no." When the letters are the other way around, and you have the O coming before the N, then it makes the O‑N sounds and the word is "on," and the children think this is fine.

Then we put the letters in the opposite direction having the N coming before the O, and it doesn't make the sound stand. We don't say no, we say no. Why? Yes, those tricky words, high‑frequency words, sight words called variety of different things, depending on which expert is talking, are necessary to make reading have any sense.

Ross:  How can teachers teach those words?

Lesley:  To begin with ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ It's a bit of rote learning. It is a bit of just stretching the word to hear what sounds you do know and identify the known sounds, but then also thinking, "Uh‑uh, that one's not making its normal sound. I've got to remember that for the future," so they remeber that tricky word.

 Ross:  Once again, that was Lesley White. If you're interested in finding out more about Lesley and the program that she uses at Letterland, please go to www.letterland.com. Thanks for listening. See you again soon.

[tefltraininginstitute]

5th Anniversary Podcast: The Best Language Learning Activities Known To Mankind

We break our record for the most guests on one show ever! Hear experts from the TEFL industry with over 200 years of collective experience share their favorite language learning activities. We speak with Edmund Dudley, John Hughes, Matt Courtois, Brian Tomlinson, Ben Beaumont, Dave Weller, Wendy Arnold, Debbie Hepplewhite, Ray Davila and Diederik Van Gorp over 65 minutes and ask them all the same question: “What’s your favorite language teaching activity?”

Listen to more of our guests on our podcast through the links below

[tefltraininginstitute]

Podcast: What is Phonics and Why Should You Care? (With Debbie Hepplewhite)

Debbie Hepplewhite tells us about phonics, what is it and why is it so vital in English language learning. Debbie has worked as an adviser to the British Government for the parliamentary inquiry ‘Teaching Children to Read’ (March 2005) and she helped to inform Sir Jim Rose’s ‘Independent review of the teaching of early reading’ (Final Report, Jim Rose, March 2006) and in 2012 was awarded an MBE from the Queen for services to education.

Ross interviews phonics expert, Debbie Hepplewhite MBE about what phonics is and why it’s so important. Debbie tells us about vocabulary enrichment, the importance of recycling, why English is so difficult to read, and much more. Debbie is also the author of the online Phonics International program for all ages (Phonics International Ltd), phonics consultant for the Oxford Reading Tree Floppy’s Phonics Sounds and Letters program, author of the No Nonsense Phonics Skills program (Raintree) and the Phonics and Talk Time series of two books for nursery.

[tefltraininginstitute]

Why Do We Teach The Way That We Teach? (with Karin Xie)

What shapes the ways we teach? What influences teachers' views and beliefs about language learning? Trinity College London teacher trainer Karin Xie and I discuss what factors we see influencing teachers' ideas about teaching and talk about how our own experiences have informed our views of language teaching and learning.

Why Do We Teach The Way That We Teach - Transcript

 Ross Thorburn:  Today, we have with us Karin Xie. Hi, Karin.

Karin Xie:  Hi, everyone.

Ross:  Karin, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do? You do teacher training. Tell us who you do teacher training for.

Karin:  I work with teachers who prepare students for exams. It's a graded speaking exam that focuses on communication skills.

Ross:  You were saying also for those teachers, a lot of them end up teaching in a way that they were taught before, right? Which is really quite different to what the exam measures.

Karin:  Yeah. In my experience with the teachers, I found a lot of them, they would still focus on teaching students the knowledge, like the grammar and the vocabulary, so that students have the knowledge for the exam but not really the skills. I wondered why. I found that relates to how they were taught when they were students. How they learned language and how they were trained.

Ross:  That got us into this conversation about all the different things that might affect how teachers teach to them, we just mentioned. One is how you were taught as a student backwash, and then how teachers are trained.

Today, we're going to try and look at what affects how teachers teach. Let's start off by talking about backwash, you mentioned earlier. What's backwash?

Karin:  It's the impact an assessment has on classroom teaching. For example, for [inaudible 1:18] exams, it's a one‑to‑one, face‑to‑face conversation the candidate has with an examiner. There's no script, no question banks.

To prepare students for that, the teacher has to mimic what's happening in the real exam and give the students a lot of chance to use the language at their own choice and express what they want to say, ask questions, etc.

Ross:  I guess a good example backwash, and maybe less good would be what? If your test is a multiple choice, pick the right tense of the verb exam, right?

Karin:  Yeah, exactly.

Ross:  In that situation, people end up just...

Karin:  Giving students lots of words to remember and do a lot of written exams that don't really prepare learners for real‑life languages.

Ross:  It's amazing how much of an effect that they can have on what happens in the classroom. IELTS, for example, the speaking part of that test, this is one of my bugbears is that the students don't have to ask any questions in the IELTS speaking exam.

If you think of what effect is that going to have in the classroom? If you're preparing students for IELTS, why would you ever teach them to ask a question? Because you never need to do that.

Of course, people usually take the IELTS so they can study abroad or so they can move to another country. I think we all agree that if you do move to another country, one of the main things you have to do is ask questions because a lot of the time you don't know what's going on.

Karin:  Yeah. Any kind of speaking exchange requires contribution from both people whereas in IELTS, the examiner is not allowed to contribute to the communication by say, giving comments or giving support.

Ross:  Absolutely.

Karin:  I think maybe we could add one point here...

Ross:  Sure, of course.

Karin:  ...about the materials teachers use, especially with new teachers. Very often you see the teachers fall into the flow, what it says, and just use it as it is.

Ross:  Materials can almost act as a source of teacher training if they're good materials, because teachers will get into the habit, maybe if they're new teachers, of following whatever structure there is in the coursebook.

It's problematic though, isn't it, if the structure in the coursebook may be using ideal or if the coursebook has been written for first year teachers and you never move beyond that.

Karin:  Or if the book doesn't allow a lot of communicative activities, the teacher may not even think about designing any activities for students to talk to each other and work with each other.

I remember you were really excited when you were designing materials. You were like, "If you do a teacher training workshop with the teachers, you are not so sure whether they're going to apply everything. But if you design good teaching materials, you are kind of sure that they're going to use it somehow." I don't know if that's...

Ross:  [laughs] I guess that must be before I'd seen the reality of how teachers use materials.

[laughter]

Ross:  I guess those are both ways of influencing what teachers do, but all of it passes through some filter that the teachers personally have of this is work, does this is fit in with my views of teaching and learning.

I remember in a previous job doing some research where we tried basically introducing different materials in this job. It was all one‑to‑one classes. Because it was online, every class was filmed. You could go back and you could watch and see the effect that the materials had on the teaching.

We did a little bit of research and started including some personal questions in the materials because we noticed in general, teachers didn't ask for [inaudible 4:47] . I remember one word that was a tongue twister.

It said like, "Can you change one word in the tongue twister and make a new tongue twister?" Pretty simple. Not an amazing activity, but some tiny bit of personalization. Afterwards, we watched 20 videos of teachers doing this. 18 of the 20 teachers didn't even ask the question.

Karin:  I found if you have that is often at the end of the unit or of the chapter. You find teachers either saying that we don't have time for that anymore or they go through it really quickly, whereas that's the most important part of the lesson. That's when the students really get to use it.

Ross:  I guess you think that's the most important part of the lesson but maybe the person using the book doesn't see it that way.

Karin:  That makes me think about why we make those different choices. We both have the same course book, but we use it so differently. That, I think, is the beliefs we have towards teaching.

Ross:  Absolutely. Another thing that maybe affects how teachers' beliefs are formed obviously is people's own experiences as a student. I can't remember what the numbers are, but it's something like by the time you graduate from university, you've been a student for something like 20,000 hours.

If do a CELTA course or something, or an initial teaching course, if you're lucky you do like a 120 hours. You're at 120 hours versus 20,000 hours. One month versus 20 years of education. It's very, very difficult to break the beliefs that are formed and how teachers themselves have been taught as students.

Karin:  I always think about the teachers that taught me and the good things that they did that I think made me learn better and the things that I didn't really enjoy. I think that shaped my teaching beliefs.

Ross:  Which is interesting, but it reminds me of the George Bernard Shaw quote, "Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It assumes people's preferences are the same. Obviously, it's worth thinking about what you liked or disliked about your teachers might be different to what the other people in the class liked and disliked about their teachers.

Karin:  I was thinking about the cultural environment behind our teaching beliefs. The one reason that my teachers used to do the lecture style teacher‑centric way of teaching is because the thousand‑year‑old teaching belief of the role of a teacher is to impart the knowledge to the students.

If the teacher doesn't talk enough, you feel like you don't learn enough. Same with a lot of parents today. If they send their students to a class, if the students were doing things rather than the teacher doing all talking, then they have the feeling of they don't get good value for the money. I'm not learning enough.

Ross:  I like your point there about the it's maybe not the 18 years that your teacher was a student...

Karin:  Or 2,000 hours.

Ross:  Yeah, or 2,000 or 20,000 hours. It's actually maybe the last 1,000 years of the culture or something that's affecting how that person teaches. There's also something in there about the culture of the school that you're in, I think as well.

There's a great chapter, I think it's at the end of Jack Richards book called "Beyond Training." He has students who did his [inaudible 7:54] course. All these teachers, after doing the [inaudible 7:58] course, are really brought into communicative language teaching, task‑based learning.

Then they go into these public schools in Hong Kong. The reality in those schools is very different from the context often surrounding communicative language teaching where in those public schools in Hong Kong, there's 60 students in a class. You're next towards others classes, so you can't be too noisy. Your manager expects you to do X, Y and Z in the class.

It's amazing how over the course of a year, you look at these teachers, some of them just go 180 degrees, and go from being like, "Oh, I want my students to communicate. I'm going to speak English in the class. I'm going to make sure students enjoy what they're doing," to being authoritarian, grammar‑based and doing everything in the students' first language.

Karin:  We need to raise teachers' awareness on their own teaching beliefs because that's how they make the choices in lesson planning and delivery, but we often miss out the step of how they can adapt all those methodologies into their own teaching context.

I had a similar experience of training some public school teachers where we talked about communicative language teaching, group work, student feedback and things like that. They were like, "With our learning aims, and the class size and our schedule, it's really hard to do that. We literally don't have the time for that, or if we get the students do that, they won't be able to pass all the exams."

Ross:  Another point here is teachers' own experiences of learning a language. This is something that I personally find really interesting, because I've learned my second language without going to any classes and without studying.

I think I have a very laissez‑faire attitude towards the teaching of grammar, really anything overly formal in the classroom, because I know that's not how I learned. Implicitly, I think that's not important, but I obviously that's not true for everyone.

Karin:  Personally, I like the language awareness approach because my experience with the language learning is that when I was learning English in high school, I never really enjoyed the grammar lessons where we learned the rules. I liked to engage myself with different sources of the language.

In the last two years, suddenly, I just became aware of the rules and I see how it works. I was like, "This is amazing." Now I like to lead my students to be aware of how language or how English works rather than giving them the rules. For example, one day, they were asking me about a brand sly. Like, "How can I say this?"

Instead of teaching them the pronunciation, I said, "Well, how do you say fly?" They were able to say that. Then I said, "Now take another look at this. How do you say this?" She was like, "Oh, sly. I know how to do it. Now I'm going to find more examples of that." I think that sense of achievement as a learner, and for me as a teacher, was really important.

Ross:  Obviously, this end up being very personal. One of the dangers with this is that there's always some learners that will learn regardless of what you do. You could have something which is definitely not the best method of teaching a language.

Let's say audio linguicism or grammar translation. There will be still have been some people that learned like that. They can then use that to justify, "Well, it worked for me, so I'm going to use it for everyone else."

Karin:  Our teachers didn't talk about why they did the things with us. Now, we can get the students to have conversations with us on how we learned the language, how we teach the lessons, and why we did them and how they can discover the ways that work for them the best.

Ross:  The last one we had here was something that affects how teachers teach is their personalities. I'm sure you've heard this before. I definitely have. Saying teachers are born instead of made, or often there's people saying, "So and so, they're just a natural teacher."

That's something that really used to annoy me a lot, because to me, it just seems as devalue all the professional development, qualifications, knowledge, and research. No one would ever say that about a doctor or a scientist. At the same time, I think there are a lot of personality traits...

Karin:  There are.

Ross:  Yeah.

Karin:  Yeah. For example, very often when you ask someone, "What makes a good teacher?" Instead of saying all those skills, people say they need to be patient, they need to care for their learners and things like that. Those were all personality traits.

Ross:  Absolutely. To me, it also reminds me of the nature/nurture debate in psychology. Are we who we are because of our genes, or are we who we are because of our upbringing? Just like that with teachers. Are teachers who they are because of their personality and who they are as a person, or is it their training and professional knowledge?

Obviously, I guess it is both, but it's really interesting to think and reflect on what are your own personality traits that you bring into the classroom, and how do you use them. Overall, it's a wrap‑up. I think it's useful for us to think about who we are and how all these different factors affect how we teach and what our teaching decisions are and what our beliefs are.

Karin:  For me, I think it's the most important thing now as a teacher that we are constantly aware of why we're making the decisions we make.

Ross:  Good. Karin, thanks so much for joining us.

Karin:  Thanks for having me.

Ross:  Great. See you next time, everyone. Goodbye.

Karin:  Bye.

[tefltraininginstitute]

Does Professional Development Make a Difference? (With Thomas Guskey)

We interview world expert on teacher development, Professor Thomas Guskey, about how to evaluate professional development. What evidence should we use? How can we tell when it’s successful? What can go wrong in professional development? And how can teachers be at the center of the checking process?

Does Professional Development Make a Difference? Transcript

Ross Thorburn:  Professor Guskey, thank you so much for joining us. In one of your papers about evaluating professional development, at the end, you say a lot of good things are done in the name of professional development, but so are a lot of rotten things. What are some of the rotten things that get done in the name of teacher development?

Professor Thomas Guskey:  One of the things that we tend to do in education, all to our detriment, is we tend to be innovation oriented, without careful attention to the evidence that might support any particular innovation.

Educators often go to large conferences where they hear very dynamic presenters who talk about these opinions they have about how education could be structured without a lot of evidence to confirm that that would really lead to greater student success.

We invest in these different innovations without thinking carefully about what impact they will have, not caring so much about what evidence really supports them.

Teachers try them. They use them for a period of time. They don't see the improvements in student learning that were promised, and so then they become very frustrated. As a result of that frustration, they tend to, one, withdraw, and be distrustful of school leaders who bring in these innovations, of the people who advocate for these innovations, and become rather skeptical overall, because they've been burned in their approaches to it.

I think that is going to work against us. I think we're coming to recognize, at long last, that when people are suggesting that these new things should be implemented, we're asking important questions about, "What evidence do you have to support it? Has it been used in contexts similar to ours? Have they documented the impact on students in ways that we find meaningful?"

We ask those critical questions, and it leads you in a very different direction.

Ross Thorburn:  You mentioned evidence there. Can you tell us what would count as evidence, or what does evidence look like?

Professor Guskey:  I think there are right resources of evidence of student learning. One of the dilemmas, particularly here in the United States that people encounter, is they want to look very narrowly at improvements in standardized test scores.

Those standardized test scores may or may not be well aligned with the curriculum that students are taught. If it's poorly aligned with the curriculum that students are taught, we wouldn't see a lot of improvement there because they're testing students on things that they haven't been taught, weren't part of the instruction program.

If we think more broadly about the variety of student learning outcomes, that it might be considered to include those overall major standardized assessments, but also to include teacher assessments, classroom assessments, other demonstrations of learning and performance, to even go beyond that to other kinds of affected things where students are confident of themselves in learning situations.

Did they feel better about their abilities in school? Are they more engaged in learning activities both in school and out of school? Are they more purposeful in the way they're going about their learning?

There's this wide range of student learning outcomes we know contributes to their success, but we often don't think of what we turn to evaluating the impact of professional learning programs.

Ross Thorburn:  Obviously, there's a lot of different types of evidence. For me, one of the problems I have with this concept is that for someone running a teacher training session, that the time it would take to do the follow‑up and gather evidence that it worked, or it didn't work, would just take so much longer than running the training itself.

How can that be done in a manner that doesn't require an obscene amount of time?

Professor Guskey:  There's a balance must be sought here. Indeed, the kinds of evidence that we often use to evaluate programs is gathered on a very irregular basis. That tends to be pretty ineffective.

The approach that I advocate is to actually ask teachers what evidence they trust, what evidence would they believe. If that's what's really working for them, how would they know it, what differences would they see in their students, and what evidence could they provide that could confirm that difference?

Sometimes, that kind of evidence is not easy to gather. It might be something we have to obtain through classroom observations, or student interviews, or things like that, but we could certainly build that into the program.

The second aspect of it is that information must be gained rather quickly.

A few years ago, I was being interviewed by an educational journal. I was asked during the interview, "When teachers are trying a new innovation, a new approach, how soon should they see results?"

Very good friends of mine at that time were saying, "Well, change is a slow process, and it might take us a while to get there. And you have to sustain efforts over significant periods of time." I said, "In two weeks."

The interviewer was stunned. The reason that I suggested that is that all the evidence that we were gathering was showing that teachers need to see that what they're doing is making a difference.

Because the stakes are high for teachers, they have this fear that if they persist in using these new strategies and techniques, there is the danger that there are students who might learn less well. They are unwilling to sacrifice their students for the sake of innovation.

That means that you must build into any particular innovation, some strategy where teachers can get evidence pretty quickly, that is making a difference. That means you can't wait until the end of the year to give a standardized assessment.

What you need to do is think about the evidence teachers gather on a very regular basis to find out if their students are learning things that's important for them to learn.

Ross Thorburn:  Does that mean that we are really looking at raising teachers' awareness of how to evaluate new technique and methods rather than, say, launching a big research project about how to evaluate how well something works overall in a school in terms of student outcomes?

Professor Guskey:  Absolutely. In fact, I advocate for that. These are your frontline warriors who are implementing these strategies. They need to see that it's making a tangible difference in the school lives of the students.

We need to be helping teachers think about what evidence they would gather that would show this has made a difference. It could be engagement raised in class. It could be the kids asking more thoughtful questions. It could be them coming to class earlier and engaging more thoughtful discussions as a part of the class. All sorts of things that teachers look for to find out if what they're teaching is really coming across.

Engaging teachers in those conversations about, "How would you know that this is making a difference?" is one of the most important ways we can start.

Ross Thorburn:  We're really then looking at helping teachers evaluate what works and what doesn't work in their own classrooms.

Professor Guskey:  Yeah, that is exactly right. In fact, I believe that that should be included in any professional learning experience. If this worked, how would you know it? How would you be able to tell from your students? What evidence would you gather to show that this was making a difference?

To build that into any professional learning experience so that the teachers become more thoughtful and more evidence oriented in their approaches as well. All those could be very, very positive benefits in any professional learning experience.

Ross Thorburn:  That's really interesting. I think that's something that's often missing from teacher training, where normally it's, "Here's this great technique, use it." Here I guess, what we're saying is, "Here's this technique, use it. And when you use it, what evidence can you collect from your classes that would show if it was working or not?"

Professor Guskey:  I agree with you. Yes, it's not something that you would see as a common element in most professional learning programs at this time.

Ross Thorburn:  Another reason that you've written about why training and teacher development often fails is because of a lack of support from schools.

If the school doesn't really support a particular professional development program, or a new practice for teachers, is it still worth trying?

Professor Guskey:  No. I think that the very best teachers are always looking for ways to get better. They are always open to ideas that might benefit their students. They are in an environment where they're willing to try those things out. They have some initial confidence that it might lead to improvement.

Again, the critical element will be allowing them to gain some evidence in a relatively short period of time, that their extra effort and their extra work are paying off, that they see a benefit.

Teachers are very, very hardworking individuals. They spend many hours in preparation outside of their regular class time. They are willing to commit even additional time and resources to that if they have some confidence that it is helping their students better.

When I do studies on teachers, I'm always asking questions like, "What makes teaching meaningful to you? What are the benefits you derive from teaching? What makes it a good job? What makes you excited about what you're doing?"

99 times out of 100, the teachers that I interview define that in terms of their students. What happens is when I see that these lessons are coming across, when I see they catch on to ideas, when I see that light come on.

This is the power of professional learning, to give that to teachers in a very powerful way, to give teachers the joy of what brought them to teaching in the first place, and to let them have that positive influence on their students which they really, really want to have.

Ross Thorburn:  Finally then, as an argument against measurement and evaluation, what do you think of that Einstein quote, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"? Are there some important effects that just can't be measured when it comes to professional development and evidence‑based practice?

Professor Guskey:  I think that there is. There are certain things that are extremely difficult to measure. I also go back to the quote by another scientist, Lord Kelvin, who said that, "If it can't be measured, it can't be improved."

That we really need to think about, if we want to make improvements, we have to find some way to determine whether those improvements have occurred or not. That implies the process of measurement.

We might say we want students to be more joyful in approaching learning situations. Clearly, that's difficult to measure, but it doesn't mean it's impossible.

We want students to have greater confidence in themselves in learning situations. We want them to have a higher level of aspiration, to have confidence that they can achieve lifelong goals and do well in their lives, and that what we're teaching can help them in that.

Just because it's difficult to measure doesn't mean it's impossible. If we want to see improvement, then we need to be able to find some way to document those improvements, which does imply some sort of measurement, even though it could be quantitative, as well as qualitative.

[tefltraininginstitute]

Teaching English as a Lingua Franca (With Marek Kiczkowiak)

We know that the majority of the world's English speakers are not native speakers, so what does this mean for how we teach English? Marek Kiczkowiak talks to us about teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF). Is ELF a variety of English? How can teachers approach teaching it? In what situations is it helpful to students (and when might it not be)?

If you would like to learn how to tackle native speakerism and teach English for global communication, try Marek's  TEFL Equity Academy.

Also check out Marek’s book Teaching English as a Lingua Franca, which is available on Amazon, and publishers’ websites: Delta publishing and Klett publishing

[tefltraininginstitute]

How to Plan Lesson Aims and Why (With Dave Weller)

Why both writing a lesson aim? Are they not printed in the coursebook? Ross and regular guest Dave Weller discuss why it’s a good idea to write a lesson aim, what a good lesson aim looks like, and what are the drawbacks to lesson aims…

How to Plan Lesson Aims and Why (With Dave Weller)

Ross Thorburn:  All right, Dave Weller. Welcome back.

Dave Weller:  Hurrah!

Ross:  Today, I thought we could talk about something that you've written a lot about, which is lesson aims.

Dave:  That seemed to be quite simple, I know, but they actually can be quite complex. The reasons behind them can be quite important as well.

Ross:  What got you interested in that? Like I said, on your website, that's the thing that you've probably written the most about. Why did you choose that as a thing to focus on?

Dave:  In the context that I train in, a lot of people tend not to do lesson aims or not see the point of them. That definitely reminds me of a light bulb moment I had years and years ago. I received a training about aims. Prior to that, I'd always just let my aims be set by the course book. I thought aims are for idiots.

[laughter]

Dave:  Why would you bother spending all this extra time trying to think through what you should do, why you should do it, when you could just open a book and walk into class?

Ross:  I thought, today, we could, maybe, split our conversation into three parts. Maybe, first of all, why bother planning aims or why bother writing them, how to write a good aim, and then are there any disadvantages or pitfalls to having aims.

Dave:  Ooh, I like that last one.

Ross:  [laughs] Great.

Why Bother Writing Lesson Aims

Ross:  I know you touched on it already, but why bother writing good aims? When did you start deciding to spend more time writing aims?

Dave:  After I received a training on writing aims, I realized that relying on the course book or someone else to set your aims meant that a lot of the time, the classes that you delivered would miss the mark. They wouldn't be applicable to the majority of the students in the class.

Really, it was a lazy way to outsource your thinking to somebody else who wasn't there, who didn't know your students and didn't know your teaching context, or even you. They weren't in the best position to make those decisions for you.

Ross:  It's so true that the person that wrote that chapter in the book has never met you and never been to your school. They've never met your students. Who knows, right? They might never have taught a class before. You never know.

Dave:  [laughs]

Ross:  Seriously, though.

Dave:  In some of the course books I've seen, that might be quite true.

Ross:  In all seriousness. They're not necessarily going to be the best qualified people to do that.

Dave:  Something that first‑year teachers did, as I did at that time, is you're really in survival mode. You're walking into class. You're trying to get all your basic classroom management techniques correct.

Managing a class, behavior management, delivering instructions, grading your language, and all these things are improving. The students, unfortunately, tend to almost take lowest priority, so you deliver or you execute your lesson plan.

If you can do that, you feel like you've had a successful lesson monitoring the impact that they have on the students and if they learn, tends to not be your highest priority because you're surviving as a first‑year teacher.

Ross:  You also teach the plan or teach the students.

Dave:  Precisely.

Ross:  Obviously, there's other things that are important there as well. For example, if you are very clear on what you're trying to achieve in the lesson, then it gives you much more room to improvise and make better decisions, a bit like the army example that we spoke about before.

If the soldiers on the ground know what the objective is rather than just blindly following and carrying out orders, they are able to improvise because they know what they're trying to do or where they're trying to get to.

Dave:  Obviously, I wasn't training my class to kill other people...

[laughter]

Dave:  ...but I totally agree. That's almost an argument for making your aims explicit. If you have adult learners or students who are able to cognitively comprehend why you're doing this.

Even if not, I also think that having good aims is the first step to personalizing, to differentiating because it forces you to consider the personality, and the characters, and the levels, and abilities of the students in your class while you create that aim.

It forces you to move away from just treating the class as one homogeneous group that you just deliver the lesson to.

Ross:  Or not even considering them at all and just considering the textbook, which is another possibility, right?

Dave:  Absolutely. It's almost like the stereotype of the professor that bumbles into the lecture hall, delivers the lecture, then looks up and realizes...

Ross:  There's no one there.

Dave:  [laughs] Precisely.

Ross:  Also, I guess it's probably a good way for you to measure or to start paying attention to, "Did my class work, or did it actually achieve what I wanted it to achieve?" That maybe helps you get out of that potential edutainment area where everyone smiled. They laughed. They had so much fun. It was such a great class.

If you have an aim, and you're very clear about the aim, you can actually tell, did the students get out of it what they were meant to get out of it?

Dave:  Even if you misjudge them, say, it's a fairly new class where you don't know the students quite as well. You might pick an aim for them that isn't appropriate.

When you're in the middle of class, that can come as a realization to you. You go, "Ah, OK, it's time to either grade it, make it slightly easier for them or make it more difficult or even change it completely if it's, perhaps, on a topic that might not be of interest that you thought would be."

How to Write a Lesson Aim

Ross:  The standard thing that gets taught on most courses is SMART, S‑M‑A‑R‑T. Was it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time‑bound? [laughs]

Dave:  Well done for memory [inaudible 05:49] .

Ross:  With that, there's some useful things in there for teachers. I do especially like the measurable. That's one of more useful things to point out to teachers. People often have a tendency to write things for aims.

The students will learn these words. Then you can get into this thing of, well, how do you measure if someone has learned? Well, you can't. What's a more useful verb in there? Relevant is also useful.

That relates to what you were saying a minute ago. You have to think about the students and what they can do. Maybe, achievable is quite good. Actually, it's not that a bad model.

[laughter]

Dave:  OK, scrap it. Let's just use that from now on.

[laughter]

Ross:  What other things that you would recommend that teachers think about when writing an aim?

Dave:  There's a couple of things, really. I used to always say by the end of the lesson, the learners will be able to do something. The problem with that is you're setting a very high standard or a very low standard. Either you're pushing every learner to achieve it, which is an impossible task, depending on the difficulty and how new it is.

Ross:  You're assuming homogeneousness among the students, or that everyone's going to start at the same level and then reach the same level.

Dave:  Precisely. I always find it better to use what the students will be better able to use and then your target language.

Ross:  I'm more of a fan of that as well. I almost see it like, imagine all the students as dots on a graph at different levels. The point, surely, is not all of them make their way over some line or some hurdle, but just that everyone's made some progress. That's much better than everyone getting over this singular point.

Dave:  Precisely. Then you're effectively able to use things like positive reinforcement as well. If certain learners achieve it and others don't, especially the strong learners, you only say, "Well done. You use this correctly."

Then other students, the weaker students who maybe would frequently miss out on hitting the aims would feel disheartened and discouraged. At least, if you use better able to, you can see an improvement.

Because your aim is using it better, they've achieving the aim that you have for them and say you're genuinely able to offer them praise and encouragement.

Ross:  How else do you phrase your aim?

Dave:  I tend to think of the language that we use in classrooms in four levels. From biggest to smallest, it will be the topic and the context, the function, and then the form. The topic would be jobs, or the Internet, or something, the wide, broad subject.

The context would be the real life situation that the language takes place in. If the topic is the what, then the context will mostly be like the where, the who, the when. Then underneath that or within that would be the function. That would be the why.

Why are we communicating in the first place? Things like giving advice, making a complaint, those are the examples of the function of the language. Then the smallest part of that would be the form. This would be the the lexis or vocabulary, the grammar and the phonology of the language that you want to use.

If you almost use that as a little checklist of the language that you're going to be using, you can make sure the students are clear on the topic.

Set a clear context at the beginning. Understand why they're communicating and the situation. Then, of course, at some stage in the lesson, you would check the accuracy of the form as well.

Ross:  Presumably there, are you going from the top to the bottom then? Are you going from the topic all the way down to the form?

Dave:  Usually, yes.

Ross:  Often, the problem or a common mistake maybe that teachers make ‑‑ I was definitely guilty of this in my first few years ‑‑ was you start off with a language and then you go, "Oh, OK. When might people say this?"

Then you go from the language up to the topic. Then, often, you end up with lots of rather contrived activities and situations.

Dave:  Absolutely. For the rest of the aim, putting that altogether, there are four things that you should take into account. The first one is the context you're operating in is what's required by the syllabus or the curriculum that you're using.

[laughter]

Ross:  Go back to the course book, basically?

Dave:  Yes. Just use the course book. No, if you stray too far from that, you may well get an irate boss pulling you into the office and getting complaints from the students that they've purchased this course book or the course for specific reasons. You've just been having a rant about your favorite topics in the classroom.

Ross:  That's the learning center part, is it?

Dave:  Yes, that will be the learner center part, personalizing it. Of course, a specific which make sure the language, one of the three, which is the four levels we talked about. Lastly, you need your aims to be observable.

You're not a mind reader. Just because you deliver the lesson to the whole group doesn't mean they've learned it. You need to be looking out for specific spoken language or written language to make sure they're producing utterances correctly or fluently.

Ross:  More fluently or more correctly than at the beginning.

Dave:  Indeed, yes. Those aims are for your learners. If you have the spare capacity, don't forget to include personal aims for you as the teacher as well. It's always nice to have something you're working on, to improving.

It could be as simple as, "I want to improve or expand my error correction techniques." It could be, "I want to try a new methodology." As long as you're working on something as a teacher, even if it's not every class, even if it's just maybe one or two classes a week or your experimentation classes, then that's still keeping you developing as a teacher.

Ross:  It's not that whole idea of sub‑aims. You mentioned one there which is a sub‑aim for yourself. Then I guess you can also have sub‑aims for, "I'm going to work on this pronunciation," which might not make it into your main aim. You might include some skill, like reading for fluency or something as well, right?

Dave:  Absolutely, yes, especially the main aims tend to be set in most part by the curriculum. The sub‑aims would be things that you've noticed particular learners might be weaker on. Or a group of learners in the class might have trouble with fossilized pronunciation, for example, in which case, yes, that would be a great thing to include in a sub‑aim.

[music]

Ross:  Let's talk about some potential drawbacks of having aims. We tend to analyze, or maybe not analyze but, at least, evaluate teaching and learning on a lesson‑by‑lesson basis. This was a good class. Students achieved this aim, but I feel that that paradigm has a problem.

It assumes that learning happens over one‑hour spaces of time, but I think it doesn't. One of the issues for me for having aims is that we tend to forget about some really, really important things that we know impact learning and things like recycling is a great example.

It often gets completely forgotten about when we look at an aim fit. Did you help students transfer that language from their short‑term memory into their long‑term memory?

Dave:  I think a lot of people, if they think about that, they assume that the curriculum will take care of that for them. That's a great thing to do for the teachers to have a look ahead and see what's coming up in the ...

Ross:  Future units or something?

Dave:  Future units for the rest of the term. It's hard for them to take that into account all at once.

Ross:  I just feel it with some of those things that if we didn't have this idea of measuring each class on a single aim, it might be a lot easier for teachers to do some of those things, to think about, "OK, what language here in this class can I preview that is gonna come up in future units?

What language can I review or recycle from previous units? What are some things that I can do that are going to help to increase students' interest and motivation in the English language?"

They seem like smaller skills within the context of a class but, overall, in terms of a whole course, those things might actually end up being more important than the seven words or the one grammar point you're trying to focus on in this lesson.

Dave:  That is leading into a different area. It's almost helping your learners become better learners in the classroom. The ability to teach those meta‑learning strategies, things like, as you mentioned, repetition, space repetition, interleaving, all those things. If teachers were more aware of those, they could weave those into their aims as perhaps sub‑aims.

[music]

Ross:  Dave, thanks again for coming on. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?

Dave:  Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit barefootteflteacher.com.

Ross:  Great.

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