A quick and fun mini blog challenge by David Dogson in his blog post here – I fed my blog URL to Wordle and Tagxedo and look which words they have gone for!

Here is my blog in the clouds!

made with Tagxedo.com

I still can’t embed this Tagxedo properly to show the words animated! (See comment in previous post) In that post, you can see a Tagxedo os Shelly Terrell’s blog and one for Nik Peachey’s blog which I made for their birthday Wallwishers. Here is the URL of the Tagxed0 http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/5ba486ca9e4349fc but shows minus photo

made with wordle.net

More educational technology, certainly, than what I would have written, say two years ago. A nice surprise. But good to know that content still rules.

Related Blog Posts

• Word clouds to integrate reading and writing
• Tech Tools & Pedagogy II – Word Clouds (you can see a Tagxedo os Shelly Terrell’s blog and one for Nik Peachey’s blog)
• Using word clouds in class – a lesson plan

This is a stage akin to the intermediate learning plateau that learners of English as a foreign language reach: teachers realise that, while they can somehow manage to carry out their day to day teaching duties, it is also evident that they are repeating themselves, that there is no development in the way they teach or even the content they teach, that they keep doing the same old things in the same old way. It is no surprise then that they start to question themselves and their teaching ability.

Stagnation symptoms

The symptoms, which you, like many other teachers experience at some point, include the following:

• You have attended methodology courses and/or workshops but you feel you cannot implement what you learnt in your own classes
• You are beginning to feel restless about your teaching approach and are no longer happy that what you do in class “works” as well as you once were sure it did
• You realise that your repertoire of techniques and activities that would help you solve problems you encounter in your teaching is rather limited
• You realise that there are attractive careers in areas of English Language Teaching such as Business English or Academic English, for which, in spite of your experience, you are ill-equipped, as you cannot do a sensible needs analysis or draw up a syllabus based on your students’needs
• You find yourself in a more senior position in the institution where you work, such as a director of studies position, but find it difficult or impossible to guide and support the teachers, observe their classes critically and give them clear and supportive feedback.
• You would like to teach in another country but, once you start applying for teaching jobs abroad, you realise that your professional qualifications are simply not enough

If you are experiencing any of the above symptoms, it may well be that what you need is not merely another series of unrelated workshops and seminars that you gratefully attend at ELT conferences, book exhibitions and free events offered by publishers and examination bodies, but rather a focused course that will take your career to a different level and earn you a qualification that can open up new opportunities.

Considering a Diploma-level qualification in English Language Teaching?

Over the years, I have trained hundreds of teachers on advanced methodology courses leading to internationally recognised post-graduate level professional qualifications such as the DELTA or its predecessor courses, the RSA DOTE and DTEFLA, and I have come to identify certain characteristics present in all good candidates:

• They have a passion for teaching
• They have a tendency to reflect on their classroom practices
• They seek out opportunities for further development
• They think giving up time for a workshop or conference is perfectly normal
• They are always on the lookout for new ideas and new ways of enriching their teaching
• They are committed to teaching as a profession  
  

On the practical side, it is important to remember that a good candidate will also have a related degree and will ideally have attended a basic methodology course which involved teaching practice and observation in a real class.

Will a diploma make a difference to your career in TEFL?

Many teachers just don’t see how a qualification such as the DELTA might change their career opportunities in their local context. While there are many schools which do seek out and recognize the value of such a highly qualified teacher, it is also true that there are many which don’t.

Here is a comment written on my other blog by one of my current DELTA trainees:

As a result of following a DELTA course, this teacher is now able to find summer jobs in UK based colleges as a teacher of English, thus taking her career to a different level and giving her more opportunities to develop as a teacher in other teaching contexts as well as being eligible for jobs which require a Cambridge DELTA as a minimum requirement, positions such as Directors of Studies, Academic Directors or Coordinators, Oral Examiners for a range of Examinations, including the City & Guilds Examinations.
The world is out there and whether you want to go out to it or bring it to you (e.g. by becoming a successful online teacher), you need the confidence and know-how that a diploma can give you.

Can a Diploma guarantee you that you will become an outstanding teacher?

There is absolutely no course in the world that can guarantee you will become a truly outstanding teacher, but having a DELTA ensures that you will be given the tools and knowledge which will help you achieve this goal.
It is no surprise that in order to become a teacher trainer, a qualification such as the Cambridge DELTA is considered an absolute must! For example, you cannot even be considered as a prospective tutor on courses such as the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA), unless you have the DELTA Diploma yourself. This is, in fact, a very fair requirement, as a course like the DELTA guarantees that you will have observed and been observed teaching and that you will have learnt how to analyse teaching and reflect on your own classroom practice.

So where can you do an advanced methodology course?

The number of centres offering the Cambridge DELTA around the world is significantly lower than those offering introductory-level CELTA courses, and with very good reason: to become a DELTA tutor you need further qualifications, such as postgraduate degrees in TEFL, TESOL or Applied Linguistics and the ability to plan and implement course syllabuses which will bring your candidates to a successful result, a task which is much more demanding than that of a CELTA course designer or tutor.
When selecting a centre, it is important to make sure that:

• the centre itself has been established for a long time and can guarantee you quality in tutorial input and support.
• the centre is well networked with educators and institutions around the world, an absolute necessity if you are to pursue a career which, nowadays, is very much based on networking and connecting.
• the centre integrates technology into its programme, so that it can offer trainees excellent support systems.
• the centre has an up-to-date ELT methodology library as well as electronic and online resources that are available 24/7
• last but not least, the centre tutors are highly qualified and experienced in teaching and assessing such demanding courses

Are you ready to go beyond your comfort zone?

The best time to follow any teacher development programme is not when you are pushed by a higher authority, but when you yourself feel ready to question your current practices, to develop as a professional, to take your career to a different level. An advanced methodology programme, such as the DELTA, will give you the chance to lift off your teaching to a different level and to acquire a depth of understanding of the principles involved in ELT practice. The best time, then, is when you feel ready to become the best teacher that you can be.

And this time could well be now!

This post first appeared in the City & Guild’s Newsletter “Lion’s Voice”  Issue 6, January 2011.

Reading is a highly complex activity and, yet, in the foreign language classroom, it is often approached as if texts are just collections of words and grammatical patterns which students, if only they could analyse and decipher them, would be able to arrive at the overall meaning of the text.

But, is this what happens when we read in the world outside the classroom? Wouldn’t it take forever to read anything if that is what we did?

When we read (think about you, reading these lines) we engage in a series of decisions,  interpretations and reinterpretations of the stream of text we are involved in processing but, do we do this merely at word and phrase or sentence level?

In this post, I would like to highlight the role of previous knowledge in interpreting textual meaning and have my readers think how they could translate this into best classroom practices in teaching their learners to be effective readers.

The diagram below shows two things:

1) the types of knowledge readers make use of in order to understand a text, beginning with what they already know about the subject, of similar texts, of type of publication and specific reason for which something was written as well as linguistic knowledge they possess.

2) the order in which this prior knowledge is put into use, with linguistic knowledge put to use last rather than first, in other words, processing is effected from the top-down rather than from the bottom-up, with bottom-up exploration coming into play when the reader encounters difficulties interpreting/understanding part of a text.

This is what we do as readers in the real world – in which we are not only accomplished in the language in which the text is written but, moreover, we have both reason and desire to read.

Language learners who are not accomplished readers, will, unless trained by their teachers, usually begin processing at word and sentence level, in effect trying to arrive at the overall meaning by first understanding all the small and local nuts and bolts of each text. This makes for slow, laborious and unmotivated reading.

Here is a diagram which represents the levels and types of knowledge we use to achieve understanding of a text.

Adaptation of a chart created by Anderson, A. & Lynch, T. 1988, Listening, OUP (p.13)

The diagram I have adapted from the original by A.Anderson & T.Lynch (1988) is an attempt to make a case for engaging our learners in activities prior to reading which will activate schematic/background knowledge, and will bring contextual knowledge into play as further ammunition for help in interpreting – thus, it is hoped that our learners will learn to make use of top-down processing;  bottom-up processing will be put into effect when they encounter meaning difficulties, when there is a need for reading between the lines, for text interpretation at a deeper level or for identification and recognition of language features which we wish to have them notice and be aware of.

Activating Prior Knowledge – Advance Organisers

“If I had to  reduce all educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly”

Ausubel, D. P. (1960). The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51, 267-272.

This is something I read only very recently, but it rang a variety of bells which first started ringing when I studied psycholonguistics at university and first heard this term in relation to the processing of discourse (whether spoken or written). I am going to try and make a connection between the concept of advance organisers which D.P. Ausubel introduced to the idea of facilitating learning by activating previous knowledge and top-down processing which is perhaps more familiar to foreign language teachers.

Graphic Organisers

A typical example of an advance organiser or sometimes called graphic organisers, would probably be some type of diagram which the learners would be involved in actively completing prior to reading a text  You can view more examples here and here

In ELT terminology, graphic organisers go by the name of “information transfer‘, a term first coined by H.G.Widdowson (1979) who identified them as excellent bridges between what he called ‘comprehension’ and ‘composition’, in other words, receptive understanding and productive skills work, speaking or writing.

Widdowson doesn’t describe exactly the same use of information transfer as I am suggesting here; but I see no reason why his ideas should not be combined with the concept of advance organising, tuning in the learners’ mind into a topic by drawing on available knowledge, not only of facts and information but of language as well – something which is of great interest to the language teacher.

Understanding the relationship between information transfer and different genres is a really useful idea, as different types of diagrams suit different text types, for example, a flowchart diagram will usually be appropriate if a text has sequential information – narrative, instructions, a process description.

Here is an example I have used with a newspaper article with the following title:

Husband tried to kill his wife 7 times

© Marisa Constantinides 2002

After a brief lead in in which the students look at the headline and see that the husband’s attempts were unsuccessful, the table above gets them to think and predict what different methods he may have tried to use and possible reasons why he may have failed; this aims to activate prior knowledge of such events, as well as related linguistic knowledge; it aims to stimulate curiosity by personally investing in this type of guesswork. By the time the students are allowed to read the text, they are really just checking to see if their guesses were the right ones.  The same diagram is used for checking up with the text ( diagram as bridge). Later, if you like and are so inclined (:-) ) you can get them to use the same diagram to invent a fictitious failed criminal who failed to rob a bank 7 times or something similar.

(If you are curious and want to have a look at the text, please go to my Materials & Downloads page and you will find it in the folder called SEETA Reading Course)

The most popular and simple graphic organiser which is used by many educators (not only ELT teachers) looks like this and it is easy to put up on a board, on a google document or even a Wallwisher!

Mind maps are also a great ways of connecting ideas and because they can be expanded and added to very easily, with the additional benefit of appearing to resemble the way our brain organises information, making connections and subconnections and creating associations. Mindmaps can be created by Ss by using large sheets of paper or, online, there are many website which offer free applications – here is an example using Mindomo

This example of a mindmap explains the uses of mindmaps and includes a great number of ideas useful to teachers.

How to use mindmaps @Paul Foreman http://www.mindmapping.com/

Cues or Prompts

I am using the term here in a different sense to how it is used in audionlingualism, in which the teacher supplies a verbal or non-verbal prompt for a student to reproduce a language pattern.

Cues or prompts in pre-reading activities may also be verbal or non-verbal but their purpose is to generate anticipation and predictions related to a text the learner are about to read. They can be simple or complex; for example, a series of controversial statements which the students must discuss before they read a text is still a prompt, albeit a more complex one.

Here is an example of such a prompt I have used to generate predictions related to a story the learners are about to read.

Questions Please Activity Based on these Prompts

A list of key words or key phrases may also act as a prompt; the learners can use these to guess the topic or they can be asked to choose which ones might be expected to be included in a text with a specific title or headline. In the case of working with a whole book, the size or amount of text may vary and it may include predictions about plot, character, themes and settings.

Questions

The concept of questions to elicit prior knowledge and generate predictions is a familiar one, in which the teacher may lead the learners into thinking about a topic by asking a variety of questions. This type of lead in is just one of the many available but, in reality, most often used because it requires minimal materials preparation.

Again, more often than not, this type of dialogic model tends to place the teacher at the centreand may  generate more teacher talk –  your choice to follow or not.  A teacher can avoid this by writing up the questions on the board and asking learners to discuss in pairs or by assigning one or two questions per pair or group to discuss and present to the rest of the class.

The Q & A format could be seen to exist in advance organisers as well; a heading in a table or graph is, in a fact a question, isn’t it?  The only difference being the format.

I personally tend to prefer questions asked by the learners themselves.

For the learners to ask their own questions about a text they are going to read, they may need one or more prompts. for example the prompt example above can be used by the class/groups to ask the teacher questions about the narrative, but only Yes or No questions – than, based on the teacher’s answers, they can be invited to try and construct the text from the answers and the prompts before they read it.

Or, they can be shown the “husband tried to kill wife 7 times’ headline and be asked to brainstorm as many questions as they think/hope the article will answer to satisfy their curiosity . The questions can be shared by all or not but the learners are then asked to read with their own questions in mind – not the teacher’s or the book’s.

Final Thoughts

I have been trying to argue the case for creating a range of activities which will

• engage the learners prior to reading a text
• prime them and motivate them to read
• promote top-down processing of the written text
• create a bridge to later stages in the lesson
• increase flow/task accountability from stage to stage
• lead to focused and purposeful reading
• provide a stimulus for follow up productive skills work.

Advance organisers can be great tools for this, but stimulating learner curiosity, excitement and motivation to read can be further enhanced by other cues/prompts and types of questioning. So, combining, mixing and matching for text, diagramatic display, sound and visual stimulation can work even better and stimulate different learners in different ways.

Diagrams (or information transfer or graphic organisers … )  have additional value however.

Their added value to other types of  priming activity is their ability to demonstrate logical links between ideas or hierarchical relationships. Once comprehension of a text has been achieved, the text can be taken away from the learners but the diagram remains available as a prompt which can generate further oral or written work.

Related Reading

Book

Widdowson, H.G., 1979, Explorations in Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press (pp. 73-74)

*You can download this book freely from the publisher’s website

Articles & weblinks

1. Graphic Organizers lists a nice range which is also related to discourse type
2. Graphic Organizers and Implications for Universal Design for Learning: Curriculum Enhancement Report
3. Cues, Questions & Advance Organizers some key research findings in summary
4. http://www.gliffy.com/ you can make a variety of diagrams online for free
5. http://creately.com/ (as for 4)
6. Larry Ferlazzo’s listing of mindmapping and flowchart tools
7. Shelly Terrell ‘s recording of awebinar on graphic organisers here!
8. Mindmapping tools on the web: Edraw Mind Mapping Mindomo (free) and Tony Buzan’s software (

A hard choice since I follow so many great bloggers – but a choice had to be made and here are my nominations for the Edublog Awards 2010

• Best individual blog Scott Thornbury’ Blog An A-Z of ELT for generating some of the richest and greatest discussions in the blogosphere and for changing the role of blogs into a shared exchange of ideas on teaching and learning.
• Best individual tweeter I am going to nominate someone whose tweets I always look forward to and who always shares valuable resources, a great smile and her amazing voice when the opportunity arises! That person is Sue Lyon Jones or @esolcourses – http://twitter.com/esolcourses on Twitter.
• Best group blog This year, I would like to nominate Digital Play, a great blog written by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer. I am not very good at most of the games they highlight, but I find their lesson plans and ideas absolutely fabulous!!! The pedagody behind them is very strong and, well, I think it’s just a great resource.
• Best new blog Emma Herrod‘s new blog fits the bill of best new kid on the block for me.. It’s got a great look and great posts and an attitude all its own
• Best resource sharing blog Robert Byrne’s Free Technology for Teachers is my choice this year – there is so much to learn from this blog I just don’t have enough hours in the day to go through it all
• Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion #ELTchat
• Best teacher blog A prolific blogger I admire very much; he is not afraid to have his say and he shares great ideas and free materials. That is Jason Renshaw and his English Raven Blog
• Best educational tech support blog This one must go (as far as I am concerned) to Nik Peachey and his great blogs: I will choose his Learning Technology Blog
• Best educational use of audio For this category I shall choose the great podcasts produced by Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab a great collection of lessons easy to use and divided by level – I suggest it to all my trainees
• Best educational use of video / visual Teacher Training Videos created by Russell Stannard for all the great videos he shares and the free tutorials which make difficult tools look very easy
• Best educational wiki http://biz-e-tech-training.pbworks.com/w/page/5929154/FrontPage maintained by members of BESIG and, notably, Carl Dowse. It’s a great resource for BE and not only!
• Best educational podcast #ELTchat podcasts every week published on http://eltchat.com/
• Best educational webinar series The 3rd Virtual Round Table is the best collection of webinar series and it’s a great and joyous event shared by many educators – thanks to Heike Philps and all the co-roganizers.
• Best educational use of a social network EFL Classroom 2.o must be one of the richest and friendliest to teachers nings for communicating and resource sharing – thanks to David Deublebeiss
• Best educational use of a virtual world SLanguages 2010 is a great annual virtual conference in Second Life and this year it was carried off with great finesse and featured some excellent talks and experiences of learning languages in a Virtual World
• Lifetime achievement David Crystal who blogs at DCBLOG and who always makes me think about language in a new way; his writings clarify and his thinking is always fresh and unbiased by academia, although I consider him one of the top scholars of our time.

Best of luck to all my nominees !

CCQ’s in the TEFL jargon which we all love to use are those questions which you need to ask right after you have taught something, be it a grammar point of a functional exponent, and they are also the questions you need to ask right after you have explained an activity to your class which you think may need clarification.

Generations of my CELTA, TEFL and DELTA trainees have agonized over their CCQ’s and this is a short article to help them as I have not found much written on them in the standard methodology texts which I recommend.

Souree: Microsoft Clip Art

Imagine you have just presented the following words using the techniques listed next to each one.

1. thumb you  put up and then pointed to your thumb

2. pet you pointed to a magazine picture of a dog

3. starving you rubbed your stomach and pointed to your mouth

Now, how can this be misunderstood you might ask? Well, in several ways and here are some: ‘thumb’ may be taken to mean ‘any finger‘ (or even “hitch-hike‘!), ‘pet’, the particular dog breed in your picture and ‘starving’ may be understood to mean  ’I have stomach-ache‘ or even ‘I’m feeling sick‘. Not all your students, I hasten to say, will have necessarily misunderstood, and, if so, not all in the same way! There are infinite possibilities for all sorts of levels and kinds of misunderstanding.

What is the most popular way of making sure students have understood?

Yes, you have guessed it : ‘Do you understand?‘  or ‘Have you understood?‘ or ‘Is this clear?’ and all its possible permutations, down to “OK”?

And what is the usual answer we get to such questions? Of course, it is a ‘Yes’ in most cases! For one thing, most students either like their teachers and do not want to hurt their feelings by implying that their explanations were not clear.

Others fear their teachers and hesitate to commit themselves like this, and still others are afraid of the ridicule of their fellow students. Confronted with a publicly addressed question of this type, most people are unwilling to admit lack of comprehension.

Think of yourself in a similar situation. You are attending a lecture or seminar and the speaker is making a point totally beyond your grasp. How many times have you boldly put up your hand and – faced by all your colleagues – honestly admitted to your lack of comprehension?

I, for one, very rarely. If someone else has the courage to do it, I’ll nod as well and murmur my agreement, but, like most people, I assume it was my fault. Naturally, I don’t want others to know I am not as clever as they are! In the language classroom, however, it is our business and our job to check this and should not rely on the boldness of one or two students.

And if I Translate?

Many teachers feel you can’t go wrong when you provide the mother tongue equivalent. The word or phrase, however, may involve an idea, a concept, a behaviour, or even a value which may be alien to our learners even in their own native language, either because they are too young, or their language does not express the notion in the same way, or for cultural reasons.

One of our trainees recently tried to teach the concept of a ‘celebrity interview’ to our refugee beginners from Afghanistan and even tried to find the words in Farsi through an oline dictionary. This met with little success as, apparently, there are no life style magazines which publish that sort of thing in their country, something which the authors of Headway Beginner did not perhaps anticipate.

Concept Checking Questions (or CCQ’s)

These questions which teachers will ask to find out how much their learners have understood. They are designed to demonstrate evidence of or lack of understanding and they are usually very simple and carefully staged.  For example, to return to my original teaching examples you might ask the following:

• thumb  - The teacher asks the class to show their thumbs. Then s/he points to any other finger (or toe!) and asks if that is a thumb
• pet – The teacher asks: Is a cat a pet? A dog? A cow? Where do we keep them? Can they live in the jungle? Do they hunt for their food?  Who feeds them?  Are they usually working animals?  Which animals in this picture are pets?
• starving – The teacher may ask: Do I need to eat or drink? Do I need any medicine/pills? Have eaten some bad food? Am I hungry or sick? Am I just hungry or very very hungry? How long ago did I eat?

In all of the above cases, the teacher has to make a decision whether or not to re-explain or to start from scratch, or to take remedial action of another type. These are decisions that depend very much on the aims of the lesson or activity and the purpose of the checking of understanding itself.

Checking understanding and checking the state of learning enables the teacher not only to assess whether the students have understood and/or can use the language she wanted to present, but also helps smooth out points of confusion either in terms of the learning material or the activities or tasks she engages her learners in. She also develops as a teacher by noticing what works or does not work in the classroom.

Should CCQ’s be just questions?

Although they are called questions, they don’t have to be. They can be true and false statements, they can be incomplete sentences, they can be questions with a binary choice to help learners or they can be non-verbal ways of checking – in fact, teachers can use any and all the methods they use for the presentation vocabulary or grammar in order to check its understanding, and this includes

• pictures (Which one shows the word?),
• time lines (Which time line fits this sentence?),
• physical activity like miming or demonstrating,
• opposites,
• synonyms,
• definitions,
•  examples,
• explanations,
• and even asking for a translation in the mother tongue or
• asking the learners to say which translation is the most appropriate.

Should CCQ’s be used just for concepts in grammar and vocabulary?

Lack of understanding may involve all the parameters of what knowing a word, phrase, or pattern entails, and this includes form, meaning, function, tenor, pronunciation, collocation, syntax, spelling, word field etc.

And how do we create good CCQ’s?

Usually, the best approach is to follow these three simple steps:

1. Think of the underlying propositions
2. List these propositions
3. Turn the propositions into a series of simple questions

By underlying propositions, I mean the concepts or notions within words, phrases, sentence patterns

An example of a lexical item

thumb

- one of the fingers

- part of the hand

- not part of a foot

An example of a pattern

You should have told me!

- you didn’t tell me

- I am angry

- it was your job to tell me

- now it’s too late

- I missed something because of this

- I am protesting

- I am being critical

- My intonation shows I am upset

- we are friends

- we are peers

- I can talk to you like this

Good concept questions are not easy to write – they require a depth of analytical as well as intuitive understanding of what we are trying to check and not just what the grammar book says. Some of you may even have spotted the links to componential analysis which good CCQ design entails.

And finally, good concept questions, especially for patterns of language, should never include the pattern we are trying to check!!!

Can you think why?

kapitzvirt

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