This post is basically an extended comment on Clare Fielder’s interesting post, Taking Control of your Teaching Career with the European Profiling Grid.
There is a lot to like about it in that it is systematic – sort of like the CEFR. It also tends to assume that you are intending to spend time near classrooms if not remaining in teaching; DoS-type progression is in it but so is the path of expert practitioner.
There are some flaws in it: it doesn’t really apply exactly to small department contexts. It also stops fairly abruptly; not blowing my own trumpet (well, maybe a bit) but if you’re at the far end already, where do you go next? I don’t intend to leave the classroom to be a Big ELT manager or materials designer for a big publisher, so then what?
These are fairly minor criticisms though, seeing as a lot of TEFLers have a shelf life of about 3-5 years. It would still be an interesting read for anybody who has a few years under their belt but if you’ve worked across contexts, what else is there to do without changing countries or companies for the sake of change?
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?
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?
Get your learners to match countries to their languages and major cities and their nationality/demonym.
Here is a set of small cards to be cut up (and laminate for longevity?) and spread around the class. Learners work together to match the countries to the languages and cities. I put in some unusual countries that are rarely looked at in textbooks, so it will challenge some learners.
You’d probably want to set it up so that unnecessary L1 is reduced. Elicit questions like “What nationality are people from…?” in a pre-task, or do some hot Focus on Form if you find there is a ton of L1 being used. Pronunciation would be useful to do some form focus with, particularly stressed syllables and possible epenthesis (adding sounds to the pronunciation of a word).
It is Creative Commons licensed so if you want to change the countries/cities/languages, go ahead. Get the PDF here or the editable word document here.
This is entirely user-generated content. You don’t even need to print out the sheet or give out the prompt cards. It’s basically a Task-Based lesson stewed in a Dogme-heavy sauce.
You have the learners explain and give mini presentations on different aspects of New Year. If you have international students, this will really help the others in their group as they will probably have tons of questions. They could also give differences and similarities between New Year in their countries and in Japan. Feel free to change it up, pass it on, etc. It is Creative Commons licensed.
There is a load of repetition so good chances for Task rehearsal and the tasks should be more fluent by the end. Find the sheet as a PPT and PDF in my Google Drive folder.
Wow, my first #ELTchat summary. Go gentle on me!
I was really interested in this because of the authentic materials in ESP side than low-levels side of things because I don’t have many low-level students at the moment.
The first thing that was made clear by @Marisa_C was that analysis is important, for student needs, appropriacy, context, etc. One thing that she also said was that it’s important to save or curate these materials for future use. I’d agree but my choice of tool would be Google Drive (as a Chrome and Android user) or Dropbox whereas Marisa advocated Pinterest, Scoop and Facebook save functions among other things. I like Google Drive because you can print to PDF and save directly to your Drive folders.
Readability scales were used by some and not by others. Some mentioned by @angelos_bollas were Read-able and Online-Utility. These basically do Flesch-Kincaid analyses. @Marisa_C also shared her Pinterest board (which I’ve bookmarked and subscribed to).
Genre was talked about by @angelos_bollas and @Marisa_C who also suggested looking at Google Books for genre. It was also suggested that all teachers could do genre analysis with authentic materials but that not many do. @Naomishema told us all about using tickets with low levels and that they are particularly good for teaching comparatives, family members and also numbers and dates. @GlenysHanson told us about having learners make how-to guides, e.g. how a gearbox works, how to give an injection. Very interesting stuff! @Marisa_C then talked about how-to videos on YouTube and that students could add subtitles to these or verbalise the instructions.
I then chipped in about realia (warning posters, financial reports) and stuff from linguistic landscapes and triggered a tangent about using L1. I don’t mind a bit of L1, especially for learners who do a bit of translation despite their level. For this, I normally have them talk about the translation in the material and whether it’s right and how they would improve it. I posted examples of photographs.
I have had tons of students who translate at work just because they are the only ones who bother to study English. A lot of this work is just to make sure that the learners can get the main gist of the text out in English, or get the main gist of an English text and wrangle it into Japanese.
I don’t use Japanese at this point but get the learners to give a quick translation if necessary, or just check their understanding before they might give a rough translation to their bosses. Otherwise, what might happen is that students translate Powerpoint slides into English as best they can and I check they make sense in the context.
I also talked about using my own email and Facebook as materials and @angelos_bollas said he used his Twitter, too.
You should also consider looking at this #ELTchat summary by Sandy Millin about authentic materials.
You might also be interested in my post about using authentic listening.
Here’s the transcript of the whole chat by @SueAnnan
On Josette Le Blanc’s blog yesterday she put up a post, in poetry, that really resonated. It was about the friction inside about trying to make things better in the classroom and in one’s own classroom. Hers is better and more concise. Mine’s self indulgent but it’s my blog and I choose what goes up. Maybe you’ve had learners like mine. Nobody Dies
I want to tell them that nobody dies,
“Nobody dies,” I tell them;
Everyone laughs, nobody dies.
I want to tell them it’s OK to be shy,
“It’s OK to be shy.”
Nobody speaks but nobody dies.
I want to tell them nobody cares,
“Nobody cares
About mistakes you make:
They’re too busy worrying about their own.”
Nobody’s scared but nobody dares so
Nobody speaks but nobody dies.
I want to tell them nobody knows,
“Nobody knows the perfect way,
So go ahead and try your own;
I’ll let you know about mine,
Which you’re perfectly free to decline,
I won’t leave you to struggle alone.”
Nobody knows who
Suddenly speaks but
Somebody dared
Although they were scared
And nobody cares
And actually
Nobody dies.
Somewhere on the internet you have seen it, probably in a ‘viral’ image. It’s attributed to bad-weather kite flier and slave owner Benjamin Franklin, and goes like this:
Tell me and I forget; teach me and I remember; involve me and I learn.
“Ooh, Marc, can you please tell us why this gets on your nerves so much?”
It would be a curmudgeonly pleasure!
It is used by teachers to talk about ‘learner centredness’ but dismisses teachers.
While my wife may tell me to clean the bathroom and I may forget, remember that this is not a classroom situation. The classroom is a place for learning. It may be a social construct but it is one that has been reached by some kind of social consensus based on an agreed location. People go there to learn, whether by listening to teachers or watching them or whatever. This whole “Tell me and I forget” essentially negates anything said by anybody in a classroom or anywhere else.
It smacks of the dreaded Learning Styles hydra that refuses to die.
“Tell me and I forget” suggests that Ben Franklin was not an auditory learner. So perhaps he was a ‘naturalistic’ learner, or an ‘experiential’ learner, what with the story of the kite and the thunderstorm. Absolute rubbish! If a bloke is clever enough to wheedle his way to the top of a puritanical yet hypocritical wealth-driven society he’s clever enough to pay attention to what someone is telling him.
“Teach me and I remember” tells us nothing about the method.
Are we teaching through mime? Diagrams? Song? Guided instruction? Ben, someone just told you what to do. Couldn’t you have taken notes? That would definitely help you remember. While multi-modal instruction is useful to really hammer home a point, there is not always time for it.
“Involve me and I learn” is just baseless.
I’m all for learner-centredness and even moderate a Google Plus community about it. The thing is, you can involve learners in any activity but if it isn’t thought out in a principled way to develop emergent skills (language use or skills in reception) then learners are only learning that busy work and jumping through hoops pleases teachers. It’s why I hate unprincipled use of games in teaching. It’s pure filler!
It is also a mistake in attribution and a poorly summarised translation.
So, that’s why. I must state that this is not a post to say that you are a bad person if you have shared this quote. You may have used it to support an argument about learner-centred classes versus a droning teacher and a PowerPoint. However, you’d be better of not supporting your argument with an incorrect attribution when there’s a perfectly good Chinese quote to support your view.
Well, Anthony Schmidt started this challenge about what we taught today and it sounded intriguing; documenting a normal day in the life at work.
Today was the second day back at school after the summer holidays and the first day back at a company class after a week off sick. They had a substitute teacher doing textbook stuff with them last week. School 8:30-9:20 3rd Grade Junior High
Prepositions of location on the syllabus but I know these kids know them. I proposed half a lesson to talk about anything they want. They chose nothing and were lethargic so they got a task to describe their partner’s room which was done but with no enthusiasm. Had to tell two students to get work done. Very unusual for this group. Like me, they were probably tired from last night’s typhoon. 9:30-10:20 3rd Grade (Different Class)
Massive difference. They chose to talk about summer holidays. The prepositions of location were fine. The holiday chat brought up problems with go and prepositions so I reviewed that and checked some pronunciation of ‘-ed’ as /t/. 10:30-11:20 2nd Grade
Occupations on the syllabus. Brainstormed jobs with given criteria in groups (outdoor jobs, jobs with uniforms, even more). Pairs discussed parent’s jobs using follow-up questions. 11:30-12:20 2nd Grade (Different Class)
As above but these students got finished really quickly so they talked about their dream jobs. A bit of scaffolding and vocabulary help here and there. 13:00-13:50 2nd Grade (Another Different Class)
Jobs again but not categorizing as these students were keen to talk about jobs from the outset. Parents jobs talked about in more detail than expected. Told the students to speak more loudly because I can’t always hear them. Last class at school for the day. Corporate 17:45-19:15 Business English/ESP
The other side of town. Two weeks ago they planned a business trip to Europe to train engineers. Today they trained each other in a highly specialized area of manufacturing. All from them; book never opened. The linguistic focuses were on hedging and emphasis. Very keen to do well; vocabulary precise but I needed to draw attention to morphology and a bit of grammar (overuse of passives). Set homework to preview socialising language in the textbook.
I am now tired and looking forward to dinner.
Ooh, no sooner do I open the library and email account for my MA in Applied Linguistics & TESOL course than Teaching Practice for the DipTESOL finally starts! I have already passed the written exam, and now just have to pass the TP, 3 written assignments (all started; one perhaps even finished) and phonology presentation.
Because of this, service might be a bit hit and miss. Or I might be living on the internet asking for help all the time. Who knows?
I should be in bed but I am not in bed yet.
Anybody else studying for the DipTESOL might want to look at this blog about it and this one which goes through it and has other cool stuff, too
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