If it's not rough, it isn't fun

Many teachers, particularly in the first years of our career, rely heavily on coursebooks in the belief that these provide a useful and accurate guide to the language that our learners need. Coursebooks bring many undisputed benefits to the language classroom, and most of their drawbacks can be overcome by judicious adaptation and supplementation, as we have discussed in these previous articles.

However, one of the more intractable problems is that the language in coursebooks is often inauthentic. In order to avoid commercial risks, publishers tend to present the same language areas in the same ways, so that different coursebooks often have an astonishing degree of similarly in their content.  This also means that we tend to be presented with an overly simplified view of language, focusing purely on form while ignoring the ways that language is actually used in context.

One example is the way short answers such as “No, it isn’t” are presented with no reference to their function or pragmatic effect, which “could often, in conversational settings, result in learners coming across as brusque, if not downright rude” (Stranks 2003: 332). Stranks provides some interesting ideas for activities to teach these structures in more appropriate ways in this article.

Instead of teaching what’s useful, we teach what’s easy, in the same way that the drunk looking for his lost keys searches where there’s plenty of light while knowing that’s not where he dropped them.  

A striking example of this selectivity is that coursebooks always present the contracted form “it isn’t” rather than “it’s not”, even though both alternatives are commonly used, often by the same speaker and even in the same sentence: 

Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it's not happening 1

Yaeger-Dror (2002), in an article available here, provides an interesting corpus-based survey of the factors that seem to influence the frequency of use of each form in various contexts. While this detailed sociolinguistic analysis may be of little direct relevance to our classroom practice, it clearly establishes the point that both forms are used with great frequency. 

Our aim as language teachers is to enable our learners to communicate effectively. The authors and publishers of coursebooks, and the teachers who use them, have a responsibility to look at how language is actually used in the real world and bring that language into the classroom.

Everything will be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it isn't the end.

References

Stranks, J. Materials for the Teaching of Grammar in Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). 2003. Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London: Continuum

Yaeger-Dror, M. It’s not or isn’t it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategies. Language Variation and Change, 14 (2002), 79–118.

 Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Authentic speaking and listening activity

This is a great activity as it integrates speaking with an authentic listening task, which is excellent preparation for the combination of listening and speaking that students are likely to need in real life. The version here is a ninety-minute lesson taught by two trainee teachers in their first meeting with an intermediate class of ten young teenagers.

In preparation, each of the teachers made brief notes about herself, including her past, her present activities, and plans for the future. The notes were used as a basis for semi-spontaneous talks which were recorded using the voice recorder on a phone. It was decided to use recordings rather than live talks as this made it easier to be consistent in case students needed to hear the talks twice. At the end of each talk, the interviewer asked three questions, which were explicitly linked to aspects of their lives that the interviewees had already mentioned. 

After making the sound recordings, each teacher created a worksheet for the listening comprehension activity. In one case, this was a series of open questions, in the other it was a gap-fill activity. Although the language in the recordings was not artificially simplified, the activities were designed to be appropriate to the level of the class.

At the beginning of the lesson, students were given the first handout, and instructed to answer the questions as they listened. After listening to the recording, the students were given the opportunity to ask questions about anything they were unsure of, and then the answers to the listening comprehension activity were checked. A similar procedure was then followed for the second listening activity. This took about thirty minutes.

Students were then given five minutes to make notes in preparation to give similar talks about themselves. They were told that they must listen carefully to their classmates so that after each talk, each student would ask the speaker one question linked to something in the talk. The actual talks each lasted around half a minute, but together with the questions and answers, the time was around five minutes for each student, a total of fifty minutes.

This is a very flexible activity, which can easily be adapted to higher or lower levels. The talks by the teachers should be as spontaneous and authentic as possible, with the tasks on the worksheets designed according to the level of the students. It’s important to get all the students to ask each of their classmates questions in order to ensure that they remain focused on the listening.

 Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

TEFL Greece trainee feedback

"The course was intensive and at times demanding. I enjoyed it thoroughly though. I have learnt a lot. The teaching practice provided a real life setting and my experience here has exceeded my expectations."

Poppy Micheloudakis

"It has been an intensive course, very challenging and it has definitely brought light into my life judging from the perspective of learning how to become a teacher. The trainer has been very supportive. If I had the chance, I would do it again."

Diana Dragan

"My experience here was grand. I learnt a lot about grammar, vocabulary and fun ways to apply it in lessons. Lots of help with lesson preparation was appreciated. The way grammar was taught was fun and memorable."

Mary Maurer

"It was a nice first experience in the position of the teacher. I was able to see how things work on the other side of the lesson, how lessons are created and planned and was reminded of all the grammar."

Ioanna Mavragani

The Book is not Read by Mary

“The book is read by Mary” was an example sentence in a lesson on the passive voice that I observed last week. Although we are used to seeing similar examples in coursebooks, this one struck me as so unnatural that I searched for it on Google to see if any writer on the Internet had ever used it. The search produced only eight results, mainly from ESL worksheets. By way of comparison, the sentence "The light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison" produces fifty-seven thousand results. So why do coursebooks continue to use such improbable examples?

 The essential problem is that these examples are based on attempts to introduce passive structures using simple lexis to describe common processes that are familiar to young children. But the passive is not normally used in this type of discourse, and in fact is rarely used at all by children with English as their first language. According to Horgan (1978), it is not until the age of thirteen that English children correctly produce complete passive sentences including the agent using “by”.

In contrast, ways in which the passive voice is typically used by competent writers are illustrated by  the following extracts from What is Madness? by Darian Leader.

“Delusions are almost always preceded by a period in which the person feels that there is some kind of meaning in the world, although it remains imprecise and elusive.” (71)

“Delusions tend to fall into two groups: the transitory attempts to find meaning, which don’t endure for too long, and the more methodical systems, built up over time, which are often more solid.” (72)

Alternating between passive and active voice enables the writer to begin both sentences with the word “Delusions”, giving prominence to the most important word by making it the theme of each sentence.  The ability to choose between active and passive also contributes to the thematic progression between sentences, enhancing the cohesiveness of the writing. The reasons for the selection of active and passive respectively are complex, and interwoven with the context in which the sentence occurs.

In the first example, the agent “period” is post-modified by a long relative clause in a way which would not be possible if “period” were at the beginning as the subject of an active sentence. Active voice is used for  the second verb (“the person feels” rather than “it is felt”) because the desired focus is on the person experiencing the feeling. The other two verbs in this sentence, “there is” and “it remains” are intransitive, so there is no question of making them passive.

In the second sentence, although the main verb is active (“Delusions tend”), passive is used in the reduced relative clause “[which are] built up over time”. Again the combination of active and passive contributes to the clarity and concision of expression.

The passive voice characteristically occurs in certain types of writing, so our lessons should draw on these as a source of authentic examples. For example, a quiz game could be devised in which students would match the three sections of split sentences like:

The light bulb was invented

by Thomas Edison

in 1879.

The telephone was invented

by Alexander Graham Bell

in 1875.

Transformation activities should be avoided, as these are generally not possible when the active and passive voices are each used appropriately in a natural context, as the extracts from What is Madness? show.

Use of the passive in spoken English is very limited, and almost non-existent in the L1 speech of children, so there is no reason to try to teach it to children learning English as a second language. On the other hand, there are a few phrases of high utility which contain the passive voice. Adult learners in particular are likely to want to say things like “I was born in the UK but I got married after I moved to Greece”. Such phrases can be introduced as chunks in communicative activities and taught without analysis at an early stage of learning.

Reference

Horgan, D. (1978). The development of the full passive. Journal of Child Language, 5, 65- 80.

Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Speaking and Listening - The Cinderella Skills

“Every normal person in the world, past infancy in years, can and does talk.”

- Whorf 

In his 1940 publication Science and Linguistics, Benajmin Lee Whorf (joint author of the infamous Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) points out that speaking is a skill that we all naturally acquire. We’re not concerned here with the conclusions that he goes on to draw from that remark, but it’s worth reflecting on the significance of the fact that speech is a skill that we all acquire in the course of natural development, just as we acquire teeth or the ability to walk.

In our methodology textbooks, all four of the language skills - reading, writing, listening and speaking - are given roughly equal weight. But in the coursebooks we use in the classroom, there generally seems to be a lot more reading and writing, and a lot less speaking and listening. A coursebook designed for around 120 classroom hours over the course of a year may well only have a couple of hours’ worth of listening material on the accompanying CD, while speaking activities are generally regarded as an optional extra at the end of the lesson and are often omitted, particularly in schools with large classes. Of course, the relative emphasis given to each of the four skills varies depending on the style of the book and the level for which it’s intended.

More significant differences are often noticeable in the respective weight given to the language skills on the one hand and the language systems – pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar – on the other hand. Exam preparation tasks often dictate a balance that is heavily weighted towards learning about grammar, ignoring the fact that this explicit knowledge about the language does little or nothing for our learners’ ability to actually use the language in communication. Perhaps also because of exam requirements, there is often a strong emphasis also on writing, including many types of texts which our learners will probably never need to write outside the classroom.

This approach to the teaching of language skills overlooks the radical difference between the way the skills are naturally developed and used in real life. Throughout history, speaking has always been the primary means of human communication. It’s only in relatively recent years that most societies have become literate, with the majority of people knowing how to read and write. And however desirable this is, we should recognize that most people most days read very little and write even less, while their day is filled with conversation and other oral interaction.

 Reading and writing, even in our first language, are skills that need to be taught and learnt through study, while listening and speaking are things that we naturally do. This radical difference should be reflected in the approaches that we take to teaching each of the four skills, in order to equip our learners with the ability to be able to succeed in the situations where they will actually use the language.

Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Employing a Native Speaker Teacher of English

In the current economic situation, it is more important than ever for your school to be distinguished by the quality of the services that you provide. One simple way to stand out from the crowd is to employ a native speaker teacher of English.

A native speaker is a constant source of authentic language, and when all the classroom interaction takes place through the medium of English, the students absorb a lot more language. They are using English to talk to an English person, and so they are motivated by the constant opportunities for genuine communication. As they struggle to find the right words to express themselves, they are engaged in an effort to get their meaning across. This effort is the key to developing their communicative competence. Every lesson is a rich source of opportunities for the development of language skills. And the parents are enthusiastic because they know that with a native English speaker their children are really using the language to communicate.

As long as your employee is from the UK or Ireland, members of the European Union, the procedures are no more complicated than if you hire a Greek national. We will provide you with clear and detailed information about all the necessary procedures for your dealings with the Ministry of Education, the Directorate of Employment and IKA. And the hourly rate of pay determined by the Ministry of Labour is exactly the same whether you employ a native speaker of English or a Greek teacher.

All of our teachers have a university degree and a TEFL qualification. Many of them have undertaken their TEFL training with us, and so they have a good knowledge of the materials and methods that we use in Greek schools of English, and they have already had observed teaching practice with Greek children. In addition to those who come to us for their training, we also receive applications from hundreds of teachers each year who are already qualified and who want to come to teach English in Greece.

So finding a native speaker teacher to suit your requirements is now just as easy as finding a Greek teacher. In the current difficult economic circumstances, students and parents are increasingly looking for a guarantee of quality. The question is no longer whether you can afford to employ a native speaker of English, but whether you can afford not to. 

Contact: Anglo-Hellenic Teacher Recruitment * 27410 53511 * info@anglo-hellenic.com

Free accommodation offer

We are offering free accommodation for the March 17 - April 11 TEFL course in Corinth. The offer is for free accommodation in a double room when two people enroll for the course together. The offer must be claimed at the time of enrolling and cannot be combined with any other offer. Accommodation is provided from Saturday March 15 to Saturday April 12.