Evaluating and Adapting Coursebooks

“The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.”

Jeanette Winterson – Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? page 33

Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Comics in ELT

Pictures are a great basis for stimulating discussion, which is why they're so widely used in speaking exams. Comic strips can be equally effective as prompts for speaking activities, and can also be used to integrate reading and writing activities.

In a cartoon with a single panel, delete the text from the speech bubble and get students in teams to create their own.  This can be done purely as a speaking activity, or extended into a short writing activity. Once each group has made their own version of the cartoon, you can give them the original to compare.

For an activity that includes some reading, use a strip cartoon with several panels. Delete the text from the last panel and get students in teams to decide what it should say.

Of course you'll need to choose cartoons that are appropriate for the age and language level of your students. The theme of "good news and bad news", commonly used in jokes, provides a useful framework.

Or to provide more support for the students, rather than deleting all the text in the last panel, just delete part of it. Or delete any key words you choose from any panel in the strip.

In this example, the language is pretty simple, and as long as the students are able to understand the text, they'll easily be able to come up with some ideas to complete the final sentence.

A comic strip like this can also be used to make an ordering activity, which is an excellent way to get students to notice coherence and cohesion in a text. Using a comic strip adds visual support and makes the activity more fun. Cut up the strip and mix up the panels so students have to put them in the right order. This simple example uses a cartoon strip with just three panels, but of course you can also use this activity with much longer comics.

This same type of comic can also be used to make a matching activity. Delete the text from the speech balloons and have students match where each text goes.

Instead of searching for suitable cartoons, make your own cartoons for students to work with, or get students to create them. Like all of the activities suggested here, this can be done either on paper or in electronic format.

A lengthy comic strip can form the basis of a substantial reading comprehension activity. Or if you provide the visuals and get students to provide the words, this can also work as a collaborative writing task.

There are several great tools available for making comics online. For a good balance of functionality and simplicity, our top recommendation is: 
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/comic/index.html

See the complete TEFL Greece collection of links to useful sites for finding and editing pictures and creating cartoons at http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/pictures2

Acknowledgement

The inspiration for this article came from Michael Robbs' presentation at the 2014 TESOL Greece convention.

Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Outstanding Teaching

Balloon Debate

A balloon debate is a classic speaking activity that can be adapted in many ways. The original version is based on the idea that there are a number of people in a hot-air balloon which is losing height and will crash killing all the passengers unless the load is lightened by someone jumping out.

The people may be heroes and celebrities, in which case you should choose ones that the students will know something about, or let them choose for themselves. All their contributions to humanity will perish with them if they aren’t chosen to survive.

Alternatively, they can be ordinary people for whom you write profiles including their age, occupation, marital status and indications of their value to society. For example, one person could be a mother of two young children who is also a talented artist, while another is a wealthy seventy-year-old philanthropist.

Students each prepare a short speech taking on the role of the person they selected, in order to persuade the group that they should be saved. After preparing their speeches, they can split into groups of four to give their speeches, then each group votes on which of the four people must jump.

Each student usually takes on the role of one individual, but you could have all the students together debate their relative merits before reaching a group consensus. This can also be extended into a pyramid discussion, where small groups combine into successively larger groups and have to try to convince each other of their decisions.

TEFL jobs websites

The TEFL Greece collection of links to websites offering TEFL jobs around the world.

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/tefljobs

What is Grammar?

"She was nice to be looked at by."

 Julian Barnes, Metroland, page 116

There are two approaches to “doing” grammar, the descriptive approach, which describes how a language is used, and the prescriptive approach, which prescribes how a language should be used. The latter raises the question of who has the authority to decide, a question which often has a political dimension, as in the conflict between demotic Greek and katharevousa. 

The desire to preserve somebody’s idea of “standard” English accounts for pronouncements such as the ban on double negatives, with its spurious appeal to logic in claiming that two negatives make a positive. By this logic, there’s nothing that Piaf doesn’t regret. Would the grammarians who reject “We never had nothing” be happier with “We ain’t never had nothing”? Ποτέ δεν ξέρεις.

 

A similarly specious rule is the prohibition on using a preposition to end a sentence with. Again, this is based on a false logic, which asserts that a preposition has to come before something else because that’s what “preposition” means. It’s claimed that violating such rules produces substandard language, although the quotation at the beginning of this article, from one of the most elegant living English writers, would indicate otherwise.

The origins of such claims can be traced back to the belief that English should conform to the grammar of Latin, as English is a degenerate form of this more noble language. This accounts for the prohibition on splitting the infinitive by the insertion of an adverb, as in the phrase “to boldly go”. As the infinitive in Latin is a single word, splitting it is impossible, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in English either.

So does this mean that nothing’s sacred and anything goes? Not at all. Even if large numbers of people use a form, that doesn’t make it correct if it contravenes a genuine logical rule of English. A case in point is the use of “less” with countable nouns, as in “less people”. This is clearly wrong as “less” is the comparative form of “little”, which is used with uncountable nouns (“little sugar”), while “fewer” is used with plural countable nouns.

However, language is continuously evolving, and as teachers we should be aware of the shifts in usage over time. This awareness may give us a less pedantic and more practical view of what to focus on and what to correct. One “error” we very commonly hear is “the same with” instead of “the same as”. But reading texts written before the nineteenth century, we realize that this used to be standard English. So our students aren’t actually wrong, just a couple of hundred years late.

Instead of devoting time and effort to such insignificant issues, it would be more useful to focus our teaching on the errors that actually obscure communication. This means looking at authentic language in use and noting what language is appropriate in different communicative contexts. In particular, we need to realize that the grammar of spoken language is quite different from the grammar of written language, and adjust our teaching accordingly. For example, the insistence that students should answer questions with a complete sentence makes them sound very unnatural. We need to listen less to the “experts” who tell us what grammar should be, and listen more to the users of the language, who show us what grammar actually is.

 Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr

Dictionaries

The dictionary is one of the most useful tools for language teachers and learners, so it’s well worth

spending some time familiarizing yourself with the different types of dictionaries that are available.

In choosing the right dictionary for each class, the first consideration is whether you want a bilingual (English – Greek) or monolingual (English – English) dictionary. Learners at lower levels may find bilingual dictionaries easier to use, but they may still encounter problems, so it’s important to choose the dictionary carefully and train learners to use it effectively. The results of my research into the problems that young learners of English have using bilingual dictionaries are available here.

Another basic distinction is the choice between electronic dictionaries and those published in book form. For elementary students, there are still more options available in book form including dictionaries for young learners. At advanced level, the major dictionaries each exist both in book form and online, but this is starting to change. For example, Macmillan announced last year that they are ceasing production of their paper dictionary. However, the online version has exactly the same content as the paper one and is free.

Free access is just one of the many advantages of online dictionaries. They are easy to search, can be updated frequently, and as they aren’t subject to restrictions of space, they can give lots of examples, which are especially useful in the case of corpus-based dictionaries such as COBUILD. You can also hear the word pronounced simply by clicking on it, doing away with the need to learn phonemic symbols.

However, just like paper dictionaries, online dictionaries vary in quality, as well as in their suitability for various types of learners. Check out our collection of links as a starting point for your explorations to find which dictionaries are best for you and your students.

 Peter Beech - info@tefl.gr