کاهش استرس در معلم ها

استخدام معلم های حق التدریس، کمبود فضای آموزشی، کمبود نیروی انسانی، سلامت دانش آموزان، مشکلات مالی، استاندارد نبودن ساختمان مدارس،همه از موضوعاتی است که در خبرها زیاد به چشم می خورد، اما به سلامت معلم ها و سختی کارشان کمتر توجه می شود.

شاید تصور کنید معلمی شغل آسانی است. ساعت های کاری کم، تعطیلات زیاد، نداشتن ارباب رجوع، کار کردن با بچه ها همه باعث شده این شغل به نظر آسان بیاید، اما برخی بررسی ها نشان داده است معلمی و تدریس یکی از شغل های پُراسترس است. اما آیا واقعاً معلم ها استرس بیشتری نسبت به شغل های دیگر دارند؟

هر معلمی از استرس شکایت نمی کند، اما بررسی ها نشان داده است که تدریس از مشاغلی است که می تواند خیلی پُراسترس باشد. حتی در بررسی تعیین سطح استرس مشاغل که توسط اداره ایمنی و بهداشت کشور انگلستان انجام شد، معلمی در راس مشاغل پُراسترس قرار گرفت. نتایج یک نظرسنجی که سال 2000 انجام شد نیز نشان داد 5/41 درصد معلم ها خودشان را در معرض استرس بالا می دانند، در حالی که 5/58 درصد معتقدند شغل کم استرسی دارند. نتایج یک مطالعه دیگر که در سال 1999 انجام شد هم نشان داد، 36 درصد معلم ها تاثیرات استرس را همیشه یا بیشتر مواقع در زندگی شان احساس می کنند.

استرس تدریس

آن چیزی که این شغل را سخت و پراسترس می کند، خودِ کار نیست، اتفافاً این شغل، شغل لذت بخشی است، اما شرایط است که کار را مشکل می کند. کری کوپر، متخصص بهداشت و روانشناسی سازمانی و عضو گروه علم و تکنولوژی دانشگاه منچستر این شغل را به بمبی در دست یک فرمانده ارتش تشبیه می کند. به عقیده او معلمی به خودی خود استرس زا نیست، اما شرایط خاص مانند تغییرات مداوم سیستم آموزشی،تغییر نیازهای آموزشی، ساعات کار طولانی و حقوق کم، زمینه ی بروز استرس را فراهم می کنند.

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article Ramadan

"The Ramadan Nutrition and Workout Plan for Success"

If you're one of those people who not only does not lose weight in Ramadan, but goes even further and gains weight this article is for you!

Rehan Jalali on working out and eating healthy, while fasting:

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how can I workout and eat properly while I am fasting? Most people see the blessed month of Ramadan as a time when they will surely lose strength and or muscle mass and some people think they can only "maintain" during this month. This cannot be further from the truth. In fact, if you use some of the strategies I am about to share with you, you can make some of your best gains during this month! It's all about maximizing nutrient uptake, maintaining proper hydration, and modifying key fat burning/muscle building hormones in your favor during this month.
 PM

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50 Things New Teachers Need To Know

Posted by Huston on August 4, 2008

[Update: Please be sure to also check out 50 MORE Things New Teachers Need To Know.]

 

Now that August is here, I’m thinking about the imminent start of the new school year.  For years I’ve watched new teachers start their first year with no clue about how to manage all that gets thrown at them, and I’ve wanted to have something to give them, samizdat style, that lets them in on what really matters, what really works, and what they should studiously ignore.  This list represents a first draft effort at some of those ideas.

Minor disclaimer: I’m a high school English teacher in Las Vegas.  Therefore, my advice is specifically shaped by that background.  To the degree that your experience differs from mine, take these suggestions with a grain of salt.  For instance, a new third grade teacher in Vermont may not find this very helpful at all.  Still, there should be a few ideas in here that anybody could adapt to their use.

 

1. Sit your desk in the front of the room, not the back: the thinking that students will act more maturely if they don’t know if you’re looking at them is wrong–they couldn’t care less.  Also, make sure there is enough room by the back wall for you to walk around behind them if you need to.  Letting students sit up against the back wall, with no other access than from coming down an aisle, is asking for trouble.  “Creative” seating arrangements, except in rare circumstances like class discussions and debates, don’t work: just arrange them in ranks and files. 
2. As the year starts, you’ll be overwhelmed by the paperwork and routines your administrators demand.  Ask a couple of people who have been at your campus for a while what’s really important to them: most of that rigmarole is just your administrators doing what their bosses told them to do; they don’t care about it any more than you do.  Veterans at your school can tell you what you can safely ignore.  You have enough to worry about without jumping through hoops for the office.

ادامه نوشته

Error correction

15 ways to correct spoken errors

1. Collect the errors for later You can then correct them later in the same class (with a game like a grammar auction or just eliciting corrections from the class) or in a future class (for example writing error dictation pairwork worksheets or using the same techniques as can be used in the same class). [...]

Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

1. Collect the errors for later
You can then correct them later in the same class (with a game like a grammar auction or just eliciting corrections from the class) or in a future class (for example writing error dictation pairwork worksheets or using the same techniques as can be used in the same class). Make sure you give positive reinforcement as well, e.g. “Someone said this sentence, and that is really good.”
Useful language:
“Here are some things that people said in the last activity”
“I heard several people say this one”
“Can anyone correct this sentence? It has one missing word/ one word missing/ You need to add one word”
“The words are in the wrong order/ You need to change the words around/ change the word order/ mix the words up”
“This is a typical mistake for students from…”
“Don’t worry, even native speakers make this mistake sometimes/ every nationality makes this mistake”
“This mistake is something we studied last week”

2. Facial expression
For example, raise an eyebrow, tilt your head to one side or give a slight frown. Most people will do this naturally, but there is a slight chance a teacher’s expression will be too critical or too subtle for your students to pick up on, and you can (amusingly) practice facial expressions in a teaching workshop by participants communicating certain typical classroom messages (“move over there to work with this person”, “work in pairs” etc.) using just their heads and faces, including feedback on spoken errors in that list.

ادامه نوشته

The English Teacher

Classroom Rules for Behavior &
Seating Charts

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The very first thing a teacher should do in a new class is to establish behavior rules. They should be reasonable and doable. There is no better time than the first day to establish these rules.

First, attendance should be taken. Then a seating chart, already filled out, should be used. On the first day students are waiting to see what happens. The seating chart, is part of their first day experience. When a seating chart is established later, it disrupts at least some of the students in their routines, makes some unhappy with the changes, and signals that the teacher is having difficulty controlling the class.

A seating chart the first day establishes that the teacher is in charge of the physical environment of the classroom as well as the academic environment. This understanding is particularly useful when dealing with 'kinesthetic' students who are often those who first need discipline.

To avoid placing students in the class alphabetically, as they may have been since kindergarten, students can be assigned alphabetically in diagonal row order. That is, students can be assigned from the bottom left corner of the seating chart to the upper right corner, diagonally. The assignments can work upward or downward from there. The purpose is simply not to have the same people sitting next to each other who are very familiar with each other.

As a result, students with 'early alphabet names,' may be seated in the back of the class and some whose names usually come later, are placed in the front of the class. This change may prevent routine behavior learned in earlier years from being easily reestablished in a new classroom.

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How to do:

When you take attendance the first day, you can ignore some noise and problems as you call out the names and fill out the attendance sheet. Do it calmly. Have the attendance taken accurately first.

Then, standing by the first seat to be assigned [the front left hand corner] announce to the class that in your classes you have assigned seating. Then announce, pointing to that desk, the name of the student who is to sit there. The student already sitting there will be willing to leave. Generally students don't want to sit in the front of the class. The others, except the one whose name has been called, are glad not to have to sit there. They are all hoping they won't have to sit in the next seat [to that student's left].

[You assign the first row across, the second row across, the third row across, etc. for the actual seating of the students because it is easy for the students to understand where to go.]]

The student who is assigned to that first seat may not be happy, but remember, on the First Day the students are waiting to see what will happen. How can he/she object to being assigned a seat? Will any student be willing to go to the office on the first day for that reason? [If so, you will be establishing control, and that student will have a "mark against them" in the principal's office for unreasonable actions.] You focus on that one student at a time. You are not focusing on controlling the entire class, rather, one student at a time... in the back of your mind, you are controlling the class, but the focus is one seat at a time. Look at the *seat*, point to it. Move on to the next seat as the one student leaves, the next one starts coming to it. Once the momentum starts, it will move smoothly even though some may be losing seats they thought that they had, next to friends, or in the back of the room.

Once they are all assigned, it is important to have the class focus on some work in order to cement the transition they just went through. I tell students to take out their notebooks and write down the class rules. This "take out the book" behavior is established habit so it helps in getting them past any feelings about their new seating positions. They write down class rules as I read them and comment on them, so that they will understand and remember them.

*Again, on the First Day students are waiting to see what will happen. If they don't get the rules that first day, they will begin to assume what the rules will be, or are, according to past experiences. Then you may have to undo their assumptions before establishing your rules. The first day is better. And giving the rules is a good transition exercise.

[If new students come in the next day, you can give them a copy of the class rules to copy into their notebooks, and ask them to return the original. Check to see whether they did copy them, and put a mark into the gradebook to certify that they read and have the rules. *Then later they can not claim that they didn't know what a particular rule was.

If you get done with the rules before the end of class, you should have a not too difficult homework assignment for them... to keep their good behavior in the process of being established for the entire class period.

Lesson plan

10 Steps to Better Lesson Plans

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Mrs. Kelly Tenkely

Kelly Tenkely is a technology teacher in a private school. Kelly also trains teaching staff on integrating and implementing technology into the classroom. In addition, Kelly is the author of iLearnTechnology blog. Add Kelly as a friend.

More articles from this author:

• 12 Tools for Blended Learning
• 15 Tools to Help You Go Paperless
• 5 BEST Virtual Field Trips

Kelly Tenkely | TheApple.com

Master teachers are also master lesson planners. They can look at a learning goal and piece together key components that will ensure that their students meet the goal. Not all lessons need to be a reinvention of the wheel, but there are several hallmarks of well-crafted lesson plans. Whether you are building your own lessons, or searching through databases of lessons, be sure to include these 10 key components:

1. Learning Goal-

Every lesson plan should have a clearly defined learning goal, after all, that is the reason for teaching! I have seen some very inventive lesson plans that lack this important ingredient. No matter how entertaining a lesson may be, if it is lacking a learning goal, it has missed its mark.
There is a day celebrated annually by students all over the country affectionately referred to as Mole Day. Celebrated every year on October 23 (10-23), Mole Day honors Avogardro’s Number (6.02 × 10^23), which is a basic unit of measure in chemistry. There are some fun lesson plans out there for Mole day (and in fact entire websites dedicated to the celebration). Mole day is uniquely celebrated by creating moles (the animal) and creating a diorama that represents a play on the word ‘mole’. For example “guaca-mole” or “Remember the Ala-mole”. Students spend weeks creating their moles and mole puns. But in all the entertainment, does the lesson completely lose its meaning?
What does the mole (the animal) have to do with Avogardro’s Number aside from sharing a name? When the learning goal is lost, so is the learning. When writing and searching lesson plans, make sure you always have a clear learning objective in mind: everything hinges on this.

2. Resources-

List the resources needed for a lesson. Nothing is worse than having the perfect lesson planned only to find that you are missing an important material. Jotting down a list of resources needed for the lesson will ensure that you have all the paper, glue, copies, etc. when the time comes to use them.
Don’t forget to list digital resources as well. Make sure if you are using technology that the websites you intend to use with students aren’t blocked at school. A great lesson you created at home could come to a screeching halt if you can’t access the video you found the night before. Also, be sure to note any of the plug-ins that may be required for a website (Silverlight, Flash, Shockwave, etc.). Often, if you can plan ahead, your tech department can confirm that you have everything in place for your lesson.

3. Standards-

It is important to note any standards being met by the lesson. Most schools are requiring a standard tie in for every lesson. Even if your school doesn’t require that you note which standards you are meeting, it is good practice to be familiar with your state and national standards. You will be surprised how many standards you are meeting in any given lesson. You may also choose to note how a lesson falls into the scope and sequence for yearlong learning.

4. Anticipatory Set-

After the learning goal, the anticipatory set is one of the most important ingredients in a quality lesson plan. The anticipatory set engages your students in the learning that is about to happen. It sets the tone for the lesson and makes students hungry to learn more. Think of the anticipatory set as a movie trailer. The trailer doesn’t tell everything about the movie but provides enough glimpses to leave you wanting more.

When I was in first grade, my teacher planted a UFO made out of cardboard boxes and yogurt containers spray painted silver in the middle of our classroom. All around the UFO were purple play dough “space rocks”. We were immediately engaged and excited about the lesson. We had no idea what we would be learning, but she already had us thinking and questioning. As it turned out, the UFO was introducing a new leveled reader we were going to read together called “My Pet Space Rock”. All these years later I still remember that lesson.

A good anticipatory set activates prior knowledge or encourages students to ask questions. Students learn, by making connections and exploring. Build anticipation for your lesson through props, secret notes from historians or scientists written to your class, a video clip, a song, a short story, or role play. Students love pretend play, so think about how you can get them to use their imagination and pretend as they are learning.

For example, if your students are studying dinosaurs, tell them they are paleontologists going on a dig. Outfit them with field journals and a ‘special’ paleontologist pencils that they can use to take notes. In my classroom, I like to use Wordles to begin my lessons. These are word clouds that you can create at www.wordle.net. I include several “clue” words about what we will be learning and project the Wordle on the whiteboard. As students come into the classroom, they guess what we will be doing based on the Wordle.

This gets students thinking about what they will be learning, activating prior knowledge, and asking questions. It takes 2-3 minutes of guessing before we begin the lesson and it readies students for the learning that will follow. It seems to me that the anticipatory set is the piece most often left out of lesson plans, and it is a shame because it’s what excites students about learning.

correction

Classroom management: speaking correction techniques

Author: Simon Mumford and Steve Darn

Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type: reference material

Suggestions of speaking correction techniques to use when teaching English.

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I want to know. What's the best way to correct students when they make a mistake, especially when they are speaking?
Posted: 30 May 2005 at 9:00pm

Introduction

Everyone makes mistakes, even speakers using their own language when they are hurried, ‘lost for words’, or forced into inappropriate language by a difficult or unusual situation. It is hardly surprising, then, that language learners make mistakes, given the difficulty of the task of comprehending, processing the content of the message and knowledge of the target language, and coming out with a response that is both grammatically correct and appropriate to the situation.

 

ادامه نوشته

ِAdult learning

30 THINGS WE KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT ADULT LEARNING

By Ron and Susan Zemke
Innovation Abstracts Vol VI, No 8, March 9, 1984

A variety of sources provides us with a body of fairly reliable knowledge about adult learning. This knowledge might be divided into three basic divisions: things we know about adult learners and their motivation, things we know about designing curriculum for adults, and things we know about working with adults in the classroom.

Motivation to Learn

1. Adults seek out learning experiences in order to cope with specific life-changing events--e.g., marriage, divorce, a new job, a promotion, being fired, retiring, losing a loved one, moving to a new city.
2. The more life change events an adult encounters, the more likely he or she is to seek out learning opportunities. Just as stress increases as life-change events accumulate, the motivation to cope with change through engagement in a learning experience increases.
3. The learning experiences adults seek out on their own are directly related - at least in their perception - to the life-change events that triggered the seeking.
4. Adults are generally willing to engage in learning experiences before, after, or even during the actual life change event. Once convinced that the change is a certainty, adults will engage in any learning that promises to help them cope with the transition.
5. Adults who are motivated to seek out a learning experience do so primarily because they have a use for the knowledge or skill being sought. Learning is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
6. Increasing or maintaining one's sense of self-esteem and pleasure are strong secondary motivators for engaging in learning experiences.

Curriculum Design

1. Adult learners tend to be less interested in, and enthralled by, survey courses. They tend to prefer single concept, single-theory courses that focus heavily on the application of the concept to relevant problems. This tendency increases with age.
2. Adults need to be able to integrate new ideas with what they already know if they are going to keep - and use - the new information.
3. Information that conflicts sharply with what is already held to be true, and thus forces a re-evaluation of the old material, is integrated more slowly.
4. Information that has little "conceptual overlap" with what is already known is acquired slowly.
5. Fast-paced, complex or unusual learning tasks interfere with the learning of the concepts or data they are intended to teach or illustrate.
6. Adults tend to compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures.
7. Adults tend to take errors personally and are more likely to let them affect self-esteem. Therefore, they tend to apply tried-and-true solutions and take fewer risks.
8. The curriculum designer must know whether the concepts or ideas will be in concert or in conflict with the learner. Some instruction must be designed to effect a change in belief and value systems.
9. Programs need to be designed to accept viewpoints from people in different life stages and with different value "sets."
10. A concept needs to be "anchored" or explained from more than one value set and appeal to more than one developmental life stage.
11. Adults prefer self-directed and self-designed learning projects over group-learning experiences led by a professional, they select more than one medium for learning, and they desire to control pace and start/stop time.
12. Nonhuman media such as books, programmed instruction and television have become popular with adults in recent years.
13. Regardless of media, straightforward how-to is the preferred content orientation. Adults cite a need for application and how-to information as the primary motivation for beginning a learning project.
14. Self-direction does not mean isolation. Studies of self-directed learning indicate that self-directed projects involve an average of 10 other people as resources, guides, encouragers and the like. But even for the self-professed, self-directed learner, lectures and short seminars get positive ratings, especially when these events give the learner face-to-face, one-to-one access to an expert.

In the Classroom

1. The learning environment must be physically and psychologically comfortable; long lectures, periods of interminable sitting and the absence of practice opportunities rate high on the irritation scale.
2. Adults have something real to lose in a classroom situation. Self-esteem and ego are on the line when they are asked to risk trying a new behavior in front of peers and cohorts. Bad experiences in traditional education, feelings about authority and the preoccupation with events outside the classroom affect in-class experience.
3. Adults have expectations, and it is critical to take time early on to clarify and articulate all expectations before getting into content. The instructor can assume responsibility only for his or her own expectations, not for those of students.
4. Adults bring a great deal of life experience into the classroom, an invaluable asset to be acknowledged, tapped and used. Adults can learn well -and much - from dialogue with respected peers.
5. Instructors who have a tendency to hold forth rather than facilitate can hold that tendency in check--or compensate for it--by concentrating on the use of open-ended questions to draw out relevant student knowledge and experience.
6. New knowledge has to be integrated with previous knowledge; students must actively participate in the learning experience. The learner is dependent on the instructor for confirming feedback on skill practice; the instructor is dependent on the learner for feedback about curriculum and in-class performance.
7. The key to the instructor role is control. The instructor must balance the presentation of new material, debate and discussion, sharing of relevant student experiences, and the clock. Ironically, it seems that instructors are best able to establish control when they risk giving it up. When they shelve egos and stifle the tendency to be threatened by challenge to plans and methods, they gain the kind of facilitative control needed to effect adult learning.
8. The instructor has to protect minority opinion, keep disagreements civil and unheated, make connections between various opinions and ideas, and keep reminding the group of the variety of potential solutions to the problem. The instructor is less advocate than orchestrator.
9. Integration of new knowledge and skill requires transition time and focused effort on application.
10. Learning and teaching theories function better as resources than as a Rosetta stone. A skill-training task can draw much from the behavioral approach, for example, while personal growth-centered subjects seem to draw gainfully from humanistic concepts. An eclectic, rather than a single theory-based approach to developing strategies and procedures, is recommended for matching instruction to learning tasks.

The next five years will eclipse the last fifty in terms of hard data production on adult learning. For the present, we must recognize that adults want their learning to be problem-oriented, personalized and accepting of their need for self-direction and personal responsibility.

Management

The Five Golden Rules of Good Classroom Management    

Are you an ESL teacher with classroom management problems? I hope not, but if you are reading this, it might be the case. Have you got a handful of troublemakers who wear you out? Or has the whole class taken over and you find it hard to teach anything?

This article proposes 6 golden rules for good classroom management to help you create your plan or strategy with your young students learning English.

Why the classroom management problem in the first place?

Firstly let's look at reasons why the children might be misbehaving. Are they bored? Does learning English not engage them? Are they fed up with sitting at their desks? Do some of them have behaviour problems such as ADD and disrupt the class for others? Maybe the children find English hard and do not think they can learn it so they hide their lack of confidence behind an excuse of misbehaviour. Maybe the naughty child just thinks that the teacher does not like him or her. Or maybe the children are not motivated to be good because they are never praised when they are well behaved.

One thing is for sure; you must be the boss, because, like a young puppy that will try to become pack leader, if you are not in charge then the children will be. And that's the last thing you want! Some newly qualified ESL teachers go out into the classrooms today like so many sacrificial lambs! They want to be nice, fun and friendly, but they fail to establish class management rules and boundaries from day one and the children stampede right over them. This can be a bit of a shock!

There are many techniques and strategies for good classroom management and ultimately you have to develop your own personal style that fits with your philosophy in life and that is also effective. In addition you must comply with the rules of the establishment you work in. If your school or institution has rules that you do not agree with and you cannot change them then look for another job! The school should be your ally not your foe.

The Only REAL Classroom Management Solution

Rather than a plan, strategy or technique, the vital key to good classroom management comes from the ESL teacher's attitude and decision to earn the love and respect of your students. Think about it, if students like you and respect you they will naturally behave well and pay attention because they want to please you. So how can an ESL teacher make this happen?

Good Classroom Management Rule 1

Be a mentor not a friend and earn the children's trust by being
firm, fair and consistent.

Save yourself the humiliation of trying to be the students' best buddy, they will probably laugh at you behind your back. Rather be their mentor, a model for them to copy, not only in terms of learning English but also in terms of how you expect them to behave. You are someone they can trust and come to for help. Err on the side of being strict, especially at first. It is harder to become strict if you have been casual and lenient.

The children will trust you if you are consistent, clear in establishing the rules from day one and consistent in applying them. Refuse to go on teaching until your rules are applied. If you are inconsistent, if you yell at the children or lose your cool, suddenly punish a child unexpectedly, put them down, be sarcastic or embarrass them, they will know that they cannot trust you.

Good Classroom Management Rule 2 

Show your EFL / ESL pupils that you care about them.

At the same time as being firm and fair in class find opportunities to talk to your ESL students informally outside of class time – for example sharing a walk over to the canteen or down a corridor. When you get the chance ask the children how they are, what sports they like, who their favourite band is at the moment and so on. The children will feel special because you have taken some of your time to speak to them. If the children feel that you know them, you know what they like, what they can't wait to do when they get home and so on, they will truly feel that you care about them. Now tell me, seriously, how much more likely are they to behave when class time comes round? In fact they could even feel embarrassed for playing you up!

Another way to communicate that you care is to look at your pupils, make eye contact and smile at them. If you have some ESL pupils you do not like in your class put yourself in their shoes and do whatever it takes to replace your negative feelings with feelings of compassion for that student.

Good Classroom Management Rule 3

Get closer to your EFL / ESL pupils.

Never spend a full class up at the board or at the front, behind your barrier of a desk. Instead, perhaps during an ESL writing task, take some time to sit in next to different students and ask them how they are, ask them if they have anything in particular they would like to ask you that they have not understood, or just tell them that they are doing well and put a couple of ticks on their work.

Good Classroom Management Rule 4

Praise and encourage good behaviour. 

Children respond far better to praise than criticism, which only makes them shrivel up inside and feel worthless. Never ever, ever use destructive criticism. Far too many human beings have a lack of self-love, as it is, without propagating it further in the classroom. There is so much good that you can do as an ESL teacher by increasing your pupils' self-esteem through praise and encouragement.

If you listen to a rather shocking number of parents, they spend their whole time telling their children to stop doing this or stop doing that, and the whole dialogue is negative. Be conscious and make sure you do not fall into that trap. Focus on the positive in order to draw more attention to it and apply the universal law of "you attract what you focus on".

Make sure you give plenty of praise and encouragement to ESL students who are well behaved. For example, give out tasks to students who are being good, thank them for being well behaved or for doing something quietly. If children are vying to get your attention say; "I'm picking Sarah because she has been so good today".

If a student is being naughty avoid using his or her name. Children love the sound of their own names – it means they are getting attention. If Johnny is talking say, "I'm listening to Sarah now".

Rewarding students is all part of the process. This does not mean taking them out to pizza. I personally am against rewarding ESL students in this way. To me it belittles the teacher to have to resort to such things, not to mention the fact that ESL teachers are usually not properly paid for the work they do without having to spend part of their salary on bribes for the children.

Instead use ideas that confer responsibility or distinction on the pupil such as: verbal or written praise, a positive note to take home to parents, a star on the work, displaying a particular student's work on the wall, being given a seat of honour, being named the student of the day or week, being given a special responsibility such as running an errand for the teacher, doing the role-call, helping the teacher with a class activity, collecting or giving out materials, leading a group activity or tutoring another student.

Good Classroom Management Rule 5

Make your teaching style interesting and varied.

Tap into all the different ESL learning styles so that you reach all students in your class. Just standing there talking at the board is not going to interest many children anyway, but aside from that, you'll miss the children who mainly learn from tactile and kinaesthetic experience. By using a wide variety of ESL classroom games you will by default dabble in auditory, visual, kinaesthetic and tactile skills and thus engage all your pupils at least some of the time.

The other advantage to ESL classroom games is that they engage and motivate the children. It's obvious; if a child is enjoying the learning process then he or she is FAR more likely to pay attention! It important though to choose appropriate games for your class size and classroom configuration.

Summary of the Golden Rules for Good ESL Classroom Management

These six golden rules will ensure that your ESL pupils trust you because they know what your rules are and that you will apply them. Your pupils will like you because you show them you care by taking time to talk to them and by getting close to them physically. They will like you because you make them feel good about themselves and learning English through your encouragement and enthusiasm. Finally they will respect you for your stimulating teaching through the use of ESL games, ESL stories, songs or ESL plays that tap into all learning styles.

Ramadan

 

The Benefits of Fasting

by Paul Martin

Sister Jane Marie Luecke is professor  of English at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. Mr. Martin is owner of a marketing/public relations firm in the Chicago suburb of Riverside. This article appeared in the Christian Century March 30, 1977, p. 298.

 

In the spring of 1957 I was managing the airport in Point Barrow, Alaska, the main supply site and a scene of heavy air traffic during the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line radar stations along Alaska’s northern coast. Working 50 to 60 hours a week, I hadn’t taken a day off for nearly a year and was scraping the bottom of the energy barrel. Overweight, irritable, tired all the time and feeling much older than my 34 years, I decided that a vacation was a necessity. Not just any vacation, however. I went to a health resort near Escondido, California, and fasted for two weeks under the direction of a physician. I drank as much water as needed but ate nothing at all for 14 days.

I

Before this I had tried a few short fasts of three or four days on my own but had never gone longer than that with only water. James McEachen had supervised many fasts and understood what to look for. He told me to take no exercise but simply to rest and sunbathe during the day and to drink water whenever I was thirsty. About the fifth day without food I developed a sore throat, my back began to ache and my teeth hurt. Dr. McEachen explained that this was a healing crisis: my body was cleansing itself of toxic substances. About the tenth day these symptoms cleared up.

With McEachen’s guidance I broke the fast on the 14th day. This was a crucial point. A fast has to be ended properly and carefully or there can be painful and dangerous complications. I was given small amounts of orange juice every three hours for two days and then allowed to eat whole fruit for another two days. After this I was given more substantial food on a regular meal time schedule. I stayed there for a week after I resumed eating and then returned to my job in Point Barrow feeling 1,000 per cent better than when I left.

I

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Using dictation
Amy Lightfoot, British Council, India

Dictation has been a feature of language classrooms for hundreds of years. However, for many teachers these days, the word 'dictation' is synonymous with 'old-fashioned', 'boring', and 'teacher-centred'. In fact, it hardly seems to merit a mention in most of the introductory texts for ELT trainees. Is it really as outdated and uncommunicative as it first appears?

Dictation has numerous uses in the ELT classroom, often involving very little preparation and a lot of creativity and interest. Used imaginatively, it can be an effective tool for working on accuracy and fluency in all four skills. In this article I will answer the following questions and at the same time provide some practical ideas for activities.

• What is dictation?
• Why do it?
• What are the potential problems?
• How can we make dictation more learner-centred?
• Conclusion
  

 

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From mother tongue to other tongue
Luke Prodromou - teacher, teacher trainer, writer
British Council, Greece

The issue of whether or not to use the mother-tongue (L1) in the English language (L2) classroom is complex. This article presents the results of a survey into student attitudes towards the use of L1 in class and some suggestions for using the L1 and its culture as a learning resource.

• Reinstating the mother tongue
• What about the learners?
• Survey result summary
• Beyond monolingualism
• Conclusion
• References
• Survey results in full

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Teaching large classes
Teachers in Action, BBC World Service / OLSET

Large classes are a reality in many countries and they pose particular challenges. This article suggests ways to help discipline, to use group work and to cope with limited resources.

• What are the challenges of teaching a large class?
• How can you use group work to help learning in a large class?
• How can group work help in a large class when resources are lacking?
• How can you develop good discipline in a large class?
• The advantages of a large class
• Next steps

 

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Teacher positioning in the classroom
Barney Griffiths, teacher, trainer, materials writer, Spain

Where we decide to position ourselves at various stages of the lesson is important if we take into account the effect it has on our learners. Whether we are standing, seated or crouching in front of, to the side of or behind learners sends out a message with regard to what we want them to do. Our choice will depend on the aim of the activity in progress. There are times when we will want to be the focus of all of our students' attention, others when we will want to be addressing groups, pairs or individuals in the class and also times when we will want to be entirely unobtrusive. We will adopt different positions accordingly.

• Standing, sitting or crouching
• Interaction patterns
• Common problems with positioning
• Conclusion
  

 

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Socio cultural awareness in ELT
Claudia Connolly , Teacher , British Council, Paris

The socio cultural element in learning is particularly sensitive in EFL because in acquiring a language there is, to some extent, an appropriation of a cultural identity too. This article looks at the social entity of learning among children. It looks at how as teachers we are social agents and how we are managing the cultural contexts of our classrooms. We prescribe socially appropriate ways of participation, which we need to be aware of.

• Child development
• The social event
• Patterns of exchange
• Peer collaboration
• Collaboration, participation and ground rules

 

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A Personality Orientated Approach to EFL Teaching
Nina Koptyug, Ph.D., associate professor of English, Russia

In the language classroom we often ask students to talk about or refer to their personal situation and experiences. This is seemingly good practice. However, with some learners, particularly younger ones, this focus on their personal lives can bring personal problems to the fore, which may actually hinder their language learning or affect their confidence in class. This article discusses this problem through actual situations and suggests a practical way to solve the problem, a way that actually widens students' communicative abilities.

• My first problem
• Is a correct answer a true answer?
• Looking for personal reasons, personal problems
• A real situation, a real problem
• A practical approach, a practical solution
• Conclusion

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Non-verbal communication
Dilek Eryilmaz and Steve Darn, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Non-verbal communication (body language, paralinguistics) has been a focus of attention for some time in areas such as the refinement of presentation skills, developing social skills, and even as as a realistic alternative to the lie-detector test. Relatively little attention, however, has been given in language teaching to non-verbal communication as a complement to spoken language, though recent trends in neuro linguistic programming regarding mirroring and parallel body language have filtered into current research and practice.

• Components of non-verbal communication
• Teaching non-verbal communication
• A Non-verbal communication lesson
• Conclusions
  

 

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Monitoring speaking
Barney Griffiths, Teacher, Trainer, Spain

As teachers I think we all accept that there is a role for correcting student speech in the language classroom. However, in my experience this tends to take place either when students are speaking in open class - when all other students can hear them and they are under enormous performance pressure, or on a personal, one-to-one level, which naturally excludes other students in the class.

• Aiding real communication
• Problems with monitoring student speech
• The practicalities of effective monitoring
• Conclusion

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Managing young learners
Gail Ellis, Teaching Centre Manager, Paris and Janet Leclere , Teacher, Young Learners Centre, Paris

Teaching young learners requires a knowledge of the developmental differences between children and teenagers and of the appropriate management skills. This article concerns the personal observations and experiences of a teacher who moved from teaching teenagers to teaching young learners. It includes ideas for classroom management and teaching strategies.

• Inside and outside the young learners classroom
• New dimension
• Classroom management and discipline
• Using the board
• Routines and activities
• Work

 

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Learning styles and teaching
Cheron Verster, teacher trainer and materials developer, South Africa

Your students will be more successful if you match your teaching style to their learning styles.

• What is a learning style?
• Where do learning styles come from?
• Why should teachers know about learning styles?
• What types of learning styles are there?
• What teaching methods and activities suit different learning styles?

 

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Humanistic language teaching
Paul Bress

'Humanism' is one of those constructs that people argue about passionately. Instead of attempting to define it, perhaps it makes more sense to focus on some commonly agreed characteristics of humanism. These are: problem-solving, reasoning, free will, self-development, and co-operation.

• Humanism and learning theory
• The humanistic teacher
• Humanism in practice
  • Teaching language items
  • Teaching skills
  • The teacher's status
  • Flexibility
• Conclusion
  

 

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Group work v. whole-class activities
Simon Andrewes, teacher, president of Granada English Teachers' Association

Group and pair work (henceforth group work) are so much a part of our everyday teaching routine that we hardly pause to think before partitioning the class to tackle some particular communicative task. But group work may not always be the best option. There will be a time and a place for whole-class activities in the English language classroom, just as there's a time and a place for group and pair work.

• In praise of group work
• In praise of whole class discussion
• Tact and sensitivity
• Repertoire
• Variety adds spice to the classroom

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Error Correction 2
Rolf Donald, teacher and teacher trainer, Eastbourne School of English

As mentioned in Error Correction 1, students can differ greatly in their attitude to producing spoken English. Some are only interested in developing their fluency at the expense of accuracy while others are so focused on accuracy that they have no fluency. While these are clearly extremes, it is not unusual to find students like this in a typical class. In Error Correction 2 we look at...

• A basic approach to improving fluency and accuracy
• Dictogloss - A way of raising students' awareness of their inter-language
• Criteria for dealing with spoken errors
• Practical techniques for correcting spoken errors
• Further reading
  

 

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Error Correction 1
Rolf Donald, teacher and teacher trainer, Eastbourne School of English

When it comes to error correction we are dealing with one individual's reaction to a student's piece of writing or utterance. This inevitably means that there will be some disagreement among teachers about what, when, and how to correct. Therefore the aim of this article is not to be prescriptive, but to highlight some key areas. It is in 2 parts. In the first part we look at ...

• Attitudes to error correction
• Categorising errors
• A model for correcting writing
• The role of planning
• Practical techniques / ideas for correcting writing
  

 

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Discipline problems
Nina M. Koptyug, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Lyceum # 130, Novosibirsk, Russia

In this article, we'll be looking at the causes of discipline problems, and at various ways of solving the problems. We shall try to see how the traditional four skills can be varied according to the class level and aptitude, and to work out some strategies for maintaining law and order in the classroom!

• Identifying the causes
• Identifying the ringleader(s)
• Varying the traditional tasks
• Increasing motivation
• Establishing the priorities

 

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Sense of humour
Nik Peachey, teacher, trainer and materials writer, British Council

For me, one of the most under exploited and neglected areas within language learning is humour. How many course books have a section on humour? How many syllabi include the ability to tell or understand a joke? Yet understanding the sense of humour of a people is a key element of understanding the culture and language and perhaps even more importantly of developing relationships with people from that country.

• Humour and culture
• Humour and classroom dynamics
• A few ideas
• When the laughter stops
• Conclusion

 

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Non-verbal communication
Dilek Eryilmaz and Steve Darn, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Non-verbal communication (body language, paralinguistics) has been a focus of attention for some time in areas such as the refinement of presentation skills, developing social skills, and even as as a realistic alternative to the lie-detector test. Relatively little attention, however, has been given in language teaching to non-verbal communication as a complement to spoken language, though recent trends in neuro linguistic programming regarding mirroring and parallel body language have filtered into current research and practice.

• Components of non-verbal communication
• Teaching non-verbal communication
• A Non-verbal communication lesson
• Conclusions
  

 

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Teacher Talking Time
Steve Darn, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

The development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) brought with it a methodology which emphasised communication in the classroom, pair and group activities and student involvement in the learning process. A consequence of this was the belief that the teacher’s presence in the classroom should be reduced.

• Why reduce TTT
• Strategies for reducing TTT
• Positive uses of TTT
• Conclusion

Why reduce TTT
Many training courses based on CLT insisted that teacher talking time (TTT) was counterproductive and that teachers should reduce TTT for a number of reasons:

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Classroom layout
Jo Budden, British Council, Spain

The layout of your classroom can have a serious impact on the way you teach and the way your students learn. This article looks at some of the basic points that you can consider regarding the way you arrange your classroom.

• The importance of layout
• Some considerations
• Classroom layouts
• Conclusion

The impotance of layout
When you're planning your lessons do you ever think about the layout of the classroom? Sometimes it may be impossible and impractical to move the furniture around at all for many reasons including the fact that in some schools the tables are bolted to the floor! However, even if the furniture is immobile, remember that your students aren't, so you can think about how you want to group students and how you can use the space you have to your advantage. This may involve using spaces at the front, or down the side of the classrooms, letting students stand up or to sit on the tables to do certain activities.

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Homework
Steve Darn, Freelance Trainer, Izmir, Turkey

Homework seems to be an accepted part of teachers’ and students’ routines, but there is little mention of it in ELT literature. The role of homework is hardly mentioned in the majority of general ELT texts or training courses, suggesting that there is little question as to its value even if the resulting workload is time-consuming. However, there is clearly room for discussion of homework policies and practices particularly now that technology has made so many more resources available to learners outside the classroom.

• Reasons for homework
• Attitudes to homework
• Effective homework
• Types of homework
• Conclusion

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Monitoring
Steve Darn, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Monitoring is a classroom management technique loosely defined as listening to the learners for their accuracy and fluency, or checking to see whether activities are going to plan and that the learners are 'on task'. However, monitoring is often carried out as a vague listening and looking exercise by the teacher, and sometimes not done at all, whereas in fact effective monitoring is a skill that needs to be developed if learners are to benefit fully from activities, particularly those of the information gap and group interactive types.

• When to monitor
• Purposes of monitoring
• How to monitor
• Conclusion

When to monitor
Monitoring goes on all the time, but particularly during speaking activities when the teacher is concerned with the general assessment of learners' performance in relation to general progress or recent language and skills development. Monitoring of individual learners takes place during written practice exercises, when the aim is to point out errors and encourage self-correction. Guided practice activities, particularly of the pairwork format, are monitored for accuracy, while less guided groupwork activities are monitored for task achievement and fluency. Monitoring may be general or multipurpose, focusing on one or more of the following aims.

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Make no mistake
Paul Bress

Although the behaviourist view of language learning has been largely discredited for some time now, a lot of teachers set great store by the stimulus / response way of inducing students to produce 'correct' language. This normally involves drilling (e.g. choral repetition drills) and then some freer practice activity during which the teacher patrols each group noting down mistakes to give the class feedback on.

• Handling mistakes
• Teacher-centred phases
• Student-centred phases
• Conclusion

I think that the teacher can come across in a rather unfortunate light on this path. The students will see the teacher's primary function as being on the lookout for examples of inaccurate language which needs to be eliminated or punished, even! I'm not sure if this should be the teacher's primary responsibility and I'd like to explore here what I try to do when faced with mistakes.

Handling mistakes
Most lessons consist of two different kinds of phases:

• Teacher-centred phases, in which the students are listening and talking to the teacher
• Student-centred phases, in which the students are listening and talking to each other.

Let's look at how teachers can deal with mistakes in each type of phase.

 

Teacher-centred phases
Students generally want to know if they're doing something right. So if a student produces a particularly good example of appropriate, accurate language, then I think it's very important to give clear, praise. However, if a student is producing inaccurate language at a time when you want all the students to understand what is accurate, then I tend to follow this 'error correction' procedure:

• a) I elicit self-correction
• b) I elicit peer correction
• c) I 'backtrack' (this means I use what students already know)
• d) I correct it myself

If a) doesn't work, I proceed to b), and if b) doesn't work, proceed to c), etc.

Here's an example of what the dialogue might look like. In this example, you'll notice that a) and b) don't work - but c) does work, which means that I'm not forced to provide the right answer.

• Student 1: Do you go to the cinema yesterday?
• Teacher: Mm…try again? (= eliciting self-correction, using a general prompt)
  (pause)
• Teacher: Yesterday? (eliciting self-correction, using a specific prompt)
  (pause)
• Teacher: Can anybody help student 1? (eliciting peer correction)
  (pause)
• Teacher: OK, ask student 2 if he goes to the cinema every day. (backtracking)
• Student 1: Er…Do you go to the cinema every day?
• Teacher: Good! What was the first word? (backtracking)
• Student 1: 'Do'.
• Teacher: Good. Now ask student the question about yesterday. (backtracking)
• Student 1: Ah! Did you go to the cinema yesterday?
• Teacher: Good! (praising!)

Although the teacher is trying to get the student to focus on accuracy in the above dialogue, I don't think that it is punitive at all. On the contrary,it is empowering the students to communicate more effectively and I think that students are very much aware of this.

 

Student-centred phases
I think it's a good idea to give individual students the choice of what kind of feedback they'd like after a student-centred phase, also known as a 'freer practice' activity. I personally ask my students to choose between

• exclusively positive feedback on their contributions
• both positive feedback plus some examples of language they used which caused communication to break down.

I find that most students, in practice, will ask for the second of these, but they feel empowered just by being given this choice of feedback.

Let's assume that a student has chosen the second style of feedback. How could you go about doing this? One thing you could do is to give each student a language feedback sheet at the end of the lesson. On this sheet, give positive feedback where a student really stretched in order to communicate something difficult. But, if something was not communicated clearly, you need to write this down too.

The sheet could look something like this:

Language Feedback
Excellent contributions	What did you mean by…?
You did very well in the role play. You spoke clearly, and you constructed some complex sentences. Well done! (etc.)	"I haven't go to New York, but I liked it very much." (etc.)

As an extension to this feedback process, I think that it's a good idea to set up regular tutorials with each student to discuss how the listed examples of communication breakdown can be repaired. At the end of each tutorial, the teacher can set each student different language research tasks, if appropriate.

 

Conclusion
In conclusion, it's quite interesting to note that, while most linguists agree with Aitchinson, who says that correction doesn't help the language acquisition process of internalising rules, teachers still do tend to instinctively correct in the formal teaching process. There are probably a number reasons for this, for example the teachers' own experience as a language student, and the fact that it seems more 'teacher-like' to do something about mistakes. But I believe that by modifying your approach from a more punitive one to a more empowering one, you will be making the process of leaning a language both more human and more efficient.

 

A version of this article published was first published in English Teaching Professional in July 2005. Republished here on 26th January, 2006

Further reading

Aitchinson, J. Introducing Language and Mind. London: Penguin Books. 1992.
Diane Larsen-Freeman: Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. OUP, 1986.
Penny Ur: A course in Language Teaching, CUP, 1996.
Jeremy Harmer: The Practice of English Language Teaching: Longman: 1991.
David Nunan: Language Teaching Methodology, Prentice Hall, 1991.

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Keeping teens interested
Kevin Thomson, British Council, Barcelona

Many English teachers would probably agree that teenagers are the most difficult age group to teach. Sometimes our teenage students do not want to be in class in the first place and often their minds can be on other things when we are giving an English lesson. However, teen classes can also be fun and very rewarding for both the teacher and students. I believe that the materials that the teacher uses in the classroom are a crucial factor in deciding if a teens class is successful or not.

• A story from the classroom
• A lesson learnt
• Practical ideas
• Conclusion

 

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Checking Understanding
Steve Darn & Ian White, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

In a standard language focus lesson following a PPP (present, practice, produce) or similar format, the target language (structure or vocabulary) is normally presented in context, then isolated and analysed. Analysis of the language consists of two sub-stages, often known as highlighting and concept checking.

Highlighting is taking the model sentence and showing, telling or eliciting what the problems are in terms of form, function, and phonology.

Concept checking is checking the understanding of difficult aspects of the target structure in terms of function and meaning. Concept checking is vital, since learners must fully understand the structure before any intensive practice of form and phonology is carried out.

• Ways of checking understanding
• Concept questions
• Some examples
• Learning to construct concept questions
• Conclusion

 

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Checking answers
Marta J. Sabbadini, British Council, Cameroon

When checking the answers to an exercise or activity teachers often revert to a more traditional role, whereby from the front of the room they ask students for their answers and tell them whether they are right. However, in the student-centred classroom this important stage in the learning process could be better exploited so as to be more engaging, interactive and empowering for our learners.

• Why we check answers?
• Checking answers to tests
• Make checking answers engaging
• Make checking answers interactive
• Make checking answers empowering
• Conclusion
  

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Methodology

The child as a learner
Isela Shipton, Alan S. Mackenzie and James Shipton, British Council

This is the first in a two part article which explores how young children learn languages and what we as teachers can do to help them and their parents to make this process more enjoyable and positive.

• When to start language learning
• What stops children from learning
• How children learn languages
• Getting parents involved
• Get to know how your children learn

When to start language learning
Most experts believe that when a child is introduced to a second language at an early age their chances of becoming more proficient in the target language will be higher. However, it is not necessarily true to say "the earlier the better". It is suggested that the most efficient time to learn another language is between 6 and 13.

 

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Asking questions
Steve Darn, Freelance Trainer & Funda Çetin, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Asking questions is a natural feature of communication, but also one of the most important tools which teachers have at their disposal. Questioning is crucial to the way teachers manage the class, engage students with content, encourage participation and increase understanding. Typically, teachers ask between 300-400 questions per day, however the quality and value of questions varies. While questioning can be an effective tool, there is both an art and science to asking questions.

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Keep a Noisy Class Quiet

Seven Tips for Helping Chatty Students Settle Down

© Katelyn Thomas

Aug 30, 2007

For new teachers, keeping noise under control can be one of the biggest struggles. Try some of these tips for getting a class to be quiet.

One of the biggest struggles new teachers face is how to handle noisy students. Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You walk by other classrooms and hear absolutely nothing but the teacher's voice. As you step into your classroom, you are bombarded with a deafening din. You look helplessly around the room and try getting your class to pay attention. They don't hear you, so you raise your voice. The level of sound goes up as your students try to out talk you. If this has happened to you, you may want to take a look at some of these teacher tested tips for quiet classrooms.

1. Begin the school year with concrete rules about talking during class and what happens when the rules are broken. Make sure you follow up on the rules and consequences that you've created or they will not be effective. You may want to have the consequences be a three step process, especially if you are working with younger students. For example, the first offense results in a verbal warning. The second time you have to hush a student, he or she has to spend ten minutes of recess sitting quietly. The third time results in detention.
2. Create a signal for silence. Some teachers make a "v" sign. Others prefer waving hands or saying a rhyme or jingle. Train your students to recognize and obey the signal.
3. Visit the local teacher supply store and take a look at the teacher aids available. One nice option is a stop light that is perfect for monitoring the level of noise when you are allowing students to work in groups and discuss the work with each other. As the students start to get loud, you can move the light from green to yellow. When they are too loud, change the light to red. When they quiet back down, it can go back to green.
4. Give your students a way to remember to be quiet in hallways. Have younger students place a finger over their lips and keep it there as they walk by classrooms or ask them all to zip the imaginary zipper on their mouth before they walk out the door. When they reach their destination, remind them of the guidelines about talking in class and allow them to unzip their lips.
5. Don't try to talk over your students. They will always be able to get louder than you, because there are so many of them. If you want to try talking without hushing them first, talk as softly as possible. A few students will usually stop talking to find out what you are saying and others will follow suit.
6. Get their attention quickly by making an easy to notice change. Shutting off the lights or ringing a bell both are attention grabbers that create a momentary silence. Use that silence to quickly and firmly remind your students of the class rules on noise and to regain control of the class.

Finally, if your class is being particularly chatty, think about what is going on. Is it the day before a holiday? Are they taking achievement tests all day? In these situations, the best way to get your class to quiet down may be to do something else for a bit. One way to help them get back on track is to have them stand up, push in their chairs and sing a song as they march around the room. When they've burned off some of that energy, have them sit down and try being quiet and attentive again.

For more new teacher support, take a look at Tips for Teachers and Organizing the Classroom.

Error correction

Error Correction 2
Rolf Donald, teacher and teacher trainer, Eastbourne School of English

As mentioned in Error Correction 1, students can differ greatly in their attitude to producing spoken English. Some are only interested in developing their fluency at the expense of accuracy while others are so focused on accuracy that they have no fluency. While these are clearly extremes, it is not unusual to find students like this in a typical class. In Error Correction 2 we look at...

• A basic approach to improving fluency and accuracy
• Dictogloss - A way of raising students' awareness of their inter-language
• Criteria for dealing with spoken errors
• Practical techniques for correcting spoken errors
• Further reading
  

A basic approach to improving fluency and accuracy

In contrast to writing, students have very little processing time when it comes to speaking, so it is hardly surprising that the following may occur.

• Students don't experiment with new language presented by the teacher.
• At lower levels students' output is mostly lexical.
• The more accuracy-focused students test the patience of the listener in the time they take to say something.
• The speech of some very fluent students is littered with errors and therefore may have a negative effect on the listener.

 

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NLP in our classes
Oya Caldır, Teacher, Trainer, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey

Every teacher – actually everybody – uses NLP. They use it knowingly or unknowingly! Maybe some would think that NLP is not useful and others would say it creates miracles. There are very different opinions about NLP, which is fine because they are all speaking from their own reality, maps, beliefs, values or filters. Here, whether you believe in NLP or not does not matter because you use NLP in your lessons or daily life in this way or that.

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Tests questions

Test question types
Richard Frost, British Council, Turkey

In my previous article Test writing I looked at some of the difficulties of writing good tests and how to make tests more reliable and useful. I will now go on to look at testing and elicitation and in particular some different question types and their functions, advantages and disadvantages.

• Types of test
• Types of task
  • Multiple choice
  • Transformation
  • Gap-filling
  • Matching
  • Cloze
  • True / False
  • Open questions
  • Error correction
• Other techniques

Types of test
Before writing a test it is vital to think about what it is you want to test and what its purpose is. We must make a distinction here between proficiency tests, achievement tests, diagnostic tests and prognostic tests.

• A proficiency test is one that measures a candidates overall ability in a language, it isn't related to a specific course.
• An achievement test on the other hand tests the students' knowledge of the material that has been taught on a course.
• A diagnostic test highlights the strong and weak points that a learner may have in a particular area.
• A prognostic test attempts to predict how a student will perform on a course.

There are of course many other types of tests. It is important to choose elicitation techniques carefully when you prepare one of the aforementioned tests.

Top of page

Types of task
There are many elicitation techniques that can be used when writing a test. Below are some widely-used types with some guidance on their strengths and weaknesses. Using the right kind of question at the right time can be enormously important in giving us a clear understanding of our students' abilities, but we must also be aware of the limitations of each of these task or question types so that we use each on appropriately.

Multiple choice
Choose the correct word to complete the sentence.

Cook is ________________today for being one of Britain's most famous explorers.
a) recommended	b) reminded	c) recognised	d) remembered

In this question type there is a stem and various options to choose from. The advantages of this question type are that it is easy to mark and minimises guess work by having multiple distracters. The disadvantage is that it can be very time-consuming to create, effective multiple choice items are surprisingly difficult to write. Also it takes time for the candidate to process the information which leads to problems with the validity of the exam. If a low level candidate has to read through lots of complicated information before they can answer the question, you may find you are testing their reading skills more than their lexical knowledge.

• Multiple choice can be used to test most things such as grammar, vocabulary, reading, listening etc. but you must remember that it is still possible for students to just 'guess' without knowing the correct answer.
  

Transformation
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning as the first.

'Do you know what the time is, John?' asked Dave.

Dave asked John __________ (what) _______________ it was.

This time a candidate has to rewrite a sentence based on an instruction or a key word given. This type of task is fairly easy to mark, but the problem is that it doesn't test understanding. A candidate may simply be able to rewrite sentences to a formula. The fact that a candidate has to paraphrase the whole meaning of the sentence in the example above however minimises this drawback.

• Transformations are particularly effective for testing grammar and understanding of form. This wouldn't be an appropriate question type if you wanted to test skills such as reading or listening.
  

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Gap-filling
Complete the sentence.

Check the exchange ______________ to see how much your money is worth.

The candidate fills the gap to complete the sentence. A hint may sometimes be included such as a root verb that needs to be changed, or the first letter of the word etc. This usually tests grammar or vocabulary. Again this type of task is easy to mark and relatively easy to write. The teacher must bear in mind though that in some cases there may be many possible correct answers.

• Gap-fills can be used to test a variety of areas such as vocabulary, grammar and are very effective at testing listening for specific words.

Matching
Match the word on the left to the word with the opposite meaning.

fat	old
young	tall
dangerous	thin
short	safe

With this question type, the candidate must link items from the first column to items in the second. This could be individual words, words and definitions, parts of sentences, pictures to words etc. Whilst it is easy to mark, candidates can get the right answers without knowing the words, if she has most of the answers correct she knows the last one left must be right. To avoid this, have more words than is necessary.

• Matching exercises are most often used to test vocabulary.
  

Cloze
Complete the text by adding a word to each gap.

This is the kind _____ test where a word _____ omitted from a passage every so often. The candidate must _____ the gaps, usually the first two lines are without gaps.

This kind of task type is much more integrative as candidates have to process the components of the language simultaneously. It has also been proved to be a good indicator of overall language proficiency. The teacher must be careful about multiple correct answers and students may need some practice of this type of task.

• Cloze tests can be very effective for testing grammar, vocabulary and intensive reading.
  

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True / False
Decide if the statement is true or false.

England won the world cup in 1966.

T/F

Here the candidate must decide if a statement is true or false. Again this type is easy to mark but guessing can result in many correct answers. The best way to counteract this effect is to have a lot of items.

• This question type is mostly used to test listening and reading comprehension.

Open questions
Answer the questions.

Why did John steal the money?

Here the candidate must answer a simple questions after a reading or listening or as part of an oral interview. It can be used to test anything. If the answer is open-ended it will be more difficult and time consuming to mark and there may also be a an element of subjectivity involved in judging how 'complete' the answer is, but it may also be a more accurate test.

• These question types are very useful for testing any of the four skills, but less useful for testing grammar or vocabulary.

Error correction
Find the mistakes in the sentence and correct them.

Ipswich Town was the more better team on the night.

Errors must be found and corrected in a sentence or passage. It could be an extra word, mistakes with verb forms, words missed etc. One problem with this question type is that some errors can be corrected in more than one way.

• Error correction is useful for testing grammar and vocabulary as well as readings and listening.

Other Techniques
There are of course many other elicitation techniques such as translation, essays, dictations, ordering words/phrases into a sequence and sentence construction (He/go/school/yesterday).

It is important to ask yourself what exactly you are trying to test, which techniques suit this purpose best and to bear in mind the drawbacks of each technique. Awareness of this will help you to minimise the problems and produce a more effective test.

This article published: 7th February, 2005

Further reading
Techniques in testing by Harold S Madsen: OUP

Related

Talk - Vote - Testing  
Think - Article - Testing and assessment
Think - Article - Test writing

about English

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"Our philosophy in the ESL department is that language is learned not for its own sake but in order to communicate and to find out about the world."

• Who is this FAQ for?
• What is the best way to learn a second language?
• When is the best age to learn a new language?
• How long does it take to learn a second language?
• What are the factors that influence the acquisition of a second language?
• How is learning a second language different from learning your mother tongue?
• What is the difference between written and spoken language?
• What is the best way to teach a language?
• Which is more important: learning grammar or learning vocabulary?
• Is English an easy language?
• I have a student who speaks perfect English, yet is struggling badly with reading and writing assignments. Why is this?
• Why do some ESL students learn much more quickly than others ?
• Does it confuse ESL students that they have to learn English and German at the same time?
• What should I know about the vocabulary of my subject?
• What is the difference between ESL and EFL?
• Where can I find more information about second language learning?
• Where can I find more on how to help ESL students my class?

Who is this FAQ for?

The primary audience for this FAQ are the mainstream (i.e. non-ESL) teachers at Frankfurt International School. For this reason some of the answers are related to the particular situation at FIS. Some of the links (e.g. to internal documents) will not work outside of the school's intranet.

What is the best way to learn a second language?

There is no one universally accepted theory of how a child learns a second language. Our philosophy in the ESL department is that language is learned not for its own sake but in order to communicate and to find out about the world. For that reason our teaching is organized around major topics, such as animals, ecology, inventions, culture and language, etc. Each topic consists of linguistic tasks, and incorporates study and computer skills. Students are exposed to written and spoken language that is (made) comprehensible to them, and engaged in different kinds of productive activities.

Professor Krashen, the eminent researcher who in my opinion has the most coherent and convincing theory of language learning, has postulated that language is acquired, both in the language and the mainstream classroom, when the student is motivated by the task, feels low or zero anxiety, and has had his or her self-esteem protected or enhanced. If such conditions prevail, and the input is comprehensible, interesting and relevant, then there is no filter or barrier preventing the natural acquisition of language.

More on comprehensible input.  More on language learning methods.  Go to Krashen's website.

 

When is the best age to learn a new language?

If you want to be able to speak without an accent, then the younger the better. Otherwise, researchers think that early adolescence is the optimal time. See my newsletter article to parents on the same topic.

 

How long does it take to learn a second language?

How long is a piece of string? It depends on what you mean by "learning a language". Even on the assumption that this means acquiring the language skills and vocabulary of an average native-speaking adult, there is still no simple answer to the question, since it depends on where and how the second language is learned, and the age at which it was started. Obviously the language learning situation of a young Peruvian child adopted by America parents is totally different from that of a middle-aged Chinese man try to teach himself English from English novels.

The question has to be made much more specific before an answer can be given. So for example in the FIS situation we can ask: How long will it take a beginning ESL student at FIS to learn sufficient English to be ready to enter the full mainstream program in middle school (i.e. exit from ESL)? And now it is possible to answer: on average students need about three years in ESL before they have sufficient English to function successfully and independently in the mainstream. However some students pass through the program much more quickly, while others need a fourth or even fifth year of ESL. See the answer to the next question for reasons why this should be.

What are the factors that influence the acquisition of a second language?

The speed and ease of acquisition of a second language is a complex interplay of internal and external factors. These are outlined in some detail in another article on this website. The information is summarized for ESL parents in a further article entitled The good language learner.

 

How is learning a second language different from learning your mother tongue?

The differences are due to three main factors: the age at which you learn, who teaches you and how long you have to learn.

Generally, you learn a second language a lot later than you learn the first, and this can give you certain advantages. Firstly, it means that you already have experience as a language learner and that you are cognitively more mature. You also have a metalinguistic knowledge; this means for example that you know what a word is and what it means to make a noun plural. Finally, you have a greater knowledge of people and the world. This helps you to make good guesses at the meaning of the unfamiliar language you encounter. On the other hand, the fact that you are older may mean that you are more inhibited and less spontaneous in using the new language for fear of making mistakes or appearing silly.

The most important teachers of your first language are of course your parents and immediate family. They generally have boundless patience and enthusiasm with your efforts to learn the language, and by intuition offer just the right kind of input to promote optimal language learning. This modulated language input is called motherese, a feature of which is the fact that mistakes of fact are corrected whereas mistakes of grammar generally are not. This all contrasts strongly with the teaching that many learners of a second language receive in the language classroom!

As far as available time is concerned, you are learning your mother tongue from the moment you are born (some say you start even before you are born!) You are then exposed to language every waking second of your day until by the age of six or seven you have mastered its essentials. That is an awful lot of time on task, and compare it with 3 or 4 hours a week in the typical foreign language classroom!

In summary, everyone learns their first language because they have the best teachers and the best circumstances, the most time and the least pressure and the greatest motivation. Learners of a second language have certain cognitive advantages but none of the others, so it is not surprising how few go on to be as proficient in their second language as in their first.

 is the difference between written and spoken language?

In general spoken language is spontaneous and unplanned, irrevocable and transient (unless tape-recorded). When speaking, the speaker and the listener(s) are both present and the listener responds to and can interrupt the speaker. Part of the message can be conveyed by intonation. Writing on the other hand is often preplanned, it can be revised for content, and checked for grammatical accuracy. It is permanent. Often the writer does not know the reader(s) and receives no feedback. Intonation obviously plays no part.

It is not surprising therefore that considerable differences between the two kinds of language in terms of word choice and word order, grammatical accuracy and complexity. For example, spoken language tends to have more idioms and phrasal verbs than written language (put up with vs. tolerate). There is much more repetition in spoken language, which also abounds with fillers such as you know, I mean etc. Spoken language rarely has long, complex or complete sentences; it consists of strings of short phrases, backtracking and restarting or reformulating.

 

What is the best way to teach a language?

Over the last 30 years there has been an intensive study of how a second language is learned, but as yet no-one has been able to come up with a comprehensive theory. For this reason there is also no consensus on how language should be taught. (Click here for an outline of some of the teaching methods that have been popular over the years.) Of course, how a language is taught depends to a large extent on the age of the learner and his reasons for learning. It also depends heavily on the learning situation. (For example, see the FAQ on the difference between ESL and EFL.) At FIS ESL students need to learn English for two main purposes: social and academic. The content of ESL teaching reflects these two main aims, but as far as methodologies are concerned, it depends to a certain extent on individual ESL teachers, with some following a more structured, grammatical line and others selecting an ad-hoc task-based approach.

But ESL students do not only learn English in the ESL classroom. It is very important that mainstream teachers realize that they too are language teachers. Much of the advice elsewhere in these FAQs is aimed at helping mainstream teachers maximize the language learning opportunities of the ESL students in their classes.

 

Which is more important: learning grammar or learning vocabulary?

Clearly, no-one can claim to speak a foreign language unless they have mastery of both its essential grammar and its essential vocabulary. But the question here is: Should the learner focus more on acquiring grammatical knowledge or on acquiring an extensive wordstore?

Over the last few decades vocabulary has been neglected at the expense of grammar in a majority of the published English language teaching courses. This focus will probably continue in most EFL situations, but in ESL situations, such as at Frankfurt International School, there is a growing understanding of the centrality of vocabulary. Certainly, to achieve academic success the ESL student, like all students, must be able to read quickly and with comprehension. A large vocabulary is a necessary condition of efficient reading.

It is true that a mastery of basic grammar is also a necessary condition of academic success in an ESL situation. To a large extent, however, grammar acquisition in such situations can take place without much directed learning or teaching. It is clear, therefore, that ESL students need to focus on the explicit learning of the large amount of vocabulary that they need to do well in their subject classes, particularly academic vocabulary. So for them, learning vocabulary is more important than learning grammar.

Following are citations from research literature that support the above claim:

".. vocabulary is perhaps the most important component in L2 ability." (Folse)

"While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyeyed." (Wilkins)

"Research has shown .. that a lack of vocabulary knowledge is the largest obstacle for second-language readers to overcome." (Huckin and Bloch)

"Nonnative speakers must have good reading skills if they expect to have any chance of academic success. Numerous researchers have shown the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading ability." (Folse)

References:

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. University of Michigan Press.

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. University of Michigan Press.

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. University of Michigan Press.

 

Is English an easy language?

There's a whole section of this website devoted to my hypothesis that English is not the easy language that some hold it to be. The question has a certain theoretical interest, and it seems that judged by most objective criteria, English is placed at the lower end of the scale of difficulty. (One objective criterion is a simple count of the number of verb inflections: English has a maximum of 5 - speak, speaks, spoke, spoken, speaking, whereas a language like Turkish has dozens of forms.) My position is that the objective simplicity of English - another example is that neither the articles nor the adjectives are inflected, as they are in German - in fact masks a grammar system of extreme complexity.

In an important sense, however, the question is irrelevant. Depending on a multitude of factors, some learners find English relatively easy while others find it very difficult. The key is to try and analyze which aspects of English are difficult for the individual learner, and why, and then work out how best to overcome these difficulties.

 

Why do some ESL students learn much more quickly than others?

There are a number of reasons why some students learn English a lot more quickly than others. The first language is obviously a major factor here. It is clearly easier for a Dutch or German child to learn English than a child from Japan or China. Also, as children learn new languages they generally find each successive one easier to master since they bring with them a great deal of implicit knowledge of how to learn languages. So a Dutch child who has already learned some French and German will probably find learning English does not present very much difficulty at all.

Another factor influencing second language development is the child’s attitude to the target language and culture. The situation at FIS is a little complicated as the new ESL student is exposed to 2 new cultures at the same time - the culture of Germany, the host country, and the culture of our school, which is dominated by Anglo-American practices. A child who is unhappy about being in Germany, or uncomfortable in his new school will probably learn English more slowly than a child for whom the move is no problem. A related factor is the attitude of the child to his new teachers and the classroom environment. Learning does not take place very easily where there is antipathy between the ESL student and the teacher or the other students in the class. Another influence on the speed at which a child learns a second language is self esteem, and linked to this, a lack of fear of taking risks or making mistakes. Confident students who are not afraid of being wrong have a language learning advantage over the fearful and timid. Personality is another factor: a motivated, hard-working student will generally do better than someone with opposite characteristics.

 

I have a student who speaks perfect English, yet is struggling badly with reading and writing assignments. Why is this?

Some students, especially those with native languages similar to English, can quickly acquire the interpersonal language skills of speaking and listening. Research has shown however that it can take more than 5 years before the non-native speaker is operating at the same level of academic language competence as his or her native English speaking peers. It can take an especially long time for those students to catch up academically whose main priority in learning English is to make friends and feel comfortable in the school. When they have sufficient English to do this, they may consciously or sub-consciously decide that they have learned all there is to learn, and "switch off."

Professor J. Cummins has more information on the different kinds of language proficiency.

 

Does it confuse ESL students that they have to learn English and German at the same time?

In general it does not confuse them. There is research which suggests that the brain can acquire and store two languages at the same time with no problems except the occasional switching of words. In fact there are compelling reasons why even beginning learners of English should also take German at our school. Firstly, it is most important that they learn the language of the host country so that they can make friends in their neighbourhood and make the most of their shopping and other social or sporting experiences. Children who feel alienated from Germany because they do not know any language are more likely to be unhappy and unsuccessful in school.

Secondly, it is very important for ESL students to have at least one subject in school in which the native English speakers do not have the special advantage that their command of English bestows. Provided the teacher speaks German most of the time in the German lesson, ESL students have an equal opportunity to be successful. This is good for their self esteem and has a positive effect on their learning of other subjects too.

More information on bilingualism.

 

What should I know about the vocabulary of my subject?

Generally speaking, each discipline (mathematics, the sciences, the humanities etc.) uses three different kinds of vocabulary, two of which are shared by all disciplines, and the other specific to that discipline only. Examples of subject-specific vocabulary are: hypotenuse (maths), convection (science), colonialism (history), glaciation (geography), inside-trading (economics). In many ways, subject-specific vocabulary is not a problem for ESL students. the words will probably be new to native-speakers too, and the teacher will usually spend some time explaining, and often, testing the meanings of such words.

Also relatively unproblematic for ESL students is the cross-discipline, everyday vocabulary that consists of the most common words of the language - the words we use and hear again and again. Typically these are short words with concrete meanings and direct relevance to the daily experiences of our students.

Much more problematic is the vocabulary which is also cross-discipline but which is restricted to academic texts. This vocabulary has been called semi-technical and it includes word such as simultaneous, consequence, whereby, outcome, gradual, etc. Elsewhere on this website, there is a page of more detailed information about semi-technical vocabulary and how mainstream teachers can faciliate the learning of vocabulary in their subjects.

What is the difference between ESL and EFL?

At Frankfurt International School we have an ESL (English as a second language) programme because English is the language of instruction for all lessons. Students at our school are exposed to English all day in what they hear and read; they must also speak and write English in all their lessons. In such situations a large amount of grammar and vocabulary is acquired naturally in regular classes such as science or drama.

Students learning EFL (English as a foreign language) may have one lesson of English per day, but the rest of their lessons are in their native language - e.g. a German student learning English at a German school. The acquistion of English takes place only in the single English lesson.

In an ESL situation such as ours it is vital that all teachers regard themselves not only as teachers of their subject but also as teachers of language. An ESL student’s language development is influenced considerably by the language learning experiences that he or she has in the mainstream classroom.

 

Where can I find more information about second language learning?

I have a number of books and articles in my room with more detailed information on all the topics treated on this page. Please see me if you would like a bibliography of what is available. I also have a bibliography of what is available in the library on this topic.

 

 

ronunciation

 

 

Ted Power

English Language Learning and Teaching

• HOME - ENGLISH
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• TEACHING INDEX

Teaching English intonation and stress patterns

TEACHING INDEX | NEXT

Teaching intonation - the theories behind intonation

Definitions

1. Tone - the rise and fall of the voice. Tune/Pitch variation. An oscilloscope will give an oscillograph of speech. The frequency will be shown by the closeness of the waves (high frequency will be shown by waves which are closer together).

2. The volume (strength of signal) will be shown by the height of the waves. The height of the note depends on the speed of opening and closing of the vocal cords. More vibrations of the larynx (up to 800 per sec) show up more compact waves.

The first thing that people (Daniel Jones, Kindom, Pike) looked at was pitch variation. Crude rules (Wh Qs fall; Yes/No Qs rise) based on introspection (what do I say?) rather than data. Those who have collected data come up with interesting findings:

Does intonation tell us what speech function is?

Many authors of intonation practice books [ e.g. O'Connor and Arnold in "Intonation of Colloquial English" or Cook in "Active Intonation" and "Using Intonation" ] provide exercises where speech functions such as polite requests or confirmation questions dictate the intonation patterns which listeners should expect or speakers should employ.
However, the findings of some research projects - most notably the Scottish Intonation Project - are that the relationships between intonation patterns [such as the tones categorized by O'Connor & Arnold] and speech functions are not so predictable.

Clear instances of rising tune -
1. Echo questions e.g. you what?
2. Challenging e.g. on Monday?
3. Conciliation: Oh really?

ATTITUDE: O'Connor & Arnold believe that intonation goes with attitude. They list 500 different attitudes. They have 4 Main Tunes.

Attitude is not conveyed by pitch alone.There's more to context than just pitch.

Note: Paralinguistic features identified by Gillian Brown. Variables include: pitch span, placing in voice range, tempo, loudness, voice setting (unmarked, breathy, creaky) articulatory setting (unmarked/tense), articulatory precision (precise/slurred/unmarked), lip setting (pursed/smiling), direction of pitch (rise/unmarked), timing (unmarked/extended), Pause (unmarked/pause).

These features are correlated with descriptions from novels: replied/said, retorted/exclaimed, important/pompous/responsible, dadly/depressed/miserable, excited, anxious/worried/nervous, shrill/shriek/scream, warmly, coldly, thoughtfully, sexily, crossly/angrily, queried/echoed.
Gillian Brown uses feature analysis (+ - or /) to make the connections. The idea of "Para-Language" is from Abacrombie. Desmond Morris has written a popular book on the subject - English people converse at 24 inches apart.

The importance of intonation in social interaction

TURN-TAKING: Giving the floor to another person or taking your turn in a conversation: rise and fall are used as a signal for when to speak and when not. Remain at a high pitch if you want to continue talking. A fall shows completion. (See Brazil)

INFORMATION STRUCTURE (See O'Connor): Major stress items pick out the most important words in the sentence: they point to the new/unknown information in the sentence. Michael Halliday has done most work on this.

Note that one function of intonation is stress. The tonic (stressed item) is the item which has the greatest amount of pitch movement on it.

Implications for teaching English pronunciation

Many linguists and teachers suggest that teachers should focus on teaching STRESS rather than RISE & FALL since there is a massive difference between how one person and another perceives an utterance. You need a machine to determine whether it's a rise or a fall.

At higher levels - for example, pronunciation sessions for learners involved in the language of negotiation or presentation in fields such as business or education, emphasis should also be given to TOPIC STRUCTURE - also related to turn-taking. Topic Switching: Start high. When people switch tack, they mark it with their voice.

[a] CONCLUSION: Teachable items are

1. Sentence STRESS
2. Contrastive STRESS.

[b] Distinguish between production and comprehension in your teaching.

[c] Teach intonation in context. e.g. being angry - use model dialogues to represent particular functions of the voice. Some practice in linking intonation patterns to attitude will probably help in clearer communication of meaning in spite of the findings of the Scottish Intonation Project.

Use of "dialogues" as English pronunciation teaching materials

Could a prose text have been used to equal effect or does the target depend heavily on face to face communication?

Many dialogues in English coursebooks are written specifically for grammar demonstration on the one hand and conversation-facilitation on the other. In each case, useful vocabulary is also demonstrated.

Colin Mortimer's dialogues in The Cambridge Elements of Pronunciation series (e.g. "Stress Time", "Weak Forms", "Link Up" and "Clusters") include single lexical items and conversational phrases i.e. some very essential features of speaker/listener interaction.

The importance of meaningful contexts and the relevance of intonation practice

How important is it to memorize dialogues incorporating these different objectives? Remember Monsieur le Surveillant's son in Algeria who memorized the whole book. Ask him where he lives and he's very puzzled!

Remember Hasdrubel in an English Primary School. His family has moved from Spain. He has mastered phonics and look and say and his reading appears to be fluent, though he has a total lack of intonation & stress. He has no idea what the words mean!

Remember the gentleman who can impress us by instantly recalling sporting facts. Try him on international politics. His memory training permits him to recall every date associated with countless events - some trivial and some important. What he is almost totally unable to do is to link information and to evaluate what is trivial and important in relation to a further goal or greater purpose. The ability to select according to priority and to combine information in other than a chronological sequence appears to be missing.

Linking intonation practice to practice in grammatical accuracy

Although books for practising English syntax in written form such as Intermediate English Grammar have their purpose, we are failing as teachers if we do not provide learners with the phonological rehearsal and memory training needed to achieve accuracy in oral English. Many important opportunities were lost to learners when language laboratory pattern drills (of the more meaningful variety) went out of fashion. Coupled with practice in stress and intonation, these drills can contribute far more effectively to communication skills than libraries of materials described as "authentic" - which often do not require learners to produce any sounds or syntactic forms at all.

Schools and Self Access Centres which really provide language practice opportunities will possess materials providing simultaneous rehearsal of syntax and pronunciation. The best of these are:

Kernel Lessons Plus Laboratory Drills and Kernel Lessons Intermediate Drills by Robert O'Neill.

Robert's drills provide rehearsal in repetition, substitution (simple, variable or progressive), transformation (e.g. Question & Answer; Tense to Tense), combination (e.g. collocation exercises). However, phonology, stress and intonation is being rehearsed all the time. Moreover, Robert's skill in relating syntax (e.g. structural forms in different verb tenses) to meaning and situation, escapes the shortcomings of drills that teach "structure speech" and offers the rehearsal and production opportunities that must be present in the curriculum if we are to have any chance of teaching oral communication. Meaningful contexts and naturalistic settings are present throughout.

Learners and teachers should be suspicious of any theory related to communicative language which ignores the essential need for active rehearsal and production of phonology (vowel & consonant sounds), stress and intonation patterns (signalling meaning and attitude) and syntax (also related to meaning via concepts such as time and completion).

Phonetics is defined as the study of sounds, while Phonology extends to the study of sounds within a language system. All spoken and written languages are systems.

To deny learners rehearsal in the recognition and production of English phonemes and syntactic forms in the name of some theory of Communicative Language Teaching dependent on "authentic materials" is absolute madness and has nothing to do with teaching communication. It also portrays a mistaken notion of authenticity. Nearly all speeches and texts that can be found in the world are produced with some purpose in mind. There is nothing culpable about creating written or spoken material designed especially to help people learn English. If material developed to practise phonology &/or syntax completely ignores function, attitude and meaning, then it is probably not very good material. Authenticity is not an issue. Texts or dialogues tailored to the phonology or grammar problems of learners from specific language backgrounds can be perfectly authentic as teaching material. Why choose texts designed to help or appeal to people with needs and interests which bear no relevance to learners' problems and goals?

Intonation has various functions in different world languages

On this page, we have been concerned with the functions of intonation in spoken English. In world languages, intonation is used to mark:

1. gender
2. number
3. quantity
4. tense or time
5. modality
6. pace (in some languages)
7. word order
8. punctuation and
9. boundary features

Teaching English rhythm and stress patterns - use of weak forms, stress placement & timing

As movement of pitch is heard on stressed syllables in the English language, practice of English intonation and stress patterns are closely linked. However, it can be beneficial to focus specifically on word and sentence stress. A Pronouncing Dictionary is recommended as a reference source to check where syllable stress occurs within words. Practising placement of stress within sentences is also essential if learners are to become good listeners and communicators, since the same sentence can take on different meanings depending on where the speaker chooses to place the primary stress:

EXAMPLE SENTENCE [A]: "I'm not going".

1. "I'm not going": meaning [1] = Not "ME", but perhaps "YOU", "SHE" or "HE".
2. "I'm not going": meaning [2] = I reFUSE to go.
3. "I'm not going": meaning [3] = I'm not GOing... I'm COMing BACK!

Sentence stress can also be illustrated and practised by writing a long sentence on the board, which can be made to carry many different meanings or points of emphasis.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE [B]: "Janet's going to Brighton tomorrow afternoon to buy herself a pair of red, leather shoes."

Practice of sentence stress is achieved by cueing the learners with questions while requiring them to use the whole sentence in reply. The second time this is done, the learners can discard the parts of the sentence which do not contain the important element of the answer in order to form a more natural response.

The teacher provides cues such as: "Is John going to Brighton...?", "Is Janet going to London..?", "Is Janet going away from Brighton...?", "Is Janet coming from Brighton...? Is Janet going to sell her mother a pair of red, leather shoes?", "Is Janet going to buy herself three pairs...?" "Is Janet going to buy herself a pair of blue, suede shoes / red, leather sandels?"

It will become clear to learners that there are many variations of sentence stress, which will decide the meaning of their responses.

A practice session on stress could also be included in a lesson aimed at improving listening comprehension. Learners who listen to utterances in a linear way, giving equal importance to each word in sequence, are exhibiting very poor listening strategies. Learners who do this are usually the ones who complain that it is too fast and ask for sluggishly slow colloquial. What they are missing is the fact that in the English language, the words carrying the important meaning are often located at or towards the end of an utterance or sentence. Words such as "I" (and more difficult items than subject pronouns placed near the beginning of sentences) are often fairly redundant in terms of meaning since they refer to known territory: i.e. the listener already knows that it is "you" who is speaking. Try the following technique to make your learners more relaxed about rapidly spoken utterances:

EXAMPLE SENTENCE [C]: "I don't know whether you're wondering who I am, but may I introduce myself. I'm Tarzan."

Having deliberately recited the unimportant parts of this utterance at breakneck speed, reassure your learners by asking them just to listen to the important components near the end of the utterance, especially the words and syllables carrying the main stress. Make the point that native speakers only listen out for one or two propositions in an utterance and all that this one really communicates is "ME...TARZAN". Learning what parts of an utterance to discard (not even to assign to "the recycle bin") is a very important listening strategy. Native speakers would find listening comprehension impossible if they did not know how to process utterances in this way. It may be worth mentioning that the keys and tunes used at the beginning of sentences can communicate attitudes i.e. they can tell you if the speaker is angry or trying to be friendly, polite, formal or cold. Without understanding any of the words, it is still possible to detect the speaker's attitude.

Nonsense words (just "pure noises"!) can even be used to practise conveying attitude. In multilingual classes, this can form the basis of an interesting contrastive linguistics project on differences and common ground in the use of tunes and keys to communicate feelings and attitudes. Leo Jones includes activities of this kind in "Notions of English" [Cambridge]. Ask your learners to utter a nonsense sentence such as "I love you" several times, telling them what attitude [e.g. warmth, indifference, pride, hostility, boredom, interest] you wish them to communicate on each occasion. Fame Academy teachers try to get learners to sing with expression. The challenge for language teachers is to get learners to speak with expression.

Phonology, stress patterns and tunes are all interrelated. To achieve the correct rhythm, it is necessary to know when to use weak forms [this frequently involves the neutral vowel "schwa"], which is under-deployed by many second language learners. Learners whose native languages have many consonant sounds, but relatively few vowel sounds, especially long vowels and diphthongs [e.g. native speakers of Arabic languages and dialects], are likely to have poor stress timing and to make insufficient use of pitch variation (i.e. intonation).

Good material to practise expression (i.e. rhythm, stress and intonation) includes situational-based texts designed for role play where utterances are short (but dramatic!). Some of the best role play texts I have used were provided by Doug Case and Ken Wilson and the English Language Teaching Theatre. The two best titles were: "Off Stage" 1979 Heinemann [15 sketches + accompanying audio-cassette] and "Further Off Stage" 1984 [10 sketches + accompanying audio &/or video cassette]. Unfortunately, these materials are no longer in print. As smaller publishers are taken over by larger ones, editors who may not have had much classroom teaching experience are sometimes too involved in the promotion of new material of questionable value and overlook older "jewels in the crown". Doug Case and Ken Wilson's excellent material is in no way dated. Ken Wilson is also remembered for his key participation in the Solid British Hat Band, which produced "Mister Monday & other songs for the teaching of English" [Longman 1973]. These songs are also landmark material and could still be successfully used to practise syntax aurally / orally instead of reading through landmark material such as Raymond Murphy's "English Grammar in Use", which will itself be 20 years old soon!

Listening practice can also take the form of discrimination exercises where the same utterance is recited using different sentence stress patterns. The learners do not even have to see the sentence written down, but it is helpful if they have an Answer Grid where they have to choose between three possible meanings for each utterance: meaning [A], [B] or [C]. The same utterance can be used in successive discrimination test questions applying different stress patterns until each of the alternative meanings [A] [B] and [C] have been exhausted, though the learner will need to mark their answers in the correct sequence. Thus, seven different utterances, each presented three times, would require a ready-made Answer Grid offering twenty-one different meanings.

The best published material I have used of this kind was Donn Byrne and Gordon Walsh's "Listening Comprehension 1 Teacher's Book" [Longman 1973] containing sample utterances to practise phonology [Units 1-11], stress, rhythm and intonation [Units 12-16]. The Answer Grids were contained in an accompanying student's workbook entitled "Pronunciation Practice". These materials have long been out of print, though it is quite easy for native speakers of English to produce their own.

The best published material, still available, for practice of stress timing and placement is "Stress Time" and "Weak Forms" contained in Colin Mortimer's "Elements of English" listed below:

Recommended materials for practice in English stress and intonation patterns

Elements of Pronunciation: Student Book [ For intermediate upwards to practise stress timing, weak forms, consonant clusters, link up ]
Elements of Pronunciation: Cassette
This book consists of practice materials for "stress time", "weak forms", "liaison" (linkages between words) and "consonant clusters". Focus on these areas of pronunciation is often neglected. Colin Mortimer's practice dialogues are graded in order to make the material accessible to levels of proficiency ranging from post elementary to higher intermediate.

Headway: Upper-intermediate: Pronunciation: Book Sarah Cunningham, Bill Bowler [ For phonology, stress and intonation combined ]
Headway: Upper-intermediate: Pronunciation Cassettes
Headway: Intermediate: Pronunciation: Book Sarah Cunningham, Bill Bowler
Headway: Intermediate: Pronunciation: Cassettes
Headway: Pre-intermediate: Pronunciation: Book Bill Bowler, Sue Parminter
Headway: Pre-intermediate: Pronunciation: Cassette
Headway Pronunciation: Elementary: Book Sarah Cunningham, Peter Moor
Headway Pronunciation: Elementary: Cassette

The Communicative Value of Intonation in English David Brazil (Ed.) et al [ For teachers and learners e.g. language of presentations &/or negotiation ]

Intonation in Context: Student's Book Barbara Bradford, David Brazil (Ed.) [ For intermediate and above with help from a teacher ]
Intonation in Context: Teacher's Book
Intonation in Context: Cassette

Intonation Practice: Book Ian Thompson [ easy to use books + audio cassettes ]
Intonation Practice: Cassette 1: Easy
Intonation Practice: Cassette 2: Moderate
Intonation Practice: Cassette 3: More Difficult

TEACHING INDEX | NEXT

How to manage your classroom

I remember it distinctly. The confusion, people rushing around me, yelling, talking, the volume so loud...can't think...so many voices screaming, can't get through, can't get past the masses blocking my way, can't survive...how do people do this everyday?

That was my first day of school in a New York City High School. I thought I'd never be able to navigate my way to class. I was afraid of all those kids in my way. I couldn't believe that people could function in a place as loud as any construction site I'd ever walked past. And now? Now those masses don't bother me as I make my way to teach my students. Those "scary people" are my students and hallway culture is just a way for them to express themselves. The noise is a vent for them. a way to relax when not in those quiet boxes we call classrooms.

I have become a part of the hallway culture. I use the hallways as an extension of my classroom. I find myself seeking out those hallways instead of avoiding them! I see the hallways as a chance to see and connect to my students in a new way. Because of this, I have had some really wonderful encounters with my students. Once, I saw one of my seventh grade students sitting on the floor with her head down. This is a student who, in class, is cheerful, popular and overly chatty with her friends. I sat down and talked with her and discovered that she was miserable, she missed her old friends and wanted to go back to her old school. The exuberant face I saw in my class everyday was a facade she put on to impress her friends. Ever since then, I have taken time to check in with her and see how she is really doing. Without the hallway, I would have never known the real world of this student.

The hallway is not just for serious encounters with students. Once I caught an impromptu "wedding" between two of my eighth grade girls. I even got to be the flower girl in that lighthearted school day moment. Sometimes I turn hallway maneuvering into my own personal game. I pretend the various legs, bags and jackets littering the hallway are mines! I have to dodge the running students to get to the safety of my classroom! Other times I walk through yelling "Beep, beep, beep" (like a track that's backing up) and see who moves out of my way. This tactic is most fun when pushing a video cart!

I joke with my students in the hallway. I laugh with my students in the hallway. I also cry with my students in the hallway, over their accomplishments and their struggles (well, they cry and I offer comfort). And sometimes, yes, I do have to reprimand or "gently scold" my students in the hallway, but that's just part of being a teacher.

Once I recognized that the hallway is a huge part of the culture of a school, I was on my way to becoming a part of that culture (insane though that culture may seem at times). Once I relaxed, I found that I actually enjoyed the hustle and bustle of school life.