Carnaval

It’s the Thursday before carnival weekend.  Preparations are being made throughout the town. The lights are up, the burger and hot dog stalls are in place, there are fluorescent wigs and plastic hats fluttering in the wind in the cathedral square.  The kids are excited, my two can’t get to sleep, and a couple of days ago when I wrote the word “carnival” on the board in class my students could hardly contain themselves.  In fact I had to rub it off, replace it with a sad face and set a dictation to bring them back down again!

That’s when I remembered that I’d written a post about this time last year about carnival but I’d let the days slip by and it got out of date and didn’t get posted.  So I dived into my drafts, dusted it off, rounded off the last paragraph, tidied up the narrative tenses here and there and here it is!

This post and the lesson it describes were inspired by an activity shared by Jason Renshaw – the Pako Festa. Thanks, Jason.

Carnival is a big deal here in Cádiz.  It lasts for two weeks and spans three weekends, starting with the traditional Mardi Gras weekend, but continuing on through the nights and the narrow streets of the old town for the following two weeks.  It is an intensely local carnival, but one that attracts visitors from all over Spain, and Europe too.  Carnival-goers feel very strongly about it.  As do my high school students. So when I saw Jason’s lessson – a reading text about a multicultural carnival in his hometown of Geelong – it was just perfect.

The classes I was working with at the time were fairly large (17-19 students), mixed level classes preparing for their university entrance exam.  In my classes, one hour once a week, we’d look at the reading and writing skills needed to pass the exam.  It was a challenge, trying to cater for everyone, stretching the stronger students, supporting and motivating the weaker students. Allowing everyone time to digest and process the reading texts. Allowing everyone time to plan and write the compositions.  This is how I used Jason’s text to help me with that challenge.

I used to start all my lessons with movement and/or noise. We’d start with activities that were not linguistically demanding, but that did demand focused attention. They were often based on single words, or single sounds, and on chorus drilling or very controlled pairwork. For example counting games, spelling games, single word conversations or intonation/attitude drills.  It meant we were all together, all on the same page, and yes, initially, all focused on me, the teacher.

In this lesson we started with a spelling game. Nothing particularly elaborate. I shouted out the letters, they had to repeat them and when they thought they knew the word, they had to shout it out. It was done at speed and at volume.  I spelled words that described the carnival weekend that had just finished (the first of the three): rain, costumes, streamers, parade. They shouted them back at me and we wrote them on the board.

This was the starting point for the next stage, a brainstorming stage.  I handed out chalk to everyone, they all went to the board and wrote words they associated with carnival.  (This is only one section of the board that runs the length of the room. Sorry about the flash reflecting on the blackboard!)

I find that with the brainstorming to the board, the stronger students usually try and stretch themselves (or possibly show off).  They write words like wigs, fancy dress and cotton candy, leaving the simpler words like fun and hats and tourists to the weaker students.  Everyone has something to contribute and hiding in the crowd of everyone at the board helps the shyer students as well. We quickly looked through the words we’d collected on the board, explored any that needed exploring (for example, sandwich – the student said they always take sandwiches to keep them going through the long nights of the carnival street parties), laughed at any that were funny, rubbed off anything that was “irreverent” and moved on.

The next step was to hand out strips of paper to each student  and ask them to write their own definition of carnival, of what carnival means to them.  Here are a few. You can see something of the range of opinions … and of levels:

As they finished I collected them in, made on the spot corrections where I thought the students had made a slip.  Again the stronger students tend to write more, elaborate more on their ideas, push the activity as far as they can.  This allows time for the weaker students to gather their thoughts and produce shorter, often simpler, but equally valid sentences. Juggling the different paces in a class like this is always an on-the-spot challenge.  When I’d collected in all the slips, I read out the definitions and opinions and asked the students to agree or disagree, encouraging both loud, enthusiastic chorused agreement and individual reasoned disagreement.

It was now time to turn to the text. I explained that we were going to look at a text describing another carnival, one that took place far away and asked them to guess where. They guessed the Canary Islands, I said, no, further. They guessed Venice and Rio, thinking of carnivals in catholic countries that reflect something of the carnival traditions in Cádiz.  I told them even further, they guessed China and Japan and finally arrived in Australia.  They confessed to having no idea what a carnival in Australia might be like. So I asked them to read the text and find any similarities with the carnival in Cádiz.  We discussed this and they highlighted the similarities (the parade, the costumes, the music and dance).  We then focused on the differences. Again they underlined the relevant passages.

In the exam they need to answer three open comprehension questions and decide whether two sentences are true or false, justifying their answer with reference to the text.  The next step in the lesson was for the students to work together in small groups to write exam questions to accompany the text.  They could use the passages they had underlined during the reading stage or any other area in the text.  I asked them to make it difficult, challenging, explaining that we would be using the questions to test other students in the class.  They always seem to rise to this particular challenge! There were two main aims here, one to encourage the students to process more deeply the task types in the exam by putting them in the examiner’s shoes and two, to encourage paraphrasing as the students will drop marks in the exam if they do not use “their own words.”

I set up the groups, mixing stronger and weaker students, and monitored, ensuring as much as possible that all the students were taking an active part, that no-one was dominating and that no-one was being left out.  They enjoyed the task and the challenge, and as I collected the “exam” questions, I also collected the texts.  I handed out the questions to new groups and asked them to answer them as they would in an exam ie in full sentences, justifying their answers with reference to the text (which they no longer had in front of them so needed to rely on their collective memories) . Of course, they had read the text so intensively when they were writing the questions that they had no problems answering them.  The last stage was for the exam writers to check and mark the answers.  And that was the end of the lesson.

In the next lesson we started with a short board race, two teams, two pieces of chalk, a kind of relay brainstorming with the teams writing up words on the board they associated with the Pako Festa carnival in Geelong (one student was particularly proud of herself for remembering the name).  I then read out some of the true/false statements they’d written in the previous lesson and fielded answers.  We did the same with the comprehension questions.  They remembered everything, even though a whole week with all its ups and downs and teenage life had passed in the meantime.  I think it was wholly down to the fact that they had written the questions themselves.

Their task in this second lesson was simply to write a similar text about carnival in Cádiz.  I handed out the Pako Festa texts again.  We looked again at the similarities and the differences, and we highlighted useful phrases. And then in groups they got down to writing.  They needed very little coaxing or guiding.  But we did a lot of discussing and redrafting. Some wrote out their own separate texts, leaning on Jason’s as a model. Others took the copy editing route, crossing out the information that was irrelevant and adding their own,  starting with the title, changing it from Celebrating Diversity to Celebrating Cádiz. Simple but effective. Very like the original text ( a great model text, Jason!) and very like their final products.

Reading back through this post I found that I had flashbacks to that lesson, very clear, almost photographic images of various different stages in the class.  An interesting experience taking a journey back through a forgotten lesson. Maybe letting things sit a while in the drafts isn’t such a bad idea after all.

One size does not fit all – a guest post by Sirja Bessero

Sirja is Estonian. She teaches English at a design college in Sierre in the Swiss Alps. We met recently over coffee and croissant at the ETAS annual conference in Yverdon.  We fell so easily into conversation it felt like we’d known each other for years. We found so many things we had in common, an interest in images, the fascination of bringing up bilingual kids, a shared teaching experience.  We both teach multi level teenage classes. We had both experienced the same frustrations.  Sirja described how she’d tackled hers and how she’d persuaded her college to let her implement her solution.  It’s such a great story that I asked her to share it on my blog.  So, here she is!  Thank you so much, Sirja, it was a real pleasure meeting you and it’s a pleasure welcoming you to my blog!

A creative solution

The description of that particular teaching post DID mention mixed-level classes but I dare confess now, five years on, that I took this « tiny » detail light-heartedly. I mean, all classes are mixed-level, right? So why worry that anything that widespread could become a major hurdle on my teaching path? Honestly, there are ways of dealing with the faster students and help that can be offered to the slower ones. All in all, I was not worried about that at all.

However, the reality started biting from day one, from the moment it dawned on me what a nightmare a truly mixed-level class can be.

I was facing a class of 15 students whose language levels varied from A1 to C1. Plus one girl who had never uttered nor written a word in English, and a guy who was bilingual (French, English).

My first year was mere survival. I worked countless hours trying to prepare lessons that would cater for all needs. For one hour in class I would toil away during three at home. I was desperate for the lower level students to progress and start speaking and for the stronger ones to find the lessons not only motivating but extremely useful as well. I was, let’s be honest, determined to accomplish an impossible feat.

But before I delve any deeper into my first year frustrations, let me explain how such a melting pot of levels came to be. Our school is a post obligatory school for future designers. It offers a four year training course which culminates in final exams whose requirements are set by the state. So for example, the level to be attained in the two foreign languages, German and English, is B1. Out of the four years of training three are done at school and one as a training course in an artist’s studio. My students have two academic hours in a row of English per week. To be able to enroll in our school students have to take entrance exams. There’s a policy which excludes relying on previous marks from previous schools thus giving everyone a new chance to prove themselves. Following along these lines you might imagine the variety of students who greet me on my first day of a new term. Not only do they vary in age but also in their previous experience. The time and facilities being limited, all the first year students follow the same language lesson no matter what their level.

But back to my first year.

So there I was, chatting to a group of young people. A couple laughed at my jokes, some pretended to understand them and quite a few stared at me with a terrorized look in their eyes sweating and hoping to go unnoticed. I did it for a year. Not the jokes, mind you, but juggling with these incompatible levels. At the end of the first year in the new school I had grown braver and instead of blaming my own ineptitude in performing a miracle I started questioning the whole organization of the classes. If the final objective is B1 then what should I do with the students who come to my classes with a higer level to begin with? If the programme is designed for students to attain level B1, is it my personal responsibility to create extra material for upper level students? Is it normal to rush through the lesson trying to « please » stronger students? Is it fair to hurry the weaker students who need support in order to achieve the final goals?

So instead of staying in my dark corner with the dark clouds over my head I started talking to everyone who cared to listen. I realized that the German teacher had excatly the same problems. But what’s even better, I discovered that our headmaster cared and promised to back us up if we found a reasonable solution. So together with the German teacher (the school being small we have only one teacher per subject) we came up with a plan. At the beginning of a semester we let stronger students take a test based on semester’s final objectives. If they pass the test with flying colours they are excused from the lessons under the following conditions:

• they have to come and take all the big tests (a way to verify they know all the grammar and vocabulary covered during the course)
• they have to do some private projects (to ensure that they keep working on their English)

To give you an idea of the nature of the projects, here’s what they need to do this semester:

1 Reading and writing

Choose a book in English (it should contain more than 100 pages). After reading discuss the following in writing:

• What did you read? What made you choose this book?
• Who was your favourite character and why?
• Do any of the characters evolve in the story? How?
• What was the most interesting / exciting part of the book?
• Did you like the ending of the book? Why? / Why not?

2 Talking

• Choose an occasion from the past ( e.g. a trip, a holiday, a party, a strange encounter, etc)
• Prepare a short talk about this occasion.
• Try to bring some pics to illustrate the talk.

3 Watching and writing

• Go to www.veryfunnyads.com
• Choose three ads, watch them and then describe them in writing.

4 Watching and talking

• Go to www.ted.com
• Choose a talk. Take notes and prepare to talk about it.

Students have to handle these projects on their own, meaning they have no fixed deadlines. However, I do insist that they hand the writing in before the final part of the semester. As for the speaking part they are responsible for fixing a time and date with me.

Relief! Yes, that’s the feeling I have had since we got the ball rolling. It is so much easier to manage my classes. Not that I faced major discipline problems but it can be very destabilizing to have students in your lesson who keep fighting off sleep because of utter boredom. It is rewarding to see the progress in weaker students who can finally get the attention and help they need. And it is so much fun to discuss a TED talk with the stronger students or to listen to their incredible stories from the past illustrated with wonderful pics.

some of Sirja's wonderful pics of her home in the French alps

The times they are a-changing

out of time @ij64

I love this image – I admit that the link may not be immediately obvious – but it’s a great way to kick off a blog post.  Thanks Ian – and thanks #eltpics !

And now for the blog post – the first of 2012, and although it’s February 2, I’m still going to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy 2012! – here goes!

Last summer I wrote about a short training course I’d been trying to put together for a local training centre.  It was intended as an extension of a pre-service certificate course. It felt like a good idea at the time. This was the rationale:

“in our immediate context, and increasingly in other contexts too, newly qualified teachers may well be asked about their views on the use of technology in job interviews, or be expected to use integrated whiteboards (IWBs) and data projectors in their classrooms”

And the aim was to:

“introduce trainees (and teachers unfamiliar with technology) to the issues, both pedagogical and technical, as well as to offer them a safe environment to dip their toes into the world of web 2.0 and educational technology.”

At the time there weren’t enough people interested and we didn’t run the course.

Last week the training centre got in touch asking me to update the information on the course so that they could advertise it well ahead of time and possibly get more takers for this summer.   In the meantime I had started to think about possibly offering the course as an online, moodle-based course. It seemed to solve the question of trainees having to stick around for an extra three days, pay for more nights in local accommodation and could possibly appeal to a wider audience.

Every Thursday I walk home after class with the course director.  The walk takes about 15 minutes and those Thursday morning walks are great.  We talk non-stop!  We plan and reflect on lessons, plan course strategies, discuss problem students, and generally put the world to rights

Last Thursday we talked about the edtech issue.  We started off thinking about who, how, when it could be run.  We talked about the online option.  We agreed at one point that a blended course might be the best option, but then slowly we talked our way away from the whole course. Basically turned our backs on it.

There has been one key change since the course was first mooted this time last year.  The school – and training centre – has moved. In its old premises there was only one, portable projector and a fairly shaky portable ebeam.  They weren’t used much in class, and weren’t used on the certificate courses at all – except for one input session where we talked about ways of exploiting digital images and video clips.  In September the school moved into its new premises.  There are ceiling bracketed projectors and wifi access in all the rooms.  Use of the technology has been integrated into all the classes – it’s part and parcel of the school.  And it’ll be part and parcel of the training courses this summer – for trainers and trainees alike.

So, in the space of less than six months, the introduction to technology course has become obsolete.  There is absolutely no need to divorce it from the main course.  I remembered a great post by Marisa Constantides about how she is integrating edtech tools in her pre-service certificate courses. Read about it here. It makes so much sense. This is so obviously the future .. or in fact, the present!

And so, I turned down the offer to write and run the course this summer. Instead we’re going to get together to discuss how to approach integrating tech tools into the course in the most natural and unobtrusive way possible.  We want to negotiate a shared approach which will inform all aspects of the course: the lessons taught by the tutors on the first day of teaching practice, the unknown language lessons in the first week, the input sessions, the pre-course questionnaire and tasks, the materials assignments … everything.  A kind of mission statement for principled use and best practice.

That’s one meeting I’m really looking forward to going to!

The Gift of the Magi

first Christmas present by Mike Harrison for eltpics

A simple lesson plan for Christmas, based on the classic short story by O. Henry.  You can find the original story here (and on many other sites too) and an audio version with accompanying worksheets here at onestopenglish.  The original text works well with advanced students, but it is a bit dense and archaic, so here’s another version, which can be adapted for almost any level.

Last year I used this story for a lesson with a group of mixed level teenagers.  I had planned to used a simplified, modernised adaptation that I had written as a reading text. If you know O Henry, then you’ll know that all his tales have a twist in the tail.  My plan was to get the students to read the story up until the twist and then write the end themselves. But I realised as I started to set up the lesson that the mood wasn’t right, that the class need energising and that the story wasn’t going to do it for them unless I injected some life into it.  So I decided to “perform” it instead.

This is, more or less, as far as I can remember, how the class went.

Step 1 : setting up the story

I explained that I was going to tell them a story. I wrote the names of the main characters on the board, Jim and Della, and gave some background information about them.  They’re young, they’re newly-married, they’re very much in love.  But they’re poor.  They live in New York, it’s the turn of the 20th century, it’s cold and snowing and very, very Christmassy.  I did this in story-telling mode, hamming it up quite a lot. (once upon a time there were two people …. they were very, very much in love … ).  I then explained that two key themes in the story are treasured possessions and perfect gifts. I explained that Delia’s most prized possession was her beautiful, long, red hair and that Jim’s most treasured possession was a pocket watch that he had inherited from his father. I asked them to think for a moment about what their most prized possessions were, prompting and giving examples until blank faces filled in. I asked them to quickly tell each other what they’d thought of. There were a lot of Blackberrys and iphones mentioned!  But also a couple of pets, or a best friend.

I then asked them to write a sentence on a strip of paper explaining their idea of the perfect gift.  I monitored and prompted and corrected where necessary and then we pooled ideas.

Step 2:  story-telling

I explained that I was going to tell them the story and that they could interrupt and ask questions whenever they felt they wanted to.  I referred to this text (The Gift of the Magi O. Henry) as I told the story, stopping to explain or embellish where necessary, paraphrasing and editing and miming to keep the students’ attention focused on me and the story.  I twirled with Delia in front of her mirror, hesitated before opening the door to the hairdressers, stopped for a quick aside to explain that wigmakers bought real hair, shed a mock tear as I looked down at Delia’s imagined shorn locks on the floor. You get the idea!  I’m not a performer outside the classroom. I’m quite shy of attention and the public eye, but in the classroom, performing and interpreting a story is different. And fun.

Step three: the twist in the tail

I stopped telling the story when it came to the crucial twist, when Jim hands Delia her present, when Delia hands Jim the tiny parcel she’s so carefully wrapped up for him.  I handed out the copy of the story that I had been “reading” from, without the final paragraph ( separated by a line in the text in the link).  I ask them to read the story so far and then to write the closing paragraph.

I must admit that at this point there was a slight dip in the attention, a small collective groan, but as they got into the writing the energy picked up again. As they finished their closing paragraphs I handed out the closing paragraph from my version and asked them to compare. They were generally pleased with the similarities.

Our time had come to an end. The one hour class was over.  I wish I’d had time to ask them to read out their endings in story-teller mode. Maybe next time.

So, please feel free to use my text, or adapt it, or perform it. And if you do, I’d love to hear how it goes!

A book review from a six year old

[this post has been languishing in my drafts for some time ... since the spring in fact ... but then a few days ago the books were back on our kitchen table after I'd lent them out to a friend ... the enthusiasm and interest were still there as my daughter scooped them up again and claimed them as her own]

Macmillan Natural and Social Sciences for primary (Spain)

Today a couple of books arrived in the post.  They were inspection copies of CLIL books for primary schools in Spain.  I was interested in them for personal reasons as well as professional ones.  I left them on the table in the kitchen to see what reaction I’d get from a potential end-user – my six year old daughter!

What’s this? she asked enthusiastically when she arrived home from school. Is it for me?  I explained that they were presents from some people I work with sometimes but that she could use them, in fact that I’d asked for them for her.

She opened the book and started a flick test.  The book fell open on a unit called My body.  There was a picture of a face and words to match the various parts. Eyes, ears, mouth, nose –I’ve done those in class, she said.  Then she stopped to mouth the letters, eyelashes – a little laugh – eyebrows – another little laugh, we haven’t done those. Chin, cheek – they’ve forgotten lips.

On she flicked. It’s just like my books in school she said. This was obviously a good thing.  Where’s the unit on animals?  She looked for the index, mouthed her way through the colour-coded topics. It’s blue, as she fingered the pages looking for the blue corners.   Hey, what’s this?  Stick?  A quick flick to the back of the book and she’d found the stickers.  The exercise required her to categorise nocturnal and daytime animals.  She didn’t need to read the instructions.  She started straight in, choosing the ones she knew.  Bat, owl … what’s a fox mum?  I’ll do the day time ones first.  Sticking finished she noticed the instructions, with all the nocturnal animals listed.  Ah, I got it right without reading! Big smile of satisfaction.

More stickers, more flicking and she stopped at a page with a map of Spain.  We’ve done this! This is Spain! Where are the stickers?  (what do you have to do, I prompt, not able to keep the teacher in me at bay!)  Colour the coast yellow, colour the mountains … off she went for her pencil case and the crayons and set to work, immersed, engaged, loving it.

So, what made the book such a success for her?  I think it was the familiarity. It looked like her Spanish school books, it had the same kind of exercises, it covered the same information, she knew what to do with it.  She found the CD as well and insisted on listening to the chants and the songs.  She tidied the four books in a neat pile. Gave them a proprietorial pat.   One satisified customer.

Hopefully it’ll help us bridge the gap between English at home and Spanish at school.  But would it work just as well for a kid whose L1 isn’t English?  I really think it could.  I think mirroring the learning that’s happening in their L1 in the English book, bringing it to life with the tricks of the ELT trade (stickers, songs, stories and chants) might well be a good direction for EFL classes as well.

post-script: the friend I lent the books to has ordered copies for the school where she works and is incorporating some of the ideas and materials in her mainstream classes. It’s a bit too early to report back yet. Maybe I can persuade her to write a guest post later in the year

(PS a big thank you to Macmillan Spain for the inspection copies.)

Let it snow …

snowman by erin & camera on flickr

This lesson plan is an old-favourite of mine.  It’s based on a poem by Carol Ann Duffy and is great for a winter’s morning, afternoon or evening – especially if it’s been snowing.  But it works just as well if it doesn’t snow where you live – it never snows in Cádiz! – images of snowfalls on the news can be context enough.  The text is fairly challenging lingusitically but the structure is quite simple and the themes appeal to most students, especially older teens. It works best with upper-intermediate or advanced students. I’ve used it with teens, young adults and, once, with a group of older business people. It’s gone down well each time.  (I also adapted it for use in the first edition of the Inside Out advanced student’s book).

I first used it with a group of students in the UK. They were all young adults on a nine-month language course. Many came from countries where it never snows. One day we were in class when snowflakes started to float past the window.  A huge gasp went up and shouts of “snow”, “I’ve never seen snow”.  It was only a flurry really, but enough to turn the hedgerows white in the street outside. We abandoned the classroom and went outside to learn about making snowballs.

A few days later we looked at this poem together in class.  Here’s the step by step lesson plan.

1  Group Discussion(s)

This works well with three separate groups, but can work fine as whole class as well.

Each group is given a card. On one side is one word:

group 1: snowman

group 2: boredom

group 3: stealing

The groups do not know what cards the other groups have. (If doing this as a whole class activity, introduce the cards one by one – the danger of doing it whole is that the activity may become a little repetitive.)

The first instruction is for the students to look at the word on the card and, individually write down five words they associate with it (you can cut this back to three if you prefer – I have done with classes that are slower “givers”). Give them a time limit. Two or three minutes is more than enough (With my teen classes recently I’ve been using the timer on my phone for timed activities – appeals to their smartphone mindsets!).

At the end of the time limit, ask the students to compare and explain their choices, then ask them to turn over the card.  When I first taught this lesson I supplied the questions. Two or three simple questions for each word, but in later versions I’ve asked the students to write their own questions, sometimes using prompts, sometimes just leaving the card blank.  I think this reflects a change in my teaching style (I first used this lesson plan in 1997) giving more and more space for the students to write the materials, growing into a “less is more” philosophy of sharing the building of the lesson.

Here are the original questions:

• have you ever built a snowman? if yes, where were you? who were you with? how big was it?
• have you, or anyone you know ever stolen anything or had anything stolen from you? if yes, what?
• what do you usually do when you’re bored? do you have any “defence mechanisms”?

Again I set a time limit and ask the ss to discuss the questions. I set time limits because I want all three groups to discuss all three topics.  We establish at the beginning that when I call an end to a discussion whoever is speaking at the time gets to finish what they’re saying and then the attention focuses back on the “centre”, on the whole class.

As each mini discussion ends, the cards circulate and the activity is repeated: brainstorming, comparing, discussing. Once the three topics have been discussed in groups, as a whole class we talk about which topic was most interesting, lead to most discussion, was most difficult to talk about and why.  This usually throws up quite a lot of language that’s worth stopping to look at.

2 Reading the poem 

I then tell the class that the three words are all themes in a text they’re going to read and very quickly field any off-the-top-of-their-heads predictions. I’m always cautious about over-predicting before reading a text. I think it can often be counter-productive. It’s often better to let the text speak for itself.

I then give each group the five verses of the poem, cut up on separate pieces of card and ask them to decide on a) an order b) a title.

You can see the full text of the poem here on a BBC website where there is also a recording and slideshow (more about that below).

The lexis is dense and colloquial.  You can choose to pre-teach some of it if you want.  I prefer to monitor and help as and when the students ask me to, I think it causes less disruption in the reading and processing.  A written glossary can help too ( Glossary)  The key to the activity, for me, is that there is no clear right answer. Of course, there’s the original poem, and we will listen to and look at that at a later point, but at this stage of the lesson, the students’ chosen order, whatever it is, is totally valid as their (re)interpretation of the poem.

Once they have decided on the order, the groups compare their versions and discuss any differences. We usually pause and look at the informal language too at this point, making a note of it, promising to come back to it later.

We discuss which word, snowman, boredom or stealing, is the best title for the poem and why.

 3 Listening to the poem 

The first few times I used this lesson, I read the poem out myself.  I’ve since discovered various recordings online. The BBC site I mentioned above has a very good recording and an accompanying slideshow. The students listen and confirm or change the order of the verses.  I keep back the slideshow for later.

4 Further discussion

We discuss any differences in the order and if it changes the emphasis of the poem at all.  I ask the students to build a profile of the person who is speaking.  Is it a man/woman, girl/boy?How old is he/she?   Why?  Where does he/she come from?  Where does he/she live?   To encourage individual answers and responses I ask the students to think about their answers first, to visualise the person. I read the questions aloud and pause after each one, prompting if necessary. I give them time to write short notes about their visualisation before they share the details with their classmates.

I then ask them to choose two or three lines they particularly like from the poem.  They can explain why if they want – but that’s not always that easy! the lines often speak for themselves.

My favourite (and often a favourite with at least some of the students, especially teens) is, “ Mostly I’m so bored I could eat myself.”  I think it speaks for itself.   Instead of asking students to explain why they like it, I ask them to practise reading it out loud.  In the original plan, we left things there, once the students had shared their favourite lines around the class.  Sometimes we made posters of the quotes.  And then we’d go back to explore the new vocabulary a little further.

5 Possible add-ons

images and slideshows:  ask students to draw up a “storyboard” of images to accompany the poem if read aloud. They can compare their ideas with the slideshow on the BBC site or look for clips on youtube. I like this one by a class of school kids in the UK , the snowman doesn’t quite live up to my personal visualisation, I’m not so sure about the background music, but I like the way the students have made it their own.

the poet talks about her poem :  As I was writing this post, I had a look online to see what other resources might be out there. As well as the BBC recording and slideshow (see links) and various study notes (the poem is part of an anthology for GCSE exams in the UK)  I came across this great text by Carol Ann Duffy, talking about how the poem came about.  The text is simple and accessible and would make good follow-up reading to the discussion of the “voice” or “face” behind the poem.

#eltchat summary : dealing with failure

This is a summary of the #eltchat that took place at  12pm GMT on November 30 2011.

How to Deal with Students who are about to Fail

Chatters from a range of backgrounds and contexts, business English classes, private language schools, universities, mainstream secondary and primary school, offered a variety of different perspectives on the topic and on evaluation and failure in general.

The chat opened with an attempt to define the parameters of the topic.  Firstly we looked at the importance of pinpointing why students are failing: is it because they aren’t working or because they aren’t ready or struggling to meet the level?  We also tried to pinpoint what we mean by failure, is it a failure to get the right grades or meet a satisfactory level for established criteria? Some chatters suggested it could be widened to cover students who were struggling to follow the pace of the classes or possibly not coming up to their own expectations(@theteacherjames). Each different context had a slightly different take on failure, but it was certainly perceived as a universal problem.

The whole idea of failure disturbs me (@tamaslorincz)

Fail is a horrible word but it is real life (@Marisa_C)

Different responses may be required for different contexts.  If students are studying towards an exam and the date of the exam is not fixed (e.g. one of the Cambridge exams) then chatters agreed that the onus was on the teacher to identify students who they felt might not pass, and counsel them about the exam, recommending that they wait until they are ready.  Some chatters talked about situations where the students were given a “pre-test” to establish their level which were then followed up by tutorials.  Others talked about systems which allowed students to do remedial work in order to gain a pass (@billpelowe).  A system by which peers help struggling classmates met with a lot of interest.

When students were having difficulty grasping ideas I used peer tutors to get them up to speed (@cybraryman1)

And one chatter uses student response cards to track progress.

@billpellowe: Keeping my students involved via low-tech student response cards has helped me identify students in danger

Progress tutorials were generally accepted as a good means of helping weaker students avoid – or prepare for – failure.  The importance of letting students know how well/badly they’re doing was also stressed, as well as making it clear to students what the consequences might be of not putting in enough work.   Continual assessment and portfolios were suggested as “early warning systems” for failure, allowing teachers to intervene in time to help the students draw up  personalised study plans and suggest remedial work, maybe, for example, on a wiki. It was agreed that it was important to make students aware of their (potential) failure.

It is our job to help them diagnose the problems and give advice and extra help. (@rliberni)

It was suggested that many students who are failing need help with study skills, organizing and studying and that this is an area where teachers can be proactive. One chatter described how she suggests personalised plans based on the students’ strengths & weaknesses for extra work outside class (@ljp2010)  It was also agreed that clear guidelines for exams should be set out well before the exam so that students know exactly what is expected of them.

Set ground rules and reminders at the beginning of the course works 95% of the time. Some ss wait until the last moment to work (@alhen)

Nobody should ever be ‘in the dark’ about their progress and readiness for an assessment if they are then we’re the failures! (@rliberni)

But of course, the end result depends on the student:

some do the work & get the benefit … you can lead a horse to water… (@ljp2010)

Attention was also paid to the psychological effect of failure on students. It was suggested that failure can become a label, a very unfortunate label, that demotivates and sets off a negative spiral, just as success breeds success, so failure breeds failure.  There was some discussion of how this can be combatted by making progress visible, by celebrating small successes, by encouraging students to think beyond the exams and beyond the system to more global aims.  With younger learners it was suggested that parents should also be brought into the equation (@ljp2010 @mattkendrickelt ) and that at times failure is inherent in the system (@tamaslorincz).

hate to see students sinking in the spiral – failure, no motivation, more failure. It can be you who can help, but not always  (@Tamkirja)

The chat moved on to discuss what we can do to avoid failure in the future. Asking questions about why students fail and making changes to course content, assessment design and tracking systems were all suggested as possible solutions.

Why are they failing? -Motivation? -Inability to keep up? -Bad course design? -Bad assessment design? Knowing this will help you (@yearinthelifeof)

A lot of time is often spent on success in the classroom – is equal time spent on why some Ss fail , e.g to get the right answer? (@Marisa_C)

Failing Ss should always make us reflect and go back to evaluation of course, materials, methods (@Marisa_C)

It was good to finish on this positive note, looking ahead to more success and less failure!  It reflects very positively on the optimism, enthusiasm and commitment of  #eltchat and all #eltchatters!

The following links were shared:

@riberni : I wrote a piece yesterday on what to do after you fail to get the result you want  http://t.co/ZxV669Wy #eltchat
@cybraryman1 :  many students who are failing need help with organizing & studying.  My Study Skills page: http://t.co/C0uS773G
@cybraryman1 : My Tutoring & Mentoring page: http://t.co/qLdgHjzw