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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
Planning the activities
According to Jeremy Harmer (1994) the best techniques and
activities will not have any use if they are not integrated into a
programme of studies and few teachers would use an activity or
material during a lesson without having a reason to do it. The best
teachers are those who think carefully about what they are going to do
in their classes and who plan how they are going to organise the
teaching and learning.
Decisions about the syllabus1 and general course content are
often taken by a school authority or Ministry of Education in our
country. The syllabus is planned according to the main textbook to be
used: teachers are expected to cover a certain number of units in a
certain time. Teachers can also use supplementary material and
available activities. The units in the book are supposed to be new for
the students and introduced in the order of the syllabus.
Good textbooks have several advantages: they have interesting
material, the language is progressively included in the units, they have
clear definitions and explanations, they are systematic about the
amount of vocabulary and grammar and allow students to study
outside the class. They are also a help for the teacher because he does
not have to think of original material for every class. But textbooks
also tend to use the same format from one unit to the next, which
1 Syllabus: the subjects studied for a particular course.
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involves a rigid sequence. Reading and listening generally have a set
place in the sequence and each unit looks more or less like those that
come before and after it.
Teachers should choose the material they want to teach,
although they are supposed to teach everything, as being part of a
programme of study (curriculum2). Teachers who use a textbook too
much and repeatedly follow the sequence in each unit may become
boring over a period of time, and thus students may find the study of
English becoming routine and monotonous, and less motivating. One
strong point of good planning is the use of variety in teaching.
Another disadvantage of textbooks is that they are not written
for your class. Each group of students is different and unique, while
most published books are written for the general students. The
students need to be treated individually.
Another aim of the teacher is to have a balanced teaching and he
is the right person to do it, because the teacher knows the students and
their needs. The textbook rarely has the perfect balance that the
teacher is looking for. The textbook is an aid and a guide and not a
sacred scroll. Teachers will have to think of the best ways to use their
books and should never let the textbook use them.
Planning principles
The two main principles for a good lesson planning, as stated
by Harmer (1994), are variety and flexibility. Variety means involving
2 Curriculum: all the courses of study offered by a school or college.
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students in a number of different types of activities, planning
interesting learning. Flexibility is used when dealing with the plan in
the classroom: what the teacher has planned may not be appropriate
for that class on that day. The flexible teacher will be able to change
the plan in such a situation.
If the activities for the students are varied, there will be the
interest of doing different things. If new language is always
introduced in the same way, then the introduction stages of the class
will become gradually less and less challenging. Students need to
know why they are doing something and what it is supposed they will
achieve. Teachers must have a purpose for all the activities they
organise in a class and they should communicate that purpose to their
students.
Variety is a principle that applies especially to a series of
classes. Over a two-week period, for example, the teacher will try to
do different things in the classes. Although there are some activities
that can last for fifty minutes, it seems generally true that changes of
activity during that time are advisable. Children, especially, need to do
different things in rather rapid succession since they will generally not
be able to concentrate on one activity for a long stretch of time.3
The teacher who believes in variety will have to be flexible
since the only way to provide variety is to use a number of different
techniques which will not all fit into one methodology. Good lesson
planning is the art of mixing techniques, activities and materials in
3 Some research has found out that children can concentrate for five minutes in one hour, while adults' concentration lasts for twenty minutes.
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such a way that an ideal balance is created for the class. In a general
language course there will be work on the four skills (reading,
speaking, writing, listening) and communicative activities.
If teachers have a large variety of techniques and activities that
they can use with students, they can ask themselves the central
question of lesson planning: 'What is it that my students will feel,
know or be able to do at the end of the class that they did not know or
were not able to do at the beginning of the class?' They may answer
that they like more learning English or they will know new language
or will be able to write a letter, for example.
To be a good teacher one should have knowledge about:
1) The job of teaching;
2) The institution;
3) The students.
1) Regarding the job of teaching, teachers should know:
a) The language they will teach: they must be able to
use the language themselves and know the rules that governs
it;
b) The skills they are going to ask their students to
perform. It is not good asking students what you yourself
cannot do;
c) What teaching material is available and appropriate
for the level they are teaching? These may include wall
pictures, flashcards, flipcharts, cards, charts, tapes, video
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playback machines, overhead projectors, computer hardware
and software, sets of books and materials and the board;
D) Different teaching techniques and stages, to be able
to recognise stages in the textbook, so that they realise when
an activity is controlled rather than free;
e) Well-prepared teachers have a large number of
activities for their classes that enable them to have varied
plans and achieve an activity balance.
F) Well-prepared teachers will have good
classroom management skills and be able to adopt a number
of different roles, different student grouping and will be able
to maintain discipline. Without these areas of knowledge a
teacher is in a poor position to make decisions about lesson
planning.
2) Regarding the institution teachers should know:
a) Time, length, frequency: teachers should know at
what time, for how long and how often classes take place,
because this influences all planning;
B) Physical conditions: teachers should know the
physical conditions that exist in the place where they teach -
electricity for socket, condition of the chairs and board, the
brightness of the light, the size of the room;
c) Syllabus: teachers should be familiar with the
syllabus the institution has for the levels that are being taught
and be sure they can cover the most part of it;
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D) Exams: teachers should know what types of exams
(if any) the students will have to take and when, because they
will try to ensure that the students are successful in tests and
exams;
e) Restrictions: teachers should be aware of any
restrictions imposed by the institution upon their teaching
(class size, availability of teaching materials, and physical
conditions).
3) Regarding the students teachers should know:
a) Who they are: age, sex, social background,
occupation (when teaching to adults);
b) The students' feelings about learning English -
motivation and attitude, educational background, knowledge
(they may be false beginners4), interests (a primary ingredient
of motivation);
c) What students need: they learn English for a variety
of reasons - for instance, for their professional lives (they read
scientific journals, want to become travel guides, etc).
The majority of students will be studying English for a reason
that makes their needs difficult to identify. In such cases the teacher
will teach the four skills, making his decision about how much weight
to give each skill as best as he can.
The pre-plan
4 False beginner: a person who has knowledge of English from different sources except going to regular classes or being tutored by a teacher
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Before writing down the exact contents of the plan the teacher
needs to think about what he is going to do in a general way, so that
his decisions are reasonably taken. Harmer (1994) considers four main
areas: activities, language skills, language type, and subject and
content. When the teacher has knowledge of what he wants to do as a
result of considering these areas, he can decide whether his ideas are
feasible, given the institution and its restrictions. The concept of the
pre-plan can be summarised like this:
Fig. 1 The concept of the pre-plan (after Jeremy Harmer)
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Teacher's knowledge of the students
Teacher's knowledge of the syllabus
Activities Language skills Language type Subject and content
The institution and its restrictions
The plan
METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
There are four major elements of the pre-plan:
1) Activities: is a term for a general description of what will
happen in the class - games, a simulation, introduction of new
language, parallel writing or story reconstruction, listening,
information gap task, etc.
Teachers should make decisions about activities independently
of what language or language skills they have to teach. Their first
planning thought should centre round what kind of class would be
appropriate for the particular group of students on a particular day.
The decision about what activities are to be included in a plan is a
vital first stage in the planning process. The teacher has to consider
what would be the best and motivating for their students.
2) Language skills: teachers will have to decide what language
skills to include in the class, depending on the activity chosen - to
concentrate on one skill or a combination of skills.
3) Language type: teachers will have to decide what language
is to be focused on during the class - general and unpredictable, yes/no
questions, talk about the past, etc.
4) Subject and content: the last and sometimes most important
decision is what kind of content the class will have - a grammar issue,
a reading passage will be chosen in terms of the students and their
interests, as it is very important for the communication of ideas.
When a teacher has a general idea of what he is going to do in
the class, he will consider the institution and the imposed restrictions.
If he has decided to take a song into class, he must make sure that this
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
is possible: if there is a tape of the song available, if there is a good
tape recorder, if the room is provided with functional sockets, if the
activity is suitable for the number and age of the students. He must ask
himself if he will be able to do all the things he wants in the available
time.
Experienced teachers consider all these details without
consciously realising they are doing so. The new teacher or the teacher
starting the job in a new school or institute will have to bear all these
in mind.
The plan
The plan has five major components:
a) A description of the class which include a description of
the students, a statement of time, frequency and duration of the
class, and comments about physical conditions and/or restrictions.
b) Recent work implies details of recent work the students
have done: the activities they have been involved in, the subject
and content of their lessons and the language skills and type they
have studied.
c) Objectives: teachers usually have more than one
because there are more than one stage in the class and each one
will achieve some kind of objective. Objectives are the aims
teachers have for the students and are written in terms of what the
students will do or achieve. They are written in general terms
(e.g., to relax the students), in terms of skills (e.g., practice in
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extracting specific information from a text), and in terms of
language (e.g., practice the use of the past tense simple with
regular and irregular verbs, questions and answers).
d) Contents: the most detailed part of the plan is the
section in which the contents are written down - teachers write
exactly what they are going to do in the class. This section has
five headings:
- context about the situation - what the subject of the
learning is;
- activity and class organisation - what the activity will
be and whether the class will be working in pairs, groups or
teams;
- teaching materials - teachers indicate what will be
used: the board, wall pictures, tape recording, etc.;
- Language - teachers describe the language that will be
used. If new language is to be introduced, they will list some
or all of the models. If the activity is an oral communicative
one, they could write 'unpredictable'. Otherwise they can write
'advice language', e.g., and give some indication of what kind
of language items they expect;
- Teachers should take into consideration possible
problems and have in mind ways of solving them because
certain activities have complicated organisation and it would
be good to know how to overcome them.
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e) Additional possibilities - teachers write down other
activities they could use, if it becomes necessary.
Why plan?
In his article on Lesson Planning Farrell (in Methodology in
Language Teaching 2002) says that language teachers may ask
themselves why they should bother writing plans for every lesson.
Some teachers write down detailed daily plans; others do the planning
mentally. Pre-service5 teachers say they write daily lesson plans only
because a supervisor, cooperating teacher, or school administrator
requires them to do so. After they graduate, many teachers give up
writing lesson plans. However, not many teachers enter a classroom
without some kind of plan. Lesson plans are systematic records of a
teacher's thoughts about what will be covered during a lesson.
Richards (1998) suggests that lesson plans help the teacher think about
the lesson in advance to "resolve problems and difficulties, to provide
a structure for a lesson, to provide a 'map' for the teacher to follow,
and to provide a record of what has been taught" (p. 103).
There are also internal and external reasons for planning
lessons. Teachers plan for internal reasons in order to feel more
confident, to learn the subject matter better, to enable lessons to run
more smoothly, and to anticipate problems before they happen.
Teachers plan for external reasons in order to satisfy the expectations
of the principal or supervisor and to guide a substitute teacher in case
5 Pre-service training is instruction which takes place before a person begins a job or task.
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the class needs one. Lesson planning is especially important for pre-
service teachers because they may feel more of a need to be in control
before the lesson begins.
Daily lesson planning can benefit English teachers in the
following ways:
A plan can help the teacher think about content,
materials, sequencing, timing, and activities.
A plan provides security (in the form of a map) in the
sometimes unpredictable atmosphere of a classroom.
A plan is a log of what has been taught.
A plan can help a substitute to smoothly take over a
class when the teacher cannot teach. Daily planning of lessons also
benefits students because it takes into account the different
backgrounds, interests, learning styles, and abilities of the students in
one class.
Models of lesson planning
There are a number of approaches to lesson planning. The
dominant model of lesson planning is Tyler's (1949) rational-linear
framework. Tyler's model has four steps that run sequentially:
(1) specify objectives;
(2) select learning activities;
(3) organize learning activities; and
(4) specify methods of evaluation.
Tyler's model is still used widely in spite of evidence that
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suggests that teachers rarely follow the sequential, linear process
outlined in the steps. For example, Taylor (1970) studied what
teachers actually did when they planned their lessons and found that
they focused mostly on the interests and needs of their students. More
important, he found that teachers were not well prepared in teacher-
education programs for lesson planning.
In response to these findings, Yinger (1980) developed an
alternative model in which planning takes place in stages. The first
stage consists of "problem conception" in which planning starts with a
discovery cycle of the integration of the teacher's goals, knowledge,
and experience. The second stage sees the problem formulated and a
solution achieved.
The third stage involves implementing the plan along with its
evaluation. Yinger sees this process as becoming routine, whereby
each planning event is influenced by what went on before and what
may happen in the future. He also sees a place for considering each
teacher's experiences as influencing this ongoing process of planning.
Research on what English language teachers actually do when
planning lessons has shown that many teachers, when they do write
lesson plans, tend to deviate from the original plan. Also, when
English language teachers do write daily lesson plans, they do not
state them in terms of behavioral objectives, even though they are
taught this method in pre-service teacher education courses. Instead,
English language teachers, especially more experienced teachers, are
more likely to plan their lessons as sequences of activities, teaching
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
routines, or to focus on the need of particular students.
Bailey's (1996, p. 38) study of six experienced English language
teachers came up with the following interesting reasons (stated as
principles) why teachers deviate from the original lesson plan:
(1) "Serve the common good." Here teachers are willing to
deviate from the original lesson plan because one student raised an
issue that the teacher perceives to be relevant for the other students.
(2) "Teach to the moment." Sometimes, teachers may
completely abandon the lesson plan to discuss some unplanned event
because the teacher thinks it is timely for the class.
(3) "Further the lesson." Teachers make a procedural change
during the lesson as a means of promoting the progress of the lesson.
(4) "Accommodate students' learning styles." Teachers may
sometimes depart from their lesson plans in order to accommodate
their students' learning styles if the original plan has not accounted for
them.
(5) "Promote students' involvement." Teachers sometimes
eliminate some steps in their lesson plans in order to have more
student involvement, especially if the students are not responding.
(6) "Distribute the wealth." This last principle has teachers
changing lesson plans to encourage quiet students to participate more
and to keep the more active students from dominating the class time.
These findings show that teacher decision making is a dynamic
process involving teachers making choices before, during, and after
each lesson.
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
The question that arises out of these studies is, What kinds of
lesson plans should English language teachers write?
Developing the plan
An effective lesson plan starts with appropriate and clearly
written objectives. An objective is a description of a learning outcome.
Objectives describe the destination (not the journey) we want our
students to reach. Clear, well-written objectives are the first step in
daily lesson planning. These objectives help to state precisely what we
want our students to learn, help to guide the selection of appropriate
activities, and help to provide overall lesson focus and direction. They
also give teachers a way to evaluate what their students have learned
at the end of the lesson. Clearly written objectives can also be used to
focus the students (they know what is expected from them).
For English language lessons, Shrum and Glisan (1994) point
out that effective objectives "describe what students will be able to do
in terms of observable behavior and when using the foreign language"
(p. 48). Hence, the language a teacher uses for stating objectives is
important. Action verbs can be used to identify desired student
behavior. Vague verbs such as understand, appreciate, enjoy
(although these can still be used for certain types of lessons, e.g.,
English poetry or reading novels), or learn should be avoided because
they are difficult to quantify. Action verbs such as identify, present,
describe, explain, demonstrate, list, contrast, and debate are clearer
and easier for teachers to design a lesson around. Use of these action
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
verbs also makes it easier for the students to understand what will be
expected from them in each lesson.
After writing the lesson objectives, teachers must decide the
activities and procedures they will use to ensure the successful
attainment of these objectives. Planning at this stage means thinking
through the purposes and structures of the activities. This step
involves planning the shape of the lesson.
Lesson Phase Role of Teacher Role of Students
I.Perspective
(opening)
II. Stimulation
III.Instruction/
Participation
IV. Closure
V. Follow-up
Asks what students have
learned in previous lesson
Previews new lesson
Prepares students for new
activity
Presents attention grabber
Presents activity
Checks for understanding
Encourages involvement
Asks what students have
learned
Previews future lessons
Presents other activities to
reinforce same concepts
Presents opportunities for
interaction
Tell what they've
learned previously
Respond to preview
Relate activity to their
lives
Respond to attention
grabber
Do activity
Show understanding
Interact with others
Tell what they have
learned
Give input on future
lessons
Do new activities
Interact with others
Fig. 2 Generic Components of a Lesson Plan. (from Shrum &
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
Glisan. 1994)
The generic lesson plan as shown in Figure I has five phases:
I. Perspective or opening. The teacher asks the students (or
himself or herself) the following questions: What was the previous
activity (what was previously learned)? What concepts have they
learned? The teacher then gives a preview of the new lesson.
II. Stimulation. The teacher
(a) poses a question to get the students thinking about the
coming activity;
(b) helps the students to relate the activity to their lives;
(c) begins with an attention grabber: an anecdote, a little scene
acted out by peer teachers or lay assistants, a picture, or a song; and
(d) uses it (the response to the attention grabber) as a lead into
the activity.
III. Instruction/participation. The teacher presents the
activity, checks for student understanding, and encourages active
student involvement. Teachers can get students to interact by the use
of pair work and/or group work.
IV. Closure. For this phase the teacher checks what the students
have learned by asking questions such as "What did you learn?" and
"How did you feel about these activities?" The teacher then gives a
preview about the possibilities for future lessons.
V. Follow-up. The last phase of the lesson has the teacher using
other activities to reinforce some concepts and even to introduce some
new ones. The teacher gives the students opportunities to do
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
independent work and can set certain activities or tasks taken from the
lesson as homework.
Teachers can have variations on this generic model. Shrum and
Glisan (1994) point out that as time passes in language lessons and as
students gain competence, the students "can gradually take on a larger
role in choosing the content and even in the structure of the lessons
themselves" (pp. 187-188). English language teachers should also
realize that language lessons may be different from other content
lessons because the same concepts may need to be reinforced time and
again using different methods. The following questions may be useful
for language teachers to answer before planning their lessons:
What do you want the students to learn and why?
Are all the tasks necessary - worth doing and at the
right level?
What materials, aids, and so on, will you use and
why?
What type of interaction will you encourage - pair
work or group work - and why?
What instructions will you have to give and how will
you give them (written, oral, etc.)? What questions will you
ask?
How will you monitor student understanding during
the different stages of the lesson?
The lesson plan should not be seen as a prescription or "how
to," because each teaching context will be different. After writing the
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
plan, the next step is to implement it by teaching the class.
Specimen plan
(example from Farrell)
Time: 12:00 P.M. to 12:35 P.M.
Subject: English language Topic: Sport
Class: Secondary 2 English (mixed-ability level)
Language Focus: Reading
Objectives:
To teach the students how to skim for main idea of the passage -
identify key words.
Prior Knowledge:
Students have learned how to locate information by reading and
finding the main sentence of each paragraph.
Materials:
I. Reading materials - article from book on Sport
2. Overhead projector/OHTs
3. Whiteboard
Step Tasks (Teacher) Tasks (Pupils) Interaction
Purpose
1 5-10 mins
Opening:Introduction to the topic sport. T activatesschema for sport.T asks Ss to help him or her write down as many different kinds of sport on the whiteboard
Listen
Ss call out the answer to the question as the T writes the
T ↔ Ss (T = teacher; Ss = students)
Arouse interest. Activate schema for sport.
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2
3
4
5-7 mins
15 mins
5 mins
within 3 minutes.T asks Ss to rank theirfavorite sports in orderof importance.
T distributes handout on sports schedule from the newspaper.
T asks Ss to read it quickly and answer the true/false questions that follow it within 3 minutes.T goes over the answers and shows Ss how he or she found the answers based on key words in the article.
T tells Ss that they just practiced skimming to get the general meaning or gist of a passage.T gives another
handout on sports from the textbook (New Clue). T asks Ss to read and
answer the true/false questions written on the paper within 5 to 7 minutes. T asks Ss for answers
and writes them on the board. T explains how key words can give the answers.
T summarizes the
answers on the board.T writes the answers.
Ss read the handout and answer the questions. Ss call out their answers to the T.
Ss check their answers.
Ss read the handout and answer the questions.
Ss call out their answers to the T
Ss check their answers.
Ss listen.
T ↔ Ss
Ss ↔ T
T ↔ Ss
Ss ↔ T(S ↔ Spossible also)
T ↔ Ss
T ↔ Ss
Focus attention of Ss on the concept of skimming for general gist with authentic materials.
Getting Ss to read passage quickly to get the overall meaning.
To remind
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
importance of reading a passage quickly first in order to get the gist.
T gives homework of reading the next day's newspaper's front-page story and writing down the gist of the story in 4 sentences.Follow-up:Next lesson: To teach the students to find the main idea of the passage by scanning.
Ss what they have just done and why - to develop pupil metacognitive awareness.
Fig. 3 Specimen plan (Thomas S. C. Farrell)Key: Interaction: T ↔ Ss means teacher interacts with the whole
class.
Specimen plan
(example from Harmer)
Date and time: 12 Nov. 2002; 8-9 a.m.
A - Description of the class: beginners/intermediate/advanced;
B - Recent work: present progressive in sentences of their own;
reading and summarising;
C - Title of unit, lesson: Food - Eating Habits;
Objectives: 1. To stir interest in the topic of food.
2. To create involvement in a reading task.
3. To read correctly and at a proper speed.
4. To study key words.
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
5. To write the recipe of a favourite dish.
D - Contents:
Warm-up: any activity that brings students' attention to class
Objective 1:
- context: students' eating habits
- activity: group discussion
- materials: menus, pictures
- language: everyday talk
Objective 2:
- context: creating opinions about healthy eating -
whole class give suggestions to the teacher
- materials: board; chalk, etc.
- language: vocabulary connected with food.
Objective 3:
- context: a text about food
- activity: students read individually. The teacher leads
the feedback session and discusses with the whole
class.
- materials: the text in the books; the explanations on
the blackboard.
- language: all - especially vocabulary connected with
food.
Objective 4:
- context: words about different kinds of food.
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
- activity: students have to put 'food' words in different
orders (food belonging to breakfast etc., words
denoting vegetables, meat and so on.)
- materials: wordlist, textbook
- language: discussion language; 'food' words.
Objective 5:
- context: food – the world/students’ lives
- activity/class: T and Ss talk about paragraph
organizing of the text
- materials : the board/handouts
- language: as above
- possible problems: Ss might not know much a
bout special food or food from other countries
E – Additional possibilities
- find the differences
- describe and draw
- a cooperative writing exercise
Specimen plan
(example from Mures County Inspectorat)
Name:
Date:
Class:
School:
Time of lesson: from………to……..
Grade:………Level of study:………………
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
No. of
students:
Textbook:………………………Unit:…..
Lesson:…………………..
Lesson aims: 1. Enriching vocabulary, reinforcing words internationally used
2. Scanning a text3. Raising awareness of false friends4. To read and complete activities in order to use the
new words5. …..
Materials: Textbook Handouts Blackboard
ACTIVITY 1 Warm upAim: To raise Ss’ awareness of the foreign words in the English
languageProcedure: 1. Informal conversation, greetings2. Homework check + Ss’
comments/opinions about it3. List of foreign words borrowed
in English: matching words with their area of origin
4.5.6.7.
Interaction
T → Ss Ss →
Ss
Timing
5 min.
ACTIVITY 2 Speaking + vocabulary workAim: To raise Ss’ awareness of the origin of some nounsProcedure:1. Ss match the drawings with the
nouns2. Identify the nouns which come
from names of people and places
Interaction
T → Ss
Pair work
Timing
10 min.
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
3.4.5.6.7. ACTIVITY 3 Pre-readingAim: To draw Ss’ attention to new wordsProcedure:1. Ss work with some words that
have recently entered the vocabulary and explain what they mean
2. 3.4.5.6.7.
Interaction
T → Ss
Timing
5 min.
ACTIVITY 4 ReadingAim: To practise scanningProcedure:1. Ss read the text, while reading
they find examples of words that are new and that have changed their meanings (examples)
2. Ss re-read the text to find more information referring to areas and sources of change: social, political relationships with the language and the American influence (ex. 3a/p. 170)
3.4.5.6.7.
Interaction
T → Ss
Group work
Timing
7 min.
8 min.
ACTIVITY 5 Follow up: vocabulary workAim: To raise awareness of words used
internationally
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METHODS OF TEACHING ENGLISH
To draw Ss’ attention to false friendsProcedure:1. Ss find common words which are
used internationally2. Ss focus on words which have a
similar form in English and Romanian but their meaning is totally different (ex. 3/p. 170)
3…..4…..5…..6…..7…..
Interaction
Pair work
Timing 5 min.
10 min.
HOMEWORK:Ex. 4. 1 + 2/p. 171 - language related idiomsEx. 5/p. 171. - Error correction
NEXT LESSON:
OBSERVATIONS/NOTES:
Class management
The teacher plays different roles in the process of learning
teaching. As Harmer asserts, he can be:
Controller. Teachers as controllers are in complete
charge of the class. They control not only what the students do, but
also when they speak and what language they use. Certain stages of
a lesson can be taught in this role, e.g. introduction of new
language when all attention is focused on the front of the class.
Some teachers appear to be natural leaders and performers, some
are quieter and feel better when students are interacting among
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themselves. When teachers are acting as controllers, they tend to do
a lot of the talking, taking from the students' time of speaking. It is
very important that control should be relaxed if students are to be
allowed a chance to learn, rather than be taught. During immediate
creativity teachers will have to relax their teaching, and during
communicative speaking and writing their role must be totally
different, to let students have a chance to participate properly.
Teachers influence the classroom atmosphere by motivating
unmotivated students. There are many ways in which students can
be inattentive or ‘off-task’: they do not take part in the activities by
sitting silent, they distract other students by talking off the topic, and
they provide ‘non-language’ entertainment. Experienced teachers
usually have a set of responses to off-task behaviour, which helps
them decide whether to ignore or attend to the problem. Lewis
(2002: 42-3) gives us three examples of how a teacher might move
through stages in managing a particular type of behaviour.
1) The back-row distractor
The same student always sits at the back and distracts the
others.
Use eye contact while continuing to speak.
Stop mid-sentence and stare until the student stops.
Talk with the student after class to investigate the
cause.
2) The non-participants
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Several students are not taking part in the assigned
activity.
Ignore them if they are not distracting others.
Walk past their desks and ask if there is a problem.
Ask colleagues how the same students participate in other
classes.
3) In a language class, teachers want students to speak.
Sometimes one student dominates question time, comment time and
all the rest of talking time. This calls for tact, because the person is
often a good language model for others.
Interrupt with “Thanks for that” and call on someone
else to continue.
Remind the student that there will be more talking time
soon.
Talk to the student individually later.
Making quick decisions on what to do about a problem
depends on answers to questions like the following:
Does the behaviour hinder other students’ learning?
Is this just a single occurrence not worth wasting time on?
Is it a whole-class problem or specific to one or two people?
Teachers also know that if large numbers of students are
failing to attend to the lesson, there could be a problem with the
lesson itself. The task may be too difficult, or it may have continued
for too long, or the content may be boring. On the other hand, the
problem may not be within the class at all. A forthcoming sports
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match or even unusual weather can change the mood of a class and
signal the teacher the need for a change of activity. (Lewis 2002: 42-
3)
Assessor. Assessing is a major part of the teacher's job, to
see how well they are performing or how well they have performed.
This is what students naturally expect, even after communicative
activities. There are two types of assessment: correction and
organising feedback. During an accurate reproduction stage, where
the teacher is totally in control, student error6 and mistake7 will be
corrected almost instantly. The teacher's function is to show where
incorrectness occurs and help the students to see what has gone
wrong so that it can be put right.
Gentle correction involves showing students that a mistake
has been made but not making a big fuss about it. The student does
not have to repeat his/her sentence correctly; it is enough that a
mistake has been acknowledged. This kind of gentle correction,
used in the right way, will not seriously damage the atmosphere of
pair work or free conversation.
Organising feedback occurs when students have performed
some kind of task and the intention is to see the extent of their
success or failure and to be given ideas as to how their (language)
problems might be solved. There are again two kinds of feedback:
- Content feedback, which concerns an assessment of
how well the students performed the activity proper and not as
6 Error: usually made because of lack of knowledge7 Mistake: usually made because of lack of attention or because of haste.
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a language exercise. For instance, when students have
completed a role-play, the teacher first discusses with the
students the reasons for their decisions in the simulation.
- Form feedback tells the students how well they have
performed linguistically, how accurate they have been. When
students are involved in a communicative activity the teacher
will record the errors that are made so that they can be
brought to the students' attention after whatever content
feedback is appropriate.
There are a number of ways of recording errors and organising
feedback:
Pen and paper. The teacher can listen to what is being
said and write down the errors that are made, thus:
Grammar Vocabulary Pronunciation Spelling Manner of
expression
Typical
errors
Fig. 4 List of possible mistakes
When the activity and the content feedback are over the
teacher can write some of the more prominent and serious errors
from the list on the blackboard. In pairs the students have to
identify the errors and correct them.
Tape recorder. The students' performance can be
recorded on tape. After the activity and the content feedback, the
students listen to it and discuss the errors, or the teacher can
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transcribe it at home and give the students their errors and a correct
version.
Video is more successful for whole class feedback
than the tape recorder. First the teacher makes sure that the activity
is filmed. When it is over, students can watch the video for content
feedback, and then they can watch it again in order to concentrate
on the language. One group can be asked to watch/ listen for any
grammar mistakes, another group can b asked to listen for
pronunciation problems, another for vocabulary problems, etc.
Teachers should be aware, however, that feedback of this kind
using audio and videotapes will take a long time and only a small
amount of the recording can be analysed. Feedback also means
telling students what 'went right'. They need to be told where they
have achieved a successful outcome or where they have used good
and appropriate language.
Organiser. It is the most important and difficult role. The
success of many activities depends on good organisation and on the
students' knowing exactly what they are to do, to talk about, write
or read about, what their task is. Teachers should never assume that
students have understood the instructions. It is always good to
check that they have grasped what they have to do, and where
possible, the students' mother tongue can be used for this. Teachers
should never use unclear instructions, they should plan out what
they are going to say beforehand and then say it clearly and
concisely. Teachers must be careful about when they get students to
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look at the material they will be using for the activity. If they hand
out material and then try to give instructions they will find that the
students are looking at the material and not listening to the
instructions.
The organisation of an activity can be divided into three
main parts:
- the lead-in, when the teacher and the students may
briefly discuss the topic in order to start thinking about it;
- instructions, when the students are told exactly what
they should do;
- The teacher initiates the activity, and a final check is
given that students have understood. The teacher may ask the
students to see if they can be the first to finish, thus adding a
competitive element, which is often highly motivating.
Participant. The teacher can participate as an equal in an
activity, especially where activities like simulations are taking
place. The danger is that the teacher will tend to dominate, and the
students will both allow and expect this to happen. It will be up to
the teacher to make sure it does not. Teachers should not be afraid
to participate because they may improve the atmosphere in the
class and give the students a chance to practise English with
someone who speaks it better than they do.
Resource. There are two other very important roles for
the teacher: to be aware of what is going on as an assessor, as
discreetly as possible, and to be a kind of walking resource centre.
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The teacher should always be ready to offer help if it is needed,
making himself available so that the students can consult him when
(and only when) they wish.
Tutor. The teacher can act as a coach and as a resource
where students are involved in their own work, and call on the
teacher mainly for advice and guidance. This is the role the teacher
adopts where students are involved in self-study or where they are
doing project work of their own choosing. This tutorial role is often
appropriate at intermediate and advanced levels. It is a broader role
than the others are, as it includes parts of some other roles:
organiser, prompter and resource.
Investigator. Teachers themselves want to develop their
own skills and improve the ways of teaching language. There are
opportunities to go on teacher training courses and to attend
teachers' seminars. Teachers can also develop by themselves or
with colleagues by investigating what is going on, observing what
works well in class and what does not, trying out new techniques
and activities and evaluating their appropriacy. Teachers who did
not investigate the efficiency of new methods and who do not
actively seek their own personal and professional development
may find the job of teaching becoming increasingly monotonous.
Prompter. The teacher often needs to encourage
students to participate or needs to make suggestions about how
students may proceed in an activity when there is silence or when
they are confused about what to do next. The role of prompter has
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to be performed with discretion for if teachers are too aggressive,
they start to take over from the students, while the idea is that they
should be helping them only when it is necessary.
Student grouping
L ockstep is the class grouping where all the students are
working with the teacher, where all the students are 'locked into' the
same rhythm and pace, the same activity. Lockstep is the traditional
teaching situation, where the teacher controls everything. Lockstep
has certain advantages: all the students in the class are concentrating
and the teacher can be sure that everyone can hear what is being said.
The students are usually getting a good language model from the
teacher, and it can often be very dynamic. Some disadvantages are:
students get little chance to practise or talk at all; it always goes at the
wrong speed. Either the teacher is too slow for the good students or
the lesson is too fast for the weak students. Shy and nervous students
also find lockstep work extremely bad for the nerves since they are
likely to be exposed in front of the whole class. Moreover, it cannot be
the ideal grouping for communicative work, as it involves too much
teaching and too little learning.
Where feedback is taking place after a reading or listening task,
it will be better to have the whole class involved at the same time so
that they can check their answers and the teacher can assess their
performance as a group.
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Weaknesses and limitations of direct instruction
While, [as illustrated above], direct instruction is one of the
most effective teaching strategies available, it is not necessarily the
best strategy to use in all circumstances.
Direct instruction has been found to be the best method to teach
rules, procedures and basic skills, especially to younger students
(Brophy and Good, 1986). However, when the goals of the lesson are
more complex or open-ended (e.g. developing students' thinking skills,
or discussing the merits of different electoral systems), the structured
and teacher-directed approach that characterizes direct instruction is
not the most effective model. More open-ended models may be more
appropriate for achieving these goals (Joyce and Weill, 1996).
The effectiveness of direct instruction also seems to depend on
the characteristics of the students taught. This approach seems to be
particularly effective for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, or
students starting from a low level of achievement in a particular
subject. For example, in a recent study in England and Wales,
relationships between student achievement and direct instruction-style
teacher behaviours were twice as high in schools with a high or
average percentage of students from deprived backgrounds, than in
schools with a low percentage of students from deprived backgrounds.
This suggests that these students are more in need of explicit teaching.
However, it must be remarked that positive relationships were also
evident in low-deprivation schools (Muijs and Reynolds, 2000c).
A further problem with direct instruction is that the role of
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students may become too passive, leading to overdependence on the
teacher and underdevelopment of independent learning skills (Gipps
and McGilchrist, 1999).
The evidence on direct instruction is also distorted towards
primary age students and the subjects of mathematics and English.
More research in other subjects and in secondary schools is needed to
see whether this method is supported in those settings as well.
Further, it has to be remarked that it is entirely possible to use
effective direct teaching strategies to teach undemanding and
unchallenging content, or to teach in a way that does not suitably
connect material. Finally, in some cases direct instruction can
degenerate into ineffective lecture-style ('chalk and talk') lessons with
little interaction with students.
Therefore, when deciding whether or not to use a direct
instruction model must depend on the goals of the lesson, and must be
linked to good subject knowledge and suitable lesson content in order
to be effective. (from Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds Effective
Teaching, 2001)
Pair work. Students can be put in pairs for a greater variety of
work including writing and reading, and to increase the amount of
student practice. Pair work allows students to use language (depending
on the task set by the teacher) and also encourages student co-
operation which is important for the atmosphere of the class and for
the motivation it gives to learning with others. Students can help each
other to use and learn language.
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There are some disadvantages: incorrectness cannot always be
checked, there is noise and indiscipline, especially with children and
adolescents (not with adult learners). It is better for the teacher to
remain at the front of the class than concentrate on one pair. Then he
can organise feedback when the pair work task is over to see how
successful it was. We should try and make sure that the pair work is
not carried out for too long as students often become bored, restless
and badly behaved. The type of pair work the teacher will organise
depends on the type of activity the class is working with.
A decision has to be taken about how students are put in pairs:
strong students with weak students or whether they will vary the
combination of the pairs from class to class.
There seems to be no research to give an answer to the ideal
combinations for either pairs or groups.
Group work increases the amount of student talking time and
the opportunity to communicate with each other. Students will be
teaching and learning in the group exhibiting a degree of self-reliance
that simply is not possible when the teacher is acting as a controller.
In some ways group work is more dynamic than pair work:
there are more people to react with and against in a group, therefore,
there is a greater possibility of discussion. There is a greater chance
that at least one member of the group will be able to solve a problem
when it arises, and working in groups is potentially more relaxing than
working in pairs, for the latter puts a greater demand on the student's
ability to co-operate closely with only one person.
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The biggest problem is one of selection of group members.
Some teachers ask the students to choose their mates, which is not
good for example when the students don't know each other. Other
teachers form groups where weak and strong students are mixed
together. This is good for the weak students. Where there students of
different levels and interests in a class, different groups can be formed
so that not all the students are necessarily working on the same
material at the same time.
Group size is also problematical: a lot depends on the activity
being performed. Where decisions are to be taken as a result of the
activity, it is probably good to have an odd number in each group.
A major possibility for group work is the idea of flexible group.
Students start in set groups, and as an activity progresses the groups
split up and re-form; or they join together until the class is fully re-
formed.
When we have different activities for each group it is better to
have one student acting as a group leader. The group leader could
have two functions: one would be to act as the group organiser,
making sure that a task was properly done, and the other could be as a
mini-teacher, where the student could conduct a drill or a dialogue.
Group work can be used for oral work, tasks where decisions have to
be taken, joint reading tasks, listening tasks, co-operative writing and
many others.
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Reasons for learning languages
There are many reasons for language study among which the
following:
a) School curriculum - language study is included
among the subject matters to be studied during the school
years. English is a language that both the students and their
parents want to be taught.
b) Promotion - some people want to study English or
another foreign language because they think it offers an
opportunity for advancement in their professional lives. They
can get a better job, knowing more than their mother tongue,
especially English, which has become the international
language of communication.
c) Target language community - some students can live
in a target language community either temporarily or
permanently. A target language community (TLC) is one
where the inhabitants speak the language which the student is
learning; for students of English an English-speaking country
would be a TLC.
d) English for specific purposes - there are some
situations where English is needed: for air traffic controllers to
guide aircraft; business executives for international trade;
waiters to serve their customers. These needs have been
referred to as EOP (English for Occupational Purposes). The
students who study abroad it is called EAP (English for
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Academic Purposes). Students of medicine or science
(studying in their own countries) need to be able to read
articles and textbooks about those subjects in English. This is
referred to as EST (English for Science and Technology). The
type of English students want to learn may be different.
e) Culture - some students want to study a foreign
language because they want to know more about the people
who speak it, the places where it is spoken and (in some cases)
the writings which it has produced.
f) Miscellaneous - some people learn a foreign language
for fun (because they like the activity of going to classes);
some people want to visit the country where the language is
spoken; some people do it because all their friends are learning
the language. Not all the students will be taught in the same
way.
Motivation
The motivation that students have is the biggest single factor
that affects their success in the acquisition of a foreign language.
Motivation is some kind of internal drive that encourages somebody
to pursue a course of action. Language learners who are motivated
perceive goals of various kinds. We can make a useful distinction
between short-term goals and long-term goals. Long-term goals might
have something to do with a wish to get a better job at some future
date, or a desire to be able to communicate with members of a TLC.
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Short-term goals might include such things as wanting to pass an end-
of-semester exam or wanting to finish a unit in a book.
Students' motivation can be separated into two main categories:
extrinsic motivation, which is concerned with factors outside the
classroom, and intrinsic motivation, which is concerned with what
takes place inside the classroom.
Extrinsic motivation. There are two types of this motivation:
a) Integrative motivation: students need to be attracted
by the culture of the TLC and they wish to integrate
themselves into that culture.
b) Instrumental motivation: students believe that mastery
of the target language will be instrumental in getting them a
better job, position or status. The language is an instrument in
their attainment of such goal.
Intrinsic motivation plays a vital part in most students' success
or failure as language learners. Factors which affect intrinsic
motivation are:
a) Physical conditions - bright and pleasant classrooms with a
low number of students, a visible and good blackboard.
b) The method of teaching must not be boring although a
really motivated student will probably succeed whatever method is
used. Nevertheless, if students lose confidence in the method, they
will become de-motivated.
c) The teacher. Whether the student likes the teacher or not may
not be very significant. What can be said is that two teachers using the
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same method can have very different results. A study done by Denis
Girard in 1970 (in Harmer 1994) shows a list of children's priorities
(aged between 12 and 17), 1=least important.
1.He makes his course interesting.
2.He teaches good pronunciation.
3.He explains clearly.
4.He speaks good English.
5.He shows the same interest in all his students.
6.He makes all the students participate.
7.He shows great patience.
8.He insists on the spoken language.
9.He makes his pupils work.
10. He uses an audio-lingual method.
Students were also asked to list any additional qualities they
thought were important. The most popular were:
He shows sympathy for his pupils.
He is fair to all his students (whether good or bad at English).
He inspires confidence.
The most important factors in teaching students well are the
teacher's rapport with the students and the teacher's personality, who
can motivate students through enjoyable and interesting classes.
Teachers clearly need to be able to show that they know their subject;
they should be able to give clear instructions and examples and as far
as possible have answers to the students' questions.
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d) Success or lack of success influences the learning of a foreign
language. Both complete failure and complete success may be de-
motivating. It will be the teacher's job to set goals and tasks at which
most of the students can be successful. To give students very high
challenge activities where this is not appropriate may have negative
effect on motivation. The same happens with low challenge activities
which are also de-motivating. Much of the teacher's work in the
classroom concerns getting the level of challenge right: this involves
the type of tasks set, the speed expected from the students.
What a language student should know
Pronunciation. Teachers want to be sure that the students can
produce the various sounds that occur in the English language. It is
important to differentiate between the sounds because they give
different meanings to the words, e.g. [i] in fit and [i:] in feat or [ð] in
there and [f] in fair. Students need to use rhythm and stress in a
correct manner to make themselves understood. When they learn new
words they must be able to pronounce them with the right stress, to
say sentences with a good intonation.
One important thing in teaching pronunciation is that of accent8.
Should our students speak with a British, American, Canadian or
Australian English? In Romanian teachers of English usually have a
British accent and the students an American one, the latter being
acquired mainly from TV shows and film. A lot depends on the
8 Accent: a way of saying words that shows what country, region, or social class someone comes from
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contact with native speakers. If students live in the target language
community they are more likely to acquire the accent of that
community. More important is the aim of understanding and
efficiency to make sure that they can always be understood and
convey their message.
To develop communicative efficiency in pronunciation students
need to hear the language used so that they can both imitate it and also
some of its specific sounds and patterns. The sources for this are the
teacher and other voices that can be heard on tapes or in the target
language community, on radio and TV. Students should listen as much
as possible to people speaking the language correctly.
Grammar. Knowing grammar is essential for competent users of
a language. The aim in teaching grammar should be to ensure that
students are communicatively efficient with the grammar they have at
their level. When grammar is presented teachers give students clear
definitions and correct texts to use and work with (but in real life
things are different and they should also be presented different types
of discourse – students need to be aware of all language possibilities
and how it is used). Teachers introduce grammar which can be easily
explained and presented, usually through reading, listening and
writing. At grammar lessons discovery activities are very important
and teachers should be prepared to use a variety of techniques to help
students learn and acquire grammar. Sometimes this involves teaching
grammar rules and sometimes it means allowing students to discover
the rules for themselves.
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Vocabulary. Language students need to learn the vocabulary of
the language and how words are used. Some words are taught at lower
levels of knowledge and some uses of words may be more complex
than others and consequently taught at an intermediate or advanced
level. Teachers should be sure that students are aware of the
vocabulary they need for their level and that they can use the words
which they want to use. Words are best taught in context, not in lists
learnt by heart. Words are rarely used alone and their meanings
depend on one another. When students learn words in context they are
more likely to remember them and they can get a better picture of
what the words mean.
Discourse. Students need to be aware of the different ways
language is used in different situations. They need to know the
difference between formal and informal language use. such
knowledge involves learning language functions. We decide what we
want to say on the basis of what purpose we wish to achieve: to invite,
to agree, to congratulate etc. The realisation of many functions can
often fall between two extremes, from very polite to friendly or
sometimes rude, from overt to suggested, e.g. “Would you mind
opening the window, please?’, ‘Shut up!’.
In deciding what language to teach when working with
functions teachers need to bear in mind the level of difficulty, the
level of transparency and the level of formality. In general we can say
that easy, transparent and neutral performance of a language function
is more appropriate for lower-level students while difficulty, lack of
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transparency and extreme formality or informality are more suitable
for more advanced students.
Skills. Competent users of a language are proficient in a series
of language skills, though not all in the same way. Teachers have to
see that students’ language skills are transferred to the use of the
foreign language. Because students study a different language teachers
will need to help them with the skills they are already subconsciously
familiar with. If teachers concentrate on reading and listening it will
help students to approach the foreign language with more confidence
and a greater expectation of success. It is possible that some students
may not be proficient at all the skills in their own language. Then the
teachers’ task will be double: to give them confidence in English and
to equip them with unknown skills in either their mother tongue or in
English.
Language varieties. English is spoken all over the world, as the
mother tongue, the second language or as a foreign language, thus one
can hear many English accents and varieties. Three factors are
important when English is taught:
1) the variety which the teacher uses;
2) which variety is more appropriate for the students (if
they are going to study in a certain country);
3) what variety of English is dealt with by the teaching
materials used.
For students at lower levels it is better to use a variety of
English. Intermediate students can be exposed to other accents and
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varieties. It is important that any competent user of the language be
able to understand as many varieties and accents as possible.
Language learning and language teaching
Language theories and approaches. It is not known how people
learn languages but there are certain theories that have already had
some effect on the practice of language teaching.
Behaviourism. The base of this theory is the idea of
conditioning: you can train an animal to do anything. There are three
stages to follow: stimulus, response and reinforcement. For example, a
sound is operated (the stimulus), the guinea pig goes up to a bar and
presses it (the response) and a bit of tasty food drops at its feet (the
reinforcement). If the guinea's pig behaviour is reinforced a sufficient
number of times, it will always press the bar when the sound is heard.
Skinner, a psychologist suggested that language is a form of
behaviourism in acquiring the first language. The same model of
stimulus-response-reinforcement accounts for how human baby learns
a language. Behaviourism was adopted for some time by language
teaching methodologists, particularly in the United States, resulting in
the audio-lingual method still used in many parts of the world. This
method focused on constant exercising of the students followed by
positive or negative reinforcement. The language habit was formed by
constant repetition and reinforcement of the teacher. Mistakes were
immediately criticised and correct usage praised.
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Cognitivism. This term refers to a group of psychological
theories based on the work in linguistics of Noam Chomsky, who did
not agree with behaviourism. He said that language is not a form of
behaviourism but a complicated rule-based system and a large part of
language acquisition is the learning of the system. Knowing the finite
number of grammatical rules, a system has enabled the speaker to
perform an infinite number of sentences. A child gradually acquires
competence to be creative as language user, that is to be performant.
The idea is that language is not a set of habits and it has influenced
many teaching techniques and methodologies, although it has never
been adopted as a methodology.
Acquisition and learning. Acquisition is characterised as a
subconscious process which results in the knowledge of a language
while learning is only knowing about the language. Acquiring a
language is more successful and lasts longer than learning.
Stephen Krashen suggested that second (or foreign) language
learning needs to be more like the child's acquisition of its native
language. Children's gradual ability to use language is the result of
many subconscious processes, because they have not consciously
started to learn a language. It happens as a result of the input they
receive and the experience which accompany it. Input is a term used
to mean the language that the students hear or read. This input should
contain language that the students already know as well as language
that they have not previously seen, i.e., the input should be at a
slightly higher level than the students are capable of using, but at a
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level that they are capable of understanding (the same way parents
tend to simplify the language they use so that the children can more or
less understand).
Task-based learning. Many methodologists have paid more
attention to learning tasks that students are involved in than on the
nature of language input. There has been an agreement that it is better
to acquire a language as a result of some deeper experience than to
learn it by heart or taken out of context. Instead of being taught
grammatical rules, students are asked to perform communicative
activities in which they have to use the foreign language. In solving
the problems the students naturally come into contact with language,
and this happens because the students are actively involved in
reaching solutions to tasks. Such tasks consist of things like finding
your way on maps, interpreting timetables or answering questions
about dialogues in which the students have to solve problems.
Humanistic approaches. Another prominent perspective is that
of the students as a 'whole person', i.e. language teaching is not just
about teaching language, but also about helping students to develop
themselves as people. These beliefs have led to a number of teaching
methodologies and techniques which have stressed the humanistic
aspect of learning. In such methodologies the experience of the
student is what counts and the development of their personalities and
the encouragement of positive feelings are seen as important as their
learning of a language.
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Self-directed learning. Methodologists have turned their
attention not just to the learning of the language but also to training
students how to be good learners. If students make the most of their
own resources and if they can take their own decisions about what to
do next and how best to study, their learning is better and they achieve
more. Ideally, a language programme would be a mixture of class
work and self-study (or self-directed learning).
The main aim of such work is to encourage students to take
charge of their own learning: we cannot teach students everything so
we have to train them to teach themselves.
Teaching the productive skills
Communication is very important and complex and has
particular relevance for the learning and teaching process. The reasons
why people are engaged in talking could be the following:
1) They want to say something.
2) They have some communicative purpose, they want
something to happen as a result of what they say.
3) They select from their language store, creating new
sentences.
These generalisations do not only apply to the spoken word:
they characterise written communication as well, the radio announcer
and an academic lecture.
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Effective communication means that the communication is
effective both from the point of view of the speaker and the listener.
Thus three points can be made about the listeners:
1) They want to listen to 'something'.
2) They are interested in the communicative purpose of
what is being said.
3) They process a variety of language, being prepared to
process a great variety of grammar and vocabulary to
understand exactly what is being said.
The information gap. When one person asks another for some
information we say that there is a gap between the two in the
information they possess and the conversation helps to close that gap.
In the end both speakers have the same information. In the classroom
teachers want to create the same kind of information gap to encourage
real communication.
The communication continuum. Whatever activity the students
are involved in, if it is to be actually communicative and if it is really
promoting language use, the students should have a desire to
communicate. If they do not want to be involved in communication
then that communication will probably not be effective. The students
should be using language in some way to achieve an objective, and
this should be the most important part of the communication. If
students do have a purpose of this kind then their attention should be
centred on the content of what is being said or written and not on the
language form that is being used. While the students are engaged in
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the communicative activity the teacher should not intervene, that is,
should not tell the students that they are making mistakes, insist on
accuracy and ask for repetition. The teacher may be involved in the
activity as a participant, and will also be watching and listening very
carefully in order to be able to conduct feedback. To the five
communicative activities (a desire to communicate, a communicative
purpose, content not form, variety of language, no teacher
intervention) we could add a sixth: no materials control so that the
students shouldn't be forced to use a certain language or be restricted
in the choice of what to say and how to say it.
The six characteristics for communicative activities can be seen
as forming one end of a continuum of classroom activity in language
teaching, and they can be reached by opposite points at the other end
of the continuum (no communicative desire, no communicative
purpose, form not content, one language item, teacher intervention,
materials control).
Stages in learning-teaching.
Introducing new language. This falls at the non-
communicative end of the continuum as the teacher works with
controlled techniques, asks students to repeat and do exercises, insist
on accuracy and correct the students' mistakes. These introduction
stages should be short and the exercises not so many although they are
important in helping the students to assimilate facts about new
language.
Practice. Practice activities fall between the two ends of the
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continuum. While students performing them may have a
communicative purpose, and while they may be working in pairs,
there may also be a lack of language variety, and the materials may
determine what the students do or say. During practice stages the
teacher may intervene to help and to point out inaccuracy.
Communicative activities. They show the characteristics at the
communicative end of the continuum. Students are involved in
activities that give them both the desire to communicate and a purpose
which involves them in a varied use of language. Such activities are
very important in a language classroom since here the students can do
their best to use the language as individuals arriving at a degree of
language autonomy.
The relationship between the different stages. There is a clear
relationship between the introduction and practice stages while the
relationship between communicative activities and the introduction
and practice stages is not so clear. If teachers introduce new language
they will often want to practise it in a controlled way. The practice
stage will often not follow the introduction stage immediately; other
activities might intervene before students again work on the same
language.
At the very early stages of language learning there is more
introduction of new language and practice than there are
communicative activities. This balance should change as the standard
of students' English rises where there should be more emphasis on
practice and communicative activities than on presentation. However
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this balance is often more the result of decisions about what the
students need on a particular day in a particular situation than it is a
decision about the interrelation of stages.
Introducing new language
Students need to get an idea of how the new language is used
by native speakers and the best way of doing this is to present
language in context, which should have some characteristics: the new
language should be used in a written text or dialogue, it should be
interesting for the students, it should provide the background for a lot
of language used so that the students can use the information not only
for the repetition of model sentences but also for making their own
sentences. In cases where the book is not right for the students, the
teacher will want to create his own context for the language.
Types of context.
Context means the situation or body of information, which
causes language to be used and can be divided into three main types:
1) The student's world: which can be a major source of
contexts of two kinds:
- the physical surroundings - the classroom, school or
institution;
- the students' lives - facts about them, their families,
friends and experiences.
2) The outside world provides the teacher with rich
contexts for presentation: stories, situations with special
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information for the practice of functional language, and
examples of language. They can be simulated or real.
3) Formulated information refers to all the information
which is presented in the form of timetables, notes, charts, etc.
The context the teacher uses depends on the type of language
that is introduced.
The presentation of structural form.
One way of explaining how the new language is formed and
how the grammar works is to explain the grammar in detail, using
grammatical terms and giving a mini-lecture on the subject, more
difficult to achieve in groups of students with different mother
tongues.
A more effective way of presenting form is to let the students
see and/or hear the new language, drawing their attention in different
ways to the grammatical elements of which it is made. Advanced
students may profit from grammatical explanations to a certain extent,
while beginners find simpler and more transparent ways more
appropriate to acquire new grammatical structures.
When teaching such structures the teacher can use patterns like
S + V + DO or S + V + A, with changeable units (for present
tense 3rd person singular: He lives in Tg. Mures). As soon as possible
students will be encouraged to use the present simple with other
grammatical patterns.
A general model for introducing new language.
The model has five components:
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1) The lead-in, when the context is introduced and the
meaning or use of the new language is demonstrated. This is
the stage at which students may hear or see some language
(including the new language) and during which students may
become aware of certain key concepts (those items of
information about the context that are very important for its
understanding). (E.g., in the case of formulated information -
the airline timetable - the key concepts are destination, via,
departure and arrival.)
2) The elicitation stage, when the teacher tries to see if
the students can produce the new language. If the students can't
produce the new language the teacher will move to the
explanation stage. If they can, but with minor mistakes, the
teacher may move to the accurate reproduction stage to clear
up those problems. If they know the language but need some
practice, the teacher may move directly to the creativity stage.
3) The explanation stage, when the teacher shows how
the new language is formed. At this point the teacher may give
a listening drill or explain something in the student's own
language; grammatical form may be demonstrated on the
blackboard - how the new language is constructed.
4) The accurate reproduction stage, when students are
asked to repeat and practice a certain number of models. The
emphasis will be on the accuracy of what students say rather
than meaning or use. The teacher makes sure that students can
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form the new language correctly, getting the grammar right
and perfecting their pronunciation.
5) Immediate creativity, when students try to use what
they have just learned to make sentences of their own. At this
stage both teacher and students can see if they have really
understood the meaning, use and form of the new language. If
students are able to produce their own sentences they can feel
confident that the presentation was successful.
Explanation techniques.
a) Explaining statements: the teacher wants to explain
the model based on a flight timetable (Flight #306 goes to
Bucharest). There can be the following procedure:
Stage 1. The teacher says the normal sentence;
Stage 2. The teacher isolates a particular feature of the model
(e.g. goes);
Stage 3. The teacher distorts this feature showing how it is
constructed (e.g. go-es);
Stage 4. The teacher returns to the isolated item (goes);
Stage 5. The teacher gives the normal model again. Where
there is more than one item that needs isolating the teacher goes
through the above procedure with the first item and then repeats it
with the second.
b) Explaining question form. English uses inversion to
form questions, even when a question word is used. When
introducing a question, teachers will follow the same procedure
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as for (a) above but isolate and distort in a slightly different
way, using the blackboard and gesture. ↓He is running. Is he
running?↑
c) Using hands and gestures. Teachers can use their
hands and different gestures to make grammatical form clearer.
For example, when the teacher says the sentence, I would have
come earlier, he raises five fingers. When he uses the short
forms of the auxiliaries, I'd've come, earlier he raises three
fingers. The teacher can pretend to hold the word do in one
hand and not in the other. By bringing the words together they
show how don't is formed. Some teachers use gesturing over
their shoulders to indicate the past and pointing ahead of them
to indicate future. Arms can be used to indicate intonation
patterns (rising and falling) and stress patterns, like a
conductor in an orchestra.
Accurate reproduction gives students controlled practice in the
form of the new language. There are three stages in this part of the
lesson:
1. Choral repetition - the whole class is asked to repeat the
model together. This technique is useful because it gives all the
students a chance to say the new language immediately, with the
teacher controlling the speed and the stress. It gives students
confidence and the teacher a general idea of whether the students have
grasped the model. Teachers should remember three things about
choral repetition:
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Clearly indicate (by conducting) when the students
should start the chorus;
Clearly indicate the correct stress during the chorus;
Stay silent during the chorus so that he can hear how
well the students are performing.
2. Individual repetition - is again conducted in three stages. The
teacher selects a student, the student responds, and the teacher gives
feedback (approves or shows incorrectness). Selecting the students
can be done by calling the student's name or by pointing. When
conducting individual repetition we should be sure that we do not
nominate students in a clearly discernible order, for this has the effect
of making the drill less exciting. A random order keeps the interest
level high since anyone could be nominated at any minute.
3. Cue-response drills - take place when students are working
with more than one model. When the teacher has presented the first
model and organised choral and individual repetition then he will
elicit the second model. If the students can produce the model the
teacher, the teacher may go straight to choral and individual repetition.
When they cannot, the teacher may go through an explanation stage
again. When there has been adequate repetition of the second model
the teacher starts a cue-response drill in which he asks students to
choose on of the two models based on a cue:
Stage 1. Instruct: the teacher tells the students what he wants
then to do. He might say 'tell me' to indicate that he wants a statement
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or 'question' to indicate that he wants a question. Often the instruction
is not actually said, but is understood by the class.
Stage 2. Cue: the teacher indicates which model he wishes the
students to say. He might do this by giving a cue word, for example
'Bucharest' to get the response. 'Flight 306 goes to Bucharest'.
Teachers might also mime an action: 'reading' to get the students
responds: 'He is reading a novel'.
Stage 3. Nominate: the teacher selects the student he wishes to
give the response. The teacher starts the cue-response drill with an
instruction ('tell me') but drops this the next time because all the
students understand what is required. When introducing subsequent
models the teacher will use less and less explanation, sometimes
cutting it out completely. As soon as the teacher is confident that the
students can manage the cue-response drill (after four to six examples)
the students can be put in pairs. One student can act as the teacher,
giving the cue and the others can give the response.
This accurate reproduction stage should be dealt with as quickly
as possible (not more than ten minutes).
Correction can be achieved in the following ways:
a) Showing incorrectness - the teacher indicates to the student
that he ahs made a mistake. If the student understands this feedback,
he will be able to correct the mistake and this will help him in the
learning process. There area number of techniques for showing
incorrectness:
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1.Repeating: the teacher simply asks the student to repeat what
he has said (using 'again') with a questioning intonation,
to indicate that the response was not correct.
2.Echoing: the teacher repeats what the student has just said,
using a questioning intonation, to indicate doubt about the
accuracy or content of what is being said. (The teacher
can do it with the whole sentence or up to the mistake)
3.Denial: the teacher tells the student that the response was
incorrect and asks for the right answer. Sometimes this
method may be a little more discouraging.
4.Questioning: the teacher can ask - Is that correct? addressing
any student in the class to answer the question. This has
the advantage of focusing everybody's mind on the
problem, though it may make the student who made the
mistake seem a bit exposed.
5.Expression: many teachers indicate that a response was
incorrect by their expression or some gestures. This is
very economical (sometimes funny) but also dangerous if
the student thinks that the expression or gesture is a form
of mockery. Showing incorrectness should be done with
tact and consideration, and should be seen as a positive
act not as a reprimand.
b) Using correction techniques when students are unable to
correct themselves.
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1.Student corrects student: the teacher can ask if anyone else
can help with the correct response. If this technique is
used intensively, students may feel humiliated.
2.Teacher corrects student: sometimes the teacher may feel that
he should take charge of correction because the students
are mixed-up about what the correct response should be.
In that case the teacher can re-explain the problem of
language which is causing the trouble. After the re-
explanation the teacher can move to choral and individual
repetition before moving-on.
The importance of meaning. It is very important for the students
to understand the meaning of the new language. This is done during
the lead-in stage where the key concepts demonstrate what is going
on. Another important factor is to check whether the students have
understood the new language, to organise our teaching accordingly.
Checking meaning can be done in three ways, information checking,
immediate creativity and translation.
a) Information checking: this can be done by asking
questions, or saying sentences that are not correct and ask the
students to correct them, or reading students' models and
asking them to say other whether they are true or false.
b) Immediate creativity and different settings. This stage
is a good indicator of whether or not students have understood
the meaning and use of the new language and we do it by
asking students to produce sentences of their own. Another
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good checking of meaning is to ask the students something
using the new language, which is not part of the context that is
being used for the presentation.
c) Translation is an excellent technique if the teacher is
fluent in the students' language. The main advantages are that
it is quick and efficient. Translation is not really possible with
groups of different nationalities and it is not always possible to
translate exactly.
Discovery techniques aim to give students a chance to use
language earlier. Usually students are given a listening or reading text
or some other examples of English sentences, and are asked to
discover how the language works. Teachers might give students a text
which is a story, for example, and then ask them to look at it again to
see how many ways they can find in it for referring to the past. They
could listen to a tape and write down any sentences which had 'if' in
them. Then they could see if there was any pattern to those sentences.
There are many techniques where the teacher gets the students
to do most of the work. Students will be more involved and will have
to use their reasoning processes. When the teacher asks the students
what they have found and discusses the language with them we have
reached an explanation stage where the teacher is talking with the
students in a more egalitarian process.
Discovery techniques are not suitable for all students on all
occasions. Frequently this approach takes more time than a more
controlled presentation and the class lacks the kind of dynamic tension
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met in whole class presentations. Designing material for discovery
activities or finding a text that will suit this approach is easier at
intermediate and advanced levels than is when beginners are taught.
Writing during presentation. Writing is used as reinforcement
for an oral presentation, either immediately or after the creativity
stage, when the teacher asks the students to write sentences using the
new language. The sentences may be the original models the teacher
used during the accurate reproduction stage, and the students might be
asked to copy those sentences from the blackboard. The students
might be shown model sentences and then be asked to write similar
sentences of their own. This is a written version of the immediate
creativity stage, and is often called parallel writing. Although
unchallenging and boring, the main object is to relate the spoken and
written forms of the new language, and to enable the students to write
the new pattern as well as say it.
Where students write in class as part of the introduction of new
language it is often advantageous to 'correct' the written work in front
of the whole class. One useful way of doing this is to ask the students
to do the written work in their copybooks. When the teacher sees a
student has finished, he asks him/her to write the first sentence on the
blackboard. The second student writes the second sentence, and so on.
When all the sentences are on the board the teacher goes through them
one by one, asking the class if they are correct. if they are not, the
teacher can ask another student to write the correct sentence or correct
the sentence himself. This technique gives the student feedback, and
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allows the teacher and the whole class to focus on grammar points if it
is necessary.
Oral practice
Oral drills are usually very controlled and have limited
potential. Because they are repetitive and not very creative they
should not be used for too long or too frequently. However they
provide 'safe' practice and accuracy can be focused on as the students
get a chance to rehearse language.
a) (Four)-phased drills (six or eight-phase drills). The
students are encouraged to ask a question and on the basis of
the answer follow it up with another question, for example: A:
Is John English? B: No, he isn't. A: Where is he from? B: He's
from Canada.
b) Mixed questions and answer drills. They have more
questions and can be asked in any order. There are some
pictures from which the teacher elicits the questions. Then
students are put in pairs to work with similar pictures and they
might use the answers to write short paragraphs. This method
provides a good opportunity for quick revision of language
previously studied.
c) Talking about frequency of activities. Students work
with a specially prepared set of flashcards. The cards show
various activities taking place. Students are put in groups of
four and a set of flashcards is placed in front of them, face
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downwards. A student picks up a card and has to ask another
student how often a relative of that student performs the
activity shown on the card. This is a simple cue-response drill,
but the students are conducting the drill themselves and the
random selection of the cards makes the drill enjoyable and
quite challenging. The use of group work means that many
students get a chance to participate in a co-operative and
friendly way.
d) Chain drills are ways of practising a particular
structure over and over again in the context of either a game
and /or a personal element. Teachers can use other groups
(when there are many students) or a whole class activity. The
teacher chooses the structure and then says, for example, My
name's Mary and I'd like to go to a party. The student next to
the teacher then has to say: Her name's Mary and she'd like to
go to a party. My name's John and I'd like to eat an ice cream.
The third student then has to remember the first two speakers'
goals and then give his own. Most drills can be adapted for pair
work and group work.
Information gap activities.
With information gap activities different students are given
different pieces of information. By sharing this information they can
complete a task. These activities are drills and because they contain a
communicative element they are more involving and motivating than
many question and answer techniques.
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An example of such an activity is 'Application', designed for
intermediate students, being used not only for oral practice but also for
reading and form-filling. Students are divided into pairs with the
restriction not to look at each other's papers. They are told that they
must each complete the paper in front of them. Student A asks student
B questions to fill in the missing information in the letter of
application.
The material makes students ask a large number of questions in
order to complete their task. For this purpose both students have to
read their material and work out what questions to ask. These
activities are designed to practise more or less specific language.
When an activity of this type is over the teacher can conduct
feedback by getting students to ask and answer the questions with the
whole class listening. This helps to check not only the students
language production, but also whether they have got the information
right.
Games.
They are a very important part of a teacher's equipment, not
only for the language practice they provide, but also for their effect.
They can be used at any stage of a class to provide an amusing and
challenging break from other classroom activity, and are especially
useful at the end of a long day to send the students away feeling well
about their English class.
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a) Ask the right question. Students are divided into pairs in
which there is A and B. Student A in each pair is given cards such as
the following:
Student A then has to ask student B questions so that B gives
exactly the answer written on A's card. Although it is funny, this game
is also difficult since student A has to think of exactly the right
question to get the right answer.
Fig. 5 Samples of cards
b) Twenty questions and other yes/no games. Twenty questions
is a team game (originally a popular BBC radio programme). Students
are divided into teams and each team must think of a number of
objects. The game starts when one student from team A asks someone
from team B a question which can only be answered with 'yes' or 'no'.
if team B finds out what the object is after a maximum of fifteen
questions they get two points. They get no points if they do not
discover what the object is after asking twenty questions. Instead of
objects the teams could be thinking of famous people, or animals, or
anything else. A charade element can be added to the idea so that
students can mime either actions (Are you smoking a cigarette?) or
occupations (Do you work with other people?)
c) Noughts and crosses. The class is divided into two teams; one
represents noughts (0) and the other crosses (X). the teacher puts the
following on the board:
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here always drinking
his may Is
aren't joke must
Fig. 6 Noughts and crosses game
The team selects the square it wishes to play for, and a member
of the team has to say a sentence using the word on that square. If the
sentence is correct the square is filled with a nought or a cross,
depending on the team the player comes from. The squares could all
contain question words, for example, or modal auxiliaries, frequency
adverbs, etc.
d) Quizzes can always be used to practise specific language
items in an enjoyable and motivating way. In the following example,
students will be practising the use of the was/were past.
The students are divided into two teams. Each team is given
time to write a number of general knowledge questions using the
was/were past. Their questions might be like the following: Who was
the first man on the moon? Where was the 1994 World Cup? Points
are given according to the time needed or the prompt response or if
the student consults the other members of the team.
Personalisation and localisation refer to those stages of practice
where students use language they have recently learned to talk about
themselves and their lives. Such stages can be very controlled or very
free. Language teaching materials in general sometimes give students
a highly grammatical idea of how questions are asked and answered.
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Research has suggested that answers to questions in real life are
seldom grammatically parallel to the questions. The answer to a
question such as Are you happy? is seldom Yes, I am. No, I'm not.
Much more likely are responses such as More or less, Can't complain,
or Why do you ask? Teachers should encourage this type of response
and ask students to add comments to their answers.
During these stages the teacher can prompt the use of additional
remarks and follow-up questions in order to encourage realistic
communication.
Written practice
Some ways of encouraging written practice are sentence
writing, parallel writing, cohesion, oral composition and dictation.
1.Sentence writing.
a) The fill-in. students have to fill in blanks in sentences.
Although it is a limited drill, it is often useful during
presentation stages and as controlled homework practice.
b) What are they doing? Students are asked to look at a
picture and write four sentences about what the people in the
picture are doing. In this exercise students use specific
language (here present continuous) to make their own
sentences.
c) Christmas. In this example students use
personalisation to write time clauses with words like 'before',
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'after', 'when', 'until', 'while' etc. The teacher can use only
national holidays, both sacred and secular.
2.Parallel writing suggests that students should have a model
from which to work. Students first see a piece of writing and then use
it as a basis for their own work. The original piece will show them
how English is written and guide them towards their own ability to
express themselves in written English.
3.Cohesion. Coherent organisation and logical thought is in
some ways more difficult in writing than in speaking, especially
because readers are often not in a position to clarify points they do not
understand with the writer in the same way as participants in a
conversation can stop the speaker and ask for repetition and re-
explanation. Cohesion can be done with the help of some devices such
as:
- co-ordinators (e.g., join the following pairs of
sentences using 'and' or 'but')
- concession trains the students in the use of concession
language such as 'in spite of' and 'although'. It also reminds
students how spoken language be formalised for written style.
- Princes, grandmothers, and bears drills train the
students how to write more coherent by using pronouns as
cohesive devices. They are asked to re-order sentences by
putting the letter of the sentence against the following
numbers (a-2, b-5, …)
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4. Oral composition. The teacher and the class together build up
a narrative and then the students are asked to write it. This process
allows the teacher and the students to focus in on a variety of language
items from verb tenses to cohesive devices. Oral compositions can be
accompanied by visual or real materials: the teacher can show students
a series of pictures, mime a story, or play them a tape with a series of
sounds.
5. Dictation has become fashionable again due to the work of
Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri, who have found dynamic
alternatives to the dictation of large texts of uninteresting prose. Two
of these alternatives are:
a) Beautiful things. The teacher may tell the students to
write the following: 'One of the most beautiful things I have
ever seen is…' and they have to complete the sentence for
themselves.
b) Poetry dictation. Students dictate to each other in an
involving and exciting way. The teacher brings one copy of a
poem into the classroom and either keeps it on the desk or pins
it to a board. The students are put into groups. Each group
sends a member up to the poem where they read only the first
line. They take this line back to their group and dictate it. Now
a second member of the group goes to the poem and reads the
second line so that it can be dictates to the group. A third
student goes up fort he third line and so on.
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Teachers can use modern poetry, which is often short and clear
or dialogues and prose passages that are not too long.
Communicative activities
These activities are intended to encourage spoken
communication between students and/or between students and the
teacher. The activities can be divided into seven categories:
- Reaching an agreement
- Debate
- Relaying instructions
- Communication games
- Problem solving
- Talking about yourself
- Simulation and role play.
Reaching an agreement. Students have to agree with each other
after a certain amount of discussion. The task is complete when they
have reached consensus. These activities promote free and
spontaneous language use. Here is an example:
Going to the mountains
Students are told that they are going on holiday and have to
decide what objects to take with them (the teacher decides on the
number - e.g., 12). The students will have to agree on the objects
chosen.
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Stage 1 All students are asked to write down the twelve objects
they would choose to have in their luggage if they were going to stay
in the mountains for a week.
Stage 2 When all students have completed their lists they are
put into pairs. Each pair has to negotiate a new list of 12 objects. This
will involve each member of the pair changing their original list to
some extent.
Stage 3 When the pairs have completed their lists two pairs are
joined together to negotiate a new list that all four students can agree
to.
Stage 4 Groups can now be joined together and the lists re-
negotiated.
Stage 5 When the teacher thinks the activity has gone on for
long enough a feedback session is conducted with the whole class in
which each group explains and justifies its choices.
This activity can be used at any level of knowledge and makes
use of a lot of language.
Debate. Some teachers say that students are reluctant to discuss.
This is partly due to the topic involved (if it's too difficult), and partly
because they are supposed to speak fluently in a foreign language in
front of their classmates. Sometimes discussions develop
spontaneously, when students express their opinions about something
just said, but this kind of debate can't be planned. There are techniques
that can be used to get students talking:
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1.Put students in groups first. This grouping will allow students
to give opinions at their ease. It will give the teacher a chance
to see if the topic is interesting and to change it if needed.
2.Give students a chance to prepare. When the topic is more
serious and formal students need to prepare their opinions first.
3.Give students a task. Students can be given a list of
controversial statements about a topic and asked to score them
from 0 to 5. They can do this in pairs or groups.
Three types of debate activity are:
- The buzz group. Groups of three or four students are
asked to think of the topic - the summer holiday, e.g., and they
should think of as many activities as possible connected with
the topic.
- Controversial topics. The students are given a number
of statements about a topic, e.g., drug addiction. They have to
circle which best reflects their agreement or disagreement
with the statement (0 = totally disagree, 5 totally disagree). 1.
Drug consumption of any kind should be forbidden by law. 0
1 2 3 4 5. When they have finished they compare the
answers in pairs and then groups, to agree a score.
- The debate. Two groups argue a case which is then
put to vote. The activity is more suitable for the advanced
students. A variation on the formal debate is the 'Balloon'
debate. Students must each choose a character. They are then
told that all the characters are in the basket of a hot-air
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balloon. The balloon is losing air and so people must jump
from the basket to save the lives of the others. Who should be
chosen as the sole survivor? The 'characters' must make
convincing arguments in favour of their own survival. A final
vote decides which characters should jump and which should
remain.
Discussion activities are an important part of the lesson.
Teachers should remember that proper organisation can ensure their
success, and the lack of it can lead to failure.
Relaying instructions. This activity implies making students
give instructions. The success relies on how accurate and correct were
the instruction, as the one of the students must perform the task.
a) Exercises
Stage 1 The teacher writes down the names of a number
of common physical exercises or has them drawn on cards.
They are given to individual students without being seen by the
others.
Stage 2 Students have to get their classmates to do the
exercises using only words, not gestures.
b) Making models
Stage 1 A small group of students is given material to
make models with (e.g. Lego). They are told to make a model.
Stage 2 the original group now has to instruct another
group or groups so that they can duplicate the original model
(which is hidden).
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c) Describe and draw
One student is given a picture which the other student
cannot see. The second student has to draw an identical picture
by listening to the first student's instructions.
Communication games. They are based on the principle of the
information gap. Students are put into a situation in which they have
to use all or any of the language they possess to complete a game-like
task.
a) Find the differences (or similarities) in pictures that
differ and which have been given to a pair of students.
b) Describe and arrange. Students work in pairs and are
given a set of pictures which has to be arranged in a given
order.
c) Story reconstruction. Students are given different
parts of a picture story. They have to reconstruct the whole
narrative even though individually they have seen only a small
part of it. This is done because each member of the group has
seen a different picture; by talking about their pictures together
the narrative is reconstructed.
d) Poem reconstruction. The same principle can be
applied to simple poems. Students have to reassemble lines
which they are given. The activity combines reading, listening
and discussion.
Stage 1 The students are put into groups.
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Stage 2 In each group each of the students is given one card
with a line and instructed not to show it to anyone.
Stage 3 The groups are told that they must reassemble the
poem - it is a one stanza poem. Students can read the lines aloud,
but they may not show them to anyone.
Stage 4 the groups are told that they must decide on a title
for the poem.
Problem solving. This activity encourages students to talk
together to find a solution to a set of problems or tasks.
a) Desert dilemma. Students are given a complex
situation and told to work out a means of survival. The
students read about the situation and then put into groups. Each
group must follow the instructions and work out how to
survive. The teacher can check how imaginative the solutions
are.
b) Fast food is one of a series of computer games where
the user has to take decisions which will affect the outcome of
the game. In this program students run a fast food stall and
they have to decide how many rolls, sausages, drinks etc. to
order for their stall and what price to charge for them. If they
make the right decisions they prosper, if not they start to lose
money. After the game has been explained, the teacher puts
students into small groups. Each group is assigned to a
computer and told to run their stall. The discussion that takes
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place is frequently fast and furious with students anxious to
ensure the success of the activity.
Talking about yourself. Three simple activities:
1.Your name. The teacher puts the students in pairs and asks
them to tell each other how they feel about their first name,
what name they would choose for themselves if they had the
chance of choosing one.
2.What we have in common. Students are put in pairs at random
and told to discover five things which they have in common.
This encourages them to cover a number of areas and topics
including musical tastes, sports, families.
3.Musical associations. In this activity the teacher encourages
the students to use the title of a song to provoke discussion of
feelings and memories.
Stage 1 The teacher asks the students to write down the
name of a song which they like.
Stage 2 The teacher then tells the students that they are
going to discuss this song with a partner. They should tell their
partner the title of their song and how the song makes them feel,
think of, feel like doing, where they would prefer to be when
hearing it.
Stage 3 when the students have had enough time to tell each
other about their songs the teacher can ask if anyone heard
anything particularly interesting that they would like to share with
the group.
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Simulation and role-play. The idea of simulation is to create the
pretence of a real-life situation in the classroom. We can ask them to
imagine themselves shopping at the market or planning a trip. As
Jones (1982) says, a simulation works when certain conditions are
complied with: a 'reality of function' (students must accept the
function; they must not think of themselves as language students but
as the people in the simulation), a simulated environment (we do not
take the students to the market) and structure (there must be some
structure to the simulation and essential facts must be provided).
Within these guidelines we can add another variable: sometimes
the students take part themselves (if we ask them to organise a party,
for example, we are not asking them to pretend to be someone else)
and sometimes we ask them to play a role, pretending to be someone
that they are not. in the second case we are talking about role-plays.
During a simulation teachers must act as participants and thus
help the simulation go on in difficult situations. After the simulation
has finished the teacher will conduct feedback with the students. The
object is to discuss with them whether the activity was successful,
why certain decisions were reached etc. It is important for the teacher
to conduct feedback about the content of an activity such as
simulation as well as discussing the use of language. If only the
second is focused on the students will perceive the object of the
exercise as being concerned only with linguistic accuracy rather than
the ability to communicate efficiently - which is the main reason for
this kind of activity.
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Some facts about homework
Homework, as Muijs and Reynolds (2001) say, is one of the
most widely used but also one of the more controversial aspects of
teaching. Unpopular with students, and often with teachers and
parents as well, it remains a central part of school life.
Homework can be defined as out-of-class activity that is an
extension of classroom work. It can be either individualized or
assigned to the whole class. LaConte (Homework as a Learning
Experience, 1981) classified the three main types of homework as:
o Practice assignments, which reinforce newly acquired
skills or knowledge. An example of this can be when students
have learnt about different types of leaves, and are asked to
look for examples in their environment.
o Preparation assignments, which are intended to
provide background to particular topics. For example,
students can prepare for a lesson by reading texts or by
collecting material in advance.
o Extension assignments, which are designed to practise
learnt material or extend the students by encouraging them to
do more research on the subject after the topic has been
studied in class.
Homework is designed to meet a variety of purposes, such as
- increase student achievement;
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- reinforce and strengthen topics taught in class;
- complete unfinished work;
- develop independent study skills;
- develop self-discipline;
- develop time management skills;
- involve parents in helping their children's learning;
- allow preparation for future lessons and topics;
- develop students' research skills;
- review and practise topics taught in school; and
- extend the school day.
The precise form that homework will take will depend on the
goals that the teacher is trying to accomplish. However, the bottom
line of all these goals is aiding students' learning, which leads us to the
question of whether homework is an effective learning tool.
Is homework effective?
Some research that has attempted to answer this question, often
with ambiguous results, however. The main reason for this ambiguity
is that it is very difficult to isolate the effects of homework from a
variety of other factors affecting students' achievement.
A major recent overview of research was published by Cooper
(1989; 1994) who looked at 120 studies categorized into three subsets
based on whether or not the study had been designed to compare
homework versus no homework, homework versus in-school
supervised work or were non-experimental, looking at the statistical
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relationship between the amount of homework done and achievement
as found through questionnaires of students and teachers (correlational
studies). Looking at 17 studies that have compared homework with no
homework, Cooper found that homework can strongly benefit student
achievement. Seventy per cent of the studies he looked at found that
students who did homework made more progress than students who
did not. Furthermore, students who did more assignments per week
achieved better than those who did fewer assignments per week, as
measured by how both groups differed from students who did no
homework. However, if a homework assignment spanned a long
period of time, such as several weeks, the impact was less strong.
Studies comparing homework with in-school supervised study also
found homework to be more beneficial, although the difference was
not as large as for students who did no homework.
According to Cooper the following positive effects for
homework have been put forward:
The short-term effects which homework can lead to are:
- better retention of facts and knowledge,
- increased understanding,
- better critical thinking,
- better information processing and
- the possibility of extending the curriculum.
Long-term effects include
- he development of better study habits,
- the development of more positive attitudes towards
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school and studying, and
- the encouragement of learning outside school hours.
Non-academic long-term effects include
- the development of greater self-direction,
- greater self-discipline,
- more independent learning and problem-solving,
- better time organization and more inquisitiveness.
Finally, homework can be used to complete tasks that students
were not able to complete in class.
Negative effects posited include satiation, as students become
tired of studying, which can lead to a loss of motivation and loss of
interest in academic work; cheating, copying either from fellow
students or from published work; and lack of time for out-of-school
leisure activities.
Cooper's review also suggests that while homework can
significantly benefit student achievement, the extent of these benefits
differs by grade and subject. Homework appeared to have the largest
positive effect for science and social studies, and the smallest effect
for mathematics. Reading and English were in the middle.
Grade differences were even stronger. Homework had the
largest effect in high school (higher secondary), where students who
received homework outperformed those who did not by 69 per cent. In
junior high school (lower secondary) they outperformed no-homework
students by 35 per cent, while in primary school students who
received homework did not outperform their peers who did not receive
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homework. According to Cooper, homework at this level does have a
positive impact, however, as it helps develop good study habits and
attitudes towards school and learning.
Other American reviews have also provided support for the
view that setting homework can improve students' achievement. (e.g.
Keith 1987; Foyle and Bailey, 1988; Faulkner and BIyth, 1995). Keith
found that homework was particularly effective for students from
disadvantaged backgrounds.
Rutter et al. (1979), studying British secondary schools, found a
strong positive relationship between the number of minutes of
homework assigned and students' achievement, attitudes towards
school and attendance.
A study in Israel likewise found a positive effect for homework,
students who were said by their teachers to complete more homework
receiving higher teacher grades (Chen and Ehrenberg, 1993).
However, it is clear that this could be as much the result of higher-
achieving students having more positive attitudes to school and
therefore completing more homework than the other way round.
Some studies do not find positive effects, however. Thus, in a
British secondary school study, Cassidy (1999) reported no positive
effects on achievement in classrooms in which more homework was
assigned. Some research has also pointed to negative effects of too
much homework
Overall, then, homework does seem to be an effective learning
tool, especially for students in the higher grades. However, this
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conclusion leaves many questions unanswered, such as how
homework should be most effectively employed.
Effective use of homework
In order for homework to be an effective learning tool, it needs
to comply with a number of principles.
The first principle, which goes against a lot of present classroom
practice, is not to use homework as a punishment. Doing so will lead
to students resenting homework, and to homework not being seen as a
learning activity. Students will get the impression that the teacher does
not value homework as a learning tool, and will attempt to complete it
as quickly and perfunctorily as possible. As a way of motivating
students or extending learning outside the classroom, this practice can
be very harmful (Cooper, 1989).
That the teacher is taking homework seriously is also indicated
by the way she or he does or does not provide feedback on homework.
Homework should be marked and returned as soon as possible. It
should always be properly corrected, as uncorrected homework gives
students the impression that all that matters is completing the task, no
matter how. This will obviously not encourage them to make an effort
to produce correct or quality work, and will thus not aid student
learning. One way to do this that saves marking time is to let students
correct each other's homework. As students are usually asked to
complete homework within a set time frame, marking and returning
homework speedily will set the right example and not give students
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the impression that different rules apply to student and teacher. One of
the findings of Cooper's (1989) overview was that homework that is
checked contributes more to student achievement than homework that
is assigned but not checked. Ornstein (1994) suggests that it is better
to give less homework but correct it, rather than give more homework
which remains uncorrected. Cooper (1989) suggests that feedback on
homework should be instructional rather than graded. This because
grading homework might lead to students losing intrinsic motivation
to do homework and lead to them completing it out of fear of bad
grades instead.
Corrected homework can also provide helpful feedback to
teachers on students' progress in the subject. One way of increasing
the usefulness of homework as a feedback tool for teachers is to log
beforehand how long she or he expects the homework to take.
Students can then be asked to write on the homework sheet how long
it has actually taken them to complete it. If this period is particularly
long, this could be an indication that the student is having problems
understanding that particular topic.
Homework should also be integrated into the lesson or topic
studied. One way to do this is to review homework at the start of the
lesson. When routinely done, this will ensure that homework is seen
as an integral part of the lesson and may also be a good way to link
previous and current lessons. While practice of skills during
homework can be necessary, research does suggest that homework is
most effective when it reinforces major curriculum ideas (Black,
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1997). Homework should be challenging, but students should be able
to successfully complete homework, which should therefore not be
used as a way of testing students. One way to help achieve this, which
can also help overcome some of the problems involved with teaching
a heterogeneous set of students, is to individualize homework, so that
it is tailored to students' levels in the subject.
A way of making homework more relevant to students is to
connect what they have learnt in the classroom to their everyday life,
for example by using television guides to help them learn the time by
looking at when their favourite programmes are on, by measuring
their room and estimating how much paint would be needed to paint it
and how much that would cost, or by interviewing relatives to learn
something about local history or media use habits. Preparing new
topics by asking students to bring in material they have collected, such
as leaves of different types for a biology lesson, can also help achieve
this aim. Researching something on the Internet can likewise be both
useful and enjoyable, though inschool provisions need to be available
for those students who do not have a computer or Internet link at
home. Apart from heightening the relevance of homework, using real-
life experience and materials in homework can help students to more
easily remember what they have learnt in school (Boers and Caspary,
1995).
Homework planners can help students develop independent
learning and organizational skills. Homework planners can, for
example, take the form of a small calendar, in which students have to
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note what homework they need to be doing and when they have to
complete it. Students will need to be taught how to use homework
planners initially, but will find them very useful once taught. Using
homework planners can help students develop good study habits, and
use of planners is recommended practice for other forms of
independent study as well.
If homework is not completed, consequences need to be
attached to this, such as making students complete homework during
breaks, giving them a negative mark in a behaviour log, withdrawing
privileges, etc. If no negative consequences follow non-completion of
homework, students will soon start to take it less seriously leading to
non-completion becoming an endemic problem.
Homework does not have to be a solitary activity as it is
possible to set co-operative homework tasks. These can take the form
of co-operative research assignments or tasks which require two or
more students to work together to complete it. As with co-operative
work in general it is necessary to ascertain that students have the
necessary social skills to work co-operatively and, if this is not the
case, to teach them these skills first (see Chapter 9). Both joint goals
and individual accountability are likewise necessary for co-operative
homework to be successful.
As was remarked in the overview of research above, the
effectiveness of homework seems to differ according to grade level.
Also, it is a well-known fact that as they get older students’
concentration levels and independent learning abilities increase. This
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leads to the question of how much homework to assign at the different
grade levels.
School-wide homework policies
In order for homework to be most effective, a school-wide
approach is recommended. Research in school effectiveness has found
homework to be important (e.g. Rutter et al., 1979), and more
generally school-wide policies that support classroom practice are
considered to contribute to school effectiveness (Creemers, 1994).
One of the benefits of school-wide policies is that they can
create an ethos in which all students feel they are treated the same, as
all teachers apply the same rules. Also, school-wide co-ordination can
help avoid the problems that can occur when different teachers give
large amounts of homework to be completed during the same period.
Furthermore, school-wide policies on homework, as on other
aspects of school life, help create equity within the school with all
students benefiting from the same level of homework whoever is their
teacher.
School-wide policies can take a variety of forms. A set amount
of homework per week in different subjects can be helpful, as can
establishing set nights to do homework in different subjects (e.g.
Monday is mathematics homework day). Developing some form of
standardization for such things as homework headings can save time
and effort, as can the use of standardized school-wide homework
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planners. Homework policies should also contain guidelines for
teachers on systematically correcting and returning homework within
a specified time frame. The policy should also set out what is expected
from parents. Use of homework clubs and opening the school library
after hours can help students who have difficulty completing
homework at home. School-wide coordination of such activities is
necessary, though, so that facilities do not become too full and a
sufficient number of support staff are available.(from Muijs and
Reynolds 2001)
For the youngest children too much homework can be harmful
as they are already tired when they come home from school and
homework can put extra pressure on them. Thus, in primary school,
some researchers advocate not assigning homework, not least in the
light of the fact that no effects on achievement were found. There are
a number of reasons to assign at least some homework to primary age
students, though. One is to help students develop their independent
learning skills and help attain the attitude that learning can take place
outside of school as well as in school. However, it is clear that young
children should not be overburdened by homework. It is generally
recommended that children from nursery to the first three or four
years of primary school should spend at most 20 minutes a day doing
homework, and no more than 30-40 minutes a day in the upper
primary years.
As children move to secondary school, the evidence on the
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positive effects of homework becomes stronger, and there is clear
support for setting homework at this level. The development of young
people allows for more time to be spent on homework and, as the
student becomes older, the development of independent learning skills
becomes ever more important in the light of the move to higher
education and the workforce. Therefore, daily homework is
recommended for secondary school students, which can take up to 90
minutes a day (Cooper, 1989).
Apart from differences in the amount of time to be spent doing
homework, homework at different grades will also serve different
purposes and may therefore take different forms. As students grow up
more complex tasks can be assigned, which can be increasingly long
term, including writing papers based on some kind of extended
research.
Parental involvement with homework
The attitude of parents to homework is often ambiguous. On the
one hand they believe it may aid their children's school achievement,
and may see homework as a good way of finding out more about what
their children are actually doing at school, on the other hand they may
feel that it takes time away from other worthwhile activities, and some
parents may be at a loss as to how best to help their children to do
their homework successfully.
One of the main ways in which parents can help their children is
to provide a quiet and private space where the child can do her or his
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homework. This does not necessarily mean that parents should make
sure that children turn the radio off or do not listen to music. On the
contrary, according to some research listening to music can aid
concentration (Hallam and Cowan, 1999). Probably this will differ
from child to child and children should be allowed to listen to music
while studying or completing homework if they feel comfortable
doing so.
Parents should encourage their children to complete their
homework and should support their children when they ask for help
without actually doing the homework for them. Showing an interest in
homework will help give children the feeling that homework is
important and valued. Parents can also help by establishing a routine
in which a certain time of the day is set aside for homework
completion. If possible, parents can help students develop their time
management and organizational skills, although some guidance from
the school can be necessary to help parents do this. This is particularly
important with younger children, who need more parental help to
successfully complete their homework assignments. Secondary school
children should largely be able to complete homework independently.
The school can help parents by giving them the information they
need and regularly communicating with them on homework. If there is
a school-wide homework policy this should be communicated to
parents. Teachers should let parents know how much homework they
plan to assign and approximately how long assignments should take.
The homework planner, mentioned above, can be used to
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communicate to parents what homework has been assigned, and it
might be useful to ask parents to sign the planner as well. If there are
consistent problems with a child not completing them to a standard
that is well below what one would expect or what the child seems able
to do in class, teachers should discuss this with parents to ascertain
whether there are circumstances at home, such as lack of a quiet
working space, that may hinder the child completing homework
satisfactorily. If possible, teachers should involve parents in
developing a strategy to solve the problem. It is important to
remember, though, that parents may not be aware of what is
happening while students do their homework due to them returning
late from work, for example (Hoover Dempsey, Bassler and Burow,
1995). It is also important to provide support to parents on how to help
students because confusion can result from students receiving
different advice or methods from parents than they do from teachers at
school.
Especially with younger children, parents should be encouraged
to do some homework activities with their children, such as reading
aloud to them or playing games with them. Explaining to parents at
the beginning of the school year how they can help in this way will be
helpful to them, as will designing certain homework assignments for
students to work on with parents. One method that can help involve
parents in their children's homework is to give homework in the form
of games that can be played with parents and siblings while
reinforcing principles that needed to be learnt (Bryan and Sullivan-
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Burstein, 1997).
For some parents, especially if they suffer socio-economic
deprivation, it may be impossible to provide the calm, supportive
space needed for children to be able to successfully complete
homework. A small minority of parents may not even be willing to do
so. Here the school can help out by providing students with the space
they need by setting up in-school homework clubs where students can
come to .study and complete homework outside school hours, as has
successfully been done in schools in a wide number of countries,
including the UK.
A further problem may be the differential access that children
have to material in the home that they can use for research purposes,
for example. This can be a particular problem with homework
assignments that do not provide merely practice of the day's lesson,
but ask students to do research on a topic or find out something to
prepare for coming topics. Here again the school can help out by
providing library facilities that students can access outside school
hours.
Teaching English grammar
Michael Swan writes about seven bad reasons for teaching
grammar and two good (Methodology in Language Teaching 2002).
The bad reasons are:
1. Because it’s there – we find it in grammar books. But
the grammar points in the course book may not all be equally
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important for a particular class. The book may have been written for
students with different purposes, studying in a different environment,
perhaps with different native languages and different problems. It may
have been designed for students with more time to spend on grammar
than they do today. The book may simply have been written by a
grammar fanatic. It is important to choose grammar points relevant to
students’ needs, rather than blindly going through the syllabus from
left to right.
2.It’s tidy – grammar looks tidy and is teachable. Grammar can
be presented as a limited series of tidy things which students can
learn, apply in exercises, and tick off one by one. Learning grammar is
a lot simpler than learning a language.
3.It’s testable – many students like tests. It is hard to gauge your
own progress in a foreign language, and a good test can tell you how
you are doing, whether you have learnt what you wanted to, and what
level you have reached. Tests show (or appear to show) whether
students are learning and whether teachers are teaching properly; they
rank learners; and (if you incorporate a pass mark) they can be used to
designate success or create failures.
4. Grammar as a security blanket - Grammar can be reassuring
and comforting. In the convoluted landscape of a foreign language,
grammar rules shine out like beacons, giving students the feeling that
they can understand and control what is going on. Although this
feeling is partly illusory (structural competence only accounts for a
portion of what is involved in the mastery of a language), anything
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that adds to learners' confidence is valuable. However, the 'security
blanket' aspect can lead students and teachers to concentrate on
grammar to the detriment of other, less codifiable but equally
important, aspects of the language.
5. It made me who I am - Many foreign language teachers spent
a good deal of time when younger learning about tense and aspect, the
use of articles, relative clauses and the like; they naturally feel that
these things matter a good deal and must be incorporated in their own
teaching. In this way, the tendency of an earlier generation to
overvalue grammar can be perpetuated.
6.You have to teach the whole system - People often regard
grammar as a single interconnected system, all of which has to be
learnt if it is to work properly. This is an illusion. Grammar is not
something like a car engine, where a fault in one component such as
the ignition or fuel supply can cause a complete breakdown. It is more
realistic to regard grammar as an accumulation of different elements,
some more systematic than others, some linked together tightly or
loosely, some completely independent and detachable.
7. Power - Some teachers - fortunately, a minority - enjoy the
power. As a teacher, one can get a kick from knowing more than one's
students, from being the authority, from always being right. In
language teaching, grammar is the area where this mechanism
operates most successfully. A teacher may have a worse accent than
some of his or her students; there may be some irritating student in the
class with a vast vocabulary of American pop idiom of which the
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teacher knows nothing; but there is always grammar to fall back on,
with its complicated rules and mysterious terminology. Even if you
have a native-speaking student in your class, he or she will not be able
to talk coherently and confidently about progressive infinitives or the
use of articles with uncountable nouns. If you can, you win.
Two good reasons:
1.Comprehensibility – knowing how to build and use certain
structures makes it possible to communicate common types of
meaning successfully. Without these structures it is difficult to make
comprehensible sentences.
2.Acceptability – in some social contexts, serious deviance from
native-speaker norms can hinder integration and raise prejudice - a
person who speaks ‘badly’ may not be taken seriously, or may be
considered uneducated or stupid. Students may therefore want or need
a higher level of grammatical correctness than is required for mere
comprehensibility.
Listen and physically respond. The first exercise, which applies
to Total Physical Response method, is a very effective way to present
imperatives, prepositions, and phrasal verbs. Although it is a
presentation technique for students at all levels, it can also provide
structured and communicative practice for beginning students who
don't have enough language to handle a communicative task. This
research suggests that students benefit from watching as well as from
doing, so you can begin by bringing several students and their chairs
to the front of the room. The rest of the class will watch and learn.
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Have students sit down and face the class. Be careful not to use any
language except English. Say "Stand up," and do it yourself to show
your students what you mean. Do it several times until the students in
the front of the room get the idea. Then ask individual students to do
it. Use their names: "John, stand up." When John does it correctly,
acknowledge this by saying, "good" or "OK." After all the students in
the front of the room can do it, try a new command: "Mary, sit down."
Go slowly. Repeat and act out each command as many times as
necessary. When students can stand up or sit down on command, ask
one to walk to the window. Remember, you can demonstrate yourself
or use gestures, but don't answer any questions in the student's native
language. Everything must be in English. Continue with other
directions, such as, "Stand up," "Sit down," "Jump," "Walk to the
window," and "Walk to the chair." When they have mastered these
commands, you can give them a new command they haven't heard
before, such as, "Jump to the window." Students will be delighted
when they realize they can understand and respond to something new
in English in so short a time. In this way, students learn to
comprehend the imperative form without even realizing it.
Listen and draw. For working with students beyond the very
beginning level, the following activity might be used for
communicative practice of prepositions and locations of objects with
various shapes.
Ask students to take out a piece of paper and a pencil. Tell them
to listen and to draw what you ask. You can make the directions as
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simple or complex as you want. The following example starts out very
simply, but becomes quite complex:
"Draw a heart in the upper right-hand corner of your
paper. Now draw a diamond to the left of the heart. Draw a
house in the middle of your paper. Now draw a tree three
centemetres below the heart. Put two horizontal, parallel lines
three centimetres below the diamond."
This exercise can continue as long as your students are
challenged and can be varied to practice vocabulary and prepositions
receptively.
Listen and colour. For receptive practice of possessive
adjectives, the following activity can be used. Give students some
crayons and a mimeographed sheet with line drawings of a boy and a
girl, and their dogs. The pictures can be simple, but students must be
able to tell the boy from the girl. Then give the class the following
instructions:
"On your paper there are two people, a boy and a girl. Colour
his hair red."
Wait for students to do this, and then say:
"Colour her hair orange. Colour her skirt brown. Colour
his pants black. Colour her T-shirt green. Colour his T-shirt
purple. Colour his dog brown and white. Colour her dog
yellow."
The actual co1ours used are not important. The main objective
is to give students a chance to follow directions while listening to
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colours and possessive adjectives in imperative sentences. When the
students are finished, let them compare papers. Finally, show them
your paper as a final check for accuracy. This activity is intended for
children, but adults enjoy it or adaptations of it as well. If you cannot
prepare mimeographed sheets for your students, you can draw the
pictures on the board and have students approximate them on paper;
two students can also come up to the front of the room and carry out
the commands with coloured chalk. The rest of the students can watch
and correct their classmates if a mistake is made.
Listen and manipulate. A particularly effective technique for
presenting or practicing prepositions and phrasal verbs requires your
students to listen and manipulate objects. For example, call one
student to the front of the room and say:
"John, put the book on the table. Good. Put the book
under the table. Good. Put the book beside the chair. Good. Put
the book in the drawer."
Introduce the phrasal verb pick up by continuing this way:
"Pick up the book and put it on the chair. Pick up the book and
put it in the drawer."
For more advanced students who have mastered prepositions of
location, you can extend the activity to demonstrate other uses of
prepositions, such as the proxy function of for. To do this, say:
"Mike, John wants to put the book on the table, but he
can't. His arm is broken. Put the book on the table for him."
Another exercise for teaching phrasal verbs that requires
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listening and manipulating objects is asking a student to come to the
front of the room. Put a piece of paper on the desk and say:
"José, pick up the paper. Throw it away. Oh, oh! We want
to keep it. Pick it up again. Give it to Marcia. She's had it long
enough. Take it away from her."
In most classes, the teacher can even invite one of the students
to take over the role of giving commands. This is usually well
received by the class.
Look, listen, and verbally respond. A very effective technique
involves the teacher speaking to students who can only give one-word
responses (as a class or individually). The word can be yes or no, or it
can be someone's name, a noun, an adjective, a number, etc. This
technique can be used to teach vocabulary, but it can also be used to
present or practice certain structures, such as or-questions, after
students have mastered comprehension of yes/no and wh-questions.
If students already know each other's names and some basic
colour vocabulary, the teacher can begin by standing next to a student
and asking the class (or an individual student) who it is:
T: Is this Maria or is this Susana? (demonstrates
response) Susana.
T: Is this Maria or Susana? (elicits response) S(s):
Susana.
T: Is Susana's blouse pink or is it blue? (points to blouse
and responds) Pink.
T: Is Susana's blouse pink or blue? (elicits response)
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S(s): Pink.
This should continue with examples involving other students
until the teacher is confident the class understands how to comprehend
and respond to alternative questions. At this point, the teacher can
introduce some well-selected pictures of desserts or sweets (along
with the vocabulary if it is unfamiliar) and say, "We're going to a
restaurant. We're going out for dessert." The conversation can
continue as follows:
T: John, do you want ice cream, pie, or cake?
J: Pie.
T: Do you want apple pie or cherry pie?
J: Cherry.
T: Sarah, do you want ice cream, pie, or cake?
S: Ice cream.
T: Do you want vanilla ice cream or chocolate?
S: Chocolate.
This should continue until everyone has a chance to respond.
The most common error is for students to answer yes or no when they
should make a specific choice. When this happens, the teacher should
show pictures of all the options in the alternative question and say to
the student(s), "You can't have both/all of them. You have to make a
choice. Which one do you want? Do you want this one or that one?"
During the exercise, the teacher should also include a few recall items,
such as these:
T: Liana, I forgot. Does John want ice cream or pie?
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L: Ice cream.
If there is a mistake, as above, or any confusion, yes/no and wh-
questions can be used to straighten out the facts:
T: Is that right, John?
J: No.
T: What do you want?
J: Pie (or cherry pie).
In this way, comprehension of alternative questions is
introduced, while comprehension of yes/no questions and wh-
questions is reviewed. This would take place during the presentation
phase of a lesson.
Listen and speak. One of the best communicative exercises for
practicing prepositions and phrasal verbs requires some preparation
but is well worth the time and effort. Before class, you will need to cut
out different shapes (triangles, circles, squares, and rectangles) from
different coloured papers. Make the shapes different sizes and colours,
but make two copies of each colour/shape combination. Use enough
different shapes so that each student can have about six or eight pieces
of paper. Before you start, be sure students know the names of all the
shapes and colours you have used.
For this exercise, each student will need a partner. Each pair is
given matching sets of coloured shapes. They can arrange their chairs
so they are sitting back to back. One student in each pair then arranges
his set of shapes on his desk anyway he chooses. The only
requirements are that he must use all the shapes the teacher has given
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him, and his partner must not be able to see the arrangement. Then,
when the teacher tells students to begin, the student with the arranged
shapes must tell his partner where to put her pieces of paper so the
arrangement on her desk exactly matches the arrangement on his. He
might say things such as:
"Find the little yellow triangle. Put it three centimetres
down from the left-hand side of your desk and two centimetres
away from the top. Now find the big red circle and put it to the
right of the triangle."
Perhaps the other student will ask:
"Is the big circle about five centimetres in diameter?"
The first student will answer:
"No, that's the small red circle. Find the big one."
Walk through the class as students do this exercise and make
sure they are using English. If they forget the word for a particular
shape, let them describe it as best they can, and you can present the
vocabulary they have forgotten after the exercise. Don't let the
students turn around or look at each other's arrangement until the
exercise is finished. Both students can speak and ask any questions of
the other that they want. The point is to communicate. The exercise is
difficult but offers a high return for the effort: it demands
communication, encourages use of new vocabulary, practices
structures already learned, and is exceedingly challenging.
Telling stories
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Teacher-generated stories. Everyone loves a story, including
ESL students. Stories are used in contemporary ESL materials to
promote communication and expression in the classroom. A dialog
reflecting some version of a "story" is central to audio-lingual lessons.
Stories can be used for both eliciting and illustrating grammar
points. The former employs inductive reasoning, while the latter re-
quires deductive thought, and it is useful to include both approaches in
lesson planning. In addition, a well-told story is the perfect context for
a structure-discourse match, but the technique can also be used
effectively for a structure-social factor match. Storytelling is one of
these extremely adaptable techniques, and it can be a convenient and
natural grammar teaching tool. You may even find that it is the
technique that holds students' attention best, as well as the one they
enjoy most.
Grammar points can be contextualized in stories that are
absorbing and just plain fun if they are selected with the interest of the
class in mind, are told with a high degree of energy, and involve the
students. Students can help create stories and impersonate characters
in them.
Students will certainly appreciate and respond to your efforts to
include them in the storytelling process, but they will also enjoy
learning about you through your stories. Adult-school students are
particularly interested in their teacher; anecdotes about you, your
family, or your friends, as long as they are relevant and used in
moderation, can be very effective.
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Stories should last from one to five minutes, and the more ex-
aggerated and bizarre they are, the more likely students will remember
the teaching points they illustrate.
Past Perfect. The story centres around students, and student
participation and development of the story is encouraged.
In an intermediate class, the story could go as follows:
"Let's say that Mrs. Gonzales gets tired of her job. What do you
do, Mrs. Gonzales?"
Allow the student to respond. Then continue:
"OK. Let's say that Mrs. Gonzales is tired of working in a
hospital. She wants to find a new job where she can make more
money. Is that right, Mrs. Gonzales?"
Shake your head up and down to signal to Mrs. Gonzales what
her response should be. The student will usually catch on immediately
and respond in a way that will advance the story. If not, continue to
shake your head to prompt the correct response. You might, perhaps,
even give the correct response yourself, with good humour. After a
few stories, you will probably find that students await your cues
eagerly and respond promptly, or occasionally enjoy giving you the
wrong response before agreeing to follow your cues. Both kinds of
responses can be effective and serve to make the experience more
interesting and fun for everyone. Continue the narration:
"So, Mrs. Gonzales decides to get a new job. What kind of job
do you think she gets?"
Let students volunteer possible jobs for Mrs. Gonzales, but
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reject them all. When you've exhausted all of their suggestions,
continue:
"No, these are really good ideas, but Mrs. Gonzales
doesn't get any of those jobs. You're a really good cook, aren't
you?"
Shake your head up and down to cue a positive response:
"What dish do you cook best? Enchiladas? Now, Nelson, you're
a rich man, aren't you?"
Shake your head up and down to cue Nelson if necessary:
"Would you like to invest some money? Good. Why don't
you give Mrs. Gonzales fifty thousand dollars to open an
enchilada stand?"
Explain that with Nelson's help, Mrs. Gonzales opened an
enchilada stand:
"I think Mrs. Gonzales will make a lot of money. What do you
think, Mike?"
After Mike responds:
"Well, you know, she did just that. Mrs. Gonzales was so
successful that in just six months, she had made enough money
to pay Nelson back and had one hundred thousand dollars left
over besides. Each year, she sold more and more enchiladas.
She became a very rich woman and moved to Beverly Hills.
She bought a big house with a swimming pool, and what else,
Mrs. Gonzales?"
After she responds:
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"Wow! Doesn't that sound great? Well, you know, after
two or three years, Mrs. Gonzales decided that she wanted to
retire. She had made so much money, she didn't need any more.
Now, Mrs. Gonzales, let me ask you, how much money had you
made before you retired?"
With cues, get Mrs. Gonzales up to a million:
"That's right. Mrs. Gonzales retired after she had made a million
dollars. "
The sentence can be written on the board and the form of the
past perfect then elicited, perhaps with the aid of a time line:
T I M E L I N E
Mrs.
Gonzales gets
tired of job
Nelson
lends her
money
Mrs. G. opens
stand; makes $
1 million
Mrs. G. gets
rich and
retires
Put the number 1 over the first action, making the money, and
the number 2 over the second action, retiring. Ask students what the
difference in form is between the first action and the second action.
You want them to notice that the first action is expressed by had + a
past participle and that the second action is expressed in the simple
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past. The teacher can tell two or three more stories, write the elicited
lines on the board, and point out the parallels in form. Stories based on
sentences such as the following have all been successful, but may
have to be adapted for your students.
o Juan had repeated Level 3 four times before he
passed.
o Carlos had had three girlfriends before he fell in love
with Luisa.
o Marie had eaten three plates of spaghetti before she
was full.
o Mr. Lee had asked a number of students before he got
the correct answer.
When telling stories, as with all other aspects of teaching, the
teacher must exercise good taste and caution, but still communicate
with the class. The appropriate balance varies from class to class, and
only individual teachers will know what the balance should be and
when it must be adjusted. Once the teacher has told the stories and
elicited the context and rules, the presentation, the first phase of the
grammar lesson, is finished. The class should then be ready to go on
to structured exercises, followed by communicative exercises.
Modals. Many teachers find modal auxiliaries and perfect
modals difficult to teach. They are very problematic for most students
as well because, unlike other verbs in English, modals act almost like
sentential operators. That is, they convey a quality of probability,
obligation, etc. to the entire sentence. Therefore, to communicate the
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function and meaning of a modal or perfect modal, lessons must be
richly contextualized with a variety of examples. Storytelling, of
course, is perfectly suited to the task. To teach must, you might tell a
story about one of your students, Jose:
"Usually he's a very good student who pays close
attention in class. However, today he is gazing out the window
with a silly grin on his face. When I call on him, he only sighs.
When I walk by his chair, I see Jose + Maria, with little hearts,
written all over his notebook. What can we conclude?"
Here let the class volunteer. Then continue:
"Obviously, Jose must be in love."
Write the sentence on the board, and then tell another story
which will elicit the inferential use of must. When you have two
sentences on the board with which to work, draw students' attention to
the important points.
To illustrate perfect modals, you could tell the story of one of
your students after the last exam. First set up the context of the exam:
"Last month we had an exam. Was it difficult, Mario?"
After the time period and the difficulty of the exam have been
established, tell the class about Rene.
"After the exam, I saw Rene. He was smiling and
whistling. He looked very confident. He wasn't nervous at all.
Now we're all very intelligent. We look at Rene, a good student,
and we see him smiling and relaxed. What can we conclude?"
The response we are looking for here is, "He must have done
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very well" or "He must have passed the exam."
Student-generated stories. Students can be marvellous
storytellers as well as excellent listeners, and this ability can be used
to good advantage. For example, for communicative practice of the
simple past, the methodologist Randall Burger had his students
complete the following with a story:
"Last night I got locked out of my house because. . ."
This exercise can be oral or written. Students love to use their
imagination and often can create very entertaining stories.
True stories can also be very exciting. An occasion for struc-
tured, communicative practice of the past perfect could be provided by
asking students to tell their partners or the class about five things they
had never done before they got to some place, e.g. the United States.
"Before I came to the United States, I had never eaten a
hamburger.”
Telling each other how they spend national holidays provides an
opportunity for students to use the simple present. Telling about next
weekend's plans will elicit the future. Conditional use of perfect
modals can be practiced by discussing what students could have done
if they had wanted to or whom they could have (or should have)
married. Such past unreal conditionals are appropriate for discussing
what would have happened if they had done so. One effective
procedure is for the teacher to model a story first and then to direct
students to tell their stories to their partners. Students usually find the
teacher's story almost as interesting as their own, and modelling the
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activity seems to break the ice. It also gives students an opportunity to
hear the grammatical structure in context once more before they
produce it.
Modified cloze. A short anecdote or story from which the
structure under consideration is omitted can be used for focused
practice of a particular grammatical structure. For example, the
following story about Nasrudin provides students with an opportunity
to practice the correct use of definite and indefinite articles. Omit the
underlined articles, and number each blank in the story for discussion
and correction purposes.
Nasrudin
Once upon a time there was a carpenter who had so much work
to do that he decided he needed an assistant. He put an advertisement
in the paper, and soon someone came to apply for the job. The
carpenter was surprised and disappointed when a strange, weak-
looking man named Nasrudin appeared at the door.
At first, the carpenter didn't want to hire Nasrudin because he
didn't look like he could even lift a toothpick; however, as no one else
had answered the ad, the carpenter finally said:
"OK, I'll give you a chance. Do you see the forest over there?
Take my axe and chop as much lumber as you can."
At dusk Nasrudin returned, and the carpenter asked:
"How many trees have you chopped down?"
"All the trees in the forest," Nasrudin replied.
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Shocked, the carpenter ran to the window and looked out. There
were no trees left standing on the hillside. Nasrudin had chopped
down the entire forest. The astonished carpenter asked Nasrudin:
"Where did you learn to chop lumber?"
"In the Sahara Desert," Nasrudin answered.
"That's ridiculous," laughed the carpenter. "There aren't
any trees in the Sahara Desert."
"There aren't any now," Nasrudin replied.
Any joke or anecdote can be put to the same use if it contains
examples of the structure being taught. Simply write the story in
language you think your students will understand. Teachers usually
are better judges of complexity and what their students comprehend
than any formula, whether syntactic or lexical, for assessing difficulty.
Sometimes it is necessary to introduce key lexical items before the
activity, but these should be kept to a minimum and introduced a day
or two in advance and reviewed on the day of the exercise. This
allows students sufficient time to internalize the vocabulary items and
gives them the opportunity to focus on form rather than on lexicon
when the lesson is finally presented.
For example, one might use the old story of "The Most In-
telligent Man in the World." Key lexical items in the story include
pilot, automatic pilot, stewardess, knapsack, and parachute. These
words should be introduced a day or two before the story is told. Then
the teacher should write up the story, leaving numbered blanks for the
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structures students are to focus on and fill in. For example, if one is
teaching the use of too, very, and enough, the structured practice story
might look like this:
The Most Intelligent Man in the World
A private jet with president X, a priest, a hippie, and the most
intelligent man in the world was travelling through the air when
suddenly one of the engines began to cough and splutter. The pilot
checked the gauge and realized that there wasn't enough fuel to make
it to the airport. He set the plane on automatic pilot and went back to
the passenger compartment. The passengers were very frightened
when they saw the pilot. He had a parachute on, and he said:
"I'm very sorry, but we don't have enough fuel to make it
to the airport. Unfortunately, we also don't have enough
parachutes for everyone. I'm taking one, and the stewardess is
taking another. That will leave three. The four of you will have
to decide among yourselves who gets them. Don't take too long
because you only have enough fuel for about three more
minutes. Goodbye. "
With that, the pilot and the stewardess jumped out of the plane
together. President X was the first person to speak. He said to the
others:
"I'm President X. I'm the president of country Y. I'm
much too important to die. I have a lot of responsibilities, and a
lot of people depend on me. I should have a parachute."
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He put on one of the parachutes and jumped out of the plane.
The next person to speak was the most intelligent man in the world:
"I'm the most intelligent man in the world. People come
from all over the world to ask my advice. I've solved problems
in every country of the world. I'm a very important person. I'm
much too important to die. I'm also very intelligent. The world
needs me more than it needs a priest or a hippie. I should have a
parachute. "
With that, he took a parachute and jumped out of the plane.
Now there was only one parachute left. The hippie looked at the
priest, but the priest didn't seem very upset. The priest spoke first:
"Look, I'm a man of God. I've made my peace with my
maker. I'm not afraid to die. There aren't enough parachutes for
both of us, so why don't you take this last one? Go in peace, my
son."
The hippie just smiled. He was very relaxed and said:
"No sweat, man. There are enough parachutes for both of
us. The most intelligent man in the world just jumped out of the
plane with my knapsack."
This story has been well received by advanced students, but if it
seems too dated or doesn't appeal to you, you might try another joke
or even a simplified version of a classic short story by someone such
as Somerset Maugham or Guy de Maupassant: the plots are classic
and hold students' attention in a way that other stories do not. For
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more advanced students, a story from a local newspaper can be
transformed into a valuable resource by making it a cloze exercise that
focuses on the relevant grammatical structure.
Students are divided into pairs, each member given a different
story. Students are allowed only a few minutes to read their stories.
Then they must summarize their stories for their partners. The stories
can be chosen for the type(s) of structure or tense they will elicit and
used accordingly. For example, non-referential it and the future tense
can be used in summarizing a weather forecast. Feature stories often
use the present tense, and some news stories are written in the simple
past. Teachers should feel free to specify a particular structure or
tense. Usually learners are cooperative and welcome the opportunity
for communicative practice of a specific form.
Dramatic activities and roleplay
Based on her experience with ESL students and her research
into the use of drama in language education, psychotherapy, and
speech therapy, Stern (1980) thinks that dramatic activities in the
classroom can be helpful in several ways. They appear to provide or
increase motivation, heighten self-esteem, encourage empathy, and
lower sensitivity to rejection.
Stern maintains that dramatic activities "are a curative for the
frustration and lagging interest which often occur during second
language learning," because they provide a compelling reason to learn.
In effect, drama gives a "strong instrumental motivation" for learning
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the second language. Stern thus concludes that drama "raises self-
esteem by demonstrating to second-language learners that they are
indeed capable of expressing themselves in realistic communicative
situations". In other words, dramatic activities can increase oral
proficiency by increasing self-esteem.
Most second-language learners can recall at least one experience
when they were reluctant to use the new language because their com-
mand of it was considerably less than native-like. According to Stern,
adults are especially inhibited by embarrassment or fear of rejection.
However, she points out that "several educators have found that drama
creates a non-threatening situation which can reduce and even
eliminate sensitivity to rejection."
Stern also addresses the issue of empathy. Stern thinks of
empathy as a relaxation or suspension of psychological mechanisms
which separate us from each other being essential to acquiring target-
like pronunciation in a second language. Schumann takes this one step
further by suggesting that "the natural factors which induce ego
flexibility and lower inhibitions are those conditions which make the
learner less anxious, make him feel accepted, and make him form
positive identification with speakers of the target language". Stern
feels that dramatic activities provide the second-language learner with
just such "natural factors" and she calls this the "spontaneity state."
Stern speculates that perhaps this is what an ESL student
observed when he said of a classmate, "The transformation in his
manner was unbelievable. He really 'hammed it up' during the phone
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conversation and everyone in the audience noticed". The experience is
really quite remarkable for students and teachers alike, and the fluency
and accuracy exhibited are often amazing. Stern hypothesizes that this
occurs during the spontaneity state because at that point
“. . . the usual gap between thought and expression which
ceases to exist in the native language might cease to exist in the
second language as well. Equally relevant to second-language
learning is the "free-flowing" creativity and the ability of the
person to draw upon heretofore untapped resources.”
As Stern says, the communicative strategies students acquire
during such a dramatic activity help them to "adjust to becoming a
speaker of the second language and tends to become a part of their
linguistic repertoire."
Skits for advanced grammar review
One of the difficulties with teaching advanced-level students is
that although knowledge of certain grammatical structures is assumed,
not all of the students truly command them. Moreover, it is often
exceedingly difficult for the teacher to determine which structures
have been internalized. A dramatic activity is an excellent tool for
such an assessment. It can reveal which structures need to be reviewed
and practiced.
Divide students into small groups of five to ten. Explain to them
that they are to write a skit that they will perform for the others. If you
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are teaching at a small institution, the whole school can be your
audience. If you are teaching at a university or adult school, probably
only one or two other classes have enough in common with your
students to appreciate their production. In any case, providing an
audience is the task of the teacher and should be dealt with before
beginning the activity. Of course, classmates constitute a sufficient
audience if there are enough of them and there is adequate space to
rehearse in without distracting anyone; the students themselves are
enough if the production can be videotaped. An audience of some sort
is essential since it stimulates motivation and provides a "payoff" for
many class sessions of hard work. It is vital to tell students who the
audience will consist of before they begin to work on their skit, as the
audience will, to some extent, determine the content of the play. A skit
prepared for classmates or schoolmates might not be appreciated by
family and friends.
The first few sessions should be devoted to brainstorming, in
which groups work out their ideas for skits. The teacher should act
strictly as a facilitator. Allow students to create something of their
own, and intervene only when it becomes apparent that no progress
will be made without your assistance. If this happens and a group
appears completely blocked, the teacher can suggest possibilities, such
as acting out a joke or anecdote; or doing a parody on American life or
institutions, such as a beauty contest, popular music, or school life; or
being a foreigner in the United States. One of our groups did a mock
ballet, all wearing enormous work boots; another did a spoof of the six
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o'clock news, complete with commercials. At this stage, students will
do best if left to their own devices. The best-received skits always
seem to be the ones the teacher has influenced least. Let students' im-
aginations go and avoid censoring. If the content of the skit is such
that school administrators or some other group might be embarrassed
or offended by it, speak to the potentially offended group to avoid sur-
prises, but defend your students.
After one or two planning sessions, it is time for the groups to
work on an actual script. Make sure they write down the dialog for
their skit and plan the necessary costumes, makeup, and props. It is
best to limit these to things that can be brought in from home.
Elaborate sets are not necessary, but creative costumes, makeup, and
simple props make all the difference in the world. Give students about
three sessions to work on this step. During the first two steps, English
is being used for communicative purposes, and the teacher should not
correct errors or interrupt any creative work. She should make
unobtrusive notes on grammatical errors or lexical difficulties and
organize mini-grammar lessons around those points.
The next step is for the teacher to edit students' work so that the
language is idiomatic and grammatically correct. This is an assess-
ment step and is essential, as it provides a clear picture of which struc-
tures need review. Recurrent structural errors and poor word choice
can provide the basis for grammar lessons during the remainder of the
semester, and you will also have a ready-made context (the dramatic
activity) for each lesson. Thus, such activities become contexts for
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grammar lessons that your students will usually remember.
One aspect of editing involves meeting with groups in order to
determine what they are trying to say. They might also need a little
help with ending a scene, planning a prop, or dressing a character.
During all of this interaction, both written and spoken, the teacher
should be alert to grammatical errors and take careful notes for future
lessons.
Once the script has been completed, type it up and make enough
copies for all of the actors and yourself. Students now need to
rehearse. One hour of rehearsal daily for three or four weeks is not too
much. Concurrently, grammar lessons should be conducted on what
the teacher has determined needs review.
When students are rehearsing, the teacher can act as a director
by suggesting movements, delivery of lines, etc. He can move around
from group to group and spend about ten or fifteen minutes with each
one. After a week of rehearsal, the teacher should begin to correct pro-
nunciation. Students should be encouraged to put their lines on tape,
and deliver them in front of mirrors, roommates, parents, pets, or
anyone who will listen. They should be allowed to correct each other
and be reminded to speak clearly so that they can be understood by
their audience.
Have each group rehearse its production numerous times. Every
rehearsal reinforces grammar points and helps offset stage fright. As
the performance approaches, students suddenly realize they are
nervous. Stage fright can be assuaged to a great degree by preparation.
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If creative control is left to the students, they will not become bored or
lose interest.
The next step is a full dress rehearsal in front of a small
audience. Perhaps you can recruit a colleague or two who have a free
period, a counsellor, or a secretary. Guests at dress rehearsals are
usually very effusive. Praise and encouragement put students in a
positive frame of mind for the final performance.
On the day of the performance, give your students plenty of
time to get into costume and prepare. Make sure you have a flash
camera and at least one roll of film, and invite the school's officials.
Introduce each skit (but let your students take their bows alone) and
prepare to experience one of the most rewarding moments in your
teaching career.
It may seem elaborate, but a dramatic activity is a remarkably
effective way to diagnose and remedy problems with grammar that
advanced students are supposed to have mastered, but haven't.
Role-playing
Another dramatic activity with which we are all familiar is role
playing. According to Rosensweig (1974), "Role-playing is the
dramatization of a real-life situation in which the students assume
roles. It . . . presents the students with a problem, but instead of
reaching a group concensus in solving it, the students act out their
solution" (p. 41). Rosensweig argues that correctly chosen role
playing scenes expose students to the types of situations they are most
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likely to encounter inside and outside of the classroom. Feedback
from the teacher provides them with the linguistic and cultural
awareness needed to function in such situations, thus improving their
self-confidence and ability to communicate effectively. It is an
excellent technique for communicative practice of structures sensitive
to social factors.
The general procedure he suggests is first to hand out the prob-
lem to the students and answer questions. Next, introduce and explain
the vocabulary and structures necessary for the task. In the following
session, divide students into groups, in which they discuss and prac-
tice how they are going to do the role-play-. Rosensweig suggests that
during this step the teacher allow students to communicate freely and
not interrupt for correction. However, the teacher should take notes on
grammatical, cultural, and phonological errors for subsequent
treatment. Next, the role-play is performed before the class. After each
enactment, the teacher comments on selected minor language errors.
Major errors are saved for formal grammar lessons later. After each
group has performed, the entire class discusses the questions raised by
the situation, such as different interpretations of the scene and
culturally or linguistically appropriate responses. The last step is to
assign a writing exercise based on the role-play or a related question.
Subsequent grammar lessons based on the errors observed during the
exercise should be presented.
Rosensweig suggests that the entire exercise be spread out over
three days: introducing the role-play situation and the initial group
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work on the first day; more group work, performances, class
evaluations, and written work on the second day; and the grammar
follow-up on the third. He points out that a classroom activity such as
this usually includes work on vocabulary, a culture lesson, written
work, and a grammar lesson, as well as work on pronunciation and
communicative strategies.
To illustrate the procedure, let us consider the following role-
play from Rosensweig. The grammar focus is the social use of
modals, such as May I see your driver's license, please?, Would you
mind stepping over here, please?, and the logical use of modals, as in I
must have left my insurance verification at home or The light might
have been yellow.
Being Stopped by a Police Officer
(Student Handout)
I. Scene
You are driving down a freeway in California and you are
stopped by a police officer. He is completely unsympathetic to the fact
that you are a foreign student and your nervousness makes it difficult
for you to express yourself. You are not sure why he has stopped you,
but you know that he is extremely angry. Your are to work out a short
skit with three characters: the driver, a passenger, and the police
officer (a fourth character could be another police officer). The
presentation should be approximately five minutes.
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II. Vocabulary
driver's license ticket
vehicle registration citation
insurance to break the law
license plate to step out of the car
valid until rear-view mirror
III. Questions for planning your role playing
Why has the police officer stopped you?
How should you react to his anger?
Is it possible that he had a good reason to stop you?
What is the best way to deal with the matter?
What kind of language do you use when you talk to a
police officer?
What are the possible problems you might have
(expired license, forgetting an important document, something
wrong with the car)?
IV. Discussion Questions
Is bribery a good way to deal with a police officer in
the United States? Why or why not?
What is the role of a police officer in the United
States? In your country?
What is the best way to treat a police officer in the
United States?
If you are stopped by a police officer, how should you
act? Would you act the same way if you were stopped by a
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police officer in your country?
What would you do differently?
V. Suggested Topics for Writing
1. Recount a personal experience that you have had with
a police officer in the United States. (This is particularly
suited for practicing the past tense and the narrative mode.)
2. Compare and contrast the role of a police officer in
the United States with the role of a police officer in your
country. (This would elicit the present tense, expository
mode.)
Pictures
Pictures are flexible and useful resources for teaching aspects
of grammar that require a structure-meaning match: they can be used
in all phases of a grammar lesson (i.e., in presentation, focused
practice, communicative practice, and for feedback and correction).
Interesting or entertaining pictures motivate students to respond in
ways that more routine teaching aids, such as a textbook or a sentence
on the board, cannot. Although they can be used to advantage at all
levels of proficiency, they are especially useful with beginning and
low-intermediate learners, who sometimes have trouble understanding
long or complicated verbal cues.
Pictures can also be used in various configurations to enhance
learning and practice. They introduce a great deal of variety into the
classroom. A picture may focus on one specific object, such as a
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house, or on an event, such as a boy jumping a fence; alternatively, a
picture may evoke an entire story. Between these two extremes, there
are pictures of a few people or a few objects. Pictures can be presented
in pairs: the same object or person on two different occasions (e.g.,
Mr. Jones before and after his diet) or two different objects or people
(e.g., a comb and a brush, a brother and a sister, etc.).
Pictures can be grouped into semantically related sets that
contain from ten to twenty items, representing animals, vehicles,
flowers, fruits, etc. Finally, a picture can become part of a sequence of
pictures that tells a story, much as comic strips or photo novels do.
Using pictures of this type allows the teacher to focus on temporal
forms and sequences in the target language.
In addition to eliciting verbal responses, pictures can form the
basis for pair and group activities. When students move into pairs or
groups, or come to the front of the class for an activity, there is
appropriate physical movement (as opposed to such inappropriate
activities as private conversation, passing of notes, staring at walls, or
looking out windows). Even the most mature, highly motivated, and
disciplined students have to move about a little during class. Activities
that encourage appropriate movement involving students directly or as
observers-will promote and enhance active learning. We feel that
pictures can play an important role in this process.
Group work as a technique
Pair or group activities demand that the teacher prepare all
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materials in advance and plan pair or group assignments well, so
students can perform their tasks efficiently. If group work is not well
planned, students become confused and demand a great deal of atten-
tion simply because they are trying to understand the task. The
classroom becomes quite chaotic when ten or more groups are
demanding clarification or additional directions for a task. Under such
circumstances, it becomes virtually impossible for the class to work or
for the teacher to move around the room and check each group's
progress.
When students first begin doing group and pair work, the
teacher should not expect them to form optimal groupings without
assistance. Thus, in addition to carefully planning and explaining the
task, the teacher must also think about group dynamics (e.g., how best
to form the groups for learning). Initially, the teacher might plan the
groupings in advance and project them on a transparency that, like a
map, indicates the membership and location of each group. If the class
is mixed ethnically, the teacher may decide to separate people with the
same native language. Some teachers have found it useful to put in-
hibited students together so they are forced to speak.
While students are working in pairs or groups, the teacher
should circulate to verify that the activity is being done as planned and
to assist students who are having problems. (Students should be
instructed in advance to raise their hands if they have a question or
wish assistance.) The teacher should not remain seated or uninvolved
during such activities but oversee as many of the pairs or groups as
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possible and respond or intervene as needed.
As the teacher circulates, she should take notes on the errors
students are making - especially the systematic errors. Such informa-
tion can be used in brief follow-up exercises in which students are
shown their most frequent and main errors and invited to correct them
and practice the problematic forms.
Using pictures to teach specific structures
Yes/No Questions
Pictures can be effective for presentation and structured
practice of yes/no questions. One favourite contexts is a pet shop. For
this you will need large pictures that everyone can see of 10 or 12
animals that are possible pets (e.g., a dog, a cat, a pony, a goldfish, a
turtle, a canary, a parrot, a hamster, a monkey, a snake). After
everyone is familiar with the vocabulary for all the animals, the
teacher has one student come to the front of the room and secretly
"buy" one of the pets. (If your class is small enough, have the student
sit in the centre of a circle formed by his classmates.) Then the
classmates must guess which pet the student has purchased by asking
yes/no questions until someone guesses the correct pet. (Note that this
format is simple, in that students directly guess the names of the pets;
different question forms are possible):
Classmate 1: Did you buy the monkey? Is it the monkey?
Student: No.
Classmate 2: Did you buy the dog? Do you have the dog?
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Student: No.
Classmate 3: Is it the pony? Do you have the pony?
Student: Yes.
The classmate who guesses the right pet then goes to the front
and makes the next secret purchase. This can continue for as long as
such practice is useful. The activity can be made more demanding by
allowing students to ask background questions about the pets (e.g., "Is
it a large animal?" "Can it fly?") or by requiring the class to guess the
price of the pet. For adult classes, instead of animals the teacher could
propose trips or meals as the context. ("Did you go to Brazil?" "Did
you have pizza?")
A similar, though more complex and more communicative
question-asking activity, can be done with pictures of famous
characters or personalities - real or fictional, living or dead. The
important thing is that everyone in the class must immediately
recognize each famous personality. In larger or low-level classes, one
student comes up and selects from the pictures the "person" he will
pretend to be (e.g., Napoleon). The class then asks yes/no questions
until someone correctly guesses the identity of the student;
Classmate 1; Are you alive?
Student: No.
Classmate 2; Are you a man?
Student: Yes.
Classmate 3: Did you really exist?
Student: Yes.
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Classmate 4: Were you an American?
Student: No.
In smaller and more advanced classes, the teacher can pin small
pictures of personalities on each student's back. The students then
have to ask their classmates yes/no questions in an attempt to figure
out who they are (i.e., who the pictures represent). This can be done
with one student asking questions of the whole class or a small group,
or it can be done as a freer activity in which everyone circulates
around the room and talks to everyone else.
Yes/No and Wh-questions
In an activity that provides communicative practice of both
yes/no and wh-questions with reference to location, pairs of students
are given two mismatched pictures of a bedroom. Students must be
told in advance not to look at each other's pictures. The two pictures
contain, among other things, some identical objects in different
positions. The task of the students is to discover through oral
communication and then to write down (a) which objects are in both
bedrooms and which are not; and (b) which appear in the same
location and which do not. The questions students would have to ask
each other many times in the course of this activity include:
S1: Is there a ________________in your bedroom?
S2: No, do you have a _________________in yours?
SI: Yes, I have a___________________
S2: Where is the _______________ (in your bedroom)?
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After the oral and written work is completed, students should
compare their lists against the actual pictures to see whether they have
communicated effectively.
Tense and Time
To elicit structured practice of the simple present tense
(habitual action), the teacher gives each group of four students a grid
with eight rectangles. A specific time of day is indicated at the top of
each rectangle:
Bob's Schedule
6:45 a.m. 7 a.m. 7:45 a.m. 9 a.m.
12:15 p.m. 12:30
p.m.
2:30
p.m.
4:30
p.m.
Fig. 7 A grid with the daily programme
The groups are also given l0 picture cards showing Bob engaged
in various activities. For example:
get up fix breakfast
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get dressed eat lunch
go to school work out at the gym
talk to his girlfriend study in the library
attend class read the newspaper
Fig. 8 Different activities performed during the day
To ensure that there is some variety in group accounts and some
negotiation among students, each group is told to use only eight of the
ten pictures to match Bob's activities with times of the day on the grid.
The task is to negotiate what Bob does every day at each time
specified on the grid, and this elicits the simple present tense.
Student 1: What does Bob do at 6:45?
Student 2: He fixes breakfast.
Student 3: No, first he gets up. Then he fixes breakfast.
Student 4: OK. He gets up at 6:45 and fixes breakfast at
7:00. What does he do at 7:45?
Because the groups choose slightly different sets of eight
pictures and order the pictures somewhat differently, there are
variations in Bob's schedule among the groups. It can be amusing (and
also a good review) to have one person from each group relate their
version of Bob's daily activities. By changing the task, other tenses
can be practiced using the same materials:
Describe what Bob did yesterday. (simple past)
Describe what Bob is going to do tomorrow. (going to
future)
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Another activity uses old photographs as a context for com-
municative practice of past states or habits, contrasted with current
ones. The teacher should ask each of the students, well in advance of
this activity, to bring in a photograph of family members or friends.
The photo should be at least five years old. Not all students will have
or want to share such photos, but if several students oblige these
photos can form the basis for contrasting past habits and states with
present ones. First, students share the photos with the class. (An
opaque projector would help; otherwise, pass them around quickly.
The teacher should bring plastic pockets or plastic wrap to protect the
photos from finger prints and smudges.)
Next, students provide data about the photos: the names of
everyone pictured, what each was doing then, and what each is doing
now. These data provide the stimulus for structured practice of the
habitual past tense in contrast with the simple present or the present
progressive. For example:
"Seven years ago, Ricardo used to be short, but he isn't
anymore. He's tall now."
"Seven years ago, Ricardo's sister Catarina used to be a
student, but now she's a dentist."
"Seven years ago, Ricardo's cousin Juan used to go to
high school. Now he works in a bank."
This can begin as a teacher-directed activity with the whole
class participating and then can change to a group-work activity, in
which a student in each group describes his picture.
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To elicit a discussion of travel plans using the will future and
because of reason, the teacher asks students to bring in a picture
postcard of some scenic place in their homeland or any place in the
world of interest to them. (The teacher should have some extra
postcards available.) Each student presents a card and gives a short
narrative about travel plans or suggestions using the will future and
because to signal a reason. The teacher should give the class a few
examples so they know what to do. For example, students with cards
from their homeland can say something like this:
"When (1) the name of another student comes to visit me
in my country, I will take (2) him/her to see ________(3)
________because________(4)_______. We will also visit
___________(5) ______ and ______(6) ________because
_______(7) ______.
Students with a card from another country can say:
"When I travel to _____(1)______, I will visit
______(2)_____ because _____(3)____. I will also visit _____
(4) _____ and ______ (5) ____ because
________(6)________."
If students are at a low level, story frames such as those above
can be written on the board or projected for focused practice. With
more advanced students, it should suffice for the teacher to model the
patterns once or twice, in which case the practice becomes more
communicative.
Sequential Logical Connectors
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In addition to their usefulness in teaching tense and time, a
series of pictures that tells a story can be used for communicative
practice of conjunctions and subordinators that overtly mark the
sequence of events in a narrative.
In the first example activity, which focuses on the use of before
and after, each pair of students is given two pictures representing the
same person or object at two different points in time; for example,
Sam weighing 300 lbs. and Sam weighing 130 lbs. or Sally's shiny car
and Sally's car after an accident. The pair of students has to negotiate
an understanding of which of the two events depicted occurred first
and what happened between the first and second events. (Actually, in
all cases either order is possible.) The pair then shows its two pictures
to the class and tells the story. Students should be instructed to use
either before or after at least once in their stories. For example, one
student might say:
"Sam decided he was too fat. He went on a diet. After he
lost a lot of weight, he looked much better."
Another pair might describe the story this way:
"Sam was a handsome young man. Then his girlfriend
cancelled their engagement and left town. After that, he was so
depressed he ate and ate and became very fat."
In an activity that allows practice of expressions of temporal
sequence, such as first, then, and next, each group is given an identical
set of four to six pictures in random order that tell a story. The groups
must first reorder the pictures so they tell the story and then write up a
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group account using temporal transitional expressions to reinforce the
sequence of events. Some of the cards used to practice tenses in the
earlier exercise describing Bob's daily activities can be used here. For
example:
"Bob got up early this morning. First he got dressed; then he
fixed breakfast; then he . . ."
One member from each group then shows the pictures and reads
the story developed by his group. Alternatively, the groups can write
their stories on transparencies and each story can be put on an
overhead projector. The groups will then see if they have all
reconstructed the same sequence. Often, at least one of the groups has
decided on a different order, which in turn can stimulate further
discussion of whether one sequence seems more logical (or perhaps
more humorous) than another. For example, in the example above, it's
possible to say that Bob had breakfast before he got up. It would be
less logical (but perhaps more humorous) to have Bob follow this
sequence.
Comparison
Pictures of two different people (stick figures or magazine cut-
outs will do) can create a context for structured or communicative
practice of comparisons. The teacher should give each pair of students
two such pictures, along with data for each picture specifying the
person's name, age, height, weight and other pertinent information.
Without access to each other's pictures or written data, both students
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should share their information orally and generate a series of
sentences comparing the two people in their pictures. For example:
"Bill is taller than George." "George is older than Bill."
For the presentation phase, the teacher should show the pictures
and model the sentences. For structured practice, the frames would be
provided and students would produce the sentences:
"Bill is _________ George."
"George is _________ Bill."
For communicative practice, students sit back to back so they
cannot see each other's pictures. The two students thus have to ask
each other many questions and share a lot of information:
S 1: I have a picture of George. And you?
S 2: I have a picture of Bill.
S 1: George is thirty years old.
S 2: Bill is twenty-five, so George is older.
A communicative activity using pictures that will help students
practice the superlative degree requires groups of three. Each group
receives a set of three pictures of objects such as houses or other
buildings – one picture for each student - and students are told not to
look at each other's pictures. Each group is also given an exercise
sheet with a list of cues for questions that must be asked and answered
during the activity. For example:
1. Most rooms?
Q:
A:
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2. Fewest rooms?
Q:
A:
3. Oldest?
Q:
A:
4. Newest?
Q:
A:
5. Biggest garage?
Q:
A:
6. 5maIIest garage?
Q:
A:
The first group to correctly complete their exercise sheet wins.
A token prize for each of the three winners, such as a piece of candy,
is a nice touch.
Relative Clauses
For communicative practice of the identification function of
restrictive relative clauses, the teacher gives each pair of students two
identical pictures depicting four or five men, women, cars, or
buildings. On one picture proper names or noun descriptions appear
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below each person or object; the other picture has blanks. Having been
instructed not to look at his partner's picture, the student whose picture
has blanks must elicit the names by asking questions with relative
clauses or reduced relative clauses. For example:
"What's the name of the lady wearing the dark blue coat?"
"What’s the name of the lady who's laughing?"
To practice the same type of relative clause in an imperative
rather than a wh-question, the teacher gives each group of four
students four or five pictures representing semantically related nouns
(e.g., different boys, houses, cars). One student in each group holds
the picture cards, while another gives commands with relative clauses
indicating the disposition of the pictures. For example:
"Give the picture of the boy who is playing baseball to
Max."
"Put the picture of the boy who is swimming on my
desk."
It might be a good idea for the teacher to do this group activity
once with the whole class before the group work starts. Also, once
each group has finished practicing with its own set of pictures, the
groups in the classroom can exchange picture sets. Then the other two
students in each group will have a chance to hold the pictures and give
the commands.
Reviewing several different structures
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Pictures can also be used to effectively review a week's worth
of lessons. Randall Burger draws a big policewoman apprehending a
small criminal on an artist's pad in front of the class as his students
watch. This immediately captures their attention and interest. After he
finishes, he asks questions which will elicit responses with a specific
grammatical form. For example, he might ask the following questions
(form elicited is in parentheses):
What is she? (copula)
What is she wearing? (present progressive)
What does he do? (present tense)
(pointing to gun) What does she have here? (present
tense with stative verbs)
Have you ever seen one? (present perfect)
Do you have one? (present with stative verbs)
How long has she been a policewoman? (present
perfect)
Does she make a lot of money? (negative)
Would you like to marry her? (modal-like forms)
What was he doing when she caught him? (past
progressive)
Do you have policewomen in your country? (yes or
no)
What would you do if you met one? (present unreal
conditional)
The list of questions is, of course, limitless. The questions can
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be varied to focus on whatever grammatical forms the teacher would
like to review. It is important that the picture be interesting and/or
amusing, though a picture appropriate for one group may not be
appropriate for another. Also, be sure to end the exercise before
students become bored or tired of looking at the picture.
Using realia
According to Kelly, the use of realia in language teaching has a
long history. As he points out:
The first clear information of the use of objects of general
relevance comes from Tudor England. Sir Thomas Elyot, for
instance, remarks, "there can be nothyng more convenient than
by little and little to trayne and exercise them in speaking of
Latin; infourmyng them to know first the names in Latin of all
thynges that cometh in syght, and to name all the parts of their
bodies" (364: 33). In the famous scene from Henry V in which
Princess Katharine's maid tries to teach her some English, we
see a little of the practical application of Elyot's advice in the
Tudor classroom.
Realia has many uses in the classroom, not the least of which
are promoting cultural insight and teaching a life-skills lexicon. Realia
can also be used effectively in teaching grammar, especially for a
form meaning match. For this kind of match, realia can be used in
combination with techniques such as storytelling and role-play in both
the presentation phase and the practice phase of the lesson.
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Hollywood stars
Let's begin by looking at some ways realia can be used in the
presentation phase. For example, if one is teaching a lesson on the
copula with predicate nominals, usually a lesson for beginning
students, realia can help focus students' attention as well as illustrate
the point.
For this lesson, the teacher should bring in several items from a
thrift store, garage sale, or child's toy box, such as a blond Halloween
wig, a train engineer's hat, a stethoscope from a toy doctor's kit, and
perhaps a doll. Call five students to the front of the class, put the wig
on one, and say, "She's a movie star." Put the hat on another student
and say, "He's an engineer." Put the stethoscope around another's neck
and say, "She's a doctor." Give the doll to the last student and explain,
"He's the father." Very quickly students in front will get into the spirit
of the lesson and enjoy demonstrating their acting skills.
One teacher who uses this technique with his beginning students
says that at this point in the lesson, the class is usually very attentive
but high-spirited. He advises student teachers not to be disturbed by
students' laughter, but enjoy their antics and laugh along with them.
This sets up a context, an experience for the grammar point: the more
students enjoy the lesson, the easier it will be for them to recall it later.
During his presentation, the teacher waits until the class settles down a
bit and then goes back to the student with the blond wig and asks the
class, "What is she?" After a student answers that she is a movie star,
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he repeats the same routine with the other "actors" in front of the
room, keeping the activity light and fast-paced. Although students
may be more interested in the roles their classmates are playing, they
are also practicing the copula.
Once students seem confident, the props can be changed to il-
lustrate the plural (doctors, fathers, etc.) and the teacher can illustrate
You are students by indicating the class as a whole. Such realia, com-
bined with the physical movement of trading props and directing the
class's attention to different actors, holds students' interest. Humour
also makes the input meaningful and enables students to integrate it
with knowledge and experience already acquired. The sight of a
classmate in a wig is easy to visualize and provides an image that
students can associate with the grammatical concept. When dolls or
stethoscopes are given to two people instead of one, and the form
becomes fathers or doctors, students have the opportunity to think
about and generate associations and relationships between the original
input and a novel situation.
You can also vary the copula lesson with the use of Halloween
masks (e.g., This is Frankenstein, She is Snow White, etc.).
Alternatively, you can use masks to practice predicate adjectives that
convey emotion in sentences, such as He is sad or They are happy.
Any realia that students associate with a predicate adjective (e.g., old,
young, fat, thin, intelligent, beautiful, strong) or with any persona
(e.g., a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher) can be used to practice the copula.
Teachers can even draw masks in class rather than buy the usual
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commercial Halloween variety. These same props can be used for
negation. Recall that there are two distinct possibilities in English for
sentential negation - either post-copula or post-auxiliary negation, as
illustrated below:
1. post-copula: Judy isn't here.
2. post-auxiliary: Mary doesn't have a car.
However, English has lexical negation as well:
3. lexical: Martha is an unhappy person.
It makes sense to teach only one pattern at a time. For example,
using the props from the exercise above, the teacher can ask (while
pointing at the doctor), "Is she a movie star?" The class should
respond, "No, she isn't." The teacher can then ask (while pointing at
the doctor), "Is she a doctor?" thereby triggering the more frequently
occurring affirmative short response, "Yes, she is."
To present sentential negation with do support, a situation will
have to be created in which the negation of some main verb other than
the copula is elicited. Students can again be called to the front of the
room and each one given a familiar item. For example, one can be
given a book, another a pencil, another a pen, another a notebook,
another a purse, etc. The teacher can then point to the student who has
the notebook and ask, "Does he have the purse?" In American English,
the answer requires sentential negation (No, he doesn't).
Sentential negation can also be elicited by bringing two students
to the front of the room and listing items of clothing they are wearing
behind them on the board: red shirt, brown sweater, black shoes, etc.
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One can then ask about the student with the brown sweater, "Does he
have a red shirt?" Another list can be made of things that obviously
neither student has. It could include some humorous items, such as
pink socks or a Rolls Royce. Questions about this list will elicit
sentential negation in the plural (They don't have pink socks).
Puppets
Puppets can be used to teach the copula with predicate
adjectives. Call a student to the front of the class and put a puppet on
his hand. Say to the puppet, "You are sad." Act out sad until the
student gets the idea and makes his puppet act accordingly. Call
another student and get her to do the same thing. Now you can
demonstrate and say, "They are sad," as well as "He is sad.” You can
ask the student what's wrong, eliciting the response, "I am sad."
Puppets can also be used to illustrate the meaning of adverbs of
manner. For example, the teacher can say, "Judy dances gracefully"
and "Punch dances clumsily"; the students manipulating the puppets
will then take them through the proper movements to show that they
understand the adverbs. Hand puppets also have the advantage of en-
couraging capable but inhibited students. Frequently, shy students will
practice language more willingly when hiding behind a puppet than
they will without a guise.
Identical boxes
The presentation phase of teaching demonstratives can also
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make effective use of realia. The teacher needs two identical and
interesting objects, such as two brightly coloured boxes. She then
places one box close to her and one far away. Again, the teacher's
movement, as well as curiosity about the boxes, will hold students'
interest. The teacher can stand next to one box, point, and say, "This
box is blue" and "That box is blue." This sets up a minimal pair: the
only distinction between the two objects is their proximity to the
teacher. As soon as students seem to catch on, the teacher can move to
the other box and say, "This box is blue," thus showing that the
demonstrative changes according to the referent's distance from the
speaker. Two sets of boxes can be used for these boxes and those
boxes. Each point can be underscored by writing it on the board, by
inviting different students to take the place of the teacher, and finally
by allowing students to practice in pairs, placing objects close to and
far from themselves. If students already know the names of colours
and various objects, it is not necessary to limit realia too strictly, but
don't overload students cognitively. They should focus on form rather
than wrestle with lexicon.
Name the objects
Realia can also be used in the communicative practice phase of
a grammar lesson. The following exercise for practicing attributive
adjectives and their order is based on a suggestion from Tim
Butterworth and Darlene Schultz, who exploit an old baby shower
game. Place a number of small objects, each of which can be
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described by more than one adjective, on a table. This exercise is
particularly challenging if you include items that differ in only one
attribute, such as a small gold cufflink and a small silver cufflink.
Allow students to study the objects for a few minutes, and clarify the
names of any objects if necessary. Then cover the items with a cloth
and have students divide into groups to recall as many items as
possible. Instruct the groups to use attributive adjectives in describing
them. A point is given for listing the item. A point is also given for
each correct adjective in the correct position. Therefore, only one
point would be given to a student who answers, "a cufflink" or "one
pen red." In the first case, only the noun is provided; in the second, the
adjective is provided, but in the wrong position. Therefore, only one
point is given in each case. However, three points would be given for
"a small, gold cufflink" - two for the adjectives in the correct position
and one for the noun. Have each group write its list on an overhead
transparency and let the class score each list to reinforce the exercise.
The group with the most points wins.
Indirect objects
Another effective use of realia is to present and practice indirect
objects and indirect object movement. In this case there is a match be-
tween structure and discourse, and the technique used is storytelling.
Have several items on hand, including a set of keys and a ball. Begin
by throwing the ball up in the air. Elicit from the class what you have
done (e.g., "You threw the ball in the air and caught it"). Write the
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sentence on the board. Then throw the ball to a student and elicit from
the class, "You threw the ball to Jose." Write this sentence on the
board as well. Then change the focus to ball by displaying several
different things you could throw. Select an object, show it to the class,
and then throw it to Jose. Ask the class, "What did I throw to Jose?"
You want to elicit indirect movement (e.g., You threw him the eraser).
It is important to remember that the two sentences, with and without
indirect object movement, are not synonymous. Indirect object
movement is pragmatically motivated, and teaching I gave the book to
Mary and I gave her the book as synonymous could mislead students.
It is unnecessary to go into the details of discourse pragmatics
with students unless they are quite advanced. Simply provide an
appropriate situation for each sentence and practice it in that context.
When the sentence with indirect object movement is on the board as
well, let students examine the two forms and tell you what the
difference is. Then go to four or five students and ask them to take an
object out of their purse or pocket. Make sure each student takes out a
different object. Try to get a set of keys or something else that requires
a plural pronoun among the objects. Collect the objects and bring
them to the front of the room. Hold up one and ask the class, "Whose
compact is this?" The class will answer, "It's Maria's." Then ask the
class, "Should I give Maria a pencil?" Point to the compact and shake
your head so students will say, "No! Give her the compact!" This will
produce a natural situation in which we have indirect object
movement. Go through the same routine with a couple of other objects
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and then invite a student to take over your role.
As each sentence is elicited, write it on the board. Draw
students' attention to the fact that the name of the person you are
giving something to can come before the name of the object being
given. You want them also to discover that when this occurs, the
preposition is deleted. Once the class has uncovered the pattern and
seems to understand it, divide the class into groups. Have each
member of the group take out an object and put it in a pile in the
middle of the group. Then one student in each group picks up an
object (not his own) while his group gives directions as to its
disposition. Walk around and listen to each group. Answer questions
or intervene as necessary.
Using the classroom
Not all teachers have the budget, time, or inclination to prepare
props for the types of exercises described above. However, the
classroom itself provides a wealth of realia to use in teaching
grammar. Ordinary items found in most classrooms, such as books,
tables, chairs, a flag, a light switch, windows, walls, and the ceiling,
can all be used. Let us consider several structures and how they might
be presented or practiced using the classroom.
Phrasal Verbs
The classroom provides a natural context for teaching phrasal
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verbs such as turn on and turns off. The teacher can turn on a light and
turn it off, and then invite a student to come to the light switch and do
the same, using the TPR technique.
The students are also part of the classroom environment and can
be given the commands sit down and stand up or take off and put on
some article of clothing they all have, such as a jacket or coat.
Students should be invited to give the commands as soon as possible.
It is easy to underestimate how long it takes to learn these types of
verbs. A great deal of time may be required to internalize the
difference between turning a radio up, down, on, or off. Teachers
should do only a few commands at a time, two or three times a week
for about fifteen minutes during class, and repeat and review at regular
intervals.
One final bit of advice regarding phrasal verbs. Whenever the
phrasal verb is separable, make sure that some of your directions
illustrate this by using the commands in both ways: Take off the coat
as well as Take it off.
Prepositions
The people and the ordinary objects found in most classrooms
can be of great assistance in presenting and practicing prepositions.
For example, to present locative prepositions, one can use a table, a
pencil, a book, a box, and a pen for structured practice of the
difference between in and on. First the teacher puts the pen on the
table and asks, "Where's the pen?" to which the class responds, "on the
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table." Then the teacher puts the pencil in the box and asks, "Where's
the pencil?" to which the class responds, "in the box." This practice
continues as the teacher manipulates the objects to elicit on the box, in
the box, on the table, etc. When the class is responding quickly and
accurately to all the combinations possible, one of the students should
come up, manipulate the objects, and ask fellow students, "Where's
the pen (book/box/pencil/etc.)?'
A more advanced version of the TPR method takes advantage of
the classroom and students for the presentation phase or structured
practice portion of a lesson on reduced relative clauses: using a
classroom set of texts (all of which look alike), the teacher places one
book under the chair, one book on the chair, one book beside the
chair, and so on around the room. Then she asks a student to come to
the front of the room, where he is given the following commands:
"Touch the book under the table. Pick up the book beside
the chair and put it on the chair. Pick up the book on the chair
and put it on top of the book in the drawer."
You can even combine TPR with storytelling and role-play for
structured practice of locative prepositions, as in:
"Jose has five dollars that he wants to hide from Maria.
Somebody tell him where to put the money so Maria won't find
it. "
Allow the class to give Jose suggestions, such as "Put it in the
drawer"
or "Put it under the book." As students learn prepositions of
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location, you can expand the list to encourage other uses of
prepositions. For example, to encourage more advanced students to
use the proxy for, you can say:
"Tom, Mary wants to open the door, but she is carrying
too many books. Show us your books, Mary. You poor thing!
Tom, help Mary. Open the door for her."
Like practice with phrasal verbs, these types of exercises can be
carried out for a few minutes at the beginning of each class period
after they have been introduced. Use commands to which all students
can respond at the same time, such as:
"Pick up your pen. Put it on your notebook. Put it under
your chair. Put it on your neighbour’s desk. Put your book next
to your pen. Now, put everything back on your desk. Look up.
Look at me. Let's get started with today's lesson."
This activity is a good way to begin each class. It can be used to
review the previous day's lesson while not requiring a special group of
students in front of the class or any special supplies.
Relative clauses
One of the most difficult aspects of teaching relative clauses is
providing sufficient context to justify their use. We have found an
effective way to do this in the presentation phase of the lesson by
using students and the classroom. Call two students to the front of the
room who are of the same sex. Have one sit down and the other stand
a few yards away. Then announce to the class that you are going to
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give the eraser to the woman who is standing up. Then ask students to
identify which of their colleagues you are going to give the eraser to.
The class will respond, "Maria!" or "Kiko!" When they have
responded correctly, give the eraser to the woman who is standing.
Then pick up a book and go through the entire routine again. Call two
different students to the front of the class and continue the routine.
When the class as a whole is responding correctly, call up a student
and ask him to give the orders. You can then move from those very
concrete relative clauses to more abstract ones. Ask the two students
in front of the room, "Where are you from?" "What is your favourite
food?" "Are you married?" "Do you want to get married?" Then ask a
student to give the book to "the man who is from Cambodia" or "the
girl who likes ice cream."
To present centre-embedded relative clauses (i.e., relative
clauses that modify the subject), you can use a variation of the old
"Button, Button" game. Use pennies instead of buttons, if you want,
since pennies are readily available in the classroom. Invite several
students of the same sex to the front of the room. Ask the class to
question them so they will have enough information to form relative
clauses. As the class elicits information, write several phrases about
each student behind them on the board. For example, behind one
student you might write the following in response to your questions:
has never seen a movie star
likes ice cream
is looking for a job
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After you have written several phrases behind each student, hold
a penny up for the whole class to see, and then put it between your
hands. Have the students in front of the room hold out their hands,
palms together at a 45-degree angle. Put your hands between each
student's hands and have them close them immediately after you
remove yours. Secretly deposit the penny in the hands of one of the
students. Then ask the class, "Which person has the penny?" Students
have to provide the answer using an embedded relative clause (e.g.,
"The woman who has never seen a movie star has the penny. ").
Whenever a correct form is elicited, write it on the board, even if it
doesn't fit the student who has the penny. Continue until students
discover who has the penny. Perhaps they will guess correctly, or
perhaps you will have to respond, "No, it's the woman who's looking
for a job!" Then review all sentences you've written on the board and
let the class make relative clauses with the phrases that were not used.
If you keep things moving fast, students will be interested. They will
see that relative clauses can distinguish between individual members
of a set, and they will be able to practice the form as well.
Teaching literature
Teaching literature to learners of a second or foreign language
has not been given the same importance in the course of time:
sometimes it was as being part of a mandatory syllabus, the reasons
being so obvious especially for philologists that they didn’t need to be
stated, other times it was shadowed by more pragmatic aims,
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especially when dealing with teaching language for special purposes.
In the last decades, though, as Carter and Long (1991) state, teaching
literature has a definite place among other learning subjects. They put
forward three main reasons why teach literature:
- The cultural model – students having the possibility of getting
in touch with universal cultural values and models;
- The language model – which gives students a chance of
getting the subtleties and creative varieties of the language;
- The personal growth model – the interest developed in
studying literature is carried by learners beyond the
classroom, enabling them to understand our roles in society
and culture.
Carter and Long also point out the distinctions between studying
literature and its use as a resource, between knowledge about literature
and knowledge of literature, between different methods of teaching
literature, such as teacher-centred, language-based approaches and
literature as a pleasure and stimulus to personal development.
Taxonomy of questions
The way in which questioning about the text is arranged
constitutes one of the most important approaches to the text: which
questions to ask at what point and in what order. Carter and Long
emphasize the importance of a certain order of the questions, as the
one that follows:
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1. The ultimate end of questioning strategies in the classroom
treatment of literature is to help lead students to greater
understanding of particular literary texts and of the nature of
literature in general.
2. A useful division can be made into low-order and high-order
questions. Low-order questions are those which attempt to
retrieve factual information, literal meanings or the basic
propositions or content of a text. They are useful in assisting
with preliminary orientation to a text. High-order questions
are less to do with literal meanings or factual content and
rather more to do with involving the learner’s own responses,
inferences, knowledge and experience of the world. They are
of a ‘higher’ interpretive order and seldom have a ‘right’
answer.
3. Another related classification of questions is into categories of
open and closed questions. Open questions will tend to be
open to exploration and probing investigation; closed
questions require above all an accurate, information-based
response. Closed, lower-order questions focus on the factual
content of a text; open, higher-order questions focus on the
imaginative or symbolic content of a text or the context of
meaning which it generates. (1991: 36-7)
Basic question types
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In order to get information we have to use content questions
that relate to the facts or propositions provided by the text. For
example, we have a fragment from the novel Under the Greenwood
Tree by Thomas Hardy:
On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man
was passing up the lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a
plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence.
When did the action happen?
Who was passing up the lane?
Where was it?
These questions are used to check the understanding of the
reading and must not take a long time to let students enjoy the flow of
the story.
Purpose of the questions
To go deeper into the content of a literary fragment the teacher
can ask students questions to establish a relationship between the
author and the readers. These are considered open questions which
can have different correct answers and which suppose shared
knowledge, difficult for the non-native speaker to detect. These are
called context of meaning questions and may be used less frequently
than other questions. For example, the following lines belong to the
poem Winter: For an Untenable Situation by Alan Dugan.
Outside it is cold. Inside
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although the fire has gone out
and all the furniture is burnt,
it is much warmer. Oh let
the white refrigerator car
of day go by in glacial thunder:
when it gets dark, and when
the branches of the tree outside
look wet because it is so dark…
Besides the questions that are meant to clarify the possible
lexical problems the teacher can ask questions to engage the learners
more effectively in decoding the meaning of the text, such as
What time of year is it?
Where do you think this happens?
What feeling is generated by the setting?
What sort of people do you imagine live in such
surroundings?
These questions establish the wider social setting of the text,
without which the reader/learner can make very few assumptions
about what is in the author’s mind. If we cannot establish a context of
meaning we are going to have considerable difficulty in
comprehending the text.
Themes and plots
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One useful starting point can be in discussing themes, or
getting learners to note how the themes of different texts are related.
The role of the teacher in this lies in the careful selection of the texts,
and then questioning or prompting to establish comparisons or
contrasts.
Themes, or subject matters, are common to everybody from
personal experience or from what we hear, see or read about in
everyday life: love, hate, war, conflict, loneliness etc. To isolate the
plot the learners must look at the whole text and find more details
about facts and propositions, about literary and non-literary features.
To make this difference clear the teacher can compare two fragments
that treat the same theme, for instance disaster at sea, one from a
newspaper and the other from a literary work.
Relating the literary text to the student’s personal world:
The teacher has an important role in activating students’
experience and linking it with the study of literature because
1. Many students have limited experience of literature as
well as of the world in general, and this may make texts
difficult or inaccessible.
2. There is often something in the student’s experience
which has a connection with, or can be compared to the
particular point in the literary text which seems not
obvious. The teacher will make the connection between
the two, either by suggesting or questioning.
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The teacher will also try to relate the text to the world around
the learners and use the background of the individual learner which
consists of
o experience of mother tongue literature
o experience of English literature
o experience, or knowledge, of the world, life, people.
In another medium
Students can be motivated to study literature by interpreting a
literary text in another medium, for example films, many of them
being based on literary stories and novels. The teacher can first give a
short introductory talk, explaining the setting, describing the
characters and giving some hints about the plot, avoiding excessive
details. Students then watch the film which is followed up by a few
general questions to find out if they enjoyed it and why.
Other aids in teaching literature are pictures and songs which
strengthen both the connection with the written text and the
motivation of the students. This interaction with a cross-media
production is not limited because it is possible to watch a film, listen
to a recording of a literary work and then set up a student-centred
activity or debate which can stimulate their interest.
Prediction
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What happens next? and What happens in the end? are frequent
questions asked when we hear or read a story that is interesting but
told at a slow pace. In a written text this may be done intentionally,
either to create a feeling of suspense or to give the reader a reason to
go deeper into the text (this usually happens with murder/mystery
novels). The reader is constantly invited to predict and very often the
writer uses a ‘twist at the end’, as in the short stories of Somerset
Maugham, where there is always an element of surprise.
Thus prediction can be a reading strategy used by the teacher.
Non-literary texts generally confirm prediction, especially those
containing factual truth value; literary texts sometimes confirm
prediction, sometimes not and they prove to be more difficult for non-
native speakers.
Prediction in the literature classroom can be achieved through
exercises which are not difficult to construct, are enjoyable and not
too very long (for more practice see Carter and Long 1991).
In the same book, Teaching Literature, the authors suggest
some ways of approaching the text, from the language perspective,
such as jigsaw reading, matching, gap-filling, reading aloud, the uses
of paragraphs, writing creatively in a foreign language. These
approaches are “strategies for generating greater awareness of the
properties of language use in literary texts”. (1991: 93)
They also propose some activities for the advanced classes such
as,
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- using a cline where teacher and students devise a scale or
cline of literariness, personal and individual for each reader to
place a text higher or lower, according to the language used
and to a standard established beforehand;
- analyzing metaphor, a traditional approach to figures of
speech and literary tropes;
- guided rewriting (e.g. rewrite a poem as a newspaper report,
narratives and letter writing, rewriting viewpoints etc);
- drama in the literature class;
- the uses of debate.
Teaching literature, like teaching grammar, is a great
responsibility of the teacher, especially to develop a sense of the
language and a pleasure to use it correctly. Activities, teaching
material and aids, texts and exercises have to be carefully chosen to
enrich the existent material in the school textbooks, where students
need extra work, or to be processed in such a way as not to be boring
or difficult to solve by the students.
Teaching students with special educational needs
What are special needs?
Special needs is a broad term, referring to very different
students with a wide range of different needs and problems. The
Department for Education and Employment in the UK defines special
needs as follows:
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A child is defined as having special educational needs if
he or she has a learning difficulty which needs special teaching.
A learning difficulty means that the child has significantly
greater difficulty in learning than most children of the same
age. Or, it means a child has a disability which needs different
educational facilities from those that schools generally provide
for children of the same age in the area. The children who need
special educational training are not only those with obvious
learning difficulties, such as those who are physically disabled,
deaf or blind. They include those whose learning difficulties are
less apparent, such as slow learners and emotionally vulnerable
children. It is estimated that up to 20% of school children may
need special educational help at some stage in their school
careers.
(DfEE, 2000)
One group of students with special needs are gifted students. At
the opposite end of the spectrum of academic achievement we find
students with learning disabilities. Learning disability, unlike a
number of other disabilities such as blindness, is an invisible disability
that is connected to problems with linking information in different
parts of the brain. Learning disabilities take a number of different
forms, which according to the American Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders can be broadly categorized into three
main subparts (APA, 1994):
1. Developmental speech and language disorders.
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2. Academic skills disorders.
3. Co-ordination disorders and other learning handicaps.
People with developmental speech and language disorders will
typically have difficulties producing speech sounds, speaking or
understanding what other people say. These difficulties can take three
forms.
1.Children with developmental articulation disorders
may have trouble controlling their rate of speech or may lag
behind other children in learning to make speech sounds. This
disorder affects about 10 per cent of young children, but can
often be successfully treated through speech therapy.
2.Children who have specific problems expressing
themselves in speech suffer from developmental expressive
language disorder.
3.Developmental receptive language disorders occur
when children or adults have trouble understanding certain
parts of speech, in spite of the fact that they do not have
hearing problems.
Students with academic skills disorders often lag behind their
classmates in one, or more often more academic skills, such as
reading, writing and maths. This lag may be measured in years rather
than months. Once again this type of disorder can take three forms.
1. Developmental reading disorder or dyslexia refers to
problems involved in reading, often caused by problems
distinguishing the sounds in spoken words, a skill that is
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crucial in learning to read. In the higher grades, when
comprehension becomes more important, other reading
disorders appear such as an inability to relate new ideas to
those stored in memory.
2. Other children can suffer from developmental writing
disorders, which can result from problems in a number of
areas such as vocabulary, grammar, hand movement and
memory.
3. Developmental arithmetic disorder can arise from problems
in memory, recognizing symbols and numbers, and under-
standing abstract concepts.
A number of other categories have also been identified, like
motor skills disorders and 'other' disorders such as delays in acquiring
language, coordination problems and attention disorders.
Students with attention disorders tend to:
- pay little attention to tasks, have short attention spans,
- not listen when spoken to directly,
- not follow instructions,
- have difficulty organizing tasks,
- avoid tasks that require sustained mental effort,
- be easily distracted,
- lose things and
- be forgetful in daily activities (APA, 1994).
Attention disorders seem to have become increasingly
widespread, and include a tendency to daydream excessively in some
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children. In others this problem can take the form of attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in which attention problems are
combined with hyperactivity. Children with ADHD will tend to act
impulsively and cannot sit still. They will tend to run around or blurt
out answers in the classroom, and are incapable of waiting their turn
in games. In adolescence, these children tend towards fidgeting and
restlessness. In adulthood this problem can take the form of inability
to concentrate or organize tasks at work.
Learning disabilities are often related to and may be caused by
social factors. Children from impoverished backgrounds more often
manifest these problems, as do children with less intellectual ability,
leading some researchers to propose that the concept of learning
disabilities is erroneous and confounded with these two factors (Lyon,
1999).
Other disabilities include hearing difficulties, which can range
from mild difficulties in hearing that can be easily remedied by the use
of amplifiers, to deafness, which in some cases can be overcome
through the use of cochlear implants. There are three major types of
hearing disorders.
- Conductive loss occurs when something goes wrong
with the outer or middle ear which results in sound waves not
being conducted to the inner ear.
- Senso-neurinal loss refers to damage to the inner ear or
auditory nerve that stops the sound data from being sent to the
brain.
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- Central auditory processing disorder means that the
neural system involved in understanding what is heard is
impaired.
Autism is a neurological developmental disability that affects
people's ability to communicate, understand language and interact
with others. Autistic children will tend to isolate themselves from
social situations. Intellectually some may be mentally retarded, but
others can be intelligent and even gifted. As well as problems with
social relations, autistic individuals often exhibit
- unusual and/or repetitive movements,
- strong resistance to change,
- over- or under-sensitivity to certain stimuli,
- tantrums and aggressive behaviour.
While most students misbehave at some points in time, some
suffer from more or less severe behavioural disorders. These students
consistently demonstrate behaviour that is different from the expected
classroom and community norm and are in need of remediation
(ERIC, 1993).
Mental retardation refers to people whose general intellectual
functioning is significantly sub average (an IQ score below 75), and
who have problems with such areas as communication, self-care,
home living, social skills, self-direction, health and safety and
academic achievement. It manifests itself before age 18. The precise
nature of the retardation can vary significantly from person to person.
Students with mental retardation
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- will learn with more difficulty
- experience problems with memory,
- problem-solving,
- logical thinking and attention compared with their peers.
Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder that is to all
appearances characterized by repeated, involuntary body movements
such as twitching, leg jerking or other 'tics', and repetitive vocal
sounds such as throat clearing. These tics will occur frequently
throughout the day, often in bouts, but may disappear for periods of
time. The specific tic of the Tourette sufferer may also change in type,
number or severity over time. Tourette sufferers do not generally
suffer low IQ, but may often suffer from attention and learning
disorders.
Once a child has been diagnosed as possessing a learning or
other disability (different procedures for this exist in different
countries) schools need to provide the necessary support for these
children. Several options exist, for example:
- placing children in 'special schools' explicitly designed
to accommodate disabled children;
- placing them in regular so-called 'mainstream' schools,
but in special separate classrooms;
- placing them in mainstream schools in regular
classrooms, but have them taken out of class for special
education;
- 'full inclusion' in mainstream classrooms (in this latter
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case the necessary adjustments to this classroom will have to be
made to meet children's special educational needs).
In recent years, there has been a clear shift towards inclusion
and away from placement in special schools or classrooms, often for
philosophical reasons pertaining to students' human rights, as well as
because of arguments concerning students' social growth. One of the
arguments goes that included students will have enhanced self-esteem
as they are not being labelled and secluded from peers to the same
extent as when placed in special schools or classrooms. Conversely,
non-disabled students will get used to being around disabled peers,
leading them to be less likely to discriminate against disabled people
in adulthood. In this way it is hoped disabled students will be able to
develop into active and respected members of the community.
The inclusion debate
One of the main questions argued over by supporters and
opponents of the inclusion of students with special needs is whether
integration into mainstream classrooms will benefit or harm students'
academic progress. Supporters of placement in special schools/units
usually argue that the smaller class sizes and specific attention given
to special needs students by experts will help their academic progress.
On the other hand, proponents of integration argue that students
in special schools/units may suffer from a lack of academic press and
may lack the benefits of interaction with higher-achieving peers.
Furthermore, typical practices in special units/schools have often been
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found not to be in accordance with effective classroom practices,
being characterized by
- lower cognitive demands,
- little use of higher-order cognitive skills,
- slower pacing,
- little time devoted to academic tasks and
- little direct instruction.
Proponents of programmes in which students spend most of
their time in mainstream classrooms but are pulled out for 1 or 2 hours
a day to follow lessons in a special unit generally see this as a good
compromise between mainstreaming and segregation, while
opponents claim that this process leads to them missing parts of the
mainstream programme, making it more difficult for them to follow
the curriculum, especially as there often seems to be inadequate co-
ordination between regular classroom teachers and teachers in these
so-called pull-out programmes.
In their review of studies up to the mid-1980s (described as
small in number and often methodologically flawed), Slavin and
Madden (1986) report that while some studies found students in full-
time special placement did as well as students in mainstream settings,
and others found they did worse (according to Slavin and Madden
these latter tended to be the better designed studies), no studies
reported that students in full-time placement did better academically
than students in mainstream settings. Some evidence emerged that
students who did not receive any support in mainstream classrooms
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did worse, however. No clear differences emerged between students in
part-time placement and students in mainstream settings. A meta-
analysis conducted by Wang and Baker (1986) (reviewing 11 studies
conducted between 1975 and 1984) reports a slightly favourable effect
of mainstreaming over full-time placement for academic outcomes.
Sixty-five per cent of measured effects were positive, and mainstream
students seemed to make more progress than segregated peers did.
These results were consistent across grade levels and when controlling
for contextual variables.
When full-time mainstreaming was compared with pull-out
programmes the former was found to be non-significantly more
effective. In an earlier meta-analysis, Carlberg and Kavale (1980)
found 'educable mentally retarded' students did worse in special
classes than in mainstream classes. A review of three meta-analyses
by Gersten et al. (1999) found small positive effects for inclusion.
Gartner and Lipsky (1987), reviewing a large number of studies,
found that the mean academic performance of special needs students
in mainstream settings was on average in the eightieth percentile
compared with non-special needs students, while the performance of
students in segregated settings was in the fiftieth percentile
A more recent review (Manset and Semmel, 1997) looked at the
effects of a number of integration programs for students with special
needs in the USA. Three out of the five reviewed programmes
(Success for All, Adaptive Learning Environments Model, and an un
titled programme by Jenkins et al., 1994) reported significantly higher
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achievement gains for students in the programme than for students in
'pull-out' programmes (students spend most of their time in
mainstream classrooms, but are removed from class for 1 or 2 hours a
day for teaching in a special unit). These programmes seemed to share
the common feature of highly focused instruction with individual
basic skills tuition. Deno et al. (1990) compared students in three
integrated programmes (Adaptive Learning Environments Model, the
Comparison Reading Programme and Data-Based Intervention) with
students in resource room programmes, and found that low achievers
and students with mild learning difficulties who participated in the
programmes scored higher on the Basic Academic Skills Survey.
Lipsky and Gartner (1997) report few differences between
special needs students in mainstream education and in pull-out
programmes. They also report that the gap in achievement between
students with mild learning difficulties and their mainstream peers did
not widen as fast when these students were mainstreamed as when
they were in pull-out programmes. In a study using the Metropolitan
Achievement test to compare learning disabled students in two
schools, Jenkins et al. (1994) found that students in the integrated
schools showed significantly higher overall gains than students in a
school using a pull-out resource room method. In a small-scale study
Banerji and Dailey (1995) reported that 2nd- to 5th-grade students
with specific learning difficulties achieved better in a mainstream
classroom than in a pull-out programme. Schulte, Osborne and
McKinney (1990) studied elementary school students with learning
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difficulties who spent
- (a) 1 hour per day in a resource room setting,
- (b) 2 hours per day in a resource room setting,
- (c) students permanently in mainstream classrooms in which a
special education teacher provided some additional instruction to the
child and
- (d) students in mainstream classrooms where special education
teachers provided technical assistance to the mainstream teacher, but
no instruction in class. It was found that students in the mainstream
classroom with extra teaching did significantly better overall (though
not in specific subjects) than students who spent 1 hour a day in the
resource room. No other significant differences were found.
In a review of reviews focusing on students with moderate
learning difficulties, Williams (1993) reported that studies seemed to
slightly favour mainstreaming. However, the deficiencies of the
studies led the author to state that a no-effects conclusion was safest.
Galloway (1985) reaches a similar conclusion.
Generally, then, these studies seem to point to positive effects of
mainstreaming over full-time and, to a lesser extent, part-time
placement in special units. However, many studies were
methodologically flawed and sample sizes were small. Conclusions
must therefore be highly tentative, although there does seem to be
some cumulative evidence for higher effectiveness of mainstreaming
over full-time placement for special needs students in general. The
picture with regards to pull-out programmes must be considered
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inconclusive, however. Also, it seems clear that whether inclusion or
placement is preferable may also depend on the nature and seriousness
of the disability.
In order for inclusion to work, a number of conditions need to
be met. Teachers must believe the included student can succeed, and
must prepare the other students in the class to accept the disabled
student. The classroom and school need to be physically prepared if
necessary, and all school staff need to understand the needs of the
students with disabilities. Staff development needs to take place to
prepare staff to support the student, and good working relationships
need to be established with the special educators in the school.
Teaching students with learning disabilities
According to the extensive studies carried out by the National
Institute for Child Health and Development in the USA, the main
predictor of reading difficulties are problems with
- phonemic awareness, followed by
- vocabulary deficits and inadequate background
knowledge of information presented in the text,
- lack of familiarity with semantic and syntactic structures
that can be employed to predict and better understand word and
grammatical relationships, and
- lack of knowledge about different strategies employed
by the author to achieve different purposes, such as humour and
dialogue.
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One of the most important aspects of treating reading
disabilities therefore is teaching these students word-sound cor-
respondences to decipher reading codes (the phonics system). This
decoding skill needs to become automatic so memory capacity that
should be used for strong comprehension of the text to occur is not
wasted on the decoding process. Strong comprehension is also
influenced by students' background knowledge and vocabulary. Thus,
both direct structured instruction in phonics and a literature-rich
environment can help students with reading difficulties.
Another problem that students with reading difficulties seem to
have is an inability to properly self-monitor while reading a text. They
fail to understand that they must pay attention to how well they
understand the text and that they should reread a paragraph or
sentence if they do not understand it. Students with this problem can
be taught a number of self-monitoring skills, such as asking
themselves questions while they read and summarizing what they
have read. However, once taught these students often experience
difficulties in generalizing these skills to other situations.
More generally, a meta-analysis of research on students with
learning disabilities but of average intelligence looking at studies
conducted over a 30-year period found that the most effective strategy
for teaching learning disabled students combined elements of direct
instruction with components focusing on the teaching of learning and
mnemonic (a sentence or short poem that you use for helping you
remember something) strategies. The main components of this
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strategy include
- sequencing (breaking down the task, providing step-by-step
prompts),
- a drill-repetition-practice sequence,
- segmentation (breaking down the task into small segments and
then synthesizing them as a whole),
- directed questioning and response,
- use of technology, modelling and
- small group instruction.
The most important factor was found to be control of task
difficulty, proceeding from simple to more difficult aspects in small,
teacher-directed steps. The effectiveness of this combined direct
instruction-strategy approach was strongest in reading, and somewhat
less strong in mathematics and social skills. Use of small (three to ten
students) teacher-directed groups rather than the whole class was
found to be beneficial to learning disabled students in a meta-analysis
including 20 studies conducted between 1975 and 1997. Peer tutoring
was likewise found to be effective. Smaller groups (three to five
students) appeared more effective than larger groups. These grouping
procedures could most usefully be combined with whole class
instruction according to the researchers.
A problem for many learning disabled students is a negative
self-concept. There are two possible approaches to dealing with this:
- a skills development approach, that aims to enhance students'
academic achievement which should in turn enhance their self-
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concept; and
- a self-enhancement approach, which uses a therapeutic ap-
proach to change self-concept.
A meta-analysis on the effectiveness of these two approaches
among learning disabled students concluded that an approach that
combined the two worked best. Collaborative work appeared to be a
factor that enhanced self-concept in many interventions.
Students with attention disorders, which some evidence
suggests are becoming increasingly prevalent, can be particularly
problematic in integrated settings as they can easily disrupt lessons
and disturb other students.
There are a number of things a teacher can do to help maintain
the attention of all and, in particular, attention of disabled students.
Employing a range of introductory attention grabbers and stressing the
importance of the topic to students' daily lives could help, as could
presenting material in small steps, explaining the relevance of each
step along the way. Students should be encouraged to learn from their
mistakes, and be actively involved in the lesson. Helping students to
set short-term, not too hard to reach goals can also be beneficial.
Using a variety of teaching methods and a quick succession of
activities can help focus students' attention and keep them from
becoming bored too quickly.
Students with attention disorders often seem to suffer from
disorganization as well. They may have difficulty
- remembering dates and assignments,
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- bringing required materials into class and
- may incorrectly record assignments,
- use time inefficiently,
- fail to properly structure essays and written work,
- fail to express themselves in an organized fashion and
- fail to plan.
It is important to provide these students with a clear structure
and routines, and specify exactly what they are expected to bring to
class at each point in the day. The teacher needs to give students clear
and simple directions, and have her or him repeat these. Assignments
need to be clearly presented and written on the same place on the
board each time. Students must be made to copy these assignments.
Teachers should try to minimize untidiness on handouts and
assignments. Modelling problem-solving and essay-writing skills can
help, especially when students are given large assignments, which
they may find confusing. Various ways of storing material and being
tidy need to be presented to them. They can be taught mnemonic
techniques and use of memory aids, such as a note attached to the
student's backpack or satchel. Furthermore, students should be praised
and rewarded for improvements in their organization, but they should
also receive the consequences of their disorganization in order to
provide them with an incentive to do better.
Children suffering from ADHD have been found to have
problems dealing with change. Consistency is therefore important.
Most ADHD children should where possible, be placed at the front of
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the class, where they have the least chance of observing other children
move as they write things down and answer questions. However, some
hyperactive children can, when seated at the front, disturb their
classmates through their constant movement and fidgeting. These
students clearly are not best left at the front. Students with ADHD
should be surrounded by students who can act as positive behaviour
models. They should not be placed near possibly distracting objects,
such as heaters, windows and doors.
Teaching students with other disabilities
When students suffer from behavioural disorders, the first step
is to identify exactly what it is that the student is doing that makes her
or him cause problems in the classroom. Then the teacher has to
identify what he wants the student to do instead, and what means
could be used to get there. Teachers should try to avoid focusing on
the undesired behaviours and try to focus on the desired behaviours
instead. Opportunities should be provided for the student to practise
the desired behaviours, such as interacting appropriately with peers
and adults. There are two possible problems that may need to be
addressed with students with behavioural disorders, skills deficits and
performance deficits. Which of these two situations is present can be
assessed by having the student role-play various situations or by
asking him what he would do in a certain situation, such as if the
teacher reprimanded him. If he can give the correct response to this
type of question or can perform the appropriate behaviour in role-play
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but not display the appropriate behaviour in actual classroom
situations, then the problem is one of performance deficit. If he is not
able to give an appropriate response to the question, then the problem
may be a skills deficit. In the latter case, direct instruction in the
required skill will be necessary before proceeding to practise the skill.
If the problem is one of performance, providing more situations to
practice the appropriate response may be sufficient (ERIC, 1993).
Parents and children with learning disabilities
A number of tips for parents of students with learning
disabilities have been suggested that can help children become more
independent and better learners. The National Center for Learning
Disabilities (2000) in the USA has suggested the following:
1. Let children help with household tasks, using
activities that can help build children's self-concept and self-
confidence, and show that this activity is meaningful and
appreciated by the rest of the household.
2. Keep instructions clear and simple, providing verbal
cues if necessary.
3. Set clear routines.
4. Minimize distractions when children are studying,
e.g. turn off the television and radio and establish calm work
spaces.
5. Be patient and offer helpful reminders when children
forget things. Remember, they are not doing it on purpose.
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6. Reward effort as well as outcomes and give the child
a lot of praise. Feed back should be immediate and connected
to the task done. It is better not to rely on gifts and monetary
rewards, but use praise, smiles etc. instead.
7. Read to your child and let her or him read to you.
8. Help other family members and friends understand
the nature of the learning disability your child is suffering
from.
9. Be consistent. Establish rules that everyone in the
family understands and be consistent with discipline and
praise.
10. Do not be fooled by promises of quick cures or
treatments, and do not believe all unsubstantiated reports that
appear in the media. When in doubt, contact a professional.
11. Encourage your child to join with peers in social
activities, and seek out parents with whom you can share
experiences.
Providing children with oral language and literacy experiences
from the start is crucial to avoiding reading problems. Reading to
children, and engaging them in play with language through nursery
rhymes and storybooks can also help develop children's language
awareness (Lyon, 1999).
Deaf or hard of hearing students can be educated in a number of
ways. One of these is the auditory-oral approach. This method
attempts to get hard of hearing children to acquire spoken language in
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an environment in which spoken language is used exclusively,
including both the classroom and the school. The home environment
is crucial in this process, as is the use of hearing amplifiers, such as
hearing aids and cochlear implants, depending on the seriousness of
the hearing problem. As well as listening skills, students are taught
speech production skills starting at the phonetic level (individual
syllables), and proceeding from there to the phonological level (whole
words and sentences) immediately. If successful, this approach will
allow hard of hearing children to communicate with a wide range of
others. Some research (Geers and Moog, 1988) found that 16-17-year-
olds who had been taught using this technique had a reading age of
about 13-14 years, which is almost double that of US deaf students in
general. A possible problem may be that the hearing loss is too serious
to be overcome even with the use of cochlear implants. The auditory-
verbal approach works from a similar idea. In this approach hearing
problems are identified at the earliest possible stage and the best
possible medical treatment or amplifier is then sought out. Then
children are taught listening and speech skills. The idea is to identify
the child's problems as soon as possible and to intervene by teaching
the necessary strategies to the parents of young chilpren.
Cued speech, another method proposed, is basically a sound-
based hand supplement to speech-reading, designed to improve the
literacy development of deaf children. It can be used by both parents
and teachers to teach students phonics and articulation. The system is
easy to learn and can be used to teach words for which there is no sign
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language equivalent. According to some research, students taught
using this method read at the same grade level as their non-deaf peers.
A different option is using a sign language. Like spoken
languages, sign languages differ from country to country, American
Sign Language for example differing from British Sign Language.
Most sign languages have developed naturally in the deaf community,
but some have been specifically developed to more closely resemble
the spoken version of the language, adding grammatical features of
that language to the sign language. These specifically developed
systems are often used by parents and teachers to teach deaf children,
as they allow them more easily to learn English or whatever their
home language is. However, some deaf parents feel this practice
negates their culture.
No single intervention that is successful with all autistic
children has been identified. However, a number of educationally and
behaviourally orientated methods have shown some success. Overall,
autistic children benefit from a highly structured environment with
very clear guidelines for appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.
This environment should include materials that help autistic people to
clearly comprehend the sequence of events and activities that will
occur, such as written or picture schedules. Skills taught should be
geared towards helping the autistic person to function day to day, such
as communication, language and social skills.
For students with mental retardation, especially younger
students, use of hands-on materials is often the most suitable teaching
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method, and use of pictures may be more appropriate than verbal
directions. It is a good idea to break down tasks into small steps, and
to proceed from simpler to more difficult tasks. Learning should take
place in short sessions, and life skills instruction could be crucial to
these students' adaptive development.
When dealing with students with Tourette's syndrome, it is
important to remember that however annoying the tics they may be
showing, they are not done on purpose and are involuntary. Peers
must be encouraged to accept the child. Giving the Tourette sufferer
private time and space to relax can help lessen the occurrence of tics
in the classroom. Providing a private space to do testing can prevent
the tics disrupting other students' concentration during exams. If the
student has language, learning or attention problems these need to be
dealt with in the ways mentioned above.
Teaching Gifted Students
The school system is inevitably geared towards the majority of
students, which means that special additional provisions need to be
made for learning disabled students. Another group that differs from
the norm, and that therefore may need special provisions, is gifted or
highly able students.
First, it is necessary to define exactly what is meant by gifted,
especially compared with 'merely' bright students. The term 'gifted' is
usually used to refer to students who score significantly above average
on ability tests such as the WISC III, Raven's Progressive Matrices or
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the Cognitive Ability Test. As a rule of thumb (a simple practical rule
that helps you in doing something), a score in the top 2 per cent of the
range of these tests (usually corresponding to a score of over 125) is
considered to indicate giftedness. Within schools, a number of other
factors are also taken into account in decision-making on whether or
not to include a certain student in 'gifted' programmes. These include
students' grades, teachers' professional opinion and sometimes views
of parents and students themselves. A number of elements that have
been proposed as distinguishing bright and gifted children are listed in
the following table:
Bright child Gifted child
- Knows the answers - Asks the questions
- Interested - Extremely curious
- Pays attention - Gets involved physically and mentally
- Works hard - Plays around, but still gets good test scores
- Answers questions - Questions the answers
- Enjoys same-age peers - Prefers adults or older children
- Good at memorization - Good at guessing
- Learns easily - Easily gets bored because she or he already knows the answers
- Listens well - Shows strong feelings and opinions
- Self-satisfied - Highly perfectionist and self-critical
Fig. 9 Bright versus gifted children
While use of tests is probably the best way of identifying gifted
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students at present, it can be important to identify gifted students early
on in their school career. For kindergarten aged students, sitting a
cognitive ability test would obviously not be practical, and therefore a
number of signs indicating giftedness in young students have been
proposed:
1. The child uses an advanced vocabulary for her or his age.
2. The child has the ability to make interesting or unusual
shapes or patterns using various media.
3. The child has an early understanding of abstract concepts
such as death and time.
4. The child can master new skills with few repetitions.
5. The child demonstrates advanced physical skills.
6. The child demonstrates advanced reasoning skills through
explanation of occurrences.
7. The child uses spontaneous verbal elaboration with new
experiences.
8. The child demonstrates a sense of humour during normal
conversation. (Silverman, 1992)
It is, however, important to remember that children do develop
at different rates and that therefore scores on a test taken at one
particular time are not set in stone. Giftedness at a particular age can
be merely the result of more rapid development which ceases to exist
once other children's development has caught up. One also has to
remember that scores on ability tests do not simply reflect innate
ability, but also result from environmental influences such as parents'
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possession of cultural capital such as books and their ability to provide
their children with an intellectually stimulating environment. Scores
on ability tests can also be influenced by a child's education.
Identification of giftedness is therefore an empirical question at one
particular moment in time, and will need to be reviewed.
Giftedness can be general, extending to a wide range of school
subjects, or specific, limited to one particular area such as
mathematics, creative writing or science. These students will achieve
very well in that subject, while being average or able in other subjects.
They will usually also be particularly interested in the area they are
particularly good at.
Apart from being intellectually gifted, students can be gifted in
a number of other ways. Typical examples include students who are
artistically gifted, or who are gifted footballers. These students are not
necessarily intellectual high achievers, but obviously do have specific
gifts.
Gifted students in classroom and school
Teaching gifted students in regular classrooms can lead to a
number of problems. Such students are liable to find the content of the
lesson unchallenging and boring, and will not be stretched by the
regular curriculum. They will not benefit to the full from their
classroom experience, and will not be able to work to their potential.
Their boredom can make them lose interest in school altogether, in
some cases leading to truancy and disruptive behaviour, and more
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often to gifted students underachieving. Research has shown that for
these students a lot of what they learn in school can be a waste of
time, as they already know large parts of the curriculum. A number of
measures have therefore been proposed to deal with gifted students.
A first way of offering gifted students an education more suited
to their ability is through ability grouping. Many studies have looked
at the effect of ability grouping on students' achievement. The
conclusion most reached is that ability grouping overall does not
significantly affect achievement, but that it does according to some
studies have a small negative effect on the achievement of low-ability
students and a small positive effect on the achievement of high-ability
students. It is therefore not surprising that this method has been
advocated as a way of teaching gifted students. Obviously, being
taught in a high-ability set will allow the teacher to teach higher-level
content at greater speed, and thus counter some of the problems with
regular whole-class teaching of gifted children such as student
boredom. However, research has shown that this practice can be
detrimental to lower achieving students.
A variation on ability grouping is cluster grouping. This means
that the small number of gifted students in a year is put in the same
class. The other students in the class remain of mixed ability. This will
more easily allow the teacher to provide the gifted students with the
learning opportunities they need (e.g. an enriched curriculum) than
when they are all in separate classes. Another advantage is the fact
that the gifted students will have the chance to interact with other
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students of the same ability. For the other teachers it obviates the need
to have to deal with the one precocious child in their class.
Disadvantages can be pressure from parents to have their children
placed in a 'cluster' class, and the fact that dealing with a cluster of
gifted students in a mixed-ability classroom can make classroom
management more complex. Therefore, this should only be considered
if the teacher who will teach this class has strong classroom
management abilities and receives some training and support on
teaching gifted students.
Another practice that has been posited as helpful to gifted
students is co-operative learning. Co-operative group work is posited
to have specific advantages for gifted students. The main advantage is
said to be the fact that gifted students can work as mentors to their less
able peers, thus allowing them to take on responsible roles in the class,
which will make them less likely to get bored by the lesson content as
they are busy 'teaching' others. Learning something with the
expectation of teaching it to others is also said to lead to learning at a
higher cognitive level. However, this approach is not without
problems. Gifted students can start to dominate the group to the extent
that they start to take over rather than co-operate. Also they can end
up doing all the work themselves, not allowing lower ability students
to experience the full benefits of co-operative group work. Gifted
students can also find it difficult to understand why other students do
not grasp the material, and can get impatient with them. Therefore, if
this approach is used, it is best not to let the co-operative groups
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become too heterogeneous.
The problem of gifted students mastering the curriculum faster
than average students and not needing to revisit learned parts of the
curriculum as much can be countered through curriculum compacting.
This means that curricular material that has already been learned is
eliminated from the curriculum and replaced by more demanding new
material for students identified as gifted or highly able. Reis et al.
(1998) found that they were able to eliminate up to half of the
curriculum in this way in their study of gifted primary age students.
Using a basic skills test, they found that this practice did not harm
students' achievement, as achievement of students who had used the
compacted curriculum did not differ from achievement of matched
students who had used the full curriculum.
Another curriculum adjustment is the use of an enriched
curriculum. This means that the curriculum is adapted to the needs of
gifted students by adding activities that require more higher-level
thinking, enquiry, exploration and discovery. An enriched curriculum
should include more elaborate, complex and in-depth study of major
ideas or themes and should encourage students to generate new
knowledge or to re-conceptualize existing knowledge. It has also been
recommended that a curriculum for the gifted and talented should
include a large knowledge base, be inter-disciplinary wherever
possible and explore new developments in the field. Some studies
have shown that gifted students in enriched classes significantly
outperform gifted students in non-enriched classes.
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While enrichment and curriculum compacting can sometimes
occur in the regular classroom, use is often made of some form of
withdrawal group, where the gifted students will be withdrawn from
their regular classroom for some part of the day to enable them to
participate in enrichment activities there.
An enrichment activity that shows some promise is peer
tutoring. The gifted student will be linked to an expert or a person
experienced in a particular field from outside the school. This is
particularly suited to students who have shown strong independent
learning abilities and are highly motivated to work on a particular
project or programme. The mentor, apart from being knowledgeable
in her or his field, will have to be enthusiastic about the subject, have
good communication skills, and be willing and able to work with
young people. Mentors can be parents, former students, or contacts
from the community, such as members of local arts organizations or
businesses. When these conditions are met, a mentoring arrangement
can be a highly enriching experience for the student.
Accelerated learning is another option for gifted students. This
concept usually refers to the practice of allowing gifted students to
move through the curriculum at a faster rate than their peers. This can
take a number of forms, such as early entrance to school or to
secondary school or university, grade-skipping or grade advancement,
placing the student with students in a higher grade for part of the day
for one or more subjects, placing students in a class in which one or
more grades are combined, or advanced placement in which primary
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students are placed in a course at a local secondary school where they
can study a more advanced topic for part of the week. Alternatively,
secondary students can be placed in a course in a higher education
institution. This range of practices means that it is difficult to reach
overall conclusions on the effectiveness of acceleration. However, a
number of advantages have been proposed. These include:
increased learning efficiency;
increased learning effectiveness;
matching the curriculum to students' needs;
exposure of the student to a new (more mature) peer
group;
increased time for careers;
increased options for academic exploration;
avoiding boredom;
avoiding alienation from less gifted peers.
Gifted, learning disabled students
A paradoxical finding is the existence of students who are both
gifted and learning disabled at the same time. These students exhibit
great talents or strengths in one area, while simultaneously showing
disabling weaknesses in others.
Baum (1990) identified three categories of gifted, learning
disabled students:
(1) identified gifted students who have subtle learning
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disabilities;
(2) unidentified students whose gifts and disabilities may be
masked by average achievement; and
(3) identified learning disabled students who are also gifted.
Identified gifted students with subtle learning difficulties are
usually high achievers, or students with high IQ scores marking them
out as gifted. However, as they grow older, their actual performance
may increasingly fail to live up to their talents. In many cases this can
be because their spelling or handwriting do not live up to their verbal
ability. These students will often be told that they are not putting
enough effort in, but sometimes teachers may be overlooking subtle
learning difficulties which have not been diagnosed due to the
student's overall giftedness. This, however, does not mean that
underachievement in gifted students necessarily results from subtle
learning difficulties. More often the cause will be motivational issues.
In unidentified students their disability and gifts mask each
other. These students may often be struggling to achieve at their grade
level, their giftedness compensating for their learning difficulties. An
example of such a disability can be dyslexia (a medical condition
affecting the brain that makes it difficult for someone to read and spell
words correctly). These students are often only identified when their
giftedness comes out in a different context, often at a later age.
Identified learning disabled students who are also gifted are
usually failing at school and have been identified as learning disabled.
However, sometimes their talent can be discovered by teachers or
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other adults. More often, though, little attention is paid to the student's
strengths as attention is focused on her or his problems.
However, outside school these students often demonstrate high-
level interests, the ability to deal with complex matters or high levels
of creativity. Because of this, they tend to be acutely aware of their
problems at school and can become increasingly pessimistic and
negative about their school experience.
Some guidelines to help these students in the classroom are the
following:
Focus attention on the development of the gift. As well as
providing students with the remediation needed to overcome their
learning disability, it is important to focus on their talent as well.
This will help improve their self-esteem, and can in some cases
lead to stronger gains than focusing on their disability.
Encourage compensation strategies. While remediation
will help the learner improve her or his skills in the area of
weakness, it will usually not totally overcome them. Thus,
students who have difficulty spelling can be encouraged to use
computer spell-checks and students who have problems writing
can be encouraged to use different means of expressing their
ideas.
Students who are gifted and learning disabled should be
helped to understand what their abilities and gifts, as well as their
weaknesses, are. This can help them make the right choices with
respect to education and career.
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Disadvantages have also been proposed, however. One of the
most important of these is that although students may be academically
more advanced than students of their age, they may not necessarily be
equally advanced socially. Therefore, putting them in a group with
older peers may have negative social consequences, with the gifted
child finding it difficult to fit into the group. Older students may also
be less likely to allow the younger, grade-advanced child to participate
in their peer groups, as associating with younger children does not
convey prestige in the peer group. Another issue is that giftedness can
in some cases be the result of temporary faster development rather
than permanent student characteristics. Acceleration can also be
organizationally complicated for schools, especially with respect to
timetabling.
A number of studies have found acceleration to have positive
effects on the achievement of gifted students, both in the short term
and in the long term. There is not much evidence that acceleration has
negative effects on students' social-emotional development either,
although it is reasonable to expect that these effects will differ
somewhat depending on which form of acceleration is used. Thus,
advanced placement is unlikely to have detrimental effects, whereas
grade skipping may, depending on the child. However, many gifted
students have been found to be more socially mature as well and often
seek older friends.
A number of researchers (e.g. Benbow, 1991) have proposed
guidelines to take into account before a decision to accelerate is taken:
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The child's intellectual abilities should be
comprehensively examined, using a variety of measures including
ability tests and academic achievement tests to make sure that the
child is intellectually capable of being accelerated.
The child's social-emotional readiness should be assessed
by a psychologist. The child should have demonstrated an absence
of adjustment problems and a high motivation to learn.
Both the child and her or his parents should be involved in
the decision to accelerate. Both must be willing to do this, and
there must be no coercion.
The receiving teacher must be enthusiastic about
acceleration and be willing to help the child adjust.
Grade advancement should occur at a natural transition
point, such as the start of a new school year.
Grade advancement should be arranged on a trial basis
(e.g. one to two months). After the trial period the child should be
able to return to her or his original grade if she or he wants to do
so.
Teachers should try not to create excessive expectations
of grade advancement, so if it does not work out the child does not
consider her or himself to have failed.
Sometimes grade advancement can lead to gaps in
students' knowledge where they have missed certain topics.
Arrangements need to be made to cover these. However, as most
curricula revisit topics and gifted children learn fast, this is not
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usually a major problem.
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