Teaching English to Young Learners - English Teachers Association ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Gary Anderson, well-known teacher/trainer for Cambridge University Press, referred to his mother’s motto that “a teacher should be like a magician”. What she meant by that was a teacher who could mould students into good, timid, and fast learners. Maybe not the same thing Sting had in mind in the song. What teachers today need are effective methods in their teaching materials. Gary said no coursebook is perfect and no student or teacher is perfect, and that’s why there’s a need for a book inside the box and course materials for outside the box: books, readers, electronic stuff, DVD-ROMs, and an interactive whiteboard. Besides the fact that no student is perfect, they all learn differently – something we teachers have known since the beginning. But what types of learners are there? A plethora, it would appear: there are those who learn with words (linguistic), through analogy and abstraction (logical), by manipulating objects and who have good hand-eye coordination (visual spatial), through rhythm and music (musical intelligence), and through body movements (body kinesthetic). Gary led us all through a variety of activities from Kid’s Box, demonstrating who we were in terms of learners and showing us that the method did indeed have elements for each type of learner. He didn’t have time to do everything, he said, amidst groans from those who wanted to do everything! The activities from e-learning include an i-dictionary, i-box and lots of games and stories on the interactive whiteboard, a relatively cheap and imaginative tool, given all the things you can do with it and all the things you can create with it. The digitalized form of the book provides a very attractive effective and affective learning device. Those of us who use it already didn’t have to be convinced. As a magician and real pro himself, Gary may have given this talk a hundred times, but the audience was excited and enthusiastic even though the workshop followed the lunch break. He left us with the idea that you can really reach out and touch someone and have fun learning through Kid’s Box. Diana Gordy W O R K S H O P : Teacher and student expectations when working in an intercultural environment P R E S E N T E R : Chris Goddard Chris Goddard is a cross-cultural trainer, specializing in English and Chinese differences. He works in companies both in the UK and China but also runs courses for EFL teachers, the field in which he started his career. Even though Chris had to cram his normal four-hour talk into 90 minutes, he succeeded in giving us an insight into possible cross-cultural issues in the English classroom in an engaging and humorous way. His talk raised our awareness of differences in values, attitudes, and behaviour in students who come from different cultural backgrounds, which can result in a mismatch between students’ and teachers’expectations. To demonstrate these differences Chris combined personal anecdotes with statistical charts comparing various attributes of different cultures. According to the ‘Iceberg Theory’, somebody’s outward behaviour is the tip of an iceberg, which consists of a vast mound of cultural values and assumptions, coming from a person’s: • history • religion • social environment • parents • school • media To illustrate, Chris took the differences in religion between, for example, Christianity in Western culture and Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in Chinese culture, showing differences in values in the two cultures that relate to: • group/individual leadership • systematic vs people organisations • importance of face • ‘who I’m with’ determining behaviour • truth vs harmony • rules vs relationships We saw tables and graphs showing how different cultures are positioned with regard to these. For example, in Chinese culture, harmony is more important than truth whereas the reverse is true in the UK. The audience looked at their own knowledge of different cultural norms through a quiz and then shared their own experiences of working with students from different cultures. Discussion of differences included the kind of activity students felt comfortable participating in, their behaviour towards the teacher, the way they expected the teacher to dress and behave, their preferred learning style, expected behaviour in class, punctuality, and ultimately how they evaluate the course. A possible reason for a student being unhappy with a class is that their expectation on some aspects does not coincide with the teacher’s, both, of course, being based on the individual’s cultural norms. This talk reminded me to be aware of the reasons why learners might behave in a way that surprises me and why they might not seem to be satisfied with a class. Being open and flexible is what we should aspire to! Chris succeeded in getting this message across in an entertaining and profound way. Tessa Osborne W O R K S H O P : Teaching adults ‘real’ English: core, explore and more P R E S E N T E R : Gary Anderson Gary Anderson’s session focused on a presentation of the new coursebook English Unlimited, aiming to introduce key features of the books whilst exemplifying good teaching practice in the way he gave his presentation. He first drew the attention of the 20-plus participants by playing music, a way he likes to begin classes. Via Jimi Hendrix’s Are you experienced?, he asked us to put ourselves in the position of our learners, and to consider what previous experience – language learning and otherwise – they bring to class, and how this affects the way they learn. He emphasized that adult learners need more than just core language. They have personal life experiences and need the means to put these into words. He then invited us to consider whether deductive or inductive learning is a better approach. After receiving our ideas, he craftily suggested a third alternative: seductively. This, he suggested, is the approach used in English Unlimited, a Cambridge series which came out in Spring 2010. He explained that the texts in the book feature authentic language, produced by both native and non-native speakers. The recordings are unscripted, full of “messy” natural language, and expose learners to signposting phrases, the vague language used in real life, and a variety of accents. Keywords chosen for analysis in the books are chosen based on corpus analysis and frequency, rather than a particular writer’s preferences. Through his PowerPoint slides, Gary showed us how the books present grammar and vocabulary. We also saw some of the electronic resources available for students to learn autonomously outside the classroom, and also watched some videos from the series. He ended by reviewing both what he had shown us during the session and the manner in which he had done it. Use of realia and cartoons to emphasize key points and using songs in class were some ideas we could take away with us to use in our classes. Michelle Mayes W O R K S H O P : Developing decision making and speaking skills through intercultural awareness P R E S E N T E R : Paul Henderson Paul started the session by getting the participants to rank the results of a survey ETAS Journal 28/3 Summer 2011 53
asking people what they feared the most. The most common fear was flying, followed by public speaking, and then death. As Jerry Seinfeld said, “This means to the average person that if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Even more terrifying than making a presentation in your own language is making a presentation in something other than your mother tongue. Paul showed us that the things which are intimidating about public speaking also frighten and inhibit people in normal conversation in a second language, and offered advice for learner and teacher behaviour to alleviate these factors. The most important thing for any public speaker to do is to focus on the message. Speaking in a foreign language is always difficult and errors are inevitable. By remaining focused on the message rather than absolute linguistic accuracy, the speaker has an achievable goal which is shared by the audience. An expectation of perfect language use is unrealistic even for native speakers, and failure leads to frustration, anger, embarrassment, confusion, and further errors. So, how can teachers get this message across to our students? Many of us are guilty of error correction during and after oral exercises, and many students expect it. This sends a very clear message to the students that even when we ask them to complete a task, the errors are still the things we notice first. We need to make an effort to clearly separate task-achievement feedback from error-correction feedback so the students know why we are listening. But if we aren’t correcting their errors, how will our students improve? Thinking and preparation time are crucial in reducing errors, as are opportunities to practice and repeat. By providing initial support and then slowly increasing the student’s independence, confidence in their own abilities is established, they find themselves completing the basic task, and then adding in more detail as they start to internalize the main parts. Error correction is still useful as long as it is discrete and never directly after a task or even at the end of the lesson. Furthermore, task-achievement feedback should be student-focused. It must be clear beforehand what the criteria are, whether they are determined by the tutor or the students, and the students should also have an opportunity to evaluate their own performance and their peers’ performances. The workshop finished with several useful activity suggestions for increasing both accuracy and fluency: thinking and planning activities, collaborative group tasks, student-designed tasks, text memorization 54 ETAS Journal 28/3 Summer 2011 games, and active listening activities. Participants left with a wealth of information and ideas to try in their classrooms. Ben Hoyt W O R K S H O P : Constructing the English Profile P R E S E N T E R : Annette Capel Annette told us all about the English Vocabulary Profile project that she has spent the last few years of her life working on, which is one of three strands in the English Profile programme, along with research into grammar and functions. The EP is a valuable resource for authors, editors, syllabus designers, teacher trainers, researchers, and examination writers. A long-term web-based research programme, it sets out to understand what the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) actually means for English by investigating what learner English is really like and developing reference descriptions for each level of the CEFR. The English Profile programme builds on activities/skills identified in the CEFR ‘can do’ statements to provide much more linguistic detail in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and functions. The questions being addressed by the English Profile programme are: • Which grammatical constructions are being used at each CEFR level, and at what point are they used accurately? • What lexical range do learners have at each level? • How does the language being used compare to native speaker English? • Which linguistic features characterise and distinguish the six levels? EP projects are conducting corpus-informed research to find out what learners can do. Corpus-informed research: • provides real language data • highlights what is frequent • clearly shows typical patterns: structures, collocations, phrases, phrasal verbs, idioms • captures change over time, as a corpus is constantly updated A vitally important tool in this research has been the Cambridge Learner Corpus, jointly developed by CUP and Cambridge ESOL, currently with over 43 million words, 180,000 exam scripts and 130 first languages. It contains over 20 million words coded for errors using 88 different error codes to allow for finely-tuned research and analysis. It has been searched alongside spoken and written native speaker corpora, the Cambridge ESOL Vocabulary Lists (KET & PET), Breakthrough, Waystage, Threshold & Vantage syllabi, the Cambridge Readers wordlists, wordlists in current coursebooks and vocabulary books, and the Hindmarsh English Lexicon. The English Vocabulary Profile project has set out to identify what learners can do from A1 to C2 levels of the CEFR by finding out what meanings of words they are familiar with. At the C levels, extra sources have been made use of, including the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), the Academic Formulas List (Ellis and Simpson-Vlach, 2010) and research into phrasal expressions (Martinez, 2010). Annette told us about some of the issues that have needed to be addressed when compiling the EVP, such as the existence of a large number of polysemous words in English (words with multiple meanings). To give a flavour of what this involves, try to answer the following questions: • How many meanings does the English word case have? • Which is the most frequent meaning for first language speakers? • Which sense is likely to be taught first to elementary learners? • Which sense is the most important in Academic English? Other complex issues relate to affixation and word families, an important part of language teaching and testing. Determining at what level learners could be said to be familiar with affixes and suffixes is being decided by examining frequency and transparency of meaning. The suffix ‘-able’ for instance has an ‘easier’, more transparent meaning in words like downloadable/enjoyable than in others such as changeable/knowledgeable. While the Cambridge Learner Corpus has been an invaluable tool, it is a corpus of written learner English, so learners’ spoken uses of words are not captured by it. The language that it contains was generated in response to examination tasks and may not, therefore, provide a full picture of learners’ knowledge. The development of the English Profile Corpus is intended to address these two issues by providing 10 million words of non-exam learner data (20% spoken and 80% written). Data collection is via the English Profile website. Annette told us how institutions that wish to can get involved by visiting the EP website and contributing to the data collection project. Students who contribute will get a chance to win Cambridge University Press learning materials. Simply visit: http://www.englishprofile.org Many thanks to Annette for telling us about how this magnificent project is going to shape the way in which courses and exams are constructed in the future. Paul Henderson
Page 1: V O L U M E 2 8 • N O . 3 • S U
Page 4: EDITOR’S NOTES “To educate as t
Page 7 and 8: ETAS NEWS President’s Report Oh,
Page 10 and 11: ETAS NEWS Faces of ETAS Support “
Page 12 and 13: What most interests you about ELT a
Page 14 and 15: ETAS NEWS Membership renewal inform
Page 16 and 17: students aged 7 - 18 in New York, R
Page 18 and 19: PERSPECTIVES Interview with Urs Ras
Page 21 and 22: Teaching English to Young Learners
Page 23: SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Teaching English
Page 26 and 27: From the REGIONS Workshop Reports B
Page 30 and 31: REVIEWS A Look at Books Nicola Mart
Page 32 and 33: Library Updates RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Page 34: 28th AGM and Convention Join us in

Teaching English to Young Learners - English Teachers Association ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?