I've just got back to Leamington Spa, having been to Canterbury, Kent, to attend the Innovate in ELT Conference 2012. This one-day event, organised by Marc Almond, had five workshops from 'some of the world's leading ELT practitioners' (it says here) - namely, Jeremy Harmer, Tessa Woodward, Luke Meddings, Russell Stannard and Nick Bilbrough. I attended three workshops, each of around 90 minutes in duration. Russell is my personal tutor and dissertation supervisor and I had no need to hear about the Connected Classroom for the nth time, having previously travelled to the Language Show, in October, at Earls Court and popped into Lomond Auditorium at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow, in March to see him talk about this. This meant I had to chose one more of these 5 to miss on this occasion. Nick, unfortunately, didn't make the cut.
If I have made any mistakes in the details, such as a methodological point, or you want to comment, please do so, especially if you are Tessa, Jeremy or Luke.
If I have made any mistakes in the details, such as a methodological point, or you want to comment, please do so, especially if you are Tessa, Jeremy or Luke.
Tessa Woodward
The first session was entitled ‘Thinking In the EFL Class’
to tie in with Tessa’s new book,
released at the end of 2011. Tessa, a
former IATEFL president, is an experienced practitioner of experiential
learning, whereby teachers first learn activities and carry them out on each
other before replicating it in the classroom. I had been involved in ‘loop
input’ with two colleagues at Warwick recently. My attendance at her session was at the expense of Nick Bilbrough, which I regret now because I had previously attended this
same session from Tessa at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow. I knew it would be a good
warmer for the day, however and, furthermore, I
didn’t actually write in details last time so I will now, hopefully, do it more justice. |
| My notes |
Next up, ‘flip it and see’, based on an idea in which simple compound nouns are listed and twisted. From a list that included ‘fridge magnet’, ‘car park’, ‘garden fence’ and ‘summer dress’ a number of alternative combinations were suggested by the participants. If the item was flipped the grammatical structure changed to an adverbial form – ie. Parked car, stringed guitar.. although it didn’t work with all of them. Question for learners is why do some work and others not? By mixing first and second part nouns a number of new items were created. These included ‘traffic hook’, ‘tree fence’, a ‘parked guitar’ for buskers roaming the streets instrument-less and Tessa’s own suggestion of a ‘fridge player’ which would blast out Vivaldi’s Four Seasons until she closed the door. This generates an idea of what this might look like and a potential conversation between learners to describe this new item’s features. Learners could go on to make an advert or do a sales-pitch for the new creation. My own suggestion, a ‘summer magnet’ was a new meteorological device to fast track to summer weather. This seemed to resonate with others bemoaning the recent rain.
Following this, ‘lists’ was another simple idea of guessing
a grouping from a list of lexical items.
Tessa read out what seemed like the lyrics to ‘My Favourite Things’ from
A Sound of Music. Under the subsequent
list of ‘things that make you happy’. I
added ‘a really, good, hot shower’ and ‘getting retweeted’.
Next up, we thought about our favourite words in English –
Tessa’s suggestions were ‘gumption’, ‘flummox’, ‘canoodle’, ‘sagacious’ and the
rarely used ‘numinous’ (not the number of lights lighting a room) – find out for yourself if you don’t know their
meaning.
Finally, some critical thinking was required in terms of a set of true or false statements. These were chosen for this particular crowd but would need adapting to local settings. Thus, the following statements were posed:
1 - Spinach makes you strong
- Haggis is Scottish
- Coffee can help a person sober up
- St Bernard dogs carry a flask of brandy round their necks
- Haggis is Scottish
- Coffee can help a person sober up
- St Bernard dogs carry a flask of brandy round their necks
Many of these turn out to be perpetuated myths not based on
fact or science, with some being completely misleading. I was still back in ‘flip it and see’ mode
so I thought I would come up with my own statement: ‘A Scottish St Bernard dog
carries spinach and helps to sober you up’. True or False?
The idea of myths segued nicely into the next session by
Jeremy Harmer.
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| Stereotypical image of multi tasking |
The common myth about ‘multi-tasking’ is that women are better
at it than men. Jeremy Harmer’s workshop
on 'the myth of multi-tasking' kicked off with this and he produced a picture to illustrate this. It is so often misleadingly portrayed as the
idea of ‘juggling various types of housework!’ One of his favourite books is The Myth of Mars and Venus by Debbie Cameron, and he quoted from the book by saying, 'Women are from Earth, men are from Earth. Get over it!'
More positively, bilingualism or code-swtiching, which has been reported again recently as a healthy thing, boosting brain power. Other contributions included students 'faking it' in the class, teachers needing skills to devise different tasks for different students, and that it is not effective in the real world because 'focus' is needed to perform tasks well.
It is undeniable that we try to multi-task more than ever before, especially due to various technologies which can be interacted with simultaneously with doing other activities. What Jeremy Harmer wanted to explore was to what extent we do multi-task and whether, perahps, certain tasks complement each others while others cause a lack of focus. His main point was to focus more, in the classroom, on 'the things that matter'.
Jeremy showed a clip - click here to see it - of Shelly Turkle, author of 'Alone Together' arguing against multi-tasking, as an educational myth for teachers to make more time, to keep
up with their students. She argued for
the merits of unitasking. It’s OK to multi task for certain, minor activities but not if you want to be seriously focus
on something important. This is interesting at the moment for me, as I am studying for my masters, and quite often have to put myself physically in a place where I am not going to get distracted or be tempting to do other non-studious activities. I might use Facebook to keep in contact with fellow students, but it can 'degrade' another task, e.g. essay writing, that I am engaged in. Jeremy commented how at many conferences nowadays, people are tweeting almost constantly during a talk. Does that degrade the attention towards the speaker? Well, maybe not, if the tweeter is making a serious of notes and quotes on what is being said. The perception, however, is that someone doing another task is not concentrating on what is being said, just as we assume as teachers that students playing with their iPhone can't possibly be giving the teacher their full attention.
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| Playing Air Viola to Elgar |
The difference between multi tasking – being simultaneous - and task shifting – doing one task,
shifting to another and then back again - was discussed. What constitutes a task was also much discussed. Driving, for example, involves many component parts, including operating the gear stick and the steering wheel, all simulatenously working together. This can include having a conversation with someone else while driving or changing the radio station. Is it several tasks, or just one? As I am writing this blog entry, I am keeping an eye on the Premiership football scores. Is 'keeping an eye on' the same as a task. Well not if we define a task as something that results in a productive outcome? At what point does it begin to degrade my writing focus? Transcribing a conversation requires upmost concentration, as evidenced by the number of times we have to rewind and listen again. Certain mundane tasks (e.g. ironing) are perfectly possible with something else going on (watching snooker on TV) or are they? Jeremy later demonstrated playing 'air viola' to Serenade by Elgar but found it difficult to talk to us and keep his place.
Jeremy gave an example of a comment on his blog post about this topic from Katy Simpson-Davis who concentrates much better on something if she is simultaenously knitting. The mind can wander otherwise. The same applies to background audio, which can either aid or hinder concentration on other tasks. Some tasks are seemingly more compatible and, following on from Tessa's activity using compund nouns, I started to imagine having a list of tasks and re-combining them to test the theory.
The relevance to ELT was then explored via a brief resume of some presentations at IATEFL 2012, where teachers were asked to rethink some of the conventions or lazy habits they had fallen into. Are we demanding enough, for example? Are we refusing to be reflective? Jeremy wanted to look at where we overload and, equally dangerous, underload our students.
We then watched 4 film clips and discussed which ones we liked and why. Then we discussed these in groups. Each clip showed a teacher, two talking direct to camera and two others getting their students to do an activity in class. We were asked to decide who got the focus right?
The four clips were:
- Conor, asking his students to stand in a line with a word each while the remaining students organised them into the right word order to make a simple sentence, 'Yesterday was Manuella's wedding anniversary'.
- Gloria, recorded on Jeremy's flip-cam, describing a 'successful lesson' on their students using WebQuests to plan a European trip.
- Bianca, recorded on flip-cam, about vocabulary testing with her German students and how effort translates into a good mark or not.
- Louise, conducting a vocabulary quiz in her class, with two teams describing the word she writes to the fellow group members.
You can hear a clip of my group's conversation here, with me speaking first:
During lunch I sat with my personal tutor and dissertation
supervisor, Russell Stannard and Luke Meddings.
No disrespect to the other speakers, but Luke was the main reason I had
signed up for this conference, although there is always an opportunity to
network and build contacts with likeminded people in the EFL arena. We discussed the origins and some characteristics
of dogme, the skills required by teachers to try it and how Arsenal were doing
against Norwich in the only Premiership clash of the afternoon. It ended 3-3.
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| Lunchtime musical entertainment |
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| with Luke Meddings and Jeremy Harmer post-lunch |
After lunch,
I attended Luke’s practical workshop on ‘teaching unplugged’ – how it meets learners’
wide-ranging needs and how conversation driven teaching yields benefits that go
beyond language learning. The essentials of 'teaching unplugged' are (1)
that it is conversation-driven, (2) it is materials-light and (3) the focus is
on emergent language.
Funnily
enough for a self-titled ‘unplugged’ session, Luke began by trying to connect
his iPad to the terminal before calling for a technician. But as Luke would
readily say, the 90s MTV Unplugged sessions (Neil Young, Nirvana, 10000 Maniacs
etc) were never totally acoustic, just stripped down to the tools available in the room.
But let me
take a moment for a little anecdote. I have often gone into a class
unprepared, unplanned and basically tried to ‘wing it’ with spontaneous
conversational class where the language emerges from the what is going on with
the students’ behaviour or activities. At KSU in Riyadh, for example, I
entered the room to find some of my students playing an iPad version of the old
70s toy ‘Simple Simon’. The discussion about it lead
into an impromptu conversation about comparing games of the 70s to
now.
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| My favourite dish in the previous 24 hours - haddock, with egg, potatoes |
Anyway, back in the workshop, Luke
asked the participants to think about a favourite food or drink they have had
and to write this down. Having shared our thoughts within a small group,
he listed some group favourites to create a list of 5. This included permanent pan-fried salmon with
tzatziki – the ‘permanent’ part was a joke as Luke had accidentally used a
permanent marker on the whiteboard. He subsequently switched to using a 'friendly bullet' marker, which immediately set the conversation off on a tangent as we collocated those two words - eg. friendly fire/rubber bullet. One favourite food was a sandwich, but instead of
Luke asking to listen out for the ingredients he asked us to remember, having
heard it described once. We came up with different interpretations and built up a
rather large sandwich full of in which the leaves fell out. It was the fault of someone throwing some imaginary figs into the mix! Someone
mentioned their love of frozen grapes - the emotional association with
the context for eating those grapes provided a personal narrative to the
answer given. Crunchie bar cookies were also mentioned. My choice of haddock with egg, mashed potato and a belgian beer from the previous night at La Trappiste was also written down. Luckily, I had photographic evidence (above pic) to check my ingredients.
The point here was that the language, the specific lexis all came from us, including going beyond the requirement of the task, by pre-empting why we were being asked about our favourite food. The 'incident' of writing 'pan-fried salmon' with a permanent marker gave a chance for the language to grow expidentially as a new dish, 'permanent' pan-fried salmon, which never runs out, was created, and was subsequently voted the best tasting, purely on the original idea. The choosing of a favourite is a 'task-light' activity, as is voting on the winner. A lot of this seems spontaneous, made up on the spot. I recognised the potential humour that was coming out of this spontaniety. As in real life, we often find real life more funny than scripted sitcoms - I know I do. As such, real, emergent language has more potential for humour, which is something I've found in my own classes.
To demonstrate further this idea of the lexis not coming from him or a textbook, Luke showed a picture of a lake without much explanation, which stimulated a couple of questions, which required a response. I guess all he did was to stimulate our senses and set up potential queries.
The point here was that the language, the specific lexis all came from us, including going beyond the requirement of the task, by pre-empting why we were being asked about our favourite food. The 'incident' of writing 'pan-fried salmon' with a permanent marker gave a chance for the language to grow expidentially as a new dish, 'permanent' pan-fried salmon, which never runs out, was created, and was subsequently voted the best tasting, purely on the original idea. The choosing of a favourite is a 'task-light' activity, as is voting on the winner. A lot of this seems spontaneous, made up on the spot. I recognised the potential humour that was coming out of this spontaniety. As in real life, we often find real life more funny than scripted sitcoms - I know I do. As such, real, emergent language has more potential for humour, which is something I've found in my own classes.
To demonstrate further this idea of the lexis not coming from him or a textbook, Luke showed a picture of a lake without much explanation, which stimulated a couple of questions, which required a response. I guess all he did was to stimulate our senses and set up potential queries.
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| Things to make and do |
The session
continued with a dictogloss, using a local news story about an ‘animal expert
that rescues trapped seagull after 25 firefighters tackle a 24-hour
blaze’. Except that’s the version ‘we’ collectively created.. once
prompted by the previously shown picture taken that day of the story’s
location. ‘How many firefighters does it take … onlookers …
Carshalton … health and safety rules … stricken seagull … entangled …
plastic bag’ – picking out key words and recreating the actual text
collaboratively. Whilst the dictogloss was being reconstructed I
ran a Google check on my smartphone using some of the key words and found a Daily Mail version
of the story, naturally framed in terms of ‘a lack of common sense’ in respect
of Health and Safety rules. Many new words were 'heard' or supplanted into our heads, showing how we made our own sense of the news story. A clip of the actual first two lines of the story, as read by Luke, can be heard below.
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| 'permanent' pan-fried salmon with seagull |
If I compare Luke's session with Tessa's then there was a clear difference between the amount of language generated by the presenter. For example, whereas Luke did not give examples of what kind of food we could suggest, Tessa regularly gave examples of words or phrases, such as 'fridge player'.
Towards the end of the workshop, we listened to 'silence' for 30 seconds and wrote down what we heard. Around 28 seconds, some birds outside made their prescence known which broke the silence. I have only ever used silence previously in class, along with switching off all lighting, as a two minute energy booster.
At the end of the workshop, after mentioning 'risk taking', Luke mentioned Donald Alan Schön's proposal of reflection-in and reflection-on action, which I recently came across with Steve Mann during a seminar at Warwick. The idea of 'reflecion-in-action' means thinking on your feet, being spontaneous. It might be more challenging but can also be more motivating. Luke quoted Schön from the infed.org site that this allows us to be surprised and even to be confused.
I am
relatively new to this concept of ‘teaching unplugged’, and it wasn't that long
ago that I was introduced to the notion of ‘dogme in ELT’, incepted in March
2000 by Scott Thornbury and picked up by Luke. They subsequently managed a dogme blog, I believe, from which comments and teaching ideas were distilled into the ‘Teaching Unplugged’
book published in 2009. Now Luke pours his thoughts onto The Unplugged Index on Posterous. Each of the activities we did could have a number of follow-up activities, but this seems to require a highly skilled, knowledgable and confident teacher, not afraid to come out from behind the desk, or from behind the book or technology.
I noted that are no specific time allocations to this approach and that a teacher
would need some intelligence in how they broke down the timing of the lesson,
if there was a specific language point to teach. In certain institutions
it is simply not possible to do this, such are the demands on sticking to a
syllabus or to use the 100 copies of a coursebook that were hastily purchased the previous year. It couldn’t work in any situation and might only be more appropriate
with higher levels.
All in all, an inspiring end to a stimulating day.
All in all, an inspiring end to a stimulating day.
