Category: Pedagogy

#ELTchat  3 Feb 2016 Summary: Differentiation

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

Differentiation is, in the educational sense of the word, treating learners differently. Here is what the Twitter #eltchat (transcript) said about it.

What is differentiation?

“What is differentiation?” appears to be such a difficult question to answer that it only got directly answered by one short answer by Angelos Bollas, despite being asked by both James Taylor and Shaun Wilden. Angelos said it is:

“designing and/or assigning diff tasks for diff ss for the same lesson”

whereas Yitzha Sarwono said it is:

“giving students different works for the same subject discussed”

How people differentiate

Talken English remarked that there are always fast finishers that need extra work. Patrick Andrews stated that differentiation isn’t just mixed abilities but also “motivation, backgrounds, etc.” Sue Lyon-Jones also added that sometimes it is appropriate to “have a spread of abilities in one group”.
Patrick mentioned:

“levels are not the same as abilities.  – if someone has only just begun, they may be able but beginner”

And Sue Lyon-Jones added that such “‘spiky’ profiles” are common in ESOL.
Talken English said that at their school there is a large gap in ability.
Sue Lyon-Jones said that differentiated homework (such as pre-teaching vocabulary) is useful, and Yitzha said that she set difficult tasks to more able students and similar easier work to students with similar problems.
MariaConca said that differentiation was necessary to cater to different learning styles. Glenys Hanson then mentioned that learning styles have been found to lack any evidence backing them up. Rachel Appleby mentioned that using learning activity styles can be good to ensure learners get different activities that they might not usually choose to do. I said that this would be a good method to counter previous teachers’ labelling of students as things like ‘a visual learner’.
I mentioned that I often differentiate by outcome, to which Patrick recommended and old book by Anderson & Lynch called ‘Listening’. I was asked how I would differentiate by outcome and my example was:

“High: order food with pragmatic appropriacy. Mid: order food (formal lang). Low: order food – no L1”

I also mentioned that it can be worthwhile differentiating by mental states, too, and not just ability.
Patrick said he was thinking about using drama in his classroom and that students who didn’t want to perform could take other roles such as directing, etc.
I said that different roles could be set in discussions: overpowering students could be given quieter roles and weaker students could be set as leader to prove their ability.
Sue Annan asked rhetorically:
“can you differentiate the amount of work, rather than the work itself- choose 4 q’s to answer(?)”

Problems with differentiation

Problems with differentiation that were talked about were:

“exposing weaker students. You don’t want them to feel uncomfortable.” (Talken English)

Glenys said

“Ts often project feelings onto students they don’t have. Respect weaker students & they’ll be OK.”

 
I also said some learners might think they are of higher ability than they really are if they are kept with others of similar but lower ability.

Advancing to What Exactly?

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Reflection

monkey_tricks
I was reading a post by Geoffrey Jordan about whether he should accept an advanced learner for an immersion course, and it got me thinking about the same topic, rather deeply.
I believe in learner-centred teaching, learner autonomy. None of this is astoundingly new, nor is it unorthodox. Some of the hackles raised by the people opposed to it may be that it is tree-hugging hippy crap or they’re tired of people who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in ten years telling them how they should be teaching. Some of it is “common sense” or “just good teaching”. However, I do think that learners could do a lot more on their own: checking vocabulary, listening practice, reading for pleasure, etc.
In the language school I used to work at, there was also a debate about whether learners could ‘graduate’ from the school. The sales staff thought not; the teachers thought so. The sales staff get money for bums on seats whereas the teachers get the feelgood glow from thoughts of helping learners attain intended proficiency levels. It’s not that simple, though. I do know of organisations that have refused advanced-level students to join classes, though this is more to do with very-advanced-level students intimidating the upper-intermediate learners. I do not know of any that have done so for reasons of fostering learner autonomy. A lot of teachers don’t like to have their learners in too low a level. What if no level is high enough? Other teachers don’t want their students to be in over their head. In that case, how come they don’t have the tools to cope with autonomy at advanced level?
Geoff’s conundrum is whether his learner would benefit (or benefit enough) from the course. In an ideal world he might just curl up with a book, a video, put the radio on, talk to somebody online or write to a friend. However, I do mean ‘in an ideal world’; his learner might not actually be motivated to do it without a teacher there to motivate him. I feel that some of my most motivated learners would read and listen widely even if I didn’t moan at motivate them to.
I see my role as having my learners get to the point where they no longer need me. However, this leads to the issue of who decides. Should the teacher or the learner ultimately decided when they are ready for autonomy? (There is an interesting article by Sara Cotterall about readiness for learner autonomy [PDF].) I hate to feel like I’m saying there’s nothing to learn, but then teaching does not necessarily equate to learning.
Of course, it’s in no teacher’s best interests to turn down money from a willing student. I tend to wonder whether it’s the morality at play; that even if we are not wrong, that we feel bad for taking money when the teaching sometimes feels less intensive or there is less visible, near-immediate learning taking place.

Actually Doing Task-Based Teaching

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

IMG_1650It’s hardly a secret that I love Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). I think it gets learners using all the language they know, trying to use stuff they kind of know and provides chances for them to realise what they don’t know.
Saying all that, it has a rarefied image and the books that link it to SLA theory sometimes disguise the fact that it is straightforward to do in your ordinary classroom.

Beware

  • You are giving learners the space to use language as they wish. They may stick to overly-simplistic forms. You must correct this.
  • If you have a grammar syllabus to follow, TBLT may not be the best choice because you should be looking at task completion in an appropriate way both in how and what language is used. If you are looking at past continuous and set a task to tell a story, in Task-Based contexts your success criteria is telling a story appropriately; within a grammar syllabus you need to assess grammar. I’m not saying you can’t teach grammar with TBLT but you don’t expect students to use specific structures 100% correctly by the end of the lesson. You’re looking for appropriate communication and learners noticing things they can and can’t do. Monitor constantly.

Planning

The old chestnut of plan backwards. “What do you want the learners to do by the end of the lesson?” The answer to this should not be a grammar structure, though you might focus on this. “Use appropriate opening gambits to start conversations and continue conversations with appropriate questions” would be better. There are some tasks here.
Set the parameters of the task: how long, how many people, what does the output/input look like, expected level of fluency, accuracy, etc.
Is there anything that the learners definitely need to complete the task? Specialist vocab for topics and situations can be elicited as a pre-task before jumping into it. Planning and anticipating steps of the conversation may be another. If there are structures/patterns/collocations to be taught, do it in the Focus on Form.

Focus on Form?

Yes, this is according to Mike Long (2015) a focus on appropriate language use and its form rather than prescriptive grammatical structures.
I often base this on errors/avoidances, like a long error correction but going deeper into usage and further examples. Drills, ‘games’ and such might go here. Focus on form does not have to be just grammar: pronunciation, morphology, pragmatics (appropriacy), and anything the learners have displayed a need for might go here.

Repetition

You can repeat tasks, report tasks, present tasks and so on at the end. Learners need to reflect on what they did in the task and what has been taught. This part should ideally have greater fluency/accuracy/complexity.

This Sounds Long

Perhaps. How much time have you got? I didn’t say it all had to fit into one lesson. Dave and Jane Willis (2007) have a bit about Task Cycles in their book Doing Task-Based Teaching.

The Normal Flow (for me)

  • Pre-Task (Elicitation or some kind of schema activation).
  • Pre-Task (Possibly an exemplar task, reading/listening for info).
  • Task.
  • Corrections/Focus on Form.
  • One of the following: Evaluate and report as a group, Repeat task with different partners, Use previous task info as part of a new task, Redraft/remake previous task output.

If there are glaring errors, let me know. No doubt this is not *best practice*. It is a quick guide. Teachers will find their feet. Play with your lesson timings, don’t be afraid to pause tasks, split or change them if your learners find them too hard. I hope you have fun.

References

Long, M (2015) Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley
Willis, D & Willis, J (2007) Doing Task Based Teaching. Oxford, OUP.

Who's Driving?

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Reflection

I finished my DipTESOL last week, thus I have time to sleep (after I wean myself of 7,234 cups of coffee a day) and, well, blog.
I was in a conversation on Twitter last week with another teacher about bullying in the classroom. How can teachers prevent themselves from being bullied in the classroom by students. I’ve also been thinking about levels of classroom autonomy that I give.
Bullying of teachers by students happens more often than people think. It can happen with children’s classes, teens and adults.

Root Causes

My opinion, and reflections of classes where I’ve been bullied, is that there’s a difference in expectation for the classes. I’ve had a bunch of nine-year-old girls complain to the head of the school/franchise owner because I wasn’t ‘fun’, where fun was endless card games and hangman. I did play these but I also made them speak English in actual conversations, the cardinal sin. It was a relief to finish the contract.
There has been a university class where I had to “lay down the law” because only three of thirty five were on task, using English or even L1. I left the class, telling the students they would not be marked present unless they got on with the work they were supposed to do, but made it clear I would be outside if anyone had questions.
Now I have a better relationship with that class. Boundaries were re-established and the learners are aware of their responsibilities. There are parameters set at the start of the lesson that I will only mark learners present after I hear them speak English x times.

Parameters, Boundaries

I think all learners need boundaries and parameters to work within. I think it is one of the things that has helped me use Task-Based Language Teaching, too.
Make clear and negotiate what is OK and not OK at the start of the course (my mistake with the girls). If there is a reason, give it. “Endless hangman means you learn nothing.”
Set parameters and/or success criteria for every task. I do this for almost everything now, about expected language complexity if I know learners will use overly simple language, time limits (asking learners how much time they need), groupings, fluency, etc.

Example:
“Talk to each other about your best friend. I want two details about appearance,” (gesture by running hand from head down) ” two personality details,” (gesture by putting hands on your heart) “and three more interesting details. I think seven minutes is OK but you have ten minutes.”
Board “2 appearance details, 2 personality details, 3 other interesting details, 10 minutes”.

If you can negotiate success criteria with your learners, so much the better.

How About Ambiguity?

Some learners don’t deal with ambiguity and vagueness well, and perhaps won’t ask for clarification and then be paralysed by a fear of doing the wrong thing. The solutions are either rigid parameters and instruction checking (not my favourite, to be honest) or a looser, wider acceptable range of outcomes that foster autonomy of decision making, judgement and let learners follow an aspect of the task that interests them (very much my favourite). That isn’t to say it’s a free for all; you still need to monitor to ensure there’s learning and/or application of learning happening. Don’t be afraid to pause tasks for clarification and stop them when they turn out to be too easy or too difficult, (but have an idea about what to do next).

Coursebook Syllabus versus Needs Analysis

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Textbooks

I have a class on Thursdays that have really let me get my teeth into needs analysis with them. It’s the first time I’ve taught a class and had ‘What do you need to learn?’ answered with something other than ‘English.’
One of my learners told me that a situation we did as an extended task has taken on even more relevance, seeing as he’s going to Europe with two classmates at the end of November.
The thing is, that task wasn’t in the book. It wouldn’t have been on the syllabus at all had I not performed a needs analysis through a class discussion on training and completing a task to analyse linguistic needs.
OK, Marc, so what’s that got to do with anything?
Well, if we have a look at the set texts, and then have a look at the needs analysis then we get to the stage where a Venn diagram or suchlike would be useful. Where is the overlap between the textbook and the needs. Ideally, the people in charge of selling the course would have nothing to do with choosing (or foisting) textbooks. After a needs analysis teachers should be able to see what they need to teach and then look to see what textbook, if any, best meets the needs of the class. What resources need to be gathered? There will always be other things cropping up in lessons that will require divergence and detours from the main syllabus but if the basics are down, everything else that needs to be rejigged on the fly can be done with a minimum of fuss.
However, if you’re working to a pacing of book pages determined by someone outside the classroom who doesn’t know the learners, whose needs are you meeting? Theirs, but their needs are only wants, and those wants shouldn’t matter.

Resources for Teaching Children

Marc Jones / / Links, Materials, Pedagogy

There are a large number of freelance teachers who won’t teach children at all because it can be more trouble than it’s worth: behaviour problems, parental disengagement, poor institutional support, dreadful training (or rather the lack of it). However, for those of us who are fortunate to find settings in which teaching children is not a painful experience, there is a lot to enjoy: witnessing the development, often at a more rapid pace than adults; engaging questions; and, lest we forget, a source of entertainment.
Here are some resources that may be useful for teachers of children/young learners.
Primary Resources
Twinkl
British Council Young Learners
Don’t forget that it is totally possible to go Dogme/materials light with kids as well, if you have paper, pens and imagination. If the class want to play games, it’s OK – provided they teach you the rules. Giving them ownership can be a bumpy ride – not a lot of kids are used to it so you might need to prime them by having little bits of control increasing incrementally. By the time they get to be responsible for choosing what they learn, it is more interesting (though it can be more challenging to teach).
Higher-ability kids can handle CLIL or project-based learning. Computer programming, geology and probability in games are all fun and useful.
Also, some cool people who teach young learners are:
Rose Bard
Anne Hendler
Tim Hampson

Principles and Filler

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

  Or ‘What can you do to separate the start of a lesson from the end without wasting everyone’s time and learners learning nothing‘
Before I start, I’m going to just say it: I have been a filler user. You get those days when the awesome lesson you planned seems to go awry or you or the learners just aren’t feeling it. I think the problem comes when the filler is routine or is pushing out principled, educationally beneficial activities.

Games

Games are my bugbear because games are what popular teachers without curricular responsibilities do. It is possible to play games and have learners learn but the danger is that learners end up playing Hangman or Bingo.
I have no problem with Guess Who? when giving descriptions, Clue/Cluedo when speculating, or a quick game of Bingo to practice listening to numbers, though. Also, if games look good and have learning as part of the mechanism, great. If it looks like it was a hastily photocopied pile of crap, your learners might well be merciless.
There are tons of awesome looking RPGs here. They do need more than one lesson to play them.

Free conversation

You can listen to the TEFLology podcast about FreeCon here.
As a teacher who sometimes uses a Dogme framework, I hate FreeCon. It is the last bastion of the lazy teacher. Beginners are given hangman, intermediate upward are given free conversation, unstructured and never reflected upon. Nobody takes any notes, nobody is really given any guidance. 
“But they want conversation practice!” the FreeCon teachers say.
I’d say that’s fine, but is it what the learners want or is it what the teachers want? And how about learning happening with the practice, like giving a bit of feedback, some alternatives that are appropriate for the learners? If you’re nodding, I think you might be doing FreeCon in a principled way. If you’re scowling, I bet it’s a conversation all about you.

Reading & Listening

I love listening, and I rather like reading, and these definitely need to be taught. The problem is, they are often just ‘done’. Simple questions straight from a book, only surface engagement, purely to kill time. I’m sure this could be done at home, so unless there’s a special reason for you to be there, why does this need to be done in a lesson?

Other Pet Peeves

  • Pages from Murphy’s ‘English Grammar In Use’ (guilty of past use).
  • “Translate this letter I can’t read”, regardless of appropriacy or language resources.
  • Song lyrics gap fills when the lyrics mean sod all (One Direction).

The Constraints of the Syllabus, the Restraints of the Teacher

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Research, Vocabulary

I’m on holidays. Wooh!  Rather, a busman’s holiday but it’s an enjoyable one. I’ve been watching ITDi.pro webinars and TOBELTA webinars. Some of what follows is about things I’ve seen, things I’ve read, things I have to deal with and just… things.

Action Research and Ordinary Classroom Teachers

Divya Madhavan gave a webinar on ITDi about action research, about our own practices, about what we can do to develop as teachers. She had everybody think about what research is and who can do research. In my opinion the whole ivory tower-ness of research is basically because ordinary rank-and-file teachers don’t share their own research. You just need to have a bit of curiosity about what happens in your class (either learning or teaching or both) and ask a question, think of something to test over a period of time (because we all have flukey classes that go far better than we have any right to expect and awful classes where things just go awry from the get-go). This gets us into a situation where we can share ideas about what works in our situation (or not), why it might (not) work, and further ideas for research.

Syllabi and the Constraints they put on us and Control!

Luke Meddings gave two webinars in one day on both ITDi and TOBELTA. One was about how we teach and how learners learn in the classroom (or learner-centredness) and one about tests and the changing roles of teachers.
I’ve been thinking about coursebooks, grammar/linguistic syllabi, word lists and so on for the last year at least. The coursebook becomes a syllabus (either top down or by insinuation due to how easy it is), whether grammar-based or lexis-based. We ‘need’ to cover the things in the syllabus, getting through all the vocabulary and then we have a car-crash situation where the learners have not taken on what has been taught except in a very superficial way. In Meddings’ ITDi webinar, there was an interesting slide: Teachers are at the side and the learners are in the centre. We need to welcome them in with the things they want to talk about. I’d say that also the teacher needs to watch out for domination by one learner, but if the learners are coming in with something to say (in L1 you could facilitate it being taught in English) you can run with it and negotiate your syllabus.
In the second webinar for TOBELTA, he advocated for 50-FREE, or 50% of class time devoted to non-syllabus learning. I am a big fan of lip-service to syllabi. I cover what has to be covered as quickly as possible then get onto tasks that will allow learners to express what is on the syllabus but maybe not with the grammar on there (because linguistic syllabi don’t necessarily result in learners learning the linguistic items so why not teach something useful). I still have a syllabus, but it’s fluid and I try to link things as far as possible to students’ interests. I’m also willing to give control to learners and just have them using the language with me able to go around, differentiating teaching according to conversation groups, bringing emergent language that corresponds with the set syllabus to the whole class.

Word Lists

I’ve been thinking about word lists as well. Things like the New General Service List and how, when we get a list, we get bogged down because we have so much to get through. Something like the NGSL gives teachers a tool to ensure the most frequent words are ‘covered’ and the possibility to check for recycling in class. What we don’t usually do is give learners a checklist based on this about how often they encounter these words outside the classroom, or how often they use them. We could, but we don’t. Why? Probably because we know that lists become dominating forces and then will probably turn off students. So , should we systematically teach vocabulary, try to have vocabulary systematically ‘noticed’ or used? I’m not sure I could agree with that. How word lists might be better used is as a diagnostic tool, with learners highlighting what they know at first, then at a second milestone highlighting in a different colour, and different colours for further milestones. Of course this is not a test, it’s highly subjective but it might be an alternative to the pressure cooker state of language teaching for standardised tests that a lot of us hate.

Tokyo Lesson Jam

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I have already set up a Tokyo Lesson Jam site for the first (and hopefully not last!) Tokyo Lesson Jam on Thursday 14th August.

Needs Analysis in Actual Practice 

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

I started a new class yesterday, a group of engineers ostensibly studying English for ‘business’*. Being the kind of guy I am and knowing that the agency I work for have signed an exclusivity agreement with a major ELT publisher, I need to know what kind of things my students need and want and which of these aren’t covered by the book.

How I go about Needs Analysis

First up I ask, “Why are you studying?” if this is a voluntary course.
The answer is always “To improve my English.” Seriously. It is always this. However, it provides a way in for self-reflection.
“What aspect of your English do you want to improve the most.”
Yesterday’s class told me speaking and listening, particularly how to follow a conversation and ensure they respond appropriately and how to express themselves without becoming tongue-tied.
“Who do you communicate with in English?”
In this case, international engineers with varied first languages and including a few native speakers but not many. Voluntarily my students gave the contexts as conferences, meetings, videoconferences and telephone calls.
“What do you need or want to talk about?”
This is going to run the gamut from small talk, discussing train timetables and into extremely specific language for applied engineering.

Is that it?

No. That’s only the bit about what the students say. I need to see the needs they show.
I set up a task. In this case it was a pre-task of talking about their own jobs then into a more abstract task of comparing their duties to that of an astronaut on the ISS. They do this in pairs, then one from each pair makes a group and shares all the ideas. I choose a random student to report back.
*Scare quotes deliberate because despite being a Business English teacher I don’t think it’s a useful term. It probably equates to English for Office Clerks and Underpaid Reluctant Translators.

"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.