Ooh, hello phonology, aren’t you looking fine?
I was just having a bit of a think and thought of a couple of bits that I’ve been doing in classes.
Treating Epenthesis with Epenicillin
You know what? Can we (people teaching learners with mora-based L1s like Japanese) just chill and stop over-egging the minimal pairs pudding? /l/ and /r/ are undoubtedly important to practice but how abouto we try to stoppu our studentsu speakingu like Wario in Mario Kart?
How? Just having them come down on the end sounds (plosives especially but it happens a lot with fricatives and affricates at the end of words, too) and hold it there.
Marc, lunacy! You can’t hold plosives.
No, but you can bring the articulators to where the air is held before termination and then just stop it early. For the non-plosives, hold it and just stop.
The next stage on is to move from the stoppage to the first phoneme of the next word. Drill it a couple more times then drill the whole clause.
It’s not magic, it needs practice but if learners know they can speak without sounding choppy as hell it gives them a foundation for trying harder to avoid it and autonomous in remedying their epenthesis problems.
Where it’s /æt/
With some learners I’ve had lately, I’ve observed the ability to ‘speak fast’, albeit with some mangled vowels.
Harsh!
Not really. Speaking is for communication and if I, somebody with years of experience hearing non-standard pronunciation, can’t understand what’s been said then some actual teaching needs to happen.
This is popular with more playful students but just have students move their jaws from /æ/ to /e/ to /I/ to /i:/ and feel the difference in their mouths. To get a good schwa I go from /æ/ to /з:/ to /ə/ stressing (oh, the irony) that the schwa has no stress. Get a couple of words with the target sounds produced then drill short phrases and short clauses and you have the start of improved intelligibility.
There is a ton written on mentoring as part of professional development. It seems like it’s pretty much a ‘good thing’ all the time, and I’m kind of tempted to go along with that because of one of the reasons I’ll give below.
You get to see another approach to the job
Everyone has preconceived ideas about teaching when they start, based on the teachers that taught them. Just as not everyone has the same experiences, not everyone has the same approach.
Some mentors will be great about this and understand that not everyone needs to do the same thing to get the intended results. Some mentors won’t be great about it and will insist you should teach their way.
You can learn a lot about your own teaching by trying to teach according to someone else’s approach. Even the bits that you might not have attributed merit toward may have hidden utility in the classroom.
You get another point of view
This is better the more mentors you have. Behaviour issues in the classroom? There are endless possible solutions. Experienced mentors probably have several techniques to counteract negative behaviour. And that’s just one example.
Avoiding too much introspection
Reflective practice is something I think is beneficial but too much reflection is worthless. Think of a mirror maze as a metaphor. If you are part of a mentoring relationship you get used to making sure your thinking and rationale are clear. People are working, and while most mentors and mentees are positive, if you get ready for a meeting with a half-baked idea people will show you that they think their time is being wasted. You get forced into habits of rigour.
Bad is Good
If your mentor is dreadful you get to see them as a cautionary tale. You get used to assessing what authoritative voices say and filtering it (which is excellent practice for books by both ELT and general Education gurus).
If your mentee is bloody awful, you get the chance to really take a hand in helping them develop and can take a hand in stopping unproductive practices through explaining better ones (and perhaps demonstrating them, too).
Finding mentors and mentees
I have a great mentor at one of my workplaces, in that he is very practical, does lots of professional development but not much theory. We get to duel a little bit on the theoretical applications I might espouse, and it helps me refine and reflect upon my beliefs.
I also have other mentors on Twitter, miles away working in different settings but still supporting me, feeding ideas and even just lending a virtual ear when I need to vent.
Mentees sort of drift, due to the peripatetic nature of my working life, but basically I have a couple of mentees, one a very new teacher who needs to go with the flow more (which leads me to practice what I preach and not obsess over minuscule annoyances at the stupidest workplace) and another who has such abundant ideas but needs a push to be bolder or just reassured they are on the right track (and who has helped with a few lesson ideas and made me justify choices leading to more confidence in my own teaching).
You might want to check out the iTDI blog mentoring issues, Giving Back and Giving Back II, too.
Hopefully this has helped you think about what mentoring is (or can be). Any more ideas?
Those of you who follow me on Twitter, (which you should definitely do for the misanthropy and ranting alone), must surely know about #TBLTchat coming up on Tuesday, 21 June 2016. I hope this is bigger than me as I would like it to have more longevity than Tokyo Lesson Jam. Hopefully internet chats are a much better thing. Certainly, I am 93.2% more attractive on the internet.
To get you in the mood, Ljiljana Havran has a great TBLT post here, and Huw Jarvis has an open-access article, in the open access TESL-EJ.
I wrote some curmudgeonly rubbish for the iTDI blog, along with Patrice Palmer and Tim Thompson. It’s all about freelancing. I’m a bit negative, Patrice is positive and Tim is balanced so I suppose this gives an overall balanced view.
Anyhow, you can read it, here.
Anybody who knows me really, really well or looks at my social media knows that I am sociopathic/misanthropic. So, when Joanna Malefaki nominated me in this blog challenge, she probably didn’t realise most people would have thought twice about nominating me. However, my friend James, who often knows me better than I know myself says I am a contrarian. I love wrongfooting people and do so just for the sake of it, sometimes. He thinks. I think that just doing the same old thing is boring, therefore, I am going to jump into this blog challenge like a sausage jumping from frying pan to fire.
So, eleven things about me, followed by eleven questions from the nominating blogger, then I nominate 11 people and then ask 11 new questions.
11 things about me
1. I live in Kawasaki, a suburb of Tokyo or of Yokohama.
2. I am a member of Teachers as Workers Special Interest Group and you can be too.
3. I teach across more contexts than most people I know. I do Business English (which I’d argue is just English for the workplace in most cases), ESP (orthodontists who need to talk to patients and their guardians), English as a Foreign Language Communication as a school subject, university general EFL, English for standardised tests like IELTS and young learners.
4. I used to play guitar.
5. I used to write fiction but haven’t had time because…
6. I am studying an MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics at University of Portsmouth via Distance Learning.
7. I also have stopped running due to this. I regularly notched up over 200 km a month at my peak.
8. My favourite novel is Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland. People who are fond of lists would do well to read it.
9. I love Dogme and Task-Based Learning and use bits from lexical approaches and The Silent Way sometimes.
10. I sometimes shout in anger when I read.
11. I love Truffaut’s film Shoot the Piano Player. You should watch it too.
Joanna’s 11 questions
1. How do you spend your free time?
With my son, my wife and son or with a book. I don’t get much so savour it. 2. What’s your favourite song?
That’s like naming your favourite student. At the minute I would say it’s Stonemilker by Björk.
3. What’s your favourite food?
Chocolate. 4. My guilty pleasure is…….. (fill in the sentence).
Chocolate. 5. Share a picture. What is it of (inspired by Clare)?
It’s banana bread I made. When I get days off work I sometimes bake. 6. If you could go anywhere in the world to teach, where would you go and why?
Berlin, Rotterdam or Antwerp. I love techno. But really I know here is good no matter where else the grass is green. 7. What’s your top tip for new teachers?
Start listening for what your learners need. It’s more important than textbook pacing. 8. What’s your top tip for teachers who feel burnt out?
Talk to someone and take paid holidays if you have any. From burnout it’s just a short step to destructive behaviour like drinking too much or even just being really negative about yourself. 9. If I wasn’t an English teacher , I would be a/ an…….
unemployed? Working in PC World? I have no idea. 10. What’s the funniest thing that has happened during a lesson?
I have no idea. I’m more of a deadpan curmudgeon than a slapstick guy. 11. Describe a typical work day.
Get up early coffee train teach coffee train coffee teach coffee train go to bed.
1. Why did you become a teacher?
2. Why are you still a teacher?
3. You have a magic wand. What would you change about the English language teaching profession?
4. No magic wands. What is one step that people could easily take to change the thing above?
5. Who was your first mentor when you started teaching? Tell us about your relationship and what you learned.
6. Who are your mentors now?
7. What’s overrated is an excuse for a gripe, and I’ve given two above already. What’s underrated in ELT?
8. What do you wish you had known about ELT when you started?
9. Loads of people see career progression as routes to ELT writing or teacher training. What else is there and what are you hoping to do in the future?
10. How many hours a week do you work outside your paid hours?
11. Who or what is the biggest influence on your teaching outside teaching?
Who doesn’t love paper aeroplanes? I mean apart from the person who has to tidy them up?
This is an easy lesson to do and could take about an hour to two hours depending on how many plane types you teach.
I took different sets of instructions from www.paperaeroplanes.com and told my students to practice making the plane. I made sure to tell everyone they would be teaching how to make their plane later.
The vocabulary needed was in the reading but be aware that inattentive students may ignore it. I would have them read and copy out a list of ten or so useful vocabulary items if I did this again. Focus on form was given as we went.
There was the opportunity to ask meanings of words as we went along and the instruction task was passed if planes were made and failed if they didn’t.
Plane types were tested for speed, height and distance. Students then wrote up a short report.
As extension work, we tried folds to the wings and fuselage to see if the planes would turn or roll.
The students loved doing this and everyone was speaking English all the time. There was even more negotiation of meaning than usual, too.
I made this to have learners build their family member vocabulary. A lot of elementary learners know the basics: ‘sister’, ‘brother’, etc. but not ‘nephew’, ‘niece’ or ‘~-in-law’.
I followed it up with learners giving easy definitions in English (and Japanese or Chinese if required1), quizzing each other using different relationships, and then writing about their own families.
I used very Anglo-Saxon names. Feel free to change them as and if you feel the need to. It has a Creative Commons license as usual.
Available as PDF and editable PPT.
1
Seeing as my learners can’t use L1 in their tests I wanted them to build upon extremely basic knowledge and substitute a possibly forgotten word with a half-decent explanation.
Pigeons – Marc Jones, copyright September 2010
First up, let me make it absolutely clear – planning lessons, at least in your head and preferably a few jottings on paper, before you go into the classroom is highly recommended. Even with Dogme you’re thinking about your likely reactions and you probably know the learners so have a good idea of needs. However, all of us at some point, and quite often for a few of us, have to wing a lesson because of any of the following reasons:
We are covering a lesson at the last minute with no cover work left by the regular teacher.
There are unexpected occurrences that mean the planned lesson (or planned tea break) can’t happen and you need to do something, preferably with a quick decision.
IT has failed or materials are not available.
What can you do?
If you have a textbook, you can do one of the other units. This will likely be a choice of nothing or the worst unit in there. Pay lip service to it by generating vocabulary from pictures in there and then set up a task or activity related to that theme. My favourite lesson when I worked for a rubbish school was an At the Airport unit which became a roleplay with feelings and personality eccentricities. I did this by selecting the only lesson a last-minute addition to the lesson hadn’t already studied.
Otherwise, you can Dogme your lesson and start a conversation. Think at each stage, what can the learners do? What can they almost do? The almost stage is great – try something that will enable this to be further developed.
Language?
This gives you the ideal opportunity to focus on weak points of language that manifest themselves in learner output. It could be grammar but it doesn’t have to be. How often do you think students get help with pronunciation? How about use of reference to sound more natural and concise? Don’t just pick a random grammar point for the sake of it. It’s nice to have gone in winging it and come out having taught something a bit unusual. I’d also say, don’t be afraid of going wide with the language focus in your lesson instead of deep with one thing. Students like it and you can always suggest further study on that point for homework (such as finding more examples online or from a newspaper or something).
Reflect
The old chestnut is, the best lessons we teach are ones we didn’t plan. Write it down: what would you do differently? What worked well? Could you substitute any part into another lesson plan to make it better? If it was without a book, your students might appreciate time to talk with each other. You’ve had a really good opportunity to teach reacting to students and not worrying about keeping to a plan. It might have been a bit rough but what were the redeeming features?
Any other tips or concerns for winging it? Leave them in the comments.
Freelancing is highly romanticised at the moment, or so I feel, on the ‘productivity’ websites. However, the fact is, I would love to be a full-time employee. What leads me to be a freelancer/serial part-timer (FSPTer) then?
I make much, much more money as a FSPTer than I would ‘full-time’ in a language school.
Pay rises in language schools in Japan are based on whether students like you. This can depend on whether your regular student on a Thursday is always tired and gives you a 4 on a questionnaire instead of a 5, or whether you are handsome. I look like Brad Pitt. In Fight Club. After getting the shit beat out of me. There are many young men in English Teaching in Tokyo who moonlight as models.
Now, before all you other long-in-the-toothed folks like me start thinking about going Omar, don’t think it’s all sweetness, think about this.
Cancellations
Most of your company classes will be agency work. Agencies will not pay you if the client cancels with over 24 hours notice. Will you fill that slot? Will there be a Bambi’s mother-zombie-crossover live-action film? In a language school, you get paid regardless, unless you work for a total piece of crap.
Sometimes an agency will make a verbal agreement with you, nothing solid, but you block your schedule, and the organisation then does further shopping around and drops your agency. They take no hit other than salesperson time. You lose ground on the slots you could have applied for.
“Private students are the way to go,” you say. I will say that you may have a private that treats you well but most get flaky and cancel at the last minute. I charge the full whack if there’s less than 24-hours notice, or stop bookings any more than a week in advance. Hit any private with these and they will soon stop taking lessons if you charge a rate that is reasonable to you. This can be good though; you don’t want to be waiting around for people that don’t respect you but only say that they do.
Admin/Paperwork
God, I hate admin. You will have at least one agency time sheet to fill in, plus student attendance. Add to that any marking if you have writing classes that turn out substantial work, and there will always be the last-minute thing that you will not get office staff help with because you don’t have office staff – you’re freelance. Add tax returns in a foreign language and messing about with multiple document formats going between phone, Pages, MS Office, Libre Office and other permutations and you’re on a one-way ticket to Self Medication Station.
Basically, you learn to prioritise. My question is “If this isn’t done, will my family starve?” You’d be surprised at how much is let go. However, you still have to balance goodwill and lackadaisical wherewithal.
The Muscles and The Belly
You will be able to shoulder everything a black hole can absorb in an aeon and more. This is because, on a busy day, you might be carrying four textbooks, a notebook, a diary, maybe a portable speaker for listening tasks, food and whatever else you might carry to kill time (novels, game machine, scale model of the Bismarck, etc.) This exercise will not stave off The Belly.
You will get hungry and every subway or train station kiosk will beg you closer with its promise of Snickers, M&Ms, sweet breads, sandwiches, ambiguous baked goods with exotic seasonal flavours. You will not have willpower, especially at five o’clock on a Thursday after a class at a food company and just before teaching a lesson on dining out. You need exercise. You will crave exercise but you might not have time.
The Ludicrous Schedule
You will spread yourself stupidly thin when you can get work (which is basically all the seasons when weather is crap except Christmas and New Year) and have more free time than you can shake a stick at over summer, unless you teach at a summer camp, though many of those pay rubbish money for staying on-site in the sticks miles from home or miles from the pub if you go in for that.
I am getting better at managing this but the cancellations do mess this up a bit.
Do I like my job? Yes, I do. Do I like freelancing? That’s not really relevant; my family likes having a place to live and being able to eat. Some days I like freelancing more, other days less. It’s about how you get by, isn’t it?
This is a thorny issue for many of us and will be part of an INSET I’m giving this weekend.
We all have our favourite error treatments/corrections (I’m going to stick to treatment seeing as there’s no guarantee it will stick, no matter what technique one uses).
There was a post by Gianfranco Conti titled 6 Useless Things Language Teachers Do. It was criticized by Geoff Jordan for laying claim to being research based but ignoring quite a bit of research.
I am not an expert but a cursory bit of reading (see below) and a webinar with Scott Thornbury lead me to the probably flawed theory that:
Types of language teaching context and activity can be put on a spectrum going from Linguistic to Content. Grammar translation and rule-based teaching would be at the Linguistic side of this spectrum; immersion and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) would be at the Content side. Task-Based Teaching would be toward the Content side when the focus is communication, and moving closer to the Linguistic side during Focus on Form activities.
Non-intrusive linguistic error treatment is less likely to be noticed, the closer one gets to the Content side, (as with Lyster & Ranta [1997]) and more likely on the Linguistic side.
Multimodal (i.e. not just spoken) forms of non-intrusive error treatment may be more likely taken up, e.g. spoken recasts supported by a written recast on a slip of paper.
There is also the research pointing to acquisition sequences that are impervious to teaching. So, if learners aren’t taking on correction after a few goes, you might leave it. It might need more time to process than you have until the end of the lesson or your learner just might not be ready for it at their current language development stage.
So, what should we do?
Think about your learners. I don’t know them, you do. Are they resistant to correction? You might do some work with them on the errors they are almost right with because low-hanging fruit might lead them to more motivation to solve other errors. Are they going to get annoyed if you interrupt and cue self-correction all the time? Then perhaps you recast (or not) and then work on the error in the next stage of the lesson. Are they going to think you’re confirming meaning? Maybe try a different way of correction.
At the end of the day we all have anxieties about whether we’re doing the best thing. I think as long as we’re trying to pay attention to what we’re doing, have good reasons for doing it then good is good enough.
If you disagree or have more to add, I’d love to hear it.
References
Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 37-66.
Further Reading
Allwright, D. & Bailey, K. (1991) Focus on the Language Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Long, M. H. (2007) Problems in SLA. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lai, C and Zhao, Y. (2006) Noticing and Text-Based Chat. Language Learning & Technology. Vol.10, No.3, September 2006, pp. 102-120
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Ooh, hello phonology, aren’t you looking fine?
