Tag: CPD

Accessing Research When You Aren't At University

Marc Jones / / Links, Research

One of my (many) bugbears is that rank-and-file teachers don’t often have access to research or academic documents when they aren’t enrolled or teaching at universities. Seriously, if SLA researchers and education researchers were keen to improve the lot of teachers on the front line then their findings would be made available to read, at least cheaply, instead of in the walled garden (hi Elsevier) that charges a fortune for a 48-hour reading period.
That said, there are little holes in the wall. Anthony Schmidt, Claire Maas and Mura Nava set up ELT Research Bites. There is superb stuff on here from a range of people. Also, Anthony has a lot of Research Bites on his personal site. A lot of academics are putting up papers on sites like Academia.edu and Researchgate.net. Not only that, but some people have publications on their own website or their university sites.

Researchers

Simon Borg – hat tip to Patrick Andrews.
Vivian Cook – Thanks Geoffrey Jordan
Zoltan Dörnyeí
Jim Flege – Phonetics and Phonology
Glen Fulcher – thanks Geoffrey Jordan
Stephen D Krashen
B. Kumaravadivelu
Roy Lyster
Paul Meara – thanks Marisa Constantinides
Paul Nation – thanks Jane Sabey
Norbert Schmitt – thanks Jane Sabey
Ian Wilson – Phoneticist

University content

University of Hawaii TBLT presentations – Once again, thanks Geoffrey Jordan

Open Access Journals/Publications

Apples
ELTED
English Language Teaching World Online – thanks Peter Watkins
Faculty of Language – an academic blog, again, thanks to Geoffrey Jordan
Humanising Language Teaching magazine. Not exactly a journal but not exactly a magazine. Very readable and not written in an ivory-tower style.
International CLIL Research Journal.
JALT Journal. Japan Association for Language Teaching’s main journal.
Journal of Second Language Teaching & Research.
The Language Teacher. Japan Association for Language Teaching’s magazine with some short research articles by members.
Ludic Language Pedagogy –  A new journal about games and play in language teaching and learning.
TESL-EJ – Thanks Geoffrey Jordan

Read more

This article by Jake Orlowitz points to even more resources.
This is Mura Nava’s list of repositories. He also says Sci Hub is useful.
This by Florentina Taylor on ELTJam.

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.

Saitama Nakasendo Conference 2015 Thoughts

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

I had a brilliant time at the Saitama Nakasendo Conference yesterday. I feel I have loads to do because I left with a ton of things to think about and so now have quite a few summer projects on to of DipTESOL portfolio writings and a summer course in writing for a mixture of ESL and EFL kids.
Paul Raine‘s keynote presentation made me regret forgetting most of the little JavaScript, JQuery and Python that I learned but also made me double keen to get back into it. Chatting to him before and after was interesting: plenty of sites and other stuff to read on my list, too.
Jesse Ewak demonstrated a bit of Voicethread, which is something I might use in the future after I have a bit of a mess around with it and find out what it can and can’t do.
I wish I had gone to see Vanessa Armand‘s presentation because after seeing her slides I realised that her ‘fishbowl’ idea might be useful for a reading class that I teach.
Rob Lowe‘s presentation on integrating a blind student into his classroom was a presentation that he gave at the Tokyo JALT/TEDSIG Teacher Journeys conference a few weeks ago. There were four of us in the audience and basically what seemed to come up was that:

  • institutions need to provide a bit more notice when assigning students with special needs to teachers;
  • there is next to no information about integrating blind/visually impaired students (or any student with special or specific needs) into the EFL/ESL/ESOL classroom.

To this end, I decided to set up a Google Plus community, SEN in ELT as a place for teachers to share information.
My presentation was quite full, probably because my title was quite simple and something that most teachers need to do (‘Teaching Listening‘). I felt almost clever by involving a bit of research that I had done and using some unusual listening material choices. It seemed to go down quite well and I felt relieved because I feel a bit like somebody’s going to point out that I’m talking through an unorthodox orifice whenever I start new classes never mind presenting in front of people with PhDs and publications and stuff.
To cap it all off, I have ideas about discourse-level language teaching and JQuery-based web apps in my head, a lesson jam to schedule and publicise and other stuff too.
Everybody I met at the conference was lovely, including the mother of one of my former junior high school students, and it was rather a festival atmosphere throughout, except I had convenience store rice balls and canned coffee instead of cold beans and a bottle of vodka for lunch.