Category: Materials

Coursebook Palaver Rechurned

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials, Textbooks

I was going to stay out of it but I think I’m going to have to jump into it. The coursebook thing has reared its head again. Thanks to Liam T, Steve Brown, Brad Smith and Hana Ticha for drawing me back in helping me to think about this.
I think I need to set out my thoughts first.
Global coursebooks are, with few exceptions, rubbish because they try to teach everyone but few actually learn what’s in the book in a meaningful way, mainly but not only because of a focus on grammar and lexical sets.
They are also rubbish because they are bland. There are the odd few with the odd reading passage I’d read for interest. Generally it’s just in there because it’s a carrier topic and in global books those topics have to be inoffensive, thus bland.
Coursebooks are rubbish because everybody speaks the same way. Completely unrealistic speech patterns, too slow and with a script that focuses heavily on presenting grammar points. Business coursebooks are usually more natural than general English coursebooks but that’s sort of like comparing death by hanging and firing squad; the result is the same: students find natural speech difficult to decode and it is difficult for them to anticipate problems with natural speech.
Not all coursebooks are terrible. Mainly business or ESP books are good. Unfortunately, people studying for specific purposes have plenty of motivation which would aid their learning. General English is often English as a School Subject and learners often learn through obligation with no clear idea about why they are studying other than because they need to.
Business coursebooks usually have more explicit discourse-level communication present than general English ones. Both are usually sorely lacking in pronunciation or phonology (even help for teachers to mine texts or audio for this in the teacher’s books is woefully absent).
What’s better than coursebooks is a good set of resources, ideally the kind of stuff with no copyright or with a Creative Commons license, or at least permission to photocopy so you can be sure there are no legal issues. These don’t usually focus on isolated grammar points but when they do they are not in a suggested sequence based on the hunches of someone completely unfamiliar with your learners. You might say that a load of these downloaded onto a USB drive or uploaded to cloud storage is a 21st century resource book.
I still haven’t found a book of resources I truly love because there are too many word searches and crosswords in some but I continue to live in hope. The execrable coursebook I have to use as a syllabus for the university I teach at for an agency does have a workbook with some great activities.

Objections to what I’m saying

  • Coverage/pacing of material is necessary because my boss says so.

    • I pay sufficient lip service to the book to say the syllabus has been taught. Usually it’s one reading done quickly with some vocabulary checks or retellings, else I do the listening as a listening skills mini-lesson,  but the rest is a task that might result in the language in the book being used. If not, that’s fine. Correct the language, reflect and probably trying the same task or a similar one again.

  • Students like books.

    • Fine. Are you a teacher or a bookseller? Is it necessary for them to use the book in a lesson or could it be used at home?

  • Teachers like books.

    • Great. If teachers find coursebooks useful then that’s awesome. I do find it difficult to believe that the same book can work across contexts to provide a sufficient footing for language acquisition to take place.
    Thinking about how to use a book is not the same as being on auto-pilot, plotting a course from page 4 to page 117 over 20 weeks. I think it’s fine to present the grammar for exposure. However, don’t expect it to be ‘mastered’ and beat yourself up or question student motivation or work rate if they can’t use it just because it’s been taught.

  • My students want me to teach the book.

    • They might want you to use it but have you asked them why? Who is the language teaching professional? You might ask how long they have used this method of study and whether it appears to be working. Sometimes you might use the book in ways that are different but as long as they are learning, I expect most students would be satisfied.

"You're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat" – pitching material

Marc Jones / / Materials, Pedagogy, Reading

I’ve had a while to mull this over. I still think I need to stick to my initial judgement that my students need to be thrown into the unknown sometimes. Anyway, this is my attempt at an autopsy of a dead lesson.
I was stuck with a spread in a (non-academic) reading course for my university students and I asked them whether they  wanted to look at something difficult the next week. After a couple of weeks of them breezing through class material it was no surprise that that they said yes.
I used this activity from Anthony Ash’s blog, knowing it was tough. I had the learners think of words they knew about air travel and space travel.
The reading was prefaced by me telling students to just look at it first and black out what you don’t know then modelling that. Only around half the class blacked out a sufficient amount.
So, what the hell was I doing? I wanted the students to have strategies to deal with a difficult text. All students will take numerous TOEIC and TOEFL tests over the next two years. I wanted to give them tools to deal with very difficult texts. The books set by the university are extremely easy so students go into their tests thinking everything will be of a similar level. When that happens it dents their confidence. I thought that if they did it in the classroom then it would be easier to manage these affective factors.
In the end I had to have the students gather around me, see the overwhelmingly black page I had created and try to get the gist, which was successful. We then looked at the comprehension questions which were basically answered well.

What did I learn?

  • It’s fine to pitch high but expect to provide a lot of support and positive feedback.
  • About 70% of my students don’t like to be challenged as much as they think they do.
  • That they are scared to ‘abandon’ sections of text that they cannot comprehend (to which I assign the blame squarely at high school grammar translation lessons).

I don’t see it as an abject failure but, no, the students weren’t as into attacking a text they perceived as impenetrable as I thought they were and so I had to abandon the planned discussion on knock-on effects of technological innovation.
I thought it would be good to write about a failed lesson after putting in my tuppence worth on Robert Lowe’s blog.

Activity – Backchannel Bingo

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials, Speaking

Here’s a conversation analysis task for learners which might form baseline information for teaching ‘active listening’, backchannelling and body language. It was inspired by this post by Olya Sergeeva (hat tip to @eilymurphy) that I didn’t have time to implement fully so tweaked to my own needs.
Update (10 October 2016): There are two leveled sheets, one for elementary/pre-intermediate (MS Word or PDF) and one for intermediate levels and up (MS Word or PDF).
One student observes two or more students having a conversation about a given topic or one of their own choosing, checking the boxes each time one of the conversation events occurs. Use a set time for this; I’d say 3 minutes at least and certainly less than 10.
At the end, observing students report which boxes were not checked. This can then be taught/coached. You could collect the information from the sheets and repeat the activity after a certain number of classes to monitor improvement (or lack thereof).
I hope this is useful. If you do try it, let me know how it went in the comments.

Teaching or Testing Listening?

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials, Textbooks

Dear Me probably in even 2010,
You get a CD in the back of your shiny book. The shiny book that has a picture of a loudspeaker to show you the track number. You ask the preset questions underneath and you play the CD and there are the lovely voices of the polite English-speaking people, all waiting to speak enthusiastically, one at a time with a handy grammar point in their throats. They are all lovely people who speak in a standard (prestige) variety with as much of their regional accent scrubbed away as possible.
Then you wonder why your students ‘cannot listen’.
Did you teach them how to listen, or did you only check their (lack of) comprehension again?
Nobody taught me how to teach listening. I doubt that the in-house trainers that trained me ever received anything other than a quick mention to ‘make sure you do some listening‘ when they were trained as teachers.
Students learn to listen by metaphorically being thrown in at the deep end. Unfortunately, like swimming, it only works the first time for a few people. Nobody learns to decode at phoneme or syllable level. Sometimes there might be word-level listening but it’s magic and accident. ‘Listen for the word “useless”. What is it used to describe?’
If we want to give students listening practice, all well and good, but don’t call it teaching. Call it listening to the CD, which could be done at home. Teach some connected speech and have students listen for examples of it. Teach some intonation patterns and have students listen for speaker attitude and intention or even how many items they are listing.
You could even ditch the stupid CD, find something online that has real conversations about something the students are interested in (such as a podcast about video games or a YouTube video about a country they want to go to) and play that instead, having them listen for words stressed in the tone units and make sense of it that way.
But don’t press play and tell the students that you’re teaching listening.
Sincerely,
You
Lots of the key ideas here are not mine. Probably most of them come from:
Field, J (2012) Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Prince, Peter (2013) ‘Listening, remembering, writing: Exploring the dictogloss task’. Language Teaching Research: 17(4) 486–500. London: Sage. Retrieved 9 October 2014.
Other #youngerteacherself posts at Joanna Malefaki’s blog.

Authentic Listening Material

Marc Jones / / Links, Listening, Materials

I’ve been looking out for some authentic listening material for some of the Business English courses I teach. I just found a website called Freesound which has some fantastic Creative Commons-licensed MP3 and wav files, free to download.
I downloaded some basic train and airport announcements and I am planning to have false beginner students listen for answers to the following questions:

  1. When does the announcement change to English?
  2. Which gate can you board the plane from?

In another class I’ll have some pre-intermediate students listen for answers to these questions:

  1. What is the new platform for the Penzance train?
  2. Does the Penzance train stop at Exeter St. David’s?

Keep it real

Marc Jones / / Materials, Textbooks

Loads of teachers seem to think that using realia (real-life objects) is a pain. I think before the prevalence of the internet throughout everyone’s lives this was true; however, you can now source realia with only a search engine and your imagination. Transport maps, supermarket flyers, tourism materials… you name it!
Using these to support vocabulary, as prompts in a role play or as materials for a task-based lesson are all possible and will often take less explicit set up than using a textbook activity because with realia the function is often self-evident. Students can also practise using real-world items rather than overly dumbed-down examples from textbooks which can leave them with a sense of false confidence. If you want to ease your students in to using realia, you might use textbook versions of such material for controlled practice and then have students use realia as part of their free practice.
Model one or two steps of an activity and usually the students will do the rest of the work themselves. You can then spend time monitoring and thinking about what language students may find or may have found useful.