Marisa Constantinides – TEFL Matters
Some thoughts on Language Teaching, Language Teacher Education & New Technologies
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These are the handouts from a talk I presented to the members of TESOL Greece in 2007. I have copied-pasted them directly from Word so the layout may not be fantastic but I have posted it here so that members of a recently started googlewave may copy and collaborate on in order to create/generate a new checklist of criteria for coursebooks as we would like them to be in the future.
I. Details of Coursebook & Class Title & Level:
- 1. Accompanying materials. What is available?
- cassettes
- workbook
- teacher’s book
- companions
- grammar books
- video-tapes
- readers
- CD ROM
- DVD
- Support Website
2. Average age of your students:
3. Average class size:
4. Seating arrangements in your class:
5. Which coursebook did you use before this one?
6. If it is part of a series, does the next level follow on well or is there a gap?
II. Initial Selection
1. What are the main reasons that make you choose a coursebook? Please, tick as many as appropriate and add more reasons if they are not listed.
- No units
- Length of units
- Layout of unit
- illustrations
- Topics
- Texts for reading
- Recorded material
- Structures
- Functions
- Material for controlled work
- Vocabulary Activities
- Grammar consolidation exercises
- Reading activities
- Listening Activities
- Speaking skills development
- Development of the writing skill
- Project tasks
- Lack of more suitable material
- Timetable fit
- Guidelines for the teacher
- Practice material in workbook
- Pronunciation practice
- Age of your students
- Exam practice material
- Logical & clear progression
- Other (please specify)
III. New Language Items (Structures/Functions)
1. Is the syllabus in the coursebook organised according to structures, functions or both?
2. Does the syllabus cover the items you feel appropriate or necessary for this level?
3. If so, do you agree with the order/sequence in which they are presented? What would you suggest if you do not agree with the ordering?
4. If the syllabus does not cover all the items you would wish to see at this level, which ones would you add?
5. Which items would you omit?
6. Is there sufficient material for grammar practice? Do you have to use any supplementary material? If so, what other material do you use?
7. Do you feel that the grammar practice material in the coursebook helps your students use it on a long term basis?
8. Is there any material for remedial work? If not, do you feel there should be some in every unit or every so many units?
9. Do all the items merit the same amount of remedial work? If not, which ones merit more attention?
10.ls there enough of the following for the practice of grammatical/functional items? (Yes or No answer)
- Items presented in context/situation
- Concepts clear to the students
- Clarity of form
- Information about use
- Controlled oral practice
- Personalized practice
- Freer oral activities
- Fluency tasks
- Written consolidation in context
- A clear, concise summary of the main points
IV. The Vocabulary
1. What’s the treatment of vocabulary in your coursebook like? Please tick.
- Appropriate for the level
- Appropriate for your students
- Too many items per unit
- Too few items per unit
- Meaning illustrated well
- Useful presentation material
- Vocabulary guessing tasks
- Consolidation activities
- Checking activities
- Use activities (oral/written)
- Vocabulary games
- Revision across units
- Collocation activities
- Vocabulary work in phrases
2. Do you need to supplement coursebook work with extra vocabulary activities? If so, what kind? What are some of the sources you use?
V. Pronunciation work
1. Is there any work on pronunciation?
2. Is it enough for your students’ needs?
2. Do you consider the tasks included useful?
3. Has your students’ pronunciation improved as a result of the tasks included?
4. Is there sufficient material to cover the following areas of English pronunciation?
| YES | NO | RECOGNITION | PRODUCTION | |
| Individual sounds | ||||
| Sound linking | ||||
| Word stress | ||||
| Intonation | ||||
| Sentence stress & Rhythm | ||||
| Intonation | ||||
| Chunking/pausing appropriately |
5. Please, look at the areas listed in 4 above and consider whether the practice material available is suitable for recognition/ear-training as well as for student production of the desired features
6. If your first language is not English, what kind of extra help would you, as a teacher, need in terms of pronunciation practice?
VI. Listening skills development
1. What percentage (of time) per unit is given to listening?
5% ( ) 10% ( ) 20% ( ) 30% ( ) 40% ( ) 50% ( )
2. Which of the following activities are included in the coursebook)
| YES | NO | |
| Listening to conversational material | ||
| Illustrating new structures/functions | ||
| Listening to understand the main points | ||
| Listening to authentic recordings | ||
| Discussions prior to listening | ||
| Listening for specific information | ||
| Diagram (map, grid, flowchart) completion | ||
| True and false statements | ||
| Intensive listening; detailed comprehension | ||
| Follow up speaking activities | ||
| Follow up writing |
3. Please, look back through the activities/objectives of No 2 and asterisk the ones which you consider essential whether they exist in your coursebook or not.
4. Please, comment on the quality of the recordings
5. Are the topics interesting to your students?
6. Is there enough variety of listening texts?
7. Are there any authentic recordings? If so, from what sources?
8. Do you feel that the taped material is a fair representation of the way native speakers speak? Whatever your answer may be, how do you know?
9. What types of taped material and activities would you like more of?
10. Overall, do you feel that your students have become better at listening due to the material and the skills training in your coursebook?
VII. Reading skills development
1. Is there enough variety of text?
2. Are the texts appropriate to the level and age of your students’?
3. Are the topics interesting & motivating?
4. Which of the following activities are included in the coursebook?
- Reading to understand the main points
- Reading authentic texts
- Lead-in activities prior to reading
- Reading for specific information
- Note-taking while reading
- Variety of comprehension tasks
- Vocabulary guessing activities
- Follow up speaking activities
- Follow up writing
- Diagram (map, grid, flowchart) completion
Please, asterisk those tasks from the list above which you feel should be included whether or not included in your course book.
5. Overall, would you say that this coursebook ca help your students become better/faster/more efficient readers?
6. Will you need to supplement this coursebook with extra reading? if so, list your sources
VIII. Speaking activities
1. Comment on the speaking activities in your coursebook. You can score them on a scale of 1 5 (5 being the highest and 1 the lowest score in each category)
- Amount (1 ) ( 2) (3 ) (4 ) ( 5)
- Relevance (1 ) (2 ) (3 ) ( 4) ( 5)
- Usefulness (1 ) (2 ) (3 ) (4 ) (5 )
- Manageability (1 ) (2 ) (3 ) (4 ) ( 5)
2. Which of the following speaking activities are included in your coursebook?
- Mechanical drills
- Meaningful drills
- Role play
- Guided discussions
- Free discussions
- Problem solving
- Information gap/exchange
- Simulations
- Games
- Oral reports
- Story telling
- Priority activities
3. Do you introduce any other activities apart from those found in the book? What type?
4. Do you consider any of the activities mentioned above difficult to use or unsuitable for your classes? If so which ones and why?
5. As a result of using this coursebook, do you think your students may become more fluent speakers?
IX. Writing Activities
1. Which of the following general types of writing are included?
- letter to friend
- formal letter
- postcard
- report
- composition
- diary writing
- story
- speech
2. Are the writing tasks you ticked above appropriate to the level and age of your class?
3. Is there enough guidance/preparation for the writing tasks?
4. Are the writing tasks meaningful and contextualised?
5. Does the book give students any help with the following aspects of writing? Enough or not? Write YES or NO next to each activity type.
- Punctuation
- Paragraphing
- linking devices
- sentence patterns
- sentence ordering
- choosing the right words
- layout (e.g., letters)
- use of reference words {e.g. ‘he’. It’)
- types of paragraphs
- organisation of ideas
- getting ideas, getting started
- drafting, editing, revising
X. Contexts & Topics
1. Are they relevant to your students’ needs, lives and culture?
2. Are they interesting to you?
3. Do you think they will interest your students? How do you know this?
4. Is there a story line in the book? Yes ( ) No ( )
5. Is the choice of topics in the book generally appropriate for the age group you are teaching?
6. Is there a variety of topics and themes?
XI.General Balance/Amount of:
| Materials for……. | Too many | Not enough | Just enough |
| Listening | |||
| Reading | |||
| Writing | |||
| Speaking | |||
| Grammar | |||
| Vocabulary | |||
| Pronunciation |
XII. The Teacher’s Guide
Look at the Teacher’s notes and pick the adjectives or phrases from this list which best describe them for you. Please, circle or underline as many as you think appropriate.
clear confusing
brief long
concise vague
indispensable unnecessary
interesting uninteresting
easy to follow cluttered
well-ordered muddled
learner centred teacher centred
a life saver useless
adequate inadequate
extra activities nothing extra included
Please, add as many other adjectives or phrases as you wish to this list.
3. What should the ‘ideal’ Teacher’s Book contain in your opinion?
XIII. Other Support Materials
1. If there are other support materials how often do you use them?
2. What would you like more of ?
XIV. Student Reactions
A good idea is always to pilot a unit of work
1. How do your students like the material? How do you know this?
2. Are there any parts of each unit that they usually like doing? Which ones? Please, be as specific as you can.
3. Which parts do they usually not like doing? Why?
XV. SUMMARISING COMMENTS – You and the material
1. How far does this coursebook satisfy you as a teacher? Why / Why not?
2. Will you use it again in future? If not, what will you replace it with?
© CELT Athens @ Marisa Constantinides
You all know the great board game of Trivial Pursuit . I just love this game and have had lots of fun playing with friends, although, it must be admitted that the cultural bias of many of the questions makes it a bit more difficult if you are playing in a language other than your own.
I find it a great game for learning about content as well, something which I find quite important in adult and younger classes. My own downfall is usually the sports category – the orange one in the Genus edition – which I dread!
There are also many online versions of this great game, like this “Bring on the 90’s” edition and “The Daily 20″ , all great fun if you are au fait with local news, entertainment, politics, etc. of the particular era or country.
Trivial Pursuit for content revision
Like all TEFL teachers, I always look for ways of using games and other material and making my own version of Trivial Pursuit was a natural consequence.
I made my first adaptation to help my Diploma (DTEFLA and later DELTA) candidates revise terminology and content on courses a bit less seriously and stressfully, which was great fun and this inspired them, of course to copy my idea and make their own sets for their learners!
Here is a sample card with the answers on the back which had categories like Language, Phonology, Skills, Spot that Quote, etc.
Trivial Pursuit for Language Practice
I then made a version of the game for our Proficiency students, called, what else, Proficiency Pursuit, with categories of questions that ranged from Transformation to Synomyms to Pronunciation, etc.
Here is a sample card (with the answers printed on the back)
Postscript
It’s a logical consequence that after students have played the game, they can be involved in making their own cards which they can give to other teams, a great language focussed activity which involves lots of dictionary look ups, grammar checking, wikipedias, google and all new technologies brought in.
The reading of the rules itself can also be stage-managed as a highly motivating reading lesson, since the final checking activity is actually playing the game!
So, be playful please. You can be playful with even the most serious content and make it fun to make it more memorable!
There is a specific activity I often use in creative thinking skills workshops which works wonderfully well. I learnt it from T.Richards, during a lecture in Athens some years ago (pls see note at end).
It’s called the “Yes, and…” activity In this activity, one person, or the teacher even, begins by positing something, anything. For example, “We’re having pizza tonight” and everyone else, in turn, has to add on to, elaborate on this statement. Some of the things you might hear in such cases, are…
- “Yes, and, I especially love pizza with pepperoni!’
- “Yes, and I am thinking, too, of ordering some for later on”
- “Yes, and don’t I wish we some right now”
- Yes, and I have noticed that some people like to drink Coke with their pizza”
- Yes, and I have been craving for pizza too. Why don’t we have some right now?”
Things get tougher a few turns later when people run out of ideas and have to keep adding positive, “yes, and…” ideas.
Some break down and begin to blurt out, “Yes, but…..” . This is not allowed; it is an absolute no, no!
If you try the opposite with “Yes, but, ….” most people can go on for hours…. Why is it that people find opposition and contradiction easier, is a true mystery to me
Contradicting often does not build, but disrupts the creative thinking process, both in the contradictor as well as in the team trying to build something, from an argument to a marketing campaign or even a skyscraper!
In order to practise “elaboration”, one of the microskills (not a very accurate term – microskill for ‘elaboration’ but it will do for the time being) of creative thinking, it is necessary to add to and to build on something, rather than to pull it apart and contradict it.
Why Practise Elaboration?
A lot of the world’s greatest inventions were created because someone noticed how an existing gadget or invention could be improved by adding or changing part of it.
In the world of ELT, most of the stuff has been said in some way or form a long time ago. I remember the first person who openly and honestly acknowledged this in front of a huge audience during one of his talk at TESOL Greece was Stephen Krashen. But he created something out of the concept that made it more popular, more directly accessible as a theory of learning, he elaborated on the thinking of previous educators and developed the L2 Acquisition theory we associate with his name so readily.
Elaboration in language learning is the thinking skill which will help us build on what we know to create something new, often innovative; it’s the skill we need most to avoid writing simplistic and bare-bones text, so, to the language teacher, it’s an interesting skill and that’s why I have developed an interest in it.
As a teacher educator, I have a vested interest in developing my trainees’ creative thinking skills and part of a teacher’s job frequently requires them to build on existing materials and create something new, improved and more challenging out of them.
As a building block to developing creative thinking skills in teachers and learners, as a well as a more positive attitute to collaborative problem solving, I think it’s an important ability to help them develop.
The “Yes, but…” attitude
A lot of what I get these days is the “Yes, but…” attitude, and I don’t just mean all the discussions against the use of technology in education.
Before that came to my sphere of awareness, I have had to deal with so many “Yes, but…” attitudes, about almost anything I try to educate my trainee teachers to do.
When they go out into the world of work, it is exactly this attitude they have to face in the workplace. “Yes, but what you learnt is fine for …(always it’s for someone else) but in our school, class, area, country it won’t work…”
Helping them to be more creative thinkers as well, may help them find some creative ways of working out these issues, rather than live in silence and succumb to the pressure of those who are either ignorant or fear change because it upsets theis safe, small but well padded world.
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Richards, T., 1993, Ideas into Action: How Creativity & Innovation are Driving Modern Business Life. Public Lecture for the Athens L.B.A.
Last night I went to a theatre performance. The short one act play is called “Silence” and was staged at a small avant-garde space for new artists, stand up comedians and musicians called Centre of Speech the Arts in my part of town, Exarhia.
This is not a theatre review but I was totally blown away by the four members of this small theatre group, and most of all by Rosa Prodromou, daughter of a very well-known ELT figure to many of my readers and valued friend, Luke Prodromou.
Rosa was at some point (some 3 years ago) also my trainee on a TEFL course, sent on by Luke who I guess was terribly worried about the prospects of her working in the theatre and wanted her to have another source of income. She is an astonishing young actress, with theatre and drama studies at MA level in the UK, talented and beautiful beyond belief.
The tools of her trade, her body and her voice, are trained to the perfection of a finely tuned instrument.
I must say, she totally smote my heart with her powerful acting. So did the other young actors in the play, but Rosa was absolutely outstanding, she stood out and is up there in the top league, with a face, body and voice just simply made for acting. And you must understand that I have known her since she was about 10, so for her to “get to me” in such a powerful way, was even harder.
There were only eight people in the audience and we all left totally blown to bits by what we had seen.
As the evening progressed at a nearby cafe-restaurant, I started getting more and more upset thinking about it.
Rosa Prodromou and her friends are operating in a world where quality in what they do is the only thing that matters to them. But of course, networking and publicity matters to the rest of us but because they don’t know how to operate the tools of 21st century communication, they have to act their hearts out for audiences of 8 and 10 people. And they don’t care all that much about it either, as long as they can do what they believe in.
“In the name of my father I will find a job in silence
In the name of friendship I will use you in silence
In the name of my career I will forget myself in silence
In the name of success I will stress my silence”
These are lines chanted during the play but Rosa’s silence is not my silence.
Then I got to thinking that Rosa is not the only one. I also know many, hundreds upon hundreds of young teachers who are in the same league as she is – talented and passionate about teaching, delivering lessons any of my readers would be proud of and yet, they work in dinghy schools, making 8 euros per hour and being told off if their classes are a little livelier than the institutional grammar-translation approach accepts.
They shouldn’t have to put up with that, just as Rosa should be acting in the big theatres to communicate her art and should be paid decently for her art.
I am upset about the number of people who have developed self-aggrandisement into a fine art and they end up rulers of every game you can think of.
I am also upset that all these young and talented people have to make do with so little and have to take second and third jobs to be able to do what they love.
Rosa now has her certifcate in TEFL from me, but she should not have to use it, although she is absolutely super as a teacher, too, with everything in perfect place! Nor should the teachers I am talking about have to trudge the big city running to this private lesson and that, just because classroom teaching doesn’t pay them enough to be able to survive.
In an ideal world, mediocrity should not rule but it does, both in Rosa’s world as in mine.
I know this may be of no interest to anyone, but well, it’s my blog and I had to get it off my chest and break the rule of silence for a change.
Translation Portals
- Translatum (the Translation Vortal) – By far the richest Greek site dedicated to translation. Worth exploring the many threads to share and learn
- Translatio – A more recent addition, this Greek site covers different but equally interesting areas-the site also offers free space if you would like to upload your CV
- Language Automation – A non-Greek site with useful links
- ProZ – A meeting point for professional translators around the globe. It also advertises translation jobs for which you can put in bids and advertise an ‘ASK AN EXPERT’ section where you can ask colleagues to help you resolve a particularly sticky translation problem.
- Lexilogia – A great online translation community with lively discussions and sharing of ideas and help
Translation Discussion Groups and Forums
- metafrasis – (230 members)
- techtranslation – Technical Translators’ Forum (814 members)
- Translatum Forum 856 Members
Online Dictionaries
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To be continued…. |
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