I think that one of the best quotes I always remember, is one by my colleague Olga Gounis, an ex-TEFL teacher and manager  who went on to study psychology and is now something of a specialist in Prebirth Psychotherapy.

When asked by one of the teachers in a workshop we were doing on improving relations with students and parents the following question:

“What do you do about discipline problems? How do  you deal with them?”

Her response was

” Discipline problems? I never have any. I make sure I don’t from Day One. “

This is a great retort by someone who knows full well that we ourselves may often create the conditions which generate undisciplined behaviours in our learners.

I also mentioned, albeit briefly, the importance of being a good role model for discipline yourself:

• Be a good role model for disciplined behaviour. It doesn’t work, you know, if you yourself are always late to class, forget to do things, are badly organized, etc. Students learn more through good example than through verbal instruction,.

All teachers (and parents) ought to follow this first, very simple, but very important rule. You cannot be asking your learners to be quiet if you are shouting while doing it, for example. The subliminal message is not the right one and will generate a class that shouts. Teacher shouts, class shouts, as simple as that!

Be a Most Excellent Class Manager

Here is my personal checklist. When I recall the few occasions when I have had discipline issues in one of my classes – and I promise you I have so few, that they really stop me on my tracks and get me to reflect and think through what I did or did not do; more often than not,  it’s because I have been remiss and did not follow my own advice!

•  My instructions are simple and clear
•  My instructions are carefully checked
•  My class is always well prepared for activities (words, ideas, grammar, knowledge)
•  I check again and again
•  I monitor their work
•  I show interest in their ideas (not just the language)
•  I assess their performance but remember to tell them what to do to improve
•  I give feedback in a pleasant and tactful way
•  I remember to praise, too

A fun role activity - Fashion Show

Develop a Great Classroom Personality 

Remember to learn something now and then; something  which will remind you of what learners go through, a foreign language is ideal, but some new skill or knowledge is also fantastic! I remember when I was trying to learn how to ride a horse, I had great issues with my riding instructor who used to shout and not allow me to say anything! Can you imagine me, someone who tells other people how to teach, being shouted down by an aggressive riding instructor???? Aaargh, not a a good experience!

No wonder I never continued with these lessons! ( A small but disturbing point: this instructor did not just make this particular learning experience an unpleasant one; he stopped me from continuing with any other instructor)

Here are are some good traits to aspire to:

• I am a good learner role model; I share my learning efforts ( and my difficulties) with my learners so they know I understand what it is to be a learner and that I haven’t forgotten what it feels like
• I show my learners that I love my job.
• I can use my voice effectively – I am lucky in this because I have had a lot of voice training. Well, if you haven’t, get some for yourself!!!! Your voice is your instrument! Having a whining, irritating voice, or a voice that is flat and never modulates, or too loud and high pitched is really not going to help you gain control a class or be as effective.
• My body language gives positive messages; videotaping yourself is a great way to find out if you have any traits or unconscious gestures or expressions you were not even aware of!
• I move purposefully around the class – I don’t prance around like a whirly dervish or pounce on my learners and I certainly don’t sit still throughout the lesson!
• I am fair and not vindictive – if I have had to deal with some unexpectedly undisciplined behaviour (in my case it involves teachers not submitting their assignments on time) I will tell the guilty party something privately and then I will forget this during the session!
• Thou shalt not sulk, look mean, be sarcastic, hurt people’s feelings, say negative stuff when they cannot deal with your questions or your materials/activities – learning is not easy for everyone and some people need more time than others
• I am a fun person to be with – I often choose materials and activities for the fun factor!
• But I am serious about my job and my students know this! They know that I blog, I talk at conferences, they know I am keen on my professional development
• I am patient and tolerant – I understand learning difficulties, both because I keep being a learner myself, but I also inform myself and read the relevant literature and research on how people learn and what may cause learning to slow down.  I  don’t consider this dry and boring ‘theory’ but crucial to becoming a better teacher.

My Lessons

• Are interesting
• Are motivating
• Make it possible to be successful
• Include a variety of activities
• Are balanced to give everyone a chance to shine
• Include some games or gamelike activities
• I try to involve all types of learners in some way (visual learners, auditory learners and kinaesthetic learners)
• I am well prepared for my classes
• I know my subject matter well; I am a lifelong language learner and am on a constant lookout for new information on language. I don’t hate reading grammar books or discourse analysis!
• My aims  are clear to me and my learners
• My aims are achievable by my learners

A Suggested Strategy

1. I gain everyone’s attention before I start
2. I explain my objectives and give clear instructions
3. I monitor my students to check if they have understood what to do
4. I am a good role model
5. I use non-verbal codes
6. I am in control of the learning environment
7. My interventions are low key
8. I program students for disciplined behaviour
9. I respect each one of my students and show this
10. I expect the best from each and every one of my students
11. I give my students a lot of responsibility
12. I train my students systematically
13. I train my students how to be better learners
14. I use positive language rather than prohibitions
15. At the end of an activity or a lesson I give motivating feedback
16. I try to assign homework that students are motivated to do
17. I have a clear and simple set of routines and rules which everyone know from the first day (e.g. posters on the walls
18. I try to create a positive and interesting learning environment; my students find the classroom a pleasant place to be
19. I systematically reward good behaviour rather than punish

Remember 

Which teachers made you naughty?

How well do you think they did on each one of my checklists?

I would love to read any comments you have on this.

Related Blog Posts

Thinking about Discipline - Part 1 by Marisa Constantinides

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Microsoft ClipArt

My first encounter with discipline problems was in my very first year of teaching – untrained, naive, ignorant as I was, I had to deal with two major crises:

The first one was the appearance of two teen sisters in my class one of who had a safety pin stuck through her cheek and the other an earring pinned to her cheek.

The second, was a 12-year-old student who grabbed hold of one of his classmates, let him dangle from the window of the third floor threatening to let go!

Having discipline problems?

Which of the following discipline problems do you face most often?

•  Late to class
•  Lack of attention
•  Lack of participation
•  Being rowdy
•  No Homework
•  Irony or sarcasm to one’s classmates
•  Disrespectful behaviour to the teacher or classmates
•  Physical damage or violence to one’s classmates or teacher
•  Verbal violence to one’s classmates

Which of these learners are your learners?

But why do students behave “badly”?

There will be many different expressions of undisciplined behaviours; teachers of adults will find they have different problems to teachers of very young learners and they, in turn, will face different issues to teachers of teenage learners.

The causes of such behaviours have been the focus of many studies and much speculation in staffrooms; in ELT, very little gets written or researched on this subject and it is a pity, because a very large percentage of the student populations taught by ELT teachers around the world, are younger pupils and teens, and much more likely than adults to be unruly!

Some of the causes mentioned in various books, blogs, etc. include power thirst, or a desire to take the control away from the teacher; anger is also mentioned, which in turn may be caused by all sorts of issues at home or at school; attention seeking, either because a pupil feels attention is owed to them or perhaps because they do not get enough attention at home; issues of confidence or self-esteem are also mentioned, poor self esteem or overconfidence which may result in undisciplined behaviours.

It seems to me then that some of the reasons that students exhibit lack of discipline are caused by their home situation, others by their own self-perception or feelings.

But, oftentimes, lack of discipline may also be caused by the school environment itself or teacher behaviourswhich provoke it.

Most information sources  neglect to mention the teacher as a cause for lack of disciplne – yet students are often naughty due to

• boredom
• lack of interest
• failure and more failure
• lack of involvement
• inability to understand or follow the class
• the teacher’s personality
• poor classroom management
• etc

These are not reasons related necessarily to their own poor ability to learn but often to a teacher’s inability to support and explain or, worse, due to a bad relationship with the teacher herself/himself/

What can teachers do?

There are two ways teachers can deal with discipline issues – proactively and reactively.

In this first post, I would like to begin with some of the proactive teacher actions, and discuss reactive action in a future one.

 Plan Discipline Problems away 

The Value of a Good Start

The first few days of any class are crucial for encouraging disciplined behaviours. From day one, set you class on the right track for good behaviour by being a positive role model yourself and by being on the ready to give warm praise to the slightest evidence of good behaviour!!!

Some Suggestions

• Getting to know you activities (it’s easier to misbehave against people you don’t know) Most of the more recently produced coursebooks (if, of course, you are using one) provide a battery of such activities in the first unit. If you do not use materials which include such ideas, a quick stroll around the web with the key-words ‘getting to know you activities’ will yield hundreds of great activities, or you can create simple questionnaires yourself which will result in class posters, glogsters, wiki entries or simple class albums with everyone’s photos, achievements, hobbies and creative art work!

• Encourage a collaborative learning environment - Many teachers forget to introduce activities which train their students to do collaborative work; seating students around tables, for example, is a clear subliminal message that ‘in this class, we will be working together, in groups’; some positing thinking activities where students brainstorm and contribute ideas on the value of working together, should be a standard start of the year practice, in fact, a topic like that would make a great lesson anyway, in the age of connectivism!

• Team building activities which will  bond the students together, give them a sense of group identity; team names appropriate to the age group; do please check out an older blog post on just this topic.

• Disciplined behaviour is everyone’s business, not just the teacher’s. Get your students involved in collaborative projects in which they negotiate and make decisions on the rules of conduct of their class, the modus vivendi of their day-to-day existence; don’t be afraid they will go the other way; young pupils appreciate teachers with a firm (but kind) attitcude (see this evidence);  don’t be afraid they will come up with bad rules. What is certain is that your students will come up with some guidelines for good behaviour and those will be the ones they will respect (because they came from themselves) and those they can deal with (because they will be what they can deal with at their age and stage of conceptual development). Just make sure you

Explain the consequences of not following rules very clearly – your students may have their own ideas on this

Assign Responsibilities and duties to all

Ask them to list some school rules and say why these exist.

Tell them to think about their English class and brainstorm rules they think are a good idea.

To start them off, elicit and feed in ideas such as:

                            * Students should try to speak English whenever they can.

                            * The teacher should be patient with the students when they make mistakes

                            * Students should show respect to each other.

                            * The teacher should make his/her lessons interesting

• Let them work in groups, perhaps making up five rules for the teacher and five for the students. Get the class to agree on the best rules. Make sure things you think are important are included!

• Expected behaviour is made clear to everyone. It’s not enough to get students involved in creating the rules governing good conduct; these have to be visible, memorable, in full view and often reinforced, not though punishment, but through rewards. Get your students to make posters, glogsters, blogposts, a mission statement on the front page of their wiki; use Web 2.0 tools or apps that are age appropriate (or don’t use them – this post is not about technology really); use what is available and accessible to fulfill the principle behind the tool.

• Use the rules & laws you have agreed on to write a student contract – everyone should agree on the terms of this contract and sign it, teacher included!

                         Rules and laws should be included in this contract

                         Ask students to be involved in rules and laws for good behaviour

                         Once the contract is agreed and written up, it should be signed by everyone*.

Parent Involvement 

Finally,  although in some cases this may be difficult, do try to involve your students’ parents as well; the younger your pupils, the more important this will be!

Translate your contract into the parents’ language and if you don’t speak it, get the pupils to translate it or use Google translate and have them edit the translation (they will be much more involved!)

* The idea of signing contracts is becoming more and more common in ELT

P.S. Are you wondering what I did as a young teacher? 

I don’t  blame you! I would be curious, too! Well, of course, I grabbed the dangling boy and rescued him. I think the horror in my eyes and the look of total disbelief I felt must have been so obvious to my student, that he turned bright red and whispered something I cannot even remember, then ran off and disappeared!

I was so flabbergasted that I went to my Director of Studies and asked her for advice – she told me that the boy (who was in fact one of my best students and always attentive and responsive in class) was too oppressed by school and home and she would take care of that, which was great! Subsequent to that, the boy went back to being an angel.

With the two sisters, I think I had gained a little bit of confidence in myself, so I called them out privately after the lesson and told them they looked great and very trendy but would they please refrain from wearing their new pins and stuff in the lesson as everyone was really curious and distracted by this sight because it was so new and modern!!!!

I still can’t believe I actually said that and they actually bought it!!!!

But, on looking back at how I taught this class, I can tell you for sure that my lessons suffered from every possible flaw I can think of – no need to go into all the gory details of what an untrained teacher can get up to!!!!

More on this in my next post

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Today, Sue picks up the topic again and in a special guest post for TEFL Matters  continues with advice on how to avoid having your content plagiarised.

It’s great to have Sue right here in my TEFL Matters ‘front parlour’!!! 

Stop, Thief!  How To Deter People From Copying Your Blog Content

by Sue Lyons Jones

In Marisa Constantinides’s passionate and heartfelt post, “Dear Plagiarist“, she gives vent to the frustration, hurt and disappointment that many of us feel when others copy our work without asking first, or seek to pass it off as something that they have created themselves. In this post, I’m going to share a tip that you can use to make it more difficult for people to copy work you publish on your blog, by customising your feed so that it only publishes the first paragraph or two of your posts, rather than complete articles.

image credit: Petr Kratochvil PublicDomainPictures.net

What are the benefits of publishing snippets rather than full feeds?

Here are three good reasons why publishing full RSS feeds is worth a rethink, if it is something that you currently do:

1) Publishing full feeds makes it really easy for people to copy your content

Back in the days when I was a new kid on the blog, I used to publish my posts as full feeds; but then I began to notice that most of the people who were scraping my content and using it to make money were doing so via my blog feed, rather than copying it directly from pages on my site. This prompted me to change the settings for my blog feed, so that it only displayed the first paragraph or two from my posts. This very quickly reduced the volume of copying to a trickle, rather than a flood.

2) Feeds often leave off the conditions attached to sharing your work

Blog feeds can publish your posts out of context, with no indication as to the terms of use. Many bloggers display licensing conditions for reusing posts in a sidebar or widget rather than in the main body of posts, and these don’t always get picked up by blog feeds. In the absence of a clear indication of how your posts can be reused, people who copy and republish your work from a feed may assume that the article can be re-published in ways that aren’t permitted by the licence, or even that you have placed your work in the public domain!

3) Publishing snippets instead of full feeds can increase traffic to your site

Protecting content aside, publishing a ‘teaser’ that gives a flavour of what your post is about instead of the complete article encourages people to visit your site and read your posts, rather than reading them in their mail box or Google reader.

How to edit and customise your blog feed

Google feedburner is one of the most popular tools for burning blog feeds, and so I’m going to use it as an example to show you how you can adjust your blog feed so that it only sends out a short snippet from your posts, rather than the full article.

Step 1:

Log into Google, and go to http://feedburner.google.com/. If you have already set up a feed for a blog with Google feedburner, the page should automatically re-direct you to the dashboard for your feeds. Click on the link for the blog feed you want to edit to view the settings.

Step 2:

Select the optimise tab in your dashboard, and then scroll down the page and click on the summary burner link at the bottom left of the page.

Step 3:

Type in the maximum length that you want your summary to be (around 250-450 words ought to be enough in most cases) and then click the save button. Next time you post something to your blog, your feed should only give subscribers a brief extract from your post, rather than the complete article.

Note that this may not work quite so well if you have widgets or share buttons near the top of your pages, but moving your page elements around will generally fix things if your feed begins churning out .html code, instead of snippets from your posts.

Will this stop people copying my content?

Perhaps not, as someone who is really determined to copy your content might look for another way to do so. What it will do though is weed out some of the scrapers who are too lazy to write their own posts and who look to your feed as an easy way of providing them with free content to pad out their sites; which should go some way towards reducing how much of your content gets lifted and republished without your permission.

Sue Lyon-Jones

Biography

__________________________________________________________________________
Sue Lyon-Jones is a freelance ELT materials developer, ESOL tutor and teaching with ICT consultant based in the UK. She publishes and writes the content for the free English lessons and ELT resources site, ESOL Courses (http://www.esolcourses.com). Her current areas of interest include teaching with web based technologies, interactive materials development, educational games, mobile learning, and Dogme ELT.  Sue is @esolcourses on Twitter.

__________________________________________________________________________
This article by Sue Lyon-Jones originally appeared as a guest post on TEFL Matters, by Marisa Constantinides, and is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 Licence.   If you wish to share it you must re-publish it “as is”, and retain all credits, acknowledgements, and hyperlinks within it.

__________________________________________________________________________
Other articles in this Series:
__________________________________________________________________________

Copyright, Plagiarism, and Digital Literacy -  Teaching Village

Related Blog Posts

Ιστολόγια & Λογοκλοπία – On Blogs & Plagiarism by Marisa Constantinides (in Greek but you can use the google translate widget)

Dear Plagiarist by Marisa Constantinides on TEFL Matters

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Lindsay’s story is sweet vindication of what plagues our profession – a profession in which for many years it was very okay to use other peoples’ ideas and materials in your lessons wiithout proper attribution and not many people bothered about it. It must be said that in many cases, the teacher pretended this was their very own creation and would never confess to having copied it from some other teacher or from a book.

Thus, careers in materials design and coursebook writing were launched and developed.

The internet has changed all that!

Now it’s possible to google your content and find out who exactly is copying your work, your blog posts, your lessons, or your slides.

It’s no longer possible to hide or pretend you didn’t know about this because plagiarism is an issue taken up by many bloggers and articles writers.

Pre-internet times, it was possible for people to go unpunished and undiscovered for ever and a day.

Now, there are so many plagiarism sleuth tools freely available to anyone on the web, that it’s just mad to try!

Here is a very good example: http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/. Just copy and paste this post into it and it will check the whole text for you.

N.B. At the time of writing this post, the search string ‘plagiarism checker’ yielded 1.800.000 results, the word ‘plagiarism’ on its own,  28.900.000.

But what constitutes plagiarism in different cultures and societies?

I think this really is a serious issue and perhaps worth considering attitudes of different societies and cultures towards plagiarism.

In the western – educated, I might add – world, plagiarism is the ultimate sin for anyone, let alone a scientist,  an academic or an educator, i.e., someone who is not considered only as a ‘transmitter’ of content or knowledge but someone who, explicitly or implicitly, transmits values. 

Hence, the creation of Creative Commons, an organisation created to explore and regulate how intellectual property can be legally and properly shared.

But the same is not true in all countries in the world; without wishing to name countries, there are cultures where proper attribution to the author or creator does not really mean very much. And when accused of plagiarism, as in the case of a specific teacher-blogger (who also features highly on onestop blogs…) when he was caught with content he had copied and pasted from e-how.com, he staunchly refused the accusation and kept pestering  me with private messages on Facebook for months to convince me that I was wrong and that, really, he was a very worthy individual and a blogger whose texts I ought to read in order to educate myself.

Of course, not all individuals in the so-called western world respect intellectual property either!

Some are extremely happy to pass others’ work as their own; in fact most cases of plagiarism, of academic essays you can buy by the yard in order to pass your courses, of fake degrees you can buy via email come from websites in the US, not some ‘third world’ country!

A personal example or three…

1. My online PLN may be well aware of the number of articles culled from my school website have graced the pages of commercial sites without my knowledge or permission. One particular site had as many as four or five at one time, listed in their ELT articles sections. This is the group called Icon which owns and runs several ELT articles sites, such as http://www.totalesl.com/  and more.
2.  Another site called ‘this cool school‘ had three of my blog posts in their entirety reposted without asking or getting my permission to do so.  And I am sure they have copied many of my copies articles and blog posts as well!
3. One of my ex-trainees following a Cambridge/RSA Diploma for Overseas Teachers of English was caught plagiarizing a full section from an article in www.developingteachers.com.  Unluckily for her, one of the Joint Chief Assessors recognised this as he worked for that outfit! The candicate received a fail grade for her internal coursework and had to retake this examination. Sweet vindication you might say and it should have taught her a very good lesson. Of course, she never acknowledged the plagiarism and pretended it was an oversight etc when it was very clear that the original paragraph had words substituted so it would not look the same. But the lesson was not learnt, I’m afraid. She later went on to do a distance M.A. And passed. Am I wrong to believe the rumour  that her assignment work was paid for?  Perhaps, but after all, I am only human.

What should educators do?

Plagiarism is just one of the expressions of a set of low moral standards, so it’s important not to let it go by without a murmur of protest. Giselle Santos, @feedtheteacher , below, puts this all in a nutshell – do read her comment which came as a response to the conversation started by Sue Lyon Jones above.

The wikipedia article on plagiarism outlines a variety of cases and sanctions, so I believe it is important that educators set an example by not practising it, not allowing it and by educating their learners through direct instruction and by example.

The importance of educators who are informed and properly attribute other people’s work by sourcing all materials has now been taken up by colleges, universities which include specific guidelines for their students.

Here is the link to a really nice and simple website with guidelines for students, interestingly titled “academic integrity” : http://tilt.library.skagit.edu/module4/academicintegrity2.htm

Plagiarism image from http://tilt.library.skagit.edu/module4/images/plagiarism.GIF

Cambridge ESOL has included proper attribution as a criterion in the assessment of teachers and when grading lessons and assignments, it is clearly stated that copyright should be listed when the material has not been created by the trainee/candidate on courses such as the CELTA and DELTA.

Dear Plagiarist,

Content is what we produce after hours of hard labour and our content is what drives visitors to our websites and what may potentially keeps our businesses open!

By taking my content, by copying and pasting it into your webpage, either openly or in ways that are not visible to the public, you are driving traffic away from my website to yours, so yes, you are stealing my traffic, which I have worked very hard to build!

By taking my content, you acknowledge that it was worth something which you are now monetizing , without my permission or consent!

By stealing my intellectual property, you are making money on my back, through the ads on your website. If my content creates traffic, that translates into clicks and each click is worth money. On free websited like Sue’s or Sean Banville’s, sites which are created with a lot of hard work and whose creators survive on the meager returns of google or other ads, yes, you are taking their livelihood away!

So, I don’t agree that we should keep an omertà about who these people are!

What can you do about this?

Despite the many plagiarism checker tools available, it is still quite difficult to trace all instances of plagiarism. For example, I often find trackbacks to specific posts from this blog or the #ELTchat blog but when I click on the pingback, it takes me to a page which does not include visible evidence of that post; yet the post and its content, rich in key words which drive traffic, have somehow been included on that page.

But if you do discover your work republished somewhere else, do not be afraid to write and do also write to the internet provider of the specific website owner. In both cases of the articles I mentioned above, my articles were removed but only after I informed the owners that I had contacted their ISP provider with an abuse report.

There are no more articles of mine on Icon or its subsidiary sites e.g. http://www.totalesl.com/  or on the cool school site.

But may be yours are!      xyz2

The removals were graceless and curt, as if it was my fault, but really I don’t care about the manners of these people. Crass and unethical, they are not expected to put up a show of giving way with good grace!

Is copying and pasting an entire text fair use?

Anyone who copies an entire article from blogs or websites and posts it on their website are paying lip service to the rules of fair use. If you see this, report it. Do not praise the guilty party but report them to the original author or website owner.

If you notice a link at the end of such a piece and it is a dead link, be suspicious. How many people will bother to visit the original website? None! The link is dead and it’s more work to find the original article. So the website owner loses revenue (if applicable) and the author does not know that his work was copied. Report this person to the author.

Does this matter to such individuals? No, it doesn’t.

But if you shower warm praise on how rich in links their site or Facebook page is (of course, all links leading back to their website) you are condoning unethical use of someone else’s intellectual property.

If you have any ideas about how to discover cases of plagiarism or any tools that you have found effective, I would appreciate it if you left them in a comment below this post.

Dear Plagiarist,

You are warned!

We are on to you!

 Related Blog Post

(in Greek but you can use the google translate widget)

Ιστολόγια & Λογοκλοπία – On Blogs & Plagiarism by Marisa Constantinides 

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Voting is open

We’d love you to join us online. We’ll be holding an #eltchat from 15.50 to 18.20 GMT on the topic of social networking and continuous professional development to coincide with our symposium.   We hope you’ll tweet with your ideas and opinions.

The symposium will look at everything from the history of #eltchat through to how the web have revolutionized conferencing.  There are 6 of us speaking over the course of the symposium and we hope to bring you as much as we can  via live stream and twitter. So watch the hashtag for more information and of course pass on the message.

Running Order of our talks

Marisa Constantinides  – #ELTchat – hashtagged conversations and CPD through social networking

Shaun Wilden  – What has #hashtagging ever done for us?

Sharon Hartle – ELTCHAT and reflective teaching

Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto – What can you do with a PLN, anyway?

Bernadette Wall  – Creating your own interest-driven professional development path using social media

Shelly Terrell – Evolution of the conference: the internet’s impact on professional development

We were very much looking forward to your contributions throughout the symposium.

Important! 

Our talks will be streated live from the conference, so stay tuned here, on Facebook and Twitter for our live channel! 

#ELTchat nominated for an ELTons Innovation Award 

Our symposium is about all those things but we can’t help being excited, pleased and proud to have been shortlisted for an ELTons Innovations Award in the Resources for Teachers Category

In fact, since we heard, we can’t stop smiling

See you online tomorrow. Join us to share this day and take part in #ELTchat today, and to bring a twitter-resistant friend with you

See you at IATEFL and online!!!!

March 22nd from 15.50 – 18.20  in Gala 1 Room

For some of us, it will be the first face-to-face meeting. Here is what I mean:

I have worked as a co-moderator with Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto for more than a year now and, although we ‘ve had many conversations on Twitter, Skype, email, even in Second Life, where we both have an interest.

But never face-to-face.

Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto - @barbsaka

And yet,  I feel closer to Barbara than many of my colleagues in my immediate milieu!

Sharon Hartle is another colleague I have yet to meet. She is a frequent #ELTchat participant, has written some great summary posts of #ELTchat discussions. Meeting her face-to-face is going to be a gift and an added bonus to going to a great conference such as IATEFL International.

Coming together for a great tweet-up

In twitter jargon this could count as the mother of all tweet ups – so many #ELTchat moderators (all five of us in fact!) and friends I talk to every Wednesday coming together for the IATEFL Symposium, is going to be a great blast of ELT energy, teacher passion and motivation, enough to keep me going, well, till the next conference where we all flock together, like birds on a wire, huddling together, in complete companionship.

Shaun Wilden - @shaunwilden

These are people I see as my colleagues and friends and for some, I feel closer than even some of my… I was going to say ‘real life friends’…. but, wait a minute, these are my real life friends, too,  it’s just that these new channels of communication have made it possible for us to connect, develop professionally and, at the same time, develop friendships, relationships and bonds that are strong, based on common goals and passions and that are firmer than any real life hug or handshake could ever make.

I find this is absolutely awesome and feel blessed to be in daily contact with so many great educators; especially blessed to be connected with Shaun, Shelly, Barbara and Berni.

So, what are we going to be talking about at the #ELTchat Symposium?

Shelly Terrell - @Shellterrell

No voting this time, I’m afraid!!! We will be streaming our talks, we will be tweeting like mad, well, may be not while we are actually addressing our audience and we are looking to spread this idea of a global conversation as far and wide as possible.

Our  Talks

The title of our Symposium is “Continuous professional development through social networking”.

We kick off at 15:50 and finish at 18:20

Our talks are going to be short – 20 minutes each at most – an extended Pecha Kucha, if you like, and we hope you, too, will participate, even if your are not physically there in the same room with us by sending tweets and comments, in reality, as all of us moderators are going to be in Glasgow next week, there won’t be any #ELTchats on Wednesday but, instead, we’ll hold an extended #ELTchat during the Symposium.

You will be able to hop in and out of it when you can and it looks like a lot of #ELTchatters are getting ready to join us online!!!

• Marisa Constantinides @Marisa_C
  

  Berni Wall - @riberni

• Shaun Wilden @shaunwilden
• Sharon Hartle @hartle
• Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto @barbsaka
• Berni Wall @riberni
• Shelly Terrell @ShellTerrell

P.S. Forgot to mention the party!!!!

Just cos we’re such a nice bunch of ELT people and #ELTchat is joined actively by many well known names in our field, Oxford University Press Global (who is a frequent #ELTchatter, if I could say that – got really confused with the pronouns in there…) are throwing a party in our collective honour!!!!

Already everyone who is anyone is attending – and then some!!!

Come to our part on Tuesday the 20th!!!! Here is your invitation here, or go to the Facebook event page and join.

Screen capture of event on Facebook

So, join us in Glasgow or follow online!

Arm yourselves with the suggestions we all put together during our most recent #ELTchat  “How to get the most out of conferences, even if you are not able to attend” and follow our talks as well as this great conference!

I’ll let @Amandalanguage have the last word here:

 Be there!

We’ll wave!

Marisa Constantinides - @Marisa_C

Second life educators are known to be great sharers – nowhere else (but on Twitter)  have I met so many colleagues willing to give away their free time and this is an inspiring environment to work in.

For the benefit of those who have not yet created any machinima productions, I have created this short guide.

This post is inspired by a post with the title How to Make a Movie which summarises the process in 19 Steps.

Second Life

Download the Second Life Viewer and create your membership and avatar

Useful Tools for recording in Second Life

•  Fraps free download from http://www.fraps.com/  You can record for up to 2 minutes – paid version (27$US) for as long as you want

• Tutorial on how to use Fraps 
• Second Life Michinima with Fraps and Vegas 
• Pinnacle Studio Ultimate version 14 trial version
• VirtualDub  suggested by Marius – you can view a You Tube video tutorial here

Screencast tools – recording your screen

•  Jing Free version allows recording your screen for up to five minutes. The screencasts can then be stored on their server and an embedding code is available.

• Russell Stannard’s great teacher training video on how to use Jing
• Screencast-o-matic  Does not require a download and can convert your screencast into a You Tube video.

• Comment: Made a test recording and on my Mac which has a good internal microphone SL sounds recorded very well but in the past when I used it on my PC it didn’t.  Here is the link to my test recording,
• Alternatives   Looks like there are quite a few – found them listed on this page. Do try them out and report your successes or comments

• Russell Stannard’s great teacher training video on how to use Screenjelly  

Audio Recording & Editing

•  Audacity - an open source application which allows you to record and edit audion. Audacity is easy to use and allows you to record different tracks and to change the level or speed or tracks or sections of your track.

• A You Tube Tutorial on how to record using Audacity and showing some of the basic functions. You can search for more on            You tube
•    

©Marisa Constantinides 2012

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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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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  non-teacher native English users form of non-native English users are often formed by  linguistic manner, 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