This post was originally written in 2009 on this blog which was very very new and had very few readers.

I have updated it with two videos of a Pecha Kucha which was inspired by it and you will find them at the end of the post. Both post & original talk and PK’s are spoof, delivered tongue in cheek and I particularly enjoyed doing them. I hope you will find some use for them. 

This short post includes my notes from a presentation I did some years ago at a  conference for Foreign Language School Owners in Greece where I was specifically asked to present a workshop on good classroom management.

At that time, I had been training a group of  directors of studies and had used  Gilbert’s (1978) excellent “Behavior Model for Creating Incompetence” . You will find this on page 87.

This inspired me to use Gilbert’s model, in some cases with phrases lifted right off his table (p.87) and in many cases, adding my own ideas to categories of teacher behaviours typically associated with good classroom management.

The idea generated this worksheet. The participants were, at some point during my workshop, involved in commenting on the statements below and, of course, turning them into positive, empowering teacher behaviours.

Handout given to participants:

Rapport –  classroom atmosphere

• Scowl and frown as often as possible – this should make you look serious and busy
• Never smile or show warmth – familiarity breeds discontempt
• Encouraging smiles are for young classes – adult classes don’t need such nonsense
• Avoid jokes and humour – the classroom is a place for work
• Create an atmosphere of high anxiety
• Threaten students with spot tests and low performance ratings as often as you can

 Setting up activities: guidelines to students

• Make your guidelines as confusing as you can
• Never check to see whether your students have understood your instructions
• Don’t bother to help or support students or groups who are lost
• Avoid explaining the purposes of activities – you were not meant to give your students free teacher training!!
• Give them as little guidance as possible and only if pushed against the wall
• Never show them how to perform well
• Hide what is expected of your students as much as possible
• Never tell them what you expect them to do in case they might get smart

Student Groupings

• Don’t mix or match groups according to levels of ability or personality
• Make sure the loudest, most domineering students are working with the shyest ones
• Never allocate tasks in group work – your students should already know how to work in a team

Training your learners

• Leave training to chance – you are there only to explain grammar & vocabulary
• Your students should already know how to participate in class activities – so they are OK
• If you decide – against all good judgement – to do some learner training, make it unnecessarily difficult
• In that case, also make training irrelevant to your students’ needs and objectives
• Never give your students choice – this means you might have to do more work
• Design activities and materials without ever consulting with your learners
• Schedule difficult activities for times when your learners are not at their sharpest
• Avoid using activities that your learners could find motivating or pleasant

Teacher’s Position and Movement

• Always remain seated behind your desk – learners must know where to find you
• When you do move, pounce! This should keep them on their toes…
• When the students are working in groups, butt in and participate
• In fact, that is an excellent time to tell them some choice episodes from you personal life

Eye Contact & Attention Spread

• Avoid looking at all the students; too much eye contact breeds familiarity
• You should only look at your favourite students – ignore everyone else
• When a student is talking, do something useful, e.g. write on the board
• Always ask your best students – ignore the rest
• Ask your weaker students questions you know they could never answer
• When a weaker student is talking, remember to glare and show disapproval

Your Language  & Using your Voice

• Treat your learners as if they were five year olds – talk to them simply and very loudly
• Call them ‘children’ as often as possible – establish your authority
• Being polite is not in your job description – you need to assert yourself over them
• Avoid using simple language everyone can understand – show off your knowledge of terminology
• The more abstruse and vague you are, the more respect you will inspire

Giving Students Feedback

• Give your students misleading information about their overall performance
• Never let your students know how well they are performing
• If anyone makes a mistake, do not neglect to comment on their low IQ
• Name students who made serious mistakes and laugh at them to motivate them to study
• Correct everything – preferably while a student is talking, for a lasting effect
• Never correct any of your favourite students – praise them warmly instead
• Make sure that poor performers get the same marks as good performers
• See to it that good performance gets punished in some way

©Marisa Constantinides – CELT Athens – 2000

Pecha Kucha Inspired by this Handout

A Pecha Kucha delivered at the 2nd ISTEK International Conference in 2011. Much of what is in this PK first originated in the handout above. This one was done in front of a live audience.

The same PK delivered online during the 4th Virtual Round Tempel Conference in 2011. 

Reference

Gilbert, T. (1978) Human Competence – Engineering Worthy Performance, A Publication of the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Below you can find a useful Knol

World Class Advice on Managing and Motivating People – Wisdom from psychologist and “performance engineer” Thomas F. Gilbert Written by Joseph Boyett, author The Guru Guide

Postscripts

1. Please feel free to use this as a handout for your workshops or discuss during teachers’ meetings on the subject.
2. Finally, someone who has recognised, applauded and wrote a follow up post to highlight my words of infinite wisdom…. A Model for Classroom Incompetence by TEFL Tradesman – what other laurels would I need? Edublog awards, eat your heart out!

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Many teachers who have had the opportunity to read discourse analysis either at University or on a PD course such as the Cambridge DELTA,  express great interest in this way of studying connected text or talk, but just as many find it  hard to incorporate it into their teaching; apart from an occasional lesson focusing on cohesive devices, referents or discourse markers, I must admit I have not seen much by way of other important concepts in discourse, especially related to the study of conversation analysis, an area which should be of intense interest to anyone teaching spoken English.

In most needs driven courses nowadays, there will be some components responding to the need of learners to acquire sociolinguistic competence and the wise ESP teacher will have phrases and functional listings, plus activities to get the studetnts to do things with this language – ranking, labelling, matching, analysing, using, etc…

But still some learners sound aggresive and abrupt in their interactions, and not only because of the intonation.

Politeness Principles Across Cultures

From http://www.infobarrel.com/Media/The_Art_of_Politeness

Being polite may differ from culture to culture – there are linguistic and paralinguistic means of conveying politeness, distance and respect which do not hold true in every language.

Take the classic French tu-vous distinction – the same exists in Greek – εσύ-εσείς – and using this plural of respect and distance makes politeness easier to spot. For learners coming from such languages, the absence of this in English is rather unsettling and difficult to replace with other linguistic tools

Another example is the highly frequent use of please in English and many other languages. In Greek, this is not used very often but informal requests tend to incorporate this ‘please’ function via the use of the noun dminutive -ακι as well as a more pleading and intimate intonation while making, say, a request. A Greek learner translating this into English will generally use the imperative, oblivious to the need to replace his/her own politeness indicators with their English equivalent.

No wonder  Japanese businessmen are reported to think that Greek businessmen are very aggressive during business negotiations (Ron White, in a talk he delivered some years ago for TESOL Greece).

Grice’s Principle of Cooperation and its Four Maxims 

In Foreign Language classroom,  teachers tend to correct  mostly for errors of grammar, or inaccuracies in functional exponents. Teachers will also respond to errors of pronunciation of individual words or sound clusters and errors of vocabulary. This is expected and highly useful for the learner.

What I do not often see offered as feedback to adult learners in collaborative activities is correction related to whether and to what degree the learners

• sounded polite
• took their turn at the right time
• produced just the right amount of talk, no more, no less, just what was necessary to carry on and promote the discussion/ develop the topic
• used appropriate intonation
• stressed the right word in each phrase to convey the central focus of their message – i.e. new information
• showed appreciation for others’ contributions
• were respectful of others’ opinions even though they may have differed from their own
• avoided interrupting others unless absolutely necessary &  then apologised for doing so
• used language which was of the right tenor for the roles, relationships, relative statuses and genre
• sounded properly tentative in their pronouncements and not overbearing or opinionated

Are these rules the same worldwide?

In the boardrooms of the world, different rules will abide and different cultures, microclimates and conventions. How quickly you can reduce distance and converse in a more intimate and familiar way will be very different in a boardroom in the US from, say, a boardroom in an Arab country, or in Japan…

There are many who argue that Grice’s Maxim’s and G Leech’s or Brown & Levinson’s or Lakoff’s politeness principles are not universal, and that following them promotes an Anglo-Saxon oriented interaction culture ( I presume this bothers them for reasons of linguistic imperialism, perhaps), and, therefore, feel it is not really necessary to introduce them into a programme.

From http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/f/forced_politeness.asp

There is, of course,  truth in the non-universality of tones and politeness rules. What sounds polite in English may sound  gruff in some cultures and what sounds polite in another country, may sound cloying, or even ingratiating in English, no question.

But in most cases, our adult learners are not aware of these perceptions of them formed by others.

They are not aware of the fact that their professional or academic persona which comes across just as it should in their native language, can be distorted beyond recognition in the foreign language projecting an image of themselves which would appall and horrify them, if they knew.

Should they not know or should they be left to discover this the hard way?

And should this concern just Business English teachers?

The impressions and judgements of the non-teacher native English user are often formed by linguistic manners, not by linguistic accuracy.

I, for example, get really annoyed when a trainee teacher  says “Where’s my handout? You haven’t given me one!”  when I sometimes inadverently skip one of them in sharing out stuff. I never say anything because it’s not the right time to call them up on their linguistic manners but I do get a message which travels not to my intellect but to my solar plexus or somewhere near there, where I think is the seat of my emotional reactions

But being a teacher makes me much more tolerant and understanding. I know that if this trainee were to be speaking to me in Greek, s/he would be using the plural of politeness/respect. In English, it sounds too direct and confrontational but  I understand and do not ‘pounce’ on the erring (according to me, always) producer of this particular utterance – I am even more tolerant in the case of foreign language learners at lower levels.

Being tolerant, patient and understanding of the learning effort, of  lack of knowledge, is one thing. Leaving your learners in the dark is another.

For me, the non-universality argument is food for the complacent, the “I-can’t-be-bothered” type of teacher. Sometimes, it’s even further reinforced by arguments such as, “It’s not my job to teach them manners. They’re adults, they should know”.

For the Business English student, this is, indeed, important information. Careers can be unmade because of such linguistic faux pax.

But it’s not just in business that you need to be aware of politeness rules.

I do think it’s our job to let people know what they sound like when interacting in English and what impressions they may create.

If the learners decide they do not wish to change, as some do, out of a particular kind of ethnic pride, that is just fine, too. It’s their decision, not ours.

How can we incorporate this type of work into speaking activities/practice?

Well, I have already mentioned one of the obvious times in a lesson: feedback after speaking activities, for example, by setting up and giving students lists of criteria and getting them to evaluate peers and self as to whether they did well or not in terms of each category.

But there should be opportunities for presentation or noticing work, too, by analysing spoken samples, by looking at videos of board meetings, by reading conversational transcripts with a particular focus on aspects of discourse, for example, lexical cohesion in a text, or on knowledge speakers take for granted when they are saying something, etc.

And of course, focusing of producing speech, for example, by introducing role activities where some people will be told to be rude and others extremely polite, by cueing the politeness principles in discussions through giving each participant a particular prompt, e.g. “Before your response, summarise the previous speaker’s point and make a flattering comment”, or some such (if this one not to your liking) cues or prompts that regulate the manner and not the content of the discourse.

A story

Some years ago, we were approached by a young executive in a well-known pharmaceutical company who wanted to have one-to-one lessons because he was soon to be transferred to a higher position in a different country and wanted to improve his English as much as he could in the short time available to him before his transfer.

Two weeks into his course, his teacher (a young native speaker teacher fresh out of her DELTA course) came to me and announced that she could not stand this student any longer and could I find him a different tutor?  ”He’s really very rude!!!” she said. “I cannot deal with him at all!”

I told her that I would give him a couple of tutorials to identify the problems and we would then decide how to proceed.

The teacher was right. While speaking to me in Greek, the young gentleman was charm personified, but in English, he turned into someone who really got on one’s nerves.

In his case, and because I could not take on the 1-2-1 course myself, I decided that we needed to confront the problem head on with some explicit instruction first and some contextualised practice later.

Materials Used

As his issues had to do with intonation, nuclear stress and discourse politeness rules, I only did some work on those areas and to be honest I could not think of any better material than what I was already using for my trainee teachers. The student was intrigued and fascinated by this ‘different’, as he called it, material, but he was highly motivated and keen to improve.

In two weeks, the student was fully aware of his main issues – as we also talked about how Greeks tend to express themselves and he did recognise himself in some of my descriptions.

His progress was fantastic.

Of course, he began by using this knowledge in a deliberate and rehearsed way before each thing he said (in other words, it had not become an automatic decision for him as yet) but I was thrilled when, one day, I heard him say in answer to a point I had just made during a problem solving task/discussion in which I was partnering with him

“Your viewpoint is very interesting, Ms Constantinides”, and in an ‘aside’ he added: “I’ve just made you feel good, but now I ‘m going to disagree with you!”

I returned him to his teacher two weeks later and, apparently all was plain sailing from then on.

Teacher Language Awareness & Discourse Analysis 

For me, it goes without saying, that the study of discourse is essential on any teacher development programme. How can teachers introduce it to their learners if they themselves do not have that type of awareness?

Discourse (spoken and written) is an important component of our English for Teachers course as well – right in the heart of their systemic competence, along with Grammar, Syntax, Phonology and the study of Meaning.

The methods we use to introduce this area of systemic knowledge do not have to be laborious and complicated. For example, the video clip below, is excellent as an introduction for the study of the topic of coherence in spoken and language and important related concepts.

Games of various kinds can be used as well – for example to introduce cohesion, I have sometimes used cards with some famous pick up lines split in two halves. The students have to mingle and find the other half, then we discuss what aspects of language led them to find that half. I like this one because the lines make the students laugh at how silly they are. Different ‘adjacent pairs”  can be used for different courses with a general of Business English focus.

Final Comments

Learning about politeness rules in spoken communication, presupposes the use of samples of language which are embedded in a context of use, preferably authentic. This does not necessarily entail long and difficult stretches of language, so the earlier we begin, the better.

I used some Wikipedia entries to link to definitions of terms used in this article but there are many very good books on the subject and if you have any further ideas to add, either about how you teach different aspects of discourse, or interesting texts and articles, I would appreciate it if you left a comment.

Some Books on Discourse Analysis

Brown, G., & Yule, G., 1983, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press

Johnstone, B., 2003, Discourse Analysis, Blackwell

McCarthy, M. 1991, Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge University Press

Partridge, B., 2006, Discourse Analysis – an Introduction,  Continuum International

Thornbury, S., 2005, Beyond the Sentence, Macmillan Education

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I still remember how much I enjoyed being nominated for some of the awards as a new blogger and tweeter in 2009 and how much this encouraged me to keep blogging and to try to keep getting better.

Some people may still think these nominations have no value – well, they do; it’s our colleagues giving us a little bit of praise and encouragement to keep sharing and  pursuing learning through blogging.

So, I will keep up with this good tradition and here are my nominations for 2011

Am taking up  Adam Simpson’s challenge, well, not really a challenge, more like an invitation but such a nice way to look back at what I have blogged about this year.  Adam said, “Choose the best 11” but I must confess I don’t write as many posts as all that. Some people seem to be able to churn them out every day, some even twice or three times a day! Pas moi! 

During July and August when I was training on two different intensive courses
ended up with very little by way of blogging but made up for it later. Anyway, here go my top posts for 2011.

#ELTchat – 99,052 Tweets and counting!

January 29th, 2011

It was quite fitting that I should set off with a post on #ELTchat. I love this weekly chat with teachers from around the world and that is one of my real favourites this year, a celebration of sharing and PLN’s. 

Advance Organisers – How they Connect the Reading Experience

February 28th, 2011 

I wrote this post while I was teaching on the same SEETA course and I really think this is one of my best so far – well, with the exception of the section on mindmaps which needs a little tweak here and there. I also reminds me of what a great course to run that was; my first Moodle course as an instructor in which I learned as much about moodling as my ‘trainees’ learnt about challenging their learners in reading lessons. 

Are you ready to go beyond your comfort zone?

March 22nd, 2011 

I have been a DELTA trainer for longer than I can remember (no, this is not actually true) and I think this is a great course to follow for an experienced teacher who is ready to go beyond PPP. I really enjoyed writing this and had a request to post it on the Cambridge ESOL website as well! 

Reporting after IATEFL Brighton

April 26th, 2011

I had every good intention of writing these well informed reports about the sessions I went to at  IATEFL Brighton, but somehow the conference itself took over and living the experience became more important than reporting it! Experiencing a conference of this magnitude takes a lot of energy! Running from session to session, stopping for [...] 

This post was another celebration of my great PLN and a precursor to my later post about TESOL France. 

Another Dogme Lesson

April 8th, 2011

This post is written in response and as part of a twitter conversation with Martin Sketchley – @ELTexperiences on Twitter. His blog post on his own Dogme observed lesson can be found at the end of this post. In the days before writing his experimental asignment for the DELTA course, Jonathan – my trainee of [...] 

It was great to support Jonathan in this DELTA experimental assignment and so exciting to have Scott produce a video to help him. This would just not have been possible even two years ago!!! I love it! 

From Critical Pedagogy to Disabled Pedagogy

May 18th, 2011

Luke Prodromou was the first guest writer on my blog, ever! And what a post he
produced to launch the Disabled Access Blog Challenge to generate awareness in
ELT Teachers about this subject!

Survey on the use of Social Networks for Foreign Language Teachers

August 6th, 2011

Dear PLN, Many of you are aware that since earlier this year,  I have been involved in an EU funded project – aPLaNet – whose aim is to help Foreign Language Teachers develop and maintain their own PLN in an autonomous way. Creating one’s PLN takes time, effort and commitment,  and those of you reading
[...] 

This was not really a blog post but putting it up on my blog encouraged a lot of
teachers to respond and I was very happy about that. Plus, I worked very hard to
produce that survey! 

Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat!

September 24th, 2011

Happy Birthday #ELTchat and all #ELTchat followers! It’s been an amazing year and I am very proud and grateful to have been a part of this! I look forward to many more birthdays and many more new directions that this great PLN will take me to! Thank to all who follow and make my Wednesdays [...]

What a great week that was!! And the celebrations in Second Life were great!!!

Going to Conferences, Connecting with Fellow Teachers – #TESOL France

 November 14th, 2011

My online life has become a source of continuous Professional Development and constant contact with my Personal Learning Network (PLN), which includes inspired and inspiring educators from all over the world. I talk to them on Twitter and Facebook every day. We hold organised discussions on Twitter every Wednesday. But meeting with them in [...]

I do go on a lot about PLN’s, don’t I? But I happen to have a great one and I can’t stop smiling whenever I meet them  

A Little & Often: Integrating Technology on Teacher Development Courses

November 21st, 2011

A few months ago (April-June 2011*)  I wrote a report on a survey on the use of technology amongst CELTA tutors. The results were rather disheartening and the
prevailing attitudes among many of my respondents ranged from the completely  negative (“It is not our job/place to introduce technology on CELTA courses; there are more important [...]

Using educational technology is one of the topics I talk about with my colleagues every day of the week – mostly on twitter, but blogs, too. It’s inevitable that I would be reporting on my successes and failures using edtech on my teacher training courses.

Embedding Creating Thinking Skills Training into our EFL Practice

November 27th, 2011

Creative teaching and learning is a topic dear to my heart and one that I have embedded very deeply into the design of all my training courses. If you would like to read the post related to teacher development, please click here, though that is not a post I wrote in 2011!

I updated this post with videos from my talk at Harrogate and shared again so
that was my most recent fave post in November.

So what does this selection say about my blogging style? Any comments?

And just in case you have been wondering why blog at all, here is a post I put up on a new blog I was trying out while I was following the EVO  course ‘Becoming a Webhead”

Why do I blog?

Post Script 

Meet these bloggers and their picks – some will be familiar, some new – a worthy read.

Adam Simpson - 11 from ’11: The best of your posts from this year (blog challenge) Adam started this challenge and what a good idea that was!

Tara Benwell – 11 from ’11 published the best 11 from the challenges she has given her learners – truly worth looking at her work with learners within a social network.

Dave Dodgson – 11 from ’11 (Almost a year in the life of my blog)  an En English teacher in Turkey and his first year of blogging – you could be on my list next year if you start now!

Tyson Sebunt  –  11 from ’11 a collegue teacher and teacher educator fron Canada with great style

Sharon Turner – SHHH it’s a Secret!!! a blogger I am getting to know and you should, too

Tamas Lorincz -  11 from ’11 I haven’t written  where Tamas writes about the 11 posts he should have written but didn’t because…well, read his blog post to find out!

,,,

Happy Birthday #ELTchat and all #ELTchat followers!

Free ClipArt from Microsoft

It’s been an amazing year and I am very proud and grateful to have been a part of this!

I look forward to many more birthdays and many more new directions that this great PLN will take me to!

Thank to all who follow and make my Wednesdays so charged with energy, revitalize my training and put me in touch with so many amazing educators!

What we have accomplished in this first year of #ELTchats! 

In this first year, we can boast about a few things and work harder to do more!

• More than 100,000 tweets have appeared with the #ELTchat hastag, many of them posted outside #ELTchat times !
• The widespread use of the hashtag for all important updates related goes to show that the #ELTchat hashtag has become an important and established tag to spread news to the ELT community on Twitter!
• We were present and shared information at TESOL France in November 2010.
• With the help and support of #ELTchat followers, bloggers and non-bloggers, we have turned www.elt.chat.com into a great resource bank of summaries which contain a wealth of ideas and links to keep up with your professional development
• We created a wiki which contains all the transcripts of the chats. You can find it here and you can browse through all the transcripts
• We created a number of podcasts which, however, due to the sudden illness and disappearance of @olafelch who was one of the original moderator and who did the sound, we have somewhat neglected! But we are coming on stronger with a great interview on Sunday! Stay tuned!!!

IATEFL Glasgow 2011 

Our next project is to make #ELTchat better known to those who are still non-Twitter users, and many great teachers seem to hesitate about joining Twitter.

Party Plans for next Wednesday 

#ELTchat 1st Birthday Party Preparations in Second Life

Join us by clicking on this slurl and logging into Second Life and visiting my plot – yes, you read correctly, my plot – in Second Life,  or if you don’t have an account and the software, go to  http:/secondlife.com/, download the application (Second Life Viewer), create your avatar in minutes and join in the fun!

I look forward to seeing you there!!!!

Post Party Update

It was great to see quite a few #ELTchat friends and three more moderators joined me in Second Life for the birthday celebrations.  Shaun Wilden, Barbara Sakamoto, Shelly Terrell, Sue Lyon Jones, Lesley Cioccarelli, Adam Simpson, Alexandra Koukoumialou and Raquel Olivera were there and were also joined by Heike Philp – Gwen Gwasi in Second Life – one of the owners of Edunation where this happened. Heike, with her usual aplomb, very quickly opened her Adobe Connect Pro  classroom and made a recording of the last few minutes of this very happy gathering and the speeches we made, which is a lovely souvenir to have and we thank her very much for it.

Have a look at some of the snapshots which I turned into a short animoto production – the pretty party lights were a headache to delete and I am sorry that Barbara had to spend so much time figuring out how to lose them!!!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Speeches were made, virtual cake and champagne eaten and drunk, which some may think is a joke, a fake, not real… but to us it felt as if we were close to each other, even if thousands of miles apart, Barbara in Japan, Shaun and Sue in the UK, Heike in Germany,  Lesley in Australia, Shelly in the US and me in Greece….

Second Life does do that.

Here is the link to the video kindly recorded by Heike Philps in Edunation, where a lot of foreign language teaching and educational conferences and meetings take place.  Raquel Oliveira, Sue Lyon Jones, Shelly Terrell, Shaun Wilden and myself are sitting on the front ‘porch’ of my very own tree house in Second Life.   (Yes, I am a proud Edunation Resident now…)

Related Post 

Marisa Constantinides Reflects on the 1st year of #ELTchat Interview on TEFLnet.com by Tara Benwell.