Weekend Traffic Lights

An earlier post looked at learner language and ways it can be used most effectively in-class as a learning tool. However, for a teacher to use Learner Language as a tool for Language Input, the learners actually need to produce some language. The underlying prerequisite to emergent language is that learners be put in a Communicative Situation, so that they can produce language.

However, getting learners to talk at length about a topic while giving them free reign over what language they choose to use to express themselves is perhaps easier said than done. Not all topics engage all learners, and the ones which do are all often too sensitive or cause divisions, such as politics or religion.

That said, there is one topic which learners are usually willing to talk about at length: the weekend. From the previous post you have 5 ideas for what to do with learner language, so this post will look at a simple classroom activity to get learners communicating and producing some language for you to later feed back on. 

Positive Reinforcement in Language Learning

The year 1967 saw the the USA and the USSR perform nuclear tests, the Beatles released Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, and L.G. Alexander published what is said to be the best-selling book in ELT First Things First.

Scott Thornbury mentions the book in his 2016 Plenary at IATEFL, saying it was so popular that you could even purchase a copy at kiosks! In the plenary, he also quotes the author saying “the student should be trained to learn by making as few mistakes as possible.” 

An idea born out of earlier methods, such as the Direct Method and Audiolingualism, the focus on accuracy over fluency was the pinnacle of the pre-communicative era in ELT. There was a general fear of encouraging mistakes by letting them slip, and ultimately allowing them to become fossilized.

Decades later, learners are now very much encouraged to prioritize fluency, to make mistakes and to learn from them. As a result, lessons nowadays often culminate in a Delayed Error Correction stage, where learners are given corrective feedback on the mistakes they made during the lesson.

However, has this shift in focus from accuracy to fluency been a wholly positive development in English Language Teaching, or have we created a new problem by resolving another? Keep reading to find out more…

Conversation Classes

There’s a post on WanderingELT which looks at what seems to be a fairly common conundrum in English Language Teaching. Basically, a learner comes to a language school traumitized by the experience of learning English through a Structural Syllabus in the state sector. In the words of Giulia Brazzale, such learners have had enough of grammar and they want “to learn to speak.”

So, these learners sign up for Conversational Classes, or one-to-one lessons with a conversational focus. From the perspective of the teacher, like Giulia, this raises a number of questions:

1. Why do learners end up in this situation?
2. Are conversation classes the solution?
3. Can good teaching happen solely through the conversation?

This post will take a look at these questions one by one and it will try to offer some answers. Keep reading to find out what they are.

Product, Process and Learner Writing

Most schools have a clear policy on writing. Many require learners to submit a certain number of writing tasks before the end of the semester. Some plan within the syllabus for a writing task to be completed every month.Others let the teacher decide what and when learners should do writing.

A piece of my own free writing in Spanish

Whatever policy a school or teacher might follow, the task at hand remains the same: the learners have to produce cohesive written texts. In English Language Teaching there are two main schools of thought on this topic: the Product Approach and the Process Approach.

This post is going to look at these two approaches and also at a third one which I am suggesting to get our learners writing not only more but more effectively. Keep reading to kind out more…

Doing Writing In Class

Anyone who has heard me speaking about Skills or read any of my lesson plans on Writing will be fully aware of the fact that I am a big advocator of doing writing in class and not at home.

I often get asked why I think this, especially since setting writing to do at home is:

1. Logical – it seems the most obvious way not to waste precious class time
2. Common – just about every course, teacher and school sets writing tasks as homework

While the logic behind this approach seems sound, it overlooks a very salient feature of writing – namely that is a skill. You would not expect your learners to develop their other skills solely at home, so why would you do expect this with writing?

In this talk, I explain my take on writing and I also try to explain why writing has ended up being the dreaded homework task that it has become.

Any thoughts, ideas or comments would be welcome – get in touch below or send me an e-mail.