Listening and self-access: a perfect partnership

IH Journalof education and development

spring 201232

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012

Issue 32Celebrating 50 years of teacher training 3Classroom matters 4 • Listening and self-access: a perfect partnership – Arizio Sweeting 4• Politeness and pragmatics in NNS interactions – Chia Suan Chong 8• Surviving your first year as an ELT teacher: what the CELTA doesn’t prepareyou for as a 10 NQT – Lewis Waitt

Management matters 13• Delegation – Letting go or losing control? – Maureen McGarvey 13

Teacher training and development 16• The first ever IH Teachers’ online conference: ‘a proud moment in IH history!’ – Alastair Grant 16• Observations on observations – ChrisOżóg 18 • IH CPD scheme – Shaun Wilden 20• Leaving a mark – Colin Barnett 22• The 2012 YL Conference – Kylie Malinowska and Sophie Montagne 24

Special interest columns 25• Young Learners - Kylie Malinowska, IHWO YL Advisor 25 • Developing Teacher – Sandy Millin, IH Newcastle 26

Reviews 27 Speak Out series - reviewed by Stefano Federici, IH Rome Manzoni 27 Digital Play – reviewed by Shaun Wilden, IHWO 28Communicative activities for EAP – reviewed by Norman Cain, IH Rome Manzoni 29 Teaching the pronunciation of ELF – reviewed by Chia Suan Chong, IH London 30

Contents

Advertising:Elizabeth [email protected]+44 (0)20 7394 2143

IH Journal Editor:Elizabeth Arbuthnott

Editorial Board:Steve Brent, Pippa Bumstead, Roger Hunt, Jeremy Page, Scott ThornburyLucy Horsefield

IH Journal, International House,Unity Wharf, 13 Mill Street, London SE1 [email protected]+44 (0)20 7494 2143

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Celebrating 50 years of teacher training IHWO DOS conference – January 20122012 is a year of celebrations in London- the Olympic Games and the Queen’s Diamond Jubi-lee. Not to be left out, IH London is celebrating its own golden jubilee – 50 years since the first ground-breaking teacher training course took place. To mark this very special year, IH London has organised a variety of celebratory events throughout the course of 2012.

IHWO DOS conference – January 2012The celebrations kicked off at the annual IH Director of Studies Conference when the DoSes’ knowledge of teacher training at International House was tested with a special TT round of questions during the pub quiz. How much do you know about teacher training at IH? Can you do better than the IH DoSes? Click here to see the quiz and test your knowledge!

IATEFL Conference, Glasgow - March 2012 The next event to take place was a party held by IH London at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow in March. The event was hosted by course book writer and IH trustee, Simon Greenall, and guests Jeremy Harmer, Dr Susan Barduhn (SIT, Vermont and former Director of IH London) and Ken Wilson (the coursebook writer and founder of English Teaching Theatre) also reminisced about their time at IH. In the words of Steve Brent, Director of IH London “the IH Party at IATEFL was extremely well – received and it was clear from the people in the room that there was a genuine affection and warmth for IH that went beyond the norm. Lucy Horsefield (IH World) announced that IH affiliates would be offering 50 Teacher Training Scholarships as part of the 50th celebrations.”.

During IATEFL we were also giving out special commemorative badges at the IH London stand to all those who had trained with IH over the 50 years. This seemed to jog many people’s memo-ries of their time with IH and of their course as we were regaled with some fantastic anecdotes

IH London – May 2012The next event to take place in this year of cel-ebrations will be a special evening reception held in IH London itself in May. Many of the pioneer-ing figures in teacher teaching are expected to attend alongside current IHL trainers and col-

leagues from the industry. Matthew Bullock, the Chair of the IH Trust will open the event and there will also be a display of photos and other memorabilia following the journey of teacher training from 1962 to the present day.

IH London – June and November 2012 IH London is also hosting two keynote talks about the way forward for teacher training.

The first talk will take place on Saturday 16th June at 11 am and the speaker will be Guy Cook, currently Professor of English with the Open University and an author whose books include Translation in Language Teaching (2010) (Win-ner of the International House Ben Warren Prize), Genetically Modified Language (2004), Applied Linguistics (2003). In his talk,’Moving targets in ELT: the secret of relative success’ he will be reflecting on the last 50 years of ideas and practices in ELT. The talk suggests that there is no simple measure of successful language teaching and learning. Measures (in both senses of the word) must change with the times, and go on changing, as new circumstances in the world create new learner needs in the classroom. So, paradoxically, the absolute criterion for success may be to realise that there isn’t one. Perhaps this is why International House has not just kept up with the times, but kept ahead.

Diane Larsen-Freeman, Professor of Education, Professor of Linguistics, and Research Scientist at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan will be the second keynote speaker and her talk, ‘Are there stages in teacher develop-ment?’ will take place on Saturday 24 November at 11 am. Diane will be arguing that the sequence of stages from novice to mastery as identified within many developmental phenomena does not exist in teacher development, and that a tra-jectory with an implied endpoint is not a useful way to think about teacher training/education.

IH Journal – autumn 2012The IH Journal will also be publishing a very special bumper teacher training edition in the autumn with contributions from those involved in teacher training both externally and from the IH network of schools.

Celebrating 50 years of teacher training

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Have you ever asked yourself why your learners perform well in listening activities in the class-room, but do poorly in listening tests at the end of the course? Surely, if they are able to perform competently in listening practice in class, they should be able to do well in listening tests too. Ironically enough, this is not what normally happens. In fact, what normally happens is that while learners often handle listening lessons, they tend to struggle with listening tests.

Perhaps, on one hand, this is because in the second-language listening classroom, learners’ skills development is scaffolded by what Field (2009) calls ‘the comprehension approach’, a conventional approach in which the teacher leads learners through a sequence of focused practice stages such as context set, vocabulary clarification and different sub-skills practice. In listening tests, on the other hand, learners are left to their own devices and reliant on prepara-tion for passing exams. In other words, learners’ performance in listening tests tends to be usu-ally more dependent on exam preparation than the use of cognitive processes to negotiate listen-ing information.

This may come to you as a blatant overgenerali-sation, but I’m also certain that there are many teachers out there who would agree with me. You’re now probably asking yourselves if I would have a solution for this issue and, to avoid the risk of sounding presumptious, I would say I don’t. What I would like to say, however, is that in my search for ways to help my learners gain more out of listening, I have found a useful ally in learner training by encouraging my learners to use self-access for listening skills development and this is what I would like to share with you in this article.

The article is divided into two parts. The first part is entirely focused on describing a self-access listening project, which I shall refer to as SALP from now on and, the second part presents a few practical ideas for exploiting self-access listening to further promote skills and language develop-ment.

The Self-Access Listening Project (SALP)

SALP was an impromptu project which I con-

ducted with a group of 15 pre-intermediate adult learners at the Institute of Continuing & TESOL Education on a five-week General English course in 2011. The main aim of SALP was to provide these learners with remedial practice in listen-ing so that they could overcome lower scores achieved on previous listening tests. The partici-pants came from a range of different parts of the world such as South East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. It is important to emphasise that these learners were also already receiving listening skills prac-tice in their General English program. More spe-cifically, they were receiving listening practice in both their Integrated Skills lessons, a com-ponent of their course which focused on skills and language development and in their Comm. Skills lessons, a component entirely dedicated to listening and speaking. Interestingly, these learners were dealing well with listening practice in these lessons, possibly because their skills development was being scaffolded by teacher-aided both top-down and bottom-up processes. Another important aspect about SALP is that it was a voluntary project i.e. the learners had the option of taking part in it or not. However, it is worth mentioning that the majority of the learners in the class chose to take part in the project and most of these learners were able to achieve the Pass grade of 63% on their end-of-the-session listening test, as illustrated in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 The project was organised into a series of steps. The first step was the selection of thematic lis-tening recording that would suitably supplement the kind of practice the learners were receiving on their General English course. Therefore, to

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avoid a clash with the themes in the coursebooks in the course program, I decided to use audio clips from reliable online sources which offered free, downloadable MP3 files. The listening files were then organised into thematic units such as animals, food, places and so on and stored on the learners’ USB’s.

The second step was the design of listening book-lets to accompany the audio clips and to include the type of test item which had been identified as problematic on the learners’ mid-session listening tests. Examples of these were multiple-choice questions, listing, gap-fills and true and false questions. Each booklet was designed to focus on one or two of these test items at a time to maximise learner exposure to them. For instance, the first booklet used in SALP included 10 listening practice exercises, each accompa-nied by 10 multiple-choice test items, which provided the learners with 100 items to use in self-access. In addition, the booklets contained a mix of different English accents, including recording by speakers from a non-English back-ground, answer keys to the practice tasks and the transcripts for all the recordings.

The third step was to establish the self-access practice with the learners and this was done in cyclical staging, as depicted in the diagram below:

As seen in the above diagram, the initial stage of the self-access practice took place in the class-room. During this stage, the learners worked on 10 listening test items with my support. For example, the learners were give time to read the test items on their listening practice sheet and then ask me questions about vocabulary, if necessary. The learners were also encouraged to use their learner’s dictionaries to check meaning of unknown words. Then, the learners listened to the recording once to answer the questions. After that, they were given a minute to check with a peer to discuss their answers. They would then have another go at the tasks and peer check

one more time. The learners would now receive an answer key and the transcript of the record-ing to check their answers. I would then replay the audio clip for them to listen to one more time while reading the transcript. Finally, I would get feedback with the group, playing the parts of the recording which learners had had difficult with.

Once the classroom practice was finished, the learners received the instructions for the self-access practice outside the classroom. As an attempt to ensure they got the most out of the listening practice, I felt the need for standardis-ing the self-access practice a bit. To do that, the learners received a separate answer sheet and the following instructions:

1. Listen to each recording as many times as necessary.

2. Enter the answers to the listening test items in your booklet.

3. Try not to check your answers with the key or read the transcript before, during or immediately after you have had your first go at the recording.

4. When you feel confident about your answers to each recording, enter them into your separate answer sheet.

5. Check your answers against the key and high-light the answer you got wrong on the answer sheet.

6. Listen to the recording again, and this time, read the transcript. Check if you are able to see why you got items X, Y or Z wrong. If not, make a note of these to discuss with the teacher.

7. Repeat the same procedure for all the other recordings in the booklet.

The instructions above were an attempt to stop the learners from instantly checking their an-swers and wasting a valuable opportunity to maximise exposure to listening. For instance, by repeatedly listening to the recordings, the learn-ers gain more familiarity with them and, conse-quently, increase their chances of unravelling features of connected speech, identifying poten-tial distractors, perceive accented differences in the pronunciation of certain lexical items and more.

The second stage of the cycle i.e. the self-access practice took place outside the classroom. For this practice, the learners were given four and a half days in general. For example, both the mate-rial and the instructions for the practice would

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be given to the learners at the beginning of the week e.g. on Monday morning, and they would have until Friday morning to complete the whole listening practice.

The third and final stage of the self-access prac-tice involved the learners gauging their progress with handling the test items by doing an innova-tively-designed progress listening test. One inno-vation of this progress test was that it was man-aged entirely by the learners. That is, the learners were responsible for marking their own tests, and there was no expectation that they revealed their test scores. Another innovation of this test was that two recordings from the self-access booklet would be randomly selected each week and put into the test and novice test items were written to accompany them. One more innovative feature of this progress test was that it included a ‘sur-prise’ recording and questions to allow the learn-ers the opportunity to measure if their listening skills and test techniques had developed with the extra practice outside the classroom.

SALP was run for a period of five consecutive weeks. After the initial cycle, once the learners became acquainted with the process, the self-access practice went into auto-pilot, and my role changed from teacher to facilitator.

Exploiting Self-Access Further: Practical Classroom Ideas

In this part of the article, I would like to share some practical ideas which could be used to exploit a self-access listening project like this for further skills and language practice.

Using Word Clouds: WORDLE

One of these websites, you could use to supple-ment your listening self-access project is www.wordle.net, a website which allows you to create word clouds by providing a text and then tweaking them with different fonts, layouts and colour combinations. Here are some ideas for us-ing this web tool with your learners.

Use the transcript of the recording, select words to focus your learners on and paste them into the box on the website to create a word cloud, as in Figure 2. Once the cloud is created, format it to a desired appearance. After that, you will be given the option to save the word cloud onto the site and make it available to everyone else who uses it, or you can print it and photocopy the cloud for instant use. Another option is to use the Print Screen button on your computer and save it on Word to prepare a worksheet for your students. Once the word cloud is created, use it for gram-

mar, vocabulary, pronunciation and speaking practice.

For grammar practice:1. Get the students to categorise the words into countable and uncountable nouns.

2. Get students to separate the words into nouns, verbs and adjectives and then write grammati-cally correct sentences about the text.

For vocabulary practice: 1. Get the learners to form lexical chunks by matching verbs and nouns, adjectives and nouns etc. For example, to throw a bottle at someone.

2. Get the learners to individually categorise the words into groups and then test their partners if they can guess their categorisation criteria.

3. Get the learners to write odd-one-out exercises using synonyms and antonyms for the words on the clouds. E.g. growl, howl, bark, neigh

For pronunciation practice:1. Get the learners to categorise the words ac-cording to stress.

2. Get the learners to find words with similar vowel sounds i.e. short and long sounds.

For speaking practice:1. Get the learners to use the words to retell the listening passage to each other.

2. Get the learners to write a telephone conversa-tion about the listening passage using the words on the cloud.

Taking the Recording for a Walk

One activity I find particularly useful, especially when setting up the self-access practice in class, is what JJ Wilson (2008: 138-9) calls ‘taking the recording for a walk’ in his book How to Teach Lis-tening, (Pearson Education). Based on the think-ing aloud protocol method, a cognitive process

Figure 2

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in which the participants of an activity discuss ways to solve a task, you pause the recording at strategic points and ask learners questions to help them rationalise on the way they’re dealing with the test items. Another way of encouraging a more active and cognitive engagement with the test items is to get the learners to act out the items to generate language, increase the learn-ers’ lexicon and better equip them for similar test items in the future. For example, imagine the following multiple choice question:

What kind of animal are you afraid of?a) Batsb) Snakesc) Dogs

Learners work together and act out a conversa-tion for each of the answers above. By doing so, they’re activating enough schemata to allow the learners to focus more on cognition than recogni-tion.

Building Crosswords Using Online Puzzle Makers

Another activity which can encourage the learn-ers to use the transcript of the listening record-ings for vocabulary practice is to crossword build-ing. To create puzzles, the learners can use Web 2.0 tools such as http://en.puzzle-maker.com/crossword_Entry.cgi, which are available for free on the internet. Here’s a suggested procedure:

1. Get the learners to work in pairs and read the transcript of a listening recording and select 10 words to build a crossword puzzle.

2. Using a learner’s dictionary, get the learners to look up the meaning of the words they selected and write definition clues for them.

3. Take the learners to a computer lab and get them to work together and create a crossword puzzle for them using the website above.

4. Make sure you assist the learners with the instructions for using this website. For instance,

make sure they separate each word and its clue with a slash “/” character and then press ‘Enter’ after each clue.

5. Emphasise to the learners that each clue can be as long as they like.

6. When the learners have finished creating their puzzles, get them to write down the an-swers to their puzzles.

7. Regroup the learners and get them to ex-change puzzles with each other. After that, the learners help each other to check their answers.

Conclusion

As Scharle and Szabó (2000: 7) emphasise, ‘developing responsible attitudes in the learner entails some deviation from traditional teacher roles.’ This means that teachers need to re-eval-uate their role in the learning process in order to start moving towards learner-centred attitudes by playing the role of facilitator and counsellor more often. It is advisable, however, that any change in roles should be gradual rather than abrupt or dramatic. Change requires patience and caution, especially as learners tend to be afraid of the uncertainties and risks involved in changes in general. Some learners also have negative opinions about alternative teaching methods and, therefore, respond suspiciously towards any autonomous initiative. For this reason, I believe that taking small steps in the classroom to long-lasting learning habits towards learner autonomy are very beneficial to reinforce motivation, self-confidence, learning strategies, cooperation and group cohesion.

References:

Scharle, Á. & Szabó, A. (2000) Learner Autonomy. A Guide to Developing Learner Re-sponsibility. Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, J. J. (2008) How to Teach Listening. Pear-son Longman.

Classroom Matters

Arizio works as a language teacher and teacher trainer at the Institute of Continuing & TESOL Education at the Univer-sity of Queensland, Australia. He has 20 years of experience in TESOL, having taught and trained teachers in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia. He holds a DELTA from IH London, an MA in Applied Linguistics TESOL from Macquarie University and has just started a PhD with the University of the Sunshine Coast. He is a regular conference presenter and the author of Language Through Film by Phoenix Education Pty, a teacher’s resource book for using feature films with higher-level learners. His email is: [email protected]

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Politeness and pragmatics in NNS interactionsBy Chia Suan Chong

I am a teacher and teacher trainer currently working at International House London. This article is a brief summary of my MA dissertation: Non-Native Speaker Perceptions of Requests – an empirical study in politeness. There has been a lot of research into politeness over the last few decades in the fields of pragmatics, inter-cultural communication, and second language acquisition and interlanguage theory. If there is one thing that these researchers of different backgrounds could agree on, it is the fact that the ways of realizing politeness are not always universal. Although Spanish speakers could use different forms of ‘you’ and their corresponding verb forms to express respect, the interlocutor they choose to use the polite forms with would differ according to the country you were in. The Spanish would claim that the South Americans are much more likely to call a stranger ‘usted’. Meanwhile, the Japanese have a complete set of verbs to refer to actions of those respected (aka the ‘polite form’), and another set of verbs to refer to the actions of oneself in front of the re-spected (aka the ‘humble form’). But when these different non-native speakers (NNSs) of English come together and use English as Lingua Franca, how much of their own forms of realizing polite-ness affect their expectations of their fellow NNSs?

Prior to becoming a language teacher, when I was living and growing up in Singapore, I was nev-er really aware of my accent. Speaking an edu-cated variety of Singaporean English meant that I was never really negatively judged for the way I spoke. However, when I first started living in Lon-don, my staccato-sounding, syllable-timed, use of the English language, alongside several subtle cultural differences, ensured that I was perceived as confrontational, rude and aggressive. Even the simple task of getting my housemates to take the rubbish out became a minefield of misun-derstanding. Of course, stress and intonation are insidious things that no one notices when expectations are met, but when they are not met can cause serious misunderstandings that lead to one’s personality (and not one’s accent) being judged.

I spent many subsequent years trying to manipu-late the way I used English to create an impres-sion that best reflected who I felt I was. This occupation of mine translated into my teaching. I would teach my students to create different levels of social distance and politeness by using formulaic language such as ‘Could you + bare

infinitive?’, ‘Would you mind + -ing?’ and ‘I was wondering if you could possibly + bare infinitive’.

Naturally, when I first encountered ELF and the focus that early research placed on communica-tive intelligibility, I was skeptical. In fact, I was perhaps more than skeptical, especially when I heard several practitioners openly claim that as long as the NNS gets the message across, it didn’t matter how the message was framed. I found myself rallying against ELF, but what I was really rallying against was the myth that ELF was only concerned with transactional and not phatic communication; the myth that ELF was to be codified as a teachable variety that could serve as a new end-point for our students to pursue; the myth that ELF was all about a simplified, dumbed-down version of English.

Hoping to prove that intelligibility was not all that mattered in interactions, I embarked on my research into the NNS perceptions of politeness in NNS-NNS interactions. Focusing primarily on requests in ELF scenarios, I proceeded to audio-record a day’s goings-on at the reception of an international language school. The requests were then transcribed and analysed, and ten were selected to represent the range of requests heard. These ten requests were then played to NNSs in eight focus groups and six interviews in an attempt to piece together the factors that contributed towards perception-creation in such interactions.

Cross-cultural Awareness

‘But you know the culture, and you know they don’t mean aggression (…) You take that into account, and yes, then you don’t consider them particularly rude’

Many respondents in both the focus groups and interviews talked about their experiences with politeness living in England, and thus were clearly aware of the differences between the ways politeness is realized. This awareness meant that these respondents had a better understanding of the impact of cultural differences and were more willing to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt if they came across as impolite.

Mutual understanding of being an NNS

‘…so you already are a bit nervous because of the surroundings, you just arrived here (…) So it might be that in the exciting, you might lose control of

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the, of the structures you’ve learnt, or whatever. So I would understand that.’

Almost every respondent mentioned the sym-pathy they felt for fellow NNSs, and some even argued passionately that assumptions cannot be made based on the language use alone as English was not their native tongue to manipulate. Hav-ing been through the English language learning process themselves, they were able to determine their fellow interlocutor’s level of English quickly and adapt and accommodate accordingly, under-stand the impact of the environment and emo-tive factors on fluency, and be sensitive to picking up on para- and non-linguistic cues rather than judging the speaker just based on the utterances themselves.

Clarity & Intelligibility

‘I think being clear of what you want is the most important thing.’

Despite my initial protests, intelligibility and impressions are not dichotomous. The ability to be clear affects the impressions you make. One respondent spoke about how she constantly avoided speaking to a housemate because the housemate’s lack of clarity and fluency meant that making sense of what she said was a chore which the respondent was not willing to take on after a hard day at school.

While it is important to be clear in your requests, one should avoid over-memorising linguistic for-mulae when attempting politeness. A member of reception warned that the memorisation of stock phrases could cause a mis-judgement of the speaker’s level of English, thus leading to a ‘mis-graded’ reply that the speaker might not follow.

Situational & Social Factors

‘…the bigger the favour, the more polite you need to be, and also, the more, shall we say, unrelated the question is to the business, you need to be more polite again (…) If you go to a hotdog stand and ask for a hotdog, then you don’t have to be very polite, do you? (…) If you have a request which is not directly related, ‘Do you know where the nearest underground is? Could you please…’ You need to be more polite than asking for the hotdog.’

The above respondent eloquently exemplifies the importance of social factors outlined by Brown and Levinson’s (1978) PDR (Power – do the interlocutors see each other as equals?; Dis-tance – how well do the interlocutors know each other?; Ranking of Imposition – how much of an

imposition is the request?). It is just as important to acknowledge the fact that much of our be-haviour depends on the context model we have of that situation. We would not go into the post office and say ‘I was wondering if you could pos-sibly sell me a stamp, could you?’ simply because it is just not the done thing. Contexts bring with them rights and obligations that speakers have to fulfill and a breach of these rights and obliga-tions could result in a social faux pas.

Implications for the classroom - politeness real-ized in dynamic and fluid interaction

Much of politeness research (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al, 1989; Ellis, 1992; House and Kasper, 1981) has been focused on perceptions of certain for-mulaic structures and linguistic features when, in fact, politeness is realized through multiple turns as meaning is negotiated. There is no doubt that the use of formulae and lexical stock phras-es does help in releasing ‘brain space’ and allow-ing learners to focus on other aspects of meaning negotiation. However, as teachers, we should perhaps go beyond teaching stock phrases and provide a platform for our learners to ponder and discuss, and in that process, gain a better under-standing of politeness as a multifactorial con-struct. Case studies that involve recordings of in-teractions could serve as the basis for classroom discussion regarding whether the speakers were being polite or impolite and why the learners felt that this was so. This presents a good opportu-nity for awareness of cross-cultural issues to be raised, and the impact of paralinguistic features, such as intonation, to be highlighted.

Meanwhile, on the topic of intonation, a study of South-East Asian Englishes (Deterding and Kirkpatrick, 2006) found no evidence that NNSs of that region concurred with NSs of the West regarding the staccato-sounding abruptness of Singaporean English. I suppose if I had lived with NNSs of English, my request to take the rubbish out would be met with mutual understanding and not have been misunderstood as being impo-lite. Or maybe I am just an impolite person after all!

Bibliography

Brown, P. and S. Levinson. (1978) Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blum-Kulka, S., J. House, and G. Kasper. (1989) Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apolo-gies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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Surviving your first year as an ESL teacher: what theCELTA doesn’t prepare you for as a newly qualified teacherby Lewis Waitt

Deterding, D. and A. Kirkpatrick. (2006) Emerg-ing South-East Asian Englishes and intelligibil-ity. World Englishes, 25/3, pp: 391-409.

Ellis, R. (1992) ‘Learning to communicate in the classroom: a study of two learners’ requests’. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, pp:1-23.

House, J. and G. Kasper. (1981) ‘Politeness mark-ers in English and German’. In F. Coulmas (Eds.), Conversational Routine (pp:157-185). The Hague: Mouton.

Chong, C.S. (2012) Politeness and Pragmatics in NNS interactions. IATEFL Global Issues Special Interest Group Newsletter, 28, 47-49.

Classroom Matters

Chia Suan Chong currently runs General Eng-lish and Business English classes, in addition to teacher training(CELTA) courses at International House London, and has been active at conferences speaking about ELF, Dogme, Systemic Functional Grammar, and Pragmatics. Active on Twitter, Chia loves a good debate and blogs regularly at chiasuanchong.wordpress.com

When planning this article I had a very simple intention: to show that you are not alone when feeling under-prepared and over-whelmed for your first year of ESL teaching. The CELTA is an incredible qualification and gives us the license to drive; but with the benefit of hindsight, I can honestly say nothing prepares us more for the challenges of being a full-time teacher than the everyday experiences we have in school. Like most, I walked to my first ESL classroom with sweaty palms, a racing heart and hoping that I wasn’t going to crash and burn. A mixture of persistence, determination and sheer desire for independence had got me to this door, and I had been told that I was ready to go-it-alone, so why did I feel that I wasn’t? You flashback to the initial euphoria of pass-ing, but suddenly this is overshadowed by the realisation that you are now passenger-less with

the freedom of the road (or your new classroom) lying in front of you. Cautious at first, we try to remember everything we were taught by our instructors; check mirrors before turning (check for understanding before activities), drive at the speed limit (grade our language appropriately to suit the class) and keep our distance from the car in front (peer checking before open class feedback). In the hope we avoid the inevitable first knock, it’s hard to remember feeling this way with someone observing our every move. But, you are not alone and, as newly qualified teach-ers, we shouldn’t feel judged for feeling some-what unprepared when reaching the end of the corridor with just a door between you and your first real ESL classroom. This isn’t the first time in your life you have been told you are capable of something by predetermined criteria and opin-ion (be it your CELTA trainers or driving instruc-tor) and it certainly won’t be the last.

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Surviving your first year as an ESL teacher: what theCELTA doesn’t prepare you for as a newly qualified teacherby Lewis Waitt

But the CELTA was only four weeks, surely there is more to know about being an ESL teacher than that? In short, yes, there will be new things every-day. But, when you think back to your CELTA qualification, it is truly incredible how much you learn about the methods of teaching the English language. However, the unobserved classroom and staffroom is the setting where you will learn to become a teacher. And so, to return back to my point of showing you that you are not alone, and that you will succeed with a little experience; what are the five things you didn’t know about being a teacher before being allowed to drive alone on the ESL highway?1. Teaching the extremes. Fortunately, for me, the intermediate groups that I was lucky enough to teach as my CELTA guinea pigs understood the semi-graded lan-guage I used whilst developing my ESL voice. But, what about elementary and other lower level students? How do you grade language for them? There is obviously a distinct difference in their ability to understand us as their teachers and so in the classroom the initial glazed looks of confusion from students will soon be a telltale sign of the need for further grading. But, apart from signing up to the CELTYL (the young learn-ers CELTA extension course), simple methods of communication that you learn on the CELTA are wonderfully interchangeable for lower lev-els. So, with practice, the ice will thaw from your students’ faces, leaving them alert and ready to start your wonderful lesson, safe in understand-ing exactly what you want from them. At the other extreme, grading your language is far less of a problem, but as a native speaker should you be expected to know all the gram-mar points of more advanced levels? Especially given that we have had very little experience of teaching the more complicated structures. Give a native speaker grammar exercises on subjects like relative clauses and mixed conditionals, probably 50% would look even more confused than your students, and the other 50% would know how to complete it without knowing why. It is this “why?” that we will learn in preparation for lessons or via courses like the IHWO LAC (Lan-guage Awareness Course). Simply looking at the book may not be enough and so, before we edu-cate our students, we must educate ourselves. Both extremes come with very different chal-lenges. Given time and experience in the class-room, language grading becomes second na-ture and we start to become more educated, as teachers. As each lesson ends, we learn another practical lesson about becoming a teacher and the weight of feeling unprepared slowly begins to fall from our shoulders. What can we focus on next?

2. Motivating the unmotivated.During the CELTA course we are fortunate enough to practise on motivated students who take any opportunity to learn English, but what about the teenagers sent by parents and clients sent by employers? Although this may not have been overtly taught during the CELTA, much of the reasoning behind warmers, context setting and open discussions can relate specifically and personally to our students. Therefore, by provid-ing them with a reason for talking in class we, in turn, provide them with motivation to practise and succeed. If we, as new teachers, engage our students with subjects that may not be confined to the textbook, students can immediately ap-pear more enthusiastic about relating the lan-guage to personal experiences. This is excellent motivation for our students and gives us as new teachers a wonderful feeling of satisfaction as our students use language from previous les-sons. Maybe becoming a teacher wasn’t as hard as we thought?3. Planning time.The initial shock of no longer planning for two 45-minute lessons a week, but twelve 90-minute lessons can certainly be an eye-opening experi-ence at first. With the luxury of time during our CELTA courses, lesson planning could have taken hours, especially in the first couple of weeks. However, as we find out very quickly, this is not realistic and, at first, planning for your new timetable may seem an impossible task. Time management and organisation will obviously be helpful companions, but with constant class-room experience, the two hours that constitute a lesson’s planning time soon diminishes. We begin to pull ideas from different corners of our minds and the staffroom making planning, once a laborious task, a freer flowing sequence of ideas that will make the next lesson the best yet. Who knows what you could use your freer time to do? Maybe expand on your language knowledge for your exam class or catch up on that marking you have been putting off because you had no time. The joys of becoming a teacher!4. Establishing routines.With each lesson planned and taught, the neces-sity of having simple routines in any classroom makes a 90-minute lesson far easier to develop. Revision and recycling of previously studied vocabulary and grammar, and feedback on last lesson’s homework activity both contribute to a well-planned lesson. It is these routines (to name a few) which give us, as teachers, flexibility at the start and end of the lesson, or as a welcome break from topic. During the 45-minute lessons we teach on the CELTA, little can be done to maxi-mise routine as each lesson is specific to a re-quired skill or specific target language. Therefore, with time and classroom experience, we develop

Classroom Matters

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Classroom Matters

our personalised routines to progress through the textbook, which in itself is a new experience. This helps us, not only decrease on planning time, but provide our students with a reason to talk, making us and them more motivated. The jigsaw of becoming a teacher is slowing piecing together!5. Piles of paperwork.After the first few days of teaching you will certainly become aware of the amount of ad-ditional activities being an ESL teacher entails. After a recent test or writing exercise, marking may begin to pile up and seem unmanageable, but remember back to when you felt the CELTA workload was unmanageable? This additional workload is totally achievable given your previ-ous experience. Methods of assessing writing and testing may not have been studied at length on the course but the workload sure was. So when we are hit with additional reports to write, and registers and work done sheets to complete, this will not be the sheet of paper that broke the new ESL teacher’s back, but experience which made us stronger and more experienced.Speaking from hindsight, could we as newly qualified teachers offer some advice on what little changes could be made to the CELTA quali-fication to help prospective teachers feel more prepared when stepping into their first ESL classroom alone? • An obvious change would be to increase the time constraints of the course to successfully include more subject material in the syllabus eg. Language analysis for the more advanced levels. However, isn’t this the beauty of the CELTA? That in four weeks you can be qualified to teach the exciting subject of ESL. Of course we are required to do language analysis in the course already, but could there be further input of more advanced language or even specify that CELTA trainees teach elementary, intermediate and advanced. In the hope of not bombarding teach-ing hopefuls with a waterfall of language termi-nology, are we not being sheltered from the real world of ESL teaching?• To prepare students for the planning times that

are more realistic, one addition could be a restric-tion on time allowed to plan for a specific lesson. Not all lessons need to be planned in this way, but by adding a time restriction to, for example, the penultimate lesson (when trainees are more experienced with the text book and classroom management, but still have the freedom of time to prepare their final lesson) a more realistic teaching environment can be created.• ESL students who are taught on a CELTA course usually do so in conjunction with other courses, and so setting of further homework could be an unwelcome edition. However, to develop assessment and marking skills, a simple marking task (in addition to the personal assess-ment of focus on the learner) could really aid the development of marking methods. This would give a new teacher a great platform to decrease their time spent on marking and other paper-work from day one of their first full time teaching post.• To develop classroom routine from the start, more emphasis could be placed on lesson con-tinuation. Since it is part of the assessment criteria already, surely more emphasis could be placed on recycling vocabulary or language from the previous lessons. By doing this, students will start lessons motivated by their language reten-tion and communication development. This could then give prospective teachers knowledge and working practice of increasing motivation levels of unmotivated students, decreasing plan-ning time and, of course, establishing classroom routine.In conclusion, it is undeniable that the CELTA is an incredible qualification in the teaching and practice of ESL teaching methods, not to men-tion how many doors a course of this length can open in relation to others. Even with continuous syllabus development, a prospective ESL teach-er may never feel truly prepared for the first time in front of their first class. Nonetheless, however invaluable the CELTA experience is, there is no substitute for the experiences we have everyday in school and the classroom, as it is here that we truly learn to be an ESL teacher.

Lewis is currently teaching in his first year with Interna-tional House. After completing his CELTA in 2008, he worked for the Éducation Nationale as a language assistant in France before moving to Poland to teach at IH Toruń. He particularly enjoys teacher development and writing, combining these two interests on his ESL blog, myesldiary.wordpress.com.

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Delegation – letting go or losing control?By Maureen McGarvey

Delegation is something which many managers feel they do, and think they are good at doing. Ask their staff though, (especially those to whom they delegate) and you may get a very different answer. Delegating effectively brings with it obvious benefits for the manager, the delegate and the organisation. Yet too often, delegation deteriorates into a clumsy and botched process which takes a great deal of time and effort to rec-tify – and which certainly puts many people off delegating more in the future!

What exactly is delegation? Here’s a definition:

[Delegation is] …the process of entrusting author-ity and responsibility to others so that work can be carried out.

However, delegation is not about giving up ultimate authority and responsibility for the work. Delegation is not abdication! It is a shift of decision-making authority from one level in the organisation to another, but the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated task.

Reasons for delegation

1. To free the delegator’s time for other work

This is the most common reason for delegation, and, I think, one of the most problematic. Many managers delegate because they feel overloaded, which is understandable; but repeated need to delegate may mean that managers need to analyse their own workload and the scope of their own job description in more detail. If you repeatedly have to delegate a particular task, for example, then that task needs to become part of someone else’s job, as it clearly can’t remain part of yours! In addition, effective delegation takes time; time to explain the parameters of the task, time to train, time to support, time to ‘keep tabs’. A manager who delegates and expects to have more time as a result is, in the beginning at least, in for a bit of a shock. However, delegating routine tasks (for you) to someone else (for whom they are not routine, but something new) can free up the manager’s time for thinking/planning/read-ing – activities which are often put on the back burner because we are ‘too busy’.

2. To develop staff

This reason for delegation has a lot to recom-mend it. Delegation with this intention can increase experience and skills, involve staff more in the life of the school and raise awareness of dif-ferent aspects of school life. Language Teaching Organisations [LTOs] are complex entities, and delegating a task to a teacher, which means they need to work closely with an administrative staff member, can help to make that teacher aware of the demands and pressures on the admin staff member. However, all too often, decisions are made about delegating tasks for a whole range of reasons, with ‘and of course, it’s developmental’ being tagged on at the end as the ‘moral reason’. If it’s being tagged on in this way, it probably isn’t developmental at all. You know it – and, rest as-sured, so does the person you are delegating to! As in so many things, it’s best to be up front from the outset. If a delegate expects a task to be de-velopmental and finds it’s a mundane task they are hardly likely to be motivated.

3. To cover for a manager’s absence

If you think you are indispensable, you are do-ing yourself, your colleagues and your LTO few favours. It’s part of your responsibility as a man-ager to ensure that work doesn’t ‘freeze’ when you are away. Some managers fear delegating for this reason, as they worry that the delegate will be better than they are. If the delegate is good at the job – you’re lucky! You have discovered a staff member with real potential, and can develop them accordingly. You don’t have to feel they are after your job; they want their own job! Delegat-ing to cover for your absence can allow them to raise their game in a way you [and they] might not have anticipated.

4. To cover for gaps in the manager’s own abili-ties

This is a commonly under-used reason for del-egation, probably relating to managers’ fears of being seen as ineffective or weak. But it is obvious that one person cannot possess all the knowledge and experience necessary to fulfil all tasks and the recognition of this is an important part of a manager’s self-awareness. Using the su-

Management matters

Management matters

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Management Matters

perior ability of the delegate as a learning oppor-tunity thus makes sense for the manager. This is especially true where managers work as part of a team and where they use delegates’ skills to complement their own. As many LTOs move towards more of a matrix structure, with project teams shifting and being reformed frequently, we could, perhaps, view this less as delegation and more as skills exchange/transfer.

Points to Consider

If the work is boring or menial, think twice before you delegate it. I know that we said earlier that freeing up the manager’s time is a key reason to delegate, but staff will quickly realise if you delegate all the ‘dull’ stuff and keep all the nice bits for yourself. Think of regular tasks which you might be tempted to delegate for this reason; rather than delegating them, can you build them into someone’s job description so they can take responsibility from the outset?

It’s worth pointing out that managers who are promoted from the teaching staff [which we all are] can have a tendency to stick very close to what they know as teachers, and not develop the skills they need to lead and manage. This can be disguised as ‘staying in touch with the staff ’ or ‘keeping my hand in’ – both important things to do, and both things which allow you to feel you are being a hands-on manager. However, you’ve been given a management role and that means you, as a manager, have to learn and develop new skills. So, while discussing and deciding on the best way to organise resource books may be something you feel comfortable with, it might be better to delegate that task to a teacher [who actually uses the books] and tackle the finan-cial report, or sales projections, or off-site class timetable, which you have been avoiding. Oates [1993] calls this ‘avoiding the funnel of speciali-sation’. This type of delegation can also encour-age and develop a team approach.

The next point is my Golden Rule for delegation. Delegate results, not tasks. In other words the manager tells the delegate what needs to be achieved, rather than specifying the procedure to be followed. Obviously, this will depend on the nature of the work to be delegated and on the experience of the delegate but, used appropri-ately, delegation enables staff to show personal initiative “beyond the scope of their normal work but within a set of company values” (Oates, ibid). Delegating results indicates very clearly that you trust the delegate to find their way, rather than following your prescribed set of steps. The earlier claim of ‘delegation is developmental/motivating’ is less likely to be true if the delegate

has absolutely no say in how they arrive at the outcome. It also helps the delegate to see the inter-connectedness of systems and processes and make their own creative leaps in solving problems. If you identify the problem you wish to tackle, and let the delegate know what the problem is and what outcome you want, you are likely to have a more involved and committed staff member as a result. And you may gain some unexpected insights as a bonus.

Choosing the right person to delegate to can be quite difficult, particularly if you have a lim-ited number on which to draw. We all have staff members who are keen, eager and enthusias-tic, and our thoughts often turn to them first. However, I would suggest that we also need to consider those ‘more difficult’ staff members. Staff notice if the same people are asked to undertake projects, and this can cause resent-ment. Sometimes, involving a more difficult staff member can lead them to realise aspects of the LTO which they were unaware of, making them less judgemental as a result. Of course, it’s not as pleasant for the manager! but if we truly want to develop all staff, we have to be even-handed with the opportunities we offer, and this includes del-egation. The delegate also needs to understand why the work has been given and its importance. It may be perfectly obvious to the manager why this is the case, but the delegate may simply feel that s/he is being imposed on if the reasons are not made explicit. A great deal of goodwill can be lost by mangers simply neglecting to explain their rationale properly.

Success in delegation depends heavily on the manager’s own attitude. Being afraid that work will not be so well done by the delegate as by the manager can be partly countered by managers reminding themselves that the reason they have their jobs is because they are expected to be able to do the work involved. If their expectations of the delegator are not unreasonably high, then there is less likelihood of disappointment. This is a case for completed work being “good enough” rather than perfect.

A different fear may be that the manager is wor-ried that, as Impey and Underhill [1994] put it, s/he will “relinquish the glory of success while retaining ultimate responsibility for failure.” Delegation is often resisted by managers who fear they are undervalued or who need to take the credit for work completed. Reminding them-selves of their role as leaders may partly help to overcome this, but it is a very real issue in many organisations.

Another problem may be the manager’s inabil-

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ity to let go of the work. This might result in over-supervision (see below) or in the manager expecting the delegate to carry out the work in exactly the way that s/he would do it. Having delegated, managers need to be able to detach themselves sufficiently to let the delegate do the work. Micro-managing (sometimes called ‘parrot delegation’, like the parrot on the shoul-der of a pirate) can stifle any enthusiasm very quickly.

Support and Feedback.

Some support features to consider are:• Providing a clear summary of the result you want to achieve• Setting the time parameters (when this needs to be completed by)• Setting regular meetings /update sessions• Helping the delegate to manage their own workload to allow for the delegation project• Providing training and support for the del-egate, perhaps in the form of coaching. A Coach-ing Circle [see below] is a helpful one to consider.

With this model, the reflection/assessment stages are built in, and this allows for feedback on the delegation process, which needs to be two-way for it to be truly effective. This feedback should, ideally, be two-way. Just as the delegate needs to know how s/he worked with the proj-ect, so too does the manager need to know how well the process was handled from the del-egate’s perspective, and what the LTO could do better next time.

Delegation offers individuals and teams a pow-erful way to develop, to raise awareness, to work in cross-functional teams and to achieve re-markable (and sometimes unexpected!) results.

Management Matters

Maureen McGarvey has been working in ELT as a teacher, teacher trainer, manager and online trainer for more years than she cares to think about. Her areas of special interest are academic man-agement training and online learning. She has taught and trained in the UK, Spain, Hungary and France. She is the author of the online suite of management training modules offered by IH London, author of the Educational Management module for the MSc in TESOL/TESP of-fered by the University of Aston, and a specialist tutor for the Universi-ty of Aston. She is one of the IH London team which has been involved in developing the new Celta Online course.. She also has an additional role as Programme Development Manager for IH London, which means she contributes to discussions and decisions about which new prod-ucts and modes of delivery IH London should commit to.

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Teacher training and development

Teacher trainingand developmentThe first-ever IH Teachers’ online conference:“a very proud moment in IH history!”by Alastair Grant

What is the sound of one finger clapping?

If you’d been at the world’s first IHWO Teachers’ Online Conference (TOC) on Friday 25th Novem-ber last year, you’d know…. well, ok, technically the online platform Blackboard Collaborate (very kindly provided by Oxford University Press) re-mains silent when an audience member presses the “applause” button, but if there had been any sound, it would have been deafening.

With an estimated 150 teachers attending, representing each of the 50 IH countries, over 70 people online at any one time, over 16 sessions and plenaries, a selection of top presenters from across the four corners of IHWO, AND a crack team of organizers and moderators, the TOC was a runaway success.

Little wonder Lucy Horsefield made the state-ment which I’ve used as a title!

And again, if you weren’t there (there’s another coming soon...), I imagine you’ll be brimming with “wh” questions now, which I shall try to sat-isfy for you. Drumroll please.

What:

The TOC is an online conference using a web platform. It allows teachers from anywhere in the world to join an online classroom where they are able to see, hear and participate in teacher development sessions, ranging in content from in-class activities to theory and methodology.

Where:

Everywhere! The online classrooms (example below) display the whiteboard on which the presenters deliver their talks. On the left of the screen you can see a chatbox where all partici-pants can add their views, respond to questions, raise their hands ( just like our students), and even come on the mic to give their ideas about a topic when asked by the presenter. They can

even commit the cardinal sin of writing on the whiteboard themselves! (my FCE kids would NEVER be so bold).

Who:

This was the real jewel in the day’s crown. The conference programme was a roll-call of teacher development talent (excluding myself – good-ness knows why I was allowed to present):

http://ihteachers.com/?p=230

Some of the highlights included Kylie Malinowska giving us an in-depth look at teach-ing Younger Learners, Jeremy Harmer’s pro-posals for collaborative teacher development, Simon Greenall reminding us to take our learn-ers’ cultural contexts into the classroom (none of that ELT imperialism, thank you very much) and Ben Naismith on the ever-fruitful world of “The D Word” (Dogme…shh), to name but a few stars in a bright galaxy of online Teacher Devel-opment.

I could add a lot more information but why should I do that when you can see it all for yourselves right here: http://ihteachers.com/?p=224

And it shouldn’t be forgotten that English Lan-guage Teaching wasn’t the only dish of the day:

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Teacher Training and Development

Neil McMahon, IHWO’s Academic Coordinator Resources & DoS Support found himself moder-ating in English, Spanish and Russian!

Right, what exactly is a moderator? Well when you come to the next TOC (I’m getting to that part, please try to be patient), you’ll see that the moderator of a session is like an assistant teacher – he or she is on hand to give a brief tour of the platform to the participants, introduce the speaker, help with any technical difficulties, and just generally be around during the session to en-sure that everyone behaves themselves and that no one chucks paper balls at the teacher.

Why:

Well, now you’re just being difficult. If the above isn’t enough to convince you of the value of such an event, then you’ll just have to come to the next one. But I guess this is where I can add a personal note to this review of the day’s proceed-ings.

I am proud to say that IH San Isidro, where I work, had three teachers present for a large part of the conference, from the comfort of their own homes. And this, for me, is exactly the point.

Everyone loves a “real world”, face-to-face confer-ence. Why? Well, mainly because of the coffee breaks where you get the chance to actually talk to people from your field who you’ve never met before. But this is, of course, dependent on ev-eryone physically getting to the same geographi-cal location. However, at it’s IH TOC, we didn’t have to.

From wherever people were, they could come for one, two, three sessions, completely gratis, and interact with peers and presenters alike: some-thing which would be unheard of at a face-to-face event.

And wouldn’t we all feel just a teensy bit shy

asking a luminary such as Mr Harmer a question in front of all those expectant faces at a normal conference? Not the case at the TOC, teachers from all walks of IHWO life were asking the great man all sorts of questions from the safety of their living rooms.

Speaking of living rooms – some unexpected conference highlights came from the webcams of the presenters themselves; including Shaun Wilden’s techno-den, Simon Greenhall’s envi-able bookshelves, Zoe Taylor’s kitchen cup-boards and Neil McMahon’s cats!

Oh and one more thing, the TOC platform itself was not the only online forum buzzing with cre-ativity on the day. Many of the participants took to Twitter to disseminate the wise words of the presenters to an eagerly-waiting ELT world, mak-ing it, arguably, one of the biggest conferences IHWO have ever done.

When & How:

This is where you guys come in. Because if you missed it, fear not good people, for there shall be another, on Friday 25th May!

So for all you DoSes and Teacher Development Managers out there, please let your schools know that there is the opportunity for FREE profes-sional development, accessible from anywhere in the IH world.

As you can see from the above eulogising, this is a golden opportunity for a across-culture, across-timezones teacher development for you and all your staff. And all you’ll need is an internet con-nection.

As Lucy Horsefield said at the time, it is a “truly global event” – and the best bit is that you can stay at home and still be part of it.

See you all there on 25th May!

Alastair Grant is an English teacher Director of Studies and the Teacher Development Manager at International House in San Isidro. He holds an Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Warwick in the UK, has completed the International House Certificate of Advanced Methodology and all modules of the Cambridge DELTA. As Teacher Development Manager in San Isidro, Alastair organises and delivers sessions in teacher training both in-house and at local schools, institutions, and conferences, including the I.H. Director of Studies conference in London. His special interests are developing students’ receptive skills as well as studying Process Writing and Dis-course Analysis.

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Observations on observationsBy Chris Ożóg

Oh no, not an observation!

Every teacher will doubtless be able to tell you about a nightmare observation in which every-thing went wrong and to which the resulting dreaded feedback was every bit as critical as feared (I know I could). Such anecdotes often reveal inherent problems in the observations procedures in a school in the first place. In this article, I’ll look at observations in more depth and suggest ways in which they can be used to maximal teacher, and hence school, benefit, using IH San José de Costa Rica (IHSJ) as an ex-ample. It also lays out some guidelines for those new to observing and maybe even some ideas for old hands.

What’s the point of an observation?

There are many reasons why teachers are ob-served. In this article, I’ll be focusing on observ-ing working teachers in a supportive manner, taking the premise that observations are there to help teachers develop and to promote reflective evaluation of their teaching practice and ratio-nale behind how they teach. This implies that ob-servations of teachers are not there to prescribe certain methodological techniques, to merely criticise, or to show off the observer’s supposed greater experience and knowledge, though from experience I know they often take these forms. The key words for me are: reflection, guidance, support, encouragement and development.

How IHSJ does it

As a CELTA tutor and the Teacher Training Coordinator at IHSJ, I observe a lot of classes. My reflections on my own practice as an observer have led me to apply the above premise to all observations and make the teacher aware of how I conduct things. In theory, this should help reduce anxiety on the teacher’s part and help create a space for open reflection, both before and after the class. After all, if teachers are to develop, they need to reflect and observational procedures should encourage this.

Not including IHCYLT, a teacher coming to IHSJ can expect to be observed up to, but not limited to, five times, along the following lines

1. An initial observation within two weeks of ar-rival

2. A follow-up to the initial observation, if re-quired or requested (focusing on points to work on from the first observation)

3. Peer observations, informally organised and on-going throughout the year

4. A ‘developmental’ observation (see below)

5. The final PDI observation

The “developmental observation” involves the teacher being observed on a point they wish to develop, whether it be trying a TBL lesson, ex-perimenting with process writing or working on their instructions. The observer helps with the planning by being available for questions, sug-gesting reading, offering advice, talking through rationale, etc. These observations are not assess-ments in any way and there should be no pres-sure on the teacher for fear of being criticised. They are there simply to encourage experimen-tation and reflective practice in a supportive manner.

A suggested procedure for organising obser-vations

If there is a supportive environment for profes-sional development in your school, organising observations shouldn’t be a problem. The teach-er can choose the class they wish to be observed on and, assuming this fits with the observer’s schedule, the observation is organised accord-ingly. This is particularly important in reducing stress for newly qualified teachers, or teachers who are new to the school, as they can choose a class they’re comfortable with. The following is a suggested procedure

1. The teacher writes a lesson plan in sufficient detail to show how the class has been planned, talking it through or asking for advice if they want. After all, planning is part of the reflective process even though it does come before the class.

2. Have a conversation with the teacher about the group to get more of an idea of what you’ll observe.

3. Read through the teacher’s plan and think through the staging, any apparent rationale, etc.

4. Follow the plan in class making notes on both

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the plan and a separate piece of paper about any-thing that seems apposite

5. Ask the teacher to complete a self evaluation

6. Prepare written feedback

7. Conduct feedback with the teacher, focusing on asking questions rather than criticising, en-couraging reflection, discussing rationale, etc.

8. Post feedback support

What should an observer look for?

In class, I have the teacher’s plan and I’ve spoken to the teacher about the group and possibly even the lesson prior to the class. What I’m looking for is successful teaching. I really don’t mind what particular approach a teacher takes, as long as it falls within a communicative framework and that it’s done well. There are certain things I gen-erally look for, namely:

• a good atmosphere and engaged learners• a lesson appropriate to the level of the group• a rationale of some sort behind the staging• as learner-centred as seems possible• successful instructions i.e. not confusing• meaning focused on• clear, complete language work, with checking and examples• appropriate practice activities• skills work well-staged, engaging and seemingly useful• some evidence of learning• no-one leaves the room confused

Note that this isn’t a restrictive checklist of points which must be covered in the class; rather, it is a set of guidelines which could cover many different aspects of an individual lesson. Of course, you may want to observe for more specific points, depending on the reasons for the observation, but the above points act as a gen-eral outline for me and work well.

Feedback

I believe there should be both oral and written feedback. In many institutions, the latter is an official document that is kept in the teacher’s file, but this doesn’t mean that oral feedback is simply reeling off what’s been written down. The other reason for written feedback is so that the teacher can have a copy to keep and to refer to in the future if they want to, as it should indicate strengths and points to work on.

Oral feedback is, for me, the most challenging part of the observer’s job. It is paramount that this be carried out in a relaxed, supportive envi-ronment and with the teacher’s development at the very heart of the process. It also depends on the personal preferences of the teacher; some people like to be given a list of things to do, for example; others prefer space and time to reflect and open discussion about the class, approaches to teaching, etc. The observer has to play this by ear and cater to what the teacher seems to want. After all, you can’t teach every class in the same way, so why should every feedback session be exactly the same? Teachers are individuals and observers need to remember that.

Personally, I like to start with a general discus-sion based on the teacher’s self-evaluation, in which points raised by the teacher are discussed in turn, with practical suggestions offered as and when it seems germane to do so. As I said above, we’ll often talk through the lesson plan and dis-cuss the teacher’s rationale in choosing activi-ties or why they set that particular context, etc. This helps the teacher see the lesson as a whole, rather than a set of randomly chosen activities. Furthermore, I’ll make reference to the written feedback and discuss reasons I chose to write what I did.

Another element to consider is filming. Some of the best feedback I’ve ever had as a teacher came from watching myself in a filmed lesson and then discussing the class with the observer. If the lesson is filmed and the teacher simply given the video to watch, they can observe themselves teaching and use notes from this in the feedback. This has the potential to turn the observation into an incredibly useful developmental experi-ence. Of course, many teachers hate being filmed and watching themselves, myself included, but as a developmental tool it can be very powerful and only the teacher need ever see the film.

Post-Feedback

It doesn’t just end with feedback, of course. The observer should be available to help the teacher with any points that came up from the obser-vation. This could involve helping with lesson planning, suggesting reading, checking language awareness if requested, etc. I know this isn’t pos-sible in every school, particularly large ones, but if there is a good professional development struc-ture there will be a mentor or senior teacher who can take on this role if the observer can’t. After all, how is a teacher supposed to develop without support? It’s a process and takes time, reflection

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Originally from Scotland, Chris has taught in 5 different countries and is currently the teacher training coordinator at International House San José de Costa Rica. He is a CELTA tutor and will soon be moving to IH Dubai to take up the post of teacher trainer there. His main interests in ELT are in Dogme and and TBL and he is part of a research project, Pura Vida Dogme, looking into Dogme, emergent language and learner motivation. His semi-regular blog, eltreflection.wordpress.com, chronicles some of his thoughts and reflections of all aspects of ELT.

and practice and some teachers need more sup-port than others.

Conclusion

The best thing about being an observer, teacher trainer or mentor, is when you see somebody teach again and you see an improvement in some aspect of their teaching. It’s very rewarding and makes the job worthwhile. It tells me that the initial observation and feedback were beneficial

and that the teacher has taken something posi-tive from what was discussed. Occasionally, you even get an e-mail thanking you for your feed-back or when teachers leave the institution they tell you, out of the blue, how useful their observa-tions were and how much they feel they’ve devel-oped as teachers. After all, we’re here to help and it’s good to know that the way we conduct our observations – the way outlined above, focusing on reflection, development and guidance – can help us achieve this.

What is your CPD plan?By Shaun Wilden

CPD seems to be one of the ELT buzzwords of 2012. The annual IATEFL conference seemed to have a greater emphasis on it than ever this year, with everyone from the publishers through to exam bodies (re)launching initiatives aimed at CPD and the language teacher.

In case you don’t know, CPD stands for Continu-ous Professional Development; a term for the process of taking responsibility for your own de-velopment as a teacher. A process that includes how you manage your CPD, record it, and find the most suitable way to grow beyond your initial training. While CPD is not a new idea, the fact we live in digital times means that it has never been easier to find a CPD path that best suits you as a teacher.

It all seems far removed from when I took my first steps into the world of academic manage-ment and teacher training. Back then the subject of teacher development was somewhat of a con-tentious issue in and around language schools. ‘What’s the best way to do it? How do we encour-age teachers to do it? What kind of development do they want? How much will you pay me for doing it?’ These were just some of the questions that I was asked. But this list is nowhere near as long as the list of excuses I was given by teachers for not wanting to develop.

With ELT being such a mixed bag of ideas, ap-proaches and teaching types, finding the perfect teacher development scheme for a school is akin to trying to solve some of the world’s great-est mysteries. In a time before the internet and

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Teacher Training and DevelopmentTeacher Training and Development

the advent of collaborative networking, teacher development was often defined by school re-sources, along with the free time of the DoS and the willingness of teachers. I can remember being part of teacher trainer teams with a whole plethora of ideas from reading circles, action research projects and pre-dip courses. However, getting teachers enthused was always tricky, so invariably teacher development defaulted to the Friday lunchtime workshop of ‘here’s a cool activity you can try in class’. Those teachers who were willing to go a bit further and take respon-sibility for their own continuous professional de-velopment found themselves an appropriate IH course to take and then go on and do the DELTA. At IH World we recognized this by introducing our Advanced Teaching Award scheme, which gave credits for every course done.

Now, while there is nothing hugely wrong with this model of teacher development, at its heart it did treat everyone the same and did not wholly allow for a personalized action plan. As anyone who has looked into CPD knows, it can take many guises; from attending a conference to writing an article. For a profession that wanted to be taken seriously, the lack of plans, portfolios, and even an all-round positive attitude to CPD, did it no favours.

But as I said, this was the state of play when I first started. Since then the world we work in and the way we work has changed immensely. One of the biggest changes, technology, got started in 2002. That’s when the term web 2.0 was first used and I think in the decade since then, web 2.0 has quietly gone about revolutionizing teach-ing, while at the same making CPD more varied, accessible, and most importantly, normal. Let me explain.

CPD has many guises:

• Attending workshops• Giving workshops • Being observed• Peer observing • Teaching A1 to C2• Doing a teaching course• Doing a language course• Creating material • Mentoring• Action research projects• Writing an article • Writing a blog• Attending a conference • Arranging an extracurricular event • Reading a teaching book• And so on

What web 2.0 has done is open these up beyond the realms of the Friday afternoon workshop. Now you can attend conferences and workshops online - there are almost too many online events to choose from. The teacher is no longer bound to the fixed slot, they can attend at a time that suits them, quite often for free, and given the price of many conferences, this factor should not be overlooked. Web 2.0 has also made research easier – want to know about using songs in the classroom then you can Google, join a Facebook group, find it on Wikipedia, watch it on YouTube, and viaTwitter or other such social networks, you can even ask the ELT world at large their opin-ion. And for one further illustration, web 2.0 has given teachers a voice that writing an article for publication could not do. By blogging, teachers can openly reflect, share their favourite idea, and tell those interested about a piece of research all at a click of a button.

Blogging in itself has become the focal point for many teachers’ CPD as it not only provides a place to record, manage and plan their CPD steps, but also acts as an immediate record of what they’ve done and what they’ve achieved.

So, given this immediate access to the ELT profession worldwide, it is no surprise that 2012 seems to be the year of CPD as I said at the begin-ning. IH World has been leading the way in online CPD since 2007. If you want to do an IH course that your school does not run, you can do that on-line. We’ve also started running live online work-shops and conferences for teachers in the net-work. Many of our teachers are active members of the blogosphere, contributing, not only to their own blogs, but those of www.ihteachers.com and the ihplatform.

Trying to build on this, we felt it was time to replace the now outdated Advanced Teaching Award. We wanted to reflect what IH teachers did and encourage them towards CPD, tying this in with their career paths in IH schools and rec-ognizing all the things they do as an IH teacher. After many online planning sessions, a period of consultation with schools and a lot of feedback, we can now say we have come up with an idea we like.

The International House Continuous Profes-sional Development Scheme has four levels; from the teacher who is just starting out to the academic manager. It tries to give achievable goals at each stage. Each level reflects what we believe a teacher is doing at that stage of their career and the idea is that it goes hand in hand with their everyday work schedule. You

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Leaving a markby Colin Barnett

(Yu Ni) = a fertile sediment that builds up along river banks or at river deltas (silt)SYLTs (Shanghai Yunnan Local Tutors) = one of the results of IH London‘s involvement in educa-tion projects in China, since 2005.Origins of SYLTsBack in 2010, the IHL-GP Shanghai team faced a number of challenges in connection with the distance TKT project we were due to start in Yun-nan province, south-west China. While previous TKT training projects took a blended learning approach, the Yunnan TKT was almost entirely online. Additionally, the number of partici-pants was significantly higher. Essentially the challenge was this: How do you mark and give feedback on monthly assignments from close to 5000 Chinese English Language teachers, with only two available IHL-GP trainers?Two of the main tools selected to measure prog-ress on the Yunnan TKT distance course were:• Individual Tasks: essentially multiple-choice progress tests linked to aspects of the TKT syl-labus, which could be completed online.• School Based Tasks: learning tasks for groups of participating teachers working in the same

school. The group response could be completed offline and later uploaded. These group tasks were designed to accommodate course partici-pants with differing language proficiencies (A1 – C1), IT literacy skills, and pedagogic knowledge.Every month, therefore, we were expecting thousands of individual and school based tasks. The monthly average of tasks to mark was, in actual fact, 3430 and 565, respectively. This was less than the total number of participants and schools enrolled but, nonetheless, a daunting task.As the individual tasks produced responses that could be automatically marked, marking and giv-ing feedback was fairly simple. Data generated trends in course participants’ answers which helped identify emergent TKT training needs. The real issue was then how to assess the high number of School Based Tasks (SBTs) responses that the project was to generate. Furthermore, as these tasks were open-ended, they could not be automatically marked. Enter the SYLTs.Growing the SYLTsIHL-GP had previously run a number of more

淤泥

Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for over twenty years. He is currently the International House World Organ-isation Teacher Training Coordinator. He also maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net and is interested in the application of technology to teaching. He is a moderator of the twitter #eltchat group which meets every Wednesday to discuss issues and ideas in ELT and membership secretary of the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG. Feel free to follow him @shaunwilden or read his blog (shaunwilden.com). When not sitting at a computer, Shaun enjoys growing food in his garden and then cooking it.

can find out more about each stage and how it works in terms of gaining certification on http://ihworld.com/teacher_development/.

Whatever your take on CPD, I think you’ll agree

that this really is an exciting time to be a teacher. Never before has it been this easy to develop yourself and find the training, resources or con-nections that will make you make a better teach-er. The question is then, what is your CPD plan?

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Colin has worked in the field of ELT since the early 90’s in various guises (teacher, trainer, examiner, materials writer and editor). He moved to China in 2005 to set up and run teacher education projects in a very ‘silty’ part of China on the Loess Plateau in Gansu Province (the soil from this region is a main contributor of the ‘yellow’ in the Yellow River). He eventually moved downstream to Shanghai, starting work on the IHL-GP teacher development projects, in 2010.

advanced courses, such as ICELT and TT (Train the Trainer), in the Shanghai area. The graduates of these courses had demonstrated more than a passing understanding of the requirements of the TKT. Following a recruitment drive among our pool of graduates, a team of eight was put together. The team adopted the name and role of SYLTs (Shanghai Yunnan Local Tutors) and training began.The training the SYLTs underwent involved processes familiar to anyone who has done stan-dardized assessment and use of descriptors, as well as how to craft feedback that was objective and developmental.Additionally, SYLTs were required to report on global patterns and themes emerging from the task responses such as • to what extent the tasks were/n’t in line with the task input,• what topic areas (linguistic/ pedagogical) were/n’t being addressed in the task responses Essentially we were adding another level to the IHL-GP scheme of teacher development: moving teachers into the role of assessors and diagnosti-cians.How the SYLTs benefittedFrom September 2010 to May 2011, the SYLTs, along with my colleague Paola Borella and my-self, provided grades and basic developmental feedback on a total of 3957 School Based task responses that were submitted by the participat-ing schools. At the end of the project, we were curious to find out if and how our team of SYLTs had benefit-ted from being involved. A number of the SYLTs commented on how they refreshed terminology, concepts, process from previous course such as Li Yu Xiang…“…During the project, I had a chance to review something that we had learnt in ICELT course.” Others revealed more development in their skills, such as Shirley,“...I did learn a lot from marking the tasks, one of

which is how to give developmental or descrip-tive comments to the CPs. And also, my summa-rizing skills have also been practiced a lot. Really appreciated the project.” (‘Shirley’ Shen Hua)One SYLT commented that,“…, I learned a lot through the process of marking the tasks. The criteria of monthly tasks always re-minded me of the important factors for effective teaching. What impressed me most is the input [the trainers] gave me on how to give positive and supportative (sic) feedback by written com-ments. After that, I applied it to the marking on my ss’ written diaries and compositions, which shew (sic) great success. In the future, I may apply the skills for the work involving training others.” (‘Brook’ Huang Liqin)Lessons learnedDuring this process of working with the SYLTs, I was reminded of the following:1. benefits of teacher education projects some-times don’t reveal themselves until long after the initial trainings have taken place2. training people for a role slightly higher than the one they are currently in can have the effect that you are really after – change in the class-room , Chinese characters for ‘silt’, is without nega-tive connotations. It is a thing which rejuvenates the soil and ultimately contributes to growth. Hopefully our SYLTs will continue to do this.This article is dedicated to Graham Holderness who supported us so much during this project and dedicated so much of his time and energy to helping people grow.About the IHL-GP projectThe IHL-GP project began in 2005 with the remit of providing teacher training to Chinese teachers of English. During its time, the project has taught countless number of teachers in various provinces across China.IHL’s direct involvement through the provision of trainers came to an end in December 2011.

淤泥

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The 2012 Young Learners’ Conference in-Prague, Czech Republic was well-supported and thoroughly enjoyed by all. Held on Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd March, 63 YL teachers and coordinators from 37 IH schools in 18 countries gathered in the Czech capital for two days of fun and informative sessions.

The theme for the conference was ‘Fads, Fash-ions & Forerunners’, but what we really wanted was to encourage and nurture the ‘international staffroom’ already present in places such as the YL Teachers Google Group. There is increasing competition in the TEFL world with an increas-ingly flooded market in some places and the na-ture of our work is changing. For many of us it’s no longer enough to provide top quality teach-ing in our top quality schools. We need to stand out from the crowd by providing extra-curricular activities. Off-site teaching projects are becom-ing more common and it’s time to face and embrace the often dreaded ‘T’ word whether we like it or not

There was a strong focus on using technology in teaching throughout the conference. Shaun Wilden’s thought provoking session grabbed the attention of even the most technophobic among us with his Harry Potter spin and he re-minded us that embracing technology is not so just about bringing new teaching tools into the classroom but rather about adapting the way we approach teaching and reaching our ‘market’ as the world changes.

Sessions were based on a diverse spectrum of subjects including handling parent teacher meetings, teaching dyslexic students, manag-ing summer camps, supporting new YL teach-ers, student motivation and YL classroom management. The emphasis was on sharing and supporting each other and throughout the con-ference new friendships were formed, emails exchanged and ideas we shared. One of the ses-sions which best exemplified the general feeling was that of Carol Crombie from IH Viseu. Confer-

ence participants shared ideas and launched a new ‘recommends’ project that will hopefully continue throughout the IH network.

Having our Teacher Training Coordinator Shaun Wilden present at the YL conference meant more than a Harry Potter spectacular. It enabled us to run an online session on teaching YL 1:1 with Anette Igel live from the conference (you can catch it at the next TOC on 25th May if you missed it). And we were able to offer our IHCYLT Q & Q session live online for those tutors unable to attend the conference in person.

With so many enthusiastic YL specialists in one place, the conference was never going to be dull and IH Prague laid on an array of cultural activi-ties to introduce everyone to their stunning city. These included a boat trip along the river with dinner and a disco onboard, a city tour and a deli-cious meal in a Czech brewery.

By the end of the conference everyone was sad to leave both new and old friends, but were buzzing with new ideas to implement in their schools. The conference conversations contin-ued via the YL Google Group, which has benefit-ed greatly from the conference with an increase in both participants and forums.

Session presentations are available to download in the IHWO Affiliates Area (YL conference page) and conference projects are still con-tinuing. Video from Kylie’s USP session will be available soon (complete with notes and contact details), the IHCYLT standardization took place at the end of April and Carol’s recommends will continue to be circulated.

Many thanks once again to Radmilla Prochaz-kova’s fantastic team at IH Prague, who made the conference so enjoyable and a great success. Special thanks go to Kristyna Pavlatova for all her hard work and to our very generous spon-sors Pearson and Oxford University Press.

Kylie Malinowska (IHWO YL Advisor) & Sophie Montagne(IHWO Membership Services & Internal Communications)

The 2012 Young Learners’ Conference in Prague,Czech Republic

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Special Interest Columns

Young Learners

In today’s super fast world everyone is hungry for more ideas but has no time to read or share them. That’s why I love Carol Crombie’s great idea presented at the IHWO YL Conference. Carol collected and collated simple ideas that can be placed on slips of paper on your staffroom notice board or shared at a staff meeting. No long blog post to read or books to madly scan. Simple ideas to be read quickly & put into practical use immediately. Fabulous! Carol’s collection can be found on the IHWO website in the affiliate’s area. In the spirit of her idea I’ve a new column in the IHWO journal which I hope will be useful & equally easy to access and implement. So here goes...

Five in a flash!

1. Fab website toondoo.com is not only great for using in class for YL to make their own comics, it’s also great for creating YLE practice exercises.

2. Get your YL to ‘act out’ any story from their coursebooks (or write their own). Call ‘cut’ and get them to re-do it ‘happier’, ‘sadder’, ‘angrier’ ‘funnier’ = loads of fun, language & intonation practice.

3. Five minutes to spare at the end of a lesson? Draw a picture on the w/b slowly, team who guesses it first (by calling out guesses) wins a point and comes up to draw their own picture.

4. No computer? No problem. Teacher as server. YL write notes on paper and give them to you the ‘server’ who distributes them to class members who in turn reply (via the ‘server’). Discussion, feed-back, sharing.... No end of uses. (Thanks David Deere)

5. Are your YL (or you!) too shy to sing? Get them to create finger puppets (or give them soft toys) the puppets then sing. In character of course :)

Kylie Malinowska

Kylie Malinowska started with IH many moons ago at IH Newcastle, and is now a Teacher, YL ADOS, Pre-School Coordinator & IH CYLT tutor at IH Prague. She also works part-time at the YL Advisor for IHWO, as well as one of their IH CYLT online tutors & IH CYLT (TiT) Mentor.She is currently working towards an MA TESOL (Applied Lin-guistics) and tries to find time to post on her TEYL blog when she can.

Special Interest ColumnsKylie Malinowska, IHWO YL Advisor

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Special Interest Columns

Developing teacher

Do you remember your first year of teaching after you qualified? How did you feel? For me, there was a lot to get my head around: a new country, a new language, new books, a new lifestyle and a whole new way of looking at my language. I’ve heard it said many times that if you can survive your first year of teaching, it gets a lot easier! So what can we do to help new teachers? And what can they do to help themselves?What?One of the most important things all teachers can do is reflect on their lessons. What worked? What didn’t? How would you do it differently next time? With all the pressures of lesson planning, paperwork and actual teaching, it can be hard to find time to stand back and think about your les-sons, especially for new teachers. Often we only really do this when we are being observed, but it should be an ongoing process.

How?Perhaps the simplest reflective structure is one based on six questions:

Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?These words can then be expanded into complete questions appropriate for each individual lesson, as well as being built on for future lessons. The teacher can choose whether to think about all six questions for a lesson, or to focus on just one. For example ‘Who?’ could become:• Who did all the talking? Did the students get enough STT? Did one student dominate?• Who had trouble with following the instruc-tions? Why do you think this happened? Do you need to make your instructions clearer? • Who benefitted most from the lesson? Was this the person you expected? Why do you think they benefitted more than other students?• Who needs more time to work on what we cov-ered? How can you incorporate this revision into future lessons?‘Where?’ could be:• Where were the students during each stage of the lesson? Did they move enough/too much?

• Where did the class take place? Could it have happened somewhere else? Would a change in environment be beneficial?When? Where? Who with?Here are a few suggestions to help make reflection a part of the everyday practice of newly-qualified teachers:• After each lesson/day, encourage teachers to spend one or two minutes of ‘quiet’ time just thinking about the day. • At the end of their first week, and at regular in-tervals thereafter, encourage the new teachers to meet a more experienced teacher for an informal chat about their week. What were their best mo-ments? What do they feel they need help with? This could be formalized within a mentor system, but simply chatting helps too.• If there is more than one new teacher at the school, ask them to share their experiences with each other (with or without a more experienced teacher present). This can really help to combat the feeling of isolation that can be a problem when you start teaching, as well as reassuring them that they are not the only one in this situa-tion.• Some teachers may want to keep a reflective journal (see link below) to record their progress as a teacher. The journal could be in notebook form, recorded as audio/video files to listen to/watch later, or even in blog form. By using my blog to reflect on my lessons, I have been forced to think about my opinions of various aspects of ELT, as well as receiving advice from many teachers around the world on how to improve my teaching.The most important thing to emphasize to new teachers is that time spent reflecting and sharing experiences is not time wasted. Instead, it can make teaching a less stressful and more enjoyable process. Further ReadingDale Coulter (IH Rome) has written an in-depth guide to reflective practice for newly-qualified teachers, including advice about journal writing, action research and getting subjective feedback. http://bit.ly/DaleCoulterReflectiveTeaching (case sensitive)

Sandy Millin is currently teaching at IH Newcastle, and has formerly worked at IH Brno, as well as in Paraguay and Borneo. She is interested in making professional development available to everyone, and to that end is an active member of the online ELT community, with three blogs and a Twitter ac-count for teaching: http://twitter.com/sandymillin

Sandy Millin

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IH Journal • Issue 32 • Spring 2012Reviews

Overview:

“The real world in your classroom” This is one of the quotes describing the new Speakout multi level series from Pearson Longman. Writ-ten with supplementary material from the BBC, the authors have certainly succeeded in bringing interesting authentic material into the classroom. Aimed at an adult audience the content is relevant and stimulating, creating numerous occasions for discussion. I used the Pre-intermediate level which presents the students with multiple practice opportunities while at the same time maintaining interest with a well thought out selection of material and artwork.The technology:While I did not use the IWB resources for this level, the student eBook

Speak out series

still lends itself well to technology, pro-ducing an up to date

and modern feel. Having used the eBook with a computer and external screen, the students appreciated the DVD lessons given their inter-active nature and authenticity. With extracts from famous BBC productions such as The Two Ronnies and The Money Programme, Speakout allows students to enter the world of British popular culture as they expand their command of the language.The Student’s eBook:The book is divided into 12 units, each with an individual topic which is carried over four sub-units. The units contain a good variety of skills promoting oral fluency and expanding the student’s level across all lexical areas, with a set structure from start to finish. Functional lan-guage is given ample space with a full sub-unit dedicated to topics such as complaining, giving opinions and finding out information. The units are packed with exercises but at no point does it feel like the coursebook is trying to adapt the language to fit the context, and the authenticity remains strong throughout.Extra materials include authentic podcasts which can be downloaded onto a student’s Smartphone. Supplementary handouts are avail-able to accompany the podcasts. The content is challenging but pushes students to take their learning outside the classroom. As well as being very impressive to students who were experienc-ing their first English language course, it also sent a clear message to those who had studied in

previous years that the world of English lan-guage learning is constantly evolving to keep up with the times.The Teacher’s Book:The teacher’s book is well laid out in the standard manner with useful optional extra activities to further discussions on the previous units. At the back there is a well designed resource bank with photocopiable activites designed for further grammar, vocabulary and functional practice.I had very few criticisms on a general level as the quality and variety of the content is very good. From a teaching perspective I did feel there could have been more emphasis on pronunciation. Secondly, given the digital nature of the course-book, I thought a digital format of the teachers’ book might have been a nice addition to allow the teacher to maximise the extra resources in a similar manner to the eBook.Overall I would sum up the Speakout series as very modern, user friendly and up to date. I would give it a gold star for its manipulation of technol-ogy and authentic material, finally bringing an English language course into the 21st century. While the language content is very similar to oth-er content already available I believe the collabo-ration with the BBC is very appealing to students who certainly enjoyed gaining an insight into British popular culture whilst they expanding their command of the language. I would highly recommend Speakout for its mod-ern feel and praise the authors for their efforts in integrating authentic material into a coursebook series.

Pre-intermediate – ebook, workbook, teachers’ bookby Antonia Clare and JJ WilsonReviewed by Stefano Federici, IH Rome Manzoni

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Digital Play by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer is the latest publica-tion in the DELTA publishing teacher development series. In my opinion this series of books is fast becoming a must for all teach-ers. Like previous publications in the series, Digital Play offers the teacher a set of ideas and activities they can use with their students. As the title suggests, this book looks at the use of computer games in language teaching.

On first reading, I was reminded of resource books I read in the early days of my teaching career, such as CALL (OUP 1989) and The Internet (OUP 2000). These were the books that really instilled into me the beneficial effects of using technology in language teaching to engage learners. With the publication of this book, teachers are brought right up to date with the latest tools available to them. One thing I remember back in the early 2000s was wondering how to get

Digital play

started and this book provides a comprehensive look at a wide range of computer games that can be used.

As is becoming standard in this series, the book is divided into three sections and though the activi-ties make up the main content, there are compre-hensive sections on methodology. Beginning with an exploration of what is meant by ‘digital play’, we move on to explore the place of computer games in education and society. Whether this is a new area for a teacher or not, the section provides an excellent overview enhanced by a constant stream of quotes from other sources. The quotes serve to whet the readers’ whistle so they can get stuck into the extensive bibliography provided by the authors. This might make it seem like quite a ‘heavy’ book but everything is provided in a clear and concise way. One feature I particularly like is the comprehensive glossary of game genres and games that can be used.

The activities themselves are divided into three sections and many of the ideas explored do not necessarily require you or the students to be play-ing the game during the class. In fact, I think this is one of the strong positives of the book. In the age of Web 2.0 it can be easy for a teacher to think that all teaching has to be done online. However this book acknowledges both, that not every class-room is connected, and not every activity has to

be done online. Don’t expect a book on ‘digital play’ to be all about using computer games them-selves - many times it is simply the topic name that brings the inspiration.

As such, chapter one contains seemingly tradi-tional classroom activities beginning with a quiz (based on computer game facts) through to activi-ties covering such things as key gaming terminol-ogy and students surveying each other on their gaming habits. Likewise chapter two deals with a non-connected classroom so we have activities such as question practice based on game char-acters, description practice by describing game worlds and comparatives dealt with via popular computer game characters. While I do feel that such sections are important and definitely pro-vide a non-daunting introduction for teachers, the experienced teacher in me did at times feel that these sections did state the obvious.

For me, the book’s main attraction comes in chap-ters three and four, which have some innovative ideas and activities for the connected classroom; be it one or multiple connections. Again though, don’t assume all of them will need access to com-puter games. You are equally likely to be using YouTube, creating online posters or reading game walkthroughs. Again the core belief being it is the ‘idea’ of the computer game, not the game itself that can be motivating and engaging. Always at

By Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley, DELTA PublishingReviewed by Shaun Wilden, IHWO

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In the introduction to her book Jenni Guse states she hopes to ‘provide communicative opportunities [for students] to notice, experiment with, analyse, produce and practice the language and skills that are essential to the study of English for Academic Purposes’ I must admit this was what interested me most about the book when I first saw it. The book also intrigued me as I know from speaking to less experi-enced EAP teachers that they are often not sure where to start when trying to teach EAP. Experienced colleagues say they want to make their EAP material communicative but find that doing so can be chal-lenging and somewhat time consuming. Luckily in her book Jenni Guse addresses both categories of teacher’s needs and provides us with a series of very well prepared and easily adaptable, communica-tive lesson solutions.

The content of the book is clearly divided into six main areas, each area

Communicative activities for EAP

containing about 20 separate activities. Four of the chapters are dedicated to dealing with the four skills; reading, writing, listening and speak-ing, while two other areas cover Vocabulary devel-opment and Grammar.

The skills sections are sub-divided following Freebody & Lake’s ‘Four Resources Model’ frame-work; that is, code user/breaker, text maker/text participant, text user and text agent/analyst. This framework offers teachers a range of activity types that help students to produce and receive meaningful language from a variety of authen-tic sources. Any teachers interested in knowing

more about the four resources model, can consult a very clear and detailed outline framework given in the appendix.

The Vocabulary development and Grammar areas of the book are divided into noticing, experi-menting and producing sections. Each section provides a series of very practical activities that can either be used as they stand in the book or can be applied to any text that the teacher al-ready uses or a text that students have previously produced themselves. This way it gives students the chance to work on texts that are meaning-ful for them. The very clear and easily accessible

the forefront of any activities is what language can be developed, again an important principle in the digital age. The games and resources are the backdrop to language development which is, after all, the reason a teacher chooses any piece of material; digital or not. However, that said, some of the games introduced are a real eye-opener i.e. chore wars. On top of the wealth of activities presented in these chapters, I found them acting as a springboard. The teacher part of my brain, automatically thinking ‘oo I like that, I can adapt it for this context etc etc’.

The final section of the book helps the teacher think about integrating digital play into the syllabus and of-

fers tips on how to develop themselves in this area.

The back covers of the book states “Digital Play is a pi-oneering book” and I do agree. Like those books that inspired me early in my career, I think Digital play offers an excellent balance of opinion, suggestion and activities. Stanley and Mawer clearly understand and love their chosen topic. This helps bring clarity to an area that might daunt a lot of teachers, providing them with simple stepping-stones to incorporating computer games into their classrooms. As I said at the beginning, I think the DELTA teacher develop-ment series is becoming a must for all teachers and Digital Play is an excellent edition to that.

by Jenni GuiseCambridge handbooks for teachers CUPReviewed by Norman Cain, IH Rome Manzoni

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framework Jenni Guse uses for the Vocabulary and Grammar areas, adapted from Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom, (T. Hedge, OUP) can also be found in the appendix.

Without a doubt this book does exactly what it states on the cover. In all activities the focus is very much on student communication but Guse goes beyond just that. The tasks and activities she proposes mean that teachers provide their students, not just with more chances for com-municative, but also opportunities for seeing the importance of authentic texts, promoting learner autonomy and opportunities to help students develop their own critical thinking and analytical skills.

At a very practical level each activity is clearly laid out from the start. A box tells the teacher the skill being dealt with, a syntactic outline of what the students will be doing, the level the activity is intended for, how much preparation is needed and the background to the task. The procedure is given in easy to follow steps and follow-up activi-ties and ideas are often provided.

The meaningful topics Guse proposes are usually of an academic nature and the skills activities relate to those required at the tertiary level, for example, research skills, presentations and essay writing. Practice is also given in relevant areas such as note-taking, referencing and how to avoid

plagiarism.

Many of the activities are printable from a CD-Rom that has been usefully provided at the back of the book and busy teachers will be pleased to know that for the majority of activities very little preparation is required. The book also includes useful exercises on concept mapping as well as how to use a visual thesaurus.

The activities range in level from intermediate level (defined by a star in the three-star grading system) and ends with fairly advanced material (three stars). For many of the activities covered, the teacher would ideally choose the actual text sources from websites; a useful source list is pro-vided in the back of the book which means that the level of texts can easily be adjusted as needed.

One of the many strengths of Jenni Guse’s Com-municative Activities for EAP is that teachers can dip into each section for ideas or to refresh their memories on a specific area without having to wade through the entire book. The book certainly provides some useful lesson ideas and outlines for practicing EAP teachers and is also an excel-lent buy for teachers who are not only working in EAP as many of the ideas could be used in a non EAP context.

Go out and buy the book! I would certainly recom-mend it.

Teaching pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)

At the IH DOS Conference this year, Robin Walker spoke about ‘Teach-ing Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)’, and I watched him impassion even the ELF cynics into openly admitting that they could not wait to cascade his plenary talk to the rest of their teachers. The power of Robin’s speech was not simply in his charming and confi-dent presentation style, but in the persuasiveness of his argument, the validity of his facts, and the appeal of his suggestions.

In his book of the same title, Robin speaks with the same authority that only a practitioner-turned-academic could have as he convincingly puts forward his argument that in a world where English is now a global

By Robin Walker OUPReviewed by Chia Suan Chong, IH London

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language used for international communication, it is pronunciation issues, and not grammar ones, that have been found to be the most important cause of breakdowns in communication. Suggest-ing that low-level English learners tend to depend on bottom-up processing to access meaning, he persuades the reader of the importance of main-taining mutual intelligibility through working on phonological features in the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), while cautioning teachers not to spend time on supra-segmental features like weak forms and connected speech, which may be used to facilitate rapid speech in native speakers, but can be detrimental to ELF intelligibility.

Throughout the book, Robin questions the as-sumptions of adopting a native-speaker (NS) target in English language learning by addressing language variation even within native speaking countries and the role of accents in the expres-sion of one’s identity, asserting that there is no such thing as ‘good English’, and presuming that a prestigious variety is suitable for all contexts represents a failure to understand the sociolin-guistic reality. Giving clear evidence to support his facts, Robin shows how one’s perceptions of what a standard accent is could affect what we find socially acceptable. Resulting from sociocul-tural conditioning, the listeners’ attitudes towards a particular accent can greatly influence their judgements of intelligibility. Shifting the onus from the speaker, and giving part of the respon-sibility to the listener to employ appropriate strategies to understand or clarify understanding, Robin adopts a post-structuralist view where in-teractions are seen as two-way active and dynam-ic processes, and focuses as much on receptive skills as he does on productive ones.

Seeing that most pronunciation books often choose to focus on helping the learner to produce ‘correct’ NS-like (usually RP or GA) phonologi-cal features, this book excels in the fact that it acknowledges the importance of being able to understand both NNS (non-native speaker) and NS accents, while also providing an accompany-ing CD to provide learners (and teachers) with good examples of expert ELF usage which offer invaluable listening practice through exposure to the different accents.

As Robin systematically debunks the most com-mon myths and misunderstandings about ELF, he addresses the concerns that many teachers often have when talking about the practical im-plications of ELF pronunciation: e.g. that ELF is a dumbed-down version of NS English which patro-nises the learner by accepting their mistakes; that the celebration of identity through variation can-not occur simultaneously with the maintenance of mutual intelligibility; that an ‘ELF accent’ or ‘ELF standard’ is unteachable since nobody has it; that a ‘bad accent’ gives a bad impression; that most learners and teachers prefer to have a NS accent.

In a chapter aptly titled ‘Techniques and materi-als for teaching ELF pronunciation’, Robin lists ideas for raising our learners’ awareness of ELF and the sociolinguistic facts that surround it, be-fore reminding us of useful pronunciation activi-ties like minimal pairs and drills to help with LFC features like consonant sounds or vowel length. Bringing in other familiar task types like the infor-mation gap, dictations, and problem-solving tasks to focus on the learners’ accommodation skills and ability to negotiate meaning, Robin shows how teaching the pronunciation of English as a lingua franca does not have be a feat of re-invent-ing the wheel, but simply a shift in one’s way of thinking and prioritizing in the classroom.

An example of such a shift is the chapter in which he and his very credible co-authors provide a list of the pronunciation difficulties of LFC features based on ten different L1s. Although reminiscent of Michael Swan’s ‘Learner English’, this book differs in that it uses these L1s as a departure point rather than a source of L1 interference, and clearly shows how you can use the L1 ‘as friend’ and not ‘as foe’ to help learners with difficult LFC features.

With clear exemplification of how a programme for ELF pronunciation can be worked into the syllabus and assessed, Robin succeeds in making this book not just for practitioners, but also for educational managers and planners. Most im-portantly, it offers food for thought as the role of the English language teacher inevitably changes alongside the shift in the role of the English lan-guage.

Listening and self-access: a perfect partnership

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